Although the principle of community action emphasized local decision making and the majority of funds flowed to CAAs organized under the aegis of local governments, the EOA reserved 15 percent of the community action budget for national emphasis programs and demonstration projects. As head of the OEO Policy and Planning division from 1964 to 1965, Boone utilized these funds to encourage more radical experimentation and to support demonstration grants to non-CAAs.27 These grants often bypassed local power structures and extended support directly to grassroots organizations and academic institutions for programs designed more to empower the poor than just to assimilate them into mainstream culture. Many of these experimental projects drew heavily on the community organizing work of Chicago’s Saul Alinsky and the youth-oriented efforts of the Gray Areas Program. They assumed that the needs of the poor would not be met until they were organized to voice their concerns on critical issues such as housing, jobs, health care, and welfare reform. Assisted by the growing number of VISTA volunteers and poverty consultants in the region, these programs nurtured a generation of young activists, both indigenous and nonnative, that increasingly rejected the service delivery model as ineffective if it failed to change the political and economic status quo. In Appalachia, as in northern cities, these special demonstration projects proved to be both the most innovative and the most controversial of the antipoverty programs.
Offering greater flexibility and freedom from local government oversight, demonstration grants tapped into new ideas and energies long stifled by the traditional political culture in the mountains. Except in labor unions, poor people had seldom been organized in Appalachia, and formal middle-class institutions such as colleges and professional organizations were sparse. The core of the region, from Morgantown, West Virginia, to Knoxville, Tennessee, lacked a major university that might have generated creativity and intellectual leadership, and the scattering of small private colleges struggled, like castles in the wilderness, to uplift a talented few. The availability of federal funds offered poor people and middle-class reformers the opportunity to mobilize for change, and it unleashed the potential of academics and professionals on the edges of the region who were eager to facilitate that change.
Whether funded by OEO demonstration grants or by the swell of private foundation dollars that flowed into the region as a result of the War on Poverty, nongovernmental initiatives burgeoned in Appalachia in the 1960s and 1970s. Like the more service-oriented CAAs, the nongovernmental antipoverty programs differed in their approaches to mountain problems. Most recognized the weakness of Appalachian civic institutions and advocated policies for social transformation, but their tactics to accomplish reform varied according to class, conviction, and moment in time. Colleges, universities, and organizations such as the CSM launched traditional programs of educational outreach, leadership training, and professional development designed to enrich the learning environment of poor children or to provide technical assistance for community planning and economic growth. Many of these efforts brought students, young professionals, and other outside experts into the region. Grassroots organizations, on the other hand, often led by poor people and their advocates, were more likely to challenge the local political and economic system by establishing cooperative businesses, creating community-based housing and health care programs, and questioning the decisions of school boards and county governments. Eventually even some of the more moderate, institutionally based projects clashed with regional power structures, and in time the progeny of the colleges and universities joined with the poor to organize dissent and resistance. Collectively, however, these nongovernmental efforts tended to question long established structures and relationships in the mountains and to test the resolve of national and local leaders to change them.
Colleges and universities played a pivotal role in the War on Poverty in Appalachia and in turn experienced major growth as a result of antipoverty research and demonstration contracts and other Great Society investments in higher education. Academics had long helped to shape the popular images and stereotypes of Appalachia, and social scientists at leading research universities on the perimeter of the region had contributed to the definition of Appalachia as a national problem area. Many of the initial planners and administrators at the OEO were scholars or at least well-trained intellectuals, and the experimental character of the War on Poverty reflected the academic model of testing hypotheses through selected demonstration projects. Although the limited demonstration model succumbed to the political demands of an all-out assault on poverty, the idea of applying knowledge to practice survived in both privately and publicly funded antipoverty efforts.
Since World War II, higher education had increasingly embraced the values of the private market, competing for an ever growing number of federal research grants and shaping the production of knowledge to meet political as well as administrative needs.28 The rise of interest in “poverty knowledge” during the 1960s spurred the attention of academics and institutions serving Appalachia and resulted in the expansion of education and research initiatives that sought to apply new knowledge to the region’s problems and that also contributed to the growth of the institutions. Especially at major research universities such as the University of Kentucky, West Virginia University, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Pittsburgh, social scientists were quick to focus their research agendas on the region and to propose intervention strategies. Faculty from these institutions contributed to the 1962 regional assessment The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey, funded by the Ford Foundation, and served as consultants to the PARC. The University of North Carolina played a central role in the design of the North Carolina Fund, a state-level predecessor to the War on Poverty. George Esser, a UNC professor, became the North Carolina Fund’s executive director.
In Kentucky, professors from the University of Kentucky, Berea College, and Morehead State University (all located on the periphery of the region) had been involved in raising awareness of mountain problems since the 1950s. Faculty contributed to the early regional development plan Program 60 and prepared draft proposals in forest and water management, highway and agricultural development, and small-town revitalization, including the New Cities plan for community relocation. In 1961 the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture launched a major outreach initiative in eastern Kentucky, the Eastern Kentucky Resource Development Project, with a $754,000 grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and a $1 million state appropriation. The seven-year project established a ten-member team of economic development experts at a new research and demonstration center in Breathitt County. The ironically named Quicksand Demonstration Center worked with local leaders on a variety of activities ranging from industrial planning to livestock production.29 Such projects were designed to link the resources of the university with the needs of Appalachian communities in a pattern consistent with its land-grant mission. West Virginia University went so far as to reorganize its administrative structure to better coordinate outreach services to the Mountain State, creating the Center for Appalachian Studies and Development, the first of its kind, in 1964.30
Not only did university-based initiatives in Appalachia describe the problems of the mountains as developmental deficiencies that could be alleviated with the application of technology and knowledge, but, like land-grant universities elsewhere, they tended to focus their efforts on work with local elites. One of the extension community development specialists in the UK project described his job as helping mountain communities to “mature” by sponsoring county and multi-county public forums for regional leaders. “This ‘developmental task’ concept for communities,” he wrote, “is derived from that discipline of educators, physiologists, sociologists, and anthropologists who believe that a child cannot crawl, walk, or run in a coordinated fashion, without first accomplishing certain developmental tasks (maturation).” He added, “Likewise, a community should not expect to have a large industry or outstanding commercial center until it has �
�matured’ sufficiently to support those aspects of community living which an industrial or commercial community must have for its people. The potential development of facilities and institutions of a community are almost entirely dependent upon the degree of mental, physical, and social development of the people involved.”31
Along with other technical and education initiatives, the Eastern Kentucky Resource Development Project and the WVU Center for Appalachian Studies and Development helped to start county development associations and later to set up multicounty planning councils. Local leaders, however, often distrusted the outside experts, resented university paternalism, and were suspicious of political reform. When funding for the Kentucky project expired and the university was unable to sustain the initiative, the Kentucky area development councils squashed a grant proposal to the OEO to revive the program on the grounds that the university project contested with the councils “for the support of local officials and development organizations.”32 Mountain elites did not object to the placement of student interns on selected service projects in their communities, but they feared the loss of control over local development decisions that federal funding of university professionals might foster.
Colleges and universities, however, tended not to distinguish between student-centered projects assisting poor people in the field and the action-oriented intervention efforts of faculty and other professionals to facilitate community planning. Both were part of the educational mission of higher education in the 1960s. Even smaller, liberal arts colleges in the mountains encouraged students and faculty to apply their knowledge to society’s problems, and many took advantage of new federal programs and foundation support to launch local outreach initiatives. For example, Mars Hill College, a small Baptist institution in western North Carolina, took the lead in organizing the antipoverty campaign in Madison County, one of the poorest counties in the state. Over the course of the next decade, the college doubled its enrollment, faculty, and operating budget and received national recognition for programs that placed student interns in a variety of new social service agencies in the county.33
Guided by a visionary, ex-Mennonite dean, Richard Hoffman, who had come south with the civil rights movement, the college organized the local CAA, the Madison County Opportunity Corporation, which wrote federal grants that established Head Start centers, family counseling and other mental health services, housing renovation projects, and job training workshops. Hoffman served for a time as executive director of the local agency, and the college president served on the board of directors along with prominent doctors and educators from the Mars Hill area. The chair of the Department of Sociology, Don Anderson, served as head of a new Madison County planning commission, the first such commission in the North Carolina mountains. Other faculty and administrators helped to create the award-winning Hot Springs Health Program, which provided health services to remote sections of the county. To better coordinate student participation in these outreach activities, Mars Hill College created the Community Development Institute, in which students worked part time as recreational directors, teaching assistants, secretaries, and staff aides in local poverty agencies. Between 1965 and 1970, the college established an Upward Bound program for local high school students and received funding from the OEO and the Southern Regional Education Board to train VISTA and other poverty workers. Many of the professional staff from these initiatives later became permanent faculty at the institution.
Other colleges in the mountains launched similar programs to involve students and staff in community service. A number of these institutions began as settlement schools earlier in the century and slowly evolved into two- and four-year colleges after World War II. Federal resources for Upward Bound, work-study, and other antipoverty programs helped these small colleges to extend their traditional mission of community-based service into more distant hollows while providing financial support for their students and enhancing institutional growth. One of the most successful programs was that undertaken by tiny Alice Lloyd College in eastern Kentucky. Created in 1916 as the Caney Creek Settlement School in Knott County, the college became a junior college after the death of its founder, Alice Lloyd, in 1962 and began receiving OEO grants in the mid-1960s to establish “outpost centers” in neighboring communities. By 1969, with assistance from the Bruner Foundation in New York, the program evolved into the Alice Lloyd College Outreach Reserves (ALCOR), which placed live-in students in sixteen area communities to provide summer recreation and educational enrichment activities.34
Settlement schools had always taken an active role in providing health screening and nutritional education in mountain communities, and ALCOR developed a special emphasis on identifying family health problems, teaching dental hygiene and personal cleanliness, and linking poor families with public health services. Led by two Alice Lloyd graduates who would later establish their own health clinic in Knott County, Benny Ray Bailey and Grady Stumbo, the project brought in nurses and medical students from outside the region to work with the college volunteers and conduct health screenings. In 1971 the summer program was extended to three other eastern Kentucky colleges and renamed Appalachian Leadership and Community Outreach. The collaborative program involved more than 150 students deployed in seventy-seven locations in twenty-two counties.35
Student service-learning projects such as ALCOR blossomed in the mountains during the 1960s. Some programs placed indigenous Appalachian students in their own communities to sponsor educational enrichment activities, teach crafts, organize community cleanup campaigns, or link families with health and social service providers, but others tapped into a growing national trend for middle-class college students to volunteer their time in underdeveloped areas. The largest of these student volunteer efforts, the Appalachian Volunteers (AV), brought together native and nonnative young people into a multistate initiative that served most of central Appalachia. Not only did the organization provide fertile ground for a growing network of regional activists, but it eventually broke with its institutional founders to become one of the more radical reform groups in the region.
Formed in the winter of 1963–1964 as part of President Kennedy’s emergency winter program for eastern Kentucky, the AV predated the passage of the EOA and reflected both the origins and the conflicting ideologies of the War on Poverty in the mountains. As early as the spring of 1963, the CSM had approached the Ford Foundation for money to form a volunteer organization of young people to provide education and social services to the people of Appalachia. The council eventually was awarded a small planning grant from the Edgar Stern Family Fund of New York, but the idea received a major boost in December 1963 when Richard Boone called Milton Ogle of the council and proposed to fund a pilot effort utilizing money from the president’s special winterization fund. During the January 1964 winter break, more than three hundred area college students participated in the renovation of two rural schools in Harlan County, Kentucky, and, at a meeting of educators, council representatives, and government officials in February, the AV was formally established and extended to nineteen Kentucky colleges with the assistance of a fifty-thousand-dollar grant from the ARA. Later that year the council received the first of several OEO demonstration grants from Boone’s office to expand AV services and hire a field staff to supervise student workers.36
Under Ogle’s leadership, the AVs (as the volunteers were known) at first followed a traditional consensus and self-help approach to working with mountain people. Students ventured forth to refurbish one-room schools and winterize homes, utilizing materials donated by area businesses and working alongside resident volunteers. With the cooperation of local school superintendents, AVs provided enrichment programs in the schools, showing movies on hygiene, demonstrating traditional dances, constructing playground equipment, and leading group recreational activities. This strategy of working with local leaders to provide services to the poor was consistent with the CSM’s philosophy of helping “any group working for the betterment of
conditions in the mountains” and with the training that most early AV staff had received as students at Berea College.37 As Ogle wrote in a letter soliciting materials from businesses, “Deprived people cannot be helped; they must help themselves.”38
In the first year of the program, students fanned out into forty eastern Kentucky counties, hanging wallboard, repairing broken windows, replacing rotted floors, and painting woodwork on many of the more than one thousand one- and two-room schools that dotted the eastern Kentucky landscape. Weekend and summer volunteers restored twenty-one dilapidated houses in Slone Fork in Knott County, helped to organize a community center in Persimmon Fork in Leslie County, constructed a greenhouse at Mill Creek in Clay County, and directed summer recreational programs for children throughout the area.39 A second OEO grant in 1965 added 150 VISTA volunteers to the program and funded additional staff to expand the AV into West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee. Two years after its founding, the AV was a showcase OEO program. The Louisville Courier-Journal praised the students as “young Samaritans” who “with little more than enthusiasm, hammers and saws” had made “a deep impression on the mountain people.”40
The very success of the early AV, however, also dramatized the depth of the problems in the mountains and ultimately led to the decline of government support for the program. As hundreds of student volunteers poured into the region—many not native to the mountains—and as field staff established permanent residences and working relationships in rural communities, cultural and political conflicts began to strain the cooperative relationship between the young poverty warriors and local elites. Some student volunteers began to question whether the renovation projects did anything to end poverty or merely camouflaged the worst manifestations of a corrupt system. Returning volunteers found little change in the communities or in the status of the poor. Schools they had repaired a year earlier were soon run down again; windows were broken, and educational materials lost. “When you start fixing up a one-room school, you start wondering,” one volunteer later recalled. “Why didn’t the local school board fix this up a long time ago? Then you ask, why aren’t there books?”41
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