MORGANTOWN, W.Va. -- Bob Armstead was a gentle man in a rough profession.

A black miner in decidedly white West Virginia, he toiled in a place where coal companies had recruited tens of thousands of blacks for jobs everyone else thought were too dangerous.

For 40 years Armstead worked hard, staying underground as racism pushed others out.

"Some said the black coal dust was a race equalizer," he wrote. "They said we were all black because of the coal dust, so blacks and whites blended, and there was less prejudice in a coal mine. I really didn't see it that way."

Armstead's story, "Black Days, Black Dust," released earlier this year by the University of Tennessee Press, has become the first published memoir of a black American coal miner.

It's a story of a quiet, hardworking, cheerful man. It's also a 255-page primer on coal mining and a window into a nearly forgotten piece of history - those few decades when tens of thousands of blacks moved into the mountains to help make West Virginia's mines among the most productive in the world.

In 1880, only 25,886 blacks lived in West Virginia, a state with 592,537 whites. But as miners unionized and went on strike, mine owners recruited blacks by the trainload from the Deep South.

By 1920, the state's black population had grown to 86,345. Whites made up nearly 1.4 million. In southern coalfield counties, blacks accounted for more than 68 percent of the population in the 1930 census.

Four generations of Armstead's family were part of the great coal mine migration, moving from the iron district of Bessemer, Ala., to north-central West Virginia in 1924.

Later, when other families moved on, the Armsteads stayed.

Bob Armstead died in 1998 at the age of 71, but his voice survives on the pages of his book.

When our shift ended, white miners and black miners took their showers in separate facilities and went their separate ways. I wondered if the company prolonged segregation by having white and colored showers, or if the white men demanded it. Underground we were equal, dependent on each other and friendly. Once we hit the showers, a mental separation took place. We were black men and white men, no longer equal."