Joseph Mulloy was among the young anti-poverty workers who joined forces with grassroots community groups, including the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People. Many anti-poverty workers came to the region optimistic that a more efficient distribution of federal aid and resources would help win the War on Poverty. The region’s political elites and local business leaders, however, benefitted from the uneven distribution of wealth. In the 1960s, Pike County had a population of just 5,000 people, most of them poor. But there were also over fifty millionaires who had been enriched by the coal industry.
Just before his arrest in the summer of 1967, Mulloy and his wife Karen joined a protest against the Puritan Coal Company to support an elderly farmer who, like Combs, had placed his body in the path of bulldozers. When the farmer won a legal battle to protect his land, Pike County’s coal operators and political elites took their frustrations out on the Mulloys and orchestrated the arrest of the couple and their friends on charges law enforcement knew to be illegal. This was after other, more bureaucratic forms of harassment had failed, including revoking the Mulloy’s car insurance and cutting off their utilities.
When the commonwealth could not proceed with charges against the Mulloys, it established the Kentucky Un-American Activities Committee to investigate, in a more general way, “activities of groups and organizations which have as their objective…the overthrow or destruction of the Commonwealth of Kentucky by force, violence, or other unlawful means.” Kentucky’s political elite intended the Un-American Activities Committee to intimidate young activists like the Mulloys and to destabilize the place that anti-poverty workers occupied in local communities.
In its intent and design, the Kentucky Un-American Activities Committee presented any opposition to the existing power structure—which at that time reflected political corruption of the highest order—as outside agitation. The Un-American Activities Committee concluded that the subversives were “outsiders that they brought in from all over the nation…and the local people resented them.” It was certainly true that many young organizers came from outside the region during the War on Poverty, but they often told a different story about how radical action came to the mountains. According to many volunteers, mountain people radicalized them, not the other way around. One explained, “I felt like I was radicalized or politicized or whatever by the people who lived in the mountains themselves.”
Rebellious activists didn’t transplant radical action against corporate interests to the mountains. That radical action originated here. In 1968, a year after Kentucky succeeded in terminating the funding for many anti-poverty workers, four masked men ambushed the night watchman for the Round Mountain Coal Company in Leslie County, leaving him tied up and blindfolded in a vehicle. Four hours later, explosive charges, stolen from the company’s own supply, detonated, destroying almost a million dollars’ worth of heavy equipment. The saboteurs, although their identities were never discovered, were likely homegrown. They had intimate familiarity with the land and with mining equipment. Perhaps most significantly, they lived in a world where destruction of land was an accepted part of life.
FOR THE GOOD OF THE POOR AND COMMON PEOPLE
Another treasured image is a more recently taken photograph of my West Virginian friend Roger May with elderly community organizer Huey Perry. May is a prolific photographer who coordinated the Looking at Appalachia project, which aimed to “explore the diversity of Appalachia and establish a visual counterpoint” to stereotypical images of eternal white poverty. His project has introduced me to some of my favorite photographers, including Megan King, who documents Hispanic Appalachia, and Raymond Thompson, who photographs the journeys of families to visit their incarcerated relatives.
Perry looks a bit small next to May—to be fair, May is very tall—but to me, he’s a giant. Perry, a former history teacher from Mingo County, West Virginia, put his teaching career on hold to fight the war on poverty in the 1960s by directing community action groups in the poorest part of the state, a struggle he documented in his memoir They’ll Cut Off Your Project: A Mingo County Chronicle. Perry’s memoir is an equally humorous and painful account of what the War on Poverty might have achieved but ultimately didn’t. He tells a story that is similar to the drama that unfolded in eastern Kentucky as political corruption and the influence of corporate interests hijacked anti-poverty funding from the poor.
By their design, the anti-poverty programs that Perry administered acknowledged that existing avenues of support—from traditional forms of welfare like the Aid to Families with Dependent Children of the Unemployed fund, to the efforts of elected representatives and the priorities of regional businesses—were insufficient to combat widespread structural poverty. Perry used the principles of community organizing to bring poor people together, and found these principles to be successful.
The War on Poverty’s logic worked something like this. In Appalachia, it often happened that flooding caused by mining destroyed roads. Community residents would approach coal companies to ask permission to use their private access roads, requests that were universally denied. Community residents would would ask their political leaders for urgent assistance rebuilding their roads, requests that were universally denied. What the War on Poverty did was come to communities to rebuild roads. What the War on Poverty didn’t do was help poor people deal with the fact that they lived in a world where those who hoarded wealth would rather see them starve than share. Perry tried to change that by rigging the War on Poverty to work directly for the people.
In Mingo County alone, Perry supported as many as twenty-six community action groups. Individually, these groups worked toward addressing problems with educational facilities, food scarcity, poor roads, voting rights, political transparency, and unemployment. Starting with Mingo’s African American community, Perry and his staff formed community groups wherever locals were receptive to them. “Participation in a community group,” he wrote, “afforded them security for the first time in their lives.”
“A community action group would consist of low income citizens organized together to identify their problems and work toward possible solutions,” he explained. “I feel it is necessary that we take our time and build an organization that involves the poor in the decisions as to what types of programs they want, rather than sit down and write up what we think they want.” This was the ethic that fueled much of the logic of Appalachian grassroots activism and motivated young reformers during the War on Poverty—involving and integrating poor people into every aspect of community life and governance.
But there were problems. Mingo County’s political establishment—both elected officials and businessmen who commanded political clout—often opposed this work. “In old England,” one of Perry’s staff commented, “if a king didn’t like you, he would cut off your head. Now if they don’t like you, they’ll cut off your project!” Mingo’s political establishment hoped it could do what elected officials and businessmen in neighboring McDowell County had done, which was to siphon off federal funding—as much as two million dollars—and use it for their own purposes, most often to buy votes or sweeten business arrangements to ensure patronage.
When people ask, “Why do Appalachians always vote against their own interests?” here we see that, historically, a very compelling and simple answer to that question was voter fraud.
For Perry, getting back to community didn’t look like preaching the gospel of bootstrapping to the poor. It meant union building and mutual aid. It meant labor and pupil strikes. It meant co-operative grocery stores. It meant confronting political corruption head on and working to ensure fair elections. It meant holding business operators accountable for providing their employees with adequate wages and safe working conditions. It meant, according to one worker quoted in Perry’s memoir, “rubbing heads with dedicated folk for the good of the poor and common people.”
This is not to say that Perry’s strategies are timeless or that they can be effortlessly applied forty
years later. But if you’re invested in arguing that Appalachians are trapped in the past—and especially if you make a name or living from it—it seems disingenuous to not find out what people in the past actually did to address poverty and inequality.
RADICAL HILLBILLIES
Here is another image, and perhaps its subjects will be more familiar. A young African American man, in short sleeves with his jacket draped over his arm, is grinning in front of a library. A similarly attired African American man, somewhat stouter, has his head turned toward two women, a young white girl who appears to be speaking to the group and an older African American woman in a long skirt and glasses. A white man with a broad smile is slightly behind them, a foot taller than anyone else in the frame. Posed but engrossed in conversation, only one subject is actually looking at the camera.
The smaller African American man is twenty-eight year old Martin Luther King, Jr., flanked by his friends Rosa Parks, Pete Seeger, and Ralph Abernathy. The young white girl is Charis Horton, the daughter of Myles Horton, co-founder of the Highlander Folk School, where the group assembled in 1957. The occasion was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the school, founded in 1932 in the coal-mining town of Monteagle, Tennessee. Two years later, the state would seize the school because a workshop attendee left twenty-five cents beside a drink cooler stocked with beer. The state, flexing its longstanding animosity toward the school for its opposition to segregation, argued that Highlander had violated its charter by selling liquor without an appropriate license.
“You can padlock a building,” Horton said, as the state took his school, “but you can’t padlock an idea.” Another image comes into frame, a press photograph of a man laughing as the door to Horton’s beloved school is chained.
Here is another image, more sinister and this time on a billboard. It’s the same young Martin Luther King, Jr., at the Highlander Folk School. An arrow is pointing to him, emblazoned with text that reads “MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. AT COMMUNIST TRAINING SCHOOL.” The billboards began appearing in 1965, the year that King led a five-day march to Selma, Alabama. They used images created by Ed Friend, an investigator for the Georgia Commission on Education, which was operating at that time as an anti-integration watchdog group. Friend surreptitiously filmed and photographed the twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations at Highlander and helped turn the fruits of his labor into a widely distributed “educational pamphlet” that linked the school and its associates to the Communist Party.
Friend’s films of the Highlander Folk School, used as anti-segregation propaganda, are unintentionally blissful. Children are everywhere and many are swimming in a lake that bordered Highlander’s farm. People are dancing. There are no racial divisions, no divisions based on gender or age.
This, too, is Appalachia. Appalachia is images of strikes and strife and land hollowed out for coal, but it is also images of joy and freedom. Our album is filled with images of people who suffered, but also people who fought.
Highlander persists today. It still operates out of East Tennessee, now as the Highlander Research and Education Center. In September 2017 the organization will celebrate its eighty-fifth anniversary. Many of the platforms supported by the organization will be recognizable. #BlackLivesMatter, Fightfor15, and mobilization against the Dakota Access Pipeline all received recent support. In other words, the Highlander Research and Education Center still focuses on Appalachian issues because the fight for racial, environmental, and labor justice—wherever it takes place—is always our fight as well.
THEY SAY IN HARLAN COUNTY
The history of eastern Kentucky is special to me because the people of eastern Kentucky asked us a question that demanded, and still demands an answer: Which side are you on?
During the 1930s, at the height of the first war in Harlan County between miners and coal operators—and you should know enough of our history by now to understand there will be another—the second most dangerous occupation, after mining, was operating a grocery store. In eastern Kentucky, people were starving. Harlan-area coal operators cut wages during the Great Depression, precipitating a fierce battle between members of the United Mine Workers and the private armies commanded by coal operators, their numbers strengthened by the use of the National Guard as strikebreakers. Working people were homeless, evicted from company housing for their union sympathies, and store owners feared widespread looting.
Tillman Cadle, a striking miner, would often spend his mornings at his local A&P, hoping that store owners might distribute what provisions they could spare. He remembered looking through the store’s windows with an awareness that his labor made possible everything that was in front of him. The lives and deaths of men like Cadle provided the fuel to process and transport food. As he stared into the store, he often thought, “We worked to make all that good food, yet there’s a piece of glass between us.” When I am asked who or what Appalachia is, I think of that piece of glass. I think of sides and boundaries and both the horror and solidarity of knowing one’s place.
The store owners, incidentally, did provide provisions to striking miners, especially those with children. And for their generosity the commonwealth rewarded them with charges of “criminal syndicalism,” the same language used to prosecute the Bradens in 1954 and the Mulloys and McSurelys in 1968.
When I think of the Harlan County in the 1970s, another coal war on repeat, I think of more glass, but this time it’s the glass of a camera lens. I see Robert Gumpert’s photographs, and Barbara Kopple’s fierce documentary Harlan County, U.S.A. I see an elderly woman on a picket line, holding a sign that reads, “DUKE ENERGY OWNS THE BROOKSIDE MINE, BUT THEY DON’T OWN US.” I see women in jail, women pulling guns from underneath their shirts. I see striking miners, milling around the mortal remains of a young man named Lawrence Jones—pieces of his brain left on the ground where a strikebreaker murdered him. I hear his fellow workers mourn, “That’s the brains of a goddamned fellow who tried to do something.”
If you saw through my eyes you’d see hands in pockets and hands on guns and toes on picket lines. You’d see an Appalachia made from funeral wreaths and breathing apparatuses, union banners and tapestries decorated with images of JFK. You’d see our parents and grandparents. You’d see men and women thinking of their parents and grandparents, who fought and died for the same damn things.
You’d see Florence Reece, singing out for us to answer which side we’re on. You’d see Barbara Kopple running toward strikebreakers in defense of miners. You’d see how easy it is to become one of us like Kopple did. No need to write a sad book or platform yourself constantly, just run toward your friends when they need you. You’d see the exhaustion of waking up before sunrise every day to be shot or jailed. You’d see people buried alive to make energy, forced to splice electrical cables knee-deep in flooded mines. You’d see men who worked with one eye on the roof, one eye on the coal, and a mind full of dreams of anywhere fresh and green. You’d hear their complaints and the response from the coal company. Over and over, “Just get your bucket. Get your bucket. Get your bucket.”
To cleanse my mind of violence, when I think of eastern Kentucky, I also think of Eula Hall. I see her in the 1980s, standing in the ashes of the health clinic she created, and that she would rebuild and fill with photographs. I try to imagine her as a fifteen-year-old girl from Greasy Creek, Kentucky, getting booted from a canning factory in New York during the Second World War for inciting a labor riot.
Hall opened the Mud Creek Health Clinic in 1973 out of a trailer in her yard. Like many Appalachians, she saw the War on Poverty pass the most desperate Appalachians by. Access to basic healthcare was, as it is today, a life or death issue in rural communities. With the help of volunteers, the clinic offered poor rural folk, many of whom suffered from health problems caused by their work in the mines, health services at little or no cost. When the Mud Creek Health Clinic outgrew the trailer, Hall moved operations into her home and lived in her yard.
Arsonists burned down the clinic
in 1982 but it never ceased operations. Hall and her staff saw patients in the yard and she called the telephone company to ask for a telephone line in her tree. When it refused, she told them that if the telephone company could put a phone down a coal mine, it could come and put a phone in her damn tree. Hall got her phone line, and eventually, she was able to rebuild her clinic. The Mud Creek Health Clinic still operates out of Grethel, Kentucky, a place memorialized by People magazine as “so remote that if you press the scan button on a car radio, the numbers keep going round without finding a station.”
UP THE RIDGE
I see images of Virginia too, images of caravans snaking up mountains to places where our hidden communities are kept. At dusk, car headlights from men on shift work illuminate the products of our most wretched talents: our ability to flatten mountains with astounding efficiency. What we installed in their place, however, are not mines. No, these images of dark and cold light are not of the earth and no one is marching up the mountain toward freedom. Quite the opposite.
The most profound example I can give you of how the past, present, and future collide in Appalachia is to tell you about the prison industry here, and about the individuals who fight it. After the mines closed, the prisons came. People desperate to replace their only source of employment opened their communities and tore apart the mountains to imprison people deemed the most violent and dangerous offenders. Like in times past, local people saw the degradation of human dignity and the exploitation of labor and land and fought against it using familiar methods.
In the prison industrial complex, inmates are commodities. They are bought and sold and transferred according to the cost of beds and the cost of land and the cost of the labor required to imprison them. In the 1990s, two prison systems opened in southwest Virginia. Their construction offered state and federal prison officials a captive and compliant workforce contained in a location that would torment inmates with bleak and alien geography. Most inmates, of course, would be African American, arriving from the Northeast or lowland South. Central Appalachia would soon become one of the most concentrated areas of prison growth in the country.
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia Page 10