Southern Changes. Volume 5, Number 2, 1983 – Southern Changes

Money on the Mainline

Tim Johnson — Tue, 01 Mar 1983 05:00:01 +0000

Money on the Mainline

By Tim Johnson

Vol. 5, No. 2, 1983, pp. 1-6

Bob Scherer, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of the Georgia Power Company, believes that electric rates should not be regulated. “Regulation isn’t working,” he explained recently to a reporter from Industry Week magazine.

“If we were deregulated tomorrow,” he continued, “and we could charge whatever we wanted, there would not be, in my opinion, a disproportionate amount of socking it to the customer.”

Although Scherer did not explain what a “proportionate” amount of socking it to the customer would be, his company has engaged in a long-range strategy of persuading the Georgia General Assembly, one step at a time, to remove authority from the state Public Service Commission, steadily increasing rates and profits. After all, as Scherer declares, “We found out that our fundamental purpose was to raise a reasonable return for our investors.”

In 1980, an election year (Georgia legislators serve two-year terms), Georgia Power pushed legislation that would have drastically restricted the PSC: the cost of plant construction work in progress would be placed into the rate base so that the Company would be allowed to earn profits on plants that were not yet in operation: consumers would be prohibited from intervening in rate cases; when the Company earned state income tax credits, the PSC would pretend that the taxes had been paid and charge consumers accordingly; rates would be based on Company estimates for future costs. Several other provisions would have also proven costly to the ratepayer. Dozens of citizens, most of them turned out by Georgians Against Nuclear Energy, lobbied furiously against the bill, and although versions of it squeaked through both houses of the legislature, it failed to pass both house and

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senate in identical form before time ran out.

The Company vowed to return the next session. In the meantime, the sponsor of the bill–Representative Bob Sise, a natural gas company executive–was defeated at the polls. The only issue his opponent discussed was “the Georgia Power Boondoggle,” as the bill was called.

The next year, the Company was back. This time, it asked for much less–legislation that would require that electric rates be based on future costs and that state tax credits and deferrals be ignored in rate cases (federal law already requires this for federal taxes). With strong behind the-scenes support from Lieutenant Governor Zell Miller (who had opposed the Company’s legislation the previous year, when he was running for U.S. Senate), the bill breezed through both houses and was signed by the Governor almost before citizens could react.

The sponsor of the bill, Senator Tom Allgood, was elected senate majority leader in only his second term in the senate. Bob Scherer sent out a fundraising letter to local business leaders for Miller’s reelection campaign.

“Clearly, the Company is working toward deregulation of its rates,” comments Neill Herring, an Atlanta activist. “Their construction program is so out of hand that they have a choice between admitting they were wrong and cancelling some of their plants, or intimidating the state legislature into giving them more of the ratepayers’ money. And they won’t admit they made a mistake.” Herring is in a position to know: since 1971, he has been involved with various groups in opposing electric rate increases.

In January of this year, Herring and forty-five other citizens attended an “Energy Strategy Conference” at a Future Farmers of America Camp near Covington, Georgia, (a campground given to FFA by Georgia Power.) The conference was organized by the Southern Regional Council, the Environmental Action Foundation of Washington, and Georgians Against Nuclear Energy (GANE). Concerned about the same issues for varying reasons, these groups hoped to bring together a diverse coalition of citizens to discuss Georgia’s energy future.

“Everybody’s affected by higher power bills,” points out Sid Moore, an attorney who has intervened in utility rate cases on behalf of poor people (for Georgia Legal Services), all residential and small business consumers (as the state-hired consumers utility counsel) and retail businesses (on behalf of the Georgia Retail Association).

Rising utility rates hit the poor hardest, but the middle class, small businesses, industry and government also suffer when power bills increase. And because utility rates are set by state agencies, organizers have a forum for opposing unjustified increases.

A recent ally of those concerned about rising electric bills is the environmentalist movement. In the past, many environmentalists supported electric rate hikes because higher rates encouraged conservation and conversion to renewable energy resources. However, because the major cause of rate hikes is the construction of new power plants, especially nuclear power plants, environmentalists have increasingly joined forces with those concerned about the economic impact of electric rate increases.

“If we’re going to stop Plant Vogtle (a two-unit nuclear plant under construction by Georgia Power), we’re going to have to cut off the money,” explains Pam Beardsley of GANE.

The January Energy Strategy Conference drew representatives of business, government and citizens groups for a weekend of workshops and strategy sessions in six areas of concern: the economics of power plant construction; alternatives to construction; organizing within cooperatively-owned and city-owned power companies; intervening in rate cases; the politics of electric utilities in Georgia, and organizing around utility issues in the black community.

“Everyone agreed that the major problem facing electricity consumers in Georgia is Georgia Power’s construction program,” according to Debby Shepherd, the main coordinator of the conference.

In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Georgia Power–like other utilities in the South–undertook massive construction programs predicated on growth rates projected at ten percent or more per year. Electricity consumption had grown at this rate through the sixties, and, using a straight-line projection, utilities assumed that this rate would continue.

There were several fallacies in this assumption. As Sid Moore points out, the utilities drew the straight line without looking at the reasons behind the growth in the sixties.

“Residences and offices installed air conditioning in the fifties and sixties, causing the tremendous jump in summer demand,” says Moore. “But the market was saturated. To assume continued growth at these levels would mean that poor people would be putting in air conditioning, since they were the only ones without it.”

Electricity prices had actually declined in the sixties, further encouraging consumption. The huge construction

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programs of the seventies, coupled with fuel price increases in the seventies, further dampening demand growth.

Contributing particularly to higher prices for electricity was the construction of nuclear power plants. Once glowingly touted as offering the potential for electricity “too cheap to meter,” nuclear power turned out to be extraordinarily unreliable and expensive. By the end of the 1970’s, electricity produced by new nuclear power plants exceeded the cost of electricity produced at oil-burning facilities.

“At this rate, it will soon be cheaper to burn money to produce electricity than to use nuclear power,” commented Danny Feig of Atlanta, an antinuclear organizer.

Another reason for the slackening demand for electricity was the increasing share of the market taken by alternative energy sources. “People are utilizing conservation techniques, wood, passive solar water and space heating, low-head hydro, and cogeneration (producing industrial process heat and electricity with the same steam),” according to Jeff Tiller, an engineer who participated in the conference.

In those states where power companies failed to adjust their construction program to the reality of growth in consumption, the consequences have been severe. Consumers have usually been required to pay for new plants whether the plants were needed or not, sharply increasing rates and further dampening consumption. Georgia Power has tried to solve this problem not by reducing construction, but by selling plants to out-of-state utilities. However, these utilities themselves are usually overbuilt, so only small percentages of Georgia Power’s “overcapacity” has been sold to out-of-state utilities.

The overcapacity problem in Georgia is particularly severe: a 1978 report by the U.S. House Committee on Government Operations states, “Georgia Power Company rated first (in annual cost to consumers of excess generating capacity) with overcharges of $39 million.” The problem in Georgia has become much worse since that time, as several more plants have come on line and growth has further declined.

Yet, the construction program of Georgia Power continues.

In West Georgia, on the Chattahoochee River, two hydroelectric projects are under way at Goat Rock and two more at Bartletts Ferry (Georgia Power already operates several facilites at those sites).

In northwest Georgia, near Rome, the Company is building three pumped-storage hydroelectric projects on Rocky Mountain. A pumped-storage facility involves two dams, one at a lower elevation where water is stored after it flows from the higher, electricity producing dam during peak hours. During off-peak times, base-load electricity is used to pump water back up to the higher dam for use during the peak hours.

In Monroe County, near Macon, Georgia Power angered residents when it condemned twelve thousand acres of land for construction of a four-unit coal facility, the Robert Scherer Plant. Utility officials once bragged that this would be the largest coal-fired facility in the world, but became quieter when residents expressed concern rather than gratitude.

The state of Georgia is allowing Plant Scherer to be built without air-cleaning scrubbers, saying that land clearing at the site constituted the beginning of construction, making the facility exempt from federal requirements under a grandfathering provision. The result, according to Georgia Power’s own environmental assessment, will be the following emissions: 37,200 pounds of sulphur dioxide per hour, 3,100 pounds of I articulates per hour, and 21,700 pounds of nitrogen dioxide per hour. Such emissions have been associated with various health problems (including lung cancer) and environmental problems (including acid rain and crop damage). Plant Scherer is a base-load plant (designed to operate around the clock) as opposed to a peaking plant (used only when demand is at its highest), meaning that the plant is scheduled to operate twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year round.

Georgia Power’s repeated efforts to sell Plant Scherer to utilities in other states has fueled the bitterness of Georgia natives. One partial buyer is the Gulf Power Company, which, like Georgia Power, is a subsidiary of The Southern Company. Gulf Power cancelled a coal-fired plant it was building on the Crystal River in Florida to buy into Plant Scherer. The reason? The State of Florida required Gulf to put scrubbers on its plants, and the cost difference between the Florida plants with scrubbers and Plant Scherer without scrubbers made the cancellation economically attractive. Billy Lovett, a member of Georgia’s Public Service Commission who attended the Energy Strategy Conference, expresses the sentiment of many Georgians when he refers to the deal as “filtering Florida’s air with Georgia’s lungs.”

Molly Martin, and Zeke Williams of Macon were among those gathered in January at the Energy Strategy Conference. They expressed concern about the air pollution from the plant–one unit of which is complete–as their primary reason for attending the conference. Also present were homeowners whose land had been

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condemned for high-voltage power lines from Plant Scherer.

“I bought a home in a rural area to get away from environmental threats to my family,” says Rabun Tingle, a small business operator and the father of six. “I’m not about to roll over and play dead when they try to condemn my land for dangerous power lines from a plant they don’t even need.”

Tingle pointed out that during condemnation proceedings for Plant Scherer, Henry Strozier, Assistant Vice-President and Manager of System Planning for Georgia Power, swore that the plant would not be sold to out-of-state utilities: “We only build for Georgia,” he said under oath.

In the same 1974 proceeding, Strozier downplayed the significance of energy conservation, saying, “The energy conservation kick has little effect on demand.”

The overconstruction problems at all these sites are dwarfed when compared with just one construction project: the Alvin W. Vogtle Nuclear Plant, named after the current president of The Southern Company. (Jeanne Shor house, a Southern Company stockholder who opposes Plant Vogtle, once proposed at an annual meeting of the Company that a currently operating plant be renamed after Alvin Vogtle “so his ego won’t be so tied up in this worthless nuclear plant.”)

Located across the river from the Savannah River Plant (where plutonium and tritium are produced for the nation’s nuclear weapons), Plant Vogtle is the most expensive construction project ever undertaken in Georgia. The Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia (MEAG), a partner in the project, estimated in May of 1982 that its 17.7% share of the plant would cost $1.8607 billion, for total plant cost of more than $10.5 billion (assuming that Georgia Power could obtain capital as cheap as MEAG’s tax-free municipal bonds, which it cannot). This cost estimate includes only construction and interest costs before the plant comes on line.

In comparison, the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Station now under construction at Kings Bay on the Georgia coast–the most expensive peacetime construction project the Navy has ever undertaken–is projected to cost $1.7 billion, less than one-sixth the currently projected cost of Vogtle. The Atlanta airport, one of the largest and busiest in the world, cost less than $500 million–one twentieth the cost of Vogtle.

At the end of 1981, the net value of all of Georgia Power’s operating equipment totaled $3.7 billion. Plant

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Vogtle would therefore cost, at current estimates, nearly three times as much as all plants, lines, poles, meters and other capital equipment in operation a year ago combined.

In 1972, Georgia Power told Moody’s investment service that the two units at Plant Vogtle would cost a total of $731 million and both would be in operation by 1980. In 1983, the Company estimates that the plants will be on line in 1988, and admits even this projection is “optimistic.” And MEAG projects that they will cost more than fourteen times the 1972 projection.

Environmentalists have long been concerned about nuclear power problems such as plant safety, waste disposal and decommissioning. Peace activists have traditionally opposed nuclear power development because it provides a means for producing materials for nuclear weapons. It is now clear that, at least in the case of Plant Vogtle, continued construction is a major economic issue.

“Plant Vogtle is an albatross,” says Al Burrell, a founder of GANE and editor of its newsletter, The Gainsayer.

Burrell and the other citizens at the January Energy Strategy Conference agreed that Plant Vogtle would be a major target of their efforts.

“We agreed that focusing on the economic aspects of Plant Vogtle holds the most promise for stopping the plant,” said Debby Shepherd.

If Plant Vogtle is completed and placed into the rate base it will have a devastating impact on electricity consumers in Georgia. Sid Moore calculates that electricity produced at Plant Vogtle will cost more than twenty cents per kilowatt hour to produce (not including distribution or administrative costs), compared with about three cents per kilowatt hour for electricity produced in Georgia today.

The cost of Vogtle electricity will be borne by virtually all electricity consumers in Georgia, since cooperatives and city-owned utilities own shares in the project.

To estimate the direct impact on Georgia Power’s retail residential consumers, a relatively simple calculation produces frightening projections. Placing Georgia Power’s share of the facility into the rate base–$5.5 billion–and paying the Company a 12.5% return on rate base (less than they now are allowed), then doubling this for the tax effect (any rate increase must be doubled for the effect of state and federal income taxes; although Georgia Power does not pay this amount, state and federal-laws require the PSC to pretend that no tax credits or deductions were taken) indicates a $1.375 billion rate hike. This does not include labor, operating costs, distribution costs or other related costs. The residential consumers’ share of this would be about $460 million, divided among Georgia Power’s 1.1 million residential consumers. Thus, the average residential consumer would pay more than four hundred dollars a year in higher power bills due merely to adding Plant Vogtle to the rate base.

Effects on other consumers–stores, industry, schools and others–will be similarly startling. What will happen to marginal businesses? Will industry locate in other states? Money put into paying school systems’ power bills cannot be spent increasing teachers’ salaries.

“Plant Vogtle is an economic quagmire,” says Carol Stangler, former coordinator of GANE. “It’s time to pull out.”

Especially in view of Georgia’s glut of electricity generating capacity (more than forty percent above peak demand with twelve more plants under construction), it is in the best interest of the state’s economy to stop construction of the Vogtle plant. Experience in other states similarly indicates that cancellation of Plant Vogtle would be a wise action.

It is also in the best interest of the Georgia Power Company to stop construction of Plant Vogtle.

As eletricity rates rise, consumers shift to alternative sources of energy, including conservation. Many industrial consumers now use their process heat (heat produced in the manufacturing process by burning coal, oil, gas, wood or another fuel) to boil water, producing steam which turns turbines, thereby producing their own electricity. Industrial motors produced today are twice as efficient as those produced just a few years ago. Residential consumers insulate their homes and, as they replace appliances, purchase more efficient ones (household appliance efficiency has quadrupled in the past ten years). Passive solar energy for space and water heating is already considerably cheaper than electricity. While few people have the capital needed at the front-end for these alternatives, lending institutions are proving more receptive.

As Georgia Power’s electricity becomes more expensive, it will make even more economic sense to switch to alternative energy sources. Within a few years–before Plant Vogtle is scheduled to come on line–electricity produced from solar cells is expected to be cheaper (including battery storage) than the electricity produced at Plant Vogtle. As consumers conserve and switch to other sources, Georgia Power will either have to lower prices in order to be more competitive with the alternatives (in which case, unless they cancel some of their construction, they will lose money) or to raise prices to its remaining customers to pay for idle power plants–an option likely to drive away even more customers.

“Georgia Power apparently doesn’t plan to stop Plant Vogtle anytime soon,” says Pam Beardsley. “Not if they can get the money the plant requires.” But Beardsley believes that, by drawing attention to the detrimental effects on the state’s economy of high utilty rates and

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overconstruction of power plants, new allies will be drawn into the battle.

Within the last few weeks, a remarkable coalition has emerged to challenge the Power Company’s latest legislative maneuverings–attempts to allow rate hikes to go into effect before full PSC proceedings are completed. Such legislation would provide Georgia Power with an extra hundred million dollars or more during each rate case.

The organized elderly have voiced their opposition through the Georgia chapters of the American Association of Retired Persons, the National Retired Teachers Association and the Council on Aging. Organized labor is represented by the Communication Workers of America, the United Auto Workers and the Machinists. Residential consumer advocates are working through Ratewatch, Georgia Action/ACORN and others. The attorney who represents major commerical consumers on rate design issues has lobbied extensively, as has John Lewis, former SNCC organizer, long-time civil rights activist and member of Atlanta’s City Council. All five Public Service Commissioners oppose such legislation as do the current and two former Consumers’ Utility Counsels (a state office established to represent consumers). The two Atlanta newspapers, usually advocates for Georgia Power, have, of late, taken the consumers’ side as have several other newspapers around the state. Two chemical companies have joined the coalition. And citizens from all over Georgia have phoned and written legislators to express their opposition.

The coalition has named itself the Campaign for a Prosperous Georgia; “It has a Republican ring to it,” explains organizer Doug Teper in explaining the attempt to show that fighting utility rate hikes is not a subversive activity. A full-time coordinator has been hired, a small grant has been obtained from the Janet Lowe Memorial Fund, and more fundraising efforts are under way.

“The fight is between truth and money,” says Rabun Tingle. “We’ll see who wins.”

The Co-Owners Of Plant Vogtle

Currently, Plant Vogtle is jointly owned by:

Georgia Power 50.1%
Oglethorpe Power Corporation 30.0%
Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia (MEAG) 17.7%
City of Dalton 2.2%

Georgia Power is an investor-owned utility serving the majority of Georgia’s electric consumers. It is wholly owned by The Southern Company, which also owns Alabama Power, Gulf Power (in Florida), and Mississippi Power.

Oglethorpe Power Corporation consists of rural electric cooperatives which serve a majority of the land area (though a minority of the population) of Georgia. It was established in the 1970s to buy into Georgia Power’s construction projects and has been able to obtain extremely cheap money from the federal Rural Electrification Administration (meaning that taxpayers are subsidizing the construction with their tax money as well as their electric rates).

MEAG was created by the State of Georgia and consists of 46 city-owned electric systems and one county-owned system representing about 8. 6% of the state’s population. It was created in the 1970s exclusively for the purpose of buying into Georgia Power’s construction projects, thereby providing lower cost capital for the construction. This is due to the tax-free nature of bonds it issues (another taxpayer subsidy).

The City of Dalton opted to stay out of MEAG but bought into Plant Vogtle on its own.

Tim Johnson, who has worked for the Georgia Public Service Commission and the Consumers’ Utility Counsel of Georgia, its an Atlanta writer and organizer.

Ethics and Equations

Polly Paddock — Tue, 01 Mar 1983 05:00:02 +0000

Ethics and Equations

By Polly Paddock

Vol. 5, No. 2, 1983, p. 7

I was never much of a math or science student. During high school and college, I went to great lengths to avoid taking any courses in those fields beyond what was absolutely required. Why dissect a fetal pig or struggle with calculus, I figured, when you could be reading Greek tragedy or studying U.S. history?

I’m not defending my admittedly narrow point of view. Students should get just as solid a foundation in math and science as in language and the humanities, I believe.

And today, as we plunge into an industrial and technological revolution that’s fast outstripping our production of skilled workers, the need is greater than ever.

Still, I’m troubled by the sudden burst of attention math and science are receiving. There’s too much talk about using the public schools to train workers–and too little discussion of injecting values and ethics into math and science instruction.

North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt, as chairman of the Education Commission of the States, recently appointed a thirty-four-member task force to reassess the nation’s educational goals.

“. . . The most important thing we can do to increase economic growth and provide more high-paying jobs,” Gov. Hunt said, “is to provide an excellent education that in strong in areas like math and science.”

The public schools, he added, must begin to “provide education for economic growth, not just for citizenship, not just because education is a nice thing to have . . . ”

Well, OK–nobody can quarrel with the need for economic growth. And it’s logical to assume that beefing up math and science instruction will help provide that. Students today get too little classroom time in those fields; the shortage of math and science teachers is alarming. And the lack of skilled workers in such areas as electronics, engineering and telecommunications is a hindrance to the kind of economic development we so desperately need.

But one of the reasons that education IS a “nice thing to have” is because it gives you context. The lessons of history, literature, religion, philosophy and ethics are critical to all fields, especially science and technology. Without them, we would have highly trained–but possibly valueless–automatons making vital decisions about creating and destroying life, altering the environment, defying what were once considered the immutable laws of nature.

Surely that’s not what we want. Yet educators and public officials are scrambling so hard to find quick solutions to the math and science lag that they aren’t always looking at the long-range implications of their actions.

Pay math and science teachers more than those in other fields, some suggest; give them a wide range of incentives to stick with teaching rather than be lured into lucrative industry jobs. Increase the number of classroom hours devoted to math and science, many argue.

But what is the effect on underpaid teachers of English, say, or history? What subject areas begin to get less teaching time? What statement does our society want to make about how we assess the relative importance of technology and the humanities?

Both U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel H. Bell and N.C. State University Chancellor Bruce R. Poulton have, in recent speeches, spoken admiringly about the rigorous math and science requirements in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe communist bloc nations. U.S. attention to these disciplines has been far too lax, both men said; it’s hardly a coincidence, they implied, that the Soviets are beating us in the race to produce engineers and other scientific experts.

That may be true, as far as it goes. But the Soviet Union is not exactly famous for its devotion to the humanities, or for the encouragement of creative, independent thinking among students. Those are qualities we claim to value highly in this country, attributes we deem essential to an enlightened citizenry. We must not lose sight of that in the mad race to turn out a new generation of science and math whiz kids.

In a recent editorial bemoaning the “deterioration” of our math and science capability. The Washington Post asserted that a “romantic bias against technology (has) inflicted real damage on the schools and their students.” While I’m not convinced that such a bias has ever existed, I can’t see how substituting a pragmatic bias against the humanities can possibly serve us well.

What we need at this point, I think, is a national reassessment of how much attention our schools are giving to ALL academic disciplines–and how much in the way of resources we as a society are willing to provide the schools to do their job. We may indeed need to beef up our math and science curricula, but ONLY as one part of a rigorous, total education that focuses on ethics as well as equations.

Governor Hunt’s task force on educational goals has said it hopes to involve parents and other interested citizens in its assessment. I suggest that those of us troubled by simplistic rhetoric about the math and science lag make ourselves heard; letters should be addressed to the Task Force on Education for Economic Growth, c/o Gov. James Hunt, Capitol Building, Raleigh, N.C. 27611.

Polly Paddock is an editorial page writer for the Charlotte Observer.

Mississippi Makes Up Its Mind

Rims Barber — Tue, 01 Mar 1983 05:00:03 +0000

Mississippi Makes Up Its Mind

By Rims Barber

Vol. 5, No. 2, 1983, pp. 8-9

The passage of an educational reform package by the Mississippi Legislature was an important victory for public involvement. Pushing the legislature to act on the education issue involved a broader based public effort than any other issue in recent Mississippi history. Such interest and effort made the legislature accountable, forcing it to act in ways that were beyond its normal, narrow political framework.

Governor William Winter focused the issues in a manner that captured the public. He developed a campaign that led people to demand reforms in education because they were right and good and possible.

In his state of the state message at the opening of the January 1982 legislative session, Governor Winter had called for creation of kindergartens, a state lay board of education and passage of compulsory attendance legislation. Exhorting the legislature to help move Mississippi out of fiftieth place among the states in per capita income, Winter called for a long term commitment to improve education. To pay for the program, he asked for an educational trust fund generated from the revenues of an increase in the oil and gas severance tax. “It’s boat rocking time,” he said, trying to motivate legislators to vote for a significant change. But the legislature only gave its approval to the state lay board, placing it on the November ballot as a constitutional amendment.

Kindergarten died on the house calendar in February 1982 as Speaker Buddie Newman adjourned the house even as members tried to gain consideration of the measure. Black legislator Leslie King condemned Newman’s action in “ignoring the will of this body.” Efforts to revive the kindergarten measure failed and the trust fund was defeated. Representative Robert Clark, chairman of the education committee, said that many representatives “turned chicken” on the issue of kindergarten when the money proposal was before them. He predicted that “this is the one last chance we’ll have in the next six or eight years to enact kindergartens.”

Clark would be proved wrong, but only after an intense public campaign initiated by Governor Winter which led to the special session in December. In the fall, the governor conducted a nine-city campaign of education forums, emphasizing the need for Mississippi to make a breakthrough in education or forever be lost in last place among the states. Almost twenty thousand people attended those forums, building support that helped pass the constitutional referendum, finally creating the state lay board of education and setting the base of support for the education reform package voted on in the special session.

People began to work for the changes they believed would bring about progress for all Mississippians. To accomplish this, they overcame their sense of narrow self-interest and saw the interdependence of all the state’s people.

The governor moved Theodore “The Man” Bilbo’s statue, one symbol of the past, out of the main corridor of the capitol building and the people helped move the legislature beyond the vestiges of that past.

Much of the recent history of Mississippi school matters has been tied up in the racial dilemma. In the 1950’s, the state responded to the Brown decision with a series of changes in the laws that were an attempt to stave off the potential effects of desegregation. In the 1960’s, school desegregation came and along with it the private school movement.

Following legal desegregation of the public schools, segregated academies blossomed across the state, leaving a fourth of Mississippi’s school districts virtually all-black (although whites still controlled the school boards). Several districts lowered their local tax support of public schools. Half the black principals in the state lost their leadership positions. With significant numbers of voters no longer committed to the public schools, many legislators faltered in their support for public education. Resolutions were passed calling for an end to busing. A try at enacting kindergarten in 1972 failed in the face of race-baiting opposition.

Throughout this period, many educational leaders continued to call for reform. In 1967, Mississippi commissioned a significant study which concluded that “our children are not receiving as effective an education as they need . . . our economic development goals cannot be achieved unless we greatly strengthen our total educational system.” Despite this and similar urgings

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that Mississippi make educational reforms, there was a hardening of the lines of resistance that left the studies collecting dust.

Finally, in the 1980s, time had healed some of the old wounds and the governor seized the opportunity. The victory came in spite of last minute rantings on the floor of the legislature against the evils of integrated schools and the clear attempt to make “those people” pay for “their education.”

A price was exacted by those good ol’ boys who would put off the day when all Mississippians can reap the benefits of a healthy and common society. Compulsory attendance will only apply to six and seven year old children this year. Kindergartens will be delayed until 1986 and will stand repealed in 1990 unless the people maintain their pressure on the legislature. The taxes will fall more heavily on the poor and the middle classes than on the monied interests in the state.

In the end, the leadership of the legislative branch did not want the political heat that they felt would surely come if they had not passed the reform package. House leaders had been badly burned in the spring when their killing of kindergarten received national attention. ABC-TV’s program “20/20″ focused on Mississippi’s failure to place the education of children above special interests such as the oil and gas industry. The legislators” behavior also spurred political activity with the formation of a progressive political action committee (Mississippi First) which had the goal of “electing a better legislature.” At the fall education forums, Mississippi First asked people to sign “Yes, I’m tired of our legislature taking a last place approach to Mississippi’s future.”

The state’s press provided clear reporting and strong editorial support. For the week prior to the special session, the statewide newpapers ran a series on educational reform issues. During the session, the Jackson papers promoted passage of the package and editorially targeted legislators who did not support it.

The mechanism for significantly improving Mississippi’s educational system is now law. In November 1982, the state’s voters passed a constitutional amendment to replace the ex officio state school board with a new lay board of education in 1984. The Educational Reform Act contains a means of empowering the new board to make improvements in school curriculum, accreditation, teacher certification, professional development and to take a hard look at the need for school consolidation.

The Act also establishes an enforceable compulsory attendance law, kindergartens and teacher aides for the first three grades. This, with the improved program for vocational education passed last spring, should provide the framework for progress.

This is not to say that all the problems are solved. The new state board of education must have the vision, aggressiveness and independence to carry out the mission set forth in the new law. The people must apply their new found strength in holding the legislature accountable for the general welfare of the community to see that the reforms are implemented. There must be a fight on financing, for the law leaves a gap that must be filled. The kindergarten issue must finally be put to rest with the removal of the repeal provision.

In Mississippi, people who were never involved in politics are now involved. They can make the difference not only in improving our educational system but in areas of health and welfare and justice for all. We cannot live as a divided people, leaving one segment or another of our population behind. Perhaps, on this foundation, Mississippi is now ready to build.

Kindergarten in all school districts by 1986, supported by forty million dollars annually
Compulsory attendance beginning with ages six and seven in 1983 and adding one year until age fourteen
Salary increases for teachers of one thousand dollars, taking Mississippi off the bottom rung of the teacher pay ladder
A performance based school accreditation system
A study to consider consolidating small schools and small districts
A commission to set new teacher education and certification standards
A program of professional development for school administrators
Authority granted to the state lay board of education to compel compliance with the new standards

Rims Barber, a member of the Southern Regional Council, is project director for Childrens’ Defense Fund in Mississippi.

Union Power, Soul Power: The Story of 1199B and Labor’s Search for A Southern Strategy

Leon Fink — Tue, 01 Mar 1983 05:00:04 +0000

Union Power, Soul Power: The Story of 1199B and Labor’s Search for A Southern Strategy

By Leon Fink

Vol. 5, No. 2, 1983, pp. 9-20

Hospitals are one of the last centers of employment in the United States to be touched by unionization. Efforts to organize hospital workers had barely begun by 1960, and by the end of that decade, few areas outside the biggest metropolitan concentrations on either coast were under union contract. Along the East Coast, the first real breakthrough had been the astounding success of New York’s Local 1199, Retail Drug and Hospital Employees Affiliate of the International Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). In less than ten years (19591968), some thirty thousand workers in the voluntary hospital system of the metropolitan area had organized and raised the minimum weekly wage from twenty-eight to one hundred dollars. Primarily based upon low-skilled, black and Hispanic service workers, Local 1199’s achievement relied on three basic ingredients: a genuine mobilization of the hospital workforce, preparation for a militant and, if necessary, lengthy strike, and finally, a political campaign aimed at arousing support for the workers from the surrounding community, including the ultimate intervention of public officials in favor of a settlement. 1199’s combination of workplace and community mobilization coincided with and directly reflected the rising expectations unleashed by

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the civil rights movements among northern blacks. Indeed, union partisans had come to believe that the joining of “union power” and “soul power” had unlocked the secret to a whole new tide of labor organizing among America’s poor and unskilled.

Still, there was cause for skepticism. New York City was, in several respects, peculiarly well-adapted to what had emerged as 1199’s style of crusade-like organizing. Historically, hospital management there had been more tolerant, public officials more liberal, the black community better organized, the state more willing to subsidize social services than elsewhere in the country.

Drawing on an enthusiastic membership, 1199’s leaders–such as President Leon Davis and Director of Organization Elliott Godoff–immigrant Jews who had entered the labor movement as left-wing radicals in the 1930’s, had learned to make the most of their terrain. But could lessons learned in New York be applied elsewhere?

As it happened the first “national’ test of the union power-soul power strategy came in 1969 when a group of hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina sought 1199’s protection. The formula which had begun to pay rewards in the North suddenly came up against a new antagonist–and one equipped with a time-tested record of resistance to social change. The result–a 113-day strike at the Medical College and Charleston County hospitals leading to approximately one thousand arrests–was one of the most disruptive and bitter labor confrontations since the 1930’s. In the South it stands as a watershed for Dublic sector labor relations.

Union organization in the South as a whole had experienced a precipitous decline since the ill-fated, postwar Operation Dixie (1946-1953). In South Carolina, unionization had never made much of a dent. While the state’s non-agricultural sector included the highest proportion of manufacturing workers in the South, this fact had not rebounded to the benefit of unions. Indeed, during the 1960’s, South Carolina’s percentage of organized workers hovered around seven percent, lowest in the nation. Aside from a cluster of white building trades and railway brotherhoods, its fifty thousand union members were concentrated among black longshoremen l and the black labor force of a dwindling tobacco industry. Anti-unionism was one issue which bound Upcountry industrialists, like the J. P. Stevens Company of the Greenville-Spartanburg area, together with their usual political competitors from Lowcountry Charleston. A statewide business and political consensus reinforced a right-to-work law and an official ban on public employee strikes with an extra, unofficial anti-union vigilance. Even state port authority workers who had possessed a statutory right to collective bargaining since 1962 had not been able to secure official recognition.

The origin of the labor troubles in Charleston may, on one level, be understood as the political climax to postwar economic and social change in the area. At a time when the city of Charleston, on the back of defense, trade and tourist dollars, showed signs of shaking off a long history of stagnation and lethargy, the fruits of recovery trickled down unevenly to the city’s residents. Forty percent of black families in the Charleston area lived below the poverty line according to the 1970 census, with another ten percent living just barely above this measure of modern subsistence. For black women, especially, who, in the period 1950 to 1970, left domestic and farm-related employment for the expanding service sector (in which hospitals formed the core group of employers), expectation and hope for improvement collided with certain realities of the workplace. In addition to a sub-minimum wage of $1.30 an hour, hospital workers, many of whom had. grown up in all-black island communities, daily encountered the residual impact of a racial caste system.

In 1968-69, the Medical College Hospital, presided over since 1964 by Dr. William McCord, son of American missionaries to South Africa, had not one black physician on its staff, not one black student in its School of Nursing. Blacks filled the ranks of low-paid nurses aides and service workers. Never displaying much tolerance for shared decision making in general, administrator McCord’s reaction to the revolt of the hospital workers, when it came, was not surprising. In the midst of the strike for union recognition by black nursing attendants and service workers, McCord exploded that he was “not about to turn a 25 million dollar complex over to a bunch of people who don’t have a grammar school education.”

The hospital’s relation to the community reproduced the social separation apparent among its own work force. Sharp distinctions characterized the care offered private (mainly white) patients vs. non-paying (overwhelmingly black) patients. Bed and waiting room assignments were divided along racial lines. Even the legacy of dual restrooms remained. Certain practices seemed openly to reflect assumptions of black racial inferiority: Black husbands, for example, were not allowed in delivery rooms, while whites were.

The racial subordination perpetuated in the hospitals reflected long-standing social patterns of the surrounding society. South Carolina, with blacks representing forty percent of the population, had not elected a black state” legislator since Reconstruction; indeed, fewer blacks proportionately were registered to vote in South Carolina

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than in any other Southern state. And Charleston, where older black males still doffed their caps to white passersby, seemed to fall well within Robert Coles’ characterization of the entire state in 1968: “No southern state can match South Carolina’s ability to resist the claims of Black people without becoming the object of national scorn.”

In Charleston, relative social calm throughout the civil rights era owed its longevity to several factors. Modern-day Charleston patriarchs had committed few of the rhetorical or physical excesses of a Bull Conner in dealing with rising black expectations. Instead, they tended to smother dissent in an appeal to civic unity while maintaining a sure hold on all centers of power in the city, including conciliatory gestures to an elite of ministers, contractor-realtors and funeral home directors within the black community.

By the late 1960s, the Charleston establishment had reason to think that it had effectively weathered the worst years of social unrest. In the 1950s, the city itself had largely been spared agitation as civil rights activists like Esau Jenkins and Septima Clark concentrated their education and voting rights efforts on outlying Johns Island. The city’s only real trouble had come in the 1963 summer desegregation campaign aimed at local merchants. Lunch counter sit-ins, mass demonstrations, and night marches organized by the “Charleston Movement,” including one major confrontation with police, finally led to a non-discriminatory agreement by the city’s major stores. Tensions had evidently eased in the city by the following fall when, following a successful suit by the NAACP and under a court order, eleven black ‘children attended previously all-white public and parochial schools without major incident. Peaceful, if still largely symbolic, integration came to the entire city school system the next year.

The first organizers of the Charleston hospital workers were a small circle of young “black power” advocates grouped loosely around their elder stateman, thirty-seven year old William Saunders who in 1968 was working as a foreman in a local mattress factory. Saunders had come out of the Army after Korea in 1954 determined to change things for his people. His passage through voter registration and integration fights on Johns Island had convinced him that the nonviolent philosophy of the civil rights movement was a “sham.” He openly quarreled with older leaders. “The situation got bad enough,” says Saunders, “until in 1966 or ’67 I was elected to the OEO Commission and a group of black leaders got a petition against me that went to the governor and he would not certify me as an elected commissioner.”

By 1967, Saunders with his Low Country Newsletter represented the voice of rising anger within the black community. Two important influences on him were Malcolm X and SNCC. Saunders hosted SNCC leader Stokley Carmichael on a Christmas visit to the Charleston area in 1967.

Together, Saunders and Black Muslim Otis Robinson fashioned a tight-knit, semi-secret self-defense group complete with code names and weapons. The level of daily fear reached its highpoint in 1968 after the killings of three students at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg and the King assassination. At that point, remembers Saunders, “We all planned to die.”

Community organizing on Johns Island put Saunders in touch with several hospital workers at Medical College Hospital (MCH) including Mary Moultrie, the twenty-six-year-old daughter of a Charleston navy yard worker, who had returned from New York City in 1966. Unhappily, although Moultrie had worked as a licensed practical nurse at Goldwater Memorial Hospital in New York, the MCH would not recognize her credentials and slotted her at the less responsible and lower paid position of nurse’s aide. While Mary Moultrie had worked with Guy Carawan of Tennessee’s Highlander Center and Esau Jenkins on community projects, Saunders was waiting for her and others at the hospital to recognize that “they had a problem” at their own workplace. It did not take long.

In February 1968 a white nursing supervisor gave orders to a group of black workers (three LPNs, two nurses aides) without showing them patient charts. Incensed at this violation of custom, the workers left work and were summarily fired. This incident was ultimately and successfully resolved by the intervention of black community leaders. It represented the beginning of continuous, although still informal, organization among the city’s hospital workers.

Soon, a group of workers began meeting regularly with Otis Robinson and Saunders. “The thing that I think had the biggest impact,” Saunders remembers, “Jesse Jackson used it, James Brown too, we stressed that you are somebody: ‘There’s no such thing as non-professional hospital workers. You are professionals. It takes a surgeon fifteen minutes to operate but you are there twenty-four hours a day with the patient. You are the most important part of the hospital.'”

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The idea of a hospital workers “union” emerged slowly. Saunders, for one, initially had “very little interest” in unions. “I saw very little difference,” he says, “between George Meany and Richard Nixon. I felt labor management was ripping off the workers.” Instead, Saunders and friends first envisioned a kind of broadbased association of community owned businesses aimed at getting blacks into the “economic mainstream.”

Mary Moultrie, who had had only distant contact with a union local while at Goldwater Memorial, agrees that “at that time we didn’t have a union in mind to affiliate with or anything like that. We just knew we had to do something to protect our jobs. We didn’t want to be picked off one by one. So we sorta kept it a secret. We’d go round and whisper to people and we’d catch people during break time and on lunch hour. We kept it out of the ears of the whites. After we started having the weekly meetings we used to get community people to come in and meet with us. When the idea for a union came up exactly, I don’t remember. I feel like its a union whenever people get together.”

A key community contact on the way towards formal organization was Isaiah Bennett, president of Local 15A, RWDSU, which represented a few hundred workers at the American Tobacco Company in Charleston. This union beachhead dated to the 1945-46 Food, Tobacco and Allied Workers strike, in which an old spiritual first became the movement song, “We Shall Overcome.” Bennett loaned the hospital workers Local 15A’s meeting hall and activated a network of community support to try to establish some form of representation and airing of grievances for the MCH workers.

Meanwhile, hospital administrators took counter measures, hiring Greenville textile counsel and antiunion specialist, Knox Haynesworth (brother to federal judge Clement Haynesworth, who, later in the year, would receive and fail to be confirmed in a Nixon appointment to the US Supreme Court). The hospital offered to discuss work-related problems only with small groups of workers selected at random. The first official response to the unionization effort came in the form of a crude cartoon picturing a fat, white, union boss enjoying wine, cigars and shapely female company at workers’ expense. To resist the union, the hospital’s administration promised to use “every legal means at our disposal.” The only concession offered the protesting black workers prior to the strike was an extra holiday on Robert E. Lee’s birthday.

In late September or early October, 1968, New York City’s Local 1199 responded with interest to an appeal from the Charleston workers. Only months before, in establishing a National Organizing Committee (NOC), the hospital union had set its sights on territory outside the state of New York and the city’s metropolitan region, “along the Eastern seaboard in the main.”

The turning point in the New York union’s mind was a visit to Charleston by 1199 vice-president and former dietary aide, Doris Turner. She was scheduled to meet with organized workers one evening at the tobacco workers hall. With delays, her plane did not arrive until after midnight. Before she went to her hotel, she decided to stop by the meeting hall just in case someone had remained behind. She found the hall full of Charleston hospital workers.

The national union decided to call its first out-of-state local 1199B. Over four hundred hospital workers elected Mary Moultrie as president of the local, formally replacing Bennett as leader of the organizing campaign.

Once the union made a commitment to the workers to fight for recognition, the struggle at MCH took a more conspicuous turn. Worker delegations besieged local and state lawmakers, protesting vehemently the refusal of the McCord administration to even meet with the employees. While meetings with Gov. McNair, a self-styled South Carolina “progressive,” and key legislators were courteous, no progress was made. In response to what Moultrie would tell Columbia legislators in February, 1969 was an “explosive” situation, state officials could only point to plans for a long-term re-classification of all state jobs that might be completed within a year. “We’re tired of asking and begging. Now we are demanding. We want union recognition,” Moultrie told the legislators. “We warn you time is running out,” added Bennett. But while state officials allowed that the legislature had the power to place the hospitals within the state labor law, no one emerged to champion such an option.

The precipitating event for the strike came on March 18. At the urging of Mayor Palmer Gaillard, McCord agreed to meet with a workers’ delegation that included union members. Seven workers including Moultrie were notified to attend an 11:00 a.m. meeting in the hospital auditorium. When they arrived, however, they found that McCord had selected eight “loyalists” to balance out the meeting. Soon nearly a hundred pro-union workers had packed into the auditorium. An administrative assistant emerged to explain that McCord would meet no groups

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larger than fifteen, that the workers were being disruptive so that the session had been adjourned and workers must return immediately to their jobs. Instead, the workers met outside with Bennett, before re-entering the hospital. The next day twelve union activists including Mary Multrie, were formally dismissed for dereliction of duty. One day later, March 20, after consultations between 1199B leaders and national union vice-president Henry Nicholas, the strike began. The strikers made two demands: union recognition and the rehiring of the twelve fired workers.

As picketers massed in front of the MCH entrance, they were immediately faced with a reality which distinguished the Charleston confrontation from any other strike in which the union had so far been engaged. It was not just a rigid hospital administration that the strikers faced but an entire city in which every formal lever of power and influence was overtly hostile to the union effort, The union’s legal problems, for example, began March 21 with a temporary state injunction severely limiting the strikers’ physical presence. The original terms of the injunction banned all picketing, but on the advice of State Circuit Court Judge Clarence Singletary the order was quickly amended. Picketing was limited to ten persons spaced twenty yards apart over a distance of two hundred yards. “According to the injunction,” Mary Moultrie later told rally in Stony Field Stadium, “we could put only five people on this field from goal post to goal post. I think even the governor, as slow as he is, could get through a picket line like that.”

Nor, the union quickly learned, could it expect to mollify the court decisions by the intervention of elected state officials. Governor Robert McNair, though shielded from day tb day direct contact with the Charleston strike, set a simple and straightforward pattern of response: “no agency of the state can be involved with unions.” From this view the strike was seen as a threat to law and order, a provocation which would lead first to the deployment of city police and agents from the State Law Enforcement Division (SLED), then to the dispatch of National Guard troops in full riot gear on April 25, and finally to the May 1 state-declared emergency and dusk-to-dawn curfew.

Before the South Carolina Bar Association on May 10, Governor McNair reaffirmed his position: “In a sense this is not a simple test of will or a test of strength. This is a test of our whole governmental system as we have known it in South Carolina.” Judge Singletary, retrospectively, set the context for the state position:

In the 1960s South Carolina was among the leaders in the South in attracting industry and our technical education program . . . and our development board had become a model for other southern states. Our governor and officials were going all over the world seeking industries and one of the inducements, obviously, was productive labor without the labor union problems that other areas of the country were experiencing. So I think that that was one of the reasons that we didn’t want to give up. When I say “we,” I think of the political leadership . . .

Since the anti-union commitments of Southern employers and governmental officials were matters not only of public record but of popular legend, what is perhaps most surprising about the hospital faceoff in Charleston is why a small outside organization like Local 1199 would undertake such an effort.

1199’s support of the Charleston strike was, in fact, based on more than a wing and a prayer. The 1199 stewards recognized that a conventional organizing drive in Charleston was doomed to failure. “The first key decision was to have a strike,” recalls Moe Foner of 1199’s National Organizing Committee. “The second key decision was that this strike could not be won unless it became a national issue. But before you could make it a national issue, it had to be made a labor-civil rights issue. The only way to do that was to create turmoil in Charleston. And the only way to do that was to convince SCLC to come in.”

The decision to enlist the SCLC as co-organizers of the Charleston campaign seems to have been made very early. Despite different backgrounds and areas of operation, history had already brought the two groups to an overlapping set of goals and organizing strategy. The organization of 1 199’s National Organizing Committee in 1968 with Coretta King as presiding chairman, and Rev. Ralph David Abernathy and Andrew Young as signatories, signalled the intention of a close working relationship between the two organizations. Martin Luther King had come to the aid of earlier 1199 hospital campaigns–in 1962 and during the 1965 Bronxville strike. The union, for its part, had frequently endorsed SCLC mobilizations with funds and picketers. On a personal level the bonds of trust between the civil rights and labor organization were secured in the close, longterm friendship of attorney Stanley Levison and Moe Foner. Levison, a former communist, still shadowed by the FBI, for years had served as an advisor to King and Young. With enduring commitments to both the labor and civil rights movement, Levison was as an able go-between, increasing the two organizations uncommon regard for each other.

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For the SCLC, the Charleston campaign offered the chance for renewed purpose and strength out of growing internal disarray. The movement which had sprung up from the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and provided the focus for a non-violent direct action approach to civil rights through the mid-1960s had by 1967 already embarked on a new course.

A shift in focus from the statute books and city halls to the marketplace, with its implied class as well as racial analysis of oppression, had hardly solidified when King and SCLC were called to Memphis to support the sanitation worker’s strike. After King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s attempt to renew SCLC’s campaign was set back amidst the mud, indiscipline and generally unfocussed strategy of the Resurrection City encampment in Washington. Organizationally, SCLC was in sad disrepair, internally feuding over Abernathy’s leadership, when the strike in Charleston broke out. Through the mediation of Stanley Levison, Moe Foner made a strong appeal to SCLC to relocate its entire staff and make Charleston its priority battleground. The black leaders of the organization agreed. Andrew Young remembers:

“We had decided that was the next frontier of the civil rights movement before Martin’s death. We began to see that having made significant social and political progress, we’d have to take on the economic question of full employment, of the right to organize, of increasing minimum wage, of guaranteed annual income. Those were things we talked about in ’67, ’68. And what led us into the Poor People’s Campaign was a specific effort to try to call the attention of the nation to the plight of some forty million people who were below the poverty line–many of whom were working. Hospital workers came into the category of the working poor. Now of that forty million, the majority of them were white. And so the Poor People’s Campaign was also the first opportunity we had in a national way to try to reach out, to form a coalition between blacks, Hispanics, American Indian, the trade union movement, and, say, white workers in Appalachia and in the inner cities. It was really an attempt to overcome racial and cultural differences and move into a common economic effort to get our nation to eradicate poverty.

In certain strategic respects, the SCLC approached Charleston as it had Birmingham, Selma, and other places where it had faced a closed fist of opposition. “When you could not get the government to negotiate, either the state government or the local government,” Young recalls, “you had to mobilize the entire community, the churches and the high schools students in a total program of non-cooperation or economic withdrawal. So we had a boycott on Charleston for one hundred days, and we had demonstrations conducted by the high school kids and by and large, we kind of kept the city on edge until they were willing to come around and talk about justice for these hospital workers.”

For the duration of the strike the SCLC made Charleston their main organizing focus. For staff members, Carl Ferris, Andrew Young, James Orange, and Hosea Williams, Charleston became a second home, while Rev. Abernathy also spent considerable time there as the lightning rod for mass mobilization, and Coretta King arrived at carefully selected moments of greatest impact. Once involved, the SCLC drew on a network of several hundred contacts gained through what Young called the “underground work” of the state’s citizenship or voter education schools. To these natural allies the SCLC added an immediate outreach to area churches.

Dave White, sent from Brooklyn by 1199 to be Charleston community relations liaison, recalls the conspicuous shift in focus as the strike became a social movement:

When they came in the first thing they did was to contact all the ministers in the city and start lining ~p churches so we could have mass meetings in the evening. They also contacted ministers and got them to loan us their churches during the day to organize the young people, kids all the way down to around eight and ten years . . . and they organized activities for these

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kids, classes where we had lectures on black history. I found out in Charleston that without the church you can’t do a fucking thing. And everything we did was through the church, whether you believed in religion or not.

Entry of SCLC and a command post of civil rights movement strategists had a mixed effect on Charleston events. Undoubtedly, the collective experience and resources gathered there contributed to the success of the campaign, reaching and mobilizing the black community of Charleston as never before. But the outside help came at a certain cost as well. More moderate figures, shy of the projected strategy, tended to be pushed aside.

A number of local figures who would ultimately figure prominently in maintenance and resolution of the strike were alienated early from the actual direction and leadership of events. They were the indigenous leaders who would have to pick up the pieces once the major drama was over. Isaiah Bennett, for example. He had sought to issue a blanket invitation to all civil rights groups to help the strikers, including the NAACP and the Urban League. “I was overruled by 1199. I didn’t know they had a working agreement with SCLC. I had no objection against the SCLC, but, like Martin Luther King, he involved everybody.”

1199 officials saw Bennett as too cautious on community organizing strategy. Not long after the strike began, he was removed from an official role in the campaign, and, although he continued to press for a settlement from the mayor and other local authorities, his activities were watched suspiciously by 1199 organizers.

Directed at once to militant mobilization of the local black community and to the sympathies of an outside, liberal white audience, SCLC’s aim was to force through shame, fear or property loss, some relenting from the official position. As Young put it at the time, “It is only when you create the same kind of crisis in the life of the community as you have in the lives of workers that the community will give in.”

SCLC leaders began their work in Charleston with confidence. Mass marches through the central business corridors started April 21 as Rev. Abernathy promised to “sock it to Charleston” and were repeated at short intervals. Demonstrations were staged in the city’s historic district and at the Old Slave Mart museum. One Saturday morning scores of teenagers dribbled basketballs down King Street, the city’s commercial thoroughfare.

The intensity of the movement grew in late April and May. April ended with ten marches in six days. Abernathy called for a boycott of classes by school children. A May 11 Mother’s Day March, led by Abernathy, Coretta King and Walter Reuther brought out an overwhelmingly black crowd of ten thousand. Finally, on May 24, SCLC escalated an economic boycott of King Street businesses by conducting “shop-ins” in which demonstrators would clog grocery aisles and cash register lines.

The coordinated actions on the ground in Charleston depended above all on the unyielding determination of the strikers themselves. Risking arrest and family hardship day after day, the hospital strikers included some of the most dedicated union women ever encountered in an American labor dispute. Letters from the workers, some written from jail in the waning days of the strike attest to the personal meanings of the struggle. For Mrs. D.P. Heyward the union was “like an oak tree in a petrified forest.” She saw the strike as a matter of getting “all the little people together to decide now or forget forever the hope of becoming a real American citizen.” Lattie Mae Glover, an aide at the Medical College, jailed once, wrote, “I’ve seen sometimes in 1199B meetings and picket-lines Satan comes our way. But appears to me that whenever Satan comes, 1199 B has prepared a way to deal with him.”

Claire G. Brown, obstetrics technician at MCH, had five children, some of whom joined her during two strike-related trips to jail.

It was one of the most exciting, hardest, and important periods of my life. The walking, walking, and more walking. The hours and efforts spent trying to get programs together for mass meetings.

There were days I wanted to cry, I was so depressed, because it seemed that in spite of all the hard work and sweat, that we weren’t accomplishing anything, . . . but 1199 didn’t lie to us, they laid it on the line and let us know just hard it was going to be . . . If felt I was prepared . . . For anything else I know if I could help it, I would never permit myself to be jailed, looking back I know if I had it to do again I would do the same thing.

Alongside the official union campaign, William Saunders’ “black power” group maintained an uneasy yet not insigificant relation to the Charleston events. As an informal confidant of Mary Moultrie, Saunders dispatched an armed “community militia” at strike meetings and demonstrations, while functioning both as an ally of and watchdog on the national strike leadership.

Relationships between the militants and the mass movement leaders were strained throughout. In Saunders’ view the uncontrollable and unpredictable nature of individual acts–no matter how reckless–served as a powerful lever against white authority. Strike organizers, however, took a much dimmer view. At one point they reportedly paid Saunders and his group to maintain basic compliance with strike discipline.

From the beginning, the public image of the strike loomed large in 1199-SCLC thinking. The recipe of press coverage, financial support, and political intervention

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that had worked so well in 1199’s successful organizing in New York was now projected at the national level. The worse the picture of the city and state that emerged from the Charleston strike, and the more aid that poured in from the outside, so the union figured, the sooner all parties would reach an acceptable compromise.

Superficially, the strategy had the earmarks of success. While running for weeks as national news, the Charleston strike gathered support both from expected and unexpected sources. Not surprisingly, New York 1199 members were the first to offer significant aid to their Southern counterparts. But help also came from the national labor movement as the AFL-CIO and the fledging UAW-Teamsters Alliance for Labor Action competed as benefactors to the Charleston hospital struggle. Moe Foner would even jest to Andrew Young, “If the labor movement would only split two more ways, well make a profit here.”

The union effort also received a number of political endorsements. Twenty-five congressmen led by New York representative Ed Koch and seventeen senators led by Jacob Javits (R-NY) and Walter Mondale (D-MN) urged federal mediation in this situation which had become “a test of the principle of non-violence at a time when many in America are losing faith in that principle as a strategy for social change.” Indeed, the plight of the Charleston strikers unified northern liberal opinion as did few issues in 1969.

Neither the endurance of the strikers nor the impressive array of outsiders who came to their support swayed the hospital administrators in Charleston or the political officials in Columbia. Six weeks into the conflict, the parties seemed utterly deadlocked.

One, although perhaps not the most important, problem for the union concerned the effectiveness of the work stoppage itself. From the beginning the Charleston strike probably created more trauma for the city than real trouble for the struck institutions. Service at both MCH and County was never severely curtailed. At the beginning of the strike MCH reportedly reduced its patient load from 450 to three hundred beds, while County Hospital also cut back by a half. By the end of the first month of the strike, County had hired some fifty-four replacements, while the Medical College made do with 250 new employees in addition to volunteer labor.

On the political front, as well, the strike was an altogether different matter within the borders of South Carolina than it was on the editorial pages of the Washington Post or New York Times. Never before had the union been so far removed from its influential friends.

Governor McNair, considered by the union as vulnerable to political pressure, simply would not budge on the issue of union recognition. Instead, he tried to avoid it by offering new material benefits to hospital workers. An early June news leak thus hinted that an ongoing review of all state employee relations had decided to recommend a raise in the state minimum wage for public workers from $1.30 per hour to the federal minimum of $1.60. In addition the review promised a serious look at job classifications, holding out the hope to hospital workers of rational readjustment of salaries and work descriptions. In the meantime the state legislators effectively registered their opinion of the strike. In the face of the Charleston school boycott organized by SCLC, the South Carolina House of Representatives on May 29 approved a Senate bill making it unlawful “to encourage or entice a child to stay out of school.” The measure provided for a fine of up to one thousand dollars and a prison term of up to two years, or both, for a first offender.

Such resistance to union demands at the state level had its counterpart in the corporate consensus with which

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Charleston community leaders handled the direct blows of the union forces. Relying on the city’s experience with the 1963 sit-ins, Judge Singletary and law enforcement officials used discretion throughout the strike to avoid violent confrontation and property damage. Several times, for example, Singletary overlooked or delayed contempt citations; on principle he kept his rulings to a bare minimum. Chief of Police John F. Conroy, an articulate ex-marine from Niagara Falls, New York, likewise, complemented the judicial approach with a cool, patient approach to the demonstrators. There was no Bull Connor among Charleston officials, thus depriving the SCLC of the issue of unreasonable, indiscriminate force by local lawmen which had energized their campaigns in Selma, Montgomery, and Birmingham.

If the local white leadership kept a firm but controlled grip on the strikers, white opinion, except for the lone voice of the Charleston Catholic diocese, grew impassionately anti-union during the disturbance. A resolution of the Charleston County Council (which oversaw County Hospital) thus referred to “the unwarranted strike and unrest foisted on its citizens by a small group of individuals, many of whom are unrelated to this area interested only in their own self-seeking ends.”

For many Charlestonians the assault by the union-civil rights forces on their city cut deeper than issues of trade unionism or civil rights. The message of deliverance and freedom carried by SCLC in its oft-repeated refrains of “I Am Somebody” implicitly castigated the old ways of a city whose very historic mindedness was both its pride and chief economic selling point. Something of the resulting reaction of outrage and hurt was evident in the paid “Letter to Ralph Abernathy”, by a local pastor which appeared in the Charleston News and Courier, May 7;

Remember what you said when you came to Charleston?–about not wanting to see any more historic sites? When you said that I do not think you knew what it could mean to some of our Negro friends…. You have heard of the famous Gardens. Do you think any real connoisseur can walk through one of these gardens without appreciating the know-how and tender care of the Black man that makes it all possible? Have you ever seen the look of pride on the Black man’s face as he watches these tourists admire these gardens? . . . What of the colored Mammy? Could all your speeches and marches ever replace the glow of pride on her face as she watches, day after day, as her little charge grows into a man of importance in the world?

Clearly, the immediate struggle of the hospital workers was projected over a much wider set of issues and symbols. It came to stand on one side for a rebellion against years of white domination and black subservience; on the other side the issue summoned up an almost chauvinistic civic loyalty, an instinctual defense of a way of life.

Within the first two weeks of May, 1199 leaders reluctantly (and privately) reached the conclusion that “we just did not have the cards.” Relying as they were on daily transfusions of outside aid to maintain their operation, the union forces were faced not only with the depletion of their resources in Charleston but growing sacrifices of their commitment to union members back home. The grim reassessment of the Charleston situation was coupled with an equally difficult question: having focused so much energy and attention on Charleston, how now to disentangle themselves without suffering a nationally humiliating defeat? Publicly, the first change in the union’s position came in a hint by organizing director Elliott Godoff on May 15 that the union might compromise its demand for direct recognition in favor of some independent intermediary voice for the hospital workers.

While the union initiative produced no sudden shift from the state’s refusal to negotiate, it was soon combined with an unexpected, outside force to raise the odds on a compromise. The new influence came from the direct intervention of the federal government. Sometime in the latter half of May, union leaders, through contacts with HEW Undersecretary James Farmer and former Undersecretary Ruby Martin, learned that MCH was

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being audited under terms of the federal regulations governing the millions of dollars in grants going to the medical complex. On June 4 the strike got perhaps its most important shot in the arm. In addition to citing thirty-seven civil rights violations by the MCH administration, the HEW noncompliance report included in its suggested means of redress the rehiring of the twelve union workers whose dismissal had touched off the strike.

Within ten days of the HEW intervention, the basic pieces were in place to end the Charleston strike. On June 9 the Governor, after cutting the city’s curfew hours in half, publicly accepted the state’s responsibility to comply with the federal guidelines. McCord soon announced his willingness to take back not only the strikers but to rehire (in accord with the HEW request) the twelve fired workers. State and hospital officials, desperate to end the unrest in Charleston but politically constrained from appearing to appease the strikers could now blame the feds for forcing concessions. Meanwhile, the union issue itself might officially be finessed. Without any formal reference to recognition or collective bargaining, the hospital would agree to a new gievance procedure allowing a worker to bring a representative of her own choosing to grievance sessions (i.e. a procedure which could allow for active union delegates). Given solid backing by the workers 1199 (as it had in New York City in 1959) might eventually turn such a deal into a union beachhead. For political officials as well as embattled hospital administrators, the immediate moment, however, counted for more. Behind the scenes hopes rose high in the union camp as the informal signing date of June 12 neared for a real agreement.

Then, only hours before the planned meeting, McCord countermanded his earlier offer to rehire the fired workers. The formula for settlement had worked perfectly, except for one problem. The Federal Government, during the Nixon Administration, was not so immune from political pressures as to allow a free hand to HEW’s civil rights enthusiasts. The Administration, in fact, felt the tug on each side. On the one hand liberal pressure for compromise and settlement of the dispute arose form the second-level administrative staff of the Administrtion. Politically, however the “Southern strategy” of the Nixon Administration looked to a different constituency and was therefore susceptible to different pressures. In this case the heat welling up from a key state and from strategists in Nixon’s narrow 1968 electoral victory could not be ignored. Already, state party chairman, Ray Harris, had made clear that Governor McNair and his fellow Democrats would be held accountable for any waffling on the hospital issue. Then, in a powerful one-two punch on the morning of June 12, Democratic Representative L. Mendel Rivers and Republican Senator Strom Thurmond prevailed upon HEW Secretary Robert Finch to back off the threatened fund cutoff to MCH “pending a personal investigation” once he returned from a planned vacation to the Bahamas. This signal of retreat from Washington effectively let the air out of the Charleston accord. Only hours later, McCord rescinded his pledge to rehire the twelve workers.

Collapse of the projected settlement set off two more weeks of rising tension, including night marches, mass arrests, fire-bombings, and threats to tie up area telephone and transportation arteries. ILA (International Longshoremen) leaders hinted that the longshoremen might close the port of Charleston, while 1199 sympathizers talked opening of spreading the union agitation to the South Carolina textile industry. The tone of the hour was suggested by SCLC aide Hosea Williams at a June 20 rally:

White folks are crazy. White America is insane. We have played around with Charleston long enough. We’re going to march in Charleston tonight or we’re going to die.

Again it fell to Washington to break the impasse. Foner links the final initiative to the behind-the-scenes work of presidential counselor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whom the union leader called on a tip from New York Post editor, James Wechsler. “I [Foner] say, ‘Look, I’m not going to be responsible, but I think you [Moynihan] have’ to know, the night marches are going to continue, and this town is going to burn.’ He says, ‘Thank you and stay in

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touch with me.’ ” Through Moynihan’s intervention the White House took advantage of Finch’s holiday absence to transfer authority over the Charleston crisis to Labor Secretary George Shultz. Armed with the renewed threat of a fund cutoff, Schultz, with Mayor Gaillard’s acquiscence, sent mediator William Pierce to Charleston on June 24. Finally, on Friday, June 27, after a tough call invoking the national interest to McCord from White House aide and former state Republican chairman, Harry Dent, the hospital director agreed once again to rehire the twelve fired workers along with the other strikers. At the same time Andrew Young paid a surprise, secret visit to the white nurses at MCH and convinced them to drop their opposition to the return of the strikers, thus removing the last political hurdle to settlement. McCord’s official statement was terse: “We have settled.”

For hospital officials the agreement itself ended the drama. Union leaders, partly because they had been through such wars before, knew better. The union needed a ‘victory,’ not just a stalemate. In the immediate coverage of the strike, they got their triumph. By selectively leaking details of the settlement and putting the best possible interpretation on the official language of settlement, the union salvaged a major public relations victory. As the New York Times noted on June 28, the settlement “appeared to meet the major demands of the hospital workers.” While no mention was made of union recognition or collective bargaining in the settlement, the union pointed to the grievance procedure and proposed credit union as means by which the union might effecively both represent employees through a union grievance committee and achieve some form of dues checkoff. These terms–neither of which were to pan out as predicted–together with worker raises, and rehiring of fired and struck workers were what four hundred jubilant, singing strikers were celebrating the night of the settlement at Zion-Olivet United Presbyterian Church.

With money, militancy, and mirrors 1199 had fought itself out of the Charleston thicket, avoiding disaster saving workers’ jobs and vindicating the determination of their followers. To some local eyes, Rev. Grant’s among them, the Charleston settlement indeed was “more than a compromise. It was a victory.”

Grant notes even more important side-effects of the strike for the community; “it was like a revolution,” black voter registration “shot up like mad” (black representation on the city council, for example, went from one to six delegates in ten years), neighborhoods in Charleston County were partially integrated, “people were forced to take notice of the entire black community.”

In 1970 Herbert U. Fielding, Charleston funeral home director, became the first black elected to the state legislature, while vocal strike supporter, Rev. Robert Woods, would follow a few years later. In addition to some positive changes in labor relations at the hospitals, Saunders, reminiscing in 1979, said that the strike made whites “respect blacks for having organized. They’re a little scared now and will negotiate before situations reach that same level of polarization.”

Next to such “benefits” of the strike, however, must be placed its ultimate failure to organize the Charleston hospital workers into an enduring and recognized union. When one turns to workers, particularly strike militants, the victory in Charleston appears comparatively hollow. At the time of the settlement, many, at least among second-level 1199 staff left the city still convinced that the foundation for a successful union local had indeed been laid. Such confidence proved ill-founded. The Charleston strikers never got their union, or anything close to it. The battle lines remained for three more weeks until County Hospital followed up the MCH settlement practically to the letter, on July 19. After that, the outside support for Charleston hospital campaign all but dried up. The money was gone, the issue had lost its national dramatic appeal, and, perhaps most importantly, the union and SCLC had other priorities. The local leadership around Mary Moultrie, more national spokesperson than organizer in any case, proved unable to maintain difficult grassroots organizing work. The workers had no office of their own and outside help came only intermittently from New York. Lone SCLC staffer, James Orange, turned his attention to other community matters including a city-

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wide organizing drive by black sanitation workers. What was worse, long-simmering mistrust and differences among workers burst forth when the real terms of day-today life at work reasserted themselves. Jubilation and celebration quickly turned to bitter recrimination and accusation against Moultrie, against Saunders, against the union itself. Only the hospital administration in this case was able to capitalize on the post-strike wave of disillusionment.

In the months following the strike the MCH administration not only refused to authorize checkoff through the credit union but effectively undermined informal union stewardship through the grievance procedure by limiting the number of times that the same person could serve as the griever’s representative. Mary Moultrie herself, strike heroine, was ultimately voted out as chapter president and withdrew from hospital organizing in discouraged confusion. The unhappy end of her roller-coaster ride into stardom and notoriety with the union was highlighted in a family trip she made to New York City in 1973. With one of her cousins, an 1199 member in New York, Moultrie paid a visit to the attractive new headquarters of the hospital workers union, the Martin Luther King Labor Center. Her cousin led Mary down one hallway at the end of which she encountered a giant, blown-up photograph of herself marching arm in arm with Walter Reuther. Mary left the building without even making her presence known to officials upstairs. Moultrie, in the end, felt, “hurt and disappointed with a lot of people who I had been involved with.” “If I had it to do again I would. But then I’d be careful.”

Beyond the conclusions of the hospital campaign in Charleston–part vindication part defeat–lay the significance of the struggle for hospital workers and 1199 nationally. Here the returns for the union proved much more tangible. In the course of the Charleston campaign the hospital union, before a nation-wide audience, had proved itself willing and able to take on any foe.

Particularly to younger black workers the “union power-soul power” crusade broke down barriers often separating labor and civil rights militancy. If such a strategy won concessions in the heart of the anti-union South, would they not utterly triumph in the urban-industrial North? In the weeks following the Charleston settlement, 1199 organizers confidently set up shop in a half-dozen cities, while in Baltimore the mere threat of “pulling another Charleston” extracted a union recognition agreement from huge and prestigious John Hopkins Medical center.

As Claire Brown declared at the end of the film, “I Am Somebody,” a union-sponsored documentary produced during the Charleston events: “If I didn’t learn but one thing it was that if you are ready and willing to fight for yourself, other folks will be ready and willing to fight for you.” She was right, of course, but the location of the fight often proves to be decisive. For those who look forward to the unionization of the Southern work force, the experience of Claire Brown and her friends leaves two difficult questions–What more is required? What more is possible?

The years since the Charleston dispute have hardly been encouraging ones for the labor movement in general, let alone for those struggling in non-union Southern bastions amid restrictive state legislation. Nevertheless, the Charleston experience may offer a few strategic clues for the future. The Charleston campaign got as far as it did by combining militant community organizing work with available political power levers–in this case the civil rights arm of the federal government. While those particular levers are considerably weaker now than they were in 1969 (and in any case are limited by the demographics of the labor force), the “political” lesson should not be lost. Short of a national “new deal” of labor legislation, the hardline anti-union policy of Southern states must be whittled away both at the workplace and the statehouse. Both “ends” of such an effort require a greater effort form the national unions. Yet, if unions are to take a more active role in Southern community life, then confident talk of a progressive “sunbelt” must come to include a formal voice for the region’s working people.

Leon Fink is assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is author of Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (University of Illinois Press, 198S). This article was first presented as a talk to the Fourth Southern Labor Studies Conference, Georgia State University in Atlanta, September 30–October 2, 1982. It forms part of a larger history of the hospital workers’ union co-authored by Brian Greenberg to be published by Harvard University Press in 1984. The author gratefully acknowledges the help of Stephen Hoffius and David J. Garrow in his research.

Almost Family. Roy Hoffman. The Dial Press, 1983.

Trudier Harris — Tue, 01 Mar 1983 05:00:05 +0000

Almost Family. Roy Hoffman. The Dial Press, 1983.

By Trudier Harris

Vol. 5, No. 2, 1983, pp. 21-23

White mistresses and their black maids have intrigued many generations of American writers. From the stereotypical portraits of the nineteenth century, to Faulkner’s more individualized but basically stereotypical Dilsey, to Alice Childress’ sassy Mildred, both black and white American writers have depicted the relations of the cultural and racial phenomena which inform white women treating black women “like one of the family.” Roy Hoffman’s Almost Family is yet another novel exploring that relationship.

Set in Madoc, Alabama between 1946 and 1975, Almost Family is the story of the parallel lives of Vivian Gold and her maid, Nebraska Waters. It explores the relationship between the two women as their children age and leave them, as well as the crises involved in one being employed by the other. Although Vivian initially scoffs at having a maid, and is frequently uncomfortable with the situation, her Jewish liberalism will not allow her to deny completely the trends of the community in which she lives. Whatever she may think to the contrary, she does have a maid, and she is politely but firmly diligent in maintaining the ultimate distance between the maid and herself. The two women might be pregnant at the same time; they may share the pain both have suffered earlier through miscarriages (Nebraska has in addition had an abortion); and they may both be devoted wives and concerned mothers. Finally, though, Vivian is mistress and Nebraska is maid; Vivian is white and Nebraska is black. The differences can never be completely overlooked.

Vivian’s position as a minority member in the larger white community which will not allow Jews to join certain clubs may be designed to show her potential to understand Nebraska’s more extreme minority position in relation to the white community; however, Vivian and her husband Edward finally become members of that club and can ignore their Jewishness (as Edward does in his support of the racist candidacy of George Wallace) in favor of acceptance. Nebraska, on the other hand, cannot change her color; nor can she realistically work to change her educational and economic status. The parallel lives are only parallel to a point. Vivian has much more room for escape from oppressing circumstances than does Nebraska.

Hoffman’s novel is not only a chronicle of the lives of these two women and their families, it also records, through them, the changes in the political and social atmosphere of Alabama and the country between 1946 and 1975. There is a scene recounting the stand of George Wallace at the entrance to the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa while Vivian’s second daughter, Rachel, is a student there. There is the account of Nebraska’s son Junior losing a leg in Vietnam. There is a gripping description of the tension and violence which erupted in Nebraska’s neighborhood on the evening of Martin Luther King’s death, and there is irony in the fact that Edward and his son Benjamin have just drive to Nebraska’s house and it is she who is put in the position of protecting them from angry blacks. There is also the tension surrounding integration as Benjamin and Nebraska’s daughter Viv (named for Vivian), the result of the parallel pregnancies, grow up in a world which has not allowed them to truly mix in public settings.

The novel is interesting and engaging, and some scenes, such as the night of King’s death and the cones-

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quent death of Nebraska’s dauther, Wenda June, are particularly poignant. However, Almost Family depends primarily upon episodic, sketchy development rather than upon detailed portraiture of the two women. We see a lot of the women, over many years, but what we see remains close to the surface. There is little reflection. Ultimately, for Vivian, life goes on and, as it does, one needs a maid. Nebraska reveals deep resentments in blaming the Golds and other whites for the death of Wenda June, but these too are passed over. Hoffman trades depth for breadth in his novel, and he draws back from potentially explosive situations. There is a big crisis in one year which is not completely resolved, but the next chapter picks up two or three years in the future and may make only passing reference to that great crisis which has occupied us in the preceding chapter.

Hoffman understands the issues surrounding his subject, and he presents a substantial number of them, but he is ever polite in his presentation, and he ever strives, sometimes incredibly so, for peaceful, cooperative solutions. For example, Vivian’s liberalism leads her to invite Nebraska’s family to her summer home at the lake for an outing. When they all show up, tremendously uncomfortable with each other, Vivian complains about her invitation having been taken so literally (seven of the Waters family show up), and she does not have the slightest idea as to what to do with them. Both families are greatly relieved when the outing-turned-ordeal is over. “It’s all too confusing,” Vivian says, “all too confusing…. You try to be a mother, it’s hard. You try to be an employer, it’s hard. You try to be a friend, it’s hard. You try to be all three and it’s impossible.” Or consider what happens when Wenda June is arrested for trying to integrate the Woolsworth lunch counter in 1961. Instead of taking her to jail, two understanding policemen bring her to the Gold home to Nebraska and Vivian. As they discuss the matter with the policemen, who have blamed Wenda June’s action on her recent nervous breakdown, one of Vivian’s cousins emphasizes that the matter can be settled because “this ain’t the law . . . this is just family.”

But maids, as the title suggests, can never quite be family. Though claims to the contrary are consistently made by both Vivian and Nebraska, actions consistently undercut their claims. That is especially vivid when Benjie, freshly in college, writes an essay comparing Vivian and Nebraska as his two Jewish mothers. When he enthusiastically sends copies of his essay to Vivian, and to his sisters Sarah and Rachel, asking their advice about submitting it to the school journal, Sarah sends him a special delivery letter requesting that he not do so. Vivian in turn sends her a cryptic note: “Dear Sarah, Thank you. Love, Mother.” Vivian and Nebraska live primarily on the surface of polite relations. They dare not face overly long the distinctions that are theirs.

These two basically good women are caught in lifestyles and patterns of behavior which are larger than either of them. When they try to deny those patterns, it means discomfort and tension for both of them. Early in her employment at the Golds’ home, Nebraska had been tolerant if Vivian came home with her; then, following the disturbances of the civil rights days, there is a period of ten years during which Vivian does not visit. Unexpectedly, one evening when Vivian drives Nebraska home, she decides to go into the apartment. Insisting that she is “just family,” she rinses a glass and gets herself a drink, then she “ooos” and “ahhhs” and gushes over the apartment until Nebraska wants “to burst into tears.” Vivian comments on how well the numerous cast-aways she has given Nebraska look in her apartment, including one of the “filling-station glasses” that she “threw . . . out twenty-five years ago.” In one brief ten-minute swoop, Vivian has reduced Nebraska’s home to a perverse replica of her own: “Dear, being in your living room is like. being in a room right out of my own house! Isn’t that something?” It is truly something that Vivian cannot see beyond the surface of things, cannot see that it is partly because Nebraska must work in the financially limiting job of maid that she is forced to save all the Gold castaways. She cannot see that, in a matter of minutes, she strips from Nebraska all pride in her home, and she obviously influences the major decision Nebraska will make shortly.

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Hoffman does see, and he understands considerably more than his characters do. One of the virtues of Almost Family is that Hoffman brings a sensitivity to the representation of relations across cultural and racial lines in the South. He stands back from all of his characters and recognizes the limitations in them. I get the feeling that he is also standing back from what he has written, knowing that there is much more to tell.

Trudier Harris, who teaches English and folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, grew up in Tuscaloosa. Her book, From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature, was published by Temple University Press in December, 1982.

The Color Purple. Alice Walker. Harcourt, Brace, 1982.

Rose Gladney — Tue, 01 Mar 1983 05:00:06 +0000

The Color Purple. Alice Walker. Harcourt, Brace, 1982.

By Rose Gladney

Vol. 5, No. 2, 1983, pp. 23-24

Speaking at the University of Florida in 1962, Lillian Smith observed that women were only beginning “to break the million year silence about themselves.” “Women rarely tell the truth,” she said, “even in their diaries, about their sex experiences, or their most intimate relationships; nor do they spend much time asking the unanswerable questions about the meaning of human life since they have never been sure they were human.” Smith linked in one sentence the necessity of women speaking the truth about themselves with their asking the unanswerable questions. In the same speech, she suggested that for women to tell the truth “might radically change male psychology.”

Although her own writing often challenged her culture’s rigid concepts of gender, Lillian Smith did not live to enjoy the literary flowering of the most recent phase of the women’s movement in America. For some fifteen years Alice Walker’s poetry, fiction, and essays have been-a major part of that flowering. In The Color Purple she has reached a new pinacle. You can rest easier now, Lil, the truth about women is being spoken.

Walker’s novel takes the form of letters between two sisters: Nettie, who is a missionary to Africa, and Celie, who is trapped in a brutally oppressive marriage in a Southern black farming community. Their correspondence spans the thirty year period ending in World War II.

A major theme in all of Walker’s writing has been the struggle of black women to create lives in the face of racism, sexism, and the inevitable self-doubt which accompanies generations of patriarchal oppression. In The Color Purple the struggle achieves fruition, but not through a gradual evolution over centuries or even decades, and not through mass organization of the oppressed against the oppressor. Furthermore, although the presence of white racism is quite evident throughout both sisters’ narratives, it is not the central theme. Of primary importance is the effort of black women to create their own lives with and without black men. The power to do so comes through the love and support of women for each other, expressed in a variety of ways.

Walker’s choice of form, letters between two sisters, allows each sister’s perspective to mirror and reinforce the other’s. Nettie’s description of life among the Olinka tribe echoes Celie’s accounts of her own life in rural Georgia. In both societies the “traditional” ideas regarding sexual division of labor and personal relationships between men and women insist on male dominance. Nettie writes:

There is a way that the men speak to women that reminds me too much of Pa. They listen just long enough to issue instructions. They don’t even look at women when women are speaking. They look at the ground and bend their heads toward the ground. The women also do not “look in a man’s face ” as they say. To “look in a man’s face ” is a brazen thing to do. They look instead at his feet or his knees. And what can I say to this? Again, it is our own behavior around Pa.

In both societies the real strength of the community can be found in women’s friendship with each other. Even as Nettie’s letters tell of the friendship among Olinka wives of the same husband, so Celie finds her greatest love and support from her husband’s lover, Shug Avery. The quality of the relationship between Celie and Shug is the key to Celie’s liberation from her role as “mule of the world.”

For Celie to free herself she must find her own voice, speak her own thoughts. Most importantly, she must replace the ideas of male dominance, the ultimate symbol of which is the image of God as male, with a new understanding of power. Shug is able to help because she understands the real power within every individual, part of the spirit of life itself. The turning point in Celie’s journey comes in her conversation with Shug about the nature of God:

Here’s the thing, says Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you rooking fort Trouble do it for most forks, I think. Sorrow, lord. Feeling like shit.

It? I ast.

Yeah, It. God ain’t a he or a she, but a It.

But what do it look like? I ast.

Don’t look like nothing, she say. It ain’t a picture

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show. It ain’t something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will he. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found It.

Echoing Shug’s understanding of God as key to liberation, Nettie writes:

God is different to us now, after all these years in Africa. More spirit than ever before, and more internal. Most people think he has to look like something or someone–a roofleaf or Christ–but we don’t. And riot being tied to what God looks like frees us.

Freed from her old concept of God, Celie begins to view all of life differently:

Well, us talk and talk about God, but I’m still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that.?) not the color purple (where it come from.?). Not the little wildflowers. Nothing.

Now that my eyes opening, If eels like a fool. Next to any little scrub of a bush in my yard, Mr.______’s evil sort of shrink. But not altogether. Still, it is like Shug say, You have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything a’tall.

For Alice Walker, the power of sisterhood leads not to a separatist female community, but to a fuller life for both men and women. Under patriarchy men have feared women’s creative power and have sought to suppress it. In doing so, they have denied much that is creative in themselves as well. When women have managed to resist patriarchal definitions of themselves, the fruits of their love and support for each other have transformed the lives of both sexes.

As Celie begins to “chase the old white man from her head,” she is no longer subject to her husband’s abuse.

With Shug’s help, she finds the means to support herself. After Celie and Shug leave him, Albert begins to change his ways. Later, freed from former definitions of power, Celie and Albert come to know each other as friends, to work together, even to discuss the differences between men and women and ask the unanswerable questions:

Anyhow, he say, you know how it is. You ast yourself one question, it lead to fifteen. I start to wonder why us need love. Why us suffer. Why us black. It didn’t take long to realize I didn’t hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don’t mean nothing if you don’t ast why you here, period.

So what you think? I ast.

I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love.

And people start to love you back, I bet, I say.

They do, he say, surprise.

Alice Walker’s writings pay tribute to a heritage of black sisters and foremothers: artists all, whether named or anonymous, a great host of witnesses from the rural American South to Africa, from the unlettered and unsung, to famous poets, story-tellers, healers and musicians. A major source of Walker’s power comes from her faithfulness to the richness of women’s spirituality. In her fiction, varied African and American Indian religious traditions sometimes merge and sometimes conflict with the concepts and beliefs of Christianity, but spiritual power remains fundamental. The Color Purple contains Walker’s best writing on the nature of God. It is also one of our finest testimonies to the power of sisterhood.

Rose Gladney is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.