Thomas Noland – Southern Changes

The Dying Memory of Hugo Black

Thomas Noland — Fri, 01 Dec 1978 05:00:06 +0000

The Dying Memory of Hugo Black

By Thomas Noland

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1978, pp. 20-21

“Mr. Justice Black and myself were both natives of Clay County. Each of us dearly loved and revered our native origins and the peoples thereof. He brought to that community and that people very great honors and very great responsibilities to honor and respect his memory.

“No other community of people ever has faced such a situation and such an opportunity in the history of our nation as far as I know. If we fail to do our part he is not necessarily disgraced as much as are we.”

Southerners may disagree on how many Souths exist today, what with the media remaking Dixie, but few will deny there are at least two. One is Atlanta and Birmingham and Durham-Chapel Hill–the South of skyscrapers, of fine universities, of regional theatre and professional ballet; of Black public officials elected by a multi-racial constituency and of suburban apartments with names like Shadowood and Quail Ridge. The other, older and vaster, is the South of Clay County, Alabama.

A hundred miles west of Atlanta, Highway 9 dips and rises through fields of soybeans and corn, past paintless and decaying farmhouses with kudzu growing in the doorways. It halves the brief one-story town of Lineville and six miles further south spills into Ashland. Mayor E. L. Wynn is fond of saying Ashland (population 3,000) has the highest altitude of any county seat in the state. That constitutes Ashland’s only claim to fame in the eyes of most of its citizens. The phrase even appears on the town’s stationery. But there is nothing on the stationery, or in city hall, or around the courthouse square, to indicate Ashland was the childhood home of Hugo La Fayette Black, probably the greatest Alabamian of this century and one of the 10 most influential justices ever to sit on the United States Supreme Court.

Three blocks off the square, there is one thing that indicates Ashland is the childhood home of Black. It is one of those round signs with a star in the middle, left over from the Bicentennial; it stands rather incongruously in front of an appalling eyesore. A close look reveals the dilapidated structure to be a house. The porch has caved in and brushy vines obscure any view from the road. It is where Hugo Black grew up.

One other thing, a hundred yards down the road is, somehow, even more poignant. It is a sign in an open field which says, “Future Home of Hugo Black Memorial Library-Museum and Boyhood Home.” On February 27, 1976-the day after Black would have turned 90-more than a hundred people, some from Clay County, many from New York and Washington, celebrated Hugo Black Day there, and applauded as Ashland businessman Morland Flegel raised the sign.

Amid hand-shaking with film producer Otto Preminger (said to be researching a movie about Black), Mrs. Hugo Black and legal scholar Max Lerner, Flegel talked that day of the “overwhelming support” the project had received. He spoke of national fund-raising, local fundraising and a goal of $750,000 for the library-museum, including restoration of Black’s boyhood home and its removal to the project site.

Lerner, in a touching address, talked of reconciliation. “There was a period when Ashland and Alabama left Hugo Black,” he said, referring to the Brown decision in which Black concurred. “But the wonderful thing is, Ashland and Alabama came back to him, and there’s a lovely completed circle there.”

Only, Lerner was wrong. Alabama came back; the Alabama that partakes of the first South, the Alabama of the Birmingham University that sponsors a three-day Hugo Black symposium around his birthday each year. Ashland, the other South, did not. For despite what was said Feb-

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ruary 27, there will be no Hugo Black Memorial LibraryMuseum in Clay County. With funds at a standstill for the past two years, with local skepticism and hostility showing no signs of abatement, and with Ashland pursuing a different library in conjunction with the county, a subdued Flegel said recently, “It’s out of the question.”

The schism between Black and his own people did not begin in 1907, when Black at 21, left his native county for Birmingham to hang out his shingle. No one considered it a slight for the local boy to seek his fortune in the raw, rambunctious “Magic City.” Besides, Black had tried being an Ashland attorney and abandoned the idea only after a fire destroyed his office and his $1,500 set of law books. The homefolks, most of whom were acquainted with his astonishing record at Ashland Academy, expected great things of him, and knew he had to accomplish them in great places.

It certainly didn’t begin in 1926, when Black returned home to launch his campaign for the U. S. Senate. He gave a rousing oration against concentrated wealth, trusts, big railroads and high tariffs; he echoed the sentiments of the hill-country populists among whom he had grown up.

Nor did it begin in 1937, when Senator Black was confirmed in Congress as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court despite the revelation of his membership in the Ku Klux Klan. It was a national controversy; but Clay County was not a party to it. What mattered at home was that hugo Black, who, as a boy, used to listen to the lawyers in the steamy Clay County Courthouse, had reached the pinnacle of his profession. Who was going to care if he had once belonged to the Klan? “They were so pleased with his appointment they didn’t get upset about it,” says Elizabeth Dempsey, who was a girl at the time. “The town acclaimed him.”

It began, rather, on May 17, 1954, the day the Court announced Brown. The school desegregation decision struck at the heart of the complex system of mores and folkways that had grown up around race. For White Clay County, it was something akin to Cain killing Abel. How could Hugo have done it? He was one of us, they said. Or was he?

Herein lies the chief irony of Clay County’s rejection of Hugo Black-for, the fact was that he, despite appearances, never rejected Clay County; it made him what he was and he knew it. A hard scrabble childhood-his father was a small storeowner-taught him the economic reality of Alabama’s north-south division.

South Alabama, the Black Belt, harks back to the antebellum “flush times” of the state. Its politicians-Gov. George Wallace, Lt. Coy. Jere Beasley, and Wallace’s heir-apparent, Fob Jamesare inheritors of the hidebound conservatism engendered by the plantation system. Hilly north Alabama never partook of the manorhouse tradition and brought the myth only because of Reconstruction racial fears. Yeoman agriculture (and few Blacks) was the pattern before the Civil War and after. Clay County is securely with the north, and no one was surprised in 1892 when the rising tide of Populism gave birth to the People’s Party of Alabama-that self-conscious challenge to Bourbon oligarchy-in Hugo Black’s Ashland.

The truth concerning Black’s position on Brown was that he, like any leader, was both of them and above them; but Clay countians could only conclude he was against them.

An anonymous pundit came up with the nutshell analysis that country lawyers still rely on to explain Black’s apparent contradiction. “When he lived in Alabama,” the saying goes, he wore a white robe and scared the Blacks to death. When he got to Washington, he wore a black robe and scared the Whites to death.”

The first time Black came to Clay County after the Brown decision, he went to his old church, Ashland Baptist. He sat alone. Only one person, according to Ms. Dempsey, would speak to him publicly, and that was her father, the county attorney. “Daddy didn’t mind taking a stand on what he believed in,” Ms. Dempsey says, “and he thought the minister and the congregation should have recognized Hugo because he wasn’t a criminal.” Hugo didn’t return for years.

There is a new, younger minister now, but many parishoners remember Black’s visit. “We have a lot of good Christians in this town,” one man said when asked about Black, “but not to the point where they’re willing to forgive and forget.”

What else, besides good Christians, does Clay County have? It has 13,000 people, who farm, sell merchandise in Ashland and Lineville, work at the Ashland poultry plant or make slacks or tires in Lineville’s two industries. Their median family income in 1975 was $5,756. They send their children to integrated public schools where the White-Black ratio is rougly seven to one. At Clay County High School in Ashland, there is Bible study each morning, an exercise in submission to the letter, but not the spirit, of justice Black’s decision banning prayer in the schools.

“Read your Bibles, but don’t pray,” is how a 1977 Clay County graduate describes the teachers’ feelings. The students respond without much prodding. He remembers that for several months after Black’s decision came down, the teachers led prayer in defiance of the decree. It was nothing like the violence that eventually greeted Brown, but it smacked of the same never-say-die, I-dare-you-to-enforce-it philosophy. By and by the Bible reading evolved, a practice which the teachers more or less clandestinely encourage.

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Another constant reminder of Black’s apostasy is the nagging racial trouble at Clay County High. Until this year, cheerleaders were elected by popular vote. Last year no Black hopeful received enough votes to take a place on the squad, and Blacks demanded a Black girl be appointed. They also demanded that selections in future be made by a panel of judges, not by vote, and threatened to quit the football team en masse if their demands weren’t met. The principal relented; a Black girl was appointed, and the judging came about. Earlier this year the judges chose eight White girls and no Black ones for the fall squad, and the principal had his hands full again. Once more Blacks threatened to walk off the team if a Black girl were not appointed. This time, the principal refused, and all but one of the Blacks quit. Word got out that one White cheerleader carries pictures in her wallet of the former Black players; she is no longer asked out. The unspoken thought in many Ashland minds is: If it weren’t for Brown, we wouldn’t be having these problems. And the chief symbol of Brown for them is Black.

It made sense, therefore, for an outsider-Flegel is from North Dakota-to take the lead when Barney Whatley and others proposed some sort of memorial to the justice in 1972, the year after his death. Another early leader, Bill Wilson, was a rural resource development expert from Auburn University and not a native Clay countian.

In the early days Flegel and Wilson were confident the money would come, once a few broadminded community pillars led the way with substantial gifts. And it seemed at first they were right. The Ashland Town Council and Clay County Commission contributed a total of $43,000. The 14-member Board of Directors of the Hugo Black Memorial Library, Inc.-all Clay countians-managed to get the Black homestead on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

That same year, Flegel, Wilson and others went to Washington, where Chief Justice Warren Burger received them warmly-“He was just great,” Flegel said-and pledged enthusiastic support. Mrs. Black donated 175 cartons of Black memorabilia for future use in the re-

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stored home. Oliver White of Ashland, who owned the house, donated it to the group. They purchased four acres up the road (where the “Future Home” sign stands) and hired an architect to draw up plans for the library-museum.

Then things began going wrong. President Nixon cut off federal funds that would have been available for IIbrary construction under the Service Construction Act shortly before he resigned. That dashed hopes for federal support; hopes for state support died in 1975, when the Alabama legislature, one of the more reactionary in the country, defeated a proposal by Representative Gerald Dial of Lineville to provide $100,000 for the project if there were a surplus in the state’s general fund. Dial never found out whether the money would have, come through-his proposal was killed in committee. Whatley, a wealthy Denver attorney, had pledged to match whatever the state would ante up. The legislature’s decision hurt doubly, since everyone had depended on Whatley to donate generously.

By 1976 it was clear the project was floundering, and was starting to be a liability for those involved. Probate Judge J. B. “Bunyan” Toland, a relative of Black’s who was instrumental in persuading the county commission to help out, was beaten for reelection that year. A one-term probate judge is a rarity in Clay; most people agree that the Black project did him in. Robert Dockerty, a professional fundraiser hired to coordinate the national effort, clearly was not on the job. He organized a five-person committee in 1976, including such luminaries as former Associate Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, former University of Alabama President Frank Rose and Ed Elson, owner of Elson’s gift stores in Atlanta. At the time, Dockerty said, “It is my dear hope to have this whole thing finished in three months.” It’s been more than two years since then, and the committee’s efforts have yielded a grand total of $4,000. Flegel still wants to try to gather enough money to renovate and move the home, but even that will take several thousand dollars more than is now on hand. Dockerty is rarely at the office these days. His wife says, “He really hasn’t been very active on it recently.”

The death-blow for the library-museum came late last year. The Town of Ashland, in conjunction with Clay County, came up with a joint city-county library board and applied to the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for Community Development funds to build the Ashland-Clay County Library. Last spring, a $100,000 grant came through-enough to pay for most of the construction.

Was the city-county library a deliberate effort to foil the Black memorial? No one in Clay County will go that far. On the other hand, no one will deny that the more people saw how bogged down the Black project was, the more they doubted anything would ever come of it. “I think everybody’s in agreement that we need a library real bad,” one county politico said. “They went along with the Hugo Black thing because it meant a library, but if there was any other way, they’d do it.” Agnes Catchings, who serves on both library boards, put it bluntly. “The people wanted a library,” she said. “They didn’t want to wait.”

One can make a case for saying the Black library-museum failed because it was too ambitious for a county like Clay. Perhaps. But that begs the overreaching question of why Clay County still turns its back on its most famous son, whose work is admired throughout the nation.

A few years ago, when the project still seemed healthy, the Women’s Study Club sold its little library on the courthouse square to an Ashland businessman. The club decided not to donate the profits to the Hugo Black Memorial Library-Museum, Inc. That should have told Flegel, Wilson and Toland something about forgive-and-forget in Clay County, Alabama. The other South, patient and unredeemed, endures.

Thomas Noland is a staff writer for the Anniston Star.

Triana Fish Story

Thomas Noland — Tue, 01 May 1979 04:00:05 +0000

Triana Fish Story

By Thomas Noland

Vol. 1, No. 8, 1979, pp. 14-15

Shortly after noon, trucks pulling two fishing boats with 55-horsepower inboard engines turn into the driveway at Triana Fire Station Number 1. Four Black men climb out, carrying buckets of fresh carp, catfish and buffalo fish caught that morning in the nearby Tennessee River. Several more men walk over from city hall. Everyone gravitates to the two stone tables under a shady tree, and the men from city hail begin slowly, methodically cleaning the fish, slicing wet and tender meat from bones and wrapping the patties in paper. By 4:00 p.m., the women of the village pull up in their cars, pass by the fishing boats that say “Town of Triana”, and collect some fish to bring home to supper.

Nobody rings up a cash register, or signs a receipt. For the 1,000 residents of this Black, lowincome community just south of Huntsville, the fish is free.

It’s been that way for the past six weeks, ever since the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta announced the results of tests of DDT taken in February of 12 Triana residents. To everyone’s dismay, the tests showed levels of the banned pesticide and its related compounds to be from five to 250 times the national average in these residents. With additional testing expected to start soon, the angry, confused and frightened residents of an obscure town in North Alabama will make medical history by providing the first massive data on the effects of longterm exposure to DDT in human beings.

As the CDC prepares to set up its testing clinic, Triana residents who supplemented their meager incomes on fish pulled from Indian Creek, a Tennessee River tributary, depend now on the daily fishing expeditions by city employees in the two “Town of Triana” boats. Those boatsand a cache of fishing gear-were donated by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Each day they are taken to a portion of the river that the authority has shown not to contain DDT-contaminated fish, and they bring back a haul that is safe to eat.

Why the Indian Creek fish are not safe to eat goes hack to 1947, when a company called Calabama Corporation set up a DDT manufacturing plant on the U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. No one suspected the enironmental dangers of DDT at the time. First sold commercially in 1946, it was hailed as a “wonder-killer” that, among other things, wiped out an epidemic of typhus-carrying lice among American servicemen in Naples in 1943. Calabama sold to Olin Chemical in 1954 and that plant continued to churn out the powdery white pesticide.

All of that changed in 1962. Arthur Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” outlined an environmental disaster that had already begun to occur because of the unrestricted use of DDT. Perhaps her strongest and best-documented evidence had to do with the chemical’s tendency to soften the eggshells of contaminated female birds. In 1970, under threat of an environmental lawsuit, the Olin plant shut down, and shortly thereafter DDT was taken off the market.

But in the meantime, the Olin plant had deposited an estimated 4,050 tons of DDT sediment along a two-mile stretch of the Huntsville Spring Branch, which feeds Indian Creek. The sediment seeped into the water and collected in the fatty tissues of the fish Triana residents were eating.

In December of last year, TVA announced the results of a survey of fish taken all along the Tennessee. Bass at Triana showed DDT levels as high as 260 parts per million; catfish exhibited 411 parts per million. When those figures are set against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration standard of 5 parts per million as the maximum for safe human consumption, it’s no wonder Triana citizens were outraged.

And when the results of CDC’s February blood test survey were announced in March-showing that all 12

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Triana residents tested had DDT and DDE (the chemical built into the highest level of the body after eating DDTcontaminated food) levels significantly above the national average-the outrage became a concerted call for action.

The day the results were announced, Triana Mayor Clyde Foster charged state and federal agencies of having been aware of the excessive DDT levels in Triana fish for years, but of refusing to release the information in an effort to use his constituents as “guinea pigs” to test the pesticide’s effects on people. He was especially outraged to learn that the average DDE level among 12 tested447 parts per billion-was in the same range as that found in workers who spent their careers in DDT plants.

“Somebody is going to have to be responsible,” Foster was quoted as saying, “even if it means having to go to President garter himself.”

The agency least willing to take responsibility-at least at the outlet-was the Army. Shortly after the TVA fish study war announced in December, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ordered the Army to come up with a plan to clean up the sediment along Huntsville Spring Branch. But Army officials argued that since the sediment lies just outside Redstone, in the Wheeler Wildlife Refuge, it is not responsible for it-even though the sediment was created by a firm (Olin) which had a lease arrangement with the Army Corps of Engineers to operate the DDT plant. Now, in concert with the EPA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Army has agreed to go ahead with a study to find “a permanent solution” to the problem, although not to determine legal responsibility for it. That study is expected to take several months.

In the meantime, Triana residents are not the only ones to suffer fallout from the controversy. A number of commercial fishermen in the Triana area-mostly Whitepractically have been wiped out by retailers’ fear of buying fish caught anywhere near Triana.

Bobby James, president of the Whitesburg Commercial Fishing Association, had to throw away more than 12,000 pounds of fish, worth $9,000, in March. His group is upset because TVA provided Triana with fishing boats, and the Army donated an old building to set up a fish market in the village, but the commercial fishermen got nothing.

James hints they may sue the Army or both. “A lot of people are thinking we want a pension or some kind of handout,” he told The Huntsville Times. “We don’t want a handout. We don’t need to learn how to fish. We have more fish than we can sell. We want to be reimbursed.”

Although commercial fishing is virtually at a standstill, the Alabama Department of Public Health still permits it on Indian Creek and the Huntsville Spring Branch. There has been no ban, according to the department’s Dr. Thomas J. Chester, because “A warning would be sufficient. Closing the stream only gives you enforcement problems.”

That warning, and all of its attendant publicity, has made life a little slower in Triana. Police Chief Joe Fletcher says no one comes to the banks of Indian Creek anymore unless he lives in Triana or has come to write about its troubles. Residents are apprehensive about the upcoming CDC tests which researchers hope will show, among other things, whether the human body continues to build up deposits of the non-biodegradable pesticide, or whether it begins secreting DDT after the substance reaches a critical level.

Like Foster, Fletcher believes the Army knew of the problem about the time “Silent Spring” came out.”They knew it was there,” he says, staring at the CDC’s report to him of his own DDT levels. “They should have come down and told us about it in 1964, when we were incorporated. They didn’t say anything then and we didn’t get the word until another source (TVA) told us.”

As for what further tests will show, Fletcher’s comments are ominous. “We don’t even know how you act when you got it,” he says, “but if it’s in you, it must be affecting you some kind of way.”

Thomas Noland is a staff writer for the Anniston Star.

French Images of the American South

Thomas Noland — Sat, 01 Mar 1980 05:00:04 +0000

French Images of the American South

By Thomas Noland

Vol. 2, No. 6, 1980, pp. 8-13

PARIS – As French television viewers watched in horror, 12 men leaped out of two vans and a car, crouched, and began firing guns at a group of people with signs. Bodies wilted like empty sacks and fell to the pavement. The sign-carriers fired back or ran for cover; some were cut down in mid-stride. Finally, after what seemed a very long time, police arrived, the shooting stopped and the men who fired were hustled off in paddy wagons.

It was not “The Untouchables” or “Hawaii Five-O” or any of the other American reruns that are standard fare on “Television Francaise.” t was the evening news, Nov. 4, 1979, and the astonishing footage had been made only one day earlier during an anti-Ku Klux Klan demonstration in a place few French had ever heard of Greensboro, N.C.

“You could tell from the tone of the anchorman, that the idea was ‘Once again, a violent outburst in this violent country,” recalled Chris Henze, a press attache at the U.S. Embassy who watches the news as part of his job. “I think things of this type get more attention if they come from the U.S. After Iran, the Greensboro shooting was the major story that night.”

There was an important aspect that set the Greensboro story apart from similar tales

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of American mayhem, however. The issue in Greensboro was race, and even if most French cannot tell Greensboro from Buffalo, almost everyone connects racial violence with “le sud” — the South.

It is Henze’s job to convince French journalists, who in turn convince the French, that such incidents are echoes of a Southern past that is long dead, and only twitches unexpectedly now and then.

The day after the shooting, he briefed a reporter for France-Soir – Paris’ largest circulation daily — who was about to appear on a television panel to discuss it. Evidently, Henze made his point.

“He did an admirable job of putting it in perspective,” Henze said, “talking about the rela tively low Klan membership in the U.S., the fact that it was an isolated incident. It was a very unfortunate event. That sort of item makes people believe we’re a country that allows racists to get out of control. I think there’s a great amount of ignorance about the progress that has taken place in the South.”

Indeed, comments from businessmen, day laborers, housewives and government workers interviewed here indicate Henze is right. The South’s forward strides from the dark ages of Bull Connor’s police dogs and Lester

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Maddox’s race baiting are recognized mostly by those rare Frenchmen who, in visiting or doing business below the Mason-Dixon line, have experienced the newest New South first hand.

For the great majority, impressions of race relations in the region are derived from sources so spurious that comments have a fairy-tale quality. Many believe the Georgia portrayed in “Autant Emporte le Vent” (Gone With the Wind) is the Georgia that brought forth Jimmy Carter, and imagine his Plains peanut farm to be graced by an ante-bellum mansion issuing nubile belles in crinoline dresses, and docile, buck-dancing Blacks who sing spirituals as they wander through the fields carrying enormous burlap sacks. Most Frenchmen do not know that George Wallace is no longer governor of Alabama; any mention of Fob James, who succeeded Wallace last year, is met with shrugged shoulders and blank stares. Some express a desire to visit the South they are attracted mainly by what they have heard of the gentle climate – but almost all want to see either Florida’s Disneyworld or New Orleans, where they imagine everyone speaks French. Mississippi? Alabama? South Carolina? These are terra incognitas to the French, slightly menacing places off the beaten path, places where, they believe, the kind of violence they saw on television Nov. 4 still occurs routinely.

A more realistic view is held by those whose friends or relatives have seen for themselves. Yvonne Perret, a Paris hotel clerk, has a cousin who bought a house in Jackson’, Mississippi and emigrated there with her husband and children. Mrs. Perret tells of worried letters from her relative after Blacks moved into the neighborhood, “which drove down the property prices.” And yet, she said, her cousin stayed on, and soon a daughter — Mrs. Perret’s niece – began to make friends with the Blacks who moved in.

“These were friends she loved and respected,” Mrs. Perret said. “It couldn’t be like the 1960s. Things must be changing there.”

Indeed, race relations in the South have changed a good deal faster than they have in France which is one reason why the French find it difficult to imagine the South’s painful and ongoing evolution toward a society of biracial equality. Here, although segregation never was established by law there is a strong feeling about what is French and what is not — and the Blacks, most of them from former French colonies in Africa, are not considered French.

As a rule, they do not mix socially with their former masters. While overt racial hostility is rare, the covert kind, described by a French government employee who asked to remain anonymous, is common.

“The French are much more racist than the Americans, because the races have no experience of living together,” the employee said. “If there is a Black man in the top floor of your apartment building, people still complain, they still say, ‘What kind of apartment is this, with Black people in it? ‘

A second reason why the French have been slow to accept racial change in the South is no fault of their own. What appears about the region in the French press often is

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reported first in the International Herald Tribune, the highly esteemed English-language daily published here. Generally, the only news about the South that makes the Tribune has to do with race – and usually, with racial confrontation. If a Frenchman were to write a history of the region since 1960, based on the Tribune‘s clip files, his volume would faithfully record the 1961 bus beatings and burnings in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama; the 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery; the 1971 school busing crisis in Charlotte and, of course, the recent deaths in Greensboro. The book would be topheavy with information in its early chapters. When race as an issue in the South quieted down in the early 1970s, the Tribune — and the French press — quieted down too.

And so, because the age of dramatic racial confrontation is mostly over, “We are told from America that America is no longer interested in fighting for the rights of Black people,” said a French professional, who follows American and French newspapers closely. “It (the American press) gives the impression that the situation is better. However, I always see stories where this is not true for example, the busing in Boston – but I don’t think the French public is aware of that.

“In France, people are just repeating what they read in the press. This is how they form their ideas. First the American press writes the stories, then the French press picks up what they say and it has nothing to do with reality. During the Vietnam War, you know, people were against America but they were just repeating what they read in the papers. Now that America is not intervening anywhere, the papers are saying America is weak, Carter is weak.”

Carter himself is a curiosity for people who equate ”farmer” with “peasant.” While the American press makes much of the president’s geographical origins, of his being the first Southerner to reach the White House since the Civil War, the French are more intrigued by his peanut business – which is widely misunderstood. “The French refer to Carter as a ‘marchand des cacahuettes’, the little Arab on the street who sells peanuts,” a Paris businesswoman said. “You say to them ‘He is also a very smart engineer,’ and they say, ‘Oh really?’

“I’m not too sure the average Frenchman even knows what being a Southerner means,” she continued. “You have to be very well-informed about America to know the difference. I don’t think most of them even know where Atlanta is.”

For those few who do know the role of Blacks in Carter’s election – especially Southern Blacks is notably appreciated. Le Monde, France’s finest daily and one of the most respected newspapers in the world, is unusually sensitive to race when writing about American politics. Unlike most foreign papers it has its own Washington staff and its reporting tends to be more comprehensive and accurate than that in Paris’ six other major dailies, some of which rely on second-hand information or short dispatches from Agence France-Presse.

Le Monde “no longer writes stories about Black voter registration in the South,” according to one French press critic – an indication of the newspaper’s acknowledgement of Blacks’ progress in this area. But the paper also exhibits an awareness that the struggle for Black equality is far from finished. When Andrew Young was dismissed as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations last August, Le Monde congratulated Carter on appointing another Black, Donald McHenry, to the post. It admiringly reviewed Young’s civil rights activism during the 1960s, his years with Martin Luther King in the heyday of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. And in a front-page editorial, the newspaper suggested that had Young been White, he might

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still have the job. It remarked that U. S. Ambassador to Austria Milton Wolf kept his position despite committing the same sin – meeting with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) — which ostensibly led to Young’s ouster. Wolf, of course, is White.

But the French whose perspective on Southern race relations is closest to reality are those who have studied the region as tourists or investors. In both groups, according to U.S. officials here, the belief that the South is the land of “colored” waiting rooms, dual drinking fountains and midnight lynching parties has died an honorable death – and many of these Frenchmen, like New South apostles, are convinced the races get along better in Nashville or even Greensboro than in New York or Detroit.

William Tappe is regional director in Paris for the U.S. Travel Service of the Department of Commerce. Part of his job is to arrange tours of the U.S. for French journalists; in many cases his agency provides free airline transportation through an arrangement with the Civil Aeronautics Board, along with discounts on such items as hotel rooms and rented cars. He also monitors reactions of the journalists – as well as ordinary tourists – who return to France after a sojourn in America.

Among those who visit the South, Tappe says the only complaint, besides a universal disgust with fast food, has nothing to do with race relations. “Recently, some have commented on how fat the Americans are in the South,” he said, smiling. “The French who are concerned about racial discrimination think of it as part of the folklore of the U.S. They are a very small minority — those who are aware at all. They have been receptive to criticism of the U.S. and they have retained that and they expect to find it. Especially first-time travellers to the U.S. seem to think they find it.”

For the most part, the journalists and others who are helped by Tappe’s organization return with glowing accounts of Southern

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charm and hospitality, although many French are distressed to find that New Orleans is not the Gallic mecca they imagined. “There’s a tremendous attraction to Louisiana,” he said, “and Miami, the destination of a National (Airlines) flight from Paris, is becoming well-known. The rest of the South doesn’t have much of an image.” As for the folkloric dimension of racial discrimination, as rendered by the french-dubbed Gone With the Wind and perpetuated in the horror stories from the worst civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s, Tappe concluded, “It’s certainly not a problem for us in selling the U.S. as a travel destination.”

Similarly, a spokesperson for the U.S. Embassy’s Commercial Division said the average French businessman who thinks of locating a plant in Dixie does not look upon Black-White relations the way he might have 15 years ago. Like the tourist who has educated himself about the region’s recent past, the businessman is more likely to consider the South’s labor climate than its racial climate.

Asked whether she knew of any French businessman who had balked for racial reasons over locating a plant in the South, attache Carolyn Ervin said, “I’ve never heard anything like that. French businessmen are aware of the easier labor climate in the U.S. generally, and there might be some understanding that the South is less expensive. The official U.S. government policy is to be neutral on all capital movement. We have lots of general literature which we give him (the potential French investor); then the Embassy lets the various state offices here know and they jump all over each other trying to get the industry.”

The jumping works both ways. Each of the offices also is interested in promoting its own state’s products for sale abroad. Louisiana, with an office near Paris’ most fashionable neighborhood, is the only state with a bureau in France; most states maintain their foreign offices in Brussels (headquarters of the Common Market), Germany or Japan. Especially aggressive as Atlanta increasingly becomes an international city, Georgia has foreign bureaus in Brussels, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, and Toronto.

“The serious investors,” Ms. Ervin added, “go to the large banks or investment houses, and they know, they educate them” about conditions in the South.

But how many serious investors take time to study Dixie? And how many tourists actually see the region? In relation to the total French population, with its fantasies, biases and amiable misinformation, both groups are miniscule. More importantly, the knowledge they acquire is barely diffused beyond a closed circle of friends and associates. Most of them are Parisians; the average French provincial never visits or does business with Spain or Germany, let alone the American South. Last year, according to the U.S. Travel Service, 259,818 Frenchmen came to America – and only 5 percent indicated they came to learn about the U.S. political or social conditions. Many more came to see “the sights,” and that, for the foreign tourist, means Hollywood, the Capitol and the Statue of Liberty not Birmingham, Little Rock and the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

The shooting in Greensboro last November is more likely to shape the average Frenchman’s impression of current Southern race relations than any single factor. His knowledge of the South is largely imagistic: a bulldog-faced Alabama governor blocking the schoolhouse door; firehoses sweeping back a crowd of Blacks who tumble and cover their eyes; a man, his voice like the waters, telling thousands of his dream; a body wrapped in blankets on the balcony of a Memphis motel – and now, the dead on a street of another Southern town that will never become a tourist mecca. School desegregation patterns and voter registration figures simply can’t compete with that.

Thomas Noland writes for the Atlanta Constitution from Paris and teaches English at the American College.