Uneven Ground (6 page)

Adjustment to life in the city, however, was not easy for many migrants. Living conditions varied from the cramped and decaying apartment buildings of the ghettos to the rows of working-class bungalows in industrial districts. New arrivals often crowded together with relatives until they could secure jobs and save enough money to set up housekeeping. Some inner-city landlords refused to rent to “hillbillies,”
and those who did charged high rents for poor accommodations. In the Uptown slums of Chicago's north side, for example, as many as seventy thousand Appalachians crowded together in deteriorating brick and gray stone apartment buildings that lined streets cluttered with abandoned cars and littered with trash and broken bottles.
²⁴

One West Virginia reporter described the “hostile world” that awaited mountain families in the Windy City. “Many migrants arrive in Chicago with only a worn out car,” he wrote. Needing cash to pay the rent and buy food, they were forced to take jobs as day laborers for agencies that “keep 40 percent of their pay as a fee,” and they had little choice but to seek housing in the most dilapidated buildings. A typical unit was home to a family that had recently moved to Chicago to find work: “Their halls, dirty and smelling of urine, are like dimly lit caves. Rotting wooden steps lead to the fourth floor, one bedroom apartment without window screens where a former Kanawha County woman, her husband and five children live.” Such apartments, he added, rented for thirty dollars a week and were surrounded by “buildings with their windows boarded up (what miners called Eisenhower curtains).” Drawn to Chicago by the hope for employment, these families found only “an unfriendly world of disappointment.”
²⁵

Those who were fortunate enough to find steady jobs often relocated to working-class neighborhoods near the factories where homes could be bought on a land contract with little money down. These communities were cleaner and less violent and offered a better environment to raise children. In these working-class neighborhoods, mountain migrants could listen to familiar music in hillbilly bars and attend revivals in evangelical churches that had followed their flocks to the North. Some of the middle-class and more educated migrants established formal social clubs that sponsored dinners, dances, and other activities. Usually named for the state from which the migrants had come, as in the cases of the West Virginia Society and the Eastern Kentucky Social Club, these clubs helped to ease assimilation into urban culture while preserving the memory of home.

Appalachian migrants everywhere met with resistance and prejudice from the local population. Pejorative stereotypes of Appalachia as a backward and degenerate place had become part of the national popular
conception of the region since the turn of the century, and these negative images followed mountain migrants to the cities.
²⁶
Urban dwellers were quick to identify the newcomers as “hillbillies,” a term that they applied to anyone from the rural South, and they were threatened both by the ever growing numbers of migrants and by their apparent cultural differences. Convinced that Appalachians were ignorant, lazy, unclean, and sometimes immoral, community leaders bemoaned their arrival as “a sore to the city and a plague to themselves” and blamed them for rising crime, congestion, and a host of other urban maladies. “In my opinion they are worse than the colored,” complained a Chicago police captain. “They are vicious and knife happy. . . . I can't say this publicly, but you'll never improve the neighborhood until you get rid of them.”
²⁷

Using imagery similar to that applied to other migrant populations, especially African Americans from the Deep South, northerners developed a repertoire of ethnic hillbilly jokes that reflected deep-seated fears and a misunderstanding of mountain culture. Many of the jokes poked fun at the lack of education, sophistication, and resources of mountain migrants; others cruelly implied immorality and ignorance. One popular midwestern story, for example, involved a fundamentalist preacher who had moved to Cincinnati: “Did you know that the old country preacher was arrested? Yes, he was arrested for polluting the Ohio River. . . . He was baptizing hillbillies in the river.”
²⁸
Southern Appalachian migrants became known across the Midwest by a number of derogatory labels, including SAMs, hillbillies, snakes, briar hoppers, and ridge runners.

Though black migrants from the South experienced discrimination in part because of race and class, the predominantly white Appalachian migrants suffered discrimination primarily because of cultural differences—or at least what were perceived to be differences—that were rooted in class.
²⁹
Speech patterns, clothing, diet, religious practices, and even the closeness of the Appalachian family seemed to set the migrants apart from other urbanites. Frequent trips back home slowed their assimilation into urban communities and reinforced the image that they were only temporary residents. Indeed, some migrants returned to the mountains as soon as they had earned enough money
in the city to keep them going in the rural area for a few months, only to return again when that money was depleted.
³⁰
Such patterns of movement frustrated landlords and employers alike and contributed to an image of the mountain migrants as irresponsible.

The values and cultural assumptions of many migrants conflicted with the modern definitions of success commonly found among the urban middle class. Describing migrants in Cincinnati in 1956, Roscoe Giffin observed, “There is reason to believe that the way of life of southern mountain people is marked by a strong tendency simply to accept one's environment as it is rather than to strive for mastery over it.” This, he added, led to “a lack of strong identification with urban goals and standards of achievement.”
³¹
According to commentators such as Giffin, Appalachian migrants tended to keep to themselves, to distrust public officials and government organizations, and to neglect education. They valued family and kinship ties over work and appeared to be less competitive, less anxious for advancement, and less aggressive than their northern neighbors.
³²
“They don't consider work to be the fundamental purpose of their lives,” observed one reporter. “They are as indifferent to politics as they are to making money.”
³³

Nowhere were these cultural conflicts more apparent than in the schools. Opportunities for formal education were limited in the mountains, and there were few incentives for the children of coal miners to complete school. Consequently, some migrant families placed little value on school attendance and performance. In the mountains, children were given greater freedom to roam and play with friends, but in city streets and schools, such activities led to trouble and delinquency. Appalachian children often lagged behind fellow students in academic achievement and were shy and reticent in the classroom. Many urban teachers had difficulty understanding Appalachian dialects and knew little of mountain culture and heritage, except for popular stereotypes. Students were quick to recognize condescension toward themselves, their families, and their culture. Parents had little experience with bureaucracies and were reluctant to become involved in the schools and in community improvement organizations. It is not surprising that dropout rates were higher among Appalachian students than among other urban groups.
³⁴

Nevertheless, despite economic and cultural barriers, a majority of migrants eventually made successful transitions to urban life. Those same factors that made them different in the new setting—cultural traditions and strong family ties—also provided strength and support to overcome adversity. Migrants who brought higher levels of education or some technical skills to the city were among the first to achieve stable employment and upward mobility. In time, thousands of fellow migrants followed them into the middle-class suburbs, becoming part of a growing, invisible minority of urban Appalachians. A study of West Virginia migrants in Cleveland in the mid-1960s found more former mountain residents living in the suburbs than in the Appalachian ghetto.
³⁵
Certainly the folks back home in the mountains were conscious of this success, since they continued to leave for the cities in growing numbers.

It was the inner-city ghettos, however, that attracted the attention of journalists and drew the concern of local officials and social welfare professionals to the plight of the Appalachian migrants. As early as the 1950s, some urban governments began to organize special study commissions and to hold workshops to address the problems created by the great migration. In 1954, for example, the Mayor's Friendly Relations Committee and the Social Service Association of Greater Cincinnati sponsored a special workshop that focused on migrants in that city. The workshop was attended by over two hundred social workers, teachers, personnel managers, city officials, and church and civic leaders and featured a lecture on the southern Appalachian people by a sociology professor from Berea College.
³⁶

Near the end of the decade, the Council of the Southern Mountains (CSM), a Berea-based association of educators and social workers, began to hold workshops in cities across the Midwest to help northern professionals “gain a better understanding of the mountain people and their background.” With funding from the Ford Foundation, the council established a network of civic leaders from Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Akron, Columbus, Dayton, and Cincinnati who traveled to Berea for a three-week training course and a tour of the region. These efforts not only helped to organize programs to improve the “urban adjustment of southern Appalachian migrants” but increasingly
drew national attention to the worsening economic crisis in the mountains.
³⁷

As larger numbers of families joined the exodus from Appalachia, community leaders, educators, and politicians in the region began to struggle with the loss of population and deteriorating economic conditions. The emigration of young adults that began during the war reached its peak in the 1950s, when more than a million people left the region. Rural communities throughout the mountains experienced population decline, but the losses in central Appalachia were especially severe. Eastern Kentucky suffered a loss of a quarter of a million residents in the 1940s, and West Virginia exceeded this number over the next decade with a net loss of more than 400,000 residents. Together the two states lost 1.2 million people between 1940 and 1960. The losses during the 1950s in Appalachian Kentucky accounted for almost 35 percent of the population in eastern Kentucky. The loss rate in West Virginia was more than 25 percent.
³⁸

The rates of population decline were even more alarming given the traditionally high birth rates in Appalachia and the expanding population in the rest of the country. Birth rates in the mountains had long exceeded the national average. Throughout most of the first half of the twentieth century, natural population increases had helped to balance emigration, but in 1957 birth rates in southern Appalachia began to decline. By 1960 migration out of the region exceeded the natural increase by more than 12 percent, and in Kentucky the figure was almost 50 percent. Nor was the population decline of the 1950s limited to rural areas, as it had been in the 1940s. Appalachian small towns and growth centers such as Huntington, Charleston, Knoxville, and Asheville also lost population during a decade when other metropolitan areas in the United States were growing and the national population increased by almost 20 percent.
³⁹

The movement of people out of Appalachia was a symptom of the deeper economic and social problems that had settled over the region in the years since the Depression. The mechanization of coal mining displaced thousands of families in the coalfields, but unemployment, poverty, and welfare dependence became a way of life in communities throughout the region. The decline of farming, for example, pushed
families off the land across most of Appalachia. Mountain agriculture had languished since the turn of the century, when industrialization altered traditional land use practices and local market patterns. After the war, this decline continued at an even more rapid pace. Between 1950 and 1960, half of the farmers and farm laborers in Appalachia left the land. By the end of the decade, only about 6 percent of the mountain population was employed full time in agriculture.
⁴⁰

The loss of the farm population in the 1950s completed the region's transformation to public work that had begun at the turn of the century. The number of full-time farmers was drastically reduced as some people fled the region and others searched for part-time work off the farm. With the coming of consumer society and the emergence of national marketing networks, many of the familiar elements of the old family farm were replaced by symbols of the new age. Orchards and beehives, mules and milk cows gave way to store-bought goods, tractors, trucks, and automobiles. The once prominent livestock industry all but disappeared with the elimination of woodlands for pasturage as a result of mining, logging, and absentee land ownership. Now more dependent on row cropping, most mountain farms were unable to compete with larger, flatland farms for national markets.

In 1954 only one in three Appalachian farms had running water and indoor plumbing, but over half had access to an automobile, and 92 percent had electricity. Because the mountain terrain was less conducive to the operation of tractors and other modern farm machinery, only about a third of the farms had tractors. The primary cash crop in many mountain counties was tobacco, which was labor intensive and could be raised on an acre or two of bottomland, but even this crop was dependent on government quotas to maintain market prices. The average southern Appalachian farm at midcentury contained less than eighty-one acres, with only fifteen acres of productive cropland. In the more rugged areas, from southern West Virginia through western North Carolina, the average was less than fifty-five acres.
⁴¹