This article is part of a regular series of conversations with the Review’s contributors; read past ones here and sign up for our e-mail newsletter to get them delivered to your inbox each week.
Hurricane Helene devastated the southeastern United States when it hit in early October—killing about 230 people and causing over $50 billion in damages—particularly in North Carolina. “Those with financial resources may be able to rebuild,” writes Olivia Paschal in a November 3, 2024, essay for the NYR Online. “In the meantime, those without them—including renters and mobile-home owners—may be forced to pick up and leave.”
Paschal, a scholar of the history of capitalism in the Ozarks, argues that concerns about gentrification and displacement in the rebuilding process are connected with decades-long struggles against consolidated land ownership in Appalachia. She writes that a generation of scholars and activists at progressive Southern organizations like the Highland Center, who turned their attention to Appalachia in the 1960s and 1970s, came to see the region “as an internal colony—a place peripheral to America’s capitalist development, where coal magnates from outside the region extracted natural resources, paid locals poverty wages, and left open wounds on the mountain landscape.”
Paschal is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Virginia and an editor at the Virginia Quarterly Review and the archives editor for Southern Exposure, a magazine published by the Institute for Southern Studies from 1973 to 2011. Her writing has appeared in The Nation and The American Prospect, among other publications. We corresponded this week over e-mail about the federal response to Helene, organizing in the South, and Walmart.
Willa Glickman: How is the recovery from Helene going? What has the balance of responsibility been between federal relief agencies, nonprofits, private corporations, and mutual aid networks?
Olivia Paschal: A major disaster like this takes months and years to recover from—thousands of homes need to be fixed, rebuilt, or torn down and built from scratch again. Families are still living in tents. There are still roads in North Carolina and Tennessee that were entirely washed away and haven’t been rebuilt. We now know that 15 percent of the housing units in counties that had declared a disaster were mobile homes, which, as I wrote in my essay, are particularly vulnerable to disasters of all kinds.
Federal and state aid is certainly doing a lot of work, but, as local officials have said, the change in administration at the federal level means that they will likely need to form new relationships with the Trump hires who will be staffing those offices. That kind of work takes time, and local officials seem more optimistic about the speed and flexibility of state-level aid. Nonprofits and mutual aid networks are still very involved on the ground, too. There are a lot of nonprofits providing food, rebuilding homes, and gathering and distributing resources. Mutual aid networks are doing debris cleanup and collecting supplies to reconstruct homes and give families Christmas gifts. The region is headed into winter now—there have already been a couple of cold snaps—so a lot of the current need is for heaters, blankets, and other kinds of supplies that can keep people warm.
Are there areas that have managed to retain local control of their tourist economies, or do the issues you mention that plague Appalachia—consolidated landownership, absentee landlordism, and displacement of locals—tend to be a feature of the industry? I’m curious if there are similarities or differences with your area of specialty, the Ozarks.
It can be useful to think of recreational and tourist economies, when “successful,” as drivers of gentrification. As I detail in the article, rural gentrification looks different than urban gentrification and can have different dynamics along race and even class lines. But it involves the same kind of precipitous increase in housing prices and elite cooptation of cultures, communities, and social worlds.
The Ozarks and the northwest Arkansas metro area are undergoing a transformation, buttressed by the wealth concentrated in the region as a result of the Fortune 500 companies headquartered there: Walmart, Tyson Foods, and J.B. Hunt Transport Services. My work right now asks why all these companies have been able to grow so much in Arkansas and examines the effects of so much wealth on such an otherwise small and poor state.
What makes the Ozarks unique is that the richest family in the world lives in what is historically one of the poorest regions in the country, a place whose economy in many places is still very reliant on low-wage labor on poultry farms and at poultry processing facilities. That makes all the dynamics around ownership, property value increases, and displacement more pronounced. The Waltons (mostly through their holding groups) have recently been purchasing huge amounts of land in the rural Ozarks some sixty, seventy miles away from the region’s urban core, including places like Horseshoe Canyon Ranch, a rock-climbing destination, and thousands of acres in and around Kingston, Arkansas. They have funded thousands of miles of mountain-biking trail development in the area and were involved in a brief, unsuccessful foray into turning the Buffalo National River from a national river into a national park preserve—a designation that, the Walton groups argued, could increase tourism but that locals feared could bring too much of it.
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These things have started to make people concerned. It’s similar to what happens in any place with outdoor recreation—it gets commodified, bought up, and developed. Walmart’s corporate headquarters being so close means that executives at many of the largest companies in the world, people who might want a lake house or a mountain house in addition to their house in town, live in northwest Arkansas. That prices folks out. You see the same thing in places like Jackson Hole. While the local dynamics are different in each place, the patterns are consistent.
The Institute for Southern Studies, where you work, was founded by the same generation of civil rights organizers that energized the Highlander Center, the Tennessee organization that you describe as “a central node” in the fight against corporate capture in the 1960s. Looking back, what impact have these organizations had on the region’s political landscape?
The founding of the Institute for Southern Studies was part of a broader attempt in the 1970s and 1980s to create counterinstitutions that could push back against conservative and reactionary forces in the South and throughout the country. The Institute, coming out of the civil rights movement as it did, was extensively involved in justice work of all kinds. They shared space and materials with Feminary, a lesbian magazine in North Carolina, and supported anti-Klan organizing and the early environmental justice movement. They helped organize and support the Brookside Mine Strike in 1973, poultry worker organizing in the 1980s, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee’s boycotts in the 1990s. Many of the institutions and policy victories won by these movements still exist.
In my conversations with Southern organizers of that era, they sometimes say they feel like they failed. I don’t think that’s true. The forces they were up against were powerful, and the battles they were fighting are the same ones we’re fighting today. The work isn’t done. To name just one example, there’s a new group of researchers working toward a second Appalachian Land Ownership study that’s based in the same kind of political commitments and participatory research that undergirded the first one that I wrote about in the essay.
What is the mood among progressive organizers in the South since Trump’s election? Are there plans being formed about what is best to focus on during the coming administration?
The organizers I’m in conversation with are planning based on years of experience. The South has been at the forefront of many of the attacks on rights, even during the Biden administration—the harshest abortion restrictions, the most stringent antilabor laws, sheriffs cooperating with federal deportation efforts. Last spring I was in a crowd of protesters at the University of Virginia that was tear-gassed by Virginia State Police who had been called in to break up a pro-Palestine encampment. The conditions under Trump will be much worse, much more all-encompassing. There will be battles on almost every front. And people are preparing. I know of immigrant workers’ rights groups that are preparing to fight deportations, groups gearing up to organize against new uses of the surveillance state, labor organizers preparing for retaliation against workers.
