Uneven Ground (20 page)

Along with other technical and education initiatives, the Eastern Kentucky Resource Development Project and the WVU Center for Appalachian Studies and Development helped to start county development associations and later to set up multicounty planning councils. Local leaders, however, often distrusted the outside experts, resented university paternalism, and were suspicious of political reform. When funding for the Kentucky project expired and the university was unable to sustain the initiative, the Kentucky area development councils squashed a grant proposal to the OEO to revive the program on the grounds that the university project contested with the councils “for the support of local officials and development organizations.”
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Mountain elites did not object to the placement of student interns on selected service projects in their communities, but they feared the loss of control over local development decisions that federal funding of university professionals might foster.

Colleges and universities, however, tended not to distinguish between student-centered projects assisting poor people in the field and the action-oriented intervention efforts of faculty and other professionals to facilitate community planning. Both were part of the educational mission of higher education in the 1960s. Even smaller, liberal arts colleges in the mountains encouraged students and faculty to apply their knowledge to society's problems, and many took advantage of new federal programs and foundation support to launch local outreach initiatives. For example, Mars Hill College, a small Baptist institution in western North Carolina, took the lead in organizing the antipoverty campaign in Madison County, one of the poorest counties in the state. Over the course of the next decade, the college doubled its enrollment, faculty, and operating budget and received national recognition for programs that placed student interns in a variety of new social service agencies in the county.
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Guided by a visionary, ex-Mennonite dean, Richard Hoffman, who had come south with the civil rights movement, the college organized the local CAA, the Madison County Opportunity Corporation, which wrote federal grants that established Head Start centers, family counseling and other mental health services, housing renovation projects, and job training workshops. Hoffman served for a time as executive director of the local agency, and the college president served on the board of directors along with prominent doctors and educators from the Mars Hill area. The chair of the Department of Sociology, Don Anderson, served as head of a new Madison County planning commission, the first such commission in the North Carolina mountains. Other faculty and administrators helped to create the award-winning Hot Springs Health Program, which provided health services to remote sections of the county. To better coordinate student participation in these outreach activities, Mars Hill College created the Community Development Institute, in which students worked part time as recreational directors, teaching assistants, secretaries, and staff aides in local poverty agencies. Between 1965 and 1970, the college established an Upward Bound program for local high school students and received funding from the OEO and the Southern Regional Education Board to train VISTA and other poverty workers. Many of the professional staff from these initiatives later became permanent faculty at the institution.

Other colleges in the mountains launched similar programs to involve students and staff in community service. A number of these institutions began as settlement schools earlier in the century and slowly evolved into two- and four-year colleges after World War II. Federal resources for Upward Bound, work-study, and other antipoverty programs helped these small colleges to extend their traditional mission of community-based service into more distant hollows while providing financial support for their students and enhancing institutional growth. One of the most successful programs was that undertaken by tiny Alice Lloyd College in eastern Kentucky. Created in 1916 as the Caney Creek Settlement School in Knott County, the college became a junior college after the death of its founder, Alice Lloyd, in 1962 and began receiving OEO grants in the mid-1960s to establish “outpost centers” in neighboring communities. By 1969, with assistance from the Bruner Foundation in New York, the program evolved into the Alice Lloyd
College Outreach Reserves (ALCOR), which placed live-in students in sixteen area communities to provide summer recreation and educational enrichment activities.
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Settlement schools had always taken an active role in providing health screening and nutritional education in mountain communities, and ALCOR developed a special emphasis on identifying family health problems, teaching dental hygiene and personal cleanliness, and linking poor families with public health services. Led by two Alice Lloyd graduates who would later establish their own health clinic in Knott County, Benny Ray Bailey and Grady Stumbo, the project brought in nurses and medical students from outside the region to work with the college volunteers and conduct health screenings. In 1971 the summer program was extended to three other eastern Kentucky colleges and renamed Appalachian Leadership and Community Outreach. The collaborative program involved more than 150 students deployed in seventy-seven locations in twenty-two counties.
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Student service-learning projects such as ALCOR blossomed in the mountains during the 1960s. Some programs placed indigenous Appalachian students in their own communities to sponsor educational enrichment activities, teach crafts, organize community cleanup campaigns, or link families with health and social service providers, but others tapped into a growing national trend for middle-class college students to volunteer their time in underdeveloped areas. The largest of these student volunteer efforts, the Appalachian Volunteers (AV), brought together native and nonnative young people into a multistate initiative that served most of central Appalachia. Not only did the organization provide fertile ground for a growing network of regional activists, but it eventually broke with its institutional founders to become one of the more radical reform groups in the region.

Formed in the winter of 1963–1964 as part of President Kennedy's emergency winter program for eastern Kentucky, the AV predated the passage of the EOA and reflected both the origins and the conflicting ideologies of the War on Poverty in the mountains. As early as the spring of 1963, the CSM had approached the Ford Foundation for money to form a volunteer organization of young people to provide education and social services to the people of Appalachia. The council
eventually was awarded a small planning grant from the Edgar Stern Family Fund of New York, but the idea received a major boost in December 1963 when Richard Boone called Milton Ogle of the council and proposed to fund a pilot effort utilizing money from the president's special winterization fund. During the January 1964 winter break, more than three hundred area college students participated in the renovation of two rural schools in Harlan County, Kentucky, and, at a meeting of educators, council representatives, and government officials in February, the AV was formally established and extended to nineteen Kentucky colleges with the assistance of a fifty-thousand-dollar grant from the ARA. Later that year the council received the first of several OEO demonstration grants from Boone's office to expand AV services and hire a field staff to supervise student workers.
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Under Ogle's leadership, the AVs (as the volunteers were known) at first followed a traditional consensus and self-help approach to working with mountain people. Students ventured forth to refurbish one-room schools and winterize homes, utilizing materials donated by area businesses and working alongside resident volunteers. With the cooperation of local school superintendents, AVs provided enrichment programs in the schools, showing movies on hygiene, demonstrating traditional dances, constructing playground equipment, and leading group recreational activities. This strategy of working with local leaders to provide services to the poor was consistent with the CSM's philosophy of helping “any group working for the betterment of conditions in the mountains” and with the training that most early AV staff had received as students at Berea College.
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As Ogle wrote in a letter soliciting materials from businesses, “Deprived people cannot be helped; they must help themselves.”
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In the first year of the program, students fanned out into forty eastern Kentucky counties, hanging wallboard, repairing broken windows, replacing rotted floors, and painting woodwork on many of the more than one thousand one- and two-room schools that dotted the eastern Kentucky landscape. Weekend and summer volunteers restored twenty-one dilapidated houses in Slone Fork in Knott County, helped to organize a community center in Persimmon Fork in Leslie County, constructed a greenhouse at Mill Creek in Clay County, and directed summer recreational programs for children throughout the area.
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A
second OEO grant in 1965 added 150 VISTA volunteers to the program and funded additional staff to expand the AV into West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee. Two years after its founding, the AV was a showcase OEO program. The
Louisville Courier-Journal
praised the students as “young Samaritans” who “with little more than enthusiasm, hammers and saws” had made “a deep impression on the mountain people.”
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The very success of the early AV, however, also dramatized the depth of the problems in the mountains and ultimately led to the decline of government support for the program. As hundreds of student volunteers poured into the region—many not native to the mountains—and as field staff established permanent residences and working relationships in rural communities, cultural and political conflicts began to strain the cooperative relationship between the young poverty warriors and local elites. Some student volunteers began to question whether the renovation projects did anything to end poverty or merely camouflaged the worst manifestations of a corrupt system. Returning volunteers found little change in the communities or in the status of the poor. Schools they had repaired a year earlier were soon run down again; windows were broken, and educational materials lost. “When you start fixing up a one-room school, you start wondering,” one volunteer later recalled. “Why didn't the local school board fix this up a long time ago? Then you ask, why aren't there books?”
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The sudden growth of the AV in 1965 brought student volunteers from as far away as California and new staff from urban centers in the Midwest and East. Some were fresh from Harvard; others had worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the South. A few came from class-conscious, union families in the Midwest, and one had been a community organizer in Chicago's Uptown.
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The new arrivals brought a more assertive view of fighting poverty than was shared by the leadership of the CSM. Even many of the indigenous AVs increasingly questioned whether the service-oriented programs of the council were doing anything to empower the poor or to alter the structures that had generated the conditions in the first place. More and more the volunteers saw the county school superintendents and the judge executives with whom the council worked to gain entry to mountain communities as the problem, not the cure, and they strained at the
institutional ties that kept them from engaging in political advocacy for the poor.

Throughout 1965 relationships between the volunteers and council leadership deteriorated as the young organizers pressed their more conservative elders to move beyond their service programs and into community action. The conflict of age and ideology came to a head in the spring of 1966 when Perley Ayer, director of the CSM, abruptly fired Ogle and the senior staff of the AV for insubordination. The remaining thirteen staff members summarily resigned and reorganized themselves the following day as a nonprofit organization, Appalachian Volunteers Inc. The newly independent organization moved its offices from Berea, Kentucky, to Bristol, Tennessee, and announced that it intended to become more assertive in organizing the poor. No longer constrained by the program-oriented consensus politics of the council, Ogle declared that the AV was “definitely an action agency.”
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Within a few days, the OEO shifted its funding for the AV to the new organization, which immediately expanded its operations in the coalfields. By the summer of 1966, the AVs were supervising the training of almost five hundred VISTA volunteers and had established several outpost education centers intended as living spaces for volunteer workers in poor communities. Instead of painting schoolhouses and providing educational enrichment activities, AV field-workers now began assisting poor people's organizations and forming community groups around the issues of strip mining and welfare rights. Especially in eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia, AVs became vocal critics not only of the coal industry and the local political establishment but of the more moderate CAAs as well.

In southeast Kentucky, for example, AV field-workers organized demonstrations against the eight-county Cumberland Valley CAA in the summer of 1966, resulting in the eventual dismantling of the agency and the reestablishment of one- and two-county CAAs that reflected greater participation by the poor. In West Virginia, AVs turned out hundreds of community people to challenge control of CAA boards by local elites and even seized control for a time of the Raleigh County agency.
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By the end of 1967, AVs were directly challenging CAAs throughout central Appalachia to be more responsive to the needs of the poor and were helping local citizens' groups to demand greater
voices in community health, education, and economic policies. No longer content with refurbishing schoolhouses and showing dental hygiene films to poor children, AVs became impatient advocates of change in a political atmosphere that feared structural change. For many state and local leaders, young AVs came to symbolize the veiled potential of the War on Poverty to upset the status quo in the mountains, a threat that increasingly concerned regional power brokers.