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"Annihilating the Hillbilly" The fact that a mountain youth takes advantage of
the opportunity to finish high school and apply to college does not
guarantee that the tentacles of the system will let him go. For
instance, one of the high-risk students I taught in the Upward Bound
program at Berea College applied and was accepted last fall at that
college. During the preceding spring he was approached by a
recruiter for the "FBI who gave him a hard sell on the benefits of working
for the Bureau in Washington. He dropped the idea of college and is
now a low-paid clerk at FBI headquarters. Since this incident I have
checked with school personnel in other areas of the region and found that
intensive recruitment of high school graduates in rural areas is now
carried out by the FBI and other government agencies who are not
finding recruits for their clerk and typist posts in urban high
schools. The law, it seems, does have a long arm and no qualms about
modern forms of impressment. Most high school dropouts--except those who marry and somehow find work or welfare payments--and unemployed high school graduates eventually end up being forced to migrate to find work. In West Virginia, for instance, 70 percent of the young people leave before they reach the age of 24. Usually referred to as "migrants" instead of more accurately as economic refugees, these youth join the more than 2,000,000 other mountaineers who have preceded them to northern cities such as Cincinnati, Chicago, Indianapolis and Detroit. If they have a skill and happened to move during a period of relative economic prosperity, or are willing to accept a job run by the stopwatch and a minimum wage employer, as many do, then their chances for survival are good. If, on the other hand, circumstances deem that they have to move in with kin in the "back home" ghetto, then the situation is different.
The
unemployed and unassimilated mountain youth finds himself in a bewildering
ghetto that defies description, and usually comparison, with the ghetto
life of other minorities. He also finds that in the city there is one
thing more unacceptable than a black man--a hillbilly, a ridgerunner, a
briarhopper. For the first time in its history America has
recognized him as a cultural minority. If he ends up in
juvenile court for stealing hubcaps, he is offered leniency with his
promise to go "back home." Judges make this offer to youth whose
families may have been in the city for three generations and can only
consider themselves Cincinnatians or Chicagons. If he enters school,
studies show that its foreign nature drives him out faster both
psychologically and physically than it does his black migrant
counterpart. For the mountain youth who is unable or unwilling to
assimilate into the life of the city, there is little help from the social
service agencies who understand much more about blacks than they do about
him. He is thus not only without help, but--perhaps more
appallingly--without an advocate in a city that he does not understand and
that does not understand him. |