This movement from individual uplift to community organizing strategies was evident in the transformation of the AV. Established in 1964 as an early student service organization, the AV initially recruited students from within the region but eventually included volunteers and staff from a variety of backgrounds and places. After receiving one of the first OEO grants, the organization evolved from repairing one-room schoolhouses and providing occasional enrichment programs for poor schools to placing permanent field-workers in rural communities and training hundreds of VISTA and other volunteers. As the number of poverty workers associated with the AV increased, the mission of the organization grew from human services to community development and eventually to issue organizing on a broader regional basis. In 1966 the AV split with the more moderate CSM and became a leading force for structural change in central Appalachia, helping to organize citizens around strip mining, welfare rights, health care, and other regional problems.
The radicalization of the AVs and other young people derived from both cultural and intellectual forces at work in American society in the 1960s. The same optimism and confidence that had fueled the consumerism of the post–World War II generation inspired their children to pursue transcendent goals of social justice and economic simplicity. For financially secure and better-educated youth of the mid-1960s, extending the American dream involved broadening the benefits of democracy, expanding civil rights, and challenging long established barriers to opportunity.
At first the cultural differences between some urban-raised volunteers and rural mountain residents created barriers to communication, but gradually the poverty warriors and local poor people found common ground. Many of the young volunteers rejected the consumer culture that was emerging in postwar America and questioned the benefits of unbridled corporate power. They found in Appalachia a welcoming culture that appeared to resist modernization and to appreciate interpersonal relationships and community. As one AV recalled, “It was an introduction to a culture, values, and a way of life that we didn’t know anything about. The whole Appalachian culture and history was very fascinating. You felt very much welcomed and involved. There wasn’t any of that outsider standoffish sort of stuff that you sometimes hear about.”6 Disenchanted with mass society, they longed for roots themselves and found a certain romantic simplicity and honesty in the lives of the rural poor.
Eventually these young outsiders learned to listen to the viewpoints of their mountain hosts, and they came to share many of their values and to appreciate their music and art. Among the Appalachian middle class, the volunteers remained little more than outside troublemakers, long-haired hippies who failed to understand traditional community mores. For many rural poor, however, the AVs were increasingly welcomed as well-meaning, although naive, young people who shared a common vision of a just world. Among many rural Appalachians, the love of children, inherent egalitarianism, and sense of fairness eased the way for acceptance and trust. On the battlefields of the antipoverty campaign, cultures merged, and ideas and perspectives that each brought to the struggle were transformed.
Among the first assumptions to dissolve in the wake of field experience for many volunteers was the belief that poverty resulted from inherent deficiencies in mountain culture. Whereas weekend recruits could more easily accept cultural and geographic explanations for economic conditions in the region, volunteers who lived and worked in mountain communities for any period of time had more difficulty attributing poverty to the values, culture, and isolation of a people they came to admire. Occasional volunteers could “pop in, pop off, and pop out,” as local residents put it, but field-workers with their feet in communities understood the complexity of local circumstances and the political consequences of powerlessness. AVs and VISTA volunteers who lived in coal camps and other rural communities quickly rejected the culture of poverty theory and behavior adjustment strategies and searched for other explanations for poor housing, inadequate health care, deficient education, and joblessness among their neighbors. As they listened to local residents express “bitterness about their life experience, about the political structure and their relationship with the coal companies and other big industries,” the volunteers adjusted their perception of powerlessness. “I felt like I was radicalized or politicized or whatever by the people who lived in the mountains themselves,” remembered one AV.7 Increasingly they came to understand the mountain experience in new ways, and they responded to alternative voices that defined the region’s poverty less as the product of Appalachian culture than of economic and political self-interest.
One of the most important of these voices was that of Harry Caudill. Although Caudill’s best-selling book Night Comes to the Cumberlands had little impact on the administrative design of the War on Poverty, his scathing exposé of the coal industry in the mountains was widely read by reporters and poverty warriors in Appalachia. Caudill himself was a tireless writer and lecturer, speaking frequently at VISTA, AV, and CAA training sessions and frequently guiding national journalists on discovery trips into the hollows. The eloquent Whitesburg, Kentucky, lawyer and environmental advocate reinforced what the young volunteers and journalists heard from community residents and connected local conditions to a pattern of regional exploitation. More than anyone else in the 1960s, Caudill shaped an alternative image of Appalachia as an oppressed region and provided the intellectual framework for a generation of mountain activists.8
Caudill attributed the economic problems of central Appalachia to the years of government neglect and corporate greed that had turned the mountains into an industrial wasteland. Most Americans, he argued, had seen the face of Appalachian poverty—“the bleak hillsides, the gray mining camps, the littered roadsides, the rickety houses, and the tattered dispirited people”—but few were familiar with the other face of Appalachia, the affluence that remained discreetly out of view. “Absenteeism and anonymity,” he pointed out to all who would listen, “curtain the vast domain of giant corporations which own the region’s wealth.” Coddled by state and local officials who were too often corrupt and self-serving, the absentee corporations drained the wealth of Appalachia just as surely as they stole the riches of Central America.9
Some of the nation’s great steel and manufacturing corporations, Caudill explained, had turned Appalachia into “little more than an internal colonial appendage of the industrial North and Midwest.” Exploited for its natural and human resources, Appalachia was a rich land inhabited by a poor people: “Its plight is worse than that of a banana republic receiving U.S. foreign aid. Its exploitative economy generates much wealth and much poverty. The wealth flows to distant cities; the poverty accumulates at home. Like Latin America, Appalachia can find no relief for its dilemma until there is far-reaching tax reform and an overhaul of the antiquated political structure.”10 There was a great need, he believed, for regional advocates “to impress upon the electorate the fact that they are living on a rich land whose inhabitants are poor because of mismanagement of the land base and the almost endless exploitation of the soil, minerals, and timber by both local residents and giant absentee corporations.” It was their responsibility, he told AVs in 1966, “to inform the people of this fact, and to set in motion a revolutionary change of thought.”11
Caudill’s use of the image of Appalachia as an internal American colony fit well within the American liberal tradition of resistance to outside oppression, and it reinforced the frustration and anger that the AVs were hearing from local residents. Volunteers could see the train-loads of coal that flowed past unemployed miners’ shacks to enrich distant investors, and they could envision their role as populists resisting corporate oppression and injustice. The colonial model, moreover, connected the Appalachian experience to universal theories of economic dependence stirring in the civil rights, labor, and antiwar movements. Whereas conventional service delivery strategies failed to confront structural inequalities within the system and cultural explanations simply blamed the poor as individuals, the colon
ial model provided a clear adversary—outside corporations and their local henchmen—around which to organize citizen resistance. For energetic but impatient young poverty warriors, it offered a framework for thinking about political and economic change in the region that linked local and regional problems with global human struggles.
The idea that Appalachia was an exploited resource colony not only provided an explanation for the paradox of poverty in a rich land but also pointed to intervention strategies more consistent with Saul Alinsky’s formula for political organizing on Chicago’s South Side than with Oscar Lewis’s framework of cultural modernization. If Appalachia was to throw off the corporate domination that controlled its wealth, the poor people of the mountains must free themselves from the feudal system of local politics that protected the absentee interests. The challenge in Appalachia, activists soon argued, was to facilitate this change by organizing citizens locally around specific community concerns—political participation, health care, welfare rights, access to housing and education, and property rights—and to build a regional identity and regional alliances around shared regional issues.
This combination of community action and regionalism generated a movement culture that bound Appalachian activists, intellectuals, and local people to a common crusade that was larger than the War on Poverty and survived long after the OEO’s demise. No longer a caricature of cultural deviance, Appalachia became a proving ground for the democratic process itself, a challenge to the fulfillment of professed American values. Shady politicians, self-indulgent corporations, elite institutions, and even corrupt unions became the focal points for confrontation; organizing the poor to take control of their lives and resources became the agenda for regional transformation. As Naomi Weintraub Cohen, a volunteer from New York, recalled, “By day you might say we were day-camp counselors and tutors of children. By evening we were out there organizing and getting people stirred up about issues. . . . We were trying to convince people that by community organizing they could change the West Virginia state law and make the law more responsive to the people and more protective of the property rights of the people instead of just the strip mine operators.”12 Inspired by postwar assumptions about what America symbolized to the world and motivated by what they saw and heard in mountain communities, the majority of poverty warriors sought justice from a system that they believed should work for everyone. Few anticipated the opposition that would emerge from those in the local power structure who had a different vision for the future.
By 1966 community action had become a larger battleground in Appalachia. The conflict now was not only over poverty but also over a political economy that had limited the region’s potential and left its people dependent. OEO principles of self-help and maximum feasible participation for the poor reinforced existing Appalachian traditions of resistance and fueled a growing regional rebellion that took on momentum of its own. Confrontations were most intense in the heart of Appalachia, in the coalfields where industrialization had drawn the lines of power and powerlessness most intensely, but challenges to the old order erupted throughout the region as new community associations appeared in villages and rural districts alike to fight a plethora of local problems.
Mountain residents, especially in the unionized coalfields, already had a strong heritage of family loyalty and working-class solidarity, but the War on Poverty provided an unexpected catalyst for organizing community resistance. Among the thousands of poverty workers who descended on the region to help the poor were many who owed no allegiance to government programs or local social service agencies. Supported by VISTA, the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), or any number of private or religious organizations, these independent volunteers were free to live and work among the poor and to determine for themselves how best to fight poverty. Eager and unencumbered by institutional guidelines and salary expectations, they tended to operate outside existing government structures. More willing to take risks than their agency-connected colleagues, these volunteer workers, some fresh from the civil rights movement, were more aggressive advocates of confrontation and civic action.
Although most early organizing efforts were localized, a regional network emerged among activists to share strategies and support grassroots efforts. After the AV separated from the CSM, it stationed field-workers throughout the coal counties to coordinate their work with that of other volunteers, to support citizen action groups, and to pressure CAAs to be more inclusive. Common training sessions, social activities, and planning retreats (often held on college campuses) provided opportunities for poverty warriors to share their experiences and to acquire a sense of camaraderie. The Highlander Research and Education Center, a labor and civil rights folk school in eastern Tennessee, quickly became a mecca for southern Appalachian activists, and local struggles soon developed into more broadly defined, region-wide campaigns.
Typical of the community organizations that evolved into issue-oriented networks of citizen-activists was the Highway 979 Community Action Council on Mud Creek in Floyd County, Kentucky. Formed in the winter of 1963 by residents of twelve poor communities along Highway 979, the group initially planned social and recreational activities for local children and adults. By 1966 the council was officially incorporated, and, with the assistance of VISTA and AV organizers, it launched initiatives to provide clean water and job training programs for the 1,300 homes in the area.13 As an AV outpost demonstration project, the Highway 979 Community Action Council received OEO funds to establish its own printing company and began publishing a community newsletter called the Hawkeye, which became outspoken in its criticism of local officials, including the Floyd County school superintendent and the head of the Big Sandy Community Action Program.14
Outside organizers played an important role in facilitating the growth of the Highway 979 Community Action Council, but all of its leaders and the majority of its members were longtime residents of the community. Native activists such as George Tucker, Woodrow Rogers, and Eula Hall helped to organize a branch of a regional anti–strip mining group, a garbage disposal service, and the Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Organization. The latter was formed to assure that local schools complied with federal laws to provide free lunches and textbooks to low-income children and to guarantee that social workers and other public assistance employees treated welfare clients with respect. It also worked to provide legal and material assistance to poor families and transportation to the hospital, doctor’s office, and other social service providers.15
For mountain women like Eula Hall, membership in organizations such as the Highway 979 Community Action Council and the Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Organization provided avenues not only to improve the lives of their children and neighbors but also to develop personal skills that would link them to networks outside their local communities. Hall became active in the national welfare rights movement, testifying before a congressional hearing in 1971, and she became a champion of coal mine health and safety legislation and surface mine regulation. Frustrated by the lack of health care in her community, she fought the local OEO comprehensive health program until she secured federal funds to build a primary care clinic on Mud Creek. Her struggles with politicians and bureaucrats gave her the toughness and knowledge to endure government cutbacks and even the loss of the building that housed the community action council and welfare rights organization in a mysterious fire. Hall and others like her continued to play leadership roles in the development of their communities for years to come, sustained by the confidence and skills acquired in these early antipoverty battles.16
Citizens’ associations like the Highway 979 Community Action Council sprang up in communities across the region, initiated sometimes by the efforts of volunteer organizers and sometimes by the spontaneous responses of poor people themselves. Groups varied in size and mission. Some were created to defend the community from specific threats—the building of a dam, unsafe roads, school closings, or environmental degradation. Others were designed to
gain benefits or services that were being denied by public officials—better education, improved housing, transportation, health care, even respect. More often than not, these objectives placed grassroots organizations in confrontation with local elites, who controlled the schools, county governments, and state agencies, including most of the OEO-funded antipoverty programs.
Indeed, the local CAA itself sometimes became the target of citizen action. Poor people had long been excluded from positions of power on school boards and other county offices, but the national rhetoric surrounding the War on Poverty raised hope that the federal government would support citizen efforts to participate as equals in their own development. The enthusiasm and organizing skills of the volunteer workers, moreover, encouraged low-income residents to challenge the administrative policies of elite-dominated CAAs and to demand a greater voice in determining how federal dollars were spent in their behalf. In some cases citizen groups advocated more and diverse job training programs or better access to health and child care services in their communities; in others they called for the elimination of politics in employment practices and greater representation on agency boards.
Among volunteers and community leaders, there were wide differences in approaches to grassroots organizing, and the tactics taken up by citizen associations varied from community to community. Some AVs, for example, preferred a bottom-up strategy of supporting community-initiated causes and local leadership; others favored a more directive approach, organizing busloads of poor people to turn out for CAA meetings and orchestrating confrontations more vigorously.17 In areas where more militant volunteers were active, organized groups not only challenged the programmatic policies of the local CAAs but attempted to seize control of those agencies as well.
Uneven Ground Page 18
