Appalachian Volunteers - Governor Nunn and KUAC

Governor Nunn and KUAC

Congressional leaders were becoming concerned by the controversies generated by OEO’s community action programs across the country, and in 1967 Oregon Representative Edith Green authored an amendment to the Economic Opportunity Act, attached to an appropriation bill, which assured that local political officials would have more influence on CAAs. Knowing its OEO funding was threatened, the AV retrenched and attempted to focus its scattered projects. Needing a more central location for its downscaled programs, now limited to eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia, the AV moved its central office from Bristol, Tennessee to Prestonsburg, Kentucky in March 1968. In July, Milton Ogle announced that he would resign from his position as executive director of the AV in September. Assistant director David Walls was appointed acting director, and was later confirmed as executive director for the organization’s final year.

Adding to the AV’s troubles, Louie B. Nunn had been elected governor of Kentucky in November 1967 (the only Republican governor of Kentucky between 1943 and 2003). He moved quickly to support legislation creating the Kentucky Un-American Activities Committee (KUAC), which passed in March 1968. Once KUAC had held hearings on the civil disorders in Louisville, governor Nunn honored his political debts to the independent coal operators by supporting the dispatch of KUAC to Pikeville to investigate alleged “subversive” activities in anti-poverty programs and at Pikeville College. One focus of the hearing was the AV’s work for reduced tap-on fees for poor people to a proposed water system along Marrowbone Creek. Walls issued a statement challenging the constitutionality of KUAC and the legality of the hearings, noting the topic of the water system would be better suited for a public utilities commission. The AV senior staff refused invitations to appear, but were not issued subpoenas, which they had hoped to challenge in court. Local AV staff who were subpoenaed appeared and denounced KUAC and its local political and coal operator allies.

Although the KUAC hearings caused serious difficulties for the AV, the most immediate casualty was Thomas Johns, the liberal president of Pikeville College, who faced what was most likely the only conservative student revolt in the United States in 1968. He resigned not long after.