Dave Cooper
The Roanoke Times

Cooper, of Lexington, Ky., is a retired engineer and a volunteer for the Mountaintop Removal Road Show.

As we celebrate Black History Month, the parallels between the great civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s and the current struggle against mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia are interesting.

The documentary film "Briars in the Cotton Patch" explores tensions in the early days of the civil rights movement surrounding Koinonia, a communal farm founded in 1942 in Americus, Ga. Koinonia was a peaceful "experiment in Christian living" founded by a courageous, gentle white activist named Clarence Jordan. At Koinonia, blacks and whites worked and lived as equals.

Read the entire story at Roanoke.com