"Annihilating the Hillbilly"
by Jim Branscome
page 8
     One group of Appalachians who are consistently overlooked and underserved by the institutions of the region are the blacks.  As a matter of fact, both government and the so-called "private" welfare agencies refuse to acknowledge the existence of blacks in Appalachia.  While the percentage of blacks in the region as a whole is low -- about eight percent -- they comprise the total populations in many small, isolated hollows and ghost coal towns abandoned by the corporations and welfare and poverty agencies.  Because the backbreaking jobs that brought black imports into the region are gone and because of the discrimination and competition with the majority of poor white people for jobs and welfare funds, their existence is a poor one, indeed.  As yet no agency report or journalist has documented the presence and needs of these people, let alone described the culture of minority group in the midst of another cultural minority.
America's unwillingness to deal with the Appalachian as he asks to be dealt with is probably no more baffling than America's seeming obsession to study and understand his unusual life style and values.  Even before the Russell Sage Foundation published John Campbell's The Southern Highlander and His Homeland in 1921, writers and sociologists were making forays into the mountains to alternately praise, condemn, and collect the mountain culture.  The studies are still being made today in the midst of the technological revolution that is, for all practical purposes, making "Middle Americans" all alike.  The conclusions of modern studies do not differ from those made in the last century.  The Appalachian is different; he is existence-oriented, independent, has close family ties, is fatalistic, cares for his elderly, ad nauseum.  If, as Robert Coles and others have written of late, the Appalachian has a life-style, a culture, that America would do well to listen to if not opt for, then why has America failed so miserably at times to meet his needs?
 

      Part of the answer is, obviously, that Appalachia in the main has been a colonial territory for America within her own boundaries.  The life style of the region served well the need of the mining and lumbering corporations for a subjugated people willing to be peasants in their own land.  Even after the bloody struggles to unionize the mines, the capacity of America's institutions, (including its labor unions) to contain the people's struggle remained intact.  So what on the surface appears to be quaint people, to be explained away by their isolation ad independence may, in fact, be more accurately described as the historical reaction of the people to colonialism.

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