![]() His critical work on the stereotyping by the national media of the Appalachian people, and the abuses of the region by strip mining, set the tone for a new generation of writers who, although they adopted newer poetic forms, owe a great debt of gratitude to West for helping blaze the trails of Appalachian reality that continue to shape the socially conscious writing of the region. During the 1960s and 1970s, West lectured and taught throughout Appalachia, the Deep South and New England. The Ku Klux Klan torched his home in 1948. He became a community activist particularly concerned with defending impoverished black people against racism. He spent much of the 1930s and 1940s as a labor organizer-first for the mine workers in Kentucky and then with textile workers in North Carolina. Later he studied the folk school methods in Scandinavia. ![]() His father, a sharecropper, was able to borrow enough money to send him to Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, and he later went to Vanderbilt Divinity School. Born near Ellijay, Georgia, Don was the oldest of nine children. West's work speaks with an undeniable urgency and anger about racism, war, and the plight ofpoor working-class people that is as modern and hard as the economic headlines of our time. West felt, and was able to render poetically, the real injustices endured by hungry children, sharecroppers, unemployed factory workers, black-lung miners, and single mothers. Not the sins of the flesh, but the sins of silence in the face of our fellow human beings' sufferings. 27 In his poetry collections, O Mountaineers and In a Land of Plenty, West's voice resonates with the baritone convictions of a preacher intent on making us face our sins of excess and omission. Bob Henry Baber is director of Concord College Community Outreach/Bonner Scholars Program and adjunct teacher in the English Department. With his passing the region lost one of its most authentic voices-for West personified the tradition of sticking up for the working class that we see reflected in the best American writers and social activists. I speak of Don West, a rebel, hillbilly radical, labor organizer, fierce individualist, preacher, and, perhaps most important of all, a poet. Remembering Don West (1906-1992) Bob Henry Baber Don West reading poetry A year and a half ago a part of Appalachia's conscience died. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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