Word: mingo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Playwright Charles Fuller has paid his debt to Weaver handsomely by fleshing out the narrative with vivid character portraits and pungent humor. The strongest portrayal, by Douglas Turner Ward, is that of Sergeant Major Mingo Saunders. A 25-year veteran, Saunders has a passion for the regular army in the same way that a priest or an artist is called to his vocation. Ward sensitively conveys the intimate, though difficult burden of an NCO, who must understand the hurts and fears of his men, yet main tain a spit-and-polish discipline to steel each soldier for the fierce ordeal...
Huey Perry grew up along Gilbert Creek in West Virginia's Mingo County and later taught history in high school there. He seemed safe and sound enough to local politicians to be selected as director of a new Economic Opportunity Commission project in 1965 The stated purpose of the program was to fight poverty in an isolated region of Appalachia, sprinkled with towns with names like Cinderella Hollow and Magnolia, but inhabited by people 50% of whom were officially classified as poor...
...dominant political clans and the courthouse crowds in Mingo County had always used welfare programs, patronage jobs and outright cash to buy the votes of the poor and keep their own positions on the public payrolls. They expected that the new poverty project would give them a chance to get a handle on nearly $2,000,000 in federal funds...
...Perry gradually got the poor of Mingo County to feel happy in ways the politicians had not expected; they found joy in banding together to exercise a power they had never known before. Their projects were hardly radical. They kept their children out of class to force stingy school boards to expand hot-lunch programs and to repair schools and outhouses. They established cooperative grocery stores to bypass merchants who raised prices on days when food stamps were issued. They exposed officials who used state-financed work gangs to improve their private property. They documented the practice of bureaucrats...