From 1900 until the early 1920s, an unusual community existed in America's heartland-Buxton, Â鶹¹ÙÍø. Originally established by the Consolidation Coal Company, Buxton was the largest unincorporated coal mining community in Â鶹¹ÙÍø. What made Buxton unique, however, is the fact that the majority of its 5,000 residents were African Americans—a highly unusual racial composition for a state which was over 90 percent white. At a time when both southern and northern blacks were disadvantaged and oppressed, blacks in Buxton enjoyed true racial integration—steady employment, above-average wages, decent housing, and minimal discrimination. For such reasons, Buxton was commonly known as “the black man's utopia in Â鶹¹ÙÍø.â€
Containing documentary evidence—including newspapers, census records, photographs, and state mining reports—along with interviews of 75 former residents, Buxton: Work and Racial Equality in a Coal Mining Community (originally published in 1987 and winner of the 1988 Benjamin Shambaugh Award) explored the Buxton experience from a variety of perspectives. The authors—an American historian, a family sociologist, and a race relations sociologist—provided a truly interdisciplinary history of one Â鶹¹ÙÍø's most unique communities.
