INTERCHANGE
A New Magazine: Our Creed and Hopes
By Steve Suitts

Vol. 1, No. 1, 1978, pp. 2-3

This first issue of Southern Changes is nothing new.

On four prior occasions during the last 34 years, the Southern Regional Council has announced the premiere of a new publication. Each has differed: one endured for 27 years and another did not live to celebrate an anniversary. All attempted to mark a new and distinct emphasis within the organization and a revived hope in the South’s future.

The publications’ names show, perhaps, the changing perception of the region by an organization born in the days when segregation of the races was fact enforced by law. The Southern Frontier was the Council’s first publication and lasted for two years. Then, in 1946, it was revised in title and format as the New South.

“The change lies in this,” the first edition of New South, stated, “that SRC will from now on strive to study and solve the problems implicit in (our) goals as parts – symptoms, if you like – of the overall problem of the South, which is the region’s need to develop a fuller use of its resources, both natural and human, to achieve a healthy balance between the agriculture and industry within the region. The democratic corollary to this, of course, lies in the duty of every Southerner to see to it that such development, as it is achieved, is used wisely and shared fairly by all, for all. It is to this development and the democratic shaping of the South’s growth that SRC will give most of its effort.” The magazine urged its readers to join in the task of making the “New South” a reality.

From 1946 until 1974, the magazine’s contributors wrote about the South with sympathy and outrage. They illuminated the obvious and obscure problems, pled with and cajoled Southerners to do better – to help bring social change.

Harold Fleming, a former director of the Council and one of the old hands at New South, reflected in its final issue that “to be honest, New South helped create the image of Southern readiness for change that somewhat exceeded the realities of the day.” Nonetheless, the New South found hope when it was scarce and marshaled an intellectual force which often plain facts could only bring.

It was just four springtimes ago when New South and its companion tabloid, since 1970,South Today, were merged into a new, colorful, and glossy magazine, Southern Voices. Although its editor observed that “there is even a Southern feel to the universe, suggesting that perhaps the stars are ironically right for this unprecedented venture,” it was not to be. After ten months, financial problems silenced Southern Voices.

During its short life, the magazine marked a change in perception. It was a time, the Council decided, when Southerners of all persuasions could speak to one another about problems and solutions – a time when the entire collected expressions of the South reporting, poetry, fiction, art, photography -could be reproduced in one medium for all to see.

With the echoes of Southern Voices still an influence today, we commence another publication. It too, has a new name and is the product of that mysterious process of “vision and revision,” influenced by the traditions, virtues, and the failures of those who came before. Compared to Southern Voices, this magazine is a modest undertaking. It has no color, no departments for art, fiction, or poetry.

The magazine will not attempt to attract every Southerner with the general, diverse expressions of Southern life and culture. Its appearance is different and the texture of its paper and its content feel different.

Hopefully, Southern Changes will have the riches of analysis, investigation, reporting, interviews, story-telling, and commentary. The magazine will mainly be a forum for reliable, concise reporting and interpretation on the issues and events of the South, with emphasis on the plight of the poor and the Black Southerners who, along with others, still seek a just settlement. It will attempt to review the moods, events, developments, and inactivities of the region. It will have little of the virtues and the sins of doctrinaire propaganda. It will attempt to show what is good and decent and hopeful about Southerners and their place. It will highlight the accomplishments of Southerners and the events of today and measure how far we have come in our march with the aspirations and ghosts of yesterday.

It will be called Southern Changes.

With only slight exaggeration, no single word has infiltrated the conversations of Southerners on the porches, in streets, or at statehouses more than the word “change.” For more than a century, it has been the inspiration of Black Southerners; for most of the Council’s existence, the hope of all liberal White and Black Southerners. It stirred the dreams and thoughts of some leaders and for others threatened the institutions and traditions they lived by. The prospects of change mothered racial tensions since folks, whom academicians called “change agents,” would not let it come in the by and by. The time for change was now.

Until the past few years, it was mostly the Southern liberals who wanted change to come rapidly. All others wanted none, thank you m’aam. Not so anymore, it seems.

Nowadays, many folk who once promoted race-mixing want to slow down some of the changes going on in our region. Poets wryly speak of losing our “distinctive Southern character.” Some writers yearn for the days before air conditioning when Southerners would sit and talk to one another. Others think we have gone far enough. Activists, who once marched to the hymns of “We Shall Overcome” and hummed the popular tune about “the times they are ‘a changin’,” now petition to stop the construction of super highways or nuclear plants.

However, not a few of those Southerners who never quite mastered the pronunciation of the word Negro now proudly boast that the South is changing. Industry, growth, money, skyscraper- they all dance in the minds of these and many others who have taken up the uncharacteristically Southern habit of judging success by a balance sheet. Perhaps, even the region’s identity is under change.

The South as a marked region is losing currency. The geography of the South has been enmeshed with a territory larger and more amorphous-the Sunbelt. It goes from the East Coast to Southern California. Some say it is a state of mind as well as place. When journalists, planners, and businessmen speak of our future, it is the Sunbelt, not the South which usually holds their attention. While some of us will not quickly cotton to the self-identity of a “sunbelter,” the changes which are spreading across the South must be reckoned with. The prospects of a better income which sometimes comes with economic development can’t be shooed away by the

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poet’s turn of a phrase nor should it be dismissed necessarily as an attack upon our Southern way of life. In a region where 40% of the nation’s poor live, the promise of a decent income ought not be shunned. And it ought not be a hoax.

Amid the growth and changing nature of the South, there also remains too much unchanged. Life in the South for too many Blacks and poor is still as it was. Low pay, no pay, poor housing, no jobs, try again next week, they don’t work because of welfare (a grand total of $2,800 each year for a family of four in Mississippi), high infant death rates, dirt roads, impure water- the chant of conditions and attitudes continues to stir the cycle of poverty and discrimination. Also, other minorities and many women are denied opportunities which national goals should guarantee to all.

With and without the changes, clarity of purpose and unity of vision are rare commodities in our times. Events and developments seem duplicitous with promise on one side and failure on the other; the complexity of social issues and the failures of government to live up to its goals confuse us all. We live in a South where we must now select carefully the changes which we invite and the ones which we oppose. Hence, the subtitle, “a chronicle of the ongoing struggle for equality.”

This publication will attempt to help us all understand the region we know as the South and ourselves, our neighbors, and the forces which influence our lives. In doing so, Southern Changes claims a new creed which borrows heavily from those original thoughts of the 1940’s. If all else seems questionable, the major concern for Southerners at home and abroad today is how will our region change. We hope that this magazine and the Council, jointly and separately, will help us know the question and the answers a little better.

As a publication which will go mostly to individuals who are associate members of the Council, Southern Changes will be read by a community of people in and outside the region who know that the futures of the South and the country have always, and will always, be tied mysteriously into one fate. It possesses the adversarial and cooperative; the patriotic, loyal, and heretical – the opposing qualities which make living in the South exciting and worrisome.

If nothing else, Southern Changes will try to keep us all from masking our uncertainty with nostalgia or blind faith in the future’s holdings. We will try to understand ourselves and our region and our country. We will try to muster a sense of purpose and recognize accomplishments and failures in ourselves and our region’s work. It is a task which for all Southerners is as old as our history and for the Council as dated as its first publication.

Let us journey together.

The Burden of the South and Nation In Another Political Year

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 1, No. 1, 1978, pp. 5-6

Southern politics has seldom offered an opportunity for hope or joy to the agitating Southerner. For those of us who bel eve that race and equality have not surrendered their central place in the life of the South, the scars and terrors of past political defeats have made us reluctantly more the observant than the participant. Perhaps, it has sharpened our ability to see clearly. Or, like the neighborhood wag sharing the tales of some highway accident, it may be that we’ve come to be satisfied with describing politics instead of engaging it.

Yet, this year of all years brings a hope for some Southern liberals that the nature of politics is changing, that the politicians’ views have improved, and that the nature of our problems has changed. As proof, it is noted that some of the most skillful masters of the old school of Southern politics are passing away from their places of political eminence. John McClellan of Arkansas, James Eastland of Mississippi, John Sparkman and Jim Allen of Alabama: none will sit in the U.S. Senate in 1979. Indeed, we are reminded that there has been no other year in the past twenty in which so many of the partricians of Southern heritage have relinquished their places.

A little more memory may also tell us, however, that there have been countless numbers of days when we’ve tried to find major societal movements in our politics overnight, and only a few of them have sustained a lasting, progressive influence Remember when some were excited that Southerners stuck with Roosevelt through three administrations as Democrats and then it all fell apart as they walked out as Dixiecrats on Truman and the civil rights plank. Remember the hope when John Kennedy carried much of the region in 1960 and the despair when Barry Goldwater did it in 1964 and Richard Nixon in 1968 and again in 1972? There was a moment of euphoria the night Terry Sanford became Governor of North Carolina in the early 1960’s and more than a moment of sadness when Jessie Helms went to the Senate from the same state in 1972.

Political Symbols

In observing the present changes in the Senate, we must also recognize the limits of political symbols. Despite our excitement and enthusiasm during a campaign, Southerners have always known that politics carries a duplicity -not always intentional, but apparently inevitable. Thus, we must realize campaign symbols for what they are and are not.

When Governor Bill Finch kissed a Black baby in Mississippi in his race for the US. Senate, we know that an old social custom had been broken. But, we don’t yet know from that gesture how much Finch cares about the interests of ‘poor Blacks or even what he’ll do on legislation for poor children. And his campaign didn’t tell, at least publicly. After Alabama State Representative John Baker, seeking a seat in the U.S. Senate, attacked George Wallace for his 1963 stand in the schoolhouse door in a political telecast, we were assured that Baker, if elected, would not make a fool of himself this fall when Blacks register at the University of Alabama. But, we really have not been told anything about how a Senator Baker would vote on legislative proposals to desegregate the University of Alabama and other state schools.

Obviously, the art of political speech to say nothing and to say something at the same time doesn’t always have a Southern trademark. Still, our campaigners have commanded the technique so long and so well that we ought to resist on principle, as well as experience, the temptation to gauge the progress of our times by the symbols and illustrations of our political campaigns.

Lest we be overcome by me temptation to say that this year is the exception, we ought to remember also that each of the men who leave the U.S. Senate did survive all major political challenges in their careers and most likely would have done so once again if they had stood for reelection.

If we can’t learn from politics much detail about ourselves, perhaps we should look at the deeds of those already elected and the opinions of those who elect them to know how well we stand. And here, I am no more encouraged than I was on those late summer nights when I stared in disbelief at the election returns which crushed my hopes and my candidates for that year.

The State of Equality

For my view, there appears no question that the day-to-day support for the campaign to achieve equality in the South and the nation is more diminished today than at any other time in the past ten years. While freedom from irrational discrimination has been embraced by our laws and popular opinion, the means to achieve equality have not.

To be sure, past work in the South and elsewhere has moved an entire segment of people out of the bondage of constant fear, intimidation, and humiliation. No longer can Blacks as a whole be dispossessed of property, life, and culture by sham laws and capricious hatred. The law of the land and its enforcement do not prohibit that massive denial for most and offer individual protection for some. And importantly, the work of the past couple of decades for civil rights has inspired a renewed attempt by many other groups in society to strive for their own equal treatment.

Yet, as historian C. Vann Woodward reminded us ten years ago, “equality (is) a far more revolutionary aim than freedom…” The attainment of this goal does not always invoke blatant hatred and

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outrageous open cruelty. Instead, the work to achieve equality often involves the relationship of everyone in almost every corner of their lives. Perhaps for this reason, It is a difficult achievement and remains largely unachieved in Southern and national life today.

Promises Unkept

Of the more than ten million Blacks who live in the South today, about seven million live in counties where more than 20% of the population is Black. Yet, not more than two out of ten of these communities has had a Black elected official in the last 100 years. There remains almost 40 counties and three times as many towns in the rural South where Blacks represent a majority of the population but have never had a Black elected official. The obstacles to full, effective voting and candidacy by Blacks exist in the large part because of continued local resistance by government officials and the growing disinterest of the federal courts.

A recent survey of the employment practices of 16 Southern cities shows the continuance of a massive pattern of discrimination against Blacks and women. The results are shocking: almost three fourths of all Black males continued to work for the Southern cities in garage and maintenance. While nine out of ten of all the high-salary positions are held by White males, none of the cities has a Black female making $13,000 or more.

Another report recently revealed that in the last reported fiscal year, the Southern states refused to participate fully in federal programs offering social services to the poor. In a region where welfare is viewed mostly as a handout to the Black poor (a perception that ignores the fact that more Whites in the South are poor than Blacks) and where we have the largest number of poor in the nation, the 11 states of the Old Confederacy failed to spend more than $120 million of federal funds which were available to provide social services such as hot meals, crisis counseling, or day care.

The state of our Southern being is not exceptional, it appears. Similar trends can be found throughout the country. Perhaps, a poll conducted by the New York Times and CBS News late last year shows clearly what is the heart of our troubles in the region and the nation. According to the poll, which didn’t ask which political leader is as popular as Walter Cronkite, three out of four Americans endorse laws providing equal job rights for Blacks, women, and the handicapped; however, an equal number–three out of four also opposes strongly any “extra consideration” for remedying past job discrimination. In fact, only Blacks as a majority favored any such “extra consideration” at any time.

It is important to note than one major source of opposition to “extra consideration” came from those very groups of Whites who once supported the civil rights movement of the 1960’s. The poll evidenced that White liberals in every region opposed the idea of “extra consideration” to remedy job discrimination at a rate of more than two to one. An endorsement of the principle, but not the means to achieve it, it appears.

Another disturbing, non-political poll last year showed that more than four out of ten of all White churches in the country remain segregated and, that in the South almost six out of every ten prohibit Blacks.

No doubt, there will bean opportunity for some of us to shed a bit of our present despair about politics when a cold November evening in the South shows the final results of this year’s voters’ wisdom. As in the past, some good folks may be elected. More important than those results, however, will be the actual results which come from our own attempts to restore the nation’s faith in the importance of equality and to push the South and the country towards a future without the lingering burdens of inequality.

In that primary effort, we have no cause yet to voice our last hurrah.

The Courtesy of Becoming a Federal Judge

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 1, No. 2, 1978, pp. 6, 7, 23

As a moderate segregationist governor of Mississippi, James P. Coleman once advised his supporters resisting integration that “any legislature can pass an act faster than the Supreme Court can erase it.” As time showed, the strategy was partially effective since racial integration began to seep into Mississippi only after being confronted with civil rights legislation, an angry president, and federal court decisions. The governor’s own course, however, may have had a more lasting effect. He retired from office, was appointed to a federal judgeship, and now sits on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Judge Coleman and his brethren on the Fifth Circuit will soon be joined by several others when the president announces the appointment of the 60 district and circuit judges who will be added to the federal bench in the South. Because of recent legislation, more than 150 new federal judges will be appointed throughout the nation. Never before have so many federal judges been appointed at one time.

Although no one, including the president, knows exactly who will fill all these positions, there is clearly a moral obligation for him to appoint a large number of qualified Blacks and women. As a recent report of the Southern Regional Council revealed, the federal court system in the South has only one Black federal judge out of more than 130. Only one Black is a U.S. attorney and only three are U.S. marshals in Southern states. No Black is a full-time magistrate or chief clerk. Overall, no more than six percent of the entire personnel of the federal courts in the South is Black – an increase of only four percentage points since 1965.

While women are represented in large numbers, mostly in secretarial and clerical positions, they hold few positions of responsibility. Only one woman is a federal judge in the South. There is no female U.S. attorney or U.S. marshal and in all professional positions in the Southern district courts, women hold only 9 percent of them.

These facts alone ought to insure that a large number of Blacks and women will be appointed; however, the same moral imperatives and striking facts existed in 1965, when not a year after signing the Civil Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson submitted the name of James P. Coleman to be a federal judge.

Judge Coleman’s appointment angered almost every civil rights activist, many of whom testified against his appointment before the U.S. Senate committee. In opposing Coleman’s nomination, Martin Luther King, Jr. expressed his own puzzlement about how the president could nominate a man who was “the architect of the Mississippi plan to circumvent the orders of the very court to which he now seeks appointment.” Despite their anger, most Southern civil rights lawyers were not surprised. They knew of that peculiar process now, in gentlemanly terms, as “senatorial courtesy.”

Despite the Constitutional provision that the president shall appoint and the Senate shall confirm nominees to the federal bench, the process usually works with the roles reversed. One or two senators from a state select the nominee, the president confirms him, and the Senate seals the bargain. Thus, in reality, it was the powerful senators from Mississippi – not Lyndon Johnson – who made Coleman a federal judge.

The process of judicial selection is pure patronage and works like this: a senator from the state where the nominee will serve selects the person and informs the president. After a background check by the F.B.I. and review by the Bar Association’s committee, the president usually submits the name of the nominee to the Senate. The Senate Judiciary Committee, in turn, returns the name to the senator asking permission, in effect, to conduct hearings. If the nominee is the same person the senator originally nominated, the committee holds hearings and votes on whether to confirm. If the senator’s selection was not forwarded by the president, he usually has an opportunity to kill the nomination.

While the process varies from time to time, the motivating element in the selection is always political favoritism and was recently described by Attorney General Bell, who became a federal judge of the Fifth Circuit in the Kennedy administration. “Becoming a federal judge wasn’t very, difficult,” Bell says. “I managed John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in Georgia. Two of my oldest friends were the two senators from Georgia. And I was campaign manager and special, unpaid counsel for the governor.”

Under this system, it is obviously easier to explain an appointment to the federal bench by looking at the local politics and the state’s two U. S. senators than by reading the president’s announcement of the nomination. Certainly, it would have been hard otherwise to figure out how President Kennedy appointed Harold Cox, a vocal segregationist who after taking office once referred to Blacks as “chimpanzees,” and how President Johnson could have come up with Coleman as his first choice.

As the system has always operated, the further a judgeship is removed

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from one particular state, the less senatorial courtesy is observed. The appointment of district courts judges whose jurisdiction is confined to one state have always been viewed as the exclusive property of the U. S. senators from that state. While the same process applies to judgeships of the circuit courts (since retiring judges are usually replaced by someone from the same state), a president has greater opportunity to exercise his own judgment on these. Positions on the Supreme Court have never been subject to the usual senatorial courtesy although many Supreme Court justices sat on lower courts and were selected to those positions by the usual process.

Like others, this system of patronage works efficiently-just not fairly. For Southern Blacks and women, the process is as exclusionary as some of the most disingenuous Jim Crow laws.

Most Southern Black lawyers have been involved since their days in law school with supporting legal battles against local state and White politicians. They’ve opposed in court most of the important legislation and political chicanery which Southern Whites attempted to maintain for their own survival. Obviously, these lawyers are seldom the individuals who are first in line for patronage from the South’s delegation to the U. S. Senate.

Many women lawyers, also, have fought hard against local White politicians in the South, and just as often others simply are not counted as vital for any political support. In both, few women lawyers have claim to enough political patronage.

Unfortunately, the system has not opened up even when the old patricians of Southern life have been replaced with more progressive Southerners. Often, the usual course of least resistance for these newer senators has been to avoid local opposition to the appointment of a Black or a woman. Usually concerned not to show themselves as “too liberal” these senators prefer less visible means of supporting Black and women constituents.

The only Black federal judge in the South, Robert Collins, who was appointed in July to a Louisiana district court, has the necessary training and experience to be a federal judge. He also had the real qualifications! He was very active and influential in successful campaigns for Louisiana’s statewide officeholders. Few of his Black colleagues in the bar across the South hold such a unique position.

The political power of Blacks simply isn’t strong enough to influence many appointments. In no Southern state has a Black been able to be elected to a major statewide office. While Black voters are significant in some statewide races, they don’t have the numbers or the political clout in any one state to demand that Black lawyers be well represented in that line of people waiting for their political dole. With emerging voting patterns where Blacks no longer vote solidly for only one White candidate in Southern statewide elections, chances of Black leaders competing successfully for their fair share of patronage will decline.

Two years ago another former governor from the South, Jimmy Carter, ran for president and pledged to rid the selection of federal judges of political patronage and to make appointments only on the basis of merit. While the president has not attempted to alter the process of selecting district judges, the heart of the patronage system, he has established for each appeals court a commission which gathers nominations and make recommendations. There are also other proposals presently before Congress which would break up the old system. Some already operate in such places as Florida where the state’s senators agreed voluntarily to alter senatorial courtesy. Although each plan differs, all have a “bi-partisan commission” which makes recommendations to the president and the senators.

It is not clear how far these new procedures move the selection away from patronage. For instance, there is little difference between the selection of a judge by a commission filled with the political cronies of a U. S. senator and the senator’s own selection. Also, there’s evidence that some of the commissions include a Black or woman in their several recommendations merely for appearance, knowing that someone else will always be selected. In any event, none of these commissions operating in the South has produced a Black or woman judge.

The standard set by these bi-partisan commissions may also have the same effect as the patronage system. For instance, some commissions have been requiring that a person have 15 years trial experience as a lawyer to be eligible for consideration. Although justified in the name of competence, the standard simply excludes an overwhelming number of Black and women lawyers in the South.

Fifteen years ago when Southern governors were fighting to keep Blacks out of state schools, including law schools, Blacks had to travel north to get a legal education and afterwards few could practice in Southern states since they were largely excluded from the bar associations. A requirement for 15 years’ trial experience as a lawyer is as exclusionary for Southern Blacks as the rule, once enforced in the South, that graduates from the state law school, where Blacks were prohibited, can automatically qualify to practice law.

Women in the South and elsewhere have faced similar obstacles. Because of social standards and law school admission practices, few women became lawyers before the 1960’s. Those who did graduate found it difficult as a lawyer to get actual trial experience. Judges, lawyers, and even clients often held the view that women could not competently handle a trial, and in large law firms women were seldom assigned to trial work. While she may be brilliant, she usually doesn’t have much trial experience.

By patronage or sham professionalism, the system of appointing judges

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must not be allowed to exclude Blacks and women from the federal bench and to deny litigants the benefit of their additional experience, insight, and knowledge. The President and the Senate not only must abandon the system of patronage but also must recognize the unique opportunity in which the federal courts of the South and the nation can now be integrated. There probably will not be another chance in the next century to redress so well the many years of denied opportunities.

Yet, the old ways of patronage will not be withdrawn easily. In 1965, when civil rights had its greatest force in the U. S. Congress, judge Coleman’s appointment was opposed by no more than eight U. S. senators- a number which did not include many liberals such as Robert Kennedy. More recently, president Carter, has also been unwilling to confront the Senate’s patronage of appointments for district judges or to insure that the selection process includes Blacks and women.

Unless Southerners of good will devote time and energy to make the changes happen, Blacks and women in large numbers will continue to be denied this one “courtesy” and in future years we may all be searching desperately for even a compromised strategy which can do half as well as the one which suited Governor Coleman and his supporters years ago.

The Unchanged Patterns of Changing Migration

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 1, No. 2, 1978, pp. 21-23

A lot of Southern history moves around in buses. In 1956. a domestic worker, Rosa Parks, refused to stir from her seat for a White man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus and prompted the historic boycott beginning a decade of mass movement for civil rights. Blacks and Whites suffered physical abuse and death when they banded together as the “Freedom Riders” to travel the South by commercial buses to integrate that segregated system. “Busing,” of course, became a political obscenity for those who opposed school integration in the late 1960s. And throughout, one-way tickets from Eutaw, Greenville, and Valdosta to the North separated families and helped drain the South of more than 12 million of its own.

Some of the old battlegrounds of civil rights, like the Birmingham bus station, still stand with discolored paint and memories. Many others including Atlanta’s terminal are new structures offering modem conveniences and perhaps a clearer view of the confused strains of today’s Southern ways.

Shortly beyond the front door in the Atlanta terminal, visitors are welcomed by the smell of fat frying. A fast foods restaurant serves hamburgers and soft drinks with employees in red and yellow uniforms. Many take their food to the lobby where the open floor space is spotted with remaining cellophane wrappers and deformed cups. The Black men and women, who sit in most of the hard plastic seats waiting for a faceless voice to announce their particular bus, are traveling the same buses as their forebearers. Yet, they have reached their final destinations.

These people are not in route in the migration which their parents or older brothers and sisters made northward by rail and bus. Most of these people are going back home for a few days to Americus, Tuskegee, or Augusta or buying a round-trip ticket up north to Detroit and New York only to visit. No longer the way-station for a longer trip, Atlanta and the other Southern cities are where they stopped once before and stayed. These people have already arrived.

The Census Bureau data shows as much: Southern metropolitan areas are the only cities in the United States which have been growing in total population since 1970.

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In part, the growth is helped by a small stream of Blacks beginning to come back from the North where they’ve lived for years. Upon returning, they are not headed for the rural counties where their parents and kin lived a generation ago. They’re settling into the cities of the South. Perhaps attracted by increasingly visible Black politicians, closeness to family, and the appearance of more jobs in the urban South, they come often by car. A little better off than before, they come home for even better times.

The one-way tickets are still being bought. In the small towns of the heavily Black-populated rural South the historic migration continues, only now it, too, often stops in Atlanta and other Southern cities. Fewer go on North. In the only rural areas in the country where more people have been leaving than coming since 1970, these Blacks buy their bus tickets for the same reason others did 30 years ago: rural life is unbearable for them.

If they stay, life looks dead end. In the face of rising costs and local resistance, Black farmers have had their numbers reduced by more than 90 percent since 1945! Over the past five years, farmers’ incomes have made no substantial gain or dropped. Small Black farmers suffer most. Taken over by machinery, the number of farm jobs, as well as the pay scale, is abysmally low.

Non-farm employment offers no better hope. Since jobs in rural areas have become so scarce for so long, many people no longer seek them and are no longer actively in the work force of the rural South. Two years ago a survey showed nearly 40 percent of the adult population not in the work force. In the last decade, employment grew in rural areas in the Deep South at a rate of 8.2 percent while the birth rate added 14.4 percent to the population. Simply, there were fewer jobs than people.

Not surprising, the last census revealed that the South contained virtually all of the Black, rural poor in the country. One out of every two Blacks in the rural South is dirt-poor.

While there is a peculiar sense of equal poverty in the rural South, an increasing number of those who face an almost insurmountable plight is the Black woman who is the head of the household. It’s estimated this year that one in three of all Black women living in the rural South are now the head of their household.

By the last census count, seven out of ten of their families were below the poverty level. While Black mothers are obviously eligible for welfare payments, most of them in the rural South work. With welfare benefits and food stamps as little as $2,800 per year for a family of four in Mississippi, employment may be their only means for actual survival. Yet, the jobs usually available to Black women in rural areas are largely limited to service work.

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More than 70 percent of the Black females working in the rural South are domestic servants.

The traditional emancipator, education, appears unbelievably useless for Black mothers wanting to find decent-paying jobs. Of those who have a high school education in the rural South, 67 percent are below the poverty level. Thus, a high school diploma isn’t worth as much as a one-way bus ticket heading out.

Unfortunately, if these women pack up the children and go off to Jackson, Columbia, or some other Southern city, their prospects are discouraging. While jobs are more available, there are also larger numbers who have already migrated from the urban North and rural South and are looking for work. Available, good jobs require very different skills from those developed in rural domestic service. As in the past up North, welfare is the only survival for many who tried to escape rural poverty only to find urban despair.

No wonder the unemployment rates among Blacks have been as high in Southern cities as Northern, especially for the young and female. In 1976, for instance, Atlanta’s unemployment rates matched the Northern big cities. And Black women continue to face the highest barriers.

Next to the hamburger stand, the bus station’s gift shop mostly sells cigarettes and candy. On a rear, side shelf sits a more unusual item – a little hand-size, miniature bale of cotton bound with cheap burlap. It’s just like those that used to sit on the freight docks of New Orleans in antebellum days – except about a ton lighter. Selling for about two dollars, the gift is tagged on the bottom with gummy paper boasting in small letters: “Made in Taiwan.”

The field where the fiber was grown and the factory where it was wrapped are an entire continent and ocean away. The hands that picked the cotton were probably mechanical arms of a large farming tractor. Nothing about it is Southern. Yet, there it sits – a product of people, industry and jobs far away – as someone’s memorabilia of the South’s history.

The faceless voice announces another bus and a swinging door opens to funnel travelers in and out. Leaning forward, a large suitcase in one hand, a small child in the other, a Black woman walks to the counter. She is in Atlanta. She has arrived.

Solar Greenhouses: The Greening of the South

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1979 pp. 8-10

Publisher’s Note: I was in no mood to he convinced when Bill Dow began to explain his idea last year. As he sat with his legs draped around one of my office chairs, I wondered what kind of bedside manner I was about to experience from this physician who prefers T-shirts and tennis shoes as work garments.

There was a twinkle in his eyes, shielded only in part by the horned-rimmed glasses which kept poking back towards his forehead. Apparently, as a part of his ceremony, he scratched his head and asked, as if both of us might figure out the answer, “What could cut your heating bill 25-45 percent, produce some vegetables and fruit year-round, and only cost about $400?” “I thought we were going to talk about issues of health care or jobs…” Bill didn’t wait for the completion of the sentence. Just as well. He asked another question more direct: “Why not attach a greenhouse to your home, grow some vegetables in it, and use the warm air to heat your house in the winter?” A greenhouse onto my house. Fine, Bill, but what does this have to do with heating bills and food? “It’s all the same thing,” he said, with an arch in his voice and a shift in his chair. I knew then that he was going to enjoy this conversation:

Suitts: Okay, let’s see if you’re serious. Give me the basics.

Dow: While everybody else is talking about elaborate technology and fancy solar energy equipment, there’s something simple that a lot of folks can do that involves greenhouses. You know even in the winter a greenhouse overheats in the daytime and is generally ventilated to keep the temperature down in the low 80s. With a solar greenhouse, instead of ventilating the hot air to the outside, just allow the air into the house when it’s needed.

Suitts: That’s why you said solar greenhouse.

Dow: Yes. Not only would it act as a solar collector for heating the house during the day, but it also would contain heat storage devices so that the excess heat can in part he stored and then released at night. Then you have a heat source that can be used to maintain temperature.

Suitts: I think it’s going to be complicated.

Dow: Not at all. Let’s take it in steps. First, a greenhouse is to be attached to the south side of the dwelling. Obviously, you place the greenhouse at that location so that it can receive the full benefit of the sun from the east in the morning, from the south at midday, and the west in the evening. At the same time, the dwelling serves as an insulation and a barrier to the north which would be the side through which ordinarily the heat would escape during the winter days.

Suitts: Simple enough.

Dow: Yes, and there’s more. The second reason you place it on the south side is because the sun is lower on the southern horizon in the winter than in the summer. The fact is that much more heat passes through a surface when it strikes the surface on the perpendicular. Thus, in the winter, the greenhouse would give maximum heating potential because on the south side it would be perpendicular to the sun’s rays. Even at the coldest points in winter, the attached greenhouse on the south side could generate 900 heat with the winter sun.

Suitts: Okay. There’s heat in the greenhouse. Won’t it escape?

Dow: The storage of the heat can be accomplished in several ways. The two major types of storage are in the floor and in water. The floor of the greenhouse can be, for example, concrete slabs or gravel, each of which can heat up during the day either from direct sunlight or contact with the air. Then after sundown, the floor will gradually give up its heat to the greenhouse helping maintain the temperature. The storage of heat can also take place by placing water in various containers in the greenhouse. This is often done in 55-gallon milk containers. In either case, the principle is the same, the water heats up during the day and gives off heat at night. Thereby, you can store heat to

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warm the temperature in the night.

Suitts: Still, don’t you have to do anything else to prevent the heat from escaping?

Dow: Well, all the walls not covered with transparent material should be heavily insulated. The transparent “skin” or covering should be a double layer. The two layers, with air between, provide some insulation. The outside layer is usually a fiberglass acrylic material and the inside covering a polyethylene sheet. There are different types of covering on the market and the materials can vary.

Suitts: Tell me, what do we do with the hot air that we’ve got in the greenhouse? Carry me one step further.

Dow: Rather than venting the hot air which you have stored in the greenhouse to the outside, on the cold days of fall, winter, or spring, the warm air can be allowed to move into the adjacent house or building. Hot air moves to cold, you know, and by opening a window or a door from the greenhouse into the house, the warm air from the greenhouse will naturally move into the house. With an opening such as a door, the cold air off the floor will move into the greenhouse as the warmer air higher up in the greenhouse moves to the upper part of the door and into your house. If the opening is only a window, then the air can enter the greenhouse from a duct off the house floor to the greenhouse or from crawling space under the house and upon heating enter through the window.

Suitts: That sounds more like a doctor’s explanation of the respiratory tract. Are you sure about that?

Dow: A friend of mine in Durham, N.C., John Hatch, has a 8 X 16 greenhouse attached to his first floor with a sliding glass door. The living quarters are on the second floor. Throughout the winter, Hatch is able to turn off his heat at 9:00 a.m. and turn it on again a half-hour after sundown. Some people have used a fan to help move the warm air into the house. Same is true for heating the greenhouse at night. Some people use the passive heat of the storage facilities and others actively heat their greenhouses at night. An 8 X 16 solar greenhouse in Pittsboro, N.C., with seven 55-gallon drums of water storage, never got below 530 during this past winter. And that was without any additional heating and some very cold weather.

Suitts: What if the sun doesn’t shine for three or four days or a week?

Dow: If one is growing vegetables or plants sensitive to the cold and cannot be moved into the house, then there will be a need for a back-up heating system. This in all likelihood will simply mean leaving the opening to the house open so that heat from the house will hold the temperature up. The alternative which many people use is to simply put a heating unit in the greenhouse usually an electric heater or a wood stove. Another alternative some are using is to compost in an area adjacent to the greenhouse and utilize the heat given off by the compost.

Suitts: What about summer?

Dow: Indeed, the greenhouses do get hot in the summertime. However, adequate venting of the inside temperature will make it approximate the outside temperature. If this develops into a significant problem, a turbine vent can be put on the roof of the greenhouse. The turbine vents move a great deal of air and should hold the inside temperature about equal to the outside temperature.

Suitts: Bill, I gather this is where the business of growing the vegetables comes in.

Dow: Right. The food producing potential really is limited only by space and the grower. Many vegetables, such as tomatoes, broccoli, lettuce, turnips, spinach, onions, and others can be grown. Fruits, too. The greenhouse may serve to prolong the fall and help the spring start earlier. This also means that one can start seedlings which can be transplanted to an outside garden later. Houseplants, obviously, can also be grown in the greenhouse.

Dow: Oh yes, and then there’s fish.

Suitts: If you are going to tell me some story about how to multiply fish and loaves, I’m ready to declare it a miracle.

Dow: Seriously, there are several places in the country where people are experimenting with using water for storing heat and growing fish. And these are edible fish, not the aquarium sort.

Suitts: It sounds impressive, exciting; however, I go back to the beginning. Am I going to give up an arm and a leg to get a greenhouse built? For myself, I’ve never built a greenhouse and really wouldn’t know where to begin.

Dow: Actually, it’s very simple and if you just know the basics about carpentry and do a little reasoning and reading, the task is hardly insurmountable. There are several good reference books I’d suggest you might want to look at – studying some details in each of them. (References listed at the end). In total, the parts and materials will be around $400-$500.

Suitts: It’s such a simple idea and really very exciting. I suppose it has a great deal of potential.

Dow: These greenhouses can be very important to folks with a little money and a lot of time. Where the government is spending millions of dollars to help poor and low-income families cut down on their heating costs, perhaps they ought to think about this idea as a means for “weatherization.”

I don’t want to take us too far. But, there is a possibility of some jobs being generated here. This kind of building can be done by the hard-core, unemployed young whose skills are not yet developed. In rural areas in the South, young folks could build greenhouses in jobs programs for the elderly and the disabled and get some valuable skills which could be used in later life. Actually, the ideal people for this task would be the small and subsistence farmers who need supplemental income. This type work would allow the time needed for agricultural pursuits. The actual building can be done in three to four days.

Farmers have the basic construction and horticultural skill already. With some basic theory and design, background and information they should be able to get into this developing trade. Perhaps, with time this could be expanded to include other forms of solars and appropriate technology installation and maintenance. At the very least, the added income could help maintain these farmers on their farms rather than have them join so many already severed from their land.

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There are still some questions to be answered before the scale of this kind of project gets massive. True, the technology is simple and the undertaking is relatively inexpensive as a means of partially heating a house and producing food. Still, we don’t know precisely how much heat savings or food can be generated. We don’t know exactly what the cost efficiency comes to be. There’s a need for more data and more experience. I don’t mean that the question at this point is will it work. Rather, the question is how well will it work given certain conditions, such as the type of weather or the floor space to be heated in the house. Also, how well does it work in urban areas compared to rural; in the South, West, or even the North.

When you think about it, however, the possibilities may extend a long way. For instance, could the increase in humidity in the house coming from the greenhouse alleviate many of the upper respiratory tract problems which are bothering people in the wintertime because of dry house heat? Also, what about reducing stress? When people become more vulnerable to social and economic pressures, they become more susceptible to disease. So, it might he possible that a solar greenhouse which reduces heat arid produces food, could help somebody feel more self-sufficient, self-reliant, and make them less susceptible to disease. Maybe…

Suitts: Wait a minute. Let’s not put too much of the potential before the fact now. Come back to the ground floor. Where do we go from here?

Dow: For folks with money and the inclination to try it, they can begin to follow up on the idea for themselves. For those with no money – and these are really the people who might be helped the most – lending institutions, governments, churches, and foundations are going to need to make some money available for some exploration and demonstrations of how it all works. No matter how you look at it, it can’t be a bad return on the dollar: heat, food, possibly jobs, and perhaps improved health – all for a little time and a little more floor space in your house.

For information or inquiries, write Bill Dow, SRC, 75 Marietta Street, Atlanta, Georgia 30303.

REFERENCES:

The Food and Heat Producing Solar Greenhouse. Fisher Yanda; Building Using Our Sun-Heated Greenhouse, Helen Scott Nearing; The Solar Greenhouse Book, James C. McCullogh; “Organic Gardening Farming” magazine. December 1977.

Renewal and Endurance: A Personal View

By Steve Suitts Steve Suitts
Publisher

Vol. 1, No. 7, 1979, pp. 4-5

In those torturous moments of human relations 35 years ago, five Southerners of prominence and good will signed their names to the legal charter of the Southern Regional Council, Inc. On January 7, 1944, Rufus Clement, president of Atlanta University, editor Ralph McGill, Bishop Arthur Moore, Charles Johnson, president of Fisk University, and Howard Odom, sociologist at North Carolina, incorporated an organization “for the improvement of economic, civic, and racial conditions in the South, in the endeavor to promote a greater unity in the South and all efforts towards regional and racial development. . . .” In that same month, McGill’s newspaper reported the uninvestigated murder of a Black Southerner.

The long journey from legal segregation to the existence of more than eighty federal laws and executive orders protecting the civil rights of Blacks and others (and more than 20 state and local agencies furthering human relations) has been an experience of triumph and unfulfilled expectations. During this time the very best and most base elements of Southern conduct and attitudes were witnessed by our neighbors and the world. It was an era of contrast: self indulgence and self-sacrifice; death and enduring hope.

The distance of 35 years for an organization like the Council focuses clearly the monumental accomplishments which have taken place in the South and touched the lives of all Americans. The accomplishments include:

– The passage of national legislation ending segregation of the races in all public places;

– The passage of legislation allowing Blacks the right to vote and to hold elected public office;

– The increase of income for the average Southerner

– Improvements in health and education.

These achievements, in which thousands had a hand, ought not be forgotten for the lessons they teach and the human capacity of compassion, sacrifice, and change which they exhibited. They gave all Southerners of good will a proud moment or two – demonstrating that the heroic and persisting efforts of Blacks and some Whites in the South were not in vain.

These accomplishments were not, however, the harbinger of a completely new order nor do they now present reasons to celebrate an uncontested victory. While Blacks as a whole have been brought out of a bondage of constant fear, intimidation, and humiliation, neither the South nor the nation has yet arrived at the beloved community. The end of blatant hatred and outrageous, open cruelty is not a signal that we have achieved a more equitable, humane and peaceful society. It only allows us the possibilities.

In its 35th year, the Council shares 1979 with the 25th anniversary of the historic decision of the Supreme Count, Brown v. The Board of Topeka, Kansas. And, appropriately so. Probably no area of human conduct demonstrates better the many sides of our quest for equality than do the issues surrounding education.

Although the guarantee that Black and White children will sit in the same room in the same school still appears to me a simple notion, most efforts in that direction have failed and still meet the most nagging resistance. Not surprisingly, integration has been applied most fully in those communities where Blacks or other minorities are in small numbers. Still, in all communities, school practices such as suspension, expulsions, and exclusionary special education classes keep many of the Black and, White children separated even under the same roof.

Where Blacks or other minorities constitute a large percentage of the population, integration of the schools has met with least success. On the whole in these communities, the sons and daughters of those who attended segregated high schools in the 1950s probably have little more contact with children of other races than did their parents in the same school. The Black children of Atlanta still go to mostly Black-populated schools within the central city and the White children go mostly to the schools in the suburbs. The Black children of Marengo County, Alabama, still go to public schools that are largely Black while the Whites continue to support the private, all-White academies.

Although no Southerner in late 1954 would have been surprised by the resistance to integration in the schools, it has been surprising to witness in the 1970s how resourceful and successful the attempts have been. It almost seems that the increase of personal income for many Whites has been an enabling bounty to allow them to bear the expense of retreating from integration.

As this pattern suggests, integration today works best usually when it

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is on terms advantageous to Whites. The rural Mississippi public schools to the northwest of Tupelo don’t mind integration so much. The fact is that the number of Black teachers has been reduced and the number of Black students is relatively small compared to Whites. In Mississippi as elsewhere, integration of the schools has largely placed the burden of long transportation, reduced jobs, and increased sacrifice on the Black students and parents. Even so, Whites continue to flee from potentially integrated schools.

The resistance is, of course, not exclusively White. While the NAACP Legal Defense Fund attempts to find broad remedies to integrate state supported colleges and universities, the presidents of those predominantly Black institutions protest. While Black and White parents are suing for metropolitan wide desegregation in Atlanta, the predominantly Black school board in Atlanta opposes the effort -claiming the potential dilution of Black control of institutions.

The guarantee that Black and White children sit in the same room in a school building does not insure that the building blocks for education will be there; however, it does remain true that in absence of integration it is most likely that Whites, who constitute 90 percent of this country’s population, will refuse to support good education for Blacks and other minorities. While some Blacks’ distrust of proposals to integrate are not misplaced, the facts have not yet changed: only with integrated schools will there possibly be a chance for the quality of education which all seek. In one way, the sum of our predicament in education is that the self interest of Blacks and Whites is no longer often seen in integrated schools. As a people, Southern Whites have seldom, if ever, observed such an interest and now an increasing number of Blacks have joined them.

There is no legislation capable of resolving all the questions of quality and equality of education. Yet, in grappling with them, we must not forsake both goals for they are more than compatible – they are essential to the lasting progress of each other.

The growth of complex issues within education may hide the fact that there remains some opportunity to muster a unity of vision and purpose among diverse peoples. If it is outrageous conditions which we must have as a motivation for joint energy and devotion, they can be found – too easily.

The plight of rural poverty and joblessness persists as the bedrock of a country which has become largely metropolitan. Almost 40 percent of Black males in rural areas are not in the job market because of physical handicap, age, or their decision to stop looking. Most of the rural Blacks are in the South and almost the majority are poor.

The difference between the status of Blacks and Whites in the South and the country is not confined to rural areas. While hymns of prosperity and economic growth have replaced “Dixie” as a battle cry, Blacks in the South still lag far behind Whites in median income. The mortality rate for infants born Black remains substantially higher than for Whites and, in some rural places, twice as high.

And with the development of Southern cities, we have ignored or tolerated the thickening core of poverty at their centers. Today, pockets of poverty in Southern cities – perhaps overshadowed by the glass skyscrapers – are settling in. The heaviest concentration of poor in the South are now within the heart of the big cities.

The duplicity of Southern life in 1944 was unmistakable. White over Black – clear and simple. While regional promotionists still bellowed out the myth of a New South where Whites and Blacks beloved one another – separately, of course – the plight of Blacks and poor Whites in the South were assumed conditions. In 1979, the essential harm of that duplicity remains. While standing side-by-side, Blacks and Whites continue to be separated by the difference of jobs, economic status, health, and malnutrition. The condition of the poor Whites continues to be obscured by the fact that they may have a dead end job. The differences which continue to separate Southerners from one another on the basis of race and poverty remain deep and unyielding barriers which too few have been able to overcome.

True, we should celebrate the vast changes which have gradually come into the Southern folkways and stateways. By recollection of the heroes and aspirations of our past we can be reminded of what forces and visions can charter our future. But, the progress of the past 35 years and the view which it places upon some questions of Southern development today must not blind us from the fact that the task is far from complete, the need is no less demanding, and the potential – while hidden and obscure – stands ready to be tapped. Improvements are not final accomplishments.

The renewal of the charter of the Southern Regional Council after 35 years gives witness to the durable belief by both Black and White Southerners that, careful and enduring, we must follow our original mission to search for that beloved community. If we fail, as surely we may, we will have at least made some contribution to good work and have carried on that essential tradition spoken so poetically in the Movement’s hymn which we must never forget – Black and White together.

Southern Politics

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 1, No. 8, 1979, pp. 23-24

In early April Jesse Helms of North Carolina appeared on the virtually deserted floor of the U.S. Senate and, after receiving recognition to debate the issue of a separate federal department of education, introduced an amendment to return prayer to the nation’s public schools. The amendment proposed to legislate away the federal court’s jurisdiction to hear cases involving state laws permitting voluntary prayer in public schools.

The unexpected amendment created a long, intense debate which ended on April 5 with the approval of the measure in a vote of 47-37 and the quick recess of the Senate until April 9 so that Democratic leaders and opponents of the amendment would have time to confer.

When the Senate returned on Monday, April 9, the opponents’ strategy was to remove the amendment from the president’s bill on education to pending legislation relating to the Supreme Court jurisdiction. Helms and his South Carolina colleague, Strom Thurmond, protested that the transfer would kill the amendment since as a part of the Supreme Court legislation it would be sent to the House of Judiciary Committee where chairman Peter Rodino of New York, as Helms said, “would bury it so deep that it will require 14 bulldozers just to scratch the surface.” On a close vote, the transfer was approved and now the measure is not expected to pass Congress.

The school prayer has been an issue in the South since 1962 when the Supreme Court banned official, organized prayers. Yet, not since Mississippi’s James 0. Eastland presided over hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1963 to overturn the “Godless Supreme Court’s opinion” had Congress witnessed a Southerner lead such a serious parliamentary charge to restore school prayers. While efforts to allow school prayer had been considered by Congress in 1971, and earlier in 1968, when Republican minority leader Everett Dirksen failed by only nine votes to have Congress approve a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision banning official school prayer, most of the Southern delegation in both houses were among the strong supporters of both efforts.

The April vote showed that little has changed in the solid South’s support. With Thurmond proclaiming that “here in the nation’s capital, we who make the laws, approve of prayers . . . , then what is wrong with letting little children in schools . . .,” seventeen Southern senators voted for the amendment, four were absent or did not vote, and only one opposed the measure.

The single vote against the amendment was cast by Arkansas Democrat Dale Bumpers. While Florida’s senator Lawton Childs voted to kill the amendment by tabling it, when the Helms amendment came up for an actual vote he supported it.

The four senators who were absent or not voting were Don Stewart of Alabama, Herman Talmadge of. Georgia, Russell Long of Louisiana, and Howard Baker of Tennessee. All others voted to remove the power of the courts to interfere with states wanting to authorize prayers.

The seventeen Southern votes, of course, gave the Helms amendment

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its margin of victory. As in the past, Southern Democratic senators departed with the Democratic majority from other regions and voted with the majority of Republicans in the Senate who supported the measure.

While another Southerner had no vote, President Jimmy Carter also expressed opposition to the amendment. At a news conference the president stated:

My preference is that Congress not get involved in the question mandating prayer in the schools. I am a Christian; 1 happen to be a Baptist. I believe that the subject of prayer in the schools ought to be decided between a person individually and privately and God. The Supreme Court has ruled on this issue and I personally don’t think that the Congress ought to pass any legislation requiring or permitting prayer.

Sometimes a student might object even to a so-called voluntary prayer when it’s publicly coordinated. It might be very embarrassing to a young person to say, “I want to be excused from the room because I don’t want to pray.”

In the April 19 vote removing the Helms amendment from the education bill, four Democratic Southerners apparently decided that the President was right and rejoined. Still, Lloyd Benson (Texas), Lawton Childs and Dick Stone (Florida), and Sam Nunn (Georgia) would still be able to claim that they supported prayers since they did vote to approve the amendment.

TheArkansas Gazette editorially bemoaned the fact that the Senate had spent so much time on an amendment it called “vintage demogogery.” While accusing its own senator David Pryor of “throwing kisses to the peanut gallery” for his support of the Helms amendment, the editorial called the measure “another effort to subvert the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights.”

The Southerner who wrote the 1962 Supreme Court opinion first banning official prayer in schools, Hugo Black stated it another way: “it is neither sacriligious not anti-religious to say that each separate government in this country should stay out of the business of writing or sanctioning official prayers and leave that purely religious function to the people themselves In 1979, however, Black’s opinion still finds little support among the South’s political leaders.

In this Issue

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 2, No. 1, 1979, pp. 2

This issue brings Southern Changes full circle with its first anniversary. Because it has matured in format, and we hope, coverage of events and issues, the magazine has been greatly benefitted by the first year’s experiences.

As a chronicle of the ongoing struggle for equality, Southern Changes apprpriately begins its second volume with a concern for the status of Blacks in 1979. In the Soapbox piece, Vernon Jordan sets the tone in his thoughts on the Black agenda for the 1980s. Jordan believes that the next ten years must improve the nation’s record of achieving a society where race is not a dividing fact since in the last decades we have failed.

On the same issue, our cover story for this month reminds us of the historic beginnings of many of today’s most pressing controversies. A small community of farming Blacks on the Georgia coast struggle to regain land taken from them in World War II for “the national interest”. The fight of families to regain their land and heritage at Harris Neck is a vivid illustration of how past wrongs ought not — cannot — be seen as a mere history without contemporary importance.

We can also see a little too much of ourselves or neighbors in our article on the continuing saga of the modern Ku Klux Klan. Although limited, KKK activities have spread to all parts of the region and may show more about the present status of race relations in what sentiments they echo than the outright racism they exude.

In another article Steve Hoffius takes a look at an employment and training program in South Carolina that is giving some Black and White women a chance to enter new jobs. It is a story of how the changing nature of the South can be one of progress and new opportunities.

Our department pieces include a new section on the comings and goings of Southerners of note and a review of the North Carolina legislature’s performance in 1979. As we said last year, we continue to see in ourselves, our region, and our nation “the opposing qualities which make living in the South exciting and worrisome.”

In This Issue

By Steve Suitts

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

While admittedly too simple, much of the Southern life is still a saga about those two old notions of equality born in public policy during the first brief Reconstruction: the vote and forty acres and a mule. Our December issue brings us up to date on both themes.

Since local and state elections were held in the last twomonths in Mississippi, Birmingham and Atlanta, several authors tell of the political issues and people of those political races. In Ron Casey’s story of the historic election of a Black mayor in Birmingham, we are told that the election pitted the very best and worst symbols of race relations with one another. Black Councilman Dick Arrington won perhaps because Birmingham is still a divided city, willing by 51 percent to make changes.

We have a piece on the Mississippi elections were the political changes are catching up with what has been the facts of life in Mississippi for several years. The meaning and final effects of these changes are not entirely clear; nonetheless, new faces and new hopes are now in office. Also, Boyd Lewis provides us with a brief gothic commentary on the elections in Atlanta.

In all these pieces there are signs of political progress, not born so much out of rapidly changing attitudes among the races although some of those changes have surely occured. It is change brought by changing populations, shifting political alliances and compromises, and perhaps the political choices afforded to Southerners at the polls. Fifteen years after the major civil rights legislation passed Congress, most of us have been seasoned too much by disappointments to offer any clear statement about the economic and social opportuity and potential which will be seized through these elections. Still, on the whole, these are pleasing signs.

While giving some modern surroundings, the issues of economic opportunity and self-help in the Deep South are rooted inthe history of slavery and the once promised freedom of “forty acres and a mule.” Bob Anderson writes with the gift of experience about the accomplishments of organizations in the Delta of Mississippi offering poor Blacks a chance for economic wellbeing. In a companion piece, Bob also expands the dimentions of his article by presenting a broader view of what is happening in the changing struggle for equal rights in the rural South.

Ginny Looney and Duna Norton also contribute to this theme by challenging the prevailing a notion that big farms are needed for the nation’s food production for the economic survival of surrounding communities. In an intriguing twenty-county study in Alabama, the authors not only challenge the assumption that big farms are best but also make the case for the prosperity of rural life may well depend upon Black and White small farmers.

Our department pieces also correspond with our general concerns in this issue by covering the Southern votes on limits to campaign expenses for Congressional races, unemployment in the South, and a day to honor Rosa Parks in Atlanta.

With the tragic events in Greensboro in Novemeber we report on quesions that linger in the aftermath of the worst racial violence in this decade.

Perhaps symbolically, this last issue of 1979 does not offer a clear opinion piece which we usually not in our “Soapbox” department. It is not that we lack opinions — indeed few who know us would venture such an explanation. There is, however, a time when events should be told, analyzed, and then simply left for reflection. As we end this year and foresee another when politics will give us a president to lead the nation and a new census will ascertain our economic and social status, our coverage of political and economic changes is done with the hope that in the new decade there will be a newnewed commitment by many to both reflection and action on the central issues about which opinions have been plentiful and progress has been short.

Economic Development

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 2, No. 3, 1979, pp. 27

While the South continues to show signs of rapid economic activity, the rate of unemployment in the region, which has not been an historically severe problem as in other regions, is suggesting that economic problems are or may be ahead for Southern workers.

Although unemployment in most 11 Southern states dropped in the last years, the decline has not always been as great as in the rest of the country. While the rate of unemployment nationally dropped from 6.3 percent to 5.8 percent for the one-year period ending July 3 1, 1979, the decline in Georgia was only from 5.8 percent. In Arkansas the unemployment rate dropped only from 6.1 percent in July 1978, to 5.7 percent one year later.

The most serious indications are that four Southern states Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, and Tennessee – continue to show unemployment rates well above the national average (see map above). For example, Louisiana’s unemployment rate was 6.7 percent in July and in Alabama the 7.9 percent unemployment rate was an increase over the July 1978 percentage of 7.2 percent.

The unemployment pattern in the South loosely resembles the situation in the northeast and northcentral states, when the unemployment figures in most states surround the national average with a substantial number above the average ranging from 6.5 percent to 8.40 percent. Only two states west of the Mississippi River, however, had unemployment rates in July 1979 above 6.5 percent. One was a Southern state, Louisiana, and the other was Oregon. Throughout the Midwest, unemployment rates in July were less than 4.5 percent.

Since July of this year the national jobless rate has been hovering around 6 percent. In August it went above 6 percent and in September it dropped back to 5.8 percent. Recently the October unemployment rate showed a major shift. Likewise, the rates in Southern states appeared to have maintained generally the same pattern that existed in July.

Historically, unemployment rates in Southern states have been below the national average. Explanations for the heightened rates of unemployment often follow very much the same rationale for national unemployment. The Southern economy, like the nation’s, is suffering from its fair share of layoffs and reduced production.

There may be some historically unique factors to the Southern pattern, however. U.S. Bureau of Census estimates the region is gaining substantially in population. Combined with a national trend of increased labor market participation by women and youth, the increased number of workers may be reflected in the unemployment rates of the South. Also, migration within the region from rural to urban locations may also be a contributing factor since the work skills of the rural place are not easily transferrable in urban settings.

Some economists are also suggesting that the South’s regional economy remains largely undiversified with heavy emphasis on low wage service industries and manufacturing. Hence, with frequent turnovers of employment in these two industries, the South’s rates of unemployment is higher than in the past.

By whatever combination, these factors may be rendering an even greater problem of unemployment for the South than the Department of Labor statistics indicate. In September the National Commission on Unemployment Statistics reported that the government’s method of counting the unemployed and the definition of the “unemployed” may be substantially undercounting the actual number of people who are seeking jobs but unable to find them.

In any event, the economic growth of the South with its increases in population has not automatically reduced low levels of unemployment. While the South may still lead the nation in rapid economic growth and number of jobs available, the benefits of the boom have not yet been seen by Southerners in the unemployment lines.