Changing Appalachia

Reviewed by Tal Stanley

Vol. 15, No. 3, 1993, pp. 32-35

Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change, edited by Stephen L. Fisher (Temple University Press, Philadelpia, 1993, 365 pages).

One of the first things I remember about that spring ten years ago is the weather: rain. Indeed, it seemed to rain all spring and we could not see White Top Mountain for days at a time. I also remember that spring as a season of deep, profound change and struggle for my life. A new social consciousness began to emerge for me. I was a college senior participating in a seminar led by Steve Fisher. The seminar focused on issues of work and workplace democracy in America and Appalachia. We discovered and explored how those of us in the seminar had been shaped and injured, divided, and limited by a class society. We discussed how work particularly and society generally might be changed to be democratic, fair for all. From the perspective of ten springs of work and study those discussions have changed much of my thinking and continue to be formative for my life.

In Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change, Steve Fisher and his collaborators continue that process of education and change. Serving as both narrative history and a tool box for social protest and dissent, resistance and change in the Appalachian region, these sixteen essays are guided by five foundational questions and issues. First, “what factors have led to the success or failure of particular change efforts” in Appalachia? Second, “how have issues of race, class, gender and culture shaped resistance efforts?” Third, “what impact have national and global structures and events had on local movements for change?” Fourth, “what is legitimate about the notion of regional identity, and what role, if any, has it played in progressive efforts?” Fifth, “what organizing strategies make sense for the future?” By addressing these five questions, each of the essayists works to dispel the culturally-produced images of Appalachia as an isolated backwater, populated by gun-toting, ignorant people complicitous in their victimization, “culturally incapable of rational resistance to unjust conditions.” What follows are eyewitness histories of grassroots movements in the region and the practical lessons learned through success and failure.

The first seven essays critically examine the issues, potentials, and obstacles to community organizing in Central and Southern Appalachia. Beginning with Mary Beth Bingman’s account of her participation in the anti-strip mining protests in Knott County, Kentucky in January, 1972, the efforts at resistance and change that are examined are those which have emerged in the region over the last twenty years. Together with Bingman, Sherry Cable’s account of the Yellow Creek Concerned Citizens organization, Bill Allen’s writing about Save Our Cumberland Mountains, Joe Szakos’ essay on Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, and Hal Hamilton and Ellen Ryan’s discussion of the Community Farm Alliance, provide glimpses of the evolution of social resistance and change, both in local communities and in the movements themselves. The essays point to a “movement of movements” diverse in its goals and membership, complex in the ways real change is realized.

These candid histories trace the transformation of organizing movements from local, individual frustration and dissent into agents of local, state, and even national collective resistance and social change. Yet throughout the failures and successes, these organizations maintain a distinctive Appalachian identity and strength. These essayists point to a number of elements common to successful Appalachian efforts at change which are repre-

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sentative of a movement away from single-issue protest groups to multi-issue organization, from less staff-dominated leadership to more shared decision-making in a context of radical democracy.

As narrative histories and effective organizing tools, this first section of Fighting Back also discusses the cultural racism, isolationism, and parochialism that tends to cripple organizing efforts, but also suggests ways that an empowering solidarity might be produced in those same efforts. Don Manning-Miller offers an overview of citizen’s groups in Appalachia and criticizes an inherent tendency among many grassroots organizations to ignore the presence and debilitating effects of racism within their own structures and membership. He outlines specific steps by which citizen groups may confront and collectively change their racist inclinations, so that Appalachian activism may be committed to a “thoroughgoing equality within and among organizations and in society at large … [and to] a successful people’s movement in our time.”

Also in the first section, John Glen’s narrative history of the involvement of the Highlander Center with Appalachian community organizing details the false starts and sometimes painful effort at redirection through which resistance and change movements must move in order to be multi-issue, multi-regional, multi-racial, and democratically defined. This is an undocumented facet of the Highlander history, but it is a history intertwined with the emergence and evolution of many grassroots movements in Appalachia. Glen shows that what may have worked in the labor movement and the civil rights struggle may not be applicable in every place, and that regional and local differences do matter. He demonstrates the complexity of social dissent and change in Appalachia, and convincingly argues for the long view of social change for the region and for Highlander, what Raymond Williams called “the long revolution.” Taking this long view enables Glen to assert that for the Center and for Appalachia “the battle for the future of the region will remain an extended and sometimes confusing struggle.”

Fighting Back’s second part, “New Strategies in Labor Struggles,” discusses some of the ways the struggle for change is experienced in Appalachian workplaces. Perhaps the most moving of the essays in the entire volume is Jim Sessions and Fran Ansley’s narrative, “Singing Across Dark Spaces: The Union/Community Takeover of the Pittston Moss 3 Plant.” Sessions and Ansley discuss how at the height of the 1989 UMWA strike against the Pittston Coal Company, the union and the community found direction by retelling the community’s memories of struggles between miners and management in the 1930s and by appropriating the nonviolent tradition of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. The Pittston struggle held out the possibility that we might “…get a glimpse of what a less oppressive set of race and gender relations might one day look like.” While acknowledging the bitterness and disappointments concomitant with any social struggle, this narrative makes clear that near St. Paul, Virginia, inside and outside the Moss 3 Plant there were “moments of transcendence that [were] capable of teaching us, of making us feel the possibilities that reside in us, in the people around us, and in the groups of which were are or can be a part.”

The third section of the book examines how a regional identity is a critical force in the “construction of class consciousness, gender relations, regional identity, and community life.” The essays in this section demonstrate the complex and interdependent relationship between regional identity and social change: social change in Appalachia depends on a strong regional identity, but the formation of that regional identity depends on a fundamental change in people’s social consciousness. These authors argue for an Appalachian identity that moves beyond earlier parochialism to a vision of Appalachia closely aligned with other regions and cultures giv-

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ing the promise of “global solidarity” for resistance and change. The most theoretical of the book’s sections, this third section also tends to be the most problematic. Particularly troubling is the tendency toward viewing the postmodern era as an entirely positive and good force. Alan Banks, Dwight Billings, and Karen Tice assert in their discussion of Appalachian Studies that postmodernity is a sensibility that “involves a heightened and healthy skepticism about truth claims” and metanarratives that ignored the regional, cultural diversity of Appalachia and Appalachians. I can agree with this, and much that Banks, Billings, and Tice put forward in their essay regarding the potential of post modernity for Appalachian studies and resistance. Trouble arises when they “reject [the] harshly critical views of postmodernity… [and] see a distinctly democratic temper in postmodernism’s … approach.” This unquestioning position ignores the material, social realities of postmodernity.

Between 1980 and 1990 the former coal producing counties in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia lost an average of 11.5 percent of population; McDowell County, West Virginia alone lost 29.4 percent. The 1990 census reported that 57.4 percent of all households with a single female as householder lived below the poverty line. In Smyth County, Virginia, 73.2 percent of single female households were below the poverty line. In 1979, in the early years of postmodernity, 11.7 percent of the national population was below the poverty line, by 1991 that same number had risen to 14.2 percent. During the same years (1979-1991) the number of African Americans below the poverty line rose from 31.0 to 32.7 percent nationally. In 1992 national unemployment stood at 5.9 percent, but 10.4 percent of African American men and 10.6 percent of African American women were unemployed. By rejecting more critical views of postmodernity, Banks, Billings, and Tice ignore the forces working against empowerment and change.

Steve Fisher’s concluding essay to Fighting Back is the most useful of all. Fisher’s essay helps us to understand that practice and theory go hand in hand and are never divorced from the daily realities of lived experience in real places.

Theoretically, Fisher sets out to review and critique two currently dominant approaches to Appalachian research and social change: Marxism and neo-populism. He focuses his argument on the concepts of “community” and “democracy,” suggesting that although idealized by neo-populists and dismissed by many Marxists, they are more complex and integral to efforts at change than either theory has heretofore admitted. As the romanticized property of the neo-populists such as Sara Evans, Harry Boyte, Lawrence Goodwyn, Jean Bethke Elshtain,

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and Christopher Lasch, “community” and “democracy” are divisive and limiting pressures. Neo-populists “conveniently ignore,” suggests Fisher, “the ethnic, racial, gender, class, and cultural differences that so often divide the people.”

Fisher contends that many traditional Marxists view “community” and “democracy” as barriers to “a collective awareness which is the essence of class consciousness.” Citing the general failure of class-based organizing in Appalachia, he argues that by repudiating traditional institutions, Marxists have misrepresented and ignored the positive local force “community” and “democracy” have as sources of “radical insurgency.” As the capstone to Fighting Back, Fisher’s work presses for “concrete structural definitions” of “community” and “democracy.” Once “community” and “democracy” are connected to concrete social realities we are able to understand how they are used as instruments in global systems of oppression and to see them as providing local roots and sources of radical activism.

Fisher argues for an activism that moves beyond localism, built on the material realities that national and global forces are determinative and transformative of lived experience in any locality. His essay lays the groundwork for a practical class-based activism that recognizes economic conditions as just one among a host of other social forces formative of class consciousness. He asserts that what is required is a people’s history and a history of capitalism … [and] the creation of resistance organizations that take culture and community seriously as spaces for political action while encouraging their members to discover the ways in which their grievances are a result of structural processes occurring at an economic, geographic, and political level far beyond the particular locale where the grievance is experience.

Indeed, this taking seriously culture and communities is the strength of Fighting Back, and the practical work of its editor.

Anyone familiar with Steve Fisher will know that one of his more significant contributions to Appalachian research and activism has been bibliographic. The bibliography which concludes this volume is another one of these contributions, extending all of the essays in Fighting Back from being important only to local, Appalachian efforts of change to national, even global significance; from being valuable histories to indispensable tools.

Steve Fisher writes that in the struggle for Appalachian change “[t]here is no easy path, no neat resolutions…” but sometimes, as in the UMWA’s takeover of the Pittston plant, we get “a glimpse of what could be.” Fighting Back in Appalachia offers us one of those glimpses.

A native of Southwest Virginia, Tal Stanley is at Emory University studying American regionalism in the context of Appalachia.

The Place of Justice

Reviewed by Tal Stanley

Vol. 17, No. 3-4, 1995 pp. 27-29

Justice in the Coalfields, directed by Anne Lewis. Camera: Andrew Garrison, Herb E. Smith, Joseph Gray, Tom Kaufman, Jerry Johnson. Sound: Anne Lewis, Alex Milenic. Assistants: Buck Maggard, Jim Branson. (Appalshop, 1995, 57 minutes.)

Many of us can trace the development of our social consciousness to particular events that had a galvanizing effect upon the way we understand not only ourselves, but the places and cultures in which we live. Although our social consciousness is continually shaped in the context of the relationships and places of our lives, these central events often retain their force as we push our understanding of their historical importance. Sadly, in many cases these galvanizing moments are not ones in which we can point to the courageous stand we made or the way we joined with others to struggle for justice. During the 1989 United Mine Workers of America nonviolent civil disobedience strike against the Pittston Coal Company, I was living and working in Wythe County, Virginia. Every Sunday afternoon hundreds of Virginia State Police gathered at the Division Headquarters outside of Wytheville, the county seat, to be briefed before traveling into Russell, Wise, and Dickenson counties to enforce Virginia’s right-to-work law against the striking miners and their supporters. Despite my woeful lack of understanding of all the issues at the time, I knew that more was at stake than the enforcement of law and the miners’ demands for a living wage. In the years since, I have come to understand the strike’s deeper issues of justice and to see my own standing-by as a complicity of sorts in systems of injustice.

Anne Lewis’ provocative and skillfully produced documentary of the strike, Justice in the Coalfields, has had a profoundly formative influence not only on my understanding of the struggle, but larger issues of American culture and Appalachian collective politics. Filmed during the strike and in the five years since, Justice in the Coalfields is a remarkable oral history narrated by persons on both sides of the nearly year-long dispute. By talking with retired and disabled miners, and the children and spouses of miners, the film clearly traces the fearful social impact of the Pittston Company’s decision to cut health and pension benefits of retired miners and their

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families. That what was at stake in 1989 has always been at stake in the coalfields and elsewhere in industrial capitalism is vividly represented by Bascom “Bear” Deel, a retired miner, telling how his father was “mashed up in the mines” by a slate fall. Deel then tells how his mother, dispossessed of home and property by her husband’s former employers, worked for five dollars a week cleaning houses in Clinchco, Virginia in order to keep the family together. With film clips from John L. Lewis’ 1947 testimony to Congress, Justice proves that health benefits for miners and their families has been a hard-won measure, an ongoing community and region-wide concern, and constantly under attack by the management of the coal industry and Taft-Hartley.

Within this social and historical context, Justice in the Coalfields effectively represents four issues at the center of the strike that remain contested territory in both Appalachia and wherever people organize for social justice. First, through oral histories of labor activists, strikers, state police, and Pittston officials, we are brought to understand the damage done by the right-to-work laws in Virginia and throughout the South. These divergent testimonies demonstrate that instead of a defense of liberty (as its proponents suggest), right-to-work legislation is usually enacted to extend the power of corporations, justifying the hiring of “replacement workers,” the use of federally and state-paid armed force against collective bargaining, and condoning the use of private security personnel against strikers. The social importance of this film is never greater than when in a moment of irony of extraordinary clarity, senior U. S. District Judge Glen Williams, who levied millions of dollars of fines against the UMWA strikers for their nonviolent actions against right to work laws, describes the Virginia State Police presence in Southwest Virginia as “the imposition of martial law.”

Second, Lewis’ work draws in sharp relief the conflict in the American consciousness between middle class individualism and values of collectivity. With extended excerpts from interviews with Martin Fox, director of public affairs of the National Right To Work Committee, and Bradley McKenzie, a local miner and organizer of the student resistance during the strike, Justice lays bare the economic and political interests that are at the heart of the rhetoric of economic individualism. Fox describes strikers’ activities as “goon behavior,” and belies the Right To Work Committee’s hidden agenda by refusing to “see workers in the plural, only in the singular.” The Fox excerpts clearly show the deep interconnection between right-to-work laws, an ideology of individualism, and the self-interests of multinational corporations. Against Fox’s politics, a youthful looking McKenzie indicts not just the policies of the Pittston Company, but the ideologies, injustices, greed, and inconsistencies of an entire global economic system. McKenzie gives voice to a resilient, placed collectivity: “You stick up for me, I’ll stick up for you, . . . we have the right to fight, . . . the community has rights …” In Justice in the Coalfields, Bradley McKenzie becomes an organic intellectual who enables us to see ourselves and society in new ways, making possible new understandings of collectivity and new struggles for justice.

Third, Lewis’ documentary illustrates the widening disparity between law and justice. Miners who had once been employed by Pittston and were not allowed to return to work after the strike, discuss their sense of loss and betrayal. Their witness makes tangible the link between corporate business interests and the judicial system, and raises the question of the availability of justice for persons and places without the economic power to secure it. Moreover, the voices and experiences of these people refuse us the possibility of easy and simplistic answers and conclusions about the strike. The Pittston strike did not bring in a new day. Justice raises the difficult questions of our own standing by and the complicity of the

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UMWA leadership in the ambivalent resolution to the strike. In April 1989, 1,700 miners went on strike, in February 1995 only 470 of those worked for Pittston. The Pittston corporation continues mining coal. The “replacement workers” whose voices and experiences are represented in the film bring us to question the justice of a system in which a worker earning five dollars an hour could not make enough money on which to live and in order to feed his family was convinced to take a striker’s job. By expanding ideas about what justice is, the film shakes loose the regional stereotypes and comfortable class complacency in which we often live. The ambiguity of the strike’s results and the meagerness of social justice to which it testifies implicate us all . In Appalachia, in the South, in workplaces everywhere, there is still dark trouble, still deep suffering, still “plenty of law but little justice.”

Finally, Justice in the Coalfields dramatically conveys the importance of place identity and the social connections of a place in any effort to collectively empower people to work for social justice. Justice brings us to know the coalfields of Southwest Virginia and Appalachia as places both of stunning natural beauty and of deep social conflict. The coalfields become in this film a conflicted place, the culture of which has been forged out of years of exploitation, resistance, struggle, and moments of human courage, dignity, integrity, and beauty. Through the refusal of local restaurants and gas stations to serve state troopers, to “Camp Solidarity” as a “free space” for people to see new possibilities for collective futures and social justice, this was and continues to be a placed-struggle. In the words of people committed to each other and to that place, the film argues that future struggles for social justice and change must first understand the values and lessons of placed-resistance. If collective struggles for social justice are to be effective, we must first give attention to those traditional institutions and concepts too often glibly and condescendingly dismissed as conservative and reactionary: country, God, church, home, family, community. The placed-resistance and collective struggle of the Pittston strike were born when those traditional experiences and that long-known place were threatened by the policies of a company that cared not for any place. Anne Lewis’ concentration on the values and experiences of the Southwest Virginia coalfields point both to the strength of that community and to the calculated, professionalized abstraction of Mike Odom, president of Pittston, from the people of the coalfields who produce Pittston’s wealth.

Whether in the voices of high school students supporting the strike in front of the courthouse in Clintwood, Virginia, a retired miner sitting in the shade of his home,or Gail Gentry paralyzed from the chest down by an accident in a Pittston mine, his health benefits to be taken away and jailed for his nonviolent acts of civil disobedience; whether in the voices of young women as they are carried to jail by Virginia State Police or strikers talking of their families as they occupy the Moss Three Preparation Plant–Justice In the Coalfields is empowered by the dialects, hopes, values, and social connections of those places. The film shows well that this was not just a UMWA struggle, but that a wide diversity of the people in the Southwest Virginia coalfields and beyond came together in support of each other. ‘They’re not talking about strangers, they’re talking about family.”

I have used this film in college classes with students who often think of Appalachians in terms of stereotypes and class prejudices. Generally, these students have never been asked to view critically the social values and lifestyles they have unquestioningly received from American popular culture. They often assume the availability of justice. After seeing Justice in the Coalfields, students unfailingly are silent for long stretches, but then ensues a protracted discussion of social justice, class and regional stereo-types, and the necessity of social change. The film offers a good opportunity to discuss the values of collective struggles for justice and the importance of place for political and social identity. It challenges the forces of race and gender by showing that everyone has a stake in this continuing struggle. The power of Justice in the Coalfields is demonstrable as students often refer to the film in subsequent papers and discussions.

Despite the questions and the sense of betrayal and unfinished work, despite the long, long struggles ahead, Justice in the Coalfields overflows with the power of that place and the values of people working together to forge a new future of social justice there. There is a militancy in Elaine Purkey’s singing, and in Buford Mullins’ vision there is an authority that challenges the old order to its foundations: “these mountains belong to the people–always have, always will.”

A native of southwest Virginia, Tal Stanley is studying American regionalism and Appalachia at Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts.

Anthologizing Appalachia

Reviewed by Tal Stanley

Vol. 18, No. 1, 1996 pp. 17-18

Appalachia Inside Out. Volume I: Conflict and Change; Volume II: Culture and Custom. Edited by Robert J. Higgs, Ambrose N. Manning, and Jim Wayne Miller. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995, 741 pages).

Attempting to anthologize creative and critical writing about a region as diverse and conflicted as Appalachia is a daunting task. How can the geography, grassroots politics, society, folk and popular cultures, collective struggles for social justice, fiction, cultural analysis, unrecorded lived experiences, and a host of other aspects of this region be anthologized in a way that gives justice to Appalachia’s complexity?

Such were the challenges facing the editors of the two-volume anthology, Appalachia Inside Out.

Inside Out is generally successful at facing the challenges of anthologizing a growing body of writing about Appalachia. With more than two hundred critical essays, reviews, poems, short stories, autobiographies, articles, vignettes, and excerpts from longer works, the collection’s greatest assets are its focus on more contemporary writing and the diversity of persons included. With selections from such writers as Booker T. Washington, “Mother” Jones, Pinckney Benedict, Myles Horton, Theodore Roosevelt, Lou Crabtree, David Whisnant, Tom Wolfe, Nikki Giovanni, Edward J. Cabbell, Marilou Awiakta, the editors offer a historical range of reflections on Appalachia’s social and cultural diversity. This Appalachia appears not as an isolated backwater, but as a region shaped within the context of social and cultural forces broadly active throughout the South and the United States. Across this range of work there are Appalachian and non-Appalachian writers who complacently remain within the limits of regional stereotypes and the marginalizing conventions of race, class, and gender. There are other writers, both Appalachian and not, who question those easy answers and push us to think in new ways about ourselves, Appalachian regional identity, and political understandings of the region.

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Of particular interest to persons working for social justice in the South and in Appalachia are essays by Steve Fisher, Marat Moore, Laurie K. Lindberg, Mike Yarrow, Judith Fiene, Helen Lewis and Rich Kirby–to name several. A project of this scope cannot do everything and every significant aspect of Appalachian culture and experience cannot be given equal weight; however, largely missing from Inside Out are writings that have emerged from grassroots struggles for social change.

Good sources for these writings would have been the Appalachian Women’s Alliance and the Mountain Women’s Journal, or even the old issues of The Plow.

While several selections seem not to have been printed elsewhere, by concentrating on already published works, Inside Out sometimes fails to represent the creative expressions of Appalachian collective politics. This is particularly damaging in the anthology’s concluding chapter, “Regional Identity and The Future,” for it is generally around questions about a place’s future that these Appalachian collective politics and a sense of regional identity emerge. Instead, this chapter, like the anthology itself, is often constricted by abstract definitions of place and a lack of attention to more political visions of an Appalachian future.

For this, readers should see other recent work such as Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change (Steve Fisher, editor. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), and It Comes From The People (Helen Lewis, Mary Ann Hinsdale, and Maxine Waller. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).

By and large, Inside Out is a helpful addition to the Appalachia studies library. Sometimes with poignancy, sometimes with bitter satire, sometimes with insightful analysis, this anthology always refuses a “consensus view” of Appalachia culture.

This collection represents a regional culture shaped among a broad diversity of people, often divided and fragmented by racism, class prejudice, and traditional gender roles. Editors Higgs, Manning, and Miller have worked to complicate the easy definitions of Appalachian culture and stereotypes of Appalachia.

Tal Stanley is a graduate student at Emory University in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts.