MY BELOVED ADOPTED state of Kentucky doesn’t rank number one in many things. In most measures of health, wealth, or education, we rank somewhere in the mid-40s. However, Louisville’s Courier-Journal recently unearthed a statistic in which Kentucky totally wrecked the curve—number of people per capita arrested for their actions during the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol.
As of this writing, Kentucky’s number of apprehended insurrectionists equals that of neighboring Ohio, a state with almost three times our population.
I doubt that surprises many readers, but there’s another side to the Kentucky story that might: There are important voices in the state denouncing the riot—members of the African American community, which is mostly concentrated in our cities, but also members of our other left-out and left-behind community, the mostly white population of Appalachian eastern Kentucky. And there are even signs that some people among those two groups are reaching out to each other.
Charles Booker is a 36-year-old African American former state representative from predominantly Black West Louisville. In 2020, in the primary to select a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, Booker ran on a “Bernie-crat” platform against Amy McGrath, the favorite of the party establishment. The killing of Breonna Taylor by Louisville police occurred during that campaign, and Booker’s leading role in the protests that followed made him better known statewide. In the end, he lost the primary, but narrowly.
In the course of that election, Booker spent a lot of time campaigning in eastern Kentucky, preaching a message of interracial unity for economic empowerment. He talked about a coalition that spanned “from the hood to the holler.” After the election, he founded an advocacy organization called Hood to the Holler.
Later, as outrage over George Floyd’s murder spread across the nation, a voice rang out from the holler as if in answer to Booker’s call. Tyler Childers, from Appalachian Lawrence County, Ky., is a 29-year-old singer-songwriter, and if country music has a future, he is it. He writes songs filled with sharp, evocative observations of life around his hometown, and even when his lyrics are about snorting pain pills, his tunes sound like they could be 300 years old.
In fall 2020, Childers dropped an album, Long Violent History, that consists mainly of old-time fiddle tunes, with one original song, the title tune, at the end. In that song, Childers asks his white Appalachian neighbors to consider how they would feel if the authorities didn’t just “[take] them for ignorant” but actually made them “scared just to be.”
“How many boys could they haul off this mountain?” the singer wonders, imagining his listeners would roar into town after the haul “armed to the teeth.”
In a six-minute video, Childers has stated plainly that his white, rural fans need to “stop being so taken aback by Black Lives Matter.” He further suggested that “the people allowing this [police violence] to happen are the same people keeping opportunity out of reach for our own communities.”
Hood to the holler. That’s the only hope for Kentucky. But if it can happen here, it can happen anywhere.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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