By Mike Templeton
While the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition Blog works hard to cover a wide range of events, ideas, artists and writers, and cultural activities, an original goal of UACC is to advocate on behalf of urban Appalachians. In the coming weeks, we will be presenting some of the major projects in urban Appalachian advocacy. To kick this off, it seems interesting and worthwhile to look at some of the earliest days of urban Appalachian advocacy.
Core member Michael Maloney’s recent review of Max Fraser’s Hillbilly Highway directly references the earliest days of urban Appalachian advocacy in Cincinnati. It was the 1953 conference among members of Cincinnati City officials in the form of the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee (MFRC; subsequently the Cincinnati Human Relations Committee), representatives from Berea College and the Appalachian Fund, and the Ford Foundation in which the issue of Appalachian migrants was first addressed. Maloney explained that this was the moment when the idea of the urban Appalachian was first identified. and the earliest suggestions as to how to help these recent migrants to the city were first put forth. Cincinnati was and remains a kind of symbolic center of urban Appalachia—it was here that people from within the urban Appalachian community first became active in setting a course for how to help our own people.
I spoke at length with Mike Maloney about what we might call the pre-history of urban Appalachian advocacy, and it is indeed a swirl of activity. It is difficult to draw a straight line with these activities because there was no line for anyone to follow in the 1950’s when this work began. The work with the MFRC more or less set the ball in motion, but these early days did not include people from within the Appalachian migrant community. Stuart Faber, who was then with the Appalachian Fund associated with Berea College, became a good friend of the Urban Appalachian Council. He carried a good deal of influence, but the prospect of being represented by what we would soon call urban Appalachians had not yet emerged.
To give you a sense of the gravity of what was at stake, Fraser describes this meeting in an article from The Atlantic: “In April 29, 1954, a cross section of Cincinnati’s municipal bureaucracy—joined by dozens of representatives drawn from local employers, private charities, the religious community, and other corners of the city establishment—gathered at the behest of the mayor’s office to discuss a new problem confronting the city. Or, rather, about 50,000 new problems, give or take. That was roughly the number of Cincinnati residents who had recently migrated to the city from the poorest parts of southern Appalachia.” The city, and urban Appalachians all knew that the social and cultural definitions of the city had changed. These changes were in fact coming to define urban areas all over the Midwest and parts of the eastern United States.
As Mike Maloney explained, “Stuart Faber was on our side, and he eventually became a mentor to Ernie Mynatt,” who was a founder of the Urban Appalachian Council and the Main Street Bible Center before it. “There were others in our camp, but in those days we had no one from within the community.”
Soon Ernie Mynatt, Mike Maloney, and others began working within the neighborhoods to bring needed services to urban Appalachians. What had become clear, and Fraser and others talk about this at length, is that the new migrant population from the southern mountains were great people, they were known to work hard, and they clearly had much to contribute to the city. But they were struggling with things like assimilating to midwestern middle-class values and habits, and this marked them for discrimination.
Urban Appalachian scholars Philip Obermiller and Thomas Wagner explain that both the general population and even civic leaders tended to “discriminate against Appalachian migrants in the areas of education, health care, housing, public services, and civic life.” Mike Maloney told me that there were people from within city council and academia who advocated sending Appalachian youth to the military or back to the mountains. What was needed was a coherent and unified voice of advocacy from within the urban Appalachian population. This came with the emerging centers of community life.
Ernie Mynatt and others founded the Main Street Bible Center in 1963. This became a hub of activity for urban Appalachian advocacy. Ernie Mynatt worked directly with urban Appalachian youth while our own Mike Maloney began the arduous processes of working with civic leaders and educational programs to bring help to the urban Appalachian population.
The migrants from the hills had, at this point, fully emerged as a unique demographic group. All of this activity in the 1960s happened to coincide with the War on Poverty which would both complicate things and shine a national light on the Appalachian migration. Maloney told me, “the War on Poverty came to Cincinnati in 1965, but the Appalachian neighborhoods were left out due to regulations pertaining to household marital status.” While on the one hand, the great social movements of the 1960s served to benefit urban Appalachians, on the other hand, as an invisible minority, the urban Appalachian populations were easily overlooked. Still, as the urban Appalachian populations vied with the urban Black population for recognition and services, this tended to unify these two groups more than it divided them. The cooperation between the Black communities and urban Appalachian communities is a long-standing tradition.
After his wanderings in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Michael Maloney learned community organizing skills, he returned to Cincinnati at the behest of Frank Foster and began unifying an Appalachian voice. A position was created for him to help organize local neighborhood communities around the needs of the urban Appalachian populations. Ernie Mynatt’s work had found support from the Appalachian Fund, with the help of Stuart Faber, as its own organization. By 1968, Mynatt had secured substantial grant funding for work in Over-the-Rhine, and the various bible centers had become independently operating centers of community support.
By 1974, the Urban Appalachian Council was formed, with the Appalachian Identity Center, the program Ernie Mynatt had led, becoming one of its programs. With that we enter the period in which urban Appalachian advocacy was in full swing. This early work was of the kind that grabs headlines. In the 1990s, UAC formed the Lower Price Hill Taks Force to battle with Queen City Barrel and other industries over the poisoning of urban Appalachian neighborhoods. Advocacy was also something that went on quietly behind the scenes. Adult education centers sprung up in the Appalachian neighborhoods to help people obtain their GEDs and to help decrease high school dropout rates among urban Appalachian youth. UAC and its affiliated community organizing groups worked to feed urban children who did not have access to healthy food. Even things like voter registration drives were a part of the work.
Nearly all of this continues to this day with the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition’s network of organizational and individual advocates. Urban Appalachians have come to redefine greater Cincinnati in the best ways. Urban Appalachians are cultural leaders, that much is certain, but we are also part of the way the City of Cincinnati defines itself. No longer just the outsiders from the southern mountains, urban Appalachians are now integral threads of the tapestry of life in our city.
Works Referenced in the Article:
Fraser, Max. “How the Hillbillies Remade America.” The Atlantic Magazine. November 19, 2023. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/liberals-lost-white-working-class-voters/676012/.
Obermiller, Phillip J., and Thomas E. Wagner. “Appalachian Movements.” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, vol. 118, no. 1, 2020, pp. 67–94.
Michael Templeton is a writer, and independent scholar. He is the author of The Chief of Birds: A Memoir published with Erratum Press and Impossible to Believe, forthcoming from Iff Books. He is also the author of Collected Apoems, forthcoming from LJMcD Communications and the awaiting of awaiting: a novella, forthcoming from Nut Hole Publishing. Check out his profile in UACC’s Cultural Directory. He has published numerous articles and essays on contemporary culture and works of creative non-fiction as well as experimental works and poetry. He lives in West Milton, Ohio with his wife who is an artist.