These were the people forced onto the road, with thousands living in tent cities along dusty highways.

For many, those highways led west.  California became the land of hope in the imagination of the impoverished, a golden dream soon crushed by the reality of life as field laborers, forced to endure hunger while living in squalid camps, forced to accept wage exploitation by large commercial agricultural interests.

These people swept up in events beyond their control were written about with great compassion by John Steinbeck in his novel The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939.

What few realize, is that the woman in this series of photographs – Florence Leona Thompson (born Florence Christie) – was a woman with deep roots in multi-ethnic Southern Appalachia.

These home-grown underclasses were of course mostly Black Americans, along with many poor “white” Southern Appalachians.

For most of the past 100 years, much of Southern Appalachia has been associated with poverty – especially “white” poverty. Volumes have been written by outsiders in an attempt to “explain” how an entire region with a “white” majority population could suffer levels of poverty and economic deprivation usually associated with America’s Black and Indigenous communities.

These American families from the Deep South and Southern Appalachia have often been disparagingly, disgracefully (and inaccurately) described as “white trash”.

Some of these same people later appear on history’s stage as “Okies”.

With extended kinship communities in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, North Georgia, Arkansas, Southern Missouri, and Oklahoma, these people regularly dispersed into Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and elsewhere to supply bodies and numbers for the back-breaking labor of crop-picking.

 

The actual ethnic roots of women like Florence Christie are mostly forgotten, because most Americans hold a number of false beliefs:

1) Americans believe that “hillbillies” are of mostly “white” Scots-Irish ancestry.

2) Americans believe that most surviving Indigenous Americans ended-up on federal “Indian Reservations”.

3) Americans believe that any Indigenous Americans not forced onto reservations simply disappeared or “went extinct”, even though many assimilated and intermarried with non-Indigenous communities.

 

Furthermore, most Americans have no idea of the sheer number of “free persons of color” who were present on the frontiers of settler-colonialism.

The actual ethnic roots of women like Florence Christie have become buried or forgotten, because most Americans today believe that anyone who is not overtly Black nor Latino, and does not conform to American Indian stereotypes perpetuated in the media, must then be defined as “white folks”.

These are the falsehoods, and this is the profound lack of understanding, at the heart of the America’s insidious racial caste system.

Florence Christie was not “white”.   Nor was she “black”, “red” or “mulatto”.  She was of Cherokee, Welsh, and Irish ancestry (and more).

Was she culturally Cherokee, Welsh, or Irish?  Probably not.  Like so many Americans, after decades, even centuries, of ethnic intermixing, she likely carried bits and bobs, odds and ends of her mixed cultural inheritance.

But the reason it is wrong to refer to people like Florence Christie as “white”, is because this erases the multi-ethnic nature of Southern Appalachia.

This erases the complex history of colonial era mixed-ethnic peoples who went into the mountains to experience a level of freedom not possible under the racial caste system which prevailed elsewhere.

By not acknowledging the mixed-ethnicity of Southern Appalachians, we forget why these people had to squat or buy the cheapest mountain land, eking a subsistence from the most marginal of hill farms, selling ginseng root or going bean or onion-picking off-farm to raise extra money.

Most of all, when we call poor Southern Appalachians “white” we can wash our hands of responsibility for the nature of a ruthlessly capitalist and racist American society and economic system which created these underclass populations right back at our country’s inception.

The thought process left unspoken goes thus:

“White folks have no reason to be poor in America. If they are poor, there’s something wrong with them.”

This is the outrageous and utterly wrong-headed thesis put forth by J. D. Vance in his execrable political screed “Hillbilly Elegy”.