Not Just Poor White: Community Organizing and Appalachian Identity in Cincinnati, Ohio, 1965–1975

In the mid-twentieth century, residents of Appalachia left home for manufacturing jobs created in the postwar economic boom. In total, an estimated 7 million people left the region in the three decades following World War II, often moving to cities surrounding the region, or in the Midwest or Mid-Atlantic states. In the 1950s alone, roughly a third of the population of Appalachian eastern Kentucky left, many for Cincinnati, Ohio, a major center for the manufacture of soap products, machine parts, and building materials. Leaving the hills and hollows of Kentucky, migrants undertook two major transitions, which William W. Philliber identified in a major survey of Appalachian migrants in Cincinnati he conducted in 1975: movements from "rural to urban areas" and from "south to north." As a result, migrants were notable as outsiders in Cincinnati, marked especially by patterns of dress and speech. A special series in the Cincinnati Enquirer on the trend pictured the "Southern migrant" as a "man with two faces in the Queen city." On one side of the drawing, his clothes are rumpled and his face is lined with worry. On the other, he wears an ironed plaid shirt, close-cropped hair, and a confident smile. According to the Enquirer, Cincinnati's ensuing social problem was to help the Appalachian migrants to urbanize and adjust to Cincinnati "easily and fully," in time making the drawing's right side the "face" of the Appalachian migrant in the Queen City.¹

"The Southern Migrant," Cincinnati Enquirer, July 14, 1957.

COURTESY OF THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER

Family inside of a home, c. 1940s–1960s.

CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER, CINCINNATI HISTORY LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES

Or was that the problem? In the late 1960s and early 1970s, urban reformers from eastern Kentucky argued that the city was wrong to try to urbanize the migrants. In its mission statement, the Urban Appalachian Council, founded in January 1974, included the statements "We affirm the right of all groups to be proud of and to celebrate their cultural heritage. We affirm the need for a mutual adaptation between mountain and urban cultures." The group argued for the existence of an Appalachian ethnic identity, a difficult project, as few migrants from the region self-identified as "Appalachian." At earlier workshops on Appalachian migration, city officials had also contended that a conflict of cultures took place, but they never described the group with a single, stable term. The genesis of the Appalachian ethnic identity was an "exercise in self-definition" on the part of organizers from the region, as historian Bruce Tucker has argued. These organizers undertook this exercise in an effort to assert that Appalachians were "not just poor white," which helped them to work within national and local anti-poverty programs. The Office of Economic Opportunity's Pilot Cities program was these organizers' first major sponsor, and the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission (CHRC) was their second.²

In "Identity Matters," a history of Appalachian organizing in Cincinnati included in Stephen L. Fisher and Barbara Ellen Smith's 2012 anthology Transforming Places: Lessons from Appalachia, Phillip J. Obermiller and his coauthors, M. Kathryn Brown, Donna Jones, Michael E. Maloney, and Thomas Wagner, conclude that these organizers were successful: "Identity awareness as a means of advocacy and organizing has proven its effectiveness among urban Appalachians in Cincinnati." The 2014 closure of the Urban Appalachian Council office and political dissatisfaction in southern Ohio prompt a reassessment of that conclusion. These organizers never achieved high levels of identification as "Appalachian," and while their cultural celebration–oriented projects have continued, their direct anti-poverty efforts have not. They were initially interested, practically, in finding a place for poor white migrants in urban anti-poverty programs, but they later became preoccupied, impractically, with defining "Appalachian" identity in an empowering way. This article does not support a conclusion in favor of the continued effectiveness of identity-group awareness as a means of advocacy for the Appalachian group.³

The City of Cincinnati began talking about the problems of...