Early Memories
     My name is Herb E. Smith.  I’m from here in Letcher County.  I was born up in Jenkins.  Grew up here in Whitesburg.  And I was a part of KFTC in 1981 as I recall.  So how many years was that?  25? Yes.  I think it was in March that we had a meeting in Hazard and they passed out the hat and we all threw in a little change.  I think that was the first time that the organization was trying to figure out how to become an organization. 

    Well really, in Kentucky, what happened is that we were trying to deal with this issue of "primacy" which has to do with who would be supervising the enforcement of strip mining regulations.  That came out of the ’77 law, the first federal law, to regulate strip mining.  Of course, a number of the states had strip mining laws previously. They had strip mine inspectors and all of this machinery to regulate strip mining and then the federal law gets passed.  And they said, for the states that want the primary roles for enforcing the strip mining laws, the federal government would grant them what was called "primacy."  Then, the federal government would basically fund the states to enforce the federal law.  So, it was kind of a big bureaucratic regamaroar, but for us what was important was that the federal government actually do what the law recquired it to do.  We had some really bad experiences with the state regulation not doing what even the state laws required, which were much less stringent than the federal laws. 

    There was a hearing on primacy. I think it was in the fall of 1980 and  a guy named Everett Akers, was there at the hearing.  A number of us who cared about the mountains and that there be enforcement of the federal law were trying to get the federal government to not grant the state primacy, because we felt like the laws would not be enforced if the state people were involved or if they were given primacy.  Nobody knew who else was in the crowd- just all these people who came there to testify at this hearing. 

    I should begin by saying that there were a whole bunch of state legislators who were basically claiming how the strip mine industry was the blessing to the citizens of eastern Kentucky and without coal and coal mining and coal jobs and coal abuse that all of us would somehow be crying some kind of sadistic cry.  And so, what happened was after all of this kind of pro-industry talk, Everett stands up.  And he first is pretty hesitant, because he doesn’t know if there’s anybody else for strong regulation in the room and then he makes some statement about the state inspectors not doing their job and all of a sudden there’s like 50 people applauding Everett.  And you can just see that he was in disbelief almost.  But he then turns to the crowd and says, “Let me tell you what happened on my property!  They enjoined me off my land!  They arrested me at ten o’clock at night, threw me in the Floyd County jail!  I couldn’t go and see about my business!” You know, and it was just a real sense of not being cowed.  That you felt, from a whole bunch of people who were in the room- who really didn’t know each other-  a sense of, “Okay.  They’ll probably get primacy, but we do have the ability to participate in decisions about mining.” And it shouldn’t just be the industry spokespeople or legislators who are in their pockets who were basically determining what was going to happen in these mountains.  It was important that citizens in Floyd County,  Martin County, Pike County, Harlan County, Bell County, Letcher County, Perry County…that all these people who often felt scattered and alone needed some way to call the industry to account for what was happening in these mountains. 

    So then, Joe Szakos,  got involved in trying to do some follow-up and he immediately connected with this scattered group of people that I was talking about earlier.  And he knew that if he could get these people in the same room, it would be possible to come up with an organizational base that would serve a lot of people who really weren’t working in any organized way together.  And we were eager for it.  We were wanting to meet.  There were a lot of people out there we did know that we wanted to get to know and we heard about them in various ways, in news reports or through the grapevine.  And, so, Joe really became the glue that bound this thing together.  And he was tireless.  He was just everywhere going out and talking to people. 

    Sydney Cornett ends up in this situation over there in Perry County.  And those of us here in Letcher County, we wanted to meet Sydney and Joe was kind of having these meetings where people could meet each other and talk about their common concerns .  And we were just, what’s the right word…It was encouraging and kind of a sense of, well to use a union word, solidarity,  to be in the same room as people like Gladys [Maynard]. She was just such a good person to be around and you knew that Gladys was talking about what she was dealing with from a very first-hand immediate reality.  And yet, she was taking her experiences and talking about it in the larger context.  And, so for us, who were a bit younger, to meet Everett Akers and Gladys Maynard, be able to strategize with them, it was just a very kind of encouraging and a learning experience for us. 

     There was also a kind of generational bridge that was very encouraging too.  In '81 I was 29 years-old and there were a number of us in their middle-to-late-20s, some in their early 30s, who had been around and been involved in some things here.  Some connected to Appalshop and other citizen efforts here in these mountains.  And of course, we connected to Joe Begley down here at Blackey.  So we knew a group of people who were within, say, a 30 mile radius, but we didn’t really have a set of friendships and working relationships with people who were of our parent’s generation and who were from this broader range of places.  So, it was just a charge to be around them and to learn from them.  They probably saw us as a bunch of wild eyed kids, but they somehow were amazingly supportive and encouraging.  I thought it was good for everybody involved, I really did. 

Sydney Cornett
    I was trying to remember at what point I got to know Sidney [Cornett].  It must have been '83 or '84.  It might have been a bit later than that.  But, it was one of these  classic broad form deed stories, where that the people who owned the land were being, basically, just treated horribly by the mineral holders.  In this case it was one of the leading coal operators in Perry County, a guy named L.D. Gorman, and his people were just treating Sydney and his family like serfs.   Fortunately, Sydney had independent income.  He had retired after two tours in Vietnam and had won all of these medals as a military person and had wanted to move back to his family property in Perry County, the property that he was raised on, and live a quite life in his retirement. 

    Then all of a sudden, his neighbors come and say, “Well, Sydney, you know, they’ve cut down all the trees on your property on the top of the mountain up there.”  And Sydney didn’t even know about it, because  where people live is down near the streams, pretty far from the tops of the mountains and it’s hard to know what’s happening on top of the mountain.  And he got up there and they were just destroying his property.  So, it was kind of a long battle and Sydney became a very important player in the Constitutional Ammendment that passed in ‘88.

Joe Begley
      Joe [Begley], of course, he and his wife had that store here.  It was his wife’s parent’s store.  And they had been in West Virginia for a long time and then Joe’s in-laws, his wife’s parents, who had the C.B. Caudill store were getting elderly and they wanted Joe’s wife to basically come and take over the store.  So Joe moved to Letcher County.  I think it was like ’63, somewhere in there.  Then, of course, all of these strip mining issues started to come up and Joe formed a citizen’s group to work with people who were being mistreated by these coal companies.  Basically, these companies claimed that they had the right to destroy people’s land in order to get to their coal.  Joe formed an organization in Blackey to help protect the property of the citizens in that area from these strip miners.   He was very colorful and engaging person and people just would turn to him where there was a problem.  The store was more like a community center than a place of business.  And country stores often play that role.  It had been something of a community center when Joe’s father and mother-in-law, the Caudills, had it.  But, Joe moved it in a much more activist way.

Culture and Coal
    I think that this sense that there’s something valuable here that pre-dated coal even and that was being destroyed by the coal industry and that stuff beign the culture of the place- the music, the way people raise gardens, the community networks and just the way of living in these mountains that people had developed over decades- was valuable to a lot of us.  And we wanted a sense of that heritage to be held up as important and prized by mountain people.  And rather than just trying to catch the newest wave of commercial products, that instead, people should reconnect to the place that they were a part of and if you actually do that, if you actually care about traditional music, it’s not very long before you run into mining issues here.  Because inevitably, say, Lee Sexton, who's a traditional banjo player, gets his hand hurt in the coal mines.  Or another person who's maybe raising these amazing gardens, looks up on the side of the mountains and there’s a bulldozer.  Or the water is being destroyed by the release of a silt pond.  Whatever you do here you run up against the pervasiveness of the coal industry.  If you care about traditional ways of life then you’re going to butt-up against the coal industry. 
    
    There’s some of it that you can’t put a value or a number on.  And everybody knows the saying, “The best things in life are free.”  I would say that the best things about culture are so complex that we can’t put a number on them.  And that if people don’t get it.  If people don’t understand the value of having a community of mutual aid and support then there’s no numbers that’s going to convince them, I don’t think.  I believe that actually any person whose grown up in a community knows this.  They know that being able to call up your neighbor and ask for help when you need it is of tremendous value. Even small things.  There was a woman in one of our films who says, “ A smile can be worth a million dollars sometimes.”  And just the ability of community members to offer encouragement and a friendly, “Good Morning,” can be of tremendous value to people.  It is to me.  So, I don’t have any way of putting a number on that and I don’t have any way of explaining to someone who doesn’t get it, why it’s important. 

    What I think is actually often true is that people use numbers to justify, sometimes even in their own minds, things that they know are unjustifiable.  And it doesn’t take a genius to look at what’s happening along Highway 80 around Hazard to know that this is horrible.  There’s no justification for the destruction that’s happening.  There’s no justification.  And it doesn’t matter how you assemble words, one look at what’s happening and you have this immediate response.  Your body responds to that level of destruction knowing that it’s wrong.  So I don’t really know how you can change someone’s opinion who doesn’t have that response, I really don’t.  I think there’s some kind of illness.  I don’t know what it is.  I would say there is a psychological problem in someone who doesn’t see the reality of the destruction.  And I don’t mean to call people names or anything, but that’s the way I feel about it.   

Appalshop and KFTC  
    Well, I think a part of it is the combination of people in each of the organizations.  Of course, Appalshop, is a pretty complex organization.  There are 20-something people that work here, almost 30.  Some people who work here have family members who work on a bulldozer, on a strip mine.  And other people have family members that work in an underground coal mine and so forth.  So, if you’re in the center of the coalfields, even within an individual, there’s conflicting ideas about what’s appropriate.

    I think that at the deeper level, the notion of the importance of democracy kind of helped as we talked about working together at Appalshop and KFTC over the years.  For me, at the center of KFTC was this idea of citizens coming together and not being passive.  The old coal camp mentality which still is pretty prevalent here,  more than I care to acknowledge sometimes, really is, to me, a huge problem. 

    These company towns were planned, built and controlled by distant corporations.  Everything from the location of the schools to the streetlights to the churches, stores, water supply, electricity, you name it, it was all laid out in a planned community in these corporate headquarters.  I think the figure is that at one point, 60% of the population in the eastern third of Kentucky lived in company towns.  So, it was big in terms of what was going on here. 

    For example, my grandfather Smith, my dad’s dad, told me he worked thirteen years in a company town and didn’t receive pay once.  They just deducted it all from his earnings. The rent, what he got from the company store.  They got furniture and everything.  The point is that that system was one of trust and obey and you did what the company officials said or they kicked you out of the house you lived in which was there’s.  It was somewhat paternalistic. In other words,  they wanted the miners to have plenty to eat and things like that, but they also were very adament that they would be in control of things.  So, it was, I don’t know, I call it "syndrome".  Just, like, people were raised to trust and obey. 

    Then as KFTC gets formed, it’s like, don’t trust and obey!  Your job is to be a citizen.  That you get to participate.  That you are an actor on the stage not somebody in the audience.  And if the company treats you bad, that you have recourse.  You can go to your fellow citizens and say, “Look, we’ve got to do something about this! These guys are running over top us and we’ve got to do whatever it takes to stop it.”  I just like that personally.  I like the idea of it and I liked the people who were involved in the organization and I think a lot of the other people at Appalshop did as well. 

    And then Appalshop’s mission or reason for being is also about empowerment in the sense of how do we use media?  How do we take these tools of cameras, recorders, microphones, whatever medium we could make available, and use that to allow people in these mountains to express themselves?  The idea of Appalshop was also about decentralizing the media, putting it in the hands of a broader range of people.  And that to for me was like similar to the notion of being a participant rather than somebody in the audience.  There’s this kind of thematic level that the two organizations were aligned.  We were a bit older, of course, having starting in 69, but actually, the ages of the people involved, a lot of the KFTC people were older than us, which we liked to have, we just didn’t have in those years.  Like, I’m now 54 and we didn’t have to many 54 year old people involved in Appalshop in the early years unfortunately. 

  When it was Kentucky Fair Tax Coalition, a number of people here were involved in the challenging of the tax on the unmined minerals.  The reason that it was called the Kentucky Fair Tax Coalition, also came out of the land study, which had to do with taxation of the mineral holdings, because in this county the wealth is in the coal.  You take all the value of all the land, the surface and all the buildings and I don’t know what the percent is, but’s it’s certainly less than 10% of the value of what’s under the surface.  So, if you’re really trying to set up a property taxation system, you’ve got to go where the value is.  So that was one of the questions we were trying to get involved in and Kentucky had this very bizarre system and we challenged…actually, as an individual I challenged the property tax of the largest mineral holding company in Letcher county, a company called Kentucky River Coal Company. 

    The year we challenged it was '84, I think.  We figured out, that they had received $10 million dollars in royalties.  They didn’t mine any coal, they just had a filing cabinet.  They kept their files about who was mining their coal and they received $10 million in royalties out of this county where that 60-something percent of the kids are receiving free or reduced price lunches.  You know, a county where you got a lot of families really in dire straights.  And they’re getting $10 million out of the county and their property tax on that coal was $22.  And you’re like, “Wow!” Of course, the local citizens are paying the property tax for Kentucky River Coal Company and so we began to challenge that. 

    Of course, the head of the Tax Appeal Board was a coal operator and we didn’t win initially, but it was fun just to be engaged in it, because here was a place where the discrepency was so clear and undefendable really.  There’s no way.  No way on heaven and earth that if you’re going to have a property tax that you can say the right bill for Kentucky River Coal Company in Letcher County is $22.  It’s just, you know, it’s ludicrous!  So eventually that changed and we won that one. 

    The big one was the ’88 constitutional amendment.  Appalshop was involved in that and we were really pleased to be a part of that and I think again it was an issue that  a number of people throughout the state understood.   KFTC had put together an amazing campaign and Appalshop played a small role in helping with the media work there. 

    And then after that, in numerous ways.  We were involved with a garbage workers videotape in Lexington where they were trying to get equitable pay for the people who were working on the garbage trucks.   In general, we’ve been trying to document these kinds of situations not really knowing exactly how they’ll be used but knowing that it’s important that we have them videotaped. 

The Success of KFTC over the Last 25 years....
   I’ve seen an amazing level of commitment and dedication and hard work over a long period of time by a lot of people.    And how many times we would propose things, get shot down, propose it again, get shot down again and propose it.  I like to do what things I can, but I feel like the hard work of making KFTC into what it is is really the credit should go to the staff that’ve done that.  And I’m just encouraged to see the result.

    I don’t think that what happened over in Eolia would have happened without KFTC’s involvement.  I know it wouldn’t have happened.  And I know that these companies aren’t used to changing their mining plans as a result of they have just had a history of running over top of people.  To see that happen was, to me, it was just a real charge.  And again, that’s a result of accumulative effort over a long, long time to build the strength of KFTC in a way that could actually have that come about. 

    So, I just want it to happen everywhere.  There should be no mining without citizen involvement.  And in fact, the truth is that the laws do say that the companies are supposed to deal the citizens in, it just hasn’t been the practice. 

    I’ve seen the downside at times when things you thought were going to pass didn’t and things that you thought you would win on end up coming out as a loss.  I was just thinking  the other day that there’s still mining up here at Lost Mountain.  It’s not that we always win, but that we’re always present.  And to me, that is where the power is- showing up.  Being available to citizens who have problems.  And having some resources. 

     Here’s what I’m certain of, you don’t win the broad form deed, you don’t change the Constitution Amendment in Kentucky by the votes of the people in the coalfields.  We don’t have enough votes in the coalfields to change the Constitution.  Most of the laws that we’re dealing with we have to make the case to people who are representing the urban centers.  I’m thinking in particular about Louisville, Lexington and Northern Kentucky.  If the citizens of those three areas understand the issues and understand what’s happening in the coalfields then I think that we get good results.  I think, in fact, that the legislatures from the coalfields are often the worst part of the legislature. 

    It’s just like Civil Rights laws in Mississippi in 1960.  You don’t get change in the laws by going to the segregationists and asking for change.  You’ve got to somehow appeal to some people who have some moral standing that’s different from the guys who are cashing in.  So, I’m just saying that it’s important for KFTC to have citizen members in Louisville, Lexington and Northern Kentucky and throughout the state.  So, when there’s an issue with the garbage workers in Lexington that those of us in eastern Kentucky should rally to their support and we should see our participation in their concerns as important to us.  If we’re going to be citizens of the so-called "commonwealth", then we have to somehow share in these moral concerns and work together to deal with the moral problems we face. 

...and hopes for the next 25. 
     I don’t have a priority that I would say, “This is what I think KFTC should do over the next ten years…”  I’ve seen a number of issues emerge that I needed to educate myself about.  For example, this earned income tax credit.  I don’t even at this minute understand it as well as I’d like to, but from what I understand about it, I find important.

     I trust the process for determining the priorities.  And I trust the goodwill and I trust the judgment and caring nature of the citizens.  I think that we’re complex beings, that we all have a dark side to us, but some of the best people in the state that I know are members of KFTC and they genuinely believe in the idea of acting on moral conviction.  And I don’t mean that in a religious way.  I mean that in the way of the old French saying, “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.”  That you would have truly free people who care about their being equality and care about people who are looking after each other’s interests.