Inside Appalachia

This week's episode of Inside Appalachia is an encore episode filled with rich storytelling and cross-cultural collaborations. What happens when a musician from Belarus gets together with Appalachian folk musicians? And we’ll talk with Affrilachian writer Crystal Wilkinson, who has been named this year’s Kentucky Poet Laureate. You'll hear these stories and more in this episode.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed and exacerbated societal inequities.

Black and Latino populations have suffered higher infection rates. People working low-income jobs are more likely to be considered essential — and therefore required to work in-person — while others have the luxury of working remotely.

The pandemic has pushed many people who were already living paycheck to paycheck out of work. Despite programs to provide rental and utility relief, some have lost their homes. At one point last summer, 60 percent of people in West Virginia said they were at risk of being homeless, according to a study by the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy.

And now, another divide is forming between those who have received the vaccine and those who are still waiting.

This week’s episode of Inside Appalachia looks at some of the divides the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed, starting with how it’s affecting people without stable homes.

Seeking Shelter

The Harmony House in Huntington, West Virginia functions as a day shelter, but it also has an outreach team to find other homeless people who are still on the streets. Once they make contact, they offer supplies and other support.

Kyle Vass, a reporter with the Us and Them podcast, spent a day with Harmony’s outreach team, visiting sites where homeless people are gathering this winter.

In a separate story, Us & Them host Trey Kay spoke with Mitch Webb, the director of the Huntington City Mission, about how it’s changed to accommodate additional people in need, while still trying to follow pandemic protocols and keep everyone safe.

Vaccine Disparities

When news arrived last year that scientists had successfully formulated not one, but multiple vaccines for COVID-19, people across the globe were relieved to finally see a potential end to the pandemic. These scientific breakthroughs were achieved at a remarkable pace, but it soon became clear that distributing these vaccines would be a monumental undertaking.

West Virginia has become a national leader in its vaccine rollout. So far, the state has delivered at least one shot to more than nine percent of the state’s residents, second in the nation, after Alaska, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But not everyone across West Virginia has had the same access to the vaccine.

Reporter Lauren Peace investigated West Virginia’s vaccine rollout for Mountain State Spotlight, an online, nonprofit news site. Inside Appalachia co-host Mason Adams spoke with her recently about what she uncovered about where the vaccine’s available, and what that reveals about health disparities across Appalachia.

Peace is a Report For America Fellow and the public health reporter for Mountain State Spotlight. Her story about vaccine distribution in West Virginia, co-written with Ian Hodgson, was published on Jan. 21. Eleven days later, in early February, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice announced that free vaccination clinics will be held in all 55 West Virginia counties.

The vaccine is providing a ray of hope that the pandemic will end. But more people may lose their homes in the months ahead. President Joe Biden has extended the moratoriums on evictions, but only through March 31, 2021. Clearly, many challenges still lie ahead as Appalachia begins to emerge from the pandemic.

Us & Them is produced by West Virginia Public Broadcasting. In an upcoming show, Us & Them digs into the racial disparities that the pandemic has exposed and made worse.

This week on Inside Appalachia, we’re revisiting a show that originally aired last fall, that prominently features bold mountain women who are making a difference in their communities.

We hear what happens when Abigail Washburn and Wu Fei combine Appalachian and Chinese folk music. We also meet the driving force behind a family-owned Black newspaper that’s been publishing since 1939. Claudia Whitworth began working there for her father in 1945, and three quarters of a century later still takes an active role as publisher of the Roanoke Tribune. And we’ll meet Rosemary Ketchum, a community activist who ran for city council in Wheeling, West Virginia. We’ll learn how she became West Virginia’s first transgender person to be elected to public office.

Appalachia And China

Can you blend Appalachian and Chinese folk music successfully? Abigail Washburn and Wu Fei spoke with Lizzie Peabody, host of the Smithsonian Institution's podcast Sidedoor, about how they combined their two instruments — the banjo and the guzheng — to produce a sound that’s both timeless and also reflects thousands of years of history from different parts of the world.

Rosemary

When Rosemary Ketchum moves to Wheeling, West Virginia as a child, she remembers being struck by it's moniker, "The Friendly City." She saw residents struggling with food security and homelessness and decided to help. Her journey continued when she ran fo the Wheeling City Council, becoming the first transgender person in the state to be elected to office.

West Virginia Public Broadcasting Producers Corey Knollinger and Chuck Kleine followed Ketchum to produce a film about her year-long campaign. Check out the half-hour documentary here.

Roanoke Tribune

Claudia Whitworth has led the Roanoke Tribune, a family-owned, African American newspaper, through segregation, the destruction of its building during urban renewal, and now the pandemic and death of print newspapers.

Yet Whitworth, now in her 90s, has never relented in the weekly newspaper’s mission, which appears in its masthead: “Making and Recording Black History since 1939!”

Whitworth told Inside Appalachia co-host Mason Adams that she believes her newspaper’s secret for success lies in her devotion to telling real stories from her community. Years back, at a gathering of Black publishers from across the country, Whitworth pushed back when a fellow publisher declared that “good news doesn’t sell.” After more than eight decades — and more than 75 years since she went to work there — her paper is still going strong.

Adams had this to say about fierce women of Appalachia:

“Growing up in the mountains, I saw fierce women everywhere I looked. From my great aunt Willie Sue, who served as a medic in World War II, to Ms. McGuire at Sharon Elementary School, who drilled a generation of Allegheny County kids in history and politics. They all show us that we don’t have to be mean or ornery to be fiercer. We can be kind, and listen to others, and reflect back what we see and hear. These women are making a stand for what they believe in — a long and rich tradition here, inside Appalachia.”

It’s been quite a stressful couple of months for most of us. For this episode of Inside Appalachia, we wanted to slow down, take a breath, and talk about one of our favorite foods — cookies!We'll get some baking tips on a very special kind of cookie, made with local buckwheat and stone ground flour.

Black lung disease is back. In fact, it never went away. Now, younger and younger miners are living with a particularly nasty form of black lung disease.

Regulators and the coal industry have known about the problem for decades — but they’ve been slow to respond.

One reporter asks, “What would happen if thousands of workers in any other industry got sick and died just because of where they worked?”

This week, we’re talking about the black lung epidemic, Inside Appalachia.