In Appalachia It’s the Women Who Brought Social Justice

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty” in the United States, taking aim in particular at the Central and Southern Appalachian states. In some parts of these mountains, more than 50 percent of the people lived in poverty. Many homes lacked indoor plumbing and electricity, and the drinking water was often unsafe. Medical care was frequently either unavailable or unaffordable.

In To Live Here, You Have To Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice, professor of history Jessica Wilkerson examines this War on Poverty in the context of certain women who helped initiate changes from the 1960s into the 1980s. 

In her Introduction, Wilkerson writes “…the War on Poverty galvanized women; they built strong alliances across communities; their hard-nosed activism changed the Mountain South; and that activism led many of them to a gender consciousness that influenced a wave of organizing in the South. Women in the Mountain South imagined a society in which interdependence is the defining feature, driving political and economic decisions.”

Wilkerson focuses her attention on one of the most impoverished regions of the Mountain South: Eastern Kentucky. Here were coal miners striking for higher wages and safer working conditions, chronic unemployment problems, and large families with children often lacking food and proper clothing. Housing was inadequate and the schools were run down. 

Wilkerson describes the influx of various federal and state workers into the region, the alphabet soup of agencies trying to improve the lives of the natives, and the tactics that helped create jobs, welfare programs, better health-care facilities, and improved schools.

Key to the success of these programs and to change were Appalachian women. Many of these women had endured grinding poverty, had raised numerous children, and had faced hardships ranging from husbands injured in the mines to abusive men. Sudie Crusenberry, for example, was an industrious mother living in the mining town of Brookside, Kentucky, who, after her husband was severely injured in a cave-in and the company ejected her family from their coal camp house, joined other Brookside women picketing the coal company during a strike. Eula Hall fought for school lunches for the poor, welfare rights, women’s rights, and community health care. Because of the lack of healthcare in her community—Hall herself had lost a baby three weeks old who had never seen a doctor—for a decade Hall nursed a vision of a community medical clinic. Eventually, she and the Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Organization established the Mud Creek Health Clinic in Floyd County. 

These struggles brought together strange alliances for that era: the volunteers from “up north,” and the locals from the mountains, middle-class and poor, white and black women. As the War on Poverty continued, other issues regarding gender and race arose. Appalachian women began demanding more access to jobs and less discrimination based on their sex. Blacks throughout the country were demanding to be treated as full citizens, and so too were those in Appalachia. Among these groups, women often spearhead the charge for change.

As Wilkerson notes in her Epilogue, “…Appalachian women activists worked for what they believed was possible—the common good in their communities, the region, and the nation. Their most potent tool was the knowledge that they carried from a lifetime of tending to families, surviving tragedies, bearing witness to the disasters of unregulated capitalism, advocating for their communities, and taking a stand for fairness and justice.”

To Live Here You Have To Fight offers blend of history, biography, and personal anecdote. Wilkerson approaches her topic as a liberal academic, but the story she tells is readable and enhances our understanding of Appalachian history.

That said, at least two of Wilkerson’s assertions are worth debating. Early on in the book, she writes that “the low African American population throughout rural Appalachia was not inevitable but part of a longer process of discriminatory policies and racial terror.”

Discrimination undoubtedly drove some black Appalachians away from the mountains, but two other factors better explain the “low African American population.” The first had to do with geography and history. The flat lands of the South were ideal for tobacco and cotton crops, and large numbers of slaves worked those fields. The mountains of Appalachia precluded large plantations, and so,  historically, far fewer blacks have inhabited the Appalachians.  

The second reason for an Appalachian migration derived from the economy. From the 1930s on, and particularly after World War II, armies of blacks and whites left the South for cities like Chicago and Detroit looking for work and a better life. In his online article “Chicago’s Hillbilly Problem During The Great Migration,” for instance, Whet Moser looks back at the 1950s and the animus felt by the natives of Chicago against the mountaineers. Google “Appalachian people migrating north,” and you’ll find a score of articles on this exodus.

Then there is the case of Sue Ella Easterling, a student activist from Appalachia. Wilkerson writes that Easterling traveled to Washington D.C. in the summer of 1968 to join the Poor People’s Campaign. “After 10 days in D.C. she had to return to Morehead State for summer school in order to graduate at the end of the summer. As a home economics major (one of the few programs of study open to women at the time), she had to stay in a campus house, where she was supposed to learn how to manage a household.” 

That part about home economics being one of the few majors open to women seemed unlikely, and so it was. In a 1968 Morehead State University alumnus magazine, we find on page 22 the recipients of the Alumni Scholarship Awards. Well over half of these recipients are female, who intend to pursue such majors and minors as English, math, history, nursing, business, education, sociology, library science, and music. 

Anyone who puts words into print makes mistakes. As a reviewer, I have misspelled the names of authors, gotten dates and places wrong, and have at times confused elementary facts. Such unintentional blemishes are a part of the game. Despite these minor imperfections, Jessica Wilkerson’s To Live Here You Have To Fight is well worth the read for those interested in Appalachian history, and in social justice and gender issues.