ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 29, 1996 TAG: 9612300017
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: NEW RIVER JOURNAL
DATELINE: WAKE FOREST
SOURCE: ROBERT FRIES
I received the best kind of holiday invitation for last weekend: Come spend time with friends, meet some new people and eat all the Christmas goodies your stomach and conscience can handle.
Heartsease Eaves came by my office to see if I would like to attend the community dinner at the Wake Forest Pentecostal Holiness Church. Absolutely, I told her, knowing that the company and the victuals would be first-rate.
It's been my professional and personal good fortune to have become friends with some Wake Forest residents. They're estimable people, full of good humor, wisdom and fortitude.
Those qualities were forged through lives led during the flame-out days of the Jim Crow era. Wake Forest is a black community in Montgomery County, formed just after the end of the Civil War by ex-slaves. Generations of their descendants have made a living by farming or working the coal mines that once dotted the nearby slopes of Brush Mountain.
They know both the promise and the reality of the American Dream. They've also endured and overcome racial discrimination without a sense of bitterness.
Wake Forest is the kind of place where white and black join hands and worship together - as they have for many years at the Little Holiness Church, a small place with a lot to say about how Americans can and should get along with one another.
This column isn't just about this small community nestled near the New River near McCoy and Whitethorne.
I'm trying to write about as many places like Wake Forest as I can - long-time, out-of-the-way New River Valley communities, people and events that shaped our little corner of the world. With all the changes of the past 40 years - more or less my life's span - communities have lost touch with themselves. My thesis is that we can better sort out the chaos of present and the uncertainty of the future if we understand our past.
Sometimes even the "here today, gone tomorrow" format of newspaper stories can establish a lasting awareness. That was the case three years ago when I wrote several stories about the area's coal mining history. New publicity about old events sparked a revival of interest that continues today, as the story that appears elsewhere in this issue of the Current on the new documentary about Parrott indicates.
It's gratifying to see your work make a difference. But I'm still mystified about how the area's rich coal mining history escaped the attention of Virginia Tech and Radford University, both of which have Appalachian Studies departments.
Having met the coal miners and their families, and, through that process, the people of Wake Forest, I want the community to know them, too. And I believe our universities are the key to making this happen.
I'll offer a success story of what can be achieved by a university-community partnership.
Two years ago, it became evident many local people had important stories to tell about working in the mines or growing up in local coal mining families, but little time remained to accomplish the task. Most of the mines - once the county's largest industry - closed almost 50 years ago. The people with the most intimate knowledge were approaching the end of their lives.
Fortunately, Mary LaLone, an anthropology professor at Radford University was interested in oral history of a Southwest Virginia coal mining community. She was driving three hours away to conduct her project. I told her a similar project could be achieved closer to home, and introduced her to some of the local miners.
It's hard not to be engaged by these people and their stories of growing up in hard economic times, with few possessions yet much love and support from families and neighbors. The contrast of their hardy times with our modern-day world of eroded values is striking.
LaLone committed a semester and a class of honors students to interview miners and their families. The inquisitive young scholars and sagacious country folk formed a strong bond of friendship and both sides learned from one another. It was an experience neither group will forget.
Plans are for their edited transcripts, with old photos, to be put in a new book, "Appalachian Coal Mining Heritage Memories: Life in the Coal Fields of Virginia's New River Valley," that Pocahontas Press of Blacksburg is publishing.
There are plenty of other potential community projects to tackle, Wake Forest being one. The goal is not only to gather information and give students and faculty a unique learning experience.
The best result may be breaching of barriers between our universities and the communities they occupy.
Already there's been a valuable recognition of these partnerships. Virginia Tech has applied its shoulder to the wheel of refurbishing Christiansburg Institute as a regional black history center. Radford University is involved in getting its social work programs more involved in the community. And service learning programs, which grant academic credit for community work, are active at both schools.
Perhaps this is a means to build stronger community support for our colleges, which have felt the effects of state funding cuts. It may also be a way to bridge the suspicion that crops up from time to time when the universities assure us that what's good for them is good for us, too.
I've seen it work.
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