Democracy Looks At the New South

By Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 4, No. 2, 1982, pp. 1-4

The news is full these days about people returning to the South, black and white, poor ones as well as those better off. The question is, will democracy return with them?

I don’t, of course, mean the democracy of actual life, for the South never had that, not even in the stumbling, wavering ways realized in the rest of our country. I mean that democracy of aspiration, which dwelt in the spirit and grand hopes that Southerners, as much as people anywhere in the world, have in times past thrust upward for the challenging of our lives. In the greatness of such as Jefferson, Madison, George Mason, and–closer to our own time–Hugo Black, James McBride Dabbs, Clifford Durr, Frank Graham, Paul Green, Fannie Lou Hamer, Estes Kefauver, Martin Luther King, Jr., Lillian Smith, Dorothy Tilly, John H. Wheeler and Aubrey Williams, the South taught men and women everywhere to love and labor for liberty and equality.

In their own region, the thought and example of those like Jefferson went into a long, sad neglect after their passing. Will the same be true of the legacy of these later leaders, who rekindled the spirit that made the Civil Rights Movement an example to be cherished wherever the wind of democracy moves?

My own odyssey as a follower of those, our recent and deeply missed prophets–for that is what they were, persons speaking truth to power–began on a Spring afternoon in 1949. As the then youngest member of Emory University’s political science faculty, I had been assigned the generally unwanted task of adviser to the Club of Departmental Majors. I had already, in my first months at Emory, voyaged once or twice to that foreign world where the Negro campuses of Atlanta were; and so, casting about for a speaker for a club meeting, I’d suggested inviting a man I’d met, Professor William Boyd of Atlanta University, to come out and talk about race relations. Rather nervously, and feeling bold, the students acceded. I extended the invitation, it was accepted, and Boyd came and spoke to our small group. While sitting in the back of the room and listening to him, I was suddenly troubled by a new thought; in old-fashioned language, I might say, was touched by grace–and as we all know, that happens but seldom to any of us. It came to me that

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my invitation had been wrong, even insulting. Here was this man, our professional colleague, responding to his first invitation to appear among us at the “white” school, and being asked to speak not about his own professional field–which happened to be international politics–but about race relations, as if that were all he had the competence to teach us.

When the meeting was over, and he and I had sat down in my office, I apologized to him. Bill Boyd, whose untimely death a few years later took from us one of our natural leaders, smiled in his ironic but accepting manner and then as the afternoon wore on gave me alone his second talk of the day. Without reference to laws or political controversies, he, out of his own goodness, calmly told me what being a black in the South entailed, of what it meant to him and his family in their daily lives, of the heartbreaking dilemmas involved in rearing his children of the never-ending succession of little things that had to be coped with in traveling through the South or getting about in Atlanta. The elephant at the Grant Park Zoo had died and a campaign was on in the schools to get the children to contribute their coins to help buy a new one. How, he asked, does one tell his eager youngster that you may give your dime, but you won’t be allowed to see the elephant when it’s bought? There was more, much more, of that; and as I listened I suddenly had my second thought of the day: I did not need it because had I ever given a moment’s thought, I could have known it on my own.

That illumination has come back to me over and over again. I have trod about ever since in the tangled morass of America’s racial struggles, not only those of blacks, but of our Hispanics and Indians as well. Time and again, I have been taught and have been made to see realities to which I had been blind theretofore. And nearly every time, I have had ruefully to reflect that I should not have needed the instruction, that the lesson could have been–should have been–deduced from my own knowledge of what American society is.

Discrimination is a social product, a fact to which the present Supreme Court, in its insistence that only that discrimination which can be proven to have arisen from the specific intentions of specific officials is prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment, seems to have willfully shut it eyes. And, not the Supreme Court alone. Does, for example, any thinking person need to be shown that poverty and housing discrimination are root causes of criminal behavior? In recent years, we have had to have large studies to show a direct connection between poverty and hunger and malnutrition; did we truly need to be taught that? There comes a point when our craving to be shown, to be given documentation, is a mask for irresponsibility, a resistance to realities which we know full well but which to admit would threaten too strongly our willful belief in the morality of our social order.

The lesson that Bill Boyd taught came back to me anew when years later I read Dr. King’s “Letter From A Birmingham Jail.” Do you remember where he said:

“I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say wait. But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers suffering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see the tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Fun Town is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: ‘Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?’ When you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you. When you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading ‘White’ men and ‘Colored’; when your first name and your last name becomes ‘John,’ and when your wife and mother are never given the respectable title ‘Mrs.’ when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”

Shortly after that “Letter” was written, the Southern Regional Council, of which I was then Executive Director, was asked to join another agency in its printing and distribution. I declined. I suppose I had practical reasons

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–of money and such like–for doing so, though what they were I can no longer recall. It was a bad mistake, one of which I am ashamed. It did not keep that classic statement from being printed, but it did keep what was then the South’s principal bi-racial organization from standing with it and for it. It was another missed opportunity, of which there have been so many, when the voices of black people were turned from in the South.

All that which Dr. King described happened in a past that, although but a few years ago, now seems distant. This is the New South, men say. And they are right. The Civil Rights Movement did accomplish great deeds, the South is vastly changed, and is the better for it. Yet much lies ahead to be done, to build democracy here, as well as in our nation. And sometimes one wonders if the cutting edge, as we used to call it, is still sharp. Way back in 1946, W.E.B. DuBois made a speech in Columbia, S.C. In the course of it, he said:

“White youth in the South is peculiarly frustrated. There is not a single great ideal which they can express or aspire to that does not bring them into flat contradiction with the Negro problem. The more they try to escape it, the more they land in hypocrisy, lying and double-dealing; the more they become what they least wish to become, the oppressors and despisers of human beings. Some of them, in larger and larger numbers, are bound to turn toward the truth and to recognize you as brothers and sisters, as fellow travelers toward the dawn.”

Whatever else must be said about the experience of being white in the pre-1970 South, there was always that bothersome conscience which DuBois described. I may be wrong, and hope that I am, but I doubt if it has still the same force, among either white youth or their elders. The war is over and done, the burden of conscience has been discharged, the duties it imposed are no more, it is time to cease doing good and instead simply start doing well for ourselves. The edge has gone out of too many of our young people. Compassion seems to have become unfashionable. To be heard, one must appeal to material interests, as such are perceived by what today passes for political parties and by our media.

If the future is now, it is a grim forbidding one. The Civil Rights Movement did its great work, just as men like Jefferson in their day did theirs. It has left us the next and even greater task and that is the combating of war and poverty, and the South is central in both.

We must never allow ourselves to take our sights off the main event, and that is the terrible bombs ready to explode in the center ring of all our our existences. One bomb, is quite literally, the bomb of nuclear warfare, to which the governments of the world approach closer day by day. The other is the bomb of world-wide poverty, compact of the misery of probably the majority of human beings now living, of whom all too many dwell here in the South and in urban and rural ghettos throughout our land.

It is instructive to go back in our thinking to Gunnar Myrdal. Perhaps you will recall the famous “rank order of discrimination” which he set down in The American Dilemma. Researching prior to and during World War II, he believed that he had found that white Southerners were and would be most resistant to any change that had to do with sex between black men and white women and with intermarriage. Following this, he found that the white South would yield most slowly on, in order: personal relationships and the “etiquette” between the races; the use of public facilities: political disfranchisement; discriminatory law enforcement; and finally, would yield most easily on economic discrimination.

His survey of Negro Southerners gave him just the opposite conclusion; namely that they cared most about economic opportunities, least of all about sexual mingling. Myrdal went on to acknowledge that he might be wrong about the white South’s dominant interests, and of course he was. We know now that, when push came to shove, the white South has far more cared about maintaining its economic privileges than its sexual codes or traditional etiquette. The harsh fact is that today at least one-third of black Southerners live below the poverty line and that upwards of two-fifths of the nation’s poor, white and black, live in the South. We have reached that disappointing level–and that is what it seems, a level ground which year to year does not rise or fall–after and despite all the great, and they were indeed great–events and victories of the intervening decades: the court battles over the white primary and higher education, the work of President Truman’s Civil Rights Committee, the suppression of the Dixiecrats, the 1954 and 1955 decisions on segregated schools, the bitter and finally successful battles against “massive resistance,” the sit-in movement and the magnificent demonstrations and voter registration campaigns of the sixties and early seventies, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the “War On Poverty” declared in 1964.

But all that accomplishment left poor people still poor, and some of them poorer than ever; and left the white folks mostly still in charge. Working alongside Mack Jones, a successor of my old mentor, Bill Boyd, as a professor of political science at Atlanta University, I have in the last year and a half helped out the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, as it fought off the harassment of the Department of Justice. That episode showed, among other things, how determinedly and resourcefully the white economic and political powers of the Black Belt will act to put down a poor people’s organization that is perceived as threatening their control.

The episode suggests another possibility. It is that the economic reform which this country so desperately requires may not come about until poor people organize themselves at local and state levels to insist upon it; that the reform to be effective must include new structures, as in the co-ops, which end the dependence of poor people on established economic and political powers; and that just as the struggle for civil rights did not gather strength and momentum until black Southerners took charge and gave leadership, so will the struggle for economic justice not really move very far until its leadership comes from the poor and those who have earned the poor’s trust.

The “beloved community” which the Civil Rights Movement in its glory days proclaimed may exceed our grasp. Must it also be beyond our reach? I would if I could call us back to those mind-changing, nation-rocking, soul-lifting ideals of non-violence and equality and freedom for all. I would because they are, ultimately, the only realistic and practical guides for our action. It is impractical and unrealistic to expect millions of people of our nation–and of a couple of billion, more or less, world wide–to endure indefinitely their poverty and degradation and not to tear down somehow the peace and prosperity of the rest of us. It is utterly unrealistic to believe that we and the Russians, not to speak of a host of lesser governments, can continue the grossest arms build-up in all history, one which features nuclear weapons of civilization destroying potency; can continue “projecting our power” all about the globe without uncontrollable war erupting. The madness of our times is that what is palpably irrational

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and even insane passes for pragmatism, while realism is dismissed as soft-headedness. Yet it is only through that idealism of the Civil Rights Days, which was in fact hard realism, that our nation and the world and the civilization that keeps us from being mere brutes stand any chance of survival.

It was through it that the possibility of democracy was brought back to the South, from which it had departed with Jefferson’s generation. Will it become more than a possibility? Democracy means the rule of the people. Its attainment and keeping are never-finished tasks. First of all, comes the establishment of equality, for the rule of the people without at least enough equality among the people so that self-reliance is everywhere is a contradiction in terms. Then comes justice, for that means that every person is to be treated fairly and with equal rights. And then true democracy requires peace, for without it the people will never rule, for commanders must, and justice will not prevail, because force and regimentation will.

We are generally led and ruled by men who though often as not good and conscientious individuals are by their policies unwitting killers of the dream, foulers of the nest, sellers of the birthright. And not America’s birthright only but that of the civilization to which we were born and which has given edge and strength to our character, given us eyes to see and to be aware of the world’s beauty and the world’s callings.

But I have too pessimistic a faith in political leaders, in the absence of ground swells of public opinion, to call upon them. As I said before, if I could I would call upon us to reclaim the ideals, the realism, of the old movement. If we did, I think we should now be saying, and acting on the saying, that we stand for no political or economic system, no ideology; that we stand instead for women and men, boys and girls, living freely, everywhere. We stand for the hope of equal chances for all, and the demand for good chances of all, now, in our own time. We stand for peace; peace between nations: peace with each other. To be for peace is to be against violence. It is to be against inculcation of the values of violence, the training of the world’s youth in violence, the all-absorbing preparations for violence. We can no more make peace by threatening war than we can make friendship by threatening enmity. Sooner rather than later, that game will not work.

From the great nuclear plants at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Savannah River, S.C., to the Pantex Plant in the Texas pan-handle where the bombs and warheads are assembled, the South is deeply embedded in preparation for nuclear holocaust. From the hollows of Appalachia to the migrant farm labor camps of Florida the South is still the poorest of regions. Here, if anywhere, is the place to redirect America from policies and values that will not work, toward those that have been tested–and do.

Dr. Leslie Dunbar is the former director of the Southern Regional Council and of the Field Foundation. He now works with the Fund for Peace, Washington, D.C. The article here its adapted from. remarks to the Blue Ridge Institute for Southern Community Executives, July 26, 1981.

Protest and Survive. Edited by E.P. Thompson and Dan Smith, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981 $4.95.

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 4, No. 2, 1982, p. 4

Protest and Survive is a powerful gift from European Nuclear Disarmament (END) to the growing American movement. The book originated as a reaction to “Protect and Survive.” a take-cover pamphlet prepared in 1980 by British civil defense. The U.S. version contains historian E.P. Thompson’s “A Letter to America,” and 11 other essays exploring the current arms race, nuclear war, military bureaucracy and the prospects for peacemaking.

The introduction by Daniel Ellsberg details the secret history of U.S. nuclear threats against other governments since the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The instances include Korea, Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam and Iran. “Every president,” writes Ellsberg, “from Truman to Reagan, with the possible exception of Ford, has felt compelled to consider or direct serious preparations for possible imminent U.S. initiation of tactical or strategic nuclear warfare, in the midst of an ongoing, intense, non-nuclear conflict or crisis.” Most recently, the threats have appeared as public policy in the Carter Doctrine endorsed by the present administration, which would start World War III to protect Western oil interests in the Persian Gulf.

Emma Rothschild opens her essay with the observation that “the United States may buy itself two things with its $1 trillion defense budget of 1981 to 1985. The first is an economic decline of the sort that comes about once or twice in a century. The second is a nuclear war.” She examines the destructive costs of the American arms boom.

A former U.S. War Department analyst, Henry T. Nash, writes about his job with the Air Targets Division of the Air Force in the 1950s and 60s. He tells of the secrecy and professional competition existing in the bureaucratic preparation for mass homicide. Ambitious young analysts select and justify targets in the Soviet Union appropriate for receiving our nuclear warheads. If an analyst’s proposed target is selected for the official “Bombing Encyclopedia,” he may merit promotion and entree into even deadlier, more classified information.

Having left the Air Force project and become a teacher, Nash is now visited by “haunting memories of his work.” “What,” he asks, “enabled us calmly to plan to incinerate vast numbers of unknown human beings without any sense of moral revulsion?” He describes some of the “forces within the system that work against such self-examination.”

Amid insane circumstances worthy of all despair, the present disarmament movement now stirs on an international level. Protest and Survive is one sign that there is still a chance to save ourselves from ourselves. That the chance is genuine we can believe from the history of one of the nuclear threats which Dan Ellsberg recounts. In November of 1969, Henry Kissinger conveyed the warning to the Vietnamese at Hanoi “that Nixon would escalate the war massively, including the possible use of nuclear weapons, if they did not accept his terms.” Hanoi didn’t accept the terms and Nixon didn’t carry out his nuclear threat. Why not? As Nixon himself records in his memoirs, there were already too many Americans in the streets protesting the U.S. war policy.

Allen Tullos is a native Alabamian who is now completing his doctoral dissertation in history at Yale University.

An Update on Voting Changes in the South

By Staff

Vol. 4, No. 2, 1982, pp. 5-11

Since last summer, when legislative committees began meeting quietly and computers started humming, reapportionment in the South has charged into the political thicket like a herd of . . . well, elephants, some white Southern Democrats are now claiming, creating thunderous noise along ancient paths. Even as the campaigns approach, Southern legislative leaders hold fast to the belief that redistricting plans must protect incumbents and cap, if not minimize, minority voting strength.

An unexpected obstacle in the path of Southern reapportionment has been the Justice Department, which reviews all voting changes–including redistricting–in eight Southern states. Empowered by the Voting Rights Act, the Attorney General (in practice, the Assistant Attorney General and the staff of the voting rights section) is required to disapprove a voting change if the local or state government fails to prove that its plan is not racially discriminatory in purpose or effect.

The surprising fact is that the Reagan Administration’s Justice Department has enforced this provision and disapproved of statewide redistricting plans in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Texas. While approving a congressional district plan in Alabama, Justice is expected by inside observers to object to statewide plans in Alabama and Louisiana. It hasn’t acted in Mississippi yet.

In the face of the Reagan Administration’s weakening position on renewal of the Voting Rights Act, tax laws for segregation academies, and other civil rights issues, this string of objections is unique, if not miraculous. While civil rights lawyers are cautious in commenting on the pattern, Southern Democrats in the state Legislatures say the motivation is an opportunity for Republican political gains.

For example, some white North Carolina Democrats from Charlotte, Raleigh, and Greensboro charge that Justice’s interest in single-member districts stems from a political awareness that Republican candidates in suburban areas will be helped by the creation of majority black districts in urban areas, leaving white Democrats with out a majority in much of the metropolitan area.

Some white Democrats in Georgia echo that sentiment as they now protest Justice’s objection to a 57 percent majority black congressional district which the state legislature passed as it turned down a 69 percent district. “The Republican Administration is interested in getting rid of two white Democrats,” an administrative assistant to a Georgia congressman said, “and replacing them with a black and a Republican.”

Southern black state legislators (who are without exception also Democrats) counter these arguments with a string of facts about specific redistricting plans. They note that while objecting to several Southern redistricting plans, Justice often stops short of disapproving of most of the districts which were drawn to cancel or reduce black voting strength. In Georgia the legislature adopted a plan that will reduce by one the number of majority black districts in Atlanta and failed to draw several majority black districts in the rural Black Belt. In its objection to the plan, Justice did not disapprove of these districts but focused on three districts elsewhere. “It’s more of an approval than a disapproval of discriminatory districts,” says State Rep. Tyrone Brooks about Justice’s actions-in Georgia.

Moreover, despite possible Republican gains in some redistricting, white Democratic legislators have diluted black voting strength in places where Democrats would be replaced not by Republicans, but by other Democrats. Here the winning Democrat would, however, be a black. And there lies the rub.

From Virginia to Texas, legislatures have drawn districts in rural, heavily black or Hispanic areas that reduce or maintain at a low level the voting strength of a majority of non-whites. This pattern appears throughout the South’s Black Belt despite the fact that the population of this rural, predominantly black area has increased in several states. The Alabama legislature’s plan shaved off enough percentages in five existing districts with at least 60 percent black population so that blacks in the proposed districts do not have a voting majority. Almost every Southern state adheres to similar practice.

In recent weeks the federal courts have begun to intervene in state reapportionment, usually issuing orders for new plans where the state is unable to adopt a lawful plan in time to get the 1982 elections underway. While the

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courts have been seen as a major protection for black voting interests in the past, the early court orders in Southern reapportionment show no substantial promise that the courts will offer sweeping remedies for black voters. In South Carolina, a federal court has adopted the congressional plan which the lower chamber of the South Carolina legislature had passed over the objections of the legislative black caucus. In Texas, the two court orders for congressional and state house redistricting offer a mixture of improvements and disappointments for minority voters. Lawsuits asking for court orders in other states are pending in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Alabama.

Below is a summary of the reapportionment efforts in the 11 Southern states.

Alabama

Air traffic between Montgomery and Washington D.C., has been heavy in the last few weeks with several confabs between legislators and Justice Department officials. Legislators and attorneys representing the state have met with U.S. Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds and his staff several times, and legislative black caucus members as well as civil rights lawyers and community leaders have also journeyed to Washington to urge objections to the reapportionment plans for the state house and senate.

The groups voicing opposition to the state plan include the NAACP, ACLU, Common Cause, Alabama Democratic Conference and the League of Women Voters. These groups opposed the plans during the special session last fall and have protested both the plans and the closed-door decisions that developed them.

Recent data from the Alabama legislative staff indicate the state plan proposes to reduce black voting strength at the polls not only in the Black Belt but in districts presently held by black incumbents elsewhere. In the Black Belt, white State Rep. Bill Edwards’s district is reduced from a 70 percent black majority to 50 percent. Rep. Rick Manley’s district is reduced to 59 percent and Rep. Leigh Pegue’s district drops to 55 percent black. Both are presently above 65 percent. Manley served as chairman of the reapportionment committee and has been one of the principal lawmakers visiting Washington.

In urban areas the black percentages in some districts are also significantly reduced. Rep. Yvonne Kennedy, chairwoman of the legislative black caucus, saw her Mobile district go from 80 percent to 69 percent black and black State Rep. Bill Clark’s district in the Mobile area was also reduced from 90 to 68 percent black. In the Birmingham area, the reapportionment plan goes even further. It eliminates a black district–thus pitting two black incumbents against each other. Another district previously more than 60 percent black will be only 53 percent black. All told, the proposed plan would eliminate as many as five districts where black voters could elect responsive candidates.

A group of Alabama citizens has filed a federal court suit in Montgomery, alleging the plan violates “one person – one vote” and the voting rights of blacks. Meanwhile, Justice has granted the state an extension until April 15 to explain its plans. Capitol insiders suggest that legislative leaders are ready to compromise and are developing plans which they hope will appease Justice and minority objections.

The Justice Department recently approved the Alabama Congressional plan which was not the subject of controversy.

Arkansas

Declaring that the plan violated the constitutional doctrine of “one person – one vote,” a federal court struck down the Arkansas congressional reapportionment plan which had proposed hardly any changes from the 1970 plan. The court is forcing the legislature to try again to hold the differences between the populations of each district to reasonable limits.

But it is legislative, not congressional reapportionment that continues to be the subject of talk by activists in Little Rock. Civil rights advocates still hope to challenge the state legislative redistricting plan which is a mixture of single and multi-member districts. For the last several years the Arkansas legislature has had only three or four black members.

“It’s that damn ‘purpose’,” explains the head of a biracial lobbying group in Little Rock. “We know one of the primary purposes of the plan was to minimize the black vote in legislative races, but proving it was the purpose has us stumped for now.” Arkansas is not covered under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and the congressional and state plans need not be submitted to Justice for approval. In court, plaintiffs are required to prove both the purpose and effects of racial discrimination in voting cases.

Georgia

In early March, the Justice Department notified Georgia officials that it was maintaining its original objection to Georgia’s congressional plan, where the dispute centers around a majority black district in the Atlanta metropolitan area. State officials promptly challenged Justice’s objection in federal court in Washington.

The plan submitted to Justice unsuccessfully includes a fifth district that is 57 percent black. This was adopted during the special session last summer only after the state house refused twice to accept a congressional plan passed by the Georgia senate that included a 69 percent black district. Black legislators vehemently objected to the compromise plan which passed the senate by only a few votes and over the objections of Georgia’s two black senators, Horace Tate and Julian Bond, as well as the senate minority and majority leaders.

Justice objected also to parts of the state house and senate plans. The General Assembly then changed the house and senate plan to meet the requirement from Washington.

In the senate, Justice’s objection included two districts, one in metropolitan Atlanta (DeKalb County) and the other in Augusta. The legislators changed the DeKalb district to increase the black percentage to nearly 70. The Augusta district was drawn to increase the black population to 53 percent. The latter district is the seat of Senate majority leader Tom Allgood.

In the house Justice’s objection was to the Dougherty County house seats in southwest Georgia. Though the

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county’s black population has grown by nearly 10 percent in the last few years, reapportionment created only one black house district–the one which now has a black incumbent. Black legislators and community groups protested the dilution of minority voting strength in the rural Black Belt of Georgia, particularly the area around Dougherty. The Dougherty plan was redrawn to create two black districts–one with a 69 percent black majority and one with a 59 percent majority.

State officials’ refusal to cooperate on the congressional issue was the result of pressure from lame-duck Gov. George Busbee and newly appointed state attorney general Michael Bowers. Bowers must run for election in the fall.

A three-judge panel has been appointed for the state’s appeal in Washington and the Georgia legislative black caucus has intervened along with private citizens. The NAACP is also requesting the right to intervene. Although the state opposed intervention, the judges ruled on March 22 in favor of the caucus and private plaintiffs.

State Rep. Billy Randall, chairman of the black caucus, criticized the the action by-Bowers and others as continued discrimination against minorities, but he is equally dissatisfied with Justice’s objection. Randall believes the objection did not go far enough in disapproving dilution of black voting strength in house and senate districts in the Georgia Black Belt.

Florida

In Florida the battle lines on reapportionment appear to be drawn as clearly between the house and senate as between the legislature and community groups. Unlike most states, Florida’s two legislative houses have been unable to reach a “gentlemen’s agreement” where each house will draw up its own plan which would be adopted automatically by the other. The result is the development of house and senate plans by both houses. And none agrees with any other.

Though there is disagreement between the two bodies, both have created plans with single-member districts for the first time in Florida reapportionment history. Both house and senate plans have kept the total population deviation to less than two percent in each district. Legislators believe both these actions will protect against possible lawsuits.

One major disagreement revolves around the “nesting” of districts–a device which places a few house districts within the “nest” of a larger senate district. Alabama has used such a plan since its last reapportionment. Florida’s house supports such a concept, but not the senate.

Another disagreement between the houses is the senate election schedule. Florida’s senate members are elected for four-year terms, one-half elected every two years. The senate would like to have the senators elected in 1980 serve until 1984 and then run under new district lines. The result would be that only half the senators would have to run in November under the reapportioned districts. The house has refused to agree to such a plan amid rumors that a number of house members are interested in a senate seat.

Florida’s constitution allows from 80 to 120 house members and between 30-40 senators. Here the senate and house also disagree. The most recent senate plan creates an 80-member house. But the house plan (which is expected to eventually be accepted) calls for a 120member body–its present size.

The disputes between the two houses have spilled over to community groups involved in reapportionment. The NAACP supports the senate’s plans and Common Cause has backed the house’s plans. The groups have developed individual alternative plans with only limited support for each other’s actions.

Common Cause developed a plan which some black legislators and NAACP leaders believe will result in fewer voting-majority black districts. Common Cause maintains that its plan creates the most minority districts in the house (nine black and four Hispanic districts with over 50 percent minority populations). While admitting that its criteria for a “black or Hispanic” district is 50 percent or more minority population, Common Cause maintains that it has taken into account “population growth, voter registration, and voting patterns.” In most Southern states the minority population eligible to vote is usually 10 percentage points below the total minority population.

The house plan presently includes seven districts with 58 to 80 percent Hispanic population–all in the Miami area. Only two districts are more than 65 percent Hispanic. The plan includes seven black districts between 52 and 73 percent, and three black districts between 43 and 49 percent. Only one district in the Miami area is 65 percent or more black. The others are scattered throughout the state. A major concern of community groups is the lack of consideration shown to Florida’s Black Belt, the area surrounding Tallahassee.

The Common Cause plan allows for a 53 percent majority-black district including Leon County in the Black Belt. The plan also includes a 56 percent black district in metropolitan Miami where the house plan creates a 45 percent black district. Five blacks and two Hispanic legislators now sit in the Florida house.

Senate plans passed by either house include two Hispanic districts over 50 percent around Miami. The house plan creates a district that is 65 percent Hispanic while the senate plan calls for a 61 percent district in its own chamber. Both plans create a district around Jacksonville that is 47 to 48 percent black.

Community groups have indicated that there is little likelihood of creating congressional districts with more than 35 percent black population.

Louisiana

The Justice Department could decide before the end of April if the Louisiana congressional redistricting plan violates the Voting Rights Act. Civil rights groups and the senate legislative black caucus, who supported a majority black congressional district during the last legislative session, have filed comments against the state plan which divides the parish of New Orleans almost in half.

In its pleadings before Justice, the black caucus notes that, were it not for the governor’s veto, Louisiana would now have a plan with a majority black congressional district composed of the Orleans parish. Late last year when the Democratic legislature adopted a 55 percent black district, Republican Gov. Dave Treen vetoed the bill. Quickly abandoning the majority black district, the legislature drew the plans to adhere to the governor’s objections. That plan passed and is now before Justice.

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Reapportionment plans for the two houses of the state legislature are also before Justice, which asked in March for more information about their origins. Objections are also being raised to these plans which create 14 legislative districts with 50 percent or more black populations. To illustrate that the plans effectively dilute black voting strength, the black caucus has developed an alternative plan that creates 20 legislative districts with a majority of black registered voters.

Some observers believe the congressional plan may test the willingness of Justice to enforce Section 5 regardless of party politics. Much of the case against the congressional plan focuses on the veto of Gov. Treen, one of the few Republican governors in a Southern state covered by the Voting Rights Act. “No case I’ve seen before Justice better evidences that a plan was rejected by the legislators because it helped urban blacks,” commented a lawyer working with a legal defense fund in Washington. “We’ll see if Justice sees the evidence differently because of Treen.”

Mississippi

Schooled in more than a decade of litigation opposing fair reapportionment, the Mississippi legislature has proceeded with redistricting its two houses and five congressional seats with a wealth of computer runs and detailed maps and a careful avoidance of any plan that increases the potential for added voting strength of blacks. Turning back efforts of the legislative black caucus to create a majority black congressional district, leading state lawmakers appear willing to assure black incumbents of their seats, to limit majority-black districts to the number provided in the existing court-ordered plan, and generally to adopt “a holding action,” in the words of one veteran civil rights worker in Jackson.

The fight over the congressional plan late last year centered on the creation of a majority-black district from the Delta counties. Several plans were proposed in hearings and on the floor of the legislature which had districts with black populations ranging from 53 percent to 65 percent. All began somewhere in the Delta counties and the “65 percent” proposal by black State Sen. Henry J. Kirksey encompassed part of the Delta and the city of Jackson.

The congressional plan, approved by a 4 to 1 vote, maintained the character of the existing congressional districts. The new plan is now before the Justice department and is being opposed by members of the black caucus and statewide civil rights groups.

The likely reapportionment plan for the two state houses will maintain 46 majority-black districts in which 17 incumbent black legislators now reside. Of the 46, only 2S house and senate districts will have black majorities of 60 percent or more, a critical fact in a state where the black registration rate is usually 10 to 15 percentage points below the general population. Sen. Kirksey has proposed alternatives to the state plan but has been unable to convince a substantial number of his colleagues that his plan better avoids dilution of black voting strength. “Too many of the districts that are majority black barely hang over the 50 percent line” remarked David Green, a member of the legislative black caucus. “These districts just appear to be majority black when they really aren’t.”

Challenges to the redistricting plans for the legislature before Justice and the courts are also expected in Mississippi.

North Carolina

With the advice of former U.S. assistant attorney general Jerris Leonard, North Carolina state lawmakers passed their third set of reapportionment plans in March, combining historical multi-member districts with a few single-member districts which they hope will satisfy the Justice Department’s earlier objections. Lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, however, are predicting another Justice objection to the new state house and senate plans.

While a lawsuit in the mid-1960s required the redistricting of the general assembly, North Carolina had been immune to much of the disputes over redistricting that spread across the South in the 1970s. Its recent problems began when the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed suit in federal district court in Raleigh challenging the state legislative plans, the congressional plan, and a state constitutional amendment passed in 1968 requiring that all state legislative districts follow county lines. That amendment had not been submitted for approval to Justice as required under the Voting Rights Act.

Justice found late last year that the requirement diluted the voting strength of blacks and disapproved it. Meanwhile, legislative leaders were convinced that the differences in population among the various legislative districts were greater than the courts would permit under the “one person – one vote” constitutional theory. Thus, the general assembly reconvened and passed a new plan for its state house.

The old state senate plan and the new house plan were then submitted to the Justice Department which found that both followed the 1968 amendment and diluted black voting strength. Justice also found that the congressional plan had the purpose of diluting black voting strength by eliminating Durham, a center of political activity for blacks, from the second congressional district that has a black population of over 40 percent.

In early February, North Carolina lawmakers returned in special session and adopted a third set of reapportionment plans and for the first time created some single-member districts which crossed county lines.

No other issue seems to have caused as much stir in North Carolina legislative politics in recent history. “Some of us are being sacrificed on the altar,” said State Sen. Melvin Daniels who represents part of the northeastern section of the state. The new house plan creates two majority-black districts and the senate plan has one 52 percent majority-black district. The legislature carefully avoided drawing single-member districts in the metropolitan areas such as Charlotte Winston-Salem, and Raleigh, since those areas are not covered under section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

J.K. Butterfield, a black leader from northeastern North Carolina, presented a reapportionment plan at a public hearing which would create a total of nine majority black districts in the house and senate. But his plan was never introduced. For a time, the legislature did consider creating another majority-black senate district but apparently decided one was enough.

The new congressional plan was approved in early March and may prompt a black former U.S. attorney from Durham to challenge incumbent U.S. Rep. L.H.

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Fountain in the Democratic primary.

Several observers are predicting that by mid-April the Justice Department will bar the use of the third set of state legislative plans. While state officials have threatened to appeal an adverse ruling by Justice to the federal courts in Washington, the legislature passed a new bill providing for four different possible dates for primary elections–all hinging on when a state house and senate plan would become lawful. That law, too, is now before Justice.

South Carolina

In a surprising decision, a federal court panel adopted in early March a congressional plan for South Carolina which had been passed earlier by the state house of representatives but not by the state senate. The NAACP, which had filed suit asking the court to draw the congressional lines, protested the court’s opinion and promised to appeal the decision and seek an objection from the Justice Department.

The court-ordered plan makes few changes in the present congressional districts, although it does split Berkeley County, a suburb of Charleston. The division of the metropolitan area into two congressional districts rubbed some powerful state senators the wrong way, and they refused to approve the plan when it was before them.

The NAACP has presented to the federal court a plan that created a district with a majority black population. In a hearing on the issue, senior district judge Charles E. Simons attacked the NAACP plans as “gerrymandered to give more than 50 percent blacks.” The state house plan which the court has embraced has no congressional district with more than a 40 percent black population.

State legislative officials are moving rapidly to have the new plan implemented. State senate judiciary committee chairman L. Marion Gressette, one of the most powerful men in South Carolina politics, contends that the court plan need not be submitted to Justice for review under the Voting Rights Act. Civil rights lawyers disagree, and another legal battle may develop.

While the South Carolina legislature hopes that it may be near the finish line with congressional reapportionment, it still faces the task of drawing new lines for its own two houses. Justice disapproved the first plan of the state house because of the discriminatory effects of district lines, primarily in the Black Belt areas where the legislature systematically leveled the percentages of blacks.

The state senate hasn’t even begun to consider a redistricting plan. The all-white legislative chamber is postponing the task on the apparent hope that it can secure Justice approval of a plan more easily later in the year. Some black leaders, including members of the legislative black caucus, have charged that the state senators hope the Voting Rights Act will be weakened before the fall and that a plan without any majority black districts would be subjected to less scrutiny under a new act.

The all-white senate has been a subject of challenge for the past few years. The Carter Administration’s Justice Department filed a federal suit challenging the present districts of the state senate but withdrew the suit after the Supreme Court’s 1980 Mobile opinion, which now requires black plaintiffs to show that voting practices have both the effect and purpose of racial discrimination.

A plan submitted to Justice under the present Voting Rights Act’s Section 5, however, requires the state or local government to prove that the plan does not have the purpose or effect of racial discrimination.

Tennessee

Tennessee is the only Southern state which has passed redistricting plans that aren’t facing serious-legal challenges. Not covered by the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act, Tennessee also has had the advantage of adding a congressional seat to its delegation instead of fighting to determine who must be eliminated.

Early forecasts had warned that U.S. Rep. Harold Ford of Memphis, one of only two black congressmen in the South, would be gerrymandered out of his strongest support in western Tennessee. The fears proved unfounded, and Ford apparently is now assured of reelection.

Texas

After months of almost daily developments, two separate federal courts in Texas have issued orders establishing the boundaries of both congressional seats and the state’s general assembly for the 1982 elections. While the orders are under appeal, they bring into focus disputes that have involved lawyers, politicians and judges throughout the state.

In the last few months a scorecard on Texas reapportionment has required two or three sheets just to list the major players: the Democratic legislative leadership, the governor, a handful of state officials on the legislative redistricting board, a couple of state court judges, six federal court judges, Hispanic and black civil rights groups, and a couple of dozen lawyers representing all sides.

Despite such a large cast in what the usually well-modulated editor of the Texas Government Newsletter calls “arcane legal machinations and Byzantine maneuverings,” Texas redistricting has evolved around the three major issues of reapportionment. Will Republicans or Democrats gain? Will incumbents protect their own offices? And will racial minorities get a fair chance to elect representatives of their own choosing? Nobody has won all or lost everything but, if the court-ordered plans remain, blacks and Hispanics will probably have lost most.

Before the reapportionment last year, Hispanic leaders had maps showing how a congressional district with a majority Hispanic population should be drawn in southwest Texas because of increased population. The general assembly balked, and no such plan was included. While Justice found the congressional plan in violation of the Voting Rights Act and, more recently, a federal court in Austin has drawn a new congressional plan, the majority Hispanic district is still nowhere on the maps.

The state legislative plans drawn by a Dallas three-judge panel do improve the voting strength of Hispanics

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around San Antonio and El Paso but fail to avoid diluting black and Hispanic voting strength in the urban areas. The plan is “temporary” since the state legislature will have to try again in 1983 to adopt its own plans that meet constitutional muster.

Federal court intervention was required largely by the upcoming May 1 primary in Texas. In order for candidates to register and run for office they had to know what districts would be lawful.

While reapportionment will now be decided in the federal courts, the May 1 primary remains an uncertainty in the face of appeals and further challenges to the orders of the three-judge panels. More developments are expected daily.

Virginia

In mid-March the fifth redistricting plan drawn by the Virginia House of Delegates was rejected by the Justice Department in a decision which prompted the

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Democratic leader of the statehouse to advise the feds to “stick it up their ear.” Civil rights lawyers immediately filed a motion asking that the federal court in Richmond take over the job of redistricting the state legislature.

In its March objection Justice found that the legislature diluted black voting strength in rural southeastern Virginia, Newport News, and Norfolk. In the rural areas the legislature divided black communities in order to assure that only one candidate would be elected by blacks in areas where at least three majority black districts could be created. In Norfolk Justice disapproved of the only remaining multi-member district in the Virginia plan. Justice found that the multimember districts subsumed black voters in a larger district where candidates who won would always be the choice of the white majority.

The ruling was a victory for the ACLU, NAACP, and the SCLC, which had challenged the Virginia legislature at every step in court and before Justice. NAACP leader Jack Gravely called upon the legislature to end the “spectacle and waste of the taxpayers’ money.” Judy Goldberg of the ACLU said, “Let the courts do it.”

The federal court in Richmond found the first plan adopted by the legislature as unconstitutional in violation of the “one person – one vote” constitutional theory. The Justice Department also objected to the plan. Another plan was vetoed by then-Gov. John Dalton.

Four blacks presently sit in the Virginia House of Delegates from majority black districts. ACLU Director Chan Kendrick says that number can be more than doubled if the federal court adopts the plan which his group has drawn.

This report was prepared by the staff of the Southern Regional Council.

‘Fair Representation is Essential to Democracy’

By Raymond Wheeler

Vol. 4, No. 2, 1982, p. 10

I am a physician, a native of North Carolina, practicing in Charlotte. I speak today as a citizen of the state interested in fair and open government and equal opportunity for all people in the state. I speak also as a member of the Southern Regional Council, a group of Southerners both black and white which, for nearly 40 years, has pursued similar goals for all of the Southern region. The Council has done important research into patterns of citizen participation in the governing of North Carolina.

Since the turn of the century, when it was one of three Southern states that refused to hold a constitutional convention to disenfranchise blacks, North Carolina has maintained a separate identity in the Southern history of race relations and an almost singular reputation for fair dealings with its black citizens. We have a reputation for moderation and we deserve full credit for the accomplishment of self-restraint during the long years of turmoil and violence that marked the times before and during the Civil Rights Movement and during the painful period of adjustment to desegregation.

This reminds me of a statement made several years ago by John Seigenthaler, editor and publisher of the Nashville Tennessean at a meeting on Southern politics. “For decades,” he said, “Southerners of good will have pleaded for moderation. And, finally, it has arrived. Now that we have got it, God save us from it.” While allowing for a little Southern hyperbole, the sentiment is appropriate to the paradox of North Carolina’s moderation in race relations while we have been most effective in belittling the voting strength of a sizable black population.

It is certainly no surprise that the Justice Department has disapproved the plans of North Carolina for redrawing both congressional and legislative districts. All three plans have contained the same obvious flaw and they dilute the voting strength of North Carolina’s black residents by assuring them minority status in almost every district.

According to the 1980 census, of the 15 states with the highest percentage of black population, North Carolina has the smallest percentage of blacks in the legislature. Thirteen of those states elected at least one house of their legislatures entirely from single member districts. Twenty-two percent of all North Carolinians are black. The membership of this general assembly is 2.3 percent black!

North Carolina has the lowest percentage of black legislators of the seven states with black populations of 20 percent or greater. The national average per state is 12 percent black population and 4.2 percent black legislators.

Among the Southern states covered by the Voting Rights Act, North Carolina is second from the bottom in the percentage of all black elected officials. Statewide, 4.7 percent of our elected officials are black. For the record, in 1968 the percentage was 0.18.

I do not report these figures in order to argue that the percentage of black elected officials or black legislators should necessarily correspond precisely with the percentage of black population. However, the comparison is a bench mark of black participation in government and an indicator of how much progress is yet to be made.

The unavoidable conclusion is that in spite of a steady increase in black registration and voting in North Carolina, there is widespread and massive under-representation of black voters in the political affairs of the state. Whether by the design of political leadership or by prejudice of white voters, blacks have been denied the opportunity to participate in the process which determines how we are governed. So long as that is true, there can be little accountability or fair, open decision making in government.

Representative government for blacks is also important for whites. Unless the primary obstacles to full participation in the electoral process are removed, public confidence in government, citizen access to government, and public accountability of government officials will be unreached goals for both black and white citizens.

I am asking the General Assembly to face squarely and honestly the notion that a fair system of representation is essential to democracy. If you do that, you must agree that blacks need more representation in government and you must come down unequivocally in support of an electoral system based on single member districts throughout our state.

Legislatures in thirty states are already elected from single member districts including Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana.

Single member districts provide a wider diversity of interests in the legislature. Voters have clearer choices. Legislators have more responsive and loyal constituencies while at the same time the legislator is required to be more accountable.

Single member districts provide each of us with a sense of a greater stake in the responsibilities of government. There is no way that North Carolina can fail to emerge from such a process except as a stronger, more unified state in which needs will be met and problems will be solved.

The late Raymond Wheeler, a former president of the Southern Regional Council, made these comments to a North Carolina legislative committee on redistricting on Feb. 4, 1982.

Notes of a Klanwatcher

By Randall Williams

Vol. 4, No. 2, 1982, pp. 11-13

It’s easy and relatively safe, in 1982, to hate the KKK, but explaining why an anti-Klan movement is necessary, and getting those in that movement to agree with the explanation, is less simple. After a year Klanwatching (a friend still calls us occasionally, asks, “Have you spotted any today?” then bursts into hysterical laughter), we taped a favorite photo to a door in the office. The picture depicts a serious young man, a member of a Canadian anti-Klan group, in mid-leap from the roof of a car, placard stick raised on high, about to smash the head of an equally serious young man who is a member of another anti-racist group. The supporting parts in the photo are played by several dozen members of these two groups, battling in a melee apparently provoked by a difference of opinion on how best to oppose the racism and violence of the Ku Klux Klan in British Columbia.

Looking at that photograph, we at Klanwatch are apt to burst into hysterical laughter.

Part of the problem is that there are so many contradictions involved; many questions about what author Stetson Kennedy calls the Bedsheet Brigade can be truthfully answered both “yes” and “no.” We will look at other parts of the problem, but first, consider some of the contradictions.

No, there aren’t enough Klansmen and they aren’t well enough organized, right now, to pose the country any serious threat. Yes, you can still get hurt, killed or otherwise terrorized by the Klan if you’re the “wrong” color or doing the “wrong” thing. Or if you happen to be married to California Klan leader Michael Mendonsa, who recently ended his wife’s budding career in organized racism by blowing her apart with a shotgun.

Still another contradiction involves the recently widely publicized Klan recruitment of youth. No, the Klan Youth Corps is not experiencing a membership explosion similar to that of the Hitler Youth in the 1930s. Yes, the Klan today deliberately seeks out youth and involves them in rallies, demonstrations and training. And a startlingly high percentage of contemporary racist violence and harassment is committed by youngsters. Klan literature does show up in schools around the country. The stuff is available for the writing from three or four Klan publications and is advertised in gun and adventure magazines available at most grocery and drug stores.

Where Klan chapters exist, it should not surprise anyone when the sons and daughters of Klansmen say or do racist things or pass around literature in school. However, the Klan youth camps which were seen on television in 1980 and written about in Rolling Stone and other publications were largely spontaneous creations for the benefit of the press, and the kids in them were almost all the children of adult Klan members.

I think the Klan has definite allure for certain types of white children. Kids dwell on mystery, violence and sensationalism, and the Klan has all of that, especially as portrayed by much of the reporting on the subject today. Some kids–perhaps most of them, really–are raised with racism. Take a kid who already has all of that stuff running around in his head, who is at the age of rebellion, and who can’t make the debate team (or; equally likely, is never encouraged to try), gets beat out by black kids on the basketball team, and sits sullenly in the back of the classroom–that kid is ripe for recruitment.

But even the strength of the adult Klan is a contradiction. It is not true that the Klan’s membership is currently growing by leaps and bounds, through reporter after reporter dutifully licks his pencil point and records it when the local head cone confides, “Well, son, we don’t discuss numbers, but we’ve got klaverns now in every country in this state and three new ones started last week.” It is true that Klan membership today is the highest since the mid1960s and that the growth was dramatic between 1975 and 1980. We at Klanwatch believe the Klan’s membership leveled off in 1981, though there is potential for more growth. Clearly, this potential is aggravated by the mean mood of the nation as a whole. It should be remembered that there are plenty of people in Washington doing more harm with ink pens than the Klan is with axe handles. Elsewhere, racist violence, whether committed by actual Klan members or not, is at a sickeningly high level, as is religious bigotry.

There is genuine reason to be concerned about these turns of events, all condradictions notwithstanding, especially when the leaders of the nation seem blind to the existence of the problems and the causes.

Which brings us to today’s sermon topic. We can cuss, meet, march, legislate and litigate until the proverbial freezing over of hell, but until we start thinking about Klansmen as people and consider how it is that we still have a society which spawns them we’re not going to whip the problem. This is not to say that the current educational campaigns against the Klan are no good, or that the

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prosecutions and civil lawsuits against criminal Klansmen do not deter other racist violence, or that outspoken stands against the Klan philosophy have no effect. All of these are vital and are largely responsible for the current disarray within the Klan ranks.

But one of the obvious similarities of most Klansmen is an overwhelming ignorance and a complete alienation from our society and its institutions. It’s a tough concept to sell the “Death of the Klan” crowd, but I think most Klansmen, the rank and file, are victimized almost as much as the targets of their hatred. It may not have been as true in the Klan’s prior incarnations, when thousands of otherwise solid citizens were members, but most Klansmen today are pretty sad characters. As a class, they are powerless people on the fringes of social and economic life. They almost always have serious psychological problems, with so-much anger and hate that they are slowly burning up from the inside. They go through their lives being manipulated by their employers, by the finance company, by the landlord, by George Wallace and Jim Eastland and the like, and finally by smooth-talking salesmen like Bill Wilkinson (head of the Invisible Empire), David Duke (National Association for the Advancement of White People), and Don Black (Knights of the KKK).

Having been ignored for so long, many of them are attracted by the aroma of power which surrounds Klan leaders. It must be power, the prospective Kluxer reasons, because people like Wilkinson get on the Phil Donahue and Tom Snyder shows; they can go to city hall and attract half the police and all the press in town; they aren’t afraid to call (chuckle) a spade a spade; they’ve got big cars, bodyguards and can even wear a suit without looking as if it was bought that morning. Once he joins, the new Kluxer can get on the evening news himself, just for standing on the street corner in his robe.

In addition to power, the social aspect of the Klan, the sense of belonging to something, should not be overlooked. Most Klansmen have never belonged to anything. Surprisingly few of them, considering the Klan’s lip service to Christianity, even attend church, according to testimony in connection with a recent civil lawsuit against a splinter Klan group in Chattanooga, Tenn. One of the defendants in that suit, a participant in the shooting incident which injured five black women, testified that he had joined the Klan for reasons which included having a group of guys to drink beer with, and because he wanted to “help people.” (Some 32 percent of white Chattanoogans, according to survey data, were favorable to some aspect of the Klan, mostly to the old vigilante notion that the Klan keeps in line not only black people but also would-be wife deserters, wanton women, etc.) Under questioning, the Klansmen admitted that the only other organization he had ever joined was the French club in his high school.

He is not atypical. Frequently, Klan meetings and rallies have an atmosphere which for all its perverse weirdness can only be described as like a country social. There may be music and speeches, children playing in the grass, mama and daddy dressed in their robes, grandma sitting in her folding lawn chair, and plenty of fish and beer.

In such situations, an interested onlooker who can detach himself for a moment from his feelings of contempt and hatred for what the organization before him represents, will be swept by a sense of sadness and pity.

Or sometimes humor, because in its benign moments the Klan often makes me wonder: If I’m supposed to be so scared, why do I feel like laughing? Last summer, Mike Vahala (also a Klanwatch staffer) and I attended a Klan recruitment rally in a public park on the outskirts of Columbus, Ga. First the movie “Birth of a Nation” was shown, then there was the usual incoherent discussion of how the government and especially the courts had abandoned white people, then the meeting broke up so the Klansmen could go burn a cross, which was not permitted in the public park.

On impulse, Mike and I got in line in the caravan which formed, and we drove 10 or 12 miles out in the country, turned off the main road onto a side road, then off that onto a private road which went across a pasture and into some woods. It was dark and mighty lonely, and the 60 people who had been at the park had dwindled to 15 or 20. Except for Mike and myself and two guys we thought (and hoped) were undercover cops, the rest appeared to be Klan members, some robed and some not, or at least strong sympathizers. There had been no weapons in the public park, but suddenly everyone was wearing them.

It was a slightly anxious moment, but then it became obvious that no one was paying attention to us. Instead, there was a serious problem with the cross-burning equipment. In an achievement of high-tech Klankraft, the local boys had built themselves a reusable cross from sections of steel pipe. Wrapped with burlap and soaked with diesel fuel, the 30-foot cross was simply too heavy to lift. For a half-hour or so, an awful lot of grunting and sweating went on, and some mighty nice white robes got soiled with dirt and diesel fuel. By this time it was getting late, and Mike and I faced a long drive and were ready to start home.

We eased into the crowd and made a few suggestions, directed a couple of guys to get up on a pickup truck for leverage, had others tie a chain to the cross and pull, and finally the cross stood up, though by now the pipe had bent and throughout the ceremony which followed one Klansman had to brace the cross by holding to the chain. The ceremony itself was similar to an ROTC drill, with a lot of marching, about-facing, saluting and so forth. The leader couldn’t remember his lines and had to get out his Klan manual and read his piece. We couldn’t understand what he said anyway, because he read with his face down and through his mask. It didn’t seem to matter. The cross lit up the sky and the non-robed spectators made photographs, and the night air was enlivened by a few “White Power” chants. Then we all went home.

My point is not that ineptitude makes the Klan less dangerous, but that its members are merely human beings who happen to be united in a destructive cause. United also by ignorance, by their station in life, by their utter inability to comprehend the world around them.

In this case, ignorance is not bliss, but blindness. While visiting the national office (a one-room masonry building) of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Tuscumbia to serve a subpoena, I had a long, casual conversation with Charlie Thomas, who works in the office. Among other things, he insisted to me that the black man who was given Allan Bakke’s medical school seat (in the famous affirmative action case) had an I.Q. of 39. “You can’t be serious,” I responded, “Why, a person with an I.Q. of 39 can hardly talk.” “Yeah,” Thomas replied. “Aint it a damn shame.” When he saw that I was unconvinced, Thomas searched for a few minutes for the “proof” of his claim, an article he had read somewhere in one of the Klan newspapers. Thomas also insisted that the racial turmoil in Decatur, Ala., in 1979, when the Klan had attacked peaceful black demonstrators, had come about because the blacks were marching in celebration of the anniversary of the rape of a white woman. When I told him he was

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wrong, that the march had been to protest what the demonstrators perceived as the unjust prosecution and conviction of a retarded black man for that crime, he was unmoved.

Charlie Thomas did not strike me as a particularly evil man. He doesn’t seem too smart and he clearly is angry about a lot of things, though he has difficulty explaining just what. My guess is that if a good union had gotten to Charlie Thomas first, he would be just as dedicated to the brotherhood of workers as he currently is to the KKK.

We should think about that when we next start chanting, “Death to the Klan.”

Randall Williams is an Alabama writer who its currently serving as director of the KLANWATCH project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Remarks in Memory Of Lillian Smith

By Gene Gabriel Moore

Vol. 4, No. 2, 1982, pp. 13-15

It is appropriate that we make what echo we can of Lillian Smith’s lifelong battle for those eternal lost causes–a classless society, uncompromised equality, and a democracy undiluted by the greed of corporations, by the saber rattling of the jingoists, by the cynicism of the politicians.

Today, perhaps more than at any time since the repressive measures of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, during the height of the antiwar movement, we Americans are the victims of a regressive regime whose threat to our common inheritance, to the rights we were promised that summer in 1776, is multiplied by the fact that it is the national government on the Potomac, not a motley cadre of slack-jaw demagogues down in old Dixie that seems unwilling to translate into the realities of this century the principles of Thomas Jefferson, of Thomas Paine, of Martin Luther King, Jr.

How do you characterize an administration whose priorities are blatantly in favor of the pitifully deprived rich–and blatantly against a child suffering from malnutrition, blatantly against that old woman in a head ag trudging beside the blacktop in Bolivar County, Miss., blatantly against the hopes of barely literate students in some woebegone high school in Monroe County, Ala., blatantly against warming the bones of the elderly in Terrell County Gal, when the cold of winter creeps into their houses?

They can be characterized only as classist, racist, as dangerous to the health of this nation and, heaven help us suicidal to the state of the world–because whatever the Russians are, they are neither weak nor easily cowed, a fact which should not cause Americans to quake in fear but it should give us pause. There is no winner in a nuclear exchange. There is no world left for a winner.

We are not sleeping sheep. We are not so much in love with the upholstery in our sedans. We are not so tied to the feasts on our tables. We are not so adorned and pampered and sweetsmelling and satisfied that we will allow the Reagan people to distort and lessen the nobility and the humanity and the morality of this nation. Look closely at the rhetoric of the Reaganites. Look very closely. For you and I and our countrymen are in trouble.

Lillian Smith knew about trouble.

Lillian Smith did not rest in the shade. Lil did not lollygag. She did not hem and hew. She told the bigots in her midst to take themselves on the short road to hell. She spelled out in language that rings with lyricism just how close to hellfire those bigots were, how rotted their souls were.

It was the day of the lynching tree, that day when Lil and Paula Snelling started their magazine in my mother’s own sweet county of Rabun. Lil stood up and she told the Talmadges and the Bilbos and the Rankins and the Heflins and the Byrds and the Longs and the Crumps and the Stennises that their ways were the ways of ruin and corrosion–and she did her telling in the face of ever-constant risk to herself. And you can be sure that those who disagreed with her–and they were most of the people on this continent, including some who knew better, who should have been her natural allies–were quick to threaten, to attack, to harass, to accuse. The ring of the phone in the night was a fearsome thing on Old Screamer Mountain.

From Southern trees hang strange fruit. The line is from a Billy Holiday song, but the words became Lil Smith’s–and the novel Strange Fruit awakened the conscience of the Nation. Lil hastened the dawn, as Dabbs said. Her first book gave her an audience. It established her as a serious artist, as a writer of large gift, as a thinker influenced not only by the ancient storytelling traditions of her own Southern origins but also by Gandhi, by Freud, by the music that had been an integral part of her life since girlhood in Jasper, Florida.

Lil was short in stature, but she wasn’t afraid to stand up and let her words be heard. They were clear words and her message was persuasive and it was heard not only in Cairo, Gal, but also in Cairo, Egypt–not only in Vienna, Gal, but also in Vienna, Austria–not only in Macon, Gal, but also in Macon, France.

For a generation of Southerners, Lillian Smith provided the words that had not been heard in the states of the old Confederacy because overlaying our reach of the world was a certain silence. It’s a terrible sleep when you can’t wake up, Lil said. It was an evil silence. It was an evil imposed upon the brains of white infants in the crib. It was an evil enforced in the bosom of the family. It was an evil ratified by lawmakers. And it was, as all great evils are, as has been said by a chronicler of another evil in this century, utterly banal.

Lil was a white woman. She was a feminist before the word won broad currency, a thinker to the left of center. She was all those things–and she was a Protestant Southerner. She was all those things–but in the main Lillian Smith was a writer. I am a writer, she said to me in a letter. How others see me is how they see me. I see myself as a writer.

I see by the papers that there are biographers at work on lives of Lillian Smith. and it can only be hoped that they will bracket their approach to Lil’s life and work with that fact clearly in focus. She was a writer. It is too convenient to critics, to the media, to her enemies and even to her friends to characterize Lil as a propagandist–certainly a talented one, but a propagandist nevertheless.

I cannot imagine taking Lil’s message to her homeland out of an account of her life, but the fact is that the woman

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put one word after another in a way that celebrates the language and advances our understanding of literature’s higher role in the human experience. She did not use words merely as a means of transporting to distant corners the particulars of her philosophy. She used words as a poet uses words, and there are exceedingly poetic, lyrical reaches in her work. That is especially true in her nonfiction–in Killers of the Dream, in The Journey, and that small masterpiece, Memory of a Large Christmas.

Even in casual correspondence, in her letters to friends and acquaintances, Lillian Smith made art. It is too easily overlooked, the art of Lillian Smith; it is too easily nudged aside in our rush to commemorate Lil’s courage, Lil’s early and often lonely crusade against the base instincts of the species. We must never diminish Lil’s stature as an artist. She gave us in her two published novels and in her two major works of nonfiction literature which reveals our human depth and reach and nobility and foibles and angst. Just as Lil instructed young Martin King, then hardly more than a country preacher down in Alabama, on the fine lines of Gandhi’s nonviolent civil disobedience . . . she gave us a body of fiction and nonfiction which possesses the stuff of important literature.

My first encounter with Lillian Smith was Killers of a Dream. That book gave questioning feelings in me the words needed for me to discover answers. Multiply my experience by ten thousand and extend it into the next generation, as I have tried to do with my own children, and you begin to catch the impact which that brave woman on the mountain has had in our wondrous stretch of the planet.

We can expect no more than one Faulkner in a century, perhaps in two centuries. We can hope for no more than one O’Neill in a hundred years. A language can hope for no mare than one Eliot in a half-century. And whatever the challenges faced by our society in these closing years of the twentieth century–and they are true challenges–we cannot reasonably expect there to emerge a poet of Lillian Smith’s gift–a Lillian Smith to pit eloquence against the slick Hollywood rhetoric of the manipulators. We can expect no more than one Lil Smith, and she was here and she is gone.

Pat Conroy

I know well what the life and spirit of Lillian Smith represents–the transcendence of the artist over the unspeakable atrocities of her time. She was the word made fire. She was the writer who possessed the indissoluble courage to say “no.” She was the artist who loved the South with all her heart, but knew in her heart that the South was both glorious and completely wrong. She was the kind of Southern writer I tried to learn from and emulate–the kind who would throw up if they wrote Gone With The Wind.

I never cared that Scarlett O’Hara went hungry in the Civil War, in fact, I was glad. Because Scarlett O’Hara, and those fierce, abiding citizens like her, came out of that War and created the South to which I was born. Scarlett was true to her promise and rebuilt Tara and never went hungry again. Nor did she give a damn that millions of Southerners, black and white, would be hungry from the time they were born until the time they died. Give me Lillian Smith; let who will take Margaret Mitchell. Give me Nat Turner over Rhett Butler. Let me walk the long miles with Harriet Tubman instead of listening to Uncle Remus. Let me write love letters to the Grimke sisters of Charleston and say thanks to Abraham Lincoln. Allow me to tell General Lee that I’m delighted he lost the war and that I loathe any man, no matter how refined or cultured, who kills other men in defense of slavery. Thank General Sherman for me, for burning Atlanta, the city of my birth, the city I love, because slavery could only end in a blaze of horror and fire. Put a rose on the grave of Martin Luther King for me. Apologize for me that I once hated his guts and called him rigger. I was a white boy raised in the South and he will understand. Tell him it was people like him, people like Medgar Evers, Julian Bond, John Lewis, Will Campbell, Courtney and Elizabeth Siceloff and hundreds of others who made me look in the mirror.

When I looked in the mirror I saw Bull Connor, George Wallace, Birmingham, Selma, separate drinking fountains, fire hoses, and blood in the streets. I saw the whole bruised tragic history of the South in those Southern blue eyes. In the mirror I was seeing myself for the first time as an enemy of the family of man. When I was a teenager the South was at war again, but the most splendid and magnificent warriors in the history of America carried no weapons into battle. They carried only a single word, “Freedom,” and all the guns of the South, all the troops and all the sheriffs, all the governors and fine Senators, all the armies of the Klan and the death squads from the Virginias to Mississippi learned something of the magic and the grandeur of the English language. They were defeated by that one glorious word. I wish I had been old enough or wise enough to have used that word in my childhood, but Scarlett O’Hara and I were at the country club working on our tans when the horses stormed across the Selma Bridge.

I grew up in the South and I hated riggers and Jews–in fact, I think I hated everybody. I brought remarkable skills to the art of hating. But I was granted a gift when I was taught the alphabet at Sacred Heart School on Courtland Street in Atlanta in 1950. I was taught to read and I learned to listen to the language. The learning of the alphabet began a slow revolution in my soul. I could hate riggers until Eugene Norris, a white English teacher in Beaufort, S.C., made me read Richard Wright and James Weldon Johnson and Countee Cullen and James Baldwin. I could hate Jews until the same teacher made me read The Diary of Anne Frank. I could hate everyone until synagogues were bombed, black girls were killed in church, and men and women were firehosed and bitten by dogs, beaten and clubbed at bus stations, and murdered and buried in levees in Mississippi. They taught me how to feel. Then they taught me to write and I learned that all writing is worthless without feeling; all writing is worthless without passion and faith.

In the late Sixties I became one of those tiresome Southern white changelings. You know the type. Blacks grew weary of the type very quickly, but I was irrepressible in those quickstepping days and my calling to the priesthood of civil rights, as I saw it, was to make my white brothers and sisters understand the spiritually crippling malady of racial prejudice. Always fear the convert–and at the same time I was one of the most zealously obnoxious converts to the cause of civil rights I ever encountered. I’m sure I did much accidental harm to the movement. I was perfectly ridiculous. It was at this moment in history I volunteered to teach on Daufuskie Island off the coast of South Carolina during the first year of teacher integration. This was 1969 and it now seems a

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thousand years ago. I had once argued persuasively with yankee classmates that the South had separate but equal school systems and still rather believed it on the day I reached the island. On the first day of school I learned that not one child in grades five through eight knew what country they lived in and my education as a Southerner was complete. I have never heard one Southern politician from Strom Thurmond to George Wallace to Herman Talmadge admit that they were monstrous, unconscionable liars when they claimed the separate but equal doctrine. They were all liars. I loathe them to this day because I once believed them. And they never had the grace to recant. They never even had the common decency to say they were wrong.

In closing, I want to tell you that the Great American South will never exist and it will always be waiting to be born. Dreams are almost never born; they are gently urged along. The Southern Regional Council has done much of this quiet gentle urging. You are desperately needed; you are required. Because of President Reagan and his administration the Southern poor and the American poor will suffer grievously. There will be hunger and sadness in the land again, in the world again.

Fight them.

The articles below were excerpted from speeches delivered at the Atlanta Biltmore Hotel on Nov. 6, when the 1981 Lillian Smith Awards for literature were presented by the Southern Regional Council.

The annual awards recognize the best fiction and nonfiction books about the South. The 1981 winners were Pat Conroy for Lords of Discipline and John Gaventa for Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley.

Atlanta writer Gene Gabriel-Moore delivered the keynote remarks.

Pat Conroy currently lives and works in Rome, Italy, and could not be present for the Smith Awards banquet. He sent his remarks, excerpted here, to Bernie Schein, who make the speech on Conroy’s behalf.

The Reagan Impact On the South’s Poor

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 4, No. 2, 1982, pp. 15-16

More than three decades ago, after the country had climbed up from the Deep Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt said that the South was the “nation’s number one economic problem.” A few years ago. facing a sluggish national economy, the president of Westinghouse declared that the South is now “the number one economic opportunity for business.” The changes have been remarkable. In the last decade the region experienced the most rapid economic activity in its recorded history, and in population and gross income it exceeded the nation’s growth.

Yet, other statistics tell us that Southerners remain the country’s poorest people and the poorest paid workers. Only in Texas among the Southern states does the per capita income equal the national average. In Mississippi, per capita personal income is only 69 percent of the nation’s, and the average Alabamian has only three-fourths of the income of the average American. In the Deep South, industrial jobs pay only about 68 percent of the wages for the same jobs outside the region.

The incomes of Southern families, especially black families, remain very limited. In 1976, in the census South, 25 percent of white families earned less than $8,000, and one in three families earned less than $10.000. Of the nearly three million black families in the same region, 49 percent earned less than $8.000, and more than 60 percent earned less than $10,000. Nearly one in three of all black families in the region were below the poverty level in 1976.

As this distribution of income suggests, the heads of Southern families–and most of them do work–are poorly paid, and black wage earners are disproportionately concentrated in low-paying jobs. Indeed, the gap between the incomes of black and white families in the South remains comparable to that of 30 years ago, when the region had legal segregation. For every dollar the white family earned in 1950 in the nation, the black family earned 51 cents. In the South in 1950, the black family had 56 cents for every dollar available to the white family. By 1975 the income of black families had risen in the region and the nation to 61 percent of white families’ income. But by 1980 black families” income in the South had dropped to nearer 57 percent of white income.

Perhaps most disturbing, black males’ income in 1950 was 58 percent of white males’ income. By 1975 black males’ income had dropped to 57 percent of white male income, and in 1980 it was nearer 55 percent. Really not surprising, the 11 Southern states remain the home of one-third of the nation’s poor and one-half of the nation’s black poor.

Into this era of simultaneously accelerating economic activity and sinking personal reward came Ronald Reagan, who interpreted his victory margin of less than 5 percent as a “mandate” for major changes in the role of the federal government and the allocations of the federal budget. These changes presume the existence of a wasteful, bloated bureaucracy of excessive benefits to a huge lot of undeserving and a small number of deserving, truly needy individuals. The reality is very different.

Though similar contrasts can be shown for housing, Medicaid and employment training, a brief look at food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) shows how Reagan is cutting away our promise to the poor before it began to be truly fulfilled.

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There are wide variations in the level of AFDC benefits for families across the country, although the composition of the family may be the same. For example, before Oct. 1,1981, the maximum monthly benefit to a family of three with no additional income was only $96 in Mississippi and $122 in Tennessee. In New York it has been more than $200.

Even before October 1981, AFDC payments have been received by a relatively small percentage of the South’s population. Less than 7 percent of Mississippi’s population received support from this program, and in no other Southern state was the percentage as high. In Texas, for example, only three percent of the state’s population were recipients of AFDC.

When compared to the number of poor in the South today. these statistics belie the notion that the welfare rolls. before the budget cuts, included many who weren’t needy. The numbers of poor among the total population in most Southern states were three or four times larger than the numbers of those on AFDC. In Alabama, 16.4 percent of the population was poor, while only 4.6 percent received welfare benefits. In Mississippi, the 7 percent of the population on AF DC was dwarfed by the 26 percent of the population in poverty.

These comparisons add up to one important fact about the welfare program that existed before Oct. 1, 1981: many more poor children in the South were in families without AFDC support than with it. In Florida, less than 40 percent of the children in poverty received benefits from the government’s major cash assistance program for the poor. In the 11 Southern states, only 3.5 percent of the population receives cash assistance from AFDC while more than 10 percent of the families within the South had incomes below 75 percent of the poverty level.

In the program which provides food stamps to the poor and the poorly paid, the number of poor who have actually received benefits in the South is considerably below the total poor population of the region. At the beginning of 1980, nearly two out of five poor families in the South did not receive anv food stamps.

Benefits provided under the Food Stamp Program are determined largely by the amount of money needed to obtain an adequate, nutritional diet. A family of three in Arkansas receiving the maximum AFDC payment of $161 before Oct. 1 could have received $160 in food stamps. An AFDC mother in Arkansas probably spent more than $23 of her AFDC payment on food, leaving less than $138 a month for rent, utilities, transportation, clothing, and other essential expenses of herself and two children.

Life with both AFDC benefits and food stamps has been no easy ride for the poor in the South. Combined benefits provided by AFDC and food stamps were extremely low even before cutbacks. Few states provided combined benefits equal to the official poverty level. As of May, 1981, nine states–all in the South–provided combined benefits which were less than 65 percent of the poverty level.

These numbers do not deny that programs aimed at reducing poverty have been at times poorly administered or even ill-conceived. Much of the government’s efforts in the area have probably been ineffective. Nonetheless, the national government’s commitment to ending poverty has not been what it is portrayed to be by this Administration. By no analysis can the programs in the South be shown as overly generous to the unneedy.

Yet the truly needy of the South are being abandoned by the present and anticipated policies of the national government. This Administration has offered nothing that signals an attempt to rethink any misjudgments of the last 15 years in the war against poverty, nor to redirect or reshape the government’s role in helping poor citizens become productive, tax-paying citizens. To date, this Administration offers hardly more than a dedicated, official effort to remove any form of government aid from the poor. While appeals to volunteerism and the magic of the private sector are presented as alternatives, cold facts suggest that the national government has now transformed the war on poverty of 15 years ago to a war on the I poor today. If this effort continues, the South’s poor–both those who now work and those who do not–shall face a future of crippled opportunities and the nation will have surrendered the truest, most selfless element of the American character.

Steve Suitts is the executive director of the Southern Regional Council. This article is adapted from remarks at the Southern Labor Institute in December.

Figures of Speech–Can a Country Boy Survive?

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 1-3

You have to stay up awful late in Alabama nowadays to put nostalgia and melancholy under the table. In cahoots, Action News and the jukebox are blowing the null breath of extinction. Some of the good ol’ boys feel the hair rising on the backs of their necks. They even have a tune: “Who’s Going to Sing the Last Country Song?”

But it is the NAACP’s Benjamin Hooks who asks the musical question. Blacks, he says, have lived so long with hard times and thwarted hopes that they know the territory. What will the white folk do? Spook and go off halfcocked, he fears. Realize a common plight? Not likely. Hooks is familiar with the shape and color of banty messiahs and traditional scapegoats.

As I drive a car-full of friends across Birmingham’s Red Mountain one night this May, the signals come clear. Vulcan, the iron man, holds high a red torch to show a death on the highway. The familiar cracks about his near-nakedness are more biting: how the Vulcan forgot to cover his ass, how Birmingham is mooning the affluent, over the-mountain community of Homewood for its failed merger vote. Looking down upon miles of city lights, we hear the car radio offering Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama. Down home this song is always in revival but tonight I hear, in a new way, the line “In Birmingham they love the Governor . . .” For the last twenty years, Alabama has really had only one Governor.

The news in Birmingham, bad for months, got worse in May and June. Magic City unemployment hung around twelve percent even before word came that U.S. Steel (a major employer for three-quarters of a century) was closing its Fairfield Works and even before local schools turned out for the summer. As a state, Alabama s jobless rate is second only to that of Michigan. The Governor, who carried Michigan in the 1972 Presidential primary, insists that he left the Heart of Dixie a different legacy. “When I was Governor the last eight years,” he proclaims, “we were first in the Southeast in new and expanded industries.”

On the radio, some Fairfield workers are interviewed.

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Twelve thousand steelworkers punched in at Fairfield just five years ago. Now, their numbers cut to nothing, their feelings are variously strong and resigned. Almost all of them resent the secrecy and hard-heartedness of U.S. Steel. Some blame the Japanese, some the “business cycle.” The district’s Congressman, Republican Albert Lee Smith, audaciously blames the workers themselves.

“I’d be willing to take a cut in pay,” says one veteran, “if we could keep the plant open. But the big man has to do some giving back too.” The Big Mules at U.S. Steel refuse comment. They check their digital watches and have their secretaries dust decades of fly ash and tailings off of ancient carpetbags.

Such were the Steel City’s ironies this May that among all the layoffs and rumors of layoffs, the AFLCIO was holding its Southeastern labor conference. Union officials heard the growing rank and file anger, noted the increasing toll that Reagonomics was taking on industrial membership and speculated. that momentum, continuing to build from Solidarity Day, would bring some election results this fall. The Southern union leaders pledged stronger organizing campaigns among service workers. Black and white women working in hospital, office and food service jobs may help shape labor’s direction in the l980s.

Meanwhile, a quarter gets you only two plays: Merle Haggard ringing the jingo bell with his latest “Okie From Muskogee” spinoff, one called “Are the Good Times Really Over For Good?” and George Jones singing “It’s the Same Ole Me” as he fails to show for a performance at Boutwell Auditorium.

Birmingham’s Post-Herald observes that as of January 1982, more than 45,000 people, about seven percent of the Jefferson County population, take their guns to town. Thousands more keep them handy at work or at play.

Guns take the worry out of being close. “Knowing what’s going on in this town,” says one citizen, “you need a gun.”

No matter how early you wake up in Alabama nowadays, a mean taste whispers in your mouth. A whisper that sometimes rises to a scream. Lately, it has found voice in Hank Williams, Jr., providing an unauthorized campaign anthem for a re-tuned George Wallace, The Governor:

I live back in the woods, you see,
My woman and the kids and the dogs and me.
I got a shotgun, rifle, and a four-wheel drive
And a country boy can survive.*



* A Country Boy Can Survive,” copyright, Bocephus Music, 1981.

It hurts that Hank Jr. has chosen this tact that country boys will be boys. For several years his considerable musical gifts and poignant Iyricism have shadowboxed his father’s awesome legacy and struggled against country music cliche. But his toughest opponents remain the sexism and the half-snarling, half-plaintive, go-it-alone stance which plagues the genre, the culture and the family tradition of which he sings. On his recent album, The Pressure Is On, Hank Jr.’s antagonisms too often invoke the emotions of reaction. Codewords are just a shot away. He sings in his powerful solo voice, while the electric guitar drives in dead earnest:

I had a good friend in New York City
He never called me by my name, just “Hillbilly.’
My grandpa taught me how to live off the land
And his taught him to he a businessman.

He used to send me pictures of the Broadway nights
And I’d send him some homemade wine.
But he was killed by a man with a switchblade knife
For forty-three dollars my friend lost his life.

I’d love to spit some Beech Nut in that dude’s eyes
And shoot him with my ol’, forty-five.
Cause a country boy can survive.
Country folks can survive.*



* A Country Boy Can Survive,” copyright, Bocephus Music, 1981.

Hank Jr. turned thirty-three in May and allowed the photographers to snap him hunkering at his daddy’s graveside in Montgomery. Yet along with the new confidence that he gives off, it is as if at the entrance to his country-rock domain in Cullman, Ala., Bocephus has thrown up a guardhouse and razor wire fence. Here, the passwords–“We say grace and we say ma’am”–give clues to the same fierce anger which, in part, propels the Wallace candidacy–“if you ain’t into that, we don’t give a damn.”*

* A Country Boy Can Survive,” copyright, Bocephus Music, 1981.

Behind the swagger, and despite the worthy call to more self-sufficiency, the message is one of romantic retreat and retrenchment. And this in a state where country boys’ farm debts now total more than two billion dollars, a rise of eighty-four percent since 1977. What happens when the bank comes to repossess the four-wheel drive? The romance of outlawry is thin solipsism to pour over the hard biscuits of attrition. Perhaps country boys can survive. Can they grow up?

For George Wallace, May brought another sort of commemoration and a resurrection–that most miraculous of survival tactics. First elected Governor in 1962, Wallace has served three terms, four really, if you count

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the time his late wife Lurleen sat in for him until her death by cancer. Now, after a self-imposed four-year “retirement,” and with a new wife, Lisa, who once sang country songs with her sister (Mona and Lisa) in the 1968 Wallace For President campaign, The Governor is ready to honor the state again with his service. Ten years to the month after he had been shot and partially paralyzed, he made the announcement. As of today, his chances for election seem excellent. Much depends on whether he can maintain the appearances of strength, stamina and coherence. It’s hard for anyone to campaign against a man come back from the grave with an electorate desperate to prevail with ah’ its myths intact.

“So hell,” The Governor told a Post-Herald interviewer, “I nearly died ten times after I was shot. I’d get well and peritonitis would develop. I would never do anything that would injure my health because I have a God-given instinct to want to survive as long as I can.”

In June, as he hops about the state from barbecue fundraiser to television studio, it is not George Wallace who appears immobilized, but many of Alabama’s voters and politicos. The spectrum of opposition appears ideologically narrow, tentative and uninspired. A few black leaders, most prominently Montgomery’s E. D. Nixon (the bus boycott leader) and Tuskegee Mayor-Johnny Ford, have even made horse trades with The Governor and are willing to swallow their history lessons in exchange for the promise of small leverages and front seats on the early-rolling bandwagon.

So back to the jukebox and one more play. This time however, it’s Tammy Wynette singing, not “Stand By Your Man,” or “Take Me To Your World,” but a different story. In it, a woman begins to find herself only after her man has moved out. She is glad to be rid of his hang-ups, gives his favorite chair to charity, wears her jeans a little tighter, changes her hair style and learns how to dance. Then, when her used-to-be wants to do her the favor of moving back in, Tammy sings, “Maybe you better wait a little bit longer, before you come back and give me another chance.” It is a promising tune which Alabamians ought to consider in this season of survival.

The Lost Colony of North Carolina

By Donna Dyer and Frank Adams

Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 3-11

“We don’t have poverty in Hertford County. People live like that because they want to. They don’t want it any other way”–L.M. “Mutt” Brinkley, Hertford County Commissioner.

In speaking of the rural poor of Northeastern North Carolina, Sister Mary Genino, a Catholic nun who has worked in the region for three years, acknowledges a bewildering configuration of powerlessness: “They are bound,” she says, “by a social structure that has not changed for hundreds of years. It has affected their economic freedom, their political freedom and their social freedom. They don’t vote–though no one comes around with a gun or turns them away from the voting polls. They drop out of school–because education doesn’t get them anywhere. And although there are no written laws that say ‘blacks and ‘while,’ the mores of past generations are still rigidly adhered to.”

Seldom since William Byrd staked the Virginia–North Carolina boundary in 1728 has there been so much discussion within and without the region about conditions of life in the “Northeast.” Some have begun to call the area east and north of Interstate 95 the state’s “lost colony.” Colonies exist when a region’s people or natural resources are under the sway of outside individuals and institutions. A colony is subordinate to and dependent upon outside sources of accumulated capital, upon the “superior training” of outsiders or their agents, upon the outsiders’ control and manipulation of privileged information, or some combination of these factors.

Advantage over the colonized or peripheral region is preserved through manipulation of wages and labor markets, through continued or increased levels of outside ownership over resources, and through the thousand and one ways in which wealth and concentrated power make themselves felt. There are also the advantages which are played through in discriminations of sex, race, religion or culture. And when necessary, there can be a show of force. Poor people are usually numerous in dependent regions (witness Sister Genino’s comments), and passions over racial attitudes, sexual traditions or religious beliefs often divide them, further preventing effective challenges to the causers and causes of poverty and quiescence. Appalachia is one such colony in the United States.

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Is Northeastern North Carolina another one?

In August 1981, Governor James B. Hunt, Jr., spoke at an “economic summit” arranged by the Department of Commerce in Edenton, once the state’s capital. The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot announced the event saying the Northeast’s governmental and commercial leaders were being invited “to continue a process of focusing bureaucratic, political, and economic attention on the region.”

Later that month, either spurred by the governor’s zeal or unimpressed by what they heard, sixteen counties formed a coalition calling itself Northeastern North Carolina Tomorrow to promote a regional agenda for economic growth. In October, they met with a delegation of Virginians to plea for help in pushing tourism, industrialization, links with the thriving Tidewater, and markets for new products. The area’s feelings of being a stepchild were underscored by talk of secession. State senator Melvin R. Daniels, Jr., a Democratic Party stalwart and influential banker, told the Virginians, “If things don’t go right with redistricting in Raleigh, we might petition Virginia to take us back in–everything from the Roanoke River through the Chowan River Basin.” Whether ploy or facetious warning, Daniel’s remarks drew swift rebuttal from equally powerful state senator J.J. “Monk” Harrington, a Lewiston manufacturer, who bluntly defended the state’s efforts to spur development. He said, “I think Northeastern North Carolina has been looked out for quite well by North Carolina officials. I have never known them-Virginians–to give us anything. We give and they take.”

Governor Hunt’s Balanced Growth Policy stirred some faint hopes for economic growth in the Northeast, a land of productive farms, endless timber tracts, pocosins, slow moving rivers and small towns. But the highly visible policy debate during the governor’s first administration spawned more rhetoric than results. The coalition’s leaders, pushed by Ahoskie newspaper publisher, Joe Parker, were agreed in their determination to see some change in the region’s bleak economic status. They arranged public meetings and held symposia at community colleges and offices of Chambers of Commerce. However, despite the region-wide, public nature of all the talk, very few of the debate’s participants offered more than a glimpse into the Northeast’s economy, or provided an analytical framework for discussing the region’s severe economic ills.

For instance, there are shifting definitions of which counties are to be included, or more accurately, are willing to be tarred as “underdeveloped.” The Governor’s Task Force on Northeastern North Carolina, the group responsible for the Edenton Summit, included Beaufort, Bertie, Camden, Chowan, Currituck, Dare, Gates, Halifax, Hertford, Hyde, Martin, Northampton, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Tyrrell and Washington. Their list coincided with the sixteen-county coalition. Other observers, particularly a few municipal, regional planners, and University of North Carolina professor of planning Ed Bergman, argue the entire First Congressional District shares the common demoninator of an agrarian-based economy with the lowest per capita income in the state. In accepting Bergman’s position, we include Carteret, Craven, Greene, Lenoir, Pamlico and Pitt counties in our analysis.

Too, the debate has been blurred by a division as to the reasons for persistent underdevelopment. Some point to myriad human deficiencies; others blame the lack of roads, schools or bridges. The first camp attributes the region’s plight to ills they say are inherently a part of the Northeast’s people and their culture. In circular fashion, they claim that the often shocking statistics of poverty, poor health, inadequate diet, ignorance, rotting housing, or lack of participation in the electoral process characteristic of the First Congressional District, explains the origins and causes of underdevelopment. Another camp, perhaps the majority, holds that the lack of adequate roads, incentives for investors, shortages of skilled labor, and inadequate tools for capital formation prevent regional modernization.

Both camps ignore several essential questions: Who owns or controls the land in this sprawling region? Who owns the region’s jobs? Where do profits go? How are governmental services distributed, or taxes levied? These key questions are at the base of any regional analysis. And while the Governor and the coalition have let them go begging, some of the citizenry has not.

Dr. Eugene G. Purcell, a minister and professor of philosophy at Atlantic Christian College, spoke at a regional development seminar organized by Elizabeth City’s College of the Albemarle on November 17, 1981. He drew knowing, approving nods from listeners when he declared that growth is difficult because people “realize the critical decisions that affect them most are made by people they cannot see and do not know.” Purcell continued: “The economic future of small towns is determined in a corporate boardroom in a distant city.

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Impersonal bureaucrats make decisions about state or federal funding and control of the schools, the quality and availability of medical care, who gets a slice of the welfare pie, what interest rates you pay for borrowed money, and even the quality of the air you breathe or the water you drink.”

Intellectuals are certainly not the only persons asking who prospers from the region’s people and resources. In 1979, before the present debate became public, a popular bumpersticker was sold at many Northeast restaurants, grocery and hardware stores. The message? “Welcome to North Eastern North Carolina: Owned and Operated by VEPCO.” The bumpersticker reflected the successful drive by twenty-one Northeast municipalities to terminate contracts with Virginia Electric and Power Company (VEPCO), headquartered in Richmond, and then buy power from Carolina Power and Light Company, based in Raleigh, saving, they predicted, $1.1 billion over a twenty-one year period.

Who Owns the Land?

According to the Sixth Edition of the Profile of North Carolina Counties, published in 1981,thereare5,783,500 arable acres in the District. Farmers till 24.9 percent of the land, or 1,400,700 acres. Timber is grown on 61.8 percent, or 3,572,200 acres. The federal government owns 233,909 acres, or 2.5 percent, using that land principally for military bases or parks. The remainder is taken up by roads, towns, trailer parks, shopping centers, junkyards, schools or prison camps.

All told, according to the 1978 U.S. Census of Agriculture, there are 10,658 farms in the District. They produced twenty percent of the state’s agriculture receipts, or $657,204,000, averaging about $62,000 per farm. The majority are small, inherited, family-held operations whose number is declining.

North Carolina State University’s Dr. Leon E. Danielson found in a 1981 study that about a third of all the state’s farmland was owned by retired persons, or by white- and blue-collar workers who farmed part-time and worked other jobs. The average size of a North Carolina farm was forty-two acres. The patterns he found hold in the Northeast, especially because tobacco is grown in abundance, and is labor intensive, and can be done part-time. But changes in farming practices, operating costs, interest rates and labor costs are wiping out the small family farm. Black farmers in the District have been particularly hard hit. Their number declined from 2,570 full-time farmers tilling 111,888 acres in 1954 to 529 full-time farmers working 26,876 acres in 1979, a drop of seventy-nine percent, causing the N.C. Division of Policy Development in June 1981 to predict that by the end of the century “there will be no black-owned farms,” in the state.

As small farms vanish, larger farms and “superfarms”–requiring huge capital resources and extensive management skills, have taken their place, adapting new technologies and taking in previously unused or marginally productive land. This trend started in 1973 when Malcolm P. McLean, the one-time Winston-Salem trucking magnate, paid $60 million for 581 square miles c land or about one third of the entire Albemarle-Pamlico peninsula, and appropriately called what he’d bought (the state’s largest farm), First Colony Farms. Since then, dozens of other investors, all but two from outside the region, have bought and developed land, cleared and drained the property, then leased or resold the farms to absentee owners or corporations. Mostly corn, soybeans and hogs are raised on these farms. A partial list of the Northeast’s superfarms includes the 44,000acre Open Grounds farm in Carteret County, owned by an Italian grain merchant; the 35,000acre Mattamuskeet Farms in Hyde County, owned by John Hancock Mutual Insurance Co. of Boston, which has another $70 million in invested farm mortages elsewhere in North Carolina; a 7,500-acre farm along the Roanoke River in Halifax County, owned by ten New York City investors; and two Washington County farms–one totalling 9,400 acres and the other 4,700 acres–owned by foreign investors hidden so completely by corporate veils that even the resident managers don’t know for whom they till. Only two of these megafarms are held by North Carolinians: Rich Farms, a 13,000-acre operation east of Belhaven, and the 15,000acre farm operated by the relatives of A.D. Swindell around Pantego.

Decisions about the daily operations on these are made locally, but management policies are set elsewhere. Profits and tax advantages accumulate elsewhere, too. Further, local control over land use policy is eroded, if not lost, as a result of absentee farm operations. Even the state’s Environmental Management Commission found their reins a bit short. They voted to assess the impact of the superfarms on the ecology because “no one knows now what effect the ‘gigantic denudations’ of large farms . . . will have in the long run on weather, water, and wildlife . . .” First Colony managers pooh-poohed the study as having little value other than “keeping a few state bureaucrats off the street.”

Who Controls the Water?

Water, so vital to farming and seemingly so abundant in the Northeast, is also becoming scarce as a result of industrial activity controlled by absentee owners, or interests outside North Carolina. The superfarms profoundly alter water distribution patterns. Thousands of pounds of farm chemicals run off into swamps and rivers, and have had a devasting impact on fish and shrimp in the

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sounds. Meanwhile, underground cones of depression traced to huge industrial withdrawals daily in Virginia have begun to diminish the underground water supply in Hertford, Northampton and Gates counties. Union Camp Corporation, operating in Franklin but headquartered in New York City, pumps about forty million gallons out of the ground daily, dropping the ground water level at least eighteen feet annually. To the south near Aurora, Texasgulf, Inc., headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, but owned by the Government of France, pumps over nine million gallons of water daily to keep its subsurface phosphate mines dry. These withdrawals, combined with the ground water pumped by municipalities or by other industries, has caused the Northeast’s ground water level to drop nearly forty feet in ten years, according to Robert Cheek of the N.C. Department of Natural Resources. Private wells from Wanchese to Rich Square have dried up as a result of the depleted artesian aquifier. Already, fishermen net crabs in the Chowan River as far upstream as Winton.

Who Controls the Forests?

The region’s timberlands are held primarily by hundreds of private landholders in small tracts. This is the pattern across the state. There are some 245,000 non-industrial forest landowners in North Carolina, more than in any other state in America. They control about eighty percent of the commercial forest production–which yields over three billion dollars annually, if the furniture industry is included. In North Carolina, only twelve percent of the forests are held by all corporations, but in the First Congressional District, five giant forest product firms own twenty-one percent of the forests, or 746,322 acres. None of them are headquartered in the Northeast although each has a regional office there, and one, Weyerhaeuser, operates a mill in Plymouth employing nearly 2,300 persons to replant trees, run its nursery, haul logs, and run the complex, sprawling mill itself.

Weyerhaeuser illustrates how firms outside the region directly influence the life inside. The Tacoma, Washington, corporation owns or manages 660,000 North Carolina acres, mostly in the First Congressional District. Even with all these holdings, Weyerhaeuser-owned timber accounts for only twenty-five percent of its production needs. Nearly three-fourths of the timber it processes must come from smaller landholders, many of whom are unable to afford investing an average of $120 per acre to replant and then wait twenty to forty years for a return on their investment. To insure that its needs are met, Weyerhaeuser constantly buys up more timberland. Also, the company sponsors reforestation programs which enable the family timberowner to hold onto land, but puts hundreds of Northeast acres under its indirect control, or under the indirect control of the handful of other companies. For they are the only buyers available.

The giant firm influences the region’s social economy even more directly. At the end of October 1981, Weyerhaeuser settled a four-year-old suit brought by black employees at its Plymouth mill. They had alleged that the company assigned blacks in disproportionate numbers to its wood products division rather than the higher paying

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fiber division. No blacks worked in the nursery, they said, and only a handful in salaried positions. Some seventy-eight percent of the work force in Plymouth (1,800 persons) was black, and the counties from which the firm drew the majority of its workers have large black population. Weyerhaeuser agreed to divide $700,000 in back pay among approximately 725 workers and pledged no further discrimination in job transfers, hiring, or promotions. Discriminatory wage patterns–to say nothing of hiring policies–provide a major reason why the region’s poverty is widespread and enduring and why the term “colony” is accurate.

Race has not been openly a part of the current debate about the region’s economic future. Black participation has been marked by its absence. Only after the sixteen-county coalition’s preliminary plans were well laid were any blacks invited to join what had been an all white, mostly male group.

An ad hoc committee of the N.C. Department of Commerce reported on March 19, 1979, on “the minority concentration issue.” Its authors, many of whom lived in the Northeast, sought to “dispel the myth that areas populated by high concentrations of minority individuals are to be avoided as possible locations in industrial facilities.” Some potential industrial clients, they noted, spurned the region because of its lack of water, sewer services, poor roads, or their low regard for its schools, shopping centers, cultural activities and recreation. Others frankly balked at the Northeast because of race. “Some . . . cite higher minority concentrations in the population and labor force as an additional factor adding to the lack of client interest . . . Some have stated a firm will not look at an area which has over thirty or forty percent minority concentration. The explanation is given that, in general, due to the lack of economic and educational opportunity, the Southern rural Black worker is perceived as having a poorer work ethic and is more easily organized by union efforts.” According to the 1980 Census, blacks are the majority of the population in four of the Northeast’s twenty-two counties and a third or more in eleven others.

Who Controls the Jobs?

Long periods of unemployment or long daily commutes for workers are another regional characteristic. Sixteen Northeast counties reported unemployment rates above the state’s average in 1980. Tyrrell County had the highest unemployment rate in the state–11.5 percent. Aggregate figures do not account for seasonal employment in the tourist industry (a major factor in Dare, Pamlico and Carteret counties) nor farming, making it likely that real unemployment during some months may be much higher than official averages reveal. For hundreds of persons, the option is commuting. Between 2,200 and three thousand North Carolinians drive daily into Virginia to work at Tidewater shipyards, or the meat packing and food processing plants in Suffolk and Smithfield. As the prices of fuel, autos and vans increase more rapidly than general inflation and the real incomes earned at these distant jobs, the region’s economy is further weakened by reducing the actual amount of money available to be spent or saved in Northeast.

The work which is available in the Northeast is characteristic of jobs to be found in other colonies–apparel sewing and manufacturing, timbering, mining, or food processing–which pay the lowest wages and characterize first-stage, primitive industrialization.

Even a casual look at available employment in the Northeast explains why workers choose to commute such long distances. Jobs are scarce. In twelve of the twenty-two counties, less than thirty percent of the nonagricultural workforce is employed in manufacturing. The state’s average is 34.6 percent. In the nine counties where more than thirty percent of the work force is employed in manufacturing, jobs in food, apparel and lumber dominate. By considering Beaufort, Craven, Lenoir and Pitt as “metropolitan centers” among the other overwhelmingly rural counties, work in those three categories accounts for fifty-six percent of the District’s jobs. Across the state, the average is twenty percent. These low-paying, low skill industrial sector job categories quickly feel the nation’s cyclical economic lurches. When building permits drop nationally, the Northeast’s trees do not. When clothing sales decline, sewing machine operators are laid off.

In only two of the Northeast’s twenty-two counties do average weekly wages exceed or approach the statewide average of $222.56. Seven counties reported weekly wages of less than two-thirds the state’s 1979 average. During that year, North Carolina, which became the nation’s eighth most industrialized state, ranked fiftieth in average weekly industrial wages. Hyde County workers labored for the lowest wage in the state, if not the U.S.,–$85.66 a week.

There is a parallel scarcity of unions. In nine Northeast counties there isn’t a union local at all; in the others only three locals are listed in telephone directories. Recent efforts by the United Food and Commercial Workers, a progressive union with an emphasis on organizing among the poorest paid sectors of the labor market, failed to overcome widespread fear among poultry processors in two huge, profitable factories. Even those unpleasant jobs were precious to people who know other work isn’t available. One veteran UFCW organizer, a native of Williamston who is based in Asheville, says, “Organizing back home is as tough as any place in the South I know of.”

Low wages, the large number of unemployed, plus the lack of unions dull any prospect for immediate change in

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wage patterns. When new firms do locate in the Northeast, pay levels remain low despite increased competition for labor. For example, a British-owned elastic manufacturing firm in 1981 took over a Jamesville building which had housed a zipper factory also owned by absentee investors. As an official from the elastic firm cut a ribbon to reopen the once-abandonded plant, he told Martin County boosters, “Pay scales at the company will be commensurate at least with those of the region of the state.”

By subtracting the public sector portion of the non-agricultural jobs, an even gloomier picture of the region’s real wage level emerges. Persons in government employ tend to be paid at higher hourly wage rates than persons in the private sector. Government employees comprise about twenty-five percent of all jobs in the Northeast and thirty-five percent of the non-manufacturing jobs in the region. Across North Carolina, the public sector averages only sixteen percent of the total work force, and twenty-five percent in non-manufacturing. In some Northeastern counties, Gates, for instance, public schools are the largest single employer. And while county government exercises control over a few jobs, most government workers are managed, hired, and fired by policies or regulations set in Raleigh, Atlanta, or Washington.

In December 1981, Governor Hunt told a Military Appreciation Day ceremony that the armed forces were more important to the state’s economy than tobacco. “The military pays out about $1.7 billion dollars annually in North Carolina,” he said, “while tobacco generated about $1.3 billion dollars in wages and salaries in 1981–one of the best yet for our number one crop.” In 1980, the military pumped $230 million into the Northeast, primarily to run the Cherry Point Marine Air Station, the New River Marine Air Corps Station, Camp LeJeune, Johnson Air Force Base, the Fifth District Coast Guard Station in Elizabeth City, and the demolition training center operated by the Central Intelligence Agency outside tiny Hertford. Over 41,000 persons are employed at those installations. Higher than average levels of government employment, plus the large concentration of military bases, further characterize a colony.

Who Controls the Capital?

Determining the final resting place for profits gained from the region’s workers and resources helps to explain why the Northeast has a severely limited capacity to form a local capital base. According to the 1981-1982 N.C. Directory of Manufacturing Firms, there are 103 manufacturers employing one hundred or more persons in the First Congressional District; only thirty-four of these are headquartered within the region. The rest make their decisions and count their profits elsewhere, usually far from North Carolina. Of these absentee firms, thirty-five, or one-half, are either textile, apparel, or lumber producers. And while the 103 firms employ nearly 23,000 persons, sixty-nine of them, or the majority, control the jobs of 18,000 persons, according to N.C. Department of Commerce figures. Every one of those sixty-nine firms is headquartered outside the Northeast. One is a foreign government.

Still another measure of how the region’s resources are drained away by absentee capitalists is seen in expenditures for new plants or machinery. These capital investments translate into tax revenue for local government, indicate a firm’s solvency, stability, and, importantly, potential for additional jobs. They hint of continued plans for operation. Only four of the twenty-two counties are within ten percent of the state’s average per establishment capital investment levels. They are the most urban counties–Beaufort, Craven, Lenoir and Pitt. In the rest of the Northeast, capital investments ranged from seventy-five to five percent below North Carolina’s average. Industrial development has paid off less than handsomely for local tax coffers. When Peat Methanol Associates announced plans to build a $250-million plant on forty acres south of Lake Phelps, Washington County officials crowed, “It would be a terrific iprovement of our tax base,” but were unable to tell “how much of the finished plant would be subject to county taxes.”

The Northeast’s low-wage, low-skill manufacturers produce goods with low added-value above the costs of raw materials plus labor. According to The 1977 Census of Manufacturing, only firms in Pitt and Lenoir approached or exceeded the state’s average value-added statistics. Thus, industrialization has neither translated into prosperity for individual workers nor substantial additional tax revenue for local governments.

Tax laws add to the region’s impoverishment. The property tax is a chief source of funds for North Carolina’s schools, human services, and some local roads. The Northeast’s county and municipal governments rely on ad valorem taxes for revenue. These taxes are disproportionately paid by small farmers, or homeowners, and storekeepers, rather than owners of the superfarms or the forestry industry relative to their profits per acre. Farms and forests are taxed according to “use values” instead of “market values,” the measures used to assess homes, trailers, autos or personal property. Land used for farm forestry usually carries a lower assessed value than residential, commercial or industrial land use.

For years, North Carolina tax law has exempted timber companies from paying taxes on cut-over land for ten years after re-seeding or replanting. In 1973, the General Assembly went a step further by exempting all

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standing timber from the tax base. The impact of their decision can be seen in tiny Gates County where 165,000 acres, or 75.5 percent of all its arable 219,300 acres, is used for forestry. Three timber companies owned 57,752 acres in Gates the year the exemption bill passed. The previous year, they had paid $7,823.73 on standing timber alone, and a total of $21,124 to the tax-poor county which had no industry at the time, and can boast only of one small sewing factory now. In a single legislative stroke, Gates lost nearly a third of the taxes paid by the timber companies. Yet the human problems faced by county government persisted. According to the 1980 Census, over twenty-four percent of the population was poor, twenty-two percent of the houses were substandard, and the unemployment rate fluctuated between five and eighteen percent annually.

How valuable was the timber harvested in Gates County that year? On one seventy-four acre tract the timber sold for over $302,000. Seven yers later–as the tax burden grew heavier as a result of the forestry exemptions–Gates County farmers sought relief. They claimed four hundred farmers, farm laborers and the county’s few businesses paid for seventy-five percent of the county revenue needs. Nor was Gates by itself. Throughout the region, the ad valorem tax rate is higher than the state average. Greene County has the highest rate in North Carolina, at $1.39 per hundred dollars of valuation, followed closely by Pamlico and Tyrrell with rates of $1.25 per hundred.

As tax rates increase, the incentives for industrial development decrease. This forces individual property tax rates to continue to climb, making it ever increasingly difficult for small property owners to hang onto their land. Adding to this self-perpetuating cycle is the regressive state sales tax. One cent of every four collected by the state in sales taxes is returned to the counties from which the revenue derived. Only a handful of the Northeast’s counties possess significant trading centers. Elizabeth City, Edenton, Williamston, Greenville, New Bern and Kinston qualify, as do Little Washington and Roanoke Rapids. However, market magnets such as Fayetteville, Raleigh and Durham–even Richmond and Tidewater, Virginia–regularly attract the Northeast’s shoppers. Rural counties with limited retail sales fail to benefit from the sales tax revenues to the degree “market” counties enjoy, thus increasing the pressure to tax rural county property at higher rates.

How are Government Services Delivered in the Northeast?

Consider the following: According to the Eastern Carolina Health Systems Agency in Greenville, the region’s health planning organization which has the largest geographic area to serve of any agency of its kind in North Carolina, sixteen counties are “medically under-served and have health manpower shortages.” Regarding emergency medical care only, the agency found that fourteen of the region’s hospitals had no twenty-four-hour physician coverage. Eight of them did not have registered nurses on duty twenty-four hours daily in emergency rooms. Only half the region’s ambulances–132 of 264–met Department of Transportation standards, and the region was short 513 ambulance attendants. Partly as a result, the agency noted, the region’s stroke mortality rates are twelve percent above state averages. Motor vehicle deaths are ten percent above state averages. Heart attack victims run a ten percent greater risk of dying before getting medical attention in the Northeast than elsewhere in North Carolina. Getting to hospitals is further complicated by the fact that nearly a third of the region’s roads are unpaved. In eleven counties, the average number of miles of unpaved roads outstrips the statewide average of 33.8 percent. In sprawling Beaufort County, for instance, over 44.3 percent of the roads are unpaved.

In a 1979 study of the Department of Human Resources listing of every county’s human service agencies, which included sheriffs’ departments, jails and prison camps, as well as hospitals, Red Cross agencies, or Departments of Social Services, a relationship between a county’s poverty and scarcity of resources appeared. In Camden County, where twenty-one percent of the 5,829 citizens were poor, there were thirty-one state or federal agencies, the fewest in North Carolina, to provide the available range of services open to other North Carolinians. Gates County, which had thirty-two listings, the next fewest in the state, had, as has been noted, nearly a quarter of its 8,876 citizens impoverished. In Hyde County, with thirty-four agencies, thirty-seven percent of the 5,875 citizens were poor. There was no public housing authority listed in these three counties, yet in Camden, nineteen percent of the housing was substandard, in Gates, twenty-two percent was below par, and in Hyde County, twenty-three percent was substandard. By contrast, in Wake County, seat of state government and one point in the affluent Research Triangle, and where less than ten percent of the citizens are poor, there are 876 agencies, the state’s highest number. In second place was Guilford County with 483, then Forsyth with 412 and Mecklenburg with 353.

Schools are often at the core of citizens’ expectations from local governments, and they frequently reflect the degree to which governments can or will finance human services. Across the region, dozens of schools have been left in the lurch and are falling to pieces. A Raleigh newspaper found that Bertie County’s only high school held fifty-four classes daily in three World War II quonset huts. Classrooms flooded regularly during rains. Two other Bertie County schools had been condemned as unsafe but continued to be used.

For the region’s older citizens, the picture is hardly brighter. In North Carolina, an average of sixty-eight dollars per person was spent on Medicaid in 1980. Fourteen of the Northeast’s counties spent less than the state average, and Northampton spent only thirty-eight dollars annually. This dismal listing could continue, but the point seems clear: Human services are scarce and supported at levels lower than available elsewhere in North Carolina.

Some Conclusions and Prospects.

There is not a single Northeast county in which the per capita income equals or exceeds the state’s average, which was $7,382 in 1979. In Hyde County, the figure was one half the state’s average; in Greene, it reached ninety-five percent. In the decade between 1970 and 1980, the Northeast’s citizens made no real gains in per capita

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income if their wages were measured against those of fellow North Carolinians. In real terms, adjusted for inflation, the gap remained about thirty percent lower. Thus, it is not surprising that nineteen of the twenty-one counties reported higher-than-average levels of poverty, and in four counties, the number of poor was double the state average.

The internal colony metaphor provides insights into some aspects of reality, distorts others, but forces attention on a set of questions. Some of the Northeast’s citizens want to know who controls development, and how. A growing number want to regain control of their jobs and land.

Long before the state’s policymakers told black farmers they were an endangered species, those farmers were struggling to survive despite predictions, policies and practices bent on eliminating their way of life. Decades of planning by the state for a unique seafood industrial park in Wanchese–at costs estimated at over $100 million in state and federal funds–raised fears among Dare County fishermen. “I’ve always said that the project will destroy us,” one fisherman told a Raleigh newspaper. “We’ll have no control over the large corporation which can absorb losses our small operation can’t stand.”

Two lines of strategy have characterized official response to the plight of the Northeast. One tack, ever since William Byrd set down the eighteenth century dividing line, has been to send in missionaries to correct deficiencies thought to be inherently a part of the local population’s own waywardness. Byrd noted in his famous journal, ” . . . sometimes the Society for Propagating the Gospel has had the Charity to send over Missionaries . . . ” to Edenton, whose residents, he wrote were “too lewd for the Priest . . . “, lacking ambition “enough to aspire to a Brick chimney,” wanting in religious devotion, and without “the least taint of Hypocrisy, or superstition, acting very frankly and above-board in all their excesses.” Helping people get used to or accept their deprivations continues to this day as the chief means which many well-intentioned persons use in Northeastern North Carolina.

Others, uneasy about blaming the victims but equally concerned about regional shortcomings, have substituted the term “progress” for the patronizing “backward.” To cure ills, these capitalists argue, a modernizing corps must be posted to the region to bolster schools, lure new industry, build roads, negotiate tax incentives. The Northeastern North Carolina Tomorrow coalition would bring into the region scores of professionally-trained persons: experts in hog and black dirt farming, medicine, community development specialists, economists, and lawyers experienced in corporate finance.

These elite approaches ignore the talents, energies and questions of the Northeast’s citizens who don’t own the banks, newspapers, or manage the superfarms. Without local, democratic control over the region’s resources and the capital needed to develop them, the colonial circle will go unbroken. Nonetheless, there are things which can be done.

In offering the following suggestions, we recognize the resistance posed by the visible and active dimensions of power and also those which, as Sister Genino suggested at the beginning of this essay, result from generations o. powerlessness. Northeastern North Carolina awaits a more thorough going analysis than that which we have provided. In the absence of such a regional analysis, as the debate goes on, we suggest some possible next steps.

First, small scale, labor intensive farming should be fostered, particularly for minority farmers or the young who are virtually prohibited from entering farming unless land is inherited. A family farm development authority similar to one established recently in South Carolina should be created by the Legislature for the Northeast. The authority would make long-term, low interest loans to persons who earn sixty percent or more of their annual income from farming, or who have adjusted incomes of less than $25,000. Absentee landownership should be halted as one step in a long-range land reform program.

Second, markets should be guaranteed for crop alternatives to tobacco, peanuts and corn, particularly the wide range of vegetable crops which can be grown profitably in the Northeast but which are as often as not imported. One U.S. Department of Agriculture study reported that North Carolinians import three fourths of all the fresh vegetables they consume.

Third, the timber industry, or N.C. State University, should take existing forest management programs into Elizabeth City State University and East Carolina University or the region’s community or technical colleges. The aim would be to upgrade the husbandry skills of small-tract timberowners, and to search for alternative marketing sources for wood products.

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Fourth, the managers and employees of small businesses should be provided opportunities to upgrade skills in all phases of their businesses at state subsidized training centers at no cost to the individuals or businesses. No firm with more than one hundred employees would be eligible; nor would any absentee-owned firm.

During the past two decades, small businesses have generated sixty-six percent of all the region’s new jobs. The state should abandon its touted industrial recruitment program and concentrate instead on development of enterprises directly related to the region’s economic needs, the skills of its people, and those marketable uses of the region’s resources. The state should establish a revolving loan fund for democratically managed businesses. This would provide working capital or start-up funds for small businesses owned and managed by workers themselves.

Fifth, state and local governments should re-examine the impact of tax policy, law and formulae on timber, farming, fishing, and small businesses; absentee ownership of both land or industry should be discouraged through higher taxation. The guiding aim of any review would be to insure rural counties a fair share of tax revenues, and to insure they are not unfairly drained of resources vital to maintain schools and human services, while seeking to spur indigenous economic activity.

Sixth, the state should encourage the growth of small scale, locally control led energy development through continued solar tax credits, demonstrations to small farmers of alternative energy options, home insulation rebates, or energy efficiency audits at large and small industry sites.

Seventh, the state should provide the necessary technical assistance for local county officials seeking to adopt industrial development policies which take into account appropriate technology, small-scale and locally controlled enterprises, or with qualifications which include firm size, ownership, waste discharge, energy efficiency, and, particularly, production links with local resources.

In the final analysis, however, we residents of Northeastern North Carolina must ourselves organize the means to autonomy. We should apply pressure on absentee owners, state politicians, county administrators, and policymakers at every level. We must close the gap between the “lost colony” and the state to which we pledge allegiance and pay taxes.

Donna Dyer and Frank Adams are natives of eastern North Carolina. Ms. Dyer is a principal with Triangle Planners Network, Inc., a nonprofit corporation offering planning and technical assistance to community groups. Mr. Adams is the author of Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander and is a community educator who now lives in Gatesville. Maps and illustrative materials for this article were prepared by Marge Manderson of the SRC staff.

Reagan’s Way of Eliminating Poverty

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 11-12

Last month the Census Bureau confirmed that Southerners remain closer kin to poverty than anyone else in the country. Southern states, as of 1980, continue to have the nation’s highest rates of poverty. One in four of all Mississippians, for example, are poor, and so are nearly half of that state’s blacks. In no Southern state was the extent of black poverty less than twenty-nine percent.

This news was followed by the general silence of the region’s politicians, as it has been since poverty statistics were first compiled in the early 1960s. When pressed, some of the white officials responded like a prideful father whose illegitimate, poorest relation had just arrived on his doorstep: get them out of sight as soon as possible and tell the neighbors they aren’t related and, no, they certainly aren’t poor.

Ironically, with the election of a former California governor over an incumbent President from Georgia, the White House has transformed Southern traditions into national stateways. It is proposing to eliminate poverty in this country by removing federal expenses to combat it by making the poor pay for being poor, by giving poverty away and by defining poor people out of existence.

The first step came when the Reagan budget was adopted by Congress last summer. While expenditures for programs aimed- directly for the poor constituted less than one in eighteen of the dollars in that year’s federal budget, sixty percent of the entire cuts which the President asked for and received came out of these programs. The same pattern–to a lesser extent–will apply in the budget for next year. On the basis of current proposals, it’s likely that thirty percent of all cuts will come out of these same programs.

Inspired by the pages of the Congressional Record of the 1960s, the Reagan Administration’s second step is to make the poor pay hard cash before they become eligible for any government assistance. Already there are propos-

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als in the hopper in Congress and floating around in concept papers at the White House to initiate the universal requirement for “co-payments” by the poor. If, for example, a mother wants a prescription filled under Medicaid for her child, she will have to put up some money before the government pays the remainder.

From its start, the food stamp program was plagued by this notion that if the poor really want and need something, they ought to put up some money of their own. Volumes of studies show that such a policy assures that the very poorest families will be the ones the program fails to reach. This strategy no doubt reduces the number of recipients, and allows some Southern senators to argue, as they did two decades ago, that the poor really aren’t poor. Since they don’t participate in the programs, they obviously don’t need them.

The third step being considered is the withdrawal of federal responsibility to help the poor. The White House’s major proposal on “new federalism” seeks to make the states take on the task of financing food stamps and the cash assistance program for families with dependent children (AFDC) while the federal government takes over Medicaid and the financing of ten or fifteen year bloc grant programs. This venture to define the relations between state and federal governments does not propose a shift from the federal to the state the entire responsibility for paving highways, financing sewer systems, or fostering agriculture. Rather, new federalism is a proposal to get rid of the federal responsibility in the two major programs aimed directly at the poor.

To finish the job, the White House has shown increased interest in defining people out of poverty. The Administration’s first domestic advisor held the view that poverty no longer existed in America. and the President has repeated a weakened version of this sentiment in several news conferences. The Administration appears eager to give a cash value to all government services which the poor receive in order to compute the income of people in deciding if they are poor. By this method, the number of poor would drop since the value of services a family received would price them out of poverty. For example, a family of four living in a housing project with a total income of $6,000 would be assessed about $3,600 (the average rent in Atlanta) for their five-room apartment. With $9,600 income calculated, the family would then be ineligible for other government aid, such as medical care, because the family “makes” more than the $8,700 poverty limit.

No White House official, however, has proposed to calculate the cash value of any government service to anyone else for purposes of paying taxes or deciding if the person is eligible for the program.

Fifteen years ago efforts to achieve the same results by a south Alabama state senator helped earn Roland Cooper the nickname of “The Wily Fox From Wilcox” County. Still in Alabama’s law books is one of Cooper’s bills that would permit the governing board in his Blackbelt county to authorize payments for those on welfare to purchase tickets to leave the state. If the Reagan Administration’s major efforts to eliminate poverty by making the poor more poor continue to gain momentum, the schemes of the “Wily Fox” and other past vocal and silent Southern politicians who fought aid to the black poor may look increasingly generous by comparison.