Whose Appalachia Is It Anyway?

Dispatch No. 1 from a Once Reluctant Daughter

Let’s get this out of the way: I didn’t always claim Appalachia. I'm originally from West Virginia, but for a long time, I introduced myself like I was from "just outside of the DC area"—as if I'd made a quick wrong turn on the Beltway and accidentally landed in a holler. Appalachia was something I thought I had to outgrow, shake off, or leave behind to be taken seriously.

Then I became a historian and I started asking questions. The more I dug into the region’s past, the more I realized I hadn’t been rejecting Appalachia—I’d been rejecting the story I was told about it.

Because here's the truth: the version of Appalachia most people know is a lie of omission.

This region isn’t just coal mines, country music, and folks in overalls. It’s a kaleidoscope of cultures, identities, struggles, and brilliance. It's the birthplace of labor revolts, gospel harmonies, radical feminism, and generational resistance.

So let’s get something straight:

Appalachia is not a stereotype. It’s a story that’s been told wrong, told partially, and told poorly. It’s time we told it better.

Black Appalachia: A Legacy Written in Coal and Courage

Black history in Appalachia doesn’t start in the Great Migration—it starts before slavery and continues long after the last coal shaft was sealed. Thousands of Black families made lives in coal towns across West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio, where they worked under deadly conditions and still managed to build schools, churches, newspapers, and communities.

They didn’t just exist. They organized.

Black miners were critical to union efforts, often at great personal risk. Despite segregation, many helped forge rare interracial alliances within the labor movement. In towns like Keystone, WV, and Lynch, KY, Black families built thriving, tight-knit communities even while facing systemic racism.

📌 And yet... when most people picture a coal miner, they don’t see a Black man with a carbide lamp and calloused hands. That’s the power of erasure.

Native Appalachia: The Mountains Were Already Spoken For

Long before any Scotch-Irish fiddle crossed the mountain passes, these ridges echoed with Cherokee, Shawnee, Moneton, and Yuchi voices.

While Indian removal forced many Native peoples westward, many resisted, remained, or returned—blending into mountain communities or maintaining distinct settlements. Today, Native traditions survive through medicine, craft, land stewardship, and memory, even as many descendants navigate complex questions of identity and recognition.

Let’s stop treating Indigenous presence in Appalachia as ancient history. They’re not ghosts. They’re neighbors.

Immigrant Appalachia: Coal Towns, Little Italys, and Syrian Storefronts

From the late 19th through the mid-20th century, Appalachia was one of the most ethnically diverse labor regions in the country.

Polish miners. Italian stonemasons. Hungarian railroad workers. Greek and Lebanese merchants. They came not just for jobs but for survival—and they built communities in coal camps, steel towns, and hollers.

Despite discrimination, they brought languages, churches, food, and mutual aid societies. Many faced dangerous work and xenophobia—but they also enriched the region’s culture in ways that linger in last names, recipes, and old brick storefronts.

📌 Want to know the real Appalachian melting pot? It looked a lot more like Ellis Island in the mountains than you might think.

Queer Appalachia: The Love That Stayed

Contrary to every "Deliverance"-style narrative, queer people have always lived in Appalachia. They’ve built quiet lives, joyful relationships, creative communities, and, in many cases, resistance movements rooted in love and survival.

Today, queer Appalachian writers, drag performers, organizers, and artists are claiming space—not just in cities, but in the same towns their grandparents were run out of.

Projects like Queer Appalachia, the rise of rural Pride festivals, and a growing literary canon have shattered the myth that queerness and mountain life can’t coexist. Appalachia isn’t just for straight people in flannel. It never was.

Labor Radicalism: Rednecks, Revolts, and Revolutions

Here’s something that should be taught in every U.S. history class: Appalachian workers led some of the most powerful labor uprisings in American history.

The Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 wasn’t just a skirmish—it was a full-blown, multi-day armed uprising by 10,000 coal miners, many wearing red bandanas (yes, the origin of the term “redneck”) and demanding fair pay, safety, and union recognition.

Coal companies used spies, armed guards, and planes to bomb their own workers. And still, the people fought.

Appalachia isn’t apolitical. It’s radical, deeply rooted in traditions of collective action, anti-corporate resistance, and working-class solidarity.

Environmental Justice: Land, Legacy, and the Long Fight

For over a century, Appalachians have had to fight not just for wages—but for the land beneath their feet and the water in their wells.

The coal industry took riches from the earth and left behind poisoned streams, clearcut forests, black lung, and poverty. But Appalachians—especially women, elders, and young activists—have long resisted.

From the Buffalo Creek flood disaster to mountaintop removal resistance in the 2000s, Appalachian environmentalists have pioneered grassroots campaigns that link land justice with social justice.

This is not a region unaware of its exploitation. It’s one that’s been organizing against it for generations.

The New Appalachia: Migration, Memory, and a Region Rewritten

Appalachians move. And when they do, they carry home with them.

Diasporic Appalachian identity is alive in places like Detroit, Chicago, and Baltimore—where whole neighborhoods still bear mountain accents and church recipes. And many are coming back, or reconnecting with roots that once felt distant.

Today’s Appalachian identity includes:

• Afro-Latino farmers in North Carolina,

• Appalachian Muslims in Kentucky,

• First-gen students rewriting the family script,

• TikTok creators, zine-makers, and digital historians sparking cultural revival.

This isn’t about nostalgia—it’s about reinvention.

So, Whose Appalachia Is It?

It's Black. It's Native. It's immigrant. It's queer. It's radical. It's not just coal and cornbread. It’s labor and love, loss and protest, memory and motion.

It’s not a museum of white poverty—it’s a living, breathing, evolving region filled with complexity, contradiction, and brilliance.

So welcome to Embracing Appalachia. This is where we begin again.

The stories that got buried? We’re digging them up. The voices that were ignored? We’re turning up the volume. The Appalachia we were told to be ashamed of? We’re loving it back—loudly, critically, and without apology.