Equal Rights

By Chuck Morgan

Vol. 2, No. 8, 1980, pp. 4-8

In our bureaucratic “work together” pragmatic society, I plead guilty to a conviction that the Constitution and the country are better off when the three branches of the federal government, the separated federal, state and local governments, private citizens and governments, private corporations and governments stand upon principles and struggle for their differing beliefs.

The genius of American democracy is its capacity for conflict and confrontation. I have a deep and abiding belief in the Constitution, in the people who live under it, and in the equal application of the law. To these beliefs I plead guilty.

We too often ascribe to ourselves, to our own times. and to our own purposes, historical imperatives. As articulate liberals, we coin phrases such as “manifest destiny,” “make the world safe for democracy,” and “democratize the military.” With these phrases we justified empire, wars and peacetime conscription.

We complicate. We refuse to see or admit that the causes of and solutions for complex problems are almost always very simple. Two such simple causes are the cotton gin and the Pill. When we search for causes our minds rebel at anything so simple as the Pill and the cotton gin. Yet, the gin made cotton king and locked Blacks into a slave system which was harsher than any other slave system in the history of the Western world. On the other hand, smaller than a cotton seed, the Pill freed women from the fear of pregnancies.

Each of these technologies, one enslaving, one liberating, provides the myths of yesterday and the mores of tomorrow. Each altered our lives. Each had and has an economic effect upon the concept of equality.

During the last half century, as we have governmentalized our lives, we have undermined the institutions of community. We have transferred to government the obligations and advantages of the family system. We have continued to consign Native Americans to reservations, prisoners and the mentally ill to out-of-sight, out-of-mind institutions, browns to barrios and Blacks to central cities. Liberals seek governmental-funded daycare centers while conservatives who state their favor of the family systems simultaneously seek to end aid for dependent children.

To the extent that liberalism is allied with governmentalism, liberalism contravenes civil liberty. All bureaucracies are self-protective. In private life, they grow until they are destroyed by leadership or by themselves. In government, they grow until they destroy all leadership and all incentives. I believe that government sits astride the back of every private citizen, extracting from each taxes under the guise of distributing the wealth. In a democratic society, that redistribution should take place in a democratic way.

It should be derived from debate, not deficits. It is this lack of debate which has allowed the new government class to transfer wealth not to the underclass but to the new government class.

Today Washington is Rome. Imperialism having failed abroad, we have moved it to the fifty pro-

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vinces. About one in every five employed in America now works for one government or another.

The common weal is in the hands, indeed, the grip of the new American upper class—government employees—the top level of the 15 to 20 percent of our employed citizens who live off taxes extracted from their fellow citizens.

They work closely with our liberal community which is salaried from tax deductible and foundation funds and draws upon inherited wealth in the public interest. They associate themselves with one hundred senators, a quarter of whom are millionaires; they identify themselves with organizations which compete for government grants.

The question is not whether capitalism can survive. The question is whether democracy can survive. Can it survive “reform” and its results, including the uncivil civil service?

Long before benign liberalism kills capitalism, it will have so crippled it that it will buckle under the sheer weight of nonproductive bureaucracy. To survive, all economic systems must produce something of value, of quality, of need. Yet in the city where I now live—one of the world’s largest company towns—the number one manufacturing industry is printing. Like the cotton gin and the Pill, the printing press enriched our liberal lives, but you can’t eat food stamps. Someone must produce, package and distribute food.

During the Vietnam War, many more young men were eligible for the draft than were needed by it. The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Selective Service was entitled In Pursuit of Equity: Who Serves When Not All Serve? (1967).

Parallel questions are posed by the economics of scarcity: Who will get less and who will get more? Who will get work when not all can? Who, if anyone, should we discriminate for?

Today, we have a society dedicated to the proposition that all women and minorities are created equal and with all men and majorities they are equally endowed by their creator with the inalienable right to share equally in the non-productive services, shortages, and inflation created by the government and the government class.

Almost everyone, rich or poor, male or female, majority or minority, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant or Polish- American, Catholic, Jew or Gentile, Ivy League, state university or “hardknocks” graduate, with or without a distinctive accent, style or manner, can recall a time when he or she was discriminated against or for, on a basis other than merit or worth.

To combat this, bureaucracies which enforce rights encourage affirmative action plans which down-play merit and design court decrees which would transfer to private life the worst aspects of the civil service system. Simultaneously, they advertise discrimination and encourage dissatisfaction and lawsuits. Widespread, individualized perceptions of discrimination force employees and employers to the courthouse, while, according to all public opinion surveys, racial and sexual prejudice has declined.

In 1970, there were 334 employment discrimination cases filed in federal districts courts. In 1978 alone, 5,504 employment discrimination cases were filed in federal courts.

Since 1954, Black male employment has declined 14 percent. White female employment has risen 15 percent. During the last 30 years, the unemployment rate among Black men has remained twice that of White men. That could be cut in half if only 400,000 minority males could find jobs. Four hundred thousand employed minority males is two percent of the almost 17 million White women who have found work since 1954. That number, 400,000, is less than five percent of the number of working wives whose husbands also are employed.

A basic truth known to all of us in the American Civil Liberties Union is that we belong to an organization which is more overwhelmingly White in its membership than is any public college or university in the South; membership in this organization and attendance at those institutions is equally voluntary. It does cost more to attend those institutions than it does to join the ACLU and liberal organizations equally dedicated to women’s rights, the rights of the elderly, and the rights of other protected groups. We should also note that there are few major business corporations which have lower percentages of Black employees than do our liberal organizations.

Despite that, we White liberals favor the total integration of American life. So do many Blacks and those in government

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agencies. Many of us even see venality in the struggle of some Blacks to retain or to find a separate identity or, to use the title of Alex Haley’s best-seller, to find Roots.

Yet, from the times of Lincoln there has been a recurrent theme of separate development within the Black community. How to compete was a principle problem. In 1929, Robert Russa Moton, a recipient of the NAACP’s coveted Springarn Medal, wrote: “Except for a few state legislatures, the Supreme Court of the United States is still all that stands in a legal way between the Negro and civil political extinction.” In 1935, Dr. Ralph J. Bunche, then the radical young Chairman of the Political Science Department of Howard University, wrote of… “the fact,…that the Negro in the United States is a special ward of the Supreme Court… It is only inadvertently that the courts like the legislatures, fail to reflect the dominant mass opinion. It must be futile, then, to erect these agencies of government to afford the Negro protection for rights which are denied to him by the popular will.”

The patron saint of Black faith has been the Supreme Court. Yet, it was that institution—of which Blacks were “wards” to use the word of Dr. Bunche—which had continued the slavery of Dred Scott, the segregation of Homer Adolph Plessy, and, after it had sanctioned segregation for five decades, had provided limited relief for Oliver Brown’s daughter Lucinda.

Then came the acts of Congress which exhibited both the high purpose of “sectional concern” and the Southern “scape goatism” which is so necessary when seeking the assistance of benign liberals. As a provincial White Southerner I welcomed these civil rights acts. It was in the South that I believed that change would come.

I wrote in A Time to Speak, in 1964… “How much easier it is to worry over Birmingham than over New York …. And while you … debate … what to do about Birmingham will you also worry over your own employees and co-workers, your schools and neighbors and that ghetto on the other side of town?” I knew the answer. Yet I also knew that minds—Dr. Bunche’s “popular will”—can be changed.

Cameras carried the message of segregation into the living rooms and thereby confronted White middle-Americans. They made essential, individual decisions in democracy’s favor. A White majority forced a reluctant White Congress to pass the new civil rights laws. Those were White Presidents who proposed them and White judges who upheld them. Once Blacks confronted the system, non-violently and within the Christian tradition, the tide turned and the popular will ran with them. Yet the words “equal protection” and “regardless of race, creed, color, sex, or national origin” merely echoed the language of Mr. Justice Bradley. Blacks are not to be “the special favorite of the laws.” The laws eliminated “special favorites.” They transformed majorities into “minorities.” The vestiges of slavery would remain.

History conspires with chance, fact with fiction, until crowded back from the threshold of a fair chance in a free society, Blacks wait in line to enter doors marked “equal.” Once in the door, they have to be able to produce equally. Many, many Blacks know that many of them are not equipped to compete on an equal basis with most Whites.

In mid-March of 1979, the Washington Post made a front page discovery. The headline read “Rules to Protect Minorities’ Rights Guard Majority,” but that was no surprise because it was the end sought by Washington’s liberal community.

Blacks who do not yet fully understand the politics of dilution, or who are themselves immune from its application, march to the cadence of coalition America. They join with everyone who has been discriminated against. In this parade in an economy of scarcity and limited jobs, the Black population inexorably and irrefutably is destined to join ranks in the rear, to struggle, stumble, and be left behind.

Coalitions may be necessary to pass bills, but the receipt of benefits by coalitions means that those who need them least will

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get the most. Unfortunately, that is true with much “affirmative action.” Those most capable of making it without preferences received the preferences. Those who are least able to compete get the least. Between 1967 and 1974, for example, the employment of wives whose husbands earned more than $30 thousand per year rose by 38 percent. Compare that to the 11 percent increase in employment of wives whose husbands earn less than $6 thousand per year.

Understanding full well that there has been and continues to be discrimination on the basis of sex, national origin, religion and, other than Black race in this country, I submit to you the question of whether that discrimination has been different in kind, degree, and extent from the discrimination against Blacks? The vestiges and longlasting economic, political, and social effects of pre-Pill America are quite different from the vestiges of the slave system.

I do not care whether others—Black or non-Black—agree with those judgments for I have had opportunities to learn that Tom Paine was right when he wrote: “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the result soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason….”

So let me state it simply. Times and minds do change but the vestiges of slavery and feudalism remain. I believe that because the Black population of the United States is an American population, only solutions provided by American traditions will work for it. Because much of Black America is no longer a total ward of the Supreme Court, but remains a ward of federal bureaucratic structures; because it is poor and, as such, is as conservative and fearful of change as are most impoverished groups; and because I believe that government and the concept of “equal” as “in separate but” continue to undercut Black progress, we must turn to the better aspects of the American past.

For years I have defended whatever tools were available for desegregation. I still do. Those tools include numerically-based affirmative action, school busing, federally funded training programs and welfare. I, too, am an integrationist, an assimilationist. Yet, we all know that Whites will not forever put their money into schools to which their children do not go. They will not for long accept the fearsomeness of night-time walks on big city streets. They will not for long continue to subject themselves to the negative end of affirmative action and fairness by compulsion and court orders.

No one bused their ancestors from Boston to Nebraska. As a child, my father made ten cents a day shoving logs off a creek bank and into the mainstream so that the logs would travel to downstream lumbermills and from there to the construction of the nation. My father was a “Southern Mountain White” who fought his way out of the “intellectual, spiritual and material impoverishment” which Black scholar Franklin Frazier urged Blacks to avoid. My father really did have one pair of shoes a year, a miles-long walk to and from a one-room school, and a much longer trek out of the mountains of Kentucky and into the American middle class.

We know of the limited aspirations of many Black Americans, of the dead-end which many Blacks do face; of the negative incentives provided Black citizens; and of the rationalizations for failure in the minds of their young.

The American Dream was based upon hope. Most Blacks, especially those who reside beyond the South, have little hope.

As Whites we know that once there really was a pot of gold at the end of the American rainbow, yonder in California, in Alaska. “Go West Young Man,” said Horace Greeley. That was good land offered under the Homestead Act. Yet, for Blacks, there weren’t 40 acres or even a mule. As in the time of McGuffey’s Reader and the Blue Back Speller, which made White America “one nation…indivisible,” today’s pot of gold, today’s homestead, today’s 40 acres, is education. It is a weapon, an instrument of power and self defense.

We must dream again the American Dream. We must devise new ways based upon our traditions to defeat the cynicism of young fogeys. Of course some Blacks, like some Whites, won’t work. Some Whites, like some Blacks, have no more ambition for their children than they have for themselves. Of course all God’s children won’t make it to the top in either a capitalistic or socialistic society. But to raise the level of the society, we must work and we must compete. Much to the chagrin of bureaucracy and pa-

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ternal, benign liberalism, work and competition are central to the American Dream.

How many bold ideas are there which might work? In Cincinnati, Ohio, school board member John S. Rue had one. He proposed that the city set aside funds to provide a college education for every Black child who, on his or her own, voluntarily travelled to and graduated from a majority White high school.

I, too, believe that to set aside the vestiges of slavery, Black children, merely because of their skin color, should be guaranteed that kind of opportunity. That is but one idea. There must be countless others which may work if grounded in the vestiges of our better traditions.

The ancestors of Blacks, unlike the ancestors of each of the rest of us, did not come to this land of their own free will. They will, however, be freed from the institution of slavery only by the free exercise of their own will. It is in the nature of governments, even benignly liberal governments, to oppress. It is in the nature of a free people to resist.

As the poet James Oppenheim wrote: They set the slave free, striking off his chains. Then he was as much of a slave as ever. He was still chained to servility, He was still manacled to indolence and sloth, He was still bound by fear and superstition, By ignorance, suspicion, and savagery… His slavery was not in the chains. But in himself… They can only set free men free. And there is no need of that: Free men set themselves free.

Charles Morgan, Jr. worked as an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU] for a number of years and is now in private practice in Washington, D.C. This article is adapted from a speech given by Morgan at the Second Janet Pollak Civil Liberties Lecture sponsored by the ACLU of Illinois last year.

A Lawyer’s Judgment for the 13th Amendment

By Staff

Vol. 2, No. 8, 1980, p. 8

It is understandable that Blacks geared their pre-Brown legal struggle to the requirement of equal protection in the Fourteenth Amendment. In the years prior to 1954, federal and state statutes separated the Black and the denied from the White and the privileged. Blacks saw equal rights, not equality.

Perhaps the Thirteenth Amendment, which addresses the continuing effects of past slavery, was ignored because of a lawyer’s judgment. In 1954, it is more likely that governmental action to remove the vestiges of slavery was simply beyond the imagination of lawyers and judges. These vestiges of slavery visible in the status of Blacks in education, the economy, and most aspects of life, were too uncomfortable to be mentioned.

Few in those years could envision a national debate over preferences for classes of citizens. Today we term the debate as a question of “affirmative action,” words which first entered the law as a part of the New Deal’s National Labor Relations Act. While we can debate interpretive constitutional words such as “unreasonable” as in the prohibition against searches and seizures, and “due process” as guaranteed by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, the word “equal” in the Fourteenth Amendment is like the words “no law” in the First Amendment. If equal” does not mean “equal”, then it means nothing. To three Whites, Messrs. DeFunis, Bakke, and Weber, the word “equal” meant something.

Rationally, affirmative action for an entire class of people does fly in the face of the word “equal.” However, the Thirteenth Amendment does not speak of “equal” protection and does not apply to Messrs. DeFunis, Bakke, Weber, me, or to most, males or females. It was written to abolish slavery, and to eliminate “the badges and incidents of slavery” which Blacks suffer. As its Senate sponsor observed in 1866: “With the destruction of slavery necessarily follows the destruction of the incidents of slavery.”

To end inequality, the rights and remedies for Blacks can find power in the Thirteenth Amendment. While the Fourteenth Amendment embraces a “broader principle” and groups other than Blacks have rights under it, the Thirteenth Amendment is an affirmative “absolute declaration” that action be taken on behalf of Blacks; the Fourteenth is a “mere prohibition.” Unlike the Fourteenth which can prohibit only state actions, the Thirteenth can also reach purely private conduct that restricts the achievement of equality.

The South Remembered

By John Marquerd

Vol. 2, No. 8, 1980, pp. 9-10

This is a superficial report. How could it be otherwise, based as it is on a short visit to the South last March. In fact, I have been telling your editors I am deeply resistant to writing it, so unclear are my impressions of the South and what it represents.

But they, good people, have persisted, so I shall try. I owe at least that much to the fantastic hospitality you-all gave us.

I hail from another South, sicker, more confused even than yours. Not terminally ill, I believe and hope; in fact there are even signs that the patient is stirring, sitting up in bed, if you like, but no more. Will she recover? She could, but it is too early to tell.

Theoretically, your South and mine have nothing in common, no shared symptoms other than metabolisms that are chemically the same. Yet when we visited you, my wife and I saw signs that made us remember, spots that looked like our spots, albeit in nothing like as virulent a form.

And strangely, we saw in your country so little real contact, perhaps even less than we have at home. Perhaps more than anything else, that worried us. Do Black and White Americans not mix? Play bridge together? Have home movies together? Have lunch together? Typists? Scholars?

We saw so few signs of it, that we began to wonder. Could it be that our travel program, our own special itinerary, took us only to people who didn’t happen to be mixing? Surely, we thought, even if that was so we should see more togetherness on the streets, in the fast food places, in the buses.

Slowly, unwillingly, we started to think that perhaps we were seeing it as it is. That despite all the legislative and judicial support for equality, that was all it was. Equality, but not togetherness. If that is all that lies ahead, it will be a great disappointment.

For, in our terms, the patient sitting up is only beginning to consider equality. As it was with you, sport has proved the starting point. From sport is following public amenities, restaurants, some bars and hotels. Our government and much of White South Africa is nowhere near even thinking of political, educational or residential equality. To the extent that we profess to do so, it is on a segregated “equality” —a sort of ‘you in your small corner and I in mine’—type.

In the workplace, too, we are unequal, yet, as I think back, I am not sure that where “equality” is breaking through it does not bring with it much more friendship, more contact, than in your case. Perhaps it is because it is early days that this seems so; maybe it is because we had so little before that every little scrap we now find is appreciated; maybe because our Black fellows know that time and numbers are on their side, that eventually they must gain so much more. Who knows? All I can say is that (as Whites) we found it harder to get easy acceptance and friendship from Black Americans down South than here. Of course, that may just be because we’re Africans.

Are we unfair to draw this kind of conclusion? A Black Birmingham politician thought we were. “In those heady days of the ’60s we thought everything was going to change totally. Now that seems naive. I mean, anyone could tell you that if there was a

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revolution in South Africa that wouldn’t right everything overnight.”

Wise words. Yet, amazingly, that man lived in such a different part of Birmingham from those quite charming and elegant Whites who took us to him. When I gave them the address they were clearly surprised, perhaps taken aback. They’d probably been there far less often than I have to Soweto, our great segregated metropolis near Johannesburg. Not that it was all that far away from downtown Birmingham; it just seemed to be.

And then we lunched in an elegant, gracious club, ate corn pones, and other Southern delicacies, in a place where we were served by smiling retainers who reminded one of the slaves in Gone With the Wind, apparently happy with their lot, safe with what they knew. Would that club admit our Black politician friend? We doubted it.

We went to San Antonio. Is that the South? We guess not. A dear guide in Maury Maverick. Now —totally new impressions once again. Mexicans. To us, a quite different community, one that was also in some ways far outside the American dream. And, we couldn’t relate to it in the same way —it seemed much further from home. This might be the South, but it seemed more South American. Not that it wasn’t delightful and interesting —just different.

But back to the town on the Mississippi. The levee. Apartheid. Well, not really. But strange things similar in nature.

Delightful, cotton planter hosts. Their daughter and son at the local private school. On the way to drop them there we passed the local public school. That at least was integrated.

“Do you have any Black folks in your school?” we asked. (Here in South Africa our daughter’s school is proud of its first four or five Black students. More next year, we hope).

“No.” A pause. “Not that there are any rules to stop it.” Pause again. “It’s just that none have qualified.” Deep pause. “Had a doctor once, applied. We sent him application forms but he never sent them in. Just stirring trouble, I guess.”

I asked his daughter, a keen tennis player, if she played against that public school in matches. “No sir” she answered.

It turned out that most of their school matches meant travelling thirty, forty miles. “Why don’t you play them,” I asked.

“I dunno, sir. Mostly private schools play private schools.”

I probed. So much like home. Such genuinely held beliefs that it was all for the good, for the good of the children, for the good of society, for the good of all concerned. Genuine horror still at the sight of a Black man with a White girl, especially that way round! Could be home.

But I must not be unfair. Your fine country has achieved so much. Even if the Brown case hasn’t really reached the levee, there is so much that is good, so many real achievements, that I feel presumptuous in even writing as I have.

So let me leave you with my two favourite anecdotes, both from Washington (which I guess can just about qualify as the South too). Millard Arnold telling me that he and some friends had held an after dinner discussion recently to try to recall when last they’d really felt affected by racism. And it was sixteen years ago, deep down South (of course!) when he hadn’t known and had stood there, trying to flag down a “White” taxi, until an old man, wiser than he, had shown him where he’d get a taxi. Only sixteen years ago! So recently!

There’s hope for us yet. As there is from the fact that 25 years ago (only 25) Maury Maverick was fighting in court for permission for a Black to box a White in Texas. Shades of Johannesburg, where the change took place two years ago.

For how soon we all forget. There is, in the Smithsonian, a Norman Rockwell painting of a little Black girl, dressed all in white, red ribbon in her hair, being escorted to school by four distinguished, brave, elders. A tomato has hit the wall behind her.

As I looked at it, recalling how recent it all was, a crowd of school children came by, mostly White but a few Black kids too.

Their teacher, filled with the same sense of contemporary historical pride that I was, stopped the class. “Just look at that.” The two Black boys looked, shrugged, moved on. She summoned them back.

“Do you know what that is?” she demanded. They didn’t. She beamed “It’s the start of integrated schools.” They shrugged again, moved on again.

I thrilled to it. You should never think you have not made progress. Those boys said it all. Integrated education was no longer an issue to them. Other things will be, no doubt, but not that. That is growth, real growth.

I envy you that growth. Liberals here dream about a day when we too will take for granted the right of every citizen, whether Black or White, to live where he wants, to go to school where he lives, to sell his services where he likes, if all does not seem well to you Southerners, remember us, for you have given inspiration to those who have so much less.

John Marquerd is the manager (publisher) of The Star, the biggest selling daily in South Africa. Until August of last year he was the manager of The World, a Black daily banned by the S.A. government in 1977, and its successor in title, Post. (The editor of these two papers, Percy Qoboza, was detained for five months when the paper was banned). Marquerd visited the South briefly when he visited the Southern Regional Council.

The Bolden Decision Stonewalls Black Aspirations

By Laughlin McDonald

Vol. 2, No. 8, 1980, pp. 11-17

The Supreme Court’s latest voting rights decision, City of Mobile v. Bolden(April 22, 1980), is bad news for Blacks. The Court held that no system of elections could be attacked on racial grounds, even one such as Mobile, Alabama’s, which has the effect of totally excluding Blacks from office, unless it could be shown that it was adopted, or was being maintained, for the express purpose of discriminating against minorities. The Court also set up standards for proving “purpose” which are all but impossible to meet. The effect of Bolden will be to give new respectability to old-style, White-only politics in the South and bring to a halt the modest gains in Black office holding of the last decade.

Mobile, built around the rim

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of Mobile Bay, 31 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico, is Alabama’s second largest city and only seaport. It was founded in 1702, and retains today a distinctive blend of the traditional and the modern. It is the home of the famed Azalea Trail, 35 miles of streets that in the spring of the year wind through blossom-strewn bay area neighborhoods and suburbs. It is home too of the Bankhead Tunnel beneath Mobile Bay, an engineering marvel of its day and the first underwater traffic tube ever built in the South.

There are some accommodations to modern times, however, which Mobile has declined to make. One of those is to the rights of Blacks to participate equally with Whites in city politics. Although 35 percent of Mobile’s nearly 200,000 residents are Black, no Black has ever won an elective city office. This exclusion is the result of Mobile’s use of at-large voting for election of its three-member City Commission.

Where voting is at-large, as in Mobile and thousands of other jurisdictions in the South, all the voters elect all office holders. By contrast, where voting is by districts, only the voters in each district elect their own representatives. District voting allows for the creation of majority Black districts capable of electing minority candidates, even in jurisdictions which as a whole are majority White and where severe race relations cause voting to be strictly along racial lines. At-large voting, however, submerges concentrations of Black population in the White majority, neutralizing, or diluting, minority voting strength. Whites, quite simply, can out vote Blacks, assuring that minority candidates never hold political office. That is exactly what has happened in Mobile.

The exclusion of Blacks from politics was not accidental, nor the result of the normal give and take of politics. It was carefully planned. After Reconstruction ended in 1877, and federal troops were withdrawn, the Southern states set about systematically to take the vote away from Blacks and reduce the Fifteenth Amendment to dead letter law. The main work of disfranchisement was accomplished through a series of state constitutional conventions. Mississippi held the first in 1890, and Alabama followed with its own in 1901. The stated purpose of the convention was “the absolute disfranchisement of the Negro as a Negro.” One delegate who addressed the Alabama convention caught precise-

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ly the mood of the assembled legislators. With rhetorical embellishment he declared, “It is our purpose, it is our intention, and here is our registered vow to disfranchise every Negro in this state and not a single White man. ”

The Alabama convention adopted a two stage program. The initial measures included a grandfather clause for veterans and their descendants, allowing most Whites to register without meeting other requirements, and a so-called good character test. The permanent plan, which went into effect on January 1, 1903, included a poll tax, a literacy test, and education, employment, and property qualifications for voting. Shortly after the convention, the legislature authorized the Democratic Party to conduct all-White primaries, with the result that even those few Blacks who actually got registered were denied the right to vote in the only election in the state that had any meaning.

The impact of these various restrictions was predictable and devastating. Black voter registration began to plummet with amazing swiftness. By 1908, there were only 3,742 Blacks registered to vote in the entire state of Alabama. In Mobile County, the regime of White rule was so firmly reestablished that as late as the end of World War 11, only 275 Blacks were listed on local voter rolls.

A series of Congressional enactments during the 1950s and ’60s, culminating with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, with its ban on literacy tests, was to have changed the complexion of Southern politics. Once Blacks were given the right to register and vote without hindrance, it was assumed they would be able to participate fully and equally with Whites in elective politics. But in places like Mobile, that was not to be.

In spite of greatly expanded Black voter registration, Black candidates consistently went down to defeat at the polls. It soon became apparent to local Blacks that even if every eligible Black in Mobile was registered, and even if every registered Black voted for Black candidates, Blacks would still lose because of deep-seated racial division and at-large voting.

After years of frustration, a group of Blacks in Mobile brought a lawsuit in 1975 in the federal district court charging that at-large elections denied them the right of equal political participation and diluted their voting strength in violation of

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the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and §2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They based their legal claims primarily upon a 1973 court of appeals decision, Zimmer v. McKeithen, which held that at-large voting is unconstitutional where the political process is not equally open to Blacks and they have less opportunity than Whites to elect representatives of their choice.

Specifically, Zimmer said that dilution could be shown by proof of such things as: a history of official racial discrimination, particularly in registering and voting; a disproportionately low number of minority-group members elected to office; a lack of responsiveness on the part of elected officials to the needs of the minority community; depressed socio-economic status of minorities; majority-vote requirements; tenuous policy favoring at-large voting; lack of access to-candidate slating by minorities; large district size; lack of residential requirements for candidates and anti-single shot voting laws. Later appeals court decisions made it clear that discriminatory purpose was necessary for a constitutional violation, but that proof of the factors in Zimmer was enough to show invidious purpose in the use of at-large voting.

The Mobile plaintiffs proved most of the Zimmer factors -“massive official and private discrimination,” no Blacks elected to office, lack of responsiveness by city government, etc. As a consequence, the district court found at-large elections for the City Commission unconstitutional under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and ordered them replaced with district voting.

The city appealed. It pointed out that Mobile had adopted at-large elections in 1911. Since Blacks had been disfranchised by that time, the motive in choosing at-large voting could not, the city argued, have been racially discriminatory. The city also contended that it was under no duty to insure proportional representation for any racial group and that the remedy imposed by the district court in abolishing the commissioner form of government exceeded the powers of the court.

The court of appeals upheld the district court in 1978. It acknowledged that proof of intent to discriminate was required in litigation under both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. It concluded, however, that even an innocently formulated election plan could be maintained for the purpose of diluting Black voting strength, and, if the aggregate of Zimmer factors were shown, as they had been in Mobile, proof of discriminatory intent was made out.

The city appealed to the Supreme Court. The case was argued in March, and again

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in October, 1979, and was decided on April 22, 1980. The Court reversed and sent the case back to the court of appeals for further consideration.

Since the law of dilution had so recently been approved and applied by the Supreme Court in a 1973 case, White v. Regents, most observers assumed that if there was reversal in Bolden, it would be because the remedy imposed by the lower court abolishing Mobile’s form of government was too extreme, and that the underlying law of dilution would not be changed. But that was not to be. The case was decided very nearly in the worst possible way for the Black plaintiffs.

There were six opinions in Bolden: a plurality decision by Justice Stewart, joined by Burger, Powell, and Rehnquist; separate concurring opinions by Stevens and Blackmun; and dissenting opinions by Marshall, Brennan and White. The critical opinion, and the one which controlled the outcome of the case, was that of the plurality. It held that the Mobile challenge could not be based on the Fifteenth Amendment, since it protects only the right to register and vote without hindrance, and not the right to have the vote count. To reach that conclusion, the plurality had to ignore prior Supreme Court decisions invalidating discriminatory procedural requirements for exercise of the franchise, even though the abstract right to vote, as in Mobile, was unimpaired. Cases as early as 1915 had held that “the right to have one’s vote counted” was of equal importance as “the right to put a ballot in a box.” Accordingly, such practices as ballot box stuffing had been found unlawful, as well as the all-White primary, even though Blacks had full access to the ballot for general elections.

As for the Fourteenth Amendment claim, the Court said plaintiffs must show that Mobile’s at-large voting was conceived or operated as a purposeful device to further racial discrimination. The Zimmer factors were most assuredly insufficient to prove an unconstitutionally discriminatory purpose.” Purpose could be shown by proof that at-large voting was adopted or maintained, “in part ‘because of,’ not merely ‘in spite of,'” its adverse racial effects. The plurality, in a terse and oblique analysis, found Bolden to be “consistent” with White v. Regents.

Stevens, the newest justice on the Court, wrote a concurring opinion that was extraordinary. For him, an election plan would be unconstitutional only if it was totally irrational or entirely motivated by a desire to discriminate. Thus, the adoption of at large voting for the express purpose of excluding Blacks from office would nevertheless be constitutional if there was any additional legitimate reason for its use. “I believe we must accept the choice to retain Mobile’s commission form of government as constitutionally permissible even though that choice may well be the product of mixed motivation, some of which is invidious.”

Stevens is the first Supreme Court Justice in modern times to rule that the Constitution tolerates a certain amount of racial discrimination. If his position is adopted by a majority of his brethren, the present court, assembled in largest part by Richard Nixon, will have virtually repealed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

The case was sent back to the court of appeals to determine whether the Black plaintiffs could meet their new burden of proof. The plaintiff’s Voting Rights Act contention was not definitively ruled on, although four of the nine justices indicated that its effect was no different from that of the Fifteenth Amendment. Whether the plaintiffs can show invidious purpose, or whether they will prevail on their argument that the statute prohibits use of election procedures that have only discriminatory effect, remains to be seen.

Bolden, with its requirement of a smoking pistol, places all but impossible burden upon those challenging racially discriminatory election procedures. Since invidious intent can no longer be shown by past discrimination and its continuing effects, only those challengers will win, presumably, if they catch elected officials making overtly racial defense of at-large voting. None but the innocent or, apparently, Supreme Court justices, can expect that to happen very often. Public officials, especially those who are sued and are represented by counsel, rarely admit to racism. Bolden means that Blacks in jurisdictions which use at-large voting—including most Southern cities, counties and school boards

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—will be denied any remedy for exclusion from office.

There is no question that at-large voting in majority White jurisdictions means no Black elected officials, except in those few cases where a particular Black candidate is able, against all the odds, to put together a winning coalition. In Georgia for example, which is about 26 percent Black, only 16 Blacks held elected office on county governing bodies, about three percent of all office holders. Not only is the absolute number quite small, but of the 18 Black county officials, practically all were elected from majority Black counties or voting districts. Blacks in Georgia’s majority White counties or districts, for all practical purposes, cannot get elected to office. The figures for other offices, such as city councils and school boards, are as bad or worse. Fifteen years after abolition of the literacy test and massive Black voter registration, at-large voting continues to shut Blacks out from equal participation in elective politics in Georgia and elsewhere in the racially polarized South.

The pernicious effects of Bolden extend far beyond the exclusion of any particular candidates from office. It deprives the entire Black community of the chance effectively to redress the problems of racial discrimination through normal political channels. When a Black sits on a city council and helps decide who will be the new city clerk or police dispatcher, the chances of a Black applicant being considered and actually hired are dramatically improved.

When Blacks participate in the decision about where to pave streets, chances are sharply increased that the dirt road in the long neglected Black section of town will get resurfaced. There is a growing consensus among Southern Blacks, in fact, as evidenced by the large number of voting rights cases brought since the early 1970s, that the whole range of discrimination related problems, in housing, services, employment, etc. can best be remedied through equality of political participation. Bolden brings to a halt this transfer of political power brought about by Zimmer and other vote dilution cases. It stonewalls the legitimate demands of the Black community.

The decision is a veritable prescription for litigation and an ever expanding civil rights enforcement bureaucracy. Minorities, denied access to local political power as a means of bringing about change, will now be forced to take each and every one of their discrimination claims to court or to a federal agency for redress. Such a result is a profligate use of the scant resources of the minority community, and an unnecessary burden upon the judiciary and the national government.

Bolden will have other effects independent of governmental responsiveness, and ominous in their implications for race relations. By refusing to recognize the intrinsic value of equal political participation and protect it, the Court has sown the seeds of contempt for the lawful processes of the courts and elective politics. Marshall, the only Black ever to sit on the Court, made just that point in a stinging dissenting opinion: “If this Court refuses to honor our long-recognized principle that the Constitution ‘nullifies sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination,. . . it cannot expect the victims of discrimination to respect political channels of seeking redress.”

Congress has the power to remedy Bolden by enacting legislation declaring voting procedures which have racially discriminatory effect are unlawful, regardless of their purpose. An example of the exercise of that power is §5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which requires “covered” jurisdictions, including most of those in the South, to pre-clear changes in voting procedures with the Department of Justice or the federal courts in the District of Columbia to make certain they do not have the purpose or effect of discriminating against minorities. Section 5, with its dual purpose or effect standard, is an enlargement of

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the protection of the Fifteenth Amendment which according to the Bolden plurality, prohibits only purposeful discrimination. The statutes were found to be constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1966 shortly after their enactment and were more recently upheld in a case decided the same day as Bolden. The Court states in City of Rome v. United States: “(Section 5’s) ban on electoral changes that are discriminatory in effect is an appropriate method of promoting the purposes of the Fifteenth Amendment even if it is assumed that §1 of the Amendment prohibits only intentional discrimination in voting.”

There is also recent precedent for action by Congress to remedy the effects of regressive Supreme Court decision making. In Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. v. Wilderness Society, the Court disallowed awards of attorneys’ fees to prevailing plaintiffs in civil rights lawsuits. Congress responded by enacting in 1976 the Civil Rights Attorneys Fees Awards Act, making the entitlement of prevailing parties to fees a matter of statutory right.

It would be a relatively simple matter mechanically to draft legislation remedying Bolden. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a general prohibition of unlawful voting practices which four of nine present Supreme Court justices say prohibits only purposeful discrimination, could be amended to read:

No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any, State or political subdivision which has the purpose or effect to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States on account of race or color…

Accompanying legislative history could make clear that Congress was acting in light of Bolden to render unlawful election schemes such as Mobile’s which have the effect, regardless of their purpose, of denying equal access by Blacks to elective office.

If amendment could be accomplished during the next session of Congress, Bolden would prove to be an opportunity, and not simply a crisis.

Laughlin McDonald is executive director of the Southern Region office of the ACLU in Atlanta.

The Federation of Southern Cooperatives Under Siege

By John Vodicka

Vol. 2, No. 8, 1980, pp.18-21

In rural Sumter County, Alabama, the plantation mentality still survives, tainted somewhat by the 20th Century, but preserved well enough to be easily recognized. Some Black people still step aside to let White people pass them on the sidewalk. Paved roads stop at the White folks’ cemetery, leaving red dirt roads for Blacks to travel to their cemetery and churches. The Whites openly refer to Sumter County public schools as “the nigger schools” and send their children to private, segregated academies. The Sumter County Public Library’s official history book on the area contains a chapter on “colored people” that describes Blacks as “entirely too careless and improvident.”

The old catechisms of racism are still spouted by most Whites in Sumter County. It is a county whose institutions and attitudes, even in 1980, are frankly, admittedly, unashamedly—and in some instances triumphantly—dominated by Whites. And consequently, as one Black citizen of Sumter said recently, “Blacks in this county have always been excluded from access to political, economic and institutional structures which control their lives.”

But the winds of change are starting to blow across the rolling, brilliantly green countryside of Sumter County. Sumter, the western-most of Alabama’s 10 “Black Belt” counties that stretch clear across the southcentral part of the state, is slowly experiencing what it did not achieve during the turbulent ’60s: Black people struggling for their human, economic and civil rights.

Black farmers and farmworkers in Sumter County are forming cooperatives to better produce an income on their small tracts of land. Credit union, consumer and handicraft cooperatives have been established. A community health center that tends to the medical needs of the poor now exists. Blacks have run for public office and are forming coalitions to deal with economic issues that were formerly decided by Sumter’s controlling White power structure.

Last spring, the Sumter County Coalition, a Black-led group, successfully boycotted the public schools and local businesses in Livingston, the county seat. The boycott lasted

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six weeks, and when it was over Blacks had won a commitment from the White-controlled school board to spend $400,000 to upgrade school facilities, to hire more Blacks to administrative positions in the school system, and to hire a Black principal at one of the schools. Now the Sumter County Coalition is gearing up to see that the incumbent White school board members face Black challengers during the fall’s elections.

Many believe the catalyst behind this sudden upsurge of Blacks taking control over their own lives is the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC), a Blackadministered program that has organized a grass roots movement giving hope to thousands of Blacks and low income people across the rural South. For the last 10 years FSC has had its headquarters near Epes, Alabama, a tiny Sumter County town that lies on the limerock banks of the Tombigbee River.

Funded largely by federal dollars, the FSC functions primarily as a unique educational institution that serves the needs of over 100 member cooperatives and some 30,000 people in 14 states. It provides training in coop organization, management, accounting, agriculture and marketing; it also helps rural Blacks develop alternative money-saving farming techniques such as solar greenhouses and wood heating stoves, housing rehabilitation and alternative cropping.

The Federation has also encouraged its non-staff members to get involved in their community and to become active in political struggles. Former FSC staff members have often be come community activists. Wendell Paris, who worked with FSC in the mid-1970s, now heads the Sumter County Coalition.

In recent Years, Sumter County’s White power structure, led by Livingston Mayor I. Drayton Pruitt, Jr., has launched an all-out attack on the Federation, seeking to destroy it and thereby return things to the way “they used to be” in Southwest Alabama. Pruitt and other powerful Whites feel threatened by FSC’s presence; their political and economic domination of Sumter County is on shakier ground than they’d like it to be.

Pruitt and his father (and law partner), I. Drayton Pruitt, Sr., are long-term Wallace backers. The elder Pruitt was Wallace’s floor leader in Montgomery; Mayor Pruitt was a Wallace delegate at the 1976 Democratic National Convention. Together, the Pruitts own the Livingston Bank, a grocery store, the newspaper and a lot of land, much of which fronts the Tombigbee River.

Last year Pruitt, along with Sumter County Probate Judge Sam Massingill and Tax Assessor Joe Steagall, wrote first-term Alabama Congressman Richard Shelby complaining about the FSC’s “political involvement” in Sumter County affairs. “Government funded activism,” they labeled the Federation, and charged such political activity violated federal funding guide-

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lines. A preliminary GAO audit was initiated by Shelby—to no avail. FSC was given a clean bill.

But the Federation’s troubles weren’t over. Last New Year’s Eve, FSC executive director Charles Prejean was subpoenaed by the federal grand jury of Northern Alabama and ordered to produce “any and all documents in connection with federal funding of FSC and its affiliated cooperatives for the years 1976-79.” Someone had asked the FBI and Justice Department to get involved.

On February 7, 1980, the Federation turned over 10 file cabinet drawers of information (including 40,000 cancelled checks) to the Birmingham grand jury. The probe is now six months old. Still no one at FSC knows who or what the Feds are after. Inquiries by Federation staff members have gone unanswered. Birmingham’s U.S. Attorney J.R. Brooks refuses to talk about the investigation other than to say, “It’s ongoing. It’s secret.”

FSC staff members and supporters think the investigation is solely an attempt to discredit the Federation and thus reduce its effectiveness.

“We’re experiencing a frontal attack from our enemies in Sumter County,” Charles Prejean maintains. “People have been trying to destroy FSC from the beginning, only in the past the techniques have been more subtle. These White folks think that any money niggers get they got to be stealin’ it.”

“What we’re seeing,” Prejean went on, “is a deliberate attempt on the part of the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI to destroy the entire organization, without going into any reason for this action.”

John Zippert, FSC’s director of program operations, agrees.

“The White politicians were really disturbed that Blacks stuck together during the school boycott,” Zippert said, “They looked for a scapegoat and decided on the Federation.”

Both Prejean and Zippert say the Federation has not violated its federal funding guidelines—that any political activity FSC staff members participate in is strictly on their own time.

“We may be a catalyst,” Zippert acknowledged, “but we are not directly involving ourselves in political matters in Sumter County. It’s only natural that when people realize the problems facing them they begin to think politically. But our interest is in developing cooperatives for poor people, not in ripping off federal monies.”

Nonetheless, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives is now under siege. As the grand jury investigation drags on, FSC is finding it difficult to devote important time to cooperative development and related activities. Nearly $20,000 has already been spent on a legal defense and more may be needed. Prejean, Zippert and other FSC staff members are spending dozens of hours each week trying to get more information on the probe, support from friends, and answers to official inquiries. In addition, private foundations are withholding grants until the investigation’s results are made known.

Fortunately, the threat to FSC has not stopped Sumter County Blacks from continuing to organize. The Sumter County Coalition, along with the Minority Peoples Council (MPQ have successfully purchased land near Epes so that Blacks can begin building low-cost housing. The MPC is attempting to gain more jobs for area Blacks with the $1.6 billion federally funded

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Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway project. The Sumter County school system is being scrutinized closely by both groups to determine if public funds are being siphoned off to the segregated academies, as many believe is happening.

“We’re not going to roll over and play dead,” Sumter County Coalition leader Wendell Paris said. “We are going to obtain some control over our lives here. Mayor Pruitt and his daddy and the other Whites who run this county have run this county long enough. Black folks are in the majority here and we intend to fight for what is rightfully ours. We want to make this a better community for everyone.”

[SIDEBAR]

Heading north from Meridian, Mississippi on Highway 11, one enters Sumter County, Alabama via York, one of a handful of motionless, soundless small towns which dot the rural county. After York comes Livingston, the county seat, with its picturesque town square complete with Confederate memorial. Tiny Epes is next on Jones Bluff, then Gainesville, one of Alabama’s oldest towns. It was at Gainesville that Confederate cavalry man Nathan Bedford Forrest surrendered his troops a month after Appomattox.

Sumter County is one of 10 Alabama counties that comprise the state’s “Black Belt”, so named because of its rich, alluvial soil and because over 60 percent of its inhabitants are Black. The Black Belt counties form a tier, stretching across the south central part of the state. Sumter is the western most county in the Black Belt, bordered on the west by the state of Mississippi, on the east by the Tombigbee River and its bulging limerock banks. To the north lie Touscaloosa and Birmingham; Mobile and the Gulf of Mexico are 120 miles southward.

The land of Sumter County is rolling and brilliantly green, generously covered with foliage and flora. Oak, cottonwood, hickory and cedar trees paint the earth, and, in springtime the dogwood blooms and makes the air smell strong.

Sumter County was founded in 1830, when White settlers obtained the land from the Choctaw Indians in the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit. Cotton soon became king, with slaves picking nearly one half million bales of cotton annually prior to the Civil War. By the mid-1800s, the Black Belt counties had achieved the most exalted aristocracy of any section of Alabama. And nowhere is it preserved in a larger area than Sumter County.

John Vodicka is a free-lance writer in New Orleans.

What’s Wrong with Justice in Wrightsville

By Ron Taylor

Vol. 2, No. 8, 1980, pp. 22-24

Johnson County Sheriff Roland Attaway keeps two microphones dangling from the roof outside his office in Wrightsville, Georgia, for the purpose of tape recording his critics. The last few months, he has not liked what he has heard. Moreover, the criticism has made it difficult for him to run his county the way he is accustomed to running it. A host of “outside agitators,” liberal lawyers and nosy newsmen have poked fun at his habit of arresting people without charging them with anything.

In the last roundup, following sniper fire in a Black section of that racially troubled town, Attaway managed to nab at least 38 suspects (he never seemed to know just how many himself) and succeeded in getting two leaders of the Black protest there indicted on a host of curious charges that included inciting a riot that apparently his deputies helped start. During the past few months, Blacks and Whites in Wrightsville have scuffled on the courthouse lawn; a little girl, a woman and a policeman have been wounded, and every extremist group in Georgia, left and right, has shown its colors there. The miracle, say those who have watched the painful developments, is that nobody has been killed.

Wrightsville is an anachronism of the most disturbing kind. All the tired marches and all the old songs serve up reminders of hopes still unfulfilled, of how far we have not come. Wrightsville is not Miami, not the ash and mutilation of a decade just begun. It is not Greensboro, North Carolina, not the ugly clash of intransigent ideologies sticking up like the tip of some awful polarization freezing inside America’s frustrated foundation. Instead, Wrightsville hangs at the damaged roots of all that did not grow after the sixties.

It is a mean little town, this South Central Georgia farming village of barely 2,000 people at the seat of a county hardly much

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bigger, holding 7,000 people altogether. Almost daily, when the tensions are properly dangerous, a White mob gathers outside the courthouse, a gang of loafers come to complain about loafers and to skip pebbles and shout threats at journalists. Why have we come, they ask. And the temptation is precariously great to tell them.

Wrightsville is depressingly similar to most other rural Deep South towns that sit just beyond somewhere, not far from nowhere. It is far enough away from the reconstructed Southern mainstream to practice its peculiar standards of justice, but close enough to cause embarassment. That basically is why Wrightsville has become another landmark in the civil rights movement that has been declared dead quite prematurely, more than once in recent years. In June, while half the world is watching, Gov. George Busbee got news of Wrightsville in China”, some of its White citizens persist in practicing political voodoo.

It is a place where, as one former resident observes, a landowner is as apt as not to let slip his racial patronage by declaring, “This is my land, this is my tractor, and this is my nigger.” The half dozen families of property, among hundreds who have nothing, entrust the order of things to Sheriff Attaway, who has handled affairs to their liking for almost 20 years. Until the Rev. E.J. Wilson came to town wearing a brass cross around his neck and his social conscience on his shoulder, nobody questioned how Attaway executed his mandate.

To those who don’t have to deal with his law-and-order eccentricities, Sheriff Attaway is a hard man not to like. There is a sophisticated shyness about the man, not the sort of gladhanding, good-old-boy deception one often finds in boondock counties. And he has an open streak of human vanity. He keeps a bottle of Grecian Formula 9 hair dye on his desk and absolutely refuses to tell his age (around 63, by most calculations). And he can boast legitimately that through the years he has kept his county almost free of violent crime. How he apparently has managed to do that is what disturbs some people.

During the sixties, Attaway was the constant target of civil rights complaints, and in one publicized incident, he roughed up a Black teenager who had been drinking at a water fountain that had once been for Whites only. He has been known to come knocking on a citizen’s door for the mere collection of a debt some merchant had complained of.

So Black residents along South Valley Street were not especially surprised to hear Attaway and his deputies pounding on their doors the night violence erupted again in Wrightsville in mid-May. He showed up at Dearest Davis’ front door wearing a black riot helmet and holding a shotgun. He ordered everybody out on the porch, including 2-year-old James Eddie Wilson, who, at his mother’s prompting, does a squealy imitation of the sheriff’s angry command, “Get down off that bed!” Attaway and his deputies hauled away Mrs. Davis; a neighbor and two teenage girls. The Rev. Wilson and John Martin, local president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, already had been arrested that evening, as had been a group of people meeting at Wilson’s church, which Attaway’s deputies stormed with pointing guns.

Within the next two days. it would become abundantly clear that Attaway’s roundup had not achieved one important purpose: determining who fired the shots that left one woman seriously wounded and a policeman grazed and sent bullets whizzing by volunteer firemen attempting to put out a blaze set by arsonists at a South Valley cafe. Instead, Attaway wove a more bizarre case.

The sheriff spent much of the next day behind closed doors, plotting his strategy and fending off questions from reporters and lawyers alike as to just how many had been arrested (the count ranged from 25 to 44 before Attaway settled briefly on 38) and just what they were being charged with (Attaway changed the charges, too). Meanwhile, prisoners were shuttled in and out. Some new ones were brought in for questioning; some that had been held were quietly released without explanation. At one point, Reber Boult, an activist lawyer from Atlanta, attempted to question the Rev. Cornelius Horton, who was sitting inside a police car awaiting transport to a hospital for needed insulin he had been denied since his arrest hours earlier. Boult was shoved aside by an officer. Horton, whose car had been demolished during the first burst of violence in April, was one of the last prisoners released. He said he was never told what he was being held for.

By the second day, only three people remained behind bars; Wilson and Martin, the two leaders of the movement in

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Wrightsville, and Boult. Boult was wrestled to a cell by Attaway and a policeman after protesting Attaway’s accusation that he had interfered with an officer in trying to talk with his client. Attaway ordered witnessing lawyers out of his office and slammed the door in the face of baffled newsmen.

By the time the preliminary hearing got under way that afternoon, it was clear Attaway had achieved at least one of his aims. Wilson and Martin, the sheriff’s arch-nemeses, would have to stand before the bar of Wrightsville justice for all the grief they had caused the sheriff.

Wilson had been giving Attaway headaches since he arrived in town last autumn to pastor the Neeler Chapel AME Church. Wilson had earned his civil rights stripes back in 1961 during lunch-counter sit-ins in Albany, Georgia. As a minister in Hancock County, he worked briefly with the late John McCowan, the controversial Black leader who brought Black-majority rule to Hancock. When he got to Wrightsville, Wilson’s practiced eye told him that Blacks were not getting a fair shake. He began picketing, often alone, for more jobs for Blacks at a local supermarket. As the protest grew, so did the tension. When Wilson and Martin would lead their followers to the courthouse steps, a White mob usually waited for them to shout jeers and taunts reminiscent of the ugly days of Selma and Birmingham. The two sides clashed bitterly the night of April 8. Several Blacks were beaten, and reporters on the scene say deputies and policemen were eager participants.

It was that disturbance—not the more recent sniper incident—that Attaway finally decided to try to pin on Wilson and Martin more than a month later. Actually, not even the two’s lawyers, led by State Rep. William Randall, whose father helped drive the mule-drawn wagon during the original Poor People’s March on Washington, knew what the charges were until Attaway handed them the list just before the hearing.

One of the charges was that of obstruction of justice, involving some convoluted quarrel in the sheriff’s office over a woman’s role in a traffic accident, and another accused the pair of criminal defamation, alleging that during one of the rallies under Attaway’s microphones, they had called the sheriff a “lying bastard”. Testifying to that charge with a sense of outrage was Georgia Bureau of Investigation Agent Harold Moorman, who said he reported the cursing to Attaway, his close friend of 17 years.

More to the point were a series of inciting to riot charges. Two of the incidents cited actually were demonstrations that resulted in no rioting at all. Witness after prosecution witness conceded that neither Wilson nor Martin had advocated physical violence, even on the day of the melee.

Hearing the case was State Court Judge Joe W. Rowland of Johnson County, one of several local officials said to owe his job to the considerable influence of Sheriff Attaway. Rowland listened patiently to the defense attorneys’ repeated arguments that testimony had failed to establish that Wilson and Martin had provoked a breach of the peace, one of the principle criteria for letting such a charge stand. With the testy explanation that he didn’t have to explain his reasons, Rowland bound over Wilson and Martin to the grand jury, a vastly White body that also picks the county school board. Two weeks later, they indicted Wilson and Martin.

Attaway has stated publicly that he hopes to see the two protest leaders go to prison, but, more likely, the mysteries of Wrightsville justice will have to be unraveled by the federal courts before the issue is resolved. Meanwhile, the little town rests uneasily in its time warp.

Ron Taylor is a reporter for the Atlanta Journal.