They'll Cut Off Your Project: A Mingo County Chronicle

When President Lyndon B. Johnson launched his war on poverty in the 1960's, Huey Perry, a young local history teacher, was selected to be the director of the program in Mingo County in southern West Virginia.  Mingo County was known for its violent labor movements, corrupt government, and the infamous Hatfield-McCoy rivalry. Huey encouraged his poverty-stricken neighbors to challenge these conditions by promoting self-sufficiency, demanding improvements in school programs, establishing a grocery store to bypass inflated prices, and exposing election fraud. Local authority responded to Huey's revolution with a hostile backlash that eventually led to an investigation by the FBI. Huey's book, They’ll Cut Off Your Project: A Mingo County Chronicle, tells a tale of the triumphs and failures of Johnson's war on poverty, describing in detail why and how a local government that is supposed to work for the public’s welfare cuts off a project intended to achieve social reform. You can find this fascinating read on amazon.com at the following link: They'll Cut Off Your Project.