Life in the Fortress: An Interview with Mary Edwards Wertsch

By Ellen Spears

Vol. 14, No. 4, 1992, pp. 16-20

Ellen Spears: What makes Military Brats so powerful at its core is your own experience as a military daughter. Speaking from that voice gives you a special authority and a special strength.

Mary Edwards Wertsch: It was a struggle for me because I did not originally plan to include my own story. I am a journalist, a newspaper reporter. I did not know Pat Conroy, but I wanted to tell him that it was because of The Great Santini that I was embarking on this book. I just wanted to thank him for opening my eyes. I didn’t know … if he would even be receptive. He, of course, turned up as this wonderful, warm, gregarious, supportive person. And then we started swapping stories.

In the course of that conversation he said, “Mary, you have got to put your own story in the book.” I said, “No, I’m not. I am a reporter, and I am doing this like everything else I have done.”

…. So I sat down to write the first chapter I wrote, the Daughters of Warriors chapter, and realized immediately that I would have to put my story in it. If I did not it was going to lack authenticity and passion and probably credibility.

It was cathartic. It had to be done, but I shrieked, I screamed as I wrote my brother’s story. My brother was 11 years older, and I was just a little girl watching him get beaten every night. The helplessness. The anger. So even though I was working through a lot of feelings about my father and affirming my love—you can have these feelings side by side—I was shrieking out at this bastard who did

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these things. I got my brother’s permission to use it in the book. People have a hard time reading those middle chapters of the book. But I say to people, please read to the end because the book is about healing. I was at Fort Bragg [N.C.] and did a signing at the PX. There was a woman who was waiting for me when I arrived, a silver-haired woman, a colonel’s wife, I believe. She told me, “I have to tell you when I read your hardback last year, I started it and I was thinking why are you torturing us like this? The more I read the more I found myself thinking this is really true, this is really true.” She bought four paperbacks for her four grown kids. She had me inscribe each one. She is giving them to her kids on the Fourth of July, saying, “Read the last chapter first”

E: A lot of military families come through the South at one point or another. Did you feel any particular things about this region in the interviews or in your own experience?

M: The Southern connection for me? Well, my mother is from Athens, Georgia. When I was growing up, it was the only geographical place I felt tied to in any way. I had only visited there a few times. But I yearned for it.

I wanted to be like my cousins who were rooted and had such a supportive network of people. I keep trying to find out what rootedness is in various ways.

I think Pat Conroy is a strong example that people can relate to. He was born in Atlanta but like most military brats that is coincidental. He was Marine Corps, and they stayed mainly in bases in the South. Because his mother was also Southern, from Alabama, be felt a connection here, too.

Military brats have to find some place to roost when they are adults. Pat wanted roots. He decided he was going to be a Southerner.

The South has a tremendous appeal for military brats because in accent, lifestyle, and culture it is something. We want to be somebody from somewhere, to have a sense of belonging. Of course for me, writing this book was an exercise in finding out who I really am as a military brat. I found out that I do have roots. Very intense ones.

I just visited Fort Bragg, near Fayetteville. My father was stationed at there for a year and a half. I went to half of third grade and all of fourth there. It was a wonderful post to live on at that time. It had great trees to climb and bushes to hide in. To return there was a little nostalgic to me. Every military base feels like home to a military brat because it is so familiar no matter whether you want to be in the military or would never do it, it feels like home. But you cannot find my name or my family’s name anywhere on that base or anyone who knew us. There is a total changeover in people all the time.

E: In The Great Santini, the family must move out of the house when the father dies; it is almost seamless with the funeral. They empty out of the house and are on their way.

M: Right. That is one of the really terrible tragedies of military life. Right when you lose, for example, the father (in that case in an accident), it can happen at any time, or war, you have to lose all the support of the community, too. You are banished from the community. Kicked out.

E: What are you saying about the culture and feeling more at home here, is it more hospitable to military culture in the South?

M: Do you mean there seems to almost be a Southern tradition to serve in the military? A lot of people have Southern connections to it to their relatives. The South is loaded with bases. It is probably cheaper for DOD to have them in the South because you do not have to shovel snow and you do not have to have problems flying in and out. It is a good place for air bases.

E: During my three years with SANE/FREEZE, one of the things that we noted was that the Southern political climate has been much more hospitable to military interests, with Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn and Richard Russell before him in the Armed Services Committee, there’s a heavy concentration of bases here.

M: They all like defense contracts because ostensibly that brings jobs. Of course it does, but the military is certainly not the best investment of money to produce jobs. It is not labor intensive. It is a lot of hardware.

E: What is happening to people now that there are cutbacks in military spending?

M: There is a tremendously high stress level in the military now because of this RIF, Reduction in Force…. Plus this is coming on the heels of a war, the Gulf War, when the divorces among active duty personnel skyrocket …. What does the Department of Defense do at this time in the wake of the war, they know that divorces are skyrocketing, there are all kinds of family problems

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happening. They cut the medical benefits, the CHAMPUS benefits. They raised the deductible which made it unaffordable for many military families to go get counseling or psychiatric help.

It is tremendously stressful. If you are in some line of work within the military that translates well into civilian life, it might be some financial thing, it might be computers, the stress is still there but not quite as threatening. But let us say you are an infantryman. You are a trained killer. What are you going to do? Or you are a tank driver. What do you do? That means you are not only talking about that individual but the wife and the children. And most people in the military are married. Most of those families do have children.

E: There was this image in the Gulf War of both parents going or the mom going. How has that affected military families?

M: I was outraged at that. I find it unconscionable that both parents would be sent to a combat zone. What can they be thinking of to do that? It is bad enough when one parent is sent, but when both parents are sent to a combat zone, that is a trauma those children will have to deal with the rest of their lives. It is inexcusable. You had a Secretary of Defense, Cheney, who had an exemption from combat duty in Vietnam because he had a wife who was pregnant and a child at home.

There was talk of chemical bombing, biological warfare. Some mothers obviously were in combat zones. For the most part women are in a support capacity. That means they are targeted because the enemy frequently in warfare will try to cut off the supply fines first. That means they are sitting ducks for chemical, biological weaponry.

This was reported on the news …. Military brats watch the news. I can tell you from Vietnam days and before and from people I interviewed, civilian kids might not have even known there was a war going on. Military kids knew about the Tet offensive. They were looking for their fathers. They were looking for their father’s friends on the news.

E: You talk in the book about the mother’s role as the revisionist family historian.

M: I talk some about the importance of myth in military families and the military in general. The military is like a Greek drama. You have archetypes walking around all over the place. As Pat Conroy once told me, it is not easy being the child of an archetype.

Military parents have a very tough challenge. I am deeply sympathetic to them. I think this is part of healing for those of us from dysfunctional families is to find empathy truly for our parents because they often did the best they could. I do not believe in obscuring accountability for really terrible acts at all, but I do think it is possible to get past that, and part of that is to put ourselves in our parents shoes.

Mothers in the military see themselves as responsible for keeping the family together through endless uprootings and the threat of war, real war sometimes, all sorts of coping situations. Part of the way they do this is to spin myths. It is a very important thing to give to them as they see it to give children a version that will help them, a helpful version. It may not be true at all. Your father loves you. Your father wants to be with you. Your father wants to spend more time with you. That may not be true at all. But how can I say that was not a useful thing to be told at the time?

The thing is that the child grows up and begins to see the holes in the story and then you sense the hurt and the outrage at the lies. There is a tendency to blame the mother who has spun this lie, this myth.

There are other myths. Of course there is always the myth that, and here I am treading on dangerous territory from the military point of view, there is always a myth in the military that every action in which they engage is for the freedom of the United States. That is a cardinal belief.

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In fact I think it was yesterday in North Carolina I passed by in the car this enormous old Veteran’s Administration hospital. Neatly manicured lawn in front. A large brick place with white columns and a big sign out front that said “Veteran’s Administration Hospital.” Let us see if I can get the name right that they had on the front: “Here is where the price that we pay for freedom is visible.” That is a myth right there: for freedom.

Military families, in view of the tremendous sacrifice they are making day in and day out need to lean on myths like that. I do not begrudge them that. They need it to survive. It is important for those on the outside of the military to see that a bit more clearly and try to affect public policy.

I have belonged to many anti-war groups and one during the Gulf War, too …. Whenever I spoke I made that point that I was not condemning the military people but the policy that was directed by the civilian government

…. I had the strong sense during the Gulf War that the entire thing, the Gulf War itself, the patriotic fervor, everything, had nothing to do with the situation in the Middle East. It had everything to do with Vietnam. It was trying to cleanse that, to purge that out of the national soul. You cannot purge things out of the national soul. Certainly not by papering it over with more lies.

E: What about the sons and the daughters?

M: I have gotten letters a couple of hundred letters from military brats who have identified strongly …. There was one son who called me. He was really affected by the book. He really likes the book, but he said it was very hard for him because it burst his own particular myth. To find that he is a classic military son right down the checklist was disturbing to him. The sons do not feel as much in control of their lives as they thought they were.

Military daughters respond, find themselves the classical military brat daughters, and for them it comes as a huge relief. A daughter gets the same information and feels very comforted. Maybe what men have done is to develop a kind of myth that their isolation is their strength. To find a book that completely contradicts that is disturbing. I may suggest that maybe a son would never have written this book.

E: You have written about feeling as fact in away that I think is unique to a woman’s point of view.

M: I have just started work on another book that is a natural extension,…. the military is not out of my system.

Various people have told me since this book came out, “Oh, the next one you have to do about the wives.”

There has been one book on that, but there needs to be another more profound, slightly different book. I always say a wife should write that book, not me. And black military brats need to write their own story and gays and lesbians need to write theirs. People need to raise their voices and contribute to the literature on our culture.

What I decided is do one on the men. The kind of book I have in mind will never be written by any of them. It is about the emotional realities of serving in the military, all the question marks that are superimposed over my entire experience inside the fortress. All the things I wanted to know about as a child but could not even articulate my questions much less be allowed to ask. I would like to know about their glorious feeling of the joining with this warrior persona that fuels them, that fires them and once a Marine always a Marine. Why? About the glory they can feel in battle. The fear and the terrible loss and the bonding with buddies in war that is unlike anything else and is far more powerful than their ties to their own families. People say it cannot be duplicated in anything in civilian life. ….I want to know about the broken hearts and souls of vets. And, of course, family issues. All these are the emotional realities. These are the very things that the military tries to train its men to distance themselves from. Authoritarians do not key in to the inner voice or anything they feel.

E: I think you may have unlocked something very revealing about our entire culture, with “rise and shine” and “gung ho” and all the language. That was a part of my family. I am not a military brat. My father spent two, maybe four, years in the merchant marine in World War II, but that was part of our life, making the bed with military comers. It has a tremendous influence in civilian life.

M: One of the scariest things going on is that our country seems to be styling itself as the warrior country of the world. There is even a paper that came out of the Pentagon as they try to find a new role for themselves in the wake of the Cold War. This Pentagon paper said there is no need for more than one superpower in the world. Guess who that is going to be? There are tremendous dangers in this and one of the things among others is a masculine/feminine split in society. What is this going to mean emotionally to our country if we adopt this stance in the world? We already see what happens, women and children get short shrift. Infant mortality goes up and the shelters for battered women get closed down. Men as well as women need to raise their voices. We cannot let this

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happen.

E: What impressed me the most was your reconciliation, your ability through clear and careful ground rules, to find love for your father.

M: It is not always possible. I think it important to see that too because I think that wounded adults from dysfunctional families do not need the additional burden of guilt when reconciliation really is not possible. It takes two to reconcile. Sometimes the parent for some reason is not willing or is too sick or whatever. It is not always possible but in that case I really do believe. I could not actually conceive of writing the book if he were still living because I valued our reconciliation…. He would not have been able to stand the revelations of this book.

So where reconciliation is not possible with a living parent it is still possible to continue the dialogue with the inner parent because they are within us; they are part of us.

E: Is there a connection between what you have written and the Tailhook scandal?

M: Even the military realizes that what happened there is unconscionable yet that it was typical. Tailhook was not a unique occurrence. There was a de facto license to conduct themselves in this way and not just in Tailhook but in other aspects of military life. The military has been willing to overlook egregious behavior if it suited the military’s purpose in some way. For example, alcohol.

Why has the military tolerated it when it caused so much damage? Damage to the mission, to the relationships with the civilian community to the warriors themselves, to their families. Why has it been tolerated? Actually encouraged.

The answer is that it suited the military’s purposes and what they believed contributed to bonding. They believe men needed an outlet. And perhaps they felt that it also anesthetized those dangerous emotions. Maybe stilled the questions that men ask themselves about what they are going to be ordered to do and why. I think it has suited to the military’s purpose to have alcohol abused. That’s the ugly truth.

The Gulf War, however, was a totally dry war. They seemed to have done what they chose to do to their own satisfaction without the help of alcohol.

I think the same goes with behavior toward women. Obviously the military does not say that it is alright to go and harass and rape women. But all armies have done this through time. Their commanders, I believe, looked the other way when this happened. This is a more modern version of that behavior. They must feel that it is a kind of outlet that warriors require. Again it is where the feminine voice has to be raised. And there are plenty of men who just despise that kind of behavior. Military men.

E: Tell me more about the organization, Military Brats, Inc.

M: It is just beginning now. It was founded by an Air Force brat named Pamela James. The name was changed. It was first Adult Children of Military Personnel. I assented to that…. [but] later I really changed my mind on that and I asked for it to be discussed among the board and other people felt the same way. There are several things wrong with that name. I do not like the term “adult child” in the first place. It infantalizes grownups who ought to be recognizing their pain but coping with it in a mature responsible way instead of whining. The other thing is that it suggests that this organization is only for military brats only from dysfunctional families and maybe only those who are dysfunctional themselves now. That is a narrowing; we wanted a much broader scope to this. It is an organization for all military brats including those from healthy loving families.

But all military brats regardless of the health of their families have a problem with issues of loss stemming from the extreme mobility of that life. This is the kind of thing that really needs to be talked about because there are such strong repercussions in adulthood, really solid patterns that we have to recognize and break.

It is Military Brats, Inc. It is not named after my book. It is named for the same reason as my book: to identify the group that we are trying to reach. There is a network of support groups.

Soon there will be a newsletter. There is also a computer registry described in the brochure so that we can voluntarily register our information and eventually we hope do computer searches to track down long lost childhood friends. It is very important to us because we lost literally everyone through our childhoods apart from our nuclear families.

We are looking for people who are interested in starting up local chapters.

Military Brats Inc. can be contacted at
P.O. Box 82262
Lincoln, Nebraska 68501-2262
1-800-767-7709

Mary Edwards Wertsch, author of Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress, chronicles the stories of those who served in the military without ever enlisting, the children of military families. Southern Changes managing editor Ellen Spears interviewed Wertsch in June, 1992.

‘Freedom Buses’ Roll Along Cancer Alley

By Ellen Spears

Vol. 15, No. 1, 1993, pp. 1-11

On the weekend of December 4-6, 1992, more than 2,000 activists from around the South and the nation joined in an unprecedented gathering in New Orleans, drawn together in a common movement for environmental justice. With these unanticipated numbers and the diversity of participants, the meeting at the mouth of the Mississippi may come to be regarded—like the October 1991 People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., that inspired it—as a watershed in the U S. environmental movement.

The New Orleans conference was called together by the Southern Organizing Committee for Social and Economic Justice (SOC), whose legacy of anti-racist and pro-union work stretches from the 1930s, and was hosted by the Gulf Coast Tenants Organization.

It was significant that the meeting was held in the South, where the disparate impact of environmental degradation on communities of color—environmental racism—is strongly felt.

An understanding of what we as a movement are up against came from a special part of the conference: a bus tour of Cancer Alley, the seventy-seven-mile stretch of the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans poisoned by more than 120 petrochemical plants.

OUR TOUR of Cancer Alley takes off from the Bayou Plaza Hotel, where many attendees are staying, near Xavier University. Our tour guides, all environmental leaders in Louisiana, are dealing with a problem faced by the whole conference—the kind of problem organizers like—the unexpectedly huge turnout “It just snowballed under our feet,”

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said Anne Braden, co-chair of SOC. “What it indicates is the tremendous breadth and depth of grassroots concern about this issue.”

Increasing interest in the tour had already forced planners to add another bus, and now we are waiting for a third. Folks pass the time pleasantly in the overcast but warming New Orleans weather, checking in with old friends and striking up conversations, making new ones. Already the diversity of cultures the conference has brought together is evident: African American residents of Homer, Louisiana, who are fighting a uranium enrichment plant; Native American activists from Oklahoma opposing General Atomic’s Sequoia Fuels nuclear facility; United Farmworkers from the Rio Grande area working to end overuse of pesticides; an Asian American staffer from one of the national environmental groups; whites from Appalachian mining towns; veteran organizers, young people, whole families.

While we are waiting, other buses, “Freedom Buses,” are carrying youth from Selina, Atlanta, Savannah and North Carolina, first stopping in Columbia, Mississippi. A youth speak-out has been organized to support demands by the African American community in Columbia, where the Reichold Chemical Company plant exploded and burned in March 1977.

The 775 residents of this Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region IV hot spot want compensation and relocation for illnesses they believe resulted from the toxic explosion. Busloads of students stop to march in solidarity on their way to New Orleans.

BACK ON TULANE Avenue in New Orleans, the humid clouds are lifting slightly and our tour begins. As the busloads wind through the Crescent City toward our first stop, Willie Fontenot shares, from his vantage point as coordinator of the Public Protection Division in the Louisiana Attorney General’s office, a perspective on the New Orleans environment.

New Orleans’s infrastructure is shaped by its unique ecosystem, with a water table above the streets in many places; some streets are below sea level. The city has the most extensive canal system in the country. And, explains Fontenot, the ground is still settling. Especially where development happened rapidly, with lots of fill, the materials used dry and shrink, and the sewer, water, and gas lines break away.

The city has one of the largest tonnage ports in the country, averaging 120 to 150 ocean-going ships every day, carrying mostly grain and oil and refined oil products.

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Though shallow, with an average depth of twelve feet, Pontchartrain, covering 610 square miles, is one of the most productive fishing estuaries in the country. Yet it contains such high fecal coliform levels that signs are posted by the Orleans Levee Board and the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals to prevent swimming.

A high percentage Of New Orleans residents drink bottled water, report our guides. “Even Louisiana-brewed Dixie Beer tasted funny,” Fontenot says, after Georgia-Pacific Chemical Company dumped forty-two tons of phenol in the river in 1981. The dumping raised the phenol threshold in the water to seven parts per billion (ppb). Phenol is not known to be hazardous to human health at that level, but it exceeded the standard of one to three ppbs. When it bonded with chlorine used to disinfect the water supply at a treatment plant, the resulting chemical could be tasted in the water. It made the water—and the beer brewed with it—taste like oil, he says.

Another result of frequent spills: major kills of fish, birds, and turtles. Runoff of the pesticide azinphosmethyl from the sugar cane fields is suspected in summer 1991 kills of more than 750,000 fish, including striped mullet largemouth bass, freshwater drum, and blue catfish in the bayous of south Louisiana.

By 1965, the state bird, the native brown pelican, once numbering 50,000, was wiped out after endrin spills in late 1950s and 1960s traced to the Velsicol plant in Memphis, Tennessee, killed fish and other wildlife. Now the brown pelicans in Louisiana have been re-established from Florida. Eighty percent of the re-established birds were killed in 1974, again by endrin, the year that EPA finally banned the substance.

Louisiana is number one among the fifty states in the discharge of toxic pollution into the waterways and number four in air pollution (based on 1988 EPA statistics). Capitol Lake, adjacent to the state capitol in Baton Rouge, is closed to fishing because of PCB pollution.

Cancer Alley takes its name from the high rates of cancer among the people in the parishes along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, among the highest in the nation. And the lung cancer rate for black men is among the highest in the world, explain our guides.

Although studies are scarce and much work remains to be done, few doubt the connection between cancer and pollution. Almost everyone we meet with Louisiana friends and kinfolk has a story to tell about a death from cancer.

Nick Spitzer, a public folklorist who used to work in Louisiana, shares one tale. “I had cancer myself. I can’t say that it was from Louisiana, but I was brought in for some chemotherapy. There was a guy there who had lung cancer, he had been an oil field worker. He was a classic, a lot of loyalty to the job and the work, and he was physically being destroyed. And the Ethyl Corporation had a plaque on the door. They donated the room, and he would say, ‘They may have contributed this room, but they also contributed a lot of patients.'”

CONCERNS OF CHEMICAL workers and others working in toxic environments are central to conference planners, who aim to unite labor and community in a common environmental movement. Conference speaker Tony Mazzocchi, of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union, argues the importance of confronting competing needs directly. Sometimes the demand for jobs does conflict with the health needs of the

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community, he says. His proposal, a Superfund for Workers, would reduce the impact on workers displaced by shutdowns of toxic industries. The Superfund would function like the GI bill, which offered tuition support and family stipends for workers after World War II as they sought college educations or technical training.

To But Cut’s and Back

Crossing the Mississippi on the Huey P. Long Bridge, we are reminded that Louisiana’s shifting politics, as unique as the landscape, will shape the response to the environmental crisis in the state. The damage to the environment allowed during Gov. Edwin Edwards’s previous terms is well documented in Southern Exposure’s March/April 1984 article “The Poisoning of Louisiana.” But given the choice of David Duke, environmentalists “held their noses and voted for Edwards,” says tour guide Nathalie Walker. Under Edwards’s current tenure, the staff of the state Attorney General’s office environmental division has been reduced by about one-half.

Kai Midboe, Edwards’s appointee for Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) chief, is regarded by environmental leaders as more sympathetic to industry than his popular predecessor, Paul Templet. Though Midboe helped establish the state’s coastal zone program, protecting wildlife habitats, he more recently represented oil and gas industry clients in an effort to limit DEQ regulations on discharges from their facilities. Midboe’s strategy is to take a cooperative approach with industry rather than engage in litigation for enforcement.

“You can work out some things,” says Fontenot. “But you don’t stop bank robbing by saying ‘let’s sit down and talk about it,’ you need a strong enforcement program, you need incentives which include strong provisions for fines. And, says Fontenot, “We have not had a tradition of that under anybody.”

Activists like Audrey Evans of the Tulane University Environmental Law Clinic expect “more frequent use of the device of the minor modification, circumventing the permitting process altogether by calling a big expansion only a minor modification.”

“We are ranked fiftieth in the state government’s commitment to protecting the environment,” explains Walker, who is the attorney for the Sierra Club Defense Fund in New Orleans. “For example, in New Jersey, they have a similar industrial base but much lower emission rates

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than Louisiana. And, they have a much larger enforcement staff for air, land, and water pollution.”

Some new laws will help. The Louisiana Air Toxics Reduction Law, passed in 1990, aims to reduce air emissions of one hundred chemicals by 50 percent by 1994. The 1989 Solid Waste Reduction Act requires reducing landfills by 25 percent. And the Wetlands Conservation and Restoration Fund will receive forty million dollars annually to deal with wetlands problems.

Louisiana’s economy has been affected by the boom and bust in oil and now the decline in natural gas production. The state ranks third in production of gas and oil, behind Texas and California. The failing economy is cited for underfunding of enforcement efforts, but it simply underscores a clear theme of the weekend conference: polluting industries must pay. It has been clear for some time, says Spitzer, that “the laissez le bon temps rouler attitude must go.”

Our first stop-off is a sewage treatment plant, which serves Marrero on the west bank of Jefferson Parish, at the LaPalco Boulevard Waste Drop-Off, built right next to the Marrero Housing Project, the first tenant-owned housing project in the country.

Tenant leader and president of our host group, the Gulf Coast Tenant Organization (GCTO), Rose Mary Smith explains, “we keep getting a foul smell just day after day. We have met with folks all up around Baton Rouge, and they tone the odor down, but that lasts for a few days and it flares back up.”

Tenants took over the management of the Marrero Project in November, 1984. The housing project had been built long before the sewage plant.

The GCTO embodies a strategy which SOC has pursued for many years: The principal victims of environmental racism are people of color, the poor, and working people. When these groups provide leadership, winning coalitions can be built.

GCTO has led a number of marches, from Huntsville, Alabama, to Cancer Alley and between New Orleans and Baton Rouge to dramatize the need for action. “We had been talking about this a long, long time and all of a sudden it exploded,” says Smith about the attention to toxic waste and race along Cancer Alley and elsewhere in the South evident at the conference.

WE WIND THROUGH Jefferson Parish. Two men on a bicycle careen in front of the bus. Peering out, we notice all-new windows on the small frame homes, windows which had to be replaced after the Shell Oil explosion at Norco in 1988. At Norco, the town which takes its name from the New Orleans Oil Refining Company, seven workers were killed when the cat cracker blew. The cat cracker, short for catalytic cracker, is a key part of the refining process, which separates raw oil into gas, oil, and kerosene. The blast blew out windows in downtown New Orleans twenty miles away.

Toxic spills, releases, and blasts keep residents of the towns along the river on edge. Fontenot explains that a decade ago people in the towns of Good Hope and New Sarpy frequently had to evacuate. At the time of the first buyout in 1981-82, people kept a suitcase packed. “Parents finally forced the school to keep busdrivers and buses on school grounds all the time to evacuate the kids,” he says.

We travel on to the Bonnet Carre spillway, where the levee opens to reroute Mississippi floodwaters to Lake Pontchartrain if the river rises more than seventeen feet. The wind has picked up and our eyes are stinging. We are smelling an acrid shoe polish odor. It’s nitrobenzene from a chemical plant across the river, explains guide Darryl Malek-Wiley, a New Orleans activist. Water pours past us from thirty-three states and two Canadian provinces. Way north along the Mississippi River, Native Americans are organizing to stop a proposal for storage of nuclear casks at the Prairie Island Nuclear Facility on the Lakota reservation in Minnesota. Farm pesticide runoff and untreated sewage has muddied the river on its way to the Gulf, even before it filters past the toxic gauntlet between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

Even if the dumping is in compliance at each of the 120-200 toxic sites along this section of the river—which many doubt (state funding for monitoring is inadequate, private monitoring cost-prohibitive; present practice relies mostly on the companies themselves to regulate)—no one knows the damage done by the combined dumping. “Nobody looks at the cumulative impact on the Mississippi River,” says Malek-Wiley.

The Clean Water Act, up for renewal in Congress in 1993, provides for monitoring at each plant in isolation, controlling pollution from point sources. Little attention has been paid either to combined effects or to nonpoint sources—runoff from agricultural lands, urban areas, construction, mining and forestry—which Claudia Copeland, writing in Congressional Research Services (CRS) Review in December 1991, calls “the most pervasive remaining unsolved water quality problems in this country.”

Companies still argue that dilution is the solution to pollution. The activists gathered here are familiar with this and other tired industry lines: “We just need to keep this landfill open long enough to bring in enough revenue to pay for shutting it down.” While it may be difficult to measure diluted toxins, a three-year study conducted by the state of Louisiana shows that more than 80 percent of fish and shellfish from the Mississippi River contain mer-

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cury and toxic chemicals. While the study stresses that the levels of toxins found were within the safety standards set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, residents are alarmed.

Malek-Wiley and others are participating in a new initiative, the Mississippi River Basin Alliance, which is forming to build the kind of pressure necessary to look at the river as a whole and change environmental policy. The Great Lakes region is the only area of the country where the pollution is monitored not just chemical-by-chemical or industry-by-industry but in the region as a whole.

In the year since its first meeting, February 20,1992, in St. Louis, the Mississippi River Basin Alliance has grown to include the Garden Clubs of America, Louisiana Environmental Action Network, the Indigenous Environmental Network, MACE (Mississippi Action for Community Education), Coalition for the Environment in St. Louis, the Minnesota Project the Tennessee Environmental Council, the Kentucky Resource Council, the American Indian Center in Milsteadt, Illinois, as well as American River, Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, Isaac Walton League and Audubon Society. With an emphasis on community-based organizations, the Alliance will look at water and air quality among other health and safety issues, economic development, and cultural and historical issues, all from the point of view of how the people who live in the basin are affected.

The Alliance aims to wield considerable influence, notes convener Bill Reading of the Sierra Club, as the river flows through states represented by “two-thirds of the Senate and three-fourths of the House of Representatives.”

OUR ROUTE TAKES us along River Road. Not all tourism is beignets and bands and Mardi Gras in the French Quarter. Touring the River Road antebellum plantations is the second biggest attraction around New Orleans.

Petrochemical plants have destroyed whole communities along River Road. Companies buy up land for the site, forcing out residents. A few families hang on, but surrounded by toxic plants, the holdouts are forced away. “It’s a calculated process that disintegrates the culture,” explains Nathalie Walker.

“It’s really bizarre,” Nick Spitzer recalls, “an old plantation house that is now the company headquarters, once devoted to sugar, now is devoted to the petrochemical industry. The people affected most are not the big house, but the people in the surrounding slave and sharecropper quarters.”

Steve Duplantier, an assistant professor of communications at Xavier University, calls up the image of Ghosts Along the Mississippi (1948, 1961), a book of photographs by Clarence John Laughlin. The people who survived … are being haunted by these new toxics along the river. It has a nasty and weird continuity, plantation big houses, gorgeous but symbols of oppression and misery, the very sites of the manor houses are now the locations of the offices of these chemical and fertilizer companies spewing out a different kind of oppression and poison.”

Guides and news reports described towns we did not see, with uncanny names like Reveilletown, Cut Off, and Good Hope, a community where all the homes but one are boarded up. In Sunrise, everybody was bought out except two people.

“I wasn’t prepared for entire towns that had been bought out to quiet complaints, wasn’t pre-

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pared for the poverty, for the concentration of the petrochemical industry that we found there. I live in New Jersey and I saw a lot of the petrochemical industry, and had never seen anything like this,” said Cathy Verhoff, director of operations for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“This is sacred land,” said one guide. It was a theme that would come up often throughout the weekend, in a powerful ceremony led by Native American leaders during the Friday night opening session as well as from Louisiana coastal residents.

The pollution of land and waterways has made impossible a way of life that depended heavily on fishing and agriculture to support a close-to-the-land existence.

We ate lunch along the River Road, at But Cut’s, named for the owner, who, following a tradition in these parts, carries his father’s nickname, earned for an injury he got sliding into home plate, explains GCTO leader Pat Bryant.

The meal of red beans and rice and fried catfish and shrimp stretches to feed us all. “I was impressed by them stopping for lunch and giving business to a people’s restaurant, rather than to one of the commercial chains.” said Jessie Deer in Water of Oklahoma. Only later does Bryant confess, “We didn’t know what the folks were going to eat.”

Crossing back across the Mississippi on the Luling-Destrehan Bridge, huge grain elevators line the banks of the river near the bridge. People living near the grain elevators have problems with particulate matter in the air, with increased incidence of respiratory problems and reports of asthma in children.

Continuing along the causeway through the LaBranche wetlands, we get a glimpse of the swamp, maintained only after great struggle by environmentalists. Much of the tupelo gum, willow, and cypress that house the herons, egrets, cranes, muskrats, and alligators has already been destroyed to make way for the petro giants.

A Ten-Mile Question Mark

“It must have been depressing,” said one conference goer, who had yet to make the tour. For some, it was. One man reportedly took to his room in disgust and despair, declining to attend the conference, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the mess. But, I didn’t find it so. We were in such great company, of so many strong people, several generations of activists, for once representative of our nation’s people, who are all doing something to stop environmental disaster. And, in some cases, we are win-

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ning.

Further upriver, in Wallace, Louisiana, residents have just succeeded in blocking Formosa Plastics from installing a $700 million rayon plant that would have devastated the town and dumped more toxic waste in the river. Formosa Plastics, a multinational corporation based in Taiwan, bought the Whitney plantation, and expected to get $425 million in tax concessions from the state. But after community pressure and a lawsuit forced an environmental impact statement, the company cancelled plans to build the rayon plant

Coalitions are essential to winning victories against major corporate projects, which wield huge budgets and political influence. And, says conference organizer Anne Braden, “Fighting environmental racism is potentially a very unifying issue; not automatically but potentially.”

Wallace residents sought out environmentalists to help win against Formosa Plastics. Preservationists from Evergreen Plantation, one of the best-preserved antebellum homes on River Road, joined in. Wilfred Greene, a seventy-year-old African American school principal in Wallace, describes one controversy over the name of the group, already chosen by residents, River Area Planning Group, RAP.

“We can’t get involved with you, you are a rap group,” said a few. But the name stayed, and together, “unified with difficulties,” they succeeded.

Greene articulates one principle for united efforts, a view shared by conference organizers. “Join hands, [but] don’t let anybody decide for you what’s got to be done in that community,” he says. “You do it, ask for help, but always hold the reins.”

Mutual work on common concerns has brought mutual respect. “He’s the wisest person that I know,” said Gad Martin, a chlorine campaign activist working for Greenpeace in New Orleans, of Mr. Greene.

The win in Wallace buoyed residents, as it did those of us gathered at the conference. Formosa Plastics still owns the land it purchased for the plant so residents continue to be on guard. And, says Martin, “We have not won for two reasons, we cannot pass on our problems [to a likely site in a Third World country], and people in Wallace still won’t have jobs.” Martin suggests a new initiative, trying to make connections with the historically black colleges to discuss economic development solutions.

Residents of Homer, Louisiana, who have formed Citizens Against Nuclear Trash (CANT), inspired other attendees, too. While their battle is far from over, residents of Center Springs and Forest Grove in Claiborne Parish, on the Arkansas border, have taken the lead in a coalition to stop a consortium from placing a uranium enrichment plant in Homer.

“One of the major contentions there [in Homer] is environmental racism,” says Michael Mariotte, of Nuclear Information Research Services, a Washington, D.C.-based research group. Louisiana Energy Services (LES), a five-member consortium whose central partner is URENCO, itself a partnership of British Nuclear Fuels, the government of Holland, and a number of German companies, is seeking permits from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to enrich uranium from commercial nuclear power plants.

In the process of fighting the permits, residents have won a commitment for the first-ever environmental racism hearing before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) panel. An NRC panel will hold an adjudicatory hearing, which differs from a traditional courtroom in that participants submit affidavits and briefs but testify only if called upon, explains Mariotte.

Residents are glad for the hearing and the delay it provides, if skeptical about the outcome. “The judges are NRC employees,” explains Homer real estate agent Toney Johnson, who is white and a member of CANT. “And they have never ruled against a single application.”

CANT activists have also sought other avenues to win their battle, electing a black representative, Roy Martis, to the police jury, the Louisiana equivalent of a county

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commission. “Most [residents] hadn’t been paying elections too much attention,” says Essie Youngblood, who lives near the proposed site. Redistricting helped, and residents organized to elect their own candidate.

And, notes Youngblood, the effort to stop the proposed plant “has improved the relationships. It may have divided some who want the plant, but the rest of us, black and white, we are much closer.”

What will the Clinton administration do about environmental racism in Homer? “We hope they will be a big help, we just don’t know. We put a ten-mile question mark behind that,” says Youngblood. “The coalition in New Orleans will be our greatest help.”

One reason Homer residents are waiting to see what the Clinton administration will do is Department of Energy appointee Hazel O’Leary. O’Leary is a top corporate affairs officer for Northern States Power Company, one U.S. member of the consortium seeking permits to open the uranium enrichment plant in Homer.

Northern States is also involved in the effort to site nuclear storage casks on Prairie Island where the Lakota Reservation is located in the upper reaches of the Mississippi. But Northern States’ involvement in these controversial projects had little impact during confirmation hearings.

Waste and Gore

Still, there’s a wary optimism that a new administration in Washington not openly hostile to the environmental movement will pave the way for confronting disparate treatment of people-of-color communities. The appointment of former Gore staffer Carol Browner of Florida to head EPA is considered a good sign.

Concerns about environmental racism “have even trickled up to the federal government,” says sociologist Robert Bullard, author of Dumping in Dixie, citing his selection to serve on the Clinton transition team’s Natural Resource and Environment cluster.

Conferees attending from East Liverpool, Ohio, went home December 6 to the news from Vice President-elect Al Gore that the Clinton administration would seek to halt a proposed East Liverpool waste incinerator until Congress investigates the plant’s safety. Though the company countered with a full-page New York Times ad, and in late December, protestors were getting arrested at the site, there is the feeling that environmental concerns are more likely to be heard than at any time during the past twelve years.

A major legislative initiative will be the re-introduction of the Environmental Justice Act. Gore was the Senate sponsor of the Environmental Justice Act of 1992, a measure which would have established a mechanism for dealing with high-impact areas of environmental pollutants. “You can have an area that is meeting the major laws and still be very hazardous, more often than not low-income or minority,” says Commission on Racial Justice staff member Charles Lee.

The bill, crafted with the aid of United Church of Christ Commission on Racial Justice Executive Director Rev. Ben Chavis, a conference co-chair, and other advo-

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cates, would require the Health and Human Services department to make a number of health assessments. Congressman John Lewis is planning to reintroduce the bill in 1993, once a new sponsor comes forward in the Senate.

Chavis was also appointed to the Clinton transition cluster on the environment. He and a few others from the conference touched base with the National Conference of Black State Legislators meeting at the Sheraton in downtown New Orleans. A natural for alliances, the NCBSL passed a resolution in support of SOC’s efforts. Legislator Bob Holmes of Georgia and former Alabama legislator Tony Harrison made their way over to the environmental justice gathering.

A National Guard for the Environment

It was just a decade ago that black residents of Warren County, North Carolina, became the first African-American citizens jailed for protesting environmental racism, describes Robert Bullard in his forthcoming book, Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots. A young woman, Kim Burwell, now twenty, who was eleven at the time she lay down in front of the truck carrying PCB-contaminated soil into Warren County, was honored in a special youth awards ceremony at the conference.

Bullard, whose Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality has become the textbook on environmental racism, has led the way in research since 1979. “The whole grassroots movement in the environmental movement” says Bullard, is “influencing the way that the national environmental organizations are talking about the environment. Even the EPA is now talking about it.”

“The movement has been very effective,” he says, but “there’s a lot of work that still needs to be done. The alliance between grassroots groups of color, and national organizations … is breaking down mistrust and stereotypes on both sides.

The convergence of the whole social justice and the environmental movement [has meant] more staff of color. Even though we are not totally satisfied with the numbers, there has been some movement diversifying the staffs and the boards.”

So while this conference feels like a beginning in many ways, it is also the fruition of at least a decade of focused work to shift the agenda of the environmental movement. The stereotypes of “elite crunchy granola types” and the “Audubon Society in khaki shorts” (Spitzer’s terms, which he admits may never have been fair) have shifted, and the movement has become more populist.

The convergence of the civil rights movement and the environmental movement is a necessity, welcomed by many. Says Domingo Gonzalez, of The Border Campaign, a grassroots group in Brownsville, Texas, who told conveners, “The time is long overdue for Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans and Asian Americans and progressive whites to unite throughout the Southern region. The environmental movement has reached the limits of its effectiveness; it will take the environmental justice movement to move things further.”

This gathering is informed by decades of experience, some of which was in support of the California farmworkers, echoed in familiar picketing at a Winn-Dixie grocery near the conference site during the event. Pesticide use which results in birth defects still plagues farmworkers’ families, and the grape boycott is still on.

We are rich in lessons learned from earlier struggles. When government officials say solving toxics problems is going to take time, conference organizer Pat Bryant recalls, “It’s the same thing they told us back in the sixties: we can get public accommodations and desegregate housing and schools, but we gotta go slow. We’ve been going slow, and that’s the problem. We’ve got to go fast.”

It was this sense of urgency that brought such large numbers to New Orleans. And while the meeting involved

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many veterans, its clearest hopeful sign was the overwhelming turnout of youth: five hundred high school students. College students formed their own caucus. Tensions were felt around the role of youth in the weekend’s program. A special Saturday morning agenda change was made to allow greater youth participation. The gathering brought several generations together and spawned youth activities back home. Shortly after the conference, Jessie Deer in Water reports the formation of YEA (Youth Environmental Awareness) among Indian youth who attended from Oklahoma. YEA has already organized its first activity, recycling Christmas trees to farmers for fish cover in ponds.

And, in addition to the Louisiana Attorney General’s office, the conference attracted other official involvement as well: from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Air Control Board.

Caucuses provided opportunities for white activists to reflect on the need for struggle against racism within white communities to build successful coalitions. The Indigenous Environmental Network was strengthened by coming together again within the New Orleans gathering, says Deer in Water, who works at Cherokee Community Initiative in Oklahoma.

The fourteen-member Asian American caucus stood together with spokesperson Cathy Verhoff, as she delivered their moving statement Sunday morning, teaching many present about Asian American culture. “We are exploding the model minority myth that keeps us in our place and explaining the history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the U.S., pointing out the diversity of our group—Indians, Filipinos, Laotians, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans from different parts of China, all of the nations of Southeast Asia, various communities in the Pacific Islands. We are standing together united and also with the people in the audience. We are [sic] still people the sweatshops, we are the textile workers, the food processors, we work in Silicon Valley. In 1945 our people were the victims of the worst environmental disaster in world history, and we are still reeling from the testing of atomic bombs in the Marshall Islands.”

The conference is only part of a major recent push in the South to keep justice issues central in the environmental movement. A coalition of grassroots environmental groups in EPA Region IV (Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee) was formed after activists took over the EPA Environmental Equity gathering in Atlanta September 14-15, 1992. One project the coalition hopes to undertake is the Neighbors Keepers Strike Force. It will provide mutual aid, with individuals and organizations serving once a month to help others and in turn calling upon the Strike Force to aid in their environmental fight, kind of “a national guard for the environment,” says Connie Tucker, who staffs the SOC Environmental Justice Project office in Atlanta. “The conference was just one highlight of a massive organizing effort to build a Southwide coalition for environmental justice.”

Overwhelmed by the huge attendance, organizers found it was impossible to distill an action plan and strategies on the spot. The Southern Manifesto, proposed by GCTO leader Pat Bryant, is a broad program in keeping with the understanding of the environment as all the life conditions of a community—clean air and water, safe jobs for all at decent wages, health care, education, equity, and justice. The Manifesto, which should be available soon with caucus recommendations and other conference materials, synthesizes some of these demands.

A follow-up meeting will be held March 27-28 in Birmingham to outline strategies and come up with an action plan. Likely priorities include: action toward a moratorium on siting new waste and other toxic facilities and demanding stricter limits on existing facilities. A campaign might focus on limiting pollution by the federal government, focusing on unbleached paper, for example. Other tough organizational questions to be wrestled with: How will the coalition continue? Should there be a parallel youth arm, or should young people be a part of a larger group?

“No conference is truly successful unless the ideas get put into life,” says Damu Smith, an African-American organizer on the Greenpeace staff who visited dozens of Southern communities working with SOC to bring people together. Smith found a community in Texas fighting the same company, sometimes dealing with the same person, as a community in North Carolina. He helped them share notes and strategy. “People are really doing their best under very difficult circumstances. The most important thing, in addition to multiracial unity, is to develop a strategy for preventing pollution, and an alternative strategy for economic development.”

A SECOND TOUR is organized, at night, for those who missed the first. Flares from the smoke stacks leap and glow, forming an even larger image in the dark.

“Prior to European contact not many native groups lived directly on the river,” says Duplantier. “It was fertile, but treacherous … No one knew better than the Indians the hydraulic power of the river. Today the power of those toxics is multiplied by the river.”

At night the Mississippi River’s reflection further obscures the dangerous poisons within. But, back across the water, with state meetings underway and more caucuses being formed, a multiracial movement that will change the river’s course is in full swing.

Ellen Spears is managing editor of Southern Changes.

Rosewood Massacre Survivors Win

By Ellen Spears

Vol. 16, No. 1, 1994, p. 12

Descendants of the black residents of Rosewood, Florida and survivors of the massacre that left at least eight dead and destroyed the town more than seventy years ago took their case to the state legislature in an effort to finally win compensation. At the close of the 1994 legislative session, they were victorious.

“It’s a matter of justice,” said Florida Senate sponsor Daryl Jones (D-Miami), “a symbol of the countless secret deaths that took place in an era that has slipped from view.” The state Senate’s 26-14 vote on April 8 supported a $2.1 million claim which will pay eleven survivors $150,000 each and provide other benefits, including scholarships, to descendants.

In January 1923, a white mob systematically burned down the town, claiming to be searching for a black man accused of assaulting a white woman. Terrorized survivors hid in the freezing piney woods outside the small Gulf Coast town, scattered to Tampa and Tallahassee, and left behind everything they owned. “The failure of elected white officials to take forceful actions to protect the safety and property of local black residents was part of a pattern in the state and throughout the region,” a state investigative team reported to legislators. Levy County Sheriff Robert Elias Walker did not control the mob, the investigators concluded, and Governor Cary Hardee went hunting while Rosewood burned.

The approval of the measure represents the first time a state legislature has voted to compensate victims of racial violence in the U.S. Though it was difficult to secure, the settlement indicates a possible route to redress when individual perpetrators of racist violence may not be charged or successfully prosecuted.

At the capitol in Tallahassee, the ten-year-old great-granddaughter of a Rosewood victim expressed the descendants’ response to the vote, saying, “We stand strong, proud and free, for we are the Rosewood family.”

Voting Rights—Failure of Commitment

By Ellen Spears

Vol. 16, No. 4, 1994, pp. 1-3

As we approach the 30th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, the quiet revolution that the Act has brought to the South is apparent, but public consensus about the racial fairness measures the law provides is shamefully lacking.

Acting on challenges brought by white voters who allege no harm to themselves, recent Supreme Court decisions and a round of redistricting lawsuits threaten to undo the most effective means to date of providing representation for African American and Latino voters who have endured a history of exclusion.

Believing that their 1994 election victory confirms white voter sentiment against race-based remedies, Republicans in Congress intend to implement policy initiatives that will undermine the movement toward racial equity. They started by eliminating the funding of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Another target is “Motor Voter.” Two bills have been introduced to repeal the 1993 National Voter Registration Act; one by Rep. Bob Stump (R-Ariz.) and another by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Seven states, including three of the most populous—California, Illinois and Pennsylvania—have failed to implement the law. Many of the states which implemented the law on schedule on January 1, 1995, failed to fully enact registration at public service agencies, a shortcoming which will disproportionately impact poor people and people of color.

Since 1965, many white Americans have expressed support for the broad principle of racial fairness, but continue to resist the practical steps necessary to achieve it. The racial chasm is nowhere more apparent than in

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the debate about voting.

Witness the blame numerous commentators have placed on redistricting-specifically the creation of “majority minority” districts—for the Republican takeover of Congress. Scapegoating minority voters for Democratic losses is worse than wrong. This inaccurate view not only undermines support for the Voting Rights Act, it prevents a clear analysis of the Democrats’ reversal of fortunes.

Setting the record straight are two studies, one by Allan J. Lichtman, professor of history at American University, and the other by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF). As Lichtman noted in a December 7, 1994, essay in the New York Times, “Democrats actually fared a bit better in the nine states with new black districts [Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia] than in the 41 states with no such districts.”

Democratic losses were worse in the U.S. Senate and in state governorships, for which voting is at-large and redistricting obviously plays no role, than in Congress, notes Lichtman. “The Democrats lost 36 percent of previously held Senate seats and about half of the governorships that were up for election in 1994.”

To boot, “even if the Democrats had retained every one of the House seats lost in the nine states that had new majority black districts-in complete opposition to the nationwide Republican surge—the Republicans still would have gained control of the House in 1994.”

The LDF report examines in detail the six districts lost by Democrats in 1994 in Mississippi, Georgia and North Carolina, concluding that “the Voting Rights Act helped save Democratic seats in Mississippi and Georgia, as well as in other states.” Comparing vote totals and the proportion of black population in the districts at stake with those in surrounding districts, the LDF’s analysis shows that had the African American population been spread among the two Democratic districts in northern Mississippi, the Democratic party probably would have lost both districts. The same is true in Georgia. “If the African American population had been spread among all seven Democratic seats in central and eastern Georgia instead of being concentrated …. the Democratic party could well have lost all of the districts.”

While all the long-term trends leading to the Republican takeover of Congress are still being analyzed, one fact is clear: Republicans organized and got out their vote. In mobilizing the surburban white male voters that provided the core of their support, Republican strategists and Christian Coalition allies relied not on a sea change in attitudes, but on exploiting patterns and resentments that have persisted for decades. “Not since 1964—not since Lyndon Johnson—have the majority of white people voted

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with the majority of people of color,” commented civil rights activist Anne Braden at the SRC anniversary meeting November 19.

The Republican animus is not directed just at the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, but at undoing policies that extend back to the New Deal. The goal, says Newt Gingrich ally Vin Weber, is “replacing a sixty-year-old framework.”

The nature of the “framework” that government will provide is at the center of national debate. If civil rights legislation is to be preserved—let alone expanded upon—within that framework, the key tasks in voting rights are at least threefold: defend the gains brought about by the Voting Rights Act; explore voting alternatives that grant full participation to minority voters still unrepresented; and change underlying attitudes that lead to white racial bloc voting, reengaging the battle for hearts and minds of white Americans.

Defend the Gains

Any strategy to defend the gains must understand that white bloc voting remains the major barrier to full democracy and that most of the increase in black officeholding is due to singlemember districts where black voters are in the majority. In a too-little-noticed but very important book published in 1994, Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman convened a host of voting rights historians, lawyers, and advocates to document the Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Princeton University Press). In this careful state-by-state survey documenting the success of the Act, Quiet Revolution recounts barriers both deliberately designed and not voluntarily changed. In most cases, as Davidson illustrates in his essay in this issue of Southern Changes [see page 4], single-member districts are the only effective tool for voters seeking to remedy a history of exclusion. Efforts to reject race-based remedies must be countered.

Likewise, the effort to repeal the Motor Voter law must be stopped. Full implementation, including at public service agencies, must be pressed in every state. Any effort to limit expansion of the electorate must be halted.

Explore Alternatives

Lani Guinier, once Bill Clinton’s nominee to become assistant attorney general for civil rights, has begun to bring conversation on ways to remedy minority exclusion in situations that do not lend themselves to single-member districts. Alternative methods, already at work in some jurisdictions, can allow voters to spread their votes among different candidates (cumulative or limited voting) or rank candidates according to preference (preference voting). By such methods, representation can be won for voters from social groups who remain underrepresented under the current system where each candidate must get 50 percent plus one. Alternatives to exclusionary systems must be further explored and tested.

Change Attitudes

But no set of remedies will ultimately succeed if our underlying attitudes remain polarized—if we cannot prepare our hearts and minds for governing in a way that celebrates diversity—including in the privacy of the voting booth.

Writing in Southern Changes in 1992, Julian Bond observed that “many of us recall an understanding [during the 1960s] that the mission of white progressives was to work and organize against racism in white middle- and working-class constituencies. That effort obviously didn’t get very far; the lack of success stemmed at least in part from lack of commitment.”

Failure of commitment remains with us. To get at the root causes that make voting remedies necessary, to succeed at the most difficult business of shortening the distance from professed principle to implementation, to begin rooting out racial demagoguery from elections will require a great deal. It will demand thoughtful new approaches, safe harbors for discussion, careful strategies, determined organizing, and coalition building. Most of all, it will require deciding—as many did to get us this far—that we must act.

The 1994 Lillian Smith Book Awards

By Ellen Spears

Vol. 16, No. 4, 1994, pp. 17-22

The 1994 Lillian Smith Book Awards were presented in Atlanta on November 18 to (from left) John Gregory Brown, winner for fiction, and Henry Louis Gates and John Dittmer, co-winners for non-fiction. Excerpts from their acceptance speeches follow.

A Modest Remedy

Reviewed by Ellen Spears

Vol. 18, No. 2, 1996 pp. 27-29

In Defense of Affirmative Action, by Barbara R. Bergmann (New Republic/Basic Books, 1996, 213 pages).

“Before we gave up on integration, we should have tried it,” wrote Jack E. White in “Why We Need to Raise Hell,” part of Time’s April 29 cover story on the death of school integration. The same must be said about affirmative action–we should have tried it.

In her straightforward book, In Defense of Affirmative Action, American University economist Barbara Bergmann makes the case for this modest remedy to centuries of white supremacy in the U.S., documenting the nation’s reluctant use of affirmative action and the unlikelihood of achieving fairness without it.

While surveys indicate that most white Americans

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see racial discrimination against black Americans today as comparatively minimal, an artifact of the past, Bergmann provides evidence that workplace “segregation by race and sex continues to be the rule rather than the exception.” For example, in a 1989 survey of workers in North Carolina, researchers found 84.7 percent of managers and 86.5 percent of supervisors work only with people of their own sex; 91.5 percent of managers and 86.4 percent of supervisors work only with their own race.

In the years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, although implementation of affirmative action programs was modest and halting, some progress towards equity was recorded. Black men’s wages moved from 69 percent of white men’s wages in 1967, to 79 percent in 1976, but have since relatively declined. Though the inflation- corrected wages of white men have been sliding since the mid-1970s, white men retain the superior position. Wages of black women have improved from 1967 to the present, but have not kept pace with white women. In 1995 white women’s wages were 73 percent and black women’s wages were 63 percent of white men’s wages. Even when statistically adjusted for nondiscriminatory factors, the gap remains.

Carefully argued, backed up by useful data, and enriched by her own research, the resource Bergmann offers adds to the arsenal of any defender of affirmative action. The book charts the sorry performance of selected large U.S. corporations in hiring women and African Americans. Bergmann also takes to task the poor oversight record of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), where a staff of 918 supervises nondiscrimination in 150,000 workplaces with federal contracts which employ one-fourth of the U.S. workforce. The OFCCP wields more power than the primary other government agency charged with examining equal opportunity, the EEOC, which is limited to responding to complaints, only a tiny portion of which are brought to trial each year. Yet, the OFCCP enforcement effort has been understaffed, is poorly managed, lacks vigor, and has few effective ways of encouraging compliance, writes Bergmann. The list of forty-one firms barred from receiving federal contracts since 1972 includes only four major companies–Prudential Insurance, Firestone, Uniroyal, and Timkin Roller Bearing. All four were debarred during the Carter administration, and none longer than three months. And, debarment virtually ceased during the Reagan-Bush years, she points out.

Despite the failure to seriously implement remedial measures and a twenty-year campaign to malign affirmative action by tagging it to quotas and preferences, she finds some good news. In her own research reported in the book, Bergmann finds that only 11 percent of those responding to a scenario about race segregation want no remedy to be drawn. Remedial actions that receive broad support include exhortations to personnel managers to consider blacks (89 percent support) and women (84 percent support) and recruit more black applicants (69 percent agree) and women applicants (52 percent agree). But when asked if personnel managers ought to “try to fill at least 10 percent of the vacancies with women and blacks who have been judged competent,” the support drops to 34 percent of respondents for women applicants and 32 percent for black applicants. Of course, majority support was not the criterion when affirmative action measures were first mandated; only acquiescence was required.

Bergmann picks apart the whole range of anti-affirmative action arguments. She attempts to dismantle the contentions of those who never supported affirmative action and conservative black spokespeople, a la Clarence Thomas, who claim that affirmative action should be discontinued as demeaning to its intended beneficiaries. In her research among black students, “By a majority of 64 percent to 12 percent, the students thought that affirmative action did more good than harm; 24 percent said they believed it made no difference. However, 82 percent thought that its abolition would make it harder for African Americans to get jobs.”

In addition, she argues, precious few alternatives have been offered to affirmative action–and each has limitations: help to the disadvantaged, enforcing the laws against discrimination, education and training, testing, and prayer. Bergmann tackles head-on the now fashionable argument that class-based programs are a fairer substitute for race- or gender-based programs.

While polling suggests the class-based remedies are more palatable, especially to white Americans, the same forces that oppose affirmative action programs are out gunning for the class-based remedies as well. A Congress that has a vindictive approach to aid to families, is hostile to financial aid to schools and students, would like to reduce medicaid and social security, and has only grudgingly passed a meager election-year increase in the mini-

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mum wage, can hardly be counted on to vigorously pursue aid to the disadvantaged, or other meaningful alternatives. Besides, as Bergmann and others have pointed out, though such programs are very much needed to cure poverty, they will not, by themselves, end discrimination. That takes a targeted remedy.

Affirmative action is not among the top ten issues that concern U.S. voters, but as it provides a sharp divide between pivotal Democratic and Republican voters, there is every likelihood that it will be used as a wedge in the 1996 elections. Polls suggest that only a minority want to outlaw it. The Feminist Majority Foundation asked voters in 1995 about the California “Civil Rights” Initiative which will be on the November ballot and reads: “The state will not use race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin as a criterion for either discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group in the operation of the State’s system of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” The results showed 82 percent in support of the deceptive language, which would end affirmative action in that state. Yet, when asked if they wanted to abolish affirmative action, only 29 percent agreed.

In closing, Bergmann comes back to an additional bit of hope that we have to build on: “a majority of Americans do want to live in a country that is fair.”

Bergmann has not limited her advocacy to the book. She is touring the country debating Terry Eastland, author of Ending Affirmative Action: The Case for Colorblind Justice. Anyone who cares about ending racial inequity ought to have Bergmann’s facts and arguments at the ready–and join her in the debate.

Ellen Spears is managing editor of Southern Changes. She is also working on a research project at the Southern Regional Council on attitudes toward remedies to racial inequity.

Prejudices and Hopes

By Ellen Spears

Vol. 19, No. 1, 1997 pp. 28-29, 31

The personal stories in Will The Circle be Unbroken? remind us how recently American apartheid shed the force of law, and at what costs the changes were extracted. These recollections inevitably lead us to consider how things have changed and to identify the work that remains to be done if we are to create an equal society. What do Americans today have to say about current racial attitudes?

“It is harder to put away the past than what we are trying to make it. If it was my people that got burned and beaten, their houses burned, it would be hard for me to forget, in just a few years.” White man, Raleigh, North Carolina, January, 1996.

“I grew up in Atlanta, and each group knew their place and the limits of social interaction were understood.” White man, Gainesville, Georgia, early 1996.

“I am more prejudiced than my parents.” Twenty-two-year old white hotel clerk, Atlanta, April, 1996.

“We’re not as prejudiced as we used to be and, hopefully, that trend will continue.” White woman, Gainesville, Georgia, January, 1996.

In Atlanta recently to plan a conference on race and region, veteran South-observer John Egerton commented on the persistent problems of race. “What people are looking for is hope and a few tools to build on previous decades of racial progress,” he said.

Seeking fresh hope and new tools, SRC conducted in 1996 a national public opinion survey and focus groups to better understand racial attitudes. The quotations at the start of this essay come from four focus groups with white Southerners conducted by John Doble Research Associates. The national telephone poll surveyed 1216 randomly selected adults in September, 1996. A further analysis of the survey data was carried out by Tom Smith, Director of the General Social Survey at the National Opinion Research Center. The project is supported by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

We focused on documenting attitudes of white Americans toward the race-based remedies which, when applied, have brought a modicum of progress toward equity for people of color and women. Now these remedies are being withdrawn.

We sought not to shape the outcome, but to step back and listen. What we have heard offers more hope than anticipated. Despite the contemporary assault on racial pluralism, there exists broad public support for measures redressing racial discrimination.

Like current racial attitudes in the United States, the survey results are exceedingly complex and often contradictory. Most people say that much progress has been made in race relations, and most want to reduce racial inequalities.

“But while public support for reducing racial inequality is broadly based, it is not especially deep,” says John Doble. “While Americans see racial tensions and racial inequalities as serious social problems,” adds Torn Smith, “they do not give these high priority along the spectrum of public concerns.”

But the research shows that the American public also does not give high priority to abolishing affirmative action programs. Moreover, in the face of difficult trade-offs, large majorities said they favor a host of remedies–some race-based, such as financial aid for black college students (75 percent) and job training for blacks who lack skills (78 percent); some class-based, such as tax breaks to low-income families for college tuition (84 percent); and some anti-discrimination measures, such as tough legal action against companies practicing discrimination in hiring and promotions (71 percent).

“Despite the low priority they give racial matters, Americans are troubled by the state of race relations,” says Smith. “Few people think that America is a color-blind society in which prejudice and discrimination no longer prevail.”

The chasm dividing the views of contemporary black and Hispanic Americans from those of white people is evident on various measures. “Most white Americans said black people do not face a great deal of racial discrimination in employment, education, housing or political representation,” notes Doble. “For example, 61 percent of African Americans say blacks face a great deal of discrimination compared to 27 percent of whites.”

Among minority groups, black people are seen as facing the most discrimination, with 32 percent of all respondents saying there is a great deal of discrimination and 51 percent more saying there is some discrimination. Twenty-seven percent say that there is a great deal of discrimination against American Indians, 24 percent against Hispanics, 19 percent against women, 14.5 percent against Asians, and 14 percent against whites.

Defining affirmative action

Public opinion towards race-based governmental policies to address racial inequality defies simple portrayal. “People do not have a position on affirmative action in general, but varying points of view on the many distinct policies that fall under this term,” says Smith.

“There is confusion about exactly what the term `affirmative action’ means, with upwards of one-third of the public not knowing what the term means and another 22 percent saying it means a quota or forced hiring. Nevertheless,” says Doble, “affirmative action should be continued, people said, by a margin of 56 percent to 32 percent.

The data does suggest frames for discussing affirmative action that garner the broadest support. “[S]upport for affirmative action is highly conditional on how the policy is presented and what steps are actually called for,” says Smith. “Support is greatest when measures emphasize equal opportunity, reject the use of quotas, highlight women, and stress the qualifications of members of the targeted group.” Support is weakest when measures are described as quotas or preferential treatment, mention only racial minorities, and refer to possible discrimination against whites or white men.

While differences between attitudes in the South and the rest of the country persist, explains Doble, “they are far less prominent than in the past.” For example, residents of the South and Northeast are just as likely to favor affirmative action (57 percent), though Midwesterners are more likely to show favor (61 percent). Those in the West are least likely (34 percent).

In the political arena, three out of four Americans believe it is in the best interests of the country if our elected officials reflect the racial and ethnic background of the entire population. And, if the failure to create minority majority districts were to lead to a sharp decline in the number of black members of Congress, people favor drawing districts that provide opportunities to minority voters by a margin of 58 to 29 percent.

Racial attitudes are more subject to change than one might expect, a fact that other researchers have noted. Given additional information about the impact of eliminating remedies to discrimination, opinions do change, researchers noted. For example, while only 44 percent of Americans favored the idea of reserving college openings for black students, people changed their minds and gave the proposal majority support (65 percent), if not doing so would mean black students will be badly underrepresented.

Opinion research should never be viewed as defining the boundaries of the possible; it was precisely by challenging the confines of public opinion and policy that the civil rights movement brought progress. More recently, Duke opponents in the 1991 Louisiana governor’s race, chose to ignore pollsters recommendations that he be challenged based on his failure to pay taxes, rather than tackle his white supremacist message head-on.

Nor is public opinion polling unerring as a measure of what people will do in practice. Witness the well-documented (Virginia Gov. Douglas) Wilder Effect in election year polling: voters will tell a pollster they will vote for a black candidate and walk into the voting both and vote for the white one. Nonetheless, analyzing this data in light of other findings, a portrait emerges, useful to those who would work for change.

What the data seem to suggest is a vast middle group willing to be led to oppose or support affirmative action; not a public clamoring for abolition. “Leadership is critical,” says John Doble.

“The losses that civil rights in general and affirmative action in particular have suffered result mostly from their defenders being outmaneuvered and outgunned,” concludes Tom Smith. “But uprooting bigotry and equalizing opportunities are not easy tasks. Racism is deeply entrenched, group disparities are large, and efforts to alleviate racial inequality are seen by some as antithetical to core American values such as individualism and even equal treatment itself,” says Smith.

Whites interviewed in focus groups remember little about segregation from experience or history. “White Americans tend to see the issue of race relations, not in historic terms, but rather through a case-by-case, pragmatic, a historical lens.”

Perhaps listening to the local people who made civil rights history recorded in Will The Circle Be Unbroken? can help. Not only do their words provide definition to the recent past, the hope that fueled their efforts–against even greater odds–is needed as we tackle the next great challenges in winning full equality.

SRC Survey Results Suggest Broad Support for Fairness Programs

By Ellen Spears

Vol. 20, No. 1, 1998 p. 23

“The country is witnessing a concerted and well-planned campaign to destroy affirmative action for women and minorities. In the end that effort will fail, partly because those behind it are totally misreading public opinion.”

– Veteran pollster Louis Harris, writing in The Future of Affirmative Action, 1996.

By now we know that despite the momentum that appears against it in the courts and the press, polls reveal a majority of Americans support affirmative action. An even greater number support specific programs that assist women and people of color in overcoming the effects of present and past discrimination.

As evidenced by the vote on the Houston, Texas initiative in November, 1997, the language of the debate is key: “Shall the Charter of the City of Houston be amended to end the use of affirmative action for women and minorities in the operation of the City of Houston employment and contracting, including ending the current program and any similar programs in the future?” When Houston voters faced that question, rather than the misleading preferential treatment language of Proposition 209, they voted 54.5 percent to 44.5 percent to retain the Minority, Women, and Disadvantaged Business Enterprises (MWDBE) and related programs sponsored by the city.

Public opinion on affirmative action is complex : what various constituencies are willing to do to remedy the effects of past and present discrimination has a great deal to do with how they perceive the facts about and causes of discrimination. Polling data from surveys conducted by the Southern Regional Council and others illustrate some of the nuances in public attitudes about the debate. SRC’s survey was a national telephone poll conducted by John Doble Research Associates which questioned 1216 randomly selected adults in September, 1996. A further analysis of the survey data was carried out by Tom Smith, Director of the General Social Survey at the National Opinion Research Center. The project is supported by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

“Several attitudes are associated with more support for affirmative action policies,” writes Tom Smith, “favoring liberal priorities, believing that inequality results from discrimination and not from negative personal traits, agreeing that many groups are discriminated against and that black people are discriminated against in many areas of life.”

Whites who see more discrimination against black Americans support more measures to remedy racial inequalities. For example, 56 percent of whites who see a great deal of discrimination favor reserving openings in college for black students, versus only 32 percent of whites who see none.

There is a strong gender gap in support for affirmative action. Despite widespread belief to the contrary, nearly half of men support affirmative action (48 percent). And 15 percent more, almost two-thirds of women (63 percent) support affirmative action.

The survey results suggest frames for discussing affirmative action that garner the broadest support. “[S]upport for affirmative action is highly conditional on how the policy is presented and what steps are actually called for,” says Smith. “Support is greatest when measures emphasize equal opportunity, reject the use of quotas, highlight women, and stress the qualifications of members of the targeted group. Support is weakest when measures are described as quotas or preferential treatment, mention only racial minorities, and refer to possible discrimination against whites or white men.”

“Opposition to affirmative action,” notes Tom Smith, “centers more on a caricature of it rather than on a balanced description of the policy.” The talking points (page 24) incorporate the findings from this and other polling.

What both researchers stress is the need for leadership in activating public opinion in support of affirmative action. “Leadership is critical,” concludes John Doble. “Judging from the breadth and depth of support people gave to remedies to reducing racial inequality, the public will respond to a call from leadership. There is broad, latent support for a host of measures. But the depth of public support suggests most white Americans do not see this as an urgent issue that demands national action. If leaders choose to ignore this issue, most Americans will, the results suggest, silently acquiesce.”

Ellen Spears is managing editor of Southern Changes.

Tracking Hurts Children

By Ellen Spears

Vol. 21, No. 1, 1999 p. 19

Several Southern state legislatures are considering controversial school voucher proposals, which public education advocates call a thinly veiled ploy to undermine public school funding and secure public funding for religious schools. Bills introduced in Florida, Texas, and Georgia would deduct money from state school budgets to fund private school tuition and are being targeted at minorities and students at low performing schools, according to opponents of the initiatives.

“The South is the next big area for vouchers,” said Jamie Daly of People for the American Way, “both Florida and Texas are going to be the next big battles.”

Daly, a critic of voucher programs, is most concerned about Florida’s proposal. On March 25, in a mostly partisan 71-49 vote, the Florida House approved a limited voucher program. It will now move to the Republican-controlled Senate where it is expected to face stronger opposition. Supported by Governor Jeb Bush and Lt. Governor Frank Brogan, former Florida commissioner of education, the bill would provide “opportunity scholarships.”

The legislation has generated an opposition group, the Florida Coalition for Public Education, which includes educators, teacher unions, principals’ organizations, and parent groups, like the PTA. “Pro-voucher legislators say they are trying to help poor kids,” said Florida state PTA President-elect Patty Hightower, “but really they are trying to buy themselves out of having to provide an adequate educational system for all students.”

Floridians for School Choice advertises the A+ program on its web site as “publicly funded scholarships to some of the most deserving students in the state.”

Texas is anticipating a prolonged fight over similar measures. Governor Bush’s brother in Texas, Governor George Bush, is also supporting a voucher program, though the bill most likely to receive attention has not yet been filed. Ted Bivins (R-Amarillo) is planning to introduce a pilot project, again targeted at schools with consistently low average student scores on standardized tests.

Carolyn Boyle of the Texas Coalition for Public Schools, which includes thirty groups that oppose private school vouchers, said “even a pilot project is a bad idea. There is not enough money to pay for the public schools now,” Boyle said. “Texas is rural, and there are no private schools,” Boyle continued.

Boyle sees the tide shifting against vouchers, even among traditional supporters. “Legislators are realizing that this would take public money away for private schools,” said Boyle, “Even a lot of Republicans are changing their minds.”

While efforts to pass voucher programs failed in Virginia and Mississippi, two Georgia proposals have provoked debate. One of the bills, filed by state Senator Clay Land (R-Columbus), called the Early HOPE Scholarship Act of 1999, was named for the immensely popular college scholarship program established under former Georgia Governor Zell Miller.

The proposal, which failed in committee, would have allowed up to 90 percent of the state’s per pupil allotment to be given to an individual low-income elementary or middle school student at schools which test below national standards for three years. Under the proposal, tuition could be used at a private school or at an “adequate public school” nearby.

Georgia’s first-term Democratic Governor Barnes has committed to establishing a task force on education to develop a comprehensive approach for school improvement in the state.

“Vouchers would only undermine the financial strength of our schools and our already weakened rural public schools,” said Brian Kintisch, director of the Macon-based Center for Law and Education.

“The majority of public school students in Georgia could never take advantage of vouchers,” Kintisch said, “because they live in rural areas without access to private schools. There could be no benefit for a public school student in a rural area, whether white or black, rich or poor.”

Ellen Spears is managing editor of Southern Changes.

Affirmative Action Battle Hits Sunshine State

By Ellen Spears

Vol. 22, No. 1, 2000, pp. 19-20

More than 11,000 students, teachers, union leaders, and grandmothers marched to the Florida State Capitol on March 8, 2000 to register their opposition to a two-pronged assault on affirmative action: Sacramento businessman Ward Connerly’s latest state initiative drive and Republican Gov. Jeb Bush’s “One Florida” plan. The Florida fight is being shaped by presidential election-year politics and spurring fresh activism in the Sunshine State.

Recognizing that affirmative action will not be easily eliminated through state legislative action (see Amy Wood’s articles in Southern Changes, Spring 1998 and Summer 1999), opponents of affirmative action have sought other means-initiatives and executive orders. Florida is facing both.

The “Florida Civil Rights Initiative” (FCRI) is actually a package of four constitutional amendments that would end consideration of race in overcoming discrimination in state hiring, contracting, and college admissions. FCRI has gathered 10 percent of the requisite signatures. A judicial review in mid-April will consider two questions: whether the initiative deals with a single subject and whether the ballot language is clear. Though Michigan, Oregon, and Colorado are potential targets, Florida is the only state where Connerly’s organization, the American Civil Rights Institute, is attempting such an initiative this year.

After winning in Washington state in 1998 where nearly 89 percent of the population is white, Connerly had several reasons to choose Florida for the next attempt to spread his anti-affirmative action ballot campaign. One of the few Southern states with a citizen initiative process (others are Mississippi and Arkansas), Florida boasts multiracial demographics much like California, where the “California Civil Rights Initiative” succeeded in 1996. The state also ranks high in the number of elderly voters, who tend to show less support for affirmative action remedies.

A win in this heavily urbanized Southern state with a large African-American population would be significant. Said Connerly in an on-line interview March 27, Florida is a

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“hotly contested state in the presidential race…[being the] fourth largest state with all those other factors that I mentioned is tremendous.”

Governor Jeb Bush, whose brother Governor George W. Bush of Texas has all but secured the Republican nomination for president, has positioned the “One Florida” plan as an alternative to the outright ban that would result from Connerly’s initiative. Like the initiative, the Bush program targets state hiring, public contracting and public education. A controversial ingredient in the plan is the “Talented 20” program, which guarantees admission to the state’s public colleges and universities to students who graduate in the top 20 percent of their classes. But Florida colleges already have an open admissions policy, and some of the low-achieving schools with high minority populations purported to benefit from the program do not offer all of the nineteen college prep courses the students need to qualify.

Some believe that the Bush plan was motivated by the fear that the Connerly initiative would greatly increase election turnout by women and minorities. Bush’s “One Florida” plan “was generated clearly to be an effort to minimize female and minority voters at the polls in November,” said Leon Russell, past president of the Florida NAACP Conference of Branches.

Tallahassee Sit-in

When Bush proposed “One Florida,” he didn’t bank on the vigor and militancy of the opposition, said Russell. Utilizing a variety of tactics-a sit-in, hearings, protests, and legislative strategies-the new movement in Florida is working to retain fairness programs. State Sen. Kendrick Meek (D-Miami) and Rep. Tony Hill (D-Jacksonville) sat in at Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan’s office January 18-19 in Tallahassee, forcing Gov. Jeb Bush to delay his executive order ending affirmative action. The sit-in brought public hearings before a Select House-Senate committee in Tallahassee, Tampa, and Miami. A Board of Regents decision in Orlando February 17 to pass the educational provisions of the Bush plan faces a state administrative challenge brought by the NAACP to be heard in April.

Bush has already altered (in the cabinet departments he controls) the way state contracts are awarded. White-owned firms already do 98 percent of the state contracting, according State Senator Daryl Jones (D-South Dade), a member of the Florida Conference of Black State Legislators. Commercial contractors, represented by the Florida Associated General Contractors Council, are supporting the Bush plan and the ballot initiative.

A broad coalition, Floridians Representing Equity and Equality (FREE), is taking the offensive. FREE helped to organize the March 8 rally and is gathering signatures for a pro-affirmative action ballot measure, possibly next year. Legislative proposals include two wage equity bills that make up the Fair Pay Act of 2000, but legislative outcomes are unpredictable since sixty-three of the 160 Florida legislators must retire this year due to term limits.

The real test of the state politics of affirmative action may come in November, when Florida’s twenty-five electoral votes are at stake. In neighboring Georgia, a Republican candidate’s attack on affirmative action helped galvanize large black voter turnout, propelling Democratic Governor Roy Barnes to a win in 1998.

Ellen Spears is managing editor of Southern Changes.