Annihilating The Hillbilly Redux: Appalachia’s Struggle Against America’s Institutions is a profoundly important book for the field of Appalachian studies that shares the author’s personal experiences, his insights, and evidence-based understanding of the ways and means by which the Appalachian Region has been historically exploited.
It talks about the deliberate impoverishment of the people by the systematic extraction of the region’s wealth by industries, agencies, and institutions that claimed to be helping them. And it dismantles the popularly accepted culture of poverty themes found in Vice President JD Vance’s 2016 best-seller, Hillbilly Elegy.
In Annihilating The Hillbilly, the author’s recurring themes, phrasings, images, symbolism, and driving ideas represent for me – metaphorically – an interpretation of a statue in the center of Alabama’s Tuskegee University, which has a lot in common with the alma mater of its author, James Branscome, who graduated from Kentucky’s Berea College in 1968.
Branscome, a journalist born and raised on a poor dirt farm in Southwest Virginia – through this magnificent work – has become Appalachia’s newest Booker T. Washington – himself a native of Malden, West Virginia.
In the spirit of the sculpture of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee University, titled “Lifting the Veil of Ignorance,” Branscome lifts the cover off the myths, legends, stereotypes, and folklore that justified the exploitation of Appalachia and his people.
From The Beverly Hillbillies to JD Vance, to the migration crisis that has emptied the Central Appalachian coalfields, to the deception and trickery of the Tennessee Valley Authority and its transformation from a New Deal genius program to its becoming the nation’s largest strip-mine coal consumer; on to the Appalachian Regional Commission’s structural underinvestment and the data-center industrial complex now establishing itself on former mine land, Branscome literally pulls the covers off without pulling any punches.
In the end, he proposes a policy framework for reversing the calamities that is based on the nation repaying Appalachia what it is owed for its role in the industrialization and wealth-building of everybody but them.
Jim Branscome’s 1971 write-up in the Journal of the Committee of Southern Churchmen was the first reference I ever saw that offered an appeal about Black people in Appalachia, who were “consistently overlooked and underserved by the institutions of the region.” That assertion, alone, inspired a book I co-edited fifteen years later titled Blacks in Appalachia.
Annihilating the Hillbilly Redux is to my memoir The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns what wind is beneath the wings of a raven.
Then there is Harry Caudill, author of the highly-acclaimed book Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1963) – which is credited with causing the War on Poverty in the 1960s – who discussed Branscome’s cutting-edge report, “The Federal Government in Appalachia,” published in 1977 by the Field Foundation. Then, as now, according to Caudill, Branscome argued that the federal government’s programs had produced measurable improvements in infrastructure and living conditions, but they had not fundamentally transformed the region’s economy or eliminated persistent poverty.
In Annihilating the Hillbilly Redux, Branscome is not merely retelling the story. He has revisited it with deeper historical understanding, newly uncovered evidence, and a contemporary perspective that challenges earlier narratives.
This book is a game changer. It is not merely informative and well written. Branscome introduces a new perspective that challenges accepted wisdom. He changes the conversation within public discourse about Appalachia, and this book surely will influence future scholarship, policy, and practice, and it should become a standard reference that others must engage with, whether they agree or disagree.
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