Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation

Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation. Edited by John C. Inscoe. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. 330 pp. $34.95. ISBN 0-8131-2173-6.

For most Americans myth and stereotype define Appalachia as a region and its residents as a people. Since the late nineteenth century, travelers, local colorists, reformers, and even missionaries described the mountain South as an isolated, benighted place populated by a culturally backward people. In the American imagination mountaineers were chronically impoverished, lazy, and prone to violence. And, despite the region's ethnic and cultural diversity, they were viewed as being exclusively white. Since the 1960s scholars have successfully separated myth from historical reality, but notions about the region's whiteness remain in both popular and scholarly circles. This collection of essays challenges long-standing assumptions about race as a force in Appalachian history and suggests several avenues of inquiry for a better understanding of this much-maligned American region.

In his introduction Inscoe notes that the lack of research on race in Appalachia is curious given the fact that Carter G. Woodson, the founder of African American history, was a native West Virginian who authored an important essay on slavery in the region in 1916. Despite an absence in the historical literature, Inscoe argues that race has played an integral part in Appalachian history. Slavery played a surprising role in shaping mountain life during the antebellum period. The institution was important economically but in ways different from regions of the South where King Cotton reigned supreme. Although some used slaves in agriculture, mountain slave owners put slaves to other uses. David Williams shows that slaves were essential to gold mining in north Georgia, and John E. Stealey III argues that the success of the salt industry in West Virginia rested on slave labor. Such work opened opportunities for Appalachian slaves not shared by their fellow bondsmen further south. According to Charles B. Dew, a slave forgeman in the Virginia mountains named Sam Williams used his skill and unique relationship with his master to earn money, purchase goods, and carve out a better life for himself and his family despite his bondage. The presence of slaves also created opportunities for cultural exchange. In her innovative essay Cecilia Conoway argues that the interaction between blacks and whites before the Civil War gave rise to widespread playing of the banjo, an instrument most commonly associated with mountain music.

Freedom posed new challenges to mountain people of both races. In the collection's strongest new contribution, Jennifer Lund Smith found that Appalachian communities offered former slaves unique opportunities to capitalize on their freedom. Choosing cooperation over confrontation, African Americans in Lumpkin County, Georgia, "used the paternalistic ethos of the white elite to their advantage," thereby guaranteeing their children an education and themselves an important place in the local political and economic system (p. 220). But the interracial cooperation in north Georgia was not matched in all mountain communities after the Civil War. W. Fitzhugh Brundage notes that the region was "neither blessed by exceptionally benign race relations nor cursed by implacable race hatred" (p. 302). Instead, late-nineteenth-century race relations in Appalachia followed a very southern pattern. Lynchings and other forms of racial violence arose as reactions to the modernization of the social, political, and economic orders.

This collection has many strengths. It assembles in a single volume the most important research published on black Appalachians in the last thirty years. But this strength is also a weakness. Only three of these essays have not been previously published. This small amount of new research might have been problematic if the essays Inscoe selected had been of inferior quality. They are not. This collection summarizes a generation's worth of writing on the black experience in the mountain South and serves as an agenda for future scholarship. It also continues a recent scholarly trend of deemphasizing Appalachian exceptionalism. Moreover, Inscoe's excellent introduction places the essays in context of Appalachian and African American historiography. As the essays suggest, race has long been an important theme in the history of Appalachia, a fact scholars are finally realizing.

RICHARD D. STARNES

Western Carolina University

Copyright University of Alabama Press Oct 2002
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