In This Issue

By Staff

Vol. 2, No. 2, 1979, pp. 2

A few weeks ago I received a letter from Cheryl A. Swanson, a student in Massachusetts who had just finished reading Robert Coles’ book, Still Hungry in America. She wrote, “After seeing pictures of how some people live in this country, I felt very guilty. I was moved by their courage and would like to help them in some way. I admire what you are doing and would like to hear about any progress you have made since 1969.”

This issue of Southern Changes will be sent to Ms. Swanson because it portrays far better than my letter of reply that state of health of the South and especially poor Southerners. Although all the issues and developments in the last ten years aren’t given a forum here, the major themes represent the new energy, faith, and failures which have come along.

The past president of the Council Ray Wheeler, has lived with and treated the pain and hurt of poverty and hunger fo more than 30 years and in our Soapbox piece he presents a thoughtful perspective onthe threat of hunger and ill-health to all of us. Ray not only reminds us that there are reasons of self interest for everyone to address the problems of poverty and hunger but also insists that it is the only thing that people who care can do.

The same broad definition of health care be seen in the works of the Student Health Coalition in Alabama. As Harriet Swift sympathetically describes the people and scenes of a health fair in rural Black Belt Alabama, we are told how young students are trying to help imediately care for people’s needs while not forgetting apparently the larger, more important social forces that decide whether one lives or dies are not measured by EKGs.

Bob Powell and Marie Jemison also contribute to the theme of this issue in their pieces on public housiing and the race for a federal judgeship. Both suggest in their own way a bleak future for what only months ago was considered recent hopeful developments in the course of government affairs.

In “The Making of a Ghetto” Powell shows that shifting the poors’ housing from one area to another doesn’t remove the old forces of local politics and bureaucratic inability to give folks a decent chance to help themselves. Jemison provides us with a case study of how people are chosen — or not chosen — to site as the arbitrators of the major legal issues affecting the poor and all of us.

Two of our department pieces also touch upon issues affecting the life and eath of the poor: taxes and women on death row.

Overall, the October issue testifies to the spirit of Southerners continuing to probe for answers and improvements in the human condition. Like the whole of this issue, Cheryl Swanson’s letter means a great deal. It’s good to know that there are those who still care, searching to know and do more about very specific causes and conditions that plague life for many and threaten the body and soul of everyone.

Correction

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 2, No. 2, 1979, pp. 3

There seems to be an item which slipped by all our dutiful proofreading in the July issue of Southern Changes probably because the error had the sound of being grammatically correct — but unfortunately it left an incorrect impression — and I have promised the author, Paige Gutierrez — that we will print the correction. The error comes on page 25, midway through the first column. It should read “The Genteel Acadian is likely to be a speaker of standard French, whereas the “Proud Coonass” is more likely to speak a nonstandard Cajun dialect.”

The Crisis of Conscience

By Staff

Vol. 2, No. 2, 1979, pp. 3-4

Three out of five federal judges in the South and probably a majority in the nation belong to segregated, all-White, social clubs, according to a report released by the Southern Regional Council.

In a survey of the social club memberships of federal judges in eleven Southern states and four non-Southern cities, SRC found that of the 127 Southern federal district judges, 58 percent belong to a social club or association that has never had a Black or other minority member. Southern federal circuit court judges were even more likely to have segregated memberships. Sixty-one percent of the circuit judges belong to all-White clubs.

“A crisis of conscience exists in the country’s federal judiciary,” says Steve Suitts, SRC executive director and author of the report. “The prevalence of memberships in segregated clubs and associations among federal judges endangers the appearance of impartiality and fairness of the third branch of the government.”

Results of the survey, undertaken over the past nine months, show that the pattern of segregated associations is not confined to the South. Federal circuit and district court judges in four non-Southern cities – Los Angeles, St. Louis, Chicago, and Baltimore – were only slightly less likely to belong to all-White clubs. Fifty-one percent of the judges in these cities hold such memberships.

In the Southern states, Florida had a larger percentage of judges with exclusive club memberships than any other state. The majority of federal judges in every Southern state except South Carolina belonged to all-White clubs. The judges in the district courthouses in Birmingham, Houston, Miami and Dallas represented the largest numbers of judicial officers with segregated club memberships of any Southern location in the study.

One federal judge in Miami, Florida, had memberships in six segregated clubs. Most judges belong to only one such club.

The survey does not identify by name individual judges who belong to all-White clubs. “There is no attempt here to embarrass any individual. The issue is whether any judge can properly belong to such clubs,” says Suitts, “and the problem is that segregated clubs are the preference of most federal judges.”

The report is based upon information collected from published sources, civil rights organizations, lawyers, and club members as of January 1, 1979. No judges appointed since that time were included in the study.

The issue of membership in segregated clubs was before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee recently when Memphis federal judge Bailey Brown refused to resign his membership in an all-White club in order to be confirmed for a circuit judgeship. After delaying negotiations, Judge Brown agreed to “suspend” his membership and the vote on his confirmation is expected soon.

The SRC report also cites an incident involving federal district judge David Belew who took office in May. When asked about the questioning before the Senate Judiciary by a local reporter, Judge Belew responded “that the questionnaire about niggers did not come up.” Since the first of the year, the Senate Judiciary Committee has required all nominees to the federal bench to complete a questionnaire that includes a question about membership in all-White clubs.

“Our findings demonstrate that the question of all-White club memberships must be faced and resolved by the entire federal court system,” the SRC director stated. “It is time for collective soul-searching,” he added.

The report calls for the U.S. Judicial Conference, the administrative arm of the federal courts, or the U.S. Supreme Court, to consider the issue and “the fundamental eroding effect that such widespread conduct by

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judges has upon the foundation of the judiciary.”

The SRC recommends that the Code of Judicial Conduct be interpreted to Prohibit judicial officers from belonging to clubs and associations that never have had Black or other minority members.

If the court fails to address the problem, Suitts says that Congress and the President should exert “moral leadership to show that public officials – even in the judicial branch – must avoid the appearance of bias.” The SRC suggests that Congress and the President confer with members of the federal judiciary and “within the limits” use constitutional powers to require the courts’ judges to address the issue.

Also, the report asks that Congress and the President set a firm policy of refusing to nominate or confirm anyone who maintains membership in all-White clubs or associations.

Referring to two other recent SRC studies on the federal judiciary, Suitts noted that “today we have a court system that has only a handful of Black judges, maintains discriminatory employment practices that no other agency would be permitted to have, and, as we see now, has most of its judges going to dinner at segregated, all-White clubs. The integrity of the courts are in jeopardy.”

A copy of the SRC report, entitled “A Crisis of Conscience: Federal Judges in Segregated Clubs,” is available for $3.00 by writing the SRC at 75 Marietta Street, N.W., Atlanta, Georgia 30303.

The Threat of Hunger and Ill-Health

By Ray Wheeler

Vol. 2, No. 2., 1979, pp. 5-8

The existence of hunger and malnutrition among the poor and occurring throughout the United States has been established beyond debate. It seems likely also beyond argument that the expansion of the Federal Food Assistance Programs has significantly altered the face of hunger in our country. We know, however, that there continues to be many people in our nation who are malnourished and who do not have the food or the health care necessary to restore themselves to health and full productivity.

The number of persons in poverty began to increase in 1970 and has not declined since then. There is reason to believe that the real incidence of poverty is higher than the poverty statistics would indicate.Whether the real poverty count is 25 million or more likely 30 million Americans, the incredible fact remains that we have in this country an enormous number of people living at or below the federally defined poverty level and, by definition, they cannot afford to purchase a minimally adequate diet unless they receive assistance.

During the past twelve years I have taken part in surveys of hunger and malnutrition and remember well the conditions and people who faced a blighted future without much hope and assistance. In the spring of 1967 shortly after a Senate Subcommittee, led by Joseph Clark and Robert Kennedy first brought hunger to the attention of the American people, I was one of a group of physicians who went as a team to study the health and living conditions of children of the poor. Here is what we found:

“Wherever we went and wherever we looked, whether it was the rural South, Appalachia, or an urban ghetto, we saw children in significant numbers who were hungry and sick, children for whom hunger was a daily fact of life and sickness in many forms, an inevitability. Many of these children were weak and in pain; their lives were being shortened; they were, in fact, visibly and predictably, losing their energy, their spirit and their health. They were suffering from hunger and disease, and directly or indirectly, many were dying.”

Wherever we went the impact was the same. We saw countless families with large numbers of children isolated from the mainstream of American culture and opportunity, possessing none of the protections of health, life and job that other Americans take for granted as rights of citizenship.

What we saw on those trips and the conclusions we drew have been documented and substantiated over and over again. As a result, unprecedented publicity, surveys, reports, TV documentaries, Presidential messages, a select committee of the U.S. Senate on Nutrition and Human Needs, and even two White House conferences, occurred. The nation was shocked and in the years that followed Congress, responding to public pressures and public needs, enacted more than a dozen food aid laws and now appropriates more than 9 billion dollars annually to feed the poor.

There can be little doubt that this generous outpouring of money for food and medical care by our government and by concerned citizens over the past ten years has saved many lives and relieves great suffering. The statistics speak eloquently to this point.

There has been a decline in infant mortality of 33 percent from 1965 to 1975 with even more rapid decline in deaths of infants during the first month of life. Infant deaths from diarrhea, influenza, pneumonia, and immaturity, in any related directly to poverty and malnutrition, have declined 50 percent or more. These reductions in mortality have occurred more rapidly among Blacks and American Indians and in the ten states with the highest incidence of poverty and malnutrition.

The observations of the 1977 Medical Team sponsored by the Field Foundation support the accuracy of this information. From May to September, 1977, six teams of doctors fanned out across the country, carefully retracing steps many of us had taken ten years earlier into the worst poverty in America. “We went again into the delta of Mississippi, the tenements of the Bronx, the isolated mountain hollows of Appalachian Kentucky, the coastal regions of South Carolina and the migrant work camps of Central Florida. Our first and overwhelming impression was that there are far fewer grossly malnourished people in this country today than there were ten years ago.”

When one visits the Head Start centers and examines the children, even cursorily, there can be little doubt that significant change has occurred since 1967. The children of the poor were healthy in appearance, lively and responsive in their interactions with each other and with their teachers. Nowhere did I see the gross evidence of malnutrition, the omnipresent evidence of acute respiratory illness, and the evidence of apathy and weakness that we saw in 1967. The teachers I questioned reported very few problems with illness among the children during the entire year.

The problem is not now primarily one of overt hunger and malnutrition, although unquestionably these conditions have not been eliminated. It is not possible to find so easily the bloated bellies, the shriveled infants, the gross evidences of vitamin and protein deficiencies in children that we identified in the late sixties.

Instead, my colleagues and I observed more subtle manifestations of malnutrition, especially among the poor in those areas where food-aid systems are functioning inadequately and are not reaching those who need help.

Undernutrition often masquerades as other kinds of problems. Many of these children already malnourished at birth, are born prematurely because malnutrition in the mother is the most common cause of prematurity and prematurity is directly linked to early infant mortality, birth defects and mental retardation.

Many undernourished infants die shortly after birth, killed by their unusual susceptibility to infections which are ordinarily benign in the well nourished child. Those children surviving infancy are more frequently ill, likely to be anemic and undersized for age, and they do less well in school than their counterparts in more affluent families.

They become slow learners, who wind up living in poverty and producing children who grow up in the vicious cycle which condemns them to lifetimes of marginal function.

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Their lives are characterized by behavioral disturbances, physical disability, high rates of failure in school and low levels of employability.

The social and economic consequences of this tragic sequence of events are enormous and devastating to the children and to the society in which they grow up. By not feeding children adequately, we may be negating our efforts to educate them and we are undoubtedly creating problems for the future.

It is important to understand that the effects of inadequate food, bad housing and poor medical care are not confined to the poor but directly determine the strength and vitality of our society, the amount of wealth and produce, and the incomes we enjoy. More than 10 years ago the Office of the Budget calculated that for every dollar we failed to spend feeding hungry people, it costs our government over three dollars in payment of sickness care, lower productivity, so-called “handouts” to the disabled. I suspect that the figures are equally or even more applicable today. As Robert Claiborne wrote recently “A balance sheet of the dollar costs of poverty versus dollar cost of ending it might well show that even in purely economic terms, humanity is the best policy.”

I know that the health status of Southern people remains the worst in the nation, far below national averages in most of the parameters we use to judge health. But, I also know that the remedy for this situation lies not in more doctors, nurses, and hospitals. It lies in a rearrangement of the priorities of our society so that public policy addresses human needs.

While much has been said and written about the economic resurgence of the South since 1945 and especially in the decades of the 60s and 70s, we are not as prosperous as we appear. We are still behind significantly (17 percent) in per capita income. A large proportion of the nation’s poor live in the South. We have 25 percent of the population of the U.S. and 40 percent of its poor. Sixty percent of the nation’s rural poor live in the South and one in five Southerners is poor, double the national rate. Both our industrial wages and our per child expenditures for education are the lowest in the nation.

Our position at the bottom of the ladder is equally solid when we examine health statistics as one would expect for health care and economic development are integrally related.

General death rates are 22 percent higher in the rural South than in the nation. The life expectancy of migrant farmers is 49 years, 23 years less than the national average. Infant mortality rates are higher than the national average for Black and White Southerners as are the rates for premature births, but in the rural South Blacks have 65 percent higher rates than their White neighbors.

The existing institutions for the delivery of medical care, no matter how they are restructured or paid for, may be irrelevant to the central health issue. All things considered, even acknowledging the remarkable benefits from recent advances in medical science and technology, the health services of the twentieth century that have been most influential for improving health have had to do with sanitation, water supply, and food distribution. The main reason we enjoy longer and healthier lives than our ancestors is not that we possess more effective ways of treating our sicknesses, though in many cases we do. We are more healthy and longer living because we get sick less often thanks to prevention of infectious disease, the provision of pure water and sanitary sewage disposal systems, and the greater availability of food.

Perhaps the most important public health measure in our history has been the gradual evolution of a society in which people – most people – are living better. There is more money for food, family sizes are smaller, work hours are shorter and work less exhausting.

Associated with these advances have been major advances in the processing, storage, and distribution of food. These overall benefits have done more to reduce morbidity and

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mortality rates and to extend life expectancy than perhaps any other societal endeavor including those directly related to coping with illness. It is likely that the greatest promise for improved health for most populations, including the South’s, in the foreseeable future continues to be related to the possibilities for improved nutrition.

There are many initiatives that might improve nutrition. They include the regulation of a advertising, improvement of housing, and public education about diet and nutrition. None of these will be effective in the absence of an effort to increase the availability of food. Local and privately initiated efforts of this kind are desirable and praiseworthy, but success on a meaningful scale demands a public policy dedicated to a more equitable distribution of food to poor people and to particularly vulnerable groups such as pregnant women, children, and the elderly. Hunger is the problem; food is the remedy.

An important first step in making available food assistance to all who needed it when, in 1974, Congress extended the Food Stamp Program to cover all those eligible for help in the entire U.S. Other programs have been added and liberalized. They have made a significant difference in the nutritional and health status of people they have reached. We can document decreases in illnesses, in infant and maternal deaths, and in the incidence of iron deficiency and anemia. Carefully controlled studies in a poor population have revealed that a 15 percent increase in dietary energy during pregnancy and the early months of infancy produced larger children who demonstrated improved learning ability over a population who had not received dietary supplement. The children evidenced improved growth, increased head circumference, and a decreased incidence of nutritional anemia. These are important measures of improved health.

Unfortunately, none of the existing food programs, either singly or together, has proved sufficient to deal with the problem of hunger. ‘Me programs are administratively clumsy, often demean people, and have never reached more than 60 percent of the people in need of help. Due to bureaucratic ineptness, hostility to the programs by local political leadership, and the lack of will on the part of the U.S.D.A. to see that the programs serve all who are eligible, – participation in these programs is actually decreasing all over the nation during a time when food prices are rising and the need for the program is greater than ever. What is needed is a system that will deliver food in adequate amounts to people who need it. I know of no proposal that will accomplish that objective short of a full employment program that guarantees a job with adequate pay to every person who wants to work and this must be supplemented by financial assistance at a realistic and humane level to those who, for a variety of reasons, cannot work and do not have money to buy enough food.

In the absence of a national policy of full employment, the new Food Stamp law, now being implemented, represents an unparalleled opportunity to assure an adequate diet for all needy Americans. There is no necessity for apology or defensiveness, for the program does more to lengthen and strengthen the lives of disadvantaged Americans than any other noncategorical social program. It is virtually the only government aid offered to the working poor.

This is a matter of self-interest. The social costs of 30 million poor and near poor in our midst are enormous, primarily in terms of the loss of human potential, lost forever to malnutrition and secondarily, in terms of operating expenses wasted in the support of battalions of caretakers.

But there is another side to this coin. In this overfed country, it is almost foolish to ask whether hunger has serious consequences. Surely, even a negative answer would not lead us to conclude that it is all right for people to remain unnecessarily hungry. The reason for feeding disadvantaged children and their families in the richest country the world has ever know is because they are hungry.

Arnold Toynbee once said “I do not believe the greatest threat to our civilization is from bombs or guided missiles. I don’t think our civilization will die that way. I think it will die when we no longer care.”

My assumption is that we do care and my hope is that we shall find the wisdom and the will to eliminate poverty from this nation and there will no longer exist the necessity for a food stamp program.

Raymond Wheeler is a physician in Charlotte, N.C. and past president of the Southern Regional Council.

The Anatomy of a Judgeship

By Marie Stokes Jemison

Vol. 2, No. 2., 1979, pp. 9-11

A vacancy loomed on the Federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and Jamie Ledlow Shores set about to fill it.

Soon after Janie Ledlow Shores won election in 1974 on her second try for the Alabama Supreme Court, she hankered for a bigger prize. A vacancy loomed on the Federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the first woman in Alabama and the third in the nation to sit on a state’s highest court set about to fill it.

“I never did yearn for the U.S. Supreme Court even – just the Fifth Circuit.” She knew where the real power resided. The Fifth had been the freedom train for Blacks in the fifties and sixties and Janie wanted to be part of the major legal decisions affecting the late seventies and eighties. So, she went for it when the vacancy was to be filled in 1976. During that presidential year the candidate Jimmy Carter promised judgeships on merit, not politics.

She was the only woman to apply to the first nominating commission appointed by the new President and his Attorney General, Griffin Bell. Although Shores and Bell were old buddies in the legal world and her qualifications as a legal scholar were renowned, her selection was not in the cards. Robert Vance, the witty, urbane, canny chairman of the Alabama Democratic Party, was the select of destiny this time. Janie’s friend Vance had made a national name for himself in the eleven years he headed the party as the Chief of Alabama’s anti-Wallace forces. His law firm has profited handsomely by his fame as the voice of reason and progress in Alabama’s gothic politics.

Now with George Wallace in his last Hurrah, a lifetime federal judgeship tempted. Who could deny him? Certainly not Allen and Sparkman, the two senators to whom he had been duly obedient and helpful. Certainly, not the southern president to whom he had delivered the state by a small margin. The charming Vance dazzled the commission. Janie came off nervous and unsure. She was surprised that she needed constituent letters. “Somebody told me I didn’t need a lot of letters. I got the wrong signals.”

Vance won handily.

After not even making the list of all White

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males, Janie returned to her active, visible role on the state court. She wrote opinions during 1977 and 1978 which proves the case for female judges. On April 22, 1977, the Alabama Supreme Court voted that a married woman had a right to sell her own property without her husband’s consent. Justice Shores wrote the opinion.

“There is no provision of the (Alabama) constitution”, she wrote, “which would permit the legislature to deny married women rights possessed by all other adults.” “The authority to do so must be found in that document and cannot rest upon an ancient myth that married women are presumed more needful of protection of their own interests than other adults, male or female.” Alabama was the last state in the Union to deny married women that privilege.

Next to fall was the archaic married woman’s will. Under Alabama law, a woman who made a will during her first marriage was required to make a second one if she remarried. Failing to know this legal secret, as was the case with many women, the legal consequence was that second husband, on the death of the wife, shared her estate with her children. It mattered not that the woman had not wished her husband to inherit. This was the law until Janie Shores wrote the opinion striking it down.

In October 20, 1978, President Carter signed The Omnibus Judgeship Act. The law stated “The Congress takes note that only 1 percent of federal judges are women.

Since the last meeting three members of the commission had been “rotated” off. The significant change was the replacement of the “militant” Florida Black female, Francina Thomas. Charlotte Dominick of Birmingham, Alabama, a member of both commissions said, “Francina was fantastic. She asked questions no one else was willing to ask. She probably was replaced by Griffin Bell because they thought she had an axe that is being both a woman and a Black.” Ulrick Lincoln, one time a lawyer in the Department of Justice replaced Francina Thomas. In 1979 Lincoln is a member of a large Tampa law firm.

Nevertheless, Janie felt good about her chances. Again she was the single woman to apply from Alabama. Women were so anxious to see her chosen that she looked for no competition from her home state. The kudoes came fast.

From a legal scholar: “Justice Shores has the ability to isolate and discard the minutiae of a lawsuit and focus on the crucial issues which must be confronted. More importantly she has the unparalleled capacity to appreciate the logical and practical ramifications of her decisions”.

Without the legal gobble-de-gook, a lawyer who had practiced before the court: “What a penetrating mind. She sees right through the bullshit into the heart of the matter”.

Then in mid-January 1979, the legendary “real” governor of Alabama federal Judge Frank Johnson, entered the race. Johnson and Shores were thick as clabber. When Janie was a poor, scrawny, teen-ager riding the bus from Loxley to Mobile, Wallace Johnson, brother to Frank, was in the law firm which gave her a job. A Johnson sister married a cousin of Janie’s in 1955 and the friendship between the future judges, Johnson and Shores, began in earnest.

“I love Frank,” says Janie. “When I heard he had applied, I called him and said I thought I ought to get out and work for him. He said, ‘No, don’t do that, Janie. Stay in’. After I hung up I wondered why he hadn’t called me.”

She went to see her old friend, Attorney General Griffin Bell. He had seemed genuinely grieved that she struck out the first time, even telling her that he had replaced the “militant” Black woman who had given her trouble. He did not tell her that Francina Thomas’ replacement would be the one to do her in. “The President wants to see women and minorities on the list,” he told her.

A few days before the February meeting, Ulrick Lincoln called Janie. He told her that he had received a letter alluding to a conflict of interest on her part in a legal matter involving her husband, James Shores, Jr.

“I thought it was decent of him to warn me,” she said. “He advised me to be prepared to be questioned by the commission on the allegations. I called the lawyers in the case and was assured that I had at no time intervened nor was my name a part of the case in any way. I was not told who originated the letter. It was not until later that I found out the letter was from George Lewis Bailes.”

Bob Vance picked Bailes to succeed him as Chairman of the Democratic Party. They were old and trusted friends.

Bailes is a real estate man and a former Alabama State Senator with a long smoldering vendetta against James Shores. Shores reciprocates, even going to the extreme in challenging Bailes’ Party seat in the 1978 elections. The letter went to only the three corporate lawyers on the

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commission. Justice Shores was questioned extensively by the commission members on the case in which her husband was a party, but she was not. It does not appear that any of the male candidates were interrogated about their wives’ possible irregularities.

Bailes says that he wrote the letter as a private citizen not as Party Chairman. In the public eye there is not a dime’s worth of difference. Women had already taken his number when he came out on television in 1978 against the Equal Rights Amendment. This attack on Janie’s integrity incensed fair-minded people all over the state. The letter writer did not say why he chose the three members to receive the letter nor did he divulge his motives.

Apparently Bailes’ letter did not cut any ice with the commission but did contribute additional fuel for the fire that would consume Janie. The real screw was at the top. Despite the continuous extravagant presidential pleas to choose women and minorities for the list, the commission seemed to hear a different order. Florida and Georgia dominated in the membership of the eleven member group with two from Alabama and one from Mississippi. The Georgians were reportably well-schooled. It was noticed that the commission president, Dubose Ausley, a Floridian, when stuck on a point quizzically turned to the Georgian end of the table. The surprise was Ulrick Lincoln, the swing vote. He voted not only against Janie, but his Black brothers as well.

Court watchers surmise that despite the Carter-Bell protestations on democratizing the list, the actuality was too hot to handle. Frank Johnson was all along the object of their affections. To put the popular Janie on the list and then bump her would offend all those uppity women out there and Carter had enough trouble in 1980. Griffin Bell’s finger prints were on the glass. He had restructured the 1976 commission and Ulrick Lincoln had come right out of his shop.

Reaction to the list of all White males was swift. David Cohen, top dog at Common Cause, the people’s Lobby, presumptiously asserted that “no woman or Black would feel the least rejected if Carter passed over them in favor of Johnson.”

Judith Crittenden, Birmingham attorney and member of the Alabama Women’s Political Caucus took another view. At a press conference she expressed “shock and disappointment” over the commission’s failure to include either a woman or a Black among the nominations. “Women’s groups are particularly disappointed in the list of White candidates in the light of the President’s mandate and the presence of highly qualified minority and female applicants.”

Of course, every Black and White person in the race from Alabama knew the game was over when the giant, Frank Johnson, caught the ball. The only faint hope was the possibility of a second circuit judgeship for Alabama which did not materialize. The point in this bit of duplicity on the part of the President and his people is that women took Carter seriously when he said he wanted a selection free of political influence (with a qualified female candidate, a second judgeship seemed in the cards.) As usual, we were naive.

The district judgeships in Alabama are now over. The nominating commission for these positions did select two women for the list. Neither was chosen by the Senators, possibly because neither was as qualified as one of the other two women not chosen. But this time, Blacks got their chance with two newly created federal judgeships. Maybe next time we women will get ours. I wouldn’t bet on it.

Marie Stokes Jemison is a free-lance writer living in Birmingham, Alabama, actively working for the ERA.

Making Things Healthy

By Harriet Swift

Vol. 2, No. 2., 1979, pp. 12-16

There’s a familiar 1960s feel to the scene that recalls VISTA television spots: energetic, attractive college students bustle up and down the halls of the summer-emptied Black high school. Country people, mostly Black but a smattering of Whites, come into the building slowly, a little hesitantly. It’s late morning on a sweltering July weekday in the Alabama Black Belt. Most of the people trickling into the Amelia Johnson High School in Thomaston are elderly or women with young children. They are here to have a physical examination, get their blood, eyesight, and hearing tested, have their blood pressure checked and perhaps receive some advice from a nutritionist and law student. They’re participating in the health fair.

The health fair, with its retinue of 30 travelling members has already been in Thomaston once and has set up in two other rural Alabama counties for weeklong stays. Now, the health fair is back in town for a follow-up week before returning to the other towns for second visits that will end with community meetings to consider the state of health care in the area and what local folks want to do about it.

Debby Hicks, 21, one of two community organizers living in Thomaston for the summer says that almost 500 people have been through the health fair here. Hicks, an anthropology graduate student at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, explains that her job is to help the community prepare for the health fair’s arrival then ensure that all the necessary follow-up work is done after the “travelling” part of the fair leaves town. Follow-up can involve seeing that records are sent to area doctors, arranging for visits to specialists if some unusual medical problem has been discovered during a check-up, or assisting community work to build a clinic.

With the help of three CETA workers

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arranged through the county, Hicks and the other community organizer, Ann Wade, have visited almost every church and civic group in Marengo County telling people about the health fair, urging them to come and enlisting their support.

“This is not a do-gooder project,” says Wade, 24, who hopes to go to medical school next year. “The community must ask for us to come, then they have to provide housing and food for the students. There’s got to be something here for us to build on.”

Health fairs have been an energetic force in rural Alabama since 1974, when a group of Alabama undergraduates, medical and nursing students began seeking “something to build on” as part of their commitment to improving rural health care. Sponsored by the Student Coalition for Community Health, a loosely-organized group based around the church-connected Wesley Foundation at the University of Alabama, the health fairs have had more spectacular successes in the past five years. One small town in North Alabama now has a doctor, clinic, and pharmacy, and other communities have established nurse-practitioner clinics and organized community improvement projects.

Not every community visited by the health fairs has found tangible results from the visit, but the coalition doesn’t write off these experiences as failures. “Sometimes,” observes a follow-up report written on a disappointing health fair site, “the best thing to help a community is to leave it alone.”

There’s a healthy lack of dogma about the coalition and its attitude toward the small communities that it visits.

“Rural places don’t need anyone’s charity,” bristles the Rev. Jack Shelton, the mentor of many of the student leaders involved in the coalition. “It’s important for our whole society for the rural community to be healthy.”

Shelton, who until recently served as director of the UA Wesley Foundation is now with the university administration, working in President David Mathews’ office on rural development projects. He’s pleased with the evolution of the student coalition which he describes as being “not very self-conscious about its own life.”

He traces the coalition’s beginnings to a group of “bright, hard-working, thoughtful” students that gathered around the Wesley Foundation in the early 1970s. Reading Robert Coles’ studies and after serious discussions about the South and what it meant to be a Southerner, the students eventually hooked up with a group of Vanderbilt University students in 1973. The Nashville group

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had been sponsoring health fairs in rural Tennessee since 1969, blending primary health care and community organizing in an open non-elitist manner that the Tuscaloosa group found attractive.

With seed money from the United Methodist Church, the coalition managed to win a $100,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (of the Johnson Johnson toiletry fortune) to be spread out over two years. Although the money has been handled by the university, the coalition is emphastically autonomous and totally student-run.

It’s important, says Shelton, for college students to have a chance to “prove themselves.”

“The coalition is a chance to build up confidence in themselves, to take a job and be responsible for seeing it through – pulling it off not in the best circumstances, not with the most expensive equipment. It’s hard work and some of them can’t take it.”

The benefits to the students may be as important in the long run as the immediate gains in the communities. The future doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers, mathematicians, nutritionists and pillars of the community who work with the health fairs each summer attesting to its profound effect on their outlook and judgment, The “final reports” published after each summer include personal evaluations of the project by each staff member, and most of these speak poignantly of these mostly White, mostly middle class college students’ reactions to living in small Alabama communities, many of them still clouded with racism, poverty and suffering.

“I’ve yet to see anybody come out of it unscathed,” Dona Norton, an unofficial advisor to the health fairs, says cheerfully.

Asked by friends to arrange introductions between coalition organizers and officials in his home county in North Alabama during the first year of the health fairs, Norton has never had an assigned position in the health fairs, but now works with the Agricultural Marketing Project, a spin-off from the health fairs that operates under the coalition umbrella.

“This just throws ’em up against real life,” he says. “There’s no typical coalition student, and there’s no typical health fair. One week he may be living up on Sand Mountain with a nice middle class White family with a swimming pool out back and the next week he’s down in the Black Belt with some poor Black family that doesn’t even have an indoor bathroom.”

Norton, 29, has a degree in regional planning from Alabama and expresses the same strong agrarian sentiments as Shelton. During his student days Norton was “infuriated” with the campus insensitivity to the rest of the state.

“All these professors who come down from Indiana or somewhere, calling everything ‘podunk,’ dismissing everything smaller than Atlanta as not worth fooling with . . . .” he shaes his head in disbelief.

The health fairs run, in Norton’s words, on “a constant series of miracles.” Generally there is only a small carry-over group from one year to the next. Health fairs, on the whole exhilirating, are also exhausting and demanding, easy to burn out on. As soon as one summer’s fairs are over, planning starts for the next year, more often than not with an entirely new group of students. They read the final reports, talk to old coalition workers, turn to Shelton and Norton for guidance.

“But nobody can tell you how to do it,” says

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Angie Wright, a member of the three-member directorship that ran this summer’s project. Wright, 22, a recent graduate of Davidson College in North Carolina, was looking for a way to combine her interest in medicine and community organizing when she heard about the health fairs.

There’s a feeling that the coalition’s strength comes from the constant infusion of new blood. If the health fairs seem to have the same problems with sloppy organization, uneven pacing and inadequate planning year after year, then they also have a freshness and enthusiasm that has gone out of too many other well-organized humanitarian efforts.

Shelton concedes that it was “easier’ to recruit students for the projects a few years ago. “They had greater social sensitivity,” he says. “They were a little more sophisticated generation of students; less dominated by the pleasure principle.”

Still, every year, the coalition manages to fill its openings with music students who learn to take

EKGs, medical students who work as community organizers, geology students who learn how to test well water. It all gets out together, and somehow, it works.

There’s some mumbling that the health fairs are being taken for granted, that they’ve taken a backseat to other coalition related projects. But no one foresees discontinuing the health fairs, at least not any time soon. Money has been a constant worry since the Johnson grant expired. In the last three years funds have come from the Methodist church, the University Student Government Association, the Chattanooga-based Lyndhurst Foundation and the Alabama governor’s office. The other coalition projects also have to scramble for funds, usually drawing on the same sources.

Norton’s Agricultural Marketing Project is similar to one run in Tennessee setting up “food fairs” in church and public parking lots throughout the summer. Farmers and gardeners bring produce to a market site on a regularly scheduled day and sell directly to consumers. The coalition has also undertaken a study of land ownership patterns in Alabama’s Appalachian counties as part of a grant from the Appalachian Regional Council. A newly-formed Community Health Development Project, headed by two former health fair community organizers, is coordinating follow-up work in health fair communities and working toward building a network of primary health care advocates in Alabama.

The unifying idea behind the coalition’s different directions is the group’s broad definition of health.

“People in a community are healthy because of what they do for themselves,” says Shelton.

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“The coalition has been intent on joining in a partnership with the communities that want to be self-reliant. This isn’t a charity, do-gooder thing. It’s just working to make things healthy. It’s just working with folks.”

In Thomaston, there’s a palpable feeling of discouragement among the staff.

“It’s too bad you couldn’t visit one of the other sites,” a visitor is told over and over. “The response has been so much more enthusiastic than here.”

The health fairs have scored their most satisfying successes in the small, primarily White towns in the hill country of North Alabama. The health fairs have acted as a catalyst in several communities, providing a vehicle to identify and act on the dissatisfactions shared by many in the area. The coalition always works with the established lower structure, but at the same time it offers new energy and new ideas that can generate their own momentum.

The coalition has had less success in the Black Belt, where communities are often split sharply along racial lines. Previous efforts have centered in Black communities, which are desperately poor and able to marshal few resources. In Thom aston the power structure is undeniably White, while the population is perhaps slightly more Black than White. There was a pronounced hesitancy on the part of the White community to participate, although several respected authority figures sanctioned the health fair. It seems a testimony to the dedication and high goals of the students that they are unhappy with the response to the health fair in Thomaston. Several key community persons were very pleased with the health fair, one pointing out that no one can recall Whites and Blacks ever working together as equals on a mutually beneficial project before the coalition came. What will happen in the months to come is unknown, of course, but the health fair has brought a moment of cooperation and sense of purpose to Thomaston that might never have been known otherwise.

Dona Norton sees a common thread of experience in all the small communities where the health fairs have worked: “They all talk about the past, things that happened twenty years ago. And it’s always traumatic, catastrophic stuff – when the school closed, when the train depot closed, when the lake came, we used to be known as the strawberry capital of the United States. The health fair is the first positive community experience that most of these folks can remember.”

It’s a time, he says, when the potential of the community can be revealed and mobilized. “One of the wonderful things is seeing so many good people surface,” he says. “Not whittlers and fiddlers and all that goddamn craftsy stuff, just ordinary good folks. They could be on the Supreme Court, president of the United States, some of them were so wise and good, but they were born in Cedar Bluffs or Boykin or Castleberry and that’s where they’ve stayed to live and die.”

A native Alabamian, Harriet Swift is a graduate of the University of Alabama and copy editor with the Birmingham Post-Herald.

The Making of a Ghetto

By Bob Powell

Vol. 2, No. 2., 1979, pp. 17-20

For Southerners who weren’t raised in them, federal housing projects are often visualized as inner city creatures of high crime with vandalized shells where rats and cockroaches populate among the left behinds of the Great Society. While they are generally thought of as exclusively a downtown, big city problem, public housing projects are creeping into the suburbs where new problems create old, disappointing results.

The move towards the suburbs began in the early 1970s when the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and local housing authorities around the country came under fire for allegedly perpetuating housing segregation in the nation’s cities. Critics claimed that placing new projects in predominantly inner city neighborhoods perpetuated residential segregation.

The Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 mandated that “large concentrations” of poor people be avoided in the selection of new project sites. With lawsuits later filed against some major urban housing authorities for failure to comply with the Act and with charges of violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1974 and due process, the move of housing projects to the suburbs began.

In 1975, the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) acquired two suburban sites, called Red Oak and Boatrock. Originally built as middle class apartments, the projects went to the city authority when the original developers went broke.

With 15,000 apartment units serving 51,000 tenants, AHA became involved in disputes with the county housing authority over who owned the projects. The courts finally awarded control to the county authority which is slated to take over this year.

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Until the court battle with AHA, Fulton county had no projects that it owned or ran directly and had dealt only with rental subsidies of private landlords on behalf of the tenants. Based on Atlanta’s experience with Boatrock and Red Oak, the county may find some unique problems with suburbia housing.

A root problem is physical isolation. At Boatrock in Southwest Atlanta the nearest physical structure, a hugh Western Electric plant, is a quarter of a mile away. The closest store – just a country store – is about three miles and the nearest shopping district, Ben Hill, is 7 miles away. The project is 17 miles from downtown Atlanta.

The Red Oak project is better off. It is located 5 miles from the suburban town of College Park and only a mile from the nearest chain grocery store.

While these may not be great distances to a middle class commuter they are terrific barriers for the poor dependent on second hand gas guzzlers and public tranportation. Even the AHA management agrees that transportation is a problem for outer city projects. Margaret Ross, information officer of AHA, says of Boatrock, “Boatrock had transportation problems but they were cleared up.”

According to residents of the projects the transportation woes still exist. In its first year Boatrock had no bus service at all. Now, buses are available at Boatrock and Red Oak but only during business hours. It also takes at least 45 minutes for the one-way trip to downtown Atlanta. The last bus from downtown to the outer reaches of the projects leaves at 6 o’clock p.m. and only Red Oak has weekend bus service to downtown.

Annie Morrison, president of the Boatrock Tenant’s Association is not only critical of the buses’ timing but also of their destination points. The buses to Boatrock run only between the project and downtown, 17 miles away. To travel to the nearby shopping center of Ben Hill, a resident must go 17 miles downtown and then 10 miles back to the shopping area. A direct bus route to Ben Hill would allow easier access for Boatrock tenants to grocery stores, commercial enterprises, the post office and to the local public health clinic.

The outer limit projects have other distinct disadvantages.

The bulk of doctors and clinics who treat the poor are located downtown. Grady Memorial Hospital, which accepts large numbers of welfare/Medicaid clients and pro-rates service costs for the working poor ineligible for Medicaid assistance is downtown close to the inner city projects. Scottish Rite Hospital, which serves many handicapped poor people at little or no cost, is 30 minutes from downtown housing projects. A bus ride from Red Oak or Boatrock takes as long as two hours one way.

The suburban projects are also separated from the centers of power that shape their lives. A former Boatrock tenant, who had previously lived in Techwood, a downtown project, contrasted the affects on activism. “At Techwood, we had a strong community group,” said Betty Thompson, “but at Boatrock, we are isolated from everything.”

While the seats of power (the mayor’s office, the City Council chambers, housing authority officers, the major media, and the state capitol) are all within a stone’s throw of most projects in Atlanta, “it’s a little hard to make those nighttime council meetings when the buses don’t run after 6:00 p.m. or you have to depend on your beat-up car,” one suburban project dweller pointed out.

The Boatrock Tenant’s Association has sent representatives to meetings of coalitions of citywide housing residents. One activist in the local welfare right’s organization sees the projects’ move to the suburbs not so much aimed at breaking down segregated housing patterns as breaking up poor people’s concentration of political power.

Another activist in the downtown Bedford-Pines area, Joe Boone recently accused a

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White developer of trying to drive the poor out of the city when plans for luxury condominiums next to poorer Bedford-Pines were announced.

Boone and other activists fear that the gas crunch will increasingly encourage White middleclass suburbanites to opt for city life. Already, Whites are beginning to trickle back into Atlanta’s inner city neighborhoods to renovate houses that were once left in disrepair.

As they trickle into neighborhoods like Grant and Inman Park, and Midtown, real estate prices skyrocket. The neighborhoods get better but moderate and low income private housing is forced out due to higher prices of real estate. If the trickle of Whites turns to a snowball, more public housing will be necessary and suburban projects may be more in demand.

For the present, the suburb is still the place of the American Dream for the many of the middle class and housing for the poor is not often welcomed.

Where the mountains of North Georgia meet the urban sprawl of Atlanta, North Fulton County is an idyllic area of station wagons, dogs, children, PTA meetings and homes ranging from $50,000 to $100,000.

The Fulton County Housing Authority announced early this year plans to build small projects in two suburban enclaves in North Fulton, Aipharetta and Sandy Springs. The suburbanites were not happy to hear the news and several hundred of them jammed hearings on the proposed projects. They held high banners that told how projects will bring crime and undesirables, welfare deadbeats and folks with dark skins. As one man said, “I moved out here to get away from those people”.

However, one North Fulton resident took a

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more mocking view in private of her neighbor’s fears. “They should be happy about the projects. Now they won’t have to send all the way to downtown Atlanta for their maids.” HUD tried to allay fears by issuing a report denying that rising crime and the pillage of the suburbia would occur.

Because the county housing authority can give priority to residents living outside Atlanta, the North Fulton residents probably would not face any influx of Black inner city residents. They can hardly escape the poor Whites, however.

Down the dirt road away from the new suburban neighborhoods, live the poor Whites of North Fulton in wretched housing, worse than many of the inner city housing projects.

Many shacks of these poor Whites are without running water or electricity and some have no indoor plumbing or heating except for wood burning stoves.

With political sophistication and economic advantage, the middle class residents of North Fulton may be able to use the problems of inner city projects and the fear of Black migration to the suburbs to consolidate support and block any federally funded project in their area. If so, the poor Whites of the area – the most likely beneficiaries – will have lost the opportunity for better housing.

At the same time, the problems of residents in suburban Boatrock and Red Oak remain overshadowed by the controversy over additional housing projects outside downtown. Frustrated and hampered, these residents wish for a return to the old projects or become disillusioned and disrespectful of their present housing. The makings of a ghetto are thus laid.

HUD appears incapable of avoiding the political decisions and unwilling to help residents of the suburban projects solve their problems. The bureaucracy is apparently much better at identifying project sites than nurturing the projects to become livable, convenient housing.

While inner city residents may face the blight of everyday deterioration and crime, the housing projects of the suburbs may be subject to the same forces, as they slowly take hold, without the political influence and downtown services that at least make life bearable.

Bob Powell is a free-lance writer living in Atlanta, Georgia.

Urban and Rural Development

By Staff

Vol. 2, No. 2., 1979, pp. 21

People who help each other build their homes save more than $8,000 in construction costs according to a survey released by Rural America.

The survey of the 1978 operations of 57 mutual self-help housing projects shows the average cost of the 773 houses built by the self-help method was $24,300. The cost of a comparable contractor-built house was $32,900. Result: a saving of $8,600 on a three-bedroom, woodframe house with 1,071 square feet of living space.

The average family of four members worked 914 hours on their house over a 81/2 month period. The family provided 56.5 percent of the labor on the house. Women were responsible for nearly half (46 percent) of the family’s work contribution. The average adjusted income of the families was $8,090.

Bad weather, loan processing delays and difficulty in finding building sites were the three biggest problems faced by the self-help participants.

The average technical assistance cost was $4,800 per house. Technical assistance cost is the cost of the project staff that helps the families organize, obtain site and construction loans and learn how to build houses. Technical assistance costs are paid by grants from the Farmers Home Administration and the Department of Labor, DOL grants are channeled through Rural America.

In the self-help housing program small groups of families work together to build houses. They receive technical assistance from a staff that usually consists of a project director, a construction supervisor and a group organizer. The families obtain loans from the Farmers Home Administration to purchase building sites, buy building materials and pay sub-contractors for doing part of the construction work.

Rural America is a nonprofit membership organization set up to give people in rural areas and small towns a stronger voice in Washington. One of the main concerns of Rural America is farmworker housing. With funds from the Department of Labor, Rural America finances the administrative costs of community based non-profit organizations that help farm workers obtain decent shelter. Rural America also provides training and technical assistance to groups interested in the organization and management of self-help housing projects.

For a copy of the self-help report “1978 Survey – Self-Help Housing Projects” contact Linda Rule at the Rural America office at 1346 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036 or call 202-659-2800. A copy costs $1.00.

Southern Women

By Liz Wheaton

Vol. 2, No. 2., 1979, pp. 22

After July 2, 1976 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that executions could be resumed under certain circumstances, state legislatures clammored to enact “constitutional” death penalty statutes and, as of June of this year, 512 people inhabit America’s Death Rows. Six of the condemned are women, and each of these is a Southerner.

Their sex is but one of the factors that make these women unique residents of the Southern executioners’ holding pens. Although Black and other minorities make up more than 47 percent of male Death Row inmates, all of the women are White. And while death sentences are not uniformly given to men who murder their wives or lovers, half of the condemned women were convicted of killing men with whom they were intimate. Two of these women received the death sentence in North Carolina (for the same method of killing, poisoning) and the others are from Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Texas.

If their court appeals are rejected, the North Carolina women will die in the gas chamber; the women in Florida, Georgia and Alabama will be electrocuted; and Texas will have the distinction of killing the first American woman by the “scientifically superior method” of lethal injection.

While much of the death penalty’s barbarity lies in the act of execution itself, the conditions of confinement on Death Row may well be more brutal than the final agony of death. “To wait like this is to die every day,” says one woman. And for the women, it may be worse because there are so few of them.

All Death Row inmates are isolated from the rest of the prison population, but the men can take some small comfort in the fact that because none of them are solitary residents they have companions on the cell block. They are within hearing distance of other human beings at all times, and most of them need only look up to see another’s face across the corridor.

Women’s prisons were not built to house Death Row inmates, so the women are confined in isolation cells which are ordinarily reserved for violent or psychotic prisoners. Customarily prison administrators recognize that minds snap quickly when deprived of human contact and therefore, rarely hold inmates in isolation for longer than a month or two as punishment. The women under sentence of death, however, are in permanent isolation.

With the exception of a guard who slides the meal tray under the steel door three times a day, most Death Row women may not see or hear another person for days. Their outside contact is limited to their attorney, a minister or psychologist, and a few family members – if their families will have anything more to do with them. For the most part, though, they eat alone; sleep, read and cry alone; and live in near-solitude in a cinder-block dungeon which may or may not have a window.

Remarkably, the women on Death Row for the most part have not been debilitated by their experience. Seventeen-year old Debra Bracewell in Alabama has experienced a religious conversion and is taking a high school equivalency course. Becky Machetti corresponds with and offers encouragement from her isolated cell in Georgia to any prisoner who writes to her. Sonia Jacobs has become a jailhouse lawyer and has filed suit against the Florida State Correctional Center for Women charging sex discrimination in her treatment as a female Death Row inmate.

Velma Barfield, however, has indicated that she will not allow her appeals to go beyond the North Carolina Supreme Court. The state’s gas chamber has been freshly painted, new leather straps have been secured to the sturdy wooden chair, and a woman may lead the ghoulish procession of death.

While different from the men of Death Row, the women also show their own diversities. They are teenagers and grandparents. They are high school dropouts and college graduates. Some are gentle and others are violent; sane and insane, weak and strong. They’re really not so different from free people.

Male or female, Death Row inmates do share a common trait: they are poor, powerless… and they shall die to serve as an example to the rest of us that killing is wrong. By this bizaare standard, states have a deadly equality.

Liz Wheaton is a staff associate for the ACLU Southern Women’s Rights Project in Richmond, Virginia.

Economic Development

By Harold Moon

Vol. 2, No. 2., 1979, pp. 23

More than half of the 11 Southern states are ranked among the worst in the nation in administering fair and equitable taxes according to a recent report of a public employee’s organization.

Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana and Kentucky are ranked 51st, 50th, 48th, 47th, 46th, and 43rd, respectively. Closely following the ten worst states were South Carolina (40th), Florida (33rd) and Virginia (32nd). Only Georgia (13th) and North Carolina (15th) were near the top ten states.

All 50 states including the District of Columbia were ranked in five specific areas of taxation; sales, personal income, business, property and general administration. The ranking measured from 1 (best) to 51st (worst) in a recent published report by the Coalition of America Public Employees entitled Tax Equity in the Fifty States co-authored by Diane Fuchs and Steve A. Rabin.

Louisiana was included among the best in the administration of sales tax, considered the most regressive form of tax. Forty-five percent of the Southern states, however, were ranked among the worse in the sales tax structures.

In personal income tax, the most equitable form of taxation, 27 percent of the Southern states fell into the worst states category.

On an annual basis states have collectively been losing more than $3 billion a year due to poor and uneven taxation of businesses who have cleverly avoided paying an equitable proportion of taxes annually. The uneven taxation of businesses has resulted in individual states placing higher taxes on personal income, property and sales taxes.

Though property tax is a main source of local, not state revenue, and, for the most part, is levied and administered on a local level, the assessing of full property value is sometimes not achieved on an equitable basis. Also, intangible forms of “property” such as stocks, bonds, money on deposit, and securities escape full assessment of value and, thereby, provide loopholes for the wealthy and a “burden on homeowners and renters.” Thirty-six percent of the Southern states have closely monitored and featured legislation to curb abuse in the property tax spectrum: Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and Kentucky were tied for the ninth position. The top ten is rounded out by Oregon, Wisconsin, Michigan, Maryland, Iowa and California. Forty-five percent of the Southern states ranked in the bottom tier: Louisiana (51st), Montana, Wyoming, Alabama (48th), Texas (46th), Mississippi (46th), Idaho, North Dakota, Delaware and Tennessee (42nd).

Better administration by states of existing tax laws in individual states could lead to eliminating the need for “additional taxes or higher rates”. The close monitoring of “how much is ‘spent’ each year” on tax breaks is one conceivable remedy. Another suggested in the survey, would be for states to cooperate on a joint effort to enforce and administer a multistate tax law where states jointly audit businesses and individuals who must pay taxes in different states. The study estimates that each state would pick up $31 in added tax revenue for every one dollar spent in extra expense.