Fighters on Blair Mountain

The security alarm has been sounding a low, pleading beep for the last twelve hours. “Meeeeeer meeeeer meeeeer.” On battery power, it called out through the night and into this morning like a lovelorn cicada that doesn’t know when to stop.

The stove and microwave are down. There’s no air conditioning, and today promises to top 100 degrees. No lights. No hot water. No refrigeration. My computer has some charge left. Otherwise, our house has been rendered pre-industrial.

Sitting shirtless in my den, worrying about my ice cream, I am acutely aware of coal. It’s so easy to take it for granted or blame it for ills—climate change, black lung, soot—but right now, I’d trade my dog for a little bit of its juice.

Coal still provides half of our power in the United States, and I don’t have to tell ya’ll what it means to the Appalachian South. For nearly three centuries, an army of miners has burrowed into our mountainsides to carve it out. Entire towns have risen and fallen around these operations. Recent generations have been fed off of coal’s profits, and before them, even more starved in spite of the wealth associated with their work.

It may be hard to imagine now, in an era of minimum wage and overtime, but early miners had to risk their lives for reasonable pay. There were no picket lines or swarms of union lawyers. To secure a living wage in the early 1900s, they took up arms and waged literal warfare against corporate agents.

There was gunfire, death, sabotage, and battlefields throughout the coal-producing South, but the moment that we should all remember is the Battle of Blair Mountain.

Miners had lived like indentured servants for decades with their livelihood miserly administered by their employers. In August 1921, they'd had enough. As many as 15,000 coal miners rallied. They scrambled up a mountainside and took on corrupt coal operators; their hired militia; and, in the end, the United States Army.

The workers fought for nearly a week. They survived homemade bombs and almost overtook a nearby town. They were only subdued when U.S. fighter planes intervened and dropped gas and explosives, leftovers from WWI, overtop them.

The battle was the largest armed insurrection in the United States since the Civil War, and it changed the course of labor relations in this country.

In a recent article in National Geographic, Cecil Roberts, President of the United Mineworkers of America, explained, "Blair Mountain stands as a pivotal event in American history, where working men and women stood up to the lawless coal barons of the early 20th century and their private armies and fought for their rights as Americans and indeed, the rights of working families all over the world."

Now, almost ninety years later, Blair Mountain is about to be blown to bits. Arch Coal and Massey Energy Company hold rights to blast and mine the land, effectively removing the top of the mountain.

I won’t go into the startling ecological damage caused by mountaintop removal; I’ve covered that before. With Blair Mountain, the trouble is compounded by the looming erasure of a great historic site.

What’s more, the state of West Virginia seems to be complicit. After archeologists discovered relics from the insurrection—guns and shells covering the mountainside--a small coalition secured a listing for Blair Mountain on the National Register of Historic Places. This would have prohibited any strip mining on the mountain.

Within a week, Randall Reid-Smith, a political appointee to the position of West Virginia State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO), requested that this designation be removed. Reid-Smith claimed that property owners on the mountain favored the mining operation over preservation.

Additional research from preservation advocates found that Reid-Smith’s figures were dead wrong, literally. They included two deceased men as well as one woman who sold her land years before. The state’s figures also omitted 13 property owners entirely. When recalculated, there turned out to be 63 landowners on the mountain, and only 25 objected to its designation as an historic place.

Regardless, in December of last year, the National Register of Historic Places recognized the authority of the SHPO, and removed the protective measure. Mining operations could begin on Blair Mountain at any time.

Want to help save Blair Mountain? Write the National Register and ask that it return the mountain to a protected status.

Want to help save my perishable food? Swing by with a cooler real soon.

[caption id="attachment_1301" align="alignleft" width="187"] Me, when I had a strong accent.[/caption]

Once I had a mountain twang. It was thick as bacon fat and stronger than the scent off a rose bush in full bloom. When I was three and living on Bent Mountain, my daddy recorded me. On that tape, you can hear me sassing at bedtime, "Maw'ma, ayan't slea'pee. Ayan't red'ee for bed, Maw'ma."

I didn't know that I spoke with a dialect. Everyone around me talked the same way--choppy and fast without stopping between words. Our sentences were punctuated by hums that could mean approval, agreement, doubt, or just plain annoyance, all depending on the tone. Sayings added flourish to our speech and framed our world with metaphor:
Lord willin and the creek don’t rise.
Can’t get ahead for tryin'.
Can’t afford a pot to piss in.
Hintin’ is in West Virginia.
Knock you into the middle of next week.
It was a gorgeous, elaborate accent, and it began to erode when I signed up for high school theater. I had to neutralize my speech on stage. For a while, the twang came back after the curtain closed, but eventually, over-enunciation took a toll. My accent softened for entire school days and even at home, where everyone thought I talked kind of funny.
Then I moved outside Appalachia. I went to college in the Piedmont of North Carolina. Natives talk slower there; the spoken word is more languid, but I didn't adopt this variation of Southern speech.
Instead I was influenced by politically progressive Yankees. They were the kind who drove clunker Saabs and spent their free time debating the merits of Ayn Rand novels. Few of them had any distinguishable accent beyond the flat intonation of America's hyper-educated class.
This dull tone wore down whatever was left of my twang. It also changed what I heard back home. On the phone and during visits, the local dialect popped. Someone would say, "Hey, swee'dee," or call me "Maur'kle'en," and I'd smile. It was like being greeted with fireworks every time I talked to my family and mountain friends.
I've heard that many Appalachians ditch their accents because of work. Some years back, National Geographic explained it this way:
"It's a common precaution among many young adults from the United States' southern Appalachian Mountains to disguise their unique way of speaking when they seek work elsewhere. They fear their distinct twang, nonstandard grammar, and obscure idioms will cause potential employers to conclude they are incapable of holding jobs."
This never occurred to me. My accent was virtually gone by the time I began working white collar jobs. I doubt it hindered my career; maybe it was because I was passing. Like people of color who used to pass for white, I blended into the dominate culture. I never denied my Appalachian roots, but for years I didn't focus on them.
I lived in Boston during my twenties and emulated New England norms. I listened to rock and jazz, not bluegrass. I vacationed at the beach or abroad, not in the mountains. I wore button downs, khakis, and rolled neck sweaters.
Once, a friend told some colleagues that I was from the Virginia mountains. Their eyes got big, and one said, "No way. I'd always assumed he was a Kennedy or something."
Of course, in Boston the local dialect was in direct contradiction to my native one. Bostonians talk as if the letter "r" had never been invented. "Pahk the cah in Hahvahd yahd," is the stock joke about their accent. Meanwhile, mountain people can drag an "r" out so far you'd think it was the whole of the alphabet. "Ids nad'farrr if yeur drivin' yeur'carrr."
It's no surprise that my accent remained dormant until I headed south. Seven years ago I moved to DC. A job was waiting and there was the promise of better weather, but mostly I was ready to be close to the Blue Ridge. On weekends, I drove to the mountains to hike, kayak, hang with locals, and for the first time in a decade, talk the way I was meant to talk.
As unconsciously as it had drifted away, my accent returned. "Ain't" and "ya'll" and "s'ko" eased out of my mouth. They sounded softer than when I was a kid, but they were back, still seasoned with a distinctive drawl. Their cadence felt natural, as if it had been inside me the whole time, waiting on the sweet smell of mountain laurel to draw it out.
Now my accent comes and goes, depending on my mood, who's talking to me, how much I've had to drink, and, especially, where I am. It's like a radio station during a car trip. In general, it's clearer in the mountains, and it fades in town.
Driving West from DC, I pick up the signal somewhere around the intersection of Highways 66 and 81. My vowels get longer. Single consonant words begin breaking into two. Everything starts looking "purdy as a pikcher" once I cross into the Shenandoah Valley. If you're in the car with me, you might even hear a gentle, twanging hum of approval.
Apparently, I'm not the only one who's proud of his mountain drawl. In that National Geographic article, Walt Wolfram, a linguistics professor at the North Carolina State University says, "What we're finding is that people are taking a new pride in their mountain culture. That includes their language. People are making the comment, 'We're hillbillies, but we're proud of it. That's who we are.'"
There's even a new Facebook page called Appalachian English. It's trying to "develop a standard of wraatin da better refleck ar speech." Under the Discussions tab, it even has guidelines for spelling in our dialect.
So if you're from Appalachia, are you proud of your accent? Still got it? Ever felt pressured to lose it?
If you're not, what do you think when you hear Appalachian accents? What do they bring to mind?

Growing up, we were a bi-bread household. Momma made biscuits and cornbread, both from prepackaged mixes sold under the same brand--Jiffy. It's a breezy moniker, and the products always lived up to it. You add a dribble of water to the corn or flour mix. There's no kneading. No lard. No baking soda. Just one bowl and an oven rack. Snap. You're done.
[caption id="attachment_1167" align="alignleft" width="240"] Beaten Biscuits[/caption]
According to corporate lore, Jiffy products were created by Mabel White Holmes, wife of Chelsea Milling Company's manager, during a moment of inspiration in 1930:
"...one day when her twin sons had brought two friends home from school for lunch, she noticed the hard biscuits the motherless boys' father had made and decided to formulate a blend of biscuit ingredients that 'even a man could prepare.'"
With her focus on ease and speed, Mrs. White Holmes' wrote a new chapter in the history of American dinner breads, but it actually appears somewhere in the middle of the book. A generation or two before, in the early 1900s, a war was fought over the right dough to serve. It was commonly called the beaten biscuit crusade.
It began like any cause, with good intentions. Across the United States the settlement movement was placing affluent volunteers in low-income communities with the goal of alleviating poverty. It is no surprise that a small brigade, primarily women, moved into our region. "All were ready to help the Appalachians," says Elizabeth Engelhardt in the book Cooking Lessons: The Politics of Gender and Food, "That 'help' often took the form of cooking lessons."
Regional standards--wild greens, cornbread, and chicory coffee--were all derided by the reformers. They saw them as rudimentary, lacking in civility and nutrients.
Maybe that's why the term "corn pone" came to become a slur similar to "hick." Mountain foods were synonymous with poverty itself. To fulfill the mission of civilizing Appalachia, these reformers had to change what our mountain ancestors ate.
Engelhardt, a scholar and Appalachian native, uncovered the personal journals of Katherine Pettit and May Stone, two women who moved to eastern Kentucky and in 1902 founded the Hindman Settlement School. In attempts to civilize locals, they emphasized the importance of wheat-based breads, like the beaten biscuit. This particularly arduous bread had to be leavened by hand. Without the aid of baking powder or soda, the homemaker was instructed to beat the biscuit with a stick or mallet a remarkable 300 times for family or 500 times for guests, forcing air into the dough.
While beaten biscuits were considered the crowning achievement of domestic life by the middle class, even Katherine Pettit had to carve out extra time to make them. In her journal, she noted a luncheon for which she was "up earlier than usual this morning to make beaten biscuit."
In the lives of mountain people, this must have been a hard sell. Their traditional breads were made from corn meal and water. Sometimes they added sugar, buttermilk or animal fat for flavor, but, to paraphrase Engelhardt, the mixing and stirring of cornbread could be done in less time than it takes for a skillet to get hot.
What's more, cornbread required no special equipment--just a bowl and a pan. Any flame would do, even an open one in the hearth or the field. Biscuits by contrast required a rolling pin, an oven, biscuit cutters, and ideally a marble slab.
Using the right dough was both expensive and time consuming. Englehardt writes that "choosing whether to cook corn bread or biscuits was not simply a question of what a woman or her family preferred on any given day....the decision made a statement about class in the Appalachians."
It sounds like a scene from My Fair Lady,but Pettit and Stone apparently did home visits with their pupils, judging their progress toward civility. In their journals, they record their impressions. "The Cornets are all clean and thrifty...They had a good dinner, beautiful honey and whole wheat biscuit from the wheat they had raised themselves." This contrasts this against their impression of most mountain residents, who "live on fat bacon, corn bread and a few vegetables, all cooked in the most unwholesome way. Everything is fried in as much grease as they can get."
Sounds like my kind of people. In contemporary Appalachia, we still keep a jar of bacon grease on our stovetops, and we favor food that is quick, cheap, and available. Today it's frozen dinners, Country Cookin, and McD's.
While a century has passed, the reformers keep coming too--celebrity chef Jamie Oliver with his West Virginia-based Food Revolution, nutritionists in every health department across the region, and even legislatures, who are beginning to regulate harmful foodstuffs.
[caption id="attachment_1169" align="alignright" width="300"] Spring Vegetable Cornbread Photo: April McGreger[/caption]
Like the ladies from the Hindman School, they all have the best intentions. I just hope that they're paying attention to the past, to local food cultures, and to our day-to-day lives. It's questionable.
In a thoughtful critique of Jamie Oliver's venture to change diets in Huntington, West Virginia, columnist April McGreger asks, "Who is supposed to make the from-scratch meals Oliver talks about? Many working mothers are on the clock until 5 or 6 o'clock. Add to that a long commute that many families endure to find jobs, and there is just no way."
As an alternate, McGreger proposes finding ways to make popular foods easier to prepare and more healthy. She offers her own adaptation to a traditional spring vegetable cornbread. I applaud her. If anyone wants to make a lasting change to the Appalachian diet, this is the way to go. In fact, I encourage McGreger to take her culturally conscious innovations one step further. If she can create an easy, healthy vegi cornbread that is based around Jiffy mix, then momma and I will be quick converts.

Diane Sawyer wasn't the only reporter who earned accolades this year for an Appalachian story. Daniel Gilbert earned a Pulitzer Prize when he delivered the 33,000 readers of the Bristol Herald Courier a riveting series on the filching of natural gas from landowners in Southwest Virginia. A prime example is Earl Whited:
"By the time Earl Whited, of Russell County, Va., died in 2006, more than a dozen gas wells on his property had sucked up over 2.5 billion cubic feet of gas in five years. The former bus driver never saw a penny."
[caption id="attachment_934" align="alignleft" width="209"] Daniel Gilbert, Journalist[/caption]
Gilbert discovered a slew of landowners who, like Whited, hadn't been paid for methane extracted from coalbeds beneath their land. Many had endured drawn out court room battles to try to secure the funds. Others didn't even know where to start.
J. Todd Foster, editor of  the Bristol Herald Courier described the situation in plain terms, "The moms and pops who own the gas beneath their land clearly are due a portion of coalbed methane royalties, but can’t afford to battle deep-pocketed corporate armies of attorneys bent on stringing the process out over years or just flouting the court’s will."
Gilbert also unearthed an escrow account containing $24 million in natural gas royalties. These funds were tied up because landowners had never been identified or there was a dispute over their allocation. When Gilbert, approached elected officials with this figure--which had grown by more than $20 million in ten years--many were surprised.
“I was shocked to see your number, $24 million?”said Republican Delegate Terry Kilgore from Gate City, Virginia. “I don’t think it was ever the intent of the General Assembly to have that kind of escrow account.”
As it turns out, this remarkable dollar figure only represents a fraction of the funds that coal companies should have deposited into escrow. As he dug deeper, Gilbert uncovered layers of accounting errors, lax oversight, and corporate double talk.
In his editorial, Foster said, "This is a classic example of how a newspaper dedicated to a community can mine a story that no one else would have ever tackled for its sheer complexity and obscurity. We won’t let up either."
Read through the eight part series, and you'll see that Gilbert wields data like a spear. He spares no one. The coal industry and government officials alike are skewered, and his remarkable report has prodded action at the highest level. The day after the Pulitzer was announced, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell signed two pieces of legislation aimed at releasing the millions of dollars held in escrow.
When asked about the award, Gilbert simply told the Associated Press that it was “a hell of an honor." This understatement belies his tenaciousness, which has turned an industry on its ear. Through targeted follow-up articles--more than twenty of them so far--he continues to press energy companies toward compliance.
Someone should call Universal Studios now. A young, intrepid reporter beats big business while working for an underdog paper from Southwest Virginia--it sounds like an Appalachian version of Erin Brokovichto me.

On all things coal, it's best to defer to Jeff Biggers. He is the author of "Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland." He also blogs about mountaintop removal on The Huffington Post and Grist. He's addressed coal from every angle on every media outlet imaginable, but this Thursday may have brought him his biggest story yet. I'll let him explain:
[caption id="attachment_2127" align="alignright" width="175"] Jeff Biggers[/caption]
"The EPA administrator announced a major decision today to clamp down on Clean Water Act violations from mountaintop removal mining...Citing new EPA studies that conclusively demonstrate that 'burial of headwater streams by valley fills causes permanent loss of ecosystems,' the EPA issued new conductivity levels 'to protect 95% of aquatic life and fresh water streams in central Appalachia.'"
This is revolutionary. When coal companies fill valleys and hollers with mining waste, they block springs. That, of course, cuts off essential sources for mountain rivers. In turn, that destroys ecosystems.
What's worse, the water that does flow is tainted. As I noted last week, this process has polluted some 1,500 miles of waterways, according to Federal estimates. In recent tests, water affected by mining operations were found to have ten times more saline than un-mined watersheds.
Fresh water creatures living in these streams aren't the only ones harmed by mountaintop removal. It's hard on people too. To make room for mining and its debris, entire towns have been displaced. Add that to the 1.2+ million acres of hardwood that have been destroyed and you have a region-wide disaster.
The EPA has had enough. It is now instructing field offices to restrict access to Clean Water Act permits, essentially forcing coal companies to clean up their act. According to the EPA media release, mine operators must demonstrate "that future mining will not cause significant environmental, water quality and human health impacts."
In a Q&A with reporters following the announcement, the EPA Administrator added, "...very few valley fills...are going to be able to meet standards like this."
That's good news for Appalachia and for Biggers, whose crusade against King Coal is personal. He was raised along Eagle Creek in Southern Illinois, where nearly all of the land was purchased by a mining company. Locals were moved out and according to Biggers, the company "blasted away the old homeplace."
It's not surprising that he intrinsically understands the dual impact of mountaintop removal; it destroys ecosystems and lives. Biggers called this week's EPA announcement "a beautiful and historic moment to celebrate on behalf of human rights and environmental justice in the Appalachian coalfields."
[youtube]RVHBp3TWR34[/youtube]

Yesterday, ABC News announced that it won The Peabody Award for Diane Sawyer’s report “A Hidden Camera: Children of the Mountains.” Maybe you saw it. It aired in February as a 20/20 special and followed the lives of four Kentucky children over two years.

It drew the largest 20/20 viewership since 2004, but reviews from Appalachia were mixed. A few went like this…

“I moved out of the region when I graduated High School to look for work as did many of my classmates. My family is still there. I see the drug abuse, the poverty, but mostly I see the children alone…If this documentary gets the attention of people willing to help and not criticize, Diane you have done an amazing thing.”

But most were more like this…

“Eastern Kentucky has it's problems…With that said, we are not all uneducated, tooth-decayed druggies.”

And this…

“I am from southern West Virginia. The people you have featured in this special are very extreme examples of people from Appalachia. People from this area are going through the same things that people in California and New York are facing.”

And this…

“Y’all come back now, ya hear! Why don't you plan a trip to meet some of us with Master's Degrees, Professional Degrees, or advanced certifications. There are plenty of us here who are health conscious, self-sufficicient, non-welfare drawing, non-Mountain Dew guzzling, non-addicted, intelligent, educated, and still have our natural teeth who would be willing to speak with you and show you the REST OF APPALACHIA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

There’s no denying it; the feature was skewed. It covered Appalachian poverty, not Appalachian culture. The middle class, music, literature, farming, tourism, industry—all of that was omitted.

In this blog, I go for the full breadth of Appalachia, and I do it two reason. First, I believe that it all contributes to the mystique and dynamism of our region. Second, in this medium, I can feature bite-sized chunks, a topic at a time, twice a week.

That said, I don't hold the same expectation for Diane Sawyer. She was graced with an hour block of primetime television. (Such a gift!) If she had tried to fold all of Appalachia into it, the show would have looked like a disjointed infomercial…

“Hear a banjo! Eat some cornbread! See the view! Aww, sad, some poor people. Don’t forget your camera!”

Instead she leveraged TV’s greatest asset --the ability to create an emotional connection. She let millions of Americans feel the desperation of living without food, the instability of having a drug addicted mother, and the struggle to achieve security when economic distress is all that you’ve known.

Other people have done this before Diane. David Sutherland’s “Country Boys” comes to mind (For the sake of disclosure, I worked on that documentary.) But who else could attract 10.9 million viewers and help them actually care about Appalachian poverty?

Beth Macy is one of Roanoke's most notable reporters. She is in Cambridge, Mass. right now on a fellowship at Harvard. In a recent blog post, she compared the high schools her son has attended in these two notably different cities:
"Students at Cambridge Rindge and Latin may leave campus to eat at nearby restaurants (sorry to say, it’s my teenager’s favorite thing about school this year). Whereas when the new Patrick Henry High School opened a few years back, administrators decided to literally lock the students inside the cafeteria, known by staff and students alike as 'the cage.'"
[caption id="attachment_498" align="alignleft" width="300"] Porno shop near my childhood home: Photo Credit Matt Ames[/caption]
Beth goes on to talk about economic and social disparities between the towns, a topic that enthralls me. I was raised by an unemployed single mom in Roanoke but went to Harvard for graduate school.
I had to get in on this conversation, so I posted the below comment on Beth's blog. Maybe a few readers out there will identify:
It’s overwhelming to think of the contrasts [ between Roanoke and Cambridge], but one that sticks with me is around cars. In grad school, I didn’t have one, and neither did my mother when I was growing up.
As a kid, it meant carrying groceries for a mile, walking past burnt out motels and [rough] bars on Williamson Road, and taking the bus, which is a sign of absolute depravity in Roanoke and many other Southern cities. It meant telling friends that I literally could not physically make my way to their houses to visit. It branded my family. I’d say that there are more than two Roanokes [Beth posited that there were two], because even among the down-and -out, you find strata. Without a car, we were way down low.
In Cambridge, the absence of wheels meant something very different. It was beyond common; it was a point of pride. There was no shoveling your car out and no moving it on street cleaning days. I could brag that I wasn’t filling the air with pollutants. I could hop the T or a bus without shame. I was an untethered urbanite breezing down city streets on clean-fueled public transit or my bike or the liberating power of my own two feet.
Don’t get me wrong. Cambridge is not superior to Roanoke. It’s just wildly different. I almost feel as if I should have a visa or a passport to travel between them, at least something more than four working tires and a full tank of gas.

The Crooked Road: Virginia's Heritage Music Trail lives up to its name. In February, it became the first place to to be named as a Distinctive Destination by the National Trust for Historic Preservation that wasn't a singular place. All other honorees are one municipality, but The Crooked Road is a series of them, 19 towns that exemplify the old time and bluegrass tradition of the state.
Not a month after this groundbreaking designation was announced, The Crooked Road took a turn. Now its funding is at risk. This weekend, Virginia's Senate Finance Committee recommended striping about $290,000 from the budget of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, which is a principle funder for The Crooked Road.
The initiative already operates on a modest budget -- about $350,000 annually. Losing support from the The Virginia Foundation could be a major blow to this promotional platform, which has proven to be a cultural success as well as an economic one.
The Roanoke Times cites a 2008 economic impact study that attributed gains along the length of the trail at $23 million every year. For those business majors out there that's a staggering ROI, something like a 6500%.
What's more The Crooked Road promises to be a model for the rest of the nation. Rob Nieweg, director of the southern field office for the National Trust recently told The Roanoke Times, "We want other regions in the country to look at The Crooked Road and see how to take regional character and, in effect, build sustainable economic development."
It would be a local calamity to lose this attraction but also a regional one. While picking styles and accents vary form holler to holler, we are one Appalachia. When one of us shines, we are all in the spotlight. When one light goes out, life for all of us gets a little dimmer.
Virginian or not, I hope you'll write, email or call a Virginia state representative and encourage him or her to find another way to balance the budget. Ask that they drive on by this crooked road.

Every now and then you run across something so beautiful and strange, you're not sure how to describe it. Andrew Cutraro, a Washington, DC-based videographer and photographer, has created this etherial homage to Appalachia's poor. Here's how he captions it:
"The uninsured working poor are revealed in Appalachia as they descend from the hills, out-of-body, to receive basic medical care."
Out-of-body is certainly true. These people's spirits seem to rise and hover before the camera. It's almost as if the souls themselves have ushered their corporal forms away for repair.
Where they gather is not clear -- maybe a clinic or a mission. It is a blessed yet gory scene. Glass angels glow from rearview mirrors and extracted teeth rest bloody on a dental stand. Perhaps better than this blog, the below clip in vokes the meaning of revival.

Out Yonder from Andrew Cutraro on Vimeo.

In third grade, when we toured Fire Station Number 1 and visited the Mill Mountain Star, when we spent weeks studying Roanoke's river and rail yard, the entire town's history, our teachers mentioned nothing about the Smith lynching. How could they miss it?
[caption id="attachment_389" align="alignleft" width="248"] Crowd at Smith lynching[/caption]
It was a media event covered as far away as New York and a local horror that had as many as 5,000 witnesses, nearly a third of the town's population at the time. While accounts vary, most agree that it began when an African American man bought wild grapes from a farmer's wife, Sallie A. Bishop. Bishop later said that the man asked her to accompany him to a nearby cellar to get his money. Then, according to Bishop, he tied her up, robbed her at knife point, bashed her head with a brick and left the elderly woman for dead.
Bishop claimed to have laid in her own blood for half an hour. She was dazed but alive. Minutes after providing a vague description to authorities, a suspect was apprehended. Media outlets reported multiple locations for Thomas Smith. He was said to have been in the woods, on the banks of the Roanoke River and also on board an outbound train, trying to skip town. Wherever he was, Smith was immediately taken to Sallie Bishop for identification. According to a dramatized and slanted article in the Roanoke Daily Record, she said...
"'He looks like him; I think he is the man; if I could see his hat I could tell.' Smith hastily took his hat from his head and threw it behind him, but the detective quickly picked it up and handed it to Mrs. Bishop, who, after examining it said: 'He is the man.'"
Roanoke was a powder keg in 1893. An economic depression was on the rise, causing layoffs and closing local banks. The town was rife with prostitution and crime, for which African Americans were too often blamed; and perhaps most importantly, in a racially divided contest, the town had just voted to prohibit alcohol. According to "Roanoke, Virginia, 1882-1912: Magic City of the New South" by Rand Dotson, white laborers had opposed the ordinance. They were narrowly defeated by an unlikely alliance between well off whites and large segments of the black community.
It took nothing -- just an accused black assailant identified only by his hat -- to ignite the ire of Roanoke's white workers. Before Smith was even at the jail, town folk were already throwing rocks and calling for his hanging. By dusk, a mob had formed outside the jailhouse. Roanoke's mayor, Henry Trout was popular with the townsfolk, but even his calls for order did no good. He summoned the Roanoke Light Infantry. This ragtag band of clerks were as much a social club as a brigade. They had never seen armed conflict, and at points, joked with the rioters outside the jail. Undeterred, the mob was passing whiskey bottles by 8:00 PM and emboldened by the arrival of men from Sallie Bishop's county of Botetourt who reportedly declared, "Rally men, Botetourt is here!"
The crowd rushed the side door of the jail. An unidentified shot was fired and the infantry let lose. People ran mad. The rioters returned fire. Bullets hit the doors of Greene Memorial Church, sending parishioners under their pews for shelter. At least one leg was blown clean off. Stomachs, groins, and heads were punctured. According to one witness, "The streets before the jail looked ashambles, bloody in forty places, the street car rails slippery with it."
In total, eight men were killed and thirty four wounded. In the melee, Mayor Trout and Smith were spirited away. Trout was taken to the nearby Ponce De Leon Hotel. Smith was taken by police to a secret spot on the opposite side of the Roanoke River.
When the mob realized that the jail was empty, it proceeded to divide into small groups and ransack local officials homes, searching for the mayor and the prisoner. At this point, The New York Times concluded its coverage of the day and lauded Trout's adherence to the law. It's article was entitled "This Mob Did No Lynching."
What The Times did not know was that a Chief Terry had pleaded with the mayor at the jailhouse to turn Smith over to the mob. While the mayor refused, Terry did not give up. Around 2:00 AM, he convinced his sergeant to return Smith to the Roanoke jail, and he informed at least one member of the mob. Their men would be waiting.
According to Dotson, "Smith spotted the posse first and took off running but made it only a few dozen yards before he was knocked down...The men proceeded only a short distance before they stopped beneath an electric light at the corner of Franklin Road and Mountain Avenue."
There they stopped, and there they stayed. By morning Smith was hanging from a nearby hickory tree. His eyed bulged. His tongue dangled from his mouth. His body was riddled with bullets, and a growing crowd was pulling away bits of his clothing, threads of the rope, and bark from the tree. They clamored for mementos like candy at a parade.
Thousands gathered, posed for photos, and laughed at the card mounted to Smith's bloody back; it read "Mayor Trout's Friends." The mob later dragged Smith's body toward the mayor's house where they intended to bury him in Trout's yard. A local minister intervened, convincing them instead to burn the corpse on the banks of the Roanoke River.
"A crowd of hundreds then followed the wagon that bore Smith's body," says Dotson, "cheering and tearing down fences on the way. When they reached a spot near the narrow gauge railroad bridge, several men gathered brush and tree limbs to build a pyre, doused Smith with coal oil, and set him afire. 'The flames roared and cracked, leaping high in the air,' according to a reporter at the scene, 'while all around stood 4,000 people, men, women, boys and children on foot, in buggies and on horseback, and numbers of them shouting over the pitiful scene.' Hundreds of onlookers fed the flames by tossing braches [sic] and twigs into the fire, and by noon, according to another correspondent, all that remained of Smith 'was a few ashes and here and there a bone.'"
Maybe this isn't a story for third graders, but it is a story that we all should know. As fulfilling as it is to revel in the natural beauty and cultural quirks of our region, we should not overlook this horrific piece of our history. Learn more through the online exhibit "The Roanoke Riot" hosted by The Blue Ridge Institute and Museum.

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For more stories on the African American experience in Appalachia check out the "Black in Appalachia" series on the right.

Let's get this out of the way. I'm as white as a bleached bath towel. Yes, I went to a predominantly black high school; and I worked in black led communities for years; and I have lifelong black friends; and I'm pretty sure that I have black cousins (though it's tough to confirm a 150 year old extramarital affair), but I'm no fool. I can't represent the black experience, not in Appalachia or anywhere else.
This series is about black people, but it will be framed by a white man's perspective. There's no getting around that. While I write "white," I hope that doesn't mean that I shouldn't write.
In my view, black Appalachians are overlooked in the annals of our culture, their contributions upstaged by the Scots-Irish, the Germans and even the Cherokee. The historic exceptions -- Booker T. Washington or the slaves who rebelled in Harper's Ferry -- receive mainstream notice, but the rest of black mountain culture is as obscure as the Smokies on a foggy day.
Like other groups, black Appalachians have their soundtrack. Today, it’s probably similar to black music elsewhere – maybe with a touch more gospel or twang. At one point, though, it was a distinct mesh of mountain tones and early black dialects. The folks at Rounder Records have assembled a collection of these songs – Deep River of Song: Black Appalachia.
Some, like "Cripple Creek," are common old-time tunes done in a signature style; others seem to be unique to black mountain people. "Poontang Little, Poontang Small" is a great example. I can find just one recording of this song. It appears on this album and also a collection of Virginia field songs, perhaps suggesting something about its origin.
Jimmie Smothers, the artist performing it, either natively has a deep, old accent, or he beautifully replicates one. It makes the song's lyrics nearly incomprehensible to my ear. Still, I cant resist humming along. It's a spirited, infectious tune and a shining example of black heritage in our mountain region.
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