Reformers to Radicals (35 page)

In 1966, when it amended the state mining code, Kentucky had some
of the toughest restrictions in the Appalachian coalfields. Because enforcement was so lacking, however, local groups such as the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People (AGSLP) began to form in the 1960s. For the Volunteers' part, their concern over the issue focused on AGSLP and Pike County. The Volunteers had already made headway in their battle against strip mining by joining with Hulett Smith, the governor of West Virginia, and they continued to press the issue with that state's general assembly. In Kentucky, progress was slower but no less dramatic. In Harlan County, the Volunteer staff member Steve Daugherty used the issue as a focal point around which he sought to organize the poor, and, in Letcher County, the AV-VISTA Mike Shields helped a local farmer resist a local strip-mine operator.
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These accomplishments, nevertheless, proved to be minor in comparison to what happened in Pike County during the summer of 1967. More than in any other county, coal was king in Pike. Bill Peterson of the
Louisville Courier-Journal
identified over fifty coal millionaires in Pikeville's population of less than five thousand, while one of the city's demographers found a supporting cast of forty lawyers. Even Edith Easterling commented that people were “so frightened of county authorities that they hadn't been out of the hollows in twenty years.” It was in this county that the Volunteers made their stand against King Coal.
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Heading the fight was Joe Mulloy, on whom McSurely probably had his greatest influence. Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, Mulloy became interested in eastern Kentucky because his family on his mother's side had come from the mountains. While residing in Pike County, he apparently stayed in contact with McSurely, who also lived there as a staff member of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF). Led by the well-known social activists Carl and Anne Braden, this association helped shape Mulloy and his actions in the county.
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After the first few school renovation projects, the Appalachian Volunteers began to invest considerable effort in Pike County's Marrowbone Folk School. Mulloy initially organized the school—founded at Poor Bottom, a tributary of Marrowbone Creek, in early 1967—as a community center meant to house a library and quilting sessions for the Poor Bottom Quilters. By the summer of that year, however, Mulloy started to push for road improvements, and he began working with the anti-strip-mining AGSLP.
From this start, Mulloy and the Volunteers moved quickly to end strip mining and to attain better roads.
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On June 3, to help plan the new issue-organizing campaign, AVs from Floyd, Harlan, and Pike counties met at the Highlander Center (formerly the Highlander Folk School) in Knoxville. The language employed at this meeting revealed the direction that Mulloy, his fellow AV staff, and his supporters had taken in recent years. Participants in this meeting reaffirmed the decision to organize around issues such as road improvements, stopping strip mining, and welfare reform. All present resolved to work, and, reflecting the new reorganization scheme, the “idea of state and county lines was thrown out the window.”
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The Pike County representatives announced that their area of concentration would be Marrowbone Creek. “On July 7, five [branch] creeks on Marrowbone will strike for roads,” announced the AVs, but other “ideas like picketing, sit-ins on the roads, and blowing up bridges were all discussed.” After his return from Highlander, Mulloy continued his work with the local AGSLP chapter. Believing that to “solve poverty, you [must] change some of the structures that cause that poverty,” Mulloy sympathized with AGSLP's goal. A few weeks after the Highlander meeting, on June 29, 1967, Jink Ray, a farmer in the Island Creek section of Pike County, set the stage for a confrontation when he blocked a Puritan Coal Company bulldozer from strip mining on land he had farmed for over forty years. Mulloy and AGSLP members supported Ray at the scene. Despite a court order in favor of the stripper, this demonstration continued every day until Edward Breathitt, the governor of Kentucky, suspended the mining permit on July 18, 1967. Two weeks later, the state revoked the permit altogether because the land was too steep to meet mining regulations. AGSLP and the Volunteers had defeated the powerful coal-mining interests, but this victory proved to be short-lived.
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The local coal operators believed that they “had to put a stop to this.” They portrayed Mulloy as a subversive outsider and the key organizer and moved to destroy the anti-strip-mining movement. Just ten days after Breathitt rescinded Puritan Coal's permit, the Pike County sheriff, Perry Justice, arrested Mulloy and Alan and Margaret McSurely—both of whom worked for the SCEF in Pike County—for sedition against the county government. Mulloy's arrest was the culmination of attempts—including the disconnecting
of his telephone and the canceling of his automobile insurance—to pressure Mulloy into ceasing his activities. More important, the Volunteers believed, Robert Holcomb, the president of both the Pikeville Chamber of Commerce and the powerful Independent Coal Operators Association, engineered Mulloy's arrest.
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Immediately following the arrest, the sheriff's department searched Mulloy's home and claimed to have found a “communist library out of this world” that included
The Communist Manifesto
and a collection of Russian short stories—conveniently ignoring copies of Barry Goldwater's
Conscience of a Conservative
and the Bible. On September 11, 1967, on the basis of such “communist” evidence, a Pike County grand jury indicted Mulloy, the McSurelys, and Carl and Anne Braden of the SCEF for sedition under Kentucky Revised Statute 432.040, which prohibited teaching or advocating criminal syndicalism against the state. Specifically, the grand jury declared that “a well organized and well financed effort is being made to promote and spread the communistic theory of the violent and forceful overthrow of the government of Pike County” and that the Appalachian Volunteers cooperated in this subversive endeavor. Three days later, however, a federal court in Lexington declared the state law unconstitutional.
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Prosecutors could not have been surprised by the federal court's ruling. In 1954, a Louisville court had indicted and convicted Carl Braden of sedition against the state using the same law. Two years later, in June 1956, the Kentucky Court of Appeals in Louisville overturned Braden's conviction. Citing a similar decision in Pennsylvania in 1956 that the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed on April 2, 1956, the appeals court ruled that acts of sedition could be directed against the nation only, not a state. Quoting the federal opinion, the state court echoed: “The federal statues ‘touch on a field in which the federal interest is so dominant that the federal system (must) be assumed to preclude enforcement of state laws on the same subject.'” Unfortunately for Mulloy and the SCEF members, this decision was binding only in the Louisville district and merely set aside the conviction without removing the laws from the statute books, leaving them available to the Pikeville court. Because of Braden's first case, the prosecutors certainly knew that a conviction would not stand and that the statute employed against those arrested would be declared unconstitutional.
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The language of the report of the Pike County grand jury, however,
revealed an understanding of these legal precedents and a desire to challenge them. In charging the activists with sedition against the county, the grand jury recommended “that in the event our present laws on sedition are declared unconstitutional by the federal courts . . . the next session of the Kentucky Legislature pass new laws which will control such activities in the future.” This case was not about enforcement of the law or anticommunism. Rather, county officials were positioning themselves to attack the mountain reformers.
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In the wake of the arrests, the Appalachian Volunteers tried to place themselves on the side of the common folk. They proclaimed: “[By] helping the very many eastern Kentuckians who are threatened by strip-mining, we have found ourselves opposed to the very few eastern Kentuckians who profit from it.” As a result, they continued, those who benefited from the coal industry “have chosen to attack us as radicals and as seditionists and to attempt to drive us out of the area.” Although, in legal terms, the AVs were cleared of the charges, for all practical purposes their position was very tenuous. Regardless of the validity of the charge, the stigma of being associated with communism seriously damaged their credibility, and, early in September, Governor Breathitt announced that all AV funding would be cut immediately.
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This declaration brought a flurry of responses to the governor's office. A Whitley County resident wrote about the AVs: “They have taught people their human rights; they have brought the very best libraries into the hollows and backwoods; and one of the greatest things they have brought was the truth.” Others were not so positive. An editorial in the
Jackson Times
entitled “Do We Really Need These ‘Helpers'?” supported the “Pike County officials who acted . . . to put a scotch under the wheels of the volunteers who are allowed to [foment] trouble wherever and whenever they will.” Even more damning, Al Whitehouse, the director of the Kentucky Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), issued a statement endorsing the governor's action withdrawing support from the AVs. “We believe,” Whitehouse announced, “that the community action programs developed at the local level are the
prime offensive weapon in the War on Poverty
,” The two funded agencies—the CAPs and the Volunteers—Whitehouse continued, “working in the same . . . areas in the field of community organization is not only very confusing to the groups we are trying to reach but has also
proven unworkable
in most instances
, Volunteers working at the grassroots level . . .
must be under the umbrella of the [CAPs] if we are to unite the community in an all out effort that can win the War on Poverty
,” While the AVs accused White-house of “making an effort to gain control of the A.V. program,” Ogle, who certainly understood that the Appalachian Volunteers relied on OEO funding for their survival, believed that the Mulloy incident “pointed out some areas of work” for the Volunteers, including “improving the relations with state offices . . . [and] local officials.” When the dust finally settled, the AVs kept their OEO funds, but the grants were due to expire the following year, and Ogle probably knew that renewing them would be difficult.
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Throughout the remainder of 1967, the Volunteers tried to maintain a lower profile because, as one staff memorandum warned, the organization “cannot afford another Pikeville.”
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A low profile, however, was far more difficult to maintain than anyone ever imagined. A new issue arose within the ranks of the Volunteers—that of military conscription for the war in Vietnam—that proved to be more divisive than any other with which the Appalachian Volunteers had had to deal.

Though Mulloy did register with the Kentucky draft board, many of his compatriots enjoyed certain types of deferments. The staff members Bill Wells, Joel Hasslen, Jack Rivel, Thomas Rhodenbaugh, Steve Kramer, and Douglas Yarrow all had either occupation deferments or conscientious objector classifications. In addition, conscientious objectors so filled the ranks of AVs and VISTA volunteers in the Southern mountains that one Volunteer, Linda Cooper, wished the AV staff “Happy Draft Deferments” on the back of one of the surveys she returned to the main office. Mulloy, too, had an occupational deferment—until the state revoked it following his arrest in Pikeville. In an effort to stay in Appalachian Kentucky and out of the war, he then attempted to get classified as a conscientious objector after his local draft board ordered him to report for induction on August 18, 1967. Unfortunately for Mulloy and the Appalachian Volunteers, the board refused his appeal.
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In response to the draft board's action, Mulloy announced that he would refuse induction into the army: “My position is that there are far too many problems, injustices, and inequalities in these United States for us to play policeman of the World. . . . But our President and others would have us fight and die in the rice fields of Asia before they would guarantee
a truly free society at home. . . . Poverty in Eastern Kentucky and the war in Vietnam are the same issue. The advocates of war and the businesses that prosper from it are the same absentee landlords that have robbed Eastern Kentucky blind for years.” Mulloy, then, believed that he must resist induction into the army in order “to bear witness to the hypocrisy of our government's posture and the crimes being committed by this government in Vietnam.”
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After Mulloy announced his intention to refuse induction, Milton Ogle and another Volunteer staff member, David Walls, urged him to resign his AV position. Ogle and Walls felt that Mulloy's action was a personal matter and that a majority of mountain residents would not agree with his position. Ogle maintained that, in light of the recent sedition trial, the AV organization should not take a stand on the war issue. After conferring with Edith Easterling, Walls reported that she was apprehensive about the newly formed Marrowbone Folk School. In addition to the personal threats “sparked by the sedition charges[,] [s]he received one threat that the newly constructed [Marrowbone Folk School] would be dynamited.” According to Walls, Easterling “was worried about the consequences for the local people working with her as AV's of Joe's planned refusal to report for induction”: “Edith was afraid that most of the people in the Marrowbone area, including many of the local AV workers, would have nothing more to do with the AV's or the Marrowbone Folk School if the AV's or the [school] became identified with Joe's stand on the draft.” In addition, Walls maintained, Mulloy had a “moral obligation” to leave the Appalachian Volunteers “when 14 out of the 17 of the east Kentuckians present at the Jenny Wiley staff meeting indicated they did not want to defend Joe's refusal to be inducted.” Among those who asked that Mulloy be relieved of his Volunteer responsibilities was a miner “who lost his job in a Pike County coal mine for defending Joe from the sedition charges.” In the end, Walls contended, Mulloy's unwillingness to resign from the staff left many eastern Kentuckians who supported the Volunteers “in the position of being forced to support Joe's stand, against their wishes.”
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