This project intends to share and amplify African Americans' sprawling and often excluded history and culture in Appalachia. Paul C. Taylor said, “The standard image of Appalachia probably works hardest at obscuring the presence, plurality, and perspectives of black folks in the region.”* Appalachian inhabitants are often stereotyped as poor, rural, uneducated--and white. Even the Library of Congress Subject Heading terminology for Appalachian people was “mountain whites” until 2005.** The real Appalachia is much more diverse, including the Indigenous nations that originally called Appalachia home. William H. Turner and Edward Cabell responded to this assumption in their 1985 edited work, Blacks in Appalachia. The assumption persists, but the scholars, historians, artists, and writers featured in this bibliography demonstrate the diversity of Appalachia.
* Taylor, Paul C. “Call Me Out My Name: Inventing Affrilachia,” in Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets, ed. Bianca Lynne Spriggs and Jeremy Paden [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017], 23-26.
** Hay, Fred J. “From “Mountain Whites” to “Appalachians (People)”: A Description of the Journey, Concluding with a Brief Sermon.” ANSS Web: The Official Website of the Anthropology and Sociology Section for the Association of College and Research Libraries, 2005.
Affrilachia, a portmanteau of African and Appalachia, is a term coined by poet Frank X Walker in response to an assumption that Appalachia is a white enclave.* The term is not universally adopted; historian William H. Turner refers to it as "a craftily marked brand" (62). Many contemporary authors and artists have adopted Affrilachia as a term that demonstrates the presence of Black people in Appalachia. We use the term in this guide along with Black Appalachian and African Americans in Appalachia.
*Walker, Frank X. Affrilachia: Poems. Old Cove Press, 2000.
**Turner, William Hobart. The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns. First edition. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2021, 63.
Appalachian culture has many interpretations--the same goes for Appalachia's regional boundaries. Scholars at Virginia Tech identified more than 20 maps of Appalachia, all with different boundaries.* This guide focuses on writers and topics associated with the "Consensus Appalachia" defined by John Alexander Williams (see gray and dark orange counties on the map) but also includes the counties identified by the Appalachian Regional Commission (light orange). We also include writers and artists who identify as Appalachian, even if their home counties fall outside the two maps.
*Including several iterations of the ARC Map. See Mapping Appalachia for all maps and a complete historiography of the various maps of the region.
"Interactive Map – Mapping Appalachia.” Accessed March 5, 2024. https://mapappalachia.geography.vt.edu/the-map/.