Appalachian Volunteers (AV) was a non-profit organization engaged in community development projects in central Appalachia that evolved into a controversial community organizing network, with a reputation that went "from self-help to sedition" as its staff developed from "reformers to radicals," teaching things from Marx, Lenin and Mao, in the words of one historian, in the brief period between 1964 and 1970 during the War on Poverty.Kiffmeyer, "From Self-Help to Sedition," Journal of Southern History, February 1998, p. 65.Kiffmeyer, Reformers to Radicals (The University Press of Kentucky, 2008).
Origins
The Appalachian Volunteers (AV) began as an activity of the Council of the Southern Mountains (CSM), which had been headquartered in Berea, Kentucky, since 1925. Following President Lyndon Johnson's State of the Union message of January 8, 1964, in which he announced his war on poverty, CSM staff member Milton Ogle organized a group of students from Berea College to help repair a one-room school in Harlan County, Kentucky. During the following two months, students from other eastern Kentucky colleges were involved in similar weekend projects.Pardue, "Volunteers," Louisville Times, March 13, 1964, p. 11. A meeting was held at the Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County to formally organize the Appalachian Volunteers to expand such efforts. Representatives of the Kentucky Governor's office, the President's Appalachian Regional Commission, and the President's Committee for a war on poverty were present to encourage college and school officials and to promise federal support. A $50,000 grant from the federal Area Redevelopment Administration to the CSM was arranged in March 1964 to fund AV activities during the rest of the year.Horton, The AV, MA thesis, 1971
Program expansion
During 1964 the AV continued to expand the number of colleges involved in school renovation, cultural enrichment, and recreation programs for children in one and two room schools.John Fetterman, "Culture Woos Stinking Creek," The Courier-Journal Magazine, November 15, 1964, pp. 5–11. A prototype summer project was tested by an AV staff member and three students, who spent eight weeks in Clay County, Kentucky, providing recreation and remedial work for the children in a remote hollow. A "Books for Appalachia" campaign, which collected over a million volumes, was begun in cooperation with the National Parent-Teacher Association.Horton, The AV.
Following the establishment of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) in fall 1964, the AV applied for a Community Action Program demonstration grant, and was awarded $300,000 in December to expand its program in 1965. The following spring the AV negotiated a $40,000 training grant with VISTA. The new funding allowed Ogle to hire staff, including Gibbs Kinderman, a recent Harvard graduate who had taken part in the Freedom Summer project in Mississippi in 1964. Also in spring 1965 the AVs received a $139,000 community action demonstration grant to support 150 college students for an eight-week summer project in eastern Kentucky. Half the students were recruited from the Kentucky colleges with active AV chapters, and the other half were recruited from colleges and universities in such major cities as Boston, Chicago and New York.Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer, pp. 189–190.
Break with the Council of the Southern Mountains
As the AV students and staff became more deeply involved in poor rural communities, they began to see local politicians and school leaders as part of the problem rather than allies in uplift. The AV began to move from a consensus to a conflict understanding of how social change takes place. In 1966 tensions between the AV and the CSM came to a head when CSM executive director Perley Ayer, who was committed to a nonpolitical, consensus vision of community development, fired AV director Ogle and his assistant director. The remaining 13 AV staff resigned. They quickly moved to incorporate as a separate organization, and OEO promptly transferred its grants to the newly independent AV. To emphasize its separation from the CSM, the AV moved its headquarters from Berea, Kentucky, to Bristol, Tennessee, a location more central to the southern Appalachians into which the AV hoped to expand.Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer, pp. 190–191.
With its new funding the AV greatly expanded its summer program in 1966, placing 500 students with eight-week projects in four states: eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, southwestern Virginia, and eastern Tennessee. OEO was becoming unhappy with the failure of many community action agencies (CAAs) in central Appalachia to take seriously its mandate of "maximum feasible participation" of the poor in the administration of the CAAs. OEO encouraged the AV to rally the rural poor for a bigger role in the local CAAs. Conflict in Kentucky's Cumberland Valley was acute, and led to a controversial defunding of its eight-county CAA, which was split into one- and two-county agencies.Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer, pp. 192–193.
Strip-mining and the sedition controversy
As the summer of 1967 approached, the AV made plans for 400 students in three states, (pulling back from a small project in eastern Tennessee). During the previous winter, field coordinator Steve Daugherty became concerned about a landslide from a strip-mine bench that threatened a house at the head of Jones Creek,see photo in Caudill, My Land Is Dying, p. 56, and in Carawan, Voices from the Mountains, p. 21. above Verda on the Clover Fork of the Cumberland River in Harlan County. Daugherty contacted the original Knott County members of the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People (AGSLP) that had generated widespread publicity when the Widow Combs resisted strip-mine operators, and 80-year-old Dan Gibson threatened the bulldozers with his rifle in 1965.Caudill, My Land Is Dying, pp. 75–79, photos on pp. 52–53; and Carawan, Voices from the Mountains, pp. 44–47. Daugherty helped organize an AGSLP chapter in Harlan County, and encouraged Joe Mulloy, AV field coordinator in Pike County, Kentucky to do the same, as conflict over strip-mining was developing on Island Creek, where Jink Ray was planning to block bulldozers from his land. Mulloy was joined by local activist Edith Easterling, an AV intern and one of several local Kentucky women who became involved in the AV and were fundamental to organizing communities. The stand-off gained statewide publicity, and ended only when Governor Edward T. Breathitt flew to Island Creek in July to see for himself and suspend the coal operator's permit, and on August 1 revoked the permit to strip-mine Ray's property.Fetterman, "Kentucky's Still Ravaged Land," Courier-Journal & Times Magazine, September 10, 1967, pp. 4–17; Caudill, My Land Is Dying, pp. 87–88; Carawan, Voices from the Mountains, pp. 48–50; Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer, pp. 200–201.
On the evening of August 11, 1967, as the AV summer volunteer program was winding down, the Pike County sheriff raided the homes of AV Joe Mulloy and his wife Karen (an AV Vista volunteer) and Alan and Margaret McSurely, who were then working for the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), and confiscated a large quantity of the McSurelys' personal papers and books. (Alan had worked briefly for the AV that spring). Books that supposedly demonstrated their seditious nature included "a large number of works about Communism, including a couple dozen by Marx, Engels, and Lenin,"Richard Harris, Freedom Spent, p. 143. as well as copies of Joseph Heller's novel, Catch-22, and Mao's Red Book. Joe Mulloy and the McSurelys were charged with sedition ("plotting the violent overthrow of Pike County, Kentucky") by Pike County Commonwealth Attorney Thomas Ratliff, who was a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor and president of the Independent Coal Operators Association. SCEF's controversial leaders, Anne and Carl Braden, were also charged, although they resided in Louisville. Three days later federal appeals court judge Bert T. Combs (a former Kentucky governor) declared Kentucky's sedition statute unconstitutional and dismissed the charges.Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer, pp. 200–201; Luigart, "Kentucky Sedition Law Ruled Unconstitutional," The Courier-Journal, September 15, 1967, pp. 1, back page; Good, "Kentucky's Coal Beds of Sedition," The Nation, September 4, 1967, pp. 166–169, reprinted in Walls and Stephenson, Appalachia in the Sixties, pp. 184–193.
Although the sedition charges were thrown out of court, the case continued to haunt the AV. The group's opponents were encouraged to go on the attack in hope of cutting off OEO funding. For their part, the McSurelys spent eighteen years in various courts, first to get back their personal papers and books, and then suing for financial damages various individuals who had held them illegally, with only limited success.Salholz and Camper, "The McSurelys' Judgment Day," Newsweek, January 17, 1983, pp. 62–63; King, "Search for Justice," The Courier-Journal Magazine, February 27, 1983, pp. 8–16; Brown, "Long legal battle ends," The Courier-Journal, December 3, 1985, p. 1, back page. The AV had supported Joe Mulloy when he was charged with sedition, but later that fall when he announced he would resist being drafted to fight in Vietnam, most of the local AV staff opposed having to defend his position. After bitter discussion and argument, the full staff voted 20 to 19 to fire Mulloy, who then went to work for SCEF.*Mason, "The 'Subversive' Poor," The Nation, December 30, 1968, pp. 721–724; Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer, pp. 204–205.
Governor Nunn and KUAC
Congressional leaders were becoming concerned by the controversies generated by OEO's community action programs across the country, and in 1967 Oregon Representative Edith Green authored an amendment to the Economic Opportunity Act, attached to an appropriation bill, which assured that local political officials would have more influence on CAAs. Knowing its OEO funding was threatened, the AV retrenched and attempted to focus its scattered projects. Needing a more central location for its downscaled programs, now limited to eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia, the AV moved its central office from Bristol, Tennessee to Prestonsburg, Kentucky in March 1968. In July, Milton Ogle announced that he would resign from his position as executive director of the AV in September.Spradlin, "Director of Appalachian Volunteers Resigns Post," The Herald-Dispatch, July 19, 1968. Assistant director David Walls was appointed acting director, and was later confirmed as executive director for the organization's final year.