Reformers to Radicals (10 page)

Encouraging people to do “what they need to do” was the purpose of an Appalachian Volunteers organizational meeting held at the Pine Mountain Settlement School at the end of January 1964. Of the nineteen colleges invited, representatives of sixteen attended. The meeting's agenda endorsed a permanent regional organization of student volunteers and proposed short- and long-term plans for the newly formed organization. On the basis of the favorable results of the initial school renovation project, the participants decided to continue working to improve the physical conditions
of the one- and two-room schools throughout the region. However, the Council of the Southern Mountains felt that school refurbishing was not enough, and it argued for a program of curriculum enrichment. Academic enrichment was just as important as schoolhouse improvements. Interesting activities, the CSM reasoned, would attract the community's school-age children and, perhaps, encourage them to complete their education. Thus, in addition to its plans to offer through its enrichment program health education and recreational activities, the CSM hoped to bring in foreign exchange students who attended nearby colleges, such as the University of Kentucky, to describe what life was like outside the United States. While its long-term vision essentially remained limited to school-based programs, the Council did make a few minor adjustments. For example, it included tutors for adults as well as children and Volunteer-operated bookmobiles in its plans. In time, the Council hoped to develop, in conjunction with local leaders, a total community development program that would include public health and sanitation components. Perhaps as a result of the successful school repair project, the participants at Pine Mountain further suggested that students could also help homeowners repair their houses.
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Organization and recruitment of the actual volunteers was also important. CSM leaders determined that each college should have a campus chapter of the Appalachian Volunteers. Most probably, they based this idea on an organization already in existence at Berea College—Campus Action for Mountain Progress (CAMP). Concerned Berea College students had created CAMP during the spring semester of 1960 in order “to aid in motivating economic, educational, and recreational development in Southern Appalachia; to study specific problems concerning the mountain region; and to render services whenever possible to civic and religious organizations interested in the mountain region.” This purpose, CAMP believed, was very similar to the purpose of Berea College (and, of course, the Council of the Southern Mountains), which was to “contribut[e] to the spiritual and material welfare of the mountain region of the South.” Economic conditions were so severe in the Southern mountains, CAMP maintained, that its organization was needed and would exist for a long time.
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Led by future Appalachian Volunteer staff member Phil Conn, CAMP was one of the more active clubs on the Berea College campus. Representatives of the organization had attended the annual conference of the Council
of the Southern Mountains in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in early 1963, and, in October of that year, Ayer urged the CSM's Youth Committee to advocate the creation of CAMP chapters on all the college campuses in and near the southern Appalachian region. CAMP members had also initiated a clothing drive for the victims of floods in eastern Kentucky, working closely with the Council of the Southern Mountains when it came time to distribute what they had collected. All things considered, this was the most likely organization for the CSM to use as a model for its campus chapters.
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About two months later, on March 14, 1964, the Appalachian Volunteers became official with the adoption of a set of bylaws at the second organizational meeting, held in Berea. According to those bylaws, the AVs' goals reflected the country's assumptions about welfare, dependency, and pluralism. First, the Volunteers wanted to “involve the citizens of the region in the process of meeting community needs by providing capable and highly motivated people to assist in projects in areas such as education, health, recreation, and human welfare.” Second, they hoped to establish an organizational base “through which students can assist their fellow citizens.” These two goals made possible the third: “to initiate programs which look to lasting solutions of the region's problems.” Milton Ogle, who became the CSM's Appalachian Volunteer program director in 1964, condensed the mission of the nascent reform organization into basic terms when he stated: “Deprived people cannot be helped; they must help themselves.”
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With the creation of a program that so dramatically put into practice the conception of self-help on the local level, the Council further ingratiated itself with the nation's leaders. Even before that first meeting at Pine Mountain had concluded, both the head of the Small Business Administration and President Johnson expressed their support for the antipoverty program. “Your goals,” Johnson stated in a telegram to Ogle, “to involve the residents of the region in the development process; to provide a vehicle through which students and others can help those in need; and to demonstrate to the nation the efficiency of the self help process . . . are most gratifying to me.” The president also implored Ogle to take control of the efforts to end poverty in Appalachia: “I am looking to you for leadership in demonstrating new and creative ways of using volunteers to help relieve conditions of rural poverty, . . . teaching, providing recreational outlets, better health facilities, helping prevent . . . entry into poverty.” While the work
already completed in Harlan County impressed the chief executive, more astonishing in his eyes was the inclusion of “the vigor and idealism of youth . . . in a great cooperative effort of public and private agencies.”
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Fortunately for the Council, Johnson's support was not limited to rhetoric. On the contrary, the president followed his words with funds. Even prior to the formation of the OEO, the Council's AV effort received $50,000, spread over a six-month period, from the ARA. Private funding for the AV effort also materialized. That same year, the Ford Foundation issued a grant of over $33,000 to the CSM for “special projects” that would be conducted by the Appalachian Volunteers in the many one-room schools in the Southern mountains. These projects included adult education, tutoring, and scholarships designed to help poor mountain children stay in school. The foundation also provided Ogle and the CSM's Appalachian Volunteer program with about $2,000 in administrative funds. With this money, Ogle could defray the cost of recruiting college volunteers and help pay the salary of a field director.
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A brief examination of a few of the activities funded by the Ford Foundation provides a revealing glimpse into how the Council's Appalachian Volunteer project implemented the philosophy that guided its first two years. In Pike County, Kentucky, for example, the Council undertook an adult education program in cooperation with the county school superintendent's office. In addition to its standard instructional aspects, the program contained a motivational component. That is, the CSM hoped “to induce in the adults the desire to learn and become aware of the value of education.” It articulated an identical goal for a project in Bledsoe County, Tennessee. Similarly, in Blackey, Letcher County, Kentucky, and Dry Creek, Raleigh County, West Virginia, the Council sought, through adult education and preschool programs, to foster “interest in education” in adults and “stimulate the learning desire” in children.
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This attempt to alter the mountaineers' values—instilling in them an interest in and a desire for education—clearly exposes the culture of poverty model underlying the Volunteers' efforts in the early 1960s. It was not so much that the mountaineers lacked a proper education as that they placed no value on learning. This, more than anything else, was what the Appalachian Volunteers hoped to change.

Included in the Ford Foundation program was funding for the placement
of an American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)–VISA volunteer in Clay and Harlan counties, Kentucky. Under the VISA (Voluntary International Service Assignment) program, volunteers agreed to serve for a certain period of time (usually a year) in an underdeveloped foreign country. It is interesting that eastern Kentucky qualified for the AFSC-VISA program. Prior to the arrival of the VISA volunteer, two Council-sponsored volunteers visited Mill Creek, Clay County. The Council had high hopes for the Mill Creek project. In their report to the Ford Foundation, the CSM's leaders referred to it as the “demonstration project for the Appalachian Volunteers.”
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Fortunately, much of the record of the Mill Creek project is extant. Rather than revealing an exemplary project, however, that record shows one replete with confusion and conflict. While the friction remained relatively minor, the project should have served as a cautionary tale for the AVs' leaders.

The Council leaders chose Mill Creek because not one of its seventy adult residents had finished high school. Further, of the twenty-five children in the town under the age of sixteen, the CSM reported, most were two to five years behind their grade level. Complicating matters was the status of the teachers. According to Milton Ogle, who presented the Mill Creek proposal to the CSM and the Ford Foundation, all the teachers either had emergency certificates (teaching licenses usually given to less than fully qualified individuals to fill a position in a school where no regular teacher worked) or held regular certificates that had long ago expired. To remedy this deplorable situation, Ogle proposed that the CSM's nascent AV-VISA project “bring to the community through Audio Visual Aids and a wide selection of books and records a modern educational experience that goes far beyond anything that has been attempted in a similar Eastern Kentucky community.” To supplement the academic effort, Ogle scheduled field trips to the state capitol at Frankfort, a manufacturing plant, and a state park. Organizations such as Berea College and the Kentucky Library Extension Service had already donated recordings and players, books, and films to the project. Rounding out the effort, a business in Manchester, the county seat, purchased basketballs and goals for the recreation portion of the project, and local families agreed to house the volunteers. Ogle requested that the Ford Foundation provide the last piece of the puzzle—$775 for the volunteers' living expenses, school supplies (paper, paint, modeling clay), and
field trip costs. The foundation readily obliged, and, in early June 1964, the Appalachian Volunteers established a permanent presence in eastern Kentucky.
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For the two CSM-sponsored AVs, the Mill Creek assignment began on June 8, 1964, and would last until the end of August. Throughout the summer, the Volunteers busied themselves with programs that would, they believed, end the mountaineers' cycle of poverty, namely, running a summer school and leading field trips designed to broaden the experience of the impoverished mountain children. For example, during the week of June 15, 1964, a group of youngsters traveled to Frankfort to meet Governor Edward Breathitt. According to the AVs, this was the first time that many of them had been out of Clay County. Indicating support for the program, Breathitt praised the Appalachian Volunteers for turning their attention toward what really was the “primary target” in the fight against poverty, Appalachia's human resources.
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The idea of broadening the experiences of isolated mountain children found adherents throughout the United States. One fervent supporter, Jack Ciaccio, an official in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare who later joined the OEO, asked the AVs to establish an out-of-town educational camp for the Mill Creek children. Flem Messer, a Clay County native and Volunteer staff member who helped organize the Mill Creek project, objected. Interestingly, Messer grounded his opposition to Ciaccio's suggestion in the culture of the mountaineers. Implying the stereotypical clannishness and aversion to modern ways commonly associated with rural Appalachians, he noted: “I doubt if half of the parents who need to send their children [to the educational camp] would do so, especially if this means sending them to Lexington or other areas any distance from home.” Just as important, he argued, if the children's educational experiences removed them from their community, “there would not be enough opportunity to deal with the parents and change their attitude [toward education].” “The parents,” he concluded, “need to be able to participate and change as their children do.”
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Volunteers certainly tried to generate and maintain interest in the project among the parents. In at least one volunteer's eye, however, a cultural and generational gap was always present. “The parents were very cooperative,” claimed the AV. “They might not have understood the things I did,
and sometimes they found them strange, but they were tolerant. . . . And we talked—
talking takes them out of their environment and gets them interested in the world
.” Children, on the other hand, openly embraced the Volunteers' effort. Nevertheless, this did not make the job less challenging. Calling the children “healthy, intelligent, and enthusiastic,” that same volunteer reported that “they responded extremely well” to the lessons offered in the summer school. Yet there were “so many things they didn't know
because of their way of life
.”
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As these statements reveal, overcoming the deficiencies of the mountaineers was as much the goal of the summer Appalachian Volunteers as was the purely educational effort.

Despite the tremendous cultural obstacles encountered, the Council of the Southern Mountains presented the summer portion of the Mill Creek project to the public as an overwhelming success. Covering the venture for the
Louisville Courier-Journal
, the reporter Jim Hampton recognized that a project such as this was difficult to assess because it produced few immediate results. Rather, the significance would not be felt for some time and would come from the “young minds brought alive, stirring from the lethargy induced by an existence circumscribed by the hills that surround Kentucky's countless Mill Creeks.” In the end, it was the Appalachian Volunteers who “kindled the imaginations” of these poor mountain children. Moreover, the AVs pulled back the veil of “isolation and poverty” that kept the “settlement locked . . . in the mold of yesterday.” In this way, the Volunteers' summer school was “unique among the efforts being made to lift Appalachia out of backwardness.”
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