Getting up in the dark, rattling around, a few of us trying to eat. We dress, pile into cars, and drive to the mouth of Clear Creek to meet the others. Several carloads, twenty women and a dozen or so men, including newsmen. We drive up Trace Fork and through an open gate. Not feeling much, neither fear nor excitement. A jeep speeds by us. We meet it at the second gate, the gate to the mine, the chain locked across the road. Two men, one with an automatic rifle, stand guard. We get out, stand around in the rain...

In May 1990 more than one thousand people gathered at the Highlander Research and Education Center in east Tennessee for a memorial celebration honoring Myles Horton, co-founder of the school and its guiding spirit for nearly sixty years. Three generations of activists came to pay tribute to the past and plan for the future. The diverse backgrounds of the participants, the attention given to cultural expressions, the memories of earlier successes in the organized labor and civil rights movements, and the workshops covering topics from toxic waste to community economic development, racism, and women’s struggles, were a striking reminder of...

Racism and the relationship of progressive movements to Black America have historically been central strategic issues for community organizers in the United States. Our history is cluttered with the cadavers of progressive coalitions undermined by white racism: the abolitionists, women’s suffrage, the Reconstruction labor movement, the Populists, the Progressives, the Booker T. Washington entente, New Dealism, and the labor crusade of the thirties.¹

For those of us who know this history and who were reborn, shaped, and educated in the fiery crucible of the civil rights and black liberation movements of the sixties and seventies, the current state of community...

The stereotype of the weak-willed, dependent Appalachian is revived each time Appalachians are “discovered” by outsiders. From the comic-strip portrayal of the television seriesThe Beverly Hillbilliesto the well-intentioned ennobling of Kai Erikson’s study of the destruction by flood of a West Virginia coal community,¹ Appalachians have been depicted as meek and apathetic. They are perceived as submissively accepting privations that non-Appalachians would not, and as culturally, perhaps constitutionally, incapable of resistance to unjust conditions.

The stereotype of the docile Appalachian will no doubt remain popular, one more burden laid on by outsiders. But Appalachians are not docile. In...

When thirteen Tennessee coalfield residents petitioned their state government to make large coal landholders pay a fair share of taxes, they hardly thought that nearly twenty years later Save Our Cumberland Mountains (SOCM, pronounced “sock ’em”) would have grown into one of the strongest citizen organizations in the Appalachian region, with 1,500 families as members. From its roots as an anti-strip mining group, the original members could hardly have envisioned the organization leading a major legislative campaign against the unfairness of employers replacing permanent employees with long-term “temporary” workers. Although SOCM’s growth has not been without pain, its willingness to...

Organizing for change has always been difficult in Appalachia. One of the major obstacles to effective organizing is the fact that the Appalachian economy has long been dependent on coal and other single-industry employers. Absentee owners control much of the land and resources, and decisions about their use are made in board rooms far from the mountains. This situation contributes to the high unemployment that makes workers reluctant to speak out and challenge existing power structures for fear of losing their jobs.

In addition, a long history of local political corruption, along with wrong-headed federal economic development initiatives that favor...

After he published an eloquent letter about the farm crisis in his local paper, Tom Robertson’s neighbors said they were surprised he could write like that. “Shoot,” said Tom, “you can’t tell how deep a well is by the length of the pump handle.” The same could be said of the family farm movement. Many people think of farmers primarily as a special interest group hurt by economic change. But at a deeper level the farm movement contains lessons for us all about the vision and strategy necessary to transform progressive politics as we head into the next century.

The...

In 1982, what did a coal miner in Tennessee, a carpenter in Charleston, West Virginia, and a highway construction worker in Kentucky have in common? They were all women who got their jobs because of women’s organizations that fought for their employment rights. From 1977 to the early part of the 1980s, nontraditional job advocacy affected the lives of hundreds of Appalachian women who had never before had the opportunity to work in the jobs that their husbands, fathers, and boyfriends had taken for granted for generations. For these women, the promise of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights...

We attribute a range of human characteristics to capital. For example, we say capital has a nose for profit and a heart for charitable contributions and philanthropy. Capital distributes its benefits with an invisible hand. Just like humans, capital also has foibles and contradictions. The eyes of capital are fixed on the future, on the lookout for what is new. The mind of capital, however, brims with nineteenth-century Darwinian concerns about competition and survival. Memory and conscience are curiously missing from the stock of capital’s human parts.

If capital had a conscience, the excesses of the coal industry would trouble...

Like many people in the Appalachian region and throughout the country, we found our lives touched by the 1989 United Mine Workers strike in the southern Appalachian coalfields. During that last year of a decade that brought such hardships to so many poor and working people and such debilitating reverses for even the mildest efforts at a progressive political agenda, the mineworkers’ strike challenged and inspired us to look again at what people might achieve as we move into the next century. We hope to share something of that challenge and inspiration in this personal memoir.

Each of us had...

The struggle for occupational health in America today owes much to the efforts of retired and disabled miners in the coalfields of Appalachia. In the late 1960s they created an organization that served as a model for occupational health battles in several industries in the 1970s and 1980s. Called the Black Lung Association (BLA), it was part of the broader black lung movement, which sought recognition of, and compensation for, a disease referred to medically as “coal workers’ pneumoconiosis.” A chronic dust disease of the lungs arising out of employment in an underground coal mine, it is known to the...

We talk here of sowing. We have had the good fortune to be a part of some intense movements for social change in the American South in our role as cultural staff members since 1959 at the Highlander Center in Tennessee. These include the civil rights movement in the Deep South, the anti–strip mine movement in the Appalachian mountains, the ongoing struggle for equity for coal miners, and the environmental movement currently evolving into a broader movement for social justice. We have lived in communities rich in grassroots cultural expression. What we have tried to sow is support for...

In examining the lives and labors of working-class Appalachian women at the close of the twentieth century, my concern is to illustrate the importance of analyses of gender to the study of waged labor and, further, to broaden the terms through which we think about labor and dissent. If economic conditions have rendered problematic not only the quality, but equally the prospect, of employment in the 1990s, they also serve to motivate activists and scholars to reexamine our assumptions about the location and meaning of waged work for members of the working class.

The study of work and protest in...

John Gaventa’s remarks, made at the first annual meeting of the Appalachian Studies Conference, were a call for a more constructive relationship between activists and scholars.¹ They were a challenge to produce knowledge useful for democratic empowerment. Gaventa’s remarks were also intentionally exaggerated. Good writing about the region was never the exclusive property of a small, committed group of nonacademics. But Gaventa’s observations were nonetheless important. They helped give identity to the emerging Appalachian Studies Association (ASA) and shape relations among activists and scholars in and around the region.

Designed from the beginning to “coordinate analysis of the region’s problems...

By the end of the nineteenth century, political turmoil, urbanization, a revolution in aesthetics, changing economic and labor relations, and new techniques of transport and communication brought about what is now called modernity.¹ In the process, imperialists and corporate administrators reshuffled territories and redefined cultures as disposable resources, as commodities that could be bought and sold.² This diagnosis pertains to Appalachia as well as to what is known as the Third World. Disagreement, disruption, and disintegration seem to hold sway. A particularly virulent and unhappy version of modernity has been imposed. Increasingly, Appalachians have become and have seen themselves as...