Evangelizing an Anglo Equality (1883–1908)

Abstract

At the turn of the century administrators at Berea College and Lincoln Memorial University (LMU) were engaged in an internecine struggle. Each sought to be the Appalachian institution of higher learning that served (white) Southern mountain students.¹ In 1929, three of the poets (Jesse Stuart, James Still, and Don West) upon whom the second half of this book focuses graduated from LMU, a small mountain college near the Cumberland Gap. There, they found voices that—as the first mountain born authors to gain national publication—have helped define modern Appalachian poetry and literature. Berea College, which has helped define what it means to be Appalachian, and LMU grew from the same neo-abolitionist networks that gave rise to African American universities throughout the South, profoundly influencing the development of America’s racial mosaic.² In short, African Americans and Appalachians share a key discursive ancestor in the form of the neo-abolitionists who saw themselves as a continuation of abolitionism that arose in antebellum America during the Second Great Awakening.