From the Editors

We are so happy to be bringing this special issue on Black Appalachia to our membership! I will start by thanking our journal team, including managing editor Mary K. Thomas, assistant managing editor Ann E. Bryant, book review editor Carson E. Benn, media review editor Matthew Sparks, and our journalism school intern, Raithlyn Godfrey. Our team is undergoing some transitions, and this is our last issue with our long-serving associate editor Christopher L. Leadingham, who will be stepping down at this time and joining the editorial board. We are going to miss Chris and extend our great appreciation for all he has done for the journal. However, we are also very happy to welcome our incoming associate editor, Meredith McCarroll. We are delighted that Meredith is joining the editorial team.We are also welcoming several other new members to the editorial board: Wesley R. Bishop, Rachel Rosolina, and Jacqueline Yahn. As always, we thank all the members of the JAS editorial board for their work on behalf of the journal. Finally, I would like to recognize our special issue editor for the hard work he has put into making this special issue possible. The articles, research notes, book, and media reviews in this issue provide our readership with critical resources on Black histories, activism, and scholarship in Appalachia. And with that, I turn it over to the special issue editor, Wilburn Hayden, Jr.Black Appalachians, Black Appalachian groups and families, Black Appalachian institutions, and Black Appalachian experiences were and are formed in Appalachia. Our history and presence originated from the earliest days of White colonial settlers’ theft of Indigenous lands. Over the centuries, Black folks through birth, migration, lived residence, and heritage have contributed to the molding and shaping of the region. The Journal of Appalachian Studies special issue on Black Appalachia is one testament to our claim to be Appalachians. The stories of Black Appalachians are Appalachian stories as much as Scots-Irish or other identity populations within the region we call Appalachia. We are Appalachians; we are Black Appalachians! I have started capitalizing all racial groups in my writings. Not capitalizing White as a racial group signals that Whites are not part of society's construct of races. Thus, it reaffirms White as the societal norm, and should be treated differently from other racial groups.Black people, unwilling and willing from the start, were participants in the taking of these lands. We enjoyed and suffered within the beauty of the mountains from river valleys, twisted mountain laurels, remote hollers, small towns, cities, and communities, and the joy and disappointment in our families. For the most, our paths in the journey have been forged through segregation and discrimination, while remaining steadfast within the trails of the region's histories, developments, and visions. Often we have been omitted, excluded, and invisible in the settler's tales and recorded notes. Yet we were and are there, contributing to part of its successes and failures. We experienced but continue to stay afloat among the strong regional forces of racism, discrimination, prejudices, and unequal privileges and resources metered through White supremacy. Appalachia has come to be our home. A home that had rooms that we could not enter or that fell silent upon our entrance. In spite of it all, we found and continued to find places to grow and thrive. This special issue brings a few voices about Black Appalachia into the light from the many blue moon months of our mountain existence.I invite you to take a stroll with us through hollers among the Appalachia Black pathways. Let's start our journey in the Cullowhee Valley. “‘Woven into the fabric:’ The Legacy and Labor That Built a University” by Liz Harper and Adam Thomas documents how Western Carolina University came into possession of the land on which the university was built. They carefully present how both Native Americans and Black Appalachians were exploited to benefit local White students and officials.Mich Nyawalo's “Multiculturalism in the Coal Mines: Re-interpreting the Battle of Blair Mountain in the Age of Black Lives Matter” draws upon the spirit of Blair Mountain. Nyawalo connects the activism growing out of the Black Lives Matter movement and the unity of Black and White miners and their supporters in the struggle against labor exploitation and state violence at Blair Mountain.Kristan L. McCullum's work “‘You will always be’: Remembering a Historically Black School in the Mountains of Eastern Kentucky” employs “subjective truth” and oral histories to reflect on Dunham High School, a segregated Black school in the Consolidation Coal Company town of Jenkins, Kentucky. This article links my own past, as a product of twelve years of Appalachian Jim Crow public schools, to understandings of unequal discrimination that were not apparent to me.The book and media reviews expand the content of this special issue: The Fifth Border State: Slavery, Emancipation, and the Formation of West Virginia, 1829–1872, written by Scott A. MacKenzie and reviewed by William E. Hardy; Lige of the Black Walnut Tree: Growing Up Black in Southern Appalachia, written by Mary Othella Burnette and reviewed by Cicero M. Fain III,; The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns, written by William H. Turner and reviewed by Tim Konhaus; Those We Thought We Knew, written by David Joy and reviewed by Candice Dyer; the album Rest, produced by Corduroy Brown and reviewed by Catherine Wilbur; and the film O Pioneer, directed by Clara Lehmann and Jonathan Lacocque and reviewed by Destiny Caldwell.The research note about US Census data that I compiled contains the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) county populations by race (Black, White, and other race populations). The tables may be useful as a starting point for examining the location of Black Appalachians in respect to research. The second note includes a link to a listing of presentations at the Appalachian Studies Association's annual conference across the past twenty-eight years (1996–2024), that focus on Black Appalachia.Along with the above-named contributors, this special issue would have not been possible without the insights, experiences, and hard work of Rebecca R. Scott, Christopher L. Leadingham, Meredith McCarroll, Mary K. Thomas, Ann E. Bryant, Matthew R. Sparks, and Carson E. Benn. A special thanks goes to the un-named peer reviewers who interrogated the manuscripts. If you are asked to review a manuscript for a journal, please say yes. For me, the most difficult experience for this special issue was the countless rejections to requests from colleagues to review manuscripts. When asked, please say yes.

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