An Appalachian Reawakening: West Virginia and the Perils of the New Machine Age, 1945-1972

5 Raising Hell in the Hills and Hollows: AVs, VISTAs, and Community Action

5 Raising Hell in the Hills and Hollows: AVs, VISTAs, and Community Action We should abandon the State Economic Opportunity Agency, because its plan for this year neatly balances boondoggle and bureaucracy and seems more designed to raise hell than the standard of living. Paul Crabtree to Governor Hulett C. Smith, July 18, 1968 We’ve given the rest of America a pretty bad impression of us. West Virginians are supposed to be hospitable, open people—yet we clobbered the hell out of these young people who came to try to help us. It’s a shame, really. Jefferson Monroe, West Virginia EOA Director, October 1, 1968 The Mineral-Hardy community action program, the Council of the Southern Mountains’ program in McDowell County (reminiscent of the settlement house approach of an earlier day), and the ambitious but underachieving Kanawha County program drew much attention in the early months of the War on Poverty, but all fell short of the ideal of “maximum feasible participation” as envisioned by the federal Office of Economic Opportunity. From 1965 to 1968, however , several community action programs, largely through the efforts of Appalachian and VISTA volunteers, worked hard to stimulate grassroots community action. Their efforts alarmed local and state government officials and segments of the press, leading to something of a Red Scare in West Virginia. Leading politicians called for ending or severely restricting their activities, and the atmosphere had a chilling effect on the reform impulse, but it also contributed to the growth of private grassroots organizations that would continue to 171 Raising Hell in the Hills and Hollows work for change, reform, and an Appalachian reawakening after the War on Poverty faded. Huey Perry and the Mingo Model for “Maximum Feasible Participation” Nowhere in West Virginia and perhaps nowhere in rural America did a rural agency focus from its beginning more completely on “maximum feasible participation of the poor” than the Mingo County Equal Opportunity Commission. In late 1964, the Mingo County Court established the commission, made up of local businessmen, to seek grants from OEO. The county court also named Gerald Chafin, a funeral director from Delbarton, as chairman of the commission. In June 1965, Chafin hired a local high school history teacher, Huey Perry, as executive director. Chafin told Perry he did not know much about the job or OEO, but he emphasized that it could mean bringing some federal dollars into the county. The commission members resented that neighboring McDowell already had received special attention from OEO. They pushed Perry to act quickly in filing grant applications that would start the federal dollars flowing into Mingo.1 An enclave of 423 square miles located in the rugged southwestern corner of West Virginia bordering Kentucky, Mingo County, like McDowell, typified the problems of the new machine age in Appalachia. Known earlier in the century as “Bloody Mingo” because of the violent coal mine wars, in 1960 Mingo had a population just short of 40,000 made up largely of native-born whites. The county suffered from the collapse of employment in coal mining, losing 16 percent of its population between 1950 and 1960 and another 18 percent in the 1960s, as the unemployed left for cities like Columbus and Detroit. In 1960, 46 percent of the county’s families fell below the $3,000 per year poverty line. The census rated only 40 percent of houses “sound and with all plumbing facilities.” Just 20 percent of the adult population had finished high school. Few job opportunities existed outside the coal mining industry. Public services such as schools, medical facilities, and roads suffered from lack of funds.2 The unemployment rate hovered at 14 percent, and 30 percent of the population collected welfare checks. The elderly poor struggled to survive on Social Security or miners’ welfare benefit checks.3 The 172 Raising Hell in the Hills and Hollows collapse of the Area Redevelopment Administration’s showpiece bootstrap effort to encourage economic diversification and to retrain miners for woodworking in 19644 had left local leaders hopeful for another perhaps more effective infusion of federal money. In They’ll Cut Off Your Project, his account of community action in Mingo, Huey Perry says little about what influenced him to bring to Mingo County the kind of approach more typical of some urban areas, or what, in the words of condescending OEO analysts, had enabled a native inhabitant of Appalachia to grasp the “lofty concept” of community action. No long-haired outsider, Perry, a native...