The arrival of Wallens Ridge State Prison and its sister institution, Red Onion State Prison, worried area community groups and media organizations in southwest Virginia and eastern Kentucky. Residents began to see that the communities of prisoners and their families were also now part of their lives.
Community media organization Appalshop, based in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and radio affiliate WMMT became hubs not just for news and communication about the prisons, but places where incarcerated men and their families, separated by hundreds of miles, tried to connect with one another. WMMT’s radio signal reached the prisons, and staff began to receive letters from the new prisoners describing loneliness and abusive conditions.
Media artists Nick Szuberla and Amelia Kirby began a radio show for prisoners that played hip-hop music and brought news from the places they called home. Szuberla remembered that, “The [prison] community came to us in the form of letters, clearly describing human rights violations and racism within our newly built prisons.” In response to this need—to acknowledge the presence of the incarcerated in their communities—Szuberla and Kirby began to connect to the families of prisoners, who sometimes called or wrote their show. This quickly became the primary focus of their slot, to pass on messages by encouraging family members to call into the show and speak to their loved ones via radio.
The two artists also created a documentary about the prisons produced by Appalshop, 2006’s Up the Ridge, which examines the prison industrial complex in a local, national, and global context. Occasionally, locals who kept the prison’s problems at a distance experienced a change of heart listening to their show. Others transformed the stories of prisoners into community theater productions with the help of prison abolition groups and with permission from the families.
In 2010, WMMT DJ Sylvia Ryerson joined the decade-old radio program—re-branded as “Calls from Home”—which by then had a national audience thanks to the internet. Ryerson expanded the program and began to organize transportation for the prisoners’ families to visit their loved ones. Raymond Thompson, a photographer from West Virginia University, documented these journeys for his Justice Undone project. Both Thompson and Ryerson’s work was highlighted in 2016 by the Marshall Project. Ryerson now does long-form radio postcards she calls “Restorative Radio,” created for specific individuals that allow them to sonically travel to, for example, their children’s birthday parties. “Rather than documenting the barriers to staying connected,” she writes, “each audio postcard enacts meaningful communication in spite of such barriers.”
In 2015, Congress set aside over four hundred million dollars for the construction of a new correctional facility in Letcher County, Kentucky. “You are Letcher County, Kentucky. You are rural, mountainous, and in the heart of the central Appalachian coalfields. Your economy is not in good shape. Fox News has called your town ‘the poster child for the war on coal.’ You are offered funds to build a new federal prison. It could bring jobs but also brings up troubling moral issues. What do you do?” asked Benny Becker from WMMT.
Letcher County congressional representative Hal Rogers, the former Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, believes the prison will transform the area’s economy. But there are fifteen prisons within a one-hundred-mile radius and local economies have not been transformed. Local labor fills the lowest paid positions, offering starting salaries of just $16,000 to $24,000 a year. Transferred employees with seniority take the better compensated roles, but in anticipation of their next transfer, they are reluctant to purchase homes or put down roots in the community. In some rural prison communities, only 10 to 20 percent of the workers, who all have to pass stringent background and credit checks, are local. Most of the counties that house prisons remain among the poorest parts of the state.
Examining prison construction only as a failed method of rural economic development, however, slights the moral repugnance of the prison industrial complex, which many rightly call a tool of the new Jim Crow. For activists in Central Appalachia, the racism of the prison industrial complex is central to their political and community organizing. Tarence Ray, an organizer with the Letcher County Governance Project, a community group that formed to oppose the proposed prison, believes that bringing prisons to rural, predominately white communities fits an established pattern of pitting poor white individuals against African American people by convincing them that their economic survival depends on supporting structures that harm and oppress.
The Letcher County Governance Project held a silent protest during Hal Roger’s presentation at the most recent Shaping Our Appalachian Region economic conference. The fate of the prison is currently in limbo; the draft of Trump’s first budget eliminated its funding. Kentucky politicians, however, are confident that congressional action to save the prison will prevail.
Appalachian prison abolition is, in many ways, a perfect storm of new regional activism. The movement is led by young people who connect the legacy of anti-coal and anti-poverty activists to modern causes. They are often anti-capitalists, a tradition that has a long history in Appalachia. As the work of Appalshop and WMMT demonstrates, community organizers are skillful storytellers and communicators committed to the idea that telling our stories is central to our activism. And they see, as the most passionate among us do, that our communities are connected. Wallens Ridge is a prison in southwestern Virginia, but it is also a telephone number on speed dial at the home of loved ones in Connecticut, and a place that absorbs a radio signal from eastern Kentucky.
YESTERDAY’S PEOPLE
“Appalachian programs can succeed only if they are based on an understanding of the mountaineer’s personality and the need to preserve his identity, according to Yesterday’s People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia by Jack E. Weller…In the simplest form and the plainest language possible, he has created an indispensable handbook for anyone who really hopes to understand and ultimately help these charter members of the Other America,” reads the brittle book review, clipped and cut from an ancient newspaper. Its usual duty is to act as a bookmark in my partner’s copy of Yesterday’s People, but I disturbed its slumber not long ago to scan and send it to a particularly defensive fan of Hillbilly Elegy.
For a number of reasons, Weller’s 1965 handbook doesn’t rub me the wrong way as other cultural or sociological studies of the region do, although it proceeds using much the same “strange and peculiar people” logic, which you may have deduced from the title. The chief reason is that Weller, originally from New York, inadvertently makes Appalachian people sound fantastic at times.
Weller’s purpose, in essence, is to explain Appalachians’ differences from middle-class Americans to a middle-class American audience. He writes descriptions like, “the mountaineer has found his way of life satisfying enough, and he looks on people of other classes without a trace of envy or jealousy…the mountaineer rejects the status-seeking, social climbing, ‘get rich,’ let’s-have-fun orientation, which he pictures as the middle class.”
Another favorite passage: “Though the mountain man often pays little attention to the larger children, he will make a great deal of fuss over babies, fondling them, and carrying them about…I have seen teenage boys take a crying infant from its mother’s arms during church, amusing it for the rest of the service with an interest and tenderness which is almost unbelievable.”
The other reason I regard Weller with a kinder eye is that I once heard a story about the end of his life. When he was dying, suffering from Alzheimer’s, he asked to be taken to the mountains one last time. According to the story, in moments when his fog lifted, he spoke of his regret for Yesterday’s People. To carry his burdens to the mountains and speak his regret is perhaps one of the most Appalachian things a person can do. I accept Weller not for what he did, but for what he became at the end, which is one of us. This story might well be bogus but I offer Weller as proof that I do not hold earth-shattering grudges toward everyone who’s ever authored a problematic study of Appalachia.
The initial scenes of the 1969 documentary Before the Mountain Was Moved are excruciating. As poor West Virginians repair cemeteries and dig out cars destroyed by strip mining, they explain the meaning of life in Appalachia. “He just laughed at me,” one woman said, explaining her conversation with a strip mine operator about damage his equipment caused to her home, “He said it was an act of God.”
Despite this healthy appreciation for the work of the almighty, a following scene shows coal operators assaulting elderly men and women as they attempt to enter their church. In the midst of an overwhelming threat of violence and retaliation, the community decides that night to travel to Charleston to express their concerns about strip mining and to ask for corrective legislation from state lawmakers. This becomes the momentum that drives Before the Mountain Was Moved; the personal and collective journeys taken by ordinary men and women to stop the destruction of their community.
One of the most interesting moments in the documentary is when community residents use a long car trip to discuss what we would today call white privilege. Led by an African American woman, the riders remember moments when white members of the community benefitted from their whiteness, and moments when they experienced collective oppression with their Black neighbors. It is not a “kumbaya” scene by any means—the white passengers are uncomfortable but yield the conversation to their African American neighbor—but it is something we are told never happens in Appalachia. There is no interracial solidarity or even conflict in Appalachia because people of color rarely exist in the worlds popular authors create for us.
The community does win its anti-strip-mining legislation. The scene where they learn of their victory is warm and wonderful. We find them on a rainy evening, peering out the windows to the mountains above, anxious about the boulders that might be washed down below. But then comes the breaking news that state lawmakers have supported their legislation by a margin of ninety-eight to one. Suddenly anxiety becomes relief. There is dancing and singing, and in the middle of the celebration, an elderly man who has been used by the coal industry his entire life shouts, “They’ve heard the voice of the people!” We want this moment to last forever for them because we know what’s coming will be worse.
MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL AND THE NEVER-ENDING BATTLE OF BLAIR MOUNTAIN
Few places symbolize the currents of Appalachian history like Blair Mountain. After the labor uprising there in 1921, the mountain became a direct link to the region’s radical history. It’s also a handy piece of evidence to counter people who tell you that your heritage is one of complacency. But while the people of Appalachia might own the memory of Blair Mountain, coal companies still own much of the land.
Mountaintop removal—the practice of blowing the top of a mountain off to make extraction easier and cheaper for coal companies—renders both mountains and miners into abstract and disposable commodities, which is part of its design. It is no coincidence that the rate of mountaintop removal rose in tandem with increased hostility to organized labor in West Virginia in the 1980s.
Mountaintop removal requires fewer workers. Coal companies have further increased economic instability by using subcontracted labor instead of permanent employees, another common union-busting strategy. It is understandable that, for some miners, working on the surface of a mountain is preferable to working underground. But it is also true that mountaintop removal has intensified environmental destruction while surrounding communities have become poorer as stable jobs have dwindled.
Mountaintop removal and parallel narratives about the “war on coal” divide communities, which also benefits the coal industry. In Matewan, the romanticized but powerful film about the prelude to the Battle of Blair Mountain, a union organizer tells an assembled crowd, “There ain’t but two sides, them that work and them that don’t.” What was once a framework of solidarity has, in parts of coal country, become a distorted way of assigning authority to a limited number of people who are allowed to speak about the coal industry. To question the logic of the industry is, in essence, to question the logic of your neighbor having a job or your cousin having health insurance. The coal industry endows us with messy identities—the “I’m not a coal miner, but…” qualification—designed to maximize conflict.
It’s difficult to overstate the degree to which mountaintop removal has changed life and work in parts of Appalachia. It is clear that Donald Trump conceals his love of coal as a commodity in his over-performed and insincere admiration for coal miners. He is not original in this strategy. He borrowed it directly from the coal industry. People outside the region, and particularly mainstream media, take great joy in pointing out these contradictions as if only they can see them, lobbing rhetorical questions to an imagined audience of coal miners: “Why have you voted against your own interests?” This question only seems relevant if you believe that individuals who were convinced to dismantle mountains can’t also be convinced to vote for outcomes beneficial to their employers.
Into this mix came in 2009 the second Battle for Blair Mountain, a multifront campaign to protect the land from mountaintop removal and to recognize its cultural and historical significance to West Virginia. And once again, West Virginia’s coal companies reacted with their peculiar brand of hysteria to what they perceived to be an assault on their fundamental right to own not only the land and its resources, but also the region’s history.
In the winter of 2009, the Department of the Interior (DOI) accepted an application to place Blair Mountain on the National Register of Historic Places. Placement of a site on the register is often more symbolic than strategic, but sometimes it is both. The register guarantees no federal protections, but it does obligate parties to make a good-faith attempt to limit damage to sites of cultural and historical significance. In the case of Blair Mountain it might mean, for example, that companies owning coal leases at the site would be obligated to forgo extraction via mountaintop removal in favor of less efficient subterranean mining methods.
There’s a particular form of coal industry math in which jobs that have never existed are perpetually taken away. In Logan and Mingo Counties, coal companies claimed that efforts to protect the mountain’s cultural heritage were stealing jobs from surrounding communities, despite the fact that subterranean extraction would require more workers. Deep resentment developed in coal country, this time not between miners and coal operators, but between conservationists and the industry at large, including non-union miners.
The application remained on the register for six months until the DOI de-listed it in response to claims of “procedural errors” made by the West Virginia state historic preservation office. This is the point where the story turns into a shit show of the highest order, even for coal country. On one side of the table were the coal companies, their legal teams, and the state’s preservation office, who argued that the original application failed to solicit comments from individuals with an important legal interest in Blair Mountain. And on the other side were archaeologists, historians, conservationists, and their legal representative who offered the very straightforward response that there was no conflict because a bit more investigation would have easily revealed those parties were long dead.
As organizations instigated lawsuits to see the mountain returned to the register, activist groups in Appalachia took a more direct approach. They decided, once again, to march on Blair Mountain and reclaim their history from the coal industry. The 2011 march included individuals from sixty-five organizations, supported by celebrities and politicians. Jason Bostic, the vice president of the West Virginia Coal Association, summed up the coal industry’s response when he looked out on a snaking li
ne of 1,500 people marching up a mountain in ninety-degree weather and asked, “What good is a mountain just to have a mountain?” The second Battle of Blair Mountain foregrounded ecological conservation, but it was about labor as well. The United Mine Workers of America helped sponsor the march, concerned about their history and the ongoing erosion of workers’ rights in southern West Virginia.
“Behold the road to Blair Mountain, where another civil war looms in the hills of Appalachia,” Chuck Keeney wrote, describing the community divisions opened by the march. Watching footage captured by marchers is a deeply uncomfortable experience. A pickup crawls by with a homemade banner that reads, “FUCK YOU TREEHUGGERS.” It’s followed by another truck and another banner, this time, “FUCK YOU SONS OF BITCHES I LOVE COAL.” Children scream at marchers and ask them, mimicking their parents, “Have you ever worked a day in your life?”
The wives of coal truck operators, who believe their husbands will be fired if the protest delays their deliveries, are filmed telling bewildered West Virginians to “go back where you came from.” Marchers attempt to move a boulder intentionally rolled onto the road from a mining site and young men jeer at them. One tells the group of activists that the 1921 miners would be ashamed of them because they had taken up arms for their right to mine coal. “They fought to unionize. Do you work at a unionized mine?” an organizer corrects him, to a blank stare. A mind remained unchanged but a boulder got moved.
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia Page 11