This Issue

Seventeen years ago, Appalachian Heritage produced its first special issue on Blacks in Appalachia. Since then, years of out-migration have reduced the numbers of blacks here, making it even easier to ignore this vibrant regional sub-group. In this special issue, Glennis Redmond poignantly asks, “Where does history go / when it hasn’t been tended?”

The rich collection gathered here by guest editor Bill Turner and editor George Brosi amply demonstrates how this history has been tended. Turner charts the contributions of African-American Appalachians in his opening essay. Skip Gates’ story of his own sojourn from Piedmont, West Virginia, to Yale and beyond highlights the power of affirmative action. bell hooks writes about the self-definition she learned as a child in Kentucky, values she has held onto as invaluable parts of her identity. These and other values were packed in the luggage of out-migrants, too, as the essay by Virginia C. Fowler on Nikki Giovanni reveals. And when it’s time to come back home, as Crystal Wilkinson’s characters do, for dinner on the grounds, a rich experience awaits. Ancella Bickley provides us not only with a unique insight into Carter G. Woodson’s West Virginia family, but her contacts also provided us some hitherto unpublished photographs of Carter G. Woodson and Bessie Woodson Yancey.

And the poetry that awaits you. Mmmm. Crystal Wilkinson’s “Terrain” should be read alongside James Still’s “Heritage.” There are searing poems by Frank X Walker, Bianca Spriggs, and doris davenport, and important contemporary sentiments by Crystal Good and Carolyn Sundy, as well as timeless ones by Pikeville’s own Effie Waller Smith.

As you read this special issue, please don’t read it silently to yourself. This material needs to be read aloud. No, it needs to be shouted. Perhaps in shouting out these words, others will hear. Perhaps in making others hear, you’ll be helping to build awareness of the true diversity of Appalachia.