Appalachian Colors

The following article contains references to sexual assault. 

Wilma Dunaway has always challenged assumptions, sometimes by her very existence.

People assume her white skin makes her a white person in a predominantly white society. Not so, she says. People assume she’s a middle-class sociology professor with middle-class values and aspirations. Not so, she says. People assume Appalachia is and always has been predominantly a white culture and the story of white settler-farmer-heroes is the story of the region. Dunaway thinks people assume too much, and she says her aim is to “blow their minds.”

Born in 1944 to a Cherokee father and a white mother, Dunaway and her five siblings often tested the limits of East Tennessee segregation laws. “Three of us were blue-eyed, three brown, and we were a rainbow in terms of skin tone,” Dunaway says. In a world where every person was sorted and valued according to black skin or white skin, the Dunaways didn’t fit.

In Tennessee, as in much of the segregated South, there were schools for whites and schools for blacks, but not for Indians. To get her children into white schools, Della Dunaway took Wilma, with her light skin, pale blue eyes, and cornsilk blonde hair, to register. “They looked at me; they looked at my mother, and they declared us all Caucasian.”

While in high school, Dimaway played basketball in hopes of earning an athletic scholarship. Sherman Dunaway drove his daughter to her games, but he was not allowed to come inside and watch her play.

When the school principal learned that a “colored man” was meeting one of the “white” girls after the games, he asked Dunaway’s mother not to send him to pick up his own daughter. “My dad was willing to put up with this crap to invest in my future, but I decided this was too much,” Dunaway says. She quit the team.

 

Now an eminent and controversial scholar, Dunaway wants to change the way we think about race in Appalachian history.

In 1996, she electrified the discipline with her book, The First American Frontier, a revisionist study of the white settlement of Appalachia and the depopulation of Appalachian Indians. In this work, she debunked many myths about the region.

Appalachian studies had always conjured images of a golden age of small backwoods farmers and before that a heroic age of hunters, explorers and Indian fighters, says Appalachian State University historian John Williams. “Dunaway stripped away the gold and the heroism, exposed the heroes—or many of them—for the land thieves and jobbers that they always had been, and argued that the seeds of Appalachian poverty were there from the very beginning.”

She also documented the depopulation of Appalachian Indians. “[Settlers] did engage in invasion of indigenous property. They did kill. They did destroy. They did steal. They did forcibly remove Native Americans to establish whites. If you can’t begin there in understanding the history of the region, then there’s an inbred racism in that history,” she says.

Many scholars in the field were shocked, Williams says. But First American Frontier won the Weatherford Award for best book on Appalachia that year. This spring, Cambridge University Press will publish two new books by Dunaway: Slavery in the American Mountain South and The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation. “We do a lot of historical lying in this country,” she says. She intends to set the record straight.

Conventional wisdom says slavery in Appalachia was more benign than in the deep South. But Dunaway says that assumption is wrong. Through an exhaustive study of slave narratives, slaveholder records, and census and tax records from 215 Appalachian counties in nine states from western Maryland to northern Georgia and Alabama, Dunaway says the evidence shows that slavery in the mountain South was more brutal than in the deep South.

In these books, Dunaway describes the systematic destruction of black families through practices intended to sustain farming operations often one bad crop away from ruin.

Enslaved men were hired out to railroads and mines for most of the year, leaving their wives to work the fields and care for children. Enslaved women were subjected to systematic breeding programs, often by means of rape, and were made to bear more children more often than their deep South counterparts. Appalachian slavery was particularly deadly for enslaved children—half of them died of disease and malnutrition before the age of 15. Of those who survived, half were sold away from their families by their 15th birthdays.

Dunaway says that “probably half” of the Appalachian Studies Association disagrees with her, but she pulls no punches in her criticism of Appalachian scholars she faults for ignoring slave narratives and extrapolating to the entire region studies of isolated counties. “People in Appalachian studies think Appalachia’s white, and they have clung to that,” she says.

And she’s not white, she says, no matter what color her skin. “People jump to the conclusion that you’re white, but we can’t do this in our country anymore,” she says. “We don’t know anything anymore about people racially or ethnically by looking at their skin.

“White is cultural; white’s life experience. White is that you belong to the majority group that has the power and the resources.”

Dunaway was the only person in her family to graduate from high school, and she believes skin color had everything to do with it. The rest of her brothers and sisters were pushed out, she says. Dunaway eventually won an academic scholarship to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville where she earned a degree in sociology. There she met former UT chancellor Jack Reese.

The first time she answered a question in Reese’s English class, the whole room burst into laughter, she says. Reese took her aside and explained to her that she spoke “pidgin” English, a combination of Appalachian English and Cherokee words. He helped her find a speech therapist. Though she credits Reese with changing her life, she says this experience taught her that if it’s not handled very carefully, bilingual kids lose their indigenous languages.

As an undergraduate, she was already questioning stereotypes about the mountain South, particularly the myth of the isolated subsistence farmer. “I remember putting up my hand when I was a freshman saying to this anthropologist, ‘Can you take me out into the countryside here and show me one of these people? Because I don’t think there is such a thing.’”

But, Dunaway observes, “When you’re poor, your life is not neat and clean.” Two things happened to derail Dunaway’s academic career: her father suffered a stroke, and her youngest brother was sent to Vietnam. To help support her family, Dunaway dropped out of a master’s program at 24 to take a job with the Knoxville Urban League. Jack Reese sat on the board. “She was the glue that held that office together,” he says. “She is a fine person with a strong social conscience.”

As a young civil rights activist in Knoxville, Dunaway says she was targeted by the Ku Klux Klan, but she continued to work with urban and rural minority communities for 20 years.

 

In 1988, Dunaway returned to UT to pursue her Ph.D. in sociology. While still a graduate student, she made a daring move. Over what she calls “the protests” of UT faculty, she contacted internationally-renowned sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein in France and asked him to review her work. He did.

“I am very impressed with Wilma; she’s an incredible researcher. She digs up everything, and I mean everything,” Wallerstein says. “She finds stuff other people have ignored or dismissed. She is a woman of enormous energy.”

Wallerstein, currently a senior research scholar at Yale University, founded world-systems theory. Wallerstein argues that over the past few thousand years, human history has been driven by a cycle of rising and declining global economic systems. He posits that the dominant system since the 15th century has been Western and capitalist in origin, and that this system has oppressed minorities and damaged the environment.

Dunaway has used Wallerstein’s theory of the world system to analyze the mountain South’s economic and cultural development. Her theoretical approach has garnered some criticism from historians such as University of Kentucky’s Ron Eller.

“We have to be careful about applying theories—especially those that reflect the patterns of modernization in the 20th century—back in historical time,” Eller says. Specifically, he worries that Dunaway has focused too much on who owned land in Appalachia and not enough on how land was used. Moreover, Eller believes Dunaway may be painting with too broad a brush.

“I find many of Dunaway’s generalizations about the pre-Civil War [Appalachian] economy unconvincing when applied to the interior and more mountainous counties that is the experience of my family’s Appalachia,” he says.

But Dunaway continues her assault on what she sees as a wall of denial in Appalachian studies. She accuses Appalachian scholars of perpetuating the “hillbilly” stereotypes they rail against by creating an imaginary “folk culture” based on middle class experiences.

“Wilma is not always the soul of tact,” Wallerstein says. “But she is a very honest person who tells it like she thinks it is.”

She does not spare the rod with Wallerstein or other world-system scholars. In an article titled “The Double Register of History: Situating the Forgotten Woman and Her Household in Capitalist Commodity Chains,” she criticized Review, an academic journal edited by Wallerstein, for largely ignoring “gendered exploitation, women [and] households.” “After 25 years,” Dunaway charged, “women are only a faint ghost in the world-system perspective.”

While researching the new books, Dunaway says she found an interesting trend in the slave narratives—one in every four ex-slaves interviewed reported an Indian parent or grandparent. Her current project is to document the existence of Native American slaves across the United States until after the Civil War.

As usual, Dunaway begins at the beginning. Appalachian Indians, like most Indian groups, already had a system of slavery in place. War captives were most often impressed into servitude, but it wasn’t necessarily a lifelong condition. Some captives would eventually become part of the community, and Indians never sold slaves far and wide, Dunaway says. But, because slavery did exist in indigenous communities, it was fairly easy for Europeans to begin trading Indian slaves.

She cites an instance in the late 1600s when a Cherokee delegation asked the British for weapons to protect themselves from slave raids by the Creeks. The British had armed the Creeks for the purpose of conducting slave raids against the Cherokee. The British then sold the Cherokee slaves in what is now the Northeastern United States and the West Indies. The Cherokee left with guns of their own and marching orders to conduct slave raids among the Creeks, also for sale to the British.

“The number one commodity coming out of the mountains, even before the fur trade, was Indian slaves,” Dunaway says. And she says she has evidence that the Indian slave trade continued after the emancipation of black slaves, into the 1870s.

 

By most accounts, Dunaway is a gifted teacher. “Students say there’s nowhere to hide in professor Dunaway’s classes,” Ryan says. “She’s a very strong teacher.” Dunaway requires class attendance and participation and teaches her students to use the Internet. She stands up for their interests, too.

“Universities do things that represent the interests of middle class students, not the interests of poor students,” she says. For example, Virginia Tech requires every incoming freshman to have a computer. Dunaway says she has students who can’t afford it.

Most important, she says she tries to teach her students to be better at race relations than their parents. “I know a lot about teaching my students not to hate racially because part of my survival mechanism as a kid was to hate white people,” she says.

Dunaway credits her father with teaching her how to survive hate and fear, even her own. “I did stop hating white people,” she says. “My father said that hatred causes you to diminish how much you can love the people you care about.”