Helen Matthews Lewis: Living Social Justice in Appalachia

Chapter 2: Breaking New Ground, 1955–1977

CHAPTER 2 Breaking New Ground, 1955–1977 Patricia Beaver I grew up in north Georgia.And when I moved to the coal fields that was a shock because there were a lot of similar characteristics, like the old HardShell Baptists, as we called them in north Georgia, and a lot of music was the same. . . . But coal, the whole industrialization of rural people made a big difference.And so that’s where I got really interested in what coal does to traditionalAppalachian culture. — Helen Matthews Lewis, quoted in Lori Briscoe et al.,“UnrulyWoman: An Interview with Helen Lewis” Helen Matthews Lewis moved to southwest Virginia in 1955. Witness to the impact of the coal industry in central Appalachia, Helen became an activist educator and an outspoken critic of the devastation occurring in the resourcerichregionthatshenowcalledhome .Teachingandlearningfromherstudents, Helen fundamentally reframed for a new generation of scholars and activists the most basic assumptions about Appalachian culture, communities, and inequality. Helen’s husband, Judd, had been hired to teach philosophy at Clinch Valley College, a branch of the University of Virginia in Wise, in the heart of the coalfields. At that time the University of Virginia would not employ both husband and wife in permanent positions. So for five years, Helen held temporary and part-time positions at the college, while she worked with women in Wise County to help start a local public library, learned from her students about the impact of coal on their region, and called for a coal severance tax to support public schools. Helen sought the PhD in order to be qualified for a full-time position at Breaking New Ground, 1955–1977 45 Clinch Valley College. Awarded a National Science Foundation grant in 1962, she traveled to the University of California in Berkeley to study for a summer. She then turned her attention to Appalachian coal research. In 1964 she entered the PhD program at the University of Kentucky. Grants from the Bureau of Mines helped her to conduct research on coal miners and their families and to develop expertise on the industry from the inside out as she interviewed miners in their workplaces and miners’ wives in their homes. Her research, in collaboration with Edward Knipe, was groundbreaking in both its subject and its methodology. She earned the PhD in sociology from the University of Kentucky in 1970, with her dissertation “Occupational Roles and Family Roles: A Study of Coal Mining Families in the Southern Appalachians.” Helen came to southwest Virginia during a pivotal time for the coal industry and coalfield communities. She watched the 1950s bring mechanization of the mines, consolidation of control by major mining operations, massive unemployment, decline of coal production, accompanying increases in poverty , and major out-migrations from the region. At the same time, many big coal companies, largely untaxed and unregulated, made large profits. Living inWise,Virginia, and teaching students from the coal communities, Helen saw firsthand the impoverishment of the coalfields and the wealth of the industry, and she recognized the connections between the local economy and the industrialization of this rural area by an extractive industry whose ownership and interests lay primarily outside the region. Stereotypes of Appalachian people as poor whites, unlettered, isolated, and culturally inadequate, were invented and replicated during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by successive waves of visitors and helpers. For decades scholars attributed Appalachian exceptionality to an isolated folk tradition, and by 1960 anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s theory of a self-perpetuating oppressive culture of poverty had gained momentum as an explanation of Appalachian poverty. In the 1960s and 1970s, images of mountain people as degraded, white, isolated hillbillies continued to be featured in America’s popular media as they had since the late nineteenth century, and these stereotypes received national attention with publication in 1965 of Jack Weller’s Yesterday’s People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia. In response to these models of deficiency and to her lived experience with economic decline in central Appalachia, Helen presented academic talks and public lectures, proposing that Appalachia was an ecologically and historically complex region with a diversity of subcultures.Writing and speaking about the 46 Helen Matthews Lewis region where she lived, Helen grew into a public intellectual, concluding that “stirring up dialogue has some great value.” In 1970 Helen introduced a new interpretive model for Appalachia, that of internal colonialism, inspired in part byCharlesValentine’s...