Interchange: In This Issue

By Betty Norwood Chaney

Vol. 1, No. 8, 1979, p. 2

May 17, markes the 25th anniversary of Brown v. Borad of Education decision by the Supreme Court. While not devoting the contents of this issue entirely to eductation, Southern Changes, like so many other publications this month, reserves some space for reflecting upon the state of deucation 25 years after the historic decision.

In “Soapbox” this month, Dillard professor Monte Piliawsky appraises the South to measure how much progress has been made since 1954. He finds the paradox of the “New South” to be most dramatically exhibited in the area of public education. “School integration,” he says, “has generally meant that White parents have pulled their children outof the public schools, leaving to Black (and some poor White) children school systems which invariably are underfunded. The remaining White chldren often are divided from Blacks by controversial tracking systems.”

Although the picture he paints is rather dismal, he nevertheless concludes that public education is still the “best hope for the ‘New South’ to provide an enlightened citizenry and to creat national unity. (The commentary carried here is part of the the introduction to a much larger unpublished work by Piliawsky entitled Exit 13 about the closed socielty at the University of Southern Mississippi.)

“Profiles in Change” from John Egerton’s School Desegregation: A Report Card from the South looks at schools around the Southland after desegregation. Together theseprofiles present a very descriptive picture– one not greatly changed since 1975- of integration in Southern public schools.

Some schools have had more success with desegregation than others. There are those like Lillian M. Brinkley in Norfolk who feels “all of us someday– we may bein our graves– will realize it has been for the benefit of everybody.” But then there are others like Rev. Joseph N. Green, also of Norfolk who says, “We’ve desegregated the schools, but I do not feel we’ve integrated the schools… integration means people are working together harmoniously and cooperatively. I don’t think this has really come about. That which separated us in the past to a great extent is still present.”

In some instances standardized test scores, a requisite for measuring progress, indicate a drop for all races since desegregation. Now another fator entering the picture is minimum competency testing, a practice that is inforce in practically every Southern state, and has probably become the hottest and most controvercial issue over the last year. Many feel that the tests, a basis for awarding high school diplomas, will disproportionately affect the poor and minorities.

In this issue, Alace Lovelace reports on yet another situation involving testing that is causing considerable controversy. It is the Georgia desegregation plan for higher education which calls, among a number of other things, for entrance and exit tests to be administered to college students. Many students and some faculty see this plan as a ploy for decreasin the number of Black students who are able to enter and graduate from college. Demonstrations and violence have erupted around this plan while others find it “totally acceptable.”

Two other controversial issues involving schools are also repoted on in this issue. They are the prayer in public schools debate, by Steve Suitts, in our Southern Politics department and the school breakfast program, by Judy Curie, in the Health Care department.

In addition, we also carry in this issue “The Triana Fish Story” by Thomas Noland about the small, poor Alabama community whose residents were found to have extraordinary levels of DDT in their bodies.

Wayne Greenhaw reports on another situation in Alabama involving the poor. It is about their legal struggle with the Alabama Power Company who is seeking the largest rate increase in the state’s history.

The appointment of G. Duke Beasley as the first administrator of the Georgia Office of Fair Employment Practices caused something of a stur last summer (See the September issue of Southern Changes, Vol. 1 No. 1), but nothing compared to the uproar created by the release of his first annual report recently. Ginny Looney brings us up-to-date on the administrator’s appointment and the report called a “complete and utter wste of taxpayer’s money” by one legislator.

As we enter the second quarter after the Brown decision, it is clear from the levels of debate surrounding education on all fronts that we are probably still another quarter of a century away from solving them. This is not to say that some progress has not been made. “Profiles in Change” attest to that fact, but the burden placed upon education in this country is a heavy one– one we’ve only begun to bear.

Public Education: Best Hope for the “New South”

By Monte Piliawsky

Vol. 1, No. 8, 1979, pp. 5-7, 25

The Myth of the “New South”

In the early 1970s, the media celebrated the emergence of a “New South” which was characterized primarily by the most successful advances in racial equality in American society. Some observers even viewed the South as the redeemer of the American soul. In 1971, Marshall Frady wrote: “It may be the South after all where the nation’s general malaise of racial alienation first finds resolution.” This dramatically changed interpretation of the South was capped off by the election of Jimmy Carter, a Southerner, to the White House in 1976.

Yet, despite all the talk about a “born again” South, the tone of hopefulness which characterized articles written about the South only a few years ago is changing. In midJune 1978, one could read an article entitled “Old Problems Persist in the New South’ ” in the Chicago Tribune, as well as a first-page article in Time magazine entitled “in Mississippi: The KKK Suits Up.” In October 1978, Tommy Lee Hines, a 26year-old mentally retarded Black man, was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison by an all-White jury for allegedly raping a White woman in Decatur, Alabama, the site for the trial of the “Scottsboro boys,” and exactly parallel case 40 years earlier. Clearly, there is need for an objective appraisal of the South to measure exactly how much progress has been made, and whether that progress is substantial or superficial. Where does the South stand today?

The issue of the New South is partly a definitional one. Contrasted to the worst excesses of the pre-1954 period, racial conditions have improved markedly. In the most significant areas of the Civil Rights Movement-political participation and access to public facilitiessubstantial progress has been made. Blacks have registered enormous political gains if measured in terms of registered voters and Black elected officials. Blacks have general access to public facilities. There is more school desegregation in the South than in the North. It may he, however, as Lerone Bennett, Jr., senior editor of Ebony, cautions, “wrong to extrapolate from these surface changes to changes in social structures.”

Black Political Participation

The impressive gains in Black voter registration do not necessarily translate into social betterment for Blacks. Many Southern Blacks live in towns where the electoral domination of the White merchant class perpetuates racism. In Tupelo, Mississippi, for example, since the spring of 1978 Blacks have been boycotting downtown merchants in protest of alleged police brutality and job discrimination. The Ku Klux Klan held a rally on May 6, 1978, at a cityowned recreation center. According to Alfred Robinson, president of the United League of North Mississippi, the Klan rally was attended by “99 percent of the city’s cops, the chief of police and the mayor.” The mayor reportedly received a standing ovation for his speech before the Klan.

Even the election of a Black mayor can be but a pyrrhic victory. Tuskegee, Alabama, has had a Black mayor since 1972. Whites have responded by establishing a separate sub-society, with their own private school and even their own newspaper; many have moved to new homes in near-by suburban communities. However, Whites still own almost all the major businesses and both banks in the downtown area and totally dominate the economy of Tuskegee. As Professor Manning Marable of Tuskegee Institute concludes in his 1977 account, appropriately entitled “Tuskegee and the Politics of Illusion in the New South”: Dc Jure segregation has ended, but defacto segregation and an ongoing culture of White racism remain pervasive.”

Black mayors in large Southern cities confront the necessity of playing brokerage politics with the White economic establishment. In the spring of 1977, Atlanta’s Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, fired sanitation workers-most of whom were Black-who had struck for higher wages and then declared: “Before I take the city into a deficit financial position, elephants will roost in the trees.”

Another serious constraint on Black city mayors is the power of the state legislatures. As White voters are losing political control of cities to Blacks, they are increasingly dependent upon the state legislatures to protect their interests. The current Black mayor of New Orleans is desperately attempting to raise funds, but is hampered by a provision in the new state constitution which allows a

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home-owner of a residence assessed at under $50,000 to pay no property tax whatsoever. Chuck Stone, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, explains that “the sole benefit redounding to the Black community’s benefit of a Black statewide office … may lie in an aroused Black pride, but not necessarily any improvement in the quality of Black life.”

Public Education

This paradox of the New Southprogress contrasted with underlying stagnation-is perhaps most dramatically exhibited in the area ofpublic schools. The formal integration of schools masks a deeper and more significant pattern of “resegregation.” School integration has generally meant that White parents have pulled their children out of the public schools, leaving to Black (and some poor White) children school systems which invariably are underfunded. The remaining White children often are divided from Blacks by controversial tracking systems, a practice of assigning students to certain selfcontained curricula.

The New Orleans public school system well illustrates the problems confronting public education in the South. Most Whites living in New Orleans send their children to private or parochial schools and no longer want to give the public schools their tax support. Although middle-class Whites have little concern about the quality of public education, they control the educational system through both political and economic power. Whether or not this non-support of public education represents racism, the net effect is that Blacks have only inferior schools to attend.

Over 80 percent of the public school enrollment in New Orleans is Black. A 1975 survey revealed that the city’s students scored in the bottom fifth on standardized tests, compared with students in the 22 other largest United States cities. The dismal quality of the New Orleans public school system reflects the total lack of financial support for the schools. In 1974, New Orleans spent only $756 per pupil, compared to an average of $1,303 in other major cities.

Clearly, the public school system in New Orleans is offering Black students an inferior education. Dr. Mack J. Spears, the Black president of the Orleans Parish school board, said in 1975 that Black children in public education in New Orleans and the nation are deliberately structured into mediocrity: “[There is] a designed strategy to achieve a label of inferior schools because there are forces, social, political and economic, which do not want Black kids to survive.”

Economic Conditions

A 1978 study conducted by the Institute for Southern Studies reveals that despite the South’s rapid economic growth, the gap between the region’s rich and poor is almost exactly the same as it was nearly 25 years ago. According to the study, as of ‘1976, the richest one-fifth of all Southern families accounted for 42.3 percent of earned income, while the poorest fifth received only 5.0 percent of every income dollar. By contrast, in 1953, the poorest one-fifth earned 3.5 percent of total income compared to 43.3 percent for the richest fifth. The study suggests that the slight improvement at the bottom end of the income scale can largely be explained by the sizeable migration of poor families out of the South, especially Blacks moving to the Northeast. However, even with. the North absorbing many of the South’s poor, the number of people living below the poverty line in the South has declined only by five percent, from 11.3 million to 10.8 million between 1969 and 1975.

The reality of life for Blacks in particular is far from the picture offered in investment brochures promoting the New South. Most Blacks in the South live in rural, non-metropolitan areas. Typically, rural workers in the cotton or sugar farms live in houses with a single woodburning stove,often lacking toilet facilities. One cause of the poor housing is the plummeting since 1971 of federal housing loans to rural Black Southerners. An increased number of Blacks simply are too poor even to quality for the low-income programs. Another, factor for the decline in loans is pure discrimination. The supervisor of the Farmers Home Administration for Sumter County, Georgia (where Plains is located), explained in 1978 why loans to Blacks had dropped off so sharply:

Black people don’t know how to adjust …. White people, you can put them in a subdivision. But not Blacks. Nine out of ten will follow the worst example. They won’t do what they should do. They fuss and fight like animals, shacking with each other’s wives. It’s a mess.

A second major factor perpetuating Black poverty in the South is the fact that the widely heralded industrial development of the New South has mainly bypassed areas where most Blacks live. A report in 1977 by the Task Force on Southern Rural

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Development revealed that Blacks actually received a considerably greater number of new industrial jobs vis-avis Whites in the decade of 1956-1966 than they did in the past decade. A third disheartening factor is the rapid disappearance of the Black-owned farms in the South. At the present rate of Black land loss-300,000 acres a year-there will be no Black farmers left in 1990. (See Nick Katz, “The Other Side of the New South (II),” New Republic, April 1, 1978.) It is not surprising, then, that in the 244 Southern rural counties with the largest Black population, 56 percent of Blacks live in poverty, compared to 20 percent of Whites. Steve Suitts, executive director of the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Council explained: “It all relates back to the tradition of White folks using Black folks as cheap labor.”

In summary, since 1954 race relations between Blacks and Whites in the South have improved dramatically in some areas and remained unchanged in others. The bottom line is that the enormous progress made in the political arena has not been translated into economic advancement for the masses of Southern Blacks. As Samuel DuBois Cook, President of Dillard University, wrote in 1976:

The decade between the midfifties and the mid-sixties was one of remarkable and unprecedented gains for Blacks. For Blacks, it was the most creative, constructive, and humane period in their long experience with the American political system. In the latesixties, however, the cold winds of conservatism, reaction, and “benign neglect” began blowing again. They continue.

One is struck by the ominous possibility that this “Second Reconstruction” for the South may fail for the same reason which doomed the First Reconstruction: a lack of economic content and a failure to give Blacks economic resources commensurate with their political power.

Race Relations in the U.S

What inferences for race relations in the country as a whole can be drawn from our analysis of the New South? There is strong and mounting evidence that the Civil Rights Movement has stalled in the North as well as the South. Take school integration, for example. In 1972-the latest year for which complete details are available-43 percent of Black students in the South attended schools in which at least half the students were White, compared to only 29 percent in the rest of the country. In fact, psychologist Kenneth B. Clark reports that the percentage of Black students attending segregated public schools in such Northern urban centers as New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago is greater in 1978 than it was in 1954.

Two recent developments threaten the future of education for Blacks and poor Americans, respectively. The Supreme Court’s Bakke decision in June 1978, a judgment supported by an overwhelming 81 percent of the American people in a Gallup public opinion poll, appears to be the death knell to an era of “affirmative action.” In a similar vein, the measure passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on June 1, 1978 (H.R. 12050) granting tax credits for tuition paid to private elementary and secondary schools was rightly labeled in an article in The Atlanta Constitution by Hal Gulliver as “the most dangerous legislation affecting public education in a long while.” Referring to the tuition tax credit plan, Gulliver quotes Dr. Benjamin Mays, chairman of the Atlanta school board, as saying:

The passage of such legislation by the federal government puts money in the pockets of the rich and well-to-do to pay for their children to go to private schools and will leave the city schools to poor Whites and poor Blacks…I believe it will be the beginning of the destruction of public education in this country which is at the heart of a democracy like ours, in which the founding fathers were interested in providing at least a high school education for every American.

The Tax Revolt expressed in the overwhelming passage of Proposition 13 in California in June 1978 and by the wholesale defeat of candidates “soft” on tax cuts in the November 1978 election is even more foreboding, as it portents a deterioration of social services for minorities. Parren Mitchell, leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, predicted in Time magazine that “every single human-resources program is going to be in danger, medicare and medicaid, welfare, the jobs programs.” Suggestive of the long-range effects of the California vote is a poll asking the state’s voters which services they felt could most usefully be curtailed. The largest number-69 percent-cited welfare payments to the poor, and 21 percent named mass transit-a service indispensable to Blacks and Chicanos. On the other hand, voters were reluctant to dispense with services most beneficial to middle-class property owners: only four percent favored cuts in the amount spent for police, and only one percent would accept reductions in funds for the fire department. In short, as Joseph Kraft of the Washington Post states, “the immediate victims of this populist hedonism, unfortunately, are the poor minorities.”

An extensive national opinion survey administered in 1978 by the Gallup Organization for Patomic Associates reveals additional gloomy news for the future progress of Blacks in the United States. The survey found that White Americans rank ‘the problems of Black Americans” as the very lowest-31st-of an array of 31 domestic and international issues, below even such concerns as “communism in France and Italy,” “mass transit,” and “Communist China.” Whites seem to believe that Blacks have made such substantial progress that their plight need no longer be a matter of major concern.

The Decline of Social Conscience

What is the deeper meaning of the new conservatism in America? Joseph Kraft describes the phenomenon as “middle-class greed. How to stop the rising wave of self-indulgence presents a genuine national problem.” Senator George McGovern terms it “degrading hedonism that tells them to ask what they can take from the needy.” I believe that the loss of guilt feelings is the key to explaining the prevailing American mood. “The middle-class is not feeling guilty anymore,” says Willie Woods, coordinator of the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials. “They’re worried about their own survival.” In short, as Professor Irving Howe notes, “I think there’s a loss of social sympathy.”

The immediate precipitating cause of our decline of social conscience is inflation. Caught in an unaccustomed economic squeeze, the middle-class is discovering that its “real” take-home pay is not increasing. Columnist William Satire refers to these Americans as “The New Poor.” Frustrated by their stagnant resentment in demands for tax cuts, regardless of the concomitant curtailment in public services, especially needed by the poor.

The underlying cause of our decline of social conscience is the loss of guilt feelings. The enormous media coverage of the Civil Rights Movement brought into our living rooms graphic and almost daily reminders of the appalling conditions of America’s poor. We felt guilty about racial discrimination and the plight of the poor. Today, however, with the decline of the Civil Rights Movement, the immediate pressure upon our psyches to feel guilty is greatly diminished. The exemplary leadership role of the federal government in the mid-1960s virtually has ended. Two years before the Bakke decision, Hodding Carter, III, then editor of the Delta Democrat-Times, wrote:

It is ironic that at the very moment we most need continuing pressure and movement, both are being withdrawn by a nation which is uncertain of where it wants to go on matters of civil liberties and civil rights.

In my opinion, it is equally unlikely that a rejuvenated civil rights effort will emerge in the near future or that the present high rate of inflation will decline. In the meantime, the economic conditions of Blacks and the poor erode further. For decades, up to 1970, Blacks were slowly gaining on Whites, economically; however, inflation has reversed that progress. Specifically, the median income of Black families which was 61.3 percent of the White median income in 1970 fell to 58.5 percent in 1974, improved slightly in 1975, but has fallen since then. An August 1978 study of the National Urban League entitled “The Illusions of Black Progress” reported the equally dismal finding that the jobless gap between Whites and Blacks is the widest it has ever been. The study found that at the peak of the 1975 recession the Black jobless rate was 1.7 times the White rate, but that by the first half of 1978, the Black jobless rate was a record 2.3 times higher than the White jobless rate. The study also dispelled the widespread impression that the Black upper-class has expanded in recent years. From 1972 to 1976, for example, the proportion of Black families whose total income was above the government’s higher budget level ($24,000) dropped from 12 to 9 per cent.

The title of this paper is meant to suggest that quality public education is the best means available to improve race relations in America. This hypothesis contains one basic assumption. Scholarly studies of racism conducted by social scientists in the past 25 years have found that in a step-like pattern the more education persons had, the greater their willingness to extend civil rights to minorities. Since the overwhelming majority of Americans attend public schools, a reduction in the quality of public education could be expected to result in a more racist citizenry. Conversely, public education, if properly structured, is an ethical enterprise to’ help clarify human values and direct human affairs “toward desirable and rationally justified patterns of action.”

Americans have always had sublime faith in the power of education. The eminent historian Henry Steele Commager wrote in 1950: “No other people ever demanded so much of education as have the American. None other was ever served so well by its schools and educators.” Americans quite properly have paid grateful homage to the success of the public schools in meeting the historic demands that society made upon them: to provide an enlightened citizenry, to create national unity, and to Americanize the millions of foreign-born. Since 1950, society has placed another “historic demand” upon public education: to combat racism. The future of race relations in America depends upon its success in this endeavor.

Monte Piliawsky is a professor at Dillard University in New Orleans.

Profiles in Change

By John Egerton

Vol. 1, No. 8, 1979, pp. 8-10, 26-28

(Editorial Note: This excerpt is taken from John Egerton’s School Desegregation: A Report Card from the South, published by Southern Regional Council in 1976. It provides a good overview of school desegregation in the South. The briefer city profiles which make up this section were authored by working newspersons who have written about the school desegregation process for their newspapers. Their by-lines follow their reports. The complete study is available from the Council at $4.00 a copy.)

Anniston, Alabama: Wounds To Heal

After eight years of backing away from desegregation and two years of living with it, Anniston school officials say they’re now getting back to their basic work: educating children.

Desegregation, when it finally came, was tense at first-but peaceful. Now the tension is gone, and educators seem to take pride in the way things have worked. “1 think people in Boston would gladly give their interest in hell to trade places with us,” says Anniston High School Principal Robert Whitehead.

The Reverend N.Q. Reynolds, a Black minister and civil rights leader who now serves as chairman of the Anniston Board of Education, says, “Once they decided it was something they would have to do, everyone buckled down and started working, and worked beautifully together.”

Anniston, with a population of 31,000 (34 percent Black), is located in Northeast Alabama, 60 miles from Birmingham. The city is surrounded by semi-rural Calhoun County, which has a population of more than 100,000, about 10 percent Black.

The city maintained a dual school system until the mid1960s. As a result of HEW enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, some “freedom of choice” desegegation began in 1965. In 1967, Anniston became one of the 99 Alabama school systems involved in Lee v. Macon County Board of Education, a statewide suit. Three years later, after many alternatives were proposed by the U.S. Department of Justice, the school system and the Black community, a plan to disestablish the dual schools was ordered into effect.

The Justice Department was not happy with the plan, because it left most of the schools either predominantly White or overwhelmingly Black. School officials, though, expressed public satisfaction. Superintendent John L. Fulmer told newspaper reporters he felt racial problems, as far as the schools were concerned, were “almost passe.” At the time, however, formerly allWhite Anniston High School was still about 80 percent White, and formerly all-Black Cobb High had 1,120 Blacks and only 13 Whites.

Further court action and out-of-court negotiation led in 1973 to yet another plan-the one that is now in force.

Under the plan, five of the 11 elementary schools (three of them originally for Whites) were closed, and Johnston Junior High School was converted to an elementary school to accommodate most of the students from the five closed schools. Anniston and Cobb high schools were paired, with senior high students going to Anniston. At Cobb, an older school located in a Black residential area, a special effort was made to strengthen the curriculum in mathematics, languages and the sciences.

The plan left several elementary schools racially identifiable. As a result, the Justice Department has kept the court case open, and has required changes in the plan from year to year. Two of the elementary schools were paired last fall. To others are still segregated. One is all

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White, and sits on the opposite side of a range of hills from the rest of the system; the other is nearly all Black, and is almost equally as isolated. The school system is under orders to look for a way to desegregate the two schools, but no specific plan has yet been suggested. Fulmer, the superintendent, says that, in view of present trends in the courts, he doesn’t believe anything will be done.

Rev. Reynolds, the board chairman, says he wishes the Justice Department would back off a little and let the school system have time to plan for the future. “Every year since 1967,” he says, “we have been monitored and required to make some additional changes in the desegregation pattern. That in itself is a hardship.”

Nonetheless, Reynolds sees nothing but progress ahead for the school system. He believes that integration has ceased to be a problem: “As we get some of the wounds healed-and they do heal more and more with time-and get some of the hangups out of our minds, we’ll have nothing but progress.”

A group of Anniston High juniors and seniors, in a discussion of the pros and cons of desegregation, concluded that it has been mostly beneficial to them. No tension remains, they said, although they are aware at times of a “them” and “us” attitude in themselves, and of what might be called-with some irony- de facto segregation. The school’s basketball team, for example, is all-Black; White youngsters who like basketball play at the YMCA.

At the elementary level, things are somewhat different. Mauvelene Phillips, the principal at Johnston Elementary, says children in the school are working well together: “We have seen improvement in the situation. Each group tends to accept the other more freely than they once did. They cooperate together.”

Today, in addition to having its first Black school board chairman, the system has a Black assistant superintendent and a Black principal at Cobb, as well as at two of the elementary schools. According to school officials, the faculty in the system-and in each school-is approximately two-thirds White and one-third Black.

The population of Anniston, while falling in recent years, has remained a steady two-thirds White. But the student body in the schools has gradually become more Black. Between 1961 and 1967, Black enrollment increased by about 600, while White enrollment fell by 800. Since 1967, both Black and White enrollment has fallenthe former by almost 500, the latter by almost 2,000. Over the entire period since 1961, total enrollment has dropped from 8,000 to 5,400, and the schools have shifted from 65 percent White to 55 percent Black.

Private and parochial schools in Anniston have absorbed some of the Whites who left the city’s schools, but Superintendent Fulmer believes most of the loss has been to surrounding Calhoun County, which has more than 11,000 students, less than 10 percent of whom are Black. Fulmer expresses some concern that continued White flight will lead to a “tipping” situation in which the system could become almost all-Black. Reynolds believes factors other than White flight are involved.

“It has become a whipping stone for the system,” he says. “I think a majority of them would have gone anyway, though, even without desegregation. It was a contributing factor, but not a major one.”

Reynolds believes the city of Anniston could help mat.ters by annexing parts of the county. Another possible move-merger of the city and county schools-has been discussed publicly on occasion, but no such change is now in prospect.

The school principals say there has been no increase in discipline problems attributable to desegregation. At Anniston High, Robert Whitehead says discipline there is related to social factors divorced from desegregation.

The system has added some remedial classes to the curriculum in recent years, particularly in reading and mathematics. Even so, many children-particularly Black children-did not do well in the first states of desegregation, according to Fulmer. He believes overall performance has improved since then, however, and he says younger students whose entire school experience has been in a desegregated setting are doing well, though “maybe not as well as they should.”

Standardized test scores have been dropping since 1969 in both city and county schools- a fact that cannot be explained by desegregation, since the county schools are overwhelmingly White. Fulmer says he has no racial breakdown of test scores to indicate how students have fared since desegregation and some school officials believe it is too early to make comparisons.

Fulmer says he gets few calls these days from parents concerned with desegregation-related problems. In coming months, however, one potential controversy does face the school system. It has to do with the need to replace Cobb Junior High with a modern facility. The school board owns ample land in a White residential area adjacent to Anniston High, and there is some sentiment for building there. Many Blacks are opposed to that; they say Whites always want to move important institutions out of the Black community. Some Whites also are opposed, on the ground that they don’t want so many children in their area of town. A satisfactory solution remains to be worked out.

-Judy Johnson

Anniston Star

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Austin, Texas: Waiting For The Court

Desegregation in Austin lurched to a rocky beginning in 1971 when the city’s all-Black junior and senior high schools were closed and their students were bused to allWhite schools across town.

The desegregation plan, approved in federal district court, did not affect the city’s elementary schools, or its sizable Mexican-American population, nor did it require Whites to be bused. Legal arguments on those and other questions were taken to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. The case has been resting there for nearly three years.

The initial change was accompanied by jeers, rockthrowing and boycotts. Now, things are quieter. The opening of schools last fall was uneventful, and a general calm prevails, marred only by occasional flare-ups between small gangs of Blacks and Whites at the district’s two or three most overcrowded schools.

“We have moved from the stage where our principal concerns were dealing with physical confrontation,” says Superintendent Jack L. Davidson. “Now there is greater concentration on the academic and extracurricular participation of all students in all phases of the school program.

Among the problems left to ponder are the high rate of dropouts and pushouts among minorities, the sparse sprinkling of minorities in extra-curricular activities, and low achievement test scores among all three racial groups.

Austin is a city of 300,000 people. Its school system enrolls 59,000 students-an increase of 4,000 since desegregation began-and the racial ratios have changed only slightly in recent years. Whites make up 63 percent of the total (a decrease of 2 percent since 1970), MexicanAmericans are 22 percent (an increase of 2 percent), and Blacks comprise 15 percent. White flight and private schools have had no significant effect on public school enrollment.

About 15,000 Austin students are bused to school, including some Black and Chicano students who participate in a minority-to-majority transfer program. Only 2,200 students are bused as part of the desegregation plan, and almost all of them are Black. At the elementary level there are five all-Black schools, and about a third of the 60 elementary schools either have a relative handful of Whites (5 percent or less) or a preponderance of them (95 percent or more).

At the secondary level, Blacks make up between 9 and 30 percent of the enrollment in formerly all-White schools. Most of the Mexican-American junior and senior high school students are concentrated in East Austin schools.

There is a high attrition rate among both Blacks and Chicanos, evidenced by two sets of figures. First, Mexican-Americans make up 25 percent of the elementary school enrollment, but only 17 percent of the high school student total. And second, Black students received 54 percent of the long-term suspensions last year. In short, there is a dropout problem among Chicanos and a pushout problem facing Blacks.

Student participation in extracurricular activities is another problem in the schools. Such programs as band, pep squad, student council and honor society attract plenty of Whites, but disproportionately small numbers of minority students.

Scores from standardized achievement tests indicate a slight drop by all three racial groups in the past three years. School officials see no connection between desegregation and test performance. Schools with high percentages of minority students tend to be clustered at the bottom of the achievement score rankings. Average scores from the predominantly White schools are higher, but still below the national average.

The percentage of Black and Mexican-American teachers in the system has inched upward since desegregation began, but the current totals do not please either group. Blacks comprise 14 percent of the total professional staff, and Chicanos only 7 percent; at the classroom level, the percentages are slightly higher. Representatives of both minority groups have accused the school district of discrimination in hiring; school officials say there is a lack of qualified applicants, and recruiting efforts have not been highly successful. In the top echelons of the school district administration, there is

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one Black and one Mexican-American among the five assistant superintendents, and one Black and two MexicanAmericans among 19 department directors.

The decrease in confrontations and racial incidents in the secondary schools, says Superintendent Davidson, is a result of two things: “People having the opportunity to adjust to the new situation, and new services provided by the district as a result of desegregation.” Tnethnic student human relations committees operate in each secondary school, coordinating activities designed to foster positive attitudes toward desegregation. There is also a schoolcommunity liaison program staffed by a tn-ethnic team of 10 persons who work to improve relations among the ethnic groups throughout the district. Several other programs, financed largely by federal funds, are focused on reading and mathematics problems, communication skills, extra-curricular activity participation, attendance problems and special learning problems of bilingual and migrant students.

“There seems to be a greater awareness on the part of most of our population of the desirability and the necessity to make desegregation work to everybody’s advantage,” Davidson says. He adds that although desegregation “hasn’t materially enhanced or hurt the cognitive achievement of Austin students, it has made school a more realistic representation of what the community is and should be.”

Still, it is generally acknowledged that only partial school desegregation has taken place in Austin, and school officials have been inclined to wait for directives from the courts, rather than to take the initiative on the issue. Bertha Means, a supervisor in the secondary schools and a respected civic leader in the Black community, believes the various programs and services the schools have started in recent years have promoted desegregation, but she thinks more needs to be done. So does M.G. Bowden the Anglo director of elementary education, who says “more integration needs to take place.”

The Rev. Marvin Griffin, the only Black on the seven-member board of school trustees, says Austin “has not fulfilled the mandate of the Supreme Court because we haven’t touched the elementary schools.” Gus Garcia, the only Mexican-American member of the board, also criticizes the current desegregation plan, saying it excludes grades on through five and requires one-way busing. Garcia would like to see the schools which have reached at least a 25 percent minority enrollment without busing be designated as integrated schools.

In New Orleans, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has been stymied for more than three years by the Austin case. Part of the conflict there concerns the legal status of Mexican-Americans, who have not been subjected to the statutory segregation as Blacks have.

Lynne Flocke

Austin American-Statesman

Bogalusa, Louisiana: Still Uncomfortable

Gradually since the mid-1960s, desegregated schools in Bogalusa have become an acceptable, if not robust, social institution. It is debatable whether they were ever destined to be anything more than a federally-enforced anomaly, bringing together the rough-edged Whites and Blacks of this milltown community in an uncomfortable atmosphere.

Bogalusa, on the toe of Louisiana’s boot-like configuration, touches the piney woods and sand loam of southern Mississippi. There is a hardtack mentality indigenous to the land, a kind of raw frontier atmosphere in which unskilled Whites have long battled with Blacks for livelihood in the same kinds of jobs. For the past two and a half decades, the town has been dominated by one industrial citizen, Crown Zellerbacn, which converts pine trees into Bogalusa brown kraft paper and the paper into grocery bags and corrugated boxes.

Initially, a court-ordered plan of “freedom of choice” desegregation came to Bogalusa in the fall of 1965. Fighting broke out between Whites and the dozen or so Blacks who transferred into the previously all-White schools. Several of the more militant White students were put under injunction by the federal court for harassing the Blacks, and for some the injunction was in force until they graduated.

Total desegregation of the city’s schools, based on a plan submitted by the all-White school board, was finally ordered by the federal court in the fall of 1969. Of the 5,157 students in the system that fall, 38 percent were Black. Enrollment has fallen by a total of about 500 since then, but the Black ratio has also fallen-by one percentage point.

School Superintendent Frank Mobley says the loss of students is not a result of desegregation or of White flight to private schools, but of a general decline in population involving Blacks as much as Whites. Private schools have not been a factor; American Academy, and all-White school, had a graduating class of 16 last year.

Mobley maintains that since he became superintendent in 1971, the desegregation plan has been fully implemented. “There are no more all-White or all-Black schools,” he says. “The percentages of Blacks range from 20 to 30 percent in some schools to as much as 45 percent in others.”

Under the initial plan, two relatively new all-Black schools in Black neighborhoods were closed. “The Black community went along with the idea of not having any totally Black schools,” says Andrew Moses, a Black radio station manager, “but we didn’t like having to lose the schools in the Black neighborhoods.”

Among more militant Blacks, there are some bitter critics of what Mobley calls “full integration.” Gayle Jenkins, a Black mother and secretary of the Bogalusa

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Voters League, is one. “We are supposed to be integrated,” she says, “but it is integrated on the outside and segregated on the inside. From an educational standpoint, we feel we have some of the best teachers among Blacks, but they are limited. There are, for instance, no Black males teaching in the elementary schools, and it was not until this past year that we had a Black named principal of an elementary school.”

Jenkins contends that there are discriminatory hiring practices affecting teachers and administrative personnel. “They are hiring Whites,” she says, “but they find some excuse-such as they can’t find Black specialists-not to hire Blacks.”

Mobley defends the hiring practices in the system. “We have three Black assistant principals, as well as one Black elementary principal,” he says. “We don’t have any Blacks in supervisory positions at this time because we were overstaffed and we’re not hiring any people.”

A.Z. Young, a long-time Black activist in Bogalusa, expresses views similar to those voiced by Jenkins. “We have physical integration,” he declares, “but not mental integration. I’m afraid that is still a long way off.”

Young says a pattern is developing in the school system: “When a Black is in charge of any activity, such as track coach, the Whites don’t participate.” Furthermore, he says, too many young Blacks who graduate from the schools “wind up in the ghettos up North, or on skid row, or have to go into service. We aren’t getting as many to go to college now as we did when we had Black schools.”

Young worries about Bogalusa being “boxed in,” culturally and economically: “We have no interstate highway, no airlines, no trains, and only two buses a day. The people who generally come here can’t make it anywhere else in the world.” From a Black standpoint, Crown Zellerbach has been a good employer and a positive force for racial justice-but it is gradually cutting back on employment.

Still, there is some optimism about the future of the school system. Two years ago, the voters passed a $4.5 million school bond issue to finance modernization and construction of school facilities. Superintendent Mobley says it is significant “that we had one of the few school bond issues to pass anywhere around this area in the past few years.”

Mobley also asserts that the school system does not have “any real discipline problems now,” as it has had in the past. “We have our share, but I don’t think it is much different than schools all over the nation. This year, we feel we are having our best year. Each year has gotten a little better.”

Shortly before last Christmas, there was an incident in which a White boy stabbed a Black boy. In the disturbance which followed, only a small number of students became involved. The federal judge in whose court the Bogalusa school desegregation case has been handled was brought into the controversy to assure fairness in the settling of the incident by school officials. Most observers appeared not to see the affair as being racially oriented.

Blacks are still concerned that they have no representation on the elected school hoard, even though they have offered capable candidates in the past two elections. “The feeling was that it was time for a Black to be on the school board,” says Al Hansen managing editor of the Bogalusa Dailr’ News.” But when Whites got to the polls, they just couldn’t do it.”

Moses, the Black radio station manager, got a very respectable vote last time, as did Murkel Sibley, a Black executive at Crown Zellerbach. But a majority of the registered voters are White, and Blacks see that as an insurmountable obstacle as long as school board members are elected at large. A lawsuit is now on file in federal court to require that single-member districts be created for each of the five board posts.

Inside the schools, the two problem areas academically are reading and mathematics. Some classes are almost all Black or all-White. In extra-curricular activities, the chorus is mostly Black, the band is mostly White, and the drama club is well mixed. Last year, a White boy and a Black girl had the leading roles in the school play. Whites and Blacks in the Bogalusa schools are still not entirely comfortable with one another, but the worst hostilities and inequalities of the past appear to have been reduced.

W.F. Minor

New Orleans Times-Picayune

Norfolk, Virginia: “For The Benefit of Everybody”

When U.S. District Court Judge John A. MacKenzie declared on February 14, 1974, that the Norfolk school system was unitary and that “racial discrimination through official action has been eliminated,” he shut the book on one of the longest school desegregation cases in the country.

For almost 19 years, the Norfolk School Board had been involved in litigation initiated by 101 Black parents and children who wanted an end to “separate but equal” education. The 1956 case bore the name of Leola Pearl Beckett, a Black seventh-grader who grew up without ever attending an undesegregated school.

Step by step over two decades, successive court orders forced the school board to desegregate its schools, to take positive steps to desegregate classrooms and faculties, to bus as a means of ending racial imbalance, to provide free transportation, and finally to pay legal fees to attorneys for the plaintiffs in the case.

In retrospect, many persons closely associated with the

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Norfolk public schools say desegregation has gone fairly smoothly.

“It was unusually smooth when you compare it to other cities of our size and racial makeup,” says John C. McLaulin, the assistant superintendent for research and planning. “Comparatively speaking, there were very few instances of violence and I can’t remember any community-instigated incidents.”

But the road the schools traveled between 1956 and 1974 was rocky at several points along the way. In September 1958, for instance, Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., used the state’s “massive resistance” laws to close six all-White junior and senior high schools and lock out 10,000 Norfolk students rather than allow 17 Blacks to enter the schools. After a federal judge ruled the anti-desegregation laws unconstitutional, the schools quietly desegregated in February of 1959, but half the members of the “Lost Class of ’59” never finished their senior year.

Another sharp turn of events came in 1970 when the school system-again under court orderbegan busing students in an effort to increase desegregation. Vocal but nonviolent civic groups protested and threatened to boycott the opening of school. In the 15 months that followed, the school system lost 7,000-almost one-fourthof its White students.

In the first year of busing for desegregation purposes, approximately 11,000 students were transported. Now, the total is about 24,000, with the increase being made necessary by changes in the desegregation plan.

The decline in public school enrollment which followed the initiation of cross-town busing was accompanied by a sharp enrollment increase in the area’s private schools, many of which sprang up as a direct result of desegregation. At the peak, an estimated 12,000 Norfolk children were attending the more than 50 private and parochial schools in Norfolk and the nearby cities of Virginia Beach, Portsmouth and Chesapeake, and the overwhelming majority of them were middle-class Whites.

But flight, sudden and severe when it began in the early 1970s, has now tapered off. In the fall of 1973, school officials reported the return of 850 students from private and parochial schools, and the following year, another 1,000 reportedly returned. No accounting of returning students waskept in 1975, but a school spokesman expressed the belief that enrollment is no longer seriously affected by White flight.

In the past 10 years, Norfolk’s public school population has declined from about 55,500 in 1965 to 54,700 in 1970 and to 47,400 in 1975. At the same time, the percentage of Black students has increased-but not to the 70 or 75 percent level some predicted as a result of total desegregation. Black percentages went from about 40 in 1965 to 45 in 1970, and to 52 last fall. Between 1974 and 1975, the number and percentage of both Blacks and Whites in the schools remained more or less unchanged. Between 40 and 45 percent of Norfolk’s 300,000 citizens are Black.

This year, Black-White ratios in the five senior high schools, 10 junior highs and 49 elementary schools are reasonably close to the 52-48 ratio for the system as a whole. Black percentages range from 22 to 69 in a few individual schools, but most are near the 50-60 mark. Some teachers, administrators and board members say, however, that the racial ratios don’t tell the whole story.

“We’ve desegregated the schools,” says the Rev. Joseph N. Green, Jr., one of two Blacks on the sevenmember school board, “but I do not feel we’ve integrated the schools. I think we’ve done a good job through busing of putting the races together physically. But integration means people are working together harmoniously and cooperatively. I don’t think this has really come about. That which separated us in the past to a great extent is still present.”

At the elementary level, children appear to work and play together without racial self-consciousness, but at the secondary level, social segregation is more apparent. “They sit in their little group and we sit in ours,” shrugged one high school student. “Integration, it doesn’t mean anything.” Some say this self-segregation simply mirrors a society in which racial divisions remain deep. The distinctly racial character of most neighborhoods in and around Norfolk would seem to support that view.

In the desegregation process, most of the formerly allBlack schools have survived, and most of the Black principals have retained their positions-contrary to what has happened in many other parts of Virginia. In 1974-75, 26 of the city’s 67 principals were Black-roughly the same as before desegregation. Only about one-third of the more than 900 secondary-school teachers were Black, however, and in the central administrative offices of the system, Blacks held only three of the top IS or so posi tions, including one of the five assistant superintendent posts.

Blacks and Whites both are concerned about the disproportionate involvement of Black students in school disciplinary matters. Almost 80 percent of the students who were suspended and subject to expulsion in 1971-72 were Black, and in the years since then, that pattern has remained essentially unchanged. There are no simple explanations for those statistics, and no quick remedy to the problem appears likely.

Busing has been seen as the source of several problems in the schools. Some parents worry about kindergarten and primary students who are bused as much as eight miles across town. Some students say school spirit has been weakened because most of those who ride buses can’t stay after school or come back at night for extracurricular activities. Busing is also said to be responsible for the decline of parental involvement in school activities and in parent-teacher associations.

In spite of the nagging problems, though, most of those who watch the schools closely appear to believe the advantages of desegregation outweigh the disadvantages.

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They say children can now learn about each other and from each other, that all children now have equal access to materials, facilities and educational opportunities, and that all have benefitted from a strengthening of school programs to accommodate a diverse student population.

There is also evidence of academic improvement. Assistant superintendent Robert M. Forster, in comparing standardized achievement test scores from 1971 and 1973, noted an increase in the average reading score of Black students (from 74.4 to 81.9, on a national norm of 100) and also of White students (from 92.3 to 96.7).

Vincent J. Thomas, who was chairman of Norfolk’s school board during much of the litigation and now is chairman of the State Board of Education, credits Norfolk and other public school systems with having “far outdistanced any other public or private institution in creating and maintaining a truly integrated environment.”

Lillian M. Brinkley, a Norfolk elementary school principal, acknowledges that the process has been painful at times, and that it isn’t finished. But she adds: “I think all of us someday-we may be n our graves-will realize it has been for the benefit of everybody.”

Kay McGraw

Norfolk Ledger-Star

The Georgia Desegregation Plan

By Alice Lovelace

Vol. 1, No. 8, 1979, pp. 12-13, 28

There is a movement afoot in this country to “curtail the educational expectations” of the masses, according to Howard Dodson, director of the Georgia-based Institute of the Black World. Commenting on the desegregation plan currently being implemented in the Georgia public schools of higher education, he says, “Essentially the plan is to dismantle the Black schools. It is reflective of racism in America. White people never see themselves as the problem. It is always the Blacks who are the problem.”

Also commenting on the plan, a young Savannah State College student involved in protests there against the plan exclaimed, “Georgia is a testing ground. Sooner or later it will be all over the country.” The plan, which calls for entry and exit tests and some merging of the programs at the Black and White schools, has angered many students, college faculty members and concerned citizens alike at historically Black Savannah, Albany and Fort Valley state colleges. The general feeling is that the three predominately Black schools are being burdened with the responsibility for desegregation while the issue of open access to higher education facilities for all citizens is ignored.

It was the historic trend of separate and unequal educational facilities, reinforced by deliberate under financing of public Black colleges that led the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to initiate a suit in the first place. In Adams vs. Califano, the Defense Fund charged the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) with a lack of aggression in requiring Southern states to end their mandatory dual system of public higher education.

As a result of this action, the court ruled in 1972 that 10 states were in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In essence Title VI stipulates that no person shall be excluded from participation or subjected to discrimination under any program receiving federal assistance.

The Court thus required Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Virginia to submit desegregation plans to HEW for correction of their violations.

The Georgia plan was accepted by Califano in 1974, but was rejected by Judge John Pratt, acting on a petition from NAACP. The Georgia Board of Regents, a board appointed by the governor and consisting of 13 Whites and two Blacks, revised the plan and resubmitted it to HEW in 1977. After further discussion and changes the plan was found acceptable by HEW and the court.

As a part of the plan, Black colleges have been promised millions of dollars in funds to upgrade their facilities and make them more acceptable to Whites. The cost of financing future construction which is an integral part of the overall success of the Georgia plan, and upgrading the curriculum at the three Black colleges is viewed by some as very uncertain in light of today’s tax shy climate.

The plan was met with violence and protest on the campuses of several Black colleges and locations across the state. At Savannah State students turned over cars, blocked off streets and boycotted classes.

The major controversy at Savannah State centered on a portion of the plan which calls for the swapping of the teacher education programs there for the business administration program at mostly White Armstrong State College. The rationale for this arrangement is that Black students majoring in education will have to attend Armstrong and White students majoring in business will elect to transfer to Savannah State. However, many Blacks feel that the number of small town and rural Black teachers will be severely affected by moving the traditional teachers education program from Savannah State to the hostile environment of Armstrong.

“Califano and President Carter both appear to have been talking out of both sides of their mouths when they said they wanted to preserve historically Black colleges,” one administrator exclaimed. “They said one ‘thing, but

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they are doing another. Teacher education is the history of Black colleges and they are taking that away from Savannah State.”

There are 28 education-related programs at Savannah State, and no one has yet made it clear to teachers just what will happen to them. They are particularly uneasy over the language of the plan which states that, “several key faculty members at Savannah State College will be reassigned or terminated as a result of the plan.”

A continuing education center operated jointly by both colleges is also proposed for some future date. The primary function of the continuing education center would be to offer various allied health programs, programs in criminal justice, courses for the disadvantaged in health, political awareness and living habits, as well as cultural and educational courses to enhance the daily lives of individuals.

In order to correct past negligence and to attract more Whites, the Board has proposed that one million dollars a year for five years (1983) be spent on “improving the campus environment of Savannah State College.”

Requirements for entrance and graduation at Savannah State will be upgraded and it is expected that 95 percent of the entering freshmen will be required to take the basic skills examination. Those students scoring less than a combined score of 750 will be required to attend “special studies” courses for which they must pay but receive no college credit.

Savannah State students contend that the creation of Armstrong State College was illegal in the first place because it was built since the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation. The Georgia Board of Regents upgraded Armstrong from a junior college to a four-year college in 1964, even though Savannah State was located about 15 miles away and offered similar liberal arts programs.

Albany State College and Albany Junior College are very dissimilar institutions, yet the Georgia plan provides for, “merging these two sister institutions and relocation of the senior college campus (Albany State) in the event that enhancement steps at Albany State do not result, within a four-year interval (1982), in the degree of desegregation required.”

Despite the fact that Albany State College is a senior college and draws students from the same general area as Georgia Southwestern, the regents felt there should be no plan requiring the increase of Black enrollment at Georgia Southwestern which had an enrollment in 1976 of 6.2 percent Black students.

The plan requires that Albany State substantially increase its White enrollment or be swallowed by the smaller Albany Junior College. It also calls for the strengthening of key administrative positions through “further personnel training or personnel replacement.”

The creation of a joint Albany State College/Albany Junior College extension and public service program is called for in hopes that it will “enhance the overall reception of Albany State College of all elements of the community.” The function of the extension and public service program is basically the same as the proposed Savannah/Armstrong continuing education center.

In order to increase the attractiveness of Albany State College, new courses will be introduced. Additional programs will be strengthened through the coordination of selected associate degree programs offered by Albany Junior College and related bachelor level programs offered by Albany State.

Admission, progression and graduation standards will be tightened at Albany State. This will result in 96 percent of the entering freshmen being required to take the basic skills examination and is expected to result in an increase in the number of students enrolled in the special studies course.

In an effort to “insure increased selectivity” in the Albany State teacher education program, a two-point five (2.5) college cumulative grade point average will be required for admission and graduation. Completion of the “rising juniors test” or regents test, prior to admission to teacher education will also be required. The same requirements will be instituted for admission and graduation for the nursing program.

As with Albany and Savannah, at predominantly Black Fort Valley State key personnel will be affected and one million dollars a year will be spent over the next five years to enhance the campus. Stricter testing procedures will result in 93 percent of the entering freshmen taking the basic skills exam. The teacher education program will require the same pre-requisites as the Albany plan.

Other institutions in the Georgia system are committed to increase by nearly 16 percent the number of Black high school graduates entering post secondary institutions. Traditionally White institutions will try to increase Black enrollment by eight percent.

Some groups, including the Georgia Conference for Open Education feel that the desegregation plan, along with standardized entry/exit tests, the declining financial aid for low-income students, the concentration of Black students in two-year institutions and the lack of Black faculty members as roll models, might be the straw that breaks the back of Black colleges. As a result of the plan, students at the three affected Black colleges issued a joint declaration calling for: (1) the removal of all standardized tests; (2) open admissions throughout all state schools; (3) credit for special studies programs; (4) 30 percent Black enrollment at the state’s mostly White schools by 1982~ (5) priority for Black colleges; and (6) the hiring and promotion of more Black faculty.

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Modibo Kadalie, political science instructor at Atlanta Junior College and spokesman for Georgia Conference said, “If this plan goes through in Georgia, all other (Black) public land grant colleges in the nation will be threatened.” In March 1979, he called for a boycott of registration at Black schools in opposition to the plan. While the boycott had only minimal effect statewide, j Modibo feels that the rate of registration at Atlanta Junior College was moderately affected.

Octavius O’Neal, organizer of a 450-mile march for justice and equality in Georgia education, expressed the belief that, “The Georgia Board of Regents and the Department of HEW are scheming to make education an elitist thing in Georgia by instituting these standardized entrance and exit examinations. We have an obligation to the Black community to fight these tests. The few gains we made during the sixties are being taken away at an alarming rate. The government is destroying the predominately Black college in the name of ‘quality education.’ ”

The Southern Education Foundation (SEF), while being opposed to standardized tests, feels that it is better for Blacks to use the plan to their advantage than to fight it. Black schools have to be strengthened to survive, a spokesperson for the foundation said. The plan provides some guidelines and directives and has all kinds of possibilities. Why not let some of the historically Black schools be made into major centers, they question. It would be “foolhardy” not to “maximize” the plan to broaden the scope of Black schools, the foundation assessed.

Officials at HEW feel the Georgia plan is “totally acceptable.” Louis Bryson, director of post-secondary education of the HEW regional office in Atlanta, sees no evidence of possible adverse effects in terms of Black student enrollment. Bryson thinks just the opposite will occur with the number of those retained. He said Black faculty will be “upgraded” as a result of the plan.

“The plan offers Black students access equal to that of the White students and (through special studies) assures they will be retained once admitted. The plan attempts to guarantee that the rate of Black graduates will be comparable to the rate of White grads.”

Bryson said a complaint has been filed by a Black student at Fort Valley State College regarding the “rising juniors test.” The Atlanta office investigated the complaint before passing it on to the office in Washington where it is currently under advisement.

“The plan calls for increased Black admission and upgrading of Black faculty. It cannot result in an adverse effect on Black enrollment,” Bryson says. “The regional office will be monitoring its progress and making on-site investigations.”

Still, many remain unconvinced. In a speech at Atlanta University in early March of 1979, Professor Otis S. Johnson, sociology instructor at Savannah State College summed up the disillusionment felt by many when he asserted:

It is my opinion that what has happened in Georgia is a travesty against justice and equality. One of HEW’s guidelines specifically states that the traditionally Black institutions should not bear any undo hardship in the efforts to desegregate the state’s system of higher education. But this is happening in Georgia. The regents are making commitments to HEW to keep the federal funds rolling into Georgia at the same time they are creating barriers to the entrance and exit of Blacks to the university system of Georgia.”

School officials will likely continue to meet throughout the spring and summer trying to determine their best courses of action. Black teachers at Savannah State believe that whatever happens will be to their detriment. Only the future will reveal whether or not their pessimistic attitude prevails for the Black colleges in general.

Alice Lovelace is the writer-in-residence at the Atlanta Neighborhood Arts Center.

Triana Fish Story

By Thomas Noland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Noland is a staff writer for the Anniston Star.

Poor People vs. Alabama Power Company

By Wayne Greenhaw

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: Aftermath of G. Duke Beasley’s Appointment

By Ginny Looney

Vol. 1, No. 8, 1979, pp. 20-21

The appointment of G. Duke Beasley last summer as the first administrator of the Georgia Office of Fair Employment Practices had appeared a safe choice for Gov. George Busbee. Yet, with surprising swiftness the director fell into disfavor and has now endangered the future of the state fair employment office.

Beasley’s experience as deputy director of the Atlanta office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, touted as the main reason for his selection, had shown that conciliation rather than litigation would be his way of settling discrimination complaints. In an interview last July, Beasley portrayed himself as a hardworking, God-fearing family man who possessed a moralistic fervor for his mission of providing equal job opportunities for minorities and women in state government. He did not lack confidence. “I predict that within 60 days we will be the most viable staff that the state has because of my own personality and how I manage,” he said. A few people did criticize him as simply a tired bureaucrat,” but most were pleased with his selection.

The praises of Duke Beasley, however, have ended. Widespread dissatisfaction with his work has caused supporters of the fair employment office to look forward to his return in July to the federal government, which had given him a year’s leave of absence with pay to set up the state organization. Beasley had offended state department heads, for example, with his cavalier attitude. In sending a questionnaire to them requesting information on minority employment, Beasley had ordered the material returned by a certain date, a deadline which the governor’s office postponed because not enough time was allowed for collection of the statistics.

Busbee has privately been critical of Beasley’s efforts to expand the scope of the fair employment office beyond its legal responsibilities. While the agency is empowered to prevent discrimination in employment in state government, Beasley has attempted to exert authority over employment discrimination by local governments, state licensing boards, state contractors and private business.

State legislators were incensed over the annual report the agency issued in February. Several Black legislators were upset because the report did not adequately deal with discrimination in state government. One White legislator introduced a resolution reprimanding Beasley for publishing the report because it was a “complete and utter waste of taxpayers’ money.” The resolution was withdrawn only upon the request of the governor’s office.

Legislators objected to the report’s many photographs unrelated to the work of the office; had they read the document closely, they might have been more angered by the sermonic messages aimed at them. “The General Assembly, it would appear, is obligated to put an end to this intentional procrastination,” the report says about the delayed response of state agencies charged with discrimination, “by giving the GOFEP perpetual life.”

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The report’s poor format, garbled language and preachy tone lend credence to the complaints about the administrator’s style and performance. Rather than presenting persuasive arguments for a prolonged and expanded Georgia Office of Fair Employment Practices, as was intended, the report obscures the problem of discrimination and diverts attention from the issue of equal opportunity. If, as one legislator said, the 72-page report (plus a 16-page preface) “looks like a high school annual,” its writing reflects the style of the senior voted

“Most School Spirit.” Under the heading “Something To Think About . . .” inspirational quotes from Eleanor Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy and Vince Lombardi were dispersed throughout the agency’s 18-page affirmative action plan, which was presented “in a ‘can do’ spirit and format.”

The lack of modesty is equaled only by the absence of information in a readable form about the office’s work. Personal histories and the families of staff have more space in the document than the charges processed through the office. In a section entitled “Behind the Scene: Youth in Limbo Reaching Out,” there are nine pages of photographs of the staff’s children, including one page devoted to a photograph and description of Beasley’s daughter. “Like her Texas born mother, Kristy is a very proud, highly intelligent and beautiful lady,” says the report. Also scattered through it are seven pages of pictures and biographies of staff members.

In contrast, only five pages of charts list the 153 complaints filed with the office and the disposition of 130 of those. The charts are not explained in the text, although several pages describing the compliance process do disclose that only one case has not been resolved through conciliation.

More attention is given to the plans and recommendations of the agency for the future than in detailing its past accomplishments. The report attempts to justify the expansion of the agency into nine additional cities, a move which would cost more than twice the present budget. This “appropriation package” has apparently gone unheeded since no additional funds were allocated.

Essays, letters and photographs from activists for the handicapped, aged and Hispanics about the need for the fair employment office fill II pages; full-page photographs with adjoining congratulatory letters from state officials were found on eight pages; six pages of letters are reproduced to illustrate that the state office attempted to establish cooperative agreements with federal agencies. Still unclear is the purpose of a three-page letter from the Ohio Civil Rights Commission which analyzes the Georgia law.

A self-serving image presented in the document (“With the innate ability of foresight and vision, the Administrator has outlined an improvement package…”)is matched by the report’s high-handed tone. “The exemption of certain public employees (of elected officials) from the benefit of the Law, appears on its facade to be arbitrary and capricious, therefore, should be invalidated.” On another subject, the report said, “Undoubtedly this grave conflict must not be tolerated by the General Assembly.”

Such commandments tend to lessen the credibility of legitimate recommendations for amending and enforcing the law. The fair employment office requests that it be a!lowed to hire outside counsel or establish its own legal department to eliminate the conflict of interest created when the attorney general represents both an individual filing a complaint and the agency being challenged in a hearing. The conflict arose when Artis Heard and the Human Resources Department could not agree on a negotiated settlement to Heard’s complaint. During the administrative hearing on the case, “(t)he attorney general’s office immediately began to attack the position that the Administrator had taken” in its defense of the state agency, the report says, pointing out that state attorneys would have to adopt “a Solomon-like posture” in violation of their code of ethics in representing both sides at a hearing.

While remaining silent on the subject of conflicts of interest, the attorney general issued an opinion in March stating that the fair employment office could not conduct a study on discrimination in hiring and promotions in state government and must limit itself to responding only to individual complaints filed with the office. The opinion effectively restricts any affirmative work on overall problems of discrimination. As a result, the Black legislative caucus has announced that it will challenge the opinion in court.

Although the law calls for a nine-member advisory board, Busbee has not yet appointed anyone to the position. The legislation creating the Office of Fair Employment Practices expires in 1980, and at this point it will take more than mere advice to restore the agency’s credibility. Moving quickly to expand its authority even before proving its competency, the agency may have told too much about itself when the report concluded that “Until equal employment opportunity becomes a shared reality in this state … Blacks, other minorities, and females must maintain their unyielding faith in God!”

Ginny Looney, a former newspaper reporter, is now a researcher in Atlanta.

Health care: School Breakfast in the South Federal Funds Available Compared With Funds Used Fiscal 1978

By Judy Currie

Vol. 1, No. 8, 1979, pp. 22-23

Since getting an adequate diet is important in order to perform at maximum potential, the idea that all school children should have the opportunity to eat a well-balanced meal each morning would not seem to be a point of major controversy. The U.S. Congress supported this idea when it enacted legislation to provide school breakfasts at little or no costs to state and local governments. Yet, school hoards in the II Southern states have exhibited such resistance and apathy toward the issue that in 1978 alone, they refused $285 million in federal funds which would have been made available to them if school breakfasts had been provided that year to children who ate subsidized school lunches.

Additional funds are available to “especially needy” schools, roughly defined by the 1978 law as those in which 40 percent or more of the school lunches are served free or at reduced prices. Since in the South over 50 percent of all lunches are either free or at a reduced price, the majority of Southern schools would qualify for the “especially needy” provision and thus be eligible for an additional $65 million. In all, failure to take advantage of this provision means a potential loss of $350 million to Southern states.

While all students who take advantage of school lunches do not take advantage of school breakfasts even when they are offered, the fact that in 1978 almost two-thirds of all Southern schools offering school lunches did not offer school breakfasts only goes to show the vast potential for program expansion.

The program, established in 1966 on a pilot basis, was given permanent status and unlimited funding in 1975. The legislation permits schools to

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serve nutritious breakfasts at minimal costs to their own budgets. The law places no priorities or limitations on the number of schools or children served. It requires only that the school boards apply to the state school food director for the program.

The resistance to the program has been substantial and is usually couched in terms of “practical” problems. One such problem is that the program will “undermine” the family. The fact that only one in five American children today eats an “adequate” breakfast is however, not a result of the school breakfast program but rather a clear indication of the need for such a program. The program in no way prevents parents who wish to serve their children a good breakfast at home from doing so.

Another problem cited in opposition to the school breakfast program is that it is another ”welfare program”-not suitable to the role of an educational system. Since a child’s ability to take full advantage of educational opportunity is dependent in large part on whether the child has an adequate diet, the program is essential to education performance. A South Carolina school food director, put it this way, “I’m not cold-hearted enough to say that you should take your social philosophy out on a kid.”

Participation rates by Southern schools in the school breakfast program is increasing rapidly, however, the resistance is both emotional and disheartening. A recent example of this resistance occurred in Auburn, Alabama, where a newly initiated breakfast program was only costing the school system $50 per month, but the school board cancelled the program after only two months operation. Concerned citizens raised $1,200 to cover any difference between costs and federal funds but there was a serious question about whether the board would accept it. Finally, after a lengthy discussion at a board meeting attended by nearly 30 Auburn residents, the school board decided to accept the money and resume the program.

Although some school boards are more reasonable than Auburn’s, in each, concerned citizens are needed to urge that the school board implement the program. Unfortunately too few Southerners have made this move.

Southern Politics

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 1, No. 8, 1979, pp. 23-24

In early April Jesse Helms of North Carolina appeared on the virtually deserted floor of the U.S. Senate and, after receiving recognition to debate the issue of a separate federal department of education, introduced an amendment to return prayer to the nation’s public schools. The amendment proposed to legislate away the federal court’s jurisdiction to hear cases involving state laws permitting voluntary prayer in public schools.

The unexpected amendment created a long, intense debate which ended on April 5 with the approval of the measure in a vote of 47-37 and the quick recess of the Senate until April 9 so that Democratic leaders and opponents of the amendment would have time to confer.

When the Senate returned on Monday, April 9, the opponents’ strategy was to remove the amendment from the president’s bill on education to pending legislation relating to the Supreme Court jurisdiction. Helms and his South Carolina colleague, Strom Thurmond, protested that the transfer would kill the amendment since as a part of the Supreme Court legislation it would be sent to the House of Judiciary Committee where chairman Peter Rodino of New York, as Helms said, “would bury it so deep that it will require 14 bulldozers just to scratch the surface.” On a close vote, the transfer was approved and now the measure is not expected to pass Congress.

The school prayer has been an issue in the South since 1962 when the Supreme Court banned official, organized prayers. Yet, not since Mississippi’s James 0. Eastland presided over hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1963 to overturn the “Godless Supreme Court’s opinion” had Congress witnessed a Southerner lead such a serious parliamentary charge to restore school prayers. While efforts to allow school prayer had been considered by Congress in 1971, and earlier in 1968, when Republican minority leader Everett Dirksen failed by only nine votes to have Congress approve a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision banning official school prayer, most of the Southern delegation in both houses were among the strong supporters of both efforts.

The April vote showed that little has changed in the solid South’s support. With Thurmond proclaiming that “here in the nation’s capital, we who make the laws, approve of prayers . . . , then what is wrong with letting little children in schools . . .,” seventeen Southern senators voted for the amendment, four were absent or did not vote, and only one opposed the measure.

The single vote against the amendment was cast by Arkansas Democrat Dale Bumpers. While Florida’s senator Lawton Childs voted to kill the amendment by tabling it, when the Helms amendment came up for an actual vote he supported it.

The four senators who were absent or not voting were Don Stewart of Alabama, Herman Talmadge of. Georgia, Russell Long of Louisiana, and Howard Baker of Tennessee. All others voted to remove the power of the courts to interfere with states wanting to authorize prayers.

The seventeen Southern votes, of course, gave the Helms amendment

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its margin of victory. As in the past, Southern Democratic senators departed with the Democratic majority from other regions and voted with the majority of Republicans in the Senate who supported the measure.

While another Southerner had no vote, President Jimmy Carter also expressed opposition to the amendment. At a news conference the president stated:

My preference is that Congress not get involved in the question mandating prayer in the schools. I am a Christian; 1 happen to be a Baptist. I believe that the subject of prayer in the schools ought to be decided between a person individually and privately and God. The Supreme Court has ruled on this issue and I personally don’t think that the Congress ought to pass any legislation requiring or permitting prayer.

Sometimes a student might object even to a so-called voluntary prayer when it’s publicly coordinated. It might be very embarrassing to a young person to say, “I want to be excused from the room because I don’t want to pray.”

In the April 19 vote removing the Helms amendment from the education bill, four Democratic Southerners apparently decided that the President was right and rejoined. Still, Lloyd Benson (Texas), Lawton Childs and Dick Stone (Florida), and Sam Nunn (Georgia) would still be able to claim that they supported prayers since they did vote to approve the amendment.

TheArkansas Gazette editorially bemoaned the fact that the Senate had spent so much time on an amendment it called “vintage demogogery.” While accusing its own senator David Pryor of “throwing kisses to the peanut gallery” for his support of the Helms amendment, the editorial called the measure “another effort to subvert the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights.”

The Southerner who wrote the 1962 Supreme Court opinion first banning official prayer in schools, Hugo Black stated it another way: “it is neither sacriligious not anti-religious to say that each separate government in this country should stay out of the business of writing or sanctioning official prayers and leave that purely religious function to the people themselves In 1979, however, Black’s opinion still finds little support among the South’s political leaders.