Appalachians And Race

African Americans have had a profound impact on the economy, culture, and social landscape of southern Appalachia but only after a surge of study in the last two decades have their contributions been recognized by white culture. Appalachians and Race brings together 18 essays on the black experience in the mountain South in the nineteenth century. These essays provide a broad and diverse sampling of the best work on race relations in this region. The contributors consider a variety of topics: black migration into and out of the region, educational and religious missions directed at African Americans, the musical influences of interracial contacts, the political activism of blacks during reconstruction and beyond, the racial attitudes of white highlanders, and much more. Drawing from the particulars of southern mountain experiences, this collection brings together important studies of the dynamics of race not only within the region, but throughout the South and the nation over the course of the turbulent nineteenth century.

"Karida L. Brown's Gone Home offers a much-needed corrective to the current white-washing of Appalachia. In telling the stories of Appalachian African Americans living and working in steel and coal towns, Brown offers a deep and sweeping look at race, the formation of identity, changes in politics and policy, and black migration in the region and beyond"--

Since the 2016 presidential election, Americans have witnessed countless stories about Appalachia: its changing political leanings, its opioid crisis, its increasing joblessness, and its declining population. These stories, however, largely ignore black Appalachian lives. Karida L. Brown's Gone Home offers a much-needed corrective to the current whitewashing of Appalachia. In telling the stories of African Americans living and working in Appalachian coal towns, Brown offers a sweeping look at race, identity, changes in politics and policy, and black migration in the region and beyond. Drawn from over 150 original oral history interviews with former and current residents of Harlan County, Kentucky, Brown shows that as the nation experienced enormous transformation from the pre- to the post-civil rights era, so too did black Americans. In reconstructing the life histories of black coal miners, Brown shows the mutable and shifting nature of collective identity, the struggles of labor and representation, and that Appalachia is far more diverse than you think.

Among the most pervasive of stereotypes imposed upon southern highlanders is that they were white, opposed slavery, and supported the Union before and during the Civil War, but the historical record suggests far different realities. John C. Inscoe has spent much of his scholarly career exploring the social, economic and political significance of slavery and slaveholding in the mountain South and the complex nature of the region’s wartime loyalties, and the brutal guerrilla warfare and home front traumas that stemmed from those divisions. The essays here embrace both facts and fictions related to those issues, often conveyed through intimate vignettes that focus on individuals, families, and communities, keeping the human dimension at the forefront of his insights and analysis. Drawing on the memories, memoirs, and other testimony of slaves and free blacks, slaveholders and abolitionists, guerrilla warriors, invading armies, and the highland civilians they encountered, Inscoe considers this multiplicity of perspectives and what is revealed about highlanders’ dual and overlapping identities as both a part of, and distinct from, the South as a whole. He devotes attention to how the truths derived from these contemporary voices were exploited, distorted, reshaped, reinforced, or ignored by later generations of novelists, journalists, filmmakers, dramatists, and even historians with differing agendas over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His cast of characters includes John Henry, Frederick Law Olmsted and John Brown, Andrew Johnson and Zebulon Vance, and those who later interpreted their stories—John Fox and John Ehle, Thomas Wolfe and Charles Frazier, Emma Bell Miles and Harry Caudill, Carter Woodson and W. J. Cash, Horace Kephart and John C. Campbell, even William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Their work and that of many others have contributed much to either our understanding—or misunderstanding—of nineteenth century Appalachia and its place in the American imagination.

Appalachian Black People provides a critical race framework for examining racism and black oppression in Appalachia. The book can be a starting or ending point for viewing experiences of black people within the Appalachian Region. For those wanting to reflect on the distinctiveness of being black within the Region, it is intended to be a stepping stone for further exploration and action. For others who seek to understand obstacles encountered by blacks in a largely white environment, it is an open window into that struggle. Hopefully others will experience the author's perspectives as a challenge to question, reject and/or accept traditional concepts of black Appalachia.

Appalachia resides in the American imagination at the intersections of race and class in a very particular way, in the tension between deep historic investments in seeing the region as "pure white stock" and as deeply impoverished and backward. Meredith McCarroll's Unwhite analyzes the fraught location of Appalachians within the southern and American imaginaries, building on studies of race in literary and cinematic characterizations of the American South. Not only do we know what "rednecks" and "white trash" are, McCarroll argues, we rely on the continued use of such categories in fashioning our broader sense of self and other. Further, we continue to depend upon the existence of the region of Appalachia as a cultural construct. As a consequence, Appalachia has long been represented in the collective cultural history as the lowest, the poorest, the most ignorant, and the most laughable community. McCarroll complicates this understanding by asserting that white privilege remains intact while Appalachia is othered through reliance on recognizable nonwhite cinematic stereotypes. Unwhite demonstrates how typical characterizations of Appalachian people serve as foils to set off and define the "whiteness" of the non-Appalachian southerners. In this dynamic, Appalachian characters become the racial other. Analyzing the representation of the people of Appalachia in films such as Deliverance, Cold Mountain, Medium Cool, Norma Rae, Cape Fear, The Killing Season, and Winter's Bone through the critical lens of race and specifically whiteness, McCarroll offers a reshaping of the understanding of the relationship between racial and regional identities.

This study of Black Indians begins with the Recon-struction Period when reparation treaties with the Five Civilized Nations which sided with the Confederacy were required to sell much of their land to the government and guarantee tribal membership and benefits to their slaves and Indians with African ancestry. This work examines the Jim Crow Era that followed which excluded many of them from membership and benefits guaranteed by the treaties. It also follows the struggle for reinstatement as tribal members persist into this millennium. Insight is provided into why and how tribal counsels and conservative politics maintained exclusion while amassing billions from gaming and other vice. Answers will be sought to find out why social problems and joblessness continue to eclipse among Native Americans and ostracized Afro-Indian relatives. The truth about the contributions and accomplish-ments of people of bi-racial and multi-racial ancestry in relationship to their ancestral homelands centering on and about the Appalachian Mountains is examined. Insight into how these people became the majority of American is perused. Whether their continuing experiences from the Reconstruction Period into the millennium affected relationship with the ancestral grounds that shape lives, cultures, traditions, and perspectives is determined. The study looks at how Native Americans and African Americans of the Appalachian region shaped the nation's history and collective identity. This study helps us understand how people belea-guered by division, ghettoization in reservations and segregated communities, discrimination, encroachment, and assimilation struggled to restore their freedom, culture, traditions, harmony with nature, and self-determination. In doing so, it provides an important contribution to human-ity's self-understanding and how the environment shapes culture, tradition, and relationships with other races and ethnic groups. Therefore, the relevance of this work is found in its contribution to the understanding of humanity itself. This work provides an incisive look at American life in conjunction to the world they live in. It poses a more definitive view of social wealth and power, as well as its cost to humanity as a whole. The truth revealed aims to unmask self-indulgent traditional myths and confront internal contradictions that precede social transformation. The interpretations derived aim to reveal the struggle and record of people of Native American and African ancestry struggled to maintain ancestral ties and tradition. The story derived provides an understanding of the richness and beauty of their diversity and contributions to the overall efforts of humans to transform the world to reflect their humanity. The story of Black Indians contributions to the development of our nation becomes a mirror through which we look to discover and know ourselves and our possibilities. As such, this work contributes to the intellectual and political emancipation of the reader as: (1) a source of self-understanding; (2) as a source for understanding society and the world; (3) as a measure of people's humanity; (4) as a corrective for hegemonic self-indulgent myths; and (5) as models to emulate.

Both born in 1942, William Drennen and Kojo Jones grew up a mile from each other in Charleston, West Virginia, each witnessing a separate side of the racial politics of segregation and desegregation in the Appalachian state. Editor Johnson (English, Marshall U.) has combined the sections of their me