Interchange: In This Issue

By Betty Norwood Chaney

Vol. 1, No. 2, 1978, p. 2

Southern Changes, for those of you who are reading our pages for the first time, marks the beginning of the Southern Regional Council’s fifth publishing venture. Our new publication is a process of “vision and revision,” influenced by the traditions, virtues, failures and successes of those who came before. Southern Changes joins the ranks of our previous publications, The Southern Frontier, New South, South Today and Southern Voices.

We hope you find the magazine to be a forum for reliable, concise reporting and interpretation of the issues and events in the South, with emphasis on the plight of the poor and the Black Southerner. For more than a century the idea of change has been the inspiration of the Black Southerner; for most of the Council’s existence it has been the hope of the liberal White and Black Southerner. Today, we still hope for change in our region and, just as important, need to understand those that do come our way.

The articles in this our second issue tell us about the different characters of change. The print on the cover symbolizes change, but is also characteristic of the duplicity so often a part of change in the Southland. Taken from a poster by the Voter Education Project (VEP), an organization dedicated to improving the conditions of minorities through the political process, the print carries the slogan, “The hands that picked cotton now can pick our public officials.” While signifying the enormous progress Blacks have made in the political arena in the South, the statement is at the same time misleading, for the fact remains that only 5 percent of elected Southern officials are Black.

In the article “Vivian Malone Jones and the VEP: From Integration to Voter Registration,” the VEP head, herself a symbol of change – one of the first two Blacks to integrate the University of Alabama discusses her work. She looks at the progress the South has made from the vantage point of that historic day 15 years ago when she faced Governor George Wallace at the University’s doors, and we get a glimpse of how it has influenced her. She concludes “I would have expected much more change.”

The public school system in Atlanta, a city that is a symbol of Black progress often referred to as “the Black Mecca,” is a case in point of change that is slow in coming. Twenty-four years after the Supreme Court decision barring segregation, Atlanta, whose 1973 “Atlanta Compromise” school plan brought very little integration, is still involved in a suit. The “Metro Suit” as it has come to be known is examined in this issue as a possible solution for integrating Atlanta’s Black majority school system.

All of the different elements of change come together in Jerry Bledsoe’s poignant and sensitive presentation of two mountain women who have waited a quarter of a century for electric power to come to their South Carolina mountain. Through them we are shown a glimpse of a way of life that has remained virtually unchanged for decades. We perceive, too, the elements of both good and bad that change brings with it. Of the electric power, one of the women says, “Been a-lookin’ to git it fer 25 years and it didn’t come just till we got so old we can’t enjoy it.”

Blacks and poor Whites are not the only ones to feel the brunt of a sometimes changeless South. Bill Cutler shares with us an experience that Howell Raines, accomplished White writer who chronicles the indignities suffered by courageous Blacks during the civil rights movement, has in the marketing of his book, My Soul Is Rested. Raines learns a bit of injustice first hand.

The last two articles – as were two of the preceding ones – are about women, to whom we pay special attention in this our second issue. In the first, we are presented the Southem Black woman who is held back from helping usher in a change – the ratification of the ERA – which might be for her betterment because she is tied to the past by certain age-old myths about herself.

And then, in a final piece, Steve Suitts focuses in more pointedly on the rural Black woman who is the head of household. The price of her ticket out of rural poverty and urban despair might even be beyond the means of the ERA.

In addition to the articles in this issue, we carry some of our regular departments. This our “Interchange” section, where you our readers share your views with us, should prove one of the most provocative. Along with “Letters-to-the-Editor” and “Keeping You Posted,” we have a thoughtful response by a concerned Black father to Robert Hilldrup’s commentary in our first issue “My Sons Are Growing Up Racists.”

Finally, in the next few days and weeks, the South will have still another chance to redress the many years of denied opportunities to its women and Blacks. In a unique opportunity that probably comes only once in a century, more than 150 new federal judges will be appointed throughout the nation. Sixty of them will be added to the federal bench in the South, In “Soapbox,” another of our regular departments, Steve Suitts examines the process by which these judges will be appointed. Under the patronage system that is in operation in the selection of the nominees, it is not very hopeful for minorities. Blacks and women will again be locked out unless Southerners of good will band together to make the changes happen. On this score, there is still . . . hope.

Tupelo: Hometown in Turmoil

By Betty Norwood Chaney

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1978, pp. 16-19

“Hey, they got a jitney jungle,” a Black kid with a Michigan brogue exclaimed to his traveling companion as the bus wound its way into the small Mississippi town. “That’s boss,” he concluded with approval. This link to his own home in the North suddenly elevated the South a bit in his esteem.

I awoke from a semi-doze at the kid’s words and looked out the window. I caught sight of a shopping center to my right and a fairground to my left. The streets were deserted and clean. As we pulled into the station my eyes scanned the top of the city’s courthouse and the police station. A view of the downtown shopping area, only a couple of blocks down the street, was cut off by some buildings.

Feeling a tinge of excitement, as I always did when arriving in this place, I aroused my sleeping four-year-old on the seat beside me.

“Wake up, honey,” I told him. “We are in Tupelo. Mama is home!”

It was a pleasant June evening, so pleasant that when I called the house for a ride from the bus station and found the line busy, I decided to walk the four blocks home. With bags in hand, my son and I walked north up the quiet familiar streets. The breeze was gentle and warm. When we reached Spring Street, I looked down out of habit to where my brother has a shoe store/shop. It is in the block with the pool hall, a cafe and the supermarket that gives

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credit, an area that for years has been dominated by rural Blacks coming to town on Saturdays.

Although my little boy and I were two Blacks walking the streets of Tupelo, Mississippi at ten o’clock at night, it did not occur to me to be afraid. My only concern was that some dog might spot us and make a fuss. Yet, this was the same Tupelo that one reporter graphically described that summer as a place where “a war of sorts” is being fought in the streets and “to some in this racially divided northeast Mississippi trading center, your skin is your uniform.” It wasn’t that I was unafraid of meeting some hooded Klansman patrolling these streets, the thought merely did not occur to me. For me, this was simply home, the place where I had grown up, where my mother and most family still lived and the place that I loved to visit much more frequently than I had the opportunity. It was, too, the place where, ironically enough, I felt most safe.

Our walk home that night was uneventful. Except for an occasional remark from me to my son, who was quieter than usual having just awaken, the walk was made in silence. Not even a resident dog acknowledged our presence.

On the surface, Tupelo appeared to be the same uneventful town that I grew up in during the fifties and sixties. At that time, although White families occupied the last three houses on my street – houses of comparable sizes and conditions – the similarities ended there and our paths rarely crossed. Racial confrontations between us were practically nonexistent.

On school days, I and my Black friends and neighbors beaded north to school and my White neighbors -certainly not friends – headed south or westward. Some of my schoolmates came from a further distance south, from a poorer, more dilapidated area across the tracks called Shake Rags.

When I was in school, it was a rare occasion for Blacks to get their pictures in the paper regarding school events. I can recall following the activities of the White girl my age that lived on my street through various newspaper clippings. Although we grew up within a few feet of each other, we never had an occasion to actually meet. She was always a popular girl and one year she was chosen one of Tupelo High School’s beauty queens. I remember reading the different newspaper accounts with a mixture of pride and envy – pride because a girl from my street was featured in the paper and envy because the same kind of coverage was denied to us Blacks.

All of that has changed now. A few years ago one of my nieces was chosen “Miss Tupelo High.” Her Black face graced the pages of the paper that had denied our existence ten years before. Now, it is not at all unusual to see Blacks pictured alongside Whites in photographs of school activities.

School desegregation in Tupelo had been another of those uneventful occurrences. Black parents here, unlike many others, both North and South, have few – if any – horror stories to tell about school integration or busing. Total integration of the schools in Tupelo exists and children from all over the city now head in the same directions for school without incidence.

Another visible change in Tupelo since the fifties and sixties is in housing. The reely structures in Shake Rags that used to house a large percentage of the Black population have been torn down and replaced with a housing project in the north end of town. Blacks are also moving into apartment buildings and complexes and some homes that were for “Whites only” a few years ago. Most important of all, “nice,” attractive brick homes are darting up constantly, bearing witness to the fact that Blacks in Tupelo are indeed progressing.

At least, this was the appearance of things. Because a temporary halt had just been called to the picketing while a recently-formed biracial committee held negotiations behind closed doors, this quietude easily belied the fact that “a war of sorts” was being waged here. The spring and summer of 1978 had been anything but quiet in Tupelo.

The Black community that laid dormant, for the most part, throughout the turbulent sixties when Blacks in many other Southern towns were raising up in protest of racial discrimination, had at last taken a stand and declared racial discrimination to be very much a factor in their town. They bad shocked the White community and some Blacks by calling and supporting a boycott of White merchants that was 80 percent effective in protest of police brutality and job discrimination. And in so doing, they had inflamed the radical element in the White community and brought forth the long-subdued Ku Klux Klan in numbers and force unknown in recent times. Near confrontations between demonstrating Blacks and countering Klansmen became common occurrences that spring and summer.

While actual racial confrontations seldom had occurred in Tupelo, an analysis of the city by the United League, a state-wide civil rights organization first invited to the area to help stage demonstrations in protest of police brutality, revealed that Tupelo had one of the worst records in the state in terms of racial discrimination.

The analysis showed that Tupelo with a population of approximately 27,000, of which around 25 percent were Black, bad very few – and in some cases – no Blacks in decision-making positions.

According to a spokesman for the League, at the time the analysis was done, with the exception of one alderman, there were no Blacks in city government in decision making positions; there were no Black store managers in any of the department stores or supermarkets; a brother of mine, appointed a few years ago after the schools were integrated, was the only Black on the school board. In no instances were Blacks employed in the workforce in proportion to their percentage of the population, except in menial positions.

There had always been grievances that needed to be addressed. I remember that in the sixties when I was in college my community’s lack of activity was a source of some embarrassment for me.

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According to Attorney Lewis Meyers of the North ‘ Mississippi Rural Legal Services the unique economical situation of Blacks in Tupelo has been a major factor keeping race relations “good.”

In Tupelo, the per capita income and the standard of living is high compared to many other areas where the plantation/sharecropping system needed only raw, unskilled labor. With Tupelo as a mercantile center, Blacks moving into northeast Mississippi were a bit more well-to-do. These middle-class Blacks became the traditional “Negro” leadership, Meyers recounts, and bad heretofore been successful in keeping the peace in Tupelo. They were a buffer zone for powerful Whites who were the ones the Black landlords and the funeral directors and the store owners had to face downtown on the bank board when they needed capital. Because of “interest tied to capital” the White power structure had been able to rely upon these Black leaders to “keep the peace.

Life began to change, however, after the Vietnam war drained the Black community and left scores of young, vibrant Black men jobless. The veterans that returned to the South in a recession to face unemployment in their hometowns and states, were a different breed from the ones a generation’ before. Disillusioned by the war, most faced no jobs, lack of stimulation and lack of direction. They were in no mood to let the peace be.

One of the forces which channeled this unrest into protest was Alfred “Skip” Robinson, a building contractor from nearby Holly Springs and founder of the United League, a grassroots organization that claims 35 chapters and about 70,000 Black members throughout northern Mississippi. According to Robinson, a middle-aged father of six, he gave young Blacks an identity, a sense of direction and a sense of purpose. Even his detractors admit that they are impressed with his ability to arouse the interest of the Black community. Walter Stanfield, a League organizer, says that Blacks in Tupelo have been willing to deal with past grievances, but until the League came to town, there was no organization around to provide the necessary leadership.

Robinson does not sound like the sixties’ leaders. He speaks of old problems with a different perspective. “We are not trying to integrate the neighborhood schools,” said Robinson. “In so many ways, integration was the worst thing that ever happened to Black people. We lost so much of our identity, things that were our own. Before integration there were more Black school principals in Mississippi than anywhere else. Now, around here, you can count them on one hand. We are taking up where the movement of the 1960s left off.”

Since Robinson’s leadership and the League’s work, there have been several important victories. For one thing, League-led protest resulted in the removal of the two officers from the police force that were implicated in the brutality suit. Not only that, but according to Stanfield, a Black building inspector has been named to the city government structure and a Black assistant has been assigned to the light and water department. Also Blacks have reportedly been hired as store managers in two stores and in several cases have received jobs that they would not have received otherwise. Meyers said, “We’ve gotten more people around here jobs than Mississippi Employment Service ever did.”

However, Robinson is increasingly being criticized for his uncompromising position by both Blacks and Whites. Several Blacks voiced their frustration over his refusal to negotiate on a settlement. Mary Douglas, a young Black mother who marched with her children on the picket line and later served on the biracial committee created to air grievances for the city, referred in particular to a meeting that included Mississippi senatorial candidate Charles Evers. Robinson had been so late for that meeting, it had to be rescheduled.

The Rev. William Rittenhouse, pastor of the biracial committee, said he saw Robinson’s continual failure to negotiate as a “betrayal of willingness to work problems out.” Aaron Henry, state NAACP president, denounced Robinson’s behavior as an attempt to exploit the situation to gain power for himself and his movement.

The animosity between the League and the traditional Black leadership has also divided the Black community. League members have frequently referred to old leaders as “Uncle Toms” and suggested on one occasion that since they bad not done anything for the Black community in all this time, maybe it was best they stay out of things now.

Many of the League members are so-called “street people” – the chronically unemployed, some with minor criminal records and former drug users – some of the established leaders point out. If they cut themselves off from us, they ask, where are they going to go when they need people to fill the leadership positions they are seeking?

Kenneth Mayfield, the local Black attorney who brought the police brutality suit sparking the protest was one of a group that extended the imitation to the League to organize in Tupelo. Despite the divisions, he is optimistic. He feels that all things considered what has happened in Tupelo in recent months has been -good.”

As a result of some of the activities over the past seven months, grievances have been brought to the fore and a “framework has been set” for finding solutions to those grievances. Mayfield is on a committee with four Whites that has been designated to draw up an affirmative action

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plan for the city to be approved by the mayor and the board of aldermen. The plan will attempt to increase jobs and representation of Blacks by Blacks, particularly, in the areas where they are most affected.

Mayfield has little doubt that the city administration will approve an affirmative action plan. In order for the ” sore to heal,” he says, the city must come up with an affirmative action plan.

A weekend visit to Tupelo in late October again found the city undergoing a quiet period. A “silent” boycott was on, but a lot of Black residents had gradually begun shopping again in the White-owned stores.

The League’s activities had been halted while they awaited the affirmative action committee report. The Klan reportedly busied itself that weekend by making an appearance at a high school band festival. A group of robed Klansmen supposedly walked past a group of young Black teenage boys and girls on the street and, as they passed, one of the boys, to the amusement of the other kids, grabbed the band flagpole and jestured at the Klansmen, 11 show you who’s afraid of who.”

All fear of the Klan appears to be gone from the Black community. Their main importance in Tupelo this whole period, one observer noted, has been in providing theatrics for the media. While the presence of the Klan did much to draw attention to the area, Rittenhouse feels that the situation in Tupelo was blown out of proportion indeliberately by the press. Although Blacks and Klansmen openly displayed weapons, no violence erupted, he pointed out.

However, Tupelo, the “All-American City,” with its symbols of growth and progress in northeast Mississippi, has had difficulty in explaining why this ‘littleness in thinking,” as Rittenhouse characterizes the Klan, experienced a rebirth in their town. Many Tupelo citizens have, frankly, been embarrassed by the whole situation.

The city now quietly awaits the results of discussions to what will be tomorrow’s situation. This time amid the quietude I sensed that something was indeed transpiring. Maybe it was the undercurrents of a grassroots organization again mapping strategy, or the Klan regrouping, or more division taking place among the Black community, or maybe it was simply a city making plans for a communal Thanksgiving Dinner as Ritterhouse, the Baptist minister, would like to think.

Perhaps, the change was within me – my perceptions. For, I had realized that Tupelo was indeed a battleground for racial issues not because it caught up with the protest of the sixties ten years later -not because of any one individual or organization. Instead, Tupelo had become the nation’s best known town for racial conflict largely because of the people and events which have grown since the civil rights movement. Like other places in Mississippi or Massachusetts, Tupelo’s signs of progress may have given most Whites the opinion that race relations are good” and many Blacks a reason to expect more.

In this way, quiet or in turmoil, my hometown is everyone’s. Tupelo is our town.

Interchange: In This Issue

By Betty Norwood Chaney

Vol. 1, No. 7, 1979, p. 2

On February 16-18, the Southern Regional Council (SRC) held its Annual Meeting in Atlanta at the Colony Square Hotel. This year the Council renewed its charter after 25 years of incorporation, and to commemorate the occasion presented a three-day conference on ” A New Charter for the South’s Future.”

The conference brought together a variety of distinguished participants from the fields of education, law, economics, civil rights and health care to review developments and conditions in the South. This issue of Southern Changes reports on that conference and reproduces three of the addresses made there.

Leslie Dunbar, former executive director of SRC and presently director of the Field Foundation, was one of a panel of three to speak on “The Role of the Law in the South.” The primary role of law in the South, he says, has been to keep Blacks “in their place.” In his presentation carried here, he offers four concerns that ought to be basic to the right role of law in the South.

In a discussion of “Human Rights: From the South to South Africa,” Wallace Terry, former Newsweek correspondent, now professor of journalism at Howard University, shares someof his experiences with Black troops in Viet Nam. He calls for an enlightened leadership which places human values above expediency and voiced his hopes and aspiration for the nation.

Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall, Saturday’s luncheon speaker, also talked of human rights. “The whole human rights movement is very important throughout the world, and it’s not dividible,” he says. “You cannot talk about human rights in other countries, and ignore them here.” His main concern, however, was about certain “universal imperatives,” inflation being one of them, that makes it difficult to help those who most need help.

In “Soapbox” this month, Steve Suits, publisher of Southern Changes and also executive director of SRC, reminds us that differences which continue to separate Southerners from one another on the basis of race and poverty remain deep and unyielding barriers. In looking toward a “new charter for the South’s future,” he cautions us that progress of the last 25 years must not plund us from the fact that our task is not complete. “Improvements,” he says, “are not final accomplishments.”

Our department pieces this month– education, rural and ruban development and Southern politics– also report on sessions from the conference and offer some perspectives on the future.

In addition, in this issue Bill Finger reports on recent J.P. Stevens and Company stockholders meeting in Greenville, S.C., and Alice Swift relays the activities of a small rural town in Georgia where the Black community is “coming to focus, demanding its rights.”

Interchange: In This Issue

By Betty Norwood Chaney

Vol. 1, No. 8, 1979, p. 2

May 17, markes the 25th anniversary of Brown v. Borad of Education decision by the Supreme Court. While not devoting the contents of this issue entirely to eductation, Southern Changes, like so many other publications this month, reserves some space for reflecting upon the state of deucation 25 years after the historic decision.

In “Soapbox” this month, Dillard professor Monte Piliawsky appraises the South to measure how much progress has been made since 1954. He finds the paradox of the “New South” to be most dramatically exhibited in the area of public education. “School integration,” he says, “has generally meant that White parents have pulled their children outof the public schools, leaving to Black (and some poor White) children school systems which invariably are underfunded. The remaining White chldren often are divided from Blacks by controversial tracking systems.”

Although the picture he paints is rather dismal, he nevertheless concludes that public education is still the “best hope for the ‘New South’ to provide an enlightened citizenry and to creat national unity. (The commentary carried here is part of the the introduction to a much larger unpublished work by Piliawsky entitled Exit 13 about the closed socielty at the University of Southern Mississippi.)

“Profiles in Change” from John Egerton’s School Desegregation: A Report Card from the South looks at schools around the Southland after desegregation. Together theseprofiles present a very descriptive picture– one not greatly changed since 1975- of integration in Southern public schools.

Some schools have had more success with desegregation than others. There are those like Lillian M. Brinkley in Norfolk who feels “all of us someday– we may bein our graves– will realize it has been for the benefit of everybody.” But then there are others like Rev. Joseph N. Green, also of Norfolk who says, “We’ve desegregated the schools, but I do not feel we’ve integrated the schools… integration means people are working together harmoniously and cooperatively. I don’t think this has really come about. That which separated us in the past to a great extent is still present.”

In some instances standardized test scores, a requisite for measuring progress, indicate a drop for all races since desegregation. Now another fator entering the picture is minimum competency testing, a practice that is inforce in practically every Southern state, and has probably become the hottest and most controvercial issue over the last year. Many feel that the tests, a basis for awarding high school diplomas, will disproportionately affect the poor and minorities.

In this issue, Alace Lovelace reports on yet another situation involving testing that is causing considerable controversy. It is the Georgia desegregation plan for higher education which calls, among a number of other things, for entrance and exit tests to be administered to college students. Many students and some faculty see this plan as a ploy for decreasin the number of Black students who are able to enter and graduate from college. Demonstrations and violence have erupted around this plan while others find it “totally acceptable.”

Two other controversial issues involving schools are also repoted on in this issue. They are the prayer in public schools debate, by Steve Suitts, in our Southern Politics department and the school breakfast program, by Judy Curie, in the Health Care department.

In addition, we also carry in this issue “The Triana Fish Story” by Thomas Noland about the small, poor Alabama community whose residents were found to have extraordinary levels of DDT in their bodies.

Wayne Greenhaw reports on another situation in Alabama involving the poor. It is about their legal struggle with the Alabama Power Company who is seeking the largest rate increase in the state’s history.

The appointment of G. Duke Beasley as the first administrator of the Georgia Office of Fair Employment Practices caused something of a stur last summer (See the September issue of Southern Changes, Vol. 1 No. 1), but nothing compared to the uproar created by the release of his first annual report recently. Ginny Looney brings us up-to-date on the administrator’s appointment and the report called a “complete and utter wste of taxpayer’s money” by one legislator.

As we enter the second quarter after the Brown decision, it is clear from the levels of debate surrounding education on all fronts that we are probably still another quarter of a century away from solving them. This is not to say that some progress has not been made. “Profiles in Change” attest to that fact, but the burden placed upon education in this country is a heavy one– one we’ve only begun to bear.

Interchange: In This Issue

By Betty Norwood Chaney

Vol. 1, No. 9, 1979, pp. 2

This issue of Southern Changes is devoted primarily to the plight facing the workers of the South. We dedicate it to A. Phillip Randolph who died May 16 at the age of 90. Not only did he give 70 years of his life to the labor movement, he is also called the father of the civil rights revolution. Inhis birthday mesage to America on April 15, presented in “Soapbox,” he lauds the role of trade unions: “It is the trade union movment that has fought to preserve the minimum wage, to keep the CETA jobs programs in tact. And it is the trade union movement that has mounted a major effort to organize low-paid and exploited workers throughout the South.”

In this issue, we carry two in-depth articles about the struggles of workers trying to organize in the South and the obstacles they encounter.

Tony Dunbar in “The Old South Triumphs at Duke” relates the efforts of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)union to organize wage workers at Duke University. Duke, a cener of learning, erected upon the lofty principles “to develop a Christian love of freedom and truth” and “to promote a sincere spirit of tolerance,” responded by hiring an anti-union consulting firm. These “Chicago union busters” as AFSCME called them, launches the kind of campaign against AFSCME and Duke laborers that makes Dunbar conclude that the “New South so ably represented at Duke University is not really much different from the old.”

The second piece, Phil Wilayto, a member of the Center for United Labor Action, offers a vivid, heartrending account of the Steelworkers strike that brought silence to the yards of the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company for 11 weeks this past winter as workers fought to win recognition for their union. Although unsuccessful this tim in their attempt to establish a union, the attitude of the workers following the strike is “We aren’t broken. We’re regrouping, we’ll be back and we’ll get our union.”

Probably the most important affermative action case since Bakke is the United Steelworkers of America v. Brian F. Weber, known familiarly as Weber. It could affect all voluntary affirmative action for racial minorities in the nation’s work force. In our third piece onlabor concerns, Laughlin McDonald, Southern director of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, details for us the factors involved in the Weber case. He determines that ultimately it is voluntary compliance that will eliminate the need for state and federal enforcement agencies.

Our Action Patterns department this issue outlines “How to File Complaints and Civil Suits Against Job Discrimination,” and the SRC Publications section lists materials available from the Council that relate to affirmative action and the employment of Blacks and women.

In addition, this issue carries an assessment of the 1979 legilative session of the Georgia General Assembly. Look for more analyses of this nature in Southern Changes as we enter our second year of publishing in September.

In closing, along with A. Phillip Randolph, we encourage you to take an active interest in the struggles of the Southern workers. We look upon the plight of the low-paid and often exploited laborer in the South as being one of the most important issues facing us today. As Randolph implores in his parting remarks, “Please, join the good fight.”

In This Issue

By Betty Norwood Chaney

Vol. 2, No. 4, 1980, pp. 2

We are as wrought with opinion and reflection in this our first issue of the new year as we may heve been bereft of it last time. In December we did not carry our usual “Soapbox” opinion piece. As publisher Steve Suitts explained at that time, it was “not that we lack opinions,” but rather “there are tiimes when events should be told, analyzed and then left for reflection.” This is not one of those times. This issue is plentiful in both opinion and reflection.

The Law Project states its positions explicitly in “Soapbox”: “The Georgia penitentiary system is a crime. It brutalizes people, gives graduate instruction in crime and is seriously dangerous to your health.” Responding to the possibility that the Georgia General Assembly next session may institute mandatory sentencing, the Project makes its stand clear. Mandatory sentencing is not the answer to crime

In Mississippi an event was analyzed by civil rights activists drawn from all over the country in a converence in Jackson recently. it was a symposium on “Freedom Summer 1964” and it brought many of the volunteers in that summer’s activities 15 year ago back together for an assessment of that historic time. It prompted two Mississippi writers to reflect on the significance of that summer and on the racial progress in Mississippi and the country since that time. Southern Changes runs these two articles as companion pieces this month.

Gordon D. Gibson pastor and community leader, looks at some of the “irony of change” that came about as a result of that summer. Most participants agreed that little had changed in the daily conditions of life for the poor. Still, Gibson feels the facts that a generation was radicalized, a host of movements was inspired and peopled and a political party was changed must be reckoned with when assessing that period.

Jackson State College professor Ivory Phillips uses the small town of Rosedale as a case study in racial progress in Mississippi. He points to some of the paradoxes abounding in the state today and finds that they add a sober perspective to the much lauded claimof racial progress in Mississippi

In Florida a group of community organizations known as the Florida Black Agenda Coalition has come together to try to identify the issues and the programs that will impact upoon the minorities communities in the 1980s. The coalition has adopted a complete agenda of items ranging from local police action to U.S. policy toward Haitian refugees.It plans to publish its agenda and confront candidates on all levels with proposals.

From Virginia we have a report on the Ku Klux Klan activities there. It seems that the Klan got the idea of holding a “recruiting rally” aimed at the military in Virginia Beach. A coalition was formed to counter the Klan’s activities. Phil Wilayto chronicles the evens surroundng an October 5 rally and demonstration. The most important lesson that the coalition learned from its experiences of fighting the Klan in Virginia according to one participant, is that “you can’t rely on the government to stop the Klan.”

Poor Southerners learned recently that they can’t rely on their congressmen to represent their best interests. Our department piece on Southern Politics this month shows that roughly seven out of 10 Representatives from the 11 Southern states voted against a bill to increase present welfare payments. In a similar vein, a report released by the Southern Regional Council in November revealed that depsite 1977 legislation almost 40 percent of poor Southerners do not receive food stamps.

In another department piece good new for the poor finally comes from Atlanta where a community food bank has been set up to distribute salvageable foodstuffs to feed hungry people

All in all the bad news for poor Southerners unfortunately outweighed the good in this issue. But the fact that coalitions continue to form to confront the bad is some good news in itself

Black Women’s Health Conference

By Betty Norwood Chaney

Vol. 5, No. 5, 1983, pp. 18-20

In 1970 Byllye Avery had it made. She was married to a wonderful man. He was college educated and had a good job. They owned their home, had a station wagon and two children. They were a black family achieving the American dream.

Suddenly, Byllye Avery’s husband died of a heart attack at age thirty-three, a casualty of hypertension (killer of one out of every four blacks). Only after years of cardiovascular stress, usually producing no symptoms which require medical attention, does high blood pressure result in major complications: stroke, heart attack, heart or kidney failure and the premature death and disability of hundreds of thousands of people each year.

High blood pressure occurs more frequently among blacks than whites; it develops earlier in life, is more severe and causes higher mortality at younger ages. Deaths from hypertension before age forty are six to seven times more common in blacks than whites.

The loss of her husband changed Byllye Avery’s life. Realizing that degrees, jobs, money or middle class trappings matter little without good health, she began a crusade to improve health care education and conditions for blacks.

Avery co-founded the Gainesville (Florida) Women’s Health Center and Birthplace, Alternative Birthing Center. Her discoveries about the conditions of black women’s health appalled her. Not only was the incidence of hypertension in black women double that of the rest of the population, but so were the rates of diabetes, cancer and lupus. And because black women-headed households make up fifty-three percent of all U.S. households in poverty, the demands of living for black mothers lead to psychological distress for more than half of the black female population. Additionally, the problem of teenage pregnancy is a major health and social concern and black infant mortality rates are twice those of whites.

“If sickness and suffering among blacks is to be reduced,” Avery said, “it will be through the development of a new consciousness about health and well being among black women.”

Over two years ago, Byllye Avery conceived the idea of a national conference on black women and health. Sponsored by the Black Women’s Health Project and the National Women’s Health Network, the conference convened this summer on the campus of Spelman College in Atlanta. Over sixteen hundred health care providers, health educators and interested women attended from across the country, overwhelming and almost tripling planners’ expectations. The three-day gathering featured workshops, speeches, films, self-help demonstrations, exhibits and cultural and physical fitness activities. Discussion topics included hypertension, diabetes, cancer, lupus, domestic violence, stress, maternal and infant health, teenage pregnancy, elderly abuse and occupational and environmental health.

Dedicated to Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977), activist and freedom fighter, the conference theme was “I’m sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,” words which Ms. Hamer said often as she struggled to effect change in rural Mississippi. According to conference coordinator Eleanor Hinton-Hoytt, the theme symbolized not only “the struggles and suffering of black women, but also our commitment to seize control of these conditions which affect our lifestyles and health.”

Keynoting the conference, Dr. June Jackson Christmas of the School of Bio-Medical Education, City College of New York, insisted that “we must do more to learn and understand the causes of our being sick; the reasons for our being tired. Black women face the triple jeopardy of being black, female and poor in a racist, sexist and class

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structured society.”

The goal was to help black women learn to take care of their bodies and take charge of their lives. “At the conference,” says Byllye Avery, “we tried to take care of black women in the way that we think we need to be taken care of–in a way that nobody has taken care of us before.” Sixty workshops ran concurrently with films, exhibits and self-help demonstrations. You could be tested for sickle cell anemia, see a film on natural childbirth or a photo exhibit on black women’s life cycles. The second and third days began with yoga and physical fitness sessions.

All the workshops were well attended but the most popular ones dealt with the psychological conditions of black women. Many illnesses that black women suffer develop amid living conditions of continuous emotional stress. “If we are going to improve our health,” argues Avery, “we first have got to deal with our minds.”

The most popular workshop was, “Black and Female: What is the Reality?” This session, designed and conducted by Lillie Allen, a family medicine educator at the Morehouse School of Medicines’ Family Practice Center. was held three times to overflow crowds. Allen sought to dispel the myth that black women have to be eternal pillars of strength. The women who attended (whites were excluded) shared deeply personal, often painful experiences. The conclusion of this workshop found hundreds of women in tears, embracing one another. “We felt,” said one woman, “tremendous relief.”

“It was amazing,” Allen says, “how one person in talking about an area that was difficult for her helped the other women present. They were able to relate to it and it opened them up. By the end of the workshop the women had become genuinely interested in and supportive of each other.”

Allen’s workshop has prompted the Black Women’s Health Project to make the formation of self-help health

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groups across the nation a major goal over the next few years. Already there are more than twenty such groups under the sponsorship of the Project. Although they all share the emphasis on reaching lower income black women and increasing their access to and knowledge of health care services and principles, these groups are very diverse in focus. A Florida self-help group, for instance, aims at reducing high blood pressure through diet and exercise, while a Georgia group has hosted a women’s health weekend in a rural area which included demonstrations on breast self-examination and gynecological self-help.

While the popular cry at the end of the Atlanta conference was for another gathering next year, Avery cautioned that “the real work has yet to be done.” She does not project another national conference until 1986. In the meantime, the BWHP has set as a goal the creation of fifty new self-help groups, a newsletter, a report and a handbook on health issues, regional conferences, and production and distribution of video health education materials and the production of a documentary on the national conference to be shown on Cable Atlanta and other cable television systems.

Individuals or groups who seek more information should contact the Black Women’s Health Project, M.L. King, Jr. Health Center, 450 Auburn Avenue, Suite 157, Atlanta, Georgia 30312, (404) 659-3854.

Betty Norwood Chaney, a former editor of Southern Changes, lives in Atlanta where she is a teacher, mother, and freelance writer.