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In the eyes of most pundits, the upcoming primaries in Appalachia -- including western Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky and West Virginia -- will most likely deal a blow to Sen. Barack Obama's ability to transcend the brewing racial quagmire in presidential politics. Didn't Sen. Hillary Clinton score a landslide victory among white voters in rural and Appalachian areas of Ohio? Conventional wisdom says Obama will never have a chance in "redneck" Appalachia, even among the Democrats.
Perhaps. But Appalachia could also provide Obama a historic opportunity to move beyond our racial politics with a truly new vision. Instead of offering worn out ideas for poverty relief, like Clinton, or succumbing to the anachronistic schemes of the dying coal lobby, Obama should shatter these artificial racial boundaries by proposing a New "Green" Deal to revamp the region and bridge a growing chasm between bitterly divided Democrats, and call for an end to mountaintop removal policies that have led to impoverishment and ruin in the coal fields.
Beyond race and rednecks, another dynamic is simmering as an undercurrent among blacks and whites in this struggling region: Obama's urban campaign and youthful environmental activists have failed to make any inroads with labor's last generation in the Rust and Energy Belts.
Truth is, Obama has a lot in more common with Appalachia than he knows, nor he is the only groundbreaking African American figure in the region's history. For starters, Black History Month founder Carter Woodson emerged out of the coal fields of West Virginia, as did Booker T. Washington, the most important African American spokesman of the 19th century. Pioneering black abolitionist Martin Delany walked out of West Virginia to alter Pittsburgh's destiny.
Woodson, Washington and Delany also understood one of the best kept secrets about Obama's adopted state of Illinois: Slavery was legal and incorporated into the state's constitution in 1818. Making an exception for the laborers in the salt wells in southern Illinois, which generated a considerable portion of the new state's tax revenues, the Illinois legislature -- and the American Congress -- willingly overlooked legal slavery in this so-called anti-slavery northern state. Slavery in the guise of indentured servitude and the kidnapping of free African Americans remained in the area until the 1850s.
Despite their glorious calls for emancipation, the Illinois legislature committed one of the most egregious acts in American political history: They declared the economic benefits of the salt (and future coal) industry outweighed the acts of inhumanity and destruction that supported this economy.
With all Democratic Party eyes now focused on the Big Coal state of Pennsylvania, Obama would be wise to ponder his state's darker history and its implications today for the Keystone state and its energy policies linked to the divisive coal industry in the wider Appalachian region.
Woodson and Washington also had first hand experience with the worst kept secret about Obama's state: A vast coal bed stretched across those salt reserves in the hilly and forested region of southern Illinois with its own cursed wealth.
While Obama likes to declare that he comes from a coal state, as if somehow identifying with rural Appalachia, he rarely mentions the fact that the shortsighted economic interests of the coal industry have subjected the bottom tier of Illinois to nearly two centuries of economic helter skelter, racial conflicts and environmental ruin.
"The rape of Appalachia," Harry Caudill wrote decades ago in his classic text on stripmining and poverty, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, "got its practice in Illinois."
Caudill was referring to the first commercial stripmine in eastern Illinois in the 1860s. By the 1920s, plundered for their coal and unable to compete with the non-union labor in Kentucky and West Virginia, the southern Illinois coal towns had turned into deforested and eroded wastelands, and were depicted by one government report as a "picture, almost unrelieved, of utter economic devastation." Southern Illinois lay claim to the highest infant mortality rates in the nation.
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