The African American Experience Project is emblematic of the effort to reclaim often-lost history—those stories that may have been long shared by many Black Americans around crackling campfires but have yet to be shared with the world. This NPS-wide initiative has unearthed many stories across the United States, and particularly in the Smokies region of Appalachia, thanks to its robust African American presence.
Most people don’t know about the important roles that Black men have played in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Much of the park’s infrastructure was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps, a work-relief program that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created in 1933. But the first Smokies superintendent, J. Ross Eakin, advised against including African Americans in the CCC crews. Records show that Black men helped build the Blue Ridge Parkway outside the park, and they faced tremendous difficulties—for instance, Black workers were not welcome to eat or stay in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the Smokies’ nearest town, until the 1950s.
In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson founded the residential Job Corps program, and the 1960s became a significant decade for Black Americans in the Smokies, many of whom found their careers in the national park. In 1967, the park hired three Black naturalists. That same year, two African Americans enrolled in nearby Haywood Community College’s inaugural forestry program.
Angela Sirna, a lead historian for the National Park Service, says that in addition to Great Smoky Mountains, Acadia National Park, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park, and some other Park Service sites launched integrated Job Corps programs in the 1960s. “Unfortunately, we know very little about the young men who worked in national parks in the first years of [the Job Corps] and their accomplishments,” she says. (Women weren’t allowed to work in the Job Corps centers at national parks.)
I follow Fletcher up a paved road surrounded by a lush green field, pastel mountains visible in the distance, and we begin our tour at the 15-acre Job Corps campus, which sits near North Carolina’s Cherokee Indian Reservation along the banks of the Oconaluftee River. The Job Corps is still in operation as a federally funded educational and vocational training program for 16-to-24-year-olds. At its inception in the early 1960s, the Oconaluftee Job Corps site housed a somewhat revolutionary integrated work program for young Black and white men, managed by the US Forest Service. Despite the South’s abundance of skilled Black laborers, the Job Corps was the first government-sponsored program that allowed Black men to work in the national park.