“We Are Not Anti-White, but We Are Pro-Black”: Black Power and the Black Appalachian Commission, 1969–74

In 1974, when Jack Guillebeaux, executive director of the Black Appalachian Commission (BAC), was asked about building coalitions with white organizations within Appalachia, he responded, “We are not anti-white, but we are pro-black.” Based on the size of the Black Appalachian population within a predominantly white region, Guillebeaux regarded “coalition politics essential.” He added, however, that doing so for the BAC would have to be “from a position of strength.” Black Appalachians had to organize themselves, build their own institutions, identify their own needs, and control their own resources. This was something the BAC, a grassroots organization, had been engaged in since its founding in 1969. Before it set out to build coalitions with white organizations, it concerned itself with building coalitions amongst Black communities across state lines in order to build a movement that put the priorities of Black people at its center. By taking a pro-Black stance, the BAC was engaged in building Black Power in Appalachia.

During the late 1960s and 1970s, the BAC advanced Black Power in Appalachia. Created out of the Black campus movement at Berea College, the BAC began as a commission of a larger white regional organization, then separated to become an independent Black-led institution. In 1971 it organized the first Black Appalachian regional conference with two-hundred attendees, and incorporated to become a public non-profit with Black board members from eleven of the thirteen Appalachian states. In 1972, the organization began advocating for community control and self-determination. It published a regional publication to build Black consciousness and a sense of a shared regional and racial solidarity, and advocated for the creation of what it called an Appalachian Black Agenda. Their story highlights the importance of addressing the history of internal racial politics in Appalachia and the ways Black Appalachians purposely developed Black organizations.