Welcome to a Different World

Welcome to a Different World John B. Stephenson Two years ago Berea College sponsored a symposium on Black Appalachia. Attended by a large number of scholars, community leaders, agency staff, and businesspersons, this gathering represented a significant advance in the state of Black Appalachian studies; it was a decided step forward from the even earlier conference on Black Appalachia hosted by the University of Kentucky Appalachian Center in 1980. (It was difficult to identify the few scholars and interested persons who might be invited to the first conference, whereas many names came readily to mind the second time around, names of persons who had recently become interested in the subject or who had been toiling in relative isolation .) And now, just two years later, that task has become even easier, which in itself says something about a field of study almost unheard of a decade ago, and about which one could safely guess that no one had even thought twenty-five years ago. Why this interest in Black Appalachia? I would offer three primary reasons. First, the story of blacks in the southern mountains has been largely untold, and so here an opportunity has been grasped eagerly to bring to light a human reality important and meaningful to its participants but virtually unknown to the reading public or to the world of scholarship. Second, the telling of the story—or stories, for there are many and they are varied—has given many people of the mountains a chance to find their voices. Third, many scholars have found through the study of Appalachia that they can gain new insight into the nature of American society generally. Thus, whether one's interest is in southern history , or slavery, or black studies, or race and ethnic relations, or labor history, or folklore, or musicology, or women's studies—to name just a few—one can find new material here by looking at the world of this "minority within a minority ." There is increased interest nowadays in revealing the experience of black people living in places fike Harlan County, Kentucky , Bluefield, West Virginia, and Asheville, North Carolina. There is renewed pride expressed by the descendants or the early African Americans in the region in their stubborn courage and the will to survive. There is the excitement shown in recovering knowledge of the contributions of Appalachian blacks to music, to journalism, to education, and to the political and social life of a region and a nation. There is the surge of intellectual adrenalin in finding patterns and connections among things previously unconnected or nonexistent. And there is the pure aesthetic pleasure one takes in the writing and the reading of a poem created by one person in one small place, speaking to an understanding humanity. There is ample evidence of all these things in the collection Bill Turner has put together in this special issue of the Appalachian Heritage. The thread that runs through each of these pieces and connects them all is the question, not yet fully answered: What has the black experience been in Appalachia, and what is it now? So turn the page, and welcome to what may be, for many readers, a different world of Appalachia. 3 ...