Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment | |
| Abbreviation | SOCM |
|---|---|
| Formation | 1972 |
| Type | Nonprofit |
| 23-7264556 | |
| Legal status | 501(c)(4) |
| Headquarters | Knoxville, Tennessee |
Board President | Erica Davis |
Executive Director | Austin Sauerbrei |
| Website | https://www.socm.org/ |
Formerly called | Save Our Cumberland Mountains |
SOCM stands for Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment (previously Save Our Cumberland Mountains) and is a Tennessee community organizing group best known for its opposition to strip mining. It was founded in 1972 to oppose what the organization said were unfair imbalances in property taxes, described by a group of Vanderbilt University students, between small and large landowners in the rural coal mining counties of East Tennessee. SOCM's focus later grew beyond the Cumberland Plateau and Cumberland Mountains regions, to include all of Tennessee. In 2008, SOCM changed its name from Save Our Cumberland Mountains to Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment to reflect its growing work in social, economic, and environmental justice. SOCM now has chapters in the cities of Jackson and Knoxville, and Bedford County, Maury County, Rutherford County and Cumberland County. The Roaring River Chapter is made up of residents of Putnam County, Jackson County, and Overton County, Tennessee. [1]
J. W. Bradley of Petros, Tennessee, is a cofounder and longtime leader of the group. [2]
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Tennessee, officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked state in the Southeastern region of the United States. Tennessee is the 36th-largest by area and the 15th-most populous of the 50 states. It is bordered by Kentucky to the north, Virginia to the northeast, North Carolina to the east, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to the south, Arkansas to the southwest, and Missouri to the northwest. Tennessee is geographically, culturally, and legally divided into three Grand Divisions of East, Middle, and West Tennessee. Nashville is the state's capital and largest city, and anchors its largest metropolitan area. Other major cities include Memphis, Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Clarksville. Tennessee's population as of the 2020 United States census is approximately 6.9 million.
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Black Mesa is an upland mountainous mesa of Arizona, north-trending in Navajo County, west and southeast-trending in Apache County. In Navajo it is called Dziłíjiin and during Mexican rule of Arizona it was called Mesa de las Vacas. It derives its dark appearance from its pinyon-juniper and mixed conifer woodlands.
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Indian Mountain State Park is a state park in Campbell County, Tennessee, in the southeastern United States. Established in 1971, the park consists of 213 acres (0.86 km2) situated at the base of Indian Mountain, a 1,949-foot (594 m) summit that overlooks the Elk Valley in the Cumberland Mountains. The park is located immediately west of the city of Jellico, and the history and development of the two are intertwined to a great extent.
Appalachian Volunteers (AV) was a non-profit organization engaged in community development projects in central Appalachia that evolved into a controversial community organizing network, with a reputation that went "from self-help to sedition" as its staff developed from "reformers to radicals," teaching things from Marx, Lenin and Mao, in the words of one historian, in the brief period between 1964 and 1970 during the War on Poverty.
The Lebanon Democrat is a daily newspaper based in Lebanon, a town of more than 32,000 in the central part of the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is published by Lebanon Publishing Co., which is owned by Paxton Media Group.
The Coal Creek War was an early 1890s armed labor uprising in the southeastern United States that took place primarily in Anderson County, Tennessee. This labor conflict ignited during 1891 when coal mine owners in the Coal Creek watershed began to remove and replace their company-employed, private coal miners then on the payroll with convict laborers leased out by the Tennessee state prison system.
State Route 90 is a 13.5-mile-long (21.7 km) state highway in Campbell and Claiborne counties in the U.S. state of Tennessee. It serves the communities of Morley, White Oak, Eagan and Clairfield in Tennessee, and Pruden at the Tennessee-Kentucky state line.
The Student Health Coalition (SHC), also known as the Appalachian Student Health Coalition, was an organization founded at Vanderbilt University in 1969 to provide health care to low-income, medically underserved communities in Appalachia, particularly East Tennessee, and later expanded to communities in Nashville and West Tennessee.
Environmental justice and coal mining in Appalachia is the study of environmental justice – the interdisciplinary body of social science literature studying theories of the environment and justice; environmental laws, policies, and their implementations and enforcement; development and sustainability; and political ecology – in relation to coal mining in Appalachia.
