ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: Minority Participation in Construction Of Atlanta Airport

By Dave Miller and Gordon Kenna

Vol. 1, No. 2, 1978, pp. 24-25

Contracting opportunities for minority-owned businesses have been the subject of much attention of late, but the methods of achieving minority business participation are not so well known. Certainly, this is a new endeavor for both contractors and purchasing departmentswhich is often bound by law and tradition to do business using conservative and often unimaginative methods. But given a genuine desire and commitment to encourage minority business participation, affirmative action goals can be reached and even exceeded within the principles of sound business management and bidding practices.

One such successful program has been implemented by the City of Atlanta in the construction of the new terminal building for the HartsfieldAtlanta International Airport. At the direction of Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson, three goals were established for the Airport Terminal Construction Program: (1) completion by a certain date; (2) completion within budget and; (3) significant involvement of small and minority business enterprise.

The last goal envisioned a role considerably more encompassing than the conventional Equal Employment Opportunity standards commonly applied to construction programs of a large scale nature. Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action Programs in the past affected the composition of the staffs of the prime contractor and the sub-contractor, but not necessarily the ownership of the contracting firms. In those EEO/AA matters, Atlanta’s “Hometown and Federal Plans” applied, however, it was in the area of ownership that the City wished to develop contracting procedures to increase the opportunities of small and minority firms to participate. Minority firms are those in which at least 50 percent of the ownership is held by persons who are defined by the United States Equal Opportunity Commission as minorities.

Atlanta has enjoyed tremendous success with each goal; the project is on time, is within budget and has afforded and fostered impressive minority involvement figures. The project averages 26 percent minority business participation of the $200 million in contracts to date. There are 96 individual contracts awarded to minority firms, 43 supply/vendors, 51 sub-contracts and two minority firms as primes. Minority Employment averages 43 percent of the present construction work force of 1500.

As a first step towards acheiving the cooperation and understanding of all parties, firms interested in bidding were required to complete a thorough prequalification process. Only firms that successfully prequalified were permitted to bid. Initially there was some misunderstanding of what was required in the prequalification process but soon it became clear that this procedure was helpful to the City, contractors, sub-contractors and the airlines.

By requiring firms to prequalify, the City can assure that all bidders are capable of doing the work, and understand the conditions and requirements of the job, especially with respect to the goals of minority business utilization.

To achieve Atlanta’s multiple goals it was required that the prime contractors (for each individual contract), (a) develop a comprehensive organizational structure and (b) award subcontracts on a competitive basis. At the same time the prime contractor was to consider and utilize as appropriate, a variety of special arrangements designed to foster equal opportunities for small and minority business enterprise participation.

CITY ACTIVITIES

To assist the prime contractor in achieving the City’s expectations, the City agreed to (a) monthly or semimonthly payments to the prime contractor so that it could meet any critical cash flow needs of its subcontractors, and (b) reimburse the prime contractor for bulk purchases of materials and equipment (which was properly received and satisfactorily stored) at the succeeding monthly or semi-monthly payment.

At the request of the prime contractor, the City, when necessary, agreed to assist in efforts to obtain from outside sources the desired assistance to small and minority business enterprises if such was required to strengthen the management expertise of such firms to manage and carry out the terms of their contracts.

The City utilized the services of its engineering joint venture to (1) assist the City’s Contract Compliance Office in monitoring compliance with EEO/AA and small minority business enterprise programs; (2) breakdown contracts in smaller work elements and; (3) provide suggestions to the City on ways to further the technical and managerial expertise of small and minority firms.

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Atlanta also established an advisory committee to assist in reviewing the continuing program of the prime contractor and sub-contractors concerned with EEO/AA compliance and small and minority business enterprises participation and made recommendations to the City concerning such performance. This group acted in an advisory capacity only to the City and included representatives of the City, the airline industry, the prime contractor, a trade association, and two (2) representatives of private non-profit organizations concerned with minority employment and business participation.

In summary, the results of the above special arrangements between the City, prospective contractors and subcontractors are a program (1) that is successful; (2) that exceeds initial expectations in terms of depth and; (3) is now being considered as a model for future large scale construction projects throughout the United States. Of particular interest are the results of a study recently released by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Airport Development Aid Program (ADAP). This study dramatically underscores Atlanta’s success in giving minority enterprises a fair share of the work and benefits created by this project. Of the $330.4 million in construction project at 27 major airports in the United States with Federal participation, $56.3 million have gone to minority firms. Of this $56.3 million, $52 million has been awarded to minority firms participating in the Atlanta Hartsfield Airport Expansion Program. Nearly 89 percent of all dollars of federally assisted construction programs at those major airports going to minority firms were contracted through the City of Atlanta. These figures demonstrate the City’s administration, Atlanta airlines, and the prime contractors commitment to affirmative action programs, and prove that minority participation goals can be reached in a business-like manner.

Greensboro Slayings

By Janis Powell & Bob Powell

Vol. 2, No. 3, 1979, pp. 3

Five people were slain and nine wounded in Greensboro, North Carolina November 3 as they participated in an anti-Klan rally. Fourteen members of the United Racist Front, a coalition of Nazis and Klansmen, were arrested and charged with first degree murder or conspiracy to murder by local authorities in connection with the slayings.

The Communist Workers Party (CWP) had called the demonstration in Greensboro to protest the growing number of Klan attacks upon Black people and civil rights workers throughout the nation. One hour before the scheduled march and rally, the anti-Klan group of one hundred demonstrators changed the publicized meeting site from Windsor Center on Market Street to the Morningside Homes housing project. Both sites are in the Black community.

Shortly after the rally began, five car loads of White men drove into the project shouting racist jeers and heckling the demonstrators. The two groups first confronted each other with rocks, sticks, and insults. Gunfire broke out and of the five killed (four White men and one Black woman), all but one were considered CWP leaders.

The Greensboro police department claims that it had the Klan under surveillance outside of town and officers a block and a half away from the demonstrators. However, uniformed officers were not on the scene until three minutes after the shooting.

Transcripts of the police radio communications indicate one officer announced the Klan arrival into the area and apparently could not get assistance in time to stop the shooting.

Greensboro Police Sgt. A.W. Lewis said uniformed police had been at the rally site but withdrew shortly before the shooting took place. Police said the withdrawal was done at the request of the demonstrators and as an effort “to keep from inflaming the marchers.”

Despite the anti-Klan nature of the rally, Police Chief Swing confidently assured reporters that the situation was not racial. He said, “We’re not talking about the Woolworth sit-ins in 1960 or the student rioting at A&T State University in 1969, this is simply a case of White against White.”

Residents of Greensboro have many unanswered questions, which are being posed as the community searches to understand – why?

—How did the Klan know exactly where to come to if the rally site had been changed? Earlier in the week the Klan had secured through the city attorney’s office the original route of the demonstrators. Despite the change in the rally site, the Klan drove straight to the site.

—When did the police discover the rally site had been changed?

—Why were the Morningside residents not informed of the change? Some residents say they glanced outside to check on their children playing to find them in the middle of a “war zone.”

—Why were there no Greensboro Klansmen involved in the shooting?

—Why do many blame thevictims for the tragedy? Equating possible CWP tactical blunders on the same level as Klan/Nazi terror tactics, some are calling both groups “crazy” and equally responsible.

—Has the Klan become willing to kill in front of TV cameras instead of on Southern back roads?

—Are local officials involved in the background of Klan activities?

—Will this tragedy reinstate various police surveillance of political activities?

—Will this incident be used as a basis for red-baiting? Shortly after the killing, a company in Collinsville, Virginia reportedly pressured its union to fine an avowed Marxist member for passing out pamphlets at work protesting the killings.

Because of these and other questions, civil rights groups and individuals around the country have called for local and national responses including: (1) vigorous prosecution of those responsible for the Greensboro murders; (2) an independent investigation of police and local officials complicity in the Nov. 3 attacks; (3) statewide legislative investigations into the activities of the Klan; and (4) open, public Congressional hearings about the activities of the Ku Klux Klan nationwide.

The Case for Small Farms

By Ginny Looney and Duna Norton

Vol. 2, No. 3, 1979, pp. 22-25

When the State Legislature was forming the next-to last county in Alabama in 1877 from the southernmost hills of the Appalachian chain, the legislators joked that the land was so poor a crow would have to carry a sack of corn to survive flying from one end of the county to the other. Yet, the land that became Cuilman County had by 1920 become the top producer of a variety of crops and has since had the largest farm sales of any county in the state.

While the reputation of Culiman County as a farming area has been growing, the reputation of one of the leading agricultural counties during the 19th century has been declining. Lying 65 miles southwest of Montgomery in the area of the Coastal Plain known as the Black Belt because of its large Black population, Wilcox County has the natural advantages to be a prosperous farming area. An 1888 promotional brochure said, Wilcox “is highly favored, both with respect to the character of the land and the abundant supplies of water.” As the vast estates on which cotton once grew

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turned to timber and pasture, the fortunes of the two counties shifted until in 1974 Cullman County, with the same amount of farm acreage as Wilcox, had 15 times the amount of farm sales.

The comparison of Cullman and Wilcox Counties offers the classic contrast between small family farms and large family plantations, and a striking evidence of how the ownership and control over land is a major factor in determining a society’s economic structure. In these two counties as elsewhere in the country, the pattern of land ownership determines land use, its productivity and the quality of life in rural communities. In addition, the income of workers, amount of taxes paid and number of public services provided all appear to be tied directly to the number and size of land holdings in a rural county. The results of the comparisons suggest what the government policies have not recognized: small farms are better than large farms for the economic health of a community because they contribute to a larger tax base, more public services, higher median incomes and more intensive use of natural resources.

For almost 40 years, the importance of small farms has been recognized in a few academic circles and government studies. In a study conducted for the Bureau of Agricultural Economics in 1941, Dr. Walter Goldschmidt examined the effect of farm size on community development by comparing two farming communities in California which differed only in the size of nearby farms. Family-sized farms surrounded one, and large corporate farms surrounded the other. The study found people were supported at a higher income near the family-sized farms than near the giant corporate farms, which had a higher percentage of low paid farm workers. Another study done in 1977 to expand Goldschmidt’s work analyzed 136 additional towns in California and found that small farm regions supported more communities, were more viable and offered more services than towns in large farm communities.

Besides improving the economic well-being of a community, small farms also produce food more efficiently, contrary to a widely held belief that big farms are better. “Modern agribusiness is more efficient because so few people are involved in food production,” the myth goes. “One farmer feeds 40 people.” That argument was refuted at a 1978 conference on land ownership in Alabama by Goldschmidt, now a UCLA professor, “When a tractor draws a combine to harvest wheat, the farmer is employing hundreds of hours of urban manpower expended in the steel mills and the oil refineries …. The farming sector of our economy appears to have dwindled remarkably when, in fact, a large portion are agriculturists working in the urban industrial environment.” Studies by the U.S Department of Agriculture in 1967 and 1973 have shown that the most efficient farm is the modern, fully mechanized one or two person operation.

Because Alabama has a tradition of small family farms along the Sand Mountain Appalachian hills and a history of large land holdings where plantations previously dominated in the Black Belt, a comparison of the two regions can show directly the effects of land ownership in the South. Using the 1974 U.S. Census of Agriculture, two students at the University of Alabama selected the 10 counties in Alabama with the smallest average size farm and matched them with the 10 counties in Alabama with the largest average farm size. Farm size was chosen as the factor dividing the two groups because it clearly indicates how well the land, a basic resource, is distributed among the county’s residents.

Jefferson and Montgomery Counties were eliminated from the study because of their metropolitan characteristics. The small farm counties which remained and their average size farm in 1974 are Marshall (80 acres), Cullman (84), DeKalb (87), Walker (91), Winston (99), Etowah (113), Morgan (114), Cleburne (120), and Blount (122). The large farm counties, which are also the counties with high Black populations, are Greene (392 acres), Macon (419), Sumter (427), Wilcox (444), Perry (472), Bullock (482), Dallas (503), Russell (578), and Lowndes (726).

The study found that the counties with more small farms had higher agricultural production and median incomes of both farmers and farm laborers. The small farm counties had more farms and sales with less farm acreage than the “large” counties. While the “small” counties had 11 percent of the state’s farm land, they produced 29 percent of the farm sales. The large farm counties, however, had 18 percent of the state farm land but had only 8 percent of its agricultural products.

Figures on farm production show that the

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small land owner uses labor intensive methods in farming in order to get a high return on every acre. The need for economy is not nearly as important for the owner of 500 acres who will use capital intensive methods of farming requiring much machinery and land. Besides making better use of the land, the farmers in the “small” counties had higher incomes, earning nearly $2,000 to $5,000 in 1974. Farmers in the “large” counties earned half as much, and in three of the counties, the median income fell below $1,000.

A composite view of the farmer in the north Alabama counties from the 1974 census is a man with 99 acres, one of 1,500 farmers in the county. He would have crop sales of $1,900 and stock and poultry sales of $20,800 a year with sales averaging $238 per acre. His 1974 income would be $3,270 a year. The statistical “average” farmer in the nine south Alabama counties in the study would own 494 acres as one of 500 farmers in the county. He would sell $6,200 of crops and $10,200 of stock a year for sales of $39 an acre. His median income would be $1,628 a year.

An analysis of several other social and economic factors within the two groups of counties demonstrate that concentrated land

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ownership restrains the development of the local community. Among the small farm counties, the three counties with a low percentage of farm land (less than one-fifth of the entire county’s land) had the largest percentages of forest land and the largest concentration of corporate ownership of the forests. Two of the three also had the highest numbers of absentee land owners.

While Walker, Winston and Cleburne Counties fit the pattern of higher farm sales found among the small size farm counties, the relatively low amount of farm land and correspondingly large amount of forest land has resulted, at least in Winston and Cleburne, in low tax revenues and public services more in line with the large size farm counties. Instead of the land being concentrated in the hands of industry and private land owners, thousands of acres of land in those two counties are owned by the federal government as part of the Talladega and Bankhead National Forests. Winston and Cleburne vividly point out the revenue problems for a county when huge tracts of land are withdrawn from the tax rolls.

Except for the two with large blocks of tax exempt government land, the counties with the small farms had a much stronger tax base than the counties with the large farms. Small farm counties had twice as much revenue from ad valorem taxes and two and a half times as much total tax revenues. In turn, the higher tax income has resulted in the small farm counties having twice as many miles of county roads and greater than a third more expenditures for public education. The median income was nearly twice as high while the poverty rate and substandard housing is half as much as in the large farm counties.

A comparison of individual “large” and “small” counties with the same proportion of farm land and rural population also confirms the important role of the small farm community development. For example, both DeKalb in the north and Greene County in south Alabama have 47 percent farm land and 73-80 percent rural population. Twenty-six percent of the workers in DeKalb commute to jobs outside the county while Greene has 21 percent commuters. Despite these similarities, the 1970 median income in “small” farming DeKalb was $5,316 compared to a $3,034 median income in Greene County. DeKalb had 1974 ad valorem taxes totaling $542,000 and 1975 total tax revenues of $1,693,000; in contrast, Greene County with its large farms received $464,000 in ad valorem taxes and $1,440,000 in total taxes. There are three times the miles of county roads and two times the expenditures for education in DeKalb County and only 55 percent of the poverty and 60 percent of the substandard housing that was found in Greene County during the 1970 census.

Land ownership, of course, is not the only factor which differentiates a small farm county from a large farm county. When “small” and “large” counties have the same percentage of farm land, their percentages of urban population and people who commute to work outside the county may differ. More striking, most of the large farm counties have majority Black populations which even through 1970 were governed largely by Whites. The absence of Black elected officials has meant historically that public services, such as roads, were often not extended into the Black community. The extent to which racism rather than land ownership lowered the income of Black Belt counties and the county tax base cannot be identified; however, the two issues are certainly intertwined.

Black farmers, nearly all small operators, are losing land nationally, at a rate of 300,000 acres a year. At the same time, the lack of job opportunities is forcing Blacks, particularly those from 24 to 35 years old, to migrate from the large farm counties. Between 1960 and 1970, two of these Black Belt counties lost a fifth of their population, one county lost a fourth and another a third. More recent figures show that, while most rural areas are gaining population, predominately Black rural areas continue to lose population.

Still land ownership is a crucial factor in the development of a county. No matter how other factors change, the pattern is that small farm counties can support more people at a higher income level than the counties dominated by large farms. The trends suggest, however, that the growing concentration of land ownership isn’t being stopped. The South lost 29 percent, or 454,000 farms, during the decade of the 60s. Southern Black farms decreased by 69 percent. As small farms dwindled in number, the large scale farms increased, and their share of farm sales continue to grow. With government bias in subsidies for large farms and tax laws making it difficult for small farmers to earn a decent living solely from farm income, the main monetary gain for small farmers today is when they sell their farm land. Government policy has effectively excised the culture from agriculture and forced farmers to adopt the large scale economy of agribusiness or leave farming. Most small farmers are leaving.

Ginny Looney is a former newspaper reporter in Alabama who now resides in Atlanta. Duna Norton is director of the Agricultural Marketing Project in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Economic Development Women’s Earnings: A Ten Year Review

Janet L. Norwood and Elizabeth Waidman

Vol. 2, No. 6, 1980, pp. 23, 25

The old saying that “the more things change, the more they stay the same” seems to apply to women’s earnings in relation to men’s no matter which earnings are examined. In 1939, median earnings for women who worked year round, full time in the experienced labor force were $788, or 58 percent of the median for men. Similar figures for 1977, the latest period for which earnings over an entire year are available, show median earnings of about $8,800 for women, or 59 percent of the median for men.

In the 10 years since the Census Bureau began to collect weekly earnings data, the ratio of women’s to men’s usual earnings has shown about the same pattern in May 1978, just as in May 1967, women full time workers still had median earnings that were only a little over 60 percent (61-62 percent) of the median earnings for men.

By occupation, these data show that, although the male-female earnings ratio has varied considerably over the years, the median for women is usually substantially lower than the median for men. For example, in sales occupations, where a large proportion of women are employed in retail stores while a large proportion of men sell cars, machinery,and insurance, women’s earnings in the second quarter of 1979 were about half of men’s earnings. In the professional technical area, where proportionately more women than men are in the lower paying occupations, i.e., nurses rather than physicians, women’s earnings were approximately 70 percent of men’s. In the clerical field, women’s wages were about 63 percent of men’s wages.

Almost all secretaries are women, as are 97 percent of all nurses, 86 percent of all file clerks, and 85 percent of librarians. On the other hand, only 9 percent of the industrial engineers are women, 9 1/2 percent of all lawyers and judges, 11 percent of all doctors, and 30 percent of all accountants.

These more detailed ouional statistics demonstrate that, on the average, employed women are working primarily in jobs at the low end of the pay scale. Even in a generally less traditional industry sector for women such as manufacturing, women are concentrated in such industry as clothing or electrical equipment where wages are lower than in many other types of factories.

The overall female-male earnings gap needs to be interpreted with care. Occupational and industry differences and the extent of labor force activity are, obviously, not the only factors involved. The fact that

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married women constitute the largest proportion of women workers may also play a large role in the female-male wage differential. Some analysts believe that many married women may put convenience of location or flexibility of hours above earnings or that they may not be as able as men to accept a promotion to a job with heavier responsibilities or a job which requires a great deal of overtime. Others believe that women have not, yet gained the self-confidence needed to seek aggressively the opportunities taken by men.

Whether these analysts are correct in their interpretations or not, we should not overlook discrimination. Many of the court settlements over equal pay in recent years have been based on findings of discrimination. Proof of discrimination, however, must go much farther than sample survey data. But these statistics can continue to provide guidelines as to what the earnings situation is for women and men in similar circumstances.

Obviously no one can predict the future with certainty. No one knows the extent to which working women will move out of the traditional occupations; or the degree to which women will gain earnings parity with men; or if their recent labor force gains will moderate. Whatever the scenario, however, women are likely to remain a permanent and important part of the work force.

Taken from the publication, Women in the Labor Force: Some New Data Series written by Janet L. Norwood and Elizabeth Waidman.

“Why the South Needs the Voting Rights Act”

By Reubin O’D. Askew

Vol. 4, No. 1, 1981, pp. 10-13

With tear gas, with billy clubs, and with bullwhips, the eyes of America were opened at Selma, Alabama in 1965. The longstanding refusal of this nation to fulfill one of the most basic of its democratic commitments was revealed for all to see.

American citizens were denied their constitutional right to vote, and they were beaten and jailed for protesting that denial, simply because they were black. Millions of other Americans, both black and white, watched as it happened. The sights and the sounds of their television screens disclosed in sad detail the horror of the attacks on the peaceful marchers of Selma.

In the wake of those attacks, those who had long resisted statutory protection for minority voting rights in America were momentarily overwhelmed by the aroused sentiments of a conscience-stricken nation. Rising to the challenge, Congress quickly enacted a new law designed to assure and protect the right to vote.

In signing that law, President Lyndon Johnson summarized eloquently the need for such legislation.

“This Act,” he said, “flows from a clear and simple wrong. The wrong is one which no American in his heart can justify. The right is one which no American, true to our principles, can deny.”

The law passed by Congress and approved by President Johnson in the aftermath of the Selma marches is the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the past sixteen years, that Act has proved to be one of the most successful laws ever enacted in the United States.

To a great extent, the wrong the Act was meant to redress has been rectified, and the right the Act was meant to protect has been secured. Throughout America, blacks and other minorities register, vote, and serve in elective office in record numbers. To many, Selma is a distant memory, and the right to vote is thought now to be a right freely and fairly exercised by all.

Not surprisingly, the very success of the Voting Rights Act has caused some, within Congress and without, to wonder whether the protections the Act affords are still needed. And, in the midst of a general retreat nationwide from the very notion of federal assertiveness, the question is asked: Why should we bother to prolong these protections when the Act comes up for review next year?

The answer to that question is simple: We should extend the Voting Rights Act because, as Americans, and as believers in representative democracy, we are still true to our principles, and we still care about the integrity of the right to vote.

Extended in 1970, and extended in 1975, the Voting Rights Act should be

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extended again in 1982. The safeguards it provides are still needed to assure a free and fair exercise of the right to vote. Those who argue against yet another extension make much of the changes the Act has wrought in the political life of the nation. They point readily to the remarkable strides we have made since Selma.

Yet, as remarkable as they may be, the advances we have made since 1965 toward full participation by minorities in the American political process are still very much inadequate. Despite our strides, black registration in the South is still more than twenty percent lower than white registration. And, despite our advances, at no level nationally do black elected officials approximate their share of the population.

Blacks today comprise about 12 percent of the nation’s population but hold only about one percent of the nation’s elective offices. And, among these black office holders in the fifty states, there is not a single black governor, lieutenant governor, or United States senator.

In my home state of Florida alone, despite the substantial advances of recent years, blacks still represent less than 1.5 percent of all elected officials. And blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities represent less than two percent of all elected officials in Florida, despite the fact that minorities constitute a quarter of the state population. There are no members of minority groups among the statewide elected officials in Florida. And, among the 160 members of the state legislature, there are just five blacks and only one Hispanic.

The Voting Rights Act must not become a victim of its own success. For that success is incomplete. The aims of the Act still have not been achieved. Blacks and other minorities in America still do not have the full benefit of the right to vote.

We have put an end to literacy tests. We have abolished the poll tax. We have done away with property qualifications. We have dispensed with “grandfather” clauses and “good character” tests. We have rid the political process of virtually all the overt means of discrimination by which the right to vote was so cynically withheld for so long. But discrimination remains. It has simply assumed other, subtler forms.

No longer is there outright denial of the right to vote, as there was at Selma and as there was throughout so much of America before 1965. Today there is instead a dilution of the impact of minority votes through imaginative schemes and practices involving at-large elections, annexation of adjacent suburbs, and gerrymandering of reapportioned electoral districts.

Minorities are allowed to register, and they are allowed to vote. But the political system is often structured in such a way that black candidates can rarely get elected. So the results are often the same as they were before 1965.

This is the principal reason why, for example, so few members of minority groups serve in the Florida legislature. At-large elections in areas of the state where minorities are most numerous virtually assure the defeat of minority candidates. Until we have single-member districts in Florida, elected officials will not be as accountable as they should be to all their constituents, and the votes of minorities will count less than the votes of other citizens.

The situation in Florida is typical of the situation elsewhere. Minority votes are diluted throughout America. This is hardly consistent with the constitutional concept of the right to vote. And it is a good example of why we still need a strong and effective Voting Rights Act.

Essential to a strong and effective Act are the preclearance provisions of Section 5. These provisions are the heart of the Act and the source of much of the current debate about the Act. Simply put, Section 5 dictates that any state or local government with a history of voting discrimination must submit any change in its election laws to the Justice Department for prior approval, and if such approval is not granted, must either change the law or obtain the approval of a federal district court in Washington.

Preclearance is viewed by its advocates as necessary insurance against renewed or continued disrimination. It is viewed by its detractors as an intrusion by the federal government into the sovereign domain of the states. Both are correct.

But in my view, the reasons for continued enforcement of the preclearance provisions are far more compelling than those against such enforcement.

Preclearance is indeed an intrusion on the dignity of sovereign states. It offends our belief in the principle of Federalism. Yet this intrusion was richly earned through years of countless indignities imposed on those who sought to exercise their right to vote. And, as much as I believe in Federalism, I believe also that our concern for Federalism must yield to our concern for the integrity of the Fifteenth Amendment.

Were it not for the long history of flagrant discrimination which led to the confrontation at Selma and inspired the Act in the first place, the elimination of preclearance might be justified. As it is, I think it naive to suppose that, without some form of federal oversight, the right to vote will not, in some instances, be abused.

We can regret the necessity of federal intervention in what ideally should be the preserve of local governments and the states. But that does not remove the necessity.

Some have maintained that, out of fairness, the preclearance provisions of

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the Act should be extended to cover all 50 states, and not merely those with past histories of discrimination. In fact many of the restrictions in the Voting Rights Act already apply nationwide. And all 50 states are already liable, if not now subject, to preclearance procedures. If a court finds that any one of them has violated constitutnal voting rights to an extent justifying relief, it can require preclearance.

As it is, Section 5 now applies to nine states and portions of 13 others. This includes states from virtually every region of the nation. Practically speaking, extending Section 5 to all 50 states would flood the Justice Department with preclearance requests, particularly as the states reapportion following the latest census.

In extending the preclearance provisions everywhere, we would lessen the ability of the Justice Department to enforce the Act anywhere-and increase the likelihood that discriminatory changes in election laws would survive the screening process.

Although it would not be advisable to extend preclearance nationwide, there may be some merit in allowing communities and states to escape from preclearance requirements if they can prove they no longer discriminate. To be acceptable, any such “bailout” provision should be carefully drafted to demand that the burden of proof in avoiding preclearance fall on communities and states to show that they are no longer discriminating. It should in no way diminish, and no way even threaten to diminish, the integrity of the right to vote.

It is important to realize as well that other minorities besides blacks have a stake in the extension of the Act. Partly as a result of low registration and turnouts, Hispanic Americans are badly under-represented at all levels of government. Hispanics are a rapidly growing minority group. Yet, according to the New York Times, there are only six Hispanic members of Congress, all in the House of Representatives, and, except in New Mexico, no Hispanics now hold statewide office anywhere in the nation.

Congress broadened the Voting Rights Act in 1975 to protect the rights of Hispanics and other minorities who often speak little or no English by requiring that bilingual ballots, bilingual voting machines, and other bilingual assistance be made available in certain areas.

I can speak firsthand of the need for this provision. In my current home of Dade County, Florida, in reaction to the arrival of the Mariel and Haitian refugees, an ordinance has been enacted prohibiting the use of any language other than English in a government publication. Without the bilingual requirements of the Voting Rights Act, Dade County would not be able to provide a bilingual ballot. Yet 35 percent of the people who live and vote in the county are of Hispanic descent.

This particular provision of the Act does not expire until 1985. But it too should be extended as an outcome of the current debate.

Still another result of the current debate should be clarification in the Act that the test of discrimination in voting is the effect of a law and not the intent of those who enacted it.

As a former prosecutor, I can say with some certainty that intent is hard to prove. Given the outcome of the Supreme Court decision last year, I think the black voters of Mobile, Alabama will agree. And I know the black voters of my former home of Escambia County, Florida, will agree as well, for they too have tried with some difficulty to prove discriminatory intent in court. But in the area of voting rights, proof of discriminatory intent should not be required. It is effect, not intent, that matters. If the effect of a law is to dilute the right to vote, then the law should be removed from the books, regardless of the intent of those who enacted it.

The inclusion of this principle in the Voting Rights Act would enable us, for the first time, to combat effectively the new and sophisticated means of voting discrimination—such as at-large elections—which have proliferated since Selma. It would help us assure that the votes of all citizens count equally in choosing our representatives and resolving public issues.

In a democracy, all else flows from the right to vote. The exercise of all our other rights as Americans depends on the free and fair exercise of the franchise. The vote is the wellspring of participation. It is the indispensable key to entry into the full life of this land. At a time when participation has diminished, when democracy is threatened, what wisdom can there be in according anything less than the fullest possible measure of protection to the exercise of the right to vote? At a time when there is so little faith in our institutions of government, what reason can there be for risking the integrity of the one means by which all Americans have an opportunity for an equal voice in the actions of government?

Reubin O’D. Askew was formerly governor of Florida and special trade representative for the United States in the Carter Administration. His remarks were presented at a conference on minority voting rights in the South on August 21, 1981.

Voting Problems and Solutions

By William Velasquez, Edward Brown Jr., Joseph Smith, James Buskey, Abigail Turner, Robert Woods

Vol. 4, No. 1, 1981, pp. 28-33

Texas

William E. Velasquez

My name is William C. Velasquez and I am the executive director of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP). SVREP is a non-partisan 501(c)(3) voter registration project working in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and Texas. We have conducted 336 voter registration campaigns in these states since 1975. In addition we have undertaken an extensive series of studies designed to measure the Hispanic participation in the political process and explore the impediments to full participation. SVREP, together with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and other legal societies have sued, settled or are currently negotiating with forty-seven (47) jurisdictions to remedy some of the more outrageous gerrymandering we have found in the Southwest.

The desires of the Hispanic voter in the Southwest are much in keeping with what all Americans want. The overwhelming majority of the requests for assistance from the field are to impact the cities and the schools. Chicanos in the Southwest want paved streets, drainage, curbs and better schools. The tradition in the vast majority of Southwestern cities is that the Mexican side of town is not paved, much less provided adequate municipal services, and the schools in our side of town are terribly inferior. Better municipal services and better schools consistently rank as the top two priorities in all our work in the field and in our polls.

Unfortunately, it is at the local level that the greatest barriers are found. For example, the first sixty-six counties that the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP) analyzed in Texas were all found to be gerrymandered against Chicanos at the county commissioner level. This, of course, is beyond the realm of statistical probability and does not happen by accident. As many as 128 counties throughout the Southwest may be gerrymandered at the county commissioner level against Chicanos. In addition, there are 42 school boards in Texas with 50 percent or more Chicano students and no Chicano elected official. Another 30 school boards with 50 percent to 91.5 percent Chicano students have only one Chicano school board member. The number of Chicano students must rise to an average of 89.1 percent before Chicanos begin having appreciable representation at the school board level. The reason for this is the at-large election scheme.

These structural barriers coupled with voting abuses, such as letting people vote who aren’t registered to vote, taking the ballot out of the booth and to the homes of Anglo ranchers to vote in tight elections, make it virtually impossible to win.

It used to be much worse.

In the last four years under the Voting Rights Act, Hispanics in the Southwest have made excellent gains in voter registration. From 1976 to 1980 the number of Hispanics registered to vote in the state of Texas increased from 488,000 to 798,000, a 64 percent increase. There has also been an increase in the number of elected officials. SVREP has documented a 29.5 percent increase of Hispanics elected to office in the three years from 1976 to 1979. Dramatic increases in registration and turnout have been noted in a number of areas where the Department of Justice has issued letters of objection. Crockett County, Texas, for example, now has a registration rate of 95.2 percent among Chicanos, and 93.6 percent of the Chicanos registered turned out to vote in a recent county commissioner race that was made possible by equitable districting lines under Section 5 of the VRA. Many other cities and counties such as Sonora, Dallas, Crockett County, Houston, and San Antonio have been similarly affected.

The process that is unfolding before us is the process whereby America integrates a people, an immigrant working class, into our democratic electoral process. We have a long way to go; however, the progress afforded us under the protection of the Voting Rights Act gives cause for optimism. My optimism is not just for the Chicano people’s political future, but for the future of our country. Indeed, I feel very strongly that the struggles we have gone through and those struggles of previous immigrant groups have helped this country stay true to its basic ideals. And important among those ideals is that America is a land of just laws that practices what it preaches …. and where in fact a group from humble circumstances can strive to and actually elect their own representatives.

William C. Velasquez gave testimony before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights on May 6, 1981.

Georgia

Edward Brown, Jr.

My name is Edward Brown, Jr.. I’m from Camilla, Georgia. I’m District Coordinator of the Seventh District of the NAACP which includes 28 counties in southwest Georgia.

Mitchell County has 50 or more elected officials but only four are black, representing the more than 45 percent black population. The county has had five suits filed against it for discrimination. The first in 1948 was for discrimination in voting.

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I’ve run for political office on two occasions in south Georgia: in 1976 for the state house of representatives from Mitchell County and in 1979 for mayor of Camilla. My experience has been that race is a tremendous handicap in running for office in southwest Georgia.

It’s difficult to campaign in white areas. I tried at first but whites were reluctant to accept my campaign material; and one tore up my card as I stood on his front door step. Private clubs and churches are basically segregated so that it is hard to establish political coalitions with white organizations. In fact, the exclusive white Lions club runs elections in Camilla; the all white Rotary club runs elections in Petham; and the Pilot Club does the same in Baconston, the third largest precinct in Mitchell County.

As might be expected, racial block voting persists in Mitchell County. During my state race, a deputy sheriff carried whites to the polls but never blacks. My wife voted and as she was marking her ballot, she heard the deputy instruct a voter in the adjoining booth not to vote for me because “he’s a nigger.” My poll watcher was denied entrance to the polls until 11:30 a.m. on election day because my white opponent did not have a poll worker present.

During the city election local police guarded the line of voters, a practice which intimidated blacks. In fact, two blacks were arrested for interfering with voting procedures. The charges were later dropped.

I received a majority of the votes cast at the polls, but after the absentee ballots were counted, I was declared the loser. I was not allowed to see the absentee ballots until a week later.

Edward Brown, Jr. presented this testimony before the House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights on June 3, 1981.

Joseph F. Smith

I am Joseph Frederick Smith of McDonough, Henry County, Georgia. I am a retired school administrator with thirty-three years in the Henry County School System. In 1980 I was elected to the county school board, becoming the first black ever to hold a county elective office.

Henry County, Georgia was totally segregated until the 1960s. The courthouse and city offices in all four towns were occupied only by whites. The eating places, bathroom facilities, drinking fountains, and all public meeting places were segregated. School integration was done in 1970 by pairing white and black students in certain grades and sending them to the same schools. Like in many other places, two large all white private schools were established in the county. They siphoned off about 1,000 students from the public schools, and costs the system $1,000 per year per child.

We began to organize in the 1960s to improve the quality of life for blacks in the county. There was and continues to be great disparity in municipal services in the white and black communities; there were no black elected or appointed officials, no blacks on the county police force, and no blacks employed in meaningful positions in government or private businesses.

We were given promises that these problems would be looked into. Some appointments were made, but the central problem was that we did not have any black elected officials. By 1972, one black had run for county commission, and in 1976 another black and I ran for the school board. None of us were successful because we just could not win under the at-large election system. Racially polarized voting prevented a black from getting enough votes to win any seat.

In 1978 we sought legal assistance, and our attorneys discovered that both the county commission and school board had changed to the at-large system in the late 1960s without submitting the legislation to the Attorney General for preclearance under Section 5. Actually, no legislation had been submitted from the county since the Voting Rights Act had been passed.

We negotiated with both groups for almost a year without success, even though the Justice Department had entered objections under Section 5 to both at-large changes. The school board refused to talk to us or our attorneys, and the county commission set up a committee that proposed several redistricting plans that all continued to dilute minority voting strength. None of the plans we submitted were even given serious consideration by this group. The state legislature delegation introduced one of these plans even though we strongly opposed it. The bill passed, the governor signed it, and the Justice Department objected again.

To the surprise of both boards we sued under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in November, 1979. In June, 1980, a judgement was entered ordering that the county be redistricted into 5 single-member districts, one of which was majority black, and assessing $14,000 in attorneys’ fees

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against the county. This was a tremendous waste of time and tax money.

As a result of the new redistricting plan, I won my seat on the board of education. The black candidate for county commission lost in a run-off by 95 votes. It is apparent to me that without Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which allowed us to attack the at-large system—no black would ever have been elected to the Henry County School Board and County Comission. No matter how much we spoke out, blacks were passed over…

Joseph Fredrick Smith presented testimony before the U.S. House Subcomittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights on June 3, 1981.

Alabama

James E. Buskey

I represent in the Alabama legislature a district in the City of Mobile, and, since my career in politics has been in that city, I am quite familiar with a lawsuit called Mobile v. Bolden. While urging the continuation of the Voting Rights Act, I must also strongly urge you to amend Section 2 of the Act to conform with Section 5 and make clear that Congress prohibits any practice which is racially discriminatory, whether in purpose or effect.

Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act has had an important deterrent effect. During my term in the state legislature, I have heard numerous changes in voting procedures discussed and abandoned due to the existence of federal clearance requirements. I know the deterrent effect of Section 5 is real.

Without Section 5, at least 72 discriminatory changes would now be in effect in Alabama, according to the Department of Justice. Forty-five objections have been filed since 1975. I ask you to consider this list of jurisdictions which have attempted to submerge black political participation through such means as changing from district to at-large voting, illegally redistricting county, city and school governing bodies, adopting staggered terms, changing residence requirements to exclude black candidates, and other unlawful tactics: Autauga County-23 percent black; Birmingham-42 percent black; Chambers County-36 percent black; Clarke County-43 percent black; Hale County-63 percent black; Pike County-35 percent black; Selma-50 percent black and Sheffield-19 percent black.

Another indication of the indispensable nature of Section 5 is the evidence that many procedures have been changed without submission to the Justice Department. The department discovered 70 unsubmitted changes in the period following the 1970 extension. Although I do not have complete information on the entire period since 1965, I believe this evasive tactic to be widespread and comparable to the documentation of almost 400 unsubmitted changes in the neighboring state of Georgia during the period.

I can also cite a number of instances of long delays in submissions. In 1969, Washington County, 29 percent black, changed from single-member districts to at-large election of its county commission. This act was not submitted to the attorney general until December 1979. In 1971, Conecuh County, 44 percent black, rearranged its county

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commission districts to eliminate a majority black district. Justice Department poll watchers discovered the change nine years later, prompting its submission in 1980.

Such attempts to subvert the law convincingly demonstrate the continued need for the present Section 5 provisions. The danger of Congress permitting the essential elements of the Voting Rights Act to die are real and have already appeared in early form with passage of enactments in my own state to require “reidentification of voters,” as the term is incorrectly stated.

Although it is the task of county boards of registrars to systematically review the voting rolls in order to remove persons disqualified as voters, many boards have hit on “reidentification” as a way to relieve themselves of the burden of their sworn duties, causing legislation to allow a number of boards to completely purge the rolls and require voters to appear before them to “reidentify” as qualified electors. At first glance this may appear a handy, if somewhat lazy, means of making certain the voting rolls are not carrying great numbers of disqualified persons. But “reidentification” must be understood as complete re-registration. The result is the instantaneous lowering of the percentage of black registration, built over the years through painstaking and costly means, to zero.

Although white registration is reduced to zero as well, whites quickly regain high levels of registration. Blacks do not. A case in point is the recent “reidentification” experience in Choctaw, a county with 44 percent black population. A 1978 law mandated “reidentification” there. Surveys reveal that white registration fell by approximately one-fifth. Black registration however, collapsed to only 52 percent of previous levels. Thus, an eight percent difference (54/44) in white-black registration grew to 30 percent (65-35) following “reidentification.”

It is no coincidence that “reidentification” legislation passed in the 1981 session would give boards of registrars in three majority black counties, each with increasing black populations and voting registration, the license to completely purge the rolls and place the burden of registering once again on the voters. Thus, Perry, 60.2 percent black, Sumter, 69.5 percent black, and Wilcox, 68.9 percent black—none ever represented by a black legislator—will force blacks to start from scratch one year prior to the next legislative election. Without Section 5 these techniques cannot be challenged quickly and can become the latest form of disfranchisement.

Such bills, introduced as local legislation, are practically impossible to defeat in the Alabama legislature. Under the rules of each chamber, such legislation is uncontestable unless one represents the particular county affected. A vote against another legislator’s local bill is a breach of the etiquette of the chamber and an open invitation to reprisal against one’s own crucial local measures.

Even with sixteen black legislators in the statehouse, we are simply unable to protect black people from such injurious legislation outside the districts we represent. Without the protection of Section 5, black people in Perry, Sumter, Wilcox and all the other counties away from Birmingham, Mobile, Montgomery, and Tuskegee have little protection from serious obstacles to black registration and representation.

The era of denial of voting rights is not past in Alabama. The Voting Rights Act functions as the bedrock of civil rights legislation. Should Congress allow the Act to die, blacks and other racial minorities will have the doors to legislative processes slammed in their faces, and the tremendous contribution minorities have just begun to make in government, so especially important in the cities and counties of our nation, will be lost.

James E. Buskey appeared before the US. House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights on June 3, 1981.

Abigail Turner

I am Abigail Turner, an attorney with the Legal Services Corporation of Alabama in Mobile, Alabama. Our staff has represented black citizens in cases charging violations of the Voting Rights Act. To ascertain whether these violations were isolated examples of noncompliance, we conducted a survey of black political participation in Alabama.

The Voting Rights Act led to dramatic increases in registration, candidacy, holding of elective office and voting of formerly disenfranchised black Alabamians. In 1960 prior to the passage of the Act, only 57,500 blacks had registered; this number had grown to over 420,000 in 1980. However, these important advances do not tell the whole story. Barriers to registration and voting still hinder black Alabamians from equal political participation.

Monroe County

In Monroe County where 44 percent of the population is black, 80 percent of the registered voters are white. Black political leaders in that

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county report that blacks have been denied registration by the all-white board of registrars because they did not have Social Security cards. They did not have cards because they had never worked in covered employment. Others who were unable to state the name of two registered voters who could vouch for them were denied registration. This voucher requirement is expressly prohibited by the Act, 42 U.S.C. S1973b(c). Alabama law permits boards of registrars to appoint deputy registrars, but the Monroe County Board had refused repeated requests to appoint them.

Pickens County

Pickens County in west Alabama has a 42 percent black population. However, 67 percent of the registered voters are white. Vigorous registration campaigns in that county have confronted stiff opposition. Again, registrars refused to appoint deputy registrars. Persons assisting in the registration campaigns reported that on at least two occasions registrars called the sheriff when groups of blacks appeared to register. The sheriff, a deputy and the courthouse grounds keeper stood over the applicants as they attempted to complete the forms. That had a chilling effect.

In the last two years, the Legal Services Corporation of Alabama has represented clients whose rights to nondiscrimination in voting have been violated. These cases clearly illustrate the effectiveness of the legal tools provided in the Voting Rights Act.

Clio

The Town of Clio annexed territory in 1967 and 1976 and did not submit the changes to the Justice Department under Section 5. The United States Attorney General requested submission of the 1976 annexation and warned the town that it could not legally implement the annexation as it affected voting until the town had complied with Section 5. Ignoring this, Clio held municipal elections in July 1980. Persons in the annexed areas voted. An all white five-member council was elected which included two residents from the annexed areas. Clio’s population in 1980, including the annexed areas, was 47 percent black. Mary Gamble, a black citizen, lost her race for town council by five votes. We represented her in filing suit under the Voting Rights Act challenging the failure to preclear the annexations. In March 1981, the three-judge federal court found the annexations violated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The court terminated immediately the terms of the two persons residing in the annexed area, and the terms of the remainder of the council and the mayor in 120 days.

Mary Gamble believes she faced serious economic problems because she was a black candidate. Ms. Gamble had a loan, secured by a second mortgage on her home, from the only bank in Clio. The white man who has been Mayor of Clio for more than 25 years is the President of the Bank of Clio. Two weeks before the town council election, the Mayor, President of the Bank, notified her that she had three days to bring her note to a current status. After she filed an election contest in state court, the Mayor came to her house about the note.

Wilcox County

No black person was registered to vote in Wilcox County prior to enactment of the Voting Rights Act. With the Act’s passage, federal registrars came to this majority black county and registered several thousand black voters.

In 1978 a black man was elected sheriff of the county and two blacks were elected to the county commission. Before the next local elections in 1980, the Wilcox County Board of Registrars decided to purge voters who had been convicted of disqualifying crimes or had died. Registered voters to be purged were not notified according to state law. They learned that their names were being removed only when the United States Office of Personnel Management, pursuant to the Voting Rights Act, began contacting the persons on the list who had been registered by the federal registrars. One of our client’s name had been removed because of death. Another’s child had died, and the adult’s name had been removed. A third person was removed because of an alleged first degree murder charge; he had never been charged.

The Office of Personnel Management found that many registered voters to be purged were properly registered and had been victims of an inaccurate investigation by the Board of Registrars. Most of the persons on the purge list were black.

When the board proceeded despite the inaccuracies, black citizens complained to the Department of Justice and the Office of Personnel Management. Our clients filed suit to enjoin the purge, so they could vote in the September 1980 primary. The Justice Department observers at the primary insisted that the persons purged be allowed to vote; Justice later disapproved the purgation of federally registered voters. At the preliminary injunction hearing prior to the November 1980 general election, the defendants consented to restore the persons’ names improperly removed and to purge in accord with state and federal law.

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The Alabama Legislature in May 1981 enacted a voter reidentification requirement for Wilcox County. Actually the process is a reregistration. The county’s first black sheriff, Prince Arnold, described the effect on black voters: “It took us 15 years to get these people registered. Now we’ll have nine months to do what took 15 years.” The bill requires a voter to appear in person before the board of registrars between the hours of 9:00 and 4:00. The board is only required to sit one day in each location. Voters must complete a questionnaire which includes Social Security number and driver’s license number. The Wilcox County act contains no option to present other identification.

Abigail Turner presented her testimony to the US. House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights on June 3, 1981.

South Carolina

Robert R. Woods

My name is Robert R. Woods, a member of the South Carolina State Legislature serving since 1973. I am a member of the Ways and Means Committee, chairman of the Joint Charleston County Legislative Delegation, former Vice-Moderator of the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church and minister of Wallingford United Presbyterian Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where more than 30 percent of the population is black.

Even though the Voting Rights Act has opened some doors in some places throughout South Carolina, there are still far too many doors that remain closed to blacks and other minorities. In areas where there has been conscious effort by public officials to uphold the law, and make efforts to include all persons in the political process, regardless of color or political affiliation, the governments that have emerged reflected these efforts.

Charleston, South Carolina, however, is an example of an area where public officials have eventually accepted the law of the land and strived to implement these laws equitably. Even though there is much to be done in our city to uplift the living conditions of all our citizenry, the city still exemplifies what can happen when all parties work together to bring about an acceptable solution.

Prior to 1975, my city was torn with dissension which had deep racial overtones. Although two blacks had been elected to sit in our city council, most of the minority residents still believed that their needs were not represented by the pre-1975 city government. The two blacks that had served on the city council had been chosen by the predominantly white organizations. Basically, it was impossible to vote for a single candidate, or to field a candidate that was responsive to the needs of my constituents. We had to vote for the entire slate, or not vote at all.

However, thanks to the Voting Rights Act, all of that has changed; and the government now is comprised of persons who truly espouse the views of all citizens. As a result of prodding from the Justice Department and the court-imposed redistricting plan, the city converted from an at-large election scheme which had closed the electoral process to blacks, to a more equitable single-member plan. After this plan was implemented, the black citizens immediately deposed the white-backed black councilmen in favor of black candidates of their choice. At the present time, our city council consists of six blacks and six whites. Our city was selected by the United States League of Cities as an All-American City. I do not believe that my city could have been so honored had it not been for Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

The Charleston county council and the Charleston county school board cannot boast these achievements. These two bodies still maintain at-large election procedures and only reflect token black representation. The South Carolina Senate also has totally ignored the needs of a full one third of the state’s population. There has not been a black to sit in our State Senate since Reconstruction. The body consists of 46 members, all elected from multi-member, at-large and numbered post. Interestingly enough, the most powerful man in the body is white and represents Calhoun County which is over 55 percent black. This Senator Marion Gressette, formerly headed the Anti-Integration Committee, a group of legislators who organized to halt integration in our state at all cost, also presides over redistricting in the Senate, and has publicly stated that he will wait until the Voting Rights Act expires in 1982 before he tackles the problem of redistricting the South Carolina Senate.

I find it unexplainable that 33 percent of our people are not represented in the upper chamber of our legislature. I am not saying that blacks are required to be represented by blacks, however, I am saying that black Americans have a right to exercise their franchise in a manner that is fully protected by the “Equal Protection Clause” of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

Robert R. Woods presented testimony before the US. House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights on June 3, 1981.

Section 5 and Voting Changes: The Heart of the Act

By Vernon E. Jordan and Lane Kirkland

Vol. 4, No. 1, 1981, pp. 36-37

Vernon E. Jordan

I am Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., President of the National Urban League, Inc. The National Urban League is a 70-year old non-profit community-service organization which has historically been concerned with seeking equal opportunities for all Americans in all sectors of our society.

Having been born and reared in Atlanta, Georgia, as a Southerner I know personally that no right in all the Constitution’s arsenal is more basic than the right to vote. I know how indispensable that right has been in including blacks in the democratic process from which historically we have been excluded. The right to vote has been directly related to our economic growth and the sense of self worth and dignity that blacks are beginning to gain in this country.

In the 60s I was director of the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council. As director, I had first hand experience of how absolutely essential to Southern reform the Voting Rights Act was and must continue to be.

The Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were great and rare affirmations of equality. There is more, much more to be done before equality that Americans have dreamed about is achieved. Those of us engaged in the struggle for equal rights and equal opportunity know all too well that the gains made by black Americans have been modest and indeed fragile. But if these times are not propitious for moving ahead, let them not be ripe for moving backward.

Section 5, which has become the critical focus of the Act during the last decade, was enacted pursuant to Congress’ power under the 15th Amendment to legislate protections against voting discrimination. This preclearance provision requires that any new changes in voting or election procedures initiated by “covered jurisdictions” must be approved or precleared by the Justice Department of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. It appropriately places the burden on heretofore recalcitrant jurisdictions by requiring that new changes not be discriminatory in purpose or in effect. It specifically protects blacks and language minorities in regions where their voting interests have been quelled.

Section 5 was enacted only after a century of near futile litigation in which constitutional arguments failed to curtail adequately discriminatory electoral procedures. It was enacted only upon Congress’ long awaited recognition of the fact that disenfranchisement takes many innovative forms. It came only after other civil rights legislation was cleverly skirted or ignored and blacks and other minorities still largely remained outsiders to the political process.

Today diminution and dilution of existing voting patterns and practices must be avoided at all costs. We must be vigilant and ever-mindful of sophisticated procedural devices and schemes which effectively nullify equitable access to the electoral process. What we currently face are 1980 versions of the pre-1965 poll tax and literacy requirements.

In North Carolina, for example, the number of enactments concerning voting changes for all 100 counties from 1925 to 1940 number only half of the amount of voting changes enacted since 1965. And those 193 enactments identified since the passage of the Voting Rights Act pertain only to the 39 North Carolina counties covered by Section 5 as compared to the 100 counties concerned during disenfranchisement.

Section 5, however, is not, by any means, limited to Southern states. It in fact applies to all or part of 23 states including Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii and parts of New England, spanning the four corners of this nation.

As a matter of fact, in New York, three covered counties—King, Bronx and Manhattan—together encompass a larger population than any single Southern state.

History has taught us that nothing short of Section 5’s requirement that a newly drafted electoral scheme have a non-discriminatory purpose or effect can insure the protection guaranteed by the 15th Amendment.

As to the administrative burden on submitting jurisdictions, the Act requires only correspondence by mail or phone while guaranteeing a decision from the Attorney General in 60 days. In our view, such a requirement is not unduly burdensome in light of the potential voting discrimination prevented and the thousands of voters affected by each Section 5 objection.

We cannot afford to differentiate between reasons why the votes of blacks and other minorities are short-changed or diluted: one reason is patently as bad as another. It may be nearly impossible to get inside the heads of John Doe or Richard Roe and pick out specific intent for specific acts. But it is not difficult to see the social intent which lies behind and expresses itself in political structures and processes which hold back what the Supreme Court once called “discrete and insular minorities.” Indeed, it is hard to avoid seeing it; only the singularly willful can manage to do so.

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Since the passage of the Voting Rights Act we have witnessed significant increases in black voter registration as well as black elected officials. The abolition of the poll tax, the presence of federal examiners, the ban of literacy tests and objections to racial gerrymandering have allowed black voter registration to climb to over 3.5 million and the election of over 2,000 black officials in Southern states.

But we also witness continuing plans to keep the black vote impotent. Since 1975, the Justice Department has filed over 5,060 Section 5 objections to discriminatory electoral systems.

Seventeen years is not enough time to undo the ropes with which America’s minorities have for centuries been bound into powerlessness. The minorities of this country have an inalienable right to expect nothing less than fair and equal participation in the political process. Nothing short of the renewal of the Voting Rights Act will satisfy that right.

Vernon Jordan testified before Congress on the Voting Rights Act on May 6, 1981.

Lane Kirkland

It is not surprising then that there is near universal agreement that the Voting Rights Act has been the most successful of this country’s civil rights laws.

Blacks and the language minorities protected by the bilingual provisions are now participating in political life in greatly increased numbers, both as voters and as candidates.

But that relative success does not mean that our nation has reached a state of grace. How much remains to be done is evident from the statistics alone: Section 5 has been in force for 15 years.

Pursuant to its requirements that covered jurisdictions clear with either the attorney general or the federal courts every proposed change in voting laws or practices, more than 800 such proposals have been rejected.

Even if we assume that in some instances the discriminatory effect was inadvertent, it is evident that there remains a solid determination in some quarters to block equality of voting rights.

Indeed, in one state—Mississippi—since 1975, there have been as many Section 5 Attorney General objections to proposed discriminatory changes in voting laws as there were in the previous 10 years of the Act’s existence.

Statistics, of course, are only a lifeless summary of a living reality. Numbers cannot gauge the depth and range of emotion—the will for power, the fear of those who are different, the racial class and cultural antagonism—expressed in laws restricting the right to participate in political life.

How can numbers measure the effects of 95 years of exclusion from the right to vote and the right to run for office, of 15 years of effective remedial action, or of an abrupt end to that effective remedy?

But those numbers, as well as common sense, are sufficient to warn us that we are discussing today’s problem, not yesterday’s, and that it is far more likely than not that to end or weaken this law is to end or to weaken the civil rights of the blacks and language minorities the law now protects.

How, then, should Congress approach the question of continuing or abandoning the Act? We believe the Act itself provides the answer.

Section 5 places the burden on the submitting jurisdiction to show that its proposed change “does not have the purpose and will not have the effect” of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color or membership in a language minority.

Under this provision, those whose laws and practices have discriminated in the past must demonstrate that they do so no longer.

We suggest that Section 5 provides a fair and reasonable principle to apply in the present debate. We submit the burden should be put on those who would limit or repeal the Act to prove their case.

Let them demonstrate that the legacy of nearly a century of rights ignored has been wholly overcome, that the lessons of 1870-1965 concerning the inadequacy of the right to sue after a change in voting laws no longer applies, and that these few years of adequate response by the federal government have brought about such a total change of heart that such a response is no longer needed.

Or, if they seek changes under the soft euphemism of perfecting amendments, let them demonstrate that their proposal provides stronger safeguards for civil rights than the present system.

We do not believe that the opponents of the Act are able to carry this burden, but we deeply believe that it is theirs to carry.

Lane Kirkland is the president of the national AFL-CIO. A native of South Carolina, Kirkland testified before Congress on May 6, 1981.

The Lost Colony of North Carolina

By Donna Dyer and Frank Adams

Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 3-11

“We don’t have poverty in Hertford County. People live like that because they want to. They don’t want it any other way”–L.M. “Mutt” Brinkley, Hertford County Commissioner.

In speaking of the rural poor of Northeastern North Carolina, Sister Mary Genino, a Catholic nun who has worked in the region for three years, acknowledges a bewildering configuration of powerlessness: “They are bound,” she says, “by a social structure that has not changed for hundreds of years. It has affected their economic freedom, their political freedom and their social freedom. They don’t vote–though no one comes around with a gun or turns them away from the voting polls. They drop out of school–because education doesn’t get them anywhere. And although there are no written laws that say ‘blacks and ‘while,’ the mores of past generations are still rigidly adhered to.”

Seldom since William Byrd staked the Virginia–North Carolina boundary in 1728 has there been so much discussion within and without the region about conditions of life in the “Northeast.” Some have begun to call the area east and north of Interstate 95 the state’s “lost colony.” Colonies exist when a region’s people or natural resources are under the sway of outside individuals and institutions. A colony is subordinate to and dependent upon outside sources of accumulated capital, upon the “superior training” of outsiders or their agents, upon the outsiders’ control and manipulation of privileged information, or some combination of these factors.

Advantage over the colonized or peripheral region is preserved through manipulation of wages and labor markets, through continued or increased levels of outside ownership over resources, and through the thousand and one ways in which wealth and concentrated power make themselves felt. There are also the advantages which are played through in discriminations of sex, race, religion or culture. And when necessary, there can be a show of force. Poor people are usually numerous in dependent regions (witness Sister Genino’s comments), and passions over racial attitudes, sexual traditions or religious beliefs often divide them, further preventing effective challenges to the causers and causes of poverty and quiescence. Appalachia is one such colony in the United States.

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Is Northeastern North Carolina another one?

In August 1981, Governor James B. Hunt, Jr., spoke at an “economic summit” arranged by the Department of Commerce in Edenton, once the state’s capital. The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot announced the event saying the Northeast’s governmental and commercial leaders were being invited “to continue a process of focusing bureaucratic, political, and economic attention on the region.”

Later that month, either spurred by the governor’s zeal or unimpressed by what they heard, sixteen counties formed a coalition calling itself Northeastern North Carolina Tomorrow to promote a regional agenda for economic growth. In October, they met with a delegation of Virginians to plea for help in pushing tourism, industrialization, links with the thriving Tidewater, and markets for new products. The area’s feelings of being a stepchild were underscored by talk of secession. State senator Melvin R. Daniels, Jr., a Democratic Party stalwart and influential banker, told the Virginians, “If things don’t go right with redistricting in Raleigh, we might petition Virginia to take us back in–everything from the Roanoke River through the Chowan River Basin.” Whether ploy or facetious warning, Daniel’s remarks drew swift rebuttal from equally powerful state senator J.J. “Monk” Harrington, a Lewiston manufacturer, who bluntly defended the state’s efforts to spur development. He said, “I think Northeastern North Carolina has been looked out for quite well by North Carolina officials. I have never known them-Virginians–to give us anything. We give and they take.”

Governor Hunt’s Balanced Growth Policy stirred some faint hopes for economic growth in the Northeast, a land of productive farms, endless timber tracts, pocosins, slow moving rivers and small towns. But the highly visible policy debate during the governor’s first administration spawned more rhetoric than results. The coalition’s leaders, pushed by Ahoskie newspaper publisher, Joe Parker, were agreed in their determination to see some change in the region’s bleak economic status. They arranged public meetings and held symposia at community colleges and offices of Chambers of Commerce. However, despite the region-wide, public nature of all the talk, very few of the debate’s participants offered more than a glimpse into the Northeast’s economy, or provided an analytical framework for discussing the region’s severe economic ills.

For instance, there are shifting definitions of which counties are to be included, or more accurately, are willing to be tarred as “underdeveloped.” The Governor’s Task Force on Northeastern North Carolina, the group responsible for the Edenton Summit, included Beaufort, Bertie, Camden, Chowan, Currituck, Dare, Gates, Halifax, Hertford, Hyde, Martin, Northampton, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Tyrrell and Washington. Their list coincided with the sixteen-county coalition. Other observers, particularly a few municipal, regional planners, and University of North Carolina professor of planning Ed Bergman, argue the entire First Congressional District shares the common demoninator of an agrarian-based economy with the lowest per capita income in the state. In accepting Bergman’s position, we include Carteret, Craven, Greene, Lenoir, Pamlico and Pitt counties in our analysis.

Too, the debate has been blurred by a division as to the reasons for persistent underdevelopment. Some point to myriad human deficiencies; others blame the lack of roads, schools or bridges. The first camp attributes the region’s plight to ills they say are inherently a part of the Northeast’s people and their culture. In circular fashion, they claim that the often shocking statistics of poverty, poor health, inadequate diet, ignorance, rotting housing, or lack of participation in the electoral process characteristic of the First Congressional District, explains the origins and causes of underdevelopment. Another camp, perhaps the majority, holds that the lack of adequate roads, incentives for investors, shortages of skilled labor, and inadequate tools for capital formation prevent regional modernization.

Both camps ignore several essential questions: Who owns or controls the land in this sprawling region? Who owns the region’s jobs? Where do profits go? How are governmental services distributed, or taxes levied? These key questions are at the base of any regional analysis. And while the Governor and the coalition have let them go begging, some of the citizenry has not.

Dr. Eugene G. Purcell, a minister and professor of philosophy at Atlantic Christian College, spoke at a regional development seminar organized by Elizabeth City’s College of the Albemarle on November 17, 1981. He drew knowing, approving nods from listeners when he declared that growth is difficult because people “realize the critical decisions that affect them most are made by people they cannot see and do not know.” Purcell continued: “The economic future of small towns is determined in a corporate boardroom in a distant city.

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Impersonal bureaucrats make decisions about state or federal funding and control of the schools, the quality and availability of medical care, who gets a slice of the welfare pie, what interest rates you pay for borrowed money, and even the quality of the air you breathe or the water you drink.”

Intellectuals are certainly not the only persons asking who prospers from the region’s people and resources. In 1979, before the present debate became public, a popular bumpersticker was sold at many Northeast restaurants, grocery and hardware stores. The message? “Welcome to North Eastern North Carolina: Owned and Operated by VEPCO.” The bumpersticker reflected the successful drive by twenty-one Northeast municipalities to terminate contracts with Virginia Electric and Power Company (VEPCO), headquartered in Richmond, and then buy power from Carolina Power and Light Company, based in Raleigh, saving, they predicted, $1.1 billion over a twenty-one year period.

Who Owns the Land?

According to the Sixth Edition of the Profile of North Carolina Counties, published in 1981,thereare5,783,500 arable acres in the District. Farmers till 24.9 percent of the land, or 1,400,700 acres. Timber is grown on 61.8 percent, or 3,572,200 acres. The federal government owns 233,909 acres, or 2.5 percent, using that land principally for military bases or parks. The remainder is taken up by roads, towns, trailer parks, shopping centers, junkyards, schools or prison camps.

All told, according to the 1978 U.S. Census of Agriculture, there are 10,658 farms in the District. They produced twenty percent of the state’s agriculture receipts, or $657,204,000, averaging about $62,000 per farm. The majority are small, inherited, family-held operations whose number is declining.

North Carolina State University’s Dr. Leon E. Danielson found in a 1981 study that about a third of all the state’s farmland was owned by retired persons, or by white- and blue-collar workers who farmed part-time and worked other jobs. The average size of a North Carolina farm was forty-two acres. The patterns he found hold in the Northeast, especially because tobacco is grown in abundance, and is labor intensive, and can be done part-time. But changes in farming practices, operating costs, interest rates and labor costs are wiping out the small family farm. Black farmers in the District have been particularly hard hit. Their number declined from 2,570 full-time farmers tilling 111,888 acres in 1954 to 529 full-time farmers working 26,876 acres in 1979, a drop of seventy-nine percent, causing the N.C. Division of Policy Development in June 1981 to predict that by the end of the century “there will be no black-owned farms,” in the state.

As small farms vanish, larger farms and “superfarms”–requiring huge capital resources and extensive management skills, have taken their place, adapting new technologies and taking in previously unused or marginally productive land. This trend started in 1973 when Malcolm P. McLean, the one-time Winston-Salem trucking magnate, paid $60 million for 581 square miles c land or about one third of the entire Albemarle-Pamlico peninsula, and appropriately called what he’d bought (the state’s largest farm), First Colony Farms. Since then, dozens of other investors, all but two from outside the region, have bought and developed land, cleared and drained the property, then leased or resold the farms to absentee owners or corporations. Mostly corn, soybeans and hogs are raised on these farms. A partial list of the Northeast’s superfarms includes the 44,000acre Open Grounds farm in Carteret County, owned by an Italian grain merchant; the 35,000acre Mattamuskeet Farms in Hyde County, owned by John Hancock Mutual Insurance Co. of Boston, which has another $70 million in invested farm mortages elsewhere in North Carolina; a 7,500-acre farm along the Roanoke River in Halifax County, owned by ten New York City investors; and two Washington County farms–one totalling 9,400 acres and the other 4,700 acres–owned by foreign investors hidden so completely by corporate veils that even the resident managers don’t know for whom they till. Only two of these megafarms are held by North Carolinians: Rich Farms, a 13,000-acre operation east of Belhaven, and the 15,000acre farm operated by the relatives of A.D. Swindell around Pantego.

Decisions about the daily operations on these are made locally, but management policies are set elsewhere. Profits and tax advantages accumulate elsewhere, too. Further, local control over land use policy is eroded, if not lost, as a result of absentee farm operations. Even the state’s Environmental Management Commission found their reins a bit short. They voted to assess the impact of the superfarms on the ecology because “no one knows now what effect the ‘gigantic denudations’ of large farms . . . will have in the long run on weather, water, and wildlife . . .” First Colony managers pooh-poohed the study as having little value other than “keeping a few state bureaucrats off the street.”

Who Controls the Water?

Water, so vital to farming and seemingly so abundant in the Northeast, is also becoming scarce as a result of industrial activity controlled by absentee owners, or interests outside North Carolina. The superfarms profoundly alter water distribution patterns. Thousands of pounds of farm chemicals run off into swamps and rivers, and have had a devasting impact on fish and shrimp in the

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sounds. Meanwhile, underground cones of depression traced to huge industrial withdrawals daily in Virginia have begun to diminish the underground water supply in Hertford, Northampton and Gates counties. Union Camp Corporation, operating in Franklin but headquartered in New York City, pumps about forty million gallons out of the ground daily, dropping the ground water level at least eighteen feet annually. To the south near Aurora, Texasgulf, Inc., headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, but owned by the Government of France, pumps over nine million gallons of water daily to keep its subsurface phosphate mines dry. These withdrawals, combined with the ground water pumped by municipalities or by other industries, has caused the Northeast’s ground water level to drop nearly forty feet in ten years, according to Robert Cheek of the N.C. Department of Natural Resources. Private wells from Wanchese to Rich Square have dried up as a result of the depleted artesian aquifier. Already, fishermen net crabs in the Chowan River as far upstream as Winton.

Who Controls the Forests?

The region’s timberlands are held primarily by hundreds of private landholders in small tracts. This is the pattern across the state. There are some 245,000 non-industrial forest landowners in North Carolina, more than in any other state in America. They control about eighty percent of the commercial forest production–which yields over three billion dollars annually, if the furniture industry is included. In North Carolina, only twelve percent of the forests are held by all corporations, but in the First Congressional District, five giant forest product firms own twenty-one percent of the forests, or 746,322 acres. None of them are headquartered in the Northeast although each has a regional office there, and one, Weyerhaeuser, operates a mill in Plymouth employing nearly 2,300 persons to replant trees, run its nursery, haul logs, and run the complex, sprawling mill itself.

Weyerhaeuser illustrates how firms outside the region directly influence the life inside. The Tacoma, Washington, corporation owns or manages 660,000 North Carolina acres, mostly in the First Congressional District. Even with all these holdings, Weyerhaeuser-owned timber accounts for only twenty-five percent of its production needs. Nearly three-fourths of the timber it processes must come from smaller landholders, many of whom are unable to afford investing an average of $120 per acre to replant and then wait twenty to forty years for a return on their investment. To insure that its needs are met, Weyerhaeuser constantly buys up more timberland. Also, the company sponsors reforestation programs which enable the family timberowner to hold onto land, but puts hundreds of Northeast acres under its indirect control, or under the indirect control of the handful of other companies. For they are the only buyers available.

The giant firm influences the region’s social economy even more directly. At the end of October 1981, Weyerhaeuser settled a four-year-old suit brought by black employees at its Plymouth mill. They had alleged that the company assigned blacks in disproportionate numbers to its wood products division rather than the higher paying

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fiber division. No blacks worked in the nursery, they said, and only a handful in salaried positions. Some seventy-eight percent of the work force in Plymouth (1,800 persons) was black, and the counties from which the firm drew the majority of its workers have large black population. Weyerhaeuser agreed to divide $700,000 in back pay among approximately 725 workers and pledged no further discrimination in job transfers, hiring, or promotions. Discriminatory wage patterns–to say nothing of hiring policies–provide a major reason why the region’s poverty is widespread and enduring and why the term “colony” is accurate.

Race has not been openly a part of the current debate about the region’s economic future. Black participation has been marked by its absence. Only after the sixteen-county coalition’s preliminary plans were well laid were any blacks invited to join what had been an all white, mostly male group.

An ad hoc committee of the N.C. Department of Commerce reported on March 19, 1979, on “the minority concentration issue.” Its authors, many of whom lived in the Northeast, sought to “dispel the myth that areas populated by high concentrations of minority individuals are to be avoided as possible locations in industrial facilities.” Some potential industrial clients, they noted, spurned the region because of its lack of water, sewer services, poor roads, or their low regard for its schools, shopping centers, cultural activities and recreation. Others frankly balked at the Northeast because of race. “Some . . . cite higher minority concentrations in the population and labor force as an additional factor adding to the lack of client interest . . . Some have stated a firm will not look at an area which has over thirty or forty percent minority concentration. The explanation is given that, in general, due to the lack of economic and educational opportunity, the Southern rural Black worker is perceived as having a poorer work ethic and is more easily organized by union efforts.” According to the 1980 Census, blacks are the majority of the population in four of the Northeast’s twenty-two counties and a third or more in eleven others.

Who Controls the Jobs?

Long periods of unemployment or long daily commutes for workers are another regional characteristic. Sixteen Northeast counties reported unemployment rates above the state’s average in 1980. Tyrrell County had the highest unemployment rate in the state–11.5 percent. Aggregate figures do not account for seasonal employment in the tourist industry (a major factor in Dare, Pamlico and Carteret counties) nor farming, making it likely that real unemployment during some months may be much higher than official averages reveal. For hundreds of persons, the option is commuting. Between 2,200 and three thousand North Carolinians drive daily into Virginia to work at Tidewater shipyards, or the meat packing and food processing plants in Suffolk and Smithfield. As the prices of fuel, autos and vans increase more rapidly than general inflation and the real incomes earned at these distant jobs, the region’s economy is further weakened by reducing the actual amount of money available to be spent or saved in Northeast.

The work which is available in the Northeast is characteristic of jobs to be found in other colonies–apparel sewing and manufacturing, timbering, mining, or food processing–which pay the lowest wages and characterize first-stage, primitive industrialization.

Even a casual look at available employment in the Northeast explains why workers choose to commute such long distances. Jobs are scarce. In twelve of the twenty-two counties, less than thirty percent of the nonagricultural workforce is employed in manufacturing. The state’s average is 34.6 percent. In the nine counties where more than thirty percent of the work force is employed in manufacturing, jobs in food, apparel and lumber dominate. By considering Beaufort, Craven, Lenoir and Pitt as “metropolitan centers” among the other overwhelmingly rural counties, work in those three categories accounts for fifty-six percent of the District’s jobs. Across the state, the average is twenty percent. These low-paying, low skill industrial sector job categories quickly feel the nation’s cyclical economic lurches. When building permits drop nationally, the Northeast’s trees do not. When clothing sales decline, sewing machine operators are laid off.

In only two of the Northeast’s twenty-two counties do average weekly wages exceed or approach the statewide average of $222.56. Seven counties reported weekly wages of less than two-thirds the state’s 1979 average. During that year, North Carolina, which became the nation’s eighth most industrialized state, ranked fiftieth in average weekly industrial wages. Hyde County workers labored for the lowest wage in the state, if not the U.S.,–$85.66 a week.

There is a parallel scarcity of unions. In nine Northeast counties there isn’t a union local at all; in the others only three locals are listed in telephone directories. Recent efforts by the United Food and Commercial Workers, a progressive union with an emphasis on organizing among the poorest paid sectors of the labor market, failed to overcome widespread fear among poultry processors in two huge, profitable factories. Even those unpleasant jobs were precious to people who know other work isn’t available. One veteran UFCW organizer, a native of Williamston who is based in Asheville, says, “Organizing back home is as tough as any place in the South I know of.”

Low wages, the large number of unemployed, plus the lack of unions dull any prospect for immediate change in

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wage patterns. When new firms do locate in the Northeast, pay levels remain low despite increased competition for labor. For example, a British-owned elastic manufacturing firm in 1981 took over a Jamesville building which had housed a zipper factory also owned by absentee investors. As an official from the elastic firm cut a ribbon to reopen the once-abandonded plant, he told Martin County boosters, “Pay scales at the company will be commensurate at least with those of the region of the state.”

By subtracting the public sector portion of the non-agricultural jobs, an even gloomier picture of the region’s real wage level emerges. Persons in government employ tend to be paid at higher hourly wage rates than persons in the private sector. Government employees comprise about twenty-five percent of all jobs in the Northeast and thirty-five percent of the non-manufacturing jobs in the region. Across North Carolina, the public sector averages only sixteen percent of the total work force, and twenty-five percent in non-manufacturing. In some Northeastern counties, Gates, for instance, public schools are the largest single employer. And while county government exercises control over a few jobs, most government workers are managed, hired, and fired by policies or regulations set in Raleigh, Atlanta, or Washington.

In December 1981, Governor Hunt told a Military Appreciation Day ceremony that the armed forces were more important to the state’s economy than tobacco. “The military pays out about $1.7 billion dollars annually in North Carolina,” he said, “while tobacco generated about $1.3 billion dollars in wages and salaries in 1981–one of the best yet for our number one crop.” In 1980, the military pumped $230 million into the Northeast, primarily to run the Cherry Point Marine Air Station, the New River Marine Air Corps Station, Camp LeJeune, Johnson Air Force Base, the Fifth District Coast Guard Station in Elizabeth City, and the demolition training center operated by the Central Intelligence Agency outside tiny Hertford. Over 41,000 persons are employed at those installations. Higher than average levels of government employment, plus the large concentration of military bases, further characterize a colony.

Who Controls the Capital?

Determining the final resting place for profits gained from the region’s workers and resources helps to explain why the Northeast has a severely limited capacity to form a local capital base. According to the 1981-1982 N.C. Directory of Manufacturing Firms, there are 103 manufacturers employing one hundred or more persons in the First Congressional District; only thirty-four of these are headquartered within the region. The rest make their decisions and count their profits elsewhere, usually far from North Carolina. Of these absentee firms, thirty-five, or one-half, are either textile, apparel, or lumber producers. And while the 103 firms employ nearly 23,000 persons, sixty-nine of them, or the majority, control the jobs of 18,000 persons, according to N.C. Department of Commerce figures. Every one of those sixty-nine firms is headquartered outside the Northeast. One is a foreign government.

Still another measure of how the region’s resources are drained away by absentee capitalists is seen in expenditures for new plants or machinery. These capital investments translate into tax revenue for local government, indicate a firm’s solvency, stability, and, importantly, potential for additional jobs. They hint of continued plans for operation. Only four of the twenty-two counties are within ten percent of the state’s average per establishment capital investment levels. They are the most urban counties–Beaufort, Craven, Lenoir and Pitt. In the rest of the Northeast, capital investments ranged from seventy-five to five percent below North Carolina’s average. Industrial development has paid off less than handsomely for local tax coffers. When Peat Methanol Associates announced plans to build a $250-million plant on forty acres south of Lake Phelps, Washington County officials crowed, “It would be a terrific iprovement of our tax base,” but were unable to tell “how much of the finished plant would be subject to county taxes.”

The Northeast’s low-wage, low-skill manufacturers produce goods with low added-value above the costs of raw materials plus labor. According to The 1977 Census of Manufacturing, only firms in Pitt and Lenoir approached or exceeded the state’s average value-added statistics. Thus, industrialization has neither translated into prosperity for individual workers nor substantial additional tax revenue for local governments.

Tax laws add to the region’s impoverishment. The property tax is a chief source of funds for North Carolina’s schools, human services, and some local roads. The Northeast’s county and municipal governments rely on ad valorem taxes for revenue. These taxes are disproportionately paid by small farmers, or homeowners, and storekeepers, rather than owners of the superfarms or the forestry industry relative to their profits per acre. Farms and forests are taxed according to “use values” instead of “market values,” the measures used to assess homes, trailers, autos or personal property. Land used for farm forestry usually carries a lower assessed value than residential, commercial or industrial land use.

For years, North Carolina tax law has exempted timber companies from paying taxes on cut-over land for ten years after re-seeding or replanting. In 1973, the General Assembly went a step further by exempting all

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standing timber from the tax base. The impact of their decision can be seen in tiny Gates County where 165,000 acres, or 75.5 percent of all its arable 219,300 acres, is used for forestry. Three timber companies owned 57,752 acres in Gates the year the exemption bill passed. The previous year, they had paid $7,823.73 on standing timber alone, and a total of $21,124 to the tax-poor county which had no industry at the time, and can boast only of one small sewing factory now. In a single legislative stroke, Gates lost nearly a third of the taxes paid by the timber companies. Yet the human problems faced by county government persisted. According to the 1980 Census, over twenty-four percent of the population was poor, twenty-two percent of the houses were substandard, and the unemployment rate fluctuated between five and eighteen percent annually.

How valuable was the timber harvested in Gates County that year? On one seventy-four acre tract the timber sold for over $302,000. Seven yers later–as the tax burden grew heavier as a result of the forestry exemptions–Gates County farmers sought relief. They claimed four hundred farmers, farm laborers and the county’s few businesses paid for seventy-five percent of the county revenue needs. Nor was Gates by itself. Throughout the region, the ad valorem tax rate is higher than the state average. Greene County has the highest rate in North Carolina, at $1.39 per hundred dollars of valuation, followed closely by Pamlico and Tyrrell with rates of $1.25 per hundred.

As tax rates increase, the incentives for industrial development decrease. This forces individual property tax rates to continue to climb, making it ever increasingly difficult for small property owners to hang onto their land. Adding to this self-perpetuating cycle is the regressive state sales tax. One cent of every four collected by the state in sales taxes is returned to the counties from which the revenue derived. Only a handful of the Northeast’s counties possess significant trading centers. Elizabeth City, Edenton, Williamston, Greenville, New Bern and Kinston qualify, as do Little Washington and Roanoke Rapids. However, market magnets such as Fayetteville, Raleigh and Durham–even Richmond and Tidewater, Virginia–regularly attract the Northeast’s shoppers. Rural counties with limited retail sales fail to benefit from the sales tax revenues to the degree “market” counties enjoy, thus increasing the pressure to tax rural county property at higher rates.

How are Government Services Delivered in the Northeast?

Consider the following: According to the Eastern Carolina Health Systems Agency in Greenville, the region’s health planning organization which has the largest geographic area to serve of any agency of its kind in North Carolina, sixteen counties are “medically under-served and have health manpower shortages.” Regarding emergency medical care only, the agency found that fourteen of the region’s hospitals had no twenty-four-hour physician coverage. Eight of them did not have registered nurses on duty twenty-four hours daily in emergency rooms. Only half the region’s ambulances–132 of 264–met Department of Transportation standards, and the region was short 513 ambulance attendants. Partly as a result, the agency noted, the region’s stroke mortality rates are twelve percent above state averages. Motor vehicle deaths are ten percent above state averages. Heart attack victims run a ten percent greater risk of dying before getting medical attention in the Northeast than elsewhere in North Carolina. Getting to hospitals is further complicated by the fact that nearly a third of the region’s roads are unpaved. In eleven counties, the average number of miles of unpaved roads outstrips the statewide average of 33.8 percent. In sprawling Beaufort County, for instance, over 44.3 percent of the roads are unpaved.

In a 1979 study of the Department of Human Resources listing of every county’s human service agencies, which included sheriffs’ departments, jails and prison camps, as well as hospitals, Red Cross agencies, or Departments of Social Services, a relationship between a county’s poverty and scarcity of resources appeared. In Camden County, where twenty-one percent of the 5,829 citizens were poor, there were thirty-one state or federal agencies, the fewest in North Carolina, to provide the available range of services open to other North Carolinians. Gates County, which had thirty-two listings, the next fewest in the state, had, as has been noted, nearly a quarter of its 8,876 citizens impoverished. In Hyde County, with thirty-four agencies, thirty-seven percent of the 5,875 citizens were poor. There was no public housing authority listed in these three counties, yet in Camden, nineteen percent of the housing was substandard, in Gates, twenty-two percent was below par, and in Hyde County, twenty-three percent was substandard. By contrast, in Wake County, seat of state government and one point in the affluent Research Triangle, and where less than ten percent of the citizens are poor, there are 876 agencies, the state’s highest number. In second place was Guilford County with 483, then Forsyth with 412 and Mecklenburg with 353.

Schools are often at the core of citizens’ expectations from local governments, and they frequently reflect the degree to which governments can or will finance human services. Across the region, dozens of schools have been left in the lurch and are falling to pieces. A Raleigh newspaper found that Bertie County’s only high school held fifty-four classes daily in three World War II quonset huts. Classrooms flooded regularly during rains. Two other Bertie County schools had been condemned as unsafe but continued to be used.

For the region’s older citizens, the picture is hardly brighter. In North Carolina, an average of sixty-eight dollars per person was spent on Medicaid in 1980. Fourteen of the Northeast’s counties spent less than the state average, and Northampton spent only thirty-eight dollars annually. This dismal listing could continue, but the point seems clear: Human services are scarce and supported at levels lower than available elsewhere in North Carolina.

Some Conclusions and Prospects.

There is not a single Northeast county in which the per capita income equals or exceeds the state’s average, which was $7,382 in 1979. In Hyde County, the figure was one half the state’s average; in Greene, it reached ninety-five percent. In the decade between 1970 and 1980, the Northeast’s citizens made no real gains in per capita

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income if their wages were measured against those of fellow North Carolinians. In real terms, adjusted for inflation, the gap remained about thirty percent lower. Thus, it is not surprising that nineteen of the twenty-one counties reported higher-than-average levels of poverty, and in four counties, the number of poor was double the state average.

The internal colony metaphor provides insights into some aspects of reality, distorts others, but forces attention on a set of questions. Some of the Northeast’s citizens want to know who controls development, and how. A growing number want to regain control of their jobs and land.

Long before the state’s policymakers told black farmers they were an endangered species, those farmers were struggling to survive despite predictions, policies and practices bent on eliminating their way of life. Decades of planning by the state for a unique seafood industrial park in Wanchese–at costs estimated at over $100 million in state and federal funds–raised fears among Dare County fishermen. “I’ve always said that the project will destroy us,” one fisherman told a Raleigh newspaper. “We’ll have no control over the large corporation which can absorb losses our small operation can’t stand.”

Two lines of strategy have characterized official response to the plight of the Northeast. One tack, ever since William Byrd set down the eighteenth century dividing line, has been to send in missionaries to correct deficiencies thought to be inherently a part of the local population’s own waywardness. Byrd noted in his famous journal, ” . . . sometimes the Society for Propagating the Gospel has had the Charity to send over Missionaries . . . ” to Edenton, whose residents, he wrote were “too lewd for the Priest . . . “, lacking ambition “enough to aspire to a Brick chimney,” wanting in religious devotion, and without “the least taint of Hypocrisy, or superstition, acting very frankly and above-board in all their excesses.” Helping people get used to or accept their deprivations continues to this day as the chief means which many well-intentioned persons use in Northeastern North Carolina.

Others, uneasy about blaming the victims but equally concerned about regional shortcomings, have substituted the term “progress” for the patronizing “backward.” To cure ills, these capitalists argue, a modernizing corps must be posted to the region to bolster schools, lure new industry, build roads, negotiate tax incentives. The Northeastern North Carolina Tomorrow coalition would bring into the region scores of professionally-trained persons: experts in hog and black dirt farming, medicine, community development specialists, economists, and lawyers experienced in corporate finance.

These elite approaches ignore the talents, energies and questions of the Northeast’s citizens who don’t own the banks, newspapers, or manage the superfarms. Without local, democratic control over the region’s resources and the capital needed to develop them, the colonial circle will go unbroken. Nonetheless, there are things which can be done.

In offering the following suggestions, we recognize the resistance posed by the visible and active dimensions of power and also those which, as Sister Genino suggested at the beginning of this essay, result from generations o. powerlessness. Northeastern North Carolina awaits a more thorough going analysis than that which we have provided. In the absence of such a regional analysis, as the debate goes on, we suggest some possible next steps.

First, small scale, labor intensive farming should be fostered, particularly for minority farmers or the young who are virtually prohibited from entering farming unless land is inherited. A family farm development authority similar to one established recently in South Carolina should be created by the Legislature for the Northeast. The authority would make long-term, low interest loans to persons who earn sixty percent or more of their annual income from farming, or who have adjusted incomes of less than $25,000. Absentee landownership should be halted as one step in a long-range land reform program.

Second, markets should be guaranteed for crop alternatives to tobacco, peanuts and corn, particularly the wide range of vegetable crops which can be grown profitably in the Northeast but which are as often as not imported. One U.S. Department of Agriculture study reported that North Carolinians import three fourths of all the fresh vegetables they consume.

Third, the timber industry, or N.C. State University, should take existing forest management programs into Elizabeth City State University and East Carolina University or the region’s community or technical colleges. The aim would be to upgrade the husbandry skills of small-tract timberowners, and to search for alternative marketing sources for wood products.

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Fourth, the managers and employees of small businesses should be provided opportunities to upgrade skills in all phases of their businesses at state subsidized training centers at no cost to the individuals or businesses. No firm with more than one hundred employees would be eligible; nor would any absentee-owned firm.

During the past two decades, small businesses have generated sixty-six percent of all the region’s new jobs. The state should abandon its touted industrial recruitment program and concentrate instead on development of enterprises directly related to the region’s economic needs, the skills of its people, and those marketable uses of the region’s resources. The state should establish a revolving loan fund for democratically managed businesses. This would provide working capital or start-up funds for small businesses owned and managed by workers themselves.

Fifth, state and local governments should re-examine the impact of tax policy, law and formulae on timber, farming, fishing, and small businesses; absentee ownership of both land or industry should be discouraged through higher taxation. The guiding aim of any review would be to insure rural counties a fair share of tax revenues, and to insure they are not unfairly drained of resources vital to maintain schools and human services, while seeking to spur indigenous economic activity.

Sixth, the state should encourage the growth of small scale, locally control led energy development through continued solar tax credits, demonstrations to small farmers of alternative energy options, home insulation rebates, or energy efficiency audits at large and small industry sites.

Seventh, the state should provide the necessary technical assistance for local county officials seeking to adopt industrial development policies which take into account appropriate technology, small-scale and locally controlled enterprises, or with qualifications which include firm size, ownership, waste discharge, energy efficiency, and, particularly, production links with local resources.

In the final analysis, however, we residents of Northeastern North Carolina must ourselves organize the means to autonomy. We should apply pressure on absentee owners, state politicians, county administrators, and policymakers at every level. We must close the gap between the “lost colony” and the state to which we pledge allegiance and pay taxes.

Donna Dyer and Frank Adams are natives of eastern North Carolina. Ms. Dyer is a principal with Triangle Planners Network, Inc., a nonprofit corporation offering planning and technical assistance to community groups. Mr. Adams is the author of Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander and is a community educator who now lives in Gatesville. Maps and illustrative materials for this article were prepared by Marge Manderson of the SRC staff.

Ending the Short Stick In Mississippi’s Woods

By Tom Israel and Randall Williams

Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 16-18

Pine trees are commonplace, but timber is an industry, especially in the South where forests stretch from Houston to the Carolinas. In Mississippi today, timber is the largest provider of manufacturing jobs and the state’s largest crop.

The timber industry will play a key role in the next several decades in the South. The trees are here, the giant wood products companies are here, and a paper shortage is projected for the next twenty-five or thirty years. The crop is constantly expanding, as witnessed by oldtimers who drive through rural areas and point out the cotton fields of their youth, now grown into the piney woods.

For the harvesters of the crop, however, even those who enjoy the work, woodcutting is one of the dirtiest, most dangerous and poorest paying of occupations.

There are two types of wood harvesters–pulpwooders, who cut and haul wood to be made primarily into paper products, and loggers, whose labor ultimately leads to the making of lumber. They can be distinguished on the road by the way the wood is stacked on their trucks: pulpwood is short and stacked across the truck, while logs are long and stacked lengthwise. In Mississippi, an estimated ten thousand people work in the woods, and about eighty percent of them are black. However, log haulers are more likely to be white than black, largely because cutting logs is more profitable than cutting pulpwood and because the timber companies have allowed whites to take that economic step up.

About four-fifths of the wood harvesters are pulpwooders, and they are the chief beneficiaries of the Mississippi Fair Pulpwood Scaling and Practices Act, which was to go into effect July 1. The story of the passage of that act and the reasons why it was necessary is worth hearing.

Woodcutters are paid a piece rate for each cord of wood they sell. A cord is a volume measure of four feet by four feet by eight feet. The pulpwooder and his crew cut the trees down, saw off the limbs, cut them into five-foot

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lengths, load them on the truck and haul them to a wood yard. The work is hard and dangerous: a get-together of woodcutters where everyone has all his fingers or toes is rare.

An average truck load has three or four cords with a gross value to the woodcutter of about $120. When the hauler brings the wood to the yard, it’s measured with a long yardstick. The common practice is for the wood hauler to hold the stick against the stack of wood on his truck, and the dealer stands back and reads the scale off the top of the stick.

The woodcutter can’t see the scale and he isn’t even told how much wood was on his truck until it has already been unloaded, by which time it’s too late to argue. The United Woodcutters Association estimates that woodhaulers earn about six to seven thousand dollars a year if they work full-time, and that an average cutter loses about fifteen hundred dollars per year to the short stick. So it has been a real problem.

The Woodcutters Association decided to organize a campaign around this issue and tried for three years to get a bill passed that would set standards for measuring-scaling–the wood at the yard. But woodcutters are very isolated from one another. They work in remote locations and they usually know only the other woodcutters who may be in their family or in their church.

They may recognize some other woodcutters by sight or may recognize their trucks which they’ve seen on the road or at the woodyard, but they don’t know them. They also haul their wood to about 250 scattered woodyards throughout the hills of Mississippi (The United Woodcutters Association is organized in forty-two counties in Mississippi.)

A second barrier to effective organizing is fear on the part of the workers. The Association is not, like most unions, an organized shop. The people who join and who speak out in favor of such things as the fair scaling act are completely unprotected at the woodyard against firing and harassment. Even woodcutters who simply attend Association meetings are subject to intimidation from dealers.

To overcome some of these barriers to organizing, the Association started a cooperative. The woodcutters have to own and operate chainsaws and trucks and they burn up large amounts of supplies, which they usually get from the wood dealers for whom they work, often at exorbitant prices.

The system is very similar to sharecropping. The woodcutters are considered independent contractors and are thus not usually covered by insurance or other benefits from either the wood dealer or the big paper companies, yet they end up in economic dependence to the wood dealers, who function much like labor contractors.

When a woodcutter needs a tire for his truck or a chain for his saw or even a loan for a piece of equipment, he will go to the wood dealer who will advance him the money and then deduct it a little at the time from the woodcutter’s pay for each cord of wood. The net effect is that the woodcutter never gets out of debt and his already meager take-home pay is whittled away even more. From the payment he receives from the wood dealer, of course, the woodcutter also has to pay his helpers, own and operate his truck and saws, pay social security and buy insurance, if he has it.

The cooperative was thus a very effective organizing tool. The Association now has co-ops at forty-three different locations around the state where the woodcutters can get their saw files and their chain oil and a dozen other products they need to stay in business. The woodcutters not only get lower prices but they get to meet and get to know each other, which helps break down the problem of isolation. And because the members of the Association are the administrators of the co-ops, they gain confidence in working together as a unit.

All of this work helped in the three-year campaign to get the fair scaling practices act, but it wasn’t enough. The campaign succeeded when the word finally got out to the landowners that they were losing as much as the woodcutters due to the short stick, or inaccurate measuring of the loads on the pulpwood trucks. The landowners off whose land the wood is cut are also paid on the basis of the measurement taken by the wood dealer at the yard. By doing a lot of organizing among small farmers, the Association eventually got an endorsement from the Farm Bureau, and on March 8 the Mississippi Fair Pulpwood Scaling and Practices Act passed.

The act requires licensing of wood dealers and establishes uniform measurement procedures, procedures where the woodcutter can file complaints, and third-party arbitration to settle disputes. These procedures are important to give protection to the woodcutter who actually files a complaint, so he won’t be told the next day not

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to come back to that woodyard again.

The next step for the Association is to organize strikes at some wood yards. The fundamental poverty of the woodcutters is not going to change until they are paid more. Getting an accurate measure will mean a lot more money but the woodcutters are still paid very little for their labor. By the time he pays all the costs of production, the woodcutter who clears eight or nine dollars on a cord of wood is doing very well.

The Association put together its first strike last summer in Fayette, Miss., where three yards were shut down for about one month. One yard settled with a two dollars per cord raise and an agreement to post standards on how the loads would be measured. The second yard came through with just a raise. The third yard, which was run by International Paper Co., shut down and moved out of town.

In addition to more strikes and other job actions, the Association is now campaigning for workers’ compensation coverage for woodcutters; as independent workers with the middlemen wood dealers between them and the paper companies, they have been denied this protection for on-the-job injuries or deaths.

Finally, there are thousands of woodcutters in other Southern states whose working conditions are equally as dangerous, whose pay is equally as low, and whose isolation is equally as limiting.

For these woodcutters, it seems, imitation of the Mississippi example may be the first step on the road out of poverty.

Tom Israel is the lead organizer for the United Wood cutters Association. This article is adapted from his remarks at a recent conference hosted in Montgomery by the Southern Poverty Law Center, where Randall Williams is employed.

South Without End

By Steve Suitts and Allen Tullos

Vol. 5, No. 3, 1983, pp. 1-2

The South has been born again in the gospel of American presidential politics. “The South is the Key” was the shorter catechism which brought the contenders to Atlanta’s Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner late this winter and it is the slogan which we apparently will have to chew on for many coming months. This emerging dogma goes beyond the fact that two-and-a-half Southerners are announced Democratic candidates for president. And, significantly, it has appeared at a time when sociologists and historians have rejoined the now-frayed debate over the very question of the South’s historical continuity, distinctiveness and validity.

Just now, when the South appears to be a region fragmented by Yellow-dog Democrats, suburban Republicans, newly registered blacks and Yankee immigrants who have assumed the garb and gab of the Dukes of Hazzard, just now, we are invited to believe the South is the Key. And, now that the South is being subsumed under the bogus epithet of “Sunbelt” or, more realistically, broken-up into a section of the country which contains several contrasting regions, here come the candidates with their “Howdy’s” and “You-all’s.” For today’s South not only embraces the finely articulated, corporate-government-university oasis of North Carolina’s Research Triangle and surroundings, it also contains the grimiest tailings of nineteenth century industrial capitalism in Birmingham, the lingering plantationism of the Mississippi Delta, as well as the “international” aspirations of Atlanta–a city too busy to wait.

To capture all this in the single garment of One South, much like slipping the tar-baby into polyester coveralls, requires a politician of clearly presidential caliber.

With the passing of the Solid South, with Democratic orthodoxy no longer taken for granted, the section becomes important because it is now willing to be unfaithful to old creeds. Yet, like the wayward Southerners to whom the television evangelists proclaim the miraculous, conversion into anyone’s fold may be rewarded with a flicker of attention (provided you enclose your check) rather than a genuine deliverance.

The South’s attractiveness to the political evangelists began with the rules for selection of the 1984 delegates to

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the National Democratic Convention. Almost one-fourth of all the votes at the San Francisco convention will come from the eleven Southern states from Virginia to Texas. The complex computation of delegate distribution rewards population size and Democratic voting patterns for the last three presidential elections. Although the South has voted Republican as often as Democratic in the last six presidential elections, its loyal support for native son Jimmy Carter exceeded that of other regions. With this advantage and increased population, the South will have an important voice at the convention in San Francisco next fall.

The timing of Southern Democratic primaries next year also supports the new gospel. Within two weeks following the traditional New Hampshire primary at the end of February, five Southern states will select convention delegates. Alabama, Georgia and Florida will hold a public primary on the same day, Tuesday, March thirteenth. Later in the week, South Carolina and Mississippi will probably choose candidates through caucuses. A candidate who does well in all the Southern primaries could lead the Democratic field even if he had not received a delegate in any other state until then.

In an era of televised imagery, the Southern primaries will also offer the first major test of survival. Reuben Askew of Florida or Ernest Hollings of South Carolina must emerge as the South’s choice if their campaigns are to be considered seriously. For other Democrats, Gary Hart of Colorado, John Glenn of Ohio and Alan Cranston of California, Southern primaries offer the important moment to show themselves as “electable.” None of these men have their own state party elections before May. Unless these candidates evidence strength by March, they will have serious problems raising money and building momentum to take to the convention.

Glenn, who has ridden the ultimate stockcar into the heavens, may have already missed his opportunity to impress upon Southerners his candidacy’s link with the region’s most popular spectator sport. He should have’ been in the grandstand, or aboard the pace-car, or awarding the trophy to Richard Petty after the May Day running of the Winston 500.

Certainly. Walter Mondale, now leading in the national polling, needs to demonstrate that his brand of politics can attract Southerners in the March primaries; indeed, his gain of a sizable bloc of delegates from the South could eliminate as many as half of his competitors. He is already doing quite well in Iowa, Minnesota and Massachusetts–states which hold their primaries shortly before the South does.

If several candidates can survive with their own state delegation’s support plus a bit more, the San Francisco convention could be the first one since 1960 where the nominee is not chosen before the opening prayer. The Western states could split between Cranston and Hart; the Midwest could be Glenn’s stronghold; Mondale may be the choice of part of the Northeast and a scattering of other states around his base in Minnesota: the South may choose one of its favorite sons.

With that outcome, it is likely that Southern delegates would be first targets for conversion since their candidates would generally be viewed as “good vice-presidential material.”

Nor is it inconceivable at such a convention that Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, who half-heartedly withdrew from the race in April, would emerge as a brokered, candidate. Bumpers’ open indecision about running for president prompted an unusual, premature national tent revival of blacks, women and white liberal groups who rallied round his candidacy.

The gospel of an important South in presidential politics is by no means limited to Democratic faith. Because of increased population, the South will have additional votes in the electoral college. With its noticeable support for Ronald Reagan in 1980, the section will be especially attractive for proselytizing by Republicans.

As the most consistent Democratic supporters, Southern black voters may find themselves in the front aisles. They are essential in almost any candidate’s projection for party victory in the region. Democrats will need a very high level of support from blacks in the South, especially if that party’s candidate in the general election is not a Southerner. Republicans also realize that a small defection of blacks to their party could deny the Democrats the South.

The one article which remains unclear in the new Southern, dogma is perhaps the most important: if the South delivers the opportunity and the votes that annoint a winning candidate, what does the South gain? And which South? With no regional mandate on substantive issues within Southern borders, the whole experience may be more akin to the clap and trap of television evangelism than to a renewal of body and spirit in the region. Southerners, especially the historically disfranchised, must drive a hard bargain if substance is not to be sacrificed to form.