Sunday, July 1, 2001
Prof says Appalachian Americans are invisible minority
By Ryan Good
Staff Writer
An invisible minority exists in the mountains that range from Mississippi to New York.
Appalachian Americans living in the mountainous regions of the eastern part of the United States have gone almost unnoticed by American culture since the time they migrated to the there, said Dr. Norman Rose, an expert in Appalachian culture, to a group of Tiffin University students Saturday as part of the university's Pro Seminar Series.
The people living the mountain ranges of the easter U.S. are a diverse group of people.
"The native americans were living there prior to anyone else. A lot of black slaves ran away up into the mountains. They ran away to escape slavery or the Jim Crow laws after the Civil War," Rose said.
Many of the people that ended up in the mountains were also white people who came to America as indentured servants or slaves.
A person convicted of a crime in Europe could face a long jail sentence or even death. Coming to the new world as a servant was a viable alternative, Rose said.
In England at the time, there were 300 crimes that one could be put to death for, vagrancy being one of them.
English vagrancy laws were quite harsh.
"All persons calling themselves scholars going around begging ... All seafaring men pretending losses of their ships ... all jugglers, tinkerers, pedlars, and petty chapman wandering abroad ... all such persons as shall wander abroad begging pretending losses by fire ..." Rose said as he read from English law.
Like any person these people wanted the best for themselves.
"The buzzword is freedom," Rose said.
When these people made their way to the mountains, they made their way into an isolation from the rest of the world.
"It stayed the same for 200 years while the rest of the country developed," Rose said. "You can go up there now and hear the same folk music."
An invention that changed American culture also had large effects on Appalachian culture &emdash; the television.
Between 1940 and 1960 about six million people left the region in search of what they saw on television, Rose said.
Rose said, "There was a big world out there, and it was all on TV."
The effects of war recruiting and the beginnings of industrialization of the region also made their mark on the people.
The reason that most people don't think of an Appalachian person as a minority is because they don't think of themselves that way either, Rose said.
"They have no self-identity," he added. "Appalachians don't identify themselves as a minority. They don't see themselves as impoverished."
Another reason that Appalachian Americans don't stand out is because of a lacking sense of their own heritage.
"They have no sense of their history. 'Where did we come over on the boat?' They have no idea," Rose said.
"Appalachian history has been isolated from the rest of the country," he added.
The nature of the region has an impact on their isolation.
"It takes a major engineering feat to build roads through mountains," Rose said.
The effect of these people on the criminal system in Ohio is vast, but many experts refuse to acknowledge it.
"One out of every three inmates in Ohio is Appalachian, one out of every eight of those is black," Rose said.
"Basically they (the prisons) don't know how to deal with it so they ignore it," he added. "This is a very understudied topic."
The isolation that Appalachians go through in life also reflects in their behavior in prison.
"The only way you are going to get to them is through their families. Being very independent-minded, they are less likely to participate in games. they tend to do their time alone," Rose said
Rose is warden if the Northeast Pre-Release Center in Cleveland. He is widely published in the area of Appalachian identity and culture. He belongs to the Urban Appalachian Council, the National Association of Blacks in Criminal Justice, the American Correctional Association, and the Buckeye Sheriff's Association, among others.