Break With The Council of The Southern Mountains
As the AV students and staff became more deeply involved in poor rural communities, they began to see local politicians and school leaders as part of the problem rather than allies in uplift. The AV began to move from a consensus to a conflict understanding of how social change takes place. In 1966 tensions between the AV and the CSM came to a head when CSM executive director Perley Ayer, who was committed to a nonpolitical, consensus vision of community development, fired AV director Ogle and his assistant director. The remaining 13 AV staff resigned. They quickly moved to incorporate as a separate organization, and OEO promptly transferred its grants to the newly independent AV. To emphasize its separation from the CSM, the AV moved its headquarters from Berea, Kentucky, to Bristol, Tennessee, a location more central to the southern Appalachians into which the AV hoped to expand.
With its new funding the AV greatly expanded its summer program in 1966, placing 500 students with eight-week projects in four states: eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, southwestern Virginia, and eastern Tennessee. OEO was becoming unhappy with the failure of many community action agencies (CAAs) in central Appalachia to take seriously its mandate of “maximum feasible participation” of the poor in the administration of the CAAs. OEO encouraged the AV to rally the rural poor for a bigger role in the local CAAs. Conflict in Kentucky’s Cumberland Valley was acute, and led to a controversial defunding of its eight-county CAA, which was split into one- and two-county agencies.
Read more about this topic: Appalachian Volunteers
Famous quotes containing the words break, council, southern and/or mountains:
“Our missiles always make too short an arc:
They fall, they rip the grass, they intersect
The curve of earth, and striking, break their own;”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“I haven’t seen so much tippy-toeing around since the last time I went to the ballet. When members of the arts community were asked this week about one of their biggest benefactors, Philip Morris, and its requests that they lobby the New York City Council on the company’s behalf, the pas de deux of self- justification was so painstakingly choreographed that it constituted a performance all by itself.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“No: until I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant Southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until I am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak, but for that you must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks: and those to whom they are spoken should be big and tall of stature.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)