Appalachian Volunteers - Strip-mining and The Sedition Controversy

Strip-mining and The Sedition Controversy

As the summer of 1967 approached, the AV made plans for 400 students in three states, (pulling back from a small project in eastern Tennessee). During the previous winter, field coordinator Steve Daugherty became concerned about a landslide from a strip-mine bench that threatened a house at the head of Jones Creek, above Verda on the Clover Fork of the Cumberland River in Harlan County. Daugherty contacted the original Knott County members of the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People (AGSLP) that had generated widespread publicity when the Widow Combs resisted strip-mine operators, and 80-year-old Dan Gibson threatened the bulldozers with his rifle in 1965. Daugherty helped organize an AGSLP chapter in Harlan County, and encouraged Joe Mulloy, AV field coordinator in Pike County, Kentucky to do the same, as conflict over strip-mining was developing on Island Creek, where Jink Ray was planning to block bulldozers from his land. The stand-off gained state-wide publicity, and ended only when Governor Edward T. Breathitt flew to Island Creek in July to see for himself and suspend the coal operator’s permit, and on August 1 revoked the permit to strip-mine Ray’s property.

On the evening of August 11, 1967, as the AV summer volunteer program was winding down, the Pike County sheriff raided the homes of AV Joe Mulloy and his wife Karen (an AV Vista volunteer) and Alan and Margaret McSurely, who were then working for the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), and confiscated a large quantity of the McSurelys’ personal papers and books. (Alan had worked briefly for the AV that spring). Books that supposedly demonstrated their seditious nature included "a large number of works about Communism, including a couple dozen by Marx, Engels, and Lenin," as well as copies of Joseph Heller's novel, Catch-22, and Mao's Red Book. Joe Mulloy and the McSurelys were charged with sedition (“plotting the violent overthrow of Pike County, Kentucky”) by Pike County Commonwealth Attorney Thomas Ratliff, who was a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor and president of the Independent Coal Operators Association. SCEF’s controversial leaders, Anne and Carl Braden, were also charged, although they resided in Louisville. Three days later federal appeals court judge Bert T. Combs (a former Kentucky governor) declared Kentucky’s sedition statute unconstitutional and dismissed the charges.

Although the sedition charges were thrown out of court, the case continued to haunt the AV. The group’s opponents were encouraged to go on the attack in hope of cutting off OEO funding. For their part, the McSurelys spent eighteen years in various courts, first to get back their personal papers and books, and then suing for financial damages various individuals who had held them illegally, with only limited success. The AV had supported Joe Mulloy when he was charged with sedition, but later that fall when he announced he would resist being drafted to fight in Vietnam, most of the local AV staff opposed having to defend his position. After bitter discussion and argument, the full staff voted 20 to 19 to fire Mulloy, who then went to work for SCEF.