Mode of Program Participation
Academic Scholarship
Participation Type
Panel
Session Title
Activism in Appalachia: Questions of Social, Economic, and Environmental Justice in Modern America
Session Abstract or Summary
This panel seeks to place the individuals and groups that sought to affect change in Appalachia between 1952 and 1990 in the broader context of postwar America and to challenge conventional understanding of the nature of activism in the region.
Thomas Kiffmeyer’s essay on Perley Ayer reexamines the work of a man who has long been regarded as a reformer beholden to exploitative forces in the region. Kiffmeyer’s presentation will engage the work of one of Ayer’s strongest critics, revisit Ayer’s own writings to highlight an individual more complex than commonly thought, and place Ayer in the context of postwar politics to reveal new insights about the relationship between reformers like Ayer and young activists who gained control of the CSM in 1969.
Henry Clay Adkins’s presentation highlights the participation of Appalachians in Dr. Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign. Existing studies of the “campaign” focus on the tensions between the competing agendas of African Americans and Mexican Americans. By examining the place of Appalachian whites in a racially charged anti-poverty movement, Adkins adds an entirely new dimension to this dramatic event.
Jennifer Ray’s examination of antiwar protests at Virginia Tech will shed new light on the nature and extent of antiwar activism on southern college campuses. Drawing upon extensive oral histories and campus newspapers, her presentation will demonstrate that there were a wide range of attitudes and opinions both about the war and about the nature of resistance to it. Her study challenges the conventional understanding that campus protests were primarily located in the urbanized North, Midwest, and Pacific regions.
Jinny Turman’s essay examines anti-modern and modernist strains of environmentalism among “back-to-the-landers” in Floyd County, Virginia. Drawing upon Andrew Kirk’s essay, “Appropriating Technology,” the presentation considers how back-to-the-landers feared the adverse effects of technology on nature even as they celebrated its potential to protect natural resources. The study challenges perceptions of the counterculture as strictly anti-modern and highlights divergent opinions about how individuals should express their environmental values.
Presentation #1 Title
Mountain Liberal: Perley Ayer and the Council of the Southern Mountains
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
In January 1952, just after he became the executive director of the Council of the Southern Mountains, Perley Ayer contacted Barry Bingham of the Louisville Courier-Journal. Concerned about his own “pretty traditional and crystallized outlook,” Ayer hoped that Bingham could lend an objective eye that would provide a clearer picture of the Council and its mission. “I genuinely need and sincerely request your personal judgment concerning the whole program of the Council, which can become a powerful factor for good throughout the area ” he wrote Bingham, “but which also can easily sink into a state of relatively ineffective egocentric existence, consisting almost exclusively of ‘missionary-minded’ private school and church associates…”
As leader of the CSM from 1951 until his death in 1968, Ayer took a languid organization and transformed it into perhaps the most influential reform institution to ever operate in Appalachia. From “Urban Workshops” designed to benefit both Appalachians who had relocated to northern industrial centers during and immediately after World War II and those city officials that worked with them, to the War on Poverty, Ayer’s CSM spearheaded the efforts to improve Appalachia in post-war America.
Despite this record, Ayer, in the very few works in which he is considered, is a much maligned figure. According to David Whisnant, the only scholar to take an in-depth look at Ayer, the CSM, under Ayer’s direction, adopted a “call to partnership” that resulted in a policy of neutrality that ultimately rendered the Council ineffective, captive to those same forces—corporations, government bureaucracies, and foundations—that were the source of the region’s problems. Ayer’s statements to Bingham, however, suggest a more complex figure. By using Ayer’s own words as well sources such as Whisnant’s, Modernizing the Mountaineer, this presentation attempts to understand Perley Ayer and place him, the organization he led, and the Appalachian region into their proper place in the history of post-war United States.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Dr. Thomas Kiffmeyer is the author of Reformers to Radicals: The Appalachian Volunteers and the War on Poverty. He is an Associate Professor of History at Morehead State University.
Presentation #2 Title
Appalachia and the Civil Rights Movement: The Poor People's Campaign of 1968
Presentation #2 Abstract or Summary
In 1968, the civil rights movement in the United States had reached a crisis. Although the federal government had addressed some African American concerns through the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts a few years earlier, discrimination remained rampant. At the same time, foreign policy issues, especially the Vietnam War overshadowed domestic issues of social and economic justice. It is within this context that the idea for Poor People’s Campaign was born. Originally Martin Luther King Jr.’s brainchild, the campaign’s design was to draw the nation’s attention to those problems including unemployment, housing and wage discrimination, and education, which the poor faced but could not easily be solved by simple access to the ballot. Because these issues transcended race, King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference believed that this inclusive campaign would unify all impoverished people in a struggle for social and economic justice.
In his recent study, Power to the Poor, Gordon Mantler examines the tensions between African Americans and Mexican Americans on the eve of, and throughout the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. His story, however, omits Appalachians. Because King hoped that his “campaign” would be about poverty and not just race, he ensured that Appalachians were part of the campaign from the beginning. Still, how did Appalachians define and understand their place in what was, despite King’s hope, largely a demonstration against racism? Drawing mainly on Mantler and Mark Brilliant’s The Color of America Has Changed for the national picture and Thomas Kiffmeyer’s Reformers to Radicals for the Appalachian region’s particular issues, this presentation hopes to understand the role of mountaineers in the national civil rights movement.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2
Mr. Adkins is a senior at Morehead State University. He studies history, humanities, and government.
Presentation #3 Title
Virginia Tech and the Vietnam War
Presentation #3 Abstract or Summary
The Vietnam War rocked the home front of the United States in a way no other previous war had done. Protests on college campuses made headlines as America’s youth spoke out against involvement in Vietnam. Historians have published numerous works that examine campus protests in places such as Kent State and Jackson State, but the question of how colleges in the southeast portion of the country reacted to Vietnam remains largely unanswered.
Nestled in the mountains of Appalachia in a small, rural community, Virginia Polytechnic Institute experienced a unique set of circumstances in the late sixties. At the center of life at VPI was the Corp of Cadets. In 1964 when VPI broke affiliation with sister college, Radford College, a new student population entered VPI and was in place to meet the trials of Vietnam head on.
T. Marshall Hahn, VPI president, faced the challenge of how to navigate a seemingly small, but boisterous group of protestors with where to draw the line between first amendment rights and illegal protest. Hahn’s papers, campus publications, collections from protest organizers, as well as histories from police officers and members of the Corp of Cadets demonstrated that VPI was a true melting pot of ideologies that collided in the wake of Vietnam. For a period of time, VPI proved to be more similar to her sister colleges in other parts of the country than to the conservative community surrounding the campus, but as a new decade dawned, the conservative nature of the local community settled back into campus life.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #3
Ms. Jennifer Ray is a graduate student in history at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. She received her undergraduate degree in History and Social Science from Radford University. Currently, she teaches history at Auburn High School in Riner, Virginia.
Presentation #4 Title
Fueling Debate in Floyd: The Floyd Agricultural Energy Co-Op and Modernist Environmentalism
Presentation #4 Abstract or Summary
During the 1970s, hundreds of “back-to-the-land” migrants moved to rural areas like Floyd County, Virginia, to attempt self-sufficiency on small plots of land. Although they did not uphold a unified, coherent ideology, most would have considered themselves environmentalists. They also tended to favor local governmental control and small-scale development strategies that could promote autonomy and self-sufficiency.
Most back-to-the-landers, in one form or another, put their environmentalism into practice. Several in Floyd formed a biofuels cooperative that they hoped would reduce local dependency on fossil fuels. Due to financial struggles, the Floyd Agricultural Energy Co-Op eventually privatized and, through the 1980s, became increasingly dependent upon tax incentives and grants from state and federal programs. Cheaper oil prices and waning political interest in alternative energy development killed the program by decade’s end.
This essay highlights one of the ways that Floyd’s back-to-the-landers put their environmentalism into practice. They fit into Andrew Kirk’s assessment of the 1960s-era counterculture as having espoused both anti-modern and modernist ideals. Stewart Brand and others believed that technology could help restore balance between humans and nature just as easily as it could destroy nature. Yet Kirk notes that the struggle to reconcile these polarized outlooks occasionally sparked conflict within countercultural circles. As the Floyd biofuels industry struggled to remain open in the late 1980s, this tension came to a head. This essay explores the evolution of FAEC and the conflict that erupted when the company proposed to transition to chemical recycling following the collapse of its biofuels operation. It suggests that these polarized outlooks lingered well into the late 20th century and could be exacerbated by outside influences, particularly flagging political will to support appropriate technology.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #4
Dr. Turman is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
Mountain Liberal: Perley Ayer and the Council of the Southern Mountains
In January 1952, just after he became the executive director of the Council of the Southern Mountains, Perley Ayer contacted Barry Bingham of the Louisville Courier-Journal. Concerned about his own “pretty traditional and crystallized outlook,” Ayer hoped that Bingham could lend an objective eye that would provide a clearer picture of the Council and its mission. “I genuinely need and sincerely request your personal judgment concerning the whole program of the Council, which can become a powerful factor for good throughout the area ” he wrote Bingham, “but which also can easily sink into a state of relatively ineffective egocentric existence, consisting almost exclusively of ‘missionary-minded’ private school and church associates…”
As leader of the CSM from 1951 until his death in 1968, Ayer took a languid organization and transformed it into perhaps the most influential reform institution to ever operate in Appalachia. From “Urban Workshops” designed to benefit both Appalachians who had relocated to northern industrial centers during and immediately after World War II and those city officials that worked with them, to the War on Poverty, Ayer’s CSM spearheaded the efforts to improve Appalachia in post-war America.
Despite this record, Ayer, in the very few works in which he is considered, is a much maligned figure. According to David Whisnant, the only scholar to take an in-depth look at Ayer, the CSM, under Ayer’s direction, adopted a “call to partnership” that resulted in a policy of neutrality that ultimately rendered the Council ineffective, captive to those same forces—corporations, government bureaucracies, and foundations—that were the source of the region’s problems. Ayer’s statements to Bingham, however, suggest a more complex figure. By using Ayer’s own words as well sources such as Whisnant’s, Modernizing the Mountaineer, this presentation attempts to understand Perley Ayer and place him, the organization he led, and the Appalachian region into their proper place in the history of post-war United States.
