Interchange: In This Issue

By Betty Norwood Chaney

Vol. 1, No. 7, 1979, p. 2

On February 16-18, the Southern Regional Council (SRC) held its Annual Meeting in Atlanta at the Colony Square Hotel. This year the Council renewed its charter after 25 years of incorporation, and to commemorate the occasion presented a three-day conference on ” A New Charter for the South’s Future.”

The conference brought together a variety of distinguished participants from the fields of education, law, economics, civil rights and health care to review developments and conditions in the South. This issue of Southern Changes reports on that conference and reproduces three of the addresses made there.

Leslie Dunbar, former executive director of SRC and presently director of the Field Foundation, was one of a panel of three to speak on “The Role of the Law in the South.” The primary role of law in the South, he says, has been to keep Blacks “in their place.” In his presentation carried here, he offers four concerns that ought to be basic to the right role of law in the South.

In a discussion of “Human Rights: From the South to South Africa,” Wallace Terry, former Newsweek correspondent, now professor of journalism at Howard University, shares someof his experiences with Black troops in Viet Nam. He calls for an enlightened leadership which places human values above expediency and voiced his hopes and aspiration for the nation.

Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall, Saturday’s luncheon speaker, also talked of human rights. “The whole human rights movement is very important throughout the world, and it’s not dividible,” he says. “You cannot talk about human rights in other countries, and ignore them here.” His main concern, however, was about certain “universal imperatives,” inflation being one of them, that makes it difficult to help those who most need help.

In “Soapbox” this month, Steve Suits, publisher of Southern Changes and also executive director of SRC, reminds us that differences which continue to separate Southerners from one another on the basis of race and poverty remain deep and unyielding barriers. In looking toward a “new charter for the South’s future,” he cautions us that progress of the last 25 years must not plund us from the fact that our task is not complete. “Improvements,” he says, “are not final accomplishments.”

Our department pieces this month– education, rural and ruban development and Southern politics– also report on sessions from the conference and offer some perspectives on the future.

In addition, in this issue Bill Finger reports on recent J.P. Stevens and Company stockholders meeting in Greenville, S.C., and Alice Swift relays the activities of a small rural town in Georgia where the Black community is “coming to focus, demanding its rights.”

Renewal and Endurance: A Personal View

By Steve Suitts Steve Suitts
Publisher

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

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

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

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

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

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

– The increase of income for the average Southerner

– Improvements in health and education.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Role of Law in the South

By Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 1, No. 7, 1979, pp. 6-8

[Introduction]

Twenty-Five years ago, the Supreme Court was just weeks away from a landmark decision that would give hope of civil rights workers struggling to inure equality in education for Blacks. The 1954Brown vs. Board of Education ruling struck down the ‘separate but equal” laws stating that separate segregated schools were inherently unequal.

Later, the 1964 Civil Rights Acts asured every citizen in the U.S., regardless of race, creed, color, religion or national origin, equal rights education, government programs; employment and access to places of public accommodation.

Despite the legislation, the South had its own laws to live by. Laws of conduct that were meant specifically to keep Blacks “in their place.” Laws that denied Blacks their human rights. Anyone dishonoring the sacred laws was treated in the same manner as Blacks.

“The Role of Law in the South” was one of the topics of discussion in a panel session during the SRC Annual Meeting. The panel consisted offormer SRC director Leslie Dunbar, Julius Chambers, the current SRC president, and attorney Charles Morgan Jr.

The panelists basically agreed that the laws are made and enforced by the people – not necessarily by the courts. “Most of the social progress in the history of the country arose not from judges, but from juries and not from bar association lawyers but from social activists,” said Morgan. Chambers added that we must go further than training more lawyers. Instead, we must find a way of meshing law with people who believe in equality.”

Leslie Dunbar’s views on “The Role of Law in the South” as presented at the Annual Meeting follow in their entirety.

Jean Jones

The right role of law in the South is what it is everywhere. It is to represent the difference between a society organized and held together by mere force, and one that is organized in behalf of people living at peace nd trust with each other.

The purport of this panel’s questions is, however, more specialized. It asks whether law continues to have practical importance as an instrument of Southern social and political reform. In our minds as we think on that question is the absolutely indispensable role that the decisions of federal courts have played in Southern racial change since 1954, and, indeed, since about 1940.

But in a broader sense, what we so gratefully saw then was not only “reform” of the political order but the law’s own rediscovery of itself, its own, much belated, reassertion of the “role of law.” Because law had been used in the South, and the judges and lawyers who are the law’s housekeepers had allowed it to be used, in the service of a violent society, its primary task had been to keep the Blacks down, keep them “in their place.” In this regard, there was no essential difference of function from county sheriffs and jailors to “leaders of the bar” and on to state and federal appellate courts: all alike served ultimately to control the Blacks. That is what the phrase “law and order” meant.

Moderates seized hold of that phrase during the days of “massive resistance” to give it a different meaning, that of obeying the Supreme Court. But that was only a brief interlude in the term’s steady history, and Nixon and friends put it back, on a national scale, to its traditional Southern significance. The fact that they did, and still do, cannot, however, be allowed to blind us to the fact that “order” is indeed precious, for without it, there can be no social peace.

The newspaper in my Westchester County (N.Y.) town recently exclaimed editorially, in the wake of a scattering of local burglaries, that “fear of the stranger must become our way of life.” That is truly a horrible thought and sentiment, and that editor ought to be gagged and pilloried – if not horse whipped through the streets. But we ignore at our peril the need all societies have for discipline, for the habit of obedience, for respect for other’s liberties and property. I am sure that here in the South as well as elsewhere, law has a necessary role to play, both in requiring discipline and in making of the rules and rulers of society something that all can respect.

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Thinking about the right role of law in the South suggests to me four more concerns that ought to be basic. First, when one looks at the prison figures one has to suspect that the law is still at its traditional work, that of controlling the Blacks. Generally speaking, until quite recently – when the examples of persons such as Thurgood Marshall, Earl Warren, Elbert Tuttle, Chuck Morgan, and Julius Chambers came to be felt – Blacks in the South very clearly saw “the law” as the enemy. Many, perhaps most, still do, as do Chicanos of the Southwest and western Indians.

The bulging prison population, the longer and still longer average sentences, the plans for prison expansion, the steady accumulation of persons on death row with 80 percent of all of them in the nation being here in the South – all are indicators of a deformed spirit of law, one intent on control and vengeance. Unless a miracle or two occurs, by the time the Southern Regional Council holds its next annual meeting, the South you represent will have killed by process of law maybe ten or twelve persons, a long reactionary step into the past. The Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons have all fought bravely and well, but the tide has been too great.

But no courtroom victory of the Legal Defense Fund should bring it more honor than its noble defeats here. The Fifth Circuit’s decision of last August in the Spenkelink case may have been, for the present, the final cutting blow. I have read Judge Robert A. Ainsworth Jr.’s opinion in that case. It seemed to me masterfully accomplished, the kind of analysis which should earn a top grade for a law student. But from a court which once so grandly stood between the South and its basest passions, there was spoken not a word of commitment to those once prized qualities of equality and compassion. When the Fifth Circuit, of all courts, can rule as it did that the disproportionate numbers of Blacks and poor on death row that are convicted of murdering Whites, are not “in and of themselves” evidence of discrimination, nor will deign even to examine the disproportionate numbers of the poor, then the role that the South’s law is playing seems to me once again laden with fright.

Second, although the signs abound that popular and political interest in some of the great civil rights causes has declined, the law’s interest ought not. We do not need to litigate every conceivable point, and lawyers most surely have no business pursuing litigation issues of interest to them but of little to their clients, the Black communities. But when all that has been said, the law must still be called upon to stand guard over what was so painfully won, and to move on to occupy those fields of equal opportunity not yet cleared.

I don’t envy today’s civil rights lawyers. Theirs will not likely be the brilliant, heady victories of a decade or two ago. Their names may consequently not become, as we say, household words, and babies may not be named for them. But they have a tremendously important job to do, holding the line against the Supreme Court and other federal courts which are no longer their assured friends; and, one might add, educating the 152 new district judges Carter is appointing.

This Supreme Court’s opinion in the hard social cases reaching it are jumbled and instable; given the mediocrity of this Court we can welcome that, for such rulings can hardly be longlasting precedents. In the capital punishment cases, the members were scattered in nearly every conceivable direction. In the Bakke case, for another example, important though it was, only Justice Lewis Powell agreed with the whole ruling, which he wrote. (As the only Southerner on this Court, perhaps he has some of those superior regional insights into racial problems we sometimes brag about.)

There is a saying in the West Virginia coal fields that there will be no peace in West Virginia until there is justice in West Virginia, and of course that is true nationallyas well, though we may have interludes of social peace without justice. It is true in the South. There is as yet too much racial injustice, too much poverty, for there to be lasting social peace. There is too much exploitation, too many officeholders leaving office richer by far than when they came in, too great and an ever growing inequality of wealth and income. Lawmakers – that

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is, judges, legislators, administrators – are almost by definition members of the elite; and elites are those who have profited. Is it then too much to ask that law, law which they make, can bring about that justice in our land and in this region that will end exploitation and poverty?

The question will have to stay unanswered. The right role of law in the South, as everywhere and always, is to enshrine liberty, and liberty’s offspring, equality and justice. When law instead upholds relations that are intrinsically unjust – such as sending the poor to prisons and even to execution in numbers that defy fairness law has betrayed its mission.

When law stood for segregation and overt racial discrimination, or when now it denies equal school funds to all children or equal access to medical help to all women or perpetuates regressive taxes, law betrays its mission to provide equal treatment.

And when law puts the pretended security interests of the state ahead of the citizen’s liberty and even ahead of its own dignity, law becomes a whore. And if you stop to think about it, a male whore at that.

Leslie Dunbar is director of the Field Foundation (presently on a leave of absence) and a former director of the Southern Regional Council. His articles and essays on political affairs and civil rights are widely published and his book, A Republic of Equals, has received much acclaim.

Human Rights: From the South to South Africa”

By Wallace Terry

Vol. 1, No. 7, 1979, pp. 9-13

I was profoundly affected by what I saw on the battlefields in Viet Nam from 1967 to 1969, particularly the outrageously racist behavior of White troops towards Blacks. I knew that most Blacks would receive far too little at home for the blood they spilled abroad. So with the kind and generous assistance of Leslie Dunbar and our friends at the Field Foundation and the Center for National Security Studies, I have spent the last few years recording and writing the Black GI’s story. It seems a small way to salute them.

From units all over the country and at any given moment, Black soldiers would meet to log their experiences with discrimination. From them I learned of our American sailors burning crosses at Cam Ranh Bay; wearing Ku Klux Klan costumes at the Navy base in Cua Viet; writing graffiti on the walls of latrines: “I wouldn’t compare a gook to a nigger.” Blacks were refused rides. They were held back in promotion. And if they became too militant, White officers shipped them to the DMZ where they were more likely to be killed in action. In effect, there were two wars in Viet Nam. And as the war against the Vietnamese wound down, the race war between Black and White Americans spread.

Investigating these racial incidents, of course, made me very unpopular with the commands. Indeed, I think the Marines once tried to eliminate me. When a Marine chopper dropped me into a field, there was no one on the ground to meet me. And the chopper did not return to pick me up in this very hot zone. My escort, a White major, was, ironically, of no real use. He was from North Carolina, and always wanted me to pose in pictures with him, because he planned to run for sheriff back home. The pictures, he said, would help him get the “colored vote.” Perhaps he had his eye on the White House, too. Anyway, I later learned that he was considered a roustabout, a troublemaker, so the Marines probably considered him expendable as well.

Racism, of course, is not the private preserve of White people. In my travels I’ve had my eyes opened to the fact that some Asians don’t like other Asians; that there are Black people killing other Black people in places called Uganda, Eritrea and Zimbabwe. Tribes in the same African country hate each other. And in Lebanon, a very beautiful country is being destroyed, because there are Arabs who cannot live in peace with other Arabs. Yet, there seems to he no more arrogant form of racism than the racism based upon color and culture.

Once, I told a very liberal and politically prominent publisher of New Republic Magazine that I believed that the war in Viet Nam lasted so long and was so wrong because of our racism. The Vietnamese were transformed into objects. Lyndon Johnson called them “little brown people.” The armies he and Nixon sent to kill them called them dinks, slopes and zipperheads. Well, the publisher was dubious. How could I suggest that this war was racist, or anymore or less racist than any other? “After all,” he

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explained, “in World War II, we called the French ‘frogs.’ So, I see nothing wrong with calling them dinks over there.” But the French belong to his race and to his culture.

Have you ever noticed that whenever there is a change of government in a European nation, no one here doubts their ability to govern themselves? But, this is the first question we raise about a new African government and the new one in Iran.

Have you noticed, too, that we never consider ourselves racists or racist murderers although we have been killing Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese and Vietnamese almost without interruption since the turn of the century? Yet, we call Idi Amin a “racist murderer.” And what race other than his own has he murdered? Idi Amin should simply be ignored and isolated. That means we should get the Americans out of Uganda and break diplomatic relations. Left to his own devices, he undoubtedly will kill more Ugandans. But, by robbing him of the world stage we have thrust him upon, there is a good chance that his macho impact on other Africans will diminish. In time, he may be done in at home by this very impotence. Our castigation simply makes him a champion of defiance of the White Western world to supporters inside and outside of Uganda. And he is likely to remain so as long as our magazines call him “the wild man of Africa” and our editorials demand his assassination.

And why, simply for the sake of a few dollars, do we insist upon lining up on the White racist side in South Africa? The Russians don’t. Frankly, I was impressed by Castro’s explanation for being in Angola. “We have an African heritage,” he explained. And that is a more convincing reason than America has for its presence in South Africa, which is helping to keep apartheid alive. If Henry Kissinger had had any respect for Black Africa or, for that matter, his fellow Black Americans, he could have made the same claim as Castro. After all, there are more people of African heritage in the United States than in all of the Caribbean.

You may also recall that Steven Biko accused this country of being the handmaiden of the tyrannical practices which led to his death since American investments in South Africa make the government stronger and the position of the struggling Blacks weaker. We should simply break all relations with South Africa until it frees its slaves, or, by whatever means necessary, the slaves free themselves.

Now the Arabs and the Persians earned Kissinger’s respect. They had the oil he wanted. That’s why the Arabs stopped being the butt of every dirty joke in Washington and Ardeshir Zahedi became the toast of Georgetown. But Ayatollah Khomeini emerged on our editorial pages as the world’s next boogey man, an Idi Amin in turban and flowing white beard who wants us to return to the glories of the Dark Ages. I confess. My sympathies for the moment lie with him. I cannot root for the Shah simply because he turned on the oil at our will and kept our arms merchants busy. The Shah was an arrogant autocrat who plundered his nations wealth. How many exdespots can fly off into exile piloting their own Boeing 707 and packing more money than a hundred Rockefellers? And what did he leave behind? Thousands jailed by Savak, his vicious secret police, and a nation whose social and economic fabric was shredded by uncontrolled growth and the co-consumption of the elite. But the American press gives no credit to Khomeini for pressing for the reforms we should have demanded from the Shah.

Meanwhile, I find myself in the awkward position of cheering the Hanoi takeover of Cambodia. For that seems to be the only way to stop the total destruction of a land as gentle as any I ever visited or learned to love. We have, of course, Nixon and his friend, Kissinger, to thank

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for that. When they chose to invade Cambodia in 1970, they turned this once peaceful land into a battlefield, and precipitated the events which led to the singularly barbaric behavior of the Khmer Rouge. After the corrupt Lon Nol regime was toppled, the genocidal Khmer Rouge took its place. We had missed the opportunity of reestablishing Sihanouk, an eccentric but benevolent dictator, on the simple grounds that his independence and neutrality had been guaranteed at Geneva. In the hands of the Khmer Rouge none was spared – the old, the women, the children. Cities were abandoned. Villages were razed. Hundreds of thousands were worked, beaten, starved or shot to death. A culture was obliterated, and your hands and mine are stained forever by Richard Nixon’s bloodiest legacy which may continue to claim even more lives.

As I perused the pages of The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice? I felt the same shudder I felt in the days of Kent State and Jackson State. Are we killing our own children again? Had he lived, young Horman seemed destined to join the ranks of The Best and The Brightest. After a brilliant career at Exeter and Harvard and service in the Air National Guard and the federal anti-poverty program, he ventured to Chile as a freelance writer. Apparently he inadvertently witnessed U.S. military and intelligence activity off the coast on the morning of the bloody coup d’etat. A few days later he was probably executed in the national stadium where thousands of detainees were beaten and tortured. The State Department says it could not establish a legal basis for attributing an international wrong to the Chilean government. Horman’s father believes otherwise. His son may have died because he knew too much, too much about American involvement in the establishment of a clearly fascist government. He has said, “I have lost trust in the statements, motives, and decency of our government.”

However many crosses we burned in Viet Nam, however many Klan costumes were worn or other insult to the Black G I, nothing still quite matched our behavior toward the Vietnamese, friend or foe.

There was the $50,000 John Deere plow we shipped to Qui Nhon without the spark plugs to start it up. So it became a public urinal where it was abandoned at the railroad station.

There were the free radios we supplied the farmers so

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that they would listen to our propaganda, which they didn’t. We tried to get their sets turned on by giving weather reports. That didn’t work, of course, because being farmers they had learned from their fathers exactly what the weather would be like the next day and the next. So we finally managed to gain their attention by announcing the next B-52 bombing strikes.

There were the women we stripped and searched for contraband before they entered our bases to clean out the hootches and do the laundry. A naval officer asked, ever so simply, “How do we win the hearts and minds by searching the vaginas?” Of course the same question could be asked of British immigration officials who are testing the virginity of Indian women and of Chicago police who are examining the genitals of women held on traffic charges.

There were the children in Viet Nam, some afflicted with leprosy, who were paid a few pennies by the Marines for every live round of ammunition, grenades and mortar rounds they found in the countryside.

There were the brave warriors of the First Cav Charley Blues who drank beer from the skulls of the Viet. Cong victims. A brother asked me, “How would you like it if someone was drankin’ out of your head?”

There was the woman with the gun, brought down with napalm. Although she was still alive, the Cav troopers stripped off her burning clothes and, using a round of machine gun ammunition like a nail, tacked their patch into her vagina. Another brother told me, “I just couldn’t eat when I saw that.”

There were the entire blocks of cities blown up to kill one sniper because we were unwilling to fight one on one, sniper against sniper, American against gook.

There were the villages blown up by American air strikes because the villagers refused to be extorted by corrupt officials who told the Americans that the recalcitrant Vietnamese were enemy Viet Cong.

And there was, of course, My Lai.

We need, of course, an enlightened leadership in our military and foreign policy. A kind of leadership which places human value above economic expediency. Domestically, we are not where we should be, in the South, in the North, in the East or in the West. The unemployment rate among Black youth is a national disgrace. And there was something sad about Black people of this city applauding happily when their former governor called for a national holiday commemorating the late Dr. Martin Luther King while his staff prepared a budget which would reduce federal spending on social programs while increasing the defense outlay. I do not oppose a King holiday, but in this instance we watched Blacks swallowing a symbolic gesture while the issue of their economic survival remains imperiled.

A few weeks later Carter sat down to the most important state dinner of his term of office. There was only a token Black American couple present among the guests honoring the deputy premier of China. The message was clear to many Blacks: affairs of state which could affect billions are in the last analysis the White man’s business. Then the evening ended at the Kennedy Center where Teng Hsiao-ping watched a 20th century edition of the minstrel show. Black performers strutting and shuffling to the strains of the musical “Eubie,” and a clown act, commonly known as the Harlem Globetrotters. Apparently those who orchestrate the president’s schedule – in Atlanta and in Washington – have their heads buried in the pages of Gone With the Wind.

I hope, too, that we will hear an end to the Moynihans and Novaks who tell us how the Irish pulled themselves up and why shouldn’t we. We have been here for more than 200 years. Yet we are treated like the newest immigrants, watching one immigrant after another leap frog over our bent down backs.

I hope that we will hear an end to the Jesse Jacksons who, by suggesting that Blacks should help themselves first, play into the hands of racists who seek any excuse to continue their discriminating ways. Blacks have been helping themselves as far as they could for over 200 years from Nat Turner to Harriet Truman to W.E.B. DuBois to Patricia Roberts Harris.

I hope we can adopt a monitoring system involving outside attorneys to guarantee full and fair prosecution when police kill. We need a law limiting cops to the use of deadly force only when they or other people are threatened with death or serious injury. In Houston, a disabled Black Viet Nam veteran was shot eight times by police because he looked wild-eyed and was supposedly carrying a gun. The gun turned out to be a Bible. No one was indicted in that case. Cops, after all, should display the same degree of discretion as the average citizen. And statistics show that if you are Black in America, you are still more likely than anyone else to be killed by the police, whether you are guilty or innocent.

I hope that we can stay forever the execution order in our society if for no other reason than capital punishment is most often visited upon the Blacks and the poor. In one 40-year or so period, Georgia executed 414 persons but only 77 of them were White.

I hope that Black leaders are asking themselves where it was that they failed, allowing hundreds of Blacks to flee

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America for a jungle utopia with the Reverend Jim Jones. Well, many Black people believe that if they are not a little paranoid in a racist society, then they are not being very realistic. Someone may actually be out to get you, so a little paranoia is like an ounce of prevention. Jones understood that paranoia, the product of centuries of division and dispossession, of intimidation and segregation. In the deepest recesses of that fear lurks a vision of obliteration in a racial Armageddon as devastating as the destruction of European Jewry under Nazi tyranny. So Jones fed that paranoia with dark warnings of impending doom in secret government death camps, and he proclaimed his message among those Blacks most easily lured, those with the least to lose and those we listened to the least. And just where were the State Department, the FBI and other authorities when those victims were crying out for help?

I hope that we develop controls to prevent the future abuses of the FBI and other intelligence agencies which in the past sought to destroy Dr. King, the Black movement and other political dissent. The entire history of FBI abuse in the sixties must be told, especially any wrong doing which it condoned, covered up or conducted.

I hope that Blacks do not get caught up in the half-baked, but suddenly popular, notions that their economic opportunities are now more shaped by class than race and that the civil rights movement was anti-Black women. Remember Diane Nash and Septima Clark and Ella Baker and Rosa Parks? I hope they are listening instead to Thurgood Marshall reminding them that the gap between Black achievement and White advancement grows greater, that they must beware of the traps laid for them by racists in every phase of American society and that they must not rely solely on the courts for progress – they must use economic and political muscle, too.

I hope Jimmy Carter will show the same concern for the human rights of Ben Chavis as he has shown for the human rights of Patty Hearst.

And I hope, finally, that we will hear an end to those Whites opposing preferential treatment for Blacks to compensate for conditions imposed by their ancestors. These same Whites have never turned down the favors created in the society they inherited, favors that stack success their way.

America must become my land, too. My Black heritage belongs to America. My talent is hers, too. My hopes are hers, too. And she is mine.

Wallace Terry is a former Newsweek correspondent and is now the Fredrick Douglass Professor of Journalism at Howard University.

Facing the Universal Imperatives

By Ray Marshall

Vol. 1, No. 7, 1979, pp. 16-18

[Introduction]

The world that we live in has changed; is changing, dangerous and uncertain – and I think that if you take a look at the concerns of the Southern Regional Council and some of the universal imperatives that impinge on those concerns, you can see that the main thing that will characterize the work of the Council, as it endures, is not that things will get easier- but they will get different. It’ll be a different environment, but it will be equally treacherous.

There are universal imperatives that, I think, are fairly obvious to people, if you think about them. One of the universal imperatives that we experienced since 1944 has been industrialization and economic development. That’s caused most of the changes.

One of the universal imperatives that we’ll face probably in the future is discrimination. We haven’t solved that problem by a long shot. What’s happened to discrimination is its forms have changed. And different people are now involved.

What the Black civil rights movement started has caught fire, and other groups are now demanding equality – and that will be a continuing process. Women will continue to demand equality. Hispanics will continue to demand equality; the handicapped, the elderly; people who are discriminated against for anything, unrelated to their merit, will be caught up in that movement – and have been caught up in it. And they will see the value, the power of the moral example that the Black civil rights movement launched.

Another concern that the Council will have to grapple with in the future, I think, is a whole range of international concerns. I think these are very important, and they’re usually overlooked. But these international concerns increasingly impinge upon our ability to get civil rights, and our ability to improve the conditions of people in the society who desperately need help.

Just to mention some of these things indicates the significance of them. The whole human rights movement is very important throughout the world, and it’s not divisible; you caimnot talk about human rights in other countries, and ignore them here. Just as Van Woodward put it so well, the institutionalization of racism around the turn of the century had strong international origins. We could not go forth and fight the White man’s burden in the world and not be infested with the same kind of racism here.

I think it also works in reverse. The origins of a lot of the civil rights movement – particularly employment originated with international concerns. A. Phillip Randolph’s first march on Washington was directly as a result of a war that we were in to make the world safe for democracy, at a time when Blacks couldn’t work in the plants, making the guns to fight the war.

The anomaly and inconsistency of that had a compelling force. I think the problem that Southern Regional Council will have to deal with is immigration. The problem of illegal immigration, particularly, will have a significant bearing on the ability to improve the conditions of lowincome people, workers generally, and to get civil rights.

I believe that because we don’t legalize the flow of peo

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ple in our work force, we are building for ourselves another monumental civil rights struggle in the future. The dynamics of that struggle will be very similar to the dynamics of the struggle that we went through in the fifties and sixties, as we will have some of the same causes.

The first generation of immigrants will endure second class status; their children will not – and you can almost count on it. And if we don’t prepare for that, to assimilate people into our society with full legal rights, then we’re going to build a serious problem for ourselves.

One of the areas of greatest concern that I have about the future is our ability to have a just and humane society by providing a decent standard of living for people; a decent job, in a relatively stable economy.

Now I believe that we can do that. I believe that the means of doing that are within our grasp. But I think it’s going to require a lot of dedication, a lot of intelligencc and a lot of hard work.

I believe that we’ve established the framework for that in the passage of the HumphreyHawkins bill, that many of you helped us get, which commits the government to the achievement of full employment by 1983.

We have been trying to do a lot in the last couple of years to move us in that direction, and I think it’s imperative that we continue to move in that direction. We should not let the talk about the budget obscure the fact that the government has for too long done too much for those who need it least, and not enough for those who need it most.

What we are trying to do with our programs is to see that that happens; that we concentrate our resources on people who need it most, in spite of the budget constraints we face.

For example, the amount of job money in the CETA system that we devote to the disadvantaged has increased, both absolutely and relatively. In 1976, we spent $3 billion on the disadvantaged; in the 1980 budget, we’ll spend $9 billion. In 1976, 63 percent of the participants in the system were classified as disadvantaged. In 1980, 94 percent will be classified as disadvantaged.

The point of that, to me, is that even though we do

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have problems with inflation and budget constraints, it does not mean we cannot continue to help those who need help. It seems to me, we need to really concentrate our efforts on seeing that that happens. We need to work to reduce the disparity in unemployment rates, as well as to reduce the overall level of unemployment rates. And we can reduce that disparity by concentrating our resources on the problem of Black youth, for example, and young people generally, and by concentrating our resources on places with the highest rates of unemployment. We must do everything we can to provide job opportunities for the people in urban areas and depressed rural areas.

Another universal imperative we will face that will make it difficult for us to help those who need help most, and to continue the civil rights struggle, is inflation. Inflation is a very serious problem. It is a particularly serious problem for low-income people, and minorities. And the reason for that is very simple – the cost of living for low income people increases much faster than the cost of living for higher income people.

When you get into inflation, you tend to buy down. You quit eating sirloin and start eating hamburger. You quit eating hamburger and start eating beans. And many people quit eating beans and start eating pet food. And that is happening, as inflation inflicts damage on the poor – the very people who can least afford to bear the brunt of inflation.

Inflation is serious because it also threatens our democratic institutions. Nothing threatens antidemocratic forces as much as inflation. It strengthens support for government, and for using government to help people who need help. Inflation frequently tends to bring out the worst in people, and tends to generate a selfish attitude that causes people to turn inward, rather than being concerned about other people.

A curious thing to me about inflation is that the wealthy do the most complaining about it, and the poor do the most suffering from it. I never could quite capture the reason for it, but I read a quote recently from one of my economist friends, John Kenneth Galbraith, who said that in this light against inflation, we have to be sure we distribute the burden of fighting inflation, according to one’s ability to fight it, which means do everything we can to see to it that the people who pay for it are those who have the higher incomes and who are in the best position to deal with the problem.

Somebody asked Galbraith, “But won’t the wealthy object?” “Yes, quite a lot,” he said and gave this quote:

“You must remember that social tranquility at all times and in all countries, is always advanced by the cries of anguish of the affluent. They have a much deeper sense of personal injustice than the poor, and a far greater capacity for indignation. And when the poor hear the primal screams of the well-to-do, they imagine that the fortunate are really suffering, and become more contented with their own lives. Good statesmanship has always required not only the comforting of the afflicted, but the afflicting of the comfortable.”

Well, I think that Galbraith, in his own way, put it very well – that in the fight against inflation, there will be strong forces to try and shift the burden for the fight to the poor; the low-income people. It seems to me that a goal of this organization should be to see that this doesn’t happen.

We’ve been trying to insure that it doesn’t happen in the Administration, by seeing that the inflation fight is equitable. That’s the reason we had a low-wage exemption; the reason we ruled out the alternative of allowing inflation to be controlled by having a recession, or having a depression – and try to maintain a level of unemployment while we deal with problems of inflation.

We tried to do it in our effort to get a real wage insurance provision in the Congress – so that wrong about our ability to control inflation, there will be some insurance, particularly for lowincome people, who will suffer the most from inflation.

Finally, we resisted the cries by people who argue that we ought to deal with inflation by not increasing the minimum wage, about rolling it back, or by doing away with prevailing wage legislation that tends to help those who do not have a power in this society to improve their own conditions.

I think that we have to continue to recognize that efforts will be made to roll back the minimum wage, to have a youth differential on the minimum wage, to eliminate it all together, and if we do that, then we will transfer the fight to the people who can least afford it.

Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall is a former director of the Task Force on Southern Rural Development sponsored by SRC.

J.P. Stevens Workers Seek ‘Some of the Harvest’

By Bill Finger

Vol. 1, No. 7, 1979, pp. 19-21

You would have thought it was the Darlington 500 the way people were flocking to the South Carolina Piedmont. But the gathering at Textile Hall in what the local chamber of commerce calls “the textile capital of the world” lacked the gaiety of a good stock car race.

On this chilly March morning in Greenville, S.C., J.P. Stevens and Company was holding its 1979 stockholders meeting. The nation’s second largest textile company with 44,000 workers, Stevens has been the target of a union campaign by textile workers since 1963. For the last four years, the stockholders meeting has been the central and public event in the escalating controversy. After large demonstrations and media coverage in 1977, Stevens moved the meeting away from the traditional New York site to Greenville. This year they again came to Greenville because, as Stevens board chairman James Finley put it in his opening remarks, “At least we’re welcome here.”

On the Monday before the meeting, the “Greenville Piedmont newspaper did the official honors. “The standing invitation for Stevens to move its headquarters from that increasingly hostile environment (New York) to Greenville remains as warm and earnest as ever.” However, there is also a hostile environment in Greenville – created by preachers, civil libertarians, civil rights leaders, attorneys, women’s advocates, and most important, Stevens workers.

“Why is my labor – my hands – so much cheaper than the same hands in New York?” asked Stevens worker Pat Burgess. “I love to weave and I’m good at it. I wasn’t raised to be chicken. I was raised to be proud and stand up for what I believe.” An attractive mother of two teenagers, Burgess was raised by her grandparents in Jessup, Georgia, where she picked cotton as a child. Now she’s a feisty union supporter in Greenville’s White Horse mill. But despite first amendment rights of’ free speech and association, people like Pat Burgess have to be careful about the statements they make.

“Mr. Chairman,” said Maynard Lovell at the stockholders meeting, “last year I spoke for the union here. Then last summer I was fired.” Lovell’s firing is but another chapter in the long and crucial conflict. Thirty eight-year-old Lovell, who presided at a pro-union rally in Spartanburg last year, was a union leader in the 4-plant complex in Stuart, Virginia, where he’d worked for 19 years.

The litany of Stevens’ lawbreaking record is familiar to many. The company has more labor violations than other company in history. They include: the firing of’ 191 workers for union activities (The workers were ordered back to work by the courts and paid $1.3 million by Stevens in back wages.); widespread violation of cotton dust standards, bad faith bargaining at Roanoke Rapids, N.C.; closing of the Statesboro, Ga., plant after the courts granted the union bargaining rights there; and a company-wide Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation for discriminating against Blacks and women.

Still, while the boycott and corporate strategies have received much public attention, the heart of the campaign lies in Stuart, Va., Greenville, S.C., and the scores of’ other Southern towns where Stevens has plants. “We just get pacified,” says Pat Burgess with fire in her eyes. “We don’t get satisfied. We can’t have a free election in any J.P. Stevens plant. There’s too much conspiracy.”

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National attention has highlighted this Stevens record to millions – from “CBS 60 Minutes” to church resolutions against such policies. But the pattern continues. In 1974, a majority of the 3300 Stevens workers at Roanoke Rapids, N.C., voted for the union. The Textile Workers Union began bargaining for a contract, but negotiations dragged on unsuccessfully, especially on the key issue of a meaningful arbitration system for grievances.

In June 1976, the Textile Workers and Clothing Workers merged into the stronger Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU). Fresh from the Clothing Workers successful boycott of Farah Pants and ambitious to crack the nation’s only major non-unionized industry, ACTWU embarked on a three pronged campaign against Stevens. It involved (1) a nationwide consumer boycott; (2) a sophisticated legal campaign building on numerous remedies and rulings already handed down against Stevens; and (3) a company-wide organizing campaign in the 83 plants.

Like the Cesar Chavez-led Farmworker boycotts of the 60s, the ACTWU boycott is dependent for momentum upon local citizens groups taking up the issue as a social cause. Boycott director Del Mileski feels that this first stage of the boycott has been accomplished in many of the nation’s cities. Local citizens’ groups – ministers, civil rights leaders and others – meet with department store officials and ask them to stop buying Stevens products as a matter of conscience. Highly visible pressure tactics on stores have been limited because of stringent secondary boycott prohibitions. (You can boycott Stevens products but not the store where they’re sold.) Because of the thousands of Stevens product lines, many of which are not sold in the retail market, making a dent in the company’s sales is difficult. Cancellations by retail stores are occurring though, and Mileski feels that “these cancellations are holding up better than Farah,” the pants company boycott of a few years ago. ACTWU has concentrated the boycott in the northern and western cities, away from the organizing campaign.

Another ACTWU tactic is the “corporate campaign”, led by 34-year-old Ray Rogers. Rogers focuses on individual Stevens Board of Directors members and their interlocking corporate lives, attempting to isolate Stevens from the entire financial community. During 1978, he achieved several successes that shocked Wall Street. In one instance, he marshaled holders of union pension funds and other liberals to pressure Manufacturers Hanover Trust to remove two of their directors – Stevens’ board chairman Finley and David Mitchell, chairman of Avon Products. Unions threatened to remove portions of their $1 million reportedly managed by Hanover Trust unless Finley and Mitchell were

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removed. Two weeks later when Women’s groups supporting Stevens workers threatened to boycott Avon Products, Mitchell quit the Stevens board as well. “Amalgamated has now resorted to terrorizing businessmen who do business with Stevens,” said The Wall Street Journal, expressing the fear of the business world over Rogers’ successes. Labor columnist Victor Reisel called the tactic “the first real test of a 21st century organization technique.”

Because of the numerous and repetitive labor law violations against Stevens, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has taken an unprecedented approach to the case. The board is now holding hearings to determine whether they should award bargaining rights to ACTWU in Wallace, N.C. (1000 workers); Montgomery, Al. (3400); Stuart, Va. (1600); and New Millford, Conn. (200). If a majority of the workers have expressed their desire to have a union by signing union cards and if the labor law violations are serious enough to prevent a fair election without intimidation, the board, and then the courts (since Stevens always appeals such rulings), would award ACTWU bargaining rights for the workers in that location without having an election.

Scott Hoyman, ACTWU’s Textiles Director for the South, has been involved in many of these hearings. “Our view, and apparently that of the board, is that it would be impossible for the Stevens workers to vote their beliefs.” On the other hand, from the podium of the stockholders meeting, Stevens’ chairman Finley said he felt the climate was fine for elections. “(We have) again publicly challenged the NLRB and the Union to let the employees decide this issue.” However, when ministers and workers rose to question Finley on the amount of money the company spends each year in legal fees fighting the labor board cases, Finley stonewalled, “This is a private matter between the lawyers and the corporation.”

Since the three-pronged campaign began in 1976, it has been anything but a private matter. The initial burst of media and celebrity attention has abated somewhat and what lies ahead for Stevens workers like Pat Burgess and Maynard Lovell is a protracted campaign in small communities where the national media rarely reaches.

As in the past years, the stockholders meeting this year proved to be merely a showcase for persons on both sides of the issue to vent their opinions. Tensions were evident as Finley gaveled down his opponents and praised the company’s supporters.

The legal remedies for the Stevens labor law violations could take several years in the appeal process. Meanwhile, the union Is slowly building support in the Stevens towns so that when NLRB elections are held, the workers are prepared for the intimidation that has been the pattern in the past. “Rome wasn’t built in a day you know,” says Burgess, explaining her steadfastness.

The Stevens campaign dramatizes the labor-management battles ahead in the South as well as the emerging issue of civil rights in the workplace. The country’s major unorganized industries – textiles and furniture – are deeply rooted in the South and the lowest average wages are still in our region. But the workers who have tasted the union campaign seem to know what they’re up against. The odds are long, but momentum is building slowly. And workers have no place to go in most cases but back to their looms and spindles. “We’re stronger than ever,” says Maynard Lovell. “People are standing up now stronger than I ever thought they would.”

“I want J.P. Stevens to make money,” says Pat Burgess, “because then my job runs. I just want to get some of the harvest.”

Bill Finger, a freelance writer, lives in Raleigh, N.C.

Eatonton, Georgia: Rural Black Community Organizes for Change

By Alice Swift

Vol. 1, No. 7, 1979, pp. 22-23

The days of White mobs gathering to lynch a Black man simply because he is Black are gone, but there are still some occurrences with the same level of hatred behind them. What happened in Eatonton is a case in point.

Until recently, Eatonton, Georgia, had a curfew which forbade anyone from being on the streets or in a public place between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. This curfew was in the city records, but not to the knowledge of many people, especially the Black community. It had never been enforced. As one local citizen of Eatonton said, “I have been here most of my life and I’ve never heard anything about a curfew. We always came and went as we pleased, anytime we pleased.”

But, late one night, a White town policeman killed a young Black man, while he was taking a walk, and the only excuse the policeman offered was a never-before-used curfew. Moreover, the policeman knew the young man and knew that he had the habit of taking late night walks.

However, according to a reliable source, “On that particular night, the policeman tried to stop the victim, but he simply kept on walking. So, at the next corner, the law enforcer’ shot the young man through the ear lobe; the bullet lodged in his skull.” The town policeman, who had killed a Black man before, shot the man for no apparent reason. The victim had no weapon, nor was he committing a crime. One of the witnesses reported that the “policeman tried to put a knife into the victim’s hand, but didn’t have chance to do so.”

“We had a tough time getting that policeman to trial,” said Willie Bailey, a respected community leader in Eatonton. The town officials appointed Bailey as the first and only Black bailiff in the town’s history “to shut me up.” Bailey is very influential in the Black community. Nevertheless, the policeman was acquitted by a jury of eight White men, three White women and one Black woman. The policeman was dismissed from his duties as an on-the-street policeman, however, he was given a higher paying position behind the desk.

This incident led the small Black community of Eatonton, Georgia, in the red clay hills of Putnam County, to unite and fight against unjust practices in their hometown. They formed the Putnam County Improvement League, open to anyone in the Black community “that is serious about making Eatonton a just place for Blacks to live.”

One of their most recent accomplishments was in having the dormant curfew removed from the town’s records. The league sued the town of Eatonton to have the curfew abolished. The lawsuit resulted in a ruling that the ordinance containing the curfew was unconstitutional. Had the league not put forth its efforts, the dormant curfew would probably still be on the books.

A temporary curfew was again established during the year when, due to arson, three of the largest and most prominent churches in Eatonton were burned. However, this time before the final decision was enacted, the town officials checked with the Black community and requested their approval.

The league has also been instrumental in bringing political change to Eatonton. After the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Blacks in Eatonton were still losing races. The elections in Eatonton were held on an at-large basis. The league filed a suit against the city in 1977 alleging that the atlarge elections decreased the strength of the Black vote, since all the voters elected each council member. Black candidates from the community would systematically go down to defeat because of the town’s majority White vote. Bailey, one of the main plaintiffs in the case, recalled that it didn’t matter how many Blacks were registered as long as more Whites than Blacks voted or as long as “race made a difference in the White community.” Without any substantial support from the White community, a Black could not get elected.

As a solution, the league asked the court to reapportion the city council, the school board and the county commission into single member districts. Hence, a fair number of districts would have Black majorities. With the single member districts, each district elects its own member of city council. Even though the solution does not guarantee that Blacks will automatically win the majority Black districts, it does guarantee that they will not automatically lose.

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Due to the efforts of the league, in 1977, Eatonton elected its first two Black town officials. The two members of the city council are working very hard to improve the situation for Blacks in Eatonton. George Williams, one of the newly elected officials, said that “We are still very much in the minority since it’s only 2 out of 7, but we are learning. We are almost 200 years behind and it is a slow learning process.” The city council works together for the entire community while, at the same time, trying to teach the entire community a few things about the Black community.

Another area of concern for the league is the upkeep of the community itself. It sponsors numerous clean-up campaigns street by street in the Black community. It wants to upgrade the community’s living conditions and help the community realize that dignity should be very much a part of their lives. Fannie Farley, a vice-chairperson of the league, stressed that sometimes “our people feel that since they are getting welfare, they can be excused for not maintaining their living conditions properly.”

According to Neal Bradley of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, “Proper cleaning of sewers and proper playground facilities are not always provided by the city in small rural towns.” Situations such as-this make it even more difficult to keep the Black community upgraded. Hence, small towns with groups such as the league are important in that they help show the city the Black community will survive despite city inattention.

One of the league’s pet projects is one designed to inspire the Black child academically. Farley pointed out that the Black child “lacks motivation. He has got to be exposed to areas other than football and basketball!” The league tries to get the schools to encourage the children to believe in themselves. However, Farley said, “The school officials and teachers don’t care, so it is all up to the Black community.”

Although Eatonton has been a model of the new strength coming forth from small town Black communities, there are other Black rural counties that are just as active and involved as Eatonton. In Wadley, Georgia, for instance, a suit is pending because of fraud in a recent city election. A Black candidate lost the election to a White candidate by only four or five votes. The voting officials contacted Whites concerning errors on their absentee ballots but did not contact Black voters.

Blacks in small rural towns are beginning to fight back. They have gone unrecognized and underrepresented by their city governments for too long. Now some small Black communities are coming into focus demanding their rights.

A freelance writer, Alice Swift lives in Athens, Georgia.

EDUCATION: The Issue of Desegregation

By Diane Johnston

Vol. 1, No. 7, 1979, pp. 25

During a lively discussion on education at SRC’s recent Annual Meeting, panelist Jean Fairfax, director of education programs for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, remarked, “There is a lot more to the Brown case than school desegregation. It got us off the back of the bus into Colony Square.”

Fairfax’s comment characterizes the main issues addressed at the session, which began with Assistant Attorney General Drew 5. Days III outlining the complexities of the desegregation issues as he sees them from the Justice Department.

Days pointed out that desegregation goes beyond simply joining Black and White children in the classroom, and includes fair employment practices so that the faculty, as well as the student body, is integrated. Desegregation also covers discrimination by sex, and against the handicapped. He explained that too little has been done by the Justice Department and HEW in terms of coordinating their activities. As a result, Days said, there are currently about 250 discrimination cases pending, many without attorneys.

Director of the Southeast public education program for the American Friends Service Committee, Winifred Green, spoke next of the unfinished business of the last three decades. “The breakthroughs of 1964 and ’65 were clear-cut,” she said, “but today, equity is more complex,” She pointed out that migrants, bilingual students, the handicapped, school drop-outs and female students must be considered when dealing with educational equity.

Green warned against unfair but subtle practices that can keep disadvantaged students back. She cited the practice of “sidetracking” children who are labelled “not ready” for the first grade. These children are often lumped into a special class and kept from advancement in regular grades.

Attacking political and educational leaders who set policy, Green said there is too much educational rhetoric and not enough action. She further criticized lethargic law enforcement agencies. She called individuals and groups like the Southern Regional Council to investigate problems and to demand continued action.

“Don’t turn your backs on these issues,” Green cautioned, “just because they are hard to understand, less visible than they were in the sixties, or because they’re hard to work with. We must all work for changes.”

Jean Fairfax concluded the formal presentation by addressing the issues of higher education. “Initially,” she began, “it was a major victory to achieve individual access for highly motivated Black students into higher education. Today, that is inadequate. Now we have to work on including Blacks as a group into the whole system.”

Fairfax showed the successes and failures of desegregation in higher education. For example, the numbers of full-time Black undergraduates in post-secondary education are increasing, as are the percentages of Blacks enrolled in predominantly White institutions. Also up are the numbers of 20-34-year-old Blacks enrolled as fulltime students.

Fairfax emphasized, however, that these gains may be unstable. She cited a decrease in Black enrollments in Virginia, questioning the possible ill effects of the minimum competency exams offered there. She also found discouraging figures in the distribution of Black students in the total school system. In some states, she pointed out, nearly half of the Black students enroll in only 2-year institutions and community colleges. The numbers of Blacks at so-called “flagship” institutions (large state universities, such as the University of Georgia at Athens), are not substantially increased. “We have to eliminate the disparities,” she said.

Fairfax questioned the adequacy of remedial programs, financial aid, and the effects of attitudes towards minorities. She also expressed concern over disproportionately low enrollment and graduation of minorities in certain key fields such as engineering, the sciences (including medicine, dentistry, and veterinary medicine), and law.

Fairfax argued, too, that universities and colleges, just as any large corporations, should be required to honor equal opportunity and fair employment laws. Black faculty members are not being hired at flagship institutions nor the smaller community colleges. For example, she said, except for a junior college in Atlanta, there are no Black presidents at predominantly White institutions in the South.

According to the NAACP leader, there is a need for a new perspective on an old problem: the role of the traditional Black institution in integration. Currently, HEW guidelines are supposed to encourage and enhance these schools with financial support; HEW certainly advises against closing or downgrading them. Fairfax, however, points out that in order to maintain and/or upgrade Black colleges, money has to be taken from funds designated for the mostlyWhite flagship institutions. She is concerned that we cannot have both since HEW appears unwilling to go that far.

During a question-and-answer period, the panelists entertained inquiries from the audience. Professor Bell Wiley of Emory University who moderated concluded the session.

Diane Johnston, a senior at Emory, recently completed an internship in the publications department at Southern Regional Council.

SOUTHERN POLITICS: Judge Robert Collins Speaks

By Robert Morris

Vol. 1, No. 7, 1979, pp. 26

“Without a pool of competent attorneys who can focus on pressing the legitimate claims of minorities, those rights will be neglected, eroded, and perhaps eventually destroyed,” said Judge Robert F. Collins, speaking to luncheon guests of the SRC Annual Meeting recently. President Carter’s appointee to the U.S. District Court in New Orleans and the South’s only Black federal judge in this century, Collins spoke of his own experiences in capsuling three decades of civil rights activity in the South. Collins’ own education began as a court case. It took a lawsuit to open the doors for him and two other Blacks to enter the Louisiana State University Law School. After graduation, he worked on local counsel in Louisiana for the Congress of Racial Equality and cooperated with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

During the 60s, Collins argued eight civil rights cases before the Supreme Court, including ones involving a student march on the Baton Rouge courthouse, Black students reading books in a Clinton, LA., library and sit-in protests in the streets.

With the help of the Voter Education Project, Blacks worked for ten years in New Orleans to raise the number of registered Black voters from 20 to 45 percent, Collins said. “Because of similar effort, the state now has the highest percentage of Black elected officials in the United States.” Although many are in minor positions, it is a start, he said. “Upon that base a lot can be built … the number is still infinitesimal,” Collins noted, referring to the fact that the number of Black elected officials in the United States is less than 2 percent.

Since the 60s, a “civic malaise” has slowed the rate of progress and “some have come to be complacent or satisfied,” Collins said. “But we still have significant numbers of the population who live in poverty and ignorance,” and have not seen the effects of change.”

Another threat to the progress of civil rights is the rise of special interest groups, Collins said. They are disproportionately powerful. “Politicians feel that they can maintain themselves in power as long as they can keep the interests of these groups. Then they can ignore the interests of Blacks and other minorities.” Only a lifetime of persisting work, he emphasized, can insure that the gains of civil rights are not lost in the next generation.

Robert Morris is a student at Georgia State University.

SOUTHERN POLITICS:Panelists look at Southern Political System

By Jean Jones

Vol. 1, No. 7, 1979, pp. 26-27

“Tyranny and tragedy have been and still are the core of the Southern experience,” Dr. Samuel Dubois Cook, president of Dillard University, remarked during an afternoon session on politics in the South at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Regional Council.

The plight of Southern politics was analyzed by Dr. Cook, Nashville Tennesseean Publisher John Seigenthaler and Atlanta City Councilwoman Panke Bradley in a panel discussion. While recognizing the great social changes made in the political system of the South, each had enormous misgivings.

“The South and the Southern political system are not ‘free at last,’ Cook continued. “In spite of the impressive gains in elective politics, tokenism is still king in this Southern political system and social order.”

Seigenthaler noted that the social changes we cherish in the South today had to overcome harsh racist attitudes of high-level positions. Now, it is not very popular to be a public racist. Still, progressive and liberal politicians who once opposed racists have now become moderates. “They cleave to the middle of the road as if the holy grail were there. We used to call for moderation. Now we have it, I don’t much care for it,” Seigenthaler concluded.

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Blacks have been elected to decision-making positions with “the largest concentration of Southern, Blacks in municipal government,” Bradley said. Yet, there is a significant drop in Southern Blacks in state, federal, and law enforcement positions, she said.

“It’s much harder for Blacks to go further, no matter how popular or guaranteed their election may be on local levels,” Bradley said. “Blacks, especially Black women, are locked in municipal positions” since they usually cannot afford to seek higher office.

Through all the gains in the Southern political structure, it is a long way from being a “postracial South,” Dr. Cook concluded. “A post-racial South is an illusion which allows the South to indulge in selfcongratulations and selfrighteousness in relation to the North and the rest of the country.”

A 1978 graduate of Clark College, Jean Jones lives and works in Atlanta. She also wrote the introduction to “Role of Law in the South” carried in this issue.