Uneven Ground
Page 19
A case in point was the turnout of hundreds of protesters at community meetings in Knott County, Kentucky, that resulted in the dismantling of the eight-county Cumberland Valley CAA in 1967 and the creation of county-level CAAs that local organizers believed would be more responsive to the needs of the poor. The bitter fight over control of the program angered area officials, who accused volunteer organizers of being “communists” intent on “teaching class hatred” among peaceful citizens.18 The controversy in Kentucky became a major example of conflict within the War on Poverty during congressional investigations of the OEO later that year.19 It also led one AV organizer to launch a short-lived drive to mobilize the poor throughout Appalachia to “take the spending of anti-poverty money—our money—away from the political bosses and big shot businessmen.”20 The organization of united Appalachian communities failed, but it was a harbinger of many subsequent attempts to rally region-wide support for political and economic change.
Fights to take over CAAs were waged in West Virginia as well, where AV organizers helped local citizens to challenge courthouse control of poverty programs. In Raleigh County, AVs put together a coalition of citizens who elected one of their own as chair of the county CAA and replaced the director of the agency, a former school superintendent, with AV Gibbs Kinderman. Aggressive political organizing produced a similar outcome in Wyoming County, but AV-supported groups failed to seize control of CAAs in Mingo, Nicholas, Boone, and other southern West Virginia counties.21
Increasingly, antipoverty organizers in the Mountain State were convinced that if they were going to change the way the War on Poverty was being fought in Appalachia, they would have to challenge the deeply rooted power of local political machines that controlled not only the poverty agencies but every other government service. In the summer of 1967 more than four hundred antipoverty workers from ten southern West Virginia counties convened a “poor people’s congress” at Concord College to discuss election fraud, unfair tax structures, backward schools, dishonesty in state agencies, and other barriers to social change. Out of that meeting, delegates from Mingo County established a fair elections committee to monitor voting and purge registration rolls in that historically corrupt county. Under the leadership of James Washington, a fifty-two-year-old African American former coal miner, the committee launched a fair elections campaign that involved hundreds of poor and middle-class citizens in the tiny coal county and, during the 1968 election, attracted bipartisan support from reform-minded politicians across the state.22
Mingo County represented one of the more infamous provinces in a region of autocratic little kingdoms. Long controlled by a coalition of political bosses, school administrators, and coal interests, Mingo had been the site of bitter class warfare earlier in the century, and little change had occurred in the ensuing years to alter the patterns of voting fraud and misgovernment that kept 60 percent of the population in poverty. The Mingo County machine maintained its grip on power through the intimidation of voters and manipulation of the ballot box. The 1960 federal census documented 19,879 residents twenty-one years old and over, but the county records listed 30,331 registered voters. In the 1964 election, 25 percent of the ballots were cast absentee, the majority filled out with the open assistance of party officials. Vote buying and voter hauling by state and local government employees were rampant.23
The fair elections committee resolved to overcome traditional fears of confronting the powerful courthouse gang by turning out hundreds of low-income citizens at community rallies and tapping “a small group of spunky housewives” to challenge the registration rolls. The fervor for fair elections was so intense that it attracted the support of statewide leaders, including former Republican governor Cecil Underwood and VISTA volunteer turned Democratic candidate for secretary of state Jay Rockefeller. In the face of heavy intimidation, committee members purged five thousand names from voter registration lists, and poor people’s groups ran opposition candidates for a number of county offices. As one reporter noted, “To the machine, the bold challenge presented a clear and present danger to its rule.” County officials lashed back with numerous illegal arrests of VISTA and AV organizers accused of being outside subversives bent on disturbing the peace of Mingo County. Despite the statewide notoriety, the old power structure carried the day. Fair elections committee poll watchers estimated that two-thirds of votes were bought in the disputed election.24
The modest results of the fair elections movement proved frustrating for those community organizers who advocated direct political action in Appalachian counties where powerful families and special interests controlled the social service agencies, the schools, and most other means of employment. Sympathetic politicians like Rockefeller tried to push through election reform legislation at the state level, but these bills failed to make it out of committee. In response, local machine leaders turned against the poverty programs, especially the AV and VISTA, and pressured the governors in West Virginia and Kentucky to remove the poverty volunteers from their counties. Although organized political action was confined to a few counties, elected officials everywhere in the mountains became wary of the links between the War on Poverty and efforts to mobilize the poor against them. Their concern proved to be warranted, but attempts to empower the poor through the ballot box were a difficult and at best long-term tactic.
After 1968 activists increasingly found other ways to battle the entrenched system. Citizen groups organized to establish health centers in remote communities and to oppose the construction of hydroelectric pump storage facilities and flood control dams that would inundate their neighborhoods. Residents of public housing projects in Asheville, North Carolina; Knoxville, Tennessee; Hazard, Kentucky; and Charleston, West Virginia, protested rent hikes and unsanitary conditions. Citizens of rural Letcher County, Kentucky, organized their own nonprofit housing corporation, the East Kentucky Housing Corporation, to build low-income homes in communities where more than 50 percent of the housing stock was dilapidated. Each of these efforts ran into resistance from local elites who controlled city, county, and area government.
Some of the most bitter and enduring struggles, however, challenged the power of the coal industry over the economy, health, and lives of coal country people and struck at the heart of systemic problems such as land use, taxation, and the hidden human costs of an extractive, single-industry economy. It was here that local fights against powerful special interests evolved into regional battles around issues that defined a larger Appalachian identity. Even those areas of Appalachia that had never experienced coal mining came to identify with the loss of independence, devastation of the land, and threat to cultural traditions dramatized by events in the coalfields.
Changes in the coal industry had been at the core of central Appalachia’s economic distress since World War II. The introduction of new technologies had given rise to massive unemployment in the underground mines and to the emergence of surface mining practices that left the landscape scarred and degraded. Rural families could see the truckloads of coal that poured from expanding strip mine operations while their sons and daughters were forced to migrate out of state for jobs and while those who remained struggled to survive on charity and government handouts.
When the UMWA announced in the summer of 1962 that it could no longer honor the health cards of some eastern Kentucky miners and was closing ten UMWA hospitals in central Appalachia, roving bands of retired and unemployed miners attempted to shut down small mines that had refused to pay royalties into the union’s Health and Retirement Funds. Spontaneous demonstrations blocked roads and shut down nonunion mines, and company tipples, bridges, and equipment were bombed in the middle of the night. After Governor Bert Combs intervened to quell the violence, leaders of the roving pickets organized the Appalachian Committee for Full Employment and in 1964 prepared to join the promised War on Poverty as a legitimate CAA. The unemployed miners’ committee never received OEO money, which eventually flowed through the hands of local government officials, but
the anger and determination to confront the industry survived in local families and reemerged in other battles over strip mine regulation, coal mine health and safety legislation, and union reform.
Indeed, out of the same communities that produced the roving pickets movement emerged one of the most famous grassroots organizations in the mountains, the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People (AGSLP). Established after “Uncle” Dan Gibson faced down strip miners on Clear Creek in Knott County, Kentucky, in May 1965, the group came to exemplify the frustration and dissatisfaction that ran deep in the region. Gibson, an eighty-one-year-old Baptist preacher, was hauled off to the county jail after he used a squirrel rifle to stop bulldozer operators from stripping the land of his stepson, who was fighting in Vietnam. Armed neighbors rallied in the town of Hindman, where Gibson was incarcerated, and dozens of friends stood off the strip miners again the day after the elderly preacher was released. A few weeks later, more than 125 people assembled in Hindman to form the AGSLP, dedicated to stopping strip mining in eastern Kentucky.25
Opposition to strip mining in Kentucky had begun as early as the 1950s, but it was not until the TVA signed a contract in 1961 with two local men to provide the agency with cheap, surface-mined coal that grassroots opposition began to mobilize. The Kentucky General Assembly enacted a weak strip mine control act in 1954, but Governor Happy Chandler abolished the enforcement agency created by the act four years later. Governor Bert Combs reestablished the bureau, but its director, a former strip mine operator, was reluctant to enforce even minor controls. Harry Caudill introduced a bill to abolish strip mining in the 1960 legislature, but it failed for lack of support. By the mid-1960s, hundreds of eastern Kentucky residents had voiced their opposition to the new mining procedure that tore away the topsoil on the hillsides to get at the coal underneath and in the process rolled stones, trees, and mine waste onto the private lands and creeks below. Even the usually moderate CSM decried the practice.26
When Perry County coal operators Bill Sturgill and Richard Kelley began mining in the Clear Fork Valley utilizing large-scale surface mining equipment, including a seven-foot auger, area residents were shocked. They were appalled not only at the level of destruction to their fields and streams from mudslides and acid drainage but at the apparent disregard for private property rights by the companies that owned the mineral deposits below their land. Most strip miners utilized their legal privilege to access the minerals beneath the surface through turn-of-the-century broad form deeds that the Kentucky courts had validated over the rights of surface landowners. The movement of bulldozers onto small mountain farms threatened not only the land and environment but the little security that remained for hard-hit families. Leadership of the AGSLP therefore included middle-class environmentalists, several area politicians, and elderly men and women whose land was immediately threatened by development.
Within weeks of Gibson’s arrest, a caravan of fifty cars from eastern Kentucky descended on Frankfort to pressure Governor Ned Breathitt to end surface mining in the commonwealth. After being presented with petitions bearing over three thousand signatures in support of abolition, the governor responded in a manner unusual for Kentucky leaders. He promised to tour the affected Appalachian counties and later announced that his administration would implement new policies to regulate auger and contour mining. Breathitt also proposed to intervene as a friend of the court on behalf of landowners in cases involving the broad form deed and to recommend permanent legislation to control surface mining in the 1966 General Assembly. Breathitt’s position nonetheless favored regulating the industry over abolishing strip mining practices, a stand that was disappointing to landowners and environmental activists in the mountains.27
Before hearings could be held on the proposed legislation, however, another poignant confrontation on Clear Creek dramatized the resolve of strip mine opponents. Early in November 1965, several AGSLP members were arrested for violating an injunction issued by an area circuit judge that prohibited interference with the mining operations of Sturgill and Kelley’s Caperton Coal Company in the Clear Creek Valley. Several local families had been gathering for weeks along a ridge in the Hardburly section of the valley to prevent the strip miners that had threatened Gibson’s farm from crossing the mountain into their community. Among the group was sixty-one-year-old Ollie Combs, a recent widow who had joined the organization at Gibson’s advice when mining equipment began to advance on Honey Gap, just above her home.28
Combs, who lived in a four-room, tarpaper-covered cabin with her five sons, feared not only that debris from the mining operations would ruin her twenty-acre homestead but that boulders loosed by the blasting on the steep hillsides might come crashing through her house, endangering the lives of her family. When the strip miners started through the gap on the morning of November 23, 1965, Combs climbed the ridge and sat down on a rock in front of the approaching bulldozer. She and two of her sons were arrested by the county sheriff and two highway patrol officers for violating the judge’s injunction and hauled off to the county jail on the day before Thanksgiving. The spectacular image of Combs being carried off her own land by two law enforcement officers—a picture snapped by a Louisville Courier-Journal photographer, who was also arrested—appeared the next day in newspapers across the country.
Embarrassed by this and other photographs showing the elderly woman from Fisty, Kentucky, eating her Thanksgiving meal in jail, Governor Breathitt called on the coal industry to stop insisting on legal enforcement of the broad form deeds until the courts could rule on the matter. “I am on their side,” the governor declared of Combs and her neighbors. He immediately implemented more stringent emergency strip mine regulations and ordered the state police not to enforce injunctions in cases involving the broad form deed. The following January, Combs testified before the Kentucky legislature, demanding that the body do something to stop the coal companies from destroying people’s homes and land in the mountains. Harry Caudill and other advocates of the eradication of strip mining on mountainsides were unable to get an abolition bill introduced, however, and the governor’s more lenient regulatory bill passed overwhelmingly. The new legislation required miners to restore hillsides to their approximate original contours, prescribed maximum slope angles for mining, and established a division of reclamation with the powers to levy fines and suspend mining permits. The law provided for only a handful of inspectors and a very limited enforcement budget.
In addition, the new strip mine regulations did nothing to ban the broad form deed and therefore failed to address one of the primary concerns of mountain activists, who feared a new round of invasions of family homesteads by the coal companies. Members of the AGSLP turned to the courts to challenge the right of strip miners to destroy the property of surface owners, but their case dragged on in the Kentucky courts through 1966 and 1967. In the meantime, they continued to monitor mining operations and to recruit new members. Among the hundreds of eastern Kentuckians who joined the group were more militant antipoverty activists, who were eager to carry the fight against the coal companies to other communities.
As the number of acres permitted for mining continued to grow, opposition to surface mining became a key organizing issue for citizens’ groups throughout the coalfields. Chapters of the AGSLP sprang up in Perry, Harlan, Leslie, Floyd, and other eastern Kentucky counties, and AGSLP pamphlets, newsletters, and other materials on strip mining were printed by the AV and distributed widely to antipoverty groups in the region. One AV pamphlet listed the profits of the forty largest coal corporations and holding companies in central Appalachia, labeling the inventory “Appalachia’s forty thieves.”29 Although AGSLP leaders continued to advocate peaceful resistance to strip mining while the legal challenge wound its way through the courts, some residents took more militant stands to stop the strippers. In the spring of 1967, saboteurs dynamited mining equipment in Knott and Perry counties, and gunfire was exchanged between protesters and miners in several communities. One “
conservation group” formed a mountain gun club to assist surface landowners “who feared that a strip operation would move in on their land by leasing the surface for $1 and setting up a firing range.”30
Among the AV organizers to join the AGSLP at this time was Joe Mulloy. The son of Louisville, Kentucky, working-class parents, Mulloy was determined to establish a chapter of the anti–strip mining group in Pike County, where he had come to work with VISTA and other poverty warriors at Poor Bottom on Marrowbone Creek, in the southern end of the county. Poor Bottom was one of the most depressed communities in eastern Kentucky. Mulloy soon met and befriended Alan and Margaret McSurely, two recently arrived volunteers with the SCEF, and together they began meeting with neighbors and holding community discussions concerning the volatile surface mining issue. Margaret had worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the southern civil rights movement before coming to Kentucky, and Alan had been engaged in antipoverty work in northern Virginia. He was hired in the spring of 1967 as an organizer for the AV but lasted only four weeks with the organization before he was deemed too controversial and was fired. He stayed on in eastern Kentucky under the auspices of the SCEF’s Southern Mountain Project.
The three organizers not only began to support the efforts of a group of local landowners opposed to strip mining on the creek but openly connected the destructive land practice to the systematic exploitation of the region by the coal industry. “It was obvious,” argued Mulloy, “that in Appalachia the cause of poverty and unemployment was unequal distribution of the tremendous coal wealth and absentee ownership of 90 percent of the valuable mineral rights.” The abolition of strip mining would be a giant step toward “controlling the entire multi-billion dollar industry that flourishes in the midst of some of America’s cruelest poverty and hardship.” Confronting the bulldozers on the mountain in Poor Bottom, he believed, could launch “a movement to reclaim the wealth of the region for the benefit of the people.”31