Charlie’s Hands (December 2020)

Acrylic on Canvas

48” x 30”

Deacon Charlie Clayborn of Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, had spent 50 years working in the coal mines. Like so many miners, he was afflicted with black lung disease when David and Janet met him in 1983. He and other miners and widows organized to fight for healthcare and benefits. 

“Charlie had these big hands,” David recalls, “and he'd bring them together like this when he opened meetings with prayer, in which he asked that the working class would come together as a great mass of people to fight for justice.”