Interchange: In This Issue

By Betty Norwood Chaney

Vol. 1, No. 2, 1978, p. 2

Southern Changes, for those of you who are reading our pages for the first time, marks the beginning of the Southern Regional Council’s fifth publishing venture. Our new publication is a process of “vision and revision,” influenced by the traditions, virtues, failures and successes of those who came before. Southern Changes joins the ranks of our previous publications, The Southern Frontier, New South, South Today and Southern Voices.

We hope you find the magazine to be a forum for reliable, concise reporting and interpretation of the issues and events in the South, with emphasis on the plight of the poor and the Black Southerner. For more than a century the idea of change has been the inspiration of the Black Southerner; for most of the Council’s existence it has been the hope of the liberal White and Black Southerner. Today, we still hope for change in our region and, just as important, need to understand those that do come our way.

The articles in this our second issue tell us about the different characters of change. The print on the cover symbolizes change, but is also characteristic of the duplicity so often a part of change in the Southland. Taken from a poster by the Voter Education Project (VEP), an organization dedicated to improving the conditions of minorities through the political process, the print carries the slogan, “The hands that picked cotton now can pick our public officials.” While signifying the enormous progress Blacks have made in the political arena in the South, the statement is at the same time misleading, for the fact remains that only 5 percent of elected Southern officials are Black.

In the article “Vivian Malone Jones and the VEP: From Integration to Voter Registration,” the VEP head, herself a symbol of change – one of the first two Blacks to integrate the University of Alabama discusses her work. She looks at the progress the South has made from the vantage point of that historic day 15 years ago when she faced Governor George Wallace at the University’s doors, and we get a glimpse of how it has influenced her. She concludes “I would have expected much more change.”

The public school system in Atlanta, a city that is a symbol of Black progress often referred to as “the Black Mecca,” is a case in point of change that is slow in coming. Twenty-four years after the Supreme Court decision barring segregation, Atlanta, whose 1973 “Atlanta Compromise” school plan brought very little integration, is still involved in a suit. The “Metro Suit” as it has come to be known is examined in this issue as a possible solution for integrating Atlanta’s Black majority school system.

All of the different elements of change come together in Jerry Bledsoe’s poignant and sensitive presentation of two mountain women who have waited a quarter of a century for electric power to come to their South Carolina mountain. Through them we are shown a glimpse of a way of life that has remained virtually unchanged for decades. We perceive, too, the elements of both good and bad that change brings with it. Of the electric power, one of the women says, “Been a-lookin’ to git it fer 25 years and it didn’t come just till we got so old we can’t enjoy it.”

Blacks and poor Whites are not the only ones to feel the brunt of a sometimes changeless South. Bill Cutler shares with us an experience that Howell Raines, accomplished White writer who chronicles the indignities suffered by courageous Blacks during the civil rights movement, has in the marketing of his book, My Soul Is Rested. Raines learns a bit of injustice first hand.

The last two articles – as were two of the preceding ones – are about women, to whom we pay special attention in this our second issue. In the first, we are presented the Southem Black woman who is held back from helping usher in a change – the ratification of the ERA – which might be for her betterment because she is tied to the past by certain age-old myths about herself.

And then, in a final piece, Steve Suitts focuses in more pointedly on the rural Black woman who is the head of household. The price of her ticket out of rural poverty and urban despair might even be beyond the means of the ERA.

In addition to the articles in this issue, we carry some of our regular departments. This our “Interchange” section, where you our readers share your views with us, should prove one of the most provocative. Along with “Letters-to-the-Editor” and “Keeping You Posted,” we have a thoughtful response by a concerned Black father to Robert Hilldrup’s commentary in our first issue “My Sons Are Growing Up Racists.”

Finally, in the next few days and weeks, the South will have still another chance to redress the many years of denied opportunities to its women and Blacks. In a unique opportunity that probably comes only once in a century, more than 150 new federal judges will be appointed throughout the nation. Sixty of them will be added to the federal bench in the South, In “Soapbox,” another of our regular departments, Steve Suitts examines the process by which these judges will be appointed. Under the patronage system that is in operation in the selection of the nominees, it is not very hopeful for minorities. Blacks and women will again be locked out unless Southerners of good will band together to make the changes happen. On this score, there is still . . . hope.

Hilldrup’s Dilemma Is Not All Black And White

By Harvey Gates

Vol. 1, No. 2, 1978, pp. 3-4

In the September issue of Southern Changes, Mr. Robert P. Hilldrup struck a cord sensitive to my paternal instincts with his article entitled: “My Sons Are Growing Up Racists.”

His concern has wider implications than the family hearth. As a writer and father I feel compelled to respond, in my own way, to his comments because I am also concerned about the attitudes my Black sons will take in race relations.

We are both fathers looking at the same coin from different sides. However, I do not think our responsibilities as parents can be paralleled. We can both teach our children to respect mankind and all other objects and creatures in this universe, but his children will have to develop tolerance, indeed love, for Blacks from their vantage of power. My boys will have to develop the same sentiments from their point of powerlessness.

From my point of view, this makes his task easier. He can tell his boys that school is an institution in society that can be used for their benefit and he will not be hard put to think of examples.

He can tell them that in spite of affirmative action policies they will still have about 80 percent of the pie. He can tell them that the sacrifice he is making, buying their lunches, clothes, school supplies, etc., will be more than vindicated by the disparities between what my Black sons will earn and what they will earn. Finally, he can tell them that if they are not satisfied with their present arrangements he and their mother have it within their power to forget about their pursuit of justice and equality and move on like the rest of his White brothers.

I do not have these options to present my sons. They are part of a different army. They must march to the beat of a different drum. They must answer the call of a different bugler.

For a long time, we were separated in the South. We were separated by the proverbial railroad tracks, but this was just a physical manifestation of a larger and deeper separation. Whites and Blacks did not touch each other in any real or meaningful ways. We did not shake hands. We denied each other the basic civilities ordinarily accorded fellow human beings. We were, in the main, just objects to each other.

We did interact on a personal level and some of these interactions, despite their limitation (master and servant relationship), developed into genuine relationships. They became more than a mutually dependent arrangement. They went as deep as the feelings and sensitivities of the participants would permit. However, these were personal, single, individual relationships, and were not transmittable to progenitors, friends and fellow members of the race.

For example, when I was a member of a team studying racial violence in the 1960s, it was not uncommon for a Black or White participant in hand-to-hand combat to take time out and go to the rescue of a friend on the opposing team. I have seen instances of groups of Blacks cordoning off their favorite store in the community during uprisings to prevent any harm to the White proprietor and his property. These are some of the manifestations of the deeper personal relationships.

Our moral commitments are no deeper than our moral convictions. Our convictions are no deeper than our perceptions of ourselves and others. Before we can have the capacity for empathy we must understand the needs of others in terms of our own feelings, emotions and desires. White people and Black people have not arrived en masse at this level, nor has any other group where artificial barriers have existed for long periods of time.

When the word White is mentioned, Blacks get an image of the repressive machine which has by definition, legally and morally, treated them as less than a fellow human being.

This is true for the old and young alike (in both races). This is why my sons and Mr. Hilidrup’s sons will have friends on the personal level, but will be enemies on the group or institutional level. Until integration reaches the plateau of feeling and commitment found in these personal relationships, we are using words that have no real meanings. Our schools, shops, jobs and governments are no more integrated today than they were a century ago. We are just operating under the same roof.

Contrary to what is generally expressed, the greatest violence against Black people has not been the lash of the whip in slavery nor the pummelling of their bodies by negrophobes. The greatest violence that has been perpetrated on Black people has been White people’s indifference to their humanness.

Whiplashes heal and the scars are soon no more than timely reminders, but the injured spirit lives on and on as if transmitted through the genes. The responsibility of this condition cannot be attributed to any generation for it is the cumulative effect of the deeds of all generations.

Justice and equality for all is a costly pursuit. There are some people hi the world who do not care about the cost of anything as long as they are not the ones who have to pay the price. These persons offer lip service to a cause, but they will not spend a modicum of energy, or for that matter, suffer a moderate inconvenience for its fruition.

Anyone who would take up the Black people’s cross in this country will not have an easy time of it. They will find themselves often at odds with some of the basic institutions in society, not the least of which is the family.

It has never been clear to this country how she can live up to her tenets as outlined in the Declaration of Inde-

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pendence (which does not have the force of law), and to the federal Constitution (which does have the force of law), without first improving the lot of the American Blacks.

Moreover, this task is further complicated when the plight of Blacks has to be improved without injury to Whites. This is the enigma our sons must face. My sons want justice and equality now. They deserve it and they can be accorded no less if they are still to be considered Americans. Hilldrup’s sons want the same thing. They also deserve it. Justice and equality should never have been a racial issue, but it has been and still is in this country. This is what forces our sons, Black and White, to be intolerant.

Hilldrup’s sons do not know what it means to be denied justice and equality because of race. So while I can appreciate Hilldrup’s concern about his sons’ racial attitudes, I can only sympathize with his plight. We are both, as parents, rowing in a sea of confusion, which one Swedish sociologist has called the “American Dilemma.” We do not know the answer. We may not have even asked the right questions yet, but Mr. Hilldrup is at least headed in the right direction. I take his comments seriously. Of course, neither of us will come up with a solution, but we are both concerned parents and on this score, at least, we are ahead of most of the others.

Harvey Gates, a columnist for the Atlanta Voice Newspaper, was the director of the Civil Agression Study Team at the Center for Research and Social Change at Emory University from 1966-69.

The Courtesy of Becoming a Federal Judge

By Steve Suitts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By patronage or sham professionalism, the system of appointing judges

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

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

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

Vivian Malone Jones and the VEP: From Integration to Voter Registration

By Christena Bledsoe

Vol. 1, No. 2, 1978, pp. 8-10

Sometime in her youth, Vivian Malone Jones decided she wanted to go to college. That wouldn’t have been such an unusual decision except that her family was poor. Her father was a laborer. She was one of seven children. She lived in Alabama. It was the early 60s. And she was Black.

“I just knew I was going to college,” she says, her voice rising with inflection as she remembers. “It was one of those things that – I just knew.”

It was 1961 and she was 18. She set her sights on becoming a certified accountant. She applied to the University of Alabama and was told “no,” due to a crowded enrollment situation. An unspoken reason stood out though. The school was all-White and accepting her would have meant integrating the university where Alabama’s well-bred White families for generations had sent their young.

She was admitted to the state’s Black school, Alabama A&M, where Alabama tradition said she belonged. She majored in business education, the closest available field to her career choice, and attended for two years. But she wasn’t satisfied. She wanted more: she wanted to be able to pick the school where the education received would help accomplish her goals. She persisted in trying to get into the University of Alabama. She sought advice from NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York and two years later her admission was ordered by a court.

She was, however, throwing herself and her family into an emotionally charged, possibly dangerous situation. Several other Black students changed their minds about entering the university after a man who identified himself as a representative of the state of Alabama spoke to their families.

” ‘You know,'” she recalls his words, “‘there’s going to be trouble here and we can’t guarantee your child’s safety under these conditions. Are you sure you want your child to go in there?'”

Her family believed she should stick with her plans. They received threatening phone calls and had police protection for six months. “But nobody ever bombed the house or burned a cross. That’s pretty good considering,” she says now.

The day finally arrived: June 11, 1963. She waited silently in a car, along with fellow would-be student James Hood, while U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach confronted Alabama Governor George Wallace. at the school door.

The TV cameras glowed, the pencil press recorded and the event became etched in the memories of Americans everywhere. It was a flamboyant extravaganza – some say staged so that Gov. Wallace could have his show – testifying that the South was reluctantly changing, that racial barriers were going to be broken and that doors to education and the social mainstream were opening for Southern Blacks.

As she sat in the car, she concentrated on how she would fare academically. “I was in. I knew that. I worried about maintaining grades with the pressure I anticipated would surround me.” She decided to push fear out of her head. “You can’t afford to let it dominate your thoughts. There are other things a lot more important that you need to think about as opposed to, ‘My God, what happens if someone fires a shot?’ You just don’t deal with that kind of thing. If you really are that concerned about your physical safety and security, then it’s probably not for you to be in a place like that.”

Today Vivian Malone Jones finds herself part of the Southern legend of change, safely chronicled in the pages of history. She went on to become the first Black to graduate from the University of Alabama. From there she moved to Washington, D.C., where she became a research analyst for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and later an employee relations specialist for the Veterans Administration’s central office. While in Washington, she also pursued the M.S. Degree in Public Administration at George Washington University.

She keeps a front page clipping as a memento of her admittance to the University of Alabama in an office drawer, but at 36, she’s too young to be content with memories from the past. Today she finds herself in a world swirled by the ’60s promise of change that was never fulfilled.

Today Jones sits near a poster that proclaims, “Hands

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that picked cotton now can pick our public officials,” and discusses her work. She now is the executive director of the Voter Education Project, a non-profit corporation based in Atlanta that has striven to promote change through the political process.

She assumed the VEP directorship in August of 1977, after former director and civil rights figure John Lewis was appointed associate director of ACTION, the federal voluntary agency. She came to VEP after several years as director of the Civil Rights and Urban Affairs Division for the Environmental Protection Agency. Widely acclaimed for its work, VEP, which began as a special project of the Southern Regional Council but became a separate entity in 1970, has assisted the voter registration of almost 3 million Blacks throughout the South.

The Black vote now counts. In 1976, Black voters, particularly in states like Mississippi, assured the election of the President. Just I1 years earlier, a U.S. president had used his office to secure passage of a Voting Rights Act designed to eliminate illegal barriers interfering with Black citizens’ right to vote.

The turnabout sounds dramatic and is. It is also misleading. Southern Blacks are far from being full partners in the political process. Despite spectacular gains such as winning the majority of Atlanta and New Orleans, they are underrepresented at the statehouse level, in the county commission and city council chambers of the South and in the U.S. Congress as well.

VEP faces a massive job ahead if the majority of Southern Blacks ever are to register and exercise their right to vote, thereby shaping a political system responsive to their needs.

Right now those prospects don’t look good. Statistically speaking, VEP’s job is half-done at best. Millions of Southern Blacks have not taken advantage of the right to register to vote, perhaps three to four million in all.

“The problem that we’re running into is that once you’ve registered all the people who are eager, willing, or at least the only thing they needed was a little motivation, then you get down to the hard-core group,” explains Jones, a tall, poised woman with a collected air.

Youths, aged 18 to 25, constitute the largest number of unregistered Blacks. Their interests tend to be scattered and they see little reason to register or vote unless an issue specifically touches them.

In rural areas where older Blacks dominate, they often don’t vote. “They’ve been accustomed to things as they were 15, 20 or 30 years ago and really see no hope for getting out of that situation.”

Another problem is that many who registered earlier failed to vote. Their names have been purged from the polls. “We’ve got the age-old problem of educating people about why it’s important to vote.” VEP attempts to pass the word that in other similar communities Blacks registered and were able to put into office officials that represented their interests.

That, ultimately, says Jones, is what voter registration is about. It’s a complicated task. It takes learning issues, learning which candidates represent your interests and lending campaign support.

“Once you’ve satisfied your basic needs of food, shelter and clothing you can concentrate on some of those more sophisticated areas. It’s difficult to get someone to contribute even a dollar when they’re looking for work,” Jones assesses.

VEP provides funds and technical assistance to registration projects run by community groups, such as the NAACP or SCLC. The work is being hamstrung by inadequate finances. Like many non-profit corporations, VEP was dependent on foundation support that sharply dwindled in the mid-70s recession. Despite efforts to expand its financial base, VEP hasn’t yet fully recovered. Its budget, a maximum of $457,000 this year if sought after funds are received, is half its early 70s size. Permanent staff has shrunk too. “We have to turn down maybe 12 requests for every one that we’re able to fund.”

Given the combination of complex field work and financial restrictions, Jones is reluctant to set a timetable for when most Southern Blacks will be registered. “I think we’ve done very well with what we’ve had,” she responds. “We’re dealing with large numbers of people who have never voted in their lives, their parents didn’t vote. When you think about the political process and how long it’s been in effect, then 16 years (VEP’s existence) represents a very small period.”

Among projects underway, VEP is funding a Florida project designed to register the handicapped and a pilot Georgia program, Project 23, the results of which later may be applied to other states.

Project 23 takes its name from the 23 Georgia counties where the majority of the population is Black. Most are located in middle and southwest Georgia, a few are spread elsewhere.

Many of the counties have no Black elected public officials. “If you’ve got a majority of 75 percent and 80 percent in some cases, and no Black elected officials, then something’s wrong with the process. “It’s like South Africa almost,” she says, diminishing with a small laugh what to some might be an unpopular analogy.

What VEP has done is to go into the 23 counties and look

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for impediments that keep Blacks from registering or running for office. A commonly found situation was that of confining voter registration to the courthouse, despite the ready convenience of widely frequented sites such as grocery stores or shopping centers.

Often the hours set for registration were so restricted that Blacks had trouble taking advantage of them. VEP experienced difficulties also in getting deputy registrars appointed to assist the registration of Blacks. In a few instances, restrictions were extreme. Jones speaks of situations where registration was held in a White home and Blacks were told to enter at the back of the house. She also speaks of a “couple of cases” where ballots were marked so that it was known who voted for whom. “This can lead to intimidation if you don’t vote for the right person.

A number of the counties now have expanded registration sites and hours and some elected officials more representative of the population. In one area, more than 99 percent of the Black populace has been registered. But problems remain. VEP frequently gets calls from area people concerned about “how the votes were counted or what happens to the ballots . . . As long as those kinds of things are still happening, we will continue Project 23.”

As she views the South from the perspective of the 60s, Jones says she would have expected much more change.

She lives in a neighborhood undergoing transition from White to Black. This is the second neighborhood she has lived in where for-sale signs have appeared on White owned homes after Blacks began moving in. She expects her current Atlanta neighborhood to be 75 percent Black within a year. “I expected that by now people would not be running when Blacks moved into the neighborhood.”

She expected that a system would have been developed by now which would have eliminated the poverty still affecting masses of Southern Blacks. In her field work, she looks around and often exclaims, “My God, this is just as it was when I was growing up.”

She recalls a recent conversation with a Black neighbor that illustrates both a lack of change and a reluctance to push the status quo.

As a point of curiosity, she asked what the fee was for the nearly private country club. “The person I was talking to said, ‘Oh, I’ve been wanting to join, but they don’t allow Blacks to join.’

“I asked, ‘Have you applied?’

“No, she hadn’t.

“This is the same kind of mentality we’re talking about when I talk about someone not going down to register or not running for office because ‘Blacks don’t do this.’ ”

Recent events, Proposition 13, the Bakke Supreme Court case, and decisions favoring the seniority system, disturb her.

“I think that some of the kinds of problems that are cropping up are the result of a settling process. It will be interesting to see which way these things go because I think it can set us back considerably if this trend continues.” She believes the country will be in for “a lot of turmoil and disruption if that happens.” She declines to speculate on the form of turmoil though, doubting that anyone could have predicted the riots of the 60s. She advocates protest through the ballot box. “That’s when it is being used properly.”

If change indeed occurs, what kind of society would she like to see it produce?

“If you’re talking about the ultimate – what I consider to be the kind of situation where we’ll say ‘Yes, we’ve arrived and things are really great.’ I think that’s the time when people can truly move into society without the overriding factor being race or sex.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever see this in my lifetime. I really don’t. I doubt it.”

Nonetheless, she appears determined to work for change, as determined as when she won the right to enter the University of Alabama. She notes that James Hood, who entered with her, recently said he would not go through the harrowing experience again.

“I feel just the opposite. If I had to do it again, I would. There is absolutely no question in my mind … I couldn’t accept that condition anymore today than I could back in 1961 when Wallace was saying I couldn’t go to that school.”

Christena Bledsoe, a former newspaper reporter, is a free-lance writer living in Atlanta.

Atlanta Metro School Suit: A Search for Equality

By Marcia Cross-Briscoe

Vol. 1, No. 2, 1978, pp. 11-12

Atlanta may be “the city too busy to hate” but its process of desegregating its public school system reflects the trends of most communities in the South since the Brown decision in 1954. Between 1958 and 1973 five desegregation lawsuits were filed against school systems in metro Atlanta, and one is still pending in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.

Emma Armour v. Jack P. Nix has been referred to as the “Metro suit” because the city of Atlanta and six surrounding counties were first charged with segregation in public education. The Compromise Plan of 1973 which stemmed from an earlier case, Calhoun v. Cook, was supposed to solve this problem; however, the proposed remedies did not significantly integrate the public schools. Roughly 20 all-White schools were integrated but the remaining Black schools, which were in the majority, were left untouched by the plan.

Several national leaders of the NAACP spoke out against the compromise which was created by the Board of Education of Atlanta and the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP. They charged that it violated national NAACP policy by leaving Black students in segregated schools. However, the plan was approved and busing of some 5,000 students to White schools occurred.

The Metro suit was filed in June of 1972 by parents who felt that their children were not receiving an adequate education in the Atlanta public schools. Mrs. Ethel Mathews, a plaintiff in the suit, said, “What we are searching for is equality for our children and the Metro suit is the only way to get it.” The case was not presented before a judge until November 1977 because the court was awaiting the decision in a similiar case in Richmond, Va. During those 5 years some of the parents who had filed the suit moved from the city or had their children transferred to other schools within the area. Attorneys from the Georgia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are representing the plaintiffs in the suit. They are seeking a metropolitan remedy whereby students would be transferred across city and county lines for the purpose of desegregating all the schools. A decision from the Court is likely by the end of 1978.

In the three days of hearings in November, the attorneys tried to prove that residential segregation exists in the metropolitan area and was deliberately created by actions of the State of Georgia operating through its governmental agencies. They presented evidence to support the fact that in 1924 the city of Atlanta created residential apartheid by enacting a zoning ordinance which designated the western corridor of Atlanta as a Black area. The North Avenue-Ponce de Leon “line” was also designated as a racial residential line, and the area north of this line was maintained for Whites only. Thus, schools remained segregated due to housing patterns created by government.

The plaintiffs further tried to establish the existence of a true metropolitan area. Their controversial, expert witness, Dr. Karl Taeuber, an urban sociologist, testified that “the Atlanta metropolitan area is an integrated social, economic and market area and the segregative actions of government in one portion of the area have and have had a segregative effect in all other portions of the area.”

The defendants testimony was heard in March at which time the attorneys for the various school systems tried to get their clients dismissed from the case. Of the original 11 defendants, only four remain. The court ruled that there was an “absence of significant interdistrict effects” to warrant the inclusion of Clayton, Cobb, Douglas, and Gwinnett counties, and the cities of Buford, Decatur and Marietta in the suit. Only the city of Atlanta, Fulton county, and DeKalb county, and the state of Georgia remain defendants in the case.

However, recent findings by David Armor, a witness for the defendants, support the plaintiffs rationale for a metropolitan remedy. In a report entitled “White Flight, Demographic Transition and the Future of School Desegregation,” he found that desegregation can cause accelerated White flight, particularly in larger school districts with substantial minority enrollment (20%) and in districts with accessible White suburbs. Armor showed that in Florida school districts where metropolitan desegregation plans are in effect, there is very little White flight to the suburbs as opposed to school districts where only inner-city desegregation is occuring.

Proposed remedies for desegregating the Atlanta area are a significant part of the case; however, they were not allowed to be introduced into the plaintiffs’ testimony. At present under the Compromise, a student can participate in a program called the Majority to Minority (M&M) Program. He may choose to transfer from a school where his race is in the majority to one where his race is in the minority. These voluntary transfers are not working as effectively as possible, however, because only Black students are choosing to go to schools where their race is in the minority, and they are being put on waiting lists to get into White schools that are supposed to accommodate them because of this program.

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Attorneys for the plaintiffs in Armour propose the creation of different types of schools which are ideally suited for an area such as Atlanta. Government management centers, health practice centers, design centers, linguistic skills centers, and an aviation center could all be implemented if a metropolitan remedy were ordered for Atlanta, Fulton County and DeKalb County.

“This is not a busing case,” said Margie Hames, attorney for the plaintiffs. Alternatives to busing which could be implemented are expanded neighborhood schools, clustering schools, magnet schools, and the use of drop off schools by commuters from the suburbs.

The controlling law on metropolitan school desegregation is set forth in the Detroit, Wilmington, Del., and Louisville, Ky. cases. In the Wilmington case, Evans v. Buchanon, originally filed in 1957, the majority opinion of the court required inter-district busing. The details of their desegregation plan have not been completely worked out, but it will probably have a bearing on Atlanta’s plan should the court rule in favor of a metropolitan remedy.

Several factors make this suit controversial. For one thing, under the Compromise plan, a new organizational structure of the school system was created. Blacks were put into key administrative positions for the first time. According to Dr. Barbara Jackson of Atlanta University’s School of Education, a metropolitan desegregation plan might dilute the hard-won power of Blacks in the Atlanta school system. Whites would likely become the majority decision-makers in a cross-country plan.

The recent trend of White movement back into the city is another factor that influences the character of the case. Presently, Atlanta has a majority Black population and the public schools are predominately Black. However, many young White families are moving into the city and want to send their children to public schools, thus decreasing the press for a metropolitan remedy.

The issue of morality is a concern. Dr. Benjamin Mays, president of the Atlanta Board of Education, testified for the defendants that Atlanta schools have done the job outlined for them by the court in the Compromise plan of 1973. He calls the suit a “money-making scheme by lawyers.”

Whether the suit is a “money-making scheme” or not, it tries to address issues which were not solved by the Compromise of 1973. In this respect it is trying to promote change for the better and a future for education in the South which is based on innovations in learning rather than placement of bodies.

Marcia Cross-Briscoe is a recent graduate of Emory University, majoring in English and Black Studies. She resides in Atlanta.

Dooty’s Last Stand

By Jerry Bledsoe

Vol. 1, No. 2, 1978, pp. 13-15

She had thought this would be the day, and all morning Luemer Plumley, whom her sisters call Dooty, sat on the porch watching and waiting.

She watched expectantly as the power company truck lurched up the rough mountain road and one of the men got out and climbed the pole and tinkered with the wires at the top. She watched as they went on up to the church and passed back down again. And still she waited, but they didn’t return.

It was almost two o’clock in the afternoon when she finally broke her silence and spoke to her sister, Della.

“Deller, I just as well cook us some dinner,” she said. “We’re not a-goina git no power today.”

“Well, Dooty,” said Della, “is that what you wuz a-waitin’ fer?”

With that, Luemer went into the rickety house and fired up the big wood cookstove in the tiny kitchen. She had dreaded it. It was a hot August day, and the heat in the kitchen was soon almost unbearable. On a similar day a couple of weeks earlier, the preacher had come to visit and found Luemer cooking dinner. She had looked at him and said, “If hell’s any hotter than this little kitchen, I sure don’t want to go there, do you?”

Besides, she had been looking forward to using her new stove. It wasn’t a new stove, actually, just a small, used electric range. It sat in the corner across from the wood stove, plugged up and ready, but powerless, and now Luemer would have to wait for another day to use it.

She guessed she could wait all right. After all, she had been waiting a good part of her life for electricity to come up Glassy Mountain.

“Been a-lookin’ to git it up here fer 25 years and it didn’t come,” she said, “just till we got so old we can’t enjoy it.”

Glassy Mountain is in an area of Greenville County, South Carolina, known as the Dark Corner, once a notorious moonshining district on the North Carolina border. It had always been sparsely settled, mainly by Plumleys. It was one of the last mountain enclaves where electricity had not reached.

The poles came now, marching up the new road, a long, winding, unpaved gash in the mountain, so steep and dangerous some mountain people refused to use it and still drove the old road, rutted and narrow, on the other side of the mountain. But others came up the new road, people from towns and cities far distant. They came in cars and trucks and jeeps, and some of them came carrying strange contraptions, great wings that they strapped to themselves so that they could leap off the cliffs at the top of the mountain and glide to landings on Highway 11, far below.

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Back in the winter a jeep had come, filled with whooping people, sliding and spinning in the snow, pulling a sled wildly behind, and just in front of the house, a man had come flying headover-heels out of the jeep and landed on the bank in front of the house with a sickening thud. The jeep had gone on and left him, and Luemer and her sister watched, terrified, from behind the door as he struggled, cursing, in the ditch.

“Every time he’d git up, he’d take the longest pause you’ve ever seen,” Luemer would say, recalling the scene, “then he’d go back down again.”

Finally, the jeep had returned, and the occupants got out and snatched up the man and strapped him across the hood, tied like a trophy deer, and then the jeep careened off down the mountain. The next morning, when Luemer listened to the news on the battery radio and heard a man had been found murdered in a ditch, she was sure it was that man she had watched struggling in the ditch.

Such goings-on the sisters had never seen before, but they had become a regular thing since the new road had come. “All the time,” Luemer said. “It’s a sight. It’s awful.” It had caused her to start keeping a gun close at hand. “No sir, they better not git off that road out there,” she said. “I’m not a’goina fool with them ol’ drunkards.”

For most of their lives, the sisters’ isolation on Glassy Mountain had been rarely infringed. There were only three of them now. There had been four until April, when Ellen, the youngest, the talkative one, died in a hospital. Mattie, too, had been in the hospital recently. The oldest at 78, she was staying with her son, off the mountain.

Only Della, 75, and Luemer, 67, remained at the old homeplace. Of the two, only Luemer had never left. Della had married and gone off down the mountain for 21 years until her husband died in 1957, when she returned. Luemer never saw any reason for marrying or leaving the mountain.

There had been 10 of them – five boys and five girls when they moved to this house in 1919 from another house on the mountain. It was an old house even then, built around a log cabin. Their father died the year after they moved in, and through the years, the sisters watched the others go one by one. Their mother died in the house in 1946. “She laid and prayed all the time for her grandchildren to come home from the Army,” Luemer said, “and just as soon as the last one come home, she died.”

In all those years, neither the house nor the sisters’ way of living had changed very much. They still cooked on the woodstove, fetched water from the spring, read by the light of oil lamps, plowed their garden with the help of a mule. Chickens and guinea hens scratched in the bare front yard as they always had, and hounds still lounged under the front porch. Luemer would allow no cats in the house, no dogs on the porch.

But then the new road had come, bringing people and trouble from distant places, and finally the electric hues had followed (although not until the sisters, and their nephew down the road, and the small church up

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the hill had paid $1,500 each to the electric co-operative), and now Luemer knew things would never again be the s neon Glassy Mountain. She had already heard that people from Greenville were coming to build vacation homes nearby.

Even after Luemer and Della had paid the money to bring the electric lines to their house, it had looked for a while as if they might not get electricity after all. The house had to be wired. An electrician showed up one day and told her it would cost $2,000 to do the job, but the sisters didn’t have any money left.

Then Jim Tankersley heard about it. He lives in River Falls, not far from Glassy Mountain. He knows the mountain and the people who live on it well. For more than 25 years, Jim Tankersley was a federal agent, a revenuer, one of the government’s top still-busters. He has always been close to the people in the area. He came up the mountain with a friend from Greenville, Shorty Vaughn, and they wired the house at no charge. Not long afterward, Shorty came back bringing the electric range.

“He said he’d fetch a Kelvinator refrigerator next Sunday or the next,” Luemer said. “I wouldn’t have had lights atall if it hadn’t been for keepin’ us milk. I told ’em all along I didn’t care about power. But we love our milk and butter, and you can’t keep it in this heat.”

Luemer didn’t know what the holdup was about for getting the power on. She’d thought the men might come back after dinner, but a storm came instead. It brought sharp lightning and heavy black clouds that sent water rushing down the gullies on the road, “a real field soaker,” Luemer called it.

When it was over, she and Della sat on the porch with visitors, enjoying the freshness and coolness the rain had brought.

Luemer told about laying in wait in the chickenho use for a black snake that was stealing her eggs and finding nine unbroken eggs inside it when she killed it. Della, a thin, frail woman, told how she swells so bad and never feels good anymore and has to go to bed before dark every day.

The subject of television came up. Luemer laughed when she was asked if she’d ever watched TV. “I’ve not watched one enough for my head to stop swimmin’. Only time I ever watched one was Billy Graham, that big preacher, and ever’ time I was about to git interested, they cut ‘im off.”

“Would you watch it if you had one?” she was asked.

“I guess everybody does, I would too.”

Two chickens got into a dispute over something one of them had scratched up in the yard. The dogs came out from under the porch where Della had shooed them and loped off toward the road.

“They goin’ now to hunt a squirrel,” Della said.

Somebody mentioned how nice and cool and quiet it was on the mountain now, and Luemer looked at the electric lines that still dangled, unconnected on the side of the house and said she expected that surely the men would come tomorrow and cut on the power so she wouldn’t have to put up with that hot kitchen again.

Jerry Bledsoe, a free-lance writer and a staff columnist for the Charlotte Observer, has served as a contributing editor for Esquire Magazine. He resides in Asheboro. North Carolina.

‘My Soul Is Rested’ Stirs Unrest In Marketing

By Bill Cutler

Vol. 1, No. 2, 1978, pp. 16-18

“White people don’t have much experience in running into that sort of prejudice. It fills you with a powerless anger. So I think it was maybe good for me, having recorded this history in as sensitive a way as I could, to then have the educational experience of feeling in a small way what millions of citizens in the South have had to deal with in a large way every day.” Howell Raines spoke deliberately, calmly, without anger, about the marketing and distribution of his highly acclaimed book, My Soul Is Rested, an oral history of the civil rights movement published last October.

He sat in his small office on the 17th floor of downtown Atlanta’s Peachtree Center. On a wall behind his right shoulder were tacked four demographic maps of the Deep South and Border South region over which he has jurisdiction as Southeastern national correspondent for the New York Times. Behind his left shoulder were posted mementoes of a Klan rally he covered in Tupelo, Mississippi, two months previously: an application form for membership (“I certify that I am a White citizen over 18 years of age of Gentile descent”) and a catalog advertising bumper stickers, T-shirts, and other paraphernalia bearing the message “In Racial Purity Lies the Nation’s Security.” On its cover, a red-white-and-blue Uncle Sam jabbed his forefinger in the familiar Army-poster pose next to an inscription: “THE KLAN NEEDS YOU.”

A short, compact man of 35 with large, slightly protruding brown eyes, small mouth, a jawline beginning to lose its definition, and a dense thicket of tightly ringleted brown hair graying at the edges, Raines looks like the god Bacchus if Bacchus spent several years eating barbecue at Southern political rallies. He grew up in a working-class district of Birmingham, the son of parents from rural North Alabama “who did not teach racial prejudice as an article of faith.”

Raines wrote of the world his parents grew up knowing in a first novel, Whiskey Man, published last year by Viking. “The people of that area are at once of the South and not of it,” Raines said. “The traditional Southern racist code doesn’t exist up there. There are no Black people, there were no slaves. Systematic, casual racism is not a part of that world, and it’s a tremendous advantage for a White Southerner, especially one who doesn’t come from well educated or affluent people, to have grown up in a home where racism is not taught in a systematic way, which was the case with me. ‘Nigger’ was not a word that was allowed, conversationally, in my home – or at least not encouraged. When you put that up against the vast canvas of Birmingham, that’s a very small thing, but psychologically I think it’s a big thing.”

After graduating from Birmingham Southern, Raines went to work as a cub reporter for the Birmingham Post-Herald. “Being in Birmingham in 1963 and then becoming a newspaperman were the things that helped to educate me about race and gave me what has become a lifelong fascination with the civil rights movement. In the South at that time, unless you were bold enough -and in Birmingham in 1963, this was a considerable boldness – to become involved directly, there were only one or two ways that you could actually see what was happening. That was to be a policeman or a reporter. So, being a reporter was very lucky for me, in that, without having to make that very great personal commitment, I got a ringside seat.”

Eleven years later, Raines took the financial and professional gamble of quitting his job as political editor at the Atlanta Constitution to assemble the material for My Soul Is Rested. “One of the reasons I did My Soul Is Rested is, knowing that world as I did, I became fascinated with the idea of moral courage. I wanted to talk to people who had challenged this monolithic system of – not only segregation , but of segregation enforced by terror.”

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The book was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons and received excellent reviews from influential publications like the New York Times and was chosen as an alternate selection of the Literary Guild, but Raines began hearing complaints from friends in Atlanta and other parts of the Southeast that My Soul Is Rested was difficult to obtain. “I became alarmed when the man who is now president of the American Booksellers Association, Charles Haslam, came to me and told me that Putnam’s regional salesman for the Southeast was making negative presentations about my book, negative presentations with racial overtones. Haslam quoted this man as saying, ‘This is a good book, but we’re not going to do anything with it because we don’t think it has any sales potential. No one wants to read a book about Black people by a White man.'”

The issue of race became even more pointed when Raines dealt with Rich’s department store in Atlanta about stocking the book. “Faith Brunson (chief book buyer at Rich’s downtown store) told me that she would buy only a few copies of My Soul Is Rested because people were not interested in the subject matter, and her direct statement to me was – as accurate as I can quote it, and this is pretty close to direct – that ‘The only people who will buy that book are Julian Bond and a few of those people.’ So, alarmed by this, I contacted Putnam and asked them to contact Miss Brunson and try to overcome her reluctance, and I was told that this was done, prior to the time that I was to have an autograph party at Rich’s. When I showed up there, there were something like 50 copies of Whiskey Man and three or four of My Soul Is Rested. I then protested again to Putnam’s, and I have in my correspondence a letter from them saying that they had again approached Miss Brunson about stocking the book and were rebuffed.

“I would from time to time call Rich’s and ask about the book, Raines continued, in which case I was invariably told that there was a heavy demand for the book, that it was not in stock, that it was a ‘special-order’ book – that is the terminology used – and that it would take six weeks to get it in. Frustrated by this, I finally was able to discuss this situation with another employee of Rich’s, who I’m not going to name because I think it might cause the person some career problems, who told me that my book was not being stocked because I had, quote, a problem, unquote, in the book department.

“The clear implication of the conversation was that the problem was antipathy toward the content of the book. I have never pursued it directly with Rich’s. My frank feeling was that it was useless to do so. I’ve lived in the South long enough to know that when you encounter

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those sorts of attitudes, it’s often impossible to change them. So, when I heard that local people were having difficulties getting My Soul Is Rested, I then set up sort of an informal system whereby I would order the book from Haslam’s bookstore in St. Petersburg (where Raines at the time was political editor for the St. Petersburg Times), where it was heavily stocked, and have it shipped into Atlanta, and I could do it much more quickly than Rich’s. It takes them six weeks, and it took me about a day to two days to handle each order.”

A check of major booksellers in Atlanta on July 6 confirmed Raines’s experience. An employee in Rich’s downtown department said My Soul Is Rested would have to be special-ordered and would take six weeks to arrive. The Ansley Mall Book Store regularly carried the hook, had sold over 20 copies since January, and could restock it in a week. Oxford Book Store had just sold its last copy, but could have the book in store again in a week to 10 days. B. Dalton Booksellers downtown carried it, had sold it “extremely well,” and could reorder it in four days. Brentano’s downtown had five in stock, had sold 10 to 20 since last fall, and could replenish their supply in “less than a week.’ Doubleday had never stocked it, but had special-ordered several copies for customers, and UPS had shipped those in less than a week.

Asked about sales of My Soul Is Rested at Rich’s, Faith Brunson said, “We don’t give out that kind of information.” Was the book in stock at Rich’s? “The only way we can tell that is to do an instock count in 12 different stores.” Was it in stock at the downtown store? “I don’t know,” said the downtown store’s chief buyer.

“I might as well be explicit about the import of this experience,” Howell Raines said, speaking very deliberately. “I think that Rich’s did not stock My Soul Is Rested because of the racial prejudice of its chief buyer, the antipathy toward it and its subject matter by its chief buyer. In her remarks to me, Faith made it clear that part of this antipathy arose from her personal negative feelings about Black people who had been involved in the civil rights movement. I can speculate that the fact that one of the major sit-ins of the civil rights movement took place in Rich’s about 20 paces from the book department at a time when Rich’s was defending segregation may have been a factor in contributing to that negative feeling.”

Bill Cutler, a frequent writer on Atlanta and Southeast politics, is the associate editor of Brown’s Guide to Georgia.

My Soul Is Rested can be ordered from the publisher, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, or from the following bookstores: Halsam Books, St. Petersburg, Fla.; Smith and Hardwick, Birmingham, Ala.; Old New York Book Store, Atlanta, Ga.; Ansley Mall Book Store, Atlanta; and Davison’s Department Store, Atlanta.

THE CHAINS THAT BIND: ERA and the Southern Black Woman

By Sylvia Crudup Cole

Vol. 1, No. 2, 1978, pp. 19-21

Congress voted recently to extend -the- period for the states to ratify the ERA until June 30, 1982. This action, however, did not have support of many Southern Congressmen. They showed the same hostility to the amendment already shown by Southern state legislators, whose lack of support has so far helped block ratification. Since 1972, 35 states have ratified the proposed federal constitutional amendment and only three are needed for ERA to become law. Of the 15 states left to ratify, 10 of them, astoundingly, are Southern.

Yet, not all the blame for the status of the ERA can be placed on the male-dominated Southern Congressional delegates and legislators. Ironically, Black women in the South, who suffer greater discrimination than their White counterparts because of both racism and sexism and who probably would be one of the prime beneficiaries of a ratified ERA, have done little to support it.

Their lack of support for the ERA is difficult to understand in light of their extremely disadvantaged position. Recent studies show that a great disparity still exists in the salaries of Southern minority employees and nonminority employees in both the public and private sectors. According to a study prepared by the Southern Regional Council which examined the employment practices in

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city government in 16 medium-sized Southern cities, Black women were found to be the lowest on the totem pole in all instances. In fact, in 1975 no Black women earned more than $13,000 per year and in all 16 cities combined only 62 earned more than $8,000 per year.

The Southern Black woman is indeed at the bottom of the socio-economic scale. Besides low earnings, she is more likely than her White counterpart to work in menial, back-breaking service occupations. Atop that, she is more often the breadwinner in the household. For minority families, one in three homes are headed by a woman, as compared with one out of eight for White women. Among married women, two out of three work because of pressing economic need. However, their annual median income is only $7,831 as compared to $8,376 for White females. This compares to a median income of $10,222 for Black men and $14,272 for White men.

The ERA is supposed to be a tool, as the Civil Rights legislation is a tool, for insuring the rights of groups facing both social and institutionalized racism. If ratified, it could help insure equal fringe benefits in employment, like equal chances for advancement, improved maternity leaves, free and adequate child care and safe and legal abortions, all areas of major concern and significance to Black women. Why then doesn’t the Southern Black woman actively support the movement to ratify the ERA?

According to research collected from indepth conversations with numerous Black women and men, Black women’s lack of support for the ERA is not due to unconcern for their plight, but rather to three deep-seated myths that they are still struggling with about themselves.

They are (1) the myth of Black matriarchy; (2) the notion that Black women are emasculators of Black men; and (3) that they have always been liberated. A fourth factor that comes into play is the fact that the Women’s Movement is often viewed as a White, middle-class issue.

The first myth derived from the fact that a significant number of minority homes were headed by women, especially in the South where Black men found it even more difficult than Black women to provide for families. The idea developed that these female-headed households were deliberately created and perpetuated by the Black woman, and that it was indicative of the domination of females in the Black culture.

This myth has caused many Black women to work hard at freeing themselves of the matriarchial figure by limiting themselves to the traditional role of homemaker. They feel they should not be out front changing people’s lives and attitudes. These women, therefore, will claim limited interest of show outright resistance to women’s rights. The adverse effects of the myth of the Black matriarchy are so deeply ingrained that some Black women fail to even see the need to change their own lives.

Some women fear that rights for minority men will be diminished at the expense of minority women. This fear is even more highly expressed in areas like the South where only recently minority males have begun to gain access to positions of power in greater numbers. (An SRC study on the employment practices in Atlanta city government revealed that Black males in significant numbers have moved into the kind of government jobs that historically were held only by White males, but Black women were again left behind in low-status, lowsalaried positions).

As Women’s groups have often pointed out, there is a direct correlation between what women are trying to achieve and what minorities are trying to accomplish. Passage of the Equal Rights Amendment could promote relationships based on equal partnership without the need for establishing any dominant party based on irrelevant criteria such as one’s sex. This could thus bring minority women and men closer together freeing them to work on other priority issues.

However, minority women concerned about their plight express the fear that equal rights for women may cause conflict between them and their men. Some outright reject the Movement on this basis alone. One prominent minority woman concerned about unity of her race declared recently that she was Black first and female second. It is unfortunate that minority women should have to feel that they must identify first as a minority and second as a woman. Discussions of this type cause some minority women to feel they should not aspire to high achievement as women in non-traditional areas. The effect on some others is that they should not aspire to high achievement even in traditional areas.

The result of this kind of thinking in Black women is not only a denial of their own competence, submerging their ability and their own real need to aspire, but also promotes a decrease in the availability of minorities who could move into higher level positions. In effect, it contributes directly to limited opportunities for the race.

Thus, unwittingly and unknowingly, minority men and women contribute to the shrinking of the minority resource pool which ultimately decreases opportunities for both. They may inadvertently reinforce the concept of male supremacy for the minority male while trying to promote racial unity.

The other issue which has caused some women a source of conflict is the belief that Black women have always been liberated simply because they enjoyed greater access to the majority culture than Black men. This access was due mainly to the fact that Black women held positions as domestic workers in White homes. The role of being breadwinner for their families caused many Blacks, even Black women themselves, to feel that they were already liberated, thus having little need to press for women’s rights.

The fallacy here comes from a misinterpretation of what liberation really is. Liberation is freedom to choose

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– the right to set limits for oneself and not have those limits set by others. It means having the right to choose and to enjoy job and career opportunities. When a woman is forced to work out of economic necessity, she should have equal access to training, education and jobs that allow her to become what she wishes for herself.

The clear mandate which would be provided by the Equal Rights Amendment is critically needed by the Black woman in the South. We need to look at equal opportunity in the South in employment, housing, child care, health care and credit and educational opportunities. Black women in the South are especially vulnerable to discriminatory practices prevalent in the job market. The South can ill afford to avoid or oppose the issue of equal rights. ERA can be a valuable tool for equality on all fronts and it is a movement which the Southern Black woman must join and embrace fully.

Sylvia Crudup Cole is an education consultant with the State Department of Public Instruction in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The Unchanged Patterns of Changing Migration

By Steve Suitts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: Minority Participation in Construction Of Atlanta Airport

By Dave Miller and Gordon Kenna

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CITY ACTIVITIES

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

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

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

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

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