Uneven Ground (19 page)

The idea of community action provided the only common theme that ran through the poverty program, but just as policy makers in Washington differed on the meaning of local control, the CAAs differed in how they administered federal funds in the mountains. Some were little more than transformed economic development commissions, controlled by local elites. Others evolved out of grassroots organizations and were designed to confront local bureaucracies and power structures in the interest of the poor. The majority of CAAs
were more moderate, functioning primarily to deliver social services designed to modify the behavior of individual poor people. Where they included the participation of the poor, CAAs usually designated sympathetic county professionals to represent the poor or established local, community-based advisory boards.
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This was especially the case among many of the early CAAs launched in response to the initial call for applications to state and local officials, before the staff at the OEO began to insist on maximum feasible participation of the poor in the composition of CAA boards. The CAA in Rockcastle County, Kentucky, for example, was created out of the Rockcastle Development Association when the county became one of the first 182 counties eligible nationally for full OEO funding. The board of the new Rockcastle County Economic Opportunity Council included the county judge executive, the superintendent of schools, the county agricultural extension agent, the mayor of the largest town, and the chair of the county Democratic Party. With funds from its first OEO program development grant, the council hired a local schoolteacher as administrator and established an office in the school board administration building. Most of the agency's early programs involved expanding educational services to the poor, including establishing a Head Start program and hiring additional teachers and teachers' aides for summer enrichment programs.
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Service-oriented CAAs like the one in Rockcastle County burgeoned and became a common model for uplifting the poor throughout the region. Such programs focused federal resources on education and low-skill employment activities disguised as job training opportunities (such as clearing roadside brush and painting public buildings) rather than on more structural approaches to fighting poverty. In mountain counties, where local school superintendents often controlled county political machines, these strategies assured that poverty dollars would be channeled through local institutions, where power brokers could utilize the funds for patronage purposes. The public schools were usually the largest employers in rural counties, and jobs as recreational directors, trainers, teachers' aides, counselors, janitors, cooks, and bus drivers only increased the poor's dependency on the political status quo.

Even those CAAs that were more willing to listen to the poor themselves—often those whose directors had been hired from outside the area—opted for moderate programs of personal empowerment, establishing rural community centers, craft programs, sewing centers, and cooperative small businesses. In Kentucky, the Knox County Economic Opportunity Council, established at the same time as the Rockcastle County CAA, provided home economic aides, home improvement demonstrations, recreational activities, and early childhood programs in thirteen community centers located in discarded one-room schools in poor, rural districts. Representatives of these centers filled a third of the seats on the Knox County CAA board. Eventually the award-winning agency started a small furniture factory and handcraft shop for low-income workers. However, a study undertaken by University of Kentucky researchers three years into the program found that, despite these services, the agency had done little to alter the county's institutional structures or patterns of political alignments.
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Such was the case in Mingo County, West Virginia, as well, where the local CAA's agency-based strategy, intended to improve existing service delivery programs, gradually evolved into a more confrontational strategy. Under the leadership of Mingo County native Huey Perry, the program eventually organized a political action league and a fair elections committee and established an independent grocery that threatened local political and business interests.
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At least at the outset of the War on Poverty, mountain power brokers welcomed the new federal programs and assumed that funding would be administered through state and local governments in the pattern established by the New Deal. Douglass Arnett, who studied the community action process in Clay County, Kentucky, pointed out that political leaders in the mountains “had no objections to giving more money or more services to poor people” as long as those “resources were channeled through existing institutions and organizations controlled by the local power structure.”
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Only when OEO administrators in Washington began to pressure CAAs to increase involvement of the poor on their boards and to directly fund demonstration projects by grassroots groups and nongovernmental organizations did the local political machines begin to question the intent of the national program.
By that time, hundreds of outside VISTA volunteers, energetic college students, and idealistic community organizers fresh from the civil rights movement had arrived in the mountains. Increasingly they joined with poor people, labor organizers, and indigenous reformers to question the service delivery approach and to challenge the assumptions on which it was based.

From the beginning, a small but influential group of OEO administrators, led by Richard Boone and his associate Sanford Kravitz, believed that defeating poverty would require more than the expansion of existing social services programs. Convinced that the poor “need access to power as well as to resources,” they advocated a bolder approach to community action and increasingly used their positions to encourage more radical change.
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Deeply committed to the idea of maximum feasible participation of the poor, Boone pushed OEO staff to demand greater involvement of poor people on CAA boards, especially after some county governments in the South refused to allow black representation and some urban startup proposals in the North became dominated by representatives of the local city hall.

Although the principle of community action emphasized local decision making and the majority of funds flowed to CAAs organized under the aegis of local governments, the EOA reserved 15 percent of the community action budget for national emphasis programs and demonstration projects. As head of the OEO Policy and Planning division from 1964 to 1965, Boone utilized these funds to encourage more radical experimentation and to support demonstration grants to non-CAAs.
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These grants often bypassed local power structures and extended support directly to grassroots organizations and academic institutions for programs designed more to empower the poor than just to assimilate them into mainstream culture. Many of these experimental projects drew heavily on the community organizing work of Chicago's Saul Alinsky and the youth-oriented efforts of the Gray Areas Program. They assumed that the needs of the poor would not be met until they were organized to voice their concerns on critical issues such as housing, jobs, health care, and welfare reform. Assisted by the growing number of VISTA volunteers and poverty consultants in the region, these programs nurtured a generation of young activists, both indigenous and nonnative, that increasingly rejected the service delivery
model as ineffective if it failed to change the political and economic status quo. In Appalachia, as in northern cities, these special demonstration projects proved to be both the most innovative and the most controversial of the antipoverty programs.

Offering greater flexibility and freedom from local government oversight, demonstration grants tapped into new ideas and energies long stifled by the traditional political culture in the mountains. Except in labor unions, poor people had seldom been organized in Appalachia, and formal middle-class institutions such as colleges and professional organizations were sparse. The core of the region, from Morgantown, West Virginia, to Knoxville, Tennessee, lacked a major university that might have generated creativity and intellectual leadership, and the scattering of small private colleges struggled, like castles in the wilderness, to uplift a talented few. The availability of federal funds offered poor people and middle-class reformers the opportunity to mobilize for change, and it unleashed the potential of academics and professionals on the edges of the region who were eager to facilitate that change.

Whether funded by OEO demonstration grants or by the swell of private foundation dollars that flowed into the region as a result of the War on Poverty, nongovernmental initiatives burgeoned in Appalachia in the 1960s and 1970s. Like the more service-oriented CAAs, the nongovernmental antipoverty programs differed in their approaches to mountain problems. Most recognized the weakness of Appalachian civic institutions and advocated policies for social transformation, but their tactics to accomplish reform varied according to class, conviction, and moment in time. Colleges, universities, and organizations such as the CSM launched traditional programs of educational outreach, leadership training, and professional development designed to enrich the learning environment of poor children or to provide technical assistance for community planning and economic growth. Many of these efforts brought students, young professionals, and other outside experts into the region. Grassroots organizations, on the other hand, often led by poor people and their advocates, were more likely to challenge the local political and economic system by establishing cooperative businesses, creating community-based housing and health care programs, and questioning the decisions of school boards and county
governments. Eventually even some of the more moderate, institutionally based projects clashed with regional power structures, and in time the progeny of the colleges and universities joined with the poor to organize dissent and resistance. Collectively, however, these nongovernmental efforts tended to question long established structures and relationships in the mountains and to test the resolve of national and local leaders to change them.

Colleges and universities played a pivotal role in the War on Poverty in Appalachia and in turn experienced major growth as a result of antipoverty research and demonstration contracts and other Great Society investments in higher education. Academics had long helped to shape the popular images and stereotypes of Appalachia, and social scientists at leading research universities on the perimeter of the region had contributed to the definition of Appalachia as a national problem area. Many of the initial planners and administrators at the OEO were scholars or at least well-trained intellectuals, and the experimental character of the War on Poverty reflected the academic model of testing hypotheses through selected demonstration projects. Although the limited demonstration model succumbed to the political demands of an all-out assault on poverty, the idea of applying knowledge to practice survived in both privately and publicly funded antipoverty efforts.

Since World War II, higher education had increasingly embraced the values of the private market, competing for an ever growing number of federal research grants and shaping the production of knowledge to meet political as well as administrative needs.
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The rise of interest in “poverty knowledge” during the 1960s spurred the attention of academics and institutions serving Appalachia and resulted in the expansion of education and research initiatives that sought to apply new knowledge to the region's problems and that also contributed to the growth of the institutions. Especially at major research universities such as the University of Kentucky, West Virginia University, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Pittsburgh, social scientists were quick to focus their research agendas on the region and to propose intervention strategies. Faculty from these institutions contributed to the 1962 regional assessment
The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey
, funded by the Ford Foundation, and served as consultants to the PARC. The University of North Carolina played a central
role in the design of the North Carolina Fund, a state-level predecessor to the War on Poverty. George Esser, a UNC professor, became the North Carolina Fund's executive director.

In Kentucky, professors from the University of Kentucky, Berea College, and Morehead State University (all located on the periphery of the region) had been involved in raising awareness of mountain problems since the 1950s. Faculty contributed to the early regional development plan
Program 60
and prepared draft proposals in forest and water management, highway and agricultural development, and small-town revitalization, including the New Cities plan for community relocation. In 1961 the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture launched a major outreach initiative in eastern Kentucky, the Eastern Kentucky Resource Development Project, with a $754,000 grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and a $1 million state appropriation. The seven-year project established a ten-member team of economic development experts at a new research and demonstration center in Breathitt County. The ironically named Quicksand Demonstration Center worked with local leaders on a variety of activities ranging from industrial planning to livestock production.
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Such projects were designed to link the resources of the university with the needs of Appalachian communities in a pattern consistent with its land-grant mission. West Virginia University went so far as to reorganize its administrative structure to better coordinate outreach services to the Mountain State, creating the Center for Appalachian Studies and Development, the first of its kind, in 1964.
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Not only did university-based initiatives in Appalachia describe the problems of the mountains as developmental deficiencies that could be alleviated with the application of technology and knowledge, but, like land-grant universities elsewhere, they tended to focus their efforts on work with local elites. One of the extension community development specialists in the UK project described his job as helping mountain communities to “mature” by sponsoring county and multi-county public forums for regional leaders. “This ‘developmental task' concept for communities,” he wrote, “is derived from that discipline of educators, physiologists, sociologists, and anthropologists who believe that a child cannot crawl, walk, or run in a coordinated fashion, without first accomplishing certain developmental tasks (maturation).” He
added, “Likewise, a community should not expect to have a large industry or outstanding commercial center until it has ‘matured' sufficiently to support those aspects of community living which an industrial or commercial community must have for its people. The potential development of facilities and institutions of a community are almost entirely dependent upon the degree of mental, physical, and social development of the people involved.”
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