Movements for Poor People’s Rights
Over a weekend in November 1971, a group of about 300 people from Kentucky, West
Virginia, and Virginia traveled to Washington, D.C. for a gathering they called “Appalachian March for Survival Against Unfulfilled Promises.” Organized by welfare rights groups and supported by the Council of the Southern Mountains and the Highlander Center, the march was a
chance for regular Appalachian people, white and black, women and men, to make claims to
their rights as citizens of the United States. The participants brought a range of issues to the table
that they saw as interconnected: public assistance for poor and single mothers; guaranteed
incomes for poor families; benefits for disabled miners, their wives and widows; and
comprehensive health services for poor people. At the heart of the march was the argument that
welfare, broadly understood, was a right: the United States government had a duty to ensure that
citizens had a “right to live.”167
A week later a small group of people who had gone on the trip came together to reflect on
the meaning of the march, what they had learned, and what they saw as next steps. Shelva
Thompson, a welfare rights activist from West Virginia, commented that she was proud of her compatriots, who showed politicians that they weren’t “talking to a bunch of old, stupid, poor people.” Eula Hall noted that it was obvious that many of the politicians did not understand welfare policies or how they affected recipients. A man from the Highlander Center who had
helped to organize the march said that it signified an important moment of coalition-building, as
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welfare rights activists came together with advocates for disabled miners, especially those who
suffered from black lung disease. “It’s people power,” he asserted. Edith Easterling, who was
unable to attend the march but who kept up with it every step of the way, argued that
Appalachians needed to organize and make demands as a group. She also noted that the march “opened people’s eyes to how politics work; you get more educated when you can get outside the community and learn new things.” Before the meeting ended, Eula Hall declared, “I think we ought to send a woman to be president.” Someone else chimed in, “What about a hillbilly?”
Laughing, they all agreed that Washington politics could use a good shake up.168
The March for Survival was the culmination of a series of events between 1968 and 1971
that focused on welfare rights activism. Like welfare rights activism generally, welfare
organizing in Appalachia was sustained by women, from the testimonies they gave at public
hearings and the contacts that they made with the National Welfare Rights Organization to their
efforts to reform social services at the local level. All the while, they worked to make policies
more responsive to the needs of low-income women, who managed household budgets and fed
children. Coal field wives and mothers sought to maintain and strengthen the social safety net
and to protect their homes and families from the worst abuses of the coal industry. At the same
time, they spoke to more abstract issues: mainly, the rights of poor people to engage the political
process and to hold local and state officials responsible for implementing fair and effective
policies. Claiming both political and welfare rights, poor people in Appalachia assessed a
political economy that left them with little power.
This chapter traces the organic development of a welfare rights movement in Appalachia
that intersected with national and regional conversations about poverty and welfare but also
reflected the unique experiences of the people involved. It opens with the Council of the
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Southern Mountain’s changing stance on poverty and its support of the Poor People’s Campaign before turning to the widely publicized War on Poverty hearings, led by Robert F. Kennedy, in
eastern Kentucky. It then traces the rise of a state-wide coalition of welfare rights organizations,
which emerged out of the antipoverty debates of the 1960s. Between 1967 and 1971, single
mothers, widows, the elderly, and disabled men inserted their ideas and visions about fairness
and equality into the debates about poverty. They did so at public hearings and at welfare rights
marches and in their own communities, where they sought to make the welfare system more
humane. In the process, they forged cross-sex and cross-race alliances that showed how diverse
groups could unify around a concept of welfare that was inclusive and rights-based rather than
one that subordinated recipients based on gender, race, and class.169
Shifting Views of Poverty
During the War on Poverty the Council of the Southern Mountains served as a clearing
house for debates about poverty and reform. Council members celebrated what they called “mountain culture” even as they worried that poor “mountaineers” suffered from a “culture of poverty.” Drawing on the post-World War II behavioral science view that poverty was the by- product of fatalistic, hopeless, and marginalized enclaves of people left behind in the post-war
boom, Council officials sought to provide educational and vocational programs that would uplift
the poor. For guidance they relied on the application of the culture-of-poverty theory to mountain
culture as outlined by Jack E. Weller, a minister and missionary who was based in West Virginia
169 Organizing under welfare rights has gone largely unanalyzed in the historiography of the War on Poverty in
Appalachia. The major treatments of the War on Poverty mention welfare rights as an aside, not as a robust, organic movement that involved hundreds of people. For one of the rare studies of welfare rights organizing in the region, published in 1975 when organizing was still under way, see Richard A. Couto, Poverty, Politics, and Health Care:
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in the 1950s and 1960s. As historian Ronald Eller explains, Weller’s book “linked the academic
ideas of the culture of poverty with popular images of Appalachian otherness to provide an intellectual framework for regional uplift programs.”170
Even though the culture-of-poverty theory was overly simplistic and narrow in its
portrayal of poverty and class in America, it did provide an opening for a national dialogue about economic inequality. Critical assessments and portrayals of poverty, from Michael Harrington’s The Other America to Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands, both of which to an
extent borrowed from the theory, were widely read and shone a light on poverty amidst
affluence. While some opponents of the War on Poverty used culture-of poverty arguments to
bolster their negative opinions of poor people and to argue against strengthening the social safety
net, poverty warriors more often drew on them to make a case for reviving social services and
educational and vocational programs. Moreover, the notion of maximum feasible participation,
one of the guiding principles of the poverty programs, paved the way for the participation of
poor people in poverty debates, and their participation would ultimately challenge the concept of
welfare dependency that lay at the heart of culture-of-poverty theory.171
Reporting on the progress of the Appalachian Volunteers and the role of youth in the
antipoverty programs, psychiatrists Robert Coles and Joseph Brenner captured the tension
inherent in many War on Poverty programs. On the one hand, scores of studies had deemed poor
people apathetic and passive, personality traits that led to a cycle of poverty. With their emphasis
on education and job training, early antipoverty programs were supposed to disrupt the cycle.
170
“Biography/History,” Jack E. Weller Papers, KYSX263-A, 1965, Special Collections, Berea College; Eller,
Uneven Ground, 102; Weller, Yesterday’s People.
171
For more on the linguistic and historical roots of the idea of welfare dependency, see Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “A Genealogy of ‘Dependency’: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State,” in Nancy Fraser, Fortunes
of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (New York: Verso, 2013); Linda Gordon, Pitied
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Yet, as outsider volunteers worked in poor communities, they found culture-of-poverty explanations less and less compelling. Coles and Brenner argued that the volunteers’
collaborations with Appalachian people “refuted volumes and volumes of research, and in a
sense confronted the nation as well as their own region with the true moral dilemma and social condition of the region.” The “moral dilemma” was not the individual failings of Appalachian people, but the conditions in which people lived. As volunteers lived and worked in the region,
they witnessed and experienced the consequences of economic disparity: bad roads, poor
sanitation, few resources to combat strip mining, and barriers to legal and medical resources.172
The Council of the Southern Mountains also began to shift its approach to poverty, most
notably at its 1967 annual conference. There, structural critiques of poverty eclipsed the culture-
of-poverty models espoused by an older generation of social scientists and missionaries.
Speakers infused the meeting with the spirit of the civil rights movement, which had turned to
economic justice as a key organizing strategy, paving the way for the Council’s support for the Poor People’s Campaign.173
Several of the invited speakers at the conference called for radical evaluations of the U.S.
economic system. Vivian Henderson, an African American economist from Appalachia and
president of a historically black college, gave a keynote speech on the Freedom Budget, which
Bayard Rustin introduced a year earlier at a conference organized by the A. Philip Randolph
Institute. Henderson was among the authors of The “Freedom Budget” for All Americans, which called for “basic, far-reaching institutional changes in the nation’s social and economic
172 Robert Coles, “An Evaluation of the Appalachian Volunteers,” and “Further Follow-Up Evaluation of
Appalachian Volunteers,” n.d. Box 12, Folder 9, AV Records.
173 For further analysis of how the Council of the Southern Mountains transformed in the twentieth century, see
Thomas Kiffmeyer, “Looking Back to the City in the Hills: The Council of the Southern Mountains and a Longer View of the War on Poverty in the Appalachian South, 1913-1970.”
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structures” and a ten-year program to liquidate poverty. Rustin had assembled a team of civil rights leaders, including Henderson, as well as a broad coalition of labor leaders, policy makers,
and intellectuals to devise the program. The summaries of the proposal pointed to key reforms:
increased employment opportunities; a guaranteed income for all Americans; adequate minimum
wages for workers; an end to the misuse and contamination of natural resources; and decent
homes, medical care, and education for all. The proposal was introduced to the Johnson
administration, but it never gained traction. Even so, some of the proposed ideas, especially a
guaranteed income and medical care for all Americans, resonated throughout the 1970s and were
picked up by antipoverty and welfare rights activists.174
While none of the other speakers in 1967 offered a proposal as far-reaching as the
Freedom Budget, they did endorse policies that would have fundamentally reshaped economic
and social relations in Appalachia. Social critic Paul Goodman argued that full employment was
unachievable in a capitalist economy and also called for a guaranteed income for Americans.
Myles Horton, who drew on the model of citizenship schools for disenfranchised African
Americans, advocated free people’s colleges in Appalachia, where mountain people could
acquire the skills and knowledge to gain power in regional politics and alter social relations. And
Gordon Ebersole of the Congress of Appalachian Development called for the coal industry to
voluntarily change from private to non-profit status and to shift from a profit motive to one of
social obligation.175 All of these speakers brought to the fore the major challenges facing policy
makers and activists: how to protect Americans from the ill-effects of capitalism. For many, the
174 “Fifty-Fifth Annual Conference, 1967,” Box 145, Folder 4, Council of the Southern Mountains, 1913-1970,
Southern Appalachian Archives, Hutchins Library, Berea College (hereafter cited as CSM Records I); Paul Le Blanc, “Freedom Budget: The Promise of the Civil Rights Movement for Economic Justice,” Working USA: Journal
of Labor and Society vol. 6, no. 1 (March 2013): 52.
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War on Poverty provided only first steps toward a fundamental restructuring of American social
and economic structures.
When the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organized the Poor People’s Campaign, organizers invited the Council to participate. The invitation reflected the SCLC’s desire to spark a movement of “waves of the nation’s poor and disinherited,” of all races, from major cities and rural areas. Their demands—jobs and income for all Americans—
and their larger goal—to challenge an economically-driven power structure in which poor people
did not have the means to participate—found supporters across Appalachia.176 The Council declared support for the Poor People’s Campaign and the SCLC’s vision of a broad-based coalition of poor people in the spring of 1968, just after the assassination of Martin Luther King,
Jr. The Council’s president Philip Young explained the decision, stating that the campaign could bring “radically new and critically needed expressions of social justice in our land” and that the Council had a duty “to help spread that information and to help develop that will.”177
On May 25, 1968, organizers of the Poor People’s Campaign and their allies held a gathering called the Appalachian People’s Meeting. Five hundred poor people and activists from across Appalachia traveled to the meeting in Charleston, West Virginia. There, SCLC
representative Andrew Young gave a rousing speech on the need for a multi-racial antipoverty
movement.178 He argued that the government’s inadequate support for quality education for all
Americans implied that some schools functioned to keep people in ignorance, not provide them
the skills to achieve a better life. Ignorant people, he stated, could be controlled by local
176
“Statement of Purpose: Poor People’s Campaign, Washington, D.C.,” Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Box 59, Folder 6, AV Records.
177
“Resolution Adopted,” Mountain Life and Work, May 1968.
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governments. At the end of the speech he was joined on stage by a white Appalachian man who
admitted to having been racist in the past, but had come to believe that “we’ve all got to stay together.” He then declared that he loved Young like a brother. 179
Four days after the meeting a group of 190 Appalachians traveled to meet activists at Resurrection City in Washington, D.C., the site of the Poor People’s Campaign, where they built an “Appalachian hollow.” A month later a larger delegation traveled to D.C. The trip reports recite all the standard complaints about the Poor People’s Campaign: it rained too much and the
mud was too thick, and as the weather worsened, some events were cancelled. Nonetheless, the
reports also point to the hard work the delegates did and the excitement that punctuated the
gathering. They shared meals and talked with groups from around the country, from migrant
farm workers from the West Coast and Mexican Americans led by Chicano activist Reies Lόpez
Tijerina to Native American groups and NAACP representatives. For those who participated, the
campaign was a powerful moment of unity across race and region. One press release from an
Appalachian group announced their purpose in attending: “to let our Congressmen and Senators,
our President, our people and the people of the world know that the poor people of Appalachia,
white and black, are standing together with the poor people of the Mississippi delta, the poor
people of the Indian reservations, the Mexican-Americans, the Puerto Ricans, the grape pickers
of California, the potato harvesters of Maine—we all stand together.”180
On their first full day at Resurrection City, Chicano activists joined a group of
Appalachians for a protest at the home of West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who had been a vocal critic of the Poor People’s Campaign. For both the Chicano and Appalachian activists,
179 “Mountain People Attend Poor People’s Conference,” The Hawk Eye, May 20, 1968, Box 130, Folder 1, AV
Records.
180 Press Release, “More than 700 people came to the Appalachian People’s Meeting…” May 25, 1968, Box 40,
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rights to land in part motivated their activism; for Chicanos, land lost during the U.S-Mexican
War, and for Appalachians, land lost to coal operators and strip-mining. Two hundred people piled into buses and rode to Byrd’s home, where they gathered in front to sing, picket, and pray (in English and Spanish). After about an hour a representative knocked on the door, and when Mrs. Byrd and a security guard answered, the group unfurled a banner that stated “POOR PEOPLE ARE NOT FREE PEOPLE—GIVE US BACK OUR LAND RIGHTS” and included
about one thousand signatures. Mrs. Byrd told the protesters that her husband was at his office and they could find him there, to which the group responded, “Let him come to us.”181
The Poor People’s Campaign offered Appalachians a chance to participate in a broad- based movement and to make political demands on a national stage. Bringing a different kind of
visibility to Appalachia, mountain people showed that the region was not solely a place of
destitution and poverty; it was also a site of tenacious activism. Moreover, the Poor People’s
Campaign infused the regional movement with energy. While the campaign in Washington
ended without achieving immediate policy changes, activists carried the lessons learned back to
their homes and into their antipoverty organizations. More than ever before, they insisted that
poor people were integral to the policy-making organizations that made decisions about and
implemented antipoverty programs.182
Welfare rights organizing was one key area of organizing. With the help of the Poor
181
Eric Metzner, “Partial Report on the Trip to Washington,” June 3, 1968, Box 40, Folder 15, AV Records.
182 Gordon Mantler argues that the Poor People’s Campaign “offered not a break or a new beginning for American
Indians, poor whites, or Puerto Ricans, but an important bridge to the more hard-nosed activism of the late 1960s