A multiethnic, multiracial portrait of Appalachia

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Oxford African American Studies Center

FEATURED ESSAY
African Americans in Appalachia
Dr. Althea Webb
Assistant Professor of Education
Berea College (KY)

Contrary to popular perception, Appalachia has always possessed significant and influential populations of color. The region, so named for the mountain range that runs through it from northeast Mississippi to southern New York, historically comprises three subdivisions—Northern, Southern, and Central—each with its own history of settlement and race relations. Indian nations, including the Cherokees, were the first peoples to inhabit the area, but by 1860 African Americans were approximately 10% of the population. There is, however, no one story of African Americans in Appalachia. Black Appalachians—like all Appalachians—have lived in rural settings as well as urban settings, and current residents may have come from families that settled in the mountains hundreds of years ago, while others are first generation migrants into the region.

As the first major mountain range west of the Atlantic coast, the Appalachian Mountains were the first "frontier." By the mid-1600s, explorers were trekking into the mountains and within fifty years, settlements had been permanently established by whites from England, Ireland, and Scotland. Many Appalachian people trace their heritage to the Scots-Irish, immigrants who lived in the border regions of northern Ireland before coming to America early in the 18th century. As whites moved into the mountains so did free and enslaved Africans. After the Revolutionary War, Union officers were given land grants in the largely uninhabited Central Appalachian area, mostly in what is now West Virginia. As white settlers demanded more land, however, the native peoples were forced to move west, a policy well underway by the time of the infamous Indian Removal Act of 1830 enacted by President Andrew Jackson.

In the early years of settlement, whites, Indians, and African Americans lived in close proximity to each other, and later generations included multiracial and multiethnic people; the Melungeons, a group thought to have European, Native American, and African ancestry, were identified in Central Appalachia early in the 19th century. Additionally, the lives of African American and white Appalachians were intertwined socially and culturally. The most obvious representation of this syncretism is the banjo, a central instrument in traditional mountain music that originated in Africa.

Enslavement in Appalachia varied according to regions. Elite Cherokee people held Africans in enslavement in the Southern Appalachia region, but the topography did not lend itself to the large plantation systems found in the lowlands of the Deep South. In the southern region, non-slave holders were in the majority, and the area also contained a large number of landless whites. Indeed, Appalachia was once thought to be an area that abhorred slavery, although recently scholars have documented the complex nature of slavery in the Mountain South. Like the nation as a whole, Appalachia was equally divided by Civil War loyalties. Northern Appalachians joined the Union, Southern Appalachians joined the Confederacy and those in the Central Appalachian area were at a crossroads. Two years after Virginia voted to join the Confederacy, mountaineers in the west and southwest areas of Virginia formed West Virginia as an independent state and joined the Union. There was an active Underground Railroad running through Appalachia from Chattanooga to Pennsylvania.... MORE