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.

Paying the Price In Pickens County

By Kelly Dowe

Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 13-14

When 69-year-old Julia Wilder of rural Pickens County, Alabama, was allowed to transfer from the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women to a work release program in Tuskegee last January, she praised God in thanksgiving.

“I thank God for opening the minds of the people here to help us. I knew he would work in his own way,” said the elderly black woman. She and her longtime fellow civil rights worker, 51-year-old Maggie Bozeman, were imprisoned Jan. 11 for a 1979 conviction on three counts of voting fraud. All-white Pickens juries had found them guilty of marking ballots for elderly and illiterate blacks in the 1978 Democratic primary and runoff. Circuit Judge Clatus Junkin sentenced Mrs. Wilder to the maximum five years in prison, and Mrs. Bozeman to four. It was the stiffest vote fraud sentence in the memory of state officials.

After the women failed in their three-year process of appeals to state courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, they made an eleventh-hour plea to Junkin for probation. When he refused and immediately dispatched them to Tutwiler, the state’s penitentiary for women, a public outcry by civil rights workers and black political leaders reached a crescendo. State officials, including Gov. Fob James, hurriedly met and came up with the Tuskegee arrangement. On Jan. 22, 11 days after entering prison, the women moved from their common cell to a mobile home and jobs in Tuskegee. There they remain, living quiet lives under the guardianship of Macon County Sheriff Lucius Amerson, no doubt comforted, but still incarcerated.

If the women were thankful for this bit of clemency by the state, they surely appreciated its irony as well. Convicted and jailed as they were under a system which has no standardized mechanism for prosecuting voting violators, and which almost never imprisons those transgressors it convicts, the Pickens County women grabbed the brass ring. They got to serve time for everyone.

Consider:

* In 1979, a federal grand jury indicted sixteen people in Randolph County in east Alabama on charges of voting violations in a 1978 sheriff’s election. The charges included conspiracy, vote buying, casting false ballots, soliciting illegal absentee ballots, and voting more than one time by an individual. Of the sixteen, seven pleaded guilty and received fines ranging from $250 to $500 and suspended sentences. Two more were found guilty in federal trials and received thousand dollar fines and suspended sentences. A tenth person, Randolph County Sheriff Charlie Will Thompson, was convicted on seven counts of conspiracy and vote buying. His sentence: a thousand dollar fine and three months in jail.

* Secretary of State Don Siegelman received more than eighteen complaints about municipal elections in 1980. These included charges of persons who had moved to other states remaining on the voting rolls in Florala; a candidate in Headland having absentee ballots distributed and cast illegally; vote buying in Woodville; and misused absentee ballots in the towns of Fyffe, Moulton, Double Springs, Bridgeport, Hamilton and Haleyville, among other allegations. Siegelman said that as far as he knows, none of these situations has resulted in convictions.

* An investigator with the Alabama district attorney’s office took statements from more than twenty Sylacauga area residents after the 1978 Coosa County election. The statements alleged coercion by elected officials, illegal registration of non-residents and vote buying. Neither the Alabama district attorney nor the attorney general, however, both of whom were given copies of the statements. pursued the matter into court.

* Circuit Judge Clatus Junkin of Pickens County gave the police chief of nearby Haleyville a sixmonth suspended sentence in a vote fraud case recently. Junkin says the circumstances of the case were different from those of the Bozeman-Wilder case. Anyway, he said, the police chief had admitted his guilt, which Mrs. Bozeman and Mrs. Wilder never did.

In the absence of a statewide elections commission or fair campaign practices commission in Alabama, the handling of vote law violators obviously is as inequitable as it is varied.

Said Siegelman: “Alabama law is so diversified and decentralized, it puts the prosecutorial decisions in the hands of local, elected officials. The (state) attorney general has been reluctant to get involved for political reasons.

“When it gets down to the district attorney level, many of them are hesitant to pursue vote fraud cases. They are elected officials and they are prosecuting people for election offenses. From a district attorney’s standpoint, they just don’t like election cases.”

Siegelman pointed to further limitations imposed by Alabama law.

“You have to take prima facie evidence to a judge, showing there were enough illegal votes cast to make a difference in the outcome of the election. The judge will order the examination of the ballots, if it’s a county with paper ballots, or the voting machines, if it’s a county with machines.

“But to do that, you would either have to have direct knowledge (of voting fraud) or a list of voters. Unfortunately, that list is locked up and sealed inside the voting machine or ballot box. It’s a Catch 22 situation which deters any cases filed on the basis of vote fraud.”

As for the sentences of the hapless Pickens County women, “I think they are out of line for the type of crime they are alleged to have committed,” Siegelman said.

“Obviously any act that results in votes being stolen or thwarting of the Democratic process must be punished. But in this case the sentences seemed to be out of line with other acts committed by other people in other parts of the state.”

The convictions of Wilder and Bozeman stemmed from the assistance with absentee ballots they gave to thirty-nine elderly and illiterate voters in the 1978 Sep-

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tember Democratic primary and runoff elections. Using testimony of local voting officials and thirteen absentee voters, the prosecutors tried to show at the trials that the women had used the ballots of the old people to vote many times for candidates of their own choosing.

The Pickens County circuit clerk testified that many individuals requesting absentee ballots asked her to send their ballots not to their homes but to the address of either Mrs. Bozeman or Mrs. Wilder. All ballots mailed to those addresses were cast for precisely the same candidates, an investigator for the county district attorney said. He said that applicants whose requests for absentee ballots were signed with an “X” often signed the ballot with a legible signature, or vice versa. A Tuscaloosa notary public testified that he notarized, at his office, many applications for absentee voting that Wilder and Bozeman brought him during the two elections.

Prosecutors called to the witness stand thirteen elderly voters for whom absentee votes had been cast. The testimony of many was garbled and confusing, and several changed their stories back and forth depending on whether the questions were being asked by the prosecution or the defense. However, four consistently said they had not voted by absentee ballot, and the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals pointed to their testimony when it refused to overturn Mrs. Wilder’s convictions. The most damaging testimony was that of Sophia Spann, 79, whose application and ballot were signed with an “X”, and who said she always voted at the polls and not by absentee ballot. Moreover, she testified that she could read and write and did not spell her name as it was written on both documents. She testified that she did not know Mrs. Wilder, whose signature was on her application to vote absentee. Mrs. Spann said Maggie Bozeman had visited her on election day to find out if she had voted.

Robert Goines, 87, testified he had applied for an absentee ballot and made an “X” on the application, which Mrs. Wilder witnessed. But he said that although he had seen the ballot, he never filled it in or signed it, because he could not write. He said he didn’t give anyone permission to vote for him. Mrs. Lucille Harris testified that Mrs. Wilder brought her a paper to sign so she wouldn’t have to go to the polls. But she said she never received a ballot in the mail, and that Mrs. Wilder didn’t visit her again. Lula DeLoach testified she signed an application for absentee ballot, which Mrs. Wilder brought to her house, but she d id not mark any ballot. She said Mrs. Wilder had told her she could “sign the paper” and “fix the paper for me,” which Ms. DeLoach said she did not object to.

Mrs. Wilder and Mrs. Bozeman pleaded innocent to the charges against them. Mrs. Wilder testified at her trial she often helped people to vote by absentee ballot in the 1978 elections. She said she often picked up applications for absentee ballots at the circuit clerk’s office, which she distributed herself or through her workers. But she said she never had the absentee ballots of other voters sent to her own box unless the voter requested her to.

She said she would often have an exchange like this with a potential absentee voter: “‘What kind of election is this?’ I would say, ‘Well, it’s the Democratic.’ And they would say, ‘That’s the way I want to vote.'”

“You reckon you will be able to be at the polls?”

“They would say, ‘No. You know I can’t get around.”

“And I said, ‘Well, would you like for me to show you how you can vote without getting down there?’

“‘ Yeah.'”

She said she would offer to take the application back to the clerk’s office once the voter filled it out, and that the clerk would mail the voter a ballot.

“And most of the time, ‘Would you like for the ballot to come to you?’

“And they would answer no, that they weren’t able to, you know, get it back to me or nobody else, and they would say, ‘No, I can’t get it to you.’

“Would you like for me to–What would you like for me to do–let it come to my box, or how would you want it done?

“‘Let it come to your box.'” She said she would agree to that and to get the ballot back to the absentee voter. She said that when she or her workers signed names to absentee ballots, it was with the permission of the individual and that the voter would “touch their hand to the pen.” She said in such visits she took along a sample ballot fo the Alabama Democratic Conference, the major black political organization in the state, but filled out the ballot only as instructed by the absentee voter.

The unanswered question is: Why did the state, which turns a blind eye to so many accused voting offenders, allow the Pickens district attorney to throw the book at these two women? One marvels at the state’s self-contradiction: First it flings them into confinement, but immediately it fishes them out and sets them up in a work release program in a town at the other end of the state. And not just to any town, but to Tuskegee, the home of Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, a town with a politically prominent black mayor and a black sheriff, a town which would give comfort and even honor to the two women. Did this transfer amount to a pardon? Or was it a sort of apology to the women for their having to take the stripes for all voting offenders?

Today, Mrs. Wilder works at a senior citizens center, and Mrs. Bozeman teaches at a center for retarded children. Their attorneys continue to seek post-conviction relief.

It could be argued that in a fifty-eight percent white, rural county, where most elected officials are white, the conviction and jailing of two black political organizers would not bring that much negative political pressure on the white district attorney, the judge, or the jury. Many of those who testified against Mrs. Bozeman and Mrs. Wilder made it plain they would not have voted at all had it not been for the women’s efforts. Many did not know what an absentee ballot was. Yet they, and other poor, black residents of Pickens County, are a likely group from which any opposition to white elected officials would logically come.

Attorney Solomon Seay thinks the prospect of this opposition becoming organized was the motivation for the vigorous prosecution and stiff sentences given the two women. Forty-two percent of the voters can’t determine an election, he says, but if they’re organized they can influence the results. In asking for dismissal of the case, Seay and the fifteen character witnesses he put on the stand have charged that the case was racially motivated and was contrived to halt black voter registration in Pickens County.

“I think if black people do not seize upon this opportunity to launch a statewide, effective voter registration campaign to register every qualified black person in this state to vote, we will have missed a golden opportunity,” Seay said.

“That’s what this is all about–the efforts of two old black women to assist functionally illiterate aged and infirmed blacks to cast their votes.”

Kelly Dowe its a freelance writer who lives in Birmingham, Alabama.

Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959. Edited by Anthony P. Dunbar, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981.

Allen Tullos

Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 14-15

The past remains as unpredictable as ever. As proof, we have Tony Dunbar’s fine book, Against the Grain. From scattered, vagrant and half-forgotten sources, he has fashioned a story which is not only important in its own right, but also is suggestive of what remains uncollected and as yet, untold.

Dunbar himself acknowledges that his narrative is only “a piece of the history” of Southern radicalism and protest in the 1930’s. “No single work,” he writes, “could record all that happened in the mines and factories, all that was attempted by women’s organizations, or all that resulted from the dissatisfaction of blacks and the poor in little towns without number.” In its fashion Against the Grain now joins several recent books already on the shelf: Donald Grubbs’ Cry from the Cotton, Thomas Krueger’s exploration of The Southern Conference for Human Welfare, H.L. Mitchell’s autobiography, Ted Rosengarten’s All God’s Dangers, Nell Painter’s edition of Hosea Hudson’s recollections and essays and oral histories in numerous issues of Southern Exposure. Additionally, these volumes of printed word have appeared concurrently with a rediscovery and reissuance of the 1930s music of Southern working folk. Record labels such as Folkways, Rounder, County, Flyright and Clanka [unclear] have tracked down the scratchy old seventy-eight rpm recordings and made them available, with extensive annotation, on shiny new albums. (This is a story for another occasion, however; readers interested in surveying the range of these musical materials should write Roundup Records, P.O. Box 147, E. Cambridge, MA 02141 and ask for a catalog or the current issue of The Record Roundup.)

All this energy betokens several genuine cravings. First in mind are the empowering effects which come through the rediscovery of indigenous traditions of Southern protest and activism. Each generation needs to know the persistent themes of its predecessors, the context of their temperaments, the campaigns waged, the findings and keepings. Awareness of kinship with the critical past, Dunbar knows, can help clarify insights and shore up our courage. A rock in a weary land.

Against the Grain traces the origins, emergence and transformation of the South’s “radical gospel”

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uprising. This was a movement which shook not so much the established church as the lives of many farmers and millworkers. For a time it restored grass-root meaning to the word Protestant. Ultimately, of course, it had its failures. The redress of class power and racial prejudice are no modest goals. The movement’s ommission from or slighting by standard history books testifies to Lillian Smith’s understanding that history’s winners name their age and to the selective orientation of historians interpreting backwards from these winners.

But as the swift ages roll, new possibilities appear and old alternatives revive, provided there’s someone like Tony Dunbar around to prod us with the memories. His interpretation first establishes the influence of teachers, people such as Alva Taylor of the Vanderbilt School of Religion, Reinhold Niebuhr and Harry Ward at New York’s Union Theological Seminary. These teachers themselves carry the spirit of a generation older than Dunbar’s central characters: Claude and Joyce Williams, Don and Constance West, Miles and Zilphia Horton, Ward Rogers, Alice and Howard Kester, James Dombrowski, Elizabeth Hawes, and others. Dunbar then follows these “students,” their ideas, institutions and influences primarily through the 1930s, but also, in more summary fashion, right down to now.

Yet, Dunbar is far from suggesting that the orders went out from an old line of graybeards to a young cadre of ideologues. Perhaps the most important notion in Against the Grain in is that Southern farmers and working people carry, within their own cultural resources, the seeds of populist revolt. And that organizers and teachers who can speak the language of the culture, who can, for instance, bring home a radical gospel, can help these seeds to flower. Such was clearly the case in the mid-1930s with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Thousands of black and white Mississippi and Arkansas tenants risked their lives in several strikes. This rising, before it was broken by state and vigilante violence and by the political clout of certain Southern Democrats within the New Deal coalition, “marked the high point of agricultural unionism in the South and provided an example of the races working together which would not be repeated until the civil rights movement emerged two decades later.”

Finally, a note on the book itself as object and artifact. From the dust jacket to the photographs which bind it’s beginning and end, the University of Virginia Press has done an excellent bit of handiwork. Photographs of the participants are interspersed throughout, along with occasional copies of period handbills, posters, poems and song texts. The type is large and easily readable and the overall design speaks of that rarest of modern productions, a work of thought and care.

Murder At Broad River Bridge. By Bill Shipp, Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1981, $8.95.

By Grant Wilson

Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, p. 15

Lemuel Penn was killed without cause and anonymously by members of the Ku Klux Klan outside Athens, Gal, in 1964. His murder was only one of dozens in the Civil Rights era but his colonel’s rank in the army reserve and the political climate of the time made Penn’s death a national matter. The combined forces of federal and state officials quickly found the murderers but what passed for justice in the South in those days protected the guilty from the law.

The history of discrimination and oppression around Athens at the time of Penn’s murder and the lives of ignorant men filled with fear and hatred give a melancholy backdrop to Bil1 Shipp’s story of the event, the investigation and final resolution. Though brief–91 pages–Shipp’s book is well-researched and is told in a clear journalistic style that pulls the reader, resisting, back to the confused, frightening years of the 1960s.

The story is not pleasant but it is well done. Murder At Broad River Bridge will be helpful to civil rights historians and to the average reader wanting to find reaffirmation of the principles that fought against injustice then, so those ideals may be applied again, now. Penn’s killing was one of the factors that helped break the Klan hold over the South in the sixties. National attention and government pressure was focused on the KKK and it withered under the assault. But though much improved, too much stayed the same, and today there is a small yet mounting growth in the Ku Klux Klan. Shipp’s short chronicle might not have been written but for that. History could have noted Colonel Penn and moved on to other atrocities but Shipp has given the fullest story possible in order that we not avoid an important lesson.

Asleep or awake the Klan lives, like a grub in the ground until a spring of opportunity arrives. It’s spring again, and Bill Shipp’s book reminds us that no matter what its guise the Klan deals out violence, death and injustice which have to be countered. The lesson must be that old battles don’t always stay won but must be fought again and again.

Grant Wilson is a freelance writer and an aspiring gentleman farmer in Kensington, Ga.

Ending the Short Stick In Mississippi’s Woods

By Tom Israel and Randall Williams

Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 16-18

Pine trees are commonplace, but timber is an industry, especially in the South where forests stretch from Houston to the Carolinas. In Mississippi today, timber is the largest provider of manufacturing jobs and the state’s largest crop.

The timber industry will play a key role in the next several decades in the South. The trees are here, the giant wood products companies are here, and a paper shortage is projected for the next twenty-five or thirty years. The crop is constantly expanding, as witnessed by oldtimers who drive through rural areas and point out the cotton fields of their youth, now grown into the piney woods.

For the harvesters of the crop, however, even those who enjoy the work, woodcutting is one of the dirtiest, most dangerous and poorest paying of occupations.

There are two types of wood harvesters–pulpwooders, who cut and haul wood to be made primarily into paper products, and loggers, whose labor ultimately leads to the making of lumber. They can be distinguished on the road by the way the wood is stacked on their trucks: pulpwood is short and stacked across the truck, while logs are long and stacked lengthwise. In Mississippi, an estimated ten thousand people work in the woods, and about eighty percent of them are black. However, log haulers are more likely to be white than black, largely because cutting logs is more profitable than cutting pulpwood and because the timber companies have allowed whites to take that economic step up.

About four-fifths of the wood harvesters are pulpwooders, and they are the chief beneficiaries of the Mississippi Fair Pulpwood Scaling and Practices Act, which was to go into effect July 1. The story of the passage of that act and the reasons why it was necessary is worth hearing.

Woodcutters are paid a piece rate for each cord of wood they sell. A cord is a volume measure of four feet by four feet by eight feet. The pulpwooder and his crew cut the trees down, saw off the limbs, cut them into five-foot

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lengths, load them on the truck and haul them to a wood yard. The work is hard and dangerous: a get-together of woodcutters where everyone has all his fingers or toes is rare.

An average truck load has three or four cords with a gross value to the woodcutter of about $120. When the hauler brings the wood to the yard, it’s measured with a long yardstick. The common practice is for the wood hauler to hold the stick against the stack of wood on his truck, and the dealer stands back and reads the scale off the top of the stick.

The woodcutter can’t see the scale and he isn’t even told how much wood was on his truck until it has already been unloaded, by which time it’s too late to argue. The United Woodcutters Association estimates that woodhaulers earn about six to seven thousand dollars a year if they work full-time, and that an average cutter loses about fifteen hundred dollars per year to the short stick. So it has been a real problem.

The Woodcutters Association decided to organize a campaign around this issue and tried for three years to get a bill passed that would set standards for measuring-scaling–the wood at the yard. But woodcutters are very isolated from one another. They work in remote locations and they usually know only the other woodcutters who may be in their family or in their church.

They may recognize some other woodcutters by sight or may recognize their trucks which they’ve seen on the road or at the woodyard, but they don’t know them. They also haul their wood to about 250 scattered woodyards throughout the hills of Mississippi (The United Woodcutters Association is organized in forty-two counties in Mississippi.)

A second barrier to effective organizing is fear on the part of the workers. The Association is not, like most unions, an organized shop. The people who join and who speak out in favor of such things as the fair scaling act are completely unprotected at the woodyard against firing and harassment. Even woodcutters who simply attend Association meetings are subject to intimidation from dealers.

To overcome some of these barriers to organizing, the Association started a cooperative. The woodcutters have to own and operate chainsaws and trucks and they burn up large amounts of supplies, which they usually get from the wood dealers for whom they work, often at exorbitant prices.

The system is very similar to sharecropping. The woodcutters are considered independent contractors and are thus not usually covered by insurance or other benefits from either the wood dealer or the big paper companies, yet they end up in economic dependence to the wood dealers, who function much like labor contractors.

When a woodcutter needs a tire for his truck or a chain for his saw or even a loan for a piece of equipment, he will go to the wood dealer who will advance him the money and then deduct it a little at the time from the woodcutter’s pay for each cord of wood. The net effect is that the woodcutter never gets out of debt and his already meager take-home pay is whittled away even more. From the payment he receives from the wood dealer, of course, the woodcutter also has to pay his helpers, own and operate his truck and saws, pay social security and buy insurance, if he has it.

The cooperative was thus a very effective organizing tool. The Association now has co-ops at forty-three different locations around the state where the woodcutters can get their saw files and their chain oil and a dozen other products they need to stay in business. The woodcutters not only get lower prices but they get to meet and get to know each other, which helps break down the problem of isolation. And because the members of the Association are the administrators of the co-ops, they gain confidence in working together as a unit.

All of this work helped in the three-year campaign to get the fair scaling practices act, but it wasn’t enough. The campaign succeeded when the word finally got out to the landowners that they were losing as much as the woodcutters due to the short stick, or inaccurate measuring of the loads on the pulpwood trucks. The landowners off whose land the wood is cut are also paid on the basis of the measurement taken by the wood dealer at the yard. By doing a lot of organizing among small farmers, the Association eventually got an endorsement from the Farm Bureau, and on March 8 the Mississippi Fair Pulpwood Scaling and Practices Act passed.

The act requires licensing of wood dealers and establishes uniform measurement procedures, procedures where the woodcutter can file complaints, and third-party arbitration to settle disputes. These procedures are important to give protection to the woodcutter who actually files a complaint, so he won’t be told the next day not

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to come back to that woodyard again.

The next step for the Association is to organize strikes at some wood yards. The fundamental poverty of the woodcutters is not going to change until they are paid more. Getting an accurate measure will mean a lot more money but the woodcutters are still paid very little for their labor. By the time he pays all the costs of production, the woodcutter who clears eight or nine dollars on a cord of wood is doing very well.

The Association put together its first strike last summer in Fayette, Miss., where three yards were shut down for about one month. One yard settled with a two dollars per cord raise and an agreement to post standards on how the loads would be measured. The second yard came through with just a raise. The third yard, which was run by International Paper Co., shut down and moved out of town.

In addition to more strikes and other job actions, the Association is now campaigning for workers’ compensation coverage for woodcutters; as independent workers with the middlemen wood dealers between them and the paper companies, they have been denied this protection for on-the-job injuries or deaths.

Finally, there are thousands of woodcutters in other Southern states whose working conditions are equally as dangerous, whose pay is equally as low, and whose isolation is equally as limiting.

For these woodcutters, it seems, imitation of the Mississippi example may be the first step on the road out of poverty.

Tom Israel is the lead organizer for the United Wood cutters Association. This article is adapted from his remarks at a recent conference hosted in Montgomery by the Southern Poverty Law Center, where Randall Williams is employed.

Ensley, Alabama: 1932

By John Beecher

Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, p. 17

The mills are down.
The hundred stacks
are shorn of their drifting fume.
The idle tracks
rust . . .
Smeared red with the dust
of millions of tons of smelted ore
the furnaces loom–
towering, desolate tubes–
smokeless and stark in the sun . . .
Powerhouse cubes
turbines hummed in,
platesteel mains the airblast thrummed in
are quiet, and the sudden roar
of blown-off steam . . .
At night
the needle gleam
where the ladle poured at the pig machine,
the deep smoulder of an iron run
and the spreading light
of molten slag over the sleeping town
are seen
no more
now mills and men are down.

From Collected Poems, 1924-1974 by John Beecher, New York: MacMillan, 1974.

The Race Toward Reapportionment

By Staff

Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 18-24

Billboards and television commercials of earnest faces and subdued colors are inviting many Southerners already to think about the virtues of candidates for the November elections. Back in the halls of the state capitols in almost half the Southern states, however, politicians face the prospects of computer runs, cross-examinations, and twilight negotiations in order to draw the lines that will decide what are the congressional and state legislative districts for the fall.

Because of the delay in the final redistricting, especially in the Deep South, the federal courts will be deciding in the next few weeks if they must order special redistricting plans in order to assure that elections go forward later this year. White state officials have been quick to lay the blame for the failure to produce a reapportionment plan on the courts or the U.S. Justice Department. “The bureaucrats in Washington,” is a phrase that begins many private conversations throughout the region in legislative chambers and state election offices. One state official in North Carolina sounded more like a former governor of Mississippi when he called the decision of the Justice Department to object to a North Carolina reapportionment plan “obscene and asinine.”

Black state legislators in the South see it another way. State Representative Jerome Tucker said of the rejection of Alabama’s plan in early May: “I anticipated the plan would be rejected. I look at it as a failure of the Alabama legislature to reapportion itself fairly.” In Georgia, where the state decided to appeal a Justice Department decision disapproving of its congressional plan, State Rep. Billy Randall of Macon, chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus, said that the delay in holding primary elections could have been avoided if the state had been willing to correct the mistakes which Justice identified.

While reapportionment is the politics of pencils, calculators, and computer printouts, it is also at bottom the process by which fundamental changes are made in the distribution of political power, and individual political fortunes rise and fall according to the lines that are drawn. This democratic exercise presents more convincing evidence that in Southern politics race as an issue remains king. The examples of relentless opposition to creating any district that permit black voters to have a powerful voice in electing representatives is staggering when added together from across the South.

In Virginia, the General Assembly met more than three times in special session considering dozens of reapportionment plans over twelve months before it was forced to permit three additional black majority general assembly districts. Of a total of 140 members, black voters will control at most the election of only seven delegates to the legislature for the next decade.

The North Carolina legislature also convened in three special sessions to adopt four redistricting plans before it decided it must add three districts where blacks may be able to control the elections for representatives to the general assembly. In February, the North Carolina legislature refused to create anything more than a fifty-one percent majority-black district in the face of advice from its lawyers and the state research officer that the plan was unlawful and that another special session would be required. Their lawyer advised them to add four or five percentage points to one senate district to forego another round of reapportionment. Yet, five more percentage points of black population in one northeastern district was too much for the general assembly to do willingly.

In South Carolina, the all-white state senate has held off redistricting in the hopes that Congress would weaken the Voting Rights Act and thus the pressures to draw districts that will give black voters a chance to elect at least one state senator. In neighboring Georgia, state lawyers are appealing a ruling that its plan for congressional redistricting was discriminatory in the face of verified comments from the chief opponent of a majority black congressional district that he would not permit “a nigger district.”

For several days in May in Alabama the state legislature ran the high risk of jeopardizing its entire reapportionment plan by reducing one rural south Alabama district from sixty-five to sixty percent black because the incumbent white legislator said that he simply could not get elected with that many blacks in his district.

In Mississippi, the legislature turned away efforts to have a majority-black district in one of five congressional seats in a state where almost two of five are black. In Louisiana, the governor vetoed a majority-black congres-

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sional district that the legislature had first adopted, and then the legislature turned around in the redistricting of its own houses and reduced by one-third the number of majority-black legislative districts in New Orleans despite a rise in the percentage of blacks in that part of the state.

In Florida, Texas, and Tennessee–all states receiving additional congressional seats for the 1980s–the state legislatures refused to give serious consideration to creating districts with a majority of black or Hispanic population.

If the expenses of lawyers and special sessions of the legislatures were added into the cost of holding some of the special primaries that may be required, the price of doggedly opposing black influence in Southern reapportionment may reach as high as five million dollars before the last penny is spent in 1982. It’s an intimidating cost, especially in these days of shrinking state budgets.

Although these facts merely highlight the systematic efforts to retard black voting strength, white Democrats continue to debunk reapportionment as only a tool for Republicans who are using blacks to front for their partisan gains. Also, some white politicians truly believe that it is bad politics for blacks’ own self interests to concentrate their influence as a majority of voters in a limited number of legislative districts when they could make up a substantial–but not a majority–percentage of several more districts.

Both arguments ignore the continuing existence of racial “bloc” voting throughout the South. In a recent study in Mississippi, for example, one political statistician found that almost ninety percent of the white voters m the state in local elections will vote only for white candidates and that a very large percentage has a pattern of voting only for white candidates who are not allied with black organizations. In such circumstances, which are not unusual throughout the South in most local elections, black voters often must have a controlling vote if they are to have a meaningful voice.

Because the number of legislators elected by black. votes continues to be very limited, the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution–more than political horsetrading–remain the major protections for the rights of black voters. The Act provides that jurisdictions in six Southern states and forty counties in North Carolina must file with the U.S. Department of Justice any change in voting before that change is implemented. These changes, including redistricting, are examined by Justice to decide if they will have a discriminatory effect or purpose. If so, the changes cannot be implemented.

A local or state government covered under this pre-clearance provision may appeal to the federal district court in Washington where a panel of three judges is convened to hear the case. In turn, black citizens are also able to file suit in local Southern federal courts if they believe that redistricting plans violate the U.S. Constitution.

In the following summaries of most Southern states, a few case studies are presented in order to illustrate the anatomy of reapportionment in the region, as it has developed recently.

Alabama

In perhaps its most comprehensive objection to a state reapportionment plan to date, the Justice Department rejected the Alabama Legislature’s proposals in early May. Justice found that Alabama had diluted black voting strength in Birmingham, Mobile, and all urban areas “with current black populations of over twenty-five percent and in the rural Black Belt counties.”

The decision set in motion a month of backroom politics and agile legal efforts to keep the federal courts out of Alabama redistricting.

In Birmingham, the proposed plan reduced the number of districts with majority-black populations from seven to six. It also reduced the influence of black voters in one of the remaining six districts despite an increase in the percentage of the black population in those parts of the metropolitan area. In Mobile and Montgomery, Justice found that the state used almost contradictory means of redistricting in order to dilute in both places the voting strength of blacks in senate districts. The redistricting of the Black Belt also evidenced voting discrimination since Justice found that the legislature had shaved off the percentage of blacks in order to reduce from five to one the number of house districts with a majority of blacks of voting age. Even in the one remaining district the majority of voting-age blacks was reduced somewhat.

Word of Justice’s actions spread quickly among state political leaders in Montgomery but reaction was comparatively mild in a capital where an Alabama governor in past years had suggested after an adverse federal court decision that the judge ought to have a “barbed wire enema.” Tempered by the experience of the last fight in Alabama over reapportionment, which brought a court order tripling the number of majority-black legislative districts, the cochairman of the reapportionment committee and probably next year’s speaker of the house, veteran state Rep. Rick Manley, moved quickly to figure out the minimal changes in the original plan that Justice would approve and his colleagues would accept.

Manley realized that a three judge federal panel sat in the background and might step in to take over reapportionment in Alabama if a plan was not adopted that could get Justice’s approval in time for candidates to file for primary elections in September. On that court, convened because of a suit by black legislators and citizens, was Frank Johnson, the judge who had ordered the sweeping reapportionment in the 1970s; Myron Thompson, a black appointee of the Carter administration who once worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the National Education Association: and Truman Hobbs, a conservative who had nonetheless supported the wing of the state democratic party that opposed George Wallace in times past.

As a white Black Belt politician, Manley was especially concerned about reshaping his own district, presently sixty-two percent black, and others in that part of rural, south Alabama. Birmingham also presented a major political problem since any remedy of Justice’s objections

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would probably mean running two or more white incumbents against one another. Indeed, to keep the court out of reapportionment, Manley had to orchestrate the drafting and adoption of the legislative plan that would affect more than twenty legislative districts and that could be approved by Justice by early June.

Meeting and telephone calls began to multiply. Manley and lawyers for the state met with Justice officials in Washington one day during the week of May 7 and the next day were back in Montgomery for a meeting with lawyers for the black plaintiffs challenging the reapportionment in federal court. Apparently, Manley told Justice, legislators and the plaintiffs’ lawyers that he was open for any suggestions and implied that he had no new plan in mind. Therefore, he would be willing to let them help shape any new plan for the legislature. It was a useful–if not entirely truthful–strategy since it kept his white colleagues believing that they would not be betrayed and told the black legislators that they might be able to get what they really wanted from him. In truth, Manley had statisticians and computers devising several options in Birmingham, the Black Belt, and Mobile, where he thought the major problems lay. When the special session was convened on Monday, May 24th, Manley had worked out his plan.

In the new plan, the percentage of blacks in the majority of black senate districts in Mobile was increased, as were the numbers of voting-age blacks in the Black Belt house districts. Further, the Manley plan created one additional majority-black house district in Birmingham and pitted two white incumbents in the same house district. Although white legislators in Birmingham grumbled and blacks realized that the proposals failed to meet all their concerns, the plan actually jeopardized the political future of no more than five white incumbents and did increase the number of majority-black districts.

Manley was taking no chances in permitting opposition to build too quickly. Claiming computer problems, Manley’s reapportionment committee withheld the details of the plan from most legislators until the session was already underway. These convenient “technical” problems kept the endangered legislators from rallying support around specific changes and added pressure on the other legislators to adopt the plan and go home. The alternative, Manley kept reminding them in public and in private, was to fail to pass a plan and turn the job over to Justice and the federal courts.

While not visible in the map-drawing, speaker of the house Joe McCorquodale also wanted a quick, tidy session. A declared candidate for governor, McCorquodale didn’t want to open himself up to charges of wasting taxpayers’ money on long, expensive special sessions that didn’t accomplish anything. Also, while not wanting to offend black legislators whom he was still courting, he certainly did not want any hand in twisting the arms of white legislators from the Black Belt where he resides and whom he’ll depend on in the November election.

In the first day of the session Manley and his cochairman Lister Hill Proctor claimed that no amendment could be made to their plan if it was to be approved by Justice. Black legislators countered that the plan had to be amended to do more in protecting the voting strength of blacks if it was to pass muster at Justice. Supporting their view, black state Sen. Michael Figures presented an alternative plan that would create additional black majority senate districts in Montgomery and the Black Belt while increasing the black population in five house districts in the Black Belt–including Manley’s own district. Other black leaders also voiced disappointment with Manley’s plan at a public hearing on Tuesday, May 25th. Wendell Paris of Sumter County said that the Black Belt house districts were “gerrymandered to make it so black people can’t be elected.”

Leaving nothing to chance, Manley quickly had the Figures plan analyzed and circulated a list to his colleagues showing that a rather large number of incumbents would be pitted against one another. Manley’s analysis created a stir even in the Legislative Black Caucus since it showed that the Figures plan, due to a mistake in the computer tabulation, placed two incumbent black legislators from Mobile in the same district.

Despite the attraction of the Manley-Proctor plan to most legislators, who would after all remain unharmed by the proposal, Manley was unable to hold all of his white colleagues in line. Black Belt state representative Leigh Peg ~es, who had defeated his black opponent by less than 250 votes in the last election, successfully convinced the house to reduce the black percentage in his district in the Manley plan from 65.9 percent black to 60.4 percent. In debate, Manley warned his colleagues once more that the change would jeopardize the whole plan and let the federal courts determine what everyone’s district lines would be. But, whites in the House were moved by Pegues’ emotional reminder: “I can’t win with 65.9 percent blacks in my district.” After his plea, they approved Pegues’ amendments and the Manley plan over the objection of blacks.

That Wednesday night, Manley apparently decided that he should begin to court the black legislators’ support for a plan that gave them something in return for accepting Pegues’ needs somehow. If the House kept Pegues’ changes, the plan might get through Justice if it had the support of all black legislators. Since the senate had followed Proctor’s instructions and passed the exact Manley plan, Manley circulated a proposal to black legislators that gave them something in the senate. First he assured some of the members of the Black Caucus that Pegues’ amendments would not stand precisely as they were. But, if the Caucus could live with a little less in the Black Belt, he would be willing to place into his own plan a majority-black senate district in Montgomery. The offer was tempting and caused spirited debate. Some Caucus members thought that Justice disapproval of a plan without a substantial black majority district in Montgomery was a sure thing. So there was nothing to negotiate over. Others had doubts.

As the Caucus considered its political and legal strategies, Manley and Proctor were busy polling senators on their reaction to possible changes in the senate districts which an agreement with the Caucus might cause. They were also conferring with state’s attorneys about the Justice Department lawyers’ inclinations on the different options. Apparently, news from both lines of inquiry indicated that the Pegues’ amendments would kill the pla[unclear] Justice and that most white senators weren’t willing to add another black majority district to make up for short-

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comings in the Black Belt.

According to one lobbyist in Montgomery, McCorquodale was in fact responsible for the initial success of the Pegues’ amendments. He refused to persuade Pegues to l accede to the Manley plan in fear that Pegues would desert his gubernatorial campaign. In absence of Speaker McCorquodale’s strong arm, Pegues could not be brought in line.

Unable to pressure Pegues or to get agreements, Manley called the Caucus late Wednesday night and withdrew his proposal. “It won’t fly,” Manley said. No longer considering a compromise, the Caucus unanimously decided to oppose any plan that didn’t remove the Pegues’ amendments and did not create a substantial majority-black senate district in Montgomery and the Black Belt.

Manley’s impasse was broken when Pegues agreed in a Wednesday twilight conversation, that if given an opportunity to present his case for a sixty percent majority-black district directly to the Justice Department, he would not jeopardize the whole legislative plan for the sake of “fairness to me” if Justice rejected his proposal. With that promise, a complicated arrangement was then designed with the cooperation of McCorquodale and Governor Fob James.

The plan called for the house judiciary committee–which Manley chairs–to take up the senate-approved, original Manley plan on Thursday, May 27. It would be reported to the house floor on Friday. This procedural move was necessary since Manley didn’t want to ask house members to override directly their own vote to approve Pegues’ amendments. After all, legislators have their pride. The strategy also allowed Manley to keep the issue clear and simple: the house should vote only once to approve the full plan and vote against all amendments including those from disgruntled white and black legislators. In this way, Manley thought he could cast the actions of the house before Justice as a good faith effort to meet it’s objections while turning away “excessive” proposals from both white and black legislators.

To satisfy Pegues, Manley arranged for the endangered legislator to go to Washington after the house had approved the Manley plan and to meet with Justice officials to argue his case for a sixty percent black district. The legislature would not adjourn until Tuesday so that if Justice approved Pegues’ sixty percent black district, an executive or legislative amendment could be made to reinstate it. If Justice failed to approve it, the original Manley plan would be law and Gov. James would sign it.

The script for this compromise was followed carefully. The legislature met and, over the objections of some disgruntled whites and the Black Legislative Caucus, approved the original Manley plan. On the weekend, Pegues flew to Washington and returned for the session on Tuesday, June 1. On the floor the legislator plaintively admitted, “If my amendment alone went on the bill, it would adversely affect it.” He had failed to convince Justice.

Both houses quickly confirmed the Manley plan with dissenting votes coming only from black legislators who didn’t think the plan went far enough in remedying the efforts of the old plan and from a handful of whites who thought it went too far or who just didn’t like the way Manley or Justice had treated them.

With final legislative action, activities shifted from Montgomery to Washington and the Justice Department. Manley, Proctor, and state lawyers flew to Washington immediately after the legislative adjournment to put their case before the U.S. Assistant Attorney General. A delegation of the Legislative Black Caucus followed in the same week to ask for an objection. On Tuesday, June 8th, Justice issued a letter approving most of the Manley plan. Full arguments before the federal court will come late in June or July.

Florida

With most counties in the state not covered by the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance section, Florida has settled the primary issues of reapportioning its congressional and state legislative districts.

With the addition of four congressional districts in the state, blacks had hoped vainly for a majority-black congressional district and some gains in creating single-member, majority-black districts in the state senate and house. Putting aside those concerns, the Florida legislators saw the most bitter fight between the interests of Republicans and Democrats and among several leading state legislators who have eyed one of the new congressional seats for their own political future.

Georgia

After the Justice Department’s decision in April to approve Georgia’s state legislative reapportionment plan while rejecting the congressional one, the state’s new attorney general, Michael Bowers, led the way in appealing the decision of Justice to the federal courts in Washington. Assuring other state officials and congressmen that the court appeal would be won in time to hold elections as usual, Bowers got a vote of confidence from both houses of the Georgia General Assembly, the Lt. Governor, and the Governor.

The state argues that Justice’s rejection of a fifty-seven percent black-populated congressional district in the Atlanta area misapplies the Voting Rights Act. The district is already fifty percent black and the state’s proposal would have increased the number of blacks in the district by seven percentage points. Bowers says that Justice is attempting to require Georgia’s legislature to make a guaranteed black seat of the Fifth Congressional District. The Democratic incumbent of the Fourth District, Elliott Levitas, adds that Justice is attempting to define him out of office by creating a district with a Republican majority.

The Justice Department’s decision to disapprove the fifty-seven percent majority-black district indicated that the state failed to rebut evidence that “the line between districts number four and five were drawn to minimize

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the voting strength” of blacks in that area. U.S. Assistant c Attorney General Bradford Reynolds reminded Bowers that the state senate had adopted the plan sponsored by black state Sen. Julian Bond to create a sixty-nine percent majority-black congressional district. Reynolds also noted that Georgia had failed to rebut evidence that the Bond plan was rejected (after several days of negotiations between the two houses of the General Assembly) largely because of the state House of Representatives’ determination not to permit black voters too much power at the polls in any congressional district. (See SOUTHERN CHANGES, April, 1982).

Once Bowers had filed the state’s appeal in Washington, several black state legislators and citizens from Atlanta intervened to support Justice’s objection. Intervenors claimed that the proposed fifty-seven percent black district not only has a discriminatory purpose but also a discriminatory effect on black voting strength. The trial starts June 28 and may last ten or fifteen days. A decision by the federal court could come as late as the end of July.

If Justice’s actions are upheld, the federal courts will likely take over the job of drawing an interim congressional plan for the primary and general elections this year in order to assure that the elections are held.

Because time is running out, the state’s attorney general attempted in May to have Georgia’s secretary of state receive filing papers from congressional candidates for the existing districts. The federal district court in Washington, however, blocked that attempt after the intervenors’ lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the state should not be allowed to proceed under congressional plans that are unlawful. ACLU lawyer Laughlin McDonald told the court that the state should not be permitted to use a congressional plan until it had adopted one that was approved by Justice and the courts. The court agreed and barred the state from proceeding with the existing congressional districts.

Pretrial discovery in the case indicates that key legislative leaders in the general assembly were in fact working to keep black voters out of control in any congressional district. Black and white state legislators have stated in sworn testimony that the primary discussion in the legislature on congressional redistricting was whether a “rigger” district would be created. The chairman of the lower house’s reapportionment committee, Joe Mack Wilson, has stated, “The only thing worse than a ‘rigger’ district is a Republican district.”

Such revelations during discovery may have caused the state lawyers to develop a highly unusual and possibly unethical practice of keeping clients and the state’s witnesses under control during testimony. Recently it was uncovered that a lawyer in the state attorney general’s office had arranged a system of tapping a state legislator’s foot under the table during depositions whenever the lawyer believed that the legislator’s testimony was “getting out of control.”

Both Justice and the intervenors have continued to stress that the proposed district which Justice rejected may have had a majority-black population but had a “fifty-four percent white voter registration.” Also, lawyers have pointed out that while legislators say they objected to Bond’s proposed district because it unnecessarily crossed county lines and divided the metropolitan area, the proposed, unsuccessful congressional district crossed county lines just as much.

Louisiana

As state officials began leaving their offices in Baton Rouge for Memorial Day weekend, Justice Department lawyers in Washington informed the state’s attorney general by telephone that the Louisiana state redistricting plan had been rejected under the Voting Rights Act.

Members of the Legislative Black Caucus and civil rights leaders i n New Orleans had petitioned Justice earlier to turn down the redistricting passed by the legislature late last year. They contend that the proposed plan is racially discriminatory, especially in New Orleans where the number of majority-white districts increased from seven to eight. This rearrangement was proposed despite an increase in the percentage of blacks in New Orleans. Black leaders pointed out that, statewide, the number of black majority districts would have been decreased from seventeen to fourteen if the legislature’s plans had been approved by Justice.

One alternative plan which the Black Caucus may present soon to the legislature when it takes up reapportionment again would provide for twenty majority-black house districts across the state.

Mississippi

Federal courts in Mississippi and Washington will decide in the next several weeks if the poorest state in the nation, with almost a forty percent black population, will have one of five congressional districts with a majority of black voters.

The possibility of a black congressional district was rejected by the Mississippi Legislature late last year when it turned down a plan by black state Sen. Henry J. Kirksey of Jackson who proposed a sixty-five percent majority-black congressional district that centered in the state’s Delta region. On March 30 the Justice Department objected to the legislative plan which created a forty-eight percent black district that ran across the midsection of Mississippi from the Delta on the west to the Alabama border on the east and a forty-five percept black district in the southwestern corner.

In disapproving the congressional plan, Justice noted that the heavily black-populated Delta had been split into congressional districts shortly after the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed in order to break up black Mississippians’ strongest voting power. Justice found, that in drafting reapportionment lines in 1981, Mississippi state officials had failed to show that the rejection of alternative proposals such as Senator Kirksey’s was not racially motivated.

By the second week of April, Mississippi had filed an

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appeal of Justice’s decision in federal court in Washington and retained Jerris Leonard, the lawyer also handling North Carolina’s redistricting case, to present their claims that a change from an existing forty-five percent black district in the Delta to a forty-seven percent black district was not racially discriminatory. According to local press reports, Mississippi also set aside a quartet of a million dollars in order to allow its lawyers to press their case.

A few days later, twelve blacks filed suit in federal court in Greenville asking that a three-judge panel prohibit the state from using the 1981 congressional plan which Justice rejected and implement instead an interim plan with a sixty-five percent majority black Delta district for elections this year. State officials apparently had hoped to win their appeal in Washington or to be permitted to use a version of their 1981 reapportionment in the June 1 primaries; however, the court did not permit its use and instead asked for oral arguments and briefs in order to make a decision on what plan could be used this year.

Blacks and some white liberals in Mississippi are also split politically on the issue of a black Delta district. Whites fear that the creation of a Delta district will take so many blacks from other areas that Mississippi would have “one friendly black face and four hostile Republicans” in its five-member congressional delegation. Blacks respond wistfully that they must have missed something in the last thirty years of Mississippi politics since they have not been able to find all those white responsive, sympathetic Democrats which such an argument assumes.

While the Greenville court is expected to rule soon, both sides in the litigation promise an appeal, and the final shape of the Delta district for the November elections this year may not be decided until late July.

North Carolina

Never in its history has the North Carolina legislature faced such persisting problems in reapportioning its own houses. The general assembly has already convened four times to draw district lines. While the dispute has now been settled in Washington and the Justice Department, a federal court in Raleigh will decide later in the summer if the state must make a fifth effort.

The latest special session on reapportionment came in late April. The legislature convened after Justice objected for the third time to both the house and senate lines. In its letter of objection, Justice found that a 51.3 percent majority-black senate district in the northeastern part of the state continued to dilute black voting strength in an area where a 61.2 percent black district had been proposed by the N.C. Association of Black Lawyers. In the house plan, Justice objected to the continued submerging of black voters in Fayetteville in a large, multi-member district of white voters. In a county where five representatives sit in the lower house, the General Assembly had proposed a district which it claimed contained “eighty-four percent majority of black registered voters.” In fact, the district of almost fifty thousand people had less than four thousand registered voters on the books because most of the residents were military families stationed at nearby Ft. Bragg. Justice accepted the arguments of the black plaintiffs who had challenged the reapportionment in federal court that this majority-black district was an illusion at best.

Because candidates’ filing dates were scheduled to begin in May, North Carolina state officials moved quickly when Justice’s actions became known. After Jerris Leonard, the state’s Washington counsel and former assistant attorney general under Nixon, advised his clients that Justice’s objections could be met with only minor changes, the legislature was called into special session. Within-three days the General Assembly had approved an increase of four percentage points in the black population of the northeastern senate district; up to 55.1 percent. In Fayetteville, a new single-member district was carved out of both the Ft. Bragg area and some of the black-populated parts of the City.

Before the General Assembly adjourned, rumors spread that U.S. Assistant Attorney General Bradford Reynolds had approved, by telephone, the new plan with its two minor changes. The official approval of the plan on April 30th, less than two days after the legislature’s adjournment, seemed to confirm the scuttlebutt.

Lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) who represent black plaintiffs in the Raleigh suit criticize Justice’s decision as providing too little protection for black voters. They point out that the fifty-five percent black senate district has less than a majority of blacks of voting-age population and that black registration is probably closer to forty-three percent. They also argue that while the Cumberland County house district may have a majority of registered black voters, it does not have a majority of potential black voters.

Despite Justice’s approval, the district lines for the legislature are not yet settled. LDF lawyers contend that the legislature’s failure to create single-member districts in Charlotte, Raleigh, and Durham, where several majority black districts could be created. will be declared unconstitutional by the federal court when the issue comes to trial in the summer or fall. Because North Carolina has only forty of its one hundred counties covered by the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act, the legislature’s redistricting of the major urban centers were not reviewed by Justice. Legal. observers believe that Justice may intervene in the federal suit in Raleigh on the side of black plaintiffs to help challenge the redistricting of the urban centers since they could not review it under the preclearance provisions.

As in other Southern states, several groups are in court fighting reapportionment. State Republicans have had their case consolidated with the Raleigh lawsuit. They are challenging as unlawful all multi-member districts throughout the state. At the same time, white citizens in Wake County–near the city of Winston-Salem–are suing the state because it created a single-member district that split parts of Wake into different legislative districts.

With Justice’s approval, North Carolina officials have gone forward with their elections for the fall. Yet,

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depending on the future evidence presented in the federal court, those plans may be only the fifth edition in the long run of redistricting in the state.

SOUTH CAROLINA

After extensive negotiations between the Justice Department lawyers and State Representative Robert Shebeen, the redistricting of the South Carolina house came to an end in April although the state senate has yet to take up its own reapportionment.

Shebeen, the chairman of the state house judiciary committee, came up with a revised plan after Justice objected to an earlier redistricting. Shuttling back and forth from Washington for almost four weeks, the South Carolina lawmaker came up with an acceptable plan that created twenty-six majority-black house districts, two more than presently exist. The gains are in majority-black districts in Richmond County surrounding Columbia and in Florence.

While primary elections proceeded on schedule, the biggest battle in line-drawing may lie ahead. The state senate has sixteen multi-member districts which elect up to five members each. The Legislative Black Caucus, none of whose members sit in the all-white state senate, are urging a single-member district plan that would give black voters a better opportunity to have their vote count.

TEXAS

Primary elections were held in Texas in early May and June under redistricting plans which federal courts had ordered for 1982. Before the next congressional elections, however, the legislature must return to Austin to draw up at least four new congressional districts around Dallas and may choose to remap the entire state.

Appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court went to the wire as the primary election of May 1 approached. The decision of a three-judge federal court panel in Texas was overturned once by the Supreme Court in early April because the lower court had gone too far in redrawing too many congressional districts. In April the lower court acted quickly and revised its plan which the Supreme Court refused to overturn.

Hispanic groups in Texas were especially disappointed in the redistricting since they had expected a majority district in Congress and substantial additions in both the state senate and house in southwest Texas.

VIRGINIA

On April Fool’s Day, the Virginia General Assembly reluctantly met in special session and ended more than a year of entanglements over redistricting by creating three additional majority-black districts in the lower house.

Civil rights and civil liberties groups who had fought the state plan before the Justice Department and the courts expressed almost complete satisfaction of the new plan. “We’ve achieved what we set out to do,” said Henry Marsh, black mayor of Richmond and lawyer for the state NAACP. Judy Goldberg of the Virginia ACLU echoed the sentiment by calling the plan a “99.5 percent victory.” After a federal court and Justice had given the state delegates three opportunities to draw lawful lines, the General Assembly acknowledged that its April session was its last chance to keep the courts out of redistricting.

While the new reapportionment adds probably three districts where blacks may be able to elect candidates Virginia presently has only four blacks among the 140 members of the House and Senate. One in five of the state’s population is black.

While black leaders and civil rights groups are pleased, white Democrats claim that the reapportionment does more for Republicans than for blacks. Calling reapportionment a “ghettoizing” of blacks and a promotion of Republican districts, these Democrats argue that the next General Assembly will be more hostile to black interests. Most black leaders find the claims unpersuasive.

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