Pre-Existing Conditions – The Student Health Coalition Archive Project

Decline of coal camp healthcare and subsequent basis of need for reform

Leave a Comment / Stories, Theme: Organizing, Theme: Organizing - Stories, Themes / By Gillian McCuistion

Charles “Boomer” Winfrey and Maureen O’Connell discuss the local healthcare setting upon Save Our Cumberland Mountain’s (SOCM) and the Student Health Coalition’s (SHC) early stages of community organizing in East Tennessee. Maureen details several local factors which established a major basis of need for healthcare reform. Recorded on May 20, 2013. Full footage of …

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Square Morman’s sons on 1960s civil unrest and Tent City

Leave a Comment / Stories, Theme: Organizing, Theme: Organizing - Stories, Themes / By Gillian McCuistion

Dana Ellis, a nurse and co-director of the West Tennessee Student Health Coalition, asks two of Square Morman’s sons what it was like in the early 1960s — from racial tensions to the development of “Tent City.” Recorded on June 1, 2018 in West Tennessee.

SHC in Mud Creek, Kentucky

Leave a Comment / Stories, Theme: Organizing, Theme: Organizing - Stories, Themes / By Biff Hollingsworth

[Story contributed by Jack Beckford, with assistance from Sara Platt Williams] During the Fall of 1970, the SHC was contacted by the Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Organization (EKWRO), centered in Floyd Co, Ky. EKWRO was already doing organizing among low-income residents in this coal country of mountainous eastern Kentucky. The dynamic leader of EKWRO, a …

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