Reformers to Radicals (26 page)

Bolstered by this new consciousness, the Appalachian Volunteers held its initial organizational meeting on May 15, 1966. The first order of business that day was a review of the organization's history, culminating with the reasons why it severed its ties with the Council of the Southern Mountains. As Ogle explained, the break was “inevitable” because the Council was
“a program agency” while the Volunteers were “definitely an action agency.” According to the Volunteer leader, the CSM “did and does not want to become an agency to provide direct services to communities as AVs do in their direct work with the people of the communities.” As he also noted: “Competition would and had developed between the CSM and the Action group.” Though the Appalachian Volunteers tried to reach an understanding with the Council, they could not arrive at a suitable arrangement. Then, on May 11, 1966, the Board of Directors of the CSM voted to grant the Appalachian Volunteers independence and sent a letter to the OEO requesting that all funds allocated to the Council for their AV program be transferred to the new Appalachian Volunteers, Inc. “We are in the process,” Ogle announced, “of receiving these funds at present.”
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In an attempt to prevent any significant decrease in Appalachian Volunteer activity and progress, Ayer and the Council staff aided the AVs in their move to the new office in Bristol, Tennessee. In addition, the CSM transferred all property purchased for the AV project and funds—which amounted to $728,000—to the new independent organization. Washington granted Ayer's request to fund the Appalachian Volunteers independently of the Council and implemented that funding on May 23, 1966. By the end of June, the Volunteers had collected $883,318 from federal and private sources. Ninety-eight percent of that sum, however, came from the OEO.
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While the Council of the Southern Mountains tried to recover from the loss of its most visible and successful program, the board member Harry Caudill found the new Volunteer organization a blessing for the Southern mountains. “The Appalachian Volunteers,” he declared, “are young people and understandably should take a more militant stand on public issues than has the Council in past years.” According to Caudill, the Volunteers needed to “impress upon the electorate the fact that they are living on a rich land whose inhabitants are poor because of mismanagement of the land base and the almost endless exploitation of soil, minerals, and timber by both local residents and giant absentee corporations.” “The Volunteers,” he concluded, “can carry this message to the people and, with good fortune, could set in motion a revolutionary change of thought.”
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The Appalachian Volunteers' first attempt at setting in motion a “revolutionary change of thought” came during the summer program of 1966. Coming so close on the heels of the split, the program reflected both the
influence of earlier CSM-AV school-based projects and the new direction plotted by the Appalachian Volunteers, Inc. In terms of demographics, the 1966 project closely resembled that of the previous year—half the participants came from outside the Appalachian region. This second summer endeavor, however, employed over twice the number of volunteers as had the previous year's, a total of five hundred. According to Milton Ogle, 90 percent of those who entered the AVs' ranks that summer were college students from two hundred institutions across the United States. While some of these students were returning volunteers, others came to the program because they had learned about it through media exposure and through the AVs' own recruiting efforts. Additionally, the Volunteers drew from regional colleges (which did not necessarily guarantee that these students were from the area) and from among community residents. This latter group represented a new initiative for the Volunteer program. Through these paid “community interns,” the Volunteers hoped to cultivate local leaders who would, under the direction of AV supervisors, organize their own communities for the sake of local improvement. Through this program, the Volunteers adopted at least the appearance of allowing local people to help each other.
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VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) associates participated in the summer project as well. Just as in the first summer program, they spent only the summer, not the entire year, in the mountains. The AVs controlled their recruitment and selection, and the relationship between the AVs and the federal government seemed inverted. Although the OEO wanted someone representing VISTA to “make the final determination concerning the selection of Volunteers for service,” the AVs wanted only a VISTA liaison officer—“a person agreeable to the Appalachian Volunteers”—to aid in the selection process. Reflecting that same self-confidence that characterized early AV reform efforts and the new militant attitude, the actual projects undertaken during the summer would be “developed by local community councils, AV's and AV field staff.” While the AVs recognized that most efforts would be centered around the schools and would include renovation and enrichment, their desire to develop programs independent of any school connection was reflected in their insistence on letting “community councils” design programs. This was different from what the federal government wanted. The OEO believed that renovation and enrichment were
the best paths toward community development and wanted the entire summer project to be “organized around local school houses.”
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The AVs anticipated a successful summer. Writing to Manuel Strong, the assistant director of the Middle Kentucky River Development Council in Breathitt County, the Volunteer staff member Mike Kline urged both Strong and the county school superintendent, Marie Turner, to meet with the volunteers assigned to their county, stating: “I think it will be a good, friendly summer.” Many accounts indicate that it was just that. At Jones Creek, for example, volunteers swam in the local creek and, reflecting preconceived gender roles, held knitting classes for the girls and hiked with the boys. Verda, in Harlan County, enjoyed a literary program coupled with crafts lessons. The scenario was similar at nearby Evarts. Here, the volunteers conducted a tutoring program and a charm school for the community's girls. Still other communities in eastern Kentucky played host to these same types of projects, such as the tutoring program at Goose Creek and the softball tournament at Bear Creek. In the reports that followed the summer project, every community listed had a school-based project.
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While these few reports reflect the activities at only a handful of the counties that the Appalachian Volunteers entered that summer, they clearly illustrate that the AVs' approach remained in line with the Council's earlier methods. Nevertheless, this first independent AV program did institute a number of changes. First, it marked the expansion of the overall Volunteer program into the states of Virginia and West Virginia. Though the majority of Volunteer activity remained in twenty-one eastern Kentucky counties, nine additional counties—Boone, Clay, McDowell, Mercer, Mingo, Raleigh, and Wyoming in West Virginia and Wise and Scott in Virginia—came under the Volunteers' umbrella.
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Second, the Appalachian Volunteers placed considerable emphasis on their community interns and community councils. Contrary to the Council of the Southern Mountains' conception of reform, which involved community representatives working in cooperation with existing local authorities, the AVs' community interns and councils operated independently of county officials and community action programs (CAPs). Once they organized their communities, the Volunteers reasoned, they could then influence OEO-funded county programs. “Perhaps the greatest weakness of the typical Community Action Program in the Appalachian area,” the AVs
contended, “is its failure to involve the poor in the planning, conduct, and review of programs.” The CAP director, along with certain members of his board, devised local community action efforts, and the poor were permitted only “to ratify a ‘pre-planned' program.” The Volunteers claimed that target-group representation on the governing board was “limited to a few ‘Toms' selected by the dominant figures”: “Even in the best situations the elected representatives of the poor constitute a small, silent minority.” This failure to involve the poor stemmed from a number of issues, including the desire of local officials to get federal funds as quickly as possible and a lack of faith in the ability of the poor to make informed decisions. Equally important, as the Appalachian Volunteers argued, the local county governments exhibited an “unwillingness to allow a dilution of centralized political power” in each jurisdiction and a belief in the absence of an organization and leadership among the poor themselves. For the Appalachian Volunteers, the remedy was the intern and community council approach.
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In their search for community interns, AV staff looked to hire people from poor local communities who exhibited “leadership potential” and a commitment “to the ideals of the Economic Opportunity Act.” They hoped through training to instill in the interns “a sense of identification with the interests and aspirations of the poor and a belief in the right and the ability of the poor people to make their own decisions.” Working in conjunction with the community councils, each mountain neighborhood could then determine its own plans and goals for the AV summer project. Utilizing this strategy, the community became the Volunteers' advisory board. Its responsibility was to ensure resident participation in the summer efforts, to administer the funding (each participating community received $300 from the Appalachian Volunteers to help pay for its activities), and to find acceptable room and board for the Volunteers. In short, community organizing at the grassroots level was the AVs' ultimate goal in the summer of 1966.
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This desire to organize communities by creating community councils explains, in part, why the summer affair so closely resembled the CSM-sponsored activities. As the Volunteers themselves recognized, schools were the closest most mountain neighborhoods came to a local organization, and the AVs hoped that their new tactics would help them avoid the pitfalls of the previous summer. Interestingly, this new Volunteer outlook rejected
the optimism that tinged most AV workers' perceptions of the first summer project. Despite reports to the contrary, the Volunteers now argued that in almost no community that took part in the 1965 effort did the activities “involve the parents and other interested citizens actively”: “In many cases the . . . program seemed to belong to the Volunteers rather than the community.” In 1966, the AVs decided that the community council would have to run the program. The Appalachian Volunteers would not act unilaterally.
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Though the Appalachian Volunteers did conduct a summer school for impoverished mountain residents of any age, the real beneficiary of the summer program was the Appalachian Volunteers as an organization. The summer project ultimately resulted in yet another transformation of the AVs. So many soldiers in the field strained the organization's supervisory resources tremendously. Their activities were fairly simple—renovation, tutoring, and enrichment in most cases—and the Volunteer staff supervised their workers casually, if they did so at all. Quoting AV fieldmen who were responsible for fifty to sixty volunteers each, David Whisnant described the summer project as “‘ridiculous,' ‘a circus' and ‘a disaster.'” By the end of the program, Whisnant concluded, the AV leaders realized “that as a tactic for bringing about change in the region, invasion by battalions of summer volunteers was not very useful.” The AV consultant Dr. Robert Coles made a similar observation. In his evaluation of the summer effort, he noted that the AV staff “was not only overworked but simply could not . . . cope with the problem of dealing with five hundred students.” Following this program, the Volunteers placed increasing emphasis on the community interns and councils.
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In other ways, the summer project was a catalyst for change within the Volunteer organization. Bringing a large number of people into the region and training them with a limited staff resulted in more than one personnel problem. One volunteer from New York City, for example, had trouble adjusting to her new surroundings. In reviewing her performance, the fieldman Flem Messer observed: “She was placed in a community that was extremely conservative socially and very far removed from the type of environment she was used to coping with.” Though Messer believed her to be dependable, she “did have considerable problems and conflicts adjusting to the very strict social situation.” In his evaluation of the Volunteers, Coles noted a “continual outpouring of all the anxieties, fears, depression,
anger, and everything else that goes along with being transplanted from one world into another and having to come to terms with it intellectually and emotionally.” Another volunteer caused problems when he failed to pay his “host family” for his room and board. (Each mountain family that housed a volunteer was supposed to receive an allowance of $12.50 per week to help defray expenses.) Over four months after the close of the summer project, this volunteer still owed his hosts over a month's rent. This situation reflected poorly on the entire Volunteer program and exposed the quantitative reasons why some local people, at least in part, accepted the Appalachian Volunteer program.
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While the summer program definitely exacted a toll on the Volunteers themselves, those who did come to terms with their situation seemed committed to substantial change in the mountains. A survey of both VISTA volunteers and VISTA associates conducted by the Volunteer staff revealed the typical individual the AV program attracted, the methods he or she hoped to use to initiate change, and weaknesses in the program. When asked whether a conference among AVs and VISTA volunteers would prove beneficial, nineteen of twenty-two VISTA volunteers responded favorably. Of these affirmative responses, many expressed a concern over fragmentation in the overall program. One hoped to decide “how to . . . coordinate our activities toward . . . common goals.” Another sought ways to facilitate the integration of the Volunteers' “organization efforts across county and state lines.” Still others wanted a conference that focused on Appalachia's problems and how the “cooperative efforts of AV-VISTAs [could] combat them.” Finally, Volunteers sought better communication between the field personnel and AV headquarters. Of the nineteen, thirteen commented on how the Appalachian Volunteers needed to improve their organizational structure for their efforts to be fully effective.
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