Alex’s Story

Born in Cincinnati, Alex Gibson’s parents moved to Jackson County in eastern Kentucky when he was six. The family was only one of two African American families there, and Alex faced racism on a daily basis. He grew up fighting, being called names, and having to endure “KKK” being written on his locker.

“My experience there set up my understanding of how the world works. Given the power, this is what white people do, I thought. If racism is your only experience, that’s what you take away.”

Things did not get better immediately. By age 16, both of Alex’s parents had passed away. Mary McLaughlin, then the director of the Upward Bound program at Berea College, with which Alex had been involved since his freshman year, helped him secure a spot at a Mississippi boarding school.

When it came time to consider college, Alex set his hopes on the “Ivy League,” but a visit to Berea changed his mind. “We were walking in front of Boone Tavern,” he remembers, “and across the street was a guy with dyed red hair, a beard he had dyed a dark cherry red, wearing a full-length dress, riding a skateboard across the street to go to food service. In my home county, that would not exist –not without being stoned or something. I knew then I would not have the same racism problems at Berea, and I fell in love with the place.”

Berea was the only school he applied to.

Alex says attending Berea College changed his view on race. “Berea taught me I had a simplistic view of race, and focused on the shared experiences people have together.” This focus led him to some major realizations about shared experience in the Appalachian region where he had spent his youth. The changes in how he thought about it began during a Berea-sponsored trip to Mexico.

“In rural Mexico, I saw another Appalachia. I was in the mountainous areas, where they didn’t speak Spanish. They lived off the land. There was a deep, antigovernment feeling. The roads were bad, the schools weren’t great. They reminded me of Appalachians.”

When he returned to Berea, one of his professors began showing films from Appalshop, a nonprofit organization in Whitesburg, Kentucky, focused on telling the stories of Appalachia and rural America.

“Most media about Appalachia is very shallow in understanding what people’s problems are. Appalshop interviewed coal miners, gave an interesting view into the region I’d never seen done. They looked at power and the way power has used these people for their resources and labor. It happens in every major country around the world. There’s an Appalachia in England and China—if it has timber and coal you’re going to see something similar. It helped me put Appalachia into context, and it took away all that anger and that view of racism as simply being between blacks and whites. It’s not really about that—it’s about power and threat. Berea was a facilitator for realizing that.”

After graduation, Alex was awarded the Watson Fellowship, where he studied the subject of mixed race people in conflict areas, such as Palestine and Israel, and how they formed an identity. From there, he went on to law school at the University of Pennsylvania before taking up work as a corporate lawyer. One day, though, he was offered the chance to take over as the executive director of Appalshop, which he gladly accepted in his home region.