African Americans and the Appalachian Heritage

African Americans and the Appalachian Heritage I am an African American male. I was born at the end of World War II in the very heart of Appalachia—Harlan County, Kentucky. These aspects of my being used to be sources of a very real and frustrating problem of identity for me. I used to counteract the intersection of being a black male and being from Appalachia by quipping that "I'd never have chosen to be born a black boy in Harlan County, Kentucky, but one cannot choose one's parentage and my dad insisted that I be born in the company hospital near his job in the mines and near where my mother had all eight of my brothers and sisters." I was twenty—a man, for all practical purposes, if not fully self-conscious— before such heavy issues as black manhood and ecological psychology hit me. The social and economic impact of massive layoffs in the mining industry were not apparent in the midst of a relatively happy family and community life. What young black boy in Harlan or Mercer County knew or cared much about the racial composition of Lynch or Bluefield? I certainly didn't define my grandparents as "carriers of culture and tradition." In college I found the black-consciousness movement that was so much a part of the 1960s rather hard to credit, since my old Lynch Colored School had offered many outlets for creative expression of the black experience. But in fact the leadership I took in various black organizations ("the Movement") was a vindication of realities and memories I had not ascribed to the experience of growing up black in Appalachia. William H. Türner, Guest Editor But the movement crystallized a lot for me. I felt much better when "black" replaced "Negro" and "colored." The cultural support systems it portended linked me with nonmountain blacks. Such amorphous entities as "black culture ," "black religion," "black music," and "black community" were embedded in cultural practices I'd long taken for granted. The ceremonies, customs, and rituals of "black nationalism" were no more to me than reincarnations of church homecomings, family reunions, and other pooling activities we'd long practiced to provide ourselves a kind of safety net and to reinforce and renew our communal values. In 1966, I met John B. Stephenson, who introduced me to the challenge of "filling the void in our understanding about black people in Appalachia." I quickly introduced him to Alex Haley's Autobiography of Malcolm X and continued in my pursuit of "more important issues." We remained steady friends, however, and by 1978, his nudging remaining steady, I had left Howard University for the University of Kentucky (my alma mater) and begun to study what he called the "unique social history of black people in the southern mountains." After more than a decade of systematic (and unsystematic) efforts—having scratched the surface, so to speak—I acknowledge the blessing of having worked with John's network of fellow Appalachian writers, scholars, community activists, musicians, and other friends and benefactors. We have learned that black people in Appalachia, especially in coal towns, 5 Carter G. Woodson, a 1903 Berea graduate, pioneered the study of black history reflect the very essence of triumph over invisibility and of the ways people devise to struggle against adverse conditions. We share here, in part, a history that covers a social fabric in which poverty and the exploitation of people and the earth are common themes. To know blacks in Appalachian America is to know how it reels when your company town loses its company . . . and you suffer the first and most losses. It is the observation, reflection, and celebration of a people's history that is deeply embedded in strong loyalty to friends, discipline and responsibility to community, and the knowledge that respect is better than popularity. In the black enclaves of Appalachia, one knows that while there are others better off, that does not mean they are better than, and that, with faith in God and hard work, you too will "do better." In 1985 Ed Cabbell and I published Blacks in Appalachia. In the years since then, our call for...