Case Study 1: The Affrilachian Poets — Black Identity in the Mountains

The Word That Changed Everything

Frank X Walker grew up in Danville, Kentucky — a small city in the Bluegrass region, on the western edge of Appalachian Kentucky. His family had been in the mountains for generations. He grew up eating cornbread and beans, hearing stories on porches, knowing the particular quality of light that comes through the hills in autumn. He was, by any meaningful definition, Appalachian.

He was also Black. And in the Appalachia he grew up in — the Appalachia of popular culture, of textbooks, of political rhetoric — those two identities did not go together.

"I would go to events, festivals, conferences about Appalachian culture," Walker has recounted in interviews, "and I would look around and everyone was white. And the culture they were celebrating — the music, the food, the crafts, the stories — I knew that culture. It was my culture too. But nobody in the room seemed to know that I existed. Nobody seemed to know that Black people had been in these mountains for as long as white people. Nobody seemed to know that the banjo came from Africa."

In 1991, Walker did something that writers sometimes do: he made a word. He took "African" and "Appalachian" and fused them together into "Affrilachian" — a single word that held both halves of his identity without asking him to choose between them.

The word was an act of linguistic resistance. It refused the categories that American culture had established — the assumption that "Appalachian" meant white and that "African American" meant urban. It insisted that the mountains contained multitudes. And it gave a name to a community that had existed for centuries but had never had a word of its own.

The Collective Takes Shape

Walker did not keep the word to himself. In the early 1990s, he began connecting with other Black writers in Kentucky and the surrounding region — writers who shared the experience of being both Black and Appalachian and who had felt the same erasure, the same invisibility, the same cognitive dissonance of being told that their home was not for them.

The Affrilachian Poets coalesced as a collective, a loose but purposeful gathering of writers who found in Walker's word a community and a mission. The collective included:

Crystal Wilkinson, from Indian Creek, Kentucky, whose short story collection Blackberries, Blackberries (2000) and novel The Birds of Opulence (2016) mapped the interior lives of Black mountain women with an intimacy and precision that the Appalachian literary tradition had never achieved. Wilkinson's prose was not polemic. It was portraiture — careful, loving, unflinching renderings of women whose existence was itself an argument against the narrative that Appalachian identity was exclusively white.

Kelly Norman Ellis, a poet from Paducah, Kentucky, whose collection Tougaloo Blues (2003) explored the intersections of Black identity, southern identity, and Appalachian identity with a lyricism that moved between anger and tenderness with the ease of a practiced musician.

Ricardo Nazario y Colon, whose presence in the collective — an Afro-Latino writer from a background that combined African, Caribbean, and Appalachian experience — expanded the definition of Affrilachian beyond the Black/white binary that even progressive discussions of race in Appalachia tended to assume.

Mitchell L.H. Douglas, whose poetry collection *\blak\ \al-fə-bet* (2011) used innovative formal techniques to explore the textures of Black language, Appalachian dialect, and the spaces where they overlapped and diverged.

These writers, and others who joined the collective over the years, produced a body of work that was not merely literature about Black Appalachians but literature from Black Appalachians — written from inside the experience, in voices that refused translation or apology.

What the Movement Reveals

The Affrilachian movement reveals several things about the politics of identity in Appalachia:

First, it reveals the power of naming. Before Walker coined the word, Black Appalachians existed but had no collective name. They were described in negative terms — "not quite Appalachian," "not quite Black," people who fell between established categories. The creation of "Affrilachian" gave the community positive language — a word that defined them by what they were, not by what they were not. The naming had immediate institutional effects: once a word existed, conferences could be organized around it, courses could be taught, anthologies could be compiled, grants could be written.

Second, it reveals the constructed nature of Appalachian whiteness. The fact that "Affrilachian" was necessary — that a new word had to be created because the existing word excluded Black people — demonstrated that "Appalachian" was not a neutral geographic descriptor. It was a racial category. It had been constructed, over more than a century, to mean white. The Affrilachian movement did not create a new identity. It revealed that the existing identity was already racialized — and it challenged that racialization by insisting on a broader, more honest definition.

Third, it reveals the limits of inclusion. The Affrilachian movement was not primarily about asking white Appalachians to include Black people in their narrative. It was about Black Appalachians creating their own narrative — their own word, their own collective, their own literary tradition, their own institutional spaces. This distinction matters. Inclusion implies a dominant group that graciously makes room for others. Self-naming implies a community that does not need permission to exist.

Fourth, it reveals the long history of Black Appalachian cultural production. The Affrilachian Poets did not emerge from nowhere. They emerged from a tradition of Black creativity in the mountains that stretched back centuries — from the enslaved musicians who brought the banjo to the Appalachian soundscape, to the Black miners who sang in the coal camps, to the Black churches that sustained community life in the mountains. The Affrilachian movement named this tradition and gave it institutional visibility, but it did not create it.

The Ongoing Work

The Affrilachian movement has had measurable impact. The word "Affrilachian" has entered the vocabulary of Appalachian Studies and is used in academic courses, conference programs, and scholarly publications. Walker was named Kentucky's Poet Laureate in 2013 — the first African American to hold the position — and his appointment was understood, by Walker and by others, as a recognition of Affrilachian identity as legitimate Appalachian identity.

Crystal Wilkinson's work has been widely taught in Appalachian literature courses, expanding the canon beyond the exclusively white tradition that had dominated for decades. The Affrilachian Poets have performed at festivals, conferences, and community events across the region, making Black Appalachian voices audible in spaces where they had been silent.

But the work is not done. The popular image of Appalachia remains overwhelmingly white. When major media outlets cover Appalachian stories — coal, opioids, politics, poverty — the faces in the photographs are almost always white. When politicians invoke Appalachian identity, they invoke a white identity. When cultural products — films, television shows, novels — depict Appalachian life, they depict white life. The erasure that Walker named in 1991 persists, even as the tools for challenging it have grown more numerous and more powerful.

Black Appalachians continue to report the experience of double invisibility — unseen by white Appalachians who define the region in their own image, and unseen by Black Americans from other regions who do not recognize the mountains as Black space. This double invisibility has material consequences: Black Appalachians are underrepresented in the political structures that allocate resources, underserved by institutions that do not recognize their needs as distinct, and underrepresented in the cultural products that shape how the region is understood by outsiders.

The Affrilachian movement is a response to this erasure, but it cannot solve it alone. Solving it requires structural change — in the institutions that produce narratives about Appalachia (media, academia, government, cultural organizations), in the distribution of resources and power, and in the willingness of the broader Appalachian community to accept that the region's identity is not what it has been told it is.

Discussion Questions

1. The power of naming. Frank X Walker created a word that changed how Black Appalachians understood their own identity. Can you think of other examples where the creation of a new word or term changed how a community saw itself? What does the Affrilachian example suggest about the relationship between language and identity?

2. Self-naming vs. inclusion. The Affrilachian movement was not primarily about asking to be included in a white-defined Appalachian identity. It was about creating a new identity that held both Blackness and Appalachian-ness. Why does this distinction matter? What is the difference between being included in someone else's story and telling your own?

3. Double invisibility. Black Appalachians report being unseen by both white Appalachia and Black America. Compare this experience to the "double consciousness" described by W.E.B. Du Bois. How does living at the intersection of two communities that do not recognize you shape identity? What strategies have Black Appalachians used to navigate this position?

4. The constructed whiteness of Appalachia. If "Appalachian" was a neutral geographic term, the word "Affrilachian" would not be necessary. What does the need for the word reveal about how the existing term has been racialized? When and how did "Appalachian" come to mean "white"? What historical processes (described in earlier chapters) contributed to this construction?

5. The limits of cultural change. The Affrilachian movement has achieved significant visibility in academic and literary circles. Has this visibility translated into material change for Black Appalachian communities? What would material change look like, and what would be required to achieve it?