Coal Miner Blackface Azcentral Article — Framed historical photo of coal miners with blackened faces posing in a pub with Bass & Co Burton Ale signs

Coal Miner Blackface Azcentral Article

2019eventdead

Published August 17, 2026

Coal Miner Blackface Azcentral Article refers to the January 2019 backlash against a Phoenix opinion column in which writer Rashaad Thomas argued that a photograph of soot-covered British coal miners in a bar could be read as blackface. The piece was ridiculed on Twitter, Twitchy, and Reddit, and picked up extra momentum because satire accounts had made the same joke months earlier.

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Overview

Coal Miner Blackface Azcentral Article refers to the online pile-on aimed at a January 2019 opinion piece by Phoenix essayist and poet Rashaad Thomas, who wrote that a black-and-white photograph of coal miners drinking beer at a pub, their faces streaked with soot, could be read as offensive blackface1. The image was hanging in an unnamed downtown Phoenix restaurant and showed British miners after a shift, but Thomas argued that a viewer's reading of the picture was not fixed by the photographer's intent1.

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Critics on Twitter latched onto the framing that a documentary photo of working-class laborers had been reinterpreted as racial imagery, and the column was mocked as an emblem of grievance culture overreach2. The backlash grew louder because it landed the same week The New York Times ran an essay arguing that a chimney-sweep scene in Mary Poppins was itself flirting with blackface3.

Origin & Background

Platform
AZCentral (op-ed) / Twitter (viral spread)
Creator
Rashaad Thomas
Date
2019

On January 28, 2019, AZCentral, part of the USA Today Network, published Thomas's column under the headline "Phoenix restaurant says this is a photo of coal miners. But I see offensive blackface"1. In the piece, Thomas recounted attending a holiday party, asking a Latinx guest and a white guest what they saw in the wall photograph, and then speaking with the restaurant's white co-owner after concluding that the image called to mind D.W. Griffith's 1915 film Birth of a Nation more than a Welsh pit village1. The owner reportedly told him Google identified the men as coal miners after work and left the photograph on the wall1.

How It Spread

Screenshots of the column hit Twitter within hours, and on January 29, conservative aggregation site Twitchy compiled dozens of mocking replies under the headline "Essayist and poet looks at photo of coal miners after work, sees offensive blackface"2. Users joked about Mary Poppins chimney sweeps and posted photos of children with dirty faces to lampoon what they saw as an inability to distinguish soot from makeup2.

On January 30, posts ridiculing the article surfaced on the /r/The_Donald subreddit, and writer Katie Herzog of The Stranger shared it to her own followers3. That same day, British comedian Andrew Doyle 4 pointed out that the satire accounts @GodfreyElfwick and @TitaniaMcGrath had posted nearly identical takes months earlier about miners and Mary Poppins, and asked whether the accounts were "satirists or prophets"4. The parallel fed a running "satire is dead" joke, sharpened by the fact that a New York Times essay titled "'Mary Poppins,' and a Nanny's Shameful Flirting With Blackface" had gone up the same day as Thomas's column3.

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