When Shall We Overcome?

By C. Eric Lincoln

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

A man died. That was eleven years ago.

A man died who ought not to have died: not because he was a Black man, but because he was a good man;

not because he had a dream, but because the dream he had was so critical for a people who had forgotten how to dream; for a nation whose dreams had lost their meaning;

not because he was a Christian, but because in being truly Christian his love for his fellow man transcended all religions and all diviions of men;

not because his death was a personal loss for those who knew him and loved him, but because his dying was a national tragedy for those who believe in the promise of America; and because his death was a temporary triumph for those who would deny that promise. For the promise of America is the American Dream, but for too many Americans it is a Dream that was never meant to be. There are those who would be Killers of the Dream, and for them the routine expression of the American Way of Life is the consignment of the poor and the undefended to the American Way of Death through poverty, disease, deception and discrimination.

Our greater tragedy is that the people we seem to kill most readily are the people whose dreams we find most troubling: dreams that refuse to articulate with the prevailing way of doing things here in America. And so with the poor and the defenseless, we kill the Abraham Lincolns, the John Kennedys, the Malcolm Xs, the Martin Luther Kings and whomever else dares to dream against the grain of the waythings are. We kill the dreamers to get at the dream in the childish belief that dreams die with the man.

Not so. Dreams die hard, if ever they die at all.

For no matter the name of the dreamer, once a dream is spoken, it belongs to the people. It lives in the people, and it can only die if the people reject it, or if the people themselves are exterminated. So let it be known that whomever would kill a dream must be prepared to first kill all the people who believe in it; or else to so narcotize them with circuses, or dazzle them with counterfeits that they forget the dream and the dreamer, and succumb to illusion and deceit. The nations who have traveled that road have inevitably paid the price, for when the people lose their dreams, they lose their confidence. When they lose their confidence, they lose their self-respect. And when they lose their self-respect, their freedom can be taken away from them.

Today our cities are floundering in crisis and decay. Our jails are filled to overflowing. Our public schools have been turned into holding pens and battlegrounds; men and women who want to work, and who need to work to survive with dignity, walk the streets and haunt the taverns for want of jobs.

Those who challenge the way things are find themselves harassed and intimidated, or silenced with unjust incarceration. They are the political prisoners Andrew Young had the temerity to bring to the world’s attention. Those of doubtful and sober minds turn to introspection; and those who believe in the righteousness of God wonder at the limits of His patience and tremble in the anticipation of His justice. Though we search and re-search the accumulated records of our national comportment, we find in them no compelling reasons for solace or satisfaction. It seems clear that somewhere America has gone wrong! It is not so much the empty pews where God and man used to meet that mark the people’s disaffection and dereliction, as it is the empty faces, the empty hearts, the empty lives.

The divorce rate is astronomical; the suicide rate is unbelievable. The murder rate far exceeds that for any other “civilized” nation in the world. This is America. The showplace of democracy; the citadel of freedom. A nation under God. The place where dreams come true. What happened? What happened to America? What has happened to us, for we make America what it is?

Our tragedy is that the American Dream has been compromised by false visions and spurious promises of those who would demean that dream. Our hope, unsubstantiated by performance, is too often made the hope of children, or the hope of fools – uninformed, Uninquiring, and unassessed. The characteristic political art of our times is delusion by confusion – the diffraction and scattering of half-truths and un-truths to the end that reality is obscured under an avalanche of words which do not mean anything, and are not intended to mean anything. Their function is merely to confuse the real issues and thus to silence opposition and paralyze response.

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More than that, we have developed a frightening affinity for self-delusion, which is the art of putting an acceptable face on what is patently unacceptable through the manipulation of words and the meaning of words. We have become masters at persuading people to believe what they know isn’t so through the employment of a kind of lingual cosmetology. When spending what you haven’t got is dismissed as “a negative cash flow,” and when shacking up is explained as “experimental living,” or when the murder of innocent individuals becomes quasirespectable because it is defined as a “contract,” or “extreme social alienation,” we have gone a far piece down the road toward legitimizing the illegitimate, and blurring the lines by which civilizations have traditionally sought to order human existence and give it direction.

The ultimate objective of such casuistry is, of course, the avoidance of human responsibility. If up and down are indistinguishable, and if all corners are round, then morality has no meaning, and one act is as good as another, barring some temporary inconvenience. No one can be held accountable if the conditions of accountability are sufficiently confused, or if there is no way to determine the place where the good and the not-good, the true and the not-true, the beautiful and the ugly separate and depart from each other.

The immediate, practical benefit of a philosophy of moral indistinction is release from the necessity of making choices. If no ethical principles can be clearly identified, then the implications for restraint and circumspection in such traditional areas of high moral concern as religion, politics, sexual behavior, human and family relationships soon vanish, individual accountability becomes obsolete, and human relations are reduced to a state of nature in which life becomes increasingly nasty, mean, solitary, brutish and short.

In a swiftly paced society such as our own, there is increasingly less opportunity for reflection and introspection.

Decisions are ad hoc: choices involving the most serious consequences are made on the flip of a coin. Millions of Americans, who are otherwise rational and intelligent, have come near to giving up making choices altogether. They have accepted instead a pre-determined print-out of their behavior based on the doubtful projections of astrology, bypassing reason, science and experience in a childlike pursuit of fantasy and easy answers. Yet, our eagerness to consign to the stars the burden of rational choice is perhaps one more evidence of the increasing onerousness of human responsibility, the release from which we struggle so vainly to accomplish.

Our destiny is not in the stars. Neither is the truth we need to make accountability reasonable and responsibility endurable. Nor is responsibility the exclusive province of any particular race, or sex, or age group, or political party, or church or denomination. It is of critical importance now to realize that our destiny is where it always was, that our national greatness can never transcend our national behavior, and that our national responsibility begins with the earnest concern for the welfare of all the people. What is the people’s welfare? It was spelled out for all time in the founding documents of the commonwealth: It is life – which includes the means of earning a decent living at a decent wage. It is liberty, which means freedom of conscience and freedom from unjust restraint or incarceration. It is the pursuit of happiness, which means the right of equal participation in all of the common values of this society regardless of your race, your sex, or your religion. Too many Americans are penalized, not because they have done wrong, but because they have the wrong name, or the wrong address, or the wrong color, or the wrong sex, or the wrong attitude, or the vrong political opinion, or the wrong friends, or the wrong amount of money.

A man died eleven years ago.

A great man died with a dream that we would overcome the great wrong that makes it so wrong to be poor, or to be Black or to be without the privileges of status and power. It is time now to get on with the resuscitation of a dream that never was, but could have been, rather than to continue to live perpetually in the shadow of that dream, or in our weakness and despair consign in to destruction. It is time for the high principles which once distinguished our efforts and encouraged our success to be brought out of hiding. It is time to shake off the shackles of accommodation to chauvinism; time to lift a torch of conviction; time to get on with the process of humanizing our deteriorating social order. It is time to ask ourselves, “What happened to the promise that was America?” It is time to give substance to the Dream of the gentle Dreamer who eleven years ago surrendered his life on the altar of America’s racial intransigence.

C. Eric Lincoln is Professor of Religion at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Declining Donkeydom in Presleyland

By Boyd Lewis

Vol. 1, No. 5, 1979, pp. 6

It was 100 years ago that cartoonist Thomas Nast decided to portray the Democratic Party as a flop-eared jackass and the Republican Party as an elephant of clearly low-wattage intelligence. Amazingly, neither party felt insulted by the nasty Mr. Nast and over the years the animal icons came to symbolize party identity and outlook.

Some years the impish little Demo donkey romps merrily around the ponderous GOP elephant and in others the elephant stomps the Bejesus out of the donkey in the manner of a wonderful underground cartoon called “Bambi Meets Godzilla”.

Politics has meant Party and Party has meant Politics for as long as anyone now alive can remember in this country. But in Memphis this December, amid a Wagnerian weather scheme that featured tornado warnings, howling rainstorms and an ice incrustation, the mainstream part of the USA showed that it is now held together by spit and bailing wire. The donkey is fast going the way of the dinosaur.

The Democrats were lured to Memphis for its first mid-term conference under the impression that the city would be warmer than conventionseeking Denver and drier than Seattle, another contender. As it turned out, it was colder, wetter and more miserable than almost any place in the country for the entire run of the miniconvention.

And the Democratic National Committee thought Memphis would represent a massed hymn to the policies of Jimmy Carter, a highly publicized show of unity, joy and Prussian organization. But as with the weather, Memphis was a ferocious disappointment. The party’s 2,700 delegates and alternates, the insiders in the 1976 campaign and footsoldiers for 1980, were split seven ways from Sunday on the most basic issues of party policy how well or poorly Carter has been doing, how the Democrats should deal with health care, defense, urban development and employment in the next election.

What was excruciatingly clear in Memphis was that the grand old coalitions which have kept the Democrats in power or close to it since the days of Franklin Roosevelt are no more. Gone is the linkage of organized labor, liberals, the cities, Blacks and the poor which interwove the special interests of each into bloc votes for the Democrats.

The George Meany/Alan Barkan/COPE/Teamsters variety of labor political operatives boycotted the Memphis gathering. Unions that did show up – NEA (National Education Association), AFSCME (Association of Federal, State, County and Municipal Employees), auto workers, machinists and the like – were all hotly opposed to the president’s domestic spending slashes and they provided the core of disenchantment on the conference floor which put lump after lump in the smooth, controlled flow of resolutions from the delegates.

White liberals, the veterans, the antiwar movement supporters, the environmentalists, Clean Gene, HHH and McGovern supporters, either closed ranks with the party hierarchy or pecked away at the edges in flaccid coalitions like the Democratic Agenda.

New coalitions rose and the most stunning was the woman’s caucus. The women and the women alone held together through the conference, got most of their resolutions passed and got ringing endorsements of the ERA from Jimmy on down the line. Indeed, the only thing Carter said at his keynote address which got the delegates to their feet was his reendorsement of ERA.

But beyond the internal events of the mini-convention, the Democrats and the Republicans are in big trouble. More voters failed to vote in the 1976 election (71 million) than there are registered Democrats, the party which runs most states, Congress and the White House. Few people vote straight party tickets any more. Single issue voting (tax relief, support of Israel, outlawing abortion, etc.) undercuts the entire rationale of a political party, which strives to provide a little of many things to the most people.

In Memphis, the donkeys of December met to show unity but revealed down-to-the-heart fractures; to support Carter but only by 2/3 of their votes; to discuss issues but only in a rigid format that choked off debate and angered the little democrats: to reinforce coalitions but saw them fall and new ones arise.

But most important of all, the Democratic Party failed to deal with a threat to its reason for being – the party of government helping, not government obsessed by the bottom line. President Carter’s $l5-$l8 billion cuts from health, job, city, education and minority assistance programs while boosting the Pentagon’s budget II percent for the next fiscal year is seen by party liberals as sheer neoNixonism, a Republican ploy if ever there was one.

Carter’s junking of the party’s basic philosophy was given little serious debate by the Memphis miniconvention. Those probing for cancer in the party’s body politick need look no further than that.

Boyd Lewis is an Atlanta free-lance writer.

The Wallace Phenomenon

By Dale Russakoff

Vol. 1, No. 5, 1979, pp. 7-9

Perhaps a rosy-cheeked, 18-year-old beauty said it best when she pushed toward the center of attention at “George Wallace Appreciation Day” in Montgomery recently.

The crowd around him was hugging, kissing and praising the frail, outgoing governor, who reached out from his wheelchair with both hands to grab them, calling most of them by name.

Finally, the girl pushed forward and threw her arms around his neck. “I love you, Gov. Wallace,” she blurted out. “You’re the only governor I’ve ever known.”

A beaming Wallace squeezed the pretty girl’s hand. “Don’t you worry, honey,” he reassured her. “I’ll be around a while.”

There is now a generation of Alabamans who have known no other word for governor than Wallace. Love him or hate him, they have had to take him personally, for he has become part of their imagination and identity as well as their history.

Monday, January 15, 1979, George Corley Wallace at 59 became a private citizen for the first time in almost 23 years, including 12 years as governor and two when his wife was governor and he ran the show.

He seems to blot out his predecessors in the memories of those Alabamans in or around their 20s, who in fact have lived under other governors. More than a governor, he was like a force his boiling image constantly on television; his rousing, revivalistic tones on the radio; the hate, love, fear and belief that he stirred throughout the country.

The faithful who came to the Montgomery coliseum to bid Wallace farewell that weekend didn’t seem to know his secret. Some said with confidence that he was a great conservative, but others called him a liberal and still another,” a populist, pure and simple.”

There was one common thread, though. Almost everyone around Wallace that day described him in personal terms, and most used the word “love.”

That is the way Wallace is asking to be remembered not as a man who left waves of hatred in his wake, certainly not as the detested target of the massive Selma March for Black voting rights in 1965.

Now he says in published interviews that race was never at the heart of his argument – that he believes integration is best for Alabama.

He was standing up for his state against the federal government – not trying to keep the Black people down, he says.

He said the same thing last year when interviewed on the Alabama civil rights movement by a reporter, a native Alabaman, who didn’t remember it that way.

“But the federal government wasn’t the only force asking Alabama to change. Weren’t large numbers of Alabama Blacks asking the same things?” I asked.

There was a pause. “Did you say you grew up in Alabama?” Wallace asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Turn it off for a minute,” he said, motioning toward the tape recorder. If this was an Alabaman he was talking to, it would be a personal talk.

The tape recorder was duly turned off, but the following exchange was committed to memory:

“I honestly said (in the 1960s) that I was for the existing order,” he said. “Of course many people were then, and I

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was one and the same. Your own parents were probably the same. You say you’re from Alabama. They probably supported me.” He folded his hands as if the point had been made.

“No, governor, they didn’t support you.”

“They didn’t?” He seemed deeply troubled.

“No, sir.”

“Well, then, they were ultra-liberals,” he said, with a decisive nod of his head. His voice got deep and spooky, the way it did in his television speeches when he’d warn in ominous tones about those “u-u-u-ultra liberals” in the North and in Washington, D.C. Once again, the point seemed to be made.

“No, sir, they were just normal people to me,” I said.

We talked for another hour, as darkness closed in outside, and his long office began to seem hollow and lonely. We ranged over the civil rights movement, the messages he sent to the federal bureaucracy, the people he had stood up for over the decades.

“We’ve got to get her out of there,” a Wallace press aide was overhead saying in the outer office as Wallace continued to talk about his long career.

Meanwhile, Wallace pulled out compilations of his 1974 election returns, showing heavy support in several majority-Black areas. “Go ask any of these people if I fight the Black people,” he said.

It seemed desperately important to him that no one go away thinking ill of him or believing he had caused harm to any people or the state.

One historian says it will take a generation to unravel the Wallace phenomenon. Who was the man and what did he mean, and how did he touch those nerves – not only here in Alabama. but all over the country? I think he’ll he judged at least as important as Huey Long.”

Ironically. he began political life as a “liberal.” in Alabama terms. He rose out of South Alabama’s Barbour County as a classic populist in the 1940s.

He thrived on personal contact from his college days onward, it is said. He tromped through fields, walked streets, sent Christmas cards, and reached deep and wide among the state’s common people. “I like to touch people,” he was quoted as saying.

It was perhaps that grassroots heritage that gave him his remarkable rapport with the American working class, whose response to him shocked and horrified established national politicians.

He was elected governor in 1962, 1970, and 1974. When the Alabama Constitution prohibited him from seeking a consecutive term in 1966, he ran his wife. Lurleen, as his proxy. She triumphed without a run-off against a field of nine, but died a painful death from cancer while in office.

Lt. Gov. Albert Brewer then took the reins for the only interruption in Wallace’s rule between 1963 and now. Wallace defeated him in 1970. (Rumors were spread during the run-off that the Brewer family shared sex and drugs with Blacks.)

It was said – and it was true – that a rainy election day bode well for Wallace because his supporters would trudge through mud and floods to vote for him. The other candidates’ backers would probably worry more about getting wet.

In Alabama, at his height, Wallace could muster a crowd of 1,500 at a village shopping center or a country road crossing where only a few dozen people lived. He seemed fired by the crowds, as if he could suck in their energy and fury, and run on it for hours. It was as if there were something deeply personal between them and him.

It is impossible to forget the frenzy that erupted at his inaugural address in 1963 when he drew the line in the dust and declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever” – the phrase for which history will probably remember him, despite his pleadings to the contrary.

He was just carrying on the battle of the people of Alabama, standing in as their proxy, doing their bidding, he now says. And when he ran for president in 1964, 1968. 1972 and 1976, that was for Alabama too, he says.

And the crippling wounds that Arthur Bremmer inflicted on him at the crest of his presidential drive in 1972? That too, was for his people, he says. “I appreciate your letting me he your instrument.” he said in a recent speech.

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“Knowing what has happened to me as a result of it, I’d do it all over again.”

Wallace’s close aides are seriously concerned about his future. They fear he will be lonely even lost – as a private citizen.

He is divorced, partially deaf, paralyzed from the waist down and plagued by pain and by swings of mood. A relative says the excitement of a loving crowd is about the only thing that takes his mind off the wrenching pains.

Wallace has been named head of fundraising for rehabilitation services at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. The job will allow him to live and work in Montgomery, the state capital, where he gained his spot in history.

He also plans to join the speaking circuit, with the help of a Nashville publicity agency. Recently, he moved into a new house, custom built to make it easy for him to move around in a wheelchair. And the state Legislature has voted to assign him two state troopers for the rest of his life, 24 hours a day, at a cost of $200,000 a year.

He needs them to lift him in and out of cars, and generally to ease his movements.

Friends and supporters also kicked in cash to buy him a $15,258 Lincoln Continental limousine. (The dealer made them a price – about $12,000, aides say.) It is identical to the shiny black car he has used as governor, except its cushiony interior is maroon instead of gray.

The car was displayed next to the podium at George Wallace Appreciation Day, and long lines of couples took turns posing in front of the sleek new car as friends snapped their pictures with Instamatics.

When the keys were presented to Wallace, he wiped his eyes. “I’m deeply moved,” he said.

Even within the festive atmosphere, there were signs that the “Wallace phenomenon” had unravelled. The crowd, including about 25 Blacks, numbered only 1,500 – the number he used to draw at rural crossroad rallies.

An estimated 12,000 had come to his 1963 inaugural ball in the same coliseum. And in Houston on the same weekend as Wallace Appreciation Day, 45,000 cheering fans met the Houston Oilers for a rally at the Astrodome, even though they’d just lost a playoff game to the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Still, the crowds pushing toward Wallace’s wheelchair felt as thick and intense as in the old days. They came from throughout the state, senior citizens from Geneva, relatives from Clayton, a beautician from Jasper, a gas station operator from Troy, a sherriff, bank employees, lunch counter owners – the coalition that first gave Wallace his phenomenal hold on the state.

Many of the men wore imitation straw hats with Wallace stickers around the brim, and the women were decked out in Wallace buttons of several vintages. One woman wore a pendant that had Wallace’s picture encased in clear plastic.

“Give ’em my love in Jasper. What’s goin’ on in Geneva? Well, hello, sherriff!” Wallace went on and on, reminding them all that he knew them by name, hometown and profession.

After the singing of “Dixie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” announcer Doug Benton, a state official who has introduced Wallace at almost every political rally he ever addressed in any state, said the familiar lines:

“I want you all to stand and welcome the star of our show, America’s greatest living statesman, the honorable Gov. George C. Wallace.”

Wallace was wheeled on stage. Flashbulbs seemed to explode all around his picture. He sat tall and beamed for the cameras, the crowd clapping in the background, the band twanging out familiar, good, country cadences.

Wallace’s face glowed with color, and he exuded the enthusiasm and life that many of his friends had seen only infrequently in past years.

But all at once, there was stillness around the governor’s wheelchair. Everyone on stage had clasped his hands, kissed him or hugged his neck. The pictures had all been taken. It was ending, you could feel it.

The governor’s hands, which had both been reaching minutes earlier to the crowd of wellwishers, rested on the wheels of his chair. Both of his cheeks were smeared with various shades of lipstick. And there he sat, ramrod straight in his wheelchair, posing with a huge, almost blissful smile for the cameras that weren’t going off anymore.

Reprinted from The Atlanta Journal and Constitution.Dale Russakoff is a staff writer for the Atlanta Journal.

Johnny ‘Imani’ Harris and the Alabama Death Sentence

By om Gardner

Vol. 1, No. 5, 1979, pp. 10-14

“It’s Time for a New Beginning.” proclaims a campaign billboard for Alabama’s new governor-elect, Fob James. With Wallace gone and anyone new coming in, many Alabamans have responded to that slogan with a new sense of hope for their state.

Yet only 15 minutes from that billboard, a few miles from the 1-65 interstate in southern Alabama, stands a grim reminder that the old Alabama is institutionalized in too many concrete forms to be transformed with one campaign slogan.

Stretching for hundreds of acres in Escambia County is a vast plantation owned by the state. There are no stately mansions with white columns and verandas. There are, however, slave laborers. But the slave gangs, while mostly Black, are integrated. In the foggy dawn light they doubletime out to vegetable and cane fields, where they labor from “can-see to can’t-see” under the watchful eyes of shotgun-toting guards on horseback. If a slave should run, haying hounds will chase him down, and whether he returns dead or alive depends on the whim of his captor.

Some historians claim that Escambia County, Alabama, was the last county in the Confederacy to free its slaves. But it is now 1979, and “slave labor” administered by the state Department of Corrections is still the dominant form of labor relations in Escambia County, Alabama.

The name of the “slave quarters” was changed to G.K Fountain Correctional Center when the citizens of nearby Atmore demanded in 1974 that the name be changed to disassociate their town from the notorious Atmore prison. It was Atmore prison that Heywood Patterson in his autobiographical Scottsboro Boy described as “The Southernmost part of Hell.” Many say it still is, despite the name change.

Across the highway is the newer, but no more humane, maximum security Holman state prison. Deep in the rear corner of Holman prison is a chair. It was brought there from the old Kilby prison near Montgomery. With a new coat of yellow paint, it resembles that new plastic furniture with the modern square look. But it’s different – it kills people. Its last victim was a woman in 1965.

In the cells adjacent to that chair are 42 prisoners, all on death row, all scheduled to die by that faceless yellow executioner.

How one of Alabama’s death row inmates got there is a story which, in itself, raises serious questions about the competence of the Alabama judicial system to impose such a final sentence on anyone.

Johnny ‘Imani’ Harris

The facts in the case of Johnny ‘Imani’ Harris are unique in some respects. But in several others his case reveals fundamental flaws in the judicial and corrections systems of Alabama; flaws that any serious “new beginning” in Alabama must correct as its first order of business.

Johnny ‘Imani’ Harris is a 33-year-old Black man who is on Alabama’s death row after a chain of judicial atrocities. He was convicted in February 1975 of first degree murder for participating in a protest in which an Atmore prison guard died. The guard was killed during the violent suppression of the prisoners’ protest in Atmore’s segregation unit on January 18, 1974.

The state did not prove that the inmate, Johnny Harris, killed Luell Barrow, the guard who died. At a July 1975 pre-trial hearing. Assistant Attorney General George Van Tassel stated, “It is not our position that this defendant (Johnny Harris) was actually holding the knife or anything else. We don’t contend that this defendant stabbed the guard.”

It was merely for his alleged participation in protesting conditions later described by Federal Judge Frank M. Johnson as “barbaric, cruel and unusual” and “unconstitutional” that Johnny Harris was sentenced to death.

William Baxley, then Attorney General of Alabama, personally prosecuted Johnny Harris. Apparently aware that he had not proved Harris’ supposed connection to the. death of the guard, Baxley told thejury, “If you don’t want to believe that this defendant is guilty on circumstantial

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evidence, then put it out of your mind and look at the la on aiding and abetting. If you are convinced that any of these people (other prisoners) committed first-degree murder,” Baxley reasoned for the jury, “then Harris is guilty as well.”

The all-White, male Baldwin county jury from which Basley had systematically struck the few Blacks and women in the prospective jury pool, returned a verdict of first-degree murder.

Baxley’s dramatic prosecution of Harris may have been a bid for white “law ‘n’ order” votes in the anticipated governor’s race. But his reenactment of the death sentence brought a memory of horror to many Black Alabamans. To them the death sentence translates into legal lynching as in the case of the “Scottsboro Boys” and many others who were not saved. A definite pattern of racial discrimination in applying the death sentence was documented by Bill Bowers, a nationally recognized expert on capital punishment, at a recent appeal hearing for Johnny Harris. He testified that between 1927 and 1965, 82 percent of all executions in Alabama were of Black people. Bowers also testified that the death sentence is far more likely to be imposed if the victim is White and the defendant Black than if the situation is reversed. In fact there is no White on death row in Alabama for the murder of a Black victim.

Yet, Baxley appealed to Harris’ White jury that, “If we can apply it (the death sentence) here, it will be a start toward bringing it back.” A local NAACP official said, “After seeing Baxley send this young man to the chair I don’t see how Black people could ever vote for him again.”

Baxley dug up an 1862 law used only seven times in Alabama’s history to use against Johnny Harris. The civil war era law mandates an automatic death sentence for anyone convicted of first degree murder while serving a life sentence.

The law assumes that the life sentence itself was received fairly, with all the constitutional protections of due process and effective assistance of counsel. In many cases, particularly those involving Black and poor defendants, that may not be a safe assumption, as we shall see in the case of Johnny Harris.

Railroaded For Desegregation?

In 1970, Johnny Harris moved with his family into an all-White neighborhood in Birmingham. They were met with garbage on their doorsteps, paint and acid on their car, and Ku Klux Klan literature slipped under their doors. The Klan activity in the neighborhood was so strong that members of the Black community on the other side of Border Street, which divides the Black and White areas, were forced to form a protective association.

The Harris family refused to he intimidated. But according to an investigator for the Harris defense team, “This is where the police came in.”

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There were five Birmingham police officers living on the same street as the Harris family. Gary Thomas Rowe, a former FBI informant, testified to a Senate Committee in 1975 that the Birmingham police department worked closely with the Klan in resisting integration. The arrest of Johnny Harris could well have been a result of that close cooperation.

One of the senior arresting officers in the case was Lt. Cook, who, according to Rowe’s Senate testimony, made the arrangements with the Klan for the police to look the other way for 15 minutes while Freedom Riders were beaten severely on May 14, 1961, in the Birmingham Trailways Terminal.

On August 19, 1970, Johnny Harris was arrested on his way to work. According to Harris, his picture was taken, he was forced into a line-up (after his accuser may have been shown his photo), and then he was told that if he didn’t confess to a robbery and a rape charge more cases would be put on him.

The alleged rape victim was a young White teenager with relatives on the police force. Harris was eventually charged with four robberies – of $11, $67, $90, and $205 – and the supposed rape.

Harris gave one of his court-appointed lawyers a list of alibi witnesses who were with him in bars on the other side of town when the crimes were supposed to have occurred. But the witnesses, including bartenders who supported his alibi, were never subpoenaed to appear in court.

The attorney appointed to represent Harris on the rape charge, Louis School, according to jail records, never once visited Harris before his trial date. And he didn’t bother to investigate the alleged rape victim’s medical report.

According to their own testimony in a hearing last April that challenged the five life sentences, Harris’ appointed lawyers waived a preliminary hearing, made no motion I’m hail, failed to question the line-up procedure, neither interviewed the supposed rape victim nor looked at a medical report on the alleged rape, never questioned Harris’ illegal arrest or the warrantless search of his house, made no pretrial motions, and filed no challenge to a jury pool in ss hich Blacks were greatly underrepresented. At the recent hearing, one attorney, School, produced his file folder on the Harris case, with only seven pages of notes in it. In other words, his attorneys prepared no defense at all. And in 1970, Harris could have received the death sentence for a conviction on any of the five charges.

Testifying on his own behalf on those charges for the first time in eight years, Harris explained at the recent hearing what happened when he went to court on April 6, 1971.

School said he didn’t see how I was going to win the case sshen the court was going to take the White woman’s word over mine, because I was Black, and that he didn’t have no intention of bucking the system. He said if I didn’t take the 1).A.’s offer I was going to get the chair. I still wanted to go to trial.

Harris testified further:

Later, they told me they didn’t have alibi witnesses subpoenaed. weren’t prepared to go to trial, and didn’t think I should fight this all the way. They said I should change my plea on the rape case and get the other four dismissed. I was [told] that there was no defense prepared: I didn’t want to get the chair. I changed my plea – not because I wasn’t innocent, but because I had no choice.

Harris thought he was pleading guilty to only one charge but found he had signed a plea to all of them when the trial judge, Joseph Jasper, sentenced him to five consecutive life sentences.

The recent challenge to the five life sentences, called a “petition for writ of error coram nobis,” was conducted before the same judge who sentenced Harris in 1971, in accordance with Alabama law. In the week-long appeal hearing, Harris’ current lawyers put forth strong evidence that Johnny Harris was denied his constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel, but Judge Jasper denied Harris a new trial. In appealing that denial, his attorneys objected that the judge based his ruling, to an extent, on his own opinion that the previously appointed lawyers had done a competent job on other cases before his court, although no evidence was entered during the hearing to support such a conclusion.

On the contrary, a long line of expert witnesses called both by Harris’ defense team and by the state, including Millard Farmer of Team Defense, Ralph Knowles of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Prison Project, and noted Alabama lawyers, judges, and law professors, testified that the trial preparations by Harris’ appointed attorneys did not meet minimum standards of competent

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representation, particularly in capital felony cases.

The decision of the lower court was upheld by the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals and is now on appeal to the Alabama Supreme Court.

In Prison – A Struggle For Survival

The rest of Johnny Harris’ story is bound up with the desperate lives of thousands of Alabama’s prison inmates.

Faced with inhuman conditions, Alabama’s prisoners took that action which Frederick Douglas said separated the slave from a beast of burden – they rebelled.

In 1972, the prisoners, tired of ignored petitions to the public and the courts, staged a 100 percent effective workstoppage. While sugar cane rotted in the fields, the administration tried to defeat the strike with every tool at their disposal.

They threatened mass punishment with guns pointed at the prisoners sitting down in the yard. The prisoners held firm. They tried to divide the White prisoners from the Black – the prisoners remained unified. Finally, they beat, transferred and isolated over 300 prisoners, hoping to disperse the “ringleaders.”

The partially successful strike ended from a combination of repression and promised reforms. But the administration swore to destroy the prisoners’ organization, the Inmates for Action (I FA). All of the officers of the I FA were placed in Atmore’s segregation unit.

Johnny Harris, like many other prisoners, protested the conditions. In 1973 he was charged with attempted escape and placed in the segregation unit. Here he took the name Imani, which means Faith.

Even in the dark recesses of Atmore’s segregation unit, the IFA continued to conduct meetings by shouting down the hall from cell to cell. They conducted daily classes in reading and writing, political education, history, and legal and physical survival in a “lecture hail” of cells where, as Imani later write, their classmates were “familiar to them only by voice, not by sight.”

On January 18, 1974, guards entered the segregation unit with bloody uniforms, after beating an IFA member at Holman Prison across the street. According to prisoners, they said, “We ought to kill these revolutionary niggers, the way we killed Clanzy,” as they started to reach for bats and ax-handles.

Fearing that an attack was imminent, two prisoners who were out of their cells grabbed two guards hostage and freed the other prisoners from their cells within the segregation unit.

When the warden arrived he was informed by IFA Chairman George “Chagina” Dobbins that the prisoners’ sole demand was to see certain named members of the press, clergy, legislature, and prison administration in order to expose the beatings and conditions to the public.

The warden, Marion Harding, according to prisoner witnesses, told Chagina, “You’re a walking dead man.” Harding, a few minutes later, led a shooting attack by prison guards on the prisoners. The warden ordered one of the guards to shoot Chagina Dobbins. Dobbins was incapacitated by the ensuing shotgun blast of birdshot in the side.

Harold E. Martin, editor and publisher of The Advertiser Montgomery and Alabama Journal, investigated the incident immediately. On February 15. 1974. he wrote in The Advertiser:

The Board of Corrections released a statement from a “fact-finding board” that Dobbins was killed by gunshot during the riot.

But State Toxicologist Nelson Gruhhs. who viewed Dobbins’ body at Mobile General Hospital, said that Dobbins died from nine stab sounds in his head caused by a heavy.sharp instrument wielded with enough force to penetrate the frontal bone in to places.

Who stabbed Dohbins and when is a mystery!

That “mystery” never resulted in any criminal indictments b the state of Alabama. even though Dobbins was apparently murdered after being shot and while in the custody of state officials.

One of the prisoners charged with the killing of the guard-hostage was Frank X. Moore. Moore was released from prison shortly after the incident, but was re-arrested at the gate on the murder charge and held on an impossible S250,000 bail in Escambia County Jail. While awaiting trial. Frank X. Moore, an IFA member, was “found” hanging in his cell. Sheriff Scotty Byrnes said it was “suicide.” But autopsy photos indicate a struggle.

Two months after the incident in Atmore, another IFA member at Holman Prison was beaten to death. Tommy “Yukeena” Dotson had smuggled out to a visitor a “death

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list” of IFA members allegedly found on the warden’s desk by a trustee. According to the Mobile Press Register, the warden denied the existence of such a list. But on March 12. 1974, Tommy “Yukeena” Dotson, said to be next on the list after Chagina Dobbins, was killed. He was removed, naked and handcuffed, from his cell, and, according to testimony, on the order of a captain, was beaten with ax-handles until his skull was caved in. Undisputed inmate witnesses said a second group of guards then came along, beat him some more, and threw his limp body down a flight of stairs.

An attempt by the state to cover up this murder by prosecuting other IFA members for an alleged escape attempt supposedly planned with Dotson, fell on its face. The state’s witnesses so contradicted each other’s testimony that Escambia County Judge Douglas Webb directed a verdict of “Not Guilty” for the accused inmates. But when this reporter asked Attorney General Bill BaxIcy 1 the state would prosecute any guards for the murder of Dotson, he replied, “There was no criminal negligence: they were doing their job.”

The guards were also “doing their job” during the January 18 Atmore rebellion. At the murder trial of IFA member Gamba Mani (Oscar Johnson), Paul Echols, a White inmate from Georgia, testified:

When the guards came in shooting, some of us got in cells… They told us to come out with our hands behind our head or we would get shot … As we got to the lobby, they beat us while they made us strip … They took all of our a itches, rings, and money . . . and stomped on them. Then the made us crawl on our hands and knees putting our hands and heads on the next man’s ass while they heat us. I Iic made us hark that day. I guess to low grade us and iiov, us the were superior.

Another inmate, Claude Harris, testified,

The guards lined up on both sides of the wall and beat us as we crawled through their gauntlet. We crawled up to the visiting room. There were two tables there, one for signing a statement, and the other for medical treatment We had to make and sign a statement before even getting patched up.

Instead of either indictment or reprimand for this barbaric group torture. Warden Marion Harding was praised by the Attorney General. Baxley said at the Harris trial, “The State of Alabama can be proud to have men like Warden Harding in charge of its institutions.” With the “mystery” of Chagina Dobbins’ death still hanging over him, Marion Harding left the Alabama prison system to take an administrative job with the federally-funded Law Enforcement Protection Agency, and has since become Auburn, Alabama’s police chief.

Meanwhile, Johnny “Imani” Harris sits on death row fighting against an execution for a crime he didn’t commit in a place where he should never have been. With a dedicated team of lawyers, and growing national and international support, Imani and his hard working defense committee are hopeful that his execution can be stopped. But such a triumph for justice, however important, is only the beginning.

Imani wrote in a recent letter,

Before the U.S. government goes degrading other countries about the way they treat theirs and American prisoners, why don’t they look at the way American prisoners are being treated here in this country. Where they and we are still citizens. Yes, stop and look at the way these prisons are run and the way we are treated.

In his Inaugural Address on January 15, Fob James told his public, “It is time to end racism and discrimination in Alabama.” If the new Governor truly wants to give Alabama a “new beginning,” there is no more pressing place to stop, look and act than the Alabama prison and judicial systems.

Tom Gardner is an Atlanta free-lance writer who is active on the defense committee for Johnny ‘Imani’ Harris.

Montgomery Widows: A Struggle to Survive

By Roxie Hughes

Vol. 1, No. 5, 1979, pp. 15-17

Florence, who prefers not to be otherwise identified, lives in the same small white house east of downtown Montgomery where she was born some 90 years ago. She lived alone until she became ill recently and now shares her home with a neighbor who takes care of her. Her main concern, she says, is getting plumbing in her neighborhood so that she can have an indoor toilet.

A 74-year-old retired home economist who prefers to be called Evelyn lives in the Cloverdale section of Montgomery, one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city. Along with her part-time maid, Evelyn lives with Sammy Davis and Jet – her cats. She spends much of her time collecting American pattern glassware and studying the stock market.

A third woman, Pearl, who describes herself as “once a woman of means,” rents a modest house bordering Highway 85 for $50 a month. Pearl, 88, said she prefers living alone to living in a nursing home after having had one “unpleasant” experience at one nursing home. But she refuses to talk about it. She used to read romance novels until her eyes grew weak, she said.

These three women are members of a large and quickly growing segment of the Montgomery County population – elderly widows. Census figures from 1960 show that widows in Alabama, 14 years and older, numbered more than 153,350. By 1970, that number had grown to 184,430.

Although the widows represent a variety of social, economic and educational backgrounds, as well as a range of lifestyles, they share many of the same problems that often come with old age and widowhood. They talk about making the adjustment, losing their spouses and how they tried filling the void created by that loss. They fear increasing crime in the city and wonder what new burden inflation will place on their limited incomes. Some say they have problems maintaining their homes, others face declining health and most value their dwindling number of old friends. Almost all say the adjustment to losing their spouses was hard at first.

“After you become a widow, you have to change your lifestyle completely,” said Evelyn, who was widowed eight years ago. “We live in an even-numbered society and widows just don’t fit in. You need four, eight or 12 to play bridge,” she said. “Although friends will tell you that their friendship will last until the end of the world, you wind up having to find other widows to hobnob with.”

Florence said she had to make several changes in her life when her husband died nearly 62 years ago. She and her husband were evangelists and spent years pastoring as a team African Methodist Episcopalian churches in Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Ohio, and Brantford, Ontario, Canada. They also traveled to Algeria as missionaries, she said.

She returned to Montgomery after her husband died and shortly thereafter she became ill. She no longer pastors

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church although she always carries her preaching license, now yellowed and cracked.

“I never know when I’m going to be called on to preach,” she said.

Pearl said after her husband died 22 years ago, she went hack to being a private nurse, and retired only three years ago.

“After we got married, he wouldn’t let me work, but when he died I nearly lost everything. I was sick for two years afterward and during a seven-year period I had to bury my sister, a brother, a sister-in-law and a niece,” she said.

“I was broken down and I haven’t had anything since.”

Many of the widows said inflation affects their retirement benefits in varying amounts. They were forced to give up something, most said.

Nearly 35 percent of the elderly people in Alabama rely on social security as their sole means of income, according to census figures. The figures also indicate that close to 44 percent of the people over 65 in the state are living below the poverty level.

Anne Brett, a 69-year-old retired zoology college professor said she had to give up her car after her husband’s death.

“Although I carefully budget my money so that it tides me through the month, I just couldn’t own my car,” she said.

“So I take a bus or my son or some friend drives me from place to place.”

Florence, who receives about $200 monthly in social security benefits, said that she is having no problems feeding herself but is unable to make some necessary repairs on her home.

“That’s just not enough money to do what needs to be done to my house,” she said. “My door needs to be fixed and some of the boards on my house are falling off.” She has nailed shut half of the rooms in her house because “there’s not much I can do about those rooms that are falling in.” But she compensates for her surroundings with potted plants which line her walls and cover every table and counter top.

Pearl said her $207 social security check covers her rent, utilities and medicine bills. She also pays a 14-year-old girl from the community to clean up and cook for her in the afternoons. “I don’t know how I budget it, but I try to buy food with whatever’s left over,” she said.

Valla Ferguson, an 88-year-old retired nurse who is partially blind said she could hardly make ends meet with her social security check.

“My medicine bill is so high that I had to give up buying meat and milk,” she said. “I’ve gotten so thin that my doctor said if I got any thinner, he wouldn’t have anyone to bill.”

Valla said she cooks one meal a day and is hoping to start getting two free meals from a state agency.

Crime is considered a serious problem among many of the widows. Evelyn said her neighborhood is made up almost entirely of widows and “when dark comes, we don’t

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dare go out,” she said. “During the day we travel in twos and we don’t carry pocketbooks.”

Pearl said she feels “reasonably safe” in her neighborhood although she has had her pocketbook snatched once and one of her social security checks taken from her mailbox.

Since she is bedridden, she leaves the key to her front door on her porch so that neighbors can check on her during the day. “But I take that key in at night, latch my door and I have started locking my mailbox,” she added.

Dorothy Gibbs, a retired high school counselor, said, “The crime rate doesn’t really frighten me, but I usually have a companion with me wherever I go and am very careful.”

Many of the widows said loneliness is hardly avoidable with the losses.

Ophelia Sippial, 80, an insurance company employee, said she leads a quiet life but is not lonely.

Ophelia, a widow for 11 years, said, “1 love getting up in the morning to watch TV news and my favorite talk shows and game shows.”

“Sometimes I have dinner with one of the neighbors in the apartment and we take turns cooking for each other.”

Dorothy Gibbs said she escapes loneliness through teaching piano lessons to children and through doing volunteer work at the Fairview Medical Center and the Crippled Child and Adult Association. She is also active with the League of Women Voters and church organizations.

“I guess I’m used to being independent because when my husband was alive he worked in another town and came home on the weekends.” However, she added that she no longer attends activities that “require couples” since her husband’s death.

Anne Brett, widowed for 28 years, does tridimensional decoupage, an art form that includes piling and gluing layers of paper to get a raised effect.

She also cooks for senior citizens each month through a free meal program at her church and teaches Sunday school.

Still there are others like Pearl and Florence who are immobilized by illness and spend much of their time at home.

“I spend my days lying here on my couch, and only walk back and forth to the bathroom and kitchen,” Pearl said.

“It’s hard for me to see my television, but I sometimes listen to my radio.”

Florence, who only goes out when she attends church on Sundays, said, “I don’t get lonely because I don’t have time to think about getting lonely. There’s too much else for me to think and worry about.”

Roxie Hughes is a staff writer for the Alabama Journal in Montgomery.

National Advisory Committee for Women and the ‘Friday Afternoon Massacre’

By Lenora Reese

Vol. 1, No. 5, 1979, pp. 18-20

A month ago, a random poll of the American people would probably have indicated few, if any, had ever heard of the National Advisory Committee for Women.

The 40-member committee had not publicly trumpeted its existence since a presidential executive order signed it into being last April. Informal sessions had been held and issues batted back and forth. A staff was set up in Washington, D.C., and duties assigned.

But it wasn’t until January 12, the day some are calling the “Friday afternoon massacre,” that the once obscure group got the recognition it deserved. And it came at the expense of its outspoken co-chair, Bella Abzug, who was fired by President Carter after White House officials learned of a press release critical of Carter’s economic and social policies.

Enraged over the dismissal, more than half the committee resigned. As this issue went to press, the count stood at 24 resigned, 16 remaining.

Of the eight members from the Southern states, the majority, six, including honorary chairperson Judy Carter, chose to stay on the panel, while two left. Of the three Southern Black members, two remained, and one left. Of the two men on the committee, one stayed and other resigned. (A third original male member, Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO, had resigned earlier over an unrelated matter.)

There was apparently no evident cohesiveness among the “Southern coalition” on the committee, and after the split, there seemed to be even less consensus of opinion on the reasons for the firing, the committee’s original purpose and its uncertain future.

Still smarting over Abzug’s dismissal in late January was Brownie Ledbetter, founding member of the Arkansas Women’s Political Caucus and state legislative chairman, a member of the Executive Committee of the Southern Regional Council, Business and Professional Women’s Clubs and Church Women United. She and Jefflyn Johnson, of Falls Church, Va., were the only two Southerners to step down.

Ledbetter, like many other feminists, believes Carter used Abzug merely as a scapegoat for the rest of the committee which he felt had gone beyond the call of duty in criticizing his position on the economy, including proposed cuts for the federal budget. Issues such as social security cutbacks and postponement of national health insurance were of vital concern to women, committee members felt, and needed to be brought to the president’s attention.

According to the committee’s guidelines, set up after the 1977 Houston International Women’s Year conference, the panel was to gather and disseminate information concerning women’s issues and advise the president on how the government would implement the National Plan of Action adopted in Houston.

The press release, which summarized a lengthy report compiled by the committee and its staff for Carter, warned the president that his “anti-inflation program will impose additional burdens upon women in increased unemployment, cutbacks in social programs, postponement of comprehensive national health insurance and deferred action on programs and addressing poverty and assistance to cities where the majority of women live.”

The release also criticized an administration proposal to increase the Defense budget by 10 percent and called on Carter to appoint a committee to investigate “military extravagance.”

Press reports have indicated that White House staffers, upon learning the release’s contents, abruptly decided Abzug should be canned. Staffers were said to be already miffed that the committee had cancelled its December meeting with Carter. According to members, a majority of the committee voted to cancel the session, although Abzug opposed such a move, because they felt the 15 minutes allotted was clearly not enough time for a meaningful dialogue.

Ledbetter, however, believes neither the press release nor the cancelled meeting were the real reasons for the dismissal. Rather, they were an excuse for the Carter administration to dispose of someone who wouldn’t toe the party line. The firing, she said, was indicative of the administration’s view of women.

“We were never taken seriously to begin with,” she said. “We were just shunted aside.”

The committee had been given a $300,000 budget and a staff to work with, but Ledbetter said Abzug and co-chair Carmen Delgado Votaw “did all the work.” Little cooperation was received from White House staffers, she said, and “it has been a constant hassle.”

“I think it’s essentially the president’s fault. I don’t think he’s without compassion for women, but it’s compassion for us as wives and mothers. He didn’t treat us as equals. He wouldn’t have treated a committee of men that way.”

Carter, meanwhile, defended his firing of Abzug at a press conference five days after the episode. The group’s criticism of him was “not part of it at all,” he said. His ap-

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pointment of Abzug just “didn’t work out well. The committee has never been well organized; their functions have never been clearly expressed to me. There’s not been good cooperation between the committee and the Cabinet members or my advisors, or me.”

Carter said he understood the group’s function was “to work with me, hopefully in harmony, to achieve mutual goals – goals of enhanced opportunities for women, for the elimination of any discrimination against women, to assure that every decision made by the government, and the executive branch or Congress, has at least one factor to be considered: how we can best meet the needs of women and to overcome the suffering that they have experienced because of past legal and other discriminatory actions.”

Carter, feminists say, obviously would have preferred the panel stick to strict “women’s” issues such as abortion rights or the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. “But we did something really far out,” said Ledbetter, with a trace of sarcasm. “We were talking about fiscal policy.”

Ledbetter said those who resigned did not see themselves as taking a critical direction, as Carter had implied in his meeting with the committee before Abzug was given her pink slip.

“We saw it as our right to tell our various constituencies what the administration was doing in areas that affect women,” she said. “I don’t feel Bella lead us down a leftist, liberal path.”

Ledbetter was backed in her resignation by the Southern Coalition for Educational Equity, a group of Southern feminists formed recently to focus on issues of sexism and racism in secondary and elementary education.

While she believes Abzug’s firing and the resulting resignations were unfortunate, Ledbetter says publicity generated by the entire episode may have actually helped the cause.

“It was unfair to Bella, but in a sense it was good because somebody heard us say, ‘the economy is a women’s issue.’ That’s clearly what we wanted to do in the first place.”

What happens now, however, will probably be up to the remaining members and whomever Carter appoints to replace those who do not return. Whatever the outcome, Ledbetter and other feminists believe Carter has been hurt by the incident and will feel the repercussions come 1980. “He misjudged us,” she said. “And her strength.”

Among the stalwarts who stayed are six Southerners, including Memphis attorney Richard Rossie, the only remaining man; Owanah Anderson of Texas, member of the Health, Education and Welfare Committee on Rights and Responsibility of Women; Dr. Elizabeth Koontz, assistant state superintendent of education for North Carolina; Judy Carter, the president’s daughter-in-law; Brenda Parker, national president, Future Homemakers of America, another Texan; and Ann Richards, Travis County, Texas commissioner, and president of the Texas Association of Elected Women.

Rossie, founding member of the Women’s Resources Center of Memphis, blames Abzug and co-chair Votaw for the “totally negative” press release and the “foul-up,” and feels it was not the committee’s function to question the president’s economic policy.

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“The president’s policy has been that excessive government spending leads to inflation, and we were implicitly rejecting that statement,” Rossie said.

And while Abzug was not personally involved in the preparation of the press release, Rossie says the staff who did prepare it “were her people. She chose them. I’m going to hold her responsible.”

The first version of the committee report, he charged, “clearly reflected her thinking and style,” which he termed “confrontational,” and he felt the committee staff had “gone wild” with it. Even after it had been redone to soften some of the more critical points, Rossie said “it reads Bella all over.”

Rossie, the only Southern member contacted to applaud Abzug’s firing, accused the former co-chair of “lecturing” Carter on the committee’s role during the group’s session with him. “Bella had the opportunity to say the press release was done without her approval and say thanks,” Rossie said, “but she didn’t.” Instead, she lectured the president on the role of the committee and how the committee viewed its role.”

Carter reportedly informed panel members of a few things he’d had on his mind about their function, namely that they weren’t being supportive enough of him.

Although feminists have said Carter’s firing of Abzug was a politically naive move, Rossie says Abzug’s treatment of the president made it the other way around. “I was horrified.”

Rossie, chairman of the Shelby County, Tenn., Democratic Committee, remains on the committee but is ambiguous about its future. Taking a more optimistic outlook were Koontz and Richards.

Koontz, former president of the National Education Association and director of the Women’s Bureau for the U.S.

Department of Labor, said she agreed to be on the committee because she believed in its purpose: ‘To further the goals of the Houston women’s agenda and have an impact at national, state and local levels. That has not been achieved,” she said.

“The war has not been won. I don’t want to give up. I hope we can be a stronger force for what has happened. There must be someone there to negotiate.”

Koontz said she had been contacted by another committee member who had resigned and asked why she had not done so as well. “I wouldn’t regard it as pressure,” she said, “but I basically operate on the premise that we set out to do a job … and I think it’s still possible to do that job.”

The chairman of the National Committee on Working Women, Koontz predicted some members may come back if they could do so “without turning their backs on Bella.” If they do not, however, Carter will more than likely have to appoint replacements from the same organizations whose representatives resigned.

For Ann Richards, whose political commitments in Texas keep her busy year-round, resigning from the committee would have meant turning her back on a decision she made last year to join the group in spite of other commitments.

Though she said she would not pass judgment on those who resigned in protest, Richards said, “Women need to progress to the point where we’re stateswomen, not merely reacting to changes because we don’t agree.”

“From my own conversations with Sarah Weddington (Carter’s special assistant for women’s affairs), my impression is that the White House wants it to continue. There was never any concrete definition of what we were going or where we were going. I hope out of this will come a better understanding of the whole thing. Time will tell.”

Lenora Reese is on the staff at the Alabama Journal in Montgomery.

EDUCATION

By Staff

Vol. 1, No. 5, 1979, pp. 21-22

Cool is the word for discipline alternatives in the High Point, North Carolina public schools. As an acronym, Cool means character oriented optional learning. As a project for junior high school students, it includes alternative learning centers, diagnostic-prescriptive teaching, student rights and responsibilities and parent education.

Funded by Title IV-C of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Project Cool operates an alternative learning center (ALC) in three junior high schools. The centers are for students who have difficulty adjusting to the normal junior high school programs. In most cases the difficulty comes to light through some form of disruptive behavior which would ordinarily lead to suspension or expulsion.

Centers are located in unused space somewhere in each junior high school and each is equipped with a wealth of materials, both commercially prepared and teacher made, designed specifically for working with the type of student assigned to the center. Each ALC can accommodate up to 15 students at a time. A staff of one professional and one aid works in each center. This staff also assists in planning and operating inservice training for teachers and parent education sessions.

Volume One, Number One of the project’s newsletter, Keepin’ Cool, described in some detail how the students are assigned to the center, what happens, in general, while they are there and how they get out. From that issue:

“The referral process is initiated with a disruptive behavioral problem recognized either by a teacher, guidance counselor, or a member of the administrative staffs of the junior high schools. The teacher conveys the necessary referral information to the Administrative Assistant who, in turn, conveys this information to the Principal of Administration. This Principal, after reviewing pertinent data is responsible for calling and chairing a staffing to give the behavioral problem due consideration.

The representation of the staffing is at the discretion of the principal. However, usually the composition of the staffing will reflect some or all of the following personnel: The ALC teacher, the student’s teachers, the home/school coordinator, the school psychologist, and the guidance counselor.

After a thorough review of the problem, the committee or staff can offer a number of recommendations including: counseling by the psychologist/guidance counselor, home visits by the home/school coordinator, utilization of outside agencies, referral back to the classroom for a cooling-off period with periodic contacts by the principal of instruction or the principal of administration, suspension, or referral to the ALC for a time limit deemed appropriate by the ALC teachers.

Once a decision has been made to refer the student to the ALC, the home/school coordinator is contacted to deliver in person a form indicating to parents that the student will be temporarily reassigned to the ALC. Another form notifies a student’s teachers that he/she will be reporting to the ALC, and requests assignments and materials.

Within the ALC, the student will have an orientation period to further explain the center, his/her role, and the teacher’s role. This orientation period will also include directed work periods alternating with a number of informal diagnostic tools such as reinforcement, anger, interest, and values inventories. As the student completes assignments within the ALC the teacher will attempt to find the antecedents of the problems, and help the student to become aware of the consequences of his/her behavior. Value clarification will be used as an alternative strategy within the center. If the ALC teacher observes the student experiencing difficulty with assignments, informal academic inventories (informal spelling and math placement tests) will be employed in an attempt to discover if the academic and behavioral difficulties are related.

While in the ALC, the student will use a Behavioral Contract and will be evaluated daily. Also, he/she will

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negotiate a contract of conditions for re-entry to the classroom. The ALC will gradually be phased-out as the student fulfills the contract conditions. Before formal reentry, appropriate teachers will be notified by the ALC teacher. It is hoped that the ALC teacher and the classroom teacher will develop a close working relationship so that diagnostic information and instructional techniques can be shared. Another staffing (re-entry) could be used to facilitate this informationsharing. This sharing will facilitate a smooth transition into the classroom.”

A student’s behavior will be periodically reviewed by the ALC staff and the classroom teacher in an effort to prevent return to the ALC.

Two years ago when Project Cool began, a student was referred to one of the ALC’s. The reasons for this referral were numerous. His teachers indicated that he was simply unable to function in a normal classroom situation, possibly because of emotional problems and a negative selfimage. They reported his behavior as being very disruptive-habitual tardies and cuts, smoking, hitting others and making noises, etc.

This student expressed a personal desire for help and requested that he be placed in the ALC. After entering the center, he seemed to thrive on personal attention and soon learned that he would receive extra praise and attention when it was so deserved. His behavior and work habits showed constant improvement. Much progress occurred as the student received individual help and instruction. Time was spent on remedial work in math and reading before advancing to regular classroom assignments.

A close relationship developed between this student and the ALC staff. Because of his interest in the guitar, the ALC aid volunteered to give him private lessons one afternoon a week.

After several weeks, the student began gradually returning to his regular class schedule. According to the ALC teacher, “His progress was gratifying. His teachers say he has done a complete turnabout and is like a different person. He is now described as being a delightful, polite, conscientious student. This is truly a success story that warms the heart and makes me say I am doing something worthwhile.”

Those who enter are finding help in the ALC. During the 1977-78 year, Project Cool worked intensively with approximately 100 students. The total involvement of the superintendent, the associate superintendent, the director of the project and the principal of the three schools in which the ALC’s are located is phenomenal, accounting in large part for the success of the project. Great things seem to be taking place in helping the junior high students who are potential dropouts turn themselves around and feel better about themselves. A strong component of the program is the close cooperation with school and community agencies including guidance counselors, school psychologists, the police and a group called Youth for Christ. The centers provide excellent dissemination of information which keep students, teachers and parents informed about the ALC.

The presence of Project Cool has helped decrease truancies, suspensions, expulsions, acts of physical violence and discipline referrals.

For more information contact: John Smith, Director Project Cool High Point Public Schools PO Box 789 High Point, N.C. 27261 (919) 885-5161

Reprinted courtesy of Creative Discipline, Vol. 1, No. 9, published by the American Friends Service Committee Southeastern Public Education Program.

HEALTH CARE

By Staff

Vol. 1, No. 5, 1979, pp. 22-23

When your school-age child walks out the door, armed with books and lunch money, will that money be spent on the food in the lunch line, or will it be spent on other snacks, instead?

That is one of the issues to be aired in a series of three public meetings to be sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture early in 1979. The meetings, to be held in Nashville, Detroit and Seattle, are the result of enormous public response, both supportive and critical, of a proposal by the Agriculture Department to restrict the sale of certain foods.

In April 1978, the Department of Agriculture proposed to restrict the sale of so-called “competitive foods” in schools until after the last lunch period.

“Competitive foods” are defined as any food sold in competition with federally-subsidized school food programs. They may be sold from vending machines, in a la carte cafeteria lines, or at separate snack bars. The restricted foods were to include candy, soda water, frozen desserts and chewing gum.

The lunch program, in addition to making use of farm surpluses, has always had two goals: to feed children a balanced meal and to teach them good eating habits. These goals are not being met, according to many concerned partnts and nutrition specialists.

Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Carol Tucker Foreman has announced the withdrawal of that proposal and has scheduled the public meetings to allow additional public scrutiny of and comment on the issue surrounding the competitive foods questions.

“Seeking public opinion before drafting new regulations underscores our commitment to broader public participation in the decision-making process of government,” Foreman said.

Specifically, the meetings will focus on standards on which to base a regulation, related to the following four topics: (I) nutrition education; (2) health; (3) eating habits; and (4) local administration and impact.

The lunch program, in addition to making use of farm surpluses, has always had two goals: to feed children

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a balanced meal and to teach them good eating habits. These goals are not being met, according to many concerned parents and nutrition specialists.

Another issue, however, surfaced in schools whereby profits from the sale of competitive foods are used to buy band uniforms and/or support school social activities.

“Restriction would mean we wouldn’t have enough money for any activities,” says Lilly Fulton, a student council advisor. “We have to look at the positive aspects of well-financed and wellattended activities for the students.”

One of the other important issues is the impact of competitive foods on nutrition education. The Department wants to find out whether children get nutritional “messages” from the availability of competitive foods. They will seek public comment on how this affects children’s eating habits.

Students express the opinion that they have a right to choose their own diets. One girl writes, “I think the government should leave the so-called junk food alone because if we want to get rotten teeth or stomach aches … I think they should let us. We are old enough to know better.”

Nutrition experts disagree. Most maintain that schools should set an example in proper diet, encouraging students to develop healthier tastes in food.

Concerned supporters of the proposal also encourage restrictions on potato chips, pastries and uncarbonated drinks. One South Carolina food supervisor states, “This has definitely hurt our lunch participation. We cannot compete with potato chips, candy bars and soft drinks.”

A Texas cafeteria worker agrees. “What troubles me most is that we give the low-income children free and reduced lunches because they are not supposed to be able to afford the lunch. Then they go through the line and get their tray and throw all or most of it away and go to the machines and buy junk food for their lunch.”

The medical profession also supports the proposed restrictions. Many dentists said that foods with a high sugar content caused dental caries among school children. Some doctors warned that poor eating habits acquired early in life could increase the risk of diseases associated with poor nutrition.

The strongest objections to the proposal, however, do not seem to deal with its relative medical merits. Opponents to the action apparently resent government intrusion into the issue. A Garland, Texas, man says, “The right to sell competitive foods in schools is not a federal issue. It is a local right and a local responsibility.”

On the local level, where restrictions have been enforced, positive results have been obtained. In Prince George’s County, Maryland, the food service director found that “lunch sales rose by 11 percent after the County Board of Education banned minimally nutritious foods from sale during lunch time.”

The effect of the restrictions on plate waste is certainly a factor. Chocolate Manufacturers’ Association of America President Richard T. O’Connell maintains that competitive foods do not affect plate waste. He cites a U.S.D.A. study that does not attribute competitive foods as the cause of waste.

Others take a stance of compromise on the issue. “I would support a ban on sales until after the lunch hour,” says one mother, “and whenever such foods are sold, the selection should include nutritious foods such as apples, nuts, raisins, or yogurt.”

Perhaps the issue is most clearly seen by a Memphis, Tennessee, eighth grader, who writes: “We would love to have orange juice and many other kinds of juice to drink instead of soft drinks. It tastes better and fills you up more, but every time we go to buy some, it’s always empty.

“The school lunch is over-priced and raunchy tasting. So we buy potato chips and nutty bars, but it’s not by choice. If the Memphis board would get some cooks that could cook, we would eat the food. Because of the malnutrition and no food, we all have colds or sore throats. I just wanted you to know this … Hang in there and help us, please.”

The U.S.D.A. welcomes further comment on the competitive food issue. Written opinions should be sent to Margaret Glavin, Director, School Programs Division, Food Nutrition Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C. 20250.

A printed discussion of the topics to be considered at the meetings is available from Ms. Glavin on request. Anyone wishing to speak at the Nashville meeting should contact:

David Alspach or Edward Hightower Food and Nutrition Service U.S. Department of Agriculture 1100 Spring Street Atlanta, Ga. 30309 Phone: (404) 881-4259 Nashville residents call: (415) 251-5758