Evangeline Mee “Working with One Hand and Fighting with the Other”: An Oral History of Kate Bradley and Community Organizing in Appalachia

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J.W. and Kate Bradley in their home in Wartburg, Tennessee. (Photo courtesy of Margaret Ecker.) Afer meeting with a Berkeley professor in folklore who told me, candidly, that among other things he did not care very much about my feldwork experience as an undergraduate, I returned home to Knoxville, Tennessee, somewhat demoralized. Te professor had said he was more concerned with the theory-based side of folkloristics. Sure, I knew about the South, but could I deconstruct the Eurocentric genealogy of folklore? “Read Lacan and come back,” he said curtly.

230 Evangeline Mee

My studies in folklore had been debunked, or so I felt. But just a few days later I found myself driving an hour west to interview two community and environmental justice activists for the Southern Oral History Program’s “Long Women’s Movement in the American South” collection. A confuence of interests, both academic and personal, brought me to the home of W. and Kate Bradley in Wartburg, Tennessee, that day. Te Smoky and Cumberland Mountains are a vital part of my family life, as they are for many east Tennesseans. Te mountains hold the memories of my childhood and young adult life, and they are integral to my idea of home and sense of place. Te environmental, economic, and social violation of mountain communities by the coal industry was therefore an urgent issue to me. Additionally, my interest in social and oral history attracted me to stories of resistance coming from afected communities, and to women activists in particular. Ofen, history focuses on high-profle characters, but oral history takes a more grassroots approach, searching for previously unheard voices, like those of women and racial minorities. Tat is how I ended up on the doorstep of J.W. and Kate Bradley one afernoon in late May of 2012. Wartburg, a small town in Morgan County, Tennessee, is situated in the midst of the lush Cumberland Mountains, a range in the southeastern section of the Appalachians. I had ofen visited the state park that neighbors Wartburg, but afer missing three turns before fnally arriving at the Bradleys’s house at the end of a long, steep driveway, I felt like anything but a local. I was greeted at the doorway by J.W. and Kate, both in their seventies and no more than fve-and-a-half feet tall. “Well, you passed the test,” J.W. said with an avuncular grin. “Most people can’t even fnd our house.” My visit with the Bradleys began with instructions to order of a Mexican restaurant take-out menu and ended with an invitation to their family reunion that weekend. In the meantime, I sat on the sofa with Kate as she spoke of her life, including stories about her involvement in Save Our Cumberland Mountains (SOCM), and her community leadership and activism. J.W., who was a little hard of hearing, sat on the La-Z-Boy to the lef and spontaneously interpolated throughout the interview with aphorisms and stories of his involvement with SOCM. Despite their lifelong commitment to community activism and economic and environmental justice, very little has been written about the Bradleys. Teir stories have been confned mostly to newspaper articles and

231 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

passing mentions in books about strip mining and Appalachian activism. Little information about Kate has been published beyond noting that she was the wife of the founder of SOCM. When I began to interview Kate and several other SOCM women, I anticipated a narrative of activism solely within the context of Save Our Cumberland Mountains. As I completed the interviews, however, I realized that the women had done much more, dedicating their lives to a myriad of social and community issues. Previous literature on women activists, especially in the civil rights movement era, concludes that “men led, but women organized.”1 Tis thesis has been appraised and critiqued over the past years. Typically, it is the accuracy of the “but” that has been called into question and subjected to revision, as it was by my interviews. Kate Bradley explained how she and other women in her community used gender-based forms of activism to both organize and lead in efective and important ways. Tese women leaders all shared a passion for justice, an indelible sense of place, toughness in the face of diversity, an ability to multi-task and be resourceful, and a selfess commitment to the betterment of their communities. More than a commitment to a single organization, they were defned by the ability to take on anything, whether it was volunteering, speech-making, lobbying, fundraising, protesting, or raising a family.

Te Bradleys and Activism Kate and J.W. Bradley were both born in Petros, Tennessee, a coalfeld community in the Cumberland Mountains. Birthed by the same coal company doctor, both were born into large families and had coal-mining fathers. Kate remembers her father “going to work and coming in black with coal dust.”2 She recalled, “It was kind of a hard life, but my mother always worked and had a big garden and raised all kinds of our food. And daddy, he’d pick berries and go in the woods and kill squirrels and all that kind of stuf. But school and church was about all we had back then.”3

1 Charles Payne, “Men Led, but Women Organized: Movement Participation of Women in the Mississippi Delta,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement, eds. Vicki Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990), 8. 2 Kate Bradley, interview by Evangeline Mee, May 29, 2012, transcript, 2. 3 Ibid. 232 Evangeline Mee

Petros was “just a poor community in Morgan County” with a railroad and depot for the coal.4 Te town was also home to the Brushy Mountain Correctional Complex, a prison built in 1896, whose inmates included James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Kate recalled that “at one time, Petros was incorporated, and they had a bank and a jail and all kinds of stores and lots of that.”5 All that has changed since the Bradleys moved ten miles down the road to Wartburg in 1994. “Tere’s nothing there now,” she said. “It’s just a dead place. It’s all gone. Tey closed the prison last year, and that was the last thing. Tey took the railroad out and everything’s gone.”6 Te Bradleys’ activism centered on issues of social, economic, and environmental justice in their community and surrounding towns. “We was just trying to make a poor community better with healthcare and protection of jobs and protection from strip mine hazards,” J.W. said.7 SOCM, which now stands for Statewide Organizing for Community Empowerment, was founded in 1972, when concerned citizens realized that large, absentee land corporations were failing to pay taxes on their mineral land. Te activists won the appeal that required appropriate taxation and formed the organization to address other problems created by the strip mining industry. J.W. described the SOCM’s founding as a response to water pollution caused by strip mining waste. He explained that, at frst, the Petros community members’ defeatism prevented them from rallying against the giant coal company. However, that changed afer a 1969 food washed away several homes, causing people to act. Local citizens were also empowered by Vanderbilt University students. J.W. said that the students told the community, “Y’all have got some problems. You need to organize and fght these problems.” Tirteen people from fve surrounding counties were sent to Nashville to lobby against the coal companies. Te Department of Revenue heard their complaints, but they had other problems. J.W. decided to form an organization and ofered fve dollars to the person who named it.8 From there, SOCM was born.

4 J.W. Bradley, interview by Evangeline Mee, August 11, 2012, transcript, 20. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Kate Bradley, interview, 23. 8 J.W. Bradley, interview, 7. 233 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Tis story points to several key topics that came up in conversation with the Bradleys: the health clinic, relationships with Vanderbilt students, legislative action, community support, toxic pollution caused by the coal industry, and raising support and funds for the betterment of the community. While J.W. was busy organizing SOCM, Kate was not only vital to the organization but was simultaneously leading the establishment of a health clinic program by creating connections with Vanderbilt students and engaging in grassroots initiatives.

Mountain People’s Health Clinic: Petros, Tennessee In the 1980s, the Nashville Tennessean published an article describing the Clear Fork Creek Valley as “a tortured moonscape of a place, rocked by dynamite blasts along the ridges, its roads potted by coal trucks, pungent acids trickling into its streams.” According to the newspaper, “Strip mines which derange the drainage causing foods and land erosion are everywhere. Te heavy machinery used requires little manpower. Miners are out of work and the young are moving away.”9 Journalists writing about the valley ofen employed the same pejorative language used to describe the state of Appalachian communities in these and surrounding counties, calling them “geographically divisive but confning.”10 Petros was one of these seemingly hopeless communities. Its population seemed too small and too poor to be able to address its problems, including lack of medical care, dilapidated public schools, and the havoc that strip mining was wreaking on their land and people. In 1969, a group of Vanderbilt students, later named the Student Community Health Coalition, mobilized eforts to address defcient medical care in rural Appalachian communities. When the students arrived in Petros, they found active community members eager to serve as agents of change. Te Bradleys were among them. J.W. revealed that it was Kate who raised money for a community building and library for a health clinic.11 Kate ofered a history of the health clinic, showing her collaborative ethic and commitment to community health:

9 F.T. Billings, “A Teaching Relationship: students in rural health care,” Transactions of the American Clinical and Climatological Assoc. (1980): 167. 10 Ibid. 11 Kate Bradley, interview, 8. 234 Evangeline Mee

I was on the health council in Wartburg and on the county health council. Me and J.W. was on that, and they rotated me and him as members of the health council for twenty-fve years. But we helped get a health clinic built out here, working with them. And then I got interested in raising money to build a health clinic. And we had a little engineer from Vanderbilt that drew the plans up for the clinic. And then they come up and worked. So they even had dinners down at Vanderbilt: bean and onion and cornbread dinners. And they helped us raise money. We got donations from everywhere. And we got that clinic built.

And we had a boy from Vanderbilt that got out of medical school, and he was our frst doctor. And then the engineer’s wife was a nurse practitioner, and she was our frst nurse. And we really had lots of luck, and the Lord blessed us. And the people in Petros were pretty good to help. It’s mostly family and friends. It got to where we would work, and then other people would want to come in and take over that didn’t know a thing about what they was doing. So we had to work with one hand and fght with the other ’til it fnally got awful disgusting. But we got what we wanted done.12

Even buying the land for the health clinic was a battle, as demonstrated by a story Kate told about traveling to Nashville to vie for the land with Southern Railroad. Surrounded by the county judge, members of the Agriculture Extension Ofce, and “a bunch of them over there trying to block us from getting that railroad land,” Kate Bradley was the only woman in a room of powerful men.13 “Course they didn’t like me, and I didn’t like them,” she said. “We’d been fghting for months.”14 Not only did Kate end up getting the land and seeing to it that the health clinic was built, she led the fundraising eforts for the entire project.

12 Ibid., 7. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 8. 235 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Cupcakes and Quilt Rafes Troughout the interview, Kate asserted her reliance on grassroots fundraising rather than funds from politicians and corporations. “Well, that was money that I’d raised with cupcakes and quilt rafes!” she said.15 Tis comes as no surprise: despite the resources poured into the region throughout Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” eastern Tennessee has rarely found government on any level to be a reliable ally. Kate raised funds selling small items such as jars of canned goods, cakes, and quilts. She asserted the importance of non-proft work in her life, emphasizing that she “never worked for anything that paid any money. It was all volunteer. Never got a nickel for nothing.”16 In the following passage Kate explains the breadth of her eforts and those of women in her community, which attracted national awareness:

We sold rummage every Saturday, J.W.’s mother and another old lady there in the community. Every Saturday they’d work all day in the rummage sales, you know, selling. A big, Methodist church would give us truckloads of rummage to sell, and we made a lot of money. And then we’d cook! We sold pies and cakes and had dinners. Tere’s one boy from Vanderbilt, his aunt in New Jersey … had a bake sale and sent us the money to own the clinic. And one of the girls that stayed with us, they made a record at her high school and sold it and give us the money from that. And we just had a lot of little things. Women done it, you know. And it just really went over. It was fun but it was a lot of work.17

Kate’s relationship with the Vanderbilt students proved fortuitous and, as the students travelled far and wide, so did awareness of the plight of the little town of Petros. Years later, Kate encountered a Vanderbilt student in California, only to learn that he had once purchased cans of pickled beans and jelly from her. In addition to the work the students accomplished, the relationships they forged lasted a lifetime. Kate and J.W. still speak lovingly

15 Ibid., 27. 16 Ibid., 9. 17 Ibid., 8. 236 Evangeline Mee

of the students, many of whom they have kept in touch with. “We all come from pretty wealthy homes, but we didn’t have love like you give us,” Kate said a student once told her.18 Te depth of their bond signaled a rapport that opened the door to the acceptance of outside resources and help.

Leading and Working Together Kate’s commitment to opening the health clinic was a full-time job, yet she still managed to support her husband and his organization. J.W. was the leader and the public face of SOCM from 1972-1977, but Kate had an equally important, albeit behind-the-scenes, role.19 While he was taking people on tours of strip mines, she was in the kitchen cooking, so that when they returned, supper would be ready and on the table. Kate said that she “fed everybody that come through the valley. We had all kinds of people come through. We fed people running for president and senators and preachers. I told him I’ve fed the saints and the sinners!”20 While Kate took pride in her work, she did not downplay the time and efort it required. She remembers cooking for a crowd every weekend. Te Bradleys rarely had a family dinner because guests were always “dropping by.”21 “I worked myself to death trying to feed them all and keep them going,” she said.22 She recalled those days with pleasure, smiling as she said, “I fed everybody in the world.”23 Te Bradleys’ eforts to improve their community through grassroots organizing were successful both legislatively and locally. Te health clinic was built, the schools improved, laws and bills restricting and halting strip mining were passed, and a community was brought together and empowered through its fght for justice. Historian Temma Kaplan writes that the ordinary women she studied while researching grassroots movements were “concerned with local issues and necessary tasks, to provide services rather than to build power bases.”24 Likewise, Kate Bradley did not gain much

18 Ibid., 33. 19 Geoffrey L. Buckley, Mountains of Injustice: Social and Environmental Justice in Appalachia (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 92. 20 Kate Bradley, interview, 3. 21 Ibid., 6. 22 Ibid., 20. 23 Ibid. 24 Temma Kaplan, Crazy for Democracy: Women in Grassroots Movements (New York: Routledge, 1996), 6. 237 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

public recognition but worked within her own means, using seemingly inconsequential methods to efect change. In an article about the civil rights movement, Charles Payne argues that “since women tend to be more deeply invested than men in networks of kin and community” they were more likely to join the movement and stay involved in less fashy, more community-based activities such as weekly meetings and neighborhood canvassing.25 He cites Karen Sack’s research, which demonstrates that “women created the organization, made people feel a part of it, as well as doing the everyday work upon which most things depended, while men made public announcements, confronted and negotiated with management.26 From this, however, he pithily concluded that “women are organizers; men are leaders.”27 His article’s summation of why women were more involved than men argued that because of women’s religiosity, they had a higher desire for “personal efcacy,” and thus a predilection for the organizational and community-based side of activist politics.28 But Kaplan and other writers have since asserted that women went farther than Payne suggests. Kaplan afrms that these women were active organizers as well as leaders, modifying Payne’s thesis. She writes of women leaders possessing not an innate, genetic quality that made them act a certain way, but rather a “female consciousness developed from cultural experiences of helping families and communities survive.”29 She applied sociologist Max Weber’s theory of the charismatic leader to many of the women described in her book “insofar as they appear to have inherent magical qualities of authority that justify their ethical mission.”30 However, “unlike [charismatic] leaders who stand aloof … participating only in the most publicized meetings, the women pay as much attention to the nitty-gritty of daily organizing as to making points that register at the national level. In doing so they create new political cultures.”31 Te political culture of Petros, Tennessee, that Kate Bradley helped create included the “nitty-gritty daily organizing”

25 Payne, 8. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Kaplan, 7. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 4. 238 Evangeline Mee

that consisted of leading weekend rummage sales, quilt rafes, bake sales, canning sales, and cooking for everyone that her husband’s organization brought through her home. At the same time, Kate never let her small-town background stop her from voicing her message about the health clinic and the schools in Petros. She went from never having given a public speech before to giving “speeches everywhere.”32 She modestly recounted speaking to an auditorium full of Tennessee public school superintendents, where she demanded more funding for their community’s decaying education system. At one assembly, she was called to speak about the health clinic. She said, “When we got down there … I was frst. And I made my talk and, well, I was the speaker of the day and I didn’t even know it.”33 J.W. and Kate are both charismatic leaders, but they also supported each other and each other’s causes. Even before SOCM or the health clinic, they volunteered together at their church. “J.W. done the labor; I raised the money to build two churches,” said Kate.34 As heavily committed as they were to their projects, they were as equally committed to each other. Kate noted: “I backed him; he backed me.”35 Kate cooked for SOCM, and when she would go to Nashville for a fundraiser, J.W. would come along to help. Tough their roles in terms of their leadership and involvement varied, both were willing to do whatever it took to improve their communities. Te scales of each of their roles were also diferent. J.W.’s work was mostly with SOCM, and he focused his attention on legislative appeals, lobbying in Washington, and leading an organization that fought giant companies and gained a level of regional recognition. Meanwhile, Kate was working from the ground foor, making sure that people J.W. showed around the mines were always fed. Her own work was more confned to her immediate community of Petros. Te health clinic and prison that she devoted most of her time to gained local publicity, but not to the extent that SOCM did. Still, the organizations they were involved in received federal recognition. As Kate noted, “Yeah, we got invited to the White House.”36

32 Kate Bradley, interview, 8. 33 Ibid., 9. 34 Ibid., 11. 35 Ibid., 13. 36 Ibid., 13. 239 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Why Women? Why Kate? Why did so many observers point specifcally to women as the force behind community activism? Kate said what other women I interviewed echoed: women were the strongest part of SOCM. “We’ve had several women that were president of SOCM afer J.W. that was good leaders.… Te women were the strongest in there! Tey backed J.W. better than many of the men. I mean, they’d go forward, and they’d get in trouble and everything. But women made SOCM strong.”37 Former SOCM President Carol Ford said that women were active in the organization because they cared about their families and their homes, “and they were the one home to do it!”38 She called them “very brave women,” saying, “and sometimes if the men are of working, trying to do their best, that leaves you.”39 But what made Kate special? Like many in the community, her father was a coalminer. She was one of seven children, yet she seemed to believe that she was the only child in her family who made something of herself. Afer telling a story about her fundraising, she said that “it just come natural” for her to raise money.40 “Honey, I’m the only one in my family. I don’t have a brother or a sister that ever was outgoing or ever done anything worthwhile,” she said.41 “I just always liked to be active.”42 Kate explained her activism by describing how she was the latest in a long line of fercely independent women in her family. Whereas J.W. had little to report about his mother—a beautician, partial breadwinner, and failed grocery store owner—Kate could not avoid interjecting from across the room to speak about women in her community and in her family tree:

All the mountain women worked to help provide. Tere was women that made gardens and canned and preserved and put up stuf.… My mother was a stronghold in our family. She would work in that garden, put up stuf for the winter for all of us, and she practically fed us. So the mountain women was

37 Ibid., 4. 38 Carol Ford, interview by Evangeline Mee, May 30, 2012, 19. 39 Ibid. 40 Kate Bradley, interview, 11. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 12. 240 Evangeline Mee

strong. And they had cows, chickens, and they did all that.43

It was at this point that J.W. reentered the conversation to mention a fact that he believed I needed to know. “And her mother’s mother was an Indian,” he said. He added that because of her race, she wasn’t allowed to be buried in the local cemetery.44 It was not until I did further research that I understood the poignancy of J.W.’s comment. Growing up in Knoxville, I had heard people talk about the “Malungeons” my entire life. Tis mysterious race of people, sometimes even referred to as “mountain niggers,” were a fgment of local folklore and they did not appear in Knoxville ofen enough to break outside the realm of myth. My one relevant memory was in high school, when a girl I had grown up playing soccer with claimed that she was Malungeon. Since then, I have discovered that there has been intense academic interest in the Malungeons. For instance, in the article “Transgressions in Race and Place: Te Ubiquitous Native Grandmother in America’s Cultural Memory,” Darlene Wilson and Patricia Beaver write about the history of racism and disenfranchisement surrounding those of mixed-ancestry in Appalachia. Even more pertinent than the complex and dynamic racial history of Appalachia was the article’s attention to the historically prescribed characteristics of the ubiquitous Malungeon grandmother. Te authors painted a portrait that highlighted the “subtle theme of female will and independence” that has been “woven through the vernacular history of the Malungeons.”45 Tey asserted, “Te association of Malungeon ethnicity with independent women remains active even today.”46 While I would never presume to attribute Kate’s activism to an innate ethnic independence, she did appear to be aware of the cultural sentiments surrounding women of mixed ancestry, and this may have infuenced her sense of identity. In the details that Kate included about the women in her life, she asserted that their strength rose from their resilience and ingenuity, their need to support their family, and their ability to multitask. On top of the fulltime

43 J.W. Bradley, interview, 19. 44 Ibid. 45 Darlene Wilson and Patricia Beaver, “Transgressions in Race and Place: The Ubiquitous Native Grandmother in America’s Cultural Memory,” in Neither Separate Nor Equal: Women, Race, and Class in the South, ed. Barbara Smith (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 49. 46 Ibid., 50. 241 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

job of caring for and keeping the family afoat, these women still had energy to serve their communities. Kate had described in detail her work with the Brushy Mountain Prison, but it was not until my later interview with J.W. that she revealed that her grandmother “was the frst woman that ever went in that prison when it was frst built” and “she cooked for them.”47

Back then there wasn’t no roads or no way to get in or out of Petros. It was just muddy roads and rocks. It’d take people a day or two to get in there if they come to see somebody at the prisons or some of their family. And my grandmother, she had a room, and she would let them stay all night and fx their breakfast for a dollar. But she’d take them in and feed them all. And give them a place to stay if they didn’t have nowhere to go. She was an old mountaineer, but she was tough. Yeah, taught me a lot. Yeah, she was a wise old woman. She was rowdy sometimes, but she was sharp. She knew what she’s—she was a McCoy.48

In those last few minutes of the interview, Kate emphasized that she descended from a line of strong, tough women. By asserting her lineage from a family of such folkloric fame as the McCoys, she wrapped herself in a birthright of mythic proportions. But Kate dispelled the stereotypes that the McCoys typically conjure, of “mountain people” being clannish and violent, by recounting how her grandmother happily fed and hosted people from across the country. When she related the terrors she had faced as an activist, I understood how well she ft into her family tree of courageous women. In Appalachian coal mining communities, companies ofen practiced clandestine forms of intimidation and violence towards resistant citizens. Te Bradleys, with their involvement in SOCM, were no exception. J.W. spoke of being physically assaulted in a courtroom where no sherifs were present and no one came to his aid. While Kate avoided physical harm, she still experienced palpable intimidation from coal company personnel. Kate said that coal companies were known for “burn outs” where they would set fre to troublemakers’

47 J.W. Bradley, interview, 22. 48 Ibid. 242 Evangeline Mee homes.49 It would take many more pages to complete the narrative of Kate’s activism, including her work in the Brushy Mountain Prison, for which she was invited to Washington, DC, and recognized as one of the “Fify Most Courageous Women in America.” Even without this, there is more than enough evidence to highlight Kate Bradley’s incredible “life of volunteer” and life of leadership. Te women I met in Tennessee demonstrated an alternative way to live. Many had never been to college, never traveled outside the United States, and probably—though I didn’t ask—never read Lacan. Teir wisdom did not come from schooling or extensive travel or reading. It came from a history of knowing who they were personally, who they were in their families, who they were in their communities, and who they were in the hollow of East Tennessee that they called home. Tey were grounded with a stalwart sense of justice, and they were willing to do whatever it took to secure that for their family and their community. Kate Bradley’s oral history gives voice to the ofen-evanescent histories of women in eastern Tennessee. Her personal account is evidence of the tenacious spirit of individuals in small communities. Te details of her activism paint a rich portrait of Appalachian resistance that continues to this day.

49 Kate Bradley, interview, 29. 243