Yesterday's People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia

An Introductory Note

An Introductory Note IT IS a cliche, no doubt, but many a publisher hopes every time he opens his mail to pick up an unsolicited manuscript that actually rings a bell. It happens so seldom that some forget it can happen. When the Reverend Jack Weller, a mountain minister, sent his manuscript in to the University of Kentucky Press, it happened. This was my conviction, too, when I was given a chance to read this book in advance of publication. I am very glad to be offered the opportunity to introduce the work. Some books are made of other men's books; other books come directly out of experience. These are often the best books, for they are made from men's lives. This book comes out of a minister's thirteen years as missionary to churches in the Southern Appalachians. Because he came as a missionary , Mr. Weller brought the objectivity of the stranger. Finally, he came to know these people better than they knew themselves. Intimate involvement in the social life of a people does not necessarily reveal the meaning of that life to a native who has no standard of comparison, but for Mr. Weller there was always a background of the other life, the outside world with which he could make comparison. There are no schedules here; nothing is coded; few respondents are listed; only hundreds of unmentioned interviews that this minister carried on with parishioners, neighbors, acquaintances over a span of many years. The beauty of this book is that the whole thing remains completely informal but rings completely true. x An Introductory Note Each year the Council of the Southern Mountains is attended by "delegates" from Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, and points north. Why is this? Social work executives and heads of city welfare programs come south to this meeting in order to learn about the problems migrants from the southern mountains offer to our great cities. First, our cities had to learn how to live with foreign immigrants; then they were faced with the migration of Negroes from the agricultural South; finally, they must adjust their programs to newcomers from the Southern Appalachians. It is my feeling that in Mr. Weller's little book they have been presented a key to the motivation, the folkways, the mores and the personality of these people. The problems of the southern mountains have long been in and out of the public eye and now they are back again to stay. Practically all of the national denominations have supported missionary activities in the area and before the age of public schools many staffed and supported mountain academies. Health services were first taken to the mountains by the Frontier Nursing Service. These nurses rode horseback to deliver the babies of mountain mothers and were the first to bring maternal and child health services to these remote areas. Berea College remains a fine example of an institution especially adapted to mountain culture and needs. Now the public agencies are stepping in and there is money in the budget for the Southern Appalachians. In 1961 President Kennedy signed the Area Redevelopment Act, a measure to help stranded rural and urban communities overcome chronic unemployment. The Cumberland plateau, practically all of West Virginia's counties, and other regions of the Appalachians were designated as redevelopment areas under the new act. New programs are now in operation. In West Virginia, a group of remote counties, organized under the Combined Extension Services of the University An Introductory Note xi of West Virginia, have embarked on a program of development proposed and guided by core committees from the most mountainous counties. Under a grant from the Kellogg Foundation, the University of Kentucky is carrying integrated extension services to the thirty counties of the Cumberlands in an attempt to hasten redevelopment. The plan is to stimulate communities by these services, to inventory their needs and work toward alleviation. The governor of North Carolina and his advisers secured the support of the Ford Foundation and other groups and established the North Carolina Fund with the aim of ending the cycle of poverty in North Carolina. All this has come to a climax in the Economic Opportunity Act in which President Johnson is attempting to mobilize a national attack on poverty. With administrative machinery at hand, with seed capital in sight, with a favorable climate of public opinion we come to a most important question. What...