A year from now, Ryan McFarland will don a cap and gown and walk across the stage at the University of Charleston, located along the Kanawha River across from the statehouse’s shiny golden dome.
The Pleasants County native will then be confronted by two decisions: law school or graduate school? Stay in West Virginia or leave?
“I really do want to stay here,” McFarland said. “I’m really motivated to be looking specifically at schools in our state and finding a place to live in our state, whether that be at home or moving to Charleston.”
He wants to stay in West Virginia, but also says there are limited opportunities.
“For instance, if I wanted to go to law school, and I wanted to stay in West Virginia, we only have one singular law school,” he said in explaining his thinking about future plans. “The same way with a lot of specialized programs and graduate schools, you’d have to go out of state to find this thing.”
This story is part of our series, “Plugging the Brain Drain” about young West Virginians deciding whether or not to leave the state.
If he does leave, he would leave his family behind, including some older relatives who are in poor health. He helps take care of them and calls it an “all hands on deck” moment for the family.
McFarland said he chose political science because he wants to be involved, to fix the problems facing West Virginia, to keep people here and to make the state better.
“I love our state,” McFarland said, “I know some things are bad, and some things need work. And I don’t want to pass that off to somebody else and hand the responsibility to other people and say ‘it’s your responsibility to fix it.’”
He’s interested in running for political office or working in state government someday.
“I would just encourage my peers to look long and hard at the trajectory of our state and realize that they do have the ability to choose the path forward for our state — whether that be through becoming a elected official, or just through voting,” he said. “All is not lost. We really have the keys to the future and we need to start working to make sure we fix the things that we don’t like in our state.”
McFarland would like to see lawmakers handle the opioid epidemic as a public health crisis as opposed to a criminal problem and said the state needs better mental health services.
He said he sees legislators stuck debating issues the younger generation had solved a long time ago like whether West Virginia needs state-wide protection for LGBTQ individuals from discrimination in employment and housing. These protections, known locally as the Fairness Act, didn’t pass during this year’s legislative session.
Sarah Christian
Sarah Christian is another young West Virginian who aspires to shape the state through politics. She lives in Tornado and graduated from West Virginia State in 2019 with a degree in political science. She said she plans to run for state legislature in the next few years to help balance a “severe underrepresentation” of her generation.
She says she wants to improve West Virginia and sees a lot of potential in the state.
“I think it’s important that young people stay here and want to make a change here,” she said. “Because everybody does want to leave.”
Christian has been out of college for a couple years and said she’s struggled to find a job in her field.
“I feel like I’m in purgatory and I don’t know what to do next,” she said.
Christian said she thought it would be easier to find a job after college and is now debating whether it’s worth hanging around West Virginia for the right opportunity.
“If I found something that was interesting to me and I got it, I’d be out of here in a heartbeat,” she said.
West Virginia is the third-oldest state in the nation, according to 2019 data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Christian said state lawmakers are investing in the state’s older generation when they should be investing in the youngest.
“What’s our state going to do when that generation isn’t here anymore, but all of the young people have left?” Christian asks. “When do you start investing in your growing generation, rather than your dying generation? When are they going to invest in us?”
Christian would like to see state lawmakers invest more money in job opportunities, affordable housing, and reliable broadband. Otherwise, she sees herself and many of her peers moving away.
“Why would we stay here when we could move to Charlotte or Pittsburgh, Columbus or Nashville and get a great paying job, a new apartment with partial utilities included and reliable internet access for under $700 a month?”
Organizations in West Virginia like the Community Foundation of the Ohio Valley (CFOV) are working to address youth retention in West Virginia by exposing current college students to opportunities that exist in the region.
At the start of the summer, Wheeling Resident Casey Wilson started a part time position with a visionary aerospace company, but he says he owes his success to a specific Ohio Valley experience.
“I’m in propulsion analysis at SpaceX, which is like a really awesome company doing crazy things. It’s one of Elon Musk’s companies. I don’t think I would be here if I never did that CFOV program,” Wilson said.
The CFOV offers a program called Community Leadership Internship Program (CLIP). CLIP gives college students a chance to explore possibilities in their field in the Ohio Valley by setting them up with internships in their fields as close to home as possible.
Placements happen exclusively in the upper Ohio Valley, which includes the entire northern panhandle of West Virginia, and two counties in southeast Ohio.
Combating the Struggle to Stay
The program is a full-time summer internship that has to be at least 80 percent real, in-field experience rather than clerical or menial tasks.
Credit Glynis Board / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Ateria Walker, a CLIP intern during the summer of 2019, is studying to be a nurse.
This gives people like nursing major Ateria Walker a good look at their chosen fields in their backyard, so they know if its a good fit. The experience has reinforced her decision in both her field and where she wants to live after college.
“I definitely 100 percent believe I’m in the right field and thanks to this program. This experience has confirmed that nursing is the right field for me. I have no worries if I do remain in the Ohio Valley, which I do plan to do, that I can find a successful job as a nurse here,” Walker said.
CLIP interns also get together every Friday to meet community leaders and visit businesses, nonprofits or government agencies in their area. The community foundation’s Program Officer Debbie Stanton recently took interns to Marshall County. They toured a natural gas well, then went to visit the Marshall County Animal Shelter.
Stanton wanted the interns to meet the shelter’s founder and director Barb Scanlon, a highly motivational self-starter who has had big impacts in the community through her work creating the county’s anumal shelter.
“Barb is grassroots,” Stanton explained. “She built this organization with some friends of hers from the backyards of the neighborhood ladies that were rescuing dogs to the grand facility that it is today. I am amazed by Barb’s story.”
Stanton says above and beyond exposure to existing businesses, the CLIP program aims to enlighten and inspire.
Following Your “I Oughta’s”
During the interns’ tour of the Marshall County Animal Shelter, Scanlon shared stories about how she found purpose and motivation through service to her community and by identifying what she calls her “I-oughta’s”
Credit Glynis Board / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Barb Scanlon founded and directs the Marshall County Animal Shelter. She met with CLIP interns to talk about the power of living in service to your community.
“I think that all of us get messages of ‘I oughta’ — ‘I oughta do this for my mother’, ‘I oughta do this for my friend’, ‘I oughta do this for my neighbor down the road.’ I know you get them and they come into your head,” Scanlon passionately explained. “And some people just think that ‘oughtas’ come into your head to take up space. They’re sent there for a reason. You get a message and you decide it’s real important that you oughta do and it comes from your head and your heart.”
Scanlon says her I-oughtas led her to create what has become a thriving animal shelter that has effectively decreased the number of dogs that have to be taken in by almost 60 percent since the start of their spay and neuter clinic in 2015.
The Urge to Return
While networking with community leaders is a plus for the students in the program, there’s hope the area will benefit from the program just as much. The main goal of the internship is to try to keep young talented people in the valley. But limitations exist.
In the case of former CLIP intern Casey Wilson, who is now interning at SpaceX, he doesn’t see enough economic diversity to keep him in the valley.
“But that being said,” Wilson said, “I think there is some inclination for me, maybe to look into moving back to Wheeling, or moving back to the valley and maybe retiring there. Which I guess is not as great as I make it sound, it’s one of the things I’m kind of disappointed about. But hey,” he added, “maybe when I’m 35 i’ll come back and start a rocket company in Wheeling.”
This year CFOV’s CLIP program has twelve interns with placements including a minor league hockey team, a bankruptcy court, and the city of Wheeling among others.
A similar program exists downriver — the Parkersburg Area Community Foundations’ Civic Leaders Program.
This is chapter two of Derek Akal’s Struggle to Stay. In the first chapter, we met a young man from Harlan County, Kentucky, who thought a college football scholarship was going to be his ticket out. But a serious neck injury led Derek to drop out and move back home.
Strange Names of Derek’s Home
Generation after generation, people in Derek’s family have felt pressure to move away from home. The struggle to stay is a central part of Derek’s family history and the history of his hometown, a little place called Lynch. Derek told me he wishes the town had a different name, but it doesn’t bother him much.
Lynch wasn’t named for a historical lynching, it was actually named after Thomas Lynch. He was an executive at US Steel— the company that built this coal-camp town back in 1917. At the time, it was the largest company-owned town in Kentucky. Today, there are yard signs posted all around Lynch to let everyone know that the town is celebrating 100 years of existence, here at the foot of Kentucky’s highest peak, which also happens to be named Black Mountain.
“Black mountain, live in Lynch, in a black community,” Derek mused. “What can you say?”
Memory and the African-American Experience
I asked Derek if he knew much about his family’s history, and how they’d come to live in Lynch. He told me that his grandma and his mom don’t talk about it much. He said I should instead ask his cousin, Karida Brown.
Karida, is a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and full-time sociology professor the University of California at Los Angeles. She’s done a lot of research about how generations of African-Americans have moved in and out of coal towns like Lynch— she’s actually writing a book about it.
Here’s how Derek describes her: “She does a lot of interviews around here. Everybody knows who she is. One thing that everybody loves about her is her hair. It’s like really poofy and curly, just beautiful. I love it. I’m trying to get my hair like hers — big and natural.”
Karida told me she’s not surprised that Derek hasn’t heard much about how his family first came to Lynch because as she said, “Memory is a very complicated thing with the African-American experience.”
Karida explained that talking about history can be really sensitive if it means you have to think about slavery— “a historical catastrophe, a shattering of who you are and where you come from. You don’t always want to be remembering that.”
Karida told me that for her and Derek’s family, “origin stories started in Kentucky….parents weren’t necessarily trying to tell…what they endured to get there.”
Even though it’s not something Derek’s talked about much, I think that if you want to understand Derek’s struggle to stay, you have to understand that many parts of his struggle are forces that his family has been dealing with for generations.
“This has been a story of African-American struggle and striving that we can trace through American history, because we’re always getting kicked out or moved from where we settle down,” Karida said.
So, now we’re going to speed through a hundred years of Derek’s family history.
Credit courtesy Derek Akal
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Derek Akal with his grandmother and mom
The Origin Story
“How the hell did all these black folks get to Harlan County, Kentucky?” Karida asked rhetorically, before she started to answer. She explained that as the U.S. became involved in World War I, there was a huge need for steel. To make steel, you need hot-burning coal like the kind found in Harlan County.
Once railroad companies pushed their way into eastern Kentucky, mining started to boom and companies desperately needed more workers than they could find living here in the hills. So, mining companies like the one that owned Lynch sent labor agents far and wide to recruit coal miners. One place where they recruited was Alabama, where Derek’s great-granddad came from.
Karida explains that for African-Americans living in Alabama, the early 1900s were a tough time.
“Leaving Alabama,” Karida said, “was more of an escape.”
Slavery had technically been abolished, but many African-Americans were still trapped doing forced labor in abusive conditions. Some were stuck in unfair farming contracts, and others were arrested, often on flimsy charges, then sold to industries that needed workers. Many of these leased convicts ended up working in coal mines, where about one in 20 workers would die each year.
It was dangerous to stay in Alabama, but it was also dangerous to leave. Derek’s great-granddad used to tell a story about one scary encounter that happened while he was traveling to Kentucky. As Karida understands it, “he was unsure if they were going to kill him right there.”
Karida has heard the story a number of times, and she shared with me a recording of Cynthia Harrington, a daughter of Derek’s great-granddad, recalling how her dad used to tell the story:
“He used to get drunk, and he basically told us the same story, about how he hoboed — we call it hitchhike — from Alabama because he heard about the jobs in the mines. He was walking and these white men saw him. They said, hey n—-, where you going? So he told them that he was going to Kentucky to get a job. They said, we heard that n—- can preach, so they said to him, n—- preach…. he said he had to do it because he was a little ‘fraid, and after he preached they said well we heard n—– like to dance, they said, n—– dance…. . And once he danced, and they taunted him some more and let him go… that’s what happened, so he used to tell us this story when he got drunk.”
Credit Benny Becker/WMMT
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Cycles of Boom and Bust
In Lynch, Derek’s great-granddad started a large family — 14 kids, including Derek’s grandma (who asked that I not use her name). There was decent-paying work for a while, but then the coal industry hit a bump due to some forces that might sound familiar to people watching today’s coal downturn. Coal was losing ground to competition from another fossil fuel, and coal miners were being replaced by fancy new mining machines.
Karida Brown said that by the mid-1940s, “the country is transitioning its dependence from coal to oil, and the mining industry began to mechanize heavily. There was not such a need for all of that manual labor. As quickly as they pulled these people in, they shut them out. I know in the case of Lynch, that African-Americans were the first to be cut out of the labor economy.”
Credit courtesy Karida Brown
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Derek’s cousin Karida Brown
Many folks in Lynch moved away. Karida Brown told me that Harlan County lost 70 percent of its African-American population between 1940 and 1970. “That is an extreme outmigration.”
Derek’s grandma was part of that wave of people who left Lynch. She followed some of her older siblings to New York City. There she met her husband, Derek’s granddad, who’d come from Trinidad. Then in the 70’s, her husband lost his job, just as the coal industry started to bounce back. Mines in Harlan County were hiring again, and Derek’s grandma wanted to get her kids away from the Heroin epidemic that had arrived in New York. So, they moved to Lynch.
“When drugs started getting bad,” she said, “I came back to raise my kids. And I’ve been here ever since.”
Derek’s grandma actually worked in the mines, too, for a year around 1979 — partly because she wanted to see what it was like, and partly because her husband had told her not to.
“He would always tell me, ‘You ain’t going in no mine!’ so I went in there. I worked close to a year on a beltline, and I enjoyed it, it really paid good. But I needed to be home, that’s my job — be home with kids.”
This boom, like the last one, turned into a bust, and once again, many folks in Lynch moved away. Among them was Derek’s mom, Katina Akal.
“When the coal mine shut down here,” she told me, “everybody had no choice but to move.”
Katina and Derek
After high school, Katina Akal moved to Lexington, where she attended the University of Kentucky, but she dropped out after she gave birth Derek. She sent Derek back to live with her mom in Lynch because, she said, she was working nights and didn’t have anyone in Lexington who could watch him.
Katina Akal says she stayed in Lexington for about 10 years, when she had her second son, “I decided to come back home, and — best decision I ever made.”
At first, she got a job at a factory. Then she went back to school, and she’s now managed to get a job close to home that she loves, as a counselor working with at-risk youth. “I feel like this is what I was meant to do,” Katina Akal said.
Many Only Come Back to Visit
Credit Benny Becker/ WMMT
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Lynch, KY
Derek’s mom and grandma both found their way back to Lynch, but they were the exception. Katina Akal told me that in their neighborhood, it used to be that every house had someone living it. These days, she said, “You live here then there’s three houses empty. There’s the next house then there’s three houses empty. It’s just terrible now.”
Derek’s cousin Karida Brown is from one of those branches of the family that didn’t move back. She grew up in New York on Long Island, but her family visited Lynch at least once a year, and Karida thought it was a magical place. She told me that, because the town had been segregated, “all I knew was that it was this black world. I thought everyone was black. Not only Lynch, but all Appalachia in my mind was black.”
Where Derek Grew Up
When out-of-town folks would visit, Karida and the rest of the family often ended up gathering at the house that Derek lives in with his grandma and his mom.
“The best food is going to be there. The biggest laughs,” Karida said.
The house, she said, is also iconic because it’s at the same intersection as two of Lynch’s most iconic locations. Across the street to one side is a big, grassy field tucked behind chain-link fence — the ballpark, which Karida says is “where everything went down.”
Across the street, on the other side of Derek’s house, is a big brick building engraved with the words Lynch Colored School.
“Up until 1963, the schools were racially segregated in Harlan County and it was the premier black school,” Karida said. “And the building is now owned by the Eastern Kentucky Social Club, so that building has so much symbolic meaning to the black community and it’s still a gathering place.”
Because the social club is so symbolic, it has sometimes been a target. Derek told me a story that his granddad used to tell him, about an event that’s something of a town legend. About 40 years ago, members of the KKK threatened to come into Lynch and tear down the social club. Derek remembers his granddad told him “everybody was sitting there ready on their houses, guns out, loaded up, ready for them to show up.”
Derek told me can really picture the scene: “My granddad just pointing his gun ready for something to happen, but you know they never showed up, so.”
Dereks says he thinks that his community has a reputation that “people around here don’t play around.”
He said he feels like the reputation helps to keep the community safe.
“I believe that there’s some racist people around here,” he said. “But they’re not brave enough to show up in Lynch, because Lynch has a history.”
‘Fight For My Life’
Lynch’s reputation has made Derek feel safer, but the reputation alone hasn’t always been enough to keep Derek safe. Derek told me a story about one time when he had to fight for his life.
As Derek told the story, it was 2015, and he was at a house party with the girl he was dating at the time. He was underage, and also a designated driver, so he wasn’t drinking.
After Derek’s girlfriend got into an argument with her sister, she left the party and started walking up the hill nearby. Derek followed behind her, and then, he remembers “there were these guys jogging behind me, just screaming the n-word like crazy.”
Derek says one of the guys had a knife on him, and flicked it out. “He just sitting there holding it, just looking at me. My life flashed before my eyes, I was like, ‘These guys are probably gonna try to kill me or something, so I’m probably have to fight for my life.’ ”
Derek remembers he looked at his girlfriend and saw her shaking. He says he felt like he was fighting for both of their lives. “I was just ready to go.”
First, Derek says he punched the guy holding the knife. “Boom. Knocked him out first hit.”
The other guy, Derek says, punched him, but he didn’t even feel it because he was in a full adrenaline rush. Derek kept fighting back.
“Boom, knocked him out. Next thing you know, the guy with the knife, I kept going after him, started beating him half to death, you know, going crazy, beating up these two dudes. You know it looked like I’d just basically liked killed ‘em, you know, two bodies on the ground, that’s what it looked like.”
Credit Benny Becker/ WMMT
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Derek Akal
The Next Morning
Derek told me, he came home around 7 in the morning. “I had a blue hoody on, and I had blood all over my hoody, my pants, the white part of my shoes, all around here was covered in blood.”
Later that day, Derek says he got a phone call from the police. “They were like man, you probably have to go to jail for assault or almost attempted murder because the guy that had that knife apparently had a really bad concussion.”
So, Derek told the police what had happened.
“I was like listen dude, he had a knife on him, so I’m fighting for my life. You know he could’ve stabbed me in my neck or something, and I wouldn’t be here, you know.”
The police, Derek says, dropped the charges and asked if he wanted to press charges against the guys who attacked him. Derek said no.
“You know, I felt bad for what I did.”
Derek says the fact that he almost killed someone spread quickly.
“That was like the biggest talk for like almost three months, and usually l didn’t like step out the house,” he said. “I was so embarrassed at what I’d done to that man. I broke his jaw in two different places, and fractured his skull with the kick that I gave him.”
Two months after the fight, Derek says he went to another house party, and ran into the guy who’d pulled a knife — the guy he’d nearly killed.
“He had scars all over his face, he had one scar on his forehead. He came up to me and he was like, ‘Man I’m really sorry for what happened. I was drunk. You really beat me up, and you made me realize, I don’t need to be doing that.’ ”
Derek said he forgave him, and asked for forgiveness in return. Then, they hugged. “Me and those guys we’re cool now, so everything’s cool.”
Toward Leaving
I asked Derek if that experience had made him feel less comfortable in Harlan County, or had pushed him more toward wanting to leave.
He didn’t seem totally sure how much it had affected his thinking.
“I mean — it can happen anywhere…. I was so friendly with everybody around here, I didn’t think it would happen toward me but it did… It didn’t push me to move, but it did push me to start looking somewhere else.”
Looking turned into planning, and then one morning, planning turned into action.
“I walked downstairs, had my bags and stuff, I told my family, ‘I’m going to the beach. I’m going to California.’”
Derek doesn’t have a car, or an airplane ticket. How is he planning to get to California? Will he find more opportunities, or more of the same struggles? Find out next time, as we continue to follow Derek Akal’s struggle to stay.
“Jobs aren’t a silver bullet,” says Coalfield Development Corporation CEO Brandon Dennison.
But they are a good start.
Dennison’s social enterprise has helped 100 percent of its first 30 graduates find employment or further their education. Now, it’s hoping to repeat that success with 50 employees.
Meanwhile, the larger goal is ambitious – to reinvent the Appalachian economy from the ground up, through sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, renovating buildings and restoring former mine lands.
These enterprises earn some money, raise more and receive some from government grants.
Dennison thinks this is a model for development throughout Appalachia. But it takes a lot of mentoring to help employees overcome childhood trauma and keep their jobs.
On the Front Porch, we ask if it can it become more than a pilot program.
Welcome to “The Front Porch,” where we tackle the tough issues facing Appalachia the same way you talk with your friends on the porch.
Hosts include WVPB Executive Director and recovering reporter Scott Finn and avid goat herder Rick Wilson, who works for the American Friends Service Committee.
An edited version of “The Front Porch” airs Fridays at 4:50 p.m. on West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s radio network, and the full version is available at wvpublic.org and as a podcast as well.
Share your opinions with us about these issues, and let us know what you’d like us to discuss in the future. Send a tweet to @radiofinn or @wvpublicnews, or e-mail Scott at sfinn @ wvpublic.org
The Front Porch is underwritten by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Charleston Gazette-Mail. Find the latest news, traffic and weather on its CGM App. Download it in your app store, and check out its website: http://www.wvgazettemail.com/
Derek Akal, 22, grew up in the famed coalfields of Harlan County, Kentucky. He’s a bit over six feet tall, he’s black, and he has an athlete’s build. Neat curls of black hair rise off the top of his head, and on his chin, he keeps a closely-trimmed mustache and goatee.
I first interviewed Derek in October 2016. At that time, he said he was trying to become a Kentucky state trooper, but also making plans to move to Texas to work on an oil rig.
By November, Derek still had one plan to find work near home, and another plan to move West, but both plans had changed. Now, he was following a lead on a lineman job that would have him climbing utility poles and making plans to move to California after his birthday, in March.
Plans Through the Whole Alphabet
For Derek, changing plans is part of the plan. When I asked Derek what would be the first thing he’d want people to hear from him in this story, this is what he told me:
“It’s okay if you want to stay. It’s also okay if you want to leave. But if you’re going to leave, then make sure you always have more than three plans. Plan A, plan B, plan C— you’ve got to have through the whole alphabet!”
Derek has had a lots of ideas about what he could do at home, and he’s told me he would stay home if his mom or grandma asked him to, but the plans Derek has gotten most excited about all involve him moving somewhere far away.
“That’s where I might have a future. I know I’m young, but I’m ready to get out there and do a lot.”
Plan A: Football Dreams
Derek was raised primarily by his granddad, his grandma and his mom.
“Because his father wasn’t around. His grandfather was his father,” said his mother, Katina Akal.
When Derek was a junior in high school, his granddad passed away.
Credit courtesy Derek Akal
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Derek Akal with his grandmother and mom
His grandma and his mom said they noticed that Derek became more withdrawn. He started to focus more intensely on a goal his granddad had pushed him toward— excelling at sports to hopefully earn a college scholarship.
You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive
His senior year, after a summer dedicated to working out, Derek became a football star. “I got defensive player of the year. I got four district championships, and I got three regional championships. You know, I dedicated all that [to] my granddad.”
Harlan County High School’s football field is called Coal Miner’s Memorial Stadium. It has huge metal bleachers on two sides, and a giant modern scoreboard behind the end zone. It’s in a beautiful spot, a patch of flat land that was blasted out of the wooded hillsides that surround it.
When Derek and I visited in November, the leaves were at their most colorful. A gym class was playing flag football, and the sound of gunshots told us someone was out hunting nearby.
Derek started to get nostalgic, remembering how he used to feel back when he played here as a Harlan County Black Bear. He told me about times his blood and tears fell onto the turf. He told me about walking onto the field before games, in front of a roaring crowd that would sing along to the country hit “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive.”
Credit Benny Becker/ WMMT
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Derek Akal
In the deep dark hills of Eastern Kentucky
That’s the place where I trace my bloodline
And it’s there I read on a hillside gravestone
You’ll never leave Harlan alive
“I’m not a big fan of country music,”Derek said, “but you know it got me pumped up like crazy. I love it.”
The last game of the season, Derek got hurt. Some of his teammates had the opponent’s running back held up, so Derek charged in to help make the tackle.
“As soon as I hit him, my head cocked all the way back, and I felt the back of my head touch my back. I broke my neck— I broke my C1 and my C2… If I hadn’t gotten hurt I’d be playing for a bowl game right now with a D1 college.”
Going Away to College
Derek was in a neck brace for four months, but he was still getting college scholarships to play more football. He accepted a scholarship to attend the University of the Cumberlands, in Williamsburg Kentucky. It’s only two hours from Derek’s home in Harlan County, but the college draws students from all across the country.
There, Derek sometimes felt like an outsider. In Williamsburg, he stood out for the way he talked— for his Harlan county accent.
Many of his classmates were surprised that someone who looks like him, a clean-cut and fashionably dressed black man, could be from rural Kentucky.
“They’d be like, ‘oh where [are] you from?
And I’d say, ‘Two hours away in the mountains.’
And first thing, they be like, ‘You serious? You don’t even look like you’re from Kentucky! You look like you’re from Georgia or Florida or New York City, city places like that.’
I’m sitting here like, ‘No man, I’m from Harlan County Kentucky!’”
That wasn’t the only discomfort Derek felt with being a young black man in Williamsburg. Derek said his feelings about the town soured after he and a friend had their car searched by police twice in one week.
“We gave [the police] the license and everything, and he was like, ‘oh, I thought you guys had stuff on y’all.’ I can’t read minds, but seeing a couple of black guys together, I feel like we got profiled right there.”
Things on the football field weren’t going great either. Two games into the season, Derek’s neck started bother him again. He became afraid that playing more football could make his spinal injury become more severe. “I didn’t want to play no more,” Derek said, “because, you know, I want to be able to walk.”
Derek was homesick, and he didn’t want to get deeper in student debt, so he decided to drop out and move back home.
What Now?
Derek’s mom says that when he got home, he was afraid that she and his grandma would be disappointed in him, but she understood where he was coming from. ” “I said,‘look, college is not for everybody. Do what you feel like you want to do.’”
“Go do something,” his grandma urged him. She said, she worries there aren’t jobs in Lynch; she would like him to get out if it means he can find work. “Go get yourself a job. I don’t want him to stick around here, walking these streets.”
Credit Benny Becker/ WMMT
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Derek Akal
Derek’s mother agrees. “I’d rather for him to go find work and be a productive member of society. I’d rather him do that than stay here and be miserable, because I can see it already. I want him to go somewhere that he can be happy.”
Derek’s mommas, as he calls them, instilled in him a drive to get out of Appalachia and find opportunity elsewhere. “I got it in my head that I can make it out, and be something for myself, by myself.”
Derek’s not the first person in his family to have that thought. In the next chapter of Derek Akal’s Struggle to Stay, we’re going to hear more about how the hunt for better work and a better life has affected Derek’s family and community for generations.
This story was produced by WMMT in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and the Ohio Valley ReSource, which is made possible with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Music in the audio version of this story was provided by Marisa Anderson. We’ll hear the next part of Derek Akal’s Struggle to Stay story next week, here on Inside Appalachia.
