Human Rights and the South

By Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1978, pp. 3-5, 28

In the closing months of the pre-atomic age, the Southern Regional Council was formed out of conviction that race was the central issue of the South. Though it may seem to us that nearly all else has changed during the hectic decades since, I doubt that race has yet yielded its place, though the problems it shapes and propels grow in their own various ways.

Nor has it yielded its place of primary importance elsewhere in the world. Even our own attention these days is more concentrated on the grim racial conflicts of southern Africa than on the still harsh relationships here. In truth, though, we can see that it is all one continuing struggle of mankind to free itself from a wrong turning it somehow made dark centuries ago, into the sadness, sickness and cruelty of racial pride.

There have been political revolutions that have blazed outward all over the world because they seemed to express noble ideals as well as partisan interests. One thinks, principally, of the American, the French, and the Russian Revolutions of modern times. I expect generations to come may see the Civil Rights revolt as like them, as America’s second sending forth of impulses toward freedom to enchained peoples. I don’t believe it is fanciful to see the road from Selma turning now toward Pretoria.

To say that is, of course, not to say that we stand on the edge of happiness. Twelve years after Selma we certainly don’t have freedom in any satisfying measure, and in some important ways, it sometimes seems to me, we are worse off. I have worked and lived most of the last 12 years in the New York area, and as far as I can judge, the conditions of Black and Puerto Rican poor (and most Blacks and Puerto Ricans are poor, or close to being so) have worsened by almost any measure one selects, whether it is political power, housing, employment, or schools. Indeed, when one considers the vast changes within the South and then looks at the conditions of the urban poor of the North, it is as if they, almost alone, sacrificed for the progress of others.

There have been other kinds of setbacks as well. We have traded in the, perhaps impossible, dreams of the sixties, and accepted meaner ideals in return. And, saddest of all, the grave has had its victory. We lost Martin Luther King Jr., and George Wallace survives. We gave up Medgar Evers, but Jim Eastland will run again and likely win. Robert Kennedy was killed, and Richard Nixon ruled. Whitney Young and Audrey and Stephen Currier drowned, but red-lining bankers and self-protective foundation boards go on as before, controlling the money. George Wiley drowned too, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan prospered. Walter Reuther; that man who always wanted labor to connect with humanity’s call, crashed to his death, while Frank Fitzsimmons, who wants only to connect with dollars, was becoming the single most powerful labor leader. These were crushing losses, and yet, unreplaced. There were others as well. Has any nation or cause ever lost so many of its natural leaders in such a short time?

Indeed when one looks back on the shining values of a dozen years ago and compares them with what columnist Bill Raspberry in the Chicago Sun Times correctly called the “situation ethics” of contemporary politics, what can we do but weep, or rage? What instructions about political morality are we supposed to receive when a month ago the Senate celebrated Messrs. Eastland and Stennis for their 30 years of joint membership in that body, three decades in which they have powerfully opposed just about any and every move toward human rights, justice for the weak and peace for the world. From the White House, Mr. Carter wished those men “many more years of dedicated service.” Surrounded by capers and cut-ups like this, one can only wonder if we are supposed to take politics seriously? Are we all expected to fall into the game, chanting I’m 0. K., you’re 0. K., Eastland and Stennis are 0. K., Helms is 0. K., Nixon too; the Vietnam War and all who made it-and especially those among its makers now called back to serve a Democratic president-, they’re 0. K. too.

All of this is done in the name of political realism, but I no longer can believe in that. Somehow down those winding roads of so-called realism, the poor of this and foreign nations as well always seem to stay poor. The wars and preparations for war ceaselessly plod on, and the owners of the world’s and our nation’s wealth go on owning it. John Lewis had it almost correct when he went up to Vanderbilt back in 1968 while still a staff member of the Southern Regional Council. In a speech titled “Human Rights-A Final Appeal to the Church” he pronounced “Woe unto the political leaders who listen to the voices of expediency and act in the interests of a Great Consensus, rather than do what is right.” Almost correct, because most of the woe, at least so far as we can see, falls not on the political leaders but on those they lead.

Let us confess, in honesty and fairness toward ourselves, that the ideals of the early sixties were perhaps too

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high and hard, that the hopes for nonviolence and the “beloved community” lie beyond us. Let us accept that, let that be our “realism,” even though any of you who share with me the good luck of knowing personally any of the heroes of South Africa, many of whom are now banned, will have to add that those same impossible ideals are moving people there as they once did here. Nevertheless, let us come down from the mountain, a bit. We do not need to come down so far.

The Southern Regional Council, along with the rest of the Civil Rights movement, has trusted in and practiced the methods of education, enlightened propaganda, political empowerment, and economic pressures of one kind or another. There have been at least two other methods. They were the methods of making friendships across racial lines and, to use a recent term, consciousness-raising. We need more of both today. It is too bad that the state and local councils on human relations have been allowed to decline. We need them, or their spirit, for the South is now as it was, a region where human relations, both bad and good but too often the former, weave the fabric of social life.

I have the feeling that, despite desegregation, there is almost less racial contact today than a decade ago. I have to admit that most of my own Black friends are ones I’ve known for a long time, and I suspect that too many other liberals, Black and White, might have to concede the same. We need to learn again why we used to like each other. So let us not be wholly preoccupied with “doing.” Let us give more time to “being” with each other, and in each other’s hopes and needs.

On the whole, I think the estrangement I sense is more the responsibility of Blacks than Whites, and the bridging of it will have to depend more on Blacks. There is a historical reason for that. At various points during the 1950s, it became clear that despite the loving and tireless effort of many good and even some great White Southerners, their leadership would not succeed. The reform of the South passed then to Black leadership. The greatest of Black leaders, Martin King, and others such as George Wiley knew how important it was that Black goals be linked with all those of democracy and peace. Their appeal was always to the nation as a whole to fulfill its Constitution, its principles, to become in its own interest transformed.

It is tempting today for Black leaders, rightfully impatient with the pace of change, to address themselves not to the whole nation or even to its liberal elements, but just to its political and corporate leadership, to its so-called “power structure,” and to speak as race leaders, not as popular or national leaders. That is what opponents of reform covertly or unconsciously welcome. For, if unemployment, poor learning in the schools, or crime in the streets are allowed to be seen as Black problems (or Puerto Rican or Chicano ones) they will likely never be solved, and their persistence year after year will only deepen and re-confirm, all racial stereotypes in White minds.

That is why one so fervently wishes that “summit” meetings of Black leaders would not merely make demands on Congress and the White House, but would see themselves, as their predecessors of a decade ago did, as the reform leaders of this nation, and would boldly claim the allegiance that is rightfully and historically theirs. Unemployment, bad schooling, and crime are not racial problems, no matter how many Blacks or Hispanics may be trapped in them. They are national problems, residues of inequitable political and economic systems, and the responsibility of all of US.

There is nothing I know of in the history of our times to lead one to believe that political office holders or corporate executives will do much about these tough and very real problems, unless the sort of Black and White multitude that demanded the reforms of 1964 and 1965 again come into being.

It is time for Black leadership to call upon White liberals to come back home. To do it, Black leaders will have to accept the fact that today Hispanic leaders must stand beside them. And it must be done without rancor; the time for scapegoating ‘liberals” is past. There will have to be an effort made to understand liberal devotion to causes like peace, anti-militarism, the sanctity of the environment, and the dignity and aspirations of women. But it is time for liberals to come back to the cause they slipped away from, the unfinished business of equality; and it is time for Black leadership to summon them. There has been enough knocking at the door of Washington and Wall Street. Those 50 percent Black youth unemployment rates will go downward only when the kind of liberal mass that brought about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is made again to know what democracy requires of it.

Energies have not, of course, been dormant. Possibly never in the history of our nation or any other have they so flourished. Those energies ended a wretched war in Vietnam, threw hard punches at the CIA and the government’s other lawless snoopers, probed the Pentagon, weighed obstacles to industry and consumer ravages of the environment, built countless and durable, if small, new community organizations, fought for the rights of children, hungry people, mental patients and prisoners, and gave women a new vision of themselves. And it all began in the heat of Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia and the rest of our South, just as was born here the impulse that has stirred Hispanics and Indians, and just as came from here the deeper resolve of people in southern Africa. And it all serves the same end, and though that end may not be as holy a one as the “beloved community” it is a good and lovely one nonetheless, of men and women living at peace with each other and with nature.

The South has had, as Vann Woodward put it, the burden of its own history. The South has also, of course, been a burden to the rest of the country. It still is, though becoming less of one. Its senators and representatives are almost never to be found at the forefront of good works. On the other hand, they are not, in anything like the degree they once were, barriers to the satisfaction of national

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needs.

I have spent some time recently studying certain votes of this 94th session of Congress, and I think what one can currently report is that the Southern delegations are about as bad or as good as the rest of Congress: which is a milestone in the further Americanization of Dixie, no doubt helped along by a Georgian at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. There is no distinction among the Southerners, certainly no Estes Kefauver or Frank Graham, nor anymore a Sam Ervin, William Fulbright, or Lister Hill who, though terrible on civil rights, would partially atone by distinguished service in some other area.

It is perhaps the age to which I’ve arrived, but all the world these days seems dominated by mediocre talents; in art, literature, science, philosophy, wherever, the days of genius or even brilliant sparkle seem gone, for a while. It would be too much to expect that Congress would rise above, or even up to the level of conquering modern mediocrity; and it does not.

If not generally worse than their colleagues, Southern congressmen and congresswomen do still sometimes hear the old tribal drums. Southerners in the House voted better than 2-1 to build the B-1, even over Mr. Carter’s opposition; but in the old days, not a third of them would have resisted the military. So one may take what consolation he can from that.

The worst display of Southern militarism came on the vote whereby Mr. Carter’s all-too-modest program to upgrade the less-than-honorable discharges of Vietnam veterans (which in disproportionate numbers were Black and other minorities) was mean-spiritedly put down by the House by denial to them of all veterans’ benefits. Only one representative of those states that once had themselves been in rebellion, Joseph Fisher of Virginia, voted for compassionate justice for those many thousands of young victims of our war-making in Vietnam.

One Vietnam veteran put the case exactly, though futilely, in a statement to a sub-committee of the House: “Those possessing bad discharges are already so burdened by unemployment, poverty, and lack of education that the benefits would have provided some new ray of hope to an otherwise dark future. One wonders why some congressmen persist in policies that result in holding down those who are already at or near the bottom.” (Interestingly, although nearly all the rest of the “Black Caucus” were against this punitive bill, Representatives Harold Ford and Barbara Jordan were not, choosing to stand with the Southern bloc rather than the racial one. May they find a better issue the next time they do! To their credit, both of them did vote against the B-1, as did nearly all the rest of the “Black Caucus.”)

On abortion, the Southerners in the House stood about 5-4 against on the many votes that have been taken in 1977 on the crucial issue of the use of Medicaid funds, a ratio no worse than the rest of the House (but one as good as it is only because of the astonishing support of the Carolina delegations). There have been so many votes taken on this issue in 1977 that an exact picture of where legislators stand is hard to come by, but on the votes in the Senate that I have examined Southerners are voting a consistent majority for the pro-abortion position.

If the tribal drums seem to be responded to less readily, the leading strings of economics seem about as tight as ever, all flighty talk of Southern populism notwithstanding. Sixteen of the Southern senators voted, against Carter, to end price controls for newfound natural gas. A bill in the House to end federal farm subsidy payments to absentee corporations came within a surprising eight votes of passage, but only 19 of its supporters were from the South. And so it goes. One could add more examples, to the point that Southerners in Congress seldom fail to wait on the interests of big oil, big finance, big farms, and big money in general.

I have gone to this length into congressional behavior for two reasons. One is to suggest to you that the South has a different political position than it used to have in relationship to the rest of the nation. Southern Blacks and White liberals used to look to Washington for indispensable help in solving their problems. That long lasting period of political dependency is now so close to being over that we may as well call it finished. Now the South must play its full part in the resolution of national issues, and has no excuse for not doing so.

Secondly, I wanted to suggest – and here I unashamedly speak as a liberal – that the South must play its part in the great liberal causes of our day. It was wrong, morally and politically unacceptable, for a Hill, Fulbright, or Ervin to be “good” on other issues, and reactionary on civil rights. It would be also wrong and unacceptable for a Southerner today to excuse his positions on war and peace and militarism, on secrecy and surveillance, on ecological necessities, on the economic rights of the poor, on the dignity of women, or on the claims of other minorities by doing a good turn here and there, or even many of them, for civil rights. When one bears of possible or actual support for an Eastland or Wallace or Thurmond, how dearly can one say the old dreams are valued?

I had an experience some years ago, in one of my first visits among Indians of the Southwest, which made me vividly realize something Black friends bad been gently and tactfully telling me, but that I had not heard well. I sat with some Indians one day, and they began attacking me- me! for policies and actions of the Government in Washington. It struck me forcefully that they weren’t distinguishing between me, tthe possibly,

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somewhat prideful critic of politicians and bureaucrats, and those very fellows: all one, all pale face. I’ve come to accept this. I can accept the fact that to a Black person, dealing with a White liberal may be only a variation of dealing with a White segregationist: all one, all White. It is beside the point. For the point is, to build a society at peace, with itself and other societies, to build a society with_ in which all men and women, and their children too, can find decent and dignified lives. And in the service of that purpose, we have all equal duties.

Our politics is throwing up men (e.g. Nixon and Agnew; you can add other, and many, examples) whose instincts are not for life and not for civilization, but for their destruction. Such men are a revolt against evolution. These are men who have the smell of death about them. But we are all infected with that plague, or else we would not elect and reelect such people. We lust for skill, we admire it and are infatuated with it, and we admire its possessors, those who can deal efficiently with the “system.” But being smart in dealing with the ” system” is small potatoes in this nuclear age. These men who govern us are the custodians of life itself.

Speaking about women, Erik Erikson once wrote that “True equality can only mean the right to be uniquely creative.” I believe the same can and must be said of Blacks, of Hispanics and Indians, of White ethnics long cast down; must be said of Africa and Asia and Latin America as they come into the councils of nations. What America wants and what the world wants is not simply for new groups to share in its few privileges, but for those new folks to bring with them their own rich insights and understandings, for them to shape society to themselves and not they to it and its death-ridden ways.

Talk like that sounds more out of place today than it did when Baldwin said he didn’t want to be integrated into a burning house. All I can say is that I have little faith that the house won’t burn unless those who, in our region and nation and world, are cut off from its power and riches find or create ways to make the economy and politics serve them, adapt to them, rather than be their suffocating embrace.

New ideas and values have more often than not come from “new” people, i.e. people newly emergent into social consequence. The world has no need for a “Black political theory” or a “female” one either; nor for a “Black” or a “female” theology, or life style, or what have you. But it is likely, I believe, that the thinking which may give birth to sanity in our lives and culture will be bred, is being bred, in the experiences and insights of being Black (or Hispanic, or Asian, or American Indian) or being woman.

And so I conclude by speaking again to you as Southerners, and as one who wants still to think of himself as a Southerner, and to such, and as such, say that I don’t like that bastard label “sunbelt.” The “sunbelt” is, at best, nothing more than an expanse of land and sunshine, at worst a place replete with problems you don’t need. To be a “sunbelter,” if that’s what it is called, is to be a rootless, non-historical person: and that, no matter what else, no proper Southerner can be. The South is not merely a geographical term. We are too far down the road of time for that. The South’s identity, all that it has to offer, is a history, and a spirit dragged and wrenched from it. A spirit that, at its deepest, knows that life – mere life – is worth all, because it can come back another day and is, anyway, in the final judgment all we have; and knows that each of us has claims on each other that may be denied for long, but not forever. Let the burden of Southern history be transformed now into the message of Southern history. Let the South stand publicly for what it has always stood privately since 1865, for life, for the tenacious holding on to it and for the unavoidable sharing of it.

To some it may seem ironic that “human rights” became the government’s announced foreign policy when a Southern moderate became president. Let us now not stop to ponder causes for that, but only give thanks for the event, while we closely and critically watch for its carrying out. If that policy grows out of a truly Southern understanding of the rightful needs of humanity, it will everywhere stand for the protection of life and the equal claims of all to it. And if so, the South would have turned the burden of its history into a lovely gift to our republic, and to human kind.

Leslie Dunbar is presently on leave from his duties as executive director of the Field Foundation in New York City. He is a former director of the Southern Regional Council and the author of several articles and A Republic of Equals published in 1966.

Editor’s Note: Last year Leslie Dunbar gave the major address at the annual meeting of the Southern Regional Council. This piece is adapted from that speech.

The Role of Law in the South

By Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 1, No. 7, 1979, pp. 6-8

[Introduction]

Twenty-Five years ago, the Supreme Court was just weeks away from a landmark decision that would give hope of civil rights workers struggling to inure equality in education for Blacks. The 1954Brown vs. Board of Education ruling struck down the ‘separate but equal” laws stating that separate segregated schools were inherently unequal.

Later, the 1964 Civil Rights Acts asured every citizen in the U.S., regardless of race, creed, color, religion or national origin, equal rights education, government programs; employment and access to places of public accommodation.

Despite the legislation, the South had its own laws to live by. Laws of conduct that were meant specifically to keep Blacks “in their place.” Laws that denied Blacks their human rights. Anyone dishonoring the sacred laws was treated in the same manner as Blacks.

“The Role of Law in the South” was one of the topics of discussion in a panel session during the SRC Annual Meeting. The panel consisted offormer SRC director Leslie Dunbar, Julius Chambers, the current SRC president, and attorney Charles Morgan Jr.

The panelists basically agreed that the laws are made and enforced by the people – not necessarily by the courts. “Most of the social progress in the history of the country arose not from judges, but from juries and not from bar association lawyers but from social activists,” said Morgan. Chambers added that we must go further than training more lawyers. Instead, we must find a way of meshing law with people who believe in equality.”

Leslie Dunbar’s views on “The Role of Law in the South” as presented at the Annual Meeting follow in their entirety.

Jean Jones

The right role of law in the South is what it is everywhere. It is to represent the difference between a society organized and held together by mere force, and one that is organized in behalf of people living at peace nd trust with each other.

The purport of this panel’s questions is, however, more specialized. It asks whether law continues to have practical importance as an instrument of Southern social and political reform. In our minds as we think on that question is the absolutely indispensable role that the decisions of federal courts have played in Southern racial change since 1954, and, indeed, since about 1940.

But in a broader sense, what we so gratefully saw then was not only “reform” of the political order but the law’s own rediscovery of itself, its own, much belated, reassertion of the “role of law.” Because law had been used in the South, and the judges and lawyers who are the law’s housekeepers had allowed it to be used, in the service of a violent society, its primary task had been to keep the Blacks down, keep them “in their place.” In this regard, there was no essential difference of function from county sheriffs and jailors to “leaders of the bar” and on to state and federal appellate courts: all alike served ultimately to control the Blacks. That is what the phrase “law and order” meant.

Moderates seized hold of that phrase during the days of “massive resistance” to give it a different meaning, that of obeying the Supreme Court. But that was only a brief interlude in the term’s steady history, and Nixon and friends put it back, on a national scale, to its traditional Southern significance. The fact that they did, and still do, cannot, however, be allowed to blind us to the fact that “order” is indeed precious, for without it, there can be no social peace.

The newspaper in my Westchester County (N.Y.) town recently exclaimed editorially, in the wake of a scattering of local burglaries, that “fear of the stranger must become our way of life.” That is truly a horrible thought and sentiment, and that editor ought to be gagged and pilloried – if not horse whipped through the streets. But we ignore at our peril the need all societies have for discipline, for the habit of obedience, for respect for other’s liberties and property. I am sure that here in the South as well as elsewhere, law has a necessary role to play, both in requiring discipline and in making of the rules and rulers of society something that all can respect.

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Thinking about the right role of law in the South suggests to me four more concerns that ought to be basic. First, when one looks at the prison figures one has to suspect that the law is still at its traditional work, that of controlling the Blacks. Generally speaking, until quite recently – when the examples of persons such as Thurgood Marshall, Earl Warren, Elbert Tuttle, Chuck Morgan, and Julius Chambers came to be felt – Blacks in the South very clearly saw “the law” as the enemy. Many, perhaps most, still do, as do Chicanos of the Southwest and western Indians.

The bulging prison population, the longer and still longer average sentences, the plans for prison expansion, the steady accumulation of persons on death row with 80 percent of all of them in the nation being here in the South – all are indicators of a deformed spirit of law, one intent on control and vengeance. Unless a miracle or two occurs, by the time the Southern Regional Council holds its next annual meeting, the South you represent will have killed by process of law maybe ten or twelve persons, a long reactionary step into the past. The Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons have all fought bravely and well, but the tide has been too great.

But no courtroom victory of the Legal Defense Fund should bring it more honor than its noble defeats here. The Fifth Circuit’s decision of last August in the Spenkelink case may have been, for the present, the final cutting blow. I have read Judge Robert A. Ainsworth Jr.’s opinion in that case. It seemed to me masterfully accomplished, the kind of analysis which should earn a top grade for a law student. But from a court which once so grandly stood between the South and its basest passions, there was spoken not a word of commitment to those once prized qualities of equality and compassion. When the Fifth Circuit, of all courts, can rule as it did that the disproportionate numbers of Blacks and poor on death row that are convicted of murdering Whites, are not “in and of themselves” evidence of discrimination, nor will deign even to examine the disproportionate numbers of the poor, then the role that the South’s law is playing seems to me once again laden with fright.

Second, although the signs abound that popular and political interest in some of the great civil rights causes has declined, the law’s interest ought not. We do not need to litigate every conceivable point, and lawyers most surely have no business pursuing litigation issues of interest to them but of little to their clients, the Black communities. But when all that has been said, the law must still be called upon to stand guard over what was so painfully won, and to move on to occupy those fields of equal opportunity not yet cleared.

I don’t envy today’s civil rights lawyers. Theirs will not likely be the brilliant, heady victories of a decade or two ago. Their names may consequently not become, as we say, household words, and babies may not be named for them. But they have a tremendously important job to do, holding the line against the Supreme Court and other federal courts which are no longer their assured friends; and, one might add, educating the 152 new district judges Carter is appointing.

This Supreme Court’s opinion in the hard social cases reaching it are jumbled and instable; given the mediocrity of this Court we can welcome that, for such rulings can hardly be longlasting precedents. In the capital punishment cases, the members were scattered in nearly every conceivable direction. In the Bakke case, for another example, important though it was, only Justice Lewis Powell agreed with the whole ruling, which he wrote. (As the only Southerner on this Court, perhaps he has some of those superior regional insights into racial problems we sometimes brag about.)

There is a saying in the West Virginia coal fields that there will be no peace in West Virginia until there is justice in West Virginia, and of course that is true nationallyas well, though we may have interludes of social peace without justice. It is true in the South. There is as yet too much racial injustice, too much poverty, for there to be lasting social peace. There is too much exploitation, too many officeholders leaving office richer by far than when they came in, too great and an ever growing inequality of wealth and income. Lawmakers – that

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is, judges, legislators, administrators – are almost by definition members of the elite; and elites are those who have profited. Is it then too much to ask that law, law which they make, can bring about that justice in our land and in this region that will end exploitation and poverty?

The question will have to stay unanswered. The right role of law in the South, as everywhere and always, is to enshrine liberty, and liberty’s offspring, equality and justice. When law instead upholds relations that are intrinsically unjust – such as sending the poor to prisons and even to execution in numbers that defy fairness law has betrayed its mission.

When law stood for segregation and overt racial discrimination, or when now it denies equal school funds to all children or equal access to medical help to all women or perpetuates regressive taxes, law betrays its mission to provide equal treatment.

And when law puts the pretended security interests of the state ahead of the citizen’s liberty and even ahead of its own dignity, law becomes a whore. And if you stop to think about it, a male whore at that.

Leslie Dunbar is director of the Field Foundation (presently on a leave of absence) and a former director of the Southern Regional Council. His articles and essays on political affairs and civil rights are widely published and his book, A Republic of Equals, has received much acclaim.

Democracy Looks At the New South

By Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 4, No. 2, 1982, pp. 1-4

The news is full these days about people returning to the South, black and white, poor ones as well as those better off. The question is, will democracy return with them?

I don’t, of course, mean the democracy of actual life, for the South never had that, not even in the stumbling, wavering ways realized in the rest of our country. I mean that democracy of aspiration, which dwelt in the spirit and grand hopes that Southerners, as much as people anywhere in the world, have in times past thrust upward for the challenging of our lives. In the greatness of such as Jefferson, Madison, George Mason, and–closer to our own time–Hugo Black, James McBride Dabbs, Clifford Durr, Frank Graham, Paul Green, Fannie Lou Hamer, Estes Kefauver, Martin Luther King, Jr., Lillian Smith, Dorothy Tilly, John H. Wheeler and Aubrey Williams, the South taught men and women everywhere to love and labor for liberty and equality.

In their own region, the thought and example of those like Jefferson went into a long, sad neglect after their passing. Will the same be true of the legacy of these later leaders, who rekindled the spirit that made the Civil Rights Movement an example to be cherished wherever the wind of democracy moves?

My own odyssey as a follower of those, our recent and deeply missed prophets–for that is what they were, persons speaking truth to power–began on a Spring afternoon in 1949. As the then youngest member of Emory University’s political science faculty, I had been assigned the generally unwanted task of adviser to the Club of Departmental Majors. I had already, in my first months at Emory, voyaged once or twice to that foreign world where the Negro campuses of Atlanta were; and so, casting about for a speaker for a club meeting, I’d suggested inviting a man I’d met, Professor William Boyd of Atlanta University, to come out and talk about race relations. Rather nervously, and feeling bold, the students acceded. I extended the invitation, it was accepted, and Boyd came and spoke to our small group. While sitting in the back of the room and listening to him, I was suddenly troubled by a new thought; in old-fashioned language, I might say, was touched by grace–and as we all know, that happens but seldom to any of us. It came to me that

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my invitation had been wrong, even insulting. Here was this man, our professional colleague, responding to his first invitation to appear among us at the “white” school, and being asked to speak not about his own professional field–which happened to be international politics–but about race relations, as if that were all he had the competence to teach us.

When the meeting was over, and he and I had sat down in my office, I apologized to him. Bill Boyd, whose untimely death a few years later took from us one of our natural leaders, smiled in his ironic but accepting manner and then as the afternoon wore on gave me alone his second talk of the day. Without reference to laws or political controversies, he, out of his own goodness, calmly told me what being a black in the South entailed, of what it meant to him and his family in their daily lives, of the heartbreaking dilemmas involved in rearing his children of the never-ending succession of little things that had to be coped with in traveling through the South or getting about in Atlanta. The elephant at the Grant Park Zoo had died and a campaign was on in the schools to get the children to contribute their coins to help buy a new one. How, he asked, does one tell his eager youngster that you may give your dime, but you won’t be allowed to see the elephant when it’s bought? There was more, much more, of that; and as I listened I suddenly had my second thought of the day: I did not need it because had I ever given a moment’s thought, I could have known it on my own.

That illumination has come back to me over and over again. I have trod about ever since in the tangled morass of America’s racial struggles, not only those of blacks, but of our Hispanics and Indians as well. Time and again, I have been taught and have been made to see realities to which I had been blind theretofore. And nearly every time, I have had ruefully to reflect that I should not have needed the instruction, that the lesson could have been–should have been–deduced from my own knowledge of what American society is.

Discrimination is a social product, a fact to which the present Supreme Court, in its insistence that only that discrimination which can be proven to have arisen from the specific intentions of specific officials is prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment, seems to have willfully shut it eyes. And, not the Supreme Court alone. Does, for example, any thinking person need to be shown that poverty and housing discrimination are root causes of criminal behavior? In recent years, we have had to have large studies to show a direct connection between poverty and hunger and malnutrition; did we truly need to be taught that? There comes a point when our craving to be shown, to be given documentation, is a mask for irresponsibility, a resistance to realities which we know full well but which to admit would threaten too strongly our willful belief in the morality of our social order.

The lesson that Bill Boyd taught came back to me anew when years later I read Dr. King’s “Letter From A Birmingham Jail.” Do you remember where he said:

“I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say wait. But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers suffering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see the tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Fun Town is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: ‘Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?’ When you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you. When you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading ‘White’ men and ‘Colored’; when your first name and your last name becomes ‘John,’ and when your wife and mother are never given the respectable title ‘Mrs.’ when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”

Shortly after that “Letter” was written, the Southern Regional Council, of which I was then Executive Director, was asked to join another agency in its printing and distribution. I declined. I suppose I had practical reasons

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–of money and such like–for doing so, though what they were I can no longer recall. It was a bad mistake, one of which I am ashamed. It did not keep that classic statement from being printed, but it did keep what was then the South’s principal bi-racial organization from standing with it and for it. It was another missed opportunity, of which there have been so many, when the voices of black people were turned from in the South.

All that which Dr. King described happened in a past that, although but a few years ago, now seems distant. This is the New South, men say. And they are right. The Civil Rights Movement did accomplish great deeds, the South is vastly changed, and is the better for it. Yet much lies ahead to be done, to build democracy here, as well as in our nation. And sometimes one wonders if the cutting edge, as we used to call it, is still sharp. Way back in 1946, W.E.B. DuBois made a speech in Columbia, S.C. In the course of it, he said:

“White youth in the South is peculiarly frustrated. There is not a single great ideal which they can express or aspire to that does not bring them into flat contradiction with the Negro problem. The more they try to escape it, the more they land in hypocrisy, lying and double-dealing; the more they become what they least wish to become, the oppressors and despisers of human beings. Some of them, in larger and larger numbers, are bound to turn toward the truth and to recognize you as brothers and sisters, as fellow travelers toward the dawn.”

Whatever else must be said about the experience of being white in the pre-1970 South, there was always that bothersome conscience which DuBois described. I may be wrong, and hope that I am, but I doubt if it has still the same force, among either white youth or their elders. The war is over and done, the burden of conscience has been discharged, the duties it imposed are no more, it is time to cease doing good and instead simply start doing well for ourselves. The edge has gone out of too many of our young people. Compassion seems to have become unfashionable. To be heard, one must appeal to material interests, as such are perceived by what today passes for political parties and by our media.

If the future is now, it is a grim forbidding one. The Civil Rights Movement did its great work, just as men like Jefferson in their day did theirs. It has left us the next and even greater task and that is the combating of war and poverty, and the South is central in both.

We must never allow ourselves to take our sights off the main event, and that is the terrible bombs ready to explode in the center ring of all our our existences. One bomb, is quite literally, the bomb of nuclear warfare, to which the governments of the world approach closer day by day. The other is the bomb of world-wide poverty, compact of the misery of probably the majority of human beings now living, of whom all too many dwell here in the South and in urban and rural ghettos throughout our land.

It is instructive to go back in our thinking to Gunnar Myrdal. Perhaps you will recall the famous “rank order of discrimination” which he set down in The American Dilemma. Researching prior to and during World War II, he believed that he had found that white Southerners were and would be most resistant to any change that had to do with sex between black men and white women and with intermarriage. Following this, he found that the white South would yield most slowly on, in order: personal relationships and the “etiquette” between the races; the use of public facilities: political disfranchisement; discriminatory law enforcement; and finally, would yield most easily on economic discrimination.

His survey of Negro Southerners gave him just the opposite conclusion; namely that they cared most about economic opportunities, least of all about sexual mingling. Myrdal went on to acknowledge that he might be wrong about the white South’s dominant interests, and of course he was. We know now that, when push came to shove, the white South has far more cared about maintaining its economic privileges than its sexual codes or traditional etiquette. The harsh fact is that today at least one-third of black Southerners live below the poverty line and that upwards of two-fifths of the nation’s poor, white and black, live in the South. We have reached that disappointing level–and that is what it seems, a level ground which year to year does not rise or fall–after and despite all the great, and they were indeed great–events and victories of the intervening decades: the court battles over the white primary and higher education, the work of President Truman’s Civil Rights Committee, the suppression of the Dixiecrats, the 1954 and 1955 decisions on segregated schools, the bitter and finally successful battles against “massive resistance,” the sit-in movement and the magnificent demonstrations and voter registration campaigns of the sixties and early seventies, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the “War On Poverty” declared in 1964.

But all that accomplishment left poor people still poor, and some of them poorer than ever; and left the white folks mostly still in charge. Working alongside Mack Jones, a successor of my old mentor, Bill Boyd, as a professor of political science at Atlanta University, I have in the last year and a half helped out the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, as it fought off the harassment of the Department of Justice. That episode showed, among other things, how determinedly and resourcefully the white economic and political powers of the Black Belt will act to put down a poor people’s organization that is perceived as threatening their control.

The episode suggests another possibility. It is that the economic reform which this country so desperately requires may not come about until poor people organize themselves at local and state levels to insist upon it; that the reform to be effective must include new structures, as in the co-ops, which end the dependence of poor people on established economic and political powers; and that just as the struggle for civil rights did not gather strength and momentum until black Southerners took charge and gave leadership, so will the struggle for economic justice not really move very far until its leadership comes from the poor and those who have earned the poor’s trust.

The “beloved community” which the Civil Rights Movement in its glory days proclaimed may exceed our grasp. Must it also be beyond our reach? I would if I could call us back to those mind-changing, nation-rocking, soul-lifting ideals of non-violence and equality and freedom for all. I would because they are, ultimately, the only realistic and practical guides for our action. It is impractical and unrealistic to expect millions of people of our nation–and of a couple of billion, more or less, world wide–to endure indefinitely their poverty and degradation and not to tear down somehow the peace and prosperity of the rest of us. It is utterly unrealistic to believe that we and the Russians, not to speak of a host of lesser governments, can continue the grossest arms build-up in all history, one which features nuclear weapons of civilization destroying potency; can continue “projecting our power” all about the globe without uncontrollable war erupting. The madness of our times is that what is palpably irrational

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and even insane passes for pragmatism, while realism is dismissed as soft-headedness. Yet it is only through that idealism of the Civil Rights Days, which was in fact hard realism, that our nation and the world and the civilization that keeps us from being mere brutes stand any chance of survival.

It was through it that the possibility of democracy was brought back to the South, from which it had departed with Jefferson’s generation. Will it become more than a possibility? Democracy means the rule of the people. Its attainment and keeping are never-finished tasks. First of all, comes the establishment of equality, for the rule of the people without at least enough equality among the people so that self-reliance is everywhere is a contradiction in terms. Then comes justice, for that means that every person is to be treated fairly and with equal rights. And then true democracy requires peace, for without it the people will never rule, for commanders must, and justice will not prevail, because force and regimentation will.

We are generally led and ruled by men who though often as not good and conscientious individuals are by their policies unwitting killers of the dream, foulers of the nest, sellers of the birthright. And not America’s birthright only but that of the civilization to which we were born and which has given edge and strength to our character, given us eyes to see and to be aware of the world’s beauty and the world’s callings.

But I have too pessimistic a faith in political leaders, in the absence of ground swells of public opinion, to call upon them. As I said before, if I could I would call upon us to reclaim the ideals, the realism, of the old movement. If we did, I think we should now be saying, and acting on the saying, that we stand for no political or economic system, no ideology; that we stand instead for women and men, boys and girls, living freely, everywhere. We stand for the hope of equal chances for all, and the demand for good chances of all, now, in our own time. We stand for peace; peace between nations: peace with each other. To be for peace is to be against violence. It is to be against inculcation of the values of violence, the training of the world’s youth in violence, the all-absorbing preparations for violence. We can no more make peace by threatening war than we can make friendship by threatening enmity. Sooner rather than later, that game will not work.

From the great nuclear plants at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Savannah River, S.C., to the Pantex Plant in the Texas pan-handle where the bombs and warheads are assembled, the South is deeply embedded in preparation for nuclear holocaust. From the hollows of Appalachia to the migrant farm labor camps of Florida the South is still the poorest of regions. Here, if anywhere, is the place to redirect America from policies and values that will not work, toward those that have been tested–and do.

Dr. Leslie Dunbar is the former director of the Southern Regional Council and of the Field Foundation. He now works with the Fund for Peace, Washington, D.C. The article here its adapted from. remarks to the Blue Ridge Institute for Southern Community Executives, July 26, 1981.

A Turn for the Worse. A Turn in the South by V.S. Naipaul. (Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. 307 pages. $18.95.). Library Service in Black & White; Some Personal Recollections, 1921-1980 by Annie L. McPheeters. (The Scarecrow Press Metuchen, N.J., 1988. xvi. 152 pages. $22.50.)

By Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 11, No. 3, 1989, pp. 13-14

A Turn in the South is, the author says, a travel book– “travel on a theme”–, which is, I suppose, his way of saying that it is an interpretation of the present-day South gained from visiting some of its parts. What he finds is a South “of order and faith, and music and melancholy”; or, as he writes in a full-blown passage, which testifies to a sort of epiphany: “Music and community, and tears and faith; I felt that I had been taken, through country music, to an understanding of a whole distinctive culture, something I had never imagined existing in the United States.”

In the wondrous process by which our cultural clergy, the New York City and New England cloisters, certify works of art and literature as agreeable and acceptable to it, this book has been granted “importance.” It has none in itself. It has a lot, in the evidence it pressed on us regarding the standards of our cultural tastemakers. The New Yorker magazine ran three lengthy portions; once upon a time, the New Yorker had Calvin Trillin roving now and then the South, as good a stylist, to say the least, as Naipaul and one who, besides, knew what to look for and what and whom to believe.

But it was the New York Review of Books which sealed the book’s “meaning,” by choosing the pages which describe “rednecks” for its December 22, 1988 issue. The review which the NYRB subsequently gave the whole book was captioned “The Reddening of America”; the reviewer called the “redneck” piece “a miniature masterpiece.” Naipaul praised it himself, calling it “full and beautiful and lyrical.” “Rednecks” in this treatment are practically synonymous with all low-income Southern whites–and with the yearnings of many who are better off as well; they are depicted as something above junkyard dogs, but not far above. No other discrete minority (as in Naipaul’s understanding they are one) would be so dishonored and lampooned in the pages of the NYRB, nor, for that matter, in a book published by Alfred A. Knopf. It is always interesting to observe what racism and overt prejudice are admissible in polite society. These days, the white Southern working class is fair game.

And country music, most particularly including Elvis Presley, is capstone and key to the South’s “distinctive culture.”

The “redneck” story is told, of course, by an interviewee, but throughout the book Naipaul carefully lets his readers know which persons interviewed he likes and which he doesn’t. The few I can recall whom he likes but little are black. Sometimes he is frank enough, as with Atlanta’s Marvin Arrington, to let his disapproval show dearly, and as arising from temperamental differences. And a few blacks he did like; Atlanta’s Hosea Williams was one. But there are far fewer blacks than whites in this interpretation of today’s South, and the whites are predominantly from that stratum known as “moderates.”

Mississippi is an outstanding example. By my count, he reports on an outdoor prayer meeting of blacks, as well as fourteen individual interviews, exactly two of which are with blacks, and one of those not consummated. Even more amazing was his selection of those two, both rather nondescript men, in a state as rich as is Mississippi in strong black leadership, both women and men.

Naipaul can insist upon the exclusivity of his theme, but

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this book, with all its hype, will be taken as a study of the contemporary South. It is a distorted one. A few of his interviews are insightful: I think particularly of those with Robert Waymer of the Atlanta School Board and Judges Alex Sanders and R.P. Sugg of South Carolina and Mississippi, respectively. Some of his own apperceptions are on target, though by now fairly commonplace; such are his statements that blacks have had by various stratagems to cope with the “irrationality” of the South, or that blacks have won political positions that do not insure actual social power, or that the old South was violent and lawless. The interpretations of the South which dominate this book come, however, from tradition-hallowing or politically conservative whites; nor does he ever challenge or balance a single one of their several disparaging remarks about blacks.

If Naipaul has read any of the classic white interpreters of the white South–Cash, Lillian Smith, Myrdal, Dabbs, Woodward, Leroy Percy, others–, there is no evidence of it. He has read Up From Slavery several times and admires it, as he does Booker T. Washington author. He has nothing good to say of W.E.B. DuBois, nor of his The Souls of Black Folks, which has “too pretty ways with words,” a strange criticism from this particular writer. Some of Naipaul’s prose is wild, his description of kudzu, for one example: a long incomplete sentence, broken by a parenthetical clause set off by dashes, and a like one inside that, topped off with a complete sentence within parentheses, being as entangling as the vine itself.

There are mistakes of fact scattered throughout the book; most are small and come in the interviews. Neither an informed writer or editor would, however, have indulged them. The publisher has done, on the other hand, an exceptionally handsome job of bookmaking and printing.

“TELL ABOUT THE SOUTH. What’s it like there.” Is anyone really interested anymore? If so, Naipaul is not a guide to follow, not if one cares to find the reality of it. Better to read, among other things, Annie L. McPheeters, Library Service in Black White; some personal recollections, 1921-1980. No fancy foot-work here. Only clear, syntactical sentences (and clear photographs), that truths about the South. Mrs. McPheeters served the Atlanta Public Libraries for over thirty years, half of them as head librarian of the West Hunter Branch, the principal facility for blacks; after retiring in 1966, she became the first black faculty member of Georgia State University.

At one place in the book, she sets down a chronology of library services for black Atlantans between 1902 and 1959. The first item records that W.E.B. DuBois and a committee of black citizens petitioned the Carnegie Trustees for a library. It was denied, though in 1903 some funds were provided to Atlanta University, for citizen use. The last item, May 24, 1959, records that Mayor Hartsfield announced the desegregation of the public library system, and that Whitney Young, for the Atlanta Council on Human Relation, “reported that the Council was pleased that race was no longer a barrier to use of the library.” What a march of events, of struggle and striving, lay between those two dates! Mrs. McPheeters chronicles it, and in her doing so we learn of the white and black people who confronted each other, and revealed some truths about themselves to each other, and to us.

This is an honest book. The final chapters are autobiographical, and enrich the earlier pages; the chapter on “early life and education” is a bright gem: indeed, Mr. Naipaul, “lyrical.”

Leslie Dunbar is the new book editor of Southern Changes. His earlier affiliation with the Southern Regional Council began in 1958. He was Director of Research during 1959 and 1960, and Executive Director 1961-1965. He lives now in Durham, North Carolina.

The Price of Empire by J. William Fulbright, with Seth P. Tillman. (Pantheon Books, 1989. xi, 243 pages. $17.95)

By Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 11, No. 4, 1989, pp. 27-28, 30

Radicals would do well to read this book by the Arkansas aristocrat; it could teach them not to be so restrained.

Americans generally, and Southerners in particular, ought to read this gently worded but unsparing “J’accuse,” for the American political mind which Fulbright depicts menaces our nation’s future, and the world’s, too.

Fulbright says: Since World War II our “obsession” (a word he repeatedly uses) with Communism and the Soviet Union has sustained an arms race; that it can almost not be turned off because of the economic and political interests now built into it; that every advance in arms has subtracted from our security; that in these years since 1945 we have been as provocative as have the Russians; that there is no alternative to detente; and that he cannot still his “suspicions” that whenever in the past better relationships between the Russians and us seemed in prospect “something unusual happened,” and not by pure coincidence.

I think all except the suspicion is right, and it may be that if I knew more, about the U-2 overflight and the shooting down of the Korean airliner, I’d agree with that also.

He says: Our political processes have become diseased, our mode of nominating presidential candidates and then electing one of them is both uniquely American and without sense–when we “get a president with intellect and character–it is something of an accident”–and that the dominating role of television is a principal cause, requiring enormous funds and inevitably demeaning and debasing campaigning. I think all that is incontestably right.

He says: Attitudes must change, before there can be sound progress. Southerners above all must know how hard that is. Once–and for long, long years–it was established principle in the South to ground political policies explicitly on race. No longer. Yet so deeply embedded are the advantages of being white that the South without open admission usually follows political directions that protect those advantages. Perhaps we are ascending from that, but it is a long climb, and millions are injured along the way. If we by similar resolve eliminated anti-Communism as a declared policy touchstone, we would still have to deal with all those who have advantage in its survival, the profit takers, the workers, the Pentagon careerists, the Congressmen who have tasted influence under its shadow.

The South has, now as in the past, a plenty of political figures who have served the cause of anti-Communism and the arms race assiduously. Why has the South traditionally been so war-minded? Why must it stay that way? Leave aside the economic stake, in plants and bases. Is there from being reared in the South a destiny that leads its political sons and daughters to become, in truth, the go-fers of the Pentagon and the CIA and the National Security Council?

Well, it may be so. It would be interesting to have responses to Fulbright’s book from such current senators as Nunn, Gore, Robb, from all those who tell us so regularly that we–you and I–will support only presidential candidates who are “strong” on defense.” Well, again, maybe. If so, there loom dark questions asked in starkest form in Fulbright’s chapter on “Our Militarized Economy”: “We have become a militarized

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economy…Millions of Americans have acquired a vested interest in these expensive weapons systems; they provide profit for large corporations and livelihoods for working people. The same people acquire, indirectly, a vested interest in the foreign policy that has committed us to a spiraling arms race with the Soviet Union, made us the world’s largest arms seller…Violence has become the nation’s leading industry…Yet this militarization of the economy is undermining us internally…” Again, I think Fulbright is right, and am grateful to him for saying these truths well and forcefully.

If people care to change this, they might think back on that earlier great attitudinal challenge which confronted the South. Difficult and slow and unfinished as that has been, it nevertheless was set in motion, and it still moves. It had three prime movers, none of whom were political leaders: tenacious courtroom lawyers; victims speaking and acting in clear and mounting protest; and the legitimizers of dissent. A movement for sane military and foreign policies cannot now have the first–the “law” is probably on the other side and with the present Supreme Court undoubtedly is; but surely there is the potential for effective protest, and Fulbright’s book can be for that a warming light and ignition.

The entire book is a plea for rational discussion, for the opening of minds and discarding of myths, for the legitimizing of dissent. There is little of that in the United States, not at any rate within Mr. Bush’s “mainstream.” When did we last hear among its masses a vigorous debate on the merits of NATO and whether it should be kept alive; or on “forward defense”; or on the Monroe Doctrine, for that matter? We go on year after year, assuming the necessity of such policies as political–and indeed, moral–givers. Without that wall of dogma being breached, and policies brought out for debate, there is no progress. Some celebrate the role of Southern businessmen in uprooting old-fashioned white supremacy but in fact they were neuters, until liberals across the South, mainly women, made secure the right within Southern public life to dissent; the acceptable right to talk, debate, question.

Senator Fulbright of Arkansas was of no help in those days. Some have said, would say, that he played an ignoble role. To his present honor, he makes no fancy defense. He simply wanted to be–he is clear about this–re-elected, and Arkansas voters exacted a price in racial conformity for his freedom to work at those issues which really interested him. (He had signed the Southern Manifesto in 1956, filed an amicus brief supportive of resistance in the 1958 case, Cooper v. Aaron, had avoided as far as he was able any contact with the school crisis which had wracked Little Rock. He had also been the only senator in 1954 to vote to cut off appropriations for Joseph McCarthy’s witchhunting committee.) Brooks Hays, for the mildest of acts, had been driven out of the House by a write-in candidate, and thereafter could, we read, play “no significant or interesting role in Arkansas affairs.” Fulbright did not want that fate. He, as it were, rests his case on the mercies of his liberal countrymen–not since he opposed McCarthy has he had friends among conservatives, nor among cold-war Democrats since he opposed the Dominican invasion of 1965 and gradually moved into opposition on Vietnam–his case being that what else he stood for and accomplished made his continuance in office a benefit.

We can all ponder that with some profit. Consider: It is not inconceivable, far from it, in fact, that there are members of Congress today who would largely agree with the need to rise above anti-Communism and a militarized society, and yet hold their tongues and vote to the contrary because they have decided that their own re-election is important to some other good cause; combatting poverty or extending civil rights, for example, or befriending nation-building in Africa (a continent which, incidentally, Fulbright never mentions). Politics is always made of choices. Fulbright would believe and say that some things are of first importance, and of course that is right. I think human dignity yields place to no other. Fulbright might, too, in principle, but is aristocratic in his valuations. To him, both great or bad actions and policies occur in virtually every situation because of what some few leaders do. I think he is wrong about that. I think he never before now, never during his long Congressional career, had a realistic chance of stamping his values on American foreign policies. The nice irony is that he may now have, as millions of new people, unencumbered by the interests which have supported the dogmas of post-World War II foreign policies, come into civic participation through the civil rights revolt he stepped aside from.

Those voters, in the South and Southwest, may go, however, in any of several ways. Lord help us if they follow the “mainstream” of Southern politics. It is an appalling mess. On virtually every one of the great contemporary issues–interventionist foreign policies, covert actions abroad, the Pentagon’s budget, environmental protection, abortion, the treatment of the poor–the trends of

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Southern politics are opposed to the common good. The prospect of new Southern seats in Congress after the 1990 census is, as of now, a dreary, scarifying one, promising more Republicans–and the Republican party and especially its Southern branch have become the first monolithically ideological major party in American history–and possibly a couple of Democrats of near likeness.

There is much more in this book than I have been able to suggest. There are delightful vignettes about past Arkansas elections. There are many and candid reflections on personalities with whom he shared Washington’s power. There are deeply interesting passages on some notable events, such as the Kennedy’s assault on Cuba (he was less opposed than one might believe) and Watergate (the worst side of which he says was that it derailed detente).

There is serious discussion of governmental structure; he is fundamentally critical of the separation of powers, though he narrows his criticism to executive-legislative relationships, never discussing how his favored parliamentary system (as in Britain) would co-exist with an independent judiciary and the power of judicial review, nor how it would adapt to our federal system.

His own pessimism is strong, and made stronger yet by this country’s relationship with Israel, which he calls a “garrison state,” and also a “client state” of the United States, that paradoxically through the great influence of the American Jewish community is enabled to dictate our Middle East policies. The worst of this, in Fulbright’s estimation, is that Israel perceives continued animosity between the United States and the U.S.S.R. to be in its interest, in its struggle with Arab states and factions, and works to keep that alive. Here too, there is at the very least’ an urgent need to establish free, robust debate.

Finally, that need is what The Price of Empire is about: the necessity of unfettered and thoughtful debate. Never mind that he attained his own dearest legislative victory–the “Fulbright scholarships”–by avoiding debate, getting it through, he notes, “as quietly as possible.” A necessary tactic. His faith for the future embraces two courses: international organization–with all its shortcomings, “I still believe in the United Nations”–and education, especially that which brings Americans and other nationals into closer knowledge of each other.

Such hopes as he permits himself depend, he writes, on the possibility of “strong and intelligent leadership.” Fulbright is living proof that liberal aristocrats, or aristocratic liberals, may still survive. Would that they might abound!

“Everything therefore comes back to the way in which we find and then choose our leaders.” Plato would have agreed with him. So might Thomas Jefferson. So may we all, once we build a true democracy from which to choose.

The degree or nature of Mr. Tillman’s role is never described; all opinions, one assumes, are those of both men.

Leslie Dunbar is the book editor of Southern Changes.

Transformed Color

Reviewed by Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 11, No. 5, 1989, pp. 19-20

The Mississippi Chinese by James W. Loewen, with a preface by Robert Coles. (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1988, second edition. Paper, xii, 257 pp. $8.95.)

Whatever has set off the South from other societies, set off its politics, social order, its culture even including its literature and music, has been owing to the black presence, and its subordinated status to the white race. Consequently, what to do with, how to think about, other peoples, ones neither clearly black nor white, has always been a distracting question, wherever such peoples appear. The pre-Civil War division between free persons and slave implied at least the potential of there being a class between or beside the two colors, but after freedom that possibility hardly existed; whites would not allow even some of their own offspring to have a separate status, like the “colored” of South Africa: it must be black or all-white.

But other peoples there have long been. Perhaps as widely known as any, despite their small number, are the Chinese of the Mississippi Delta, and that because of fumes Loewen’s book, which first appeared in 1971 and is now in a second edition, with a preface by Robert Coles, good photographs, and an afterword by the author that brings the story to date. It sparked a widely shown documentary film, a very instructive issue of Southern Exposure (July/August 1984), and other studies.

But as well, on the other side of their state, there are the Choctaw Indians, quietly (for the most part) living outside the currents of Mississippi history. Other Indian tribes and groups are about the region; one group of them, the Lumbees of Robeson County, North Carolina, and vicinity, is many times more numerous and every bit as interesting as the Delta Chinese. There is also a scattering of small groupings, whose origins seem more cloudy even than are those of the Lumbees and the Mississippi Chinese: twenty-six years ago, in the pages of New South, one of this magazine’s predecessors, the estimable Ira Kaye wrote of one such, the Turks of Sumter County, South Carolina.

In more recent days, other new groups have appeared, and with no mystery about their comings. The Cubans of southern Florida (unlike the long established ones of Tampa) arrived with verve and muscle. Other Hispanic and Asian peoples seem in small numbers to be everywhere about.

It is tempting to tender another contrast with South Africa. That mad country is obsessed with separateness, holding even Afrikaans- and English-speaking whites at a distance from each other, trying to hold each black tribe from the others, holding the Indians and the colored from everyone else, everybody pushed into an assigned and graded place. Our South, on the contrary, has wanted but one division and distinction–either white or black–and some inner social force drives other peoples one or the

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other way, unless they are Indians who stay on reservations.

So it has been with Jewish Southerners. Some of them resist, but blacks clearly have decided that Jews are simply white, differing from other whites no more than Catholics or Episcopalians differ from Baptists. By and large, save for a few social anachronisms, so have decided whites. And so, as Professor Loewen shows us, it has become with the Delta Chinese, and even more dramatically. When they first appeared, in the 1870s and 1880s, they were treated as Negros. By the 1970s, they were “white.” They had made the transition in a special way: by selling groceries to blacks.

How this happened Loewen, who is a sociology professor at the University of Vermont, tells authoritatively and well. I suspect many readers will, as I did, find its story of the Chinese mainly of interest as bring a prism reflecting sharper understanding of the situation of the Delta’s blacks. Thus does the old division concentrate our thoughts!

One chapter in particular tells not only a lot about the Chinese but also about whites and blacks, about the United States and blacks, about the place of the poor of our country. It is chapter five, its title is “Opposition,” and Loewen regards it as his “most important single contribution to the theory of race relations.” Its conclusion can be briefly stated, though without doing justice to its merits. The argument is that the upper stratum of Southern society determines its values, including its racial norms and practices. Against the commonplace charge that discrimination, and worse, are the fault of poor whites, never of “good people,” Loewen stands resolute. “I was not trying to prove the lower class free of prejudice. Rather, I attempted to show that status pressures impinge upon the lower white strata from the white status structure.” In short, “racism originates in the upper class.” Whether or not this is a theoretical discovery, it is a clear-eyed observation; and whether or not it can be applied to other situations in other societies, Loewen makes the case convincingly that it is a truth about our South.

As benefits of one of the protegee of that great and good man, the late Ernst Borinski (Loewen taught for a number of years at Tougaloo College), Loewen has written a book not only sensitive and keen but concerned for the humanness of its subjects. The book is sound social science. It is not a book one cannot put down, but it is one that rewards the reader who keeps at it.

LESLIE DUNBAR is the book review editor of Southern Changes.

An Unending Stream: History One Day at a Time.

Reviewed by Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 11, No. 6, 1989, pp. 20-23

The News and Observer, Raleigh, North Carolina, (Friday, November 17, 1989, five sections, $0.25).

We are swamped by information. The least of us knows, sort of, things that the wisest of old could hardly imagine; nor the most pessimistic know to dread. Historians are the reporters of what of the past is important to keep in memory; news reporters are historians of the instant, digesting for our minds each day’s memorable happenings.

I am a word man myself, and so I get nearly all my “news” from reading, not from television. I suppose, though, it is all the same: the stream is unending and unrelenting. Usually we take it passively, absorb what we can or want to and go on about our business. Every now and then, however, the weight of it jolts one into awareness. It is like catching a cold in the winter; there are germs swirling about all the time, but only sometimes are we vulnerable. The news of November 17 may not have been more overwhelming than on many other days, but it was one of mine for being vulnerable.

My morning paper is the Raleigh News and Observer. It is a good newspaper. Compared with what was for years my daily, the New Fork Times, it covers local and state news more adequately and its editorials are typically more intelligent and stimulating (even when wrong or annoying). National and international news it mostly cribs from the big national dailies, and does that very well. It carries probably too many columnists, and as the contemporary preoccupation with “balance” demands, selects them from a range of opinions; also in contemporary style, it pretty well ignores the left. Conservatives such as Safire, Kilpatrick, and Georgie Anne Geyer are not truly “balanced” by a centrist such as wicker–more closely by the occasional Mary McGrory but she is outnumbered several to one. Admittedly, America political opinion has not much “left,” but it should not really be hard to find pro-labor or pacifist or Marxist commentators. Nevertheless, the News and Observer is a paper of quality, has a manifest integrity about itself, and no one outside its home-town owns it; not yet at any rate.

Back to November 17. Look at the day’s front page, the mounting of the flood that was to break over me. The “top” story was that five Jesuit priests plus a lay one (later we would also learn that he was Jesuit), their cook and her daughter, were murdered in San Salvador, almost certainly by thugs in the employ of our side in a civil war which seems on the brink of turning El Salvador into another Lebanon, where death is an individual’s and the national society’s realistic expectation.

There was more on the front page. In one of the state’s towns, a twenty-year-old black mother of three children, ages two months, one year and two years, killed them all with a steak knife; no one seems to know why. In East Germany, non-communist parties entered the Cabinet; in South Africa beaches were de-segregated; and in the United States the House of Representatives “balances” reforms of its ethics by pay increases.

A political horror. A private horror. An advent of liberty. A small murmur for equality. A decaying of a once

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proud American institution. The news of November 17, 1989, would go on this way; one could sense history trembling in order to rise and claim it all.

In the following pages, George Bush, Jesse Helms (in the manner of a playbill, I am picking up characters in order of appearance), the five Senators who took the coin of a rotting savings and loan, Admiral Poindexter (does anyone believe that the subpoena he got, as this day reported, for Mr. Reagan to testify at his trial will actually be fulfilled?), Phillip Morris (that’s a corporation which will subsidize the government’s celebration of the Bill of Rights’ bicentennial), and Ms. Donna Bazemore–all these stride toward us.

Ms. Bazemore, not so incidentally, is a black woman of Ahoskie, North Carolina, who told a Congressional subcommittee what they (and probably the rest of us) would just as soon not hear; our enormous poultry factories are unsanitary places. Picasso came into the news, too; one of his paintings brought $40.7 million. (We were later to learn that a Japanese businessman was the buyer.) Congress surrendered to Mr. Bush on abortions for poor women, and Democrats there abandoned expanded child care for this session. The Navy was insistent–in a gloss on the meaning of loyalty–that one of its own seamen, not itself organizationally, caused the deadly blast on the USS Iowa, an old battleship brought out of its mausoleum by the Reagan administration to parade around the planet, “projecting power.”

I stop, even though I am only at page 14 of the first section. Read farther, and there will be news of Israelis and Palestinians. Bulgaria. Lebanon. Brazil. China (as I am swamped by news, that country is awash in too many cabbages). Nicaragua. Afghanistan. Lech Walesa. There will be editorials about oral sex, national youth service, and a state officeholder straying among the flesh pots of NewYork. Columns about Mr. Helms, Mr. Walesa, France’s children’s policies, fetal tissue research; and there will be Mr. Safire chortling over the USSR’s reported economic difficulties. There will be a cartoon about Mr. Bush’s “secret” plan to overthrow Noriega, another reminding us that it was labor unions which brought about change in Poland.

One “Letter to the Editor” affectionately remembered the Rev. James Reeb, murdered in Selma, Alabama, at the time of the 1965 march; another lamented threats to the state’s environment implicit in the $9 billion–that’s it: billion–road building program adopted by the legislature earlier this year; another by the manager of the huge Shearon-Harris nuclear power plant near Raleigh assured all that, as regards a recent fire at the plant, “at no time was the public in danger.”

Then there are Sports–lots–and Business. But it is enough. On the other hand, I suppose I should not leave out that there was a panel discussion of business ethics at the University of North Carolina, with several very important persons participating in this the concluding session of a conference on international competitiveness; or that Burroughs Welcome, a British company which has a big laboratory in the state’s Research Triangle Park, reported

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a bullish year, much of its profits coming from its AIDS drug and its antiviral drug for genital herpes; or that the Navy suspended IBM (!) from bidding on new contracts because of the revealed fraud of selling used equipment for new.

As said, enough, even though I am omitting the most interesting section of the whole paper today: the local news. But a reviewer should not tell everything. Buy the book.

How does this belong among book reviews?

First, for readers who want to know about the present United States or its southern region, what book would tell more? Granted, that from the above, and the yesterdays’ editions, everyone must be his or her own historian, must give it shape and meaning, must somehow contrive the formula that would put it all into understandable equation.

Second, the daily newspaper–if a good one such as the News and Observer–is in fact a standard of measurement, or seen from another angle an evaluator of the non-fiction that analyzes and interprets our place and time; for fiction too, that attempts that. The maddening complexity the journals report stands as a measure of what a book ought to represent, to “stand for.” A book cannot embrace it all. Somehow, though, the good book has to reflect an awareness of that same impossibility complicated, often chaotic and hurtful, occasionally fine, always on-rushing world and region which the good newspaper reports. Contemporary Southern writers, of both fiction and nonfiction, are often so intent on depicting (and typically these days unlike past ones, celebrating) the uniqueness of the South that any very lively sense of the region’s immersion in a larger world drifts and vanishes. Possibly that is a holding action, a clinging to what is still here yet is firmly on a one-way passage away.

A dozen or more novels could be made from the local news–the Section C news–of this day’s papers: University of North Carolina student precariously perched atop a radio tower protesting the CIA; eight North Carolina State University wrestlers on trial for brutally assaulting two men and a woman annoyed over having their lawn urinated on; an FBI agent convicted for drunk driving after wrecking an FBI-owned car; more on the trial of Eddie Hatcher, of Robeson County newspaper office fame; a citation of Duke Power Co. (!) for toxic contamination of ground water. Novels could be written, and no doubt similar ones will be. Their quality will depend on how well they connect their stories to the world beyond Section C, how well they are “of this world” as well as at home.

Third, the fact is there is some awfully good stuff in the region’s papers. I have for the past two years been a judge in the Institute of Southern Studies journalism competition. Some of the “feature” writing and investigative reporting around the region, from Texas to Virginia, is

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outstanding, and some series are (as I’ve wearily discovered) of almost book length.

And so finally, and for all these reasons, Southern Charges herewith invites reviews of your local newspaper. A friend–one who is often subject to fits of dear and therefore indignant observations of society–angrily remarked to me recently that there are three bodies of people who are never told to go jump in the lake (he used a more vivid expression; federal judges, foundation executives, and the editorial board of the New York Times. I’ll pass on the accuracy of what he said about judges, affirm that he is right about foundation executives (I was one for fifteen years, and no one–or hardly anyone–during those years spoke a cross word to me), and cannot here do anything about the Times. But if you, our readers, want to submit a review talking about your local newspaper, praising or damning, we shall read what you send to us, in the hope we may publish it. Can you write clearly and interestingly about the home-town paper, and not too lengthily? If you can and are moved to do so, we would like to see your work.

Encores, of November 17, 1989.

A crew of Marines rescued in bad weather five men from a sunk tugboat, eight miles at sea off Cape Lookout. Brave men there are still.

An old Woolworth’s lunch counter once sat-in in Salisbury, a videotape of the historic Greensboro sit-in of 1960, and a videotape of the killing of five by the Klan in Greensboro in 1979 are joined with an original draft of the Constitution in an exhibit at the state’s Museum of History.

The family of an Israeli soldier killed by Palestinian guerillas donated his heart to an Arab; the widow said, “If it is possible to save a person, I think it is a religious commandment.”

Hope is still ours by right of such as these, and of that young man, 175 feet aloft.

LESLIE DUNBAR is the review editor of Southern Changes.

Telling a Mouthful about the South.

Reviewed by Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 12, No. 2, 1990, pp. 19-22

Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, co-editors. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. $49.95.)

Is an encyclopedia, and this one in particular, a book or an event, an event that should be written about elsewhere in this magazine? It is here, in the back of the book, that the duty has been assigned, and I shall endeavor to consider it as a book, albeit one of a distinctive sort.

Doing that is made difficult right off, because I–and I am reasonably positive every one of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture’s many other reviewers–have violated a reviewers first obligation: to have read the whole book. My plea in extenuation is that I have read a lot of it, and some of all of its twenty-four parts.

The parts proceed alphabetically from Agriculture to Women’s Life. The usual practice of encyclopedists has avoided subject classification. The editors of the E.S.C. added to their challenges by making such. As many topics

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overlap subject areas they had the problem of deciding where to put them. There are, by hasty count, more than fourteen hundred articles–and my first high-heaped praise is of the editors’ accomplishment in lining up about eight hundred persons to write them–and the placement of these many pieces has presented reviewers something to criticize. Given the task the editors faced one ought to spare the criticism. Reflecting on the difficulty, for example, of deciding whether to place the article on “Desegregation” under Black Life, Law, Politics, Social Class, or Violence suffices both to illustrate how close the judgment calls could be and to be accepting of the editorial decision, which in fact put this one under none of those but Education instead. Cross-references do help.

Some assignments do, however, apparently reflect a different kind of editorial judgment, one that expresses valuation. Placing the article on “Harry Crews” under Media, rather than Literature was probably an innocent slip. But to place “Margaret Mitchell” and “Frank Yerby” under Mythic South and “Lillian Smith” under Women’s Life instead of Literature are irritating literary valuations.

Another favorite area of comment by reviewers has been to note omissions: if this person is in why is this other one not, is the common approach. As in, if “Julian Bond” why not John Lewis and Robert Moses, if “Patsy Cline” and “George Jones” why not Kitty Wells and Johnny Cash, if “Hank Aaron,” “Ty Cobb,” “Dizzy Dean,” and “Satchel Paige” why not–for goodness sakes–Willie Mays? Well, why not indeed? Such are the perils of encyclopedia construction, and the joys of sideline critics.

Some omissions are more serious, however. How, for perhaps the leading example, can there be any reasoned justification in such a venture as is the Encyclopedia for the neglect of Thurgood Marshall, who has done as much as any person of this century to transform the South? (And if the grounds are that he was by origin but a Marylander, this man who has strode the South both literally and by influence for decades, those grounds did not keep out his fellow Marylander, H. L. Mencken.)

Another difficulty for the reviewer is that to comment on style or substance would be unfair when there are many articles, written by a small army of writers, and when numbers of them are yet unread. There seems no principled course other than to consider the tome as a whole, which means to concentrate on concept and outline rather than substance. Some articles are quite good, some are bad, and I think everyone who explores the book would say the same although not agreeing on which. I will note, however, examples of what in my opinion are good and poor models of the genre of encyclopedia essays.

The aforementioned piece on school “Desegregation” is an example of the former: clear, compressed, accurate, and obviously authoritative. Here, as elsewhere, the suggested bibliography is one that probably everyone familiar with the topic would want to revise–in a variety of disputable ways–but the important thing, the essay itself, is all one might turn to an encyclopedia to find.

On the side of bad models, I trust that an exhaustive reading of the encyclopedia would not turn up another article worse than “Newspapers,” in the Media section. I say that without concern here for its content–though it is generally atrocious–but because it is a very model of what an encyclopedia article should not be, for it is stuffed with the essayist’s personal preferences. Readers are told, for example, which are the “best” newspapers in each state and who have been the “courageous” editors of the South, and the fact that both lists are well off the mark is less to be noted than that such subjective judgments have no business in a reference work.

These two articles do not stand alone; there are many others which are very good and appropriate, and there are some others that, like “Newspapers,” are inappropriate. But fundamentally, the Encyclopedia is to be appreciated in terms of its concepts and architecture. The latter is easier to discuss. As noted, the book has twenty-four subjects. Was that necessary? Would the work be just as interesting were it more conventional, essays simply arranged alphabetically? Possibly so, but the editors are entitled to their belief, and their implied assertion that here are the twenty-four most salient aspects of the South does give another big thought to chew over. I have no fault to find with the outline. The inclusion of some subjects–I think especially of Violence but also Ethnic Life–is fresh and unexpected and altogether correct.

Each part has a Consultant who has contributed an introductory essay. In areas where I presume to trust my own judgment I single out Politics as a section where the Consultant has written a fine and trenchant introduction (concluding with the understated sentence, “Whether state governmental policies that favor public aid for industrialists, oppose labor organization, support relatively low taxes and services, and tailor social policies to the needs of land developers and real estate brokers will benefit the region’s people as a whole and will alleviate racial and other social problems remains an open question.” The ensuing

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articles are well chosen and–with only a scant few bobbles of fact and a wisp of blind overconfidence in southern peoples, as in suggesting that states which export such as Helms and Gingrich have outgrown demagogy’s attractions–well handled. This section can be read and studied as a first class treatment of a single subject, and is strong evidence of the good sense behind the editors’ plan of constructing the E.S.C. around subject areas.

The other side of that is, however, that with subjects as fluid and changeable as Politics and most others in this volume, to deal with them once, if that has been well done, almost commits the publisher to bring out revisions from time to time.

And finally, concept, beginning with the question, “Should this have been done at all?” Should we who live and work in this geographic region known as “the South” be deliberately deepening the sense of being Southern, of Southernness, of being, in one of the essayist’s words, “enthralled by the southern consciousness and its traditionalism?”

Or, on a somewhat different level, should we be burrowing ourselves more and yet more deeply into the digs started by Howard Odum, converting the South into “data,” which can be added to and mined and re-mined endlessly. Odum is, indeed, the intellectual patron hovering over the Encyclopedia, for it as did he expresses a uniquely Southern (as far as I detect) blending of social science and romantic attachments. The E.S.C. believes that there is a Southern “way of life,” and its text is meant to be the lineaments and the interpretation of that “way,” or culture.

John Shelton Reed, in the foreword to The Disappearing South?, an interesting collection of essays by specialists in the study of Southern politics (edited by Robert P. Steed, Lawrence W. Moreland, Tod A. Baker. University of Alabama Press, 1990. xii, 224 pages $26.95), has written: “one enduring element of ‘southern distinctiveness’ has been a concern for what that distinctiveness might be, a concern that amuses other Americans when it doesn’t just get on their nerves. This book’s title places it in a long tradition of inquiry, further specified by its subtitle, ‘Studies in Regional Change and Continuity,’ and one continuity has been the persisting worry by several generations now of thoughtful Dixiologists–journalists, students of history and literature, scholars from nearly every social-science discipline–about whether they have anything left to talk about.”

This is one of those matters which believing makes so; at leas/partially. If people who live in the South believe that they do have a distinct culture, then they have one. If observers cannot (as some able ones say they cannot) point to basic differences between the Southern “way of life”-of the Southern “mind”–and that of other regions’ folks, but if Southerners themselves continue to believe there are these differences, then so much for facts. A quarter of a century ago, I wound down an essay by asking, “Ten years from now, or 20, will people living between the Potomac and Rio Grande still identify themselves with each other, still feel worthwhileness in calling themselves Southerners?”

I answered then, “I do not know.” The answer now seems to be in. They do. They do, and too often for generally bad reasons. The Encyclopedia celebrates superficiality (“Goo Goo Clusters”) and seriousness in almost the same breath and indiscriminately. In doing so it is true to the present day South. An article on “Bonnie and Clyde” is almost as long as the immediately following one on “Capital Punishment;” that is to trivialize. So is the equality between “Snake Handlers” and “Southern Baptist Convention” or between a piece on “Armadillo” and its preceding ones, “Appalachian Coal Regions” and “Appalachian Mountains.” There is playful fascination with coltish things such as “Jack Daniels Distillery” and “Murder Legends.” The examples could, unfortunately, be multiplied. This side of E.S.C. is depiction of a South that does not care or give a damn, and today’s South is in fact much like that.

In which particular, the contemporary South is at one with the nation as a whole, as we became in recent years.

The editors say, “Black culture is central to understanding the region and the Encyclopedia’s attempt to explore this perspective in specific, detailed topics may be the most significant contribution of the volume toward understanding the region.”

They are certainly correct about the centrality of the black presence and experience. And there is, to be sure, a considerable quantity of space given to blacks and their concerns, though some opportunities are missed; there is, for one, only slight attention given to the black bar, its history and growing role.

But can an encyclopedia, with the constraints which the form imposes on even so unconventional one as this, be fairly taxed with a social or political mission? The great Encyclopedie served one, but has or can any since?

If the E.S.C. is intended to elevate regional racial cultures as well as describe them then it would have to be appraised on very demanding requirements. Those would include the measure by which it alters what are for white racial liberals today’s governing rules in their relations with the black community: keep a distance; engage with blacks only in politics; never publicly find fault and be ready to praise when publicly called upon; and never move a step in advance of black leaders in calling for institutional integration, even though that generally means not at all.

If such a measure were applied to the Encyclopedia, I doubt that it would pass; in that failure, it would be well representative of the region: and in fact, of the nation, no distinction there, at all. Until the section on Violence is

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reached, this is a book which wants the South to be liked, or at least respected. wants Southerners to feel good about themselves. The section on Violence is different, but one discordant note does not greatly change the rhythm.

Where do blacks fit into that? I cannot say that I hope they will–in these days of bullying small nations and turning away from the poor I am against any Americans feeling good about themselves–but I do hope they will find themselves and their cultures, and some of their troubles and their aspirations, justly depicted in these pages.

Leslie W. Dunbar, former executive director of both the Field Foundation and the Southern Regional Council, is the book editor of Southern Changes.

Un-American Censorship.

Reviewed by Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, pp. 11, 13

Advancing American Art by Taylor D. Littleton and Maltby Sykes. Introduction by Leon Litwack. (University of Alabama Press, 1989. 159 pages.).

A Romare Bearden for $6.25 anyone? How about a Jacob Lawrence for $13.93? Or a destined to be famous Ben Shahn for $60? A Georgia O’Keefe for $50?

Professor Littleton and Emeritus Professor Sykes of Auburn University recount how their campus obtained a collection of paintings, notable ones by artists of interest, for prices such as those. The story, a generally forgotten one, is fascinating and also an exemplary one, in these days of zealotry over the National Endowment for the Arts and what to do about alleged “obscene” art. The book is so unintentionally topical that I am puzzled by its neglect in the national press.

The short facts were these. In 1946 the State Department, in the enthusiasm of those post-War days for spreading American influence and values, decided to send art exhibits abroad. At a cost of $49,000 it selected 79 oils. Some were to go to Europe, some to Latin America. Perhaps unwisely they were first shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in October 1946. Criticism commenced at once. It was to increase, in the press-New York Journal-American, Look Magazine, others-radio-Fulton Lewis Jr.-and most impellingly, Congress. As the selection was mostly “modern” (but not inclusive of then emerging “abstract expressionism”), more conservative artists also were disparaging. The ruckus in Congress proved too embarrassing to an administration with larger concerns. President Truman called the paintings “merely the vaporings of halfbaked lazy people”; his opinion had, however, not been publicized before the time when Secretary of State George Marshall recalled all the paintings in June 1947 (they were then being shown in Prague and Port-au-Prince); a short time later he had them declared “surplus property” and transferred to the old War Assets Administration. The 79, plus 38 watercolors separately purchased, were auctioned to tax-supported institutions. Auburn got 36 of them (for $1,072). The University of Oklahoma got another 36. (The University of Georgia bought ten, and the remainder went to Texas A&M, Rutgers, and the University of Washington.) The total purchase price, for oils and watercolors, was $5,544.

Should public money–tax payer’s money–be used for art? The complaint in 1946-47 was less that it had been than that it had been for this art, which is the same as the complaint trumpeted and neighed by North Carolina’s Jesse Helms and allies, Republicans and Democrats, in 1990. There is a difference between then and now, an interesting one though I am not sure what it portends. The criticism in the 1940s was that the selected paintings somehow demeaned the United States, put it in a poor light, and were done by politically suspect (i.e. leftist) artists; in 1990, obscenity is the enemy. Like a lot of civic

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life, the direction is toward below the belt.

Yesterday’s liberals were much like today’s. They retreated; those who held office in government scampering away fast. The brouhaha was soon forgotten. Likely as not, so will be the one now led by Mr. Helms, when the 1990 Congressional races are over and done with. These political campaigners against art, then as now, knew, however, what they were about, which was–as now–providing red meat for the American electorate.

Liberals tend not so well to know what they are about. Littleton and Sykes report little evidence that liberals of the 1940s defended these pictures. They ought to have, I think, because some of them as reproduced in this book are stunningly beautiful. I don’t think the same can be said for the works which have uncorked the current uproar, but then what is it that has not deteriorated culturally in our, present decade? Liberals even as they bring charges of censorship are inclined today to leave the quality debate alone, as they concentrate on process. It is a losing tactic: substance wins every argument with process. The public, which is the final arbiter, wants art it can respect.

What though. of process? Is a democratic government required, by any political theory, to support art? Probably not. But if it decides to do so, may it fittingly choose among artists and their works?

It is an age-old issue. Plato wrote at length about it. Art he thought to be fundamental to a good political order, but he would have firmly controlled its forms and shaped their style. The modern democratic tradition is otherwise, both in public respect for art-which is reduced to an anarchy of taste-and government’s right and even duty to direct it. Respect art or not, American governments-federal, state, local-inevitably involve themselves in artistic decisions. The design of public buildings, the illustrations in children’s school books, the taxation of art collections, the awarding of scholarships-these and like matters all pave the way for more direct challenge, such as what art-the statues, the murals, the anthems- governments may commission and what artists’ careers it may financially aid. Who will decide what is to be favored?

One may well not like (I don’t) his or her tax dollars being spent on some of the forms of expression we have lately seen publicized. One may think (I do) our art community and art critics irresponsible in their aesthetic judgments. But if we are to have federal support of art at all, the worst conceivable judge of what is good and worthy is Congress.

This incapacity of Congress is true not only for art. I am not sure that the Constitution requires that there be publicly supported education. Certainly it does not require federal support. But the truth we have had to learn, sometimes painfully, is that though legislative bodies are indispensable for deciding whether to do or not to do, they are when they intrude in areas such as education and art bumbling at best and malign at worst, and the worst is frequent. Advancing American Art tells well what havoc Congressmen caused in 1946-47. We may see a repeat today. Littleton and Sykes let us see too how the uproar over these paintings was an overture for the Red scare which would seize the country and corrupt our law, morals, and political values during the ensuing decade.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Congress has become a destructive institution. By its own complicity in the wastage of national treasure on arms and military might, neither it nor Presidents can seldom do anything-can move-against problems that matter to people’s welfare. All they can readily do, as long as foreign governments will lend or give us the money, is saber-rattling or saber-unsheathing abroad and-here at home-the flailing at “social issues”: art censorship flag burning, “family values,” and-yes–drug criminalizing. We tear ourselves apart over such issues, and it is Congress and Presidents who impel us to do so. It is self-willed destruction of the capacity for self-government. Issues-if one may call them that-like these are for this generation of Congressmen and other politicians the functional equivalent of “rigger” politics, of “waving the bloody shirt,” of antiCommunism for their predecessors. They are the kind of “issues” that allow Congress to turn away from the nation’s real problems, or to mask the roles they themselves play in service to financial interests.

Littleton and Sykes have done a great service in reminding us of an earlier bout of this democratic disease. They and Professor Litwack (whose Introduction really should have been an Afterword, inasmuch as it picks up the history where the book stops) place the 1946-47 episode within the context of the harsh nativism that is always present in American democracy and the anti-Communism that was emerging and which in the soon-to-be years of Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover would form an evil era of American history.

It did, however, have at least two good outcomes. “All of the furore seemed hardly to have affected the careers of the exhibit’s artists unless they were enhanced by it.” That was one. A second was and is that Auburn University obtained a collection of fine paintings, worth one’s making a trip to Auburn.

The Poor You Have With You

Reviewed by Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 13, No. 4, 1991

The Truly Disadvantaged, by William Julius Wilson. (University of Chicago Press, 1987. xi. 254 pp.).
The Closing Door, by Gary Orfield and Carole Ashkinaze, with a Foreword by Andrew Young. (University of Chicago Press, 1991. xx, 254 pp.).
The Undeserving Poor, Michael B. Katz. (Pantheon Books, 1989. ix, 293 pp.).
A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society. Gerald David Jaynes and Robin M. Williams, Jr., editors. (National Academy Press. 1989. xiv. 608 pp.).
Unemployed and Uninsured, and other occasional papers of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington, D.C. 1991.
The State of America’s Children 1991, by the Children’s Defense Fund, Washington, D.C.

Not long ago I wrote in these pages that there seems to be no end to books about Atlanta. I had not known then of The Closing Door. After reading it one can only wish that there will be at least more book, one able to report that the blockage of most of black Atlantans from decent life chances which Mr. Orfield and Ms. Ashkinaze convincingly document, has been opened. Getting through The Closing Door is a struggle. It is an even more saddening and depressing study than is The State of America’s Children 1991 for though one comes from that full of sorrow and anger over our mistreatment of our children it is possible to feel at least a hope that changed political policies could make a great difference. The Closing Door, on the other hand, depicts the miring of people behind connected walls of social structure that are deeply grounded in social and economic realities, ones not likely to respond to such political decisions as we seem capable of. So it is hardly a criticism of the book to say that its least persuasive pages are those few at its end which discuss “what must done.”

Prior to those, the situations of black Atlantans in education, employment, and housing are relentlessly analyzed. In every area, the finding is that while many black Atlantans have done very well most have not, and that for them the conditions are worsening, a decline coincident with the Republican administrations since the early 1980s The door is closing for them.

The plight of the majority of blacks is set against Atlanta’s glittering reputation, its rapid growth and general prosperity, and its black political leadership. (A foreword by Andrew Young goes somewhat sideways of the book’s argument, and was, curiously, signed more than a year before publication.) For these trends, Orfield and Ashkinaze impartially distribute blame among fed. eral, state, and local governing bodies.

Not readily, however, to the citizenry. “Residential segregation remains a fundamental underlying feature of urban racial inequality … the level of residential segregation in metropolitan Atlanta is very high….” Here as elsewhere, the authors look to government for both cause (developmental decisions and non-enforcement of anti-discrimination laws) and remedy (reversal of the causes). They are right to decry this misfeasance, but it must be time for us to do what they call for–“it is essential to confront the issue of racial discrimination directly”–but even more basically than they do. Is it not time to question whether the liberal premise we adopted in the post-World War II years may have served its usefulness, that if laws will but change allowable conduct peoples’ prejudiced attitudes can be safely tolerated?

We little talk anymore of mainstream prejudice, and do little to combat it. What we do is pretty much to load the problem of re-shaping attitudes onto the schools (i.e. governmental agencies). I hazard the guess that less black-white conversation about what we used to call “racial relations” goes on in the South today than in even the 1950s. The Southern Regional Council, to its fault, long ago abandoned the state and local Councils on Human Relations in which it had once invested large–and not unrequited–hopes. I suspect that the door, in the rest of the country as well as in Atlanta, will continue to “close” until a strong sense of the common interest spreads within the public, not only determining governmental and corporate actions but also manifesting itself in a willingness, which obviously today does not exist, to believe once again, blacks as well as whites, in the value of knowing and getting along with each other.

The lack of appreciation of that among social scientists

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produces the irrelevancy of many of their prescriptions. One is left high and dry by the kind of reasoning which first tellingly describes (and eat, this book’s analyses of facts are outstanding) the ineffectiveness of minority contractors’ “set-asides,” then notes the Supreme Court’s probable invalidation of them, and follows by decrying the court’s action as damaging a “central accomplishment of black victories”; or which after detailing the frustrations of fifteen or so years of reliance on litigation to integrate the public schools of Atlanta while they were being deserted massively by white parents chastises black leadership for not continuing to rely on the lawyers and judges.

Orfield and Ashkinaze are wholly right in insisting that governmental action, even leadership, is now as before required for the resolution of our racial inequities. But law and law enforcement have their limits; the authors must know that and ought to have said so strongly. When I read their Chapter Five on “High Schools” I truly felt like weeping, for the youth in those schools and-confessedly–for the collapse of old hopes and dreams we once had and thought we had moved toward realization. On the evidence of this book those schools are terrible (and in my home town of Durham, in some ways a mini-Atlanta, one would find equally bad schools). But when the polemic of the authors against Atlanta’s black leaders who in the early 1970s sought a road to better schools other than more and yet more litigation (largely controlled from New York) is finished, all they can say in alternative is that “the data” do not “support” a conclusion that academically another way, with heavier busing, would have been better.

I don’t know how to make our schools better teach and rear our children and youth- Mr. Orfield and Ms. Ashkinaze do not either. Like other social scientists, they tell well what does not work. What I have experienced or observed working are only two things: good teachers, and that requires pay high enough to attract them into the profession–and it must be that a respected profession of responsible practitioners–and keep them there; and community values that surround children with expectations that they ought to learn, values strong in home, church and synagogue, and in the public including the press and television.

Orfield and Ashkinaze have a theoretical point to argue, and wrongly choose to do so by placing it in opposition to William Julius Wilson’s central conclusion regarding public policy in his The Truly Disadvantaged. His was that reform of poverty requires a political resolve to create full employment, that such cannot be attained without deep economic change, and that that is not about to happen unless the reforms are perceived as directly benefitting a wider slice of society than just minorities. Orfield and Ashkinaze decide that this rules out race specific programs (though Wilson says it only means they should not be “central”), and moreover that Atlanta’s experience shows the futility of Wilson’s condusion as ameliorating black poverty. Their criticism is important.

Its basis is that Atlanta during the 1980s was, they contend, the sort of tight labor market which Wilson sees as necessary for the poor’s advance–and yet in Atlanta they did not (at least the black poor did not: The Closing Door gives little attention to the non-black poor). The authors would have done better to see the Atlanta experience as confirming Wilson’s analysis. There was, of course, no “tight labor market” for black Atlantans and their argument that there would have been if racial deprivation in Atlanta’s schools and housing were not so intense that employers had to import workers from elsewhere does not get us very far. Not, at least, as a refutation of Wilson’s carefully constructed thesis that the poor will remain not only “truly disadvantaged” but economically superfluous (as Orfield and Ashkinaze unintentionally show them to be in Atlanta) absent a national commitment to full employment, and the structural changes in our economy that could make that possible.

Many persons (and I am one) regard The Truly Disadvantaged as the most valuable writing on American poverty of recent years. Perhaps the only one of lasting importance. Some years ago, Wilson would have been the winner of any contest, had there been one, for worst book title, with his The Declining Significance of Race. The book appeared at the same time as the early sproutings of what was to be the 1980s lush crop of reactionary and revisionist treatments of race and poverty. Conservatives loved and liberals hated the book, unread, just for its title. It has taken a while for Wilson to set his critics straight, as he first attempted to do in an epilogue to the second edition of Declining Significance and does again in the preface to The Truly Disadvantaged. If classifications matter, Wilson might be said to be in the tradition of Bayard Rustin. From his own impressive and widely respected scholarship he

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concludes as had Rustin that the welfare of America’s poor, black and non-black, is inextricably connected to an economy that is by public demand required to make decent room for them. The Truly Disadvantaged is a book more radical than liberal, because it knows that “any significant reduction of the problems of black joblessness and the related problems of crime, out-of-wedlock births, single-parent homes, and welfare dependency will call for a far more comprehensive program of economic and social reform than what Americans have usually regarded as appropriate or desirable. In short, it will require a radicalism that neither Democratic nor Republican parties have yet been realistic enough to propose.”

Joblessness comes first. Other problems are “related” to it. Wilson’s theoretical distinction is to insist that it–not poor people’s behavior, or the “culture of poverty,” or female-headed households and early pregnancies, or the welfare system–is basic: and the most important segment of it is black male joblessness. Wilson has argued persuasively that the root cause of the female-headed households is the small “male marriageable pool,” young unincarcerated black men working at decent paying jobs.

An interesting part of The Truly Disadvantaged comes in its first chapter where a variety of liberal perspectives on poverty are challenged. Wilson does not do this. however, in a liberal-bashing way but with the intent of pressing liberals to go beyond their usual analyses and programs, and to do so with realism. But he no more than Orfield and Ashkinaze nor Michael Katz follows realism to where in the present times it inevitably will lead, and that is to American militarism. In the years from the Second World War to the early 1970s this country did a mighty thing. Led by the great Southern civil rights movement, the rule of terror against blacks was halted, legal segregation and discrimination were ended, minority political rights were established, and doors were opened for the black elite to grow. All of those achievements can and undoubtedly will enlarge themselves; and good remnants of the Johnsonian “war on poverty”–Head Start, legal services, Jobs Corps–will continue to feed a trickle of the “truly disadvantaged” into what invidiously these days is called the “mainstream.”

But for the most part, realistic hopes for most of the poor had ended by the time President Carter took office. What the economy has told them ever since is the cruel, the damning, message that they are not needed. They are redundant. Nothing new about that. I and a horde of other North Americans of Scottish ancestry would likely not be here had our generally destitute forefathers not become redundant in Scotland. But the historic options no longer exist. People, all of us, have to do well here, together. We’ll not, not as long as Congress and Presidents don’t give a damn. Because if they ever started caring (instead of mouthing the claim), they would have to give up the commitment of our largest energies and resources to the military; and that they have not the courage or the wit or the will to do. Orfield and Ashkinaze will not get their renewal of commitment to civil rights nor will Wilson get his radical reforms as long as they have not, and as long as the public prefers yellow ribbons and parades. Orfield and Ashkinaze rightly say that we must confront directly the facts of racial discrimination. But if and as long as friends of the American poor do not confront directly American militarism they are but marking time, pawing the ground.

Michael Katz’s The Undeserving Poor is largely a review of what social scientists of the past quarter century have said about poverty and their recommended policies to eradicate it (Wilson has a few pages of such review also.) Students of these matters should find this book useful. At the same time, good students will be asking themselves what economics and the other social sciences can contribute to the amelioration. I think the answer is factual description and analysis.

It is hard to think of any benefit the poor owe to economists and other social scientists, who of late have studied them so everlastingly much. The poor of the 1930s owed the social scientists of the time a lot, for programs such as Old Age and Survivor Insurance (“Social Security”) and unemployment insurance originated in the universities. But assistance has dried up, to the present situation where a Wilson has to go against the grain of contemporary social science in order to say (what most people have known all along) that first of all, the poor need jobs.

What social scientists can do, and no one else has the tools to do so well, is, first, to provide clear, accurate descriptions; and, second, never to allow politicians to believe that gimmicky solutions are to be treated seriously or the public misled by them.

The Undeserving Poor has little of the anger and passion that made Katz’s earlier In the Shadow of the Poorhouse so attractive. There are even less of those qualities in A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society. This is a volume that undoubtedly should be on the shelf of every library. A score or so of eminently qualified authorities, many consultants also of reputation, many commissioned papers, a considerable staff, and what must have been many, many thousands of dollars combined to study and report. There are chapters (which include much repetition and overlapping) on political participation, the economy, schools, health, crime, families, attitudes, and yet more. It was all produced under the auspices of the National Research Council.

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As a portrait–“snapshot” seems to be the current word–of where black Americans were in the late 1980s (and are still) the report should be of high value. Sometimes, however, the book forsakes all claim to be other than a review of the relevant literature, giving readers another depressing opportunity to witness how much social science has been written in recent years about the poor, how assiduously social scientists have mined the same data and shaded the same “findings.” All three of the books discussed above are full of the compulsion to show that everything written by co-professionals has been read.

A Common Destiny compares itself with Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and with the Kerner Commission’s 1968 Report on Civil Disorders. It has neither the ardor of the latter or the commanding intelligence of the former. One came–one still comes–from a reading of Myrdal with messages to chew over, to agree or disagree with. One comes from this book with only as much information as one can load and carry. Its message, if there is one, is in its title: we are destined to be together.

Scan the lengthy bibliographies and references of Wilson, Orfield and Ashkinaze, and Katz, and there will not be found citations of the Children’s Defense Fund or the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. A shame–academic snobbery. We could do more satisfactorily without the products of academic social science than the loss of the reports of staffs (which include their own good economists and other social scientists) at the Fund and the Center. Regularly they report today what the academicians will be “finding” tomorrow.

I don’t intend this as more crude sniping at the universities; there is too much of that already. They bring skills that the advocacy centers hardly can; Orfield and Ashkinaze, for example, wrote a treatment of educational opportunities more powerful than anything I have heretofore read. It is, however, to organizations like the Fund and the Center that we have to depend on for the sharpening of facts to the service of political processes and to, first of all, an understanding that American poverty firmly connects to a) American partisan politics but b) even more, to the deep desire of both Democrats and Republicans to leave it alone, as well as they can. Orfield and Ashkinaze won’t enter that arena, Wilson strides above it, Katz seems in the present book to think solutions are all a matter of debate among “experts,” and A Common Destiny concludes on the orthodox note that there must be “public and private programs to increase opportunities and to reduce raceconnected constraints and disadvantages.”

People at Robert Greenstein’s Center and at Marian Wright Edelman’s Fund don’t take time to talk that way. ‘The Children’s Defense Fund’s annual “State of America’s Children” begins with an essay by Ms. Edelman which is as wise as it is moving, and then gets right down to business: first chapter, “family income and employment” The beginning of caring for children is to put adequate money into their homes.

“Eradicating childhood poverty” is essential to “improving the health, education, housing, welfare, and development of children and youth. Eliminating childhood poverty requires–ensuring that full-time work yields incomes high enough to support a family and that parents have the education and skills to obtain stable employment”

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities speaks with similar realism. A steady stream of reports comes from it some recent titles include Real Life Poverty in America; Unchanged Priorities; A Painless Recession?; Drifting Apart: Income Disparities Between the Rich, the Poor, and the Middle Class.

I am not sure that any problem of American life today is more serious than the one suggested by the last title or not connected to it Robert Greenstein and his staff, like Marian Wright Edeiman and hers, are frequent witnesses before Congressional committees. In March of this year, Greenstein tried to get the attention of one of them, by telling it:

“In fact, the growth in the incomes of the wealthiest Americans has been so large that just the increase between 1980 and 1990 in the after-tax income of the richest one percent of the population equaled the total income of the poorest twenty percent of the population in 1990. In other words, the increases in the after-tax income of the richest 2.5 million Americans between 1980 and 1990 equaled the total income the 50 million Americans with the lowest incomes received in 1990.”

So, off to our next jolly good Desert Storm. Build the space platform and the supercollider. Plunge ahead with Star Wars and still more B2s. Give more military aid to our clients abroad.

The poor you will have with you always.

Leslie Dunbar is book review editor of Southern Changes