Many of the new organizations published newsletters that reached thousands of readers inside and outside Appalachia, but no organization played a larger role in providing a network for regional activism than the CSM. Traditionally a rather moderate voice for reform, the council was taken over in 1969 by young activists who redirected the old organization’s mission toward more radical causes and restructured its many commissions to reflect the interests of youth, community organizers, and the poor. The council no longer represented “professional persons, settlement school, religious, health, and education workers, and businessmen and philanthropists” interested in Appalachia but instead became a communication vehicle for the bottom-up democratic movement that activists hoped would sweep the region.61
Under the leadership of Warren Wright, the council established a number of new commissions to reflect a wide range of constituents and issues: aging, black Appalachians, community action, education, natural resources, poor people’s self-help, regional development, youth, urban affairs, and welfare reform. Throughout the 1970s, the council’s annual meetings and periodic commission forums brought together a mixture of community activists from across Appalachia. More important, the council magazine, Mountain Life and Work, was a widely distributed source of information and opinions about movement struggles and regional events. As executive director for 1970–1971, Wright reoriented the council toward “a different kind of war on poverty,” one that would increase the “political awareness” of mountain people. “They have to learn,” he told a reporter soon after taking office, “that the people own the system and that the system doesn’t own them. I want them to know the extent to which they’ve been defrauded.”62
The new CSM reflected the revolutionary change of thought and strategies that had swept Appalachia since the announcement of the War on Poverty. Mountain advocates no longer saw the culture or geography of the region as a primary barrier to development; instead they challenged the very assumptions and institutions on which the rhetoric of growth and opportunity was built. As council member Sally Maggard told the readers of Mountain Life and Work in 1972, the essence of the controversy over strip mining in Appalachia was “not wildflowers” but the definition of “progress” itself.
In Appalachia, exploitation goes hidden under the rhetoric of economic development. People are forced out of their homes and from their farms because it is more profitable to let mud slide into living rooms and across cornfields than it is to mine coal with care. Little thought is given to farmlands which would have fed families for generations to come. People find that there are not jobs in the mountains because a cheap and ruthless method of mining requires few laborers. People are forced to take mining jobs which destroy their homes and the entire economic base of the region, or else move away to migrant cities like Dayton, Cincinnati, Baltimore, or Chicago. Miners are injured and die because it is more profitable to mine coal in unsafe conditions than it is to run safe mines.63
The challenge facing the mountains, Maggard and other activists concluded, was to confront those “powerful individuals” who controlled the region’s resources (including human resources). Abolition of strip mining alone was not the answer. To carry the struggle to the political and economic power brokers outside the region, in 1972 the new council opened an office in Washington DC, staffed by Alan McSurely, to assist the lobbying efforts of Appalachian groups.64
The growing network of regional activists and organizations that confronted issues such as strip mining and black lung disease created a fertile environment for the growth of citizens’ groups that confronted a variety of other concerns throughout the mountains. Residents of rural North Carolina communities fought the expansion of a national park visitors’ center near the Blue Ridge Parkway. Others in Kentucky and West Virginia organized to resist the construction of dams that would flood family farms. Citizens in southwest Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and West Virginia established local chapters of the regional group Citizens for Social and Economic Justice that helped parents negotiate with school boards for better lunch programs and free textbooks and provided paralegal services for low-income people.
Some of the organizations that sprang up in the 1970s were designed to coordinate the efforts of diverse local groups on a larger regional basis. In eastern Kentucky, community-based groups formed the Human/Economic Appalachian Development Corporation to better assist craft and agricultural cooperatives, low-income housing programs, and other alternative economic development efforts. At a meeting in May 1977 in Williamson, West Virginia, 150 representatives of fifty mountain organizations created the Appalachian Alliance to synchronize region-wide “direct action” in support of individuals and communities that were “working to gain democratic control over their lives, workplaces, and natural resources.” The alliance hoped to provide “a unified voice for Appalachian people,” serve as a forum for communication among regional organizations, and change public policy through research on issues ranging from landownership to strip mining and health delivery.65
The most notable product of the Appalachian Alliance was the publication of a study of landownership patterns in eighty Appalachian counties, financed by the ARC in 1978 and undertaken by the alliance’s Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force. Staffed primarily by young activists and college students, the task force identified the large corporations and land companies that controlled up to 90 percent of the surface land and 100 percent of the mineral resources in some Appalachian counties. These wealthy landowners paid only a small fraction of the taxes for schools, roads, and other public facilities in impoverished communities. Absentee ownership, the report concluded, limited job opportunities and economic development alternatives, restricted the local tax base, and shifted the burden for public services to local residents.66
Disparity in taxation had long been an issue for Appalachian activists, and in the 1970s pressure mounted to institute a severance tax on coal and other minerals and to equalize assessments on surface and subsurface property. Throughout most of the industrial history of Appalachia, the natural wealth of the region had been mined by large corporations and shipped out of the mountains untaxed, leaving local schools and other community services starved for public support. The coal industry’s powerful grip on state and local governments kept property taxes low and taxes on unmined minerals even lower. Most Appalachian states depended on regressive sales taxes to support state government expenditures, and even after the passage of meager severance taxes on coal in the early 1970s, the revenue from extractive taxes flowed to the state general fund for distribution statewide (in Kentucky) or into the repair of coal haul roads (in West Virginia and Virginia). In 1976 a “mountain caucus” of eastern Kentucky legislators succeeded in returning 4 percent of severance tax funds in the commonwealth to coal-producing counties for capital projects that promoted economic development, but most coal communities and nearby rural counties where coal production had diminished received few benefits from the funds.67
Nor did the mining industry contribute its fair share to county property taxes. Studies of landownership and taxation in Appalachia found a direct correlation between the poverty of a county and the percentage of property owned by mineral companies. In Claiborne County, Tennessee, for example, one British company owned 17 percent of the county’s land but paid only 3 percent of the county’s property taxes (an average of twenty-five dollars per assessed acre for forty-four thousand acres). Seventy-five percent of the county’s revenue came from state and federal sources. In fourteen West Virginia counties, twenty-five companies owned 44 percent of the surface land, yet they were assessed for only 20 percent of the area taxes. On the whole, in central Appalachian counties, only 48 percent of total revenue came from local sources, compared with 65 percent nationally.68 The disparity in taxation of unmined mineral assets beneath the surface was even greater. In eastern Kentucky counties, the tax on unmined coal was set at such a low rate that it was considered uncollectable, despite the coal’s potential value to
its corporate owners.69
Inequities in the tax structure led activists from the Appalachian Alliance and local concerned citizens to form a coalition to challenge Kentucky’s tax system, including property tax rates and the distribution of severance tax revenues. In 1981 they formed the Kentucky Fair Tax Coalition (KFTC), which unsuccessfully lobbied the Kentucky legislature to raise unmined mineral taxes but eventually won a state supreme court decision that unmined minerals should be taxed no differently than other real property. The following year, the coalition became a citizen-based membership organization and changed its name to Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. In time, KFTC would become one of the largest grassroots organizations in Appalachia and would expand the fight for fair taxation to include challenges to the broad form deed, which many activists saw as the worst example of coalfield injustice. After the statewide Save Our Homeplace campaign in 1988, the citizens of Kentucky finally passed a constitutional amendment effectively limiting the power of coal companies to mine without the consent of the landowner and requiring companies to pay for damages caused by mining.70
The revolution within the CSM and the emergence of regional organizations such as the Appalachian Alliance, the Human/Economic Appalachian Development Corporation, and KFTC reflected the metamorphosis of the War on Poverty in Appalachia by the early 1970s. What had begun as a nationally initiated and locally fought campaign to bring poor people into the mainstream of modern American life had stirred a collective response in Appalachia that not only redefined regional identity but cast the social and economic troubles of the mountains in a broader context. For the remainder of the twentieth century, Appalachia would endure not only as a socioeconomic problem area—a persistent reminder of the failure of the national War on Poverty—but as a battleground for American values. Conflicts over environmental quality, welfare reform, public decision making, and economic development would continue to divide mountain communities as they did the rest of the nation, but a new regional consciousness would make those battles especially intense in the mountains and increasingly portentous for the rest of America.
Nurtured by growing networks of indigenous people, former poverty warriors, and young professionals, a new regional consciousness emerged in the mountains that challenged prevailing assumptions about the otherness of Appalachia and about the process of development as well. The Appalachian movement, of course, reflected a mosaic of contributions and political philosophies. Even the mountain middle class, which had initially rejected the word “Appalachia” because of its connection with poverty, increasingly accepted the label as a useful marketing strategy for countercultural products and applied it to businesses, organizations, and even furniture styles. University scholars, especially in the social sciences, gained long denied recognition for their study of mountain life and culture, and academic presses vied for manuscripts on regional topics. The demand for Appalachian artists and musicians mushroomed, and regional colleges introduced courses in Appalachian studies to accompany those in African American studies, women’s studies, and other innovative fields.
But the heart of the Appalachian studies movement lay in the young activists who remained in the mountains after the collapse of the antipoverty crusade and continued to fight for social justice and change. Not only did these college students and former poverty warriors discard cultural stereotypes in favor of structural explanations of mountain poverty, but many also rejected the idea of progress implicit in American models of development in the post–World War II period. Like the counterculture movement that swept the rest of the country, the new Appalachian regionalism evolved from both the cultural and the political radicalism of the Vietnam War era and reflected as much a desire to change the course of the nation as it did a determination to escape assimilation.
In many ways the burgeoning Appalachian movement was anti-modern, defending traditional lifestyles and romanticizing Appalachian culture. Some of the former poverty warriors openly abandoned the emerging consumer society and sought to return to the land on individual homesteads or communes. These “back to the landers” cherished simplicity and found meaning in the old-time ballads and handcrafts. Some formed lasting friendships with neighboring poor families who, out of economic necessity, preserved the old ways. Thousands of native Appalachians rediscovered their own heritage and gained new pride in place and family ties. In an era of rapid social change and rising ethnic consciousness, Appalachians old and new discovered their roots and came together to defend their people from assault.
At its core, however, the regional movement represented a thoroughly modern effort to protect human rights and to spread the promises of security and freedom from want to a larger community of people. While they feared that public institutions and government were easily co-opted by private interests, mountain radicals and reformers shared a common faith in the democratic traditions of fairness, self-determination, and justice. They opposed the concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of the few and accused business leaders of putting profits before the common wealth of the community. They favored government intervention to regulate the abuses of corporations and looked to expand government services, but they also sought to preserve private property rights when family farms were threatened by corporate greed or public development. They believed that “good government” could conserve the land and sustain the people through civic engagement and community-based economic enterprise. The problem in Appalachia, they came to agree, was not poverty or strip mining or health care alone; it was a pattern of corruption that had tainted the whole system.
Many of the strongest advocates of the new regionalism were students or young intellectuals associated with colleges and universities serving Appalachia, and they were quick to link the injustices of the mountains to global struggles against racism, imperialism, and corporate capitalism. The War on Poverty always had an important academic component. The theories of human behavior and economic development that drove government programs in the region came out of institutions of higher education, as did many of the volunteers in the antipoverty crusade. Training sessions for AVs, VISTA volunteers, and other poverty workers were frequently held on university campuses, and in many mountain communities the local college provided the only public space for community forums and workshops.
The expansion of higher education in the region during the 1960s and 1970s brought growing numbers of working-class students into the classroom and provided young people with critical access to new ideas and broader social movements. Most of the mountain activists, for example, were steadfast opponents of the Vietnam War, and they connected their fight for regional justice with larger concerns about American actions throughout the third world. “The same values and national priorities which allow this country to inflict massive destruction upon the Vietnamese,” declared one Appalachian movement publication in 1971, “are responsible for poverty, cultural imperialism, and the attacks upon the land and people of Appalachia.”71
During the 1970s several Appalachian colleges established centers for Appalachian studies and developed curricula to support growing faculty and student interest in the region. Most of these programs offered coursework in Appalachian history, literature, and culture, preferring to study the region and its problems and avoid active engagement in controversial and politically divisive issues. Activists, however, gathered around a number of institutions and used them to support regional organizing initiatives. Clusters of Appalachian advocates developed around West Virginia University, Marshall University, the University of Kentucky, the labor and civil rights school at the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee, and Don West’s Appalachian South Folklife Center in southern West Virginia. Near Morgantown, West Virginia, for example, activists organized the People’s Appalachian Research Collective to develop an Appalachian “action-study center” at WVU and to work with researchers at the university’s Institute for Policy Studies.
Several former AVs settled into graduate study a
t the University of Kentucky and helped to establish the Appalachian Center in 1976. Appalachian centers were also created at Berea College (where there was an active group called Students for Appalachia), Mars Hill College, Pikeville College, and Appalachian State University, and regional studies programs were launched at Ohio University, Emory and Henry College, Lees College, Union College, Alice Lloyd College, and other institutions. Marshall University activists created the Appalachian Movement Press to promote the development of regional consciousness and, for a time, ran a cooperative labor school with Antioch College. In 1971 almost a dozen colleges and federal agencies in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia organized the Appalachian Consortium to encourage a better understanding of the region’s history and culture.
Faculty on a number of campuses had begun teaching courses on Appalachia in the 1960s, and following an initial Appalachian studies conference at Virginia’s Clinch Valley College in 1970, research and teaching on Appalachia expanded on college campuses throughout the mountains. Academic interest culminated in a major gathering of regional advocates at the Cratis Williams Symposium at Appalachian State University in 1976, which led to the creation of the annual Appalachian Studies Conference in 1978. Relationships between institutionally based scholars and more radical community activists were cordial but tense from the first of these meetings. Reflecting their basic distrust of institutions and cultural (rather than political) definitions of the region, activists at the Clinch Valley College conference shouted to the more conservative academic participants, “You are the enemy.” Some radical intellectuals later warned unsuccessfully against the creation of an institutionalized Appalachian studies association.72
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