Beth Howard

Beth Howardis the Cultural Strategist for Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ),the largest national organization bringing white people into the fight for racial and economic justice. She grew up in a rural white working-class commnity in Eastern Kentucky and has organized in the American South for two decades, primarily in her beloved home state of Kentucky.

Beth has been a lead organizer on campaigns to raise the minimum wage and restore voting rights. She's also engaged white working-class Southerners on successful electoral campaigns, including ones that defeated an abortion ban ballot initiative in the 2022 Kentucky midterms and reelected Democratic Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear in 2023-and ran a rural field office in the 2020 Georgia runoff election.

Beth is the creator of the viral narrative campaignRednecks for Black Lives, and has been featured on theNBC NewsNational Day of Racial Healing special,Matter of Fact's Listening Tour with Soledad O'Brian, NPR'sHere and Now,Now This News, in the bookPower Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections, theNew York Times, andThe Boston Globe. Beth lives in Lexington, Kentucky. Song for a Hard-Hit Peopleis her first book.You can find her on Substack atWorking Class Love Notesand online atbethhowardky.com.