Civil Rights Issues in West Virginia

Since the late 1980s, the West Virginia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil
Rights has been concerned that statewide leadership in protecting civil rights has diminished.
From 1988 through 1993, as detailed in the next
section, the Advisory Committee sponsored several community forums and fact-finding meetings at which panelists documented worsening
civil rights problems in the state. The Advisory
Committee followed up on these events by presenting a series of recommendations in its reports to state officials on actions to improve the
climate.

This heightened attention to civil
rights issues resulted in some steps forward;
nonetheless, experts and community members
testifying at subsequent planning meetings in
1996 and 1997 emphasized to the Committee
that race relations had continued to deteriorate
and that state agencies had failed to address
this problem adequately.
To explore these issues in greater depth and
spur stronger efforts for change, the Committee
held three community forums across the state,
in Logan in November 1998, Morgantown in
June 1999, and Charleston in April 2000. The
present report provides an overview of current
civil rights issues in West Virginia based on testimony at these three forums and limited additional research, presents key findings of the Advisory Committee based on the information
gathered, and sets forth recommendations of the
Committee for actions to address the problems
and improve the situation of civil rights in West
Virginia.