Photo Exhibit Focuses On Appalachian Blacks

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Blacks in two rural Appalachian communities will come to life in a exhibit of photographs on display through May 29 outside the Mainstage theater in the Center for the Arts on the University at Buffalo North (Amherst) Campus.

The exhibit, "It Takes Some Kicking: Voices in Black Appalachia," features 40 photographs by Wilburn Hayden, Ph.D., former associate dean of social work at UB; his brother, Ronald, and one of Hayden's former graduate students, Derek Williams.

Hayden, director of the Master's of Social Work Program at the California University of Pennsylvania, is recognized nationally for his research on blacks in Appalachia, whom he describes as a "minority within a minority."

The exhibit, which records the lives of black residents of two former coal-mining towns in Virginia, also includes narratives excerpted from interviews with its subjects. It has toured nationally through the Appalachian Consortium's Traveling Exhibition Program.