Witness In Montgomery

By Randall Williams

Vol. 5, No. 4, 1983, pp. 1-6

Not since the celebrated bus boycott of 1955-56 or the Selma March days of 1965 has the atmosphere in Montgomery, Alabama, been so charged with racial tensions. The immediate cause is a string of incidents involving blacks and the Montgomery police, but behind these cases looms a larger issue, Mayor Emory Folmar, a conservative Republican who was beaten decisively by George Wallace in the 1982 governor’s election.

Folmar is both mayor and de facto police chief of Alabama’s capital city, and his hard-line, love-it-or-leave-it attitudes on public safety, community development, redistricting and other issues have led to steadily deteriorating relations with the forty percent of Montgomery’s population that is black, as well as with a growing number of whites. His critics, while recognizing that the recent police confrontations were serious incidents, charge that a more flexible personality and more responsive leader than Folmar would have prevented their escalation into a full-scale community crisis.

Now, the situation is reminiscent of the earlier civil rights era in this city known as the Cradle of the Confederacy. The black churches are again the scene of mass meetings. The black leadership has held well-publicized but private strategy sessions from which has emerged an unusual–for recent years, at least–unanimity, including an economic boycott of the city’s largest bank. Picket lines have been thrown up against a white-owned black radio station. Protest marches have been held. A cross has been burned in the yard of the spokesman for the black leaders.

Several incidents since the first of the year have contributed to the current situation. Most recently, an armed black man was killed in June by a white policeman

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responding to a report of a shooting in the neighborhood. In May, a black man who was apparently drunk but unarmed was killed by a black policewoman. In April, a white policeman seriously wounded an unarmed black man who was mistakenly thought to be an escaped prisoner.

The first and most controversial incident occurred in February when a group of black mourners was assembled in the deceased’s home following the funeral. Before the night was over, two white plain-clothes policemen had been injured, one critically, and eight mourners arrested. The police say they identified themselves, were taken hostage and then beaten and shot. The mourners say the two whites did not identify themselves as police but kicked down the door to the house and charged in with their guns drawn, at which time the blacks disarmed them and then called the police. Later, the mourners say, more police arrived and the two whites tried to escape and shots were fired.

The two accounts vary so widely that Montgomery citizens can only wait and hope that the upcoming trials will reveal the truth. However, the police department’s early handling of the incident was seen by blacks and by many whites as a gross over-reaction and an attempt to cover up possible improper conduct by the two officers. For example, Police Chief Charles Swindall held a predawn press conference to denounce the mourners as “wild animals who had their prey on the ground.” He used the word torture to describe the treatment of the officers, said one of them had had his throat slashed requiring seventy-five stitches, and made other highly inflammatory comments.

This infuriated blacks, especially when the press later reported that the most serious offenses on the records of any of the accused were traffic violations, that the officer’s “slashed” throat required ten stitches instead of seventy-five, and that one of the officers’ guns was missing, despite the fact that police had immediately surrounded the house and had searched everyone present, Also, the police tape recorder did not work when it should have automatically recorded radio transmissions and phone calls about the incident. In addition, there were allegations that the accused were beaten during;. interrogation.

On the other hand, many whites and some blacks criticized over-reaction by black leaders, too, notably the call by State Rep. Alvin Holmes for federal authorities to place the city under martial law. The circumstances of the incident cast grave doubt on the conduct of the police, mused many Montgomerians, yet there was no getting around the fact that two officers were severely wounded. Why, asked whites, were there not some prayers for the two officers among the vigils and protests that were being held in the black community?

The matter of the missing tape recording from police headquarters was seen as similar to a mid-1970s scandal in which police wrongfully shot a black man, then allegedly planted a gun on his body. The automatic tape recordings in that incident had been erased by the time the prosecutor asked for them, and ultimately the public safety commissioner, the mayor and nearly a dozen police officers resigned or were fired.

The mayor at that time was James Robinson, and his resignation led to a 1977 special election which was won by Emory Folmar, who had been the city council president. Ironically, Robinson is widely perceived by blacks as a basically decent man who was trapped in the Whitehurst scandal by accident, while Folmar is believed by many blacks to be the problem with the police department. In addition, Folmar is seen as being generally hostile toward black interests if not actively racist.

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Robinson usually enjoyed good relations with the black community. In fact, Robinson was instrumental in changing the city’s form of government in the early 1970s from a three-man commission, elected at-large, to the nine-district council, thus paving the way for the first black elected municipal officials in Montgomery history. When the first council elections were held in 1975, four blacks and five whites were chosen, and the nine then selected Folmar as the council president. It was Folmar’s first venture into elective politics, and from the council’s first organizational meeting, he made it clear that he meant to be a force to be reckoned with.

His District Eight constituents were overwhelmingly white and among the city’s wealthiest and most conservative residents. Through a combination of representing his district and his own philosophy of government, Folmar was frequently on opposite sides from black council members on issues ranging from council appointments to the allocation of community development funds. In fairness to Folmar, it should be said that he was not alone–many council votes were split five to four along racial lines; but blacks resented Folmar most because he was not only the council president but also its most powerful personality, and at least two of the white council members invariably cast glances at Folmar before raising their own hands during votes on controversial issues.

Two council debates are good illustrations. The first concerned community development money, which was intended by Congress to help eliminate what the planners call urban blight. To the blacks on the city council, this meant the money should build sewers, sidewalks, street lights and community centers in low-income areas, particularly in black low-income neighborhoods which had been neglected in all the decades past; Montgomery had several black neighborhoods as late as 1975 which had to use outdoor toilets because sewer lines had never reached them.

Long battles were fought over this money and in the end many sewers and sidewalks were built. But the community development funds also helped build a golf course at a recreation complex located on the eastern edge of Montgomery near the suburbs where white residents have been steadily relocating since World War II. Community development money was also used for three neighborhood parks built in predominantly white residential areas which were definitely not blighted. Folmar did not win these projects without help, but he was instrumental in their passage and his attitude was interpreted by blacks as one of “I don’t care what Congress said, we whites, poor or not, are also getting some of that government money.”

A second case which increased the black council members’ distaste for Folmar resulted when blacks moved to rename a street in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. The street in question, Jackson Street, was the site of King’s home for the years that he was the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church; this was the house that was bombed in the Fifties while Coretta King and the children were inside. Folmar spoke and voted against the renaming and then introduced a compromise which would have named a section of Interstate 85, which passes through the city, after King. This debate had occurred before, in the early Seventies when Montgomery still had a three-man commission form of government, and the Interstate compromise had been suggested then, too. But that compromise failed because of opposition from state officials. The issue then took on a new significance after blacks had achieved voting power in city government.

The argument was that it would be wrong to dishonor Andrew Jackson in order to honor King, so the Interstate memorial was an alternative and would be even more visible. Getting the memorial was symbolically very important to Montgomery blacks and it was the first major question with racial implications to come up after the four black council members had taken their seats. They were disappointed that the whites had felt it was necessary to put up a fight on the issue, and they were not totally satisfied with the Interstate memorial since it was not city property. But they accepted the compromise anyway, only to discover that federal highway regulations prohibit the naming of interstates for individuals. Rightly or wrongly, many observers, white and black, believed that Folmar had known this fact all along and deliberately led the council down a rabbit trail Ultimately, blacks in the Alabama legislature pushed through a resolution and overcame the federal obstacles and today all who pass through Montgomery on I85 see a huge green sign proclaiming it Martin Luther King Jr. Expressway. But the incident did not increase Folmar’s stature in the black community, and relations with his black colleagues on the city council have worsened since he became mayor and his power increased.

Gung-ho, stubborn, fiercely competitive, hardworking, and capable are terms which are regularly used to describe the mayor. Hard-headed, macho, dictatorial, intolerant, devious, racist, overly aggressive and paranoid are some others.

Employees at city hall say that if Folmar were judged on administrative ability and dedication alone he would rank among the best mayors any city could want. He is at his desk most days before other employees have taken their morning showers. He is personally wealthy-

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before entering politics he was a shopping center developer–and draws only a token dollar a year as his mayoral salary (though a recent letter-to-the-editor writer argued-that he is overpaid).

He is an ex-Army officer who was a highly decorated hero of Korea. He still keeps himself in rock-hard physical condition and has a military approach to organization and discipline. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the police, and it is in the area of law enforcement that his critics are most severe. The critics come from both inside and outside the police department.

Outside critics charge that Folmar believes, and expects everyone else to believe, that the police are always right; that he has encouraged an us-versus-them mentality; that he tries to run the department himself, and that the net result has been an increase of harassment by police, especially of blacks and gays.

“Just call our city Fort Montgomery and the mayor our commander-in-chief,” comments Joe Reed, a black city councilman who has been Folmar’s most persistent opponent in city government and who is also the head of the Alabama Democratic Conference, the state’s leading black political organization.

Adds Willie Peak, the white president of the city council, “Most whites recognize there could be possible wrongs on both sides [of the February confrontation]. Most whites are concerned about the ‘we can do no wrong’ attitude of the police.”

Critics inside the police department also fault Folmar for trying to run it like a military battalion with himself as general; for imposing his decisions over those of experienced, career police professionals, and for making promotions contingent on an officer’s personal loyalty and chumminess with the mayor.

Since Folmar came to power, several high-ranking police officials have retired from the department rather than accept the mayor’s tight control. Their privately stated grievances range from favoritism in promotion, to what they view as a ridiculous obsession with spit and polish, to Folmar’s actual interference with field operations.

It is true that Folmar has personally shown up at all hours of the day or night to participate in or take charge of on-the-scene police work, and that the officers who work as his bodyguards move rapidly through the ranks, often bypassing officers of greater experience. To give thy. example of just one officer, an example related by other police, Folmar acknowledged the good work of the officer yet refused to promote the man because “you’re not loyal to me.”

Folmar is the police chief, observed one ax-officer. “He personally promotes; Chief [Charles] Swindall doesn’t have the gumption or the power to do anything about it. Chief Swindall should have retired when Folmar was reelected.” Both current and ax-officers view this as a bitter irony because they consider Swindall to be an excellent police officer and actually a better chief than the man he replaced.

Folmar’s personal pistol-packing gave rise to the Montgomery joke: “Question: Why is the Mayor’s pistol chrome-plated? Answer: So it won’t rust in the shower.”

The police themselves tell and laugh at this joke, but they are less amused by Folmar’s parade inspections and pep talks. “These are grown men he’s having out here standing at attention. This isn’t boot camp,” observed an ax-officer.

Ex-police are also critical of the department’s low salaries and note that Montgomery taxpayers routinely spend five thousand or more dollars to send a new officer through Police Academy training only to have him leave for a better paying job after a year or two on the force. Many ten-, fifteen-, and even twenty-year veterans are also tempted out of police work for higher salaries with detective or security agencies or state government job”. Asked what he considered to be the biggest problem with the Montgomery police, a high-ranking official of the Alabama State Troopers replied, without hesitation, “They have too many young officers because they don’t pay enough to keep experienced men.”

Several highly symbolic changes have been made in the police force since Folmar became mayor. One was the repainting of all the police cars from a pleasant, non-threatening light blue to stark black and white. Another was the emergence of black SWAT-team style uniforms for officers on the night shifts. The new uniforms replace the traditional policeman’s hat with a baseball-type cap without a badge and feature bloused pants tucked into high lace-up military-style boots. The people inside the cars and uniforms are the same as before, but the difference in appearance is striking, and ominous.

Ex-police say the night shift officers themselves sought the new uniform because they believed it would be safer during the most dangerous hours of police work–a shiny badge flashing in the night is a better target. But the uniforms add to the military effect which Folmar has encouraged for the department, and the change has not gone unnoticed in the community. The uniforms were meant to be worn by the third shift officers, but the hats, at least, have apparently been adopted as a symbol by some officers, especially the younger ones, and are routinely seen at all hours. Some older officers even doubt the theory behind the new uniforms. “When we’re out o~ the street,” they say, “we want people to recognize

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instantly that we’re police”; and the traditional uniform tells them that.

It is impossible to judge the accuracy of the allegation, but people who say they have been harassed by Montgomery police, especially young blacks, say in so many words that they believe there are certain police or even squads of police who look for opportunities to provoke people, and that these are the police who wear the military-type uniforms. This may be only a perception, but it increases fear and hostility and that creates trouble for the officer on patrol. The state trooper official who spoke of low salaries mentioned a second area of concern for Montgomery police: “P.R.–they’ve also got a public relations problem. Brother, do they need some better public relations.”

Even the ax-officers who are critical of the mayor, however, also note that he reorganized the department into smaller divisions with greater supervision and more officers on the street at all times. Folmar and Chief Swindall claim that crime has been reduced since Folmar took charge.

A city government source from the Robinson era observed that Folmar took office at a time when, due to the Whitehurst scandal, police relations with blacks were at a low point. And then, rather than take steps to identify and correct the problem, it seems that Folmar’s actions made things worse.

Not all of Folmar’s strong-arm tactics were aimed specifically at the black community, however. Soon after he took office the police conducted an illegal drug search of patrons at a rock concert at the Montgomery Civic Center. Every person entering was searched, with or without probable cause, and a number of arrests were made. The arrests were nullified after a federal judge sharply rebuked the police actions–and the mayor–but three years would pass before another rock concert was held at the Civic Center.

City hall insiders also view with suspicion the scuttling by Folmar of the reorganization that former mayor Robinson had engineered. Basically, Robinson divided the city’s departments into several major divisions, each of which was headed by a professional administrator who took care of the details and answered to the mayor’s office on policy and procedure. Folmar has dismantled this system, and every department head in the city is under Folmar’s personal supervision–and knows it.

Such is the background against which the current racial troubles in Montgomery must be seen. Legal challenges have been raised to a Folmar-backed redistricting plan for this year’s city elections. A federal judge has agreed with black challengers that the city’s new reapportionment plan was drawn to discriminate against black voters and black officeholders, particularly against long-time Folmar opponent Joe Reed. After the ruling, Folmar said the city would appeal, and he also issued what amounted to a personal attack on the federal judge, who is black. Folmar’s statement, to the effect that the ruling was not unexpected considering the source, encouraged disrespect for the law and for federal judges and bordered on outright racism. Elections may or may not be held in October.

Despite widespread discontent with Folmar, few have seemed especially eager to challenge him. The strongest potential candidate has been city council president Peak, but he has said he will not run. The announced candidates to date are a young white businesswoman who said she would drop out if a more experienced contender emerged, a white contractor with connections to the business community, and Franklin James, a member of a

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prominent Montgomery family and the brother of former longtime mayor Earl James. Only James, who was once the state’s industrial relations director, has any political experience. James announced his candidacy just as this issue was going to press, and it is too early to assess his chances. However, his political reflexes are evidently in good shape because he went directly to the key issue: Folmar himself. James’s opening statement included references to the incumbent’s ego, grandstanding tactics, and lightning-rod administrative style. Montgomery needs a mayor, James said, who can get along with all of the city’s people, and who solves problems rather than creates them. James also promised that his industrial relations background would bring factories and jobs.

Black council member Donald Watkins, an attorney who represented the Bernard Whitehurst family after the 1976 shooting, has said he will run against Folmar if “no credible white candidate comes forward.” (The statement was made before James or the contractor, David Thames, announced their intentions; Watkins has not indicated whether he considers Thames or James to be credible candidates.)

Blacks acknowledge that no black mayoral candidate can win in the face of a white electoral majority. However, the precinct totals cannot be comforting to Folmar. He cannot be expected to get more than a handful of Montgomery’s black voters, and 30.2 percent of the registered voters are black. He is also a Republican, and although the city elections in Montgomery are not partisan contests, he would still be vulnerable against a strong white Democrat who can avoid antagonizing the conservatives while still expressing some of the misgivings many whites also feel toward Folmar’s brand of leadership. Folmar did not carry Montgomery in the 1982 gubernatorial race against George Wallace.

Folmar recently presented petitions bearing what he said were more than seventeen thousand signatures of Montgomery voters who wanted him to run for reelection. However, no one has collected the signatures of those who will vote for anyone else, and Folmar is obviously sniffing the political winds. While he had, earlier rejected calls for committees to probe issues causing racial tensions, he changed his course a few weeks ago and announced his own bi-racial committee. He appointed the chairman and vice-chairman and invited council members to nominate three persons each to the new committee. So far, three of the four black council members have declined, saying the committee was created by Folmar for political reasons and could never be effective while the chairman was appointed by Folmar. Critics also say that Folmar made a mistake when he named a white chairman and a black vice-chairman rather than two co-chairs, and they view the structure of the committee as proof of Folmar’s determination to control even the discussion over Montgomery’s current problems. The committee received another wound when the black vice-chairman, the president of Alabama State University, resigned without attending a meeting, saying he could not take part in a committee with such obviously political overtones.

Meanwhile, an anonymous citizen known as Jack Smith has created the Friendly Supper Club, which merely invites interested persons to show up with a guest of a different race at an appointed time at a local cafeteria to “break bread together” and get to know one another across racial lines.

The second of the dinners, in June, took place just one day after a cross was burned in the yard of black county commissioner John Knight, who is the spokesman for the boycott called by blacks against the First Alabama Bank. Coming at a time of increasing attention to Montgomery’s racial troubles, the contrast between the cross-burning and the Friendly Supper Club was too great for the media to pass up. CBS and NBC both sent camera crews to town, and their reports juxtaposed pictures of the charred cross in Knight’s yard with shots of blacks and whites smiling and talking around the cafeteria tables. The local media especially made a point of the difference between Folmar’s beleaguered bi-racial committee and the independently created Friendly Supper Club. Dialogue was the order of the day, but it was not the Mayor who was doing the talking.

One of those at the June dinner was Johnnie Carr, the president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which sponsored the bus boycott in 1955-56. Dialogue is fine, said Mrs. Carr, but it is not the solution. “When a city of this size can’t find a decent leader for mayor, I have to ask what is wrong. Folmar accuses us of crying ‘racism,’ but when you look at the man’s record, how do you explain it except as racism?”

Mrs. Carr said the black community views Folmar’s creation of the bi-racial committee as a belated attempt to gloss over the current problems. She believes the strategy will not work.

“We don’t need a bandaid,” she said. “We need a good physical examination, and then we’re going to have to have some political surgery.”

Randall Williams is a Montgomery resident and a contributing editor of Southern Changes.

Denial of Tenure At Vanderbilt

By Frye Gaillard

Vol. 5, No. 4, 1983, pp. 7-8

By almost any measure, the last year has been a good one for Elizabeth Langland. Her first two books, published by the University of Chicago Press and the University Press of New England, have drawn praise from the critics, and a third book–Society and the Novel–has been accepted by the University of North Carolina Press.

In addition, her teaching is going well at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., where Langland is the 34-year-old Chairman of the English Department. Teaching generally goes well for Langland. She was widely acclaimed by the students at Vanderbilt, where she taught until 1982, and where students lined up one hundred and twenty at a time for her British Novels class.

But Langland was forced to leave Vanderbilt. The University’s Arts and and Science Dean, Jacque Vogeli, overruled a recommendation by the school’s English faculty that she become the first woman in the department’s history to be granted tenure. That decision has sparked a federal lawsuit and a national controversy, and Vanderbilt’s image has taken a beating.

The court case will be heard sometime in October. In the meantime, Vanderbilt officials have sought to defend themselves against charges of egregious sexism, which is a difficult task, given the facts that are available to the University’s critics. At the time of Langland’s tenure vote, for example, Vanderbilt’s Arts and Science College had two hundred and ten tenured faculty members, of whom two hundred and three were male.

There were already “grumblings about those statistics. But the complaints grew louder after June 13,1981, when Langland was summoned to the office of English Department Chairman James Kilroy. “The news is not good,” Kilroy told her. And he read her a letter from Vogeli, approximately two pages of single-spaced type, informing her that her tenure request was being denied. Vogeli, who had approved tenure for twenty-nine men and one woman during his time as a Vanderbilt dean, ordered Kilroy not to show Langland the letter or allow her to take any notes on its contents. Just read it to her once, Vogeli had said.

Still, Langland got the gist of it. Vogeli found her scholarship deficient; she had failed, he said to establish “a national reputation” in her field.

Langland was shaken and dismayed. but many of her colleagues were outraged. One of the angriest was Susan Ford Wiltshire, a tenured, Southern-bred classics professor who arrived at Vanderbilt in 1971. Wiltshire knew that no woman hired after that had been granted tenure at Vanderbilt, despite lofty assurances by the school’s administration that Vanderbilt was committed to equality.

In addition, Wiltshire was familiar with Langland’s credentials as a teacher and a scholar–the three books she had written or edited during three years at Vanderbilt, a time during which she also wrote several scholarly articles, chaired the University’s Women Studies Program and taught at least three courses a semester.

“Elizabeth was widely recognized as one of the genuinely excellent teachers on campus,” said Wiltshire. “As for Jacque Vogeli’s estimation of her scholarship, there are a great many people–including the majority of her own department, and more recently, critics around the country–who clearly disagree with him.”

For Wiltshire and many others, the issue boiled down to this: Despite Vanderbilt’s atrocious record in promoting women faculty members, a University dean went out of his way–took the unusual step of overruling the recommendation of a respected department–to deny tenure to an excellent teacher and promising young scholar.

The move seems all the more surprising in view of Vanderbilt’s national reputation for excellence. The English department has long been one of the best in the South, with writers such as Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom passing through in recent decades.

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And during the political and social turbulence of the 1960s, Vanderbilt’s chancellor at the time, Alexander Heard, stood up strongly for academic freedom–keeping his campus peaceful not by threats of repression, but by honest open dialogue that impressed even the most radical of students.

Vanderbilt people take pride in all that. But they also wince at the University’s shabbier moments, including its decision in 1960 to dismiss the Reverend James Lawson from its graduate divinity program. Lawson was black, and his offense, in the eyes of the Vanderbilt administration, was to lead sit-in demonstrations at Nashville lunch counters.

Harvie Branscomb, Vanderbilt’s chancellor before Heard, explained the University’s position this way: “There is no issue involved of freedom or thought, or of conscience, or of speech, or of the right to protest against social custom. The issue is whether or not the University can be identified with a continued campaign of mass disobedience of law as a means of protest.”

Susan Wiltshire and other critics argue that the same institutional defensiveness and startling lapse of vision have characterized Vanderbilt’s handling of the Elizabeth Langland case. As proof, they cite Vogeli’s recent quotes in a student publication:

“(The press) reported that I denied tenure. I do not deny tenure. I sometimes fail to concur with a department recommendation. There is a difference. Deny has a pejorative ring. Deny implies that tenure is something that rightfully belongs to a faculty member, and that I am preventing that member from receiving it. It is like saying your professor denied you an A.”

Wiltshire, Langland and many of their colleagues were unimpressed, at the least, by Vogeli’s stance, and they formed an organization called WEAV (Women’s Equity at Vanderbilt) to push the Langland case and to raise the larger questions about women’s equality. Regardless of the outcome of the Langland suit, the WEAV members are convinced their efforts will have a long-run effect.

“The history of this institution will be significantly altered by what has happened in the last year and a half,” concludes Wiltshire. “Elizabeth Langland and Jim Lawson each said ‘no’ to the ‘no’–and that makes all the difference.”

Frye Gaillard, a Southern author and editorial writer at the Charlotte Observer, is a graduate of Vanderbilt, class of ’68.

“A Nation at Risk”

By Joseph A. Mcdonald

Vol. 5, No. 4, 1983, pp. 8-10

The Report from The National Commission on Excellence in Education, “A Nation at Risk,” has generated tremendous reaction. Newscasts, newspapers, journals, and magazines, in the South and across the nation, are devoting more space than usual to a commission report. What does this document offer for our region’s schools which consistently rank near the bottom in test scores and finances? Unfortunately, the Report barely scratches the surface in its analysis of causes of our educational problems and thus reflects no understanding of the role that poverty and racism play in subverting ~ quality education. One of the reasons for the impressive’ and overwhelmingly favorable attention, in fact, is that it allows us to pay lip service to high ideals and express indignation over the state of education without having to make any fundamental changes that might threaten the status quo.

To quote from the Report, “We conclude that declines in educational performance are in large part the result of disturbing inadequacies in the way the educational process itself is often conducted.” This line tells us that the report ignores the fact that our educational system does not exist in a vacuum. Its form and content are shaped by the larger society of which it is a part. We can never adequately understand education unless we first examine this connection to the larger society, yet this report fails completely to do so.

Instead, the Commission cites four specific areas of criticism about the educational process itself: content, expectations, time, and teaching. In a nutshell, content refers to curriculum and the easing of standards within the schools. Expectations refers to the decline in demands placed on students by graduation requirements, grading practices, college admission requirements, and so on. Time refers to length of school day and school year as well as extent of homework assignments. Teaching refers to training, abilities, shortages, and salaries of teachers. Finding fault with all four areas, the report recommends that we devise a new and tougher curriculum, raise expectations by implementing higher standards, lengthen the school day and year and assign more homework, and train and pay teachers better. The Report concludes with great optimism: “We are the inheritors of a past that gives us every reason to believe that we will succeed.”

It is almost impossible not to be offended by this report. Its obvious emphasis on symptoms rather than causes, the great care taken not to be too critical, its refusal to deal with issues of power and conflict, make it a document without teeth and without meaning for educational change. It therefore is a document, ironically, which supports the status quo, which argues for minor tinkering at best. It allows politicians, business leaders, and the middle and upper classes to demonstrate concern about education, to present themselves as high-minded citizens without committing themselves to any change which would threaten their interests. Its very acceptance by these elements of the population informs us of its ideological compatibility with these interests.

To be more specific, this document is a smokescreen for the real issue plaguing our educational system–the huge inequality characterizing our society. That the Commission could spend eighteen months researching and writing a document which does not mention inequality and class structure is a slap in the face of the poor, the working class, and minorities. Studies over the last twenty years (Coleman in 1966 and Jencks in 1972 are the most frequently cited ones out of a much larger number) conclusively show student performance is

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strongly related to socio-economic status, or class background. More than quality of schools or teachers, or money spent per pupil, or class size, or nature of libraries, this factor explains why some students do well and some do poorly. This explanation makes people uncomfortable since it represents a challenge, a moral challenge, to inequality. Thus it is ignored when possible and viciously attacked when publicized.

Class background is important because those with wealth, power, and status can use their resources to insure that their advantages are passed on to their children. Schools merely reproduce the inequality in one generation in the next generation. Tracking systems, teacher expectations, IQ tests, peer pressure, financing, and curriculum have all been found to contribute to this reproduction. Clearly, schools are not a vehicle for upward mobility. Again, this finding is rejected by most because it means that quality education for all is possible only through the reduction of inequality in our society. It is interesting, and telling, that the United States is second rate in education as well as in other areas indicative of the quality of life of citizens, such as infant survival rate and the availability of decent housing and medical care. All of these reveal the terrible consequences befalling a society when one-fifth of the people receive over forty-four percent of the income each year while another fifth receives less than four percent. The distribution of wealth (financial assets, property, valuables) is even more unequal. Since those who monopolize income and wealth are also those with significant political influence, programs involving income redistribution are kept to a minimum. And as long as inequality is unlikely to be reduced, publicity about the role of inequality in the production and maintenance of educational mediocrity is unwanted.

We can go even further. Perceptive analysts, over the years, have pointed out to us that our educational system is actually performing the exact function intended. Corporations, and politicians who must count on corporate support, have certain needs. One of these is for a labor force to handle semi-skilled and unskilled jobs without undue complaint, armed only with the skills necessary to punch a clock, follow directions, and tolerate repetitive, meaningless work. Our work world has been so deskilled and dehumanized that the talents and abilities basic education transmits can be reduced to a minimum. Corporate America does not need well-educated people in great numbers. The ones that are needed can be supplied by the middle and upper classes. Middle level management can come from the middle and lower middle levels with occasional upwardly mobile working-class students allowed as proof that anyone can make it. In South Carolina, for instance, the textile industry has strongly opposed Governor Riley’s call for increased taxes to improve the state’s poorly funded school system. The industry does not want to lose the large number of semi-skilled and unskilled workers that the schools currently provide.

The schools thus accomplish two important goals. One, they keep industry supplied with an ample supply of workers, and two, they insure that wealth and power remain in the same hands from generation to generation. Those who are exploited by these goals have the least amount of power in our society to protest. Thus the only changes publicized are those that would tinker with the system.

But if this system is working as intended, why would political and economic elites support the report and the tinkering (as they have been doing)? I can think of several reasons. One, criticism of education has become quite pervasive. This report might mollify the critics and coopt the issue of educational-change, insuring that proposals are acceptable to the elites. It also demonstrates, falsely, to the parents of children being cheated by our educational system that help is on the way. And it serves a further ideological purpose in this regard by telling all of us that the problem lies within the educational process which, if modified, would work well (with the implication that children will have only themselves to blame if they do poorly).

Second, the Report offers a scapegoat for the tremendous economic difficulties we are facing today. It strongly suggests that our loss of dominance in worldwide markets and the faltering of our automobile and steel industries have been caused by the “rising tide of mediocrity” that afflicts our educational institition. There is no mention, of course, of monopolistic practices, failures to invest in new equipment, continued production of larger cars because of the greater profits expected, expensive mergers, and the host of other problems which lie at the bottom of our current economic morass. Instead, our schools are to blame.

Thirdly, and most importantly, the Report does reflect some serious economic concern being felt by multinationals. The very first line of the document states, “Our nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.” Some tinkering, therefore, is actually desired by the economic and political powers that be to bring U.S. education more in line with the demands being placed on our corporations by changes in the world economic system. Specifically, education needs to be more technical, more mathematical, more computer oriented. Social science is valuable only so that future executives can understand the geopolitical parameters of the battle against Communism and the exploitation of the Third World.

The Report falls woefully short in its portrayal of the personal and humanitarian purposes of education. Little concern is expressed over the failure of our schools to stimulate critical discourse, social criticism, and other safeguards of democratic ideals. For the economic and political elite, education is an instrument, an instrument to promote advantage for a few and to instill acceptance, conformity, and complacency in the many. Elites in the South do not want the schools to become sources of challenge to right-to-work laws or to the low levels of voter registration among blacks. As long as public schools continue to be mechanisms for maintaining inequality, these elites can continue to hold a disproportionate share of the region’s wealth and power. At the same time, they can send their own children to the segregation academies.

Until we come to grips with class and racial inequality

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in our society, education will continue to serve the needs of the few. Reports such as this offer no hope for significant change. The Commission fails to mention even basic problems such as variations in funding of schools depending on the wealth of local areas. It does not mention the continued housing discrimination which keeps minorities in poor neighborhoods, the job discrimination which makes it difficult for the poor and for minorities to obtain good jobs even if they succeed in school, or the need for continuation and improvement in special programs for the disadvantaged.

That the Report fails to mention such elementary ideas and instead opts for minor tinkering with curriculum, teacher training and school days is sufficient reason for progressives to reject it, loudly. The Report is worse than meaningless. It will be used in justifying challenges to teacher unions, making curriculum more conservative and purging progressive personnel and ideas. Its omissions and the uses to which it will be put place the report squarely behind the status quo.

Joseph A. McDonald is assistant professor of sociology at Newberry (SC) College. He its currently investigating the impact of textile mill closings on Southern workers and communities.

Can We Be Saved from School Savers?

By Paul Gaston

Vol. 5, No. 4, 1983, pp. 10-11

Before I had a university professorship, wrote a book, received a Ph.D., won a Fulbright to study abroad, and graduated from the college of my choice, I spent fifteen years (three of them as a kindergartener) working in wood, clay, leather, and silver; singing; acting; folk dancing; playing sports and games of all sorts; and, yes, basket weaving (using Alabama long-leaf pineneedles)–all in a school where these things were thought to be as educational–as basic–as reading and mathematics.

In fact, we didn’t categorize things that way, which is one reason why I react badly every time someone talks about going back to the basics. What are the basics basic to, I always wonder. In our school, folk dancing was as important as American History; Arts and Crafts as essential as Chemistry. When we were very young, before we were eight, nature walks were part of our daily routine and learning to read was something we didn’t do–there would be plenty of time when we were ready for it. Everything we did was basic and some of what others now call “the basics” we left out until it was time for them.

I don’t believe the members of the National Commission on Excellence in Education would share the enthusiasm I have for my school. But, then, I feel the same way about their ” imperative for educational reform.” AII of those litanies to “excellence,” “quality,” “standards,” and “tough demands”–not to mention the jingoism–frighten me with the vision of joyless students obediently churning out higher test scores.

Every time I am confronted with such blatant examples of competition, coercion and mindlessness as the American way of learning, I think back to the School of Organic Education, in Fairhope, Alabama, where I went, and wish that its values and assumptions could be our inspiration.

The founder of our school–a remarkable woman named Marietta Johnson–always said “education is growth.” By this she meant that education should not be training or preparation for future demands but the proper nurturing of immediate needs of the whole organism. She called her idea “organic education” and she strongly believed that no part of a child’s development should be isolated from another without the danger of warping the child. The spiritual, mental, and physical must always be kept in balance; stressing one to the detriment of another would damage the whole child.

Because this philosophy pervaded the school–not just the faculty but also the pupils–we never thought about which courses were academic or more basic than others, which would assure you of the college of your choice and which would condemn you to a trade school. There was no “tracking system” and had anyone ever proposed a “college preparatory” class the idea would have perplexed us. The best preparation for the future, we believe, was unselfconscious absorption in the things that naturally and properly interested us at any given stage of growth. We quite literally prepared for the future by not preparing for it.

I don’t remember if there were SATs in my day. I’m certain that if they existed as a requirement for college admission we would never have set them up as goals to work toward. Tests were as alien to our idea of education as were honors courses, acceleration, specialization, and preparing for a career. We had no tests or marks in pottery or drama–everyone understood we did those things because we liked them–and it worked the same way for Spanish and Shakespeare: we studied because we wanted to, without being ranked, compared, and classified. One of our major articles of faith was that learning is its own reward.

And we found that learning is intensely satisfying. Because our teachers helped us to care about what we studied, treated our opinions with respect, and encouraged us to share, defend, and refine them, we learned to read and write and reason because those things were important to us, not to meet someone else’s expectations of what we ought to be.

Tests, examinations, grades, promotions, honors, rewards and other invidious distinctions masquerading as incentives to learning were all perversions of the educational system, we believed. If you worked to get a good grade or to beat out somebody else, you were warping your own growth, undermining your own education. Why would anyone do that?

No one failed at our school; and, with no failure, the roots of fear were cut off. That released power in many persons who might otherwise have been crushed early in life. With no honor rolls–no awards for any achievements–there was less chance for false pride to develop and more support for the idea of achievement as its own and sufficient reward. With no grades there was no cheating. Cheating was one of those absurdities we

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jokingly called “un-organic.” Later, when we went to college, we looked on those who boasted of their anti-cheating “honor codes” as being curiously perverted.

We varied greatly in our talents and backgrounds–we were a good cross section of the community–but the school helped each of us to grow to our potential. There was no mechanical formula for this, no system that could be designed and mandated by some educational authority. Far more important than method or technique were the values and assumptions of our teachers. They believed in the school’s philosophy, in organic education. They had faith that if you valued each pupil as a unique individual, took them where they were and worked from there, everything would turn out fine in the long run.

There were certainly standards–we all knew we were expected to do our best–but we never had what the National Commission would call “objective” standards that would show whether an individual student was measuring up to the norm or not. There simply were no fixed reference points by which we could be placed in a continuum in relationship to our peers. We were ourselves in an environment deeply mistrustful of measuring and comparing.

There was discipline, too. We were not a “do as you please” school. But the discipline we had was not imposed by rules and regulations, fear of punishment or lust for reward. It was self-discipline that emerged quite naturally from our confidence in the school and in ourselves and our keen sense of what was right and what was wrong.

Along with confidence we had great pride in the school. Our school spirit–intense and pervasive–was rooted in a belief that we were part of an important experiment in social democracy. John Dewey visited the school in 1913, just six years after it opened, and he made a famous report, stating that the school was showing “how the ideal of equal opportunity is to be transmuted into reality.” Our founder said many times that equal opportunity exists only when all children are provided the conditions for the full development of their capacity. We believed those conditions existed at our school. I suppose we were naive, but we held proudly to the idea that our school pointed the way to a sounder, more just and humane democratic society.

Thirty-seven years after graduation I am still naive enough to believe that we had the right idea. I know the National Commission doesn’t have it.

Paul M. Gaston teaches history at the University of Virginia and its the author of The New South Creed (Knopf) and the forthcominq Women of Fair Hope. He is a member of the executive committee of the Southern Regional Council.

The Freeze Down South

By Margaret Roach and Allen Tullos

Vol. 5, No. 4, 1983, pp. 11-14

In the fall of 1982, the Nuclear Freeze Campaign mobilized the largest referendum drive in United States history. Over eleven million Americans voted for the freeze. It won in nine of ten states and in all but three of thirty-seven local referendums that were held in towns, cities and counties across the country.

Even if Southern state and city election laws made it easy to hold popular initiatives–which they didn’t–disarmament organizers would still have the South’s strong pro-military climate to contend with. Congressional delegations from the South are among the Pentagon’s strongest supporters. Military employees and contractors abound (see “Shaping the South’s Pre-War Economy” in Southern Changes, August September 1982). Nonetheless, citizens and church groups in Dixie are fashioning a nuclear disarmament movement tied to the large stirrings in the rest of the U.S. and in Europe. The movement here, as elsewhere, continues to grow. Excitement and expectation mingle with an awareness of the realities of the South’s web of military dependencies.

Organizers for the Freeze Campaign (only one of several groups active in the present peace movement) have much to report both inside and around the South’s border during the past several months. In Miami-Dade County, one place where the resolution did get on the ballot, voters approved the freeze by a fifty-eight percent margin. In Atlanta, where a right wing group took legal action to block a Nuclear Freeze/Jobs With Peace referendum, an exit poll conducted on election day revealed that sixty-one percent of the voters supported the freeze. In Austin, Texas, fourteen thousand of seventeen thousand participants in a “people’s election” voted approval. The West Virginia house and senate have passed the freeze resolution. In North Carolina, the resolution passed the house but was defeated in the senate by a tie-breaking vote by Lieutenant Governor Jimmy Green.

On March 7 and 8, some seven thousand citizens from around the country (including more than six hundred Southerners) made the trip to Washington to participate

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in the Citizens’ Lobby for a U.S./Soviet Nuclear Freeze. Among the Dixie delegations were 150 supporters from Virginia, 120 from Kentucky, a hundred from Georgia, eighty from Florida, sixty from North Carolina and fifty from Arkansas. These activists were quite aware of the strong relationship between the amount of military dollars a Southern state receives and the voting habits of that state’s members of congress.

On the South’s border, in Arkansas and West Virginia, where there is an insignificant proportion of Pentagon money, congressional delegations have outshown Deep South states in their votes for the freeze and against building particular weapons systems.

“We’ve been dumped on by the Pentagon. Arkansas is considered to be expendable,” says Bob Bland of Little Rock’s SANE chapter, offering as examples the Titan missile field where an explosion in 1980 killed one airman and injured twenty-one others and the nerve gas production facility at Pine Bluff. Neither represents much in terms of employment. Dividing along party lines, Arkansas’ two Democrats have often voted on the side of nuclear disarmament while the state’s two Republicans have followed the Reagan lead. “We’ll remove the arch-hawks in ’84,” Bland says.

Arkansas is the only Southern state whose senators are both sponsors of the freeze resolution. Both David Pryor and Dale Bumpers also oppose the MX missile. Pryor is presently waging a war with the Pentagon as he seeks to prevent $130.6 million in chemical warfare money from entering his state. “Nerve gas,” he argues, “doesn’t kill-soldiers, it kills civilians.”

Like Arkansas, West Virginia receives few military contracting dollars. There are no major military facilities in the state and only two thousand Department of Defense employees, three-fourths of whom are civilian. As in Arkansas, the only thing the Reagan-Weinberger military build-up means for the people of West Virginia is a loss of social programs and increased economic pressure for the unemployed young to “be all you can be” in the armed forces. West Virginia sends a greater per capita percentage of its young people to the military than any other state.

Both houses of the West Virginia legislature endorsed the freeze in January: the senate by a vote of twenty-eight to five and the house by voice vote. These victories contributed to other ones. “It was our organizing around congressional districts and winning the endorsement of the state legislature that made our influence felt in the congressional delegation,” explains coordinator Susan Walter of Charleston.

And felt it was. Only one out of its four representatives voted for the freeze in 1982. In a skillful statewide campaign to “make peace an issue in West Virginia’s congressional races,” West Virginians for a Bilateral Nuclear Freeze (with chapters in twelve towns) worked hard to replace their state’s pro-military representatives. With three new congressmen elected in November of 1982, the freeze stance moved to one hundred percent.

Certainly the issue of nuclear war was a key in the state’s third congressional district where incumbent Mick Staton said, “I believe the earth would be destroyed when the good Lord in heaven decides it should happen.” Staton was replaced by freeze supporter Robert Wise.

West Virginia is also the home of Senator Jennings Randolph (D) who, since 1945, has been proposing the establishment of either a U.S. Department of Peace, or a U.S. Peace Academy to study the causes of war and teach techniques for resolving conflicts. Although Randolph’s proposal has fifty-three cosponsors, it is currently bottled up in a senate committee by its chief enemies, Alabama’s Jeremiah Denton (R) and New Hampshire’s Gordon J. Humphrey (R). “I have been gently told,” says Randolph, “that even though my reasons for establishing a peace academy are sincere and well-intended, I am naive if I believe such an academy will serve as anything but a commie front.”

As one moves toward the heart of Dixie, congressional supporters for disarmament grow scarcer. In July of 1982, when the U.S. House of Representatives considered the freeze and defeated it by a 204 to 202 vote, only twenty-two of 107 congressmen in the eleven states of the old Confederacy voted in favor. The South remains the bastion for die-hard militarists. Yet, even here, freeze activists have helped engineer a few surprises. Consider North Carolina.

In contrast with Arkansas and West Virginia, North Carolina ranks fifth in the nation in the size of its military payroll and third in the number of military personnel within the state. Fort Bragg and Camp LeJune are two of the largest bases in the U.S. The state also has Jesse Helms and John East.

During the past year, several groups formed the North Carolinians for a U.S./Soviet Nuclear Freeze. They mounted a statewide campaign, gathering more than forty thousand signatures on the freeze petition. Seven of the state’s cities voted to approve the freeze proposal. “We started with the cities and moved out to the rural areas where we found terrific support,” says Dale Everts, coordinator of the campaign. Before losing by a twenty-five to twenty-four vote in the NC senate, the freeze resolution passed the lower house by a sixty-five to forty-eight tally in March.

During the North Carolina house debate, J.P. Huskins, from Statesville, a conservative on most issues, explained his opposition to Reagan’s military build-up: “It’s like those cowboys who try to outdraw themselves in front of a mirror. Those cowboys out on the plains can’t do

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it and the cowboy in the White House can’t do it either.”

By the time the freeze resolution appeared again in the U.S. House of Representatives this year, newly elected members as well as returned incumbents from the mid-term election were aware of the freeze movement’s strength among the American mainstream. Nonetheless, thanks to the tolerance of proponents and the dogged persistence of opponents in offering a succession of weakening amendments, nearly forty-two hours of debate were required before a version of the resolution passed. A final touch, facilitated by Georgia’s Elliott Levitas (D), made the proposition palatable to all but Reaganites and irascible hawks.

Levitas’ modifications produced a resolution that requires the suspension of any freeze agreement which is not followed by mutual arms reductions within a specified period of time. Despite the addition of the Levitas’-inspired convoluted language, the principle of “freeze then reduce” remains intact and in contrast with the Reagan Administration’s attempts to build-up first-strike weapons. The freeze resolution, however, remains both non-binding and largely symbolic. The final House vote, taken on May 25, was 278 to 149 in support of the amended resolution. Still, only forty-six of 116 Southern members of Congress voted favorably.

The Southern delegation is doing more than opposing non-binding resolutions; they are at the front of the Reagan-Weinberger re-armament campaign with its proposed five year expenditure of $1.8 trillion. Certainly there are the old line war hawks–the likes of Alabama’s Edwards and Denton, Mississippi’s Stennis, Texas’ Tower and North Carolina’s two senators. These men make no apologies for their militarism.

Other Southerners, as illustrated by Levitas and by Georgia’s Senator Sam Nunn (D) and Tennessee Representative Albert Gore (D), have begun to give the appearance of concern for eventual disarmament while in fact encouraging the pursuit of nuclear weapons modernization.

Consider the current proposals of Nunn and Gore. Influential in recent congressional voting and in the formation of legislative consensus on military matters, these two men have become sophisticated in their militarism–or, as folks used to say, wiser in their wickedness. Nunn and Gore resort to the language of Orwellian newspeak in which lip service supportive of a longed-for goal (the dismantling of nuclear weaponry) is accompanied by actions which seek an opposite end (a “superiority” of arms). Under Nunn’s “build-down” proposal (which calls for the dismantling of two older warheads for each new one produced) or Gore’s suggestion (known as “de-MIRVing”) that the U.S. shift from multiple to single warhead missiles, aging nuclear weapons will be replaced by more modern ones and numerical reductions in nuclear warheads and missiles will result in an actual increase in the speed, accuracy and destructive power of the missiles which are deployed.

Whether they are promoted as a compromise between the Reagan Administration’s approach to arms control (“Reagan does not like to spend money on anything that does not explode,” notes Arkansas Senator Dale Bumpers) and a genuine nuclear freeze, or whether they are promoted as bi-partisan agreements by Presidential panels such as the Scroweroft Commission, the build-down and kindred schemes are frauds. With a simple phrase, suggestive of disarmament, build-down proponents seek to siphon off the broad and growing support that exists for a serious movement to abolish nuclear weapons. “As in the case with the nuclear freeze proposal,” build-down co-sponsor Charles Percy (R-IL) has admitted, “it benefits from an underlying concept that can be readily grasped and embraced by the general public.” Unlike the freeze, which stops the arms race in its tracks, the build-down offers an escalation in the production of weapons with ever-greater first-strike potential. Ground, air and sea-launched cruise missiles would be deployed. Trident II submarine-launched missiles could replace Poseidon and Trident I missiles. New MX missiles and the mobile Midgetman (favored by Gore) would replace Minuteman. Comparable systems could be developed by the Soviets. There would be fewer missiles, but these would be more dangerous–and move us closer to a hair-trigger response during a national crisis or to the contemplation of first strike: “Use them or lose them.”

“Remember that all political life is compromise,” suggested Leslie Dunbar of the Fund for Peace during a May gathering in Atlanta of Southern disarmament activists. “But be clear what compromise is. When Senator Nunn proposes a ‘build-down’ and Mr. Reagan shows an interest in it, that’s not our compromise. That’s a compromise between them and them. When men we have relied on in the past, like Albert Gore, Jr., begin to allow how they’ll support a few MXs in order to get Midgetmen, don’t even act interested. That’s not a compromise between them and us. The woods will be full in the next months with so-called compromises like these.”

Thanks in large part to the compromises of Nunn and Gore, the U.S. Senate and House, within a month of the successful freeze vote in the House, approved $625 million in start-up costs for flight testing and for development of basing plans for the MX missile. On the horizon lay the shape of tens of billions to come. Ninety-eight of 116 Southern representatives gave their approval as did all but three Southern senators (Bumpers and Pryor from

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Arkansas and Sasser of Tennessee were the exceptions). “No strategic weapons system that has ever passed this stage of funding.”-warned Representative Les AuCoin(DOR), “has been permanently canceled.”

In July both Nunn and Gore were still promising “to hold Reagan’s feet to the fire” and insist that he show some flexibility in his arms control positions in exchange for their willingness to support the MX as a bargaining chip with the Russians. “Those of us from the prairies,” counters Representative Byron Dorgan (D-ND), “know the difference between a bargaining chip and a cow chip. Those who spend twenty billion dollars for this kind of chip ought not to be trusted with the taxpayer’s money.”

As the $200 billion military authorization bill for 1984 steamed its way through this summer’s Congress, freeze activists pondered the prospects and tactics for the coming months. The national Freeze Campaign deems organizing in the South so important that it has designated its field organizing project for this region. Training workshops have already been held in Fort Worth and Atlanta. The American Friends Service Committee’s regional disarmament project is looking at Southern congressional districts to determine where pro-military representatives may be vulnerable for challenge by pro-freeze candidates.

At the June strategy session in Fort Worth, organizers debated the question of whether to shift the focus from the freeze to specific nuclear weapons systems. The Campaign re-affirmed its position that no additional nuclear weapons “can be justified on grounds of morality, economics or national security.” The decision to oppose specific weapons has been left up to local activists with the offer of national assistance. The National Campaign has issued a call to participate in local demonstrations on October 21-24 to oppose the deployment of Pershing and Cruise missiles in Europe in December.

The Freeze Campaign is also setting up a national political action committee for the 1984 elections. The Campaign will target a half-dozen senatorial races, fifty to seventy-five congressional races as well as presidential candidate selection. With its seven primaries and caucuses during one week in March, the South is considered a key area.

Some activists feel that the freeze strategy doesn’t go far enough and are calling for a “no freeze, no funds’) approach: the targeting of every new nuclear weapons system for opposition until a freeze is achieved. In considering this position, Randy Kehler of the National Freeze Campaign cautions, “even if we approach specific weapons systems in a bilateral way–and we have formulated some proposals for doing that–we will begin to lose the focus on the comprehensive freeze on all weapons systems in a way that will lose us the popular appeal the freeze has had.” Kehler notes that efforts to combat specific weapons systems have existed in the U.S. for years: “Even when they are temporarily successful, as with the B-1 bomber, the weapon comes back at us or it is replaced by another more dangerous one. The proponents of these weapons systems know that even if we win one battle, eventually they can tire us out on the weapon-by-weapon approach.”

William Reynolds, southeastern representative at the Fort Worth session, suggested that in the South, with organizers facing congressional delegations who are still overwhelmingly in the Pentagon’s camp, “we still need to establish the freeze position with its clear bilateral language. Southern senators and representatives have spent decades working to bring military money into the South. It’s going to take a lot of work and time to reverse that.”

Margaret Roach is on the staff of the Atlanta Nuclear Freeze/Jobs With Peace Campaign. Allen Tullos is the editor of Southern Changes.

The Smokehouse of Politics

By Staff

Vol. 5, No. 4, 1983, pp. 14, 16-17

John Lewis:

If we were to measure the Reagan Administration by a “humanity index,” we would have to conclude that the politics and record of this Administration are uncaring, insensitive and inhumane. From the callous disregard of the poorest of the poor, to the increased threat of nuclear holocaust, it can be said without stretching the point that this Administration poses an ultimate threat to human life and the survival of this planet.

On the domestic front, the President’s own Budget Director admitted that “supply side” economics is nothing more than a giveaway program to reward the wealthy at the expense of the poor. Poor and middle class workers are deprived of jobs and income, home mortgages are being foreclosed, and the family structure itself is being wrecked by the nightmare of unemployment.

Some of the most enlightened policies of previous Administrations are being discarded, enriching the profits of multi-national corporations, including the Southern Company, at the expense of the health and safety of the American people. Our safety in the workplace, protection from toxic industrial wastes, the right to know what is in the food we eat, and environmental protection, are but a few of the areas of our lives which are under the direct attack of this Administration.

The economic programs of this Administration are literally killing us. They threaten the quality of life of unborn generations and the lives of our senior citizens who, despite a mild winter, have had to face the unthinkable choice of deciding whether to spend their money on food or heat. The task before us is to develop policies and programs which promote the common good and a redistribution of the resources and wealth of this nation in an equal and fair manner. We must find a way or make a way to ease the burden of high energy costs on the poor. In 1983, in modern America, people simply should not be faced with the stark choices of food or fuel. We live in the wealthiest nation on the face of the earth, and it is immoral, and an absolute sin, for any person here to be

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forced to choose between giving up one necessity of life so that they can have another one. Not some people, but all of our people, should have access to all of the necessities of life, including food, shelter, health care, education, and in a modern society such as ours, transportation, communication, and an adequate access to energy.

For the most part, Southern utilities have shown very little interest in how their rate hikes and their total operation affect the quality of life of poor people.

In spite of the lack of utility involvement in programs to help the poor, there are a number of actions which utilities could undertake to help ease the impact of rising energy costs. An example of the few utilities which have pursued progressive energy conservation programs demonstrate two main points: first, that utility involvement in conservation programs can work, and second, that public pressure is necessary to implement the programs and make sure that they work properly.

To be successful in stopping rate increases, we must have a grassroots organizing effort as well as legal intervention. Public utility commissions are political bodies and they respond politically. We must approach our rate cases in a political manner.

We need to take the offensive in working with public utility commissions. Rather than simply reacting to a rate hike request, we need to begin petitioning the utility commissions to implement progressive policies and require these to be adopted by the utilities. It is clear from past history that utilities will not adopt progressive programs voluntarily, but only when they are pushed into it.

We need to increase our involvement in the overall political process. We need to run candidates for office and get actively involved in electing candidates for utility commissions, for state legislatures and for city and county commissions. These other bodies all play a major role in the political process of rate-making, and we must gain power in them. Our power and impact will be a function of our ability to play a significant role in putting people in office.

Jim Hightower:

I want to thank Commissioner Jim Buck Ross for allowing me into the state. You know as agriculture commissioners, among our many duties is to regulate the various pests. I think it says a lot of him that he let a Texan come in and he didn’t even dip me at the border.

Now I’m not going to give you a long speech, but I do want to share some general thoughts on three subjects: public policy, power and politics–which is really three ways of saying exactly the same thing. Public policy is shaped by power. We’re not shaping public policy right now because we’re not in power, because we’ve not been paying enough attention to politics. That’s the importance of what we did in the state of Texas last year.

Who’s got the power? You go out there and talk with one of those raw-boned ranchers in West Texas. You talk with him about going to the auction where’s he getting fifty-five cents a pound for his beef, and then going into town to the Safeway where they charge him $3.93 for the same beef. Who’s got the power there? And you talk with people living on social security who can’t pay their light bill because the electric company is building a nuclear plant and charging in advance for the electricity. So who’s got the power there?

Where are we going to get our energy? Now the industry knows where they want to get it. They want to get it from the nuclear source. And, because they happen to be in power at the moment, that’s where they’re getting it. They don’t want to mess with renewable resources of energy and they don’t want to mess with conservation because they don’t put much money in their pockets. Even though these systems make not only good sense, but probably the best sense.

In a state like Texas, we’ve got more sun and wind than we know what to do with. They’re constants in our lives. For people in Lubbock, on the High Plains, twenty mile per hour winds mean a calm day. Out there they say if your hat blows off, don’t bother chasing it, just turn around and there’ll be a better one coming along. We live with the wind there, so why don’t we use it? Well, the reason is because we’ve not put enough into politics.

Power doesn’t give itself up. You’ve got to go take it. “Liberty is not given, it is taken.” A friend of mine says, “If you want some ham, by God, go into the smokehouse.” Like I said in my campaign, if we got together and went into that smokehouse of politics, instead of coming out with an old, salty slab of fatback, for a change we were going to come out with a whole hog. And that’s what we did. We sliced off some of the sweetest meat of Texas politics. We got the governorship, the agriculture commission, the treasurer’s office, and attorney general’s office and the land commissioner’s office. We had a sweep in our state senate. That’s a mighty good feeling.

Having done it, we’ve got to perform. That’s the hardest part. That’s the chore we’re now facing, the battle that we’re making in Texas and the battle that you’ll be making.

In Texas, we’ve now got four or five good people elected to statewide offices. We all sit on something call TENRAC, Texas Energy and Natural Resources Advisory Council, which is an energy policy-making body, heretofore big oil–Exxon and Mobil. Now we have a chance to allocate some research monies in a different way, to pursue a different sort of development strategy. We can deal with water not by hauling a glacier down from Alaska and melting it on the High Plains, but by conservation systems.

Let’s look at a few utility issues–the automatic fuel adjustment clause for example. I understand that here in I Mississippi, a utility company can post a bond and they go

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ahead and build a plant or pay executives a higher salary than they’re getting, then charge it to the consumer. I call that a fool adjustment clause.

The whole issue of rate structure is the sacred cow for the industry. The first priority of most utility commissions in the United States is to increase the return on investments of the shareholders. In Texas, that runs on the average of well above fifteen percent. They’re out there fighting any tampering with the rate structure such as “lifeline” or any graduated rate structure. Instead they want to offer us charity. Now the utility companies are coming out with a system in which consumers have a voluntary check-off of one dollar added to their monthly utility bill to pay for poor people’s bills. Instead of having a fair rate structure. We’re not upsetting them any. We’ve got to go fight for fair rate structure.

Some of you are from Louisiana. You might have heard of Earl Long over there. One time, Earl told about the rich man who died and went to the pearly gates demanding to get in. Of course, you don’t just go through the pearly gates. There’s a clerk out front and Saint Peter’s sitting back there rendering judgment.

Well, the clerk’s looking over this man’s life story. He says, “Lord have mercy, I don’t see how in the world you think you’re going to get through here, you never did no good to nobody.”

The rich man said, “Oh, now wait a minute. Back in 1925, I gave a nickel to a blind beggarman.”

The clerk said, “That’s very generous of you, but it’s certainly not good enough to come in.”

He said, “Yes, but in 1935, a widow woman needed cab fare home, and I tossed her a nickel.”

The clerk said, “Well, that’s good too, but it doesn’t make up for a life of leisure.”

The rich man said, “Yes, but I’ve got a consistent pattern of giving. In 1945, I went by that Salvation Army Christmas bucket and put another nickel in there.”

The clerk turned to Saint Peter, and said, “What in heaven’s name are we going to do?”

And Saint Peter said, “Give him back his fifteen cents and tell him to go to hell.”

These people want to offer us welfare programs. We’re not interested in welfare. We are interested in fair rate structures. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking utilities or food prices or bank policies or whatever. The central issue is fairness. Too few people have all the money and power. They’re using that money against you and me every chance they get. What are we going to do about it? Well, it’s very simple. We’ve just got two choices: to lay back or to fight back.

We’ve got to fight back. That’s what we’ve begun to do in Texas and I see that’s what you’re doing here. I believe we fight back mostly through politics. Our lives are in our politics. I grew up in North Central Texas, in Sam Rayburn’s old country up there, old time Populist country. They had a saying up there: “the water won’t ever clear up until you get the hogs out of the creek.” Hogs just don’t waddle out of the creek, you’ve got to shove them out. You’ve got to take some sticks to them. And that’s what we’ve got to do. When I say we, I mean all of us. It’s got to be a unified effort: working families, poor people, old people, family farmers, ranchers, small business people. We got to get together again, put our shoulders together and push those hogs out of the creek. And that means you’ve got to take your politics directly to the people.

When I first went back to talk politics in Texas, I found liberals hanging around holding small meetings in very, very small rooms. Wringing their hands and saying, “Lord have mercy, what are we going to do?”

“My friends,” I told them, “you’ve got to go to the people. You’ve got to talk not just to the bean sprout eaters. You’ve got to get out and put that coalition together.”

And, not only do you have to go out to the people, you’ve got to go to them on the issues and don’t flinch.

When I was running for railroad commissioner, I was told “You can’t go out to West Texas and talk to those farmers. They have gas wells on their land and they identify with the gas company. They’re going to think you’re somebody off Mars talking about how bad the gas companies are.”

I went on out and I did talk about the gas companies and I found out it wasn’t any trouble at all. Why was that? Because those farmers were selling gas to the companies at one price and buying it back, the same gas–for their irrigation pumps–at three times the price they sold it for. Pretty easy economic message to get across to them.

I’ll just leave you with this thought, a theme that I ran upon this time. I stole the advertising slogan of a moving company over in Austin: “If we can get it a-loose, we can move it.” Well, we got it loose.

From the conference, “The South’s Poor and Utility Issues,” held earlier this year in Jackson, Mississippi, we present excerpts from. the observations of Atlanta City Councilman John Lewis and Texas Commissioner of Agriculture Jim Hightower.

Long Journey Home

By Bland Simpson and Cece Conway

Vol. 5, No. 4, 1983, pp. 17-19

One of the world’s great collections of Southern and country music has come home, and therein lies a ballad.

Early one morning in late April, a truck from California rolled into Chapel Hill, bringing the John Edwards Memorial Collection–nearly a thousand boxes of old 78-rpm phonograph records, sheet music and faded letters–to its new and permanent home at the University of North Carolina. For this archive, assembled by a young Australian, shipped at his death in 1960 to a fellow collector in New Jersey, then back across America to a long residency at the University of California at Los Angeles, it was journey’s end.

“There’s almost no end to the variety of material in

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those boxes,” said UNC’s Dan Patterson, after the dust had settled in late May. Patterson, the energetic director of the Folklore Curriculum here, was trail boss in the University’s drive to acquire the archive. “We hope we can find a copy of John Edwards’ will in there.”

Edwards’ will directed that the original collection–country music from the early period of its commercial history–be maintained in the United States for research purposes. When recipient Eugene Earle arrived with the archive in southern California in 1962, he and several other scholars and collectors–Archie Green. D.K. Wilgus, Ed Kahn, and Fred Hoeptner–formed the John Edwards Memorial Foundation and found housing for the archive at UCLA’s Center for Comparative Folklore and Mythology.

“We had wanted the collection to be housed in the South originally,” recalls Archie Green, “and we tried several institutions. But in the early 1960s, no Southern university was really committed to the serious study of any Southern vernacular music.”

The founders of the JEMF, like Edwards, understood that the record companies in the 1920’s and 1930’s had captured, in living sound, a host of emerging and evolving musical forms–repertories that did not interest scholars of that day. As documents of the vast impact of new technologies and commercialization on the old homemade music, these recordings in fact constitute a significant contribution to folklife studies.

During the two decades it was at UCLA on loan, the Edwards collection received the combined holdings of all its directors and other collectors and grew to include: fourteen thousand 78s, ten thousand 45s; a thousand LPs; correspondence and taped interviews with performers and other music business figures; six hundred song folios; sheet music; books; posters; photographs, and much more. And the Foundation enlarged its conception of the collection and embraced a wide range of traditional and commercial American music forms: cowboy, western, country western, old time, hillbilly, bluegrass, mountain, Cajun, sacred, gospel, race, blues, rhythm blues, soul, and folk rock.

Even before scholars had become fully aware of the collection’s significance, young musicians of the late 1960s were learning old-time styles and music from cassette tapes and from records pressed out of the Foundation’s collection. Now, the LP albums released by the JEMF have been turned over to Californian Chris Strachwitz, owner of Arhoolie Records and Down Home Music, who intends to keep the JEMF records in print and the label’s name alive and active.

In a recent edition of its Quarterly, JEMF executive secretary Norm Cohen wrote: “There is no denying that the creams of the founders of the JEMF over two decades ago have not been matched by reality . . . On the other hand, we have much to be proud of. We have led the way, in both printed and recorded media, toward the acceptance of country music and its related folk-derived forms as a subject for serious study at American educational institutions.”

Dan Patterson agreed. “Their Quarterly made the JEMF known all over the world.” And photographs from JEMF files, as well as references to materials there, abound in non-fiction works about country music. Cohen himself, in LONG STEEL RAIL, and JEMF president Archie Green, in ONLY A MINER, have used the collection’s riches in writing about railroading and mining songs.

Still, Patterson said, “The JEMF directors seemed to feel the collection was under-staffed and under-utilized at UCLA.” The JEMF’s reputation was firmly established, but the fate of its archive was not; the Foundation ran on grants, gifts and benefit concerts, and on the proceeds from high-quality but slow-selling records and publications. Patterson said he also believes the board in recent years began to think the collection belonged in the South, adding: “I think they decided it was unfair to deprive the South of a resource for the study of its own history.” At the heart of that study is the influence of the machine and technology on the South and the expression of Southern values in changing musical forms.

The first notion Patterson had that the JEMF was considering such a move came in 1979, when Green lectured in Chapel Hill. Patterson recalls: “He remarked, ‘Would UNC be interested in housing this collection?’- something like that. I thought, ‘Now, that wouldn’t happen.”‘ But in April, 1981, when Cohen came to Chapel Hill for a conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Patterson felt, “They were looking us over.” Cohen saw the 2500-LP Folk Music Archive that Patterson and his folklore students had built at UNC, and heard the plans the University had approved for its expansion.

It was Cohen who, in October 1982, suggested to Patterson at the American Folklore Society’s meeting in Minneapolis that, “If UNC is interested in the collection, it should make an offer now.”

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Patterson moved quickly once back in Chapel Hill. With partner Donald Shaw–a former student, now a journalism professor and director of UNC’s Media Center–he interested University Library director James Govan, a former Chattanoogan, in purchasing the l collection. But Govan told Patterson and Shaw: “The library couldn’t staff it now–could you?”

In short order, Patterson and Shaw strung together enough baling wire to fence in the collection: interim storage space from the Undergraduate Library, money to transport the collection from California to North Carolina from the Music and English Departments (including some discretionary funds offered by professor and novelist Doris Betts), assistantships and summer staff from the deans of the graduate and summer schools, and an initial operating budget created with the help of the provost and the chancellor.

UNC made its offer in January, 1983. The JEMF board accepted the bid in February, generously sending the collection back home at a fraction of its estimated half-million-dollar value. And Patterson, Shaw, and a crew of students and library staffers were singing the final chorus to the Ballad of John Edwards as they rounded up the 929 boxes on a Carolina loading dock the sunny morning of April 21st.

“Negotiations went so fast,” Patterson said, “that the collection came at an awkward time. We can’t open it till we have public facilities. And we have to get staff positions and operating costs into the University budget. We need to educate ourselves–about equipment, so as not to damage the original materials when we make protection copies of the recordings, and about the l copyright laws, so there is no infringement when we make copies for the public. We have to inventory and catalog what we’ve got, and begin efforts to add to the collection.”

When UNC’s main library moves into a new structure, a substantial part of the basement of L.R. Wilson Library will house the media collection- that Shaw is building. Here the JEMF Collection will be the lodestar of the Southern Media Center and Folk Music Archive. But the move that frees up the space will not occur until at least December 1983, and Wilson Library will then undergo two years of renovation. Patterson anticipates the grand opening of the collection will be in 1985.

What we in the South now have–with the Edwards Collection here, and complementary collections at the Library of Congress in Washington and at the Country Music Foundation in Nashville–is the world of American country and ethnic music, from early times and in many forms, in context and within reach of musicians, scholars and listeners. The region owes a debt to an Australian who never set foot in the land whose music he loved. His name will now remain tied to the songs of the American South.

Bland Simpson has co-authored the musicals Diamond Studs, Hot Grog and Life on the Mississippi. He has written the recent novel of country music, Heart of the Country (Putnam, 1983) and its a lecturer in creative writing at UNC. Cece Conway its a lecturer in English at UNC, a folklorist and co-director of the recent film Tommy Jarrell–Sprout Wings and Fly.

Forestry and Equity

By Tom Hatley

Vol. 5, No. 4, 1983, pp. 19-23

If you travel along a state highway during the Southern winter, your eyes follow unavoidably the constants of the land: field openings of red, brown, and dun-colored soil breaking against the highway, and never far off, green seams of forest against the horizon. The intervals of green in the Southern landscape, more, often than not, signal the presence of pine and other fast-growing softwood trees. The land is also green in another sense, however, for the sixty million acres of softwood forest in the South today are financially valuable. The harvest of trees in an agricultural product second only to the value of tobacco cropping in North Carolina, and twenty percent of that state’s land area is covered with pine trees. The South supplies nearly half of the nation’s softwood timber today and can grow even more wood in the future. Across the South, softwood trees such as pine, sweetgum, and sycamore provide a main part of the employment base for 1.3 million forest industry workers, in occupations ranging from falling trees to making paper.

Corporations and, increasingly, banks, insurance companies and pension funds are investing in timberland in the South with the expectation of dependable investment returns from four to six percent over inflation. Boosters of this financial promise point to Georgia-Pacific Company’s decision to move its corporate headquarters from Portland, Oregon, to Atlanta and the forty-million-

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dollar pulpmill being built by a Finnish-American joint venture in New Augusta, Mississippi, as bellwethers of a new age. Much more than a simple discovery of the South’s potential to become the new “woodbasket of the nation,” corporate decisions to invest in the South often have to do primarily with changes and dislocation in the global market for wood products. For instance, the Baltic region of Scandinavia cannot continue to meet the West European demand for paper pulp, which it has supplied since late mediaeval times, off of its own cold and wet land alone. Whatever the underlying reasons for the shift to the South, the increasing worldwide wood demand, whether for cooking fuel, paper pulp, lumber, or methanol, means that the changes taking place in the Southeast will be long-lasting.

On the Southern forest today, small-sized land ownerships remain the rule. This particularly holds true for the valuable mature or near-mature pine stands across the South. Forty million acres of pineland are in private hands. In North Carolina, 250,000 owners held eighty percent of the state’s private land. Each of these individuals owns a tract which is on the average less than one hundred acres.

Black people in the South hold a substantial share of this wealth in land and trees. Yet an unfortunate combination of economic and social forces is pushing these blacks toward landlessness. Dependable statistics concerning black land ownership–how many acres, how many owners–are very difficult to come by. The Census Bureau itself estimates that the number of black farmers was undercounted by fifty-three percent in the 1974 Census. Similar problems appear in the counts of many agencies concerned with rural trends. In a sense, this statistical fuzziness reflects the indeterminate (or even unrecognized) standing of minority landowners and their problems for many government programs.

Some alarming trends show themselves in spite of the imprecision of the statistics on certain points. Over the past decade the number of black farms diminished at two and one-half times the rate of white agricultural holdings. Today roughly 85,000 farms are being operated by blacks; there were 130,000 in 1969. Of course, not all black landowners are farmers. Department of Agriculture figures suggest that there is a large group of blacks (perhaps fifty percent of the size of the number of active farmers) who own rural acreages but do not actively farm them. The rate of decline in the holdings of black farmers proper probably crosses over to this group as well, as it does for the relatively small holdings of native Americans.

The trend toward land loss by minorities, particularly in the South, where their holdings are concentrated, is not new, but, instead, of slowing, it is increasing. The 1982 report of the US Civil Rights Commission, “The Decline of Black Farming in America”, warns early on that “At [the present] rate of loss, there will be virtually no blacks operating farms in this country by the end of the next decade.”

The situation which the Commission addressed in its report is often labelled a crisis in farmland ownership. But the problem extends beyond the image of cultivated fields and pastures that the word farmland calls to mind. Valuable and appreciating minority-owned forests, whether on a section of a family farm’s acreage or on non-farm holdings, are also vanishing. Of farmland owned by blacks in the South, certainly more than half is forested; non-farm rural land is even more wooded. In the changing economic landscape of the South, the small landowner, particularly the black landowner, is losing substantial present and future forest assets to corporations and individual investors seeking tax shelters.

E.F. Hutton Group, Inc. offices in medium-sized cities across the nation are at this moment offering shares in a second limited partnership of twenty million dollars to purchase woodland in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. Promising a turnover time of as little as seven years, a return of eight percent during the life of the partnership, and significant tax shelter aspects, Hutton fully subscribed the first offering in less than four months. This arrangement (and others like it offered by Merrill Lynch and First National Bank of Atlanta) capitalizes on the very large standing stock of mature pine timber in the South today. Though the promotional literature for these plans stresses the long-term potential for a bull market in the Southern forest, each plan is basically designed to harvest both trees and tax credits. As Hutton’s promotional brochure notes: “Southeastern timberland is avail-

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able.” Sadly, the long-term loss of minority-owned land in the South has contributed to the tragic ‘availability’ of woodland formerly held by small owners.

The billion-dollar-plus land and timber asset owned by minority landowners in the South remains a significant potential equity resource of Southern blacks. Yet putting an exact price tag on this land is difficult. Land prices are highly variable throughout the South. One hundred acres within the asphalt reach of a city like Charlotte or Jackson may have a high development value; a similar piece of land in a rural section may bring only a fraction as much. The share of land value contributed by the forest is also difficult to pin down. Perhaps as much as one-half of the total value of black-owned forestland (again, representing roughly fifty to seventy percent of the total black land-holding) can be attributed to the value of the trees growing on the land. Because of their high value in today’s market, pine stands disproportionately contribute to this total value.

Markets for forest products are highly changeable. Yet the financial advantage of selling pine timber relative to other species seems very likely to continue for the next ten to thirty years. During this same period, local or regional markets (such as in North Carolina’s furniture belt) may also be strong for hardwood species such as oak, walnut and maple. But the greatest forest asset of small owners today, and the best promise for financial return, remains pine softwood stands–many of them on minority lands–growing across the region.

Pine stands demand special management techniques, and both the need for such techniques as well as the potential scale of forest income are peculiarly rooted in the historical origins of the pine forest. Exploring the social and ecological past of the Southern pine forest can bring the current situation of forestland in the South–its opportunities and problems–into sharper focus.

Of the forty million acres of pineland in private ownership in the South, most are the unexpected inheritance of agricultural change during the years from 1930-50. Stephen Boyce of the US Forest Service has told this story best in a series of fine technical articles on wood supplies in the South. The generation of Southern farmers of this period realized that with the help of new tractor and chemical fertilizers, they could make their production goals on much smaller acreages. New farm policies seeking to restrict production encouraged them in this adjustment, and this, along with direct dislocation, contributed to the acreage of land left unplowed and fallow. When the land was left uncultivated, pine seeds, windblown from trees along field edges, took root and grew into a new extensive pine forest. Today these twenty-five to fifty-year-old pines constitute much of the regional forest asset that investors are now discovering. True to their beginnings, the Southern pinelands remain largely in the hands of farmers and small landowners black and white.

An aerial photograph showing green. old field patches of pine in the corner of a Piedmont or Coastal Plain county can be read like a still-shot of land change. Five or so major species of pine are the dominant old field species in the South because they germinate and come to maturity under full sunlight better than other trees. They are not tolerant of the shade cast by a neighbor. Common ecological threads tie together all of the pine stand patches. The trees are often growing on less productive soils that follow the farmers’ logic: steeper, drier slopes and eroded fields were the first abandoned. The pines can slowly heal some of the damage done to this ground.

Once it takes hold, the pine forest has a lifespan stretching to 150 years. The early life of the pine stand sees seedlings gradually crowd out the yellow of broom-sedge and asters to form a thick canopy. By middle age, the number of trees in the stand drops off sharply, and those that are left grow taller and more valuable. Eventually the growth rate of these trees tapers off, and longer-lived trees such as oaks or elm and hickory begin to grow faster than the pines and finally outlive them. Forest management can be effective in improving the value of pine stands during the middle years–roughly from thirty to sixty–of their life.

Most of the millions of acres of pine forest growing on small, privately-owned tracts across the South are now entering this critical period. Though these thousands of individual stands are not all equally promising, the larger acreages have a particularly strong potential to make forest management pay off through building long-term income. As the trees on private land age, this possibility will begin to diminish. Around the end of the century, about the time that the post war generation of Southerners reaches retirement age, a decline will be in full swing.

Today so many of these old-field pine stands, now entering maturity in the financial sense, are being cut that forest economists are predicting a dip in the Southeastern softwood supplies. At the same time, small landowners are not renewing these stands through tree planting or other measures. What is showing up in the

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graphs as a small tilt today will become a serious shift twenty or thirty years down the road, when the current southern softwood surplus has been opportunistically consumed. Even though corporations have begun extensive planting programs to try to insure a portion of their future wood supplies, they cannot make up the deficit on their lands alone. A serious and unfortunate consequence is that corporations are responding to this dilemma by turning toward establishing intensive forest plantations on Southern wetlands such as peatlands and alluvial river bottoms. Serious environmental damage results from converting natural forest ecosystems to simplified, single species landscapes. The consequences of wetland conversion range from losing genetic diversity as native plants and animals are pushed out by uniform monocultural plantings, to short-circuiting the complex pathways by which wetlands regulate water flows and buffer pollution. In light of this, it makes environmental sense to continue and even intensify the harvest of trees off oldfield stands with a history of disturbance like those commonly on small land-holdings. The alternative is, all too plainly, to allow corporations to continue to gamble with large scale modification of natural systems valuable to all Southerners.

Intensifying the management and harvest of trees off private lands makes good economic sense for the small landowner as well. However, just as there are makes opportunities to make this choice worthwhile, minority landowners are being pushed out of a market that they, along with other small holders, have dominated for years.

Part of the problem has to do with the way in which small landowners view the financial potential of their forests. Most are accustomed to treating forest land as a nest egg or savings account with a small investment return. Yet anyone who has counted the annual growth rings on a stick of firewood has witnessed the rate of which trees add to their “principal”. And the market price for wood has increased steadily over this century Given this, long-term forest income can more closely resemble an annuity with continued growth beyond inflation. However, active forest management is nearly always necessary to make this promise a reality.

Most of the pine forests owned by private individuals in the South grow and are cut without the benefit of sound forestry practices. When these lands are not properly managed, or are sold or foreclosed, another corridor to a stronger rural economy is closed off for blacks. On the mature pine stands, the manner in which trees are harvested has a great deal to do with the future income that can result from the forest. For example, clear-cutting/he family property all at once will often result in a second forest of far less value than that initially on the land, particularly if the original forest was an old field pine stand. Over the past decade, only twenty percent of the pine stands cut in the South have returned to pine through natural reseeding from nearby trees. Another twenty percent, mainly on larger holdings, was replanted. For financially hardpressed landowners, the investment in purchasing and setting out seedlings makes planting a difficult step to take. As a result, cashing in on a nest egg of old-field pines may well be impossible the second time around.

Foresters have developed middle-of-the-road cutting techniques that may offer a way out of the cycle of clear-cutting and neglect that is today’s rule. Two methods of cutting and regenerating the forest–“group selection” and “shelterwood”–are promising. These techniques work with the existing mature forest to renew the stand as the forest is harvested over a period of years. Under shelterwood management, thinnings are carried out early in the life of the forest; then, when the forest stand reaches middle age, two or more substantial cuttings are made. As the canopy is opened, light falling on the forest floor will allow a second generation of pines to grow under the old stand of trees. When the original stand is removed, a new vigorous pine generation will be ready to take its place. The group selection technique creates a forest of patches of different-aged trees by making many small openings in the forest canopy from year to year.

Shelterwood and group selection management styles may hold financial advantages for the small owner as well. Since frequent cuttings are made, income will be received on a regular schedule rather than all at once. When a stand is finally harvested, another stand will be approaching a point at which it too will be financially productive. These techniques are not useful on all lands–particularly less fertile ones. However, they are currently being used on only a small fraction of the Southern forest on which they could be effective.

The difficulties of bringing minority-held forest land under productive forestry practices also lie outside of, as well as in, the woods. The average size of forest tracts held by black owners is small, probably less than fifty acres. On land-holdings of this size, it is difficult to obtain management advice while the stand of trees is growing, and to

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schedule sound patterns of harvest for profitable sales. However, as the trees mature, there are many possible strategies for overcoming these handicaps. Organizing marketing and management cooperatives among small landowners may offer one way out of this problem. The chief advantage is that, by combining ownerships, co op members can gain more leverage and demand better prices from buyers of timber and pulpwood. Yet cooperatives without a loyal membership and good technical advice have a hit-or-miss record of success.

Small landowners also must find a path through the tangled thicket of forest law. Timber sales, contracts, and the determination of tax liability all require special knowledge. Because forestry policy making is a very specialized domain, isolated from scrutiny by the general public, much of what is on the books is pitched toward corporations and larger owners. Yet there are opportunities here as well, particularly with regard to taxation and direct subsidies. Owners of forestland or timber are afforded favorable long-term capital gains status on the sale value of their trees, and on management costs that improve forest growth. Also on the positive side, a joint state-federal “Forestry Incentives Program” can pay up to half of the cost of reforesting cutover land, or caring for the forest. In many areas forest lands qualify for special ad valorem property tax status, which can reduce the cost of owning land. However, all of these programs remain under-subscribed by small land owners. Most do not know of their existence.

In every Southern state there are federal and state agencies that could be key players in offering forest management assistance to minority landowners. These public service organizations are split between groups concerned specifically with the forest–such as State Forestry Services–and groups like the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA), the Soil Conservation Service, and Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service–that are concerned mainly with farmers and farm owners. The latter group of agencies, especially the FmHA, has come under sharp criticism for failing to directly address the problems faced by black farmers. The Civil Rights Commission report found that the FmHA “has not given adequate emphasis or priority to dealing with the crisis facing black farmers today . . . The level of assistance provided [to minorities] is insufficient to correct the effects of past inequalities or to reflect the urgency of the problem at hand.” One reason for lack of involvement by the FmHA is the small size of most black farms. American agriculture, and American forestry as well, emphasize bigness, leaving behind the small scale family farm for an integrated, corporate, tomorrow. Yet there is persuasive evidence that small farms are not in themselves less efficient in terms of crop productivity or energy expenditure. Instead, the problem largely lies in the language of regulations, in market structures, and in the perceptions of loan bankers and some agency personnel.

The same biases and problems carry over to small-scale forest owners and the agencies they could call on for help. State forestry services are often closely allied to forest industry, and, in spite of this alliance, many are relatively poorly funded. These agencies have also failed to focus imaginatively on the problem of underproductivity of small landowners in particular, much less on the especially urgent problems of minority holders. Yet in forestry there remains a widespread allegiance to the worth of small forests, and this belief could provide an underpinning for building programs targeted to aid minority property owners.

Realizing the full potential of forests to contribute to the financial health of small landowners will require effort. State and federal agencies concerned with forestry and conservation will need to work hard to reach minority landowners. Links to wood and lumber markets will need to be forged, and small landowners must be open to a new way of viewing their forest land–as an asset to be carefully cultivated. This is a long and difficult agenda, but a basic resilience in the Southern land, which engendered today’s productive pine forest out of agricultural dislocation, gives room for optimism.

A sense of this strength in the land comes through in Ellen Glasgow’s turn-of-the-century novel Burren Ground. The post-Reconstruction southside Virginia is resistent to the efforts of farmers at cultivation: Although “Spring after Spring the cultivated ground appeared to shrink into told fields’ where scrub pine or oak succeeded broomsedge and sassafrass as inevitably as Autumn into Winter,” still. “Now and then a fresh start would be made.” Like these lines, the succession of chapters–“Broomsedge, Pine and Life Everlasting” in the book also signal regeneration. Good management of the natural tendency of land toward forest can be turned to the advantage of small landowners, and give them an edge on survival. Forestry practiced in a way responsible to the land as well as to the ledger can help minorities to remain in possession of their rural Southern heritage.

Tom Hatley, native of North Carolina, forester and writer, is spending the summer at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria.