Author: Dwight Billings and David Walls
Source: Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, 1980.
In recent decades several million migrants from rural Appalachia have made their way to urban centers, mainly in the Midwest and the South. In adjusting to urban life they have had problems similar to those of earlier immigrants from other lands. The city people among whom they have come to live have to some extent imposed a group identity upon them. Many are regarded as "hillbillies" or "briars." Appalachians lack the church organizations, distinct language, and racial characteristics that often define an ethnic group. What group consciousness they have comes from their distinctive kinship system, religion, dialect, and music. Their group identity is only partial, but they are very often perceived as a group.
The Appalachian Mountains stretch from Quebec to Georgia; the Appalachian Regional Development Act of 1965, as amended, established the boundaries of the Appalachian Region as including 397 counties in 13 states from New York to Mississippi, with an estimated population in 1975 of about 19 million people. But only the central and southern highlands, extending more than 600 miles diagonally across Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, are commonly meant by the term Appalachia.
Southern Appalachia was initially colonized by English, Scotch-Irish, and German immigrants or their descendants from Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, and eastern Virginia, who settled among small groups of Cherokees and other American Indians. Slaves, though few, were present, and a number of small groups of mixed origin, called Melungeons or Guineas, lived in isolated areas. Although the region has been romanticized by missionaries and local-color writers as an "arrested frontier," it has never been as isolated as is popularly believed. Subsistence agriculture supported a rural culture that stressed freedom, democratic values, and fundamentalist Protestantism, as was the case throughout the nonplantation South, but race was less of an issue. The nation's first abolitionist newspaper, Elihu Embree's Emancipator, was founded in the Tennessee mountains in 1819. There were considerable abolitionist and, during the Civil War, Union sympathies throughout the mountains, which survive in many areas today as a strong Republican tradition. The family was the most important social unit and remains so among the rural population despite the changes wrought by industrialization.
Religion remains an important component of Appalachian culture. Fundamentalist Protestant beliefs are widely held, although church membership is below national norms. The largest denomination by far is the Southern Baptists (around 40 percent of church members), followed by Methodists (some 20 percent), and Presbyterians as a distant third (around 5 percent). In the more isolated rural areas, small sects, including various Holiness and old-time Baptist groups, flourish.
Appalachia can be viewed as a heterogeneous set of rural fringes peripheral to such cities as Pittsburgh and Atlanta, where the economic decisions affecting its population and resources are made. The region has also been treated as something of an internal colony, whose resources are exploited with little benefit to the local population. Railroads opened up the mountains for extraction of timber, oil, and gas in the late 19th century, and chemical and textile production became important industries, but coal mining in the Allegheny and Cumberland plateaus had the greatest impact. Between 1870 and 1930 mining led to the concentration of much of the rural population in company towns, created a class conscious industrial work force, intensified social stratification, and attracted new ethnic groups into the mountains. Although the region is commonly described as a reservoir of homogeneous Anglo-Americans, one study revealed that 34,400 of 53,000 new jobs in West Virginia mines between 1890 and 1910 were filled by immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Later southern blacks also augmented the labor force: in southern West Virginia they constituted nearly a quarter of the mine workers in the 1920s.
In the 1930s the United Mine Workers of America succeeded in organizing the coalfields of southern Appalachia. Led by John L. Lewis, that union played a vital role in the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organization and of unions in the auto, steel, and rubber industries. Many of the emigrants from Appalachia brought with them a strong commitment to unions as they moved to industrial cities north of the Ohio River in the 1940s and 1950s.
The decline of the coal industry in the 1950s, resulting from the use of diesel fuel for the railroads and the growing popularity of other fuels for home heating, led to mechanization and to the layoff of nearly 250,000 miners. Unemployment forced a huge emigration from Appalachia. West Virginia, for example, lost 75,000 mining jobs in the 1950s and nearly a half-million people. Although the population of some portions of Appalachia, such as the Georgia mountains near Atlanta, continued to grow, heavy emigration from other parts of the region (totaling some 1.6 million net loss through migration in the 1950s —16 percent of the 1950 population) kept the Appalachian population almost stationary in spite of considerable natural increase. Nearly half that total loss was accounted for by emigration from 26 coal-mining counties in the Allegheny and Cumberland plateaus. In the 1960s net migration loss fell to about 600,000, but natural increase also declined sharply, so the Appalachian population grew only 4.3 percent. Emigration from l950 to l970, then, had a profound impact both on the composition of the Appalachian population and on the cities to which the migrants moved.
Migration and Resettlement
Migration from the Appalachians is not a recent phenomenon. At various periods in the 19th century, people left the mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas and made their way to the Ozarks, southern Illinois, Texas, and Oklahoma. Another migration stream of long standing led from two sources in the southern Appalachians to areas of settlement in western Washington State, some 2,000 miles away. It began around 1880 in conjunction with the growth of the western timber industry, hit a peak between 1900 and 1917, and continues on a more moderate scale to this day. Except for the coal counties and urban areas, the southern Appalachians had a net emigration during the 1920s. During the Depression more people returned to the land than left it, and the region had a net immigration. The great emigration took place in the 1940s, 1950s, and to a lesser extent, the 1960s. During the 1970s the overall population in some counties grew for the first time in decades.
Millions of people from southern Appalachia (not less than 3 million, perhaps 6 to 8 million) now live outside the mountain region, mostly in the same cities chosen by the migrants during the last five or six decades. Atlanta, where 20 percent of all immigrants are white Appalachians from Georgia and Tennessee, has recently received the most, but the migrants to Midwestern cities attract more attention. There the immigrants from the coal-mining counties of the Allegheny and Cumberland plateaus are sometimes the largest single source of new population. Migrants from eastern Kentucky gravitated to the Miami River Valley from Cincinnati to Dayton, Ohio. Approximately 80,000 first- and second-generation Appalachians live in Cincinnati, one of the first Midwestern cities to attract an Appalachian population; they now constitute about 17 percent of the city's inhabitants. Industrial towns in the Miami Valley have received large numbers of Kentucky mountain people. In Middletown, Hamilton, and South Lebanon, Ohio, Appalachian migrants probably make up as much as 50, 60, and 95 percent, respectively, of the population. Migratory streams from northern West Virginia lead to Pittsburgh; other West Virginia Appalachians migrate to Cleveland (where they are 13 percent of the population) and Columbus, Ohio (where they are 33 percent); smaller groups go to Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Indianapolis, Ind., Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
All these migratory streams have been sustained by kinship networks that produce a uniform settlement pattern. Often entire families migrate to the same city, neighborhood, and street where former neighbors and kin already live. These kinship networks link rural mountain communities with a variety of urban communities and are consequently a primary source of information and stability for Appalachian migrants. Family ties not only provide housing and jobs, but assist new arrivals in less tangible ways. Urban Appalachians are less apt to depend on welfare or voluntary organizations than are other low-income groups, because the extended family provides many of the necessary social services and bears much of the cost of relocation.
Social class origin affects residential location and many other aspects of the process of migration. Many higher-status Appalachians left the mountains a long time ago, taking their families with them and settling in small industrial towns and working-class suburbs, where they rather easily and quickly assimilated. The less-well-off frequently settled first with kin in urban slums such as Chicago's Uptown, Cleveland's Near West Side, East Dayton, or Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine. Because many of them were literally economic refugees, forced to leave because of depression in the coal regions and subsistence farming areas, they arrived with no relevant vocational skills and have been especially vulnerable to economic recession. Many are still dependent on casual day labor, and perhaps one-third of the migrants still live in the slums. In Cincinnati, for example, Appalachians make up 65 percent of the slum population and 50 percent of the total unemployed, and they are reported to have the highest school dropout rate in the city. But the majority of urban Appalachians have achieved stable employment in industry, for the most part in unskilled and semiskilled jobs. In some manufacturing plants in the Cincinnati area, 75 percent of the work force is mountain born. Here also the family has cushioned the adjustment of inexperienced rural migrants to industrial work. Frequently, family members are employed at the same plant, and employers have found that kinship networks ensure a steady labor supply and that family sponsorship encourages labor discipline. Many of these workers were laid off in the 1950s and 1960s, but most of them subsequently acquired stable employment and promotions. Workers typically move from slum to working-class neighborhoods and then to often predominantly Appalachian suburbs. In recent years many Appalachians have completed college either in the mountains or in the cities; a sizable number are in white-collar occupations such as teaching.
Ethnic Commitment
Appalachia was simply a physiographic term until after the Civil War. Little distinguished the way of life there from frontier life generally. Southern Appalachia as a distinctive cultural region was invented in the mid-1870s by local-color writers who began to use the mountains as a setting for fiction and travel sketches published in popular magazines. Prolific writers on such mountain themes as conflicting Civil War loyalties, moonshining, and feuding included Mary N. Murfree, James Lane Allen, and John Fox, Jr. Educators and social reformers, in the meantime, described the southern Appalachian cultural region as a problem area deserving the attention of church home-mission boards and private philanthropic foundations. Leaders of this middle-class "uplift" movement, including William G. Frost, president of Berea College, and John C. Campbell, founder of the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers (later the Council of the Southern Mountains), were more interested in influencing private and public policy than in developing the people's identity as southern highlanders or Appalachian mountaineers.
Appalachians lack the characteristics of distinctive race, nationality, or religion that typically set apart ethnic groups in urban environments. Most are Anglo-Americans, but they remain in identifiable communities in many northern cities. Residential segregation determined by poverty and sustained by kinship-based settlement patterns encourages isolation. Hillbilly bars, restaurants, and tiny storefront Pentacostal churches dot the neighborhoods where they live. Although it is questionable whether the traditional Appalachian culture should be viewed as in any way distinct from that of the rest of the upland South extending through the Ozarks, a recognizable sociolinguistic pattern and shared folk traditions help to sustain a mountain identity, which is reinforced by frequent trips "down home." Participation in the kinship structure means that to some extent lower-class migrants are members simultaneously of a rural and an urban community. One study found that 20 percent of the city-dwelling mountain people who were interviewed would give up one-fifth of their current income if they could find jobs in Appalachia.
Hillbilly stereotypes cause some migrants to disavow their Appalachian origins, but they also function to pull the group together. Many Appalachians have felt the influence of such stereotypes, probably more often from public-service agencies than from employers. Appalachian migrants are also often assumed to be antisocial and delinquent by police and the courts.
A number of cities now have organizations to encourage the Appalachian population to participate more effectively in urban life. One of the most successful of these is the Urban Appalachian Council in Cincinnati, which approaches Appalachian problems as those of a minority ethnic group. It cooperates with organizations inside Appalachia, such as the Council of the Southern Mountains, on "down home" projects and with black groups on voter registration and community-police problems. The Appalachian Identity Center in Cincinnati tries to improve the Appalachians' self-image and to combat prejudice against hillbillies in the schools. Appalachians are becoming recognized as a distinct ethnic community in Midwestern cities and are beginning to be felt as a political bloc.
Appalachian advocates build their programs on the work of John C. Campbell, who founded the Council of the Southern Mountains and its magazine, Mountain Life & Work, which began publication in 1925, to counteract stereotyped characters like Snuffy Smith, Li'l Abner, and the Beverly Hillbillies. Since the white Appalachian migrant with a steady job probably encounters few barriers to assimilation into the American mainstream, it is probably easier for him or her to assimilate than to maintain the Appalachian identity and struggle against the stereotypes it involves. For the majority of the region's people, Appalachian has never been as important a symbol of identity as family, community, county, or even state and nation. Still, the kinship system means that events down home as well as events in the cities may foster a sense of Appalachian ethnicity. Whether Appalachian ethnicity will become more important depends on its significance to Appalachians both in the southern mountains and in the cities.
The classic study of the Appalachian region is John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1921; reprint, Lexington, Ky.; 1969). A comprehensive academic treatment is Thomas R. Ford, ed.; The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey (Lexington, Ky., 1962). Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands (Boston, 1963), is a popular social history of eastern Kentucky. Interviews with Appalachians in the mountains and in the cities are found in Robert Coles, Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers (Boston, 1971), and The South Goes North (Boston, 1972); Kathy Kahn, Hillbilly Women (New York, 1972); Guy and Candie Carawan, Voices from the Mountains (New York, 1975); and Todd Gitlin and Nanci Hollander, Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago (New York, 1970). A study over a 30-year period of the adaptation of migrants from a small community in eastern Kentucky to cities in Ohio is Harry K. Schwarzweller, James S. Brown, and J.J. Mangalam, Mountain Families in Transition: A Case Study in Mountain Migration (University Park, Pa., 1971).
The Bibliography of Southern Appalachia, compiled by Charlotte T. Ross (Boone, N.C., 1976), is a comprehensive listing of books and monographs. The best collection of materials on social and economic aspects of the region is in Morgantown at the West Virginia University Library, which also publishes a periodic Appalachian Bibliography, covering books, articles, and theses. The Berea College Library in Berea, Ky., has the best collection on regional literature and folk arts. The library of the Urban Appalachian Council in Cincinnati has a collection of material on Appalachian migrants in the cities. The best source of current demographic information is the Appalachian Regional Commission in Washington, D.C., which publishes the journal Appalachia.