In This Issue

By Steve Suitts

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

While admittedly too simple, much of the Southern life is still a saga about those two old notions of equality born in public policy during the first brief Reconstruction: the vote and forty acres and a mule. Our December issue brings us up to date on both themes.

Since local and state elections were held in the last twomonths in Mississippi, Birmingham and Atlanta, several authors tell of the political issues and people of those political races. In Ron Casey’s story of the historic election of a Black mayor in Birmingham, we are told that the election pitted the very best and worst symbols of race relations with one another. Black Councilman Dick Arrington won perhaps because Birmingham is still a divided city, willing by 51 percent to make changes.

We have a piece on the Mississippi elections were the political changes are catching up with what has been the facts of life in Mississippi for several years. The meaning and final effects of these changes are not entirely clear; nonetheless, new faces and new hopes are now in office. Also, Boyd Lewis provides us with a brief gothic commentary on the elections in Atlanta.

In all these pieces there are signs of political progress, not born so much out of rapidly changing attitudes among the races although some of those changes have surely occured. It is change brought by changing populations, shifting political alliances and compromises, and perhaps the political choices afforded to Southerners at the polls. Fifteen years after the major civil rights legislation passed Congress, most of us have been seasoned too much by disappointments to offer any clear statement about the economic and social opportuity and potential which will be seized through these elections. Still, on the whole, these are pleasing signs.

While giving some modern surroundings, the issues of economic opportunity and self-help in the Deep South are rooted inthe history of slavery and the once promised freedom of “forty acres and a mule.” Bob Anderson writes with the gift of experience about the accomplishments of organizations in the Delta of Mississippi offering poor Blacks a chance for economic wellbeing. In a companion piece, Bob also expands the dimentions of his article by presenting a broader view of what is happening in the changing struggle for equal rights in the rural South.

Ginny Looney and Duna Norton also contribute to this theme by challenging the prevailing a notion that big farms are needed for the nation’s food production for the economic survival of surrounding communities. In an intriguing twenty-county study in Alabama, the authors not only challenge the assumption that big farms are best but also make the case for the prosperity of rural life may well depend upon Black and White small farmers.

Our department pieces also correspond with our general concerns in this issue by covering the Southern votes on limits to campaign expenses for Congressional races, unemployment in the South, and a day to honor Rosa Parks in Atlanta.

With the tragic events in Greensboro in Novemeber we report on quesions that linger in the aftermath of the worst racial violence in this decade.

Perhaps symbolically, this last issue of 1979 does not offer a clear opinion piece which we usually not in our “Soapbox” department. It is not that we lack opinions — indeed few who know us would venture such an explanation. There is, however, a time when events should be told, analyzed, and then simply left for reflection. As we end this year and foresee another when politics will give us a president to lead the nation and a new census will ascertain our economic and social status, our coverage of political and economic changes is done with the hope that in the new decade there will be a newnewed commitment by many to both reflection and action on the central issues about which opinions have been plentiful and progress has been short.

Greensboro Slayings

By Janis Powell & Bob Powell

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

Five people were slain and nine wounded in Greensboro, North Carolina November 3 as they participated in an anti-Klan rally. Fourteen members of the United Racist Front, a coalition of Nazis and Klansmen, were arrested and charged with first degree murder or conspiracy to murder by local authorities in connection with the slayings.

The Communist Workers Party (CWP) had called the demonstration in Greensboro to protest the growing number of Klan attacks upon Black people and civil rights workers throughout the nation. One hour before the scheduled march and rally, the anti-Klan group of one hundred demonstrators changed the publicized meeting site from Windsor Center on Market Street to the Morningside Homes housing project. Both sites are in the Black community.

Shortly after the rally began, five car loads of White men drove into the project shouting racist jeers and heckling the demonstrators. The two groups first confronted each other with rocks, sticks, and insults. Gunfire broke out and of the five killed (four White men and one Black woman), all but one were considered CWP leaders.

The Greensboro police department claims that it had the Klan under surveillance outside of town and officers a block and a half away from the demonstrators. However, uniformed officers were not on the scene until three minutes after the shooting.

Transcripts of the police radio communications indicate one officer announced the Klan arrival into the area and apparently could not get assistance in time to stop the shooting.

Greensboro Police Sgt. A.W. Lewis said uniformed police had been at the rally site but withdrew shortly before the shooting took place. Police said the withdrawal was done at the request of the demonstrators and as an effort “to keep from inflaming the marchers.”

Despite the anti-Klan nature of the rally, Police Chief Swing confidently assured reporters that the situation was not racial. He said, “We’re not talking about the Woolworth sit-ins in 1960 or the student rioting at A&T State University in 1969, this is simply a case of White against White.”

Residents of Greensboro have many unanswered questions, which are being posed as the community searches to understand – why?

—How did the Klan know exactly where to come to if the rally site had been changed? Earlier in the week the Klan had secured through the city attorney’s office the original route of the demonstrators. Despite the change in the rally site, the Klan drove straight to the site.

—When did the police discover the rally site had been changed?

—Why were the Morningside residents not informed of the change? Some residents say they glanced outside to check on their children playing to find them in the middle of a “war zone.”

—Why were there no Greensboro Klansmen involved in the shooting?

—Why do many blame thevictims for the tragedy? Equating possible CWP tactical blunders on the same level as Klan/Nazi terror tactics, some are calling both groups “crazy” and equally responsible.

—Has the Klan become willing to kill in front of TV cameras instead of on Southern back roads?

—Are local officials involved in the background of Klan activities?

—Will this tragedy reinstate various police surveillance of political activities?

—Will this incident be used as a basis for red-baiting? Shortly after the killing, a company in Collinsville, Virginia reportedly pressured its union to fine an avowed Marxist member for passing out pamphlets at work protesting the killings.

Because of these and other questions, civil rights groups and individuals around the country have called for local and national responses including: (1) vigorous prosecution of those responsible for the Greensboro murders; (2) an independent investigation of police and local officials complicity in the Nov. 3 attacks; (3) statewide legislative investigations into the activities of the Klan; and (4) open, public Congressional hearings about the activities of the Ku Klux Klan nationwide.

Changing Politics in Mississippi

By JoAnn Klein

Vol. 2, No. 3, 1979, pp. 5-6

Mississippi ― fresh from legislative reapportionment designed to better reflect racial composition of voting age population – became the state with the greatest number of Black elected officials in elections November 6. Long a hotbed of racial conflict and struggle, the Deep South state took over the top spot from Louisiana by electing record numbers of Blacks to county offices and four-year legislative terms.

In addition, William Winter, a former lieutenant governor, was elected governor by a 2-to-l majority. Winter, a three time candidate for the chief executive’s slot, lost his first gubernatorial contest because he was considered too moderate on racial matters.

Seventeen Blacks won seats in the Mississippi Legislature, an increase from six in the 1979 session. In the 122-member House of Representatives, Blacks will comprise 12.2 percent of the membership. Fifteen Black candidates, all Democrats, won seats in the lower chamber. Four are from Hinds County, the state’s most populous county and the location of Jackson, the state capitol.

Black state Rep. Robert Clark of Lexington in rural Holmes County, is expected to retain his chairmanship of the House Education Committee. Two years ago, Clark became the first Black committee chairman since Reconstruction. He is also the senior Black legislator, entering his fourth term.

Black House members also include state NAACP president Aaron Henry of Clarksdale, who doubles as co-chairman of the Mississippi Democratic Party; Meridian NAACP president Charles Young and Jackson NAACP president Fred Banks, a leading candidate to become Mississippi’s first Black federal judge.

A result of a 14-year fight to reapportion the legislature, the increased Black membership comes from across the state, from north to south, east to west.

Across the hall in the state Senate, two Blacks will join the 52-member body. Both are Hinds County Democrats and will become the second and third Black senators in Mississippi since Reconstruction. Doug Anderson, presently a state representative, and Henry Kirksey, principal plaintiff in the reapportionment case, will make 3.8 percent of the upper chamber Black.

However, with all the Black gains, there was at least one major setback. The state’s most famous Black senate candidate – Fayette mayor Charles Evers, brother of slain civil rights leader Medger Evers – was stopped in his effort to win a senate seat in four counties along the Mississippi River.

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With the legislative victories, Black elected officials in Mississippi neared the 350 mark. That figure was buoyed by the re-election of 15 incumbent Black supervisors, who run county governments in the state’s 82 counties. Blacks picked up supervisors posts in Claiborne, Holmes, Yazoo and Hinds counties.

In Hinds County, two Blacks will sit on the five-member supervisors’ board. They are the first Black members since Reconstruction. Both defeated long-time incumbents.

At the same time, Blacks won sheriff’s post previously held by Whites in Claiborne, Marshall and Holmes counties. All three counties have predominantly Black populations.

Along with local and legislative races, the 1979 gubernatorial election also reflected a change in Mississippi politics.

Winter won the Democratic nomination without the support of former U.S. Sen. James 0. Eastland, Mississippi’s chief political kingpen for three decades. In addition, Eastland’s longtime political organization didn’t back Winter until he had won the party nomination.

As a result, Winter is not expected to choose from the Eastland favorites when he makes several hundred appointments that befall a new governor.

Winter’s election also purged former supporters of George Wallace from the ranks of the Democratic Party hierarchy. Party Vice Chairman Jan Little and secretary George Winborne switched to support Republican nominee Gil Carmichael.

More moderate members of the Democratic Party had been trying to rid themselves of the Wallacites for years and believe they’ve finally driven them into the more conservative Republican ranks.

In addition, Carmichael’s nomination was also a victory for more moderate Republicans. Carmichael, who angered GOP conservatives in 1976 by supporting Gerald Ford over Ronald Reagan for the party’s presidential nomination, defeated Leon Bramlett, hand-picked by the State’s Reagan following.

Mississippi’s new governor has thus far stayed out of presidential politics. However, Winter stumped the state for John F. Kennedy in 1960. Immediately after the election, Winter said his support of President Kennedy doesn’t mean he’ll endorse Sen. Edward Kennedy this year.

JoAnn Klein is a political reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi.

Election day in Mississippi

By L.C. Dorsey

Vol. 2, No. 3, 1979, pp. 7-8

As almost a hundred people crowded into Henry J. Kirksey’s campaign headquarters, it was clear that they were also keeping their eyes on other races in the state.

The November 6 general election saw the culmination of a concerted struggle for the fulfillment of the “one man, one vote” doctrine, which began in the mid-fifties, escalated in 1964 with the “Freedom Summer” activities and finally, fourteen years later, was realized when a federal court ordered plan guaranteed the election of Blacks to the Mississippi legislature.

Henry Jay, as Kirksey is affectionately called by friends, was one of the plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit against the state with other members of the old Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). The suit became the full-time occupation for Kirksey who worked with a series of attorneys over the years to legally reapportion the state to allow Blacks a fair shake in state government.

A lawsuit filed by Kirksey and several other citizens in 1975 has resulted in three Blacks from Hinds County joining the legislature, making a total of four Blacks in the House of Representatives (Douglas Anderson, Fred Banks, Horace Buckley, and Robert Clark from Holmes County).

Watching other races, the supporters in the Kirksey headquarters considered some of the Black candidates “movement” people. While others were “opportunists” or even “front men” for the White establishment. Several of the Blacks vying for the newly created positions in the legislature simply decided that they would run, sought the endorsement of powerful people in their areas and

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announced their candidacy.

Whatever the political and legal events that brought Mississippians to the 1979 General election, it was obvious that Mississippi politics would never be the same. “I couldn’t sleep,” Kirksey acknowledged in anticipating election day.

Kirksey’s youthful campaign manager talked about the strategy that was supposed to guarantee Kirksey’s victory. They’re voting heavily in Jackson, but the vote appears to be splitting enough so that Henry will win,” E.C. Foster said.

All over the state Blacks were being urged to go to the polls to vote. A worker from gubernatorial candidate William Winter’s campaign headquarters called: “There are some people in West Jackson who need rides to the polls. Can you pick them up?” he asked. A quick check of the map showed that the people lived in another district. A call to the local Labor Council’s office was made and cars were dispatched from there to get the voters.

In Mound Bayou in Boliver County, where there was a hotly contested Sheriff’s race, a16yearold Black was in charge of the Winter campaign machinery. He busily ferried people to the polls for both Winter and Richard Crowe, a Black man running for Sheriff.

Yet the stream of information about voting irregularities also began coming m. Amzie Moore, a long-time political leader in Boliver County drove to the “Crowe for Sheriff Headquarters” to complain about the way he and other voters were pressured at the polls. There was one report that incumbent William B. Alexander, challenged by a Black was inside a polling station telling the voters to “remember your Senator” in plain view of a federal observer and poll workers.

In nearby Marshall County, early reports indicated that police stationed at the polls were deterring voters from the polls. There were also charges of vote-buying.

Finally, though the votes were in.

Kirksey, who is expected to be the chairman of the Black Caucas in the 1980 Legislature, defeated two White opponents for Senate District 28. It was Kirksey’s fourth bid for public office, having lost two previous state bids and a U.S. Senate bid last year.

Douglas Anderson, one of four Blacks elected to the House in 1975, had prevailed over a former campaign worker. Hillman Frazier, a newcomer to politics, went to an easy victory over a Republican candidate. Political observers credit his success to a serious, door-to-doOr “talking to people” campaign.

Judy 0. Cambrell, a Black attorney running in a predominantly White district, lost to the incumbent Dick Hall.

Bennie Thompson, mayor of Bolton, is a newly elected supervisor in Hinds County, having survived a highly controversial campaign.

In Boliver County, White incumbent Alexander prevailed. Richard Crowe lost.

No one seems optimistic that the seventeen new Black members of the state legislature will create instant change, but a Kirksey volunteer and senior at Tougaloo College said, “At least we will have someone up there who will fight for us, and let us know what is going on.”

Johnny Todd, Black mayor of Rosedale, while happy about the election results, was disappointed about the failure in his home county Bolivar. “We have to organize,” he said. Milburn Crowe, agreed that the lack of organization in Bolivar County allowed some politicians and leaders to exchange money for votes and voter influence. “We have to start now to organize so that we are ready next time,” said Crowe.

It was a day of victories in Mississippi and the moment to begin again for the next times.

L.C. Dorsey is a civil rights worker and author of Freedom Came to Mississippi.

Atlanta Blacks Lose in Special Election

By Boyd Lewis

Vol. 2, No. 3, 1979, pp. 9-10

It’s the hottest political secret of Atlanta, the city “too busy to hate”, that the unhorsed barons of the old White power structure are now busily stringing together a collection of “great White hopes” to recapture the city’s top political position from Black office-holders.

There has been some anxiety as to just when the offensive will be launched. But with meticulous precision, the Ivan Allen Jr. Memorial Political Resurrection Machine is being assembled to pull the Atlanta mayorality, city council, county comission and the city’s legislative delegation back into the right-thinking, White-thinking, commercially sensitive camp.

But despite rumors to the contrary, the loss suffered by two Black candidates to the Whites in the City’s October special election and run-off did not signal the opening of the crusade to recapture the Political Grail from the Black Mecca.

Instead, the losses of Clint Deveaux in a county-wide legislative race and ma Evans in the election for a vacated post on the Atlanta City Council reflect dynamics all their own – dynamics both peculiar to Atlanta and applicable in all multiracial cities.

Deveaux lost to Bettye Lowe, wife of county commissioner Tom Lowe, who swamped him with 62 percent of the vote. InaEvans, whose previous political aspirations have floundered on heart-breakingly thin margins, teetered on the edge of victory all through the night of the October 23 run-off but lost to a former city neighborhood planner, Elaine Wiggins Lester.

In the general election of October 2 and the runoff three weeks later the turnout of registered voters was uniformly dismal. Seventy-five percent stayed home for the first vote, 88 percent didn’t vote in the runoff.

The general apathy was bad enough but Black voter apathy was so extreme that political observers had to go back to the days of the White Primary, the poll tax and nightriders to match the dismal figures. At Precinct 9 R in the heart of the Black district (Perry Homes) 4 percent of those registered voted. Precinct 9 K (Archer High School) had a 7 percent turnout. Many other predominantly Black precincts had less than 10 percent of their voters go to the polls.

The once-omnipotent political machine assembled in 1972 by former Congressman (and later UN Ambassador) Andy Young which mobilized the Black and progressive White neighborhood movements has since collapsed and

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there is no longer any effective voter education /voter registration effort ongoing in the city.

Those who felt that the defeat of the local option sales tax measure October 2, piggybacked onto the special elections, was due to a revived coalition of Blacks and politically progressive Whites in the manner of the old Young Coalition were winking at the truth. The tax was supported by some of the builders of the Young machinery, Mayor Maynard Jackson, Julian Bond, and “Daddy” King as well as the downtown Chamber of Commerce and the daily newspapers.

The poor voted against the sales tax because they would be hit with another penny at the checkout counter and would benefit not at all by an alleged $29 million property tax rollback.

The city’s neighborhood movement, mostly lead by young White professionals at this point, opposed the sales tax because they didn’t want to dump more millions into a city council which has become a braying legislative jackass, oblivious to the overall needs of the city and grandly arrogant (as in the case of the refusal to let Atlantans vote on a replacement for city council president Carl Ware who resigned during the summer).

And the third leg on the stool of the “no” vote on the sales tax came from the White enclaves to the north of the city. This was the White flight getting in a joyful kick at Maynard Jackson, the coloreds, White hooligans of the liberal stripe and Atlanta in general.

A tin whistle is the prize to anyone who can link that vote into a coalition. Even Maynard Jackson’s troops defected in droves, with people who campaigned for him in 1973 and for reelection in 1977 being just as efficient in spending the sales tax hike/property tax cut scheme into the dustbin for years to come.

The White victors Lowe and Lester are hardly to be considered soul sisters. Bettye Lowe is a conservative, suburban oriented Republican and former lobbyist for the family, environment and something called the Committee for Moral and Social Decency. Elaine Lester lives in the integrated East Lake community, has excellent personal and professional contacts in the Black community and is as city-oriented as Lowe is county.

And there is very little bond of political commonality between Deveaux and Evans.

Deveaux is an articulate issues man who insists on personal campaigning without plugging into the infamous and often corrupt network of “endorsements”. His independence has cut him off from the usual round of kind words from the pulpit, introductions around Paschal’s inner circle at breakfast and presence on the “tickets”. His clearly middle class background (not to mention marriage to popular WSB TV news anchor Monica Kaufman) was not well perceived by lower income Black voters. His very name was remote and to the last, a mystery (“Dever – Oh, that Frenchman?”)

Ina Evans had far more street savvy than Deveaux, endorsements from such archangels of the city’s lumpenproletariat as former police commissioner Reginald Eaves and State Rep. Bill McKinney, a tireless sign-stapling crew and a husband who aggressively directed the DeKalb County NAACP. The polling results show how much stronger a campaigner she was than Deveaux but the ultimate outcome was no different: defeat. Evans failed to win the in-town White neighborhood support that Deveaux did because of her incomplete attention to issues research Time and again she would confess in debates that she honestly didn’t know the answer to a fairly routine question. Honesty is always good to have in politicians but not while confessing that homework has not been done.

The October elections demonstrated anew the fact that Atlanta remains a snug haven of political anarchy. No political machines set the tone or anoint the candidates. City elections remain a game played and won through a random process. But as sure as they’re bears in Atlanta’s Grant Park Zoo, the pale archons of the driving clubs and executive suites are viewing it all and marveling aloud how easy the Second Reconstruction could be slammed to a halt by swift, highly coordinated assaults when the next elections roll around.

What waits in the wings for Atlanta is far more important than the personal wins and losses acted out on the stage of October’s special election.

Boyd Lewis is a news reporter for WABE FM radio in Atlanta, Georgia.

The Election of Birmingham’s Black Mayor

By Ron Casey

Vol. 2, No. 3, 1979, pp. 11-14

Apparently there were two sets of voices vying- for Officer George Sand’s attention as Birmingham Police Department car 71 pulled into the convenience store lot the night of June 22. The first was that of a White store employee whose co-worker stood inside with a bullet wound in his shoulder. “They’re in there,” Sands would later say he heard the worker yell as he pointed to a dark green Buick on the parking lot. “Look out. They’ve got a shotgun. They shot Mike.” A group of Blacks would later testify they had been standing across the street yelling a different message to Sands: a warning he did not acknowledge.

In plainclothes and with drawn revolver, Sands and his partner began to edge toward the car, commanding its occupant to remain still. As the two officers reached the back door of the vehicle, the passenger lunged suddenly downward into the seat. Sands responded with an almost instantaneous burst of gunfire. Three of his four bullets struck 21 year old Bonita Carter in the back. Later it would be learned that the young Black woman had apparently had nothing to do with the assault on the store employee. She had been an acquaintance of the assailant and had gotten into the car at his request when he ran away.

The shooting awoke racial tensions in Birmingham that had lain dormant for more than a decade. And those tensions would become a double-edged sword that would, on the one hand, cut through the city’s racial past and pave the way for its first Black mayor and, on the other, hound a man of long standing liberal credentials from office.

David Vann, a onetime law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black and a Birmingham attorney, had been elected mayor of the city four years before by the narrowest of margins after forming a shaky coalition of liberal Whites and Blacks. That was possible because the city that elected Vann was drastically different from the White supremist steel town of the early 1960s. In the decade since the days of Bull Connor’ White suburban flight had almost equalized the city’s racial make-up and the young, but growing, University of Alabama in Birmingham, with its mammoth medical complex, had replaced U.S. Steel as the city’s largest employer.

Still, when Vann first got word of the Carter incident, he must have sensed its potential for harm. -His liberal reputation did not make him popular with the city’s conservative Whites. He had

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been instrumental in filing the suit that brought an end to the decades-old gerrymandering of the Alabama Legislature making “one man – one vote” the law of the land and had also been one of the driving forces behind a change in Birmingham’s form of government that drove the segregationists of the 60s from office.

With the Carter shooting, his strength in the Black community, he must have known, was being blasted away by a hail of gunfire from a policeman’s revolver.

Try as he might, Vann would not be able to find a common ground that would allow him to compromise the issue. On one side were the city’s Black leaders, led by local SCLC President Abraham Woods, who were clamoring for Sand’s dismissal. On the other side were the members of the Birmingham Fraternal Order of Police, the closest thing in Birmingham to a police union. Only a couple of months before, they had called their first strike ever, and after the Carter shooting, they were demanding that Sands be left on the force until a grand jury could look into the matter.

Vann tried his first compromise; Sands would remain on the force while a biracial committee of eight civic and religious leaders held open hearings and took sworn testimony on the matter. In the meantime, Vann also would call for a review of the situation by the police department’s own Firearms Discharge Review Board.

After more than a week of testimony, the ad hoc committee reported it could find no justification for the shooting. The police board, however, voted 5-1 that the shooting was within department policy. Vann again was faced with a dilemma.

Again, he tried a compromise. Sands was within policy so he could not be fired, said Vann. But that was only because the policy was faulty. Vann ordered it changed and also ordered that police officers be given training that would make them less likely to use unnecessary force.

The compromise pleased no one. Blacks were not only irked by the Bonita Carter incident, they were also mindful of the fact that similar incidents had gone largely without resolution in the city’s recent past. Within a week after Vann announced his decision, thousands of demonstrators, led by Woods and SCLC national President Joseph Lowery, converged on Birmingham’s main street for a protest march. It was the largest held in the city since the 1960s. At the end of the march, however, instead of police dogs and fire hoses, the marchers met David Vann who had arranged for

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them to have a stage and sound equipment. He marched the last few steps of the demonstration himself singing “We Shall Overcome” with the marchers.

Vann’s conciliatory gesture only caused him more political problems with conservative Whites, who felt he had sold out the police department. And his efforts did him little good with the Blacks. Black leaders announced they would begin a “selective boycott,” saying that certain White business in the city would be affected. The boycott would not end, they said, until Sands was removed from the force. Vann held firm while the boycott plans were being laid. But shortly after Blacks met with representatives of the Birmingham Area Chamber of Commerce, another curious event transpired. Vann suddenly announced that Sands’ lawyer had sent him a medical report. Sands, said the report, had been affected by all the tremendous strain he had been under and would have to retire from the force indefinitely.

It had taken about 30 days for the coalition that David Vann had been nurturing for four years to be ripped apart. As summer wore into September, and the pack began to gather for the October election, it was becoming clear that for Vann the handwriting was on the wall.

The pack that gathered ranged all the way from the likes of Mohammed Oliver of the Socialist Workers Party to Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Don Black. It also included one of Vann’s longtime allies and the man who probably more than any other had been responsible for shaping the political fortunes that put Vann in office – Dr. Richard Arrington Jr. Four years before, as both Arrington and Vann sat on the City Council, Arrington began to air a series of citizen police brutality charges in open meetings, placing then Mayor George Seibels in the same kind of situation that the Bonita Carter incident would leave Vann facing. Arrington, a Black educator, subsequently endorsed Vann and swung massive Black support his way.

Also in the 1979 race were City Councilman John Katapodis, a Harvard-educated former Birmingham school board employee, Larry Langford, a city councilman and onetime television news reporter, and Frank Parsons, a local attorney and travel agency president.

Despite the racial overtones, it was a relatively lackluster campaign. Of the major candidates, Vann campaigned on his record and Arrington on his eight years experience as a councilman and abilities as an administrator. The only controversy that surfaced concerned an incident that won Parsons the almost unanimous condemnation of the Birmingham media. Speaking before an all-White civic club, Parsons told members words to the effect that Blacks in the city would bloc vote and that Whites had better do the same if they didn’t want to end up with a Black police chief.

That incident would make the run-off election that followed all the more tense. After all the primary ballots had been counted, the city had pretty much voted a racial ticket. Blacks, by and large, voted for Blacks and Whites voted for Whites. Arrington led the ballot with 33 percent of the vote and only a small portion of that coming from Whites. The closest man in the race was Parsons who had only 16.5 percent of the ballots, all White. Vann, who had been armed with a $70,000 campaign arsenal (a good portion of which came from businessmen and leaders in Birmingham’s suburbs) finished a dismal fourth behind Katapodis. Most of Vann’s votes came from the affluent, White Forest Park section of the city and the area around the University of Alabama in Birmingham. The mayor did not carry a single Black box.

During the next three weeks, the campaign between Arrington and Parsons would further polarize the city and draw two former mayors into the contest.

Birmingham has more registered White voters than Blacks (71.259 – 57,301). Parsons knew his best chance to win was with a heavy White turnout.

For Arrington, there was a slightly different

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game to be played and, in some ways, a much harder one. That game consisted of: (1) turning out a record Black vote; and (2) at the same time capturing at least 10 percent of the White ballots in a city which had gained a national reputation for its racial prejudice.

But Arrington would have help in his effort. Both the city’s major newspapers endorsed the former college dean and to help overcome the fears of the White business community, Alabama Lt. Gov. George McMillan, a native of the Birmingham area, hosted a luncheon for Arrington which had as its drawing card the appearance of most of the city’s other elected officials. Though Vann would refuse to endorse anyone outright, as the campaign developed, he would make it known that he personally planned to vote for Arrington.

In the Parsons’ camp was former Mayor George Seibels – the man Vann and Arrington had been able to unseat four years before. Seibels took out full-page newspaper advertisements accusing Arrington of racial politics and of playing political football with the Birmingham Police Department. Though the Fraternal Order of Police would not endorse candidates for fear of losing the organization’s tax-exempt status, a group of police wives took out ads supporting Parsons and several hastily-organized “law and order” groups gave Parsons their endorsement.

The effect of the pressure on city voters was evident on election day. Some 68.8 percent of the voters turned out.

Though it was nip and tuck through most of the long night of vote tallying, Arrington finally took the election by a margin of only 2.2 percent. He had won it by turning out massive support in all the city’s Black boxes and by being able to pick up somewhere between 12-15 percent of the Whites vote, a substantial portion of which came from the areas of the city that had supported Vann during the primary.

Two weeks later, after a graceful concession speech by Parsons and calls for unity from Parsons, Seibels and Vann, Richard Arrington Jr. was sworn in as Birmingham’s first Black mayor. Looking out over the crowd in Boutwell Auditorium – named for former Mayor Albert Boutwell who had been in office during much of the racial turmoil of the 60s – Arrington recalled how his father, a sharecropper, had been forced to borrow the money for the bus ticket that brought him to Birmingham and a job in the hot steel mills.

“The story of my parents’ quest for a better quality of life and their faith that it could be found in this valley is the story of many other families who came to Birmingham seeking a better chance,” said Arrington as Parsons, Seibels and Vann looked on from the speakers platform “. . – In this valley they have been able to make a decent living, to educate their children and to watch this valley grow; and for some, like my parents, to see their children attain positions of responsibility they never dreamed of.”

Ron Casey is an editorial writer for the Birmingham News.

The Business of Blacks In the Mississippi Delta

By Robert Anderson, Jr.

Vol. 2, No. 3, 1979, pp. 15-19

On a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1967, two White physicians who were conducting a survey for the Field Foundation came to Belzoni, Mississippi, and spent three hours talking to Black families. Their findings on this visit and on visits to similar places in rural Mississippi would later help awaken the nation to the fact of hunger and malnutrition in the United States and would trigger legislation leading to an expanded food stamp program and maternal and infant feeding program.

The doctors wrote, “In sum, we saw children who are hungry and who are sick – children for whom hunger is a daily fact of life and sickness, in many forms, an inevitability. We do not want to quibble over words, but ‘malnutrition’ is not quite what we found; the boys and girls we saw were hungry – weak, in pain, sick, their lives are being shortened; they are, in fact, visibly and predictably losing their health, their spirits, their energy. They are suffering from hunger and disease and… they are dying from them – which is exactly what ‘starvation’ means.”

At the time of the doctors’ visit, much of rural Mississippi was still a harsh, unyielding racist society, little changed by the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In its racial attitudes Belzoni itself was known as one of the state’s most rigid towns. A local Black leader had been shot to death by White vigilantes only a few years before. As the doctors proceeded on that Sunday from one Black home to another, the chief of police followed behind them in his car, and a small crowd of unfriendly Whites gathered across the street. The afternoon ended without incident, yet the presence of the police was plainly intended to intimidate, and a sense of fear was pervasive.

The pace of life has not changed much in Beizoni in the twelve years since that episode, and some local practices also remain unchanged. Because the town boundaries have been drawn so as to exclude Black neighborhoods, Blacks cannot vote in local elections and have no claim on city services. But there has nevertheless been a decided change in atmosphere. The town’s schools are integrated and Blacks and moderate Whites do not live with a day-to-day consciousness of racial tension. The Black population of Belzoni enjoys an additional sense of security (and pride) in the support it receives from (and gives to) the local Mississippi Action for Community Education (MACE).

MACE, a strong, versatile organization headquartered in Greenville, originated in the civil rights movement. A MACE representative, in fact, helped guide the visiting doctors on their 1967 trip to Belzoni and other Mississippi localities. The founders of the organization described their purpose as being “an institutional means to realize the social and economic rights that civil rights protest activities and legislation could not.”

Paramount among the founders’ goals was community organization in an eleven county area of the Mississippi Delta. The area is predominantly rural and agricultural, and its population is widely dispersed. The major crop is cotton, but soybeans and rice are also grown. The production of beef cattle has also emerged in recent years as a mor undertaking. Technological advances in agriculture, however – particularly mechanization of cotton farming over the past 20 years – have brought about a loss of almost 300,000 farm jobs in Mississippi, 40 percent of the total number of jobs

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available in 1950. The majority of those thrown out of work have been Black, and most of them had worked as sharecroppers on cotton plantations. One result of the loss of jobs has been a great exodus of Blacks from the Delta.

Unemployment rates today in the 11 Delta counties exceed national and state averages. For males in the state the rate is around 9 percent; for females it is 13 percent. In the MACE Delta counties the rate is 12 percent for males and 20 percent for females. Some 75 percent of the area’s unemployed males and 80 percent of the unemployed females are Black.

Census figures further reveal the extent of poverty in the Delta. In Madison County, 61.1 percent of the families live below the poverty level; in Humphreys County, the figure is 77.4 percent. The measure of poverty in other counties ranges between these two figures. Mean family income in Madison County is $2,252; in Humphreys County it is $1,686. In Madison County, 34.7 percent of the families receive public assistance; in Humphreys County, 50 percent.

For organizational purposes, MACE divides the Delta counties into two categories – the six core counties, in which MACE works full time, and the five technical assistance counties. In the latter, MACE provides only limited technical assistance. Its reasons for the limitation of its efforts include rivalries with local organizations in some counties and lack of receptivity to community organizing in others. Each of the 11 counties elects two representatives to the MACE board of directors. MACE has approximately 23,000 members, who pay annual dues of $5 each.

New MACE field workers take part in a 30 day training program at the organization’s headquarters, followed by a two-month trial period in the field. They are instructed in the rules and regulations for filing for public assistance, food stamps, Social Security benefits, and Medicare and Medicaid. They are also taught how to file complaints with public agencies and how to conduct public meetings.

Field workers serve MACE members in several ways. In 1976, for example, MACE workers in Holmes County and the staff at Greenville won a major victory by achieving equal public services for Blacks. The precedent for such equalization had been set in a landmark decision in 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled that a pattern of discrimination against Blacks existed in the town of Shaw, Mississippi, because Blacks did not enjoy equality with Whites in the provision of street paving, street lighting, and other public facilities and services.

Little had been achieved in Shaw itself sincethe decision because no organized follow-up effort at the local level was made. But in Lexington, a town of some 3,000 in Holmes County, the local MACE chapter, led by Howard Bailey, chairman of MACE’s board, undertook a detailed civic survey. MACE members determined where Whites and Blacks lived, and they acquired a map showing how city services, including water and sewage facilities, were distributed. Their comparison of the distribution with housing patterns showed discrimination against Blacks. Assisted by MACE attorneys, the local group filed suit, asking for equalization.

Since the suit was filed, more than $1.3 million in services have been provided to Lexington’s Black neighborhoods. Indeed, the attitude of local officials has changed from a resistance to cooperation in the equalization effort, in large part because MACE attorneys have helped the officials prepare applications for federal aid to help the city pay for additional services. In Belzoni, similar citizen action generated by MACE field workers is currently directed toward trying to bring about redrawing of the town boundary lines that exclude Black residents. Altogether, MACE has generated $11 million in equalization services.

One highly visible MACE program has been the construction of a 76 unit housing project, including a social center complete with recreational facilities, in the small town of Flora. Begun in 1974 and completed in 1976, the project is small by the standards of more prosperous localities. In the Delta, however, any decent new housing for the poor is more than welcome. (In all of MACE’s Delta counties, the percentage of housing that lacks plumbing far exceeds the state rate of 22

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percent. In one county it is 60 percent.)

To qualify for admission to the Flora project, a family cannot have an income above that which would make them eligible for public housing. In addition, the family must either live in substandard housing or be headed by a person 62 years of age or older or by a handicapped person. Rents range from $172 to $239 a month, but tenants are eligible for federal rent supplements. Under provisions governing such supplements, each family must pay 25 percent of its income to live in the project, but if that amount is not enough to pay the rent, the federal government will pay directly to the developer up to 70 percent of the rent owed by the family.

MACE’s most extensive work consists of economic development and the creation of jobs for Black Delta residents. This work is carried forward by the Delta Foundation, which MACE established in June 1969 as a non-profit, tax-exempt community development corporation. It has many of the same board members as MACE, and its chairman, Charles Bannerman, is also chief executive officer of MACE.

Bannerman is the dominant personality in both organizations. A native New Yorker, he came to MACE in 1968 after two years in Washington as director of technical assistance for the Citizens’ Crusade Against Poverty. After working four years as associate director, he succeeded to the directorship held by Edward Brown, a community organizer who had been the driving force behind the creation of MACE. In furthering MACE’s economic development activities, Bannerman has displayed the energy and managerial adroitness of a highly successful business executive in a growing corporation.

Although the Delta Foundation is a nonprofitorganization, it has two wholly owned subsidiaries, Delta Enterprises and the Delta Development and Management Corporation, which are profit-making enterprises. Delta Enterprises is the holding company for three businesses: Fine Vines, in Greenville, which manufactures denim jeans; Electro Controls, in Canton, a manufacturer of switches used in aircraft instruments; and Mid-South Stamping Company, in Sardis, which produces metal parts for a variety of industrial purposes.

Delta’s Fine Vines denim manufacturing plant in downtown Greenville is a bustling enterprise today, but at the beginning it was plagued by production problems. Most of the workers came from farm backgrounds, with no experience at all in industry, and they had to be trained from scratch. Production in the first year or two of operations fell far short of expectations. The plant had been scheduled to produce 200 pairs of jeans daily, but by the end of the first year of operations, it was producing only 320 pairs a week and quality control was difficult to maintain. One reason, according to the plan manager, was that the inspectors, unused to management responsibilities, were reluctant to report the poor work done by their friends and neighbors.

During this period, too, organizers from the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union persuaded workers in the plant to petition the National Labor Relations Board for a union election. Delta officials had to make a hard decision. Union representation would mean higher wages and greater fringe benefits at a time when the struggling business was losing $25,000 a month. Yet because of the organization’s avowed social orientation, its self-image and its reputation among its consituency would be tarnished by opposition to the union. Delta nonetheless decided to oppose unionization, on the ground that the plant had been created to provide training and jobs for disadvantaged people, and not primarily to maximize profits. Negotiations lasted six months. Many Delta officials, like management officials in more profit-oriented companies, resented having union organizers coming into their shop and, in their view, telling them how to run their business. This resentment was fed further by the fact that the organizers were White and, according to these officials, had not previously demonstrated much interest in the general welfare of Blacks.

Opposition to the union created a split in Delta’s managerial ranks, which, of course, consist in large measure of people who are especially sympathetic to the needs of the poor. Indeed, one highranking policy maker resigned, denouncing

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Fine Vines as a “business for business” venture. In July 1972, a majority of the workers voted for union representation. Employees are still represented by the union, and today there is little evidence of open friction between management and union.

Improvements at Fine Vines are evident. Production is up to 850 dozen pairs of jeans per week. The company’s gross receipts for 1977 were $3 million. Quality control now is such that the plant is able to fulfill contracts with major retailers such as J.C. Penney.

Sam Moncure, who became director of the plant in 1976, is optimistic about the future, even though finding adequate plant supervisors still seems to be a problem At the same time, he notes the presence of several employees who, he feels, have considerable supervisory potential and, with proper training, could prove to be an important element in the plant’s future success. Moncure is a White Virginian with a wide background in apparel manufacturing management. He is dedicated to making the plant a profitable venture that can continue to provide employment for Fine Vines’ 105 workers.

Robert Tewes, general manager of Delta Enterprises, is also manager of Delta’s most recently acquired business, Electro Controls, in Canton, which manufactures reed switches for aircraft instruments. Delta decided to acquire the company because electronics is considered a growth industry and because, unlike many electronic products, the Electro Controls switches are fairly simple to produce and employees can be easily trained in the process. In-plant training lasts from eight to ten weeks, with an investment of approximately $1,200 per employee.

The company employs 60 people. It was acquired from Hathaway Instruments in the fall of 1974 and was originally capitalized at $850,000. Its main problems, according to Tewes, are developing greater sales volume, establishing cost controls, and keeping up with technology. The company has sales representatives in many cities in the United States and in Europe. It has contracts with major aircraft instrument companies and with RCA, Westinghouse, and Chevrolet.

Tewes, in his mid-forties, is an industrial engineer who was hired by Delta in 1971 through a management employment firm. His previous job had been production superintendent for the Cummins Engine Corporation in Indiana. He was attracted to the job with Delta in large measure by the organization’s social concerns. “I represent a marriage of two worlds,” he says, “social responsibility, doing something that isn’t totally for profit, combined with the textbook way of doing business.” Tewes played a major role in negotiations for acquisition of Electro Controls, Fine Vines, and Mid-South Stamping Company.

Mid-South Stamping, located at Sardis, 120 miles north of Greenville, was acquired by Delta in October 1971 for $150,000. The company manufactures small metal parts for industrial purposes. In 1974, it acquired Delta Fan Company of Jackson, Mississippi, a manufacturer of residential and commercial attic exhaust fans. Later that year it purchased Century of Memphis, Inc., a manufacturer of folding attic staircases. The acquisitions were a natural extension of MidSouth’s operations since the company was already producing metal hardware for folding staircases.

In its early days, Mid-South faltered. Many of the markets it had hoped to develop did not materialize. Its equipment was out of date and in poor operating condition. But Delta nursed it along because it felt that the initial problems could be overcome and because Mid-South was Delta’s first industrial enterprise outside the Greenville area.

The first step in reversing the decline was the hiring of a new manager, John Patterson, a middle-aged executive with an extensive background in metal parts manufacturing. Immediately before joining Mid-South he had been vice president of a metal stamping company that had annual sales of $12 million. Under Patterson, Mid-South losses began to go down, and the company was able to purchase new equipment. Through sound management and a great deal of hard work and patience, the company survived. Today it employs some 30 workers.

The Delta Foundation’s agricultural enterprise, the Leflore County Area Cooperative, has grown dramatically since it was chartered in 1971 and began operations on 160 acres. MACE provided capital of $20,000 and helped obtain loans for the venture from the Southern Cooperative Development Fund and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Today the

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co-op has 3,000 acres of rice and soybeans under cultivation. MACE describes the co-op as the largest black agricultural production venture in the country.

The co-op’s growth, however, has come about with less than $40,000 in equity capital, and it has had to borrow money to continue operations. Such borrowing is common practice in agricultural finance, but Leflore’s debt-to-equity ratio at the end of 1976 stood at 24-to-1. This high ratio means there is limited capital for expansion. To attract more capital, therefore, the co-op is planning to change to a corporation. “There is a rapidly growing awareness among sophisticated investors such as insurance companies and pension funds of the long-run return on investments in Southern agricultural land, particularly rich Delta land,” says Scott Daugherty, assistant director of the Delta Foundation.

Delta has provided loans to many businesses that could not otherwise have found credit. For the most part these have been small businesses, such as gasoline stations and grocery stores. One major beneficiary, however, is a Black-owned FM radio station, WBAD, in Greenville, which received $30,000 from Delta. WBAD has the highest listener rating of the area’s six stations. Its programming features rock, blues, and classical music.

WBAD is owned and directed by William Jackson, a native of Greenville who has worked in the broadcast industry for more than two decades. In 1972 Jackson was an announcer for the station, which was then White-owned but was nevertheless the only station that featured programming geared to a Black audience. Jackson had developed a following among Black listeners in the area, and when the station’s owners decided to sell, he and a partner came to the Delta Foundation for investment backing. Delta agreed because the station would be Black-owned, because it had shown its money-making potential (in 1972 it had a net income of $42,000), and because it could serve as a forum for publicizing Black community activities.

By big-city standards the station is not physically imposing. It is housed in a small cementblock structure far off the highway in what was once a cotton field. But to the Black residents of the Greenville area, it is a voice with which they deeply identify. The station currently has on file an application for AM broadcasting, which will enable it to reach more listeners and attract more advertising revenue.

As the Delta Foundation expanded it increasingly sensed a need for better-trained managers. It therefore established a management-training center in 1977. The center prepares selected current employees and other candidates for management positions within the foundation’s companies and elsewhere. The center was planned with the help of academic experts and active businessmen who designed a work-study program to develop middle-management skills for employees with limited experience. The program serves two ends. It increases the efficiency of Delta’s management and it provides advancement opportunities for individual employees. A certain hope for the future is evident in the spirit of these farming workers and community organizers.

But organizations such as MACE and Delta Foundation realize that they cannot alone do the job of reversing historic migration patterns by making small farms and business enterprises more viable. Specific policy changes are needed. The Commission on the Future of the South, which was made up for the most part of leading Southern businessmen put it this way: “The South can continue to depopulate the countryside or, through civic enterprise, private decisions, and public encouragement, we can locate jobs where people are instead of moving people to the city. Making it possible for young people to stay home, we could distribute prosperity and reinforce the vitality of dying places.”

Such words could have just as well been spoken by Charles Bannerman or Robert Tewes whose organizations and businesses have demonstrated that cooperative movements among poor people can function well in a climate in which basic civil rights are protected – and in a manner no more revolutionary than, say, a meeting of the board of the Chase Manhattan Bank.

Rural, Poor and Southern Directions of the Civil Rights Movement

By Robert Anderson, Jr.

Vol. 2, No. 3, 1979, pp. 20-21

The American South has long had a singular attraction for scholars and journalists. The region has seemed to embody all our social and racial tensions. It has been all too easy to find in that society extreme examples of poverty and racism and the corrosive effects of both on the lives of people. In the last two decades a great deal of change has come to the South. Blacks at last have gained the right to vote, the right to equal educational opportunity, the right to equal employment – and the right to eat a hamburger at a lunch counter. In addition, the attitudes of Southern Whites have moderated to a degree that would have seemed impossible not too long ago.

But harsh realities remain. Despite political gains and the lowering of social barriers, most Southern Blacks still face formidable economic obstacles. Although they constitute 20 percent of the region’s population, their share of the financial benefits of the region’s economy is far below that mark.

The consequences of economic obstacles to the well-being of Southern Blacks are readily apparent in Bureau of the Census statistics. With 25 percent of the nation’s total population, the South is home for 38 percent of the nation’s poor. Comparisons between Black and White poverty are even more dramatic. More than half of rural Southern Black families are living at or below the poverty level while only 17 percent of rural Southern White families live in such conditions. Almost half of Southern farm laborers and about one fourth of all Southern farm owners live in poverty. However, the percentage of Black farm owners who are poor is nearly as high as the percentage for all farm laborers. (The average Black-owned farm is only about one-fourth the size of the average White-owned farm.)

The Southern farm population has declined sharply in recent decades. From 1960 to 1970, the number of farm workers dropped from approximately 3 million to about 1.7 million. The total rural population, however, has remained constant. About 42 percent of the total Southern population lives in rural areas – 5.7 million people on farms, but 1 5 million off the farm.

Many thoughtful Southerners have become increasingly concerned about the consequences to the South of the displacement of its agricultural workers and the neglect of the needs of its rural people in general. For example, the Southern Regional Council and the Southern Growth Policies Board have analyzed the Southern rural needs. In 1977 the Council’s Task Force on Southern Rural Development issued a report based on the deliberations of Southern leaders from diverse backgrounds. The report calls for governmental action to make rural areas more attractive to their residents through more effective manpower policies, better health care delivery, increased rural credit, and better housing. Such improvements, the Task Force report says, would make it possible for more people to remain in the rural South and would also relieve pressures on the cities that now absorb the in-migration.

Two years earlier, the Southern Growth Policies Board through its Commission on the Future of the South, which treated rural needs as just one of several subjects, did note that rural areas have special problems to be solved. It, too, recommended ways to achieve a better quality of life in rural areas; these include measures to

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improve health care delivery, housing, and land use.

Both reports suppor the idea of self-help among the poor, and the Task Force report explicitly urges the strengthening of poor people’s cooperatives as a means toward self-help. “The rationale for a development cooperative or CDC (community development corporation) is fairly clear,” the report states. “Private market forces arelikely to isolate many people and places from the development process…In the rural South, the old plantation areas with heavy Black populations are often ignored. Firms seeking profits alone tend to avoid these locations… The major advantage of a successful development organization is its ability to meet a variety of community needs and remain relatively independent of local political and economic power structures.”

One time-honored sign of a people’s social or economic despair is its pattern of migration. During World War II and for many years after, some three million Southern Blacks, driven from the land by mechanization and barred by discrimination from decently paying jobs, moved to the large cities of the North. Most were tragically ill-prepared to compete in an industrial job market and to adjust to the pace and pressures of urban life. But the out-migration of Blacks is now considerably less than it was ten years ago. Blacks are more and more coming to see that Detroit, Chicago, Washington, andd New York are not utopias.

Increasingly, Blacks are opting to stay South. Many of them feel that the South is their home not merely by geographical happenstance but by social and cultural heritage. The civil rights movement, although it did not itself appreciably alter the economic conditions of Southern Blacks, had much to do with this change in the social and political life of the South and, in addition, helped create conditions under which economic change could also take place.

Today, the legacy of the civil rights movement is found not only in Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma, and other battleground cities known so well to civil rights activists of the sixties, but also in the South’s rural areas. It is found in places such as Lafayette, Louisiana, where the Reverent Albert McNight, an intense and dedicated Roman Catholic priest, directs the Southern Cooperative Development Fund; in Greenville, Mississippi, where Charles Bannerman, outgoing, entrepreneurial, and gregarious, directs the Delta Foundation and an organization called Mississippi Action for Community Education; and in Tuskegee, Alabama, where John Brown, a taciturn former high school teacher, provides effective, low-profile leadership to the Southeast Alabama Self-Help Association.

These men and their organizations, and other leaders and organizations like them, are dedicated to improving the lot of Southern rural Blacks. The organizations include veterans of the civil rights sturggle who are mindful of the continuing need to guard social and political rights. But there main concern today is to foster the economic well-being of their constituents, particularly through self-help programs and cooperative economic institutions. The common goal of these organizations and others is to enable those who wish to remain in the rural South to do so. They aim to achieve their goal by providing a social and economic environment in which people can live and work with dignity and security.

Although much does remain to be done, for the first time since the exodus of the poor began more than 30 years ago, more poor people are entering the rural South than leaving, the Census Bureau reported late in 1978. The reversal of the migration tide is also due to the tendency of the Southern poor to stay in the South and find jobs there above the poverty level, according to the report.

The social climate has also changed dramatically. Black residents who assert their rights, and outsiders who seek to help them improve their social and economic condition, no longer live inpervasive danger. Slowly and sometimes with difficulty, the South’s rural poor are begining to reap some of the opportunities envisioned in the American Dream.

Articles adapted from Rural, Southern and Poor, a Ford Foundation report.

The Case for Small Farms

By Ginny Looney and Duna Norton

Vol. 2, No. 3, 1979, pp. 22-25

When the State Legislature was forming the next-to last county in Alabama in 1877 from the southernmost hills of the Appalachian chain, the legislators joked that the land was so poor a crow would have to carry a sack of corn to survive flying from one end of the county to the other. Yet, the land that became Cuilman County had by 1920 become the top producer of a variety of crops and has since had the largest farm sales of any county in the state.

While the reputation of Culiman County as a farming area has been growing, the reputation of one of the leading agricultural counties during the 19th century has been declining. Lying 65 miles southwest of Montgomery in the area of the Coastal Plain known as the Black Belt because of its large Black population, Wilcox County has the natural advantages to be a prosperous farming area. An 1888 promotional brochure said, Wilcox “is highly favored, both with respect to the character of the land and the abundant supplies of water.” As the vast estates on which cotton once grew

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turned to timber and pasture, the fortunes of the two counties shifted until in 1974 Cullman County, with the same amount of farm acreage as Wilcox, had 15 times the amount of farm sales.

The comparison of Cullman and Wilcox Counties offers the classic contrast between small family farms and large family plantations, and a striking evidence of how the ownership and control over land is a major factor in determining a society’s economic structure. In these two counties as elsewhere in the country, the pattern of land ownership determines land use, its productivity and the quality of life in rural communities. In addition, the income of workers, amount of taxes paid and number of public services provided all appear to be tied directly to the number and size of land holdings in a rural county. The results of the comparisons suggest what the government policies have not recognized: small farms are better than large farms for the economic health of a community because they contribute to a larger tax base, more public services, higher median incomes and more intensive use of natural resources.

For almost 40 years, the importance of small farms has been recognized in a few academic circles and government studies. In a study conducted for the Bureau of Agricultural Economics in 1941, Dr. Walter Goldschmidt examined the effect of farm size on community development by comparing two farming communities in California which differed only in the size of nearby farms. Family-sized farms surrounded one, and large corporate farms surrounded the other. The study found people were supported at a higher income near the family-sized farms than near the giant corporate farms, which had a higher percentage of low paid farm workers. Another study done in 1977 to expand Goldschmidt’s work analyzed 136 additional towns in California and found that small farm regions supported more communities, were more viable and offered more services than towns in large farm communities.

Besides improving the economic well-being of a community, small farms also produce food more efficiently, contrary to a widely held belief that big farms are better. “Modern agribusiness is more efficient because so few people are involved in food production,” the myth goes. “One farmer feeds 40 people.” That argument was refuted at a 1978 conference on land ownership in Alabama by Goldschmidt, now a UCLA professor, “When a tractor draws a combine to harvest wheat, the farmer is employing hundreds of hours of urban manpower expended in the steel mills and the oil refineries …. The farming sector of our economy appears to have dwindled remarkably when, in fact, a large portion are agriculturists working in the urban industrial environment.” Studies by the U.S Department of Agriculture in 1967 and 1973 have shown that the most efficient farm is the modern, fully mechanized one or two person operation.

Because Alabama has a tradition of small family farms along the Sand Mountain Appalachian hills and a history of large land holdings where plantations previously dominated in the Black Belt, a comparison of the two regions can show directly the effects of land ownership in the South. Using the 1974 U.S. Census of Agriculture, two students at the University of Alabama selected the 10 counties in Alabama with the smallest average size farm and matched them with the 10 counties in Alabama with the largest average farm size. Farm size was chosen as the factor dividing the two groups because it clearly indicates how well the land, a basic resource, is distributed among the county’s residents.

Jefferson and Montgomery Counties were eliminated from the study because of their metropolitan characteristics. The small farm counties which remained and their average size farm in 1974 are Marshall (80 acres), Cullman (84), DeKalb (87), Walker (91), Winston (99), Etowah (113), Morgan (114), Cleburne (120), and Blount (122). The large farm counties, which are also the counties with high Black populations, are Greene (392 acres), Macon (419), Sumter (427), Wilcox (444), Perry (472), Bullock (482), Dallas (503), Russell (578), and Lowndes (726).

The study found that the counties with more small farms had higher agricultural production and median incomes of both farmers and farm laborers. The small farm counties had more farms and sales with less farm acreage than the “large” counties. While the “small” counties had 11 percent of the state’s farm land, they produced 29 percent of the farm sales. The large farm counties, however, had 18 percent of the state farm land but had only 8 percent of its agricultural products.

Figures on farm production show that the

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small land owner uses labor intensive methods in farming in order to get a high return on every acre. The need for economy is not nearly as important for the owner of 500 acres who will use capital intensive methods of farming requiring much machinery and land. Besides making better use of the land, the farmers in the “small” counties had higher incomes, earning nearly $2,000 to $5,000 in 1974. Farmers in the “large” counties earned half as much, and in three of the counties, the median income fell below $1,000.

A composite view of the farmer in the north Alabama counties from the 1974 census is a man with 99 acres, one of 1,500 farmers in the county. He would have crop sales of $1,900 and stock and poultry sales of $20,800 a year with sales averaging $238 per acre. His 1974 income would be $3,270 a year. The statistical “average” farmer in the nine south Alabama counties in the study would own 494 acres as one of 500 farmers in the county. He would sell $6,200 of crops and $10,200 of stock a year for sales of $39 an acre. His median income would be $1,628 a year.

An analysis of several other social and economic factors within the two groups of counties demonstrate that concentrated land

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ownership restrains the development of the local community. Among the small farm counties, the three counties with a low percentage of farm land (less than one-fifth of the entire county’s land) had the largest percentages of forest land and the largest concentration of corporate ownership of the forests. Two of the three also had the highest numbers of absentee land owners.

While Walker, Winston and Cleburne Counties fit the pattern of higher farm sales found among the small size farm counties, the relatively low amount of farm land and correspondingly large amount of forest land has resulted, at least in Winston and Cleburne, in low tax revenues and public services more in line with the large size farm counties. Instead of the land being concentrated in the hands of industry and private land owners, thousands of acres of land in those two counties are owned by the federal government as part of the Talladega and Bankhead National Forests. Winston and Cleburne vividly point out the revenue problems for a county when huge tracts of land are withdrawn from the tax rolls.

Except for the two with large blocks of tax exempt government land, the counties with the small farms had a much stronger tax base than the counties with the large farms. Small farm counties had twice as much revenue from ad valorem taxes and two and a half times as much total tax revenues. In turn, the higher tax income has resulted in the small farm counties having twice as many miles of county roads and greater than a third more expenditures for public education. The median income was nearly twice as high while the poverty rate and substandard housing is half as much as in the large farm counties.

A comparison of individual “large” and “small” counties with the same proportion of farm land and rural population also confirms the important role of the small farm community development. For example, both DeKalb in the north and Greene County in south Alabama have 47 percent farm land and 73-80 percent rural population. Twenty-six percent of the workers in DeKalb commute to jobs outside the county while Greene has 21 percent commuters. Despite these similarities, the 1970 median income in “small” farming DeKalb was $5,316 compared to a $3,034 median income in Greene County. DeKalb had 1974 ad valorem taxes totaling $542,000 and 1975 total tax revenues of $1,693,000; in contrast, Greene County with its large farms received $464,000 in ad valorem taxes and $1,440,000 in total taxes. There are three times the miles of county roads and two times the expenditures for education in DeKalb County and only 55 percent of the poverty and 60 percent of the substandard housing that was found in Greene County during the 1970 census.

Land ownership, of course, is not the only factor which differentiates a small farm county from a large farm county. When “small” and “large” counties have the same percentage of farm land, their percentages of urban population and people who commute to work outside the county may differ. More striking, most of the large farm counties have majority Black populations which even through 1970 were governed largely by Whites. The absence of Black elected officials has meant historically that public services, such as roads, were often not extended into the Black community. The extent to which racism rather than land ownership lowered the income of Black Belt counties and the county tax base cannot be identified; however, the two issues are certainly intertwined.

Black farmers, nearly all small operators, are losing land nationally, at a rate of 300,000 acres a year. At the same time, the lack of job opportunities is forcing Blacks, particularly those from 24 to 35 years old, to migrate from the large farm counties. Between 1960 and 1970, two of these Black Belt counties lost a fifth of their population, one county lost a fourth and another a third. More recent figures show that, while most rural areas are gaining population, predominately Black rural areas continue to lose population.

Still land ownership is a crucial factor in the development of a county. No matter how other factors change, the pattern is that small farm counties can support more people at a higher income level than the counties dominated by large farms. The trends suggest, however, that the growing concentration of land ownership isn’t being stopped. The South lost 29 percent, or 454,000 farms, during the decade of the 60s. Southern Black farms decreased by 69 percent. As small farms dwindled in number, the large scale farms increased, and their share of farm sales continue to grow. With government bias in subsidies for large farms and tax laws making it difficult for small farmers to earn a decent living solely from farm income, the main monetary gain for small farmers today is when they sell their farm land. Government policy has effectively excised the culture from agriculture and forced farmers to adopt the large scale economy of agribusiness or leave farming. Most small farmers are leaving.

Ginny Looney is a former newspaper reporter in Alabama who now resides in Atlanta. Duna Norton is director of the Agricultural Marketing Project in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Southern Politics

By Staff

Vol. 2, No. 3, 1979, pp. 26

Alarmed by the enormous amounts of money that Political Action Committees (PACs) are contributing to campaigns, a majority of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives took a first step in October to limit the funds that PACs can contribute to House candidates.

In a 217-198 vote House members decided to limit the “arms race. . . of campaign dollars . . . .” in approving an amendment sponsored by Dem. David Obey of Wisconsin and Rep. Tom Railsback of Illinois. The amendment which applies only to the lower house of Congress would prohibit House candidates from receiving more than $70,000 from any or all PACs in any two-year period preceding an election.

PACs are often the political units of labor, business, or professional associations that presently can contribute any amount of money to any candidates for the U.S. House or Senate. A study by the Federal Elections Commission in 1978 showed that labor, corporate and trade association PACs gave almost three times as much money to incumbents as they did challengers. In 1978 almost 25 percent of all funds contributed to House candidates – nearly $23,000,000 came from PACs.

The Congressional Quarterly reported that 13 representatives in the South would be directly affected by the limit since in the last election they received more than the proposed limit of $70,000 from PACs (see chart below). Six of these House members are from Texas and four from Louisiana and Tennessee. Of the thirteen, five voted for the limit. They were Jim Wright (Texas), Bob Eckhardt (Texas), Claude Pepper (Florida), Jim Mattox (Texas), and Gillis Long (Louisiana).

Southern House members as a whole, however, overwhelmingly opposed the limit on PAC contributions. Of the 108 House members from the 11 Southern states, 76 opposed the Obey amendment; 30 supported it; and two members from Louisiana didn’t vote. Only in Tennessee and Florida did a majority of the state’s House members support the limit. Four of eight Tennessee representatives and eight of fifteen Florida House members voted “yea”. No House member from Mississippi or Arkansas supported the limit.

As a matter of fact, Southern Congressional delegations provided the bulk of opposition to the limit on contributions. Almost 40 percent of all the “nay” votes against the limit came from the South and more than 90 percent of all the Democrats opposing the changes were Southerners.

A list of the 30 Southern representatives who did support the Obey amendment follows:

Southern Representatives Supporting the Obey Amendment to the Federal Elections Campaign Act.

Alabama

Nichols

Bevil

Florida

Hutto

Fugua

Bennett

Mica

Stack

Lehman

Pepper

Fascell

Georgia

Fowler

Louisiana

Long

North Carolina

Neal

Preger

Rose

Hefner

Gudger

South Carolina

Derrick

Jenrette

Tennessee

Gore

Boner

Jones

Ford

Texas

Mattox

Eckhardt

Brooks

Wright

Leland

Virginia

Harris

Fisher