Council of The Southern Mountains - Conflict and Decline

Conflict and Decline

The departure of the AV staff did not end conflicts within the CSM. As staff grew more critical of Ayer’s insistence on strict neutrality on the politics of anti-poverty efforts and economic development in southern Appalachia, the pressure grew on Ayer to step down. In 1966 Loyal Jones replaced Ayer as executive director, but internal controversies were just getting started. The issues came to a head at the annual meetings at Fontana, North Carolina in 1969, and at Lake Junaluska, North Carolina in 1970. A vote at Fontana approved a proposal to require the CSM board of directors to include 51 percent poor people within three years, and resolutions were passed in favor of a guaranteed annual income and opposing the Vietnam War. Conservative critics charged the meeting had been packed with radical outsiders. Conservatives' fears were reinforced the next year at Lake Junaluska, when the meeting voted to oppose strip-mining for coal and took other controversial positions. Funding sources began to withhold grant money, and several weeks later Jones resigned as executive director.

The reorganized CSM board of directors chose Warren Wright, a farmer and self-educated minister, as its new executive director, assisted by CSM staff Isaac Vanderpool and Julian Griggs, but a year later Wright resigned. A new egalitarian model of staff decision-making was instituted. In fall 1972 the CSM moved out of Berea to Clintwood, in the coalfields of Dickenson County, Virginia. A lean staff, often working for subsistence wages, managed to continue CSM activities for another decade and a half, continuing to publish ML&W, giving publicity and support to Black Lung Associations, welfare rights groups, mine health and safety programs, and miners’ strikes. The CSM also maintained the Appalachian Bookstore and Record Shop in Berea, and a mobile bookstore that traveled to regional events. The CSM closed its doors in 1989.