From Berea to Junaluska:
Challenges to the Appalachian War on Poverty
“Never saw an organization,” Loyal Jones, director of the Council of the Southern Mountains (CSM), the official antipoverty agency in Appalachia, reputedly exclaimed following the organization’s 1969 Fontana, North Carolina conference, “with so much wrong with it that people fought to be part of it.” That sentiment, according to one Appalachian, “… summed it all up just right.” Speaking before the CSM’s 1970 Lake Junaluska gathering, this same individual turned the tables on Jones and contended that “[t]he sharpness of the anger, frustration, sorrow, joy obscured the fact that people, ordinary people, poor people, plain people, … began to take the CSM, not seriously, not ambitiously, maybe not even hopefully, but as their own.”[1] In short, what Jones saw as problems, others identified as the chance to overhaul and remake the CSM.
By 1970, many people in what was becoming a “new” CSM had rejected the “cooperative” Council model “because of its role in the sixties as facilitator of other people’s programs… especially the government’s antipoverty programs.”[2] In its place, these people hoped to raise an organization that was increasing controlled by and responsive to mountain people. Combining a number of critiques, both of the War on Poverty and state and local officials, those Appalachians that “took over” the Council reconfigured the organization in ways that augmented local control, but also led to its demise in 1989. This essay will examine the growth of opposition within the Appalachian War on Poverty.
[1] Junaluska Speech, April 25, 1970, Council of the Southern Mountains Records, 1970-1989, Southern Appalachian Archives, Hutchins Library, Berea College.
[2] Quote in “Introduction: History and Description of CSM and Mountain Life and Work” ca 1983, Council of the Southern Mountains Papers, 1970-1989.