Paying the Price In Pickens County

By Kelly Dowe

Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 13-14

When 69-year-old Julia Wilder of rural Pickens County, Alabama, was allowed to transfer from the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women to a work release program in Tuskegee last January, she praised God in thanksgiving.

“I thank God for opening the minds of the people here to help us. I knew he would work in his own way,” said the elderly black woman. She and her longtime fellow civil rights worker, 51-year-old Maggie Bozeman, were imprisoned Jan. 11 for a 1979 conviction on three counts of voting fraud. All-white Pickens juries had found them guilty of marking ballots for elderly and illiterate blacks in the 1978 Democratic primary and runoff. Circuit Judge Clatus Junkin sentenced Mrs. Wilder to the maximum five years in prison, and Mrs. Bozeman to four. It was the stiffest vote fraud sentence in the memory of state officials.

After the women failed in their three-year process of appeals to state courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, they made an eleventh-hour plea to Junkin for probation. When he refused and immediately dispatched them to Tutwiler, the state’s penitentiary for women, a public outcry by civil rights workers and black political leaders reached a crescendo. State officials, including Gov. Fob James, hurriedly met and came up with the Tuskegee arrangement. On Jan. 22, 11 days after entering prison, the women moved from their common cell to a mobile home and jobs in Tuskegee. There they remain, living quiet lives under the guardianship of Macon County Sheriff Lucius Amerson, no doubt comforted, but still incarcerated.

If the women were thankful for this bit of clemency by the state, they surely appreciated its irony as well. Convicted and jailed as they were under a system which has no standardized mechanism for prosecuting voting violators, and which almost never imprisons those transgressors it convicts, the Pickens County women grabbed the brass ring. They got to serve time for everyone.

Consider:

* In 1979, a federal grand jury indicted sixteen people in Randolph County in east Alabama on charges of voting violations in a 1978 sheriff’s election. The charges included conspiracy, vote buying, casting false ballots, soliciting illegal absentee ballots, and voting more than one time by an individual. Of the sixteen, seven pleaded guilty and received fines ranging from $250 to $500 and suspended sentences. Two more were found guilty in federal trials and received thousand dollar fines and suspended sentences. A tenth person, Randolph County Sheriff Charlie Will Thompson, was convicted on seven counts of conspiracy and vote buying. His sentence: a thousand dollar fine and three months in jail.

* Secretary of State Don Siegelman received more than eighteen complaints about municipal elections in 1980. These included charges of persons who had moved to other states remaining on the voting rolls in Florala; a candidate in Headland having absentee ballots distributed and cast illegally; vote buying in Woodville; and misused absentee ballots in the towns of Fyffe, Moulton, Double Springs, Bridgeport, Hamilton and Haleyville, among other allegations. Siegelman said that as far as he knows, none of these situations has resulted in convictions.

* An investigator with the Alabama district attorney’s office took statements from more than twenty Sylacauga area residents after the 1978 Coosa County election. The statements alleged coercion by elected officials, illegal registration of non-residents and vote buying. Neither the Alabama district attorney nor the attorney general, however, both of whom were given copies of the statements. pursued the matter into court.

* Circuit Judge Clatus Junkin of Pickens County gave the police chief of nearby Haleyville a sixmonth suspended sentence in a vote fraud case recently. Junkin says the circumstances of the case were different from those of the Bozeman-Wilder case. Anyway, he said, the police chief had admitted his guilt, which Mrs. Bozeman and Mrs. Wilder never did.

In the absence of a statewide elections commission or fair campaign practices commission in Alabama, the handling of vote law violators obviously is as inequitable as it is varied.

Said Siegelman: “Alabama law is so diversified and decentralized, it puts the prosecutorial decisions in the hands of local, elected officials. The (state) attorney general has been reluctant to get involved for political reasons.

“When it gets down to the district attorney level, many of them are hesitant to pursue vote fraud cases. They are elected officials and they are prosecuting people for election offenses. From a district attorney’s standpoint, they just don’t like election cases.”

Siegelman pointed to further limitations imposed by Alabama law.

“You have to take prima facie evidence to a judge, showing there were enough illegal votes cast to make a difference in the outcome of the election. The judge will order the examination of the ballots, if it’s a county with paper ballots, or the voting machines, if it’s a county with machines.

“But to do that, you would either have to have direct knowledge (of voting fraud) or a list of voters. Unfortunately, that list is locked up and sealed inside the voting machine or ballot box. It’s a Catch 22 situation which deters any cases filed on the basis of vote fraud.”

As for the sentences of the hapless Pickens County women, “I think they are out of line for the type of crime they are alleged to have committed,” Siegelman said.

“Obviously any act that results in votes being stolen or thwarting of the Democratic process must be punished. But in this case the sentences seemed to be out of line with other acts committed by other people in other parts of the state.”

The convictions of Wilder and Bozeman stemmed from the assistance with absentee ballots they gave to thirty-nine elderly and illiterate voters in the 1978 Sep-

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tember Democratic primary and runoff elections. Using testimony of local voting officials and thirteen absentee voters, the prosecutors tried to show at the trials that the women had used the ballots of the old people to vote many times for candidates of their own choosing.

The Pickens County circuit clerk testified that many individuals requesting absentee ballots asked her to send their ballots not to their homes but to the address of either Mrs. Bozeman or Mrs. Wilder. All ballots mailed to those addresses were cast for precisely the same candidates, an investigator for the county district attorney said. He said that applicants whose requests for absentee ballots were signed with an “X” often signed the ballot with a legible signature, or vice versa. A Tuscaloosa notary public testified that he notarized, at his office, many applications for absentee voting that Wilder and Bozeman brought him during the two elections.

Prosecutors called to the witness stand thirteen elderly voters for whom absentee votes had been cast. The testimony of many was garbled and confusing, and several changed their stories back and forth depending on whether the questions were being asked by the prosecution or the defense. However, four consistently said they had not voted by absentee ballot, and the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals pointed to their testimony when it refused to overturn Mrs. Wilder’s convictions. The most damaging testimony was that of Sophia Spann, 79, whose application and ballot were signed with an “X”, and who said she always voted at the polls and not by absentee ballot. Moreover, she testified that she could read and write and did not spell her name as it was written on both documents. She testified that she did not know Mrs. Wilder, whose signature was on her application to vote absentee. Mrs. Spann said Maggie Bozeman had visited her on election day to find out if she had voted.

Robert Goines, 87, testified he had applied for an absentee ballot and made an “X” on the application, which Mrs. Wilder witnessed. But he said that although he had seen the ballot, he never filled it in or signed it, because he could not write. He said he didn’t give anyone permission to vote for him. Mrs. Lucille Harris testified that Mrs. Wilder brought her a paper to sign so she wouldn’t have to go to the polls. But she said she never received a ballot in the mail, and that Mrs. Wilder didn’t visit her again. Lula DeLoach testified she signed an application for absentee ballot, which Mrs. Wilder brought to her house, but she d id not mark any ballot. She said Mrs. Wilder had told her she could “sign the paper” and “fix the paper for me,” which Ms. DeLoach said she did not object to.

Mrs. Wilder and Mrs. Bozeman pleaded innocent to the charges against them. Mrs. Wilder testified at her trial she often helped people to vote by absentee ballot in the 1978 elections. She said she often picked up applications for absentee ballots at the circuit clerk’s office, which she distributed herself or through her workers. But she said she never had the absentee ballots of other voters sent to her own box unless the voter requested her to.

She said she would often have an exchange like this with a potential absentee voter: “‘What kind of election is this?’ I would say, ‘Well, it’s the Democratic.’ And they would say, ‘That’s the way I want to vote.'”

“You reckon you will be able to be at the polls?”

“They would say, ‘No. You know I can’t get around.”

“And I said, ‘Well, would you like for me to show you how you can vote without getting down there?’

“‘ Yeah.'”

She said she would offer to take the application back to the clerk’s office once the voter filled it out, and that the clerk would mail the voter a ballot.

“And most of the time, ‘Would you like for the ballot to come to you?’

“And they would answer no, that they weren’t able to, you know, get it back to me or nobody else, and they would say, ‘No, I can’t get it to you.’

“Would you like for me to–What would you like for me to do–let it come to my box, or how would you want it done?

“‘Let it come to your box.'” She said she would agree to that and to get the ballot back to the absentee voter. She said that when she or her workers signed names to absentee ballots, it was with the permission of the individual and that the voter would “touch their hand to the pen.” She said in such visits she took along a sample ballot fo the Alabama Democratic Conference, the major black political organization in the state, but filled out the ballot only as instructed by the absentee voter.

The unanswered question is: Why did the state, which turns a blind eye to so many accused voting offenders, allow the Pickens district attorney to throw the book at these two women? One marvels at the state’s self-contradiction: First it flings them into confinement, but immediately it fishes them out and sets them up in a work release program in a town at the other end of the state. And not just to any town, but to Tuskegee, the home of Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, a town with a politically prominent black mayor and a black sheriff, a town which would give comfort and even honor to the two women. Did this transfer amount to a pardon? Or was it a sort of apology to the women for their having to take the stripes for all voting offenders?

Today, Mrs. Wilder works at a senior citizens center, and Mrs. Bozeman teaches at a center for retarded children. Their attorneys continue to seek post-conviction relief.

It could be argued that in a fifty-eight percent white, rural county, where most elected officials are white, the conviction and jailing of two black political organizers would not bring that much negative political pressure on the white district attorney, the judge, or the jury. Many of those who testified against Mrs. Bozeman and Mrs. Wilder made it plain they would not have voted at all had it not been for the women’s efforts. Many did not know what an absentee ballot was. Yet they, and other poor, black residents of Pickens County, are a likely group from which any opposition to white elected officials would logically come.

Attorney Solomon Seay thinks the prospect of this opposition becoming organized was the motivation for the vigorous prosecution and stiff sentences given the two women. Forty-two percent of the voters can’t determine an election, he says, but if they’re organized they can influence the results. In asking for dismissal of the case, Seay and the fifteen character witnesses he put on the stand have charged that the case was racially motivated and was contrived to halt black voter registration in Pickens County.

“I think if black people do not seize upon this opportunity to launch a statewide, effective voter registration campaign to register every qualified black person in this state to vote, we will have missed a golden opportunity,” Seay said.

“That’s what this is all about–the efforts of two old black women to assist functionally illiterate aged and infirmed blacks to cast their votes.”

Kelly Dowe its a freelance writer who lives in Birmingham, Alabama.

More Than Steel Mills Are Silent

By Kelly Dowe

Vol. 4, No. 4, 1982, pp. 3-5

Several times, thinking about it all, I’ve been taken back to the First Presbyterian Church in Montgomery.

It is a particular Sunday in the early 1960’s that I remember. I must have been eleven. I was waiting in our pew in the middle section of the cavernous sanctuary for services to begin, my family nested around me. My mother and my brother sat on one side, and two great-aunts, whose husbands, my uncles, were an elder and a deacon in the church, sat on the other. The air was cool and still, and in the enormous room with its high ceilings and dim light, where stained-glass and brass appointments forever needed polishing, I felt an abiding sense of security. That was when the commotion began.

Not much happened that I could see, but it centered on the main entrance behind us and sparked a crackling tension among the worshippers. Several heads swivelled toward the rear of the church, only to turn quickly around again. Several of the men strode with quiet purposefulness toward the rear doors. I could see nothing, but in a few minutes I knew the excitement had ended. The men returned to their seats. The organ prelude began on schedule. It was only after church, probably when we were driving home, that I learned what had happened: a small group of black people had tried to attend our Sunday service. They were turned away at the door. Someone, perhaps one of my uncles, had simply told them they were not welcome. They left without incident. Everyone seemed to think the situation had been handled masterfully. The church had behaved correctly and in the best possible taste.

That was twenty years ago. The incident re-emerged in my mind with startling clarity this spring, when I learned that Birmingham’s Downtown Rotary Club, one of the most exclusive organizations in the city, had quietly voted to continue its policy of excluding black members. Specifically, when Rotarian Angus McEachran, editor of the Birmingham Post-Herald. asked the membership to remove the word “white” from the Constitution’s membership requirements–“Any white adult male person of good moral character”–he was voted down, one hundred twenty to ninety. It was the culmination of a three-year campaign McEachran had waged within the club to bring about the change. He resigned shortly afterward.

The club’s reaffirmation of its barrier against blacks, erected when the club was founded in 1913, made national headlines and prompted an outcry from Rotary International and Rotary clubs around the globe. On June 3, nearly a month after the original May 12 vote, the membership reversed itself and voted overwhelmingly to ask its board to reconsider the ban on black members. But when the Rotary board of directors met, it voted unanim-

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ously not to delete the word “white,” but to drop the club’s sixty-nine-year-old bylaws and to adopt the consitution of Rotary International which makes no mention of race.

Despite having their feet held to the fire, the Rotarians, like we Presbyterians years ago, had remained firmly in control and behaved correctly and in good taste. They could pretend the club had made no error, not even in basic practicality, and no one had to apologize or recant. They obfuscated the real issue–their decision, as an institution, to practice deliberate racial discrimination in choosing members. Many Rotarians later said they had not voted against having black members, but against overruling the board of directors. That, they said, was not how Rotary works.

The more I thought about the Rotary vote, the angrier I became. I was angry at the corporate board chairmen, the bank presidents, and the lawyers who recorded their bigotry. I was angry at all forms of institutional racism–the all-white country clubs with their columns and black footmen, the segregated churches, debutante societies and service guilds. I was especially angry at those Rotarians who knew better but were too complacent to speak out. Six are ministers or rabbis. One is president of a Baptist university. Did they feel no tearing sense of injustice? McEachran had already taken the lead. All they had to do was add their voices to his.

I was angry at the Rotarians for obliging all those people who think Birmingham is the national headquarters for racism. Many Rotarians do not even live in Birmingham, but in affluent, outlying communities. The run-of-the-mill Birmingham resident, who might live in an integrated neighborhood or send his kids to an integrated school, didn’t seem to deserve this new black eye. In the Birmingham school system, which is seventy-five percent black, test scores are at and above national averages and integrated PTA’s are strong. Through a network of ninety-three neighborhood organizations, blacks and whites have come to city government jointly with successful appeals for improved drainage, better lighting, and more recreational opportunities. Under Richard Arrington, the city’s first black mayor, the crime rate has dropped, the budget remains balanced, and the city has worked with developers and merchants to revitalize the downtown business district. Obviously the city has a long way to go in race relations, but it has come a long way since 1963.

After a while my anger gave way to cooler questions. Why had the Rotarians put their racist posture on paper, when they could just as easily keep blacks out by the exclusive nature of the club? “Extremely difficult” was one Rotarian’s description to me of the process of getting any new member into the club. “To get somebody in the Birmingham Rotary Club would take about six months.

You must have so many people to nominate you and so many people to second it. Some of these people pride being in the Downtown Rotary Club more than they pride being in a country club,” he said. And the chances of a black person’s admission by the current membership? “Practically impossible.”

Why would the likes of the head of the local Merrill Lynch office, I wondered, the president of the First Alabama Bank of Birmingham, and the president of the Alabama Power Company find it so difficult to have lunch alongside a black federal judge or a black insurance company executive? And in bad economic times, why would Rotarians jeopardize the city’s already shaky image with a written ban on black members? Unemployment now stands at thirteen percent. Did the members believe news of their vote would not get out? Displaying awesome faith in Rotarian discretion, eight former Rotary presidents mailed a joint letter to each club member a few days before the original vote, urging defeat of the proposed change. “As everyone knows, it is a very controversial and complicated subject . . . The fact that it is even coming before the entire membership is not only damaging to our club, but also our community,” they advised.

The scuttling about before the vote would have been funny, in retrospect, had the outcome not been so dismaying. One particularly prominent parson cornered McEachran at a cocktail party to wish him luck. “I wrote to the board for you. And I’m going to vote with you,” he said. McEachran replied, “I’m counting on you to do more than that.” The minister backpedaled. “Angus,” he said, “when you’ve been here as long as I have, you’ll learn that in Birmingham you have to pick your fights.”

Even the image of Angus McEachran taking on Birmingham’s business upper crust is funny. McEachran, who constantly battles extra pounds, who routinely hangs up the telephone when kept on “hold” more than thirty seconds, whose reporters make fun of his stoop-shouldered gait and grunting speech, hardly seems like a wedge of social change. Deficient in the skills of small talk, impatient with diplomacy, he is apt to end prolonged debate by tossing a verbose dissident from his office. But in the Downtown Rotary Club, where acceptance of the business elite deterred the voice of objection for sixty-nine years, McEachran alone was willing to be consistently recognized as breaking rank.

You could name a dozen reasons why individual Rotarians might have wanted to retain their color ban. Many are elderly and longtime residents of the city where change has never come easy. The average age of the eight former presidents who mailed the letter, for example, was seventy-four. Many, with their executive positions, their homes in all-white suburbs like Vestavia and Mountain Brook, and their memberships in all-white country clubs and churches, probably expected to continue their racial isolation. Some, seeing the Downtown Rotary Club not as a service organization, but as an exclusive social club, perhaps saw no more reason to admit blacks to it than they would to their country club.

The phenomenon is not that a few, wealthy, conservative men are able to isolate themselves from the realities of a changing world and insist on systematic exclusion of

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non-whites. Southern history is full of affluent people who, while they didn’t ride in the night with torches and whips, urged on those who did with their voices of approval. James Armstrong, a black Birmingham barber who saw his entire family arrested in the 1960’s after attempts at integration, summed it up best. “The Klansman doesn’t always wear a hood. Sometimes he wears a tie,” he said. “It took me a long time to realize that.”

The depressing thing is that racists are allowed to prevail in 1982. That’s what makes me most uncomfortable of all. Because the people who allow it are not confined to Birmingham’s Downtown Rotary Club. They are all of us whites who fail to bring black families to our churches, who don’t ask black couples to consider buying the house next door, who don’t include blacks regularly in our socializing, for fear of offending our friends who are not so right-thinking as we.

“The ultimate tragedy of Birmingham was not the brutality of the bad people but the silence of the good people.” Martin Luther King Jr. said it in his 1963 book, Why We Can’t Wait. It still hits too close for comfort.

Kelly Dowe is a freelance writer living in Birmingham, Alabama.

A Holiday Shopper’s Guide to Alternative Giving

By Kelly Dowe

Vol. 10, No. 5, 1988, pp. 18-20

When my mother was a little girl in Centreville, Alabama, she received the gift of an apple–not a real apple, but a wooden one with a tiny wooden tea set inside. The cups were no bigger than the tips of her fingers.

I loved hearing about that apple tea set as a child. For me it represented pure romance as I knew it, and it somehow captured the sweet mystery of my mother’s life before me. When I was about ten, I found in my Christmas stocking an apple tea set of my own. The apple was a rich enamel red. It was the size of a real apple, at least the big one in my Christmas stocking, and the dishes inside were no bigger than my fingertips.

Which was better, the apple tea set of my mother’s stories or the real thing? Who cares? I now tell my own daughters, aged five and nine, about both apples and they berate me for not saving my apple for them.

As Christmas and Hannukah approach, all of this brings to mind the choosing of gifts and the work we want our gifts to do. We want each gift to complete ourselves or the recipient (preferably both); we want to give joy, warmth, pleasure and romance. What we often do instead, as depressing memories remind us, is the reverse. Succumbing to the pressures of last-minute shopping, local supply and personal finances, we present a child we love with another molded plastic toy. We regale people we care about with boxes of powder. Uninspired shirts and ties, best-selling trash in hardcover, and gift-wrapped, waxy candy…and all after we have promised ourselves, “This year, I won’t.”

Happy chance!

A shopping helper has arrived in the form of “alternative” mail order companies. These businesses have mushroomed in the last five to ten years, and sell generally good quality, hard to find items, often at modest prices. Such companies are “alternative” because they are usually connected to a social cause organization, such as UNICEF, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, or Koinonia Partners, into which they pour excessive earnings. Most, though not all, are non-profit.

Other, profit-making, businesses in the “alternative” category dedicate themselves to a particular purpose or philosophy. The Earth Care Paper Company of Madison, Wisconsin, for example, sells mostly recycled paper products. A number of toy and book companies, such as Hearth-Song: A Catalog for Families; Tryon Toymakers; Animal Town Game Co.; and Chinaberry Book Service, are dedicated to the idea of teaching kindness and good values to children through healthy play. Each sells beautifully made toys and books in luscious, natural materials. Customers shop by catalog, which are obtained by writing or calling the company. (Even heavy users of mainstream catalogs are not on many alternative catalog mailing riots.)

Imagine these among your holiday gifts to loved ones:

• Beautiful, handmade quilts, in patterns such as Bear’s Paw, Coat of Many Colors, and Grandmother’s Dream, made by the Freedom Quilting Bee, a women’s sewing
  

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  cooperative, in Alberta, Ala. Quilts cost from $395 for single bed size to $695 for king size. FQB also makes butcher-style aprons for $9 and potholders for $3, among other items (prices are approximate). For a catalog write: The Freedom Quilting Bee, Route 1, Box 72, Alberta, AL 36720.

• A solar-powered re-charger for a car battery. Just set it on the dashboard and plug its adapter into a car or RV cigarette lighter. Cost: $39.95. Sold through the Renew America Catalog, which supports renewable energy. Other solar powered products include a calculator ($19.95), music box ($19.50), refrigerator ($1,560) and child’s construction kit ($14.95). The catalog offers many other energy-saving products. Renew America Project, 1001 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 638, Washington, DC 20036.
• A child-sized, handmade wooden carpenter’s box, and a small hammer, ax and saw to use with it. Tryon Toymakers of Campobello, S.C. The carpenter’s box is $12 and the tools $12 per set. Other toys, all hand-crafted and painted, include: a Noah’s Ark with animals ($35, small, and $65, large), a magic wand ($4), puzzles ($6 to $30) and a rocking horse ($80). Tryon Toymakers, Route 3, Box 148, Campobello, SC 29322.
• A delightful book for a child is Paper By Kids by Arnold E. Grummer, a treatise on how to make paper at home by recycling your junk mail. For fifth graders and up. $10.95. Earth Care Paper Co., 100 S. Baldwin, Madison, WI 53703.
• To organize the sizable alternative holiday catalog offerings a different way, one might look for:
• Food Items–Koinonia Partners, of Americus, Ga., a Christian farm community which provides low-cost housing and other services to its neighbors, sells gift-boxed fresh pecan products noted for their high quality. They include: shelled and unshelled pecans, pecan dates, pecan bark, fruitcake and granola. Koinonia Partners, Route 2, Americus, GA 31709-9986.
• Music–Appalshop, Highlander Collections and Flying Fish sell acclaimed music selections on records, tapes and compact discs:
  • –An arts and education center in Kentucky, Appalshop has Lee Sexton’s bluegrass banjo “Whoa, Mule Whoa” on LP and cassette, and “Blues For My Kentucky Home” by the Buzzard Rock String Band, cassette only. Both are $8. Appalshop Sales, 306 Madison St., Whitesburg, KY 41858, or call 1-800-545-7467.
  • –Highlander Center sells a selection of records and tapes celebrating social activism through the years, including “Come All You Coal Miners,” produced by Guy Carawan, and “Sing for Freedom,” featuring Bessie Jones and Doc
    

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    Reese. Most are $7. Highlander Center, Route 3, Box 370, New Market, TN 37820.

  • –Flying Fish sells records, tapes and compact discs including “Carry It On,” an anthology of union songs sung by Pete Seeger, Jane Sapp and Si Kahn. Flying Fish, 1 304 W. Schubert, Chicago, IL 60614.
• Clothing–Amish work pants, with button-drop and buttons for suspenders if desired. $24. A favorite with customers of Co-op America, a nonprofit association of businesses which share a commitment to peace. Other offerings: Peace Fleece–Soviet and American wools blended into knitting yarn, a range of craft items, and home products. Coop America, 2100 M Street, N.W., Suite 310, Washington, DC 20063.
• Another source of distinctive imported clothing is One World Trading Co., which functions as a direct link between you and Mayan producers living in Guatemala. By eliminating a middle agent, it offers consumers good prices for high quality items, while insuring the Mayans a fair return. Goods include blazers, belts, shirts and other handmade garments of lovely, all-cotton fabric. Write to One World Trading Co., c/o Plenty, P.O. Box 310, Summertown, TN 38483-0310.
• Cards, stationery and calendars–Although these are stock items of many catalogs, special mention should go to:
  • –The National Wildlife Federation for its line of holiday cards with wildlife artwork. From portraits of a dramatic snow owl to impressions of a flock of Canadian geese, its offerings are rich and captivating. Its cards cost from $12 to about $20 for most boxes.
  • –UNICEF, which works to ease the high mortality rate among children in the developing world, offers a wide range of note cards and stationery in its catalog. These include no-occasion cards illustrated with seventeenth century Ching Dynasty depictions of spring flowers ($5.50 for ten cards and envelopes) and stationery with delicate bird illustrations by Tran Phuc Dyen of Viet Nam ($9 for ten note cards, fifteen writing sheets and twenty-five envelopes). Write to UNICEF, One Children’s Boulevard, Ridgely, MD 21685, or call 1-800-553-1200.
  • –The Fellowship of Reconciliation, which helps finance work for peace and social justice worldwide, offers a line of cards, posters and calenders [sic] which are stark testimonials to the cause of peace. A package of plain white stationery with the words “Practice Nonviolence” in dark blue and cherry at the top costs $6 for thirty sheets with plain envelopes. Greeting cards with “Peace” in both Hebrew and Arabic on the cover and the message, “Peace is our hope” inside, cost $5 for ten folded cards with envelopes. Fellowship of Reconciliation, Box 271, Nyack, NY 10960.

Writer and editor Kelly Dowe lives in Tuscaloosa, Ala.