An Oral History of Kate Bradley and Community Organizing in Appalachia

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

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