[NYTr] Bk Rvw - A Hard Journey: The Life of Don West

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Ed Pearl

UE News, December, 2007 via Portside
http://www.ueunion.org

"A Hard Journey: The Life of Don West"
by James J. Lorence.
University of Illinois Press, 2007. 
344 pages, 22 photographs. Cloth, $39.95.

Review by Gordon Simmons
UE News

Historian James Lorence has written an engaging biography of a man many
have come to regard as a modern-day folk hero. Don West was a legendary
public figure in these parts when I first met him in Charleston, West
Virginia, in 1988. He enjoyed a local reputation as a populist poet, as
well as a social and cultural advocate for Appalachia.

Being the founder and director for the Appalachian South Folk Life
Center in Pipestem, West Virginia, made him a public figure known to
many. He was also the husband of artist Connie West and father of
musicians Hedy West and Ann Williams.

One of the values of A Hard Journey is discovering just how much more
there was to this remarkable person. Born in rural northern Georgia in
1906, West would go on to lead an eventful life of an uncompromising
activist committed to racial and economic justice. He was already a
student activist for social causes when he entered divinity school in
1929. There West embraced a populist version of social gospel theology,
all the while embarking on a life-long practice of literary work at the
same time as fellow students Jesse Stuart and James Still.

West would go on to help found the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee
with Myles Horton, animated by a vision of training Southern labor
organizers. In 1933, West returned to Georgia to work on behalf of
Angelo Herndon, an African American organizer for the Communist Party
who had been arrested under a Reconstruction-era law against
insurrection.

Although previously associated with the Socialist Party, West was drawn
towards the Communists for their militant stand for racial equality in
the South. Within a year, he was engaged in union organizing among
textile workers in North Carolina and, soon after, coal miners in
Kentucky. In 1946, Clods of Southern Earth, his first poetry
collection, was published and sold remarkably well. By this time, West
had been serving as a Congregationalist minister in Ohio, but his
social and political activism had continued unabated, and his poetry
clearly reflected his radical beliefs and commitments.

Under government surveillance for his political ties, West returned to
rural Georgia and spent time farming, as well as organizing for the
Progressive Party, which in 1948 nominated for president Henry Wallace,
who had previously served as Pres. Franklin Roosevelt's vice president.
After weathering the McCarthy era, West ended up teaching college in
Maryland during the early 1960s, just as the nascent New Left of the
Students for a Democratic Society was coming into their own on campus.
By 1966, West had returned to his native Appalachia to found a school
and folk festival at Pipestem, West Virginia, with which he would remain
associated for the remainder of his life.

In the early 1970s, he collaborated with Marshall University students
on publishing material as the Appalachian Movement Press, a key voice
in the grassroots regional movement. This book chronicles a
life of unwavering commitment to the cause of the working class and
racial and economic equality. Thanks to Lorence's book, those of us in
the Appalachian South -- and indeed elsewhere -- can take a deeper
inspiration from West's life and writings.


[Gordon Simmons is statewide chief steward of UE Local 170 - the West
Virginia Public Workers Union. He works for the West Virginia Division
of Culture and History as an editorial assistant at Goldenseal, a
magazine of West Virginia traditional life. This review first appeared
in the December issue of the UE News. Learn more about UE at
http://www.ueunion.org

A Hard Journey can be purchased directly from the
University of Illinois Press, at http://www.press.uillinois.edu ]

____________

Portside aims to provide material of interest to people on the left
that will help them to interpret the world and to change it.

Subscribe: portside.org/subscribe