Reformers to Radicals

by Thomas Kiffmeyer

  Through the remainder of 1966 and into 1967, the Volunteers worked to liberate mountaineers from poverty and subservience. Impoverished rural mountaineers were not unambitious, strange, or quaint, Milton Ogle informed Robert Kennedy. They were “exploited, underdeveloped, and basically bypassed by the progress of the nation as a whole.” Appalachia’s problems, Ogle declared, were very similar to those of the “‘third world.’” The people of the region were “weary from exploitation,” and, because they “provided the backbone of the nation’s resources,” they “must do whatever it takes to begin to benefit from these resources.” This statement became the battle cry of the Appalachian Volunteers for the next year.53

  In order to help the local people of Wise County, Virginia, help themselves, the fieldman Joe Mulloy proposed the creation of a reference book on the political, economic, and social fabric of the county. “This idea,” he explained, “grew out of the lack of information—the lack of [data] that the folks have about what is available and the fact that the . . . service agencies are not doing the job they should.” This volume would allow the mountaineers to discover the “who, what and how of welfare, health and sanitation, coal operations, unions, [and] pensions.” This information was important because rural people needed to know how the system worked “in order to operate within [this] structure and bring about effective change.” It would illustrate the flaws of the existing power structure and make their exploitation more successful. Taking a cue from the civil rights movement and the Highlander Folk School, Mulloy thought that his reference book could become the text for an “Appalachian Freedom School.”54

  Mulloy’s tactics apparently achieved some success. In a memorandum to the OEO, Tom Rhodenbaugh indicated that the board of directors of the Wise County CAP fired the agency’s director, James Sommerville, who was sympathetic to the AV position. Rhodenbaugh claimed that Sommerville did not wish to see the county’s CAP turned into yet another “paternalistic” social program and that he supported, with AV help, a group of African American women in the town of Norton who organized a “domestic services corporation” (a laundry service) and a sewing cooperative headquartered at a CAP-run community center. After the co-op asked the local CAP for additional funding, rumors that the grassroots organization really was an AV-inspired and -led domestic workers’ strike circulated throughout the town. In what the Volunteers interpreted as an attempt to keep the people dependent, the majority of the program’s board decided that the women then working in the center should be rotated out after only a few months in order to give more people a chance to benefit from the program. Those then working protested the decision, and Sommerville organized their appeal. He claimed that the Volunteers saw the tension between himself and the board as an opportunity to direct the entire county program toward the problems of the poor, and they then approached the board with ideas for additional projects to benefit the impoverished in the county.55

  At a meeting on September 29, 1966, the Wise County CAP president announced that there “was an internal force seeking to disrupt [the program] and to subvert its expressed purpose.” In response, the Volunteers issued a “propaganda piece” called “The Wise Owl” that carried the news of the board’s earlier decision to close the county’s Program Development Office and then “championed [this decision] as a beginning of the end of Appalachia’s problems as the poor shouldered arms to wage their own fight.” Following the distribution of this newspaper, the program labeled the AVs “subversives,” and, at the suggestion of the AVs, the poor began to form people’s committees. As these committees protested the action of the Wise County CAP, the board relieved Sommerville of his duties as director. Until they could get Sommerville returned to his post, the Volunteers added him to their staff so that the work in the county could continue unabated.56

  To the north, in Raleigh County, West Virginia, the Appalachian Volunteers realized their greatest success to date. Here, more than in any other county in which they worked, they demonstrated that “democracy is real and functioning at the grassroots level.” After establishing a people’s committee, they succeeded in replacing the local CAP director with Gibbs Kinderman, an AV staff member. Raleigh County, like most of the other counties of southern West Virginia, had a strong union and an organizing tradition, which aided Kinderman in his assent to power in the county CAP. Moreover, the county CAP was inadequately funded and badly run. As a result, official opposition to the Volunteers was weak and poorly organized. In Mingo County, West Virginia, by contrast, after the county CAP director, Huey Perry, resigned after a losing battle with the local political hierarchy, the Volunteers tried unsuccessfully to “take over” that CAP as well.57

  In eastern Kentucky, where the majority of Volunteer activity still took place, the results and consequences were not yet so dramatic. Nevertheless, the AVs did make an impression on many county officials. It was “flap time,” Ogle informed the AV membership. By this, he meant that the Volunteers had gotten “enough community people together and talking that the hair on the backs of some of the more unresponsive ‘public servants’ [was] standing on end.” As a consequence, those “public servants” mounted a campaign to discredit the Volunteers in the eyes of the OEO. To counteract this, the Volunteers embarked on their own campaign to bolster their position with the federal government. Ogle asked his fieldmen to gather petitions, letters, and testimonials of community action from mountain folk that could be presented to OEO. “Its important,” Ogle concluded, “that the CAPS begin to realize that the A.V.s are for real and that community organization is part of their job.”58

  The AVs did continue organizing in eastern Kentucky. “Appalachian Volunteers and VISTA Volunteers are constantly harassed by public blasts from local politicians who see poor people becoming more knowledgeable and more experienced,” Ogle declared. There was “as a result,” he continued, “a loosening of the grip of the political patronage system on which the poor have been forced to depend. Isolated mountain people are finding that their voices have an important effect on updating and upgrading the social and economic institutions in their localities.”59

  According to the AVs, much of this “upgrading” “has been diagnosed by county leaders as ‘agitation’ or as a response on the part of isolated poor people to agitation by Vista and Appalachian Volunteers.” Tracing the history of the War on Poverty in Breathitt County, for example, the AVs argued that, in the beginning, the men and women who led the antipoverty agencies “operated on the assumption that the ‘target population’ possessed neither organizational or administrative skills nor the gumption to acquire such skills”: “Consequently, involving the poor in the conception, design and implementation of anti-poverty programs has been kept to a minimum.” Because the local administration ignored them, the people along the north fork of the Kentucky River began to hold their own meetings. On May 3, 1966, Buck Maggard, a local resident, called a meeting at Lost Creek and formed the Breathitt County Grassroots Citizen Committee. According to the AVs, Maggard’s motivation for his new organization was his “antagonism for the Community Action Office in [the county seat of] Jackson which he contended was controlled by the power structure.” The AVs themselves argued that the “county has been dominated for forty years by one political family which has virtual control of the county, its resources and its people.” As a result, “misuse of funds, graft, and patronage” were “realities” that the Volunteers needed to address in Breathitt County.60

  Operating independently from the local CAP, Maggard’s Grassroots Committee and the AVs worked with the poor of Sandy Ridge in neighboring Wolfe County to form a pine roping and Christmas decoration manufacturing cooperative and established a quilting shop in Malaga, also in Wolfe. With Volunteer help, it created community libraries at Barwick, Haddix, Hayes Branch, and a number of other small communities in Breathitt County. As of November 1966, the committee continued, with absolutely no help from the county CAP and little expectation of getting any, to organize the poor a
round issues that were important to them. By 1967, the Volunteers aided in the establishment of a local chapter of the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People (AGSLP). A somewhat militant anti-strip-mining organization, AGSLP grew out of the actions of Knott County’s Mrs. Ollie “Widow” Combs and Dan Gibson in 1965. During the next three years, the AVs worked to form AGSLP chapters in Breathitt, Pike, Floyd, and Harlan counties.61

  In addition to the work with AGSLP in Harlan County, the Volunteers founded an outpost at Evarts. Using that outpost as a headquarters, the AVs conducted programs on welfare rights and established an “independent” Head Start–like program that the county school board effectively shut down because of what the Volunteers labeled simply a “contract violation.” Moreover, the AVs sought to develop indigenous local leadership within the county, a project that would make “the future of the A.V.s HELL.” The AV HELL—or Headquarters for Education of Local Leadership—program in Harlan County called for the establishment of a center that would be a gathering place for the poor to think creatively about their problems and possible solutions. At this proposed educational institution, a project somewhat similar to Mulloy’s textbook on Wise County politics, would be a library of information about local, state, and federal governments. HELL would also, the Volunteers hoped, publish a newspaper meant to assist “in educating people about the political scene.” The end result would be a homegrown pressure group that would “make [local] institutions more responsive to the needs of the people.”62

  In the fall of 1966, taking action of a more concrete form, the Volunteers backed a candidate for the Harlan County school board in opposition to the “county dictator,” James Cawood. Though their candidate lost, the AVs believed that they issued a “strong challenge to the Cawood political machine” and that they had established an organizational base as a result of the campaign. This was the foundation, they believed, “for the development of new skills in [the] democratic political process, [and for] true economic equality and power for the masses.” Having established this base and the HELL program, the Volunteers embarked on an effort to “break the control over the [community action] programs by the county school superintendents; programs which involved several thousand dollars worth of patronage.”63

  In Floyd County, Volunteer efforts resembled both the past and the present orientation of the organization. In addition to conducting school repair, the AVs also helped found the Highway 979 Community Action Council (979 CAC), composed of representatives from twelve small communities along Highway 979. The 979 CAC started a local newspaper, the Hawkeye, which sought to break down the barriers of intercommunity communication. In June 1966, a group of citizens from the community of Mud Creek traveled to the state capital to discuss the community’s water supply. According to an AV report, the water for Mud Creek came from open wells, at least 75 percent of which were contaminated. As a result of this meeting, Governor Breathitt declared Mud Creek an emergency area and provided OEO funds for the construction of a new water system. Others from the 979 CAC bypassed their local officials and went straight to the state capital. Representatives of Little Mud Creek and the Right Tolar school paid visits to the state highway commissioners’ office and the state board of education to ask for better roads, better school buildings, and, most important, better teachers.64

  Activities in Letcher County centered on the Volunteer outpost center at Carcassonne. High on the priority list was the creation of a welfare rights organization, but the Volunteers suddenly encountered the apathy so commonly ascribed to mountain people—that same attitude the Volunteers were, they claimed, helping mountaineers overcome. “Development of any sort of welfare rights organization here is difficult and slow work,” the Volunteers claimed, “largely because very few welfare recipients have any prior experience at working together and because even fewer really expect to see any substantial improvement in welfare programs.” Despite the difficulties, the Volunteers continued organizing in Letcher with the support of the local AGSLP chapter. Unlike welfare reform, this issue of strip mining seemed to energize people. Those “who used to believe that nothing could be done to protect their land now realize they can do just that by acting together.” By functioning as a unit, the people in Letcher County could now come to grips with water pollution, soil erosion, and their legal rights.65

  Welfare reform and politics also dominated Appalachian Volunteer activity in Pike County, one of the country’s principal coal-producing counties. Responsible for Pike was the Wise County, Virginia, AV fieldman Joe Mulloy, who had moved to Pike County in 1967 and focused his activities on three broad topics—strip mining, welfare rights, and the Marrowbone Folk School. Located on Marrowbone Creek, the folk school was a rallying point for AV activity in the county. Shortly after their arrival in 1966, the Appalachian Volunteers charged the superintendent with “misuse of funds” and with selecting teachers for political reasons rather than on the basis of their qualifications. “Education in these counties,” the Volunteers announced, “is in need of total revamping.” Repeating a common theme, they accused the local CAP of working to maintain the status quo, as opposed to actually working to end poverty.66

  While rhetoric dominated, activity did not lag. Edith Easterling, a lifelong resident of Poor Bottom, in Pike County, and an energetic AV intern, led a group of local residents to Frankfort in order to discuss education in the county. Though the group had arranged to meet the state superintendent, Harry Sparks, Sparks did not keep his appointment. Instead, the Poor Bottom contingent discussed among themselves how county politics dominated the school system. “We talked about our schools and how the teachers work under pressure,” Easterling reported to the Volunteers. “We also talked about politics and how they are played in our community. I worked for the Board of Education and the principal called me in and said ‘you vote like we say or you don’t work here.’ I did not vote like he said and I was not hired back to work the following year.” Other teachers would “change their politics so they could go on working.” These complaints were not exclusive to teachers but came “also from local citizens.” “Can’t we, as Americans get help so we can be free?” Easterling appealed.67

  In the wake of these accomplishments, the Appalachian Volunteers entered the summer of 1967 feeling most potent. At a June 1967 Board of Directors meeting at Beckley, West Virginia, the antipoverty group made one of its most bold statements: “The board made a resolution that all people involved in community action should write letters to their congressmen and senators against elected officials making up or sitting on advisory boards concerned with poverty.” It further asserted that “the people should run their own affairs without some ‘joker’ in a plush office telling people what they need, and what to do” and that either “more poor people should run for office or people who fairly reflect the feelings of those who elect them.”68

  Strip mining, like politics, was again an important topic of discussion. Six months earlier, at their winter meeting in Huntington, West Virginia, the Volunteers had called for restrictions on strip mining on the grounds that it threatened personal property, “scenic spots,” and “recreation areas” and caused “extreme or severe pollution.” Calling it their “number 1 problem,” they proclaimed: “Stripping in these mountains should be outlawed.” Ogle added that everyone interested in central Appalachia “should work to abolish it.” Other board members suggested that the Volunteers help local residents establish their own utility districts that, unlike the Tennessee Valley Authority, would not use stripped coal. This, they hoped, would lead to the end of that mining method.69

  The AVs also indicted the county-administered CAPs in eastern Kentucky. The CAP in Wolfe County, one participant stated, “don’t want poor folks to get involved.” Someone from Breathitt County exclaimed: “All we get is promises.” Nancy Coles proclaimed that, because the Volunteers informed the poor about the Breathitt County CAP, it “won’t have anything to do with [the AVs].” Gordon Meade of Floyd County asserted tha
t the county CAP had concealed its activities from the poor: “AVs told us about CAP and that’s what makes CAP mad.” The result: “They knock us down faster than they pick us up.” Summing up the situation, the Volunteers determined that county officials gave jobs to their relatives and that politicians, in general, “by pass the poor and do what the middle class and high class of people want.” In the end, the poor resigned themselves to this situation. Don Turner, an AV intern from Breathitt County, declared: “They feel they can’t ask the local CAP for help because they won’t help them.”70