Blacks Elected in Wilcox County

By Randall Williams

Vol. 3, No. 1, 1980, pp. 20-21, 22

For Larry Threadgill, whose family has been active in civil rights organizing and Black politics here since the early 1960’s, things are looking up. It has not been too many years ago that his older sister was being beaten as she took the first pioonering steps to integrate the local White high school. Nor has Threadgill forgotten having his shirt ripped off by the White superintendent of education as still more Blacks tried to register at that same school a few years later.

When he was subsequently expelled, Threadgill skipped from the 11th grade to college and graduated with a pre-law degree. In 1978, a chance weekend visit to help a Black man campaign for office brought him home. His candidate did become sheriff and another Black was elected tax collector, making history in Wilcox County. Threadgill chose not to go back to Atlanta. Now in the election just past, four more Blacks have won public offices in this Black Belt county in southwest Alabama.

At least it seems, change is in the wind here.

In January, for the first time ever, Blacks will take seats on the Wilcox County Commission and the Board of Education. About 70 percent of Wilcox County’s citizens are Black and they now have a determined and effective political organization. With a majority of Black voters, at last united, they will elect more Blacks in two more years and will control both these boards. Given recent trends and the mood of the Black electorate, it may now be impossible for a White to be elected in Wilcox County.

The Surprise is not that this is happening, but that it took so long. In the restaurant at the Bassmaster Inn in downtown Camden the morning after the September 2 Democratic primary, the mood of the Whites eating there was eerily reminiscent of what one used to read about Rhodesia. The threat has not yet arrived, but its shadow looms large on the horizon. “I’m about to sell what I got and move to to Australia or somewhere,” a forest ranger muttered.

Asked if the effectivenss of the Black political organization does mean that Wilcox Whites are now locked out of public offices, Larry Threadgrill replied: ” I hope it does not. I hope we have some good White peope in Wilcox County. I would hate to completely segregate the whole thing. I worked for integration in education and politics. I would hate to turn around and defeat my purpose. All I want to see is just some responsible people in office, be they Black, White, Japanese or Indian. If a Black is elected who doesn’t have the interest of the whole county at heart, I will work just as hard to get him out as I’ll to get a White out”.

Sheriff Prince Arnold echoes Threadgill, saying, “If a man goes in there and proves that office is for the full power of the people, he can get elected.”

Arnold became the youngest Black sheriff in the United States when he was elected over five White opponents in 1978. Arnold’s age, 27 at the time of election, and his color gained him national prominence, an invitation to President Carter’s Salt II White House Conference, and a seat at the 1980 Democratic National Convention. Arnold is generally considered by both Whites and Blacks to have done a good job as sheriff. The statistics indicate that crime against persons and property have declind slightly since he took office. (Previously White sheriffs had tended to ignore Black-on-Black violence; Arnold put out the word early that he would not). He says he has tried to fulfill a campaign promise to “treat everybody the same”, making point of keeping on his staff a white deputy who had been with the former sheriff.

“The only thing people want is to be treated like a human being and Whites who do that can get elected. But I don’t know too many in the offices now who do,” Arnold says.

The catch is theat the Whites who would be the most acceptable candidate to Blacks, those who are themselves most willing to accept Blacks, the young professionals, are the least likely to accept to seek public office. One such White man revealed that a group of about 30 young professionals recently met to discuss their shared belief that the mayor of Camden was inadequate for the office. The group tried to select one of their own to run against the mayor, but each person nominated declined too busy, not planning to stay in Camden, conflict with job, etc. Not one of the 30 young professionals was willing to run.

Even if, however, Blacks take complete control of the government of Wilcox County, they will be shut out of the greatest power base of all, the economic bloc. Wilcox is a relatively large county, roughly 900 square miles of land, some of the richest, balckest soil in North America. Before cotton was dethroned, virtually all of this land was farmed. Most of the farms were huge by Alabama standards–3,000 acres and up. Today 70 percent of the land is in pine forests, either privately managed or under the control of the giant paper companies. McMillan-Blodell, a Canadian wood products company built a $77 million plant here in the 1960s and is now the county’s largest employer (the Wilcox Board of education is second). Today’s farm products are beef cattle, soybeans and some cotton. All farming is heavily mechanized. If he has $80,000 to spend for a piece of equipment, it is possible for one man, riding in an air-conditioned and CB-and stereo equipped cab, to do the work that previously took a small army of slaves, sharecroppers, or hired field hands. There are only a handful of Black landowners in the county, most of them in Geese Bend, the isolated section on the far side of the river from Camden. Blacks there own farm land because of an experimental Farm Security Administration program of the 1940s.

The transition from crops to trees and the mechanization of the farming created or coincided with,depending on one’s point of view, the exodus of Blacks from Wilcox County. The county’s population to be 13,000. the loss has been among the Black population; the White populaion has remained steady and may have increased slightly. In another two decades, the Black-White population in Wilcox County could be about even.

But meanwhile as long as they have a majority, Blacks have an opportunity to make substantial changes in the way Wilcox County is run. The first necessary step seems to be to broaden the revenue base. With control of the school board and the county commission, and with a unified Black voting bloc, an increase in property taxes could be effected. This is not a new idea; as early as 1966 a published report cited landowners’ fears that Blacks would take control and raise taxes.

Will it happen? During the recent campaigns, the screening committee asked the county commission candidates what they would do about taxes. One of the men who was ultimately elected said he thought the answer was to impose a sales tax “because that would be easiest and fairest”. The screening committee endorsed his candidacy anyway, hoping that before he takes office he can be made aware of the distinctions between progressive and regressive taxation.

Should a tax initiative be successful, there would be considerable irony in that the same wealthy landowners and merchants who dominated the schools when Blacks’ slice of the pie was almost invisible would now have to pay for the improvements so long needed for education. Of course, to effect significant change in taxation, Blacks will also have to gain control of the Board of Equalization, a body which has the authority to reduce property assessments if a lnadowner feels his taxes are too high. This board’s members are nominated by the county commission, the school board and the Camden city council. Aside from the paternal attitude expressed by school board member Robert Lambert, who says Whites need to control the board because Blacks are financially inept, one wonders if White determination to control the school board long after White children had left the public schools might be linked to the essentials need to control the appointments to the Board of Equalization.

One also wonders why, in a county which has almost 70 percent Black population, it has taken until 1978 and 1980 to elect Blacks to important county offices. Sheriff Prince Arnold says it was fear that kept Blacks from realizing the full strength of their numbers at the voting booth “fear of the structure in this county”. School board member-elect K.P.Thomas says flatly that the fear of losing their jobs made many Black teachers work against Black political efforts. “Most of the time to get hired, you had to make committments not to be in this or be in that. During the election time the superintendent and the school board members get out among the teachers and workers and campaign against the people who are running. This is what hurts us so much.”

Fear, intimidation, White influence–each of these explanation is a part of the picture of political ineffectiveness which handicapped Blacks up to this time. It is a waste if effort, really, to wonder why change was so long cominh. Wilcox county was one of the handful of “cipher” counties in which there were no Blacks registered when the Voting Rights Act was passed. Says Monroe Pettway, a Black farmer, “I remember when I wasn’t no Black registered voters in Wilcox County. Right there in Gees Bend we were the first ones to register over to that court-house. The White folks over there went crazy. Acted like they didn’t know where the courthouse was and some of ‘e, working in the courthouse.”

There is an expression “Colored Peoples’ Time,” which is sometimes used (with no respect) to describe the in-their-own-time pace at which older, especially rural, Blacksconduct their business. Certainly years of dealing with the Wilcox White folks would teach one a thing or two about patience, perseverance and prayer. Ultimately, he best explanation may be merely that it took time for Blacks to gain their leadership network, and to realize, as Prince Arnold pointed out, that “it could be done.”

Now, of course, time seems to be on the side of the Blacks, though the Lord knows there are problems enough to keep them occupied.

Randall Williams is an Alabama journalist now in Georgia

Notes of a Klanwatcher

By Randall Williams

Vol. 4, No. 2, 1982, pp. 11-13

It’s easy and relatively safe, in 1982, to hate the KKK, but explaining why an anti-Klan movement is necessary, and getting those in that movement to agree with the explanation, is less simple. After a year Klanwatching (a friend still calls us occasionally, asks, “Have you spotted any today?” then bursts into hysterical laughter), we taped a favorite photo to a door in the office. The picture depicts a serious young man, a member of a Canadian anti-Klan group, in mid-leap from the roof of a car, placard stick raised on high, about to smash the head of an equally serious young man who is a member of another anti-racist group. The supporting parts in the photo are played by several dozen members of these two groups, battling in a melee apparently provoked by a difference of opinion on how best to oppose the racism and violence of the Ku Klux Klan in British Columbia.

Looking at that photograph, we at Klanwatch are apt to burst into hysterical laughter.

Part of the problem is that there are so many contradictions involved; many questions about what author Stetson Kennedy calls the Bedsheet Brigade can be truthfully answered both “yes” and “no.” We will look at other parts of the problem, but first, consider some of the contradictions.

No, there aren’t enough Klansmen and they aren’t well enough organized, right now, to pose the country any serious threat. Yes, you can still get hurt, killed or otherwise terrorized by the Klan if you’re the “wrong” color or doing the “wrong” thing. Or if you happen to be married to California Klan leader Michael Mendonsa, who recently ended his wife’s budding career in organized racism by blowing her apart with a shotgun.

Still another contradiction involves the recently widely publicized Klan recruitment of youth. No, the Klan Youth Corps is not experiencing a membership explosion similar to that of the Hitler Youth in the 1930s. Yes, the Klan today deliberately seeks out youth and involves them in rallies, demonstrations and training. And a startlingly high percentage of contemporary racist violence and harassment is committed by youngsters. Klan literature does show up in schools around the country. The stuff is available for the writing from three or four Klan publications and is advertised in gun and adventure magazines available at most grocery and drug stores.

Where Klan chapters exist, it should not surprise anyone when the sons and daughters of Klansmen say or do racist things or pass around literature in school. However, the Klan youth camps which were seen on television in 1980 and written about in Rolling Stone and other publications were largely spontaneous creations for the benefit of the press, and the kids in them were almost all the children of adult Klan members.

I think the Klan has definite allure for certain types of white children. Kids dwell on mystery, violence and sensationalism, and the Klan has all of that, especially as portrayed by much of the reporting on the subject today. Some kids–perhaps most of them, really–are raised with racism. Take a kid who already has all of that stuff running around in his head, who is at the age of rebellion, and who can’t make the debate team (or; equally likely, is never encouraged to try), gets beat out by black kids on the basketball team, and sits sullenly in the back of the classroom–that kid is ripe for recruitment.

But even the strength of the adult Klan is a contradiction. It is not true that the Klan’s membership is currently growing by leaps and bounds, through reporter after reporter dutifully licks his pencil point and records it when the local head cone confides, “Well, son, we don’t discuss numbers, but we’ve got klaverns now in every country in this state and three new ones started last week.” It is true that Klan membership today is the highest since the mid1960s and that the growth was dramatic between 1975 and 1980. We at Klanwatch believe the Klan’s membership leveled off in 1981, though there is potential for more growth. Clearly, this potential is aggravated by the mean mood of the nation as a whole. It should be remembered that there are plenty of people in Washington doing more harm with ink pens than the Klan is with axe handles. Elsewhere, racist violence, whether committed by actual Klan members or not, is at a sickeningly high level, as is religious bigotry.

There is genuine reason to be concerned about these turns of events, all condradictions notwithstanding, especially when the leaders of the nation seem blind to the existence of the problems and the causes.

Which brings us to today’s sermon topic. We can cuss, meet, march, legislate and litigate until the proverbial freezing over of hell, but until we start thinking about Klansmen as people and consider how it is that we still have a society which spawns them we’re not going to whip the problem. This is not to say that the current educational campaigns against the Klan are no good, or that the

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prosecutions and civil lawsuits against criminal Klansmen do not deter other racist violence, or that outspoken stands against the Klan philosophy have no effect. All of these are vital and are largely responsible for the current disarray within the Klan ranks.

But one of the obvious similarities of most Klansmen is an overwhelming ignorance and a complete alienation from our society and its institutions. It’s a tough concept to sell the “Death of the Klan” crowd, but I think most Klansmen, the rank and file, are victimized almost as much as the targets of their hatred. It may not have been as true in the Klan’s prior incarnations, when thousands of otherwise solid citizens were members, but most Klansmen today are pretty sad characters. As a class, they are powerless people on the fringes of social and economic life. They almost always have serious psychological problems, with so-much anger and hate that they are slowly burning up from the inside. They go through their lives being manipulated by their employers, by the finance company, by the landlord, by George Wallace and Jim Eastland and the like, and finally by smooth-talking salesmen like Bill Wilkinson (head of the Invisible Empire), David Duke (National Association for the Advancement of White People), and Don Black (Knights of the KKK).

Having been ignored for so long, many of them are attracted by the aroma of power which surrounds Klan leaders. It must be power, the prospective Kluxer reasons, because people like Wilkinson get on the Phil Donahue and Tom Snyder shows; they can go to city hall and attract half the police and all the press in town; they aren’t afraid to call (chuckle) a spade a spade; they’ve got big cars, bodyguards and can even wear a suit without looking as if it was bought that morning. Once he joins, the new Kluxer can get on the evening news himself, just for standing on the street corner in his robe.

In addition to power, the social aspect of the Klan, the sense of belonging to something, should not be overlooked. Most Klansmen have never belonged to anything. Surprisingly few of them, considering the Klan’s lip service to Christianity, even attend church, according to testimony in connection with a recent civil lawsuit against a splinter Klan group in Chattanooga, Tenn. One of the defendants in that suit, a participant in the shooting incident which injured five black women, testified that he had joined the Klan for reasons which included having a group of guys to drink beer with, and because he wanted to “help people.” (Some 32 percent of white Chattanoogans, according to survey data, were favorable to some aspect of the Klan, mostly to the old vigilante notion that the Klan keeps in line not only black people but also would-be wife deserters, wanton women, etc.) Under questioning, the Klansmen admitted that the only other organization he had ever joined was the French club in his high school.

He is not atypical. Frequently, Klan meetings and rallies have an atmosphere which for all its perverse weirdness can only be described as like a country social. There may be music and speeches, children playing in the grass, mama and daddy dressed in their robes, grandma sitting in her folding lawn chair, and plenty of fish and beer.

In such situations, an interested onlooker who can detach himself for a moment from his feelings of contempt and hatred for what the organization before him represents, will be swept by a sense of sadness and pity.

Or sometimes humor, because in its benign moments the Klan often makes me wonder: If I’m supposed to be so scared, why do I feel like laughing? Last summer, Mike Vahala (also a Klanwatch staffer) and I attended a Klan recruitment rally in a public park on the outskirts of Columbus, Ga. First the movie “Birth of a Nation” was shown, then there was the usual incoherent discussion of how the government and especially the courts had abandoned white people, then the meeting broke up so the Klansmen could go burn a cross, which was not permitted in the public park.

On impulse, Mike and I got in line in the caravan which formed, and we drove 10 or 12 miles out in the country, turned off the main road onto a side road, then off that onto a private road which went across a pasture and into some woods. It was dark and mighty lonely, and the 60 people who had been at the park had dwindled to 15 or 20. Except for Mike and myself and two guys we thought (and hoped) were undercover cops, the rest appeared to be Klan members, some robed and some not, or at least strong sympathizers. There had been no weapons in the public park, but suddenly everyone was wearing them.

It was a slightly anxious moment, but then it became obvious that no one was paying attention to us. Instead, there was a serious problem with the cross-burning equipment. In an achievement of high-tech Klankraft, the local boys had built themselves a reusable cross from sections of steel pipe. Wrapped with burlap and soaked with diesel fuel, the 30-foot cross was simply too heavy to lift. For a half-hour or so, an awful lot of grunting and sweating went on, and some mighty nice white robes got soiled with dirt and diesel fuel. By this time it was getting late, and Mike and I faced a long drive and were ready to start home.

We eased into the crowd and made a few suggestions, directed a couple of guys to get up on a pickup truck for leverage, had others tie a chain to the cross and pull, and finally the cross stood up, though by now the pipe had bent and throughout the ceremony which followed one Klansman had to brace the cross by holding to the chain. The ceremony itself was similar to an ROTC drill, with a lot of marching, about-facing, saluting and so forth. The leader couldn’t remember his lines and had to get out his Klan manual and read his piece. We couldn’t understand what he said anyway, because he read with his face down and through his mask. It didn’t seem to matter. The cross lit up the sky and the non-robed spectators made photographs, and the night air was enlivened by a few “White Power” chants. Then we all went home.

My point is not that ineptitude makes the Klan less dangerous, but that its members are merely human beings who happen to be united in a destructive cause. United also by ignorance, by their station in life, by their utter inability to comprehend the world around them.

In this case, ignorance is not bliss, but blindness. While visiting the national office (a one-room masonry building) of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Tuscumbia to serve a subpoena, I had a long, casual conversation with Charlie Thomas, who works in the office. Among other things, he insisted to me that the black man who was given Allan Bakke’s medical school seat (in the famous affirmative action case) had an I.Q. of 39. “You can’t be serious,” I responded, “Why, a person with an I.Q. of 39 can hardly talk.” “Yeah,” Thomas replied. “Aint it a damn shame.” When he saw that I was unconvinced, Thomas searched for a few minutes for the “proof” of his claim, an article he had read somewhere in one of the Klan newspapers. Thomas also insisted that the racial turmoil in Decatur, Ala., in 1979, when the Klan had attacked peaceful black demonstrators, had come about because the blacks were marching in celebration of the anniversary of the rape of a white woman. When I told him he was

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wrong, that the march had been to protest what the demonstrators perceived as the unjust prosecution and conviction of a retarded black man for that crime, he was unmoved.

Charlie Thomas did not strike me as a particularly evil man. He doesn’t seem too smart and he clearly is angry about a lot of things, though he has difficulty explaining just what. My guess is that if a good union had gotten to Charlie Thomas first, he would be just as dedicated to the brotherhood of workers as he currently is to the KKK.

We should think about that when we next start chanting, “Death to the Klan.”

Randall Williams is an Alabama writer who its currently serving as director of the KLANWATCH project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Elephants in the Cottonfields

By Randall Williams

Vol. 5, No. 1, 1983, pp. 19-20

Elephants in the Cottonfields: Ronald Reagan and the New Republican South. Wayne Greenhaw. Macmillan, 1982.

The growing strength of the Republican party in Dixie has taken many Democrats by both storm and surprise, but the G.O.P. muscle-building did not begin yesterday. Explaining this fact is only one of the services performed here by author Wayne Greenhaw, though if he had accomplished nothing else Elephants would still bee success.

In fact the book offers a great deal more. Greenhaw has assembled detailed profiles of the leading personalities behind the Republican surge; he manages to give us a picture of the situation in every Southern state, and his interviews with young voters reveal what the South’s political future might be if many Republican dreams–and Democratic nightmares–are realized.

In that sense, Greenhaw’s book is non-partisan political reportage; both Democrats and Republicans will come away from Elephants knowing much more about their respective parties.

There is plenty of history here that never gets taught in many Southern schools. Greenhaw starts at the beginning, with the Southern reaction to the formation of the Republican party. Then he moves ahead, through secession, through war, then Reconstruction, then the return to power in the South of white Democrats.

Of more immediate interest is the examination of how Goldwater fever hit the South in 1964. Here Ronald Reagan appeared for the first time, and Richard Nixon returned, and the groundwork was laid for the first real two-party politics in the South in one hundred years.

Greenhaw writes that this was no accident but an indicator of the polarization within the Democratic party over racial issues. Strom Thurmond was not the only Democrat converting to Republicanism out of a belief that the South was being forced by national Democrats into a Second Reconstruction.

But as white Southern Democrats abandoned their party, blacks moved into it. (The quotes by George Wallace–the ’64 model–on this development are intriguing.) More than ninety percent of blacks voted Democratic in 1964, signaling the extent to which Lincoln’s party and the Democrats had switched roles.

Elephants is a contemporary story from this point on, and begins to be peopled by familiar characters. Here for example is Jesse Helms, who began as “a soda jerk at the local drugstore, sweeping out the weekly Monroe Enquirer, and writing up the high school (athletic games),” and eventually became a newspaper, radio and television personality, which gave him the platform he needed to become a well-known conservative voice in the “tobacco valleys of eastern North Carolina.”

Thousands of words have been written about Helms, but few have as carefully explored his early career and the foundation of his astonishing political popularity built around a philosophy of negativism . . . “He has always against something, whether it was food stamps for the needy, sex education for the ignorant, or government-paid abortions for women who could not otherwise afford such drastic measures of birth control.” Meanwhile, adds Greenhaw, “federal support for tobacco farmers was a necessity as (Helms) viewed it. Besides, his wife had a tobacco allotment.”

Similarly profiled is Jeremiah Denton, the junior senator from Alabama who rode his reputation as a Vietnam war hero into the Capitol. Both Denton and Helms are important to any discussion of Republicans today, but they do not represent the entire party. In fact, the detail with which Elephants examines the extreme right, especially the religious right, reveals the serious differences which exist within the Republican party.

Representing another faction of the GOP is Tennessee’s Howard Baker, through whom Greenhaw illustrates the “new old Republican order.” Baker’s Senate seat adjoins those of both Helms and Denton, but his brand of Republicanism may as well be from another planet. While Helms was reading segregationist editorials over the air in North Carolina in the Sixties, Baker was studiously keeping to the middle of the road, voting against federal funds for busing but for all major civil rights legislation.

Greenhaw’s skill as a reporter has never been more evident than in the chapter he does on Lee Atwater, the South Carolina protege of Thurmond who ramrodded the Reagan campaign in the South and in his spare time managed the campaigns of six Republican congressional candidates (all six won).

Atwater is the master–and originator, he says–of the Negative Factor Theory of politics. This theory is put into practice through a simple technique: Never mind the issues, just raise lots of money, find dirt on the opponent, then publicize the hell out of it. If no dirt exists, invent some.

This chapter should be memorized by any Democrat planning to run for office in what used to be the Solid South. However, Greenhaw writes not just about Atwater’s strategies, but about the man himself. In fact, he peels Atwater like an onion, layer by layer, yet he does

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it in such a way that probably no one will enjoy that chapter more than Atwater himself.

Greenhaw makes no projections for the future success or failure of Atwater and his Republican colleagues. He acknowledges that although Republicans are growing in strength, Democrats generally still control the South but with a looser grip than before.

What will become of the young Republicans who call themselves progressives, or the New Right apostles who viewed Reagan’s election as a mandate for them? That remains to be seen, of course, but Greenhaw has given us a good look at the landscape.

Randall Williams, a writer and editor who lives in Montgomery, is a Yellow-dog Democrat.

Witness In Montgomery

By Randall Williams

Vol. 5, No. 4, 1983, pp. 1-6

Not since the celebrated bus boycott of 1955-56 or the Selma March days of 1965 has the atmosphere in Montgomery, Alabama, been so charged with racial tensions. The immediate cause is a string of incidents involving blacks and the Montgomery police, but behind these cases looms a larger issue, Mayor Emory Folmar, a conservative Republican who was beaten decisively by George Wallace in the 1982 governor’s election.

Folmar is both mayor and de facto police chief of Alabama’s capital city, and his hard-line, love-it-or-leave-it attitudes on public safety, community development, redistricting and other issues have led to steadily deteriorating relations with the forty percent of Montgomery’s population that is black, as well as with a growing number of whites. His critics, while recognizing that the recent police confrontations were serious incidents, charge that a more flexible personality and more responsive leader than Folmar would have prevented their escalation into a full-scale community crisis.

Now, the situation is reminiscent of the earlier civil rights era in this city known as the Cradle of the Confederacy. The black churches are again the scene of mass meetings. The black leadership has held well-publicized but private strategy sessions from which has emerged an unusual–for recent years, at least–unanimity, including an economic boycott of the city’s largest bank. Picket lines have been thrown up against a white-owned black radio station. Protest marches have been held. A cross has been burned in the yard of the spokesman for the black leaders.

Several incidents since the first of the year have contributed to the current situation. Most recently, an armed black man was killed in June by a white policeman

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responding to a report of a shooting in the neighborhood. In May, a black man who was apparently drunk but unarmed was killed by a black policewoman. In April, a white policeman seriously wounded an unarmed black man who was mistakenly thought to be an escaped prisoner.

The first and most controversial incident occurred in February when a group of black mourners was assembled in the deceased’s home following the funeral. Before the night was over, two white plain-clothes policemen had been injured, one critically, and eight mourners arrested. The police say they identified themselves, were taken hostage and then beaten and shot. The mourners say the two whites did not identify themselves as police but kicked down the door to the house and charged in with their guns drawn, at which time the blacks disarmed them and then called the police. Later, the mourners say, more police arrived and the two whites tried to escape and shots were fired.

The two accounts vary so widely that Montgomery citizens can only wait and hope that the upcoming trials will reveal the truth. However, the police department’s early handling of the incident was seen by blacks and by many whites as a gross over-reaction and an attempt to cover up possible improper conduct by the two officers. For example, Police Chief Charles Swindall held a predawn press conference to denounce the mourners as “wild animals who had their prey on the ground.” He used the word torture to describe the treatment of the officers, said one of them had had his throat slashed requiring seventy-five stitches, and made other highly inflammatory comments.

This infuriated blacks, especially when the press later reported that the most serious offenses on the records of any of the accused were traffic violations, that the officer’s “slashed” throat required ten stitches instead of seventy-five, and that one of the officers’ guns was missing, despite the fact that police had immediately surrounded the house and had searched everyone present, Also, the police tape recorder did not work when it should have automatically recorded radio transmissions and phone calls about the incident. In addition, there were allegations that the accused were beaten during;. interrogation.

On the other hand, many whites and some blacks criticized over-reaction by black leaders, too, notably the call by State Rep. Alvin Holmes for federal authorities to place the city under martial law. The circumstances of the incident cast grave doubt on the conduct of the police, mused many Montgomerians, yet there was no getting around the fact that two officers were severely wounded. Why, asked whites, were there not some prayers for the two officers among the vigils and protests that were being held in the black community?

The matter of the missing tape recording from police headquarters was seen as similar to a mid-1970s scandal in which police wrongfully shot a black man, then allegedly planted a gun on his body. The automatic tape recordings in that incident had been erased by the time the prosecutor asked for them, and ultimately the public safety commissioner, the mayor and nearly a dozen police officers resigned or were fired.

The mayor at that time was James Robinson, and his resignation led to a 1977 special election which was won by Emory Folmar, who had been the city council president. Ironically, Robinson is widely perceived by blacks as a basically decent man who was trapped in the Whitehurst scandal by accident, while Folmar is believed by many blacks to be the problem with the police department. In addition, Folmar is seen as being generally hostile toward black interests if not actively racist.

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Robinson usually enjoyed good relations with the black community. In fact, Robinson was instrumental in changing the city’s form of government in the early 1970s from a three-man commission, elected at-large, to the nine-district council, thus paving the way for the first black elected municipal officials in Montgomery history. When the first council elections were held in 1975, four blacks and five whites were chosen, and the nine then selected Folmar as the council president. It was Folmar’s first venture into elective politics, and from the council’s first organizational meeting, he made it clear that he meant to be a force to be reckoned with.

His District Eight constituents were overwhelmingly white and among the city’s wealthiest and most conservative residents. Through a combination of representing his district and his own philosophy of government, Folmar was frequently on opposite sides from black council members on issues ranging from council appointments to the allocation of community development funds. In fairness to Folmar, it should be said that he was not alone–many council votes were split five to four along racial lines; but blacks resented Folmar most because he was not only the council president but also its most powerful personality, and at least two of the white council members invariably cast glances at Folmar before raising their own hands during votes on controversial issues.

Two council debates are good illustrations. The first concerned community development money, which was intended by Congress to help eliminate what the planners call urban blight. To the blacks on the city council, this meant the money should build sewers, sidewalks, street lights and community centers in low-income areas, particularly in black low-income neighborhoods which had been neglected in all the decades past; Montgomery had several black neighborhoods as late as 1975 which had to use outdoor toilets because sewer lines had never reached them.

Long battles were fought over this money and in the end many sewers and sidewalks were built. But the community development funds also helped build a golf course at a recreation complex located on the eastern edge of Montgomery near the suburbs where white residents have been steadily relocating since World War II. Community development money was also used for three neighborhood parks built in predominantly white residential areas which were definitely not blighted. Folmar did not win these projects without help, but he was instrumental in their passage and his attitude was interpreted by blacks as one of “I don’t care what Congress said, we whites, poor or not, are also getting some of that government money.”

A second case which increased the black council members’ distaste for Folmar resulted when blacks moved to rename a street in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. The street in question, Jackson Street, was the site of King’s home for the years that he was the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church; this was the house that was bombed in the Fifties while Coretta King and the children were inside. Folmar spoke and voted against the renaming and then introduced a compromise which would have named a section of Interstate 85, which passes through the city, after King. This debate had occurred before, in the early Seventies when Montgomery still had a three-man commission form of government, and the Interstate compromise had been suggested then, too. But that compromise failed because of opposition from state officials. The issue then took on a new significance after blacks had achieved voting power in city government.

The argument was that it would be wrong to dishonor Andrew Jackson in order to honor King, so the Interstate memorial was an alternative and would be even more visible. Getting the memorial was symbolically very important to Montgomery blacks and it was the first major question with racial implications to come up after the four black council members had taken their seats. They were disappointed that the whites had felt it was necessary to put up a fight on the issue, and they were not totally satisfied with the Interstate memorial since it was not city property. But they accepted the compromise anyway, only to discover that federal highway regulations prohibit the naming of interstates for individuals. Rightly or wrongly, many observers, white and black, believed that Folmar had known this fact all along and deliberately led the council down a rabbit trail Ultimately, blacks in the Alabama legislature pushed through a resolution and overcame the federal obstacles and today all who pass through Montgomery on I85 see a huge green sign proclaiming it Martin Luther King Jr. Expressway. But the incident did not increase Folmar’s stature in the black community, and relations with his black colleagues on the city council have worsened since he became mayor and his power increased.

Gung-ho, stubborn, fiercely competitive, hardworking, and capable are terms which are regularly used to describe the mayor. Hard-headed, macho, dictatorial, intolerant, devious, racist, overly aggressive and paranoid are some others.

Employees at city hall say that if Folmar were judged on administrative ability and dedication alone he would rank among the best mayors any city could want. He is at his desk most days before other employees have taken their morning showers. He is personally wealthy-

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before entering politics he was a shopping center developer–and draws only a token dollar a year as his mayoral salary (though a recent letter-to-the-editor writer argued-that he is overpaid).

He is an ex-Army officer who was a highly decorated hero of Korea. He still keeps himself in rock-hard physical condition and has a military approach to organization and discipline. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the police, and it is in the area of law enforcement that his critics are most severe. The critics come from both inside and outside the police department.

Outside critics charge that Folmar believes, and expects everyone else to believe, that the police are always right; that he has encouraged an us-versus-them mentality; that he tries to run the department himself, and that the net result has been an increase of harassment by police, especially of blacks and gays.

“Just call our city Fort Montgomery and the mayor our commander-in-chief,” comments Joe Reed, a black city councilman who has been Folmar’s most persistent opponent in city government and who is also the head of the Alabama Democratic Conference, the state’s leading black political organization.

Adds Willie Peak, the white president of the city council, “Most whites recognize there could be possible wrongs on both sides [of the February confrontation]. Most whites are concerned about the ‘we can do no wrong’ attitude of the police.”

Critics inside the police department also fault Folmar for trying to run it like a military battalion with himself as general; for imposing his decisions over those of experienced, career police professionals, and for making promotions contingent on an officer’s personal loyalty and chumminess with the mayor.

Since Folmar came to power, several high-ranking police officials have retired from the department rather than accept the mayor’s tight control. Their privately stated grievances range from favoritism in promotion, to what they view as a ridiculous obsession with spit and polish, to Folmar’s actual interference with field operations.

It is true that Folmar has personally shown up at all hours of the day or night to participate in or take charge of on-the-scene police work, and that the officers who work as his bodyguards move rapidly through the ranks, often bypassing officers of greater experience. To give thy. example of just one officer, an example related by other police, Folmar acknowledged the good work of the officer yet refused to promote the man because “you’re not loyal to me.”

Folmar is the police chief, observed one ax-officer. “He personally promotes; Chief [Charles] Swindall doesn’t have the gumption or the power to do anything about it. Chief Swindall should have retired when Folmar was reelected.” Both current and ax-officers view this as a bitter irony because they consider Swindall to be an excellent police officer and actually a better chief than the man he replaced.

Folmar’s personal pistol-packing gave rise to the Montgomery joke: “Question: Why is the Mayor’s pistol chrome-plated? Answer: So it won’t rust in the shower.”

The police themselves tell and laugh at this joke, but they are less amused by Folmar’s parade inspections and pep talks. “These are grown men he’s having out here standing at attention. This isn’t boot camp,” observed an ax-officer.

Ex-police are also critical of the department’s low salaries and note that Montgomery taxpayers routinely spend five thousand or more dollars to send a new officer through Police Academy training only to have him leave for a better paying job after a year or two on the force. Many ten-, fifteen-, and even twenty-year veterans are also tempted out of police work for higher salaries with detective or security agencies or state government job”. Asked what he considered to be the biggest problem with the Montgomery police, a high-ranking official of the Alabama State Troopers replied, without hesitation, “They have too many young officers because they don’t pay enough to keep experienced men.”

Several highly symbolic changes have been made in the police force since Folmar became mayor. One was the repainting of all the police cars from a pleasant, non-threatening light blue to stark black and white. Another was the emergence of black SWAT-team style uniforms for officers on the night shifts. The new uniforms replace the traditional policeman’s hat with a baseball-type cap without a badge and feature bloused pants tucked into high lace-up military-style boots. The people inside the cars and uniforms are the same as before, but the difference in appearance is striking, and ominous.

Ex-police say the night shift officers themselves sought the new uniform because they believed it would be safer during the most dangerous hours of police work–a shiny badge flashing in the night is a better target. But the uniforms add to the military effect which Folmar has encouraged for the department, and the change has not gone unnoticed in the community. The uniforms were meant to be worn by the third shift officers, but the hats, at least, have apparently been adopted as a symbol by some officers, especially the younger ones, and are routinely seen at all hours. Some older officers even doubt the theory behind the new uniforms. “When we’re out o~ the street,” they say, “we want people to recognize

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instantly that we’re police”; and the traditional uniform tells them that.

It is impossible to judge the accuracy of the allegation, but people who say they have been harassed by Montgomery police, especially young blacks, say in so many words that they believe there are certain police or even squads of police who look for opportunities to provoke people, and that these are the police who wear the military-type uniforms. This may be only a perception, but it increases fear and hostility and that creates trouble for the officer on patrol. The state trooper official who spoke of low salaries mentioned a second area of concern for Montgomery police: “P.R.–they’ve also got a public relations problem. Brother, do they need some better public relations.”

Even the ax-officers who are critical of the mayor, however, also note that he reorganized the department into smaller divisions with greater supervision and more officers on the street at all times. Folmar and Chief Swindall claim that crime has been reduced since Folmar took charge.

A city government source from the Robinson era observed that Folmar took office at a time when, due to the Whitehurst scandal, police relations with blacks were at a low point. And then, rather than take steps to identify and correct the problem, it seems that Folmar’s actions made things worse.

Not all of Folmar’s strong-arm tactics were aimed specifically at the black community, however. Soon after he took office the police conducted an illegal drug search of patrons at a rock concert at the Montgomery Civic Center. Every person entering was searched, with or without probable cause, and a number of arrests were made. The arrests were nullified after a federal judge sharply rebuked the police actions–and the mayor–but three years would pass before another rock concert was held at the Civic Center.

City hall insiders also view with suspicion the scuttling by Folmar of the reorganization that former mayor Robinson had engineered. Basically, Robinson divided the city’s departments into several major divisions, each of which was headed by a professional administrator who took care of the details and answered to the mayor’s office on policy and procedure. Folmar has dismantled this system, and every department head in the city is under Folmar’s personal supervision–and knows it.

Such is the background against which the current racial troubles in Montgomery must be seen. Legal challenges have been raised to a Folmar-backed redistricting plan for this year’s city elections. A federal judge has agreed with black challengers that the city’s new reapportionment plan was drawn to discriminate against black voters and black officeholders, particularly against long-time Folmar opponent Joe Reed. After the ruling, Folmar said the city would appeal, and he also issued what amounted to a personal attack on the federal judge, who is black. Folmar’s statement, to the effect that the ruling was not unexpected considering the source, encouraged disrespect for the law and for federal judges and bordered on outright racism. Elections may or may not be held in October.

Despite widespread discontent with Folmar, few have seemed especially eager to challenge him. The strongest potential candidate has been city council president Peak, but he has said he will not run. The announced candidates to date are a young white businesswoman who said she would drop out if a more experienced contender emerged, a white contractor with connections to the business community, and Franklin James, a member of a

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prominent Montgomery family and the brother of former longtime mayor Earl James. Only James, who was once the state’s industrial relations director, has any political experience. James announced his candidacy just as this issue was going to press, and it is too early to assess his chances. However, his political reflexes are evidently in good shape because he went directly to the key issue: Folmar himself. James’s opening statement included references to the incumbent’s ego, grandstanding tactics, and lightning-rod administrative style. Montgomery needs a mayor, James said, who can get along with all of the city’s people, and who solves problems rather than creates them. James also promised that his industrial relations background would bring factories and jobs.

Black council member Donald Watkins, an attorney who represented the Bernard Whitehurst family after the 1976 shooting, has said he will run against Folmar if “no credible white candidate comes forward.” (The statement was made before James or the contractor, David Thames, announced their intentions; Watkins has not indicated whether he considers Thames or James to be credible candidates.)

Blacks acknowledge that no black mayoral candidate can win in the face of a white electoral majority. However, the precinct totals cannot be comforting to Folmar. He cannot be expected to get more than a handful of Montgomery’s black voters, and 30.2 percent of the registered voters are black. He is also a Republican, and although the city elections in Montgomery are not partisan contests, he would still be vulnerable against a strong white Democrat who can avoid antagonizing the conservatives while still expressing some of the misgivings many whites also feel toward Folmar’s brand of leadership. Folmar did not carry Montgomery in the 1982 gubernatorial race against George Wallace.

Folmar recently presented petitions bearing what he said were more than seventeen thousand signatures of Montgomery voters who wanted him to run for reelection. However, no one has collected the signatures of those who will vote for anyone else, and Folmar is obviously sniffing the political winds. While he had, earlier rejected calls for committees to probe issues causing racial tensions, he changed his course a few weeks ago and announced his own bi-racial committee. He appointed the chairman and vice-chairman and invited council members to nominate three persons each to the new committee. So far, three of the four black council members have declined, saying the committee was created by Folmar for political reasons and could never be effective while the chairman was appointed by Folmar. Critics also say that Folmar made a mistake when he named a white chairman and a black vice-chairman rather than two co-chairs, and they view the structure of the committee as proof of Folmar’s determination to control even the discussion over Montgomery’s current problems. The committee received another wound when the black vice-chairman, the president of Alabama State University, resigned without attending a meeting, saying he could not take part in a committee with such obviously political overtones.

Meanwhile, an anonymous citizen known as Jack Smith has created the Friendly Supper Club, which merely invites interested persons to show up with a guest of a different race at an appointed time at a local cafeteria to “break bread together” and get to know one another across racial lines.

The second of the dinners, in June, took place just one day after a cross was burned in the yard of black county commissioner John Knight, who is the spokesman for the boycott called by blacks against the First Alabama Bank. Coming at a time of increasing attention to Montgomery’s racial troubles, the contrast between the cross-burning and the Friendly Supper Club was too great for the media to pass up. CBS and NBC both sent camera crews to town, and their reports juxtaposed pictures of the charred cross in Knight’s yard with shots of blacks and whites smiling and talking around the cafeteria tables. The local media especially made a point of the difference between Folmar’s beleaguered bi-racial committee and the independently created Friendly Supper Club. Dialogue was the order of the day, but it was not the Mayor who was doing the talking.

One of those at the June dinner was Johnnie Carr, the president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which sponsored the bus boycott in 1955-56. Dialogue is fine, said Mrs. Carr, but it is not the solution. “When a city of this size can’t find a decent leader for mayor, I have to ask what is wrong. Folmar accuses us of crying ‘racism,’ but when you look at the man’s record, how do you explain it except as racism?”

Mrs. Carr said the black community views Folmar’s creation of the bi-racial committee as a belated attempt to gloss over the current problems. She believes the strategy will not work.

“We don’t need a bandaid,” she said. “We need a good physical examination, and then we’re going to have to have some political surgery.”

Randall Williams is a Montgomery resident and a contributing editor of Southern Changes.

Crackdown in the Black Belt: On to Greene County

By Randall Williams

Vol. 7, No. 3, 1985, pp. 2-5

Fifth of July “not guilty” verdicts by a federal jury in Selma have freed the voting rights activists known as the Marion Three. Stymied, for the moment, is the Reagan Justice Department’s effort to help local white officials reverse the electoral gains of black voters in many rural counties of the South since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

As the Marion (Perry County) defendants were acquitted, trials for five other activists from nearby Greene County began. At this writing, two of these cases have ended with hung juries in federal court in Birmingham.

The various trials and the situations from which they have arisen are complicated, involving multiple-count indictments, scores of witnesses, political infighting, and conflicts between the ideals and realities of voting procedures. Regardless, a central fact is becoming increasingly clear to courtroom observers:

These cases only incidentally involve voting; the real issues are power and control in the parts of the Deep South where black majorities are wresting public offices from

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historically entrenched white elites.

For a decade after passage of the Voting Rights Act, black population majorities in Alabama Black Belt counties were not transformed into electoral victories. Greene County was the exception, with blacks capturing all of the county’s elective offices as early as 1968. By 1975, others had begun to catch up. The school boards in the five counties where the FBI has been conducting its voter fraud investigations are good illustrations. In 1975, blacks held all five school board seats in Greene County, but only two of five in Sumter, one of five in Lowndes, and none in Perry and Wilcox. Following the elections of 1984, blacks filled all the school board seats in Sumter, Greene and Wilcox, and four of five in both Perry and Lowndes.

These gains came through hard work and through increasingly sophisticated voter registration efforts by black activists, most recently in conjunction with the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign which proved especially strong in heavily black rural counties.

The outcome of the voting rights revolution in Alabama, has been a bitter factionalization within the Black Belt counties. Lining up on one side have been almost all of the black leadership, the vast majority of black voters, and political organizations like the Perry County Civic League headed by Albert Turner and the Greene County Civic League headed by Spiver Gordon (whose trial begins in October). Within the past couple of years, beginning about the time blacks began winning all the elections, white dominated political action coalitions (commonly referred to as “PAC” or the “Coalition”) emerged in several Black Belt counties. The white leadership of these groups courted blacks to run as candidates who were less objectionable–to whites–than the black activists in the civic leagues.

John Zippert, a white civil rights activist who has worked for more than a decade with the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, describes a leaflet circulated by the PAC in Greene County opposing several measures proposed by the black community for the 1984 elections. Among these were an increase in county tax on parimutuel betting at the white-owned Greene County greyhound racing track; reallocation of some dog track revenues to give funds to organizations directly serving poor and black people; annexation of three predominantly black subdivisions into the city of Eutaw (whites still control thirty-three of forty-two city governments in the Black Belt), and an increase in ad valorem property tax rates in Greene County for the support of the public schools.

All of these measures were in the interest of most black people in Greene County. “After PAC’s initial meetings were held, ” says Zippert, “I learned that PAC had selected a slate of black candidates to run for the county commission and other offices. PAC stated that these candidates were ‘responsible,’ meaning in effect that they would take their direction from powerful white people.”

According to Zippert, the 1984 elections in Greene County came down to a choice between two slates of black candidates. “One slate was supported by the Greene County Civic League, dedicated to pursuing a course of action in the interest of establishing and maintaining effective political participation by low income persons of any race or creed and by blacks who comprise a majority in Greene County who traditionally have been excluded from political participation by whites; the other slate consisted of blacks who had made a deal with the whites and were willing to serve the interests of whites in the county.` Race and racial politics were the dominant factors in the 1984 local elections in Greene County.”

In those elections, both political factions vigorously campaigned and engaged in voter registration, including absentee registration. Neither side had great success recruiting from the other, although blacks in the “coalitions” outnumbered whites aligned with the civic leagues.

Voter registration figures for both blacks and whites in the ten-county Black Belt of west Alabama include dead people, folk who moved away years ago, and voters registered in the county where they live and in the county where they work. The latest figures available are inaccurate, but the relative numbers are nonetheless significant. From the pre-1965 era when there were essentially no registered black voters here, the 1982 registration figures show some 70,000 black voters and 62,000 whites.

The 138 blacks who currently hold public office in these ten counties account for nearly half of the state’s total of elected black officials, which is among the highest in the nation. With increased voter registration and the diminishing of old fears–black fears, that is; whites fear a different

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bogeyman and imagine they now hear him scratching at the door–comes the promise of additional black sheriffs, school board members, county commissioners, district attorneys and probate judges. With black political power comes control of county revenues, sufficient clout to secure black participation in government public works contracts and programs, several seats in the Alabama legislature, influence on the outcome of a Congressional seat, and the margin of difference in a close US Senate race.

On July 5, all of these prospects were on the minds of the Marion Three defendants as they embraced. waved to the press, and sang with their families and supporters on the steps of the Selma courthouse soon after the not guilty verdicts and after the courtroom audience had stood to loudly applaud, then cheer the departing jury. Albert Turner, the most prominent of the defendants, renewed his contention that the man with the most to gain from the intimidation of black voters in Alabama is freshman GOP Senator Jeremiah Denton.

The far-right Denton, who voted against the extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, who has defended Jerry Falwell’s attack on Desmond Tutu, and whose re-election in 1986 is by no means assured, has branded as a “nefarious lie” Turner’s view that Denton bears a measure of responsibility for the current Justice Department crackdown.

Yet, in several instances over the previous four years, Alabama’s junior Senator has intervened with the Justice Department in Alabama voting rights matters, taking the side of local white powerholders against the interests of black citizens. Too, the offices of the US Attorneys in Alabama now bulge with Reagan appointees made upon the advice of Senator Denton.

Proof of Denton’s involvement in the west Alabama cases is not necessary in order to appreciate the black activists’ fundamental claim that they are being selectively prosecuted as part of a larger effort to thwart the emergence of political power in areas of the rural South. Grassroots black organizers are convinced they are witnessing a second period of Redemption, when whites who have lost local power, as they did during Reconstruction, are using whatever measures they can to displace blacks from the political process. In the view of the Albert Turners of the Black Belt, the Reagan Administration is abandoning the black citizens whom the federal government championed during the Civil Rights movement and is placing its authority and might with the whites who previously held control and who want to again.

A General Accounting Office investigation of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, (based at Epes in Sumter County), is- seen as one recent example of federal pressure being applied after local whites made complaints against the black economic development organization. After several years of intense scrutiny of the Federation’s books turned up no wrongdoing, the investigation was closed, leaving the Federation badly crippled by the constant harassment.

Attorneys representing Union (Alabama) mayor, James Colvin, the first of the Greene County defendants to go on trial in Birmingham this summer, made allegations of similar politically motivated pressure from the Justice Department as they argued a selective prosecution motion.

Ira Burnim, a Southern Poverty Law Center attorney on Colvin’s defense team and the lead counsel in a civil lawsuit filed against the Justice Department (see Southern Changes, May/June 1985), tells of a conversation with Marshall Jarrett of Justice’s Public Integrity Section.

Jarrett made clear to attorney Burnim that the investigation and prosecution,! in Greene County are part of a larger effort by the government not only in the Black Belt of Alabama but in black majority counties of Mississippi. Burnim says there exists a letter from an assistant U.S. attorney general to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch which treats “the problem of voter fraud” as a single interconnected issue. Another Justice Department official has said that the investigations were brought on by “arrogance on the part of blacks.”

As arrogance is not yet a federal crime, the government needed other charges to place before grand juries. In the summer of 1984, Justice Department officials–including William Bradford Reynolds and Stephen Trott–devised a new policy for federal investigations of election offenses which, in effect, enabled federal prosecutors to target black civil rights activists in Southern black majority counties. The FBI was ordered to Greene and the other Black Belt counties prior to the September 1984 elections to collect evidence. Judging by the testimony during Colvin’s trial, practically every citizen in the town of Union must have been interviewed by the FBI Colvin’s defense lawyers found it curious that the federal agents uncovered evidence of alleged wrongdoing only by people affiliated with the Greene County Civic League.

In a single summer’s day of interviews with voters in Greene County, Colvin’s defense team investigators identified eight fraudulent ballots, four fraudulently witnessed ballots, and other election offenses committed by political opponents of those who have been indicted by the government.

“We’re talking about vote fraud involving federal elections and not only members of PAC, but public officials as well,” Burnim maintains.

One person who has lived outside Greene County for years told a defense investigator that he did not vote in last September’s Democratic primary or primary run-off elections in Greene. Yet a ballot affidavit in his name was among the evidentiary materials collected by the US Attorney’s office. The ballot affidavit was notarized by a white Greene

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County public official who is a known supporter of the PAC.

After the September 1984 elections, FBI agents interrogated voters to determine if campaigners for the Greene County Civic League had cast fraudulent ballots. Meanwhile, Civic League leaders turned over to the US Attorney’s office evidence of similar alleged misconduct by their opponents in PAC. No PAC campaigners or officials have been implicated in the Justice Department investigation.

Burnim tells of numerous PAC-related incidents which an intense federal investigation should have uncovered. In one instance, an FBI agent approached a voter whose name and address appeared on two absentee ballots cast in the election. The voter identified her ballot, but told the FBI she had never seen the second ballot, which was witnessed by the signatures of two PAC supporters. The FBI apparently never questioned the two individuals who had signed the ballot.

Under Alabama law, it is illegal (indeed, it is so written on the ballot) for candidates to witness absentee ballots or give assistance to voters. Yet Burnim presented the court with evidence of several instances where PAC candidates were witnessing absentee ballots. None of those voters were interviewed by the FBI.

Other selective prosecution evidence presented by Colvin’s attorneys included cases of persons voting absentee who lived outside Greene County and were thus ineligible to vote. One person whose name appeared on an absentee ballot notarized by a public official affiliated with PAC told defense investigators he not only did not request to vote in Greene County but was registered in another state at the time of the election. The public official notarizing this ballot was not indicted.

Much of the evidence of PAC violations paralleled material which had been delivered to the Justice Department last fall by members of the Greene County Civic League, yet apparently none of it had been followed up by the FBI. “Is it not startling,” asks Burnim, “that all of the indictments have been against Greene County Civic League leaders when it took us just three days to uncover vote fraud by PAC? Wouldn’t it be striking if we can find misconduct on both sides and the government cannot?”

In a written opinion denying Burnim’s selective prosecution motion, a federal magistrate concluded that in terms of judicial resources the US attorney might be justified in indicting the Greene County defendants while not pursuing the complaints against PAC because the number of incidents revealed in the three-day defense investigation was less than the number gathered by the eight-month FBI investigation.

A more realistic assessment is that the Reagan Justice Department is cooperating with local whites intent on reversing and dismantling the black movement for democratic political empowerment.

This article is based on reporting by Southern Changes editors Allen Tullos and Randall Williams and on articles published in the Green County Democrat. Previous articles in this series have appeared in Southern Changes for March/April and May/June, 1985.

In Wallace’s Wake–New Demagoguery for the Eighties

By Randall Williams

Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 10-12

“Alabama has it all,” brag the interstate billboards leading into the Heart of Dixie. The slogan is aimed mostly at Florida- or Louisiana-bound tourists but nowadays applies equally well to the contest for the state’s governorship.

The Democratic primary and run-off were held in June, but the party’s nominee was undeclared until August due to legal challenges and an order by a three-judge federal panel barring certification of the apparent winner. Among the judges signing the order was Frank M. Johnson Jr., known by many Alabamians over the past quarter-century as the “real governor” of the state for the control he exerted in orders on prisons, schools, mental hospitals, public hiring and civil rights.

In the 1960s and 1970s Johnson’s legal activism was necessary to fill the vacuum left by the inaction of Gov. George C. Wallace, who always found it expedient to let the Federal courts force state officials to do the politically unpopular. It seemed fitting that Judge Johnson’s latest legal entry into Alabama justice came as another Wallace vacuum loomed.

George Wallace, at last, is retiring from the office he has held for four terms, five if you count the term of his first wife, Lurleen, who was elected as his surrogate in 1966 when the law forbade consecutive terms. Contending in Wallace’s wake were Lt. Gov. Bill Baxley, the favorite and the champion of a large but loosely knit coalition of labor voters, blacks and Wallaceites; former Gov. Fob James, well-liked by business (“the rich get richer and the poor get Fobbed”); former Lt. Gov. George McMillan, darling of the reform-minded and determined to avoid the “wimpy” image that may have cost him the Governor’s Mansion in 1982; and . . . Atty. Gen. Charlie Graddick, the law-and-order dark horse who has emerged as the latest demagogue in an Alabama lineage stretching back through George Wallace to Cotton Tom Heflin and William Lowndes Yancey.

Graddick is the New version of the Old Wallace. Many who remember only the extremities of the past find it hard to call Graddick a racist because he actually does nothing overtly against blacks; his popularity with racists is due to the fact that he largely ignores the quarter of the state’s citizens who are black, and that he is a demagogue for the Eighties, a subtle master of euphemisms and code phrases that communicate racial meaning without the blatantly nasty words of the previous generation.

In winning the attorney general’s office in 1978, Graddick transformed himself from an unknown Mobile County district attorney with a series of stark, loud television commercials claiming he would get tough on crime. In a speech, he declared he wanted to “fry [murderers] until their eyes popped out and you can smell their flesh burn.” Once in office, he waged a highly publicized prosecution of “food stamp cheats” and feuded with the prison commissioner who sought to relieve the state’s growing inmate population through alternatives such as work release and restitution programs. Critics accused him of being a poor, frequently reversed prosecutor, indifferent to white-collar crime and to such public nuisances as KKK paramilitary training.

Like former Gov. James, Graddick is an exRepublican who switched parties to run a state-wide campaign. Although Alabama has become, since the Second World War, one of the most conservative states, giving large votes to GOP Presidential nominees, it has not elected a Republican governor since Redemption. Alabama’s junior Senator, former admiral and POW Jeremiah Denton, is the first Republican elected to statewide office in more than a hundred years. However, the Goldwater sweep of Alabama in 1964 elected several Republican congressmen, and in recent years a growing number of Republicans have been elected to county and legislative offices. The GOP currently holds two of the state’s seven Congressional districts.

Graddick and James owe their political careers to that still-small contingent of Alabamians who have declared themselves Republicans and to that large and growing block of voters who identify philosophically with the GOP even though they still call themselves Democrats in state and local elections. In short, the Reagan vote. Baxley, on the other hand, stumped vigorously for Mondale and Ferraro in 1984, and he gets his strongest support from the backers of that losing ticket.

Baxley was a two-term attorney general before Grad lick, but there is practically no other similarity

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between the two. Where Graddick seems to evoke the old racial passions, Baxley repudiates them. A decade after the fact, he reopened the case of the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church and convicted a former Ku Klux Klansman for the murders of the four children. Baxley, a law student in 1963, said he was motivated by his shame and anger that people could do such a thing in his state and get away with it.

As attorney general, Baxley was viewed as a tough, able prosecutor but may have been most respected for the job he did recruiting a talented crop of young Alabama lawyers, including some who had left the state to work on Wall Street and the first black assistant attorney general in Alabama history. He then prosecuted murderers and white collar criminals with equal vigor.

On the negative side, the bachelor Baxley had a reputation as a playboy and a gambler who had made and lost large sums in Las Vegas and in the commodities market. Though he had married before making his first attempt at the Governor’s office in 1978. the image stuck with him, renewed in the recent campaign by intimations of an affair with an Associated Press reporter who quickly resigned her job and left the state.

Baxley led the June 3 primary voting by eighty thousand votes, with Graddick a strong second. Graddick then picked up the endorsement of McMillan, causing Baxley aides to charge that McMillan–who had called Graddick unfit to serve before the election–had offered to endorse Baxley in exchange for payment of McMillan’s considerable campaign debt. Graddick probably did not need Fob James’s endorsement; those voters had no place else to go.

Alabama does not require party registration, but voters in its primaries do pledge to support the party nominees in the subsequent general election. Alabama law expressly prohibits voters in one party’s primary from supporting another party’s candidate in a run-off.

Graddick attacked Baxley as the candidate of special interests, playing up donations of about $100,000 Baxley received from political action committees supported by the Alabama Education Association and on Baxley’s endorsement by both of the state’s black political organizations. Graddick was the only candidate who did not seek the black endorsements; in fact, he did not even campaign in the west Alabama Black Belt. Graddick received more donations than Baxley, mostly from businessmen, industrialists and business-related political action committees. Among his biggest contributors were well-known Republicans, including former Nixon Postmaster Winton Blount, and June Collier, the “Buy American” auto parts manufacturer who was appointed by Reagan to the Industrial Policy Advisory Committee.

Two weeks before the June 24 run-off, polls placed Baxley and Graddick almost even.

The Alabama Democratic Party began a statewide campaign aimed at discouraging the 33,000 voters in the June 3 Republican primary from crossing-over to vote in the Democratic runoff; there was no statewide Republican run-off and only token local contests. Candidate Graddick, the state’s top law officer, declared that cross-over voting was legal. The day before the election, one of his assistants, the chief of the voting fraud unit of the Alabama Attorney General’s office, after meeting with Graddick campaign officials, issued a letter advising county election officials that they faced possible legal actions if they attempted to prevent Republicans from voting in the Democratic run-off.

The run-off voting was the closest in recent Alabama history, with Graddick on top by 8,756 votes, less than a percentage point of the almost one million total. Graddick’s campaign workers began answering the phone “Governor-elect …” the next day, but Baxley refused to concede without a recount.

Then Baxley supporters filed an election challenge to the state Democratic Party charging that as many as 20,000 Republicans, far more than Graddick’s margin of victory, had illegally crossed over on June 23. After a few days of deliberation, Baxley filed his own concurrent challenge. The charges made sense: In a television interview on election night, Graddick thanked Republican voters and said the crossover vote had made the difference in the run-off. Jean Sullivan, a Republican National Committeewoman from Selma also had bragged to the press that Graddick had been elected by Republicans, and, on the weekend before the run-off, a series of television commercials had been aired in which four Republican state senators stated that crossover voting was legal.

The party challenge was soon followed by a class-action federal lawsuit filed by a black county commissioner and his wife alleging that Graddick had violated Section Five of the Voting Rights Act by advising voters that it was legal to cross over. Graddick had illegally diluted the black vote by changing election practices without preclearance from the Justice Department, the suit charged.

On Aug. 1, federal judges Johnson, Truman Hobbs and Myron Thompson ruled on the voting rights issue.

In strong language, the Court concluded, “The June 24th runoff was so close, the number of illegal crossover voters so great, and Mr. Graddick’s violation so flagrant, this Court cannot take the chance that Mr. Graddick received the Democratic nomination as a result of his illegal actions.” The judges barred the Alabama Democratic Party from certifying Graddick as its nominee and said the Party could either certify Baxley (if it could be proved that he would have won except for crossover votes) or could call a new runoff between Graddick and Baxley.

“It is absolutely clear,” the Court continued, “that as a candidate and, more importantly, as the Attorney

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General, Mr. Graddick made every effort to get voters to violate the anti-crossover rule.”

The Court had no sympathy with Graddick’s argument that the anti-crossover rule was unenforced in the two previous elections, saying, “We note also that during the entire time the crossover law remained on the books and allegedly unenforced, Mr. Graddick was the chief legal officer of the state of Alabama.”

With this directive from the federal courts, a five-member committee of the Alabama Democratic Party began hearing the party challenges. On August 15, the committee certified Baxley as the winner based on votes legally cast, although the committee never actually declared it had evidence showing how many crossover votes had been cast nor what percentage of the crossovers went to Graddick. The committee declared Graddick’s actions amounted to “malconduct” and that he had “abused the power of his office” and failed to maintain “separation between his campaign efforts and the official acts of his office.” The subcommittee, as had the federal court, accepted statistical evidence showing that almost all crossovers voted for Graddick, more than enough to change the outcome of the election.

Graddick then went into federal court himself but was rejected in an opinion even more sharply worded than the first. The judges said the attorney general showed “a complete misunderstanding of the controlling legal principles of the case.”

In true Wallace style, Graddick bitterly attacked the federal judges, comparing them to a piano player “on the first floor of a house of ill repute” oblivious to actions on the second floor. He called himself the “people’s candidate” and charged that the election had been stolen by the Democratic subcommittee, a “gang of five.”

Over Labor Day, Graddick traveled about the state raising funds for a November write-in campaign. Political observers in Alabama say a successful write-in campaign would be almost impossible due to the complexity of the procedures and the effort required of voters, and would help Baxley by taking votes from his Republican opponent.

The Republican party leadership, while nervous about a Graddick write-in, is jubilant over the Democratic in-fighting. The two-party system has been born in Alabama, optimists among them have declared, with the expectation that many nominal Democrats are now so disgusted that they will make the jump to the GOP. The Republican candidate, Guy Hunt, a quiet former probate judge who could not buy an audience two months ago and is still often unrecognized as he works the shopping mall crowds, is a classic case of the man in the right place at the right time. Whether he has staying power depends on the depth of the anti-Baxley and anti-Democratic Party sentiment, and on Graddick, who is demagoguing around the state with the energy–if not the style–of a young George Wallace. If Graddick drops the write-in campaign and Hunt proves to be the dull but clean figure he seems, the Republicans’ odds of taking the statehouse will improve from none to possible.

But November is a long time off, and Baxley can still win. He is a skillful campaigner and a strong debater, and he has a large following of loyal Democrats who will work hard for him and the party. His immediate challenge is convincing the uncommitted that it was Graddick— not a five-man Democratic conspiracy— who stole their votes through his willful and greedy violation of the Voting Rights Act.

Excerpts from booklet published during Alabama Democratic Primary campaign by forces opposed to Lt. Gov. Bill Baxley and linked to Atty. Gen. Charles Graddick. The comic book-style piece is customized on the back cover (below) to attack Baxley, but is otherwise a generic attack on the National Education Association. NEA officials say the same booklet has been used in other states by right-wing organizations.

Randall Williams is the managing editor of Southern Changes and a partner in the Black Belt Communications Group of Montgomery, Alabama.

Living the Day Labor Life

By Randall Williams

Vol. 10, No. 5, 1988, pp. 7, 20

Earlier this year, the Southern Regional Council published a lengthy investigative and analytical report of the growing temporary manual labor industry. Workers in these “labor pools” are among the least protected and most poorly rewarded persons in the U.S. labor force. The SRC report, entitled Hard Labor: A Report on Labor Pools and Temporary Employment, contained first-hand accounts by many unemployed and homeless men who rely on labor pools for their meager existence. One such worker is Wade Wagner, who was interviewed in Austin, Texas, by Randall Williams. Wagner’s edited comments follow. To obtain the complete forty-eight-page report, with illustrations and a statistical appendix, send $10 to the SRC, 60 Walton Street, Atlanta, GA 30303.

Monday, I had the flu. It took me till Tuesday to feel like going outside and getting a job. Wednesday, I get up and go out there about 8 o’clock. I worked about three hours yesterday. Trimmed trees. A contractor came through that I had been helping all along. I made about 16 bucks. That’s it up to this point. And I was standing around over there at Salvation Army when you came up. That’s been my week.

All I did was go in, get a shower, get something to eat. Actually, that diet, sometimes you have to eat food to satisfy your hunger but actually didn’t satisfy the taste buds at all. I got me a shower, and then a guy came through about 8 o’clock, and said, was anybody interested in going to church? And I said, I might go. “Will they have any refreshments?” And he said, “Yeah, I’m quite sure they will. I can’t say definite, but they usually have refreshments. Sometimes we have used clothes and things, too.” So about four of us jumped in this van and went and had services. And then after service, they didn’t bring any refreshments, so the church guy brought us back and on the way he stopped by a chicken place. So we all had chicken. Had a pretty nice time of it.

The Salvation Army can be okay. It can help a person because when people are living in the streets, and they have been living under normal conditions, you always like to have a change of clothes. At least every two days, you want to get out of ’em and change. But anybody that has lived normal like that, they’re going to find out, if they’re living in the streets, they can only carry what they carry in a bag. So therefore, you have to leave your bags, and they find that very hard to do. You know, in a safe place. And then going over here and taking a shower, where they’re going to sleep [at the Salvation Army], putting back on the same clothes they got out of, that they’ve been wearing two or three days or longer, actually it’s not going to do you much good to take a shower.

Another place you can stay is the labor hall’s bunkhouse. There’s a guy that sits there in the office. You go in to the window and pay your rent. They assign you a bunk. If you are a regular you can get a regular bunk assigned to you.

It is definitely adequate. I ain’t going to say it’s spic and span. But it’s clean enough. The linens are clean. It’s sanitary. It’s safe. Well, actually, anytime you have a bunch of men together, you’ll always going to find some disturbances. Somebody may have too much to drink, start a fight. Normally it’s just fists, but there has been some stabbings in the past. But usually everybody gets along fine. You can come and go as you please. Stay out all night if you want. No curfew. TV is usually off by 12 but sometimes they leave it on all night. You can play cards. You can gamble. You can have alcohol.

But getting back to the Salvation Army, in the dorm I was in, there was probably close to a hundred.

I got up and ate breakfast–about 4:30 they woke us up. Actually, I tried to eat breakfast. It was oatmeal and to tell you the truth, I couldn’t quite eat it. Even from a child I never could eat oatmeal. So then I walked over on Sixth Street to this 7-11 store and

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had myself a good cup of coffee. Then I walked down on Second Street. It was real cold. Everybody was not going to get work. So then I walked back down on Seventh Street to the labor hall. But there wasn’t much going on this morning.

Most days are routine like that, if you can come up with enough to eat and get a place to sleep. Going back to what makes people happy, everybody likes to eat the best food that they could possibly get, like meat, vegetables, you know, an adequate diet, a nutritional diet. There are places where you can show up and get food. It might not be real tasty and it probably ain’t got that many vitamins but it’ll get something in your stomach.

With my cheap labor, I mostly have enough to cover coffee, cigarettes and food. What else do we spend money on? Everybody could probably get all the outside clothes–pants, shirts, tee-shirts–that he could humanly possibly carry around. He wouldn’t have to spend his money on that. Buying a car is completely still out of anybody’s income bracket. Bus fare is fifty cents, costs you a dollar to go round trip anywhere around town.

I don’t know any program that’s going to cover any medical expenses. I’ve been lucky. I’ve had flus and colds, but–Eckerd Drug has been my doctor, what with buying cough medicines, aspirins.

You asked about recreation. Well, we used to shoot backcourt ball down at the bunkhouse. I used to jog up to last year. There’s a track by the riverside, real nice. I used to jog but I found out my diet was not sufficient to jog, so therefore I was going to do more body harm by trying to jog on malnutrition than I was going to help. I like to go to movies but I usually don’t have the money. There’s a dollar movie over on Red River and fellows go over there if they have a dollar. Otherwise you can’t go. If you got in a card game and won $25 or something like that you might do it. But if you want to go to Antone’s, or a club with entertainment, if you like blues, and I am a blues fan… I’ve been trying to get there but I never can afford the $20 it takes.

Symbols and Mail Order Merchandising

Randall Williams

Vol. 11, No. 2, 1989, pp. 12, 14-17

Obsessions are never simple, and they usually lead to suffering. I, for instance, am almost reduced to going barefoot, my shirts are frayed at the collar and cuff, and I’m only thankful it was a mild winter for I badly needed a new jacket.

In my attire, you see, I have fallen victim to an obsession; for many months now I have been unable to order clothing from Land’s End, a mail-order company based in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, that previously was my favorite place to shop.

If you have a few minutes, I will share my sad story.

Land’s End sells well-made, sturdy, reasonably priced, low-key clothing. I’m a low-key guy; I silently cheered when Land’s End made a point of having no horses, alligators or other animals on their shirts. At one time Land’s End must have been a small company, though I saw a chart recently that put them sixth among U.S. mail order companies, with 1985 sales of $227 million. When I first saw and ordered from them years ago they at least gave the impression of smallness, and their catalogs were informative but nowhere near as slick as the four-color 150-pagers that now arrive with each new season.

Bear with me. The catalog is the point of this story.

Over the years I have watched that catalog evolve. I don’t have any old copies to prove it, but I think they used to say that all the models in the catalogs were Land’s End employees. That was okay with me, even reassuring–I don’t look like a model myself. I would get the catalogs, and I would order a few things every now and then. I liked the merchandise, and I like ordering things by mail, probably because I grew up in the country and almost everything we had came from Sears and Roebuck or Speigel. In fact, when I was a child I used to get baby chickens from Sears and Roebuck, a hundred chirping chicks at the time, in a cardboard box delivered by our mailman. Also, ordering from Land’s End was easier than going to the mall–it wears me out to go to the mall, and there are practically no retail stores left in downtown Montgomery where I live.

For a long time, things were fine. But as the seasons came and went, that catalog began to grate on me.

The catalog that really set me off was Vol. 23, No. 2, dated February 1987. It arrived in mid-January. I can remember the date because it was right after a large mob of Ku Klux Klansmen, members of other assorted hate

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groups, and plain white folks attacked an event promoted as a brotherhood march in memory of Martin Luther King Jr. in Forsyth County, Georgia.

You may remember the incident. The small group of would-be marchers were removed for their own protection by law enforcement officers. Their attackers asserted their intention to keep Forsyth County all-white, as it virtually had been since 1912, when widespread racial violence in the aftermath of a rape-murder literally drove black citizens from their homes and from the county.

Signs at the Edge of Town

In the years since, Forsyth, just forty miles from downtown Atlanta, had been one of those Southern locales which boasted signs saying, “Nigger, don’t let the sun set on you in ____ County.” We’ve all seen the signs, heard the stories, laughed or cringed, depending on our view or our color. Of course, that was twenty years ago. Now Forsyth has lost much of its rural feel and is growing fast because many people, white people, don’t mind working in black-majority Atlanta but prefer to live farther out, in suburbs which are said to resist plans for rapid transit because of fears of making access too easy for black criminals.

Two weeks and a media blitz after the first march, there was a second march. An estimated twenty thousand people from all over the United States marched to make a statement against the latest display of raw bigotry in one little backwater of America. Gradually the situation eased, the task forces wrote their reports, the reporters went home. To this day there are no blacks living in Forsyth County.

It was against this backdrop that the February 1987 issue of the Land’s End catalog arrived on my desk, and that I grasped what had been irritating me about the excellent work done by Al Shackleford.

Al is the copy director for Land’s End advertising and he has the hands-on responsibility for the catalogs. I know this because I called Land’s End one day and his was the voice that finally got on the line. Al sounded like a good person, and it’s obvious that he does good work.

But, no matter how good he is, if he had told me in advance what he was going to do in the February 1987 catalog, I would have laughed in his face and told him it was impossible.

I would have been wrong.

A few years ago Land’s End began using documentary photography to tell stories about some aspect of their products: hand shoemaking in New England, wool gathering in the British Isles, and such. For the February 1987 issue, a first-rate photographer named Archie Lieberman was commissioned to do a photo essay on U.S. cotton production, to make a point about the 100 percent cotton clothing sold by Land’s End.

A Turn in the South

Lieberman traveled through California, Arizona, Texas, Tennessee and Georgia, and his pictures of workers in the fields, gins, and mills are gorgeous and evocative.

Of the twenty-nine people in his essay, there isn’t a black face among them–one Native American and two Hispanics from Arizona, but no blacks. And as I rapidly thumbed through the rest of the catalog, I saw consciously what I had been realizing all along, that of the hundreds of models in the Land’s End catalog, every single one was WASP.

Seeing those photos just a few hours after reading about an attack on a brotherhood march, I had to ask, what is the difference between the view of America held by a rock-throwing mob in Cumming, Georgia, and the view held by a huge retailer with offices in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, and Chicago? Not much, obviously.

What had been bothering me about Land’s End was its aggressively white image of America. Of course we are talking about marketing, meant to sell a particular line of products to a particular audience. But I don’t dress that differently from black men of my age and occupation–or from Hispanics or Asians who live where I do, shop where I do, play and work where I do. I couldn’t believe that a company like Land’s End would be opposed to selling its goods to non-whites. [For additional discussion of media’ marketing stereotypes, see Southern Changes, July 1979.]

I quit ordering from Land’s End, but I continued to get the catalogs.

By now, my obsession was interfering with my work. No matter what kind of deadline I was under, as soon as the mail brought a new catalog, I ripped through it looking for non-white faces. Eventually a couple of Asian child models appeared in the back pages, but this only intensified my

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concerns.

One day I dialed Land’s End.

When I got Al on the phone, I introduced myself and said:

“…so I decided what the hell, I’d just pick up the phone and call and ask. I’m just curious to know whether it’s editorial policy or just coincidence or what, that essentially there is nobody in your catalog except white folks.”

There was a short pause, and then Al replied:

“Yeah. It’s not really editorial policy, Randall. It’s something we are aware of and we are working to correct. About the only thing, we have had Hispanic, Oriental, we’ve had kind of different ethnic groups represented in sort of an editorial context. In that sense, it’s not–that’s kind of a hard question to answer, but it’s not, you know, we realize that we are pretty, you know, about 99 percent Caucasian catalog. Let’s put it that way. And we are going to correct that.”

“Do you have any black customers?”

“Oh, I’m sure we do. It’s hard to say how many, but I know we’ve gotten–we just got a letter from a black family in California, pretty much, you know, kind of asking the same question you are asking and so I have no way of knowing how many black customers we have, but I’m sure we do have black customers. And I realize that if you are a black Land’s End customer and you get the catalog, you’re probably rightfully offended by the lily-whiteness of the catalog.”

Then I explained to Al how I had gotten his cotton photo essay right after the Forsyth incident:

“You know, I’m from here and grew up here and my people raised cotton and stuff like that and I just would have thought that it was pretty much impossible to do a piece on cotton production in the South without any black people in that piece. And yet, ya’ll managed to do it. Do ya’ll discuss this kind of thing within your company?”

“We do. I don’t really know what to tell you because it’s like a real sore point with a lot of us. Usually, when I get a call like this I would just refer it to our P.R.–the guy that’s in charge of our P.R.”

What does he say?”

“I really don’t know, to tell you the truth. I don’t know what the standard Land’s End response to this is, but I don’t see how it could be a very good one.”

“Is there somebody in the company that if ya’ll were to do a feature with black faces in it, or if you had a black model come along, would they say no?”

“Well, I tell you, I don’t want to get into that, really. You know, there have been quite a few people that have raised this point with us.”

“Inside your company as well as without, I take it?”

“Yeah. Oh yeah. But, I mean, it’s a regular–we defi-

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nitely get feedback from our customers kind of wondering, talking about the same thing that you’re talking about. It’s just an area that we realize that, or at least most of us realize, that we haven’t done a very good job. We are really looking forward to the day when you can get a Land’s End catalog and it represents America as it really is, rather than just like a select group of America.”

“Yeah, well, I have to say in ya’ll’s defense, ya’ll are not the only ones. I’ve become kind of obsessed by catalogs since I’ve been considering this.”

Yeah. Do you get the L.L. Bean catalog?”

“yeah.”

“I think L.L. Bean’s argument is that they only use their own employees as models. Being in Maine where, you know, let’s face it, there’s probably about 99 percent white, so that’s kind of how they rationalize what they do. You know, if you—”

“How about ya’ll’s work force? I assume ya’ll, you know, given you are partly in Chicago—”

“You know, actually, yeah, we have black employees. Our main operation though is up in Dodgeville and I’d say that’s probably 95 percent of the company is up there.”

“Is that mostly white up there?”

“Yeah. Mostly white. Rural farm country.”

“If I wanted to pursue this a little further, who would I ask for?”

“Probably the guy to talk to is our vice president of public relations, whose name is Terry Wilson.”

So Al and I said goodbye, and I called Wilson, introduced myself, and explained that I had already talked to Al and why.

“Well, let me try to be as direct as you’ve been. It is not a conscious policy on our part. In fact, we do not have a policy about who appears or who doesn’t appear in a catalog. A lot of these people, as you probably have deduced as you’ve been looking at it and have been a customer for a number of years, are customers of ours, some of them are employees, some of them are models, obviously, but we try to, our main objective is to make them look like real people who buy and use the clothes. Now at the same time, and in addition to that, we sell and we solicit customers all across the board, regardless of background or color or ethnic persuasion, or religious persuasion. We send our catalog to anyone who wants it. We solicit business from everyone we can find who we think is a potential customer. I’m not going to try to deny that what you say is true. The only point I would like to make is that it has not been a conscious effort. I think you and others have pointed this out to us. It bothers some of our customers like you and we do pay attention to these comments. It’s something we are looking into and that’s about all I can tell you at this point.”

“…What do ya’ll do when yell get people who comment like this?”

“Well, we monitor all the comments that we do receive from customers–positive and negative–and try to direct them to the people in the company whose area of responsibility the comments relate to, in this case, primarily the people who select the individuals who model the clothes in the catalog.”

“Do you think it’s a problem? What kind of an image do you think it presents in terms of what this country is supposed to be about and so forth for ya’ll to have a catalog like that? Now I’m not suggesting ya’ll are the only ones, mind you. I’m not saying that.”

Frankly, I don’t know whether we are or not. I can tell you that’s not the way we look at the catalog, either ours or anyone else’s. We haven’t and I don’t think we will start to count people who are so-called party poops. I get the same comments from the handicapped. I get the same comments from racial groups now and then. As I say, we are certainly out encouraging and soliciting business from anybody we think we can attract as a customer, regardless of who they are, where they are, or what color they are. It’s a marketing question as much as anything else and it’s something we are going to have to deal with.”

“Do you think you have customers that would be offended if you had black models?”

“Oh, I don’t think any more than are offended that we don’t. In fact, as I say, we do not have a policy about who’s in the catalog and who isn’t. We don’t select our models because of color or minority question. We select them for a number of other reasons which may or may not be valid, depending on the eyes of the individual who is in your shoes, the customer. We are trying to market our clothes as well as we can to as broad a group as we can and that includes blacks and [unintelligible], and handicapped and everybody else who can wear them. We make clothes to fit people, not their colors. All I can tell you is about that. At the same time, you are not the first person who has commented on the situation…”

Comments from Customers

“About when did ya’ll start getting comments like this?”

“Oh, gee, that I can’t honestly tell you. I haven’t been with the company that long to go back in history, but there are a few every now and then and I suppose there probably have been. Although I can’t say for sure.”

“But it’s not like these comments like mine just started during the last six weeks or something?”

“No.”

“And yet, up to this time, despite these comments, there have been no–you know, the catalogs haven’t changed, because I’ve been consciously paying attention. I guess I was unconsciously mindful of it for some time, but I’ve been consciously paying attention to it for two years now.”

“Again, I don’t argue with what you say, but at the same time we receive a large number of comments on a large number of subjects and we try to, as I said, evaluate each one in terms of what’s best for the business and what’s best in terms of trying to attract as many customers as we can. I get comments all the way from ‘why don’t you sell larger sizes,’ ‘why don’t you sell petites,’ and they run all over the lot so I assure you we pay attention to those. I don’t want to start repeating myself. That’s where we are.”

I didn’t want Terry to repeat himself, either, so I gave him my Forsyth County/Land’s End comparison and asked whether he saw the connection.

“I’m not that familiar with the situation that you mentioned, but I don’t know whether they are totally analogous because we are not out running people out of communities where they have a perfect right to go or we are not running them out of our property or burning crosses. We are not

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overtly endeavoring to do harm to people psychologically or .. physically. We are trying to simply present a line of clothing the best way we know how. The only thing I can fall back on is we would welcome as many minority customers as we could get.”

“Right, but you are not ready to put them in the catalog.”

“Well, you will have to draw your own conclusions about that, obviously. I think we have been making a little bit of progress. There have been, in the last few issues, a couple of minorities.”

“There appear to be two Oriental children in this issue, for example.”

“Yeah. So progress does not always come over night. I understand your concern. I know where you are coming from, and I appreciate your calling it to our attention. Ill make sure it will be discussed.”

I assured Terry I would try to help him, and for the past few months that was the end of it.

Yesterday, I got a new Land’s End catalog, Vol. 25, No. 3, March 1989. On page 147 there’s an Asian child. The same child is also on pages 146,143 and 139.

And…guess what. There, on page, 92, big as life, is an entire black family from Queens, N.Y., with a nice little story about them.

Well, it’s a start, Al and Terry.

I only wish that–given the unfortunate circumstance of blacks in Forsyth County being forced to leave their homes in 1912 and the historical and contemporary rhetoric by white supremacists who want to send blacks and (recent) immigrants “back to where they came from”-that you hadn’t used your first black models to illustrate a feature on luggage.

Randall Williams is the managing editor of the Southern Regional Council’s publications, including Southern Changes. From 1981-85, he was the director of the Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a tenure which contributed to an obsession with racial images already well-defined by living in rural Alabama for most of his life.

Good Writing on Good Food

Reviewed by Randall Williams

Vol. 13, No. 3, 1991, p. 30

Side Orders: Small Helpings of Southern Cookery and Culture, by John Egerton. (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1990. 224 pp. $14.95.).

A highly readable, entertaining and informative tour along the region’s stovetops and sideboards by the author of the definitive Southern Food. The present book consists of previously published essays which presumably makes it a collection of leftovers, and in this case the flavors survive. There are sixty or more recipes, and a lot of what the author describes as “just talk–kitchen talk, table talk.” Even the recipes, for everything from turnip greens to Duke of Norfolk Punch, are anecdotal in style. “The social and cultural dimensions of Southern food are as important as its appearance and taste and quality…It is not just the food itself that matters; it’s also the people, the setting, the precedents,” Egerton writes. In nine chapters on Cookery and Culture, he shows why.

“…Something Is Bound to Happen”

Reveiwed by Randall Williams

Vol. 25, No. 1-4, 2003 pp. 21-22

Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr Letters from the Civil Rights Years, edited by Patricia Sullivan (New York: Routledge, 2003.

There is delight and living history on every page of this welcome collection of the correspondence of Montgomery’s Virginia Durr, who would have turned a hundred this year. Durr was already the subject of a fine oral history memoir (Outside the Magic Circle, 1985, University of Alabama Press), but the letters selected and annotated here by historian Patricia Sullivan show us afresh why Durr was not only colorful but also important. Few Southern white women of the 20th century lived as close to the epicenter of the Civil Rights Movement as Virginia Durr or understood so keenly how that movement was a part of an ongoing struggle to refine the peculiarly American experiment in democracy.

Durr’s role was personal, political, and ideological. Born into a privileged white family in Birmingham, she slipped into genteel poverty when her Presbyterian minister father lost his pulpit after being convicted by his denomination of biblical heresy. Still, she made her society debut, married the brilliant young lawyer Clifford Durr, and joined the Junior League.

However, the Great Depression had Birmingham in its grip, and through her work as a Red Cross volunteer in the mill villages Durr became increasingly aware of the hypocrisies of the local corporate and civic leaders-the fathers of her friends in society and church-in their vicious union-busting, the evictions from company houses of laid-off workers, and the exploitation of racial fears.

When Clifford Durr’s law firm laid off junior members and secretaries rather than reduce senior partners’ salaries, Clifford Durr either quit or was fired. Fortunately, Virginia’s sister Josephine was married to Hugo Black, Alabama’s junior senator and future Supreme Court Justice. Through Black’s influence, Clifford Durr got a job with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (later he would serve on the Federal Communications Commission) and the Durrs set up household in rural Alexandria, Virginia. Here they would stay for seventeen years.

Virginia Durr happily immersed herself in New Deal and progressive politics, chiefly around suffrage, against the poll tax, and to end Jim Crow segregation. Here she also began to exhibit what was perhaps her greatest gift, that of collector of kindred souls and networker. She knew everyone, it seems, and Patricia Sullivan has carefully footnoted the letters in this volume to remind us who the players were and of the linkages between the various parties and groups mentioned.

What a cast of characters it is! Durr’s regular correspondents ranged from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to organizer Jim Dombrowski, from brother-in-law Hugo Black to future President Lyndon Johnson, from author Jessica Mitford to literary critic Maxwell Geismar. Durr was far from a society hostess in Washington, or in Montgomery after 1950, but she had an uncanny knack for hosting dinners where interesting and often important people showed up. In both her parties and her letters, she stimulated debate on all the significant social issues of her time, constantly trying to persuade people to make alliances and to act for progressive causes, legislation, and electoral politics.

Her philosophy is summarized in a 1941 letter to the young historian C. Vann Woodward, whose books were becoming handbooks for progressive activists: “I have an invincible belief that if the right people ever get together something is bound to happen.”

Back home in Montgomery, Alabama–where the Durrs had retreated after Clifford resigned from the FCC rather than sign Harry Truman’s anti-communist loyalty oath–she tried to keep a low profile but couldn’t. She and Clifford were ostracized from the white community but made friends in the black community. When Rosa Parks was arrested, the Durrs went with organizer E. D. Nixon to get her out of jail, and then Clifford Durr helped young attorney Fred Gray prepare her defense.

As two of the very few local whites who supported the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Durrs were thrust into the thick of what became the modern Civil Rights Movement. They remained in it for the duration always outspoken

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voices against the demagoguery of Alabama’s elected officials, and always supporting and encouraging and providing a safe haven to the civil rights activists, historians, and journalists drawn to and through Montgomery from 1955 through 1968.

All these events and personages are revealed in Virginia Durr’s correspondence from 1951 to 1968, which is the period editor Sullivan chose as a way of limiting what could have been a thousand-page volume. As it is, there is not a dull paragraph in the book, and Sullivan’s own extensive introduction and bridges between the letters provide a readable and most valuable overview of the civil rights struggle. It is a personal view, to be sure, but when the person is as remarkable and has as fine an intellect and insight as possessed by the late Virginia Foster Durr, one can only regret that more letters could not be included.

Randall Williams is a former managing editor of Southern Changes, and is a long-time associate of the Southern Regional Council. He is the editor-in-chief of NewSouth Books.