Setting The Record Straight About Black People In The Appalachian Region Of The United States (Part I: online excerpts)

Edited by Azizi Powell

This is Part I of a two part pancocojams series about Black people in the Appalachia region o the United States.

This post presents information about the term "Appalachia" and presents excerpts from several online articles about Black people in Appalachia.

Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2022/11/black-people-in-appalachia-part-ii-some.html for Part II of this pancocojams series. That post showcases a YouTube video about Black people in Appalachia and includes selected comments from that video's discussion thread about Black people in Kentucky and in other parts of Appalachia.
 
The content of this post is presented for historical, socio-cultural, and educational purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to Dr, Jacqueline Clark and Dr. Althea Webb for their research and writing on the subject of Black people in Appalachia. Thanks also to all others who are quoted in this post and thanks for the cultural legacies of Black people who lived/live in Appalachia.

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A DEFINITION OF AND INFORMATION ABOUT APPALACHIA 
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachia
..."While the Appalachian Mountains stretch from Belle Isle in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, to Cheaha Mountain in Alabama, Appalachia typically refers only to the cultural region of the central and southern portions of the range, from the Catskill Mountains of New York southwest to the Blue Ridge Mountains which run southwest from southern Pennsylvania to northern Georgia, and the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. In 2019, the region was home to an estimated 25.7 million people, of which roughly 81% are white.

[...]

Since Appalachia lacks definite physiographical or topographical boundaries, there has been some disagreement over what exactly the region encompasses. The most commonly used modern definition of Appalachia is the one initially defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission in 1965 and expanded over subsequent decades.[5] The region defined by the Commission currently includes 420 counties and eight independent cities in 13 states, including all 55 counties in West Virginia, 14 counties in New York, 52 in Pennsylvania, 32 in Ohio, 3 in Maryland, 54 in Kentucky, 25 counties and 8 cities in Virginia,[10] 29 in North Carolina, 52 in Tennessee, 6 in South Carolina, 37 in Georgia, 37 in Alabama, and 24 in Mississippi".

[...]

Culture

Ethnic groups

An estimated 90%[73] of Appalachia's earliest European settlers originated from the Anglo-Scottish border country…In America, these people are often grouped under the single name "Scotch-Irish" or "Scots-Irish". While various 20th century writers tried to associate Appalachia with Scottish highlanders, Highland Scots were a relatively insignificant percentage of the region's early European immigrants.[76]

Although Swedes and Finns formed only a tiny portion of the Appalachian settlers it was Swedish and Finnish settlers of New Sweden who brought the northern European woodsman skills such as log cabin construction which formed the basis of backwoods Appalachian material culture.[77]

Germans were a major pioneer group to migrate to Appalachia, settling mainly in western Pennsylvania and southwest Virginia. Smaller numbers of Germans were also among the initial wave of migrants to the southern mountains.[11]: 30–44  In the 19th century, Welsh immigrants were brought into the region for their mining and metallurgical expertise, and by 1900 over 100,000 Welsh immigrants were living in western Pennsylvania alone…

The coal mining and manufacturing boom in the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought large numbers of Italians and Eastern Europeans to Appalachia, although most of these families left the region when the Great Depression shattered the economy in the 1930s. African Americans have been present in the region since the 18th century, and currently make up 8% of the ARC-designated region, mostly concentrated in urban areas and former mining and manufacturing towns;[80] the African-American component of Appalachia is sometimes termed Affrilachia.[81]

Native Americans, the region's original inhabitants, are now only a small percentage of the region's present population, their most notable concentration being the reservation of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina. The Melungeons, a group of mixed African, European, and Native American ancestry, are scattered across northeastern Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, and southwestern Virginia.[82]

According to the American Factfinder's 2013 data, the Southern Appalachia has a white majority, comprising 84% of the population. African Americans are 7% and Hispanics or Latinos are 6% of the population. Asians and Pacific Islanders are 1.5% of the population. Although the counties have great differences among themselves, in terms of racial and ethnic diversity.[83]"...
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I added italics to highlight those sentences.

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ONLINE EXCERPTS ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE IN APPALACHIA

These excerpts are given in no particular order and are numbered for referencing purposes only.

EXCERPT #1
From https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2019/02/20/hidden-black-history-in-appalachia/ Hidden Black History in Appalachia by Jacqueline Clark PhD on February 20, 2019
"In February of 1926, Carter G. Woodson helped establish “Negro History Week” to educate teachers, students, and community members about the accomplishments and experiences of Blacks in the United States...

Nearly a century later, Black History is still at risk of erasure, especially in (once) geographically isolated areas, like Appalachia. The standard narrative that Scots-Irish “settled” Appalachia starting in the 18th century hides the fact that there were often violent interactions between European immigrants and indigenous people in the region. Even in the 1960s when authors like Michael Harrington and Harry Caudill reported on Appalachian mountain folk, the people were depicted as Scots-Irish descendants, known for being poor, lazy, and backward, representations that are reinforced in contemporary accounts of the region, such as J. D. Vance’s wildly popular memoir Hillbilly Elegy.

Accounts like these offer stereotypical understandings of poor Appalachian whites, and at the same time, they ignore the presence and experiences of Blacks in the region. Work by social scientists William Turner and Edward Cabell, as well as “Affrilachia” poet Frank X. Walker, and historian Elizabeth Catte attempts to remedy this problem, but the dominant narrative of the region centers still on poor whites and their lives.

[…]

So too are the stories of Blacks living in Appalachia today. Even though the number of African American residents has increased in some parts of  Appalachia, while the white population has decreased, little is formally documented about their lives. That absence has led scholar William Turner, to refer to Blacks in Appalachia as a “racial minority within a cultural minority.” Not only does erasing African Americans from the past and present of Appalachia provide an inaccurate view of the region, but it also minimizes the suffering of poor Blacks, who relative to their white counterparts, are and have been the poorest of an impoverished population.

Woodson established “Negro History Week” to document and share the history of Blacks in the United States, recognizing that, “If a race has no history, it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.” The history of African Americans in the Appalachian region is largely absent from the area’s official record, and without making it part of the dominant narrative, we risk losing that history.

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EXCERPT #2
From https://oxfordaasc.com/page/2527 "Featured Essay - African Americans in Appalachia" by Dr. Althea Webb, Assistant Professor of Education, Berea College
"Contrary to popular perception, Appalachia has always possessed significant and influential populations of color. The region, so named for the mountain range that runs through it from northeast Mississippi to southern New York, historically comprises three subdivisions—Northern, Southern, and Central—each with its own history of settlement and race relations. Indian nations, including the Cherokees, were the first peoples to inhabit the area, but by 1860 African Americans were approximately 10% of the population. There is, however, no one story of African Americans in Appalachia. Black Appalachians—like all Appalachians—have lived in rural settings as well as urban settings, and current residents may have come from families that settled in the mountains hundreds of years ago, while others are first generation migrants into the region.

As the first major mountain range west of the Atlantic coast, the Appalachian Mountains were the first "frontier." By the mid-1600s, explorers were trekking into the mountains and within fifty years, settlements had been permanently established by whites from England, Ireland, and Scotland. Many Appalachian people trace their heritage to the Scots-Irish, immigrants who lived in the border regions of northern Ireland before coming to America early in the 18th century. As whites moved into the mountains so did free and enslaved Africans. After the Revolutionary War, Union officers were given land grants in the largely uninhabited Central Appalachian area, mostly in what is now West Virginia. As white settlers demanded more land, however, the native peoples were forced to move west,a policy well underway by the time of the infamous Indian Removal Act of 1830 enacted by President Andrew Jackson.

In the early years of settlement, whites, Indians, and African Americans lived in close proximity to each other, and later generations included multiracial and multiethnic people; the Melungeons, a group thought to have European, Native American, and African ancestry, were identified in Central Appalachia early in the 19th century. Additionally, the lives of African American and white Appalachians were intertwined socially and culturally. The most obvious representation of this syncretism is the banjo, a central instrument in traditional mountain music that originated in Africa.

Enslavement in Appalachia varied according to regions. Elite Cherokee people held Africans in enslavement in the Southern Appalachia region, but the topography did not lend itself to the large plantation systems found in the lowlands of the Deep South. In the southern region, non-slave holders were in the majority, and the area also contained a large number of landless whites. Indeed, Appalachia was once thought to be an area that abhorred slavery, although recently scholars have documented the complex nature of slavery in the Mountain South. Like the nation as a whole, Appalachia was equally divided by Civil War loyalties. Northern Appalachians joined the Union, Southern Appalachians joined the Confederacy and those in the Central Appalachian area were at a crossroads. Two years after Virginia voted to join the Confederacy,mountaineers in the west and southwest areas of Virginia formed West Virginia as an independent state and joined the Union. There was an active Underground Railroad running through Appalachia from Chattanooga to Pennsylvania .

[…]

No number of age-old stereotypes can erase the fact that, Appalachia, distinctive as it is, has never been a region that is lily white. History reveals that Appalachia has always had a racially and ethnically diverse population that has been significant and influential. Migration and mobility has shifted patterns of diversity within sub-regions and particular counties, but many areas recall traditions of inclusive collaboration unlikely to have taken hold outside the mountains. Indeed, while some areas today are largely white, the collective memory of a county may reveal a vastly different history."
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No publishing date is given for this article. However, 2004 is the latest date for books in the recommended reading section.

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