By: Steve Goodman
This blog post, written by EVC founder Steve Goodman, is Part 1 of a two-part series on EVC’s groundbreaking work supporting youth media production across the urban-rural divide.
As I write this, Appalachia is once again in the news. Donald Trump’s pick for his vice-presidential running mate is controversial author J.D. Vance, who rose to fame in 2016 with the publication of his Hillbilly Elegy. A memoir of his time growing up in Appalachia, the best-selling memoir has been widely criticized by scholars and Appalachians for mining conservative stereotypes of working-class whites in the region and praising policies known to be harmful to the region. Vance’s voice, embraced by conservatives, brings home the need for youth and community perspectives with not just lived experience, but with critical literacy, an understanding of history, the ability to analyze how power functions within systems of oppression, and how oppression functions intersectionality across race, class, gender, and sexuality.
In December 1984, I went to a retrospective of Appalshop films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Originally founded in 1969 as a community film center and funded as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Appalshop by 1984 had become a thriving center for arts, culture, economic development, education, and community organizing in Eastern Kentucky, the heart of Appalachia.
At the retrospective, I saw films by Appalachian filmmakers, including Herb E. Smith, Elizabeth Barret, Mimi Pickering and others. The documentaries explored women coal miners in labor unions, community struggles in general, and the history of degrading, classist depictions of the “hillbilly” of Appalachia. The films also celebrated the rich artistic, musical, and other cultural contributions the region has made to U.S. culture.
These documentaries changed my life, and inspired me to take the fledgling Educational Video Center (EVC) in a bold new direction. The films broadened my thinking about the possibilities for what EVC could be and sparked the idea of EVC existing beyond the borders of New York City. Across the seemingly vast geographical, cultural, and racial divides between New York and Eastern Kentucky there was a shared need for youth to push back on the negative stereotypes that proliferated in mainstream movies, television, and news media by telling their own stories and showing the world as they experience it. I wanted to visit Appalshop. More than that, I wanted EVC youth to see and experience Appalshop and meet the young people who were living very different lives in the mountains but shared some of their struggles.
Urban and Rural Youth Together
I imagined a summer documentary camp where EVC youth would live, learn, and make documentaries together with youth from Kentucky. I called Appalshop to see if they would be interested in hosting such a project. Appalshop was open to us visiting them and using their editing facilities, but they weren’t able to host a camp. They told me to call Marie Cirillo, a community organizer from Clearfork Valley in eastern Tennessee.
I called Marie, and she saw the great potential of bringing rural and urban youth together for a documentary filmmaking summer camp. She had cabins on the Woodland Community Land Trust where the youth could stay. And she had prior experience, since she’d been video-recording oral histories in coal-mining communities a decade earlier. I couldn’t believe my good luck, and I saw the idea of the camp taking shape before my eyes!
Marie said there wasn’t much money, but, through her networks, she could provide most of the food (I remember eating a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and baloney sandwiches). And I told her we could bring all the video cameras, recording decks, microphones, monitors and VCRs. Friends loaned us extra sleeping bags for students who didn’t have any. Appalshop agreed to give us free use of their editing facilities in Kentucky.
Suzanne Valenza (my then partner) collaborated with me in planning and running the camp. She taught English at Queens Satellite Academy and helped recruit EVC youth from Bronx and Queens alternative high schools, where EVC was working. Marie recruited some youth who lived in the local area near the Roses Creek Holler. Others came from Appalachian communities just across the border in Kentucky and Virginia.
Now, I just needed to find the money to pay for our share of the food, for videotapes and other supplies. And of course we needed money to rent a van for the long drive to Tennessee and local travel once we got there. We were very lucky to meet New York Community Trust Program Officer Kate Cheico, who gave us a three thousand dollar grant. (Kate later became an active member of EVC’s Board.) With that grand sum, we set out to run a month-long camp for about a dozen youth in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee.
Community Organizing and Solidarity
As I got to know Marie better, I could see why Appalshop had recommended her. She was a force of nature—a dedicated, tireless, community organizer. She had been a member of the Glenmary Sisters, a small order of “new nuns” serving the urban poor in Chicago and the impoverished rural areas of Appalachia. She left the order and moved to Roses Creek Holler where she became a leader of the community land trust movement. Land trusts provided affordable and sustainable housing in places where unregulated, rampant land acquisition by absentee landlords was driving widespread poverty. Appalachia was rich in natural resources Yet timber, coal, and mining companies were extracting these resources, stockpiling their resulting wealth, and ensuring very little of it made it into the pockets of the people who lived on the land. . Marie devoted her life to countering these structural forces by developing community, supporting miners’ families, building women’s cooperatives, and nurturing small businesses.
Her work won her many friends and allies, and also attracted some powerful enemies. These enemies shot up her house, cut the brake linings of a volunteer’s car, causing them to crash, and burned down a local clinic and several houses she had built. Though slight in stature, Marie was fearless. She wasn’t intimidated by this violence. She continued organizing for environmental regulation of the strip-mining that was devastating the mountain environment and poisoning the drinking water. And she kept advocating for jobs, better healthcare and housing in the community.
Thinking back on this time, I now believe it might have been a good thing that I hadn’t known about the turbulent history of opposition to organizing in the community. I might have been overly concerned. Instead, I trusted in our partnership and in the goodwill of the local community. I knew that the kids would teach and learn from each other—and that I would be learning from all of them. I hoped that we were planting seeds that over time would bear fruit for the young participants involved in this intercultural experience. I envisioned that we were helping to develop new work opportunities for the youth. We were building awareness of urban and rural Americans of their shared histories and struggles. We were nurturing solidarity across historically marginalized poor white, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. And all of this, I believed, was a strong antidote to a growing divide that was beginning to define the United States.
The Journey Begins
Leaving behind the traffic of Queens and the Bronx, we traveled for hours on the flat open highway. Eventually, our van began to climb along the twisting, winding roads into the beautiful Cumberland Mountains. There were no shoulders, no guard rails, just a steep drop off down the side of the mountain. When I experienced moments of drowsiness during the long drive, I would be snapped awake by the adrenaline-rush of huge logging trucks carrying massive loads coming right at us as we rounded hairpin turns.
We arrived at Roses Creek excited and nervous. Marie welcomed us. Her modest home was abundant with beautiful Appalachian quilts hanging on the walls and locally handcrafted wooden furniture. The EVC youth met their rural counterparts, and we all went to unpack our things in the cabins. Immediately, the youth began sharing their cultures and experiences. The EVC youth said they were so used to the constant noises of the city that it was hard for them to get used to sleeping at night in the quiet of the mountains. Their discomfort was not helped by all the horror movies they liked watching where nothing good ever came to young people sleeping in cabins in the woods. But they came to feel more comfortable with the new surroundings, and soon the dance rhythms of merengue music could be heard at night from the boombox the Dominican youth brought with them.
Land and Power
Just a few years before our camp, John Gaventa had written his now classic book, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley, about the impact of these issues in the community around our camp. Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands is another study of poverty in Appalachia and is credited with bringing an Appalachian focus to President Johnson’s War on Poverty. The themes in these books became the backdrop for our work.
The day after our arrival, Marie took us on a tour of the area, showing us where the coal mines and mining camps used to be. The strip-mining had blown apart and ravaged the land. She helped us understand how we are all connected, especially by the land. Everything kept coming back to the question of land: Who owns it? Who owns what’s on top of it? Who owns what’s underneath it? This conversation spurred a brainstorming session the resulted in these questions, scrawled on poster paper:
What does this land mean to you?
What are people’s legal and emotional attachments to the land?
Do you have one room with several purposes (stove in bedroom, beds in living room)
Have you ever had your electricity cut off? How do you cook/heat?
‘Even when you were in your mother’s womb, you were of the earth’– Clairce Hall
Clairce swears they own it and the company stole it
Power, in all its multiple meanings, was also a theme of our discussions. We talked about “power” as energy as electricity and “power” as agency and political self-determination. We pondered questions such as Who gets to control our life and property, for ourselves, our family and the larger community? And what about the coal that’s extracted from the rural communities in Appalachia? It gives us the energy that powers our cities, but it comes at a terrible cost: the degradation of the land and of the health of the miners, who die from = accidents and black lung. The owners are enriched by what is beneath the ground, those living on top of that land are left impoverished.
We took our EVC teaching methods and used it with our students in the camp. Students brainstormed ideas for their projects and worked collaboratively taking turns using the camera, interviewing and editing.
Since it was a summer camp and we were all living together, we also listened to music, went swimming, and watched the movies on the VHS videos that we brought. We went to the small local town of Jellico to celebrate July 4th and, to my surprise, saw some local kids breakdancing out on the street. I remember when we all went camping and swimming in nearby Cove Lake, one of the local youth participants killed a large snake. It turned out to be a poisonous copperhead. It was then we learned we needed to keep an eye out for all the copperheads that lived in our area.
For the continuation of this blog post, read Part 2.
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