Virginia Tech Professor’s Books Challenge Appalachian Myths
BLACKSBURG, Va.
According to conventional wisdom, residents of Appalachia had few slaves, and the slaves who did live in the region received better treatment than their counterparts in the Deep South. Virginia Tech sociologist Dr. Wilma Dunaway says much of this conventional wisdom is plain wrong.
“We do a lot of historical lying in this country,” she told The Roanoke Times. In her new books, Slavery in the American Mountain South and The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation, she intends to set the record straight.
Dunaway said she has studied slave narratives, slaveholder records and tax and census records from 215 Appalachian counties in nine states, including Maryland, Georgia and Alabama. Not only was slavery common in the mountain South, it was more brutal than the slave systems in the Deep South, her research concluded.
