In Birmingham, a Hearing on Human Rights

By Anne Braden

Vol. 16, No. 3, 1994, p. 19

Charlotte Keys, who leads a fight against poisoning from an abandoned industrial site in Columbia, Mississippi, said the “American dream has become a toxic nightmare.”

Rose Sanders, who mentors a new generation of African-American youth in Alabama, said “separate and unequal education is active and alive.”

Tamika Elmore, of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement in Birmingham, said African-American youth have been “thrown away … we don’t matter; the society blames us instead of changing conditions that created us.”

The occasion was a hearing at the Carver Theater in Birmingham on October 15. Three international religious leaders took testimony on violations of human rights in the U.S. It was part of a campaign of “education, investigation, and action” sponsored by the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches exploring the possibility that U.S. racism violates international human rights law.

The Birmingham hearing, one of seven held in cities across the country in October, lasted all day. Community activists from seven Southeastern states testified.

For anyone looking for a ray of hope on today’s horizon, it was a bleak day. Witnesses gave accounts of sickness and death from pollution in Ft. Valley, Georgia; Pensacola, Florida; Sumter County, Alabama; and Warren County, North Carolina; of African-American youth destroyed by academic tracking and “mis-education” in Alabama cities and rural North Carolina; of African-American college students “never taken seriously”; of Native Americans in North Carolina and African Americans in Mississippi caught in a criminal-justice system defined by racism; of African-American workers being “the first to go” in massive industrial “down-sizing” in Birmingham, and African-American women working under killing conditions in poultry plants across the South.

The international leaders in Birmingham came from Zimbabwe, Tonga, and South Africa. They were part of a nine-member team; other sub-groups held hearings in New York, Chicago, Washington, Oakland, El Paso, and Okmulgee, Oklahoma. At an October 19 press conference in Washington, the team issued a preliminary report saying there is “widespread evidence of gross and consistent patterns of racism throughout the fabric of U.S. society.”

The team will submit a report to the National Council of Churches, the U.S. government, and the United National Human Rights Commission at a February 1995 meeting.

“We are not putting America on trial,” said one team member. “Our hope is that America will be able to resolve these issues.” The team stressed special responsibility of churches, including white ones.

But will white church members hear? Although they received extensive advance information, no mass media covered the Birmingham hearing. White Birmingham church members in attendance could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

The team’s preliminary report said; “We found that in many areas, with some notable exceptions, concerns about racism were limited largely to black churches.” It seems painfully evident that, with a few honorable exceptions, white church people have not yet begun to respond adequately to Martin Luther King’s 1963 “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”

Anne Braden is co-chair of the Southern Organizing Committee for Social and Economic Justice (SOC) and a member of the National Council of Churches Racial Justice Working Group.

Voting Rights On Trial Again in Alabama

By Anne Braden

Vol. 20, No. 2, 1998 pp. 17-18

Connie Tyree is a thirty-six-year-old single mother and grandmother in Greene County, Alabama, who cares for three children and is a volunteer community activist. In 1994, she helped 249 absentee voters cast their ballots.

This year, Tyree cannot help anybody vote, and she cannot even vote herself. Instead, after years of community service untouched by any trouble with the law, she faces thirty-three months in prison; she was convicted in federal court in Birmingham of conspiracy to commit voter fraud. She is free now on bond, pending appeal, but a court order bars her from election activity.

Tyree is a victim of a new attack against activists working for voting rights and fair representation for African Americans in the Alabama Black Belt. Twelve people have been indicted-eight in Greene County, and two each in Wilcox and Hale counties. These are Black-majority counties, where African Americans have won control of local governing bodies.

The two indicted in Wilcox have pled guilty to misdemeanors to avoid jail time and the burden of a trial. A trial of the Hale County defendants is set for August. In Greene County, Commissioner Frank “Pinto” Smith has also been sentenced to thirty three months and removed from office. The others charged here will probably be tried in the fall. All are activists in the Alabama New South Coalition (ANSC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which organize for African-American political power.

Civil Rights Leaders Protest to Reno

A group of the nation’s top civil rights leaders met June 11 with U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno to ask the Justice Department to investigate the government’s activities in the Black Belt and to put a stop to the ” intimidation of African American voters.” State Senator Hank Sanders of Selma, Alabama led the delegation, which included NAACP President Julian Bond, NAACP Legal Defense Fund Executive Director Elaine Jones, and Martin Luther King III, the new president of the SCLC, which his father co-founded. Congressman Earl Hilliard (D-Ala.) and staff members representing Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), who helped arrange the meeting, participated. And, Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, co-chair of the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice (SOC) and co-publisher of the Greene County Democrat John Zippert took part by teleconference. Sanders said after the meeting, “It was clear to me that they were listening to us, and we were able to say what needed to be said.”

In a briefing paper presented to Reno and Assistant Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr., leaders pointed out that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) questioning of voters has produced a dramatic reduction in voter turnout. In the June 2, 1998 first primary election, overall voter turnout declined to 3,928 from 4,691 in the comparable election in 1994, despite the fact that the number of registered voters increased during the four-year period. Most striking was the decline in absentee ballots filed, from 1,118 in the 1994 first primary election, to 147 absentee ballots cast on June 2.

Absentee voting is always a major factor here because many voters are elderly and shut-in and many work outside the county. The activities that brought indictments against Tyree and others consisted of helping relatives, friends, and neighbors apply for, fill out, and submit absentee ballots-all legal endeavors. But investigators searched for people who would say an application or ballot had been filled out or changed without their permission.

Candidates supported by black voters have been hurt by the decline in turnout. For example, the incumbent prosecutor, Barrown Lankster, the first African American to hold the post, lost by 256 votes to the white prosecutor he ousted in the previous election.

This struggle began in the 1960s. After the people’s movement won the right to vote in a bloody encounter on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, the national spotlight moved away from the South. But in the Alabama Black Belt, African Americans proceeded to register voters and organize them. By the late 1970s, there were Black-majority governing bodies in five West Alabama counties.

Alarm bells went off among the white power structure

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that had always controlled the politics and economics of the Black Belt-and of Alabama. In the mid-1980s, in an attack similar to the current one, 212 voter fraud charges were brought against eight Black Belt organizers. Not one felony charge held up in court (see “Return to the Black Belt,” p. 19).

That attack boomeranged. People in the Black Belt fought back and organized a stronger political movement, with support coming from across the country.

And people went on voting. In most Black Belt elections, the turnout is a phenomenal 70 percent. “In Greene County, we think it’s low if it’s 70 percent,” says Booker T. Cooke, Jr., who is under indictment. “We usually get 80 or 85 percent.”

A chief architect of the 1980s indictments was Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, now U.S. Senator from Alabama, and then U.S. District Attorney in Mobile. Sessions, who comes from the old Black Belt power structure, also launched the current investigation before running for the Senate.

The indictments are part of a multi-pronged strategy. The old power structure set up a committee to counter ANSC, called Citizens for a Better Greene County, which includes some African Americans. There are ongoing efforts to pass laws that make voting more difficult, challenges to redistricting maps that have provided fairer representation, constant “investigations” of Black elected officials, and media reports that picture these officials as dishonest and incapable of managing government. Senator Hank Sanders notes that the many-faceted assault is ominously like the attacks that drove Blacks from office during the terror that followed Reconstruction in the last century.

Black Representation Has Brought Progress

For African Americans in Greene County, changes over the last thirty years are more than symbolic. This spring, people from diverse organizations-including the Southern Regional Council-took part in a caravan through Greene County to show support for voters. One thing we noticed was the attractive housing developments. Hundreds of new housing units have been built since Blacks took the reins of government and got federal grants.

“We used to live in dilapidated shacks without inside plumbing,” says Sarah Duncan, an activist since the 1960s who has registered hundreds of voters. Greene is still one of the poorest counties in the nation (see table on page 6, and although Blacks make up 80 percent of the population, more than 80 percent of the land is owned by whites.

Some small industry has come, bringing a limited number of construction jobs. Many African Americans work in government. There is a new high school. Water and sewer services extend to homes never reached before. A new health clinic serves six counties. And there is an African American bank, an activity center for the community, extensive cultural activity, and a courthouse named for Reverend William McKinley Branch, one of the county’s first black elected officials.

“Black people used to be afraid to go to the courthouse,” says Duncan. “Now we walk the streets without fear.”

Intimidation’s Cost

“Almost 1,000 of the 1,400 plus people who voted by absentee ballot in the Greene County general election in 1994 have been questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” states the report to the Attorney General. When three African-American churches were burned in Greene County, FBI agents approached voters to ask about these fires, then questioned them about absentee ballots. As yet no one has been indicted for the church burnings.

In the Tyree-Smith case, of the hundreds of voters they assisted, investigators found only seven ballots to question. Trial witnesses told what the FBI said to some of the people they questioned. For example: “Michael, you are in trouble, you need a lawyer, you may go to jail.” Some of the government’s witnesses changed their stories at the trial. Willie Carter, who was in jail for selling cocaine when he was questioned by the FBI, told the Grand Jury he had never voted absentee. But he testified later that he gave “Pinto” Smith permission to apply for an absentee ballot for him.

“They targeted our most vulnerable citizens,” says Laddi Jones, who covered the trial for the Greene County Democrat, a Black-owned community newspaper.

State and federal investigators have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on this investigation. Essentially, it is an effort to deal with a political struggle by using criminal charges-which undermines the democratic process itself.

A quote from elderly activist Daisy Nixon, “I’ll vote on,” became a rallying call during the 1980s attack. Although she has died, that spirit lives on. “We won’t stop now,” says Sarah Duncan. “I want my children and grandchildren to be able to live in Greene County and have a good life here.” Those of us who visited the area recently believe that spirit will prevail again, but again the people here need the support of justice-minded people everywhere.

Anne Braden is co-chair of the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice (SOC) and a Life Fellow of the Southern Regional Council. She was deeply involved in the defense of Black Belt voting rights in the 1980s.

BOOKS: Breaking the Wall of Resistance

By Anne Braden

Vol. 22, No. 1, 2000, pp. 22-24

In 1954, Anne and Carl Braden purchased a home in an all-white neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky, on behalf of a black couple, Andrew and Charlotte Wade. The Wall Between is Anne Braden’s first-hand account of the consequences of that simple, bold action-mob violence against the Wades and the bombing of their house and Carl’s imprisonment on charges of sedition. A finalist for the 1958 National Book Award, The Wall Between was republished by the University of Tennessee Press in 1999. In an epilogue to the new edition, Braden brings the story up to the present. Below in an excerpt from that epilogue, Braden raises the challenge to today’s social justice movement.

I came into social justice movements at the height of the repression of the Cold War. The labor movement was being decimated by anti-Communist hysteria: the CIO’s “Operation Dixie” to organize the South, lay shipwrecked on this division. Organizations seeking civil rights, peace, and justice had been crushed everywhere. People were being told that social change groups were subversive. Communists, and then many others, were fired from their jobs, careers were destroyed, many people went to jail, and some committed suicide. Most people became afraid to speak, to meet, to organize; the “Silent ’50s” descended. Social problems festered that still plague us today….

Suddenly, in the depth of this repression, in Montgomery, Alabama, a new movement arose. From there, the movement ignited the South, and the flames fanned out across the country. The movement of African Americans in the South, ultimately joined by an increasing number of white people, won victories that many would have said were impossible. It also broke the pall of the 1950s, opened up everything in our society to question, and made it possible for all people seeking justice to be heard. It brought longstanding struggles of Latinos and Native Americans to the nation’s center stage. And it set in motion the mass antiwar movement of the 1960s, the new women’s movement, new openings for workers to organize in the South–and later movements of other oppressed people: the disabled, lesbians and gays, environmentalists.

Bob Moses, one of the architects of the voting rights movement that shook the country from Mississippi, made a profound comment in 1964:

“The Negro seeks his own place within the existing institutional framework, but to accommodate him society will have to modify its institutions–and in many cases make far-reaching fundamental changes…. The struggle for jobs for Negroes forces questions about the ability of the economy to provide jobs for everyone within our present socio-economic structure: lack of legal counsel for Negroes brings into focus the general lack of legal counsel for the poor. . . . The function of the white American is not so much to prepare the Negro for entrance into the larger society–but to prepare society for the changes it must make to include Negroes.”

As African Americans moved for freedom , it was as if the foundation stone of a building shifted, and the whole structure shook. That movement never achieved political power in the 1960s, but for a few shining years it set the agenda of the country–and it was a humane agenda.

Some years ago, I interviewed the Rev. C.T. Vivian, one of Martin Luther King’s top aides. C.T. put his analysis of the 1960s in theological terms. “You know it is really true,” he said, “what it says in the Bible, that a person must repent of his sins before he can be saved. That’s true of a nation, too. In the 1960s this nation took just the first step toward admitting it had been wrong on race. As a result,

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creativity burst forth everywhere.”

People in power who felt threatened by these new upsurges became frightened. And they knew that the root of their problem lay in the African-American freedom movement, and in similar movements among Latinos and Native Americans. They acted to destroy those movements. During that intense period of repression, the late 1960s–ignored by too many white people at the time, and today ignored by many historians–Black Panthers were murdered all over the country; organizations were destroyed by COINTELPRO operations, and activists were framed on a wide assortment of contrived charges. I was traveling the region then for The Southern Patriot, and could visit hardly any community where the Black organizers were not either in jail, on their way, or just out by dint of much local struggle. The attack was massive.

No people’s movement is ever totally destroyed. But the African-American movement was blunted at a critical moment–just as it was launching major offensives for economic justice, which remains today the unfinished business of the 1960s revolution.

Meantime, there was a tremendous propaganda assault on the minds of white people. More and more in the late 1960s, we began to read in the mainstream media about the “white backlash,” although public opinion polls were showing that a greatly increased number of white people favored measures to ensure equal justice and opportunity (including affirmative action) for people of color.

Soon white people were hearing–from the media, from academics and later from the government itself–that what African Americans had gained had taken something away from them. The exact opposite was true. Everything Blacks had won had benefited most of the people in the country. For example, job programs were set up, and young unemployed whites got jobs too. Blacks demanded access to education, and scholarship programs opened college doors to masses of young whites too.

But the dominant propaganda said otherwise, and soon whites were hearing they were victims of “reverse discrimination.” The most pernicious danger our country faces today is the widespread acceptance of this myth. And over the decade of the 1970s, as so many whites were led to feel threatened, a total reversal in the country’s mood occurred–from one that encouraged the solving of social problems by collective efforts that would benefit everyone, to an atmosphere that encouraged each man and woman to turn inward and seek to solve problems for self alone, in private backyards, far from the arena of public issues.

Some civil rights advocates blame the administration of Ronald Reagan for the drive to reverse the gains of the 1960s. I think it worked the other way. The attack on the African-American movement that began in the late 1960s and the campaign for the minds of this nation’s white people that permeated the 1970s created the base that put the Reagan administration in power and dictated that the 1980s would be a time when everyone would be encouraged to “get what you can for yourself alone.”

New movements erupted in the 1980s, antiracist action against new hate groups, the mass movements around the two Jesse Jackson presidential campaigns, new stirrings of organizing within the labor movement. But as we moved into the 1990s the visions of a just society that had fired the 1960s had been narrowed so far that even the most minor reforms–for example the addition of more Head Start programs, important but a far cry from the needed massive overhaul and expansion of our educational system–seemed like great victories.

Hopes for a New Antiracist Movement

So we stand on the verge of the twenty-first century with a significant new black middle class produced by the decades of struggle–but with the great masses of African Americans living in poverty, with hopelessness destroying a generation of youth, and the poor being told they are the cause of their own problems. The truth is that this society has not yet done what Bob Moses said in 1964 it must do–make the changes necessary to make room for African Americans. According to every statistical table, people of color have only half as much of the good things of life as whites (housing, health care, jobs, educational opportunity, income) and twice or three times as much of the bad things (infant mortality, slums, unemployment, and prison cells). In effect, it is as if our society has decided that a person of color is only 50 percent of a human being.

Because this society has never made room for African Americans, it is moving toward a situation in which it does not have room for people of any color. The new global economy is being built on the cheap labor of people of

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color around the world, with fewer and fewer opportunities for masses of people at home. Today, statistics tell us that 1 percent of American households own the same amount of wealth as the total owned by 92 percent. Between 1979 and 1997, the real income of the poorest one-fifth of U.S. families declined by 7 percent, while the income of the top 20 percent increased by 34 percent and the top 1 percent by 106 percent. The average U. S. corporate executive now earns 326 times that of the average factory worker, and 728 times the annual income of a minimum wage earner. In other industrialized countries, this ratio of executive to factory worker is about 21 to 1; in this country in 1970, it was 41 to 1. “The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer” is a cliche, but it describes our society today. This disparity has led to the collapse of many societies.

A new massive thrust toward racial justice will not by itself solve all the problems that face us. But as long as people of color can be written off as expendable, and therefore acceptable victims of the most extreme inequities, the basic injustices in our society will only get worse.

Until a huge new crusade for racial justice develops, the white people who today are asking, “What can I do?”–and there are many of them–can help hasten that day by taking visible stands against specific manifestations of racism in their communities. In so doing, they create a break in what sometimes seems to be a solid wall of white resistance to justice–and often even a refusal to admit that a problem still exists. It helps to create a pole to which other whites can gravitate when the time comes that they realize they must act. We need to create in our communities what I call an “antiracist majority.”

Unfortunately, it is not likely that white people in significant numbers will take such action on their own initiative. They will do it as they began to do it in the 1960s when organized mass movements of people of color force them to face unpleasant truths. I have hope today because I see arising at the grassroots in myriad local communities new movements of people of color demanding justice.

Right now, there is no cohesive force bringing these localized movements together in a united crusade. Mass movements always come as the product of years of mundane work by unsung heroes, and no one can predict when the upsurge will crystallize. I am not at all sure I will live to see it. But I am convinced that it will happen. And when it does, a huge question will be how many white people will understand that this upsurge holds hope for their lives too, and will therefore go through the personal metamorphosis needed to join this new movement.

Anne Braden is the co-chair of the board of directors of the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice in Louisville, Kentucky.