Poor People vs. Alabama Power Company

By Wayne Greenhaw

Vol. 1, No. 8, 1979, pp. 16-19

He knew it would be an uphill climb from the beginning. Back in the winter of 1978, Robert John Varley, anewattorney whohad joined the federally-funded Legal Services Corporation of Alabama (LSCA), was glad to have the clout ofGov. George C. Wallace and Atty. Gen. Bill Baxley on his side. It had surprised Varley and Ohio native Stanley Weissman, also with LSCA, that Wallace was actually fighting a monopolistic utility like the Alabama Power Company. “All of my friends back home didn’t believe me when I first told them,” remarked Weissman later.

But Wallace and Baxley were seriously fighting side-byside with the legal services attorneys. They were fighting the little man’s fight; they spoke out for the middle-class consumer, the old person on a fixed income and the sidewalk businessman. They didn’t want to see Alabama Power Company receive the largest rate increase in the state’s history.

The request for the large rate increase came at the tail end of a eight-month battle in which Wallace was trying to show the Alabama Public Service Commission, the state’s utility regulatory body, that the company needed to lower the consumer’s electricity bills. Neither the governor nor his lawyer ever entertained the notion that the power company would use his forum to ask for an increase; but both knew the company could ask at any time. The request came like an afterthought during a late November session.

Immediately, Baxley jumped into the arena in support of Wallace. “The company is trying to get the raise before Wallace goes out of office so it can be put on his shoulders rather than the new man,” Baxley commented in private.

The LSCA, a non-profit organization organized after the Legal Services Corporation Act was passed by Congress in 1974, entered the picture on behalf of the poor people of the state. With six regional offices in Montgomery, Muscle Shoals, Gadsden, Dothan, Mobile and Selma, the LSCA had been fighting the legal war for the poor for nearly two years. With a goal to provide the poor at least minimum access to legal services, LSCA Executive Director Marvin Campbell pushed his staff to battle for better housing, consumer protection, prisoners rights, health care, equal education and other areas in which the poor have been mistreated.

With the power company asking for its gigantic increase only at the end of the year and in the dying days of an old administration, the public service commission did not act.

Later, during a public hearing, Alabama Power Company President Joseph M. Farley testified that Baxley’s earlier prediction had been right. He said his company did not ask for the increase when it first needed it-in mid-l978—-for political reasons. He said the power company did not wish to interject another issue into the statewide political campaign for governor. He knew that Baxley, who ran second to businessman candidate Fob James, would have used the increase request to his benefit since several members of the Alabama Power Company’s Board of Directors made large contributions to James’ campaign fund.

Two new commissioners, James E. “Jim” Folsom Jr., the charismatic young son of “Kissin’ Jim” Folsom, a former two-time governor of the state, and Pete Matthews, a veteran state legislator, joined incumbent commission president Juanita McDaniels in January of 1979. Immediately, Alabama Power Company again asked for a more-than-33 percent permanent increase in rates. The company also asked for the same increase on an emergency basis-meaning it would go into effect immediately.

However, the two new commissioners told the media they wanted to wait. They said they did not know enough about the case. They wanted to hear both sides to the argument.

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Then the new governor, Fob James, a former AllAmerican football player from Auburn University who had promised “a new beginning” after 16 years under George Wallace, met with his buddies on the power company board. Without telling the LSCA attorneys, James, a selfmade multimillionaire with a sporting goods manufacturing company in Opelika, summonsed all three commissioners and the new attorney general, Charles Graddick, to his office. For more than an hour they met in secret behind closed doors. At the end of the meeting, a spokesman said the group had discussed the need for an emergency rate increase for the power company. And a day later the PSC unanimously agreed to hear the request.

Bob Varley was up early that morning. From his rural home in Autauga County, he drove into Montgomery as the sun was coming up over the Alabama River. At LSCA offices in Montgomery’s downtown Bell Building, Varley, who some two months earlier had agreed to take the case because “I was ready to do anything in the courtroom,” started his first major legal battle.

The young man who had grown up in southwest Florida, attended Auburn University on a Navy ROTC scholarship, served for four years in the Marine Corps, finished the University of Alabama Law School in 1977 and clerked for U.S. District Judge Sam C. Pointer, Jr., was eager to dive into the legal world. What he lacked in experience, he made up in work and intelligence.

At Varley’s side was Stan Weissman, who had been hired out of Ohio as LSCA’s utility specialist. Although he was a member of the Ohio Bar, he was not allowed to practice in Alabama until he passed the local examinations. While he worked on the utilities case, he also studied for the Bar and took the battery of tests.

The heaping workload and pressure of test-taking, however, was nothing new to Weissman. The 48-year-old former chairman of the Ohio Environmental Board of Review was also a holder of a Ph.D. from Illinois Institute of Technology with a major in chemistry. After earning a law degree from Capitol University in Columbus, Ohio, he passed his Bar exam there before moving south.

APC President Joe Farley was the first to take the stand on behalf of his company. He spent two days answering questions by his attorneys explaining in detail why the Alabama Power Company needed some $290 million a year more than they were presently being paid by Alabama consumers. With deadpan emotion, he told-using charts with graphs and columns of statistics-how the power company would be broke within several years if it did not receive the largest increase ever asked.

By the end of the second day, when an assistant attorney general was finally allowed to question Farley, he was asked why APC’s parent company, The Southern Company, continued to pay highnearly ten percentdividends, if it was actually going broke.

Farley leaned forward, loosened his shoulders beneath his dark pinstriped suit in a characteristic gesture, and stated at long length that one could not equate Alabama

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Power Company with The Southern Company. He said that APC had its own problems, while The Southern Company was making progress in other states.

When asked why consumers in Georgia, Mississippi, Florida and Tennessee paid less than the average homeowner or apartment dweller in Alabama, Farley again went into a complex answer which skirted the question.

After Farley’s third day on the stand, an opposition lawyer said, “There is no way you can get a straight answer from the man. He has more corporate tricks up his sleeve than all the Rockefellers and Fords combined.”

During his testimony, Farley pointed out that all construction would stop on the Joseph M. Fancy Nuclear Reactor Plant near Dothan if the increase was not awarded.

Shortly after he stepped down from the stand, thousands of construction workers were laid off at the plant. Work at other facilities was also slowed.

It was a dramatic demonstration of raw power-not necessarily kilowatts.

The LSCA put on several witnesses. Each told how his or her family operated on very little money. A woman described her home in the western section of Montgomery where indoor plumbing was installed within the past five years. “But the wood is so poor in my house that at one place you can sit on the toilet and look down and see the ground,” she said. She said that she and her husband had been trying to save a little money from his pension, their only income, to close such holes, insulate the house, and keep heat from escaping. But she said they were able to save very little with their electricity bill rising every month.

Another witness said his light bill was twice the rent on his five-room house and “if it goes any higher we’re going to have to do without groceries.”

In Selma, an out-of-work truck driver expressed appreciation for LSCA’s intervention in the suit. Back in 1978, when the APC first asked for the increase, they charged some customers the high rate and collected nearly $300,000, which the company was forced by the courts to pay back. The driver was charged the accelerated rate. The electricity bill for his four-room house with an unpainted outdoor lean-to toilet totalled about $22 in October. His bill jumped to $29 in November. “I didn’t have no idea they were going to raise me like that. Here we were with Christmas coming on and no money for anything. That $7 raise might not mean much to somebody making $100,000, but it meant toys for my children and some extra oranges and apples in their stockings,” he added. He had received his $7 refund after LSCA fought for it in court.

During this same period of time, according to its own annual report, APC President Fancy was making $148,049.98 for 1978 . He had received a $12,500 raise from the year before when he made $135,555.48. In 1977, the power company’s two executive vice presidents were paid a total of more than $160,000. A third executive vice president was added in 1978, and three were paid more than $250,000. The company’s 21 other vice presidents received well over $1,000,000 in salary payments for the year.

Legislator Alvin Holmes of Montgomery called for the company to “fire the vice presidents who don’t do anything but sit behind desks and let that be their increase.”

After all sides were heard in the PSC chambers, it was a general concensus among observers that the threemember panel would vote for the increase.

Little more than a week later, an order on the emergency increase came down signed only by Folsom and Matthews. McDaniel abstained from voting.

When it was announced that there would be an increase LSCA faces fell. Then it was explained that the increase would be less than one-third that asked by the power. company. The commissioners had decided on a plan introduced by Folsom giving the power company a 9.5 percent or about $82 million increase. “I did not vote for it because I do not think it is enough to provide the state with adequate electrical power in the future,” said McDaniel.

Within days, LSCA attorney Bob Varley was back in the courtroom asking that the order be set aside because the PSC did not have the authority to grant an increase or even listen to the emergency hearings. LSCA maintained the PSC had broken Alabama’s sunshine law by meeting in secret with Gov. James, Atty. Gen. Graddick and officials of the power company. “Because of those meetings-three that we know of (including a meeting with the governor’s executive assistant and the PSC behind closed doors)-the Public Service Commission heard the case and ruled,” Varley stated.

However, Varley was quick to say that LSCA was not opposed to the lowering of the increase from 34 to 9.5 percent, adding, “They simply didn’t have the authority to make any decision.”

LSCA Executive Director Marvin Campbell looked at the entire on-going fight. “If in fact there is a need for a substantial increase, as the power company contends, the interplay of facts exists: the lack of planning by the PSC in the past with the failure on its part to anticipate future

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costs and the impact of construction of new generating capacity on the residential consumerthese factors created problems.

“The Alabama Power Company’s rate schedule puts the responsibility on the residential consumer when it is the industrial consumer that receives the benefits of expanded capacity.

“Now the PSC needs to take swift action to protect the residential consumer-particularly people with low and fixed incomes-when the impact hits the hardest,” Campbell continued.

“Last year, the power company went before the PSC for a certificate of convenience and necessity and presented a very low cost for the Farley Nuclear Plant. The company estimated the cost at about $300 million and as of now it has already cost about $800 million. That was very poor planning,” Campbell said.

Shortly before presenting its case to the PSC for a permanent increase, the power com pany bought 30 minutes of prime time television for about $10,000. Vice President Samuel Booker outlined current necessities. He said the company’s coal supplies were at an all-time low. He said that, because of low rates, new customers would be delayed in having their facilities connected. And he said customers should make plans to conserve energy during summer months.

LSCA’s Weissman said the APC spokesman had presented “a one-sided account” which did not “take into consideration the Fuel Adjustment Clause” (given to APC by the PSC four years ago) to allow the company the capability to buy coal immediately and pass the cost on to the consumer.

Weissman said LSCA, however, did agree that everybody should conserve energy and that the power company should rewrite its rate schedule in order to provide incentives for residential consumers to conserve electricity.

The Times, a Black Montgomery newspaper, quoted a local man, “I have four children. It was about the coldest day of the year when they (power company workmen) came out and cut off my electricity.

“I had not received a light bill. I went down to the office and wanted to pay half of my bill, and they refused me.

“I told them that I had not received my bill, and they said it was my mistake-not theirs.

“I didn’t have anywhere to take my family that night, and one of my daughters caught the flu. She almost died,” he said.

After that night, he said, his family began using kerosene lamps for light.

It will probably be another three to four months before a decision is finally made on a permanent increase. In the meantime, Robert John Varley still wakes up before dawn and drives across the Alabama River to work where he and Weissman are still climbing the hillside, fighting tremendous odds.

Wayne Greenhaw, a free-lance writer, has had four books published, including WATCH OUT FOR GEORGE WALLACE. He also handles media contacts for Legal Services Corporation of Alabama.

A Year After Alabama’s New Beginning

By Wayne Greenhaw

Vol. 2, No. 6, 1980, pp. 20-22

Less than a year after Governor Fob James took over the reins of government in Alabama from George Wallace, it was announced that the state was on the verge of bankruptcy.

James’ promised New Beginning looked as though it was about to crumble before a foundation was laid. His record with the Alabama Legislature during his first year was next to nil. The new constitution which he had promised by mid-spring failed to survive in committee. Then he announced a new tax oil gasoline just as the pumps began to register close to one dollar per gallon and the state highway department could do nothing but weep for lack of funds. And when his liaison personnel with House and Senate didn’t count correctly the votes for James’ War Against Illiteracy program, it failed and embarrassed the new governor.

Within days of the announced bankruptcy, James, for the first time in any capital observers remembrance, handed over prepared budgets for the coming year to the legislators prior to the regular session. The proposed budget was thousands of pages long, lap-sized two volumes, and was taken with glee by Speaker of the House Joe McCorquodale and Lieutenant Governor George . McMillan. Both grinned like possums eating molasses as they held the gigantic volumes for the television cameras.

But during the next week in January, preparing for budget hearings and the new legislature which started in February, neither McCorquodale nor McMillan could be found in the halls of the newly renovated state capitol.

Shouting loudly out of the port of Mobile and the valleys of Birmingham, however, were members of the so-called blue ribbon commission on education. Out of the woodwork came commission chairman Dr. Harold Martin of the Magic City, saying the members’ time and energy had been wasted. The Governor had done them in with his $1.2 billion education budget which proposed a cut in elementary and secondary education. And from the hills of north Alabama, commission member Roscoe Roberts asked why the Governor had named them to the study group if he

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was not going to take their advice.

Executive director Paul Hubbard of the Alabama Education Association, who had been fighting James all the past year, pointed sarcastically at the budget and said it was worthless. He said that it would not only take learning out of the state’s education process but it would gut the teacher program.

And even James’ friend, superintendent of education Wayne Teague, who held the Governor’s political hand on numerous issues during his first year, shook his head in disgust at the proposed budget. Teague said he learned ask about the cut in elementary and secondary education from a six o’clock television broadcast. He pointed out that the state was already close to bottom in the nation in money spent per pupil for education.

From the plains of Auburn, Alabama Coalition Against Hunger director William Edwards said that he had found that one item in the proposed budget would cut $7.5 million from the school lunch program which now feeds poor children nourishing lunches in public schools. “This money pays the part-time help which are the lowest people on the totem pole of state salaries,” Edwards said angrily. “Fob James has said from the beginning that he plans to cut state employees. Now he’s aiming his political guns at the littlest man or woman he can find within state government,” he added.

Dr. Robert Lager, the governor’s education adviser who came up with the presented figures, meekly took up for his brainchild. Others in James’ office either were not available for comment or chose not to comment.

The education budget was only the first roadblock in what might become another of Alabama’s historic do-nothing

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legislatures, according to one Black Belt lawmaker. “We are in a hell of a shape,” the legislator said. “We have to face up to what Governor James is handing us right off the bat. By the time we’re in session, the people will know it’s nothing. Then what kind of program can the Governor have? He is putting himself in the hole from the first.”

Another central Alabama senator, Don Harrison of Montgomery said emphatically, “I am going to propose solid, positive legislation. I am going to vote on everything the way my constituents want me to vote.” One of Harrison’s proposals was a strict law against consumer fraud which he in the senate and progressive house member Euclid Rains of Dothan plan to co-sponsor. They pushed the legislation last year but without backing from floor leaders. This year they hope to give Alabama a Deceptive Trade Practices Act. It is the last state without such a law.

In the meantime, a handful of lawmakers concerned themselves with looking into Alabama’s regressive tax structure but warned that “we have about as much chance as we always have had,” which translates to next to none.

A tax study by the Coalition of American Public Employees in 1979 showed Alabama 51st in a list including the District of Columbia. Alabama’s tax collections came primarily from sales tax – 66.6% and still growing according to a study by the graduate school of business at the University of Alabama in 1974. At the same time, Alabama showed the lowest property taxes in the southeast with the possible seesaw exception of Mississippi.

James had promised that he would lift the sales tax from food and drugs, but when the regular session of the legislature opened, the lawmakers had not seen the proposal. “We are going to do something,” a lawmaker promised, “with or without the governor.”

Wayne Greenhaw of Montgomery Alabama, is a free-lance writer and the author of several books.

Half Pints and Rain Barrels: Hunger in Alabama

By Wayne Greenhaw

Vol. 2, No. 7, 1980, pp. 17-19

A dark-skinned woman with a sharp straight nose, aged twisted lips,and legs slightly bigger around than a half dollar, Annie Bell Brown looked surprised when more than forty people walked into her scrub-brush front yard.

She sat on a ragged old sofa somebody else had discarded years ago. She leaned forward and dipped Garrett snuff, and she cradled gnarled arthritic fingers gingerly around a swollen elbow that hung limply in a sling. A week before a local teenager had found her lying in a dirt street of Black Jack. Her arm was broken. Small dogs played around her frail body. The young man picked her up and carried her to an emergency room nearly twenty miles away.

Annie Bell Brown is one of about two-hundred residents of Black Jack, a no-man’s-land tucked between Saraland and Satsuma in Mobile County in south Alabama. Neither the county nor the towns will claim the territory.

A native of nearby Plateau, where she was born with a twin sister seventy-four years ago, she now wiles away her time on the porch of the one-room unpainted shanty for which she pays twelve dollars a month. The dwelling is furnished with a wood heater-stove, a rundown mattress on rustied springs, a refrigerator, and a rickety chest-of-drawers.

When the forty-some-odd people from Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Washington D.C. visited her on a Coalition Against Hunger tour, Mrs. Brown, a widow, showed surprise in her big brown eyes. “I don’t get no food stamps,’ she said. “I don’t have the strength to stand in line all day,” she added. Asked if she could use food stamps if somebody brought them to her, her face lighted. “I sure could,” she said.

“I don’t know nothing about no Medicaid, Medicare or anything else like that,” she said. She receives a check for nearly $150 each month from Social Security, she said. “That’s from my husband, who passed,” she explained.

In a cupboard near the stove sat a one-pound plastic of black-eyed peas and a partial can of Luzianne coffee. In the refrigerator was a half-pint of milk and a jar of peach preserves.

Asked about plumbing, she pointed toward the rear of the shack where an outhouse teetered at the edge of a ditch. And she said the pump where she got her water was some fifty paces down the dirt road.

Sipping the strawberry Kool-Aid offered by Bill Edwards, a young man who has been fighting Alabama hunger most of his adult life, she half-whispered, “The Lord sent y’all. I know He did.” And local Black state senator Michael Figures took down her name and address. He said he would have someone with a food stamp form

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to her front porch by nightfall.

On the way north into Choctaw Indian country, Bill Edwards said that this is what his Coalition Against Hunger is all about. “We want to make the public aware that problems like this exist in our communities.” And a man from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development agreed. “It’s not just in the big cities of Washington, New York, Newark, Atlanta, it’s everywhere,” he said.

Within an hour the group bumped down a clay road in the Piney Woods near the Alabama-Mississippi border. Tall, handsome, Roman-nosed John Rivers, a fourth generation Choctaw, told about the problems of being the third race in a south Alabama county “where nobody ever wanted anything to do with you. We were told by the White people that we were not theirs. And the Black people didn’t want us. When I was a boy we had three separate schools for the three races in Washington County.”

He guided the way to a small frame house where a sickly olive-complected child clung to the skirt of his undernourished mother. The woman said her husband had died six months earlier. She was on food stamps, but they barely provided enough food for her and her four children. The other two boys and a girl were in school. As the group tromped through the crowded cabin, a representative from the county pensions and security office almost fell through the floor when her foot weighed upon a loose board.

Less than a half-mile away the group pulled into the grassless yard of a tiny house. It looked like something a middle-class child would build as a play hideout in the backyard of a suburban home. Out of the front door of the plywood and cardboard dwelling ran a three foot high little boy with a beaming round face and twinkling brown eyes. “Hi,” he said, “my name’s Bubba.” And the first woman reached down and swooped him up into her arms and uttered, “Give me a hug, Bubba,” and he hugged with a huge grip.

Inside the ten-by-fifteen-foot two-room house stood a barefoot woman in a red print dress. Two girls slightly smaller than Bubba held to her sides. She had sharp Indian cheeks, raven hair, soft brown eyes, and skin the color of the deep red clay. She invited the group into her neat well-scrubbed home.

Standing on the back stoop, she pointed out where she, her husband, and their three children had lived before the old house had burned to the ground. There had been no insurance. There was no way to rebuild.

“We tote water from up there on the hill. And up yonder

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we go to the bathroom. We catch water off the roof. We bathe in washtubs. And I wash the clothes in that there pan.”

“There ain’t no electricity. It got cut off. The power company got my bill mixed up with a fellow up the road. By the time we got it straightened out they said we owed $124 and I’d have to pay it to have the electricity turned back on. But we don’t have that kind of money.”

“It gets kind of cool in the winter. We have that canned gas. It’s a little and have to have it filled every week, and I cook with that.”

Holding her head high and defiant, she said, “When you are poor, you do what you have to do.”

On the way to yet another place Bill Edwards reiterated his old fight against an apathetic public. An angry young man, Edwards has been shaking his finger in the face of the rich and the fat for at least a decade.

A Californian, Edwards grew up in Orange County “which I guarantee you is just as backward in its way as much of Alabama,” he says. Studying history and political science at California State College in Fullerton, he came to the University of Alabama’s graduate school in 1969 and took a masters degree in social work.

Working with the National Democratic Party of Alabama, a predominantly Black splinter group in the early 1970s, Edwards developed a quick and deep insight into the state’s political world. He also worked with VISTA through Miles College in Birmingham. Again with Miles College, he moved to Greene County where for four and one-half years he had “quite an experience, saw poverty at its worst, watching the splitting-up factions of the Black people’s political life.” Then, for two years, he directed the Alabama Migrant and Seasonal Farm Workers. He and his wife, a teacher from Birmingham, moved to Loachopoka between Auburn and Opelika in central Alabama and he began work with the Coalition Against Hunger.

Totally committed and estimated, Edwards slips into a passionate speech punctuated with cold hard facts. He looks back on President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty as the beginning of the dream to rid the country of hunger. “At that time the nation began its dream about actually doing something about poverty, actually getting the people out of poverty ” he says.

“All you have to do is look and see, and the myths about poverty die hard and fast. Some people believe all poor people are lazy, drive Cadillacs, eat gourmet meals from food stamps. These people work hard, keep their homes clean, and barely have enough to eat,” he states.

With Edwards on the day in the south Alabama country was Hollis Geer, staff attorney of Legal Services Corporation of Alabama, the co-sponsor of the hunger tour. Geer, who represents many of the Mo-Wa (short for Mobile-Washington counties) Indians, rides the country circuit at least once a week to check with her outlying clients.

A native of Boston, Geer moved with her family to Huntsville, Alabama, when she was 12, and after graduating from Duke in anthropology spent two years in Liberia and Ghana. Back in Boston, she worked with prison reform groups and attended Boston University Law School.

While still in school, she worked with Legal Services Corporation offices in Knoxville one summer, “and I knew I wanted to come back South and do this kind of work.”

In the push and shove world, she makes room in local churches for intake sites to meet with her clients. And soon she hopes to share an office in Chatom, seat of Washington County, with the Coalition Against Hunger people.

As the dust-coated school bus rocked back toward the tour’s starting point, Bill Edwards creased his forehead and spoke about the people. Leaning forward, he hit his fist into his palm “There is so much that we have to do. It’s an up-hill battle, but we think we can do it.” And to his side Hollis Geer nodded her head in agreement as the bus passed several tar-papered shacks with a scrawny collard patch and a rustied-out car in the front yard.

Wayne Greenhaw is a freelance journalist in Montgomery, Al. and is author of several books about Southern events and people.

Woodcutters Organize: Echoes of Change in the South’s Backwoods

By Wayne Greenhaw

Vol. 3, No. 1, 1980, pp. 16-19, 22

The tall huskily-built Black man opened his mouth and let his baritone voice ring out through the small plain rectangular frame church in southwest Alabama.

Proud of his heritage, ready to pass on to his children and his children’s children all that he knows of his past, Ralph Lee Johnson is trying his best to hang on to whatever he can make in the present.

A pulpwood man, whose father was a woodcutter and whose great-grandfather came over to this country from Africa on a slavery ship, Ralph Lee Johnson ekes a living out of the Piney Woods like more than 150,000 others in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

Living in a three-room house he put together out of scrap plywood, two-by-sixes he carved out of soft hardwood with his bare hands and strong shoulder muscles, he and his wife Maggie and their four children burned to frazzles in the hot sun of the summer of 1980. Sweltering in the shade, he said, “We done all the work we could do back in the spring, and now—usually when we’re working the hardest—there’s nothing to do.”

Ralph Lee Johnson blames no one person or institution for his present predicament. “It’s tough times,” he allows, and he knows that south Alabama, northwest Florida and southern Mississippi were all hit hard by Hurricane Frederic in the fall of 1979. Following the storm, hundreds of thousands of feet of timber were down and had to be cut, and the situation resulted in a surplus supply at the paper mills.

“I can’t honestly sit here and blame the paper companies. I know they have to make money. That’s what they are in business for. I blame the woodcutters themselves, like me and my friends in these woods, for not organizing and making sure that we always have enough work—whether there is a hurricane or what, ” Ralph Lee Johnson says.

While he provides for his family out of a scrawny garden, where even the collard greens appear to beg for needed water, he has put his trust in an association of pulpwood workers. Since the mid-1960’s, Ralph Lee Johnson has seen associations appear and reappear, and he has become skeptical of their importance.

“The people from the outside come in and start talking and build up our hopes. We listen, and we think they know our situation and will work for us. We get worked up about making the life in the woods better. We all know it has to be better.”

Seven years ago, when the pulpwood workers’ situation in the South received national attention, Ralph Lee Johnson was satisfied that the Gulfcoast Pulpwood Association, founded by a group of cutters near Hattiesburg, Mississippi in the late 1960s, would be the answer to his and other cutters’ problems. “It has helped a great deal,” Johnson remarks. “The leadership has continued to function, we have won several big lawsuits, but the economic situation for the cutter is still terrible.”

Black minister A.L. Richardson of Mobile County, Alabama, and his associate, James Graham of Wayne County, Mississippi, believe that through continued organization “the woodcutter will see the light within several years. Already the paper companies are beginning to make concessions to us. Even the little givings in help a great deal when you look at the big picture. It is really not different from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It has the same foundation: people have to be given their human rights; they will not stand to be oppressed forever.”

Other White and Black leaders in the woodcutters movement throughout the backwoods southland say the old-time White power structure kept the poor Blacks and Whites apart for a long time. “The George Wallaces and the Ross Barnetts and the Faubuses pushed poor Whites and poor Blacks against each other, living in a turmoil of hatred because of the colors of our skin, and at long last we sat down, took a deep breath, and looked around,” says William J. Gaines of Waycross, Georgia, who admits having ridden with the Ku Klux Klan during the 1950s and 1960s. Since shortly after World War Two, Gaines has been a pulpwood cutter. “By the early 1970s, I think we were beginning to see that we had more in common with our Black neighbors than we did with the three-piece-suited cigar-smoking politician sitting in the statehouse. We could see that we had been blind as bats to the real problems, which was that of feeding and raising our children and making something out of our lives. We had been beaten down, down, down, by our own hatred. Now, all of a sudden, we were stunned. We saw that that Black man down the road was starving just like we were. He was getting screwed by the rich paper company people just like we were. The system he was working in was the same one we were working in, and the only way we could ever get a fair break – either Black or White—would be to stand together, side-by-side, hand-in-hand, and face the giants together.”

Several woodcutter associations cropped up over the South. The newest, and thus far the most successful, has been the Southern Woodcutters Assistance Project (SWAP) backed by

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the Board of Homeland Ministries of the United Church of Christ, an ecumenical project also supported by several other Protestant groups and Catholic orders.”

In February of 1979 a group of 39 woodcutters and their families met in Canton, Mississippi, and agreed to set up a purchasing cooperative. “The idea was: you have to start somewhere,” according to Jeff Sweetland, who after working with Cesar Chavez’s efforts in California joined SWAP during the spring of 1980.

“One of the biggest problems faced by the woodcutter and his family is that he owes so much. He becomes so indebted to the wooddealers; and the paper companies he can never really get out of the hole. Everything is marked up so high, and with interest added, the cutter historically has been in debt to the company store,” Sweetland points out.

The coop concentrated on chainsaws, chains, material, supplies that would be used every month, things that wear out and have to be purchased over and over, and the savings to an average woodcutter amounted to about $75 per month. During its first year the coop sold almost $50,000 worth of merchandise that had been marked up very little.

In August of 1979 some 300 members of the coop met in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where they decided to expand to a full-fledged association. With almost unanimous effort, the United Woodcutters Association was formed, and anybody who cut wood, hauled or helped in the process was eligible to join.

“We deliberately started north of Jackson so we wouldn’t have jurisdictional fights with the Gulfcoast Pulpwood Association,” says Sweetland. “By now we have run into less than 10 people in our area involved with the GPA,” he adds.

With United Church of Christ minister Jim Drake, another former assistant to Chavez, working as coordinating officer, the UWA was established, elected a national executive board, and went to the federal government for the charter of a credit union which would further help problems of indebtedness. By early 1980 the first federal credit union for woodcutters was chartered. And today it works like any other credit union with members paying in shares, and soon the cutters will be able to make loans at low interest rates. Previously they had been forced by economic conditions and geographic isolation to go to the dealers, companies and loan-shark-type finance operations.

Also in Philadelphia, the group agreed to form United Woodcutters Services, a non-profit organization to assist the cutters with problems in worker’s compensation, insurance, and other legal areas. “We provide services to any woodcutter, whether he is a member or not,” explains Sweetland.

In August of 1980 the United Woodcutters Association decided to make its presence known politically. Times were rougher than during the past five or six years, although the weather was ideal for woodcutting. Some woodyards were given quotas, some were shut down for two and three weeks in a row, and some turned down hardwood and would take nothing but pine. Other problems that had been in existence since the beginning of woodcutting and the pulpwood industry continued.

As much as ever, many woodcutters were given the short stick, where the cord of wood is measured incorrectly at the woodyard and the cutter is paid less than he should be paid for the wood he delivers. The woodcutters complained

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to the UWA, and it was decided in Forest, Mississippi, at a legislative convention attended by more than 650 persons that the UWA should seek legislation.

“The people passed a resolution to go after the legislature in the state capitol,” Sweetland says. “The UWA wants a Fair Pulpwood Scaling Practices Board created. Where there is no equal bargaining now between the woodcutter and the wooddealer, the board would protect the interest of the woodcutter,” Sweetland explains.

“The key feature of the board would be to issue operating licenses to woodyards and revoke such licenses if the yards abused their privileges,” he adds. Sweetland believes UWA can get such legislation passed next year.

A third-generation pulpwood farmer and woodcutter, Ralph Lee Johnson believes “we have made a few strides in the right direction. But we have a long, long way to go. It has been an uphill battle all the way, and I can’t see the top yet.”

Johnson likes to preach at the Nazareth Primitive Baptist Church “where most of us attend, where we pray to the Lord to provide for us if it is His will, and we empty our tortured souls out for Him to see us bare as the day we were born.”

Not unlike the woodcutters throughout the South, Ralph Lee Johnson has been in debt to his local woodyard for all of his adult life.

“I started helping my Daddy cut wood down near Pensacola, Florida, some forty years ago. I was not even in high school. I was about this tall, but my muscles were developed, and I could drive the mules about as good as a grown man.

“We didn’t have mechanical skidders back then. When we cut logs down in the swamps we had to go in with a team of mules, wrap ’em good with chains, and pull ’em out. Sometimes it’d take a day of hard work just to get a log or two out of bad swamp, especially in late fall, after the rains, or in the spring. It wasn’t like it is today, and it ain’t easy today.

“Back in those days we not only had hard times with old-fashioned equipment, we had a hard time with the people in the industry. The first paper companies formed their woodyards out in the Piney Woods to take care of people like my Daddy and other woodcutters. The woodyards were the middlemen. They worked directly for the paper companies as agents. They bought from us. It’s the same system we operate under today. We can never take our wood directly to paper companies. We go to this woodyard or that woodyard. We are assigned to one in our area. If we cut wood way over yonder, closer to another yard, we still have to deal with this one. We have to haul right on by. I’ve passed by three or four during some hauls, using more gas, then going back, cutting more wood, and hauling it to the yard again. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but that’s the way it is. It ain’t changed since I was a little boy. And my Daddy back then told me his Daddy had had to do the same thing with his oxen pulling a cart loaded with wood.

“I remember Daddy getting the short stick from the yard down in Florida. It was a bad time. A short stick is a bad count on your cord. A cord of wood is supposed to be 128 cubic feet. That’s the measure. But one yard Daddy worked out of down there had him pile his wood in an old pig pen. They said that when the wood came up to the top of the fence, that was a cord. If it had had a true measure, it would have actually been about one and a half cords.

In another place, over in Georgia, the yard manager walked out to the truck, looked it over, then wrote in his book. He said he judged cords with his naked eye. Daddy would then haul his wood into the yard, dump it into a pile that had already been unloaded by other trucks, waiting there for the railroad cars to come and get it and take it to various paper mills, and Daddy wouldn’t know what the man determined until he pulled up in his empty truck and walked into the office for his slip. If the manager liked you, you got a good count. If he didn’t, you got short sticked.

Ralph Lee Johnson and his fellow woodcutters throughout the South, from the South Carolina Appalachians to the Texas hill country, have experienced the same humiliations. They continue to be at the mercy of the gigantic paper companies. And more and more of these companies have been moving southward recently because more timber is available, longer cutting seasons are open in the Sun Belt, and the labor force is separated and unorganized. “I believe that now is our chance to break out of the old mold of our fathers and move into the Twentieth Century,” Ralph Lee Johnson preached late on a sweltering August Wednesday afternoon in the church where he and others preach the gospel on Sundays. Johnson was telling woodcutters from a radius of nearly one hundred miles about the necessity of organizing.

“The pulpwood business is where the coal miners were back in the early thirties. They were getting the black lung disease, and they were dying, and their widows and their babies got nothing but misery from the companies. They were working in the poorest of conditions. They saw the light in the labor unions, and they joined hands

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and stuck together. Now they have better wages, better working conditions, insurance and workmen’s compensation.

“Look at us! Look at Johnny Jefferson back there! Stand up, Johnny!” A man who had been as tall as Ralph Lee Johnson once stood. He was bent forward, and his face showed the agony of years of suffering, and right arm was nothing but a nub.

“Johnny Jefferson is one of us. Most of y’all know him. He cut wood with the best of ’em until nine years ago. Nine years ago he was working up in Washington County, cutting for Larry McCollum, and the chainsaw slipped and caught his arm and tore it to shreds.

“I know you’ve all seen a wild chainsaw. I know you’ve all seen blood gush out of a man’s arm. And I know you’ve all seen men who were out there cutting until they lost a hand or an arm.”

“Johnny, how much did they pay you for your arm?” Ralph Lee Johnson hollered.

Johnny Jefferson said nothing. He sat and shook his head.

“They didn’t pay you one red cent, did they, Johnny?”

Again, Johnny Jefferson shook his head.

“Mister Larry McCollum came by to see you in the hospital didn’t he? He’s a real good man. He don’t mean no harm. But he did not empty his back pocket and give it to you, did he?”

Johnny Jefferson was silent.

“Larry McCollum or R.J. Simpson over in Mississippi or Raiford Greene over in Louisiana or any of the other dealers, they won’t give you one red cent. And you might as well be talking to a loblolly pine as to talk to International Paper or Gulf States or Union Camp or St. Regis or Georgia-Pacific or Scott or Masonite or any of the others.

They want the wood, but they don’t want to take the responsibility for getting it out of the forest. That’s the pure and the simple of it. When some poor cutter like Johnny Jefferson cuts off his arm, they turn the other way. They don’t want to have anything to do with it. They say we are independent contractors. I say we are workers. We do their work for them.

“For more than a hundred years, since the first Southern paper mill opened in South Carolina in the eighteen-hundreds, the woodcutter has been getting the short stick. We have complained. We have mostly hung our heads and walked away. In our silence, there is sadness. In our silence, there is grief. I grieve over my children and their children’s children. But I will grieve no longer, because I know now that the woodcutters will join together and fight for their rights.

“When my boy went into the business, he had to borrow money from a dealer, he bought his second-hand truck from the dealer, and even his saw and grease and oil were bought on credit from the dealer. After the man charged fourteen and fifteen percent interest, there’s no way he will ever get out of debt. It’s a lost cause from the beginning. And I know all of you are in the same predicament. And many of your children are already planning to be woodcutters. They don’t know anything else.”

From his audience, Ralph Lee Johnson received a chant of “Amen! Amen, brother,” and people nodded in unison.

Ralph Lee Johnson, moved by his own monologue, nodded with them. He knew he was one of dozens of speakers at various churches and meeting places throughout the South during the sum-

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mer of 1980, urging woodcutters to unite. He knew he was part of a movement which had started at various crossroad junctions all across the southland during the late sixties but failed to grow to fruition during the seventies. He knew too that he had taken the first step, along with the other leaders, in a direction toward unionizing the pulpwood workers of the southeast.

“Like a man who walked among us not too long ago in another battle for human rights, I have a dream.” His voice rang through the naked rafters. It was strong and heartfelt and not without the fiery tone of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “I think that it is time for all pulpwood peoples to hold themselves proud. We do not do a slave’s work. We are craftsmen in a trade.”

And the “Amen” sound came again.

“We need to walk together through the forest of hopeless dreams and climb the hillside of success. We can do it together! ”

As suddenly as he had spoken, he bowed his head and closed his eyes. He said a prayer for all of them: paper company, woodyard dealer, and woodcutter.

Then Ralph Lee Johnson, who had been cutting wood in the forests of the South since he was a boy, asked them to join with him. And the Blacks and Whites held hands and swayed rhythmically as they sang, “Oh, oh, oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day . . . ”

Wayne Greenhaw is a freelance journalist in Montgomery, Alabama and is author of several books about Southern events and people.

Big Profits and Little Pay in South’s Backwoods: Woodcutters Organize (Part II)

By Wayne Greenhaw

Vol. 3, No. 2, 1981, pp. 14-17

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Woodcutters have generally been considered the bottom of the barrel when you are talking about agriculture in the South,” stated a forestry professor at Alabama’s Auburn University.

“The industry has been a profitable one for the huge companies, but the workers in the woods, cutting the timber and hauling it to the woodyards have been submissive to the demands of the companies,” explained Dr. Herman Aiken, who has worked with half-dozen top companies as a consultant to their new timber crops.

“Today we can plant a hybrid pine tree in the South and harvest it in less than fifteen years. The Sun Belt may even lend itself to faster harvesting in the near future. When you have an annual rainfall of between forty-five and sixty inches with a preponderance of sunshine during most of the year—even in the winter, you have an ideal situation for the modern fast-producing forest. In the Pacific Northwest, Washington, Oregon, and parts of California and Idaho, it takes nearly sixty-five years for a tree to mature,” Dr. Aiken added.

“The time factor is one reason for the tremendous growth in the pulpwood industry in the South during the past decade,” the professor said. “Another reason is the cheap labor. There is no doubt about that. The company looks at the overall picture in every agricultural area before it decides to move in that direction,” he said.

This movement was emphasized recently by the decision of Georgia-Pacific, a leader in the pulpwood industry, to come South. A company spokesperson explained the move of corporate headquarters from Portland to Atlanta by saying, “We are not going to abandon the Northwest, but we have shifted our interests to the South, where we have more than two-million acres.” In 1979, Southwest Forest Industries, headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, registered what the president, W.A. Franke, termed “a milestone” in its purchase of a Panama City, Florida, pulp and linerboard mill, a railroad line and 425,000 acres of timberland in Florida, Georgia and Alabama from International Paper Company. “We looked at Panama City on an opportunistic basis. It was clear that the longterm economics for owning the timber were good. This was our initial objective. After studying the project, we concluded there were also opportunities for added profitability at the paper mill. So our thinking moved from a timberlands-oriented acquisition to the concept of an integrated profit center that would be a long-term contributor to the company’s earnings,” Franke remarked.

In its move into the South, Southwest Forest Industries purchased 245,000 acres in pine and 157,000 in hardwoods. A company representative said, “We have the wood to supply a large portion of the Panama City mill’s needs. We bought lands that have been managed intensively for high productivity and we have the resource base to diversify into lumber and plywood production. Most important, we are now in the South in a meaningful way, where the fast timber growth cycles point to more rapid expansion in our industry than in other parts of the country. We made a good buy here.”

The Panama City mill uses about eight-hundred-thousand cords of pulpwood and woodchips every year, and company-owned timberlands furnish about twelve and one-half percent of the mill’s needs. “Many, many woodcutters depend on our operation to keep them in work, and we want to continue to work with them,” a mill representative said. However, it was added, by 1985, the company’s pine plantations should be supplying about twenty-five percent of the mill’s needs.

0ne of the people who have been attempting to organize woodcutters throughout the region, Ben Alexander of Atlanta, Georgia, greets these moves, “We want to welcome the new companies. All the woodcutters want to see more and more companies coming into the area. It’s good to see, it revitalizes the business of pulpwooding. But we want to educate them from the beginning. We don’t want them to think they are coming into a backward area where the labor force will lay down, roll over, and play dead.”

Alexander pointed out that the wage structure in Southern states has been a great incentive to companies to move from other sections of the United States into the South. “That sort of green is irresistible,” said Jim Drake, coordinating officer in Mississippi of the Southern Woodcutters Assistance Project (SWAP). “Trade unions in paper mills report that similar jobs in Oregon pay three times the wage in Mississippi. Furthermore, the old standard that ‘Prices are cheaper down there’ does not hold. In Mississippi, March 1980 gasoline prices were the highest of all fifty states,” Drake continued.

“In Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Texas, Arkansas and Florida there are more than fifty to sixty thousand aging pulpwood trucks hidden in

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deep woods,” Drake stated. “Each truck requires a crew of three persons. Thus, tucked away in hollows and hamlets are over one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand families dependent on pulpwood for a living.”

“No congressional subcommittee has ever delved into the misery of these people,” Drake continued. “They are the invisible workers and their families. They go unseen, unheard. They live in the poorest counties of America, and Black or White, they suffer malnutrition, poor healthcare, inadequate education and substandard housing.

“And yet, on their strong backs and out of their sweat, International Paper, Georgia-Pacific, St. Regis, Masonite, Weyerhauser, and Scott Paper, to mention only the giants, have built their vast empires,” the United Church of Christ minister said.

With the accelerated growth of the paper industry in the South during the past ten years came the emergence of people like Jim Drake who were interested in organizing the pulpwood workers. Drake, for instance, was sent into the backwoods by the Board for Homeland Ministries of the United Church of Christ to work with SWAP in Mississippi. Several years earlier a young Massachusetts attorney named Grant Oldfield had been in Mississippi to register voters during the summers of 1964 and 1965, “and while we were there we found that not only were Black people discriminated against but the White as well as Black pulpwood worker was being pushed to the back of the bus. The woodcutter was the second-class citizen of the agricultural South. After I finished Boston University Law School I came back to Hattiesburg and set up an office to start working with the woodcutters. We got a little money from Catholic Charities and the Southern Voter Education Project, and we worked to put some sting into the political makeup of Mississippi.”

But three years later, having met with dozens of local political defeats and numerous stumbling blocks, Oldfield went back to his native state to fight for other causes. He was more or less replaced by other young lawyers and organizers in Hattiesburg who began working in the late 1960s with the Gulfcoast Pulpwood Association (GPA), which by 1973 had organized some three thousand woodcutters in southwest Alabama, southern Mississippi and northwest Florida.

Oldfield and his associates filed a lawsuit in the early 1970s against two companies. The paper companies countered with their own lawsuit against the cutters. For nearly a year in the mid 1970s, GPA was ordered to discontinue its organizing efforts while the case was before the courts. However, in 1975, after limited victories for the woodcutters in federal courts, Scott and International Paper companies agreed to an across-the-board raise in prices of pulpwood paid to the cutters and haulers. The companies also agreed to pay GPA attorneys $25,000 in fees.

The cutters were given an overall five-dollar-per-cord increase in payment, and owners of standing timber, which is cut to become pulpwood and sold to the woodyards, were given a one-dollar-and-fifty-cent raise per cord. Scott and International also agreed at the time not to take their fight against GPA’s organizing efforts to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“It was a significant step forward at the time,” commented a GPA leader. “Unfortunately, however, that was the last we heard from the companies. We got the increase. They could not deny us that. But the negotiations stopped there. That was the last raise we received. Now, it appears, we have to go back into court to seek further relief.

“GPA is continuing its organizing efforts. We have moved in several directions. We are looking now for a more substantial increase with a more permanent basis of cost-of-living raises. It costs the pulpwood cutter more and more to live every year, just like it costs the paper companies more and more to produce pulpwood. They are making more and more profits, but those profits are not shared with the man who is working hard to produce the pulpwood. We feel that it is time that we made something for our sweat and blood.”

Many woodcutters participating in

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organizing their fellow workers believe that the various labor associations need to ban together in a southwide effort. In northern Mississippi and Louisiana, SWAP spokesmen say that they do not wish to compete with GPA, “but we would like to join hands with all woodcutters to make sure our efforts do not go to waste.”

Wayne Greenhaw is a freelance journalist in Montgomery, Alabama and author of several Southern books. His final installment on the woodcutters will appear in the next issue.