Uneven Ground (24 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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.
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The controversy in Kentucky became a major example of conflict within the War on Poverty during congressional investigations of the OEO later that year.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.