Black Huntington: An Appalachian Story by Cicero M. Fain III (review)

In Black Huntington: An Appalachian Story, Cicero M. Fain III tells the story of the founding of Huntington, West Virginia, in the nineteenth century from the perspective of its earliest Black residents. A third-generation Black Huntingtonian, Fain builds on a tradition of African American historians who have told the history of Appalachia, too often rendered as an all-white enclave, through stories of migration, community, and labor of Black people. He joins sociologist Karida Leigh Brown, the daughter of parents who hailed from the coal-mining town of Lynch, Kentucky, who recently published her award-winning book Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia (2018). Fain and Brown build on the works of luminaries like Joe W. Trotter, who published Coal, Class, and Color (1990) about Black coal miners in southern West Virginia, as well as the "father of Black History," Carter G. Woodson, who attended school in Huntington and wrote the first scholarly articles on African Americans in Appalachia.

The book starts in Cabell County (future home of Huntington) in the 1850s, when it was still a part of the state of Virginia. Fain distinguishes the slaveholders of western Virginia from the more prosperous, planter elite in the eastern part of the state. Enslaved people faced "the contested nature of the borderland demarcated" by the Ohio River: one side (Ohio) was free, and the other (Virginia) was slave (5–6). Port cities along the river offered enslaved people access to information, news of loved ones, and opportunities for employment on steamboats or at resorts, where enslaved men and women exercised a degree of control over services. Less than fifty miles away on the Ohio side of the border, the Underground Railroad ushered Black people to freedom. Fain describes a place in flux, where enslaved people had more movement than their brothers and sisters farther south and to the east. During the Civil War, Cabell County's white citizens voted to remain in the Union, the state of Virginia seceded, and, in 1863, the state of West Virginia was founded. The upheaval created conditions for greater mobility and the African American population in Cabell County declined.

In 1869, railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington arrived in Cabell County in search of property for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad. He purchased five thousand acres, and by 1871 the town of Huntington was incorporated. The construction of the railroad attracted Black migrants and stemmed the tide of Black outmigration from southern West Virginia. Carter G. Woodson's family was among the first Black migrant families to arrive. His father, James Woodson, a former slave, was drawn to the opportunity for steady wage work constructing railroads or working in mines. He and his wife stayed for a few years before returning to Virginia. Their two sons, Robert and Carter, returned to West Virginia in 1893 to work on railroad construction crews before beginning work in coal mines in the town of Nutallburg. There Carter got his first taste of the power of African American history, as he read aloud newspapers and books in exchange for food and discussed politics and history with Black miners. In 1895, the Woodson family returned to Huntington, where Carter enrolled in the newly formed Douglass High School, named for Frederick Douglass.

The story of the Woodson family captures twin developments in Huntington: the rise of industrial labor that attracted Black migrants, and the establishment of Black institutions that fostered community. Fain explains that the growth in the Black population in the late nineteenth century is attributed to the opening of the railroads and other industry at the moment when Black migrants were searching for work; the draw of stable wages; and the absence of Jim Crow laws and retention of voting rights in West Virginia. Black residents had greater access to education and public spaces in Huntington than they did farther south. Along with Douglass High School, which continues to hold annual reunions, African Americans...