COLUMN ONE : Bias Blights Life Outside Appalachia : Decades after they left the mountains for Cincinnati, families endure prejudice and social ills. The city bans discrimination against them, but stereotypes are hard to break.

For nearly 30 years after World War II, the mountain children of eastern Kentucky were said to learn three lessons early in life: reading, writing and Route 25, the old road to the factory jobs in this Ohio River city.

Newcomers here no more, the urban Appalachians are set apart, even in the second and third generations. “Turns out that old highway could lead to a world of misery,” country-music star Dwight Yoakam sings in a plaintive lyric dedicated to his Appalachian-born family.

In neighborhoods of shabby row houses and cramped bungalows, where preachers sermonize in storefronts and laundry dries on lines, tens of thousands of coal miners’ descendants make up a lasting white underclass plagued by high unemployment, horrendous dropout rates, and drug and alcohol addiction. About 44% of the area’s residents of mountain stock are either poor or at serious risk of falling into poverty, sociologists have found; virtually all of them live within city limits.

A major reason for the troubles, community activists believe, is lingering prejudice and ignorance of mountain culture. “Did you ever see the Beverly Hillbillies?” asked Pauletta Hansel, an assistant director of the Urban Appalachian Council here. “Snuffy Smith. The Dukes of Hazzard. That’s the stereotype.”

The caricatures can make the basics--schooling, housing, jobs--hard to come by or to keep. A twang in the voice, a quirky expression like “I reckon,” a taste for banjo music, all passed on to children and grandchildren raised here, can lead to many other assumptions: This person is not smart, this person won’t show up on time, this person’s temper is likely to be quick. “Hillbilly” jokes and quips are not uncommon.

Sixteen months ago, Cincinnati responded by adopting the nation’s only human rights ordinance banning discrimination against Appalachians.

With an estimated 20% to 30% of the city’s residents of Appalachian stock, the mountain folk are the second-largest distinct group in town, behind the 40% of the population that is black. The city schools have designated May as “Appalachian Month,” and a political action committee, AppalPAC, supports sympathetic candidates, albeit with a mixed record of success. An advocacy group, the Urban Appalachian Council, provides social services and works to instill pride.

But problems persist. “The fair housing department has not been oriented to helping Appalachians,” said City Councilwoman Bobbie Sterne. “We had to fight for youth jobs. They said Appalachians weren’t applying.” She sighed. “I don’t know.”

Appalachian activists say similar troubles have surfaced in Columbus, Dayton and Akron, Ohio, in Indianapolis, and in other cities that lured more than 3 million people from Appalachia over three decades. Many of them were forced to leave home as automation in the coal mines took away their work. During a second mountain emigration in the 1980s, 45,000 people headed mostly to boom towns in the Carolinas and Georgia.

“If the numbers continue, those areas (in the Southeast) are going to face many of the same problems down the road that the Midwest cities face today,” said Ronald D. Eller, director of the University of Kentucky’s Appalachian Center. His own memories as a child of Appalachian parents in Akron--the “capital of West Virginia” was its nickname at the time--are more than tinged with bitterness.

The diaspora has resulted in mountain people becoming “an invisible minority,” in their new homes, said Phillip J. Obermiller, a sociologist who has written extensively about them. On paper, they couldn’t be more mainstream: white, English-speaking, Protestant.

Though some blacks also live in the Appalachians, the majority of the residents trace their lineage to settlers from England, Ireland and Scotland who rejected the coastal cities of America in favor of frontier freedoms, beginning in the late 1700s. If a man heard a rifle shot, the adage went, he packed up and left to escape overcrowding.

Over the years, as farming and hunting gave way to coal mining, the isolated gaps and hollows nurtured a distinctive way of life, based on helping kin and neighbors while staying independent and wary of outsiders. The emphasis on clan traditions meant that the taking of sides during the Civil War could lead to feuds lasting well into this century. It also resulted in the custom of decorating family graveyards once a year while telling old tales, a practice that is still observed.

The culture has demonstrated remarkable staying power in the cities, in part because so many Appalachians moved together and in part because their old homes were so close by. The first generation of urban Appalachians could drive or take a bus back each weekend, carrying the children along. Now, that second generation brings the grandchildren back on special occasions.

At the same time, however, “it’s hard to get ahead if you don’t feel part of something,” said Larry Redden, an organizer with the Urban Appalachian Council.

Here in Cincinnati, it is clear that those who retain traces of the hills in their lives can be made to feel different, indeed. Others may make sport of dulcimer music, or of a popular custom of sending a funeral arrangement in the shape of a phone off the hook, with a sign declaring “Jesus Has Called.” This is a city where some liberal middle-class whites recall that, during childhood, “hillbilly” was a term used at home, while racial epithets were strictly forbidden.

Whether such separateness deserves legal protection is a matter of local debate, especially among Cincinnati’s African Americans, who tend to fare slightly worse than Appalachians, statistics show. “They have a lot of the same kinds of problems (as blacks),” said Sheila Adams, president of the city’s chapter of the Urban League. “But do I think it’s easier for them in the long run? Probably.”

Councilman Dwight Tillery, who is black, said he found it “interesting” when he noticed that Appalachians were included in the human rights ordinance. He voted for it, figuring, “What harm could it do?” The measure also banned bias on the basis of gender, age, race, religion, disability or sexual orientation.

Then, last month, Tillery held hearings on unemployment and poverty in Cincinnati. “I got an education from the Appalachian community,” he said. “I can see very well the real possibility of other whites discriminating against them. They’ve been through a lot of pain.”

June Smith Tyler moved to the Cincinnati area from Harlan County, Ky., in 1966. Now 51 and a partner at a prominent law firm, she tells of a job interview elsewhere in the city a decade ago, when she had just graduated from night school. Working days as a nurse, she had still managed to earn a place on the law review. After a pleasant lunch with several attorneys, a senior partner told her in the privacy of his office that he had to “be careful” about hiring anyone with a mountain accent.

Even now, she winces at thoughtless one-liners tossed off by would-be wits. She lives south of the Ohio River, which is the Kentucky boundary, and has lost count of the times she’s been asked if she kicks off her shoes as soon as she crosses the bridge.

Today, Amy Morgan, 22 and Cincinnati-born, is frequently asked where she’s from. The question is based on the soft twang acquired from her mother, aunt and grandparents. “I just tell them, Kentucky,’ ” she said, and shrugged. “I was brought up like I was in Kentucky.”

Growing up, if she and her siblings weren’t home by dark, “we’d be getting a switching,” said Morgan, now separated from her husband and the mother of two toddlers. She is taking a high school refresher class and hopes to study to become a veterinarian technician. Her cousins, high school seniors, still have to be in bed by 9 on school nights.

Morgan cherishes her family, but she did get teased. Once, a high school classmate had a thing or two to say about Morgan living next door to her aunt. Her zoology teacher overheard, and asked: “Your family lived all together in a holler, didn’t they?” It was true, actually; they had. Why was his tone so condescending?

Such tales of slights at school are not unusual. Mike Overbey, 39, who works for the Urban Appalachian Council, remembers getting suspended when he was 17 for slapping a teacher who’d called him a “backward hillbilly.”

More recently, another teacher read a list of Appalachian jokes to a class of young teen-agers. He included this description of a “hillbilly seven-course dinner”: A six-pack and a bag of potato chips.

Just weeks ago, at a prestigious magnet school for the performing arts, 10th-graders discussed the play “Antigone.”

A student described the incest in the drama as “confusing.”

“Not if you’re from Kentucky,” teacher Matthew Rabold answered.

Later, Rabold, 30, called the remark “thoughtless.” Puzzling over why the offending words slipped out, he finally decided: “It’s just the perceptions I’ve gotten from the popular media, even cartoons: the shoeless, toothless backwoodsman. I’ve never seen a positive portrayal.” A five-year veteran of public school faculties, he could not remember any special activities for “Appalachian Month.”

The verbal slaps help explain why 17% of Appalachians and their descendants over age 18 in Greater Cincinnati never finished high school, said Michael Maloney, who runs mountain culture workshops for teachers and social workers around the Midwest. Dropout rates in several city neighborhoods run closer to 80%, he said--worse than in eastern Kentucky itself, where the figures are in the 40% to 50% range.

“Dignity and respect are more important than education,” said Maloney, who grew up in Lee County, Ky. “Parents will yank their kids out of school” because of insults.

That argument, however, fails to persuade everyone. “It’s a cop-out,” said Don Bearghman, principal of a grade school in Lower Price Hill, a part of town where virtually everyone has Appalachian roots.

The student body at Bearghman’s Oyler Elementary School is almost evenly divided between bused-in blacks and the white children and grandchildren of Kentucky emigrants. “An Appalachian being called a hillbilly is like a black child being called the ‘n-word,’ ” the principal said. “It’s no reason to drop out of school. I don’t buy that.”

Certainly other factors are involved. Money, for one. Obermiller, who surveyed Appalachians in Greater Cincinnati in 1980 and 1989, said that many families achieve working-class status by making everyone, including teens, get jobs.

It was a job at a turkey farm near Cincinnati that pulled Danny Courtney from school when he was 17. But economics can also be an effective argument in favor of education. Now 32, Courtney and his wife are on welfare while they attend classes to prepare for the General Equivalency Diploma test. They need, he says, to boost their earning power for the sake of their 4-year-old son.

Returning to studies, though, is far from easy and the vast majority of dropouts never do. “It would help if they know there are good things in their culture, things to be valued,” said Larry Holcomb, coordinator of the Northside Community School, a continuing education center with an Appalachian clientele. “Then they could envision themselves going to college.”

Matthew Rabold, repentant, wants to do his part. He met with members of the Urban Appalachian Council following complaints about the “Antigone” incident and ever since, he has been searching out mountain writers for his students to read. He hopes that a local poet, Brenda Saylor, will speak to his class.

He has been touched by her words about “my people,” the ones she describes as “the men, tall stiffbacked; the women with their long hair/and unpainted smiles.” She writes of self-denial and of embracing the past:

“Their kids will laugh at their dreams

and shy from their songs

but when the fiddle plays

the young will pick up their feet,

move to an ancient rhythm

and ask for the stories

of their grandmothers.

Faraway, a mountain will sigh, knowing it has not been forgotten.”

Mountain Exodus

Cincinnati, has prohibited bias against Appalachian people as part of its human rights ordinance. Appalachian activists say bias has also surfaced in Columbus, Dayton and Akron, Ohio and Indianapolis.