Affrilachia: The Black Appalachians History Forgot

In nineteen ninety-one, a poet from Kentucky named Frank X Walker coined a word: Affrilachia. He made it from Appalachia and Africa, and he made it to name something that existing narratives of both regions had systematically erased. Black people had lived in the Appalachian mountains and foothills for generations, and neither the story that Appalachia told about itself nor the story that African America told about itself had room for them.

The Appalachian narrative, as it had been constructed in popular culture and academic literature from the late nineteenth century onward, was a narrative about white people. The mountains were where Anglo-Saxon settlers had preserved a pure and ancient culture, away from the corrupting influences of cities and immigrants. The poverty of Appalachia was framed as a white problem, the people of Appalachia as a white people. The Black communities that had existed in the mountains throughout that entire period were simply not in the story.

In the Tennessee mountains, those communities had different origins. Some descended from enslaved people who had been brought to the mountains to work in farming, timbering, and early mining. Others were free Black families who had settled in hollows and coves before the Civil War. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, coal mining drew Black workers into Appalachian Tennessee communities where they lived and worked in a complicated relationship with white neighbors, sometimes in relative equality, sometimes under the same segregation that governed the lowland South.

The specific communities in Tennessee's portion of the Affrilachian world are less fully documented in the accessible published record than historians of the broader region would like. The Tennessee Folklore Society Archives and the work of oral historians at the University of Tennessee hold some of what is known. There is more to recover.

What Frank X Walker named in nineteen ninety-one was not a new reality. It was an old reality that had been made invisible, and naming it was the first step toward seeing it.