In 1967, the sheriff of Pike County, Kentucky, ordered a raid on the home of community organizers Karen and Joseph Mulloy, a young couple affiliated with a number of anti-poverty and anti-coal programs. To the delight of law enforcement and the county’s political elite, the raid unearthed “a Communist library out of this world” that included Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. The sheriff, the appropriately named Perry Justice, ordered the arrest of Joseph, his neighbor Alan McSurely, and his friend Carl Braden for sedition against the government of Pike County.
This was the second time that Braden found himself charged with sedition in Kentucky. In 1954, he and his wife Anne helped purchase a home for an African American couple, Andrew and Charlotte Wade, in Louisville. The swift backlash, which included an attempt by white neighbors to dynamite the home, prompted Braden’s arrest. The pretext? They were attempting to overthrow the commonwealth by igniting a race war. The court convicted Carl Braden and sentenced him to a term of fifteen years. He served eighteen months in prison, and forty-two days in solitary confinement, before the Supreme Court, ruling on a case in Pennsylvania, determined that charges of sedition were only applicable in federal matters, not state or local. During the 1954 trial, the Bradens lost approximately 800 books, seized by law enforcement, and spent $40,000 in legal fees.
Over a decade later, Perry Justice alleged that the Mulloys and McSurelys, with the assistance of Braden, were attempting to “take over Pike County from the power structure and put it in the hands of the poor” by using mountain people and anti-poverty workers to “promote causes aimed at downgrading and maybe overthrowing the Government.” The commonwealth charged them with “teaching or advocating criminal syndicalism against the state,” an ambiguous legal tactic most often reserved to harass labor unions and their supporters. Although Pike County officials knew sedition charges were unconstitutional, the Mulloys and McSurelys were indeed attempting to help poor individuals in the mountains seize power from the wealthy. In other words, they were engaging in one of the finest and oldest Appalachian traditions.
One of the most offensive “Trump Country” essays I have encountered came courtesy of Kevin Baker in the March 2017 issue of the New Republic. It’s a painfully smug attempt to effect a kind of gotcha by juxtaposing historic Appalachian labor uprisings against our presumed present complacency. Look at how far the radical have fallen, Baker seems to argue, setting Blair Mountain insurrections against the tepid and polite applause for coal interests at a televised Bernie Sanders rally. But we are not accountable to Baker’s narrow definition of radical, which nods in limp recognition at men with guns, but excludes individuals like the Mulloys, McSurelys, and the Bradens.
A flaw of popular narratives of Appalachia is the willingness of authors to describe destruction and social decline in lurid detail while remaining wholly uninterested in the people who challenged it. To the National Review, Appalachia is the “white ghetto,” a place filled with “the unemployed, the dependent, and the addicted.” To me, Appalachia is a battleground, where industry barons, social reformers, and workers wage a constant war that is passed down through generations, often reflecting inherited struggles that feel repeated and never-ending.
When I imagine our history, I see photographs. You might notice that visual cues populate this volume, which is an artifact of both my peculiar way of thinking and also of the frequency with which photographers, journalists, and visual artists come to document us. References to challenging ways of seeing or looking at Appalachia appear in many projects created by Appalachians as opposed to those that are about Appalachians. It is often second nature for many of us to inject the language of visual literacy into our work because we’re accustomed to serving as passive subjects for others and ultimately just want to be seen as we truly are.
So like any good host, let me conclude our visit by dragging out our family photo album to show you Appalachia as I see it. Here is Anne Braden, dressed in black, with her neat pocketbook and tilted head at her husband’s sedition trial. Here is Myles Horton, a labor and civil rights activist from Tennessee, flanked by Rosa Parks and Septima Clark. Here is Robert Payne, a disabled African American miner who helped lead one of the largest wildcat strikes in history as president of the Disabled Miners and Widows organization. Here is Eula Hall, with her big, teased hair and her finger pointed in the face of every bureaucrat that stood in her way. Here is Huey Perry, poised to lead a hundred-car-long funeral procession to mark the death of his community action group. Here are my grandparents, here are your grandparents. Here is Judy Bonds, fishing with her grandchildren after her shift at Pizza Hut, before she became the face of anti-mountaintop-removal activism. This is who we are. This is who we have been all this time.
There is a single figure in the photograph I see in my head that is otherwise cluttered with the artifacts of ruined land—slender and crooked branches, deep ravines—and industrial equipment. The figure is an elderly woman, sixty-six years old and aged even beyond that by poverty, with a dark-colored kerchief on her head and a walking stick by her side. She stands before a bulldozer with her head bowed.
She is sitting in the next frame. Depending on the angle of the photographer—Bill Strode working for the Courier-Journal out of Louisville—the bulldozer is still visible but so are trees ripped from the earth by their roots. In one image her kneeling frame even appears underwater because the shadows of equipment and the shadows of dead things engulf her small body.
The final frame is perhaps the last one Strode captured before police arrested him for documenting the woman’s protest. A uniformed officer has his hands hooked beneath her arms. A man in a dark suit, looking wholly out of place on a ravaged mountain, supports her feet. She is limp. The middle of her body sags beneath the two men because, although she is light, she has forced them to carry her down a steep mountain.
This is how I see Ollie Combs, who in 1965 sat in front of the Caperton Coal Company’s bulldozers to protest their abuse of her land. A legal loophole gave Caperton ownership of the minerals beneath Combs’s land and the land surrounding it, and although she owned everything above ground, exploitive land deeds entitled coal companies to extract these minerals by any means necessary, including the destruction of her home and property. I see Ollie Combs in jail, on Thanksgiving, eating alone.
There is another image, uncaptured, that should haunt your memories. Testifying against coal companies in eastern Kentucky, young women described watching bulldozers rip through a family cemetery. Alice Sloan, a Kentucky-area educator, described how Bige Richie pleaded with the coal company to spare the grave of her child: “The bulldozer pushed over the hill and she begged them not to go through the graveyard. And she looked out there and there was her baby’s coffin come rolling down the hill. One man said he wouldn’t go through and push it down. The other said, ‘Hell, I will,’ and he took the bulldozer and went right on through.”
The struggle to prevent the wholesale destruction of land by strip-mining coal companies in eastern Kentucky gave rise to the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People. This grassroots organization was established after an eighty-one-year-old preacher named Dan Gibson used armed resistance to route bulldozers off his family land in Knott County, Kentucky, in 1965. Ollie Combs was a member, as were many elderly Kentuckians who tried to protect the land while their children and grandchildren were fighting in Vietnam. Like coal companies, the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People went about its business by any means necessary. It waged painfully slow legal challenges through the courts, but members also engaged in more militant forms of action and in illegal methods of protest such as industrial sabotage.
The fringe group Mountaintop Gun Club, for example, rented private surface land for $1 from concerned landowners. In return, the club established shooting ranges on threatened land in the hopes that the presence of armed individuals might deter coal companies from taking the land by force. Members of the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People described parts of eastern Kentucky in the late 1960s as a war zone where armed residents faced off daily against coal operators.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
“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.
But I am also citing Yesterday’s People for another reason. While Weller was compiling his handbook about the region’s “primitive” people, those very same people were engaged in business of their own. They were not looking for saviors but instead set to work consolidating their collective power to create political change for the good of their communities.
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.
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 line 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.
Good news for Blair Mountain came in 2014 when a court of appeals ruled that petitioners—who by that point included the Sierra Club, Friends of Blair Mountain, the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, the West Virginia Labor History Association, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation—could move forward with a legal challenge to vacate the DOI’s de-listing of the site. In 2016, a federal judge ruled that the DOI had violated federal law, and a second agreed that the agency had acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner by rubber-stamping the state’s evidence using a process that contained “very little, if any, indicia of reasoned decision making.”
Despite this procedural victory, Blair Mountain remains in limbo. It has not yet been returned to the National Register. It may never get there. It exists in the space between the question, “What good is a mountain just to have a mountain?” and Judy Bonds’s assertion that “there are no jobs on a dead planet.” In that regard, the Battle of Blair Mountain is never-ending, looped, and waiting for its next generation of soldiers.
There once existed in the field of Appalachian Studies a model of Appalachia as an “internal colony.” Looking at this framework—what it did and didn’t do—is a good way of considering how we all, Appalachians included, might be able to get Appalachia a little less wrong.
After the War on Poverty failed, many Appalachians came to believe that the region’s problems could not be fixed without the help of local experts, whose coherent sense of history could drive social change. The War on Poverty had attempted to address Appalachia’s problems in a top-down fashion, anchored in the belief that change could take place within the region’s existing economic, social, and political structures. When this strategy proved to be inadequate, Appalachians set out to define the region’s problems in their own language and according to their own experiences.
The “internal colony” model came courtesy of 1978’s Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case, by Helen Lewis, Linda Johnson, and Donald Askins. It defined the region’s long history of destruction in the name of capitalism as a form of colonialism. It also understood the use of stereotypes and myths as an extension of colonization. The “internal colony” model gave many Appalachians, for the first time, a tool for understanding the region’s web of exploitation, from the stories of local color writers in the early nineteenth century to the corruption that fueled the domination of the coal industry in the twentieth.
Scholar Mary K. Anglin reflected on the work as “an activist interpretation grounded in a sense of place and a reading of social hierarchy, principally through the lens of class relations.” It is not surprising that individuals living in a region considered a “third world” by Americans might believe theories of colonialism spoke to their experiences as well. The theory, quite accurately, presented unchecked capitalism as the root of Appalachia’s problems. Following the priorities of the radical Left, it also called for an anti-colonial movement in Appalachia.
The “internal colony” model is deeply satisfying but problematic. Students of Appalachia such as myself experienced powerful epiphanies examining this model, which allowed us to transform our shame into coherent and righteous anger. Ada Smith, a founder of the Stay Together Appalachia Youth Project, said that the model “allowed me to understand that my people, my heritage, and culture were not the problem, and gave me a way in which I could more easily understand power…This in turn connected me to issues around racism, classism, and homophobia because of their structural nature.”
Barbara Smith and Steve Fisher wrote that the emotional power of the “internal colony” model helped students of Appalachia better situate the logic of “place-based exploitation…with cultural degradation” and work against it. “It thereby creates Appalachia as a regional collectivity, no longer pathologized but oppressed, and enables us to situate ourselves in a shared cultural geography that recognizes all residents as heirs to a special, place-based identity,” which in turn “draws an undeniably powerful line between innocent victims inside the region and profiteering elites on the outside.”
The model appeared at a time when there was intense interest in the region to determine who exactly “owned” Appalachia. In 1977, widespread flooding in Kentucky and West Virginia, exacerbated by mining activity, left hundreds homeless. When relief agencies tried to construct temporary housing for victims, they could find no suitable combination of land that was both dry and not controlled by obstructive corporate entities. The following year, the Appalachian Regional Commission and the Appalachian Alliance launched the Appalachian Land Study, which used participatory action research to document and map patterns of land ownership in the region.
Their findings, released in 1981, confirmed what most had long suspected: that outside corporations owned the majority of the region’s mineral rights and almost half its surface land. The study also found that the property taxes of non-corporate land owners were offsetting the taxes on land owned by corporations. In one county, for example, corporations that owned 70 percent of the land contributed just 4 percent of the county’s property tax stream. Not surprisingly, communities where such a stark imbalance existed experienced sharp declines in quality of life.
The “internal colony” model, therefore, reflected what was true in 1978 and is still true today; that the region’s uneven distribution of wealth and resources is a significant obstacle in efforts to address Appalachian poverty. This portal, however, also reflected imbalances of its own. The use of a colony model to understand modern Appalachia elides the region’s history of indigenous colonization and the continued marginalization of Native American individuals both within Appalachia and the wider United States. As Emily Satterwhite wrote, “The idea of Appalachia as racially distinct, rural, and premodern has served to reassure white Americans of the persistence of an indigenous white national culture.”
In rare moments when intellectuals praise Appalachia, and more often in moments when we praise ourselves, even those of us who are white are endowed with indigenous cultural traits. We are keepers and stewards of the land, for example, fighting the encroachment of destructive forces. For some, this cultural identity fosters solidarity between indigenous and non-indigenous people in Appalachia. There is and was, for example, enormous support among Appalachian activist groups for indigenous water-protectors at Standing Rock. At the same time, native land rights continue to be an afterthought in more contemporary discussions of corporate land ownership, one of many tensions that must be interrogated and reconciled in post-coal strategic visioning.
The “internal colony” model also situates the problems of Appalachia as imported woes inflicted on the region by a revolving cast of outsiders. It risks excusing us from the responsibility of imagining how we in the region might be complicit in structural inequality and oppression. A chief example of this is the support for the coal industry found among Appalachia’s political elite, but equally important are the homophobia, racism, and xenophobia within the region. Appalachian author Silas House writes, “Homophobia lurks in the hollers and slithers along the ridges in Appalachia. The reason why is because Appalachia is in America. What is happening here is happening throughout the rest of the country.”
In Appalachia, there’s a tendency to believe that tensions only occur when outsiders meddle in our business. This is a benevolent stereotype that stretches back more than 150 years. Anthropologist Allen Batteau called it the myth of “Holy Appalachia”—a fiction designed to help repair a society contaminated by the evils of slavery. During and after the Civil War, it became therapeutic, in a sense, to allow a category of white persons to be immune from racial hysteria. In other words, white Appalachians became the first beneficiaries of #notallwhitepeople.
Citing the existence of Appalachian anti-slavery societies and our geographic and cultural distance from plantation slavery, intellectuals from Abraham Lincoln to Carter G. Woodson have made the case for our racial innocence. If the institution of slavery fundamentally altered the moral compass of white individuals, it followed that those who lacked exposure to it could be spared. White people in Appalachia used this myth of racial innocence frequently for many years, most visibly of late in Vance’s popular claims that white Trump voters in Appalachia are a different breed, uncontaminated by racism.
The myth of “Holy Appalachia” returned to use when white supremacists converged on Pikeville, Kentucky, at the end of April 2017. Organized by the Traditionalist Worker Party, members of the League of the South, the Oath Keepers, and the Nationalist Social Party rallied in Pikeville in “defense of white families.” White supremacists have often tried to gain a foothold in Appalachia and center the region in projected fantasies that combine white racial solidarity with economic uplift. In response to the rally, militant leftists, anti-racists, and anti-fascists planned a counter-protest. The city of Pikeville passed special ordinances explicitly intended to discourage counter-protest, many businesses in the area closed for the duration of the rally, and locals with the ability to leave for the weekend were encouraged to do so.
Local commentary about the rally from both regional media and residents emphasized that Pikeville had done nothing to encourage the rally. The commentary took pains to suggest that both the white supremacist demonstrators and counter-protestors were all outsiders. News reports made it a point of sharing, as an editor from TriState Update did, that “many of the cars TWP members left in had out-of-state license plates. Some were from California, Alabama, and Georgia just to name a few.”
Writing for the Huffington Post, Kentucky native Jason Belcher wrote that “local citizens did not turn out to support any of the groups…Conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats here don’t agree on much, but we agree extremism has no place in Pikeville.” Dave Mistich, of the 100 Days in Appalachia project, framed the event as the “white supremacist rally and counter protest that no one wanted here.” Mistich wrote, “Participants from both sides were mostly from out of state, leaving locals few and far between Saturday afternoon in downtown Pikeville.” According to these local voices, Pikeville is a place of folksy neutrality where the good and the bad cancel each other out as long as no one steps out of line and becomes “an extremist.”
Pikeville, you may remember, is the same place where the wealthy and powerful tormented community activists and charged organizers with sedition. Eastern Kentucky, you also may remember, is immortalized in one of the most recognizable anthems of the labor and civil rights movements as a place where there is no neutrality. There are many things that have come to Appalachia that no one wanted, but how we respond to them once they’re here is important.
Many local residents did indeed counter-protest; their willingness to do so was a product of life in communities shaped by racism. They marched, some wearing red bandanas, and captured video of the event that they later set to bluegrass music and shared in forums populated by other Appalachians. One protester explained, “Well, Nazis put out a call to white families to come here, and I’m here as the mother of a white family to say that Nazis aren’t welcome in Appalachia. We have real problems here with pipelines, oil and gas and coal companies are poisoning water and air. A few people are getting rich while our children get sick and Nazis come in and tell us to blame that on other poor people because they have a different color skin? Please.”
Local counter-protestors took explicit steps to connect their identities as both Appalachians and anti-racists and put this identity to work in the service of social change. It’s a form of activism that, much like the racism that compelled them to act, is wholly consistent with the region’s history.
You’ll often hear, in the region, variations on the belief that “hillbillies are the only group it’s still socially acceptable to belittle.” This is not the case, not by a long shot. What is true, however, is that people are often blindly classist while remaining self-congratulatory about their other progressive credentials.
One of the most insidious manifestations of this attitude is the belief that people could escape the problems of the region if they would just move. This attitude rarely acknowledges the personal factors that may impact someone’s desire to move. Rather, it flatly equates migration with opportunity in ways that are disappointing. The National Review is fond of preaching, for example, variations on Kevin Williamson’s painful but popular advice that poor people “need real opportunity, which means they need real change, which means they need U-Hauls.” Let me tell you how that worked out for me.
Appalachians are a group of people burdened with the task of perpetually re-earning our place in narratives of American progress. In this we are not alone. For us, however, this burden manifests in calls for migration and the de-population of our home, an exodus of sacrifice that must be performed in order to prove that we are not the people you think we are. To leave is to demonstrate our ambition, to be something other than dependent and stubborn. To leave is to be productive rather than complacent, and to refuse is to be complicit. Theories of “brain drain” suggest that the only individuals willing to be left behind are those who are pathological, choosing to forgo a chance at prosperity to live among the lost.
I left. I earned a PhD and promptly moved where the job market sent me, which happened to be southeast Texas. The move was wholly in line with notions of appropriate mobility, particularly for those with an elite education who take their place in a system of privilege that narrows as it elevates. In other words, I am a product of two worlds that demand a particular path of ambition: the mountains and the academy. The logic of the academy reinforced that I should accept any position, no matter how remote the location or how awful the pay, to be successful.
The corner of Tennessee I come from is not known for its coal extraction, but it is known for transforming that coal into energy through the all-encompassing hand of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Its power-generating facilities produce coal-ash, a particularly toxic substance that defies convenient disposal. Using the TVA’s own data, the Southern Environmental Law Center estimates that over the last sixty years, twenty-seven billion gallons of coal-ash have leaked from the utility company’s Gallatin facility, one of six such plants in Tennessee.
Steve Hale and Steve Cavendish, writing for the Nashville Scene, described a 2008 industrial spill not far from me, “Around 1 a.m., the retaining wall of an 80 acre ash pond at the Kingston Fossil Plant 40 miles from Knoxville collapsed, sending 50 years of waste spilling out into the night. In all, 1.1 billion gallons of wet ash rushed forth from the plant—a tidal wave of toxic sludge that covered some 300 acres, spilled into a nearby river and destroyed three homes, sweeping at least one off its foundation.” The TVA responded by purchasing 180 contaminated properties and 960 toxic acres of land. Five years after the spill, only Tommy Charles and his wife were left in his neighborhood. He cried when reporters came to ask him why he didn’t leave. At the age of seventy-four, he didn’t have anywhere else to go.
If the logic of exodus was correct, then my relocation would forever entitle me to be spared the sight of people weeping for their homes. It would exempt me from conversations with bank tellers about the worsening symptoms of their children’s asthma. My daily commute would be forever free from the monotonous rush to roll up windows at certain mile markers. My water would be drinkable and my air clean. I would be paid my worth, allowed to live in productive comfort among others allowed the same.
This is not the reality I experienced. Instead, I followed the market to the polluted air and contaminated water of Texas’s “cancer belt,” this time brought to you by the oil industry. Here, the poor people most likely to suffer the worst effects of refinery pollution are African American, not white, but the same brutal disregard is present. But this time it was me weeping for my home—both the one I left and the one I came to.
When I traveled to give academic talks or to interview for other positions, I became convinced that the smell of refineries followed me, on my clothes, and would reveal my true identity: someone not important enough to not be poisoned. The logic of exodus just shrugs its shoulders at these realities and tells us to move smarter. I decided to ignore this logic and come back home to fight smarter.
The relief at returning is overwhelming, to come creeping again toward home. Silas House writes, “There is a language in the kudzu and it is all ours and belongs to no one else. This is my tongue for you, whispering our history: words words words.”
In 2012, community organizer Si Kahn shared a story at a conference in Pennsylvania about union activist Florence Reece. Reece wrote one of the labor movement’s most powerful anthems—“Which Side Are You On?”—about the harassment of her family by anti-union thugs in eastern Kentucky in the 1930s. Kahn retold a conversation he had with Reece much later in her life about the day she wrote her song.
According to legend, Reece became so angry that she tore a calendar off the wall, letting the words flow onto its pages. “I could never understand,” Kahn said, “how Florence Reece could write down five whole verses on one of those calendars” crammed with information like “phases of the moon the moon didn’t even know it had. There’s just no room to do that.”
“Si,” the voice of the now-departed Reece patiently answered in the story, “before I started writing I turned it over.”
“We need to make a deceptively simple decision,” Kahn concluded, “No one has ever laid it out more clearly than Florence Reece…Part of our work now and for the next fifty years is to turn everything over.”
And then the people sang, in voices bright and loud, the song that Reece gave us.
Fifty years is not just an arbitrary dateline in Appalachia. We gather in these spaces of collective dreaming to sing and bear witness with the hope that we might call into being the end of what Rebecca Scott called “the dismal banality of the dominion of coal.” In Appalachia, coal isn’t just coal. It’s the blackest part of a constellation of knowledge that tells us it is easier in our world to bury a person alive than lift her up.
“Mountaintop removal is an act of radical violence,” says the People’s Pastoral, our theology of liberation popular among some Catholics in the mountains, “that leaves monstrous scars across Earth’s body resembling moonscapes, dead zones on our planet which cannot be restored to their prior life-giving condition. Many people who see these wounds close up lament: ‘This is what the end of the world looks like to me.’”
Ours is a region that makes graveyards for mountains, because companies have made our mountains into graveyards. “In his hands are the deep places of the Earth; the strength of the hills is His also,” one gravestone reads, quoting Psalms.
There are, of course, individuals in the region who think the future of Appalachia is still coal black. But I prefer to think that it might be brighter, like the highlighter-colored shirts Larry Gibson wore, printed with his telephone number, daring us to care and reach out. Gibson died on the mountain he fought so hard to protect from mountaintop removal. In vain, rescuers transported him to a hospital where his daughter said, “You could smell the freshness of the air that was still on him. The dirt was embedded in his fingernails. It traced through every finger, every knuckle and every crease.” Or it might be the bright purple of ironweed that Judy Bond pointed out to visiting reporters after her love for another ruined mountain earned her the Goldman Prize for environmental activism. “They say they’re a symbol of Appalachian women,” she said, “They’re pretty. And their roots run deep. It’s hard to move them.”
In the early years of my training as a historian, I came across a photograph taken in Haysi, Virginia, in the 1930s, captured by a New Deal photographer. My grandfather’s family is from Haysi and I became obsessed with this image and its mysterious origins because it profoundly challenged what I thought it meant to be Appalachian.
The image shows the interior of a tidy café with perfectly laid out checkered tablecloths. The time of day is ambiguous, but it is likely daytime—there is a backlight in the window that trained eyes can see. In the corner of the café is what appears to be a futuristic machine—an automatic photobooth. A well-dressed couple, their faces glowing from the camera’s artificial light, sits inside. Leaning against the window is a young woman, waiting on her turn or waiting for her companions to be photographed. No one is paying attention to the photographer behind the government’s camera.
My imagination ran wild when I looked at this image. Who brought a photobooth to Haysi, Virginia, a place populated by poor coal mining families? How long did it remain? Did anyone in my family use it? I ordered books on antique camera equipment from the library and imagined future plans to march into the National Archives in Washington, DC, my credentials as a historian in hand, and ask to see the image in person.
When the rush of questions abated, I realized that this was the first time I had looked closely at an image of Appalachia that didn’t inspire shame or pain. I wasn’t looking at the usual images of people trapped in poverty, intended to evoke pity. I was looking at a photograph of men and women apparently content, more interested in making their own images than the image being made of them. Because I viewed this image without feeling shame and pain, I could imagine myself in the future, a person who belonged in a cultural institution demanding to see my history.
Whatever happens next for Appalachia, there are people here who deserve similar moments of liberation from their pain and shame, to see their lives and history as something other than an incoherent parade of destruction and wretchedness. I hope that people in the region who keep fighting will, like the figures in my favorite photograph, turn away from anonymous cameras and capture their own images.