David Walls (born October 21, 1941) is an activist and academic who has made significant contributions to Appalachian studies and to the popular understanding of social movements.
[1] While at Berkeley, he was active in SLATE, the campus political party,[2] and served a term on the board of directors of the Associated Students of the University of California.
After graduating from UC Berkeley, he began work in 1964 as a management intern at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in Washington, DC, serving as an assistant to Mary E. Switzer, commissioner of the Vocational Rehabilitation Administration, and her deputy.
[3] Although his initial work in Harlan County involved organizing low-income people to demand representation on the Cumberland Valley's community action agency, he soon was drawn into the growing opposition to strip-mining for coal, after a landslide from a strip-mine bench threatened a house at the head of Jones Creek,[4] above Verda on the Clover Fork of the Cumberland River in Harlan County.
Although the sedition charges were quickly dismissed by federal judge and former Kentucky governor Bert T. Combs, the case undermined OEO support for the AV.
[5] After Republican governor Louie B. Nunn was elected in November 1967, the AV faced an investigation by the Kentucky Un-American Activities Committee (KUAC).
[6][7][8] In an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal, Walls summarized the outlook of the AV staff on the coalfield region: An impatience with the slowness of change and paternalistic government programs; a distrust of experts who think they can solve the problems of poor people; a disgust with the way corruption is taken for granted in the mountains; a trust in the ability of poor people to solve their own problems, given the proper tools and money; a desire to end the colonialistic exploitation of Appalachia by corporations in Pittsburgh and New York and by small cliques of men in county seats; and a belief that the wealth of the area's mineral resources ought to go toward constructing a better way of life for all the people who live here.
In fall 1970 he began full-time studies at UK, moving to Lexington, Kentucky, to live with a group of fellow graduate students in Collective One, a politically progressive household of five men and five women.
[22] He was also critical of Project Censored's occasional inability to distinguish between sound and unsound science, as in the case of NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn[23] and its promotion of 9/11 conspiracy theories.
He has since taught short courses on the sources of social movement success for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes (OLLI programs) at SSU and other northern California campuses.