Appalachia, Democracy, and Cultural Equity

By Dudley Cocke

Excerpted from: Voices from the Battlefront: Achieving Cultural Equity Marta Moreno Vega and Cheryll Y. Greene, Editors.
Africa World Press, New Jersey: Trenton, 1993.

A joke from the Depression goes:  Two Black men are standing in a government breadline; one turns to the other, "How you making it?"  The other looks up the line,  "White folks still in the lead."

Although central Appalachia's population is 98 percent white, the region joins the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the Mississippi Delta at the bottom of the barrel in United States per capita income and college-educated adults.  Two out of five students who make it to high school drop out before graduating, which is the worst dropout rate in the nation.  Forty-two percent of the region's adults are functionally illiterate.  In eastern Kentucky's Letcher County, half the children are classified as economically deprived, and almost a third of the area's households exist on less than $10,000 a year.  What's the story here?  Why are these white people doing so poorly?  Part of the answer lies in the beginnings of the nation.

In the ascendancy of antidemocratic ideas such as those expressed by Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists were buried some of the seeds of Appalachia's poverty.  In opposition to Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton proposed that the President and Senate be elected for life; he wrote:  "All communities divide themselves into the few and the many.  The first are the rich and wellborn, the other the mass of people.  The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact.  The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right."  In the next 200 years, this old-world idea would be cultivated by the few for profit.

Capitalism didn't arrive in central Appalachia until the 1890's (coinciding with the official closing of the western frontier).  Before then there were no banks, no railroads, and no industry on the Cumberland Plateau.  Monopoly capitalism arrived late and with a vengeance.  Timber and mineral rights were snapped up by absentee corporations for a fraction of their market value.  Within twenty-five years, these corporations dominated the region's economy, controlling the land, the labor pool, and the county courthouse.

Now, a hundred years later, central Appalachia is a mineral colony of national and supranational energy corporations.  Now the region avoids at its own further peril international savvy.  Union Carbide was responsible for small chemical leaks in Institute, West Virginia, as well as for the tragedy in Bhopal, India in 1984.   A recent American appointee to the British Coal Board was partially responsible for the destruction of a Mingo County, West Virginia - Pike County, Kentucky community during the bitter 1984 to 1986 A.T. Massey coal strike.  At the time of the strike, A.T. Massey was a subsidiary  of Royal Dutch Shell, which also mines in South Africa.  These absentee corporations, often with only a pretense of national interest, continue to carry off Appalachia's wealth, leaving behind unemployment, poor schools, poor health care-in sum, the poverty that Appalachia has come to represent.

A story points to how confusing poverty is to those who are poor and those who try to empathize with it.  In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared the war on poverty.  As part of the national media's coverage of that domestic war, CBS produced "Christmas in Appalachia."  Charles Kuralt narrated:  "Up on the hill is the Pert Creek School.  And up there on this one day is the only sign in this hollow that it is Christmas in Appalachia."  The camera cut to half a dozen kids gathered around a coal stove singing "Silent Night."  After the broadcast, a little town in Virginia named Appalachia received so many pairs of shoes, simply addressed to "Appalachia, U.S.A.," that the mayor and his coworkers were being pushed out of city hall.  As the story goes, when it looked like the jail would be filled up, leaving no room for meanness, a shoe-burning party was proclaimed by City Council.  The town helped rid the nation of its extra shoes and then returned to the routine of daily dealing with its lot.

Stereotyping has been a modus operandi consistently used by the relatively few to rationalize dominating the region's people and resources for profit.  The inevitable missionaries, for example, chimed in with a chorus that had been singing since the early 1700's.  In this instance, Marie Louise Poole opined in 1901:  "Sometimes, unknown by them, I get a glimpse into their minds, and I am sick.  There is filth in their thoughts.  I want to save them."  In 1912, the New York Times editorialized:  The majority of mountain people are unprincipled ruffians.  There are two remedies only:  education or extermination.  The mountaineer, like the red Indian, must learn this lesson."  Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History (1935), writes by report, never having spent time in Appalachia:  "The Appalachian mountain people at this day are no better than barbarians.  They are the American counterparts of the latter-day White barbarian of the Old World, the Rifis and Kurds and the Hairy Ainu."  The irony here is that Ainu, who are people from the northernmost Japanese islands, have light skin, Caucasian features, and hairy bodies-we can imagine what some of the Japanese thought of them. The effect of this entrenched stereotyping has been to undermine a people's self-esteem.

In this demoralizing and divisive process, racism also has played its part:  "They are of good stock . . . They will overflow from their mountains, offset some unpromising foreign elements-and reinforce the nation,"  proclaimed Teddy Roosevelt.  "In my opinion they are worse that the colored," remarked a Chicago police captain in a 1958 Harper's Magazine article.  In the workplace, it was common practice for white coal operators to pit Black workers against Appalachia's white miners-and both against immigrant workers.  For example, agents were sent to the deep South covertly to offer Black sharecroppers a rail ticket and a job up North in the mines.  The new miners weren't told when they were being recruited as scab labor by the company to break the nascent union.  After a while in many coal camps, it became company policy to keep, in their phrase, "a judicious mixture" of races and ethnicities, each group living separately and each speaking a different native tongue.

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