Case Study 2: Urban Appalachians in Cincinnati and Chicago

Over-the-Rhine: Mountain Culture in the City

Walk north from downtown Cincinnati, cross Central Parkway, and you enter Over-the-Rhine — a neighborhood whose name tells a story about layers of migration. In the nineteenth century, German immigrants settled here in such numbers that crossing the Miami-Erie Canal (which once ran where Central Parkway now is) was likened to crossing the Rhine River into Germany. By the mid-twentieth century, the Germans had moved on, and a new wave of migrants was arriving: Appalachians from eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, and southern Ohio — mountain people drawn to Cincinnati by factory jobs and proximity to home.

By the 1960s, Over-the-Rhine had become the densest concentration of Appalachian migrants in any American city. The neighborhood was poor, crowded, and declining — the same trajectory of urban decay that was affecting working-class neighborhoods across industrial America. But within its boundaries, something remarkable was being built: an urban Appalachian community that maintained, under the most difficult circumstances, the cultural patterns and social structures of the mountains.

The population was young, transient, and economically marginal. Many residents worked in Cincinnati's factories — the meatpacking plants, the soap and chemical factories along the river, the machine shops and warehouses that employed unskilled and semi-skilled labor. The wages were low by Cincinnati standards but higher than anything available in the Kentucky and West Virginia counties from which the migrants had come.

Housing was the constant struggle. Over-the-Rhine's building stock was old — nineteenth-century tenements originally built for German working-class families — and the landlords who rented to Appalachian migrants saw little incentive to invest in maintenance. Apartments were overcrowded, often without adequate heat or plumbing. Families of six or eight occupied two-room units. Single men slept in rooming houses where a bed might be rented by the shift — one man sleeping during the day while another worked, swapping places in the evening.

The neighborhood developed its own economy, parallel to and partly separate from the mainstream Cincinnati economy. Appalachian-owned bars and restaurants served mountain food and played country music. Storefront churches — Baptist, Holiness, and Pentecostal — sprang up in converted retail spaces, offering the ecstatic worship style that mountain migrants craved and that mainstream urban churches could not or would not provide. Small businesses catering to the Appalachian population — barbershops, used clothing stores, second-hand furniture dealers — lined the commercial streets.

The Institutions of Survival

The most important institution in urban Appalachian Cincinnati was not a government agency or a social service organization. It was the church.

Appalachian migrants brought their faith with them, and in Cincinnati they recreated the church communities that had anchored their lives in the mountains. These were not large, established congregations with endowments and professional staff. They were storefront operations: a rented commercial space, a hand-lettered sign, a minister who worked a factory job during the week and preached on Sunday, a congregation of thirty or fifty people who had found each other in the city through the same kinship networks that had brought them north.

These churches did everything. They provided worship, of course — the long, emotional services with gospel singing, fervent prayer, and preaching in the traditional mountain style. But they also provided material support: food for families in crisis, help with rent, rides to the doctor, assistance navigating the urban bureaucracies (welfare offices, hospital intake, school enrollment) that bewildered people who had grown up in communities where everyone knew everyone and institutions were informal.

Secular institutions emerged more slowly. The Urban Appalachian Council (UAC), founded in 1974, became the most prominent advocacy organization for Appalachian migrants in Cincinnati. The UAC was born out of the recognition that Appalachian migrants faced a distinctive set of challenges — cultural dislocation, discrimination, educational disadvantage, health disparities — that existing social service agencies were not addressing. The UAC advocated for recognition of Appalachian identity, documented the discrimination that migrants faced, and pushed for educational programs, job training, and social services designed for the specific needs of the urban Appalachian population.

The UAC's most significant achievement was persuading the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission to include Appalachians as a protected group in the city's equal employment opportunity ordinance. This was, as far as anyone could determine, the first time that Appalachian identity had been formally recognized as a basis for anti-discrimination protection in any American city. The recognition was not purely symbolic — it acknowledged that Appalachian migrants faced discrimination in employment, housing, and education, and it provided a legal framework for addressing it.

Lower Price Hill: A Community Portrait

If Over-the-Rhine was the most visible Appalachian neighborhood in Cincinnati, Lower Price Hill was in many ways the most deeply Appalachian. Perched on the steep hillsides west of downtown, Lower Price Hill was a neighborhood of narrow streets, aging houses clinging to the slope, and a population that was overwhelmingly white, working-class, and Appalachian in origin.

The neighborhood's geography was itself Appalachian — the steep hills, the narrow streets, the sense of enclosure created by the terrain. Migrants from the mountains found the topography familiar in a way that the flat industrial landscape of Detroit could never be. The houses were small and close together, like the company houses in a coal camp. The social structure was intimate: everyone knew everyone. The informal economy — barter, mutual aid, shared childcare, labor exchange — functioned in Lower Price Hill much as it had in the hollows of eastern Kentucky.

Lower Price Hill was also desperately poor. The factories that had drawn migrants to Cincinnati were declining. Unemployment was chronic. Drug and alcohol problems were endemic. The neighborhood's school, poorly funded and understaffed, struggled to serve a population of children who were often hungry, sometimes homeless, and almost always poor. The cycle of poverty that had characterized the coalfield communities was, in a sense, replicated in the urban setting — different in its specifics but recognizable in its dynamics.

Community organizers in Lower Price Hill — many of them Appalachian themselves — worked to build institutions that could break the cycle. Community centers offered after-school programs, job training, and health services. Churches provided the social glue. The Lower Price Hill Community School became a hub for neighborhood life, offering adult education, community meals, and a gathering space for residents who might otherwise have had nowhere to go.

Uptown Chicago: The Northern Frontier

Twelve hours north of Cincinnati, the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago was building its own urban Appalachian community — similar in some ways to Over-the-Rhine and Lower Price Hill, but with a political edge that made it unique.

Uptown in the 1960s was a receiving neighborhood for the poor of many backgrounds. Appalachian migrants shared the area with Native Americans (relocated from reservations by federal policy), Japanese Americans (some of whom had been displaced by internment during World War II), and other rural-to-urban migrants. The neighborhood was a patchwork of cheap hotels, rooming houses, and apartment buildings where landlords rented to anyone who could pay the weekly rate.

The Appalachian community in Uptown was younger, more male, and more transient than the Cincinnati community. Many of the migrants were single men or young couples without children — people who had come to Chicago for factory work and who might stay for a few years before moving on to another city or returning to the mountains. The turnover was high, and the institutional structures that characterized the more settled Cincinnati communities were slower to develop.

What Uptown did develop was a political consciousness.

In the late 1960s, as the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the broader tide of radical politics swept through American cities, Uptown became a site of grassroots organizing among poor whites. The Young Patriots Organization, founded in 1968, was the most visible product of this organizing. The Young Patriots were young, white, Appalachian — and they were radical. They wore Confederate flag patches (which they understood, controversially, as a symbol of poor white rebellion, not racial supremacy) and berets modeled on the Black Panther Party. They organized around issues of poverty, police brutality, and the failures of the welfare system.

The Young Patriots' most remarkable act was the alliance they forged with the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican activist organization) in the original Rainbow Coalition — an alliance that predated Jesse Jackson's use of the term by more than a decade. The coalition was brokered by Fred Hampton, the charismatic young leader of the Chicago Black Panthers, who argued that poor whites, poor Blacks, and poor Latinos shared common interests that transcended racial divisions.

The Rainbow Coalition was short-lived. Hampton was killed by Chicago police in December 1969, in a predawn raid that has been widely characterized as an assassination. The coalition fragmented. The Young Patriots faded. The political moment passed.

But the fact that it happened — that poor white Appalachians in Chicago found common cause with the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, that they marched together and organized together and called each other comrades — is a piece of American history that deserves to be remembered. It challenges the narrative that Appalachian whites are inherently conservative, inherently racist, inherently opposed to cross-racial solidarity. The people of Uptown were as Appalachian as anyone in Harlan County, and they chose a different politics.

The Children: Between Two Worlds

The most poignant dimension of the urban Appalachian experience was the situation of the children — the generation born in the city to parents from the mountains.

These children occupied a space between worlds. At home, they heard mountain accents, ate mountain food, absorbed mountain values. At school, they entered a world that implicitly or explicitly told them that everything about their home culture was wrong. Their accents were mocked. Their clothing was judged. Their parents' educational backgrounds were held against them. Teachers, often unconsciously, treated them as slow, disruptive, or unteachable — not because of any intellectual deficit but because their cultural presentation did not match the middle-class urban norm.

The dropout rate among urban Appalachian children was alarmingly high — higher, in Cincinnati, than the dropout rate among Black students, and receiving far less attention. Educational researchers who studied the phenomenon identified a pattern of cultural mismatch: the schools were designed for urban middle-class children, and children from mountain backgrounds did not fit the mold. The curriculum was irrelevant to their experience. The social norms were foreign. The teachers did not understand them. The result was disengagement, failure, and departure.

Some children thrived despite the obstacles. They navigated between the mountain world of home and the urban world of school with the same bilingual dexterity that the children of European immigrants had shown in the coalfields a generation earlier. They learned to code-switch — to speak mountain English at home and standard English at school, to present one self to teachers and another to family. This adaptation required intelligence, flexibility, and emotional resilience of a high order. It also imposed a psychological cost: the constant message that your authentic self is not acceptable in the wider world.

Legacy and Continuity

The urban Appalachian communities of Cincinnati and Chicago have evolved significantly since the peak migration years. Over-the-Rhine has been gentrified — the old tenements converted into boutique hotels, craft breweries, and upscale apartments. The Appalachian population has been largely displaced, pushed to the outer neighborhoods and the suburbs by rising rents and changing demographics. The Urban Appalachian Council continues its work, but the community it serves is more dispersed, more assimilated, and less visible than it was a generation ago.

Uptown Chicago has undergone a similar transformation — gentrification has replaced the rooming houses with condominiums, the honky-tonks with wine bars, the radical politics with the politics of real estate development. The physical space that held the urban Appalachian community has been erased.

But the people remain. The descendants of Appalachian migrants in Cincinnati and Chicago number in the hundreds of thousands. They are teachers, nurses, factory workers, business owners, students, retirees. Many identify as Appalachian — a cultural identity that has proven surprisingly durable across generations, persisting even in people whose connection to the mountains is a grandparent's memory or a family reunion held once a year in a Kentucky hollow they have visited but never lived in.

The urban Appalachian experience teaches a lesson that the history of the mountains themselves also teaches: that people are not passive recipients of economic forces. They are agents who build communities, create institutions, form political alliances, and maintain cultural identities under conditions of extraordinary difficulty. The Appalachians who came to Cincinnati and Chicago were not defeated by the city. They were changed by it, as they changed it. The exchange was unequal — the city had more power, more resources, and less need to adapt — but it was an exchange, not a surrender.

Discussion Questions

1. Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati has been gentrified, displacing the Appalachian community that lived there for decades. Is gentrification a form of the same displacement pattern that characterized Appalachian history — outside forces transforming a community for profit? Or is it fundamentally different?

2. The Young Patriots Organization in Chicago allied with the Black Panther Party despite being composed of poor white Appalachians. What made this alliance possible? Why did it fail? What does it tell us about the possibilities and limits of cross-racial solidarity among poor Americans?

3. Urban Appalachian children faced cultural mismatch in city schools — their accents, values, and cultural backgrounds clashing with the expectations of the educational system. How should schools respond to cultural difference? Is adaptation the responsibility of the student, the school, or both?

4. The Urban Appalachian Council successfully advocated for Appalachians to be included as a protected group in Cincinnati's anti-discrimination ordinance. Is "Appalachian" a cultural identity that merits formal legal protection? How does this compare to other protected categories?