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

White Politics in a Black Land

Bill Minor — Sat, 01 Oct 1983 04:00:01 +0000

White Politics in a Black Land

By Bill Minor

Vol. 5, No. 5, 1983, pp. 1-5, 7-9

It was the sort of affair which a few years ago would have been unthinkable in Mississippi: an NAACP fundraising luncheon in Vicksburg, the Civil War “Gibraltar of the Confederacy,” and almost half the crowd consisted of white politicians, eager to make points with local black leaders and pay their respects to Dr. Benjamin Hooks, the NAACP national director.

Among the white politicians on hand was State Representative Clarence Benton “Buddie” Newman, the Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives, the man whom many regard as the most powerful figure in Mississippi government. Newman’s legislative district has been altered as a result of recent reapportionment to include a section of the suburbs of Vicksburg (embracing several north Warren (County white residential areas), as well as his longtime political base–the two tiny cotton and soybean plantation counties of Sharkey and Issaquena–tucked in a bend of the Mississippi River.

For most of the thirty-six years that the stubby, bespectacled Newman has served in the legislature he has been one of the most influential lawmakers in suppressing civil rights for blacks. His role as a close advisor to Governor Ross Barnett during the 1962 James Meredith crisis at the University of Mississippi has never been widely known, but insiders to that sad episode of state history say that Newman advocated the most extreme of the measures taken by Barnett to defy federal authority.

By trading some of their influence for black support, old time segregationist politicians in Mississippi such as Newman have displayed an amazing agility in adapting to an integrated political milieu without losing any of the power they had back in the days of segregation. Even in a number of legislative districts with decided black majorities, black candidates have found that it is often

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impossible to win against seasoned white politicians who can shrewdly maneuver the black vote.

Now, at age sixty-two, the raspy-voiced erstwhile soybean farmer from Valley Park is at the top of a political system in Mississippi in which the legislative branch dominates state government, virtually holding governors hostage in their ceremonial office in the magnificent eighty-year-old capitol building in Jackson.

At the Vicksburg NAACP luncheon, Newman was seated at the head table close to Dr. Hooks. The affair came just a few days before the August 2 Democratic primary in Mississippi, wherein Newman had drawn surprisingly stiff opposition from a thirty-six year old white woman accountant named Phyllis Farragut.

Ms. Farragut, known for her activity in the League of Women Voters and the Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, is highly regarded in the Vicksburg black community for her demonstrated social concerns. She had come to the luncheon at the invitation of several local NAACP leaders who privately had given her assurances of support in her race with Newman.

Longtime Mississippi civil rights leader Aaron Henry of Clarksdale, state president of the NAACP, and for the past three years a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives, was asked to say a few words at the Vicksburg luncheon. To the amazement of the local NAACP leaders, Henry turned his remarks into a virtual endorsement of Buddie Newman for reelection.

“This is MY speaker,” said the sixty-year-old Henry, “through the years we’ve developed a wonderful working relationship.” The bitter irony is that in years past, Henry had picketed outside the State Capitol against many of the repressive laws which Newman helped to pass to keep blacks out of the political process.

Capping off the event, the evangelistic Hooks stirred the two hundred blacks present to shore up the NAACP as a civil rights force in Mississippi and challenged everybody, including the white politicians, to match his twenty dollar contribution to the Vicksburg chapter. Among the first to come forward and plank down his twenty dollar bill was Buddie Newman.

Perhaps the episode at the Vicksburg luncheon was a precursor of what would happen in Farragut’s campaign to unseat Newman with the help of the black vote in Sharkey and Issaquena Counties. The 1980 population census showed Sharkey with 65.7 percent black population and Issaquena with 55.7 percent.

“We really worked hard trying to get black votes in Sharkey and Issaquena counties. A lot of black persons there were very nice to me and seemed to be sympathetic to my campaign,” Ms. Farragut said later, “But a week before the election, I realized we hadn’t gotten to first base.”

Every time she spoke with some influential black in the two counties, Newman would come along behind her and find out what problems the black person might be having. . . with the PIK program or Social Security, and the like. “Then Newman would pull his strings and get the person’s problem taken care of,” said Farragut. “I couldn’t do anything like that.”

When the votes were counted on the night of August 2, Farragut and Newman had run almost a deadheat in Warren County, only twelve votes separating them. But in the two black-majority counties of Sharkey and Issaquena, Newman piled up his winning margin of nineteen hundred votes, getting almost ninety percent of,` the black vote.

“What was so discouraging is that my candidacy offered a choice for the first time between the old ways and a new way,” she related. “It was the old way that had given them a thirty-two percent illiteracy rate in those two counties and held back the state. We offered them a change.”

Farragut also came out of the election experience disenchanted with black leader Aaron Henry, whom she said had given her strong indications at the beginning of her candidacy that he would use his influence to help her. “He is one person I will always be wary of,” she declared.

Newman considers himself a “farmer” because of the several hundred acre soybean and cotton farm he has lived on and operated for a number of years in the tiny village of Valley Park. But for at least twenty-five years he has been on the payroll of Southern Natural Gas Company, a gas transmission line based in Birmingham, which maintains a pumping station in Valley Park. Variously, Newman has described his connection with Southern Natural as that ,of “public relations” or “industrial development” representative.

Because Newman has only rarely performed any visible function for Southern Natural (once or twice he has gone before the state tax commission seeking to hold down the company’s tax assessment in Mississippi), it is widely assumed that he must be one of the “friends” that Southern Natural’s president, Peter G. Smith, referred to

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in remarks before the Alaska Public Service Commission several years ago. At the time, Southern Natural Gas was seeking rights to the trans-Alaskan pipeline. and Smith bragged about the influential buddies the company had in Southern legislatures, specifically referring to Mississippi.

When Ms. Farragut raised the issue of Newman’s questionable relationship with the natural gas utility company during the election campaign, Newman explained it away by saying “everyone knows I give my salary (from Southern Natural) to charity during the months the legislature is in session.” The Mississippi legislature raised the salary of the Speaker of the House to $34,500 in 1980, on the premise that the job was fulltime.

Newman’s formal education consists of high school and a year and a half at a junior college before he went into the Army in World War II. After the war, he was elected to the Mississippi State Senate from Issaquena County, becoming part of the. “Class of 1948” which is looked upon as one of the brightest group of freshman legislators ever to sit in Jackson. Newman, however, was not one of those who showed signs of providing a more moderate, intellectual leadership for the future.

He began his climb to political power when he moved over to the Mississippi House in 1952 and became one of the young lieutenants in the Old Guard of then Speaker Walter Sillers, a courtly Delta plantation statesman-lawyer. With Sillers in mind, William Winter, the current governor and another member of the Class of ’48, had written in A History of Mississippi, compiled in 1973: “Although the office of speaker is less glamorous than that of governor, the real power in Mississippi lies with the legislature.” Sillers is still regarded as the most powerful single legislative figure of this century, in a career that spanned fifty years in the Mississippi House.

In the Dixiecrat rebellion of 1948, when Mississippi Democrats, along with those of three other Southern states, bolted the ranks of the National Democratic Party and voted for the States’ Rights ticket of Strom Thurmond and Fielding Wright, one of the chief architects of the movement was the grey-maned Sillers. The 1948 bolt put Mississippi on a course of alienation from the national party that would last for the next quarter century, finally ending in a unified bi-racial party in 1976.

During the latter half of the 1950s, following the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, Sillers and his loyal followers in the Mississippi House ran roughshod over the then moderate governor, J. P. Coleman, who, though a supporter of segregation, opposed putting the state on a collision course with the federal government.

When Coleman sought a new state constitution in late 1957 to replace the state’s 1890 document, the Sillers forces, with Newman a leading spear-carrier, soundly repelled the Coleman effort, implying that he was seeking to undermine the foundation of the state’s segregated society. Instead of a new constitution, the Delta conservatives pushed through a constitutional amendment providing that the legislature by a majority vote could abolish public schools if they were ever integrated.

A quarter of a century later, Mississippi still has its same antiquated constitution. Newman. who became Speaker of the House in 1974, has been one of those largely responsible for perpetuating the old document with its school abolition provision and a one-term limitation on governors, putting chief executives at a distinct disadvantage in dealing with the legislature.

For years, the legislature has been encroaching upon the executive branch of government in Mississippi, putting lawmakers by statute on the most powerful state boards and commissions. When the state’s attorney general, Bill Allain, precipitated a showdown with the lawmakers last year, Newman rallied the legislative forces to resist by going to court with their own attorney, a Newman crony.

A lower court judge ruled last January that the lawmakers were violating the state constitutional provision on separation of powers, and the case is now pending before the Mississippi Supreme Court. In the meantime, Allain has become the Democratic nominee for governor and is heavily favored to win the November 8 general election.

In the Mississippi House, the Speaker apoints all committees, even designating the chairs and vice-chairs. On key committees, almost invariable, Newman’s most loyal lieutenants sit in charge: Representative H. I,. “Sonny” Merideth of Greenville, his closest confidante, on Ways and Means; Representative Ed “Stump” Perry of Oxford, on Appropriations, and Representative Jim Simpson of Long Beach on Rules. With a brief word or even a nod from Newman, these chairmen know which bills “Mr. Speaker” wants brought out or left to die in their committees. Since the committee chairs control which bills will be considered and which will not, they hold the power of life and death over legislation.

Under the “deadline” system for considering legislation, which the Old Guard pushed through in the early ’70s (and which is now untouchable), a convenient graveyard is provided for three-fourths of the bills introduced at each session before they get any real consideration.

And, when a committee fails to stop some measure Mr. Speaker doesn’t want, he has other devices–his Rules Committee which can put bills up or down on the calendar, or his own gavel.

With the fall of his gavel, Newman, in the 1982 session,

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choked off a drive launched by Governor William Winter to create the state’s first system of free public kindergartens. Winter hoped to fund the kindergartens with an increase in the state’s severance tax on oil and gas production, a tax which had remained unchanged since 1944. Not surprisingly, Newman has been a longtime foe of increased oil and gas tax.

Newman had taken refuge on the kindergarten issue for several years by saying that the only way he could support kindergartens was if they were funded largely by local school districts. Yet, because of a taxation straitjacket placed upon school districts by the legislature, such a system of funding was virtually impossible.

Kindergartens had also become a last line of defense among oldtime segregationists in the Mississippi Legislature who privately regarded the proposed system as “nothing but a babysitting service for black kids.”

With the kindergarten bill awaiting action on the House calendar, Newman called for a voice vote on adjournment which would have the effect of killing the measure. Despite a heavy chorus of “no’s,” Newman rapped the gavel and ruled the House adjourned. He then stalked off the podium, amid shouts by kindergarten backers for a roll call vote.

Newman’s action brought down upon him the wrath of public school forces as never before and became a focal point four months later for an ABC-TV 20/20 feature making him the culprit for depriving children in the nation’s most educationally deprived state of the opportunity to attend kindergartens. The 20/20 segment tied Newman’s outside interest as a gas company representative to his willingness to kill kindergarten.

The ABC show forced a turn-around in Newman’s attitude and triggered a succession of events which, in a winter special session, culminated in the passage of the Educational Reform Act of 1982.

Newman, stung by national exposure, created a special House committee to draft the school reform act containing the features wanted by Governor Winter, together with a financing plan. To the surprise of critics, the House committee brought forth a package which included an increase in the oil-gas tax, plus a laundry list of other tax hikes providing $140 million for the education measure.

What some have termed the “Christmas miracle” in Mississippi happened in mid-December, 1982 when the Educational Reform Act won enactment after unprecedented editorial pressure from the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, which later won a Pulitzer Prize for its efforts. The final version of the financing plan, however, eliminated any oil-gas tax increase, and shifted most of the burden to consumers through a one-half cent increase in the state sales tax. (Mississippi does not exempt groceries from the sales tax, thus placing a large portion of the tax increase on the poor.) Nonetheless, the way opened for Mississippi public kindergartens by 1986 and for other education improvements. (See “Mississippi Makes Up Its Mind,” Southern Changes, March/April 1983.)

The arrogance of Newman in killing the kindergarten bill in 1982 precipitated formation of a statewide bi-racial organization called “Mississippi First” to elect a more progressive legislature. Out of this came Ms. Farragut’s candidacy and a dozen or more foes for Old Guardsmen. While Mississippi First failed to unseat Newman, it did manage to topple seven of his committee chairmen and remove some other deadwood members.

How Newman, despite his old identity as a strong racist in the heyday of the white Citizens Councils and afterwards, has been able to establish rapport with the black power structure is one of the Mississippi political anomalies which Ms. Farragut discovered at first hand.

It was not until the early 1970s, after black voting strength began to show in Mississippi politics, that Newman discovered any need to communicate with blacks, even though he had always represented a black majority population area.

His first perceptible move came in 1974 when he shrewdly outmaneuvered several other able legislators to gain the House speakership. As one of those to nominate him for the post, Newman picked Representative Robert Clark of Ebenezer, who, in 1967, had become the first black member of the Mississippi Legislature since 1888. Three years later when the chairmanship of the House Education Committee became vacant, Newman rewarded Clark with the post.

Perhaps the true indication of how much Newman trusted Clark to pass on major education matters came afterwards when Newman began referring such measures to both the Education Committee and the Appropriations Committee–headed by a faithful lieutenant of the Speaker.

The most powerful black figure in Newman’s home county of Issaquena is Mayor Unita Blackwell of Mayersville. Many have wondered why Ms. Blackwell had not challenged Newman for his legislative seat, since she would have swept the black vote in the district.

Newman evidently began courting Ms. Blackwell several years back so as to dissuade her from launching an opposition movement. Observers remember the occasion of the Third Congressional District Democratic caucus in April 1980 when Newman sat at Blackwell’s elbow for eight solid hours, voting down the line with her to make certain she would be a delegate from the district

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to the Democratic National Convention.

For weeks before the August primary contest with Newman, Ms. Farragut had tried to contact Blackwell and enlist her support. “I was never able to see her,” Farragut said, “but she sent word she was going to be out of the state working on an advanced college degree most of the summer and would not take part in the campaign.” This, Farragut later discovered, would not exactly be the case.

“I found I had been led down the primrose path, and that Unita Blackwell had organized her forces for Newman before she left,” she declared. “A lot of people say you can’t get the black vote by getting to the leaders anymore. I don’t think that is so in Sharkey and Issaquena Counties.”

In a number of instances where old hands in the Mississippi legislature were turned out of office this past summer, it was said to be a case of their having lost touch with their constituents. A notable exception came in State Senatorial District Thirteen, a decidedly black-majority district in the heart of the Delta where Senator Robert L. Crook, fifty-four, won his sixth successive term in the Legislature even though he doesn’t really reside among his constituents.

Crook, a white attorney, lists Ruleville as his hometown, but it is common knowledge in the legislature and among many in his alleged home county of Sunflower that he and his family have resided in Jackson, 120 miles to the south, for the past twenty-three years. Once a dry cleaning establishment operator in Ruleville, Crook had gone to Jackson in 1960 to take a job as state civil defense director in the Ross Barnett Administration. With no formal education beyond high school, Crook had gotten a law diploma from a night school in Jackson and became a member of the state bar, getting elected to the Mississippi state senate from Sunflower County in 1963 when only whites voted in the black-majority county.

In most of the election years since, Crook has encountered only token opposition, usually a little-known black candidate. This time, he was put to his sternest test when the district was reshaped to include a substantial chunk of neighboring Coahoma County and the city of Clarksdale, giving the district a fi3.6 percent black voting age population.

Not only did he have a rather prominent black opponent, fifty-year-old Elijah Wilson of Clarksdale, the president of the Coahoma County NAACP, but also fifty-two-year old Turner Arant, member of a prominent Delta cotton farming family.

Crook was fresh from having led Senate forces in blocking Governor Winter’s proposed reforms in the prison system. Winter sought to provide alternative sentencing and decentralization of prison facilities as a solution to overcrowding at Parchman Penitentiary and county jails around the state.

Labelling the Winter proposals “soft on crime,” Crook had mounted a campaign which almost destroyed the model state corrections board created in 1976 in response to a federal court order directing modernization of the penal system. For years. Crook has considered Parchman Penitentiary, located in Sunflower County, his personal fiefdom, involving himself in who is hired and fired, and serving as the “outside world” lawyer for inmates.

Significantly, when prison guards living on the premises at Parchman didn’t want to send their kids to integrated public schools in Sunflower County, Crook got through a bill providing tuition grants to send them to private, segregated academies.

In the old days of the Citizens’ Councils. Crook had been a loyal supporter of the segregationist organization. In 1966 he sponsored the CC’s bill for a “Mississippi Relocation Commission,” to provide one-way bus tickets for blacks to go North. It would offer assistance to any families who believed “they can improve their economic and social status by relinquishing residence and citizenship in this state and by going to and residing in another state.”

Prospective clients for relocation would be taken from the county welfare rolls. Funds would be provided to any family to move their belongings and transport themselves to another state, but acceptance of the funds would constitute a lien against any property the expatriated family may have in Mississippi. The debt would be cancelled after a certain number of years.

The “one-way ticket” measure never passed the legislature, and veteran lawmakers now concerned about their image with black voters don’t like to talk about the bill. When the Relocation Commission proposal was brought up by Crook’s opponents in the past summer’s campaign, he shrugged it off as “just newspaper talk.”

Wilson, the black opponent of Crook in the August 2 Democratic primary, had the backing of Mississippi First, which considered Crook to be one of the negative forces in the legislature. The organization put its

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maximum help to the tune of $2500 in cash, printing and consultant services behind Wilson, but he was unable to raise more than one thousand dollars beyond that from black political activists, even though a majority of the residents of the district were in Coahoma County, and that part of the district was seventy percent black.

Coahoma County and Clarksdale happen to be the home of Aaron Henry, the state NAACP president. However, as Wilson’s campaign developed, it became evident that he was not getting the support from Henry which he would expect from a fellow black leader.

Six months earlier, Wilson had been elected president of the Coahoma County NAACP chapter, replacing Henry, who had held that title for nearly thirty years. “I didn’t campaign for it. The nominating committee came back with the recommendation that I be elected president, and that is what happened,” says Wilson.

Sources of campaign funds Wilson expected to tap in the black community “just didn’t come through . . . I don’t know if Aaron had anything to do with that or not.” The lack of money didn’t give him the kind of exposure he needed, especially in Sunflower County, which has seven small municipalities, the largest being Indianola with a population of around nine thousand.

Although Sunflower County has a fifty-five percent black majority, Crook got four to one the number of votes Wilson received, and almost double the number Arant received. Even with a clear majority over his two opponents in the 2900 votes Coahoma cast in the election, Wilson finished out of the money in third place, setting up a runoff between Crook and Arant.

Crook contends the utility companies went after him “with all the money and influence” they could throw into the second primary on the side of his opponent because of Crook’s stand for strong utility regulatory laws and his opposition to rate increases in recent years. “It’s unbelievable what they tried to do,” he says, “they spent $160,000, I believe, trying to defeat me.”

If the figure of $150,000 were accurate, it would be the largest amount ever expended in a single legislative race in Mississippi. In any case, Arant put on a major campaign for a largely rural area, utilizing phone banks, billboards and special spots on regional television stations during the three-week runoff campaign.

Crook, despite his heavy black constituency, has never learned how to pronounce the word “Negro,” or use the word “black.”

“This nigra woman called me,” Crook said later, “and said she had been in a meeting with the Arant folks that morning and she was offered $350 to work at the polls on election day.” The black lady had been told that she and some twenty-five others at the meeting would get the $350 plus $150 if Arant carried the voting precinct.

“She told me,” says Crook, “‘Mr. Crook, I don’t have

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anything against you . . . you tried to help me one time, and I don’t know what to do.'” His advice, she told this reporter, was to accept the money “and let your conscience tell you how to vote.”

In the runoff Wilson decided to do a radio spot endorsing Arant because of some underhanded tactics he had learned that Crook used against him in the first primary. “He’s [Crook] a good manipulator. I thought I had all of the black mayors and aldermen in Sunflower County, but he went around after me and said Aaron Henry was supporting him. I never had a chance to counteract that,” Wilson said.

Wilson came out of the political race critical of his longtime black colleague, Aaron Henry. “He doesn’t speak for black folks in this state, but a lot of white folks think that he does,” Wilson declared. “Aaron is looking out for himself, not for the rest of us.”

Nobody underestimates the fact that Crook is a tiger when it comes to waging a campaign to hold on to his political base. “He has the qualifications,” said James Robinson, an alderman and black businessman in Indianola, who voted for him, “even though he might not have been the best man.”

Sylvester Ingram, a black grocery store operator at Moorhead, admitted he had voted for Crook. “I’ve known Senator Crook a long while, and I think he has made us a good senator. I don’t think he has said too much against the blacks. He’s for poor people, and that’s okay with me.”

Four years ago, state senate district thirty-seven in southwest Mississippi had more or less been tailor-made for Fayette Mayor Charles Evers. Many whites felt it better to give him a forum in the legislature rather than have him as a constant critic from the outside. The district had a 61.5 percent black voting age majority and included Jefferson and Claiborne Counties, considered “Evers Country.”

But the charismatic black political figure did not campaign very hard, assuming that his name recognition was all he needed to win handily. A year before, Evers had run as an independent for the U.S. Senate in the race won by Republican Thad Cochran and polled over 8600 votes in the four counties (Jefferson, Claiborne, Franklin and Copiah) in the senatorial district. That was believed more than adequate to win the seat in the state senate.

Meanwhile, however, some other factors entered the political picture. Significant opposition developed around Fayette because of Evers’ high-handed style of governing. In addition, he lost the backing of Mississippi AFL-CIO President Claude Ramsay for discouraging unionization of a new industry in Fayette.

Organized labor, which is not strong in southwest Mississippi, nevertheless proved to be a critical factor in defeating Evers and electing white Hazlehurst attorney Jay Disharoon, who had made an all-out bid for labor support. Disharoon, thirty-four, also had developed good relations with area blacks in a previous race for a U.S. congressional seat.

Evers fell some thirteen hundred votes below what he had received the year before in the U.S. Senate race in the four counties, and Disharoon wound up the winner by nine hundred votes in the November, 1979 general election.

This was the first of two political setbacks for the veteran Mississippi civil rights leader in his supposed stronghold. A year and a half later, Kennie Middleton, a thirty-year-old black attorney, came along and upset Evers for the mayor’s job in Fayette.

Disharoon kept his fences mended with his black constituents and when this year’s elections rolled around, he drew no opponents.

Newly created house district twenty-nine, a 67.1 percent majority black voting district in Bolivar County was considered almost a certainty to elect a black this year. The race pitted two white incumbent representatives, Ed Jackson of Cleveland and Hilliard Lawler of Rosedale, both of whom had rather good “moderate” credentials, along with a black candidate, Reverend Henry Ward, Jr.

Ward led the field in the August 2 first Democratic primary, going into a runoff with Jackson, forty-one year old printing company owner, on August 23. Jackson had done a lot of personal favors for his black constituents and was able to pull enough votes out of the black community to edge Ward by three hundred votes in the second primary. Ward’s defeat was blamed largely on a poor turnout of black voters in the runoff.

Jealousies and divisiveness among black leadership in Mississippi continue to plague efforts of blacks to win political offices that are within their grasp.

The classic example was the failure of State Rep. Robert Clark of Ebeneezer to win the Second Congressional District seat last year after impressively capturing the Democratic nomination in the first Democratic primary of June, 1982. The fifty-three year old Clark, a popular black legislative figure, was given strong endorsements by Governor William Winter and all leading white Democrats in the state in his general election face-off with Republican Webb Franklin last November.

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Clark’s own campaign organization estimated he needed only about twelve percent of the white vote in the twenty-one county district to win comfortably. The district, embracing eleven Delta counties, had a 53.6 percent black population majority, and unofficial voter registration figures indicated blacks made up a fifty-five percent majority of registered voters district-wide.

The white vote that Clark needed materialized, but he fell two thousand votes short of winning when the black vote failed to reach expectations in a half dozen counties where he ran significantly below the black vote Jimmy Carter received in 1980.

Many of Clark’s campaign supporters blame the defeat of the Holmes County legislator on a few black political leaders and office-holders in the Delta who feared that the election of a moderate like Clark would diminish their local power and make him the consummate spokesman for the black community.

Instances were found where close supporters of former Tchula Mayor Eddie Carthan, now serving a federal prison sentence for falsifying statements to receive federal funds, discouraged blacks from voting for Clark because the Ebeneezer lawmaker had not defended Carthan. Several black mayors were also believed cool toward Clark because he was chosen by an informal caucus of blacks to be the candidate, rather than they.

Since the not-too-distant past when Robert Clark was the one black to sit in the Mississippi Legislature, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of black lawmakers. Four years ago, following creation of single-member legislative districts under federal court guidelines, the black legislative contingent rose from four to seventeen–two in the Senate and fifteen in the House. As a result of this year’s elections, to be completed on, November 8, blacks are assured of two additional seats in the House, and possibly a third, with a good chance of increasing the number of senators to three.

However, this total of twenty or twenty-one black lawmakers in Mississippi still falls considerably below the potential of black representation based on the number of legislative districts with majority black voting age populations. Ten Senate districts have a black VAP of fifty percent or more, four of them over sixty percent. Among House districts, a total of twenty-six districts have fifty percent or more black VAP, sixteen of them more than sixty percent.

Although they represent only fifteen percent of the total membership of the Mississippi House, the bloc of black lawmakers has been effective by standing together on several mayor issues, primarily against increases in taxes which hit the poor and blacks hardest. Reluctantly, some of the younger, more aggressive black lawmakers have come around to the philosophy of Robert Clark that they must first work within the system before they can change it.

Because Buddie Newman and his “Delta barons” have once more consolidated power, the prospect looms for at least four more years of waiting for change. What impact the black legislators can have in the meantime depends upon a dole system, in whose features lie a glimpse of plantation days.

Bill Minor, a longtime observer of Mississippi polities, lives in Jackson.

Checking the Teeth of Change

Steve Suitts — Sat, 01 Oct 1983 04:00:02 +0000

Checking the Teeth of Change

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 5, No. 5, 1983, p. 6

The obvious changes in Southern politics usually deserve our most intense suspicions, and Mississippi’s recent democratic primary election for the state legislature is only the most recent reminder of this truism.

After fifteen years of litigation, the Mississippi legislature was forced by federal court order to redistrict in 1979. The redistricting plan created twenty-nine house districts and sixteen senate districts of more than fifty percent black population. Compared to the four blacks who were then sitting with a hundred and seventy white colleagues in the state legislature, the redistricting change prompted one black newspaper in the state to proclaim “a political revolution not witnessed in over a century.”

In 1979 a total of seventeen blacks were elected to the Mississippi legislature. Earlier this year twenty-one were nominated in democratic primaries and will probably be elected in early November. But in 1984 there will still be twice as many majority black districts as there will be black legislators in Mississippi. While these changes are meaningful, Mississippi appears to have witnessed only half a political revolution.

“Not so,” I was told, during my last trip to Mississippi, by a young white lawyer who considers himself both politically sophisticated and color blind. Commenting after three years spent away from the state in an East coast law school, he said: “We have had a revolution. Racial politics is almost dead in this state. Blacks don’t need to vote for a black face every time. They will vote for whites who represent them and that’s a real political change ….”

Some, however, see it differently. Robert Jackson, a young black with the Quitman County Development Organization, said, “we should have the right to select our own leaders but are being hampered by not having a fair chance at the ballot box. We are sick and tired of whites choosing our leaders for us.”

While the interpretation of what has happened in Mississippi elections is not at all obvious, the plain fact is that black candidates ran and lost in more than forty-five majority black legislative districts in the Democratic primary this summer. Some black candidates lost because some blacks did vote for white candidates such as Speaker of the House Buddie Newman. Yet Newman’s victory is not simon-pure evidence of the end of racial politics in Mississippi (see Bill Minor’s article in this issue). In addition, several tainted factors continue to deny black people equal footing at the ballot box.

Some Mississippi counties have dual sites for registration. The places of registration still remain distant to most voters and are open at infrequent times. In the rural Delta of Mississippi, for example, the average black citizen must lose part of a day’s work and travel an average of thirty-nine miles to register to vote. These problems are faced by both blacks and whites, but blacks more often than whites have difficulty in leaving their work to register and, because substantially fewer have automobiles, blacks find it more difficult to travel long distances to the polls and to registration sites.

The election-day turnout is also a factor in Mississippi election results. Blacks continue to turn out for elections in smaller percentages than whites. Lack of transportation is one reason. Another important reason, often overlooked, is historical: the average black Mississippian was permitted to vote so recently that he has had an opportunity to vote in only three or four presidential elections. Blacks in Mississippi thus have only a short tradition of political participation to help them overcome real or remembered acts of intimidation for voting.

These explanations prompt an almost universal response from white rural legislators from Virginia to Mississippi: “What more do they want? The courts have given blacks majority of the population in the districts.”

Here lies the common misunderstanding and misrepresentation about redistricting in the South. In Mississippi, what appears to be a majority black district often is not. Blacks have a majority of the total population in the Mississippi senate district that includes Quitman County. Yet in rural Mississippi, and in much of the rural South, the black population is very old or very young. Hence, a fifty-four percent black district is reduced by about seven percentage points because of the difference between the percentage of the general population of voting age and the percentage of blacks who are of voting age. Hence a fifty-four percent black district is in fact a forty-seven percent black district of voting age population.

Black voting strength may be further reduced by another seven percentage points because of the difference in registration between blacks and whites. Here, the problem of dual registration, distance, and a short history of political participation take their toll. Thus a candidate in this Mississippi district of fifty-five percent black population can expect that forty-one percent of those voting will be black. When all the subtracting is done, the number of legislative districts in Mississippi where black voters are in the actual majority is probably no more than twenty. This difference of almost fifteen percentage points is why civil rights lawyers active in voting cases often assume that a legislative district that is less than sixty-five percent black is not a district where the black population has a majority of those voting.

Misunderstanding the nature of change in the region’s politics is one of the ancient temptations. With peculiar legalisms and political shorthand, the nature of political change is also easily manipulated in the public understanding. The folk wisdom, “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” is worth remembering in these days of changing Southern politics.

Steve Suitts is the executive director of the Southern Regional Council.

Aaron Henry from Clarksdale

Worth Long — Sat, 01 Oct 1983 04:00:03 +0000

Aaron Henry from Clarksdale

By Worth Long

Vol. 5, No. 5, 1983, pp. 9-12

This is Aaron Henry and I’m from Clarksdale, have always lived here. Born outside of the city limits on a plantation called Flowers’ Brothers. It’s still out there. I grew up chopping cotton, picking cotton, slopping hogs, milking cows, doing all the things that a country boy does. No nostalgia, that’s simply the area of my beginning.

When I was a youngster, going to school out in the country, white kids were able to go to school seven months and black kids went five. Now the rationale for that was the black kids had to help cultivate and harvest the crops and do the work. Many of the white kids were sons and daughters of the plantation owners.

It was not right, from my earliest perception, that white kids would go to school seven months, we couldn’t go but five. That was one of the things I worried my mother about. I also worried her about why did I have to step back when a white person walked into a store although I was there first and why couldn’t I drink water out of certain barrels which were marked for whites. But most of all I kept on her case about the school months.

One day my momma called me. She say, “Aaron, come here.” She say, “About this five months and seven months school deal. I want you to know you my boy–and you don’t need but five. The rest of them jokers they go to have seven, but you my boy, you don’t need but five.” Hell, I been cocky ever since.

My mother was involved with the Methodist church as long as I can remember. And the white and black women of the Woman’s Society of Christian Service–they were trying to Christianize Japan–often were in our home. My parents were in their homes. When they came they brought their children. I got to learn and to know their kids just like their kids got to learn and to know me. In that way I developed very early an understanding that white folks put on their pants one leg at a time. I always had the feeling that there was no such thing as white supremacy and black inferiority.

Neighbors used to tell my momma, “This boy going to get his fool self killed. I heard him talking to Mr. So-and-so and he wasn’t being mannerable. He says ‘yes’ and ‘new’ to white folks and he don’t call them Mr. and Mrs. He don’t say ‘yazzum’ end ‘nome.’ You oughta teach him better cause he’s going to get hurt if you don’t.”

I heard it often. Neighbors come into the house–and in those days, grown people talked and they asked the

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children to leave. A lady’d say, “Mattie, I got something I want to talk to you about.” Momma’d say, “Aaron, you; need to go outside for awhile.” I’d listen and I’d hear what they were saying.

In my time when a child was growing up, every adult in the neighborhood was his momma and his poppa. You messed up and they got a hold of you. When your momma come home, they told her and you got another whipping. So I was always anxious to know what they were telling momma, cause I was kinda tough. I was doing what I felt came natural being a boy: climbing trees, shooting birds, stealing watermelons and plums, all those kinds of things.

The major kind of resistance that blacks were engaged in as I grew up had to do with the farm economy and the determination of blacks to earn or to obtain what they’d earned. In many instances, the white landlord at the end of the year had the habit of not dealing fairly. Those blacks who stood up were often asked to move off the plantation. They were singled out as troublemakers. And this is where you heard the horror stories as I was a child, about how blacks were misused by whites largely because of either their unwillingness to do work that they felt was more and above the reward they would receive for it, or their demands for pay for the work that they done.

You remember the old black folksong, “When Do We Get Paid for the Work That We’ve Done?” That’s pretty much the basic reaction of blacks toward white supremacy as I grew up.

As an eleventh grade student at Coahoma County Agricultural High School, we had a teacher, a young lady who had finished school at Dillard and had done some work at Fisk. Her name was T.K. Shelby. She was very much aware of the NAACP and black life. As extra reading material she had our class engaged in stuff like The Soul of Black Folk by W.E.B. Dubois, Black Boy by Richard Wright, and Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith.

Well, at the conclusion of our junior year, she encouraged us to take out a membership in the NAACP Youth Convention–which at that time was a quarter. And most of us did.

Now that sort of ties into my further activity upon graduation from high school and the next year going directly into the armed service. The armed services in World War II, when I went in, was as segregated and discriminated as any facet of American life. Black and whites didn’t live in the same areas, didn’t eat in the same dining room, didn’t play on the same playground. We even went to the movies on separate days. It was a completely apartheid situation.

Those of us who had come into the armed services with at least a smattering of a feeling that this was legally wrong often found ourselves allying with the NAACP unit in the nearest big town. We did basic training in Fort McClellan, Alabama. There was an NAACP chapter in Anniston and one in Birmingham. That’s where we participated in trying to overcome segregation and discrimination in the armed forces. We later were billeted in California. So I just can’t remember any time in my adult life when I was not involved in trying to overcome the evils of segregation.

Now ever since I can remember anything about black life, blacks have always resented mistreatment at the hands of whites. Even during slave ship days there were blacks who jumped overboard rather than be slaves. And women who threw their children in the mouths of sharks in the water rather than have them grow up as slaves. Any of us who think that the phrases we are coining now, and the leaders that are on the scene now, and the issues that we are dealing with now, that we are the first persons of the black community to have the enlightenment to do that, we are as stupid as the fourteen year old boy who thought he discovered sex. It has been around a long time. Don’t remember when there was not a movement by the black community that said, this is wrong and we are going to overcome it.

But certainly the efforts of blacks in this state to have an equal voice and a fair share of what it was, really goes back to an organization known as the Black and Tan Republicans which was the early voice for black freedom in this state. Before Roosevelt in ’32, I’m sure most of the blacks in this state considered themselves Republican allies, because of the fact that the slave question had ended during the time we had a Republican president in the White House, Abraham Lincoln. The Republican party in the South continued to permit blacks to participate, wherein the Democratic party became a white exclusive club.

On the event of the presidential election of 1876, which brought together Samuel J. Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes, when Hayes became President of the United States, the end of the first effort at participation began to erode because of the positions and the edicts from the White House that he began to express. And all America became energized about this segregation thing to the point where in 1896 you remember that in Plessy vs. Ferguson, although Plessy had ridden the Illinois Central Railroad train, every day when he got ready to St. Louis and sat where he wanted to, in 1896 the conductor came to Plessy and told him, “I’m sorry, but in this dining room you’ve got to sit behind the curtain.” Of course Plessy refused to sit behind the curtain and was thrown in jail. And the Supreme Court ruled in 1896 that segregation was the law of the land, when it decided that as long as things are equal, they may be separate.

Restaurants had an aisle generally down the center and whites went on one side and blacks went on the other. Stores had a custom–if not a law, to always serve all the white folks present before any of the blacks were server! regardless to when who came into the store. There were

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curtains on the buses which blacks sat behind and whites in front as long as there were no whites standing. If there were whites standing, the curtains were moved and the blacks who had been sitting had to stand. Blacks rode in the front car on trains, right behind the coal car with all its soot and debris. The whole system was geared toward making things as comfortable as possible for whites, and as difficult as possible for blacks.

We lived with this damnable separate but equalness from 1896 until 1954 when another Supreme Court overturned Plessy vs. Ferguson in Brown vs. Kansas. In the school desegregation case which says when you educate children and you separate them by race to do it, you commit an act that is “calculated to warp their minds in a manner never likely to be undone.” So then America turned around to some degree in 1954, but it was around 1965, ’66 and some areas as late as 1970, before the integration orders from courts and from the people themselves in the areas actually began to take effect.

White Citizens Councils were formed in response to the 1954 decision. The catalyst that ignited the White Citizen’s Council was the fact that in fourteen towns in Mississippi, immediately after the Supreme Court decision, petitions were presented signed by more than a hundred families in each area, calling upon the school boards to obey the law and integrate the public school system. Well, the response to that was that the names of the people who had signed the petitions were made public. They were published in newspapers, put upon the cages of banks and lending institutions. Most of these people became victims of economic pressure, to the extent in some places like Yazoo City, those who signed petitions Y were not able to even purchase food although they had the money.

Medgar Evers signed the petition for Jackson. Medgar was able to maneuver in the Jackson area as he did because of the allies that were there to give him encouragement and assist him in every way. Now you might recall Medgar and I became involved in the Mississippi NAACP at the same time. I was a part of a team that went to Alcorn College in 1952 to help encourage Medgar to come to work for an organization known as the Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company, whose president was Dr. T.R.M. Howard of Mound Bayou. I served as secretary of that institution. Dr. Howard was also the- president of an organization known as the Regional Council of Negro Leadership which was touted by many newspapers as the home grown NAACP. And that was a pretty good characterization of it.

Upon graduation, Medgar agreed to come to Magnolia Mutual. He worked for a year with us and the abilities of the young fellow were so evident that anybody who came in contact with him immediately recognized that there was something great in this particular individual.

The first NAACP unit in Mississippi was organized in Vicksburg in 1918, about nine years after the organization was founded in Springfield, Missouri. In the early 1950’s there was strong talk that Mississippi needed someone to coordinate the efforts of fourteen or fifteen NAACP branches in the state. Ruby Hurley, who had been invited into Clarksdale in 1953 to help organize an NAACP here, had met Medgar. Dr. Howard was very willing that Medgar go to the NAACP as field secretary because this was a sort of rising-tide-that-lifts-all-boats type of philosophy. Medgar understood that every branch president must understand that you are to be enraged and involved in those issues that make it possible for the progress of the black community to come up to the standards that you yourself feel that it ought.

Medgar and I travelled over this state together a tremendous amount. We had three real intimate years of working together, working with each other, from the time I became president of the Mississippi state conference in 1960 until Medgar was killed in June of 1963.

We had gotten word that the Klan was determined to get both of us. They were going to take us off one at a time. They were going to flip a coin and see who went first. About fifteen, sixteen persons were marked for extinction–Dr. Edward Stringer from Columbus, Dr. Howard, Amzie Moore from Cleveland, Gilbert Mason from Gulfport, Vernon Dahmer from Hattiesburg, Gus Courts who was shot in his grocery store at Belzoni and after that he went to Chicago, and several others. I guess that’s the mark of effectiveness.

You know I’ve made my peace with God a long time ago. By the time I got involved in the NAACP, it had been my blessing to have finished one of the major universities in this country and to have gone into the pharmaceutical business in a way that I could give some comfort and some relief to thousands of people who either had not had the chance, that I had, or had not taken advantage of the chances that I had. I have taken a position that I’m God’s child, and I’ve never really feared the difficulties of the movement. You know we’ve had several things here. We’ve had the house bombed. The piece of tin you see up there in the store now a result of the last bombing of the drugstore. We do that to keep reminding ourselves as to what the situation has been, and what it can be.

To show you what justice can come to, I’ll tell you a story that begins in 1963. SNCC, CORE, NAACP and SCLC were determined to offset the vituperation that was being expressed by Senator Stennis, Senator Eastland, Jamie Whitten and other members of the Mississippi congressional delegation on Capitol Hill. They said that if you give blacks the right to vote, they won’t use it. We decided that we would put that lie to rest. We would run for governor.

We organized the Freedom Vote Campaign which had as its main instrument a little newspaper, The Free Press. Medgar Evers, R.L.T. Smith, Bill Minor and several other people were involved in the Free Press. It was the instrument that we used to alert people throughout the state that the Freedom Vote was going to take place.

I also went down to WLBT television in Jackson and asked the manager for the opportunity to buy time to run my campaign. He looked at me and said, “Niggah, you know we ain’t go’n sell you no time on TV for no political campaign. We don’t sell black folks no time.”

I said, “Well, I’m running and I came by to ask you.”

That night I went back to a mass meeting and reported the fact that the man at the television station wouldn’t sell me no time, and what he had said to me. The National Council of Churches had a cadre of folks in the state at

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that time from all branches and religions. Their communications director told me, “I know you don’t like to be called a niggah, but I would like for you to go back down there with me tomorrow. If this is the answer we get again, the United Church of Christ will move to divest the station of its license. This is blatant racism and is against the rules and regulations of the FCC.”

So we walked in the next morning. The cat looked over the room and saw me and said, “Look niggah, I told you yesterday,” he said yestiddy, “we wadn’t gotn sell you any damn time, and here you are back today with a damn yankee.”

I said, “Well, all right. I just come back to try.”

We walked out. The suit was filed. We fought it from 1963, won the revoking of the license and finally the privilege to operate the station in 1979—that’s fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years of fighting. The niggah that they wouldn’t sell time to in 1963 today sits as the chairman of the board of directors of that damn television station.

But anyway, when we decided to do the Freedom Vote Campaign in 1963, we set a date and put ballot boxes in churches and stores. There was one here in this drug store. In all the places where black folks congregated. And out of that effort we garnered the participation of better than ninety-thousand blacks, who registered before God and everybody, that if they had the right to vote then they would. And this was one of the very strong pieces of evidence that we used in arguing for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Ninety-thousand blacks in Mississippi who knew that their votes couldn’t count but who were willing to cast them to demonstrate their concern for the right to vote.

The following autobiographical recollections of Aaron Henry (born 1922 in Coahoma County, Mississippi) sketch his involvement in the movement for black civil rights up to the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Democratic National Convention of 1964. Presented here in an excerpted and edited form, this interview, conducted earlier this year by Worth Long, is one in a series documenting the modern civil rights movement in the Deep South. Worth Long is director of the SRC’s Civil Rights Radio Project.

Drawing the Lines: A Reapportionment Primer

Brian Sherman — Sat, 01 Oct 1983 04:00:04 +0000

Drawing the Lines: A Reapportionment Primer

By Brian Sherman

Vol. 5, No. 5, 1983, pp. 12-18

Reapportionment occurs, or at least should occur, every ten years–when the results of the population census are released. Three years after the 1980 census, some jurisdictions (states, counties, municipalities) have not yet completed their reapportionment plans. Other plans have become the subject of lawsuits which will take many months to resolve. Groups such as the Voting Rights Project of the Southern Regional Council have continued to review reapportionment plans of state and local governmental bodies in the South, to assist community groups who are fighting discriminatory plans and to develop, upon request, alternative plans.

Many jurisdictions in the South persist in using reapportionment as a means to prevent blacks and other minorities from full political participation. Blacks tend to be severely underrepresented at every level of government. There are still many counties and cities where blacks constitute a majority of the voting-age population but whose elected officials remain all white.

Most visibly, there are no black governors and no black U.S. senators. Only two blacks–one from Texas, the other from Tennessee–sit in Southern delegations to the House of Representatives. Only 5.9 percent of the members of state legislatures in the Old Confederacy are black, whereas the black population of these states is 19.7 percent. Only forty-six municipalities, of all sizes, in these

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states have black mayors. Invariably, blacks win election only in jurisdictions or districts which are clearly majority black and only after they have overcome various impediments placed by established white power structures.

In recent years, the major obstacle to black representation has been white bloc voting in combination with either at-large or unfairly apportioned election districts.

In developing standards for enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, the U.S Department of Justice (DOJ) has come to recognize that, at present, the only blacks will win representation is by election in districts which are majority black. Consequently, DOJ has defined a fair reapportionment plan as one in which the percentage of majority black districts in a jurisdiction comes nearest to the percentage of blacks in the population. If a county, for example, has a five-member elected commission and a population which is 41.6 percent black, a fair plan will provide for two of the five districts (forty percent) to be majority black.

The Department of Justice defines a “majority black district” as one whose population is at least sixty-five percent black. This figure takes into account the greater percentage of blacks than whites in a jurisdiction’s population who are under voting age and the fact that blacks usually have lower registration and voting rates than whites. These lower rates can be partially explained by the greater number of blacks than whites who are poor. Poor people are less likely to be able to leave work to register, less likely to have transportation to distant registration and polling sites and less likely to be members of special interest groups which have the money to mobilize their members.

In addition, the legacy of terror and oppression to which blacks have been subjected is perpetuated by intimidation, threats and other abuses. Many thwarting devices remain. Inaccessible registration sites and polling places, uncooperative registrars, menacing poll-watchers, discriminatory purges of the voting rolls and absentee ballot abuse are some of the most frequent obstacles faced by blacks.

Since 1965 all of six Southern states (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia) and parts of three others (Florida, North Carolina, and Texas) as well as all of the counties and municipalities in them, have been required by Section Five of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to submit any proposed changes in any aspect of the electoral process to the Department of Justice for preclearance. The jurisdiction must submit a description of the planned change along with evidence to show that the change will not discriminate against blacks or other minorities. If Justice agrees, the change is precleared and can go into effect; if it is considered discriminatory, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights will write an “objection letter” informing the jurisdiction that the plan is not precleared.

When a jurisdiction receives an objection letter, it should withdraw the proposed change and offer a new, non-discriminatory, plan to the Department of Justice. Ideally, blacks will be included in discussions leading to the development of a new plan. They will negotiate with white leaders to reach an agreement. Often a consensus is arrived at because whites realize they will be vulnerable to a lawsuit unless a fair plan is developed. Predictably, if a plan has received the support of both blacks and whites in the jurisdiction, Justice will preclear it.

Often however, white leaders will refuse to negotiate with blacks. Some jurisdictions make no changes even after receiving an objection from Justice. Other jurisdictions don’t even bother to submit their plans for preclearance at all. In either case, the plan goes into effect. Other than preclearing or objecting to plans, the Department of Justice rarely takes an active role in the reapportionment process. Local black leaders who have carefully monitored the reapportionment process and find a proposed change to be discriminatory often have to initiate litigation in order to stop a discriminatory plan from going into effect.

There are some three thousand jurisdictions in the South with significantly large black populations. Even a Department of Justice with officials at every level who are determined to enforce the Voting Rights Act would have a difficult time assessing all of these plans for discriminatory intent or effect. Their task is made more difficult by the professionals (lawyers, demographers) often hired by jurisdictions to prepare elaborate materials purporting to show that the submitted plan is not discriminatory. Unless local black leaders are aware of what the jurisdiction is doing and communicate with DOJ directly or through civil rights groups, the Justice official assigned to the case may see no reason to believe the plan may be discriminatory. Having only sixty days to review the plan, the official may find no justification for any other action besides preclearance.

The attitude of the President and the Justice Department is critical. An obviously discriminatory plan may still be precleared if the Justice Department has other things on its mind. This was the case after the 1970 census when the Department, under the direction of Attorney General John Mitchell, was more concerned with mobilizing white support for Richard Nixon’s reelection than with enforcing the Voting Rights Act. Emblematic of the discriminatory plans which the Nixon-Mitchell DOJ ignored was the Mississippi congressional reapportionment plan which fragmented newly franchised black voting strength in the Delta by dividing it among three districts. Equally discriminatory plans were allowed to stand throughout the South. Blacks continued to be underrepresented throughout the 1970s and had to wait until after the 1980 census for their next opportunity for electoral fairness.

Supporters of fair reapportionment increased their

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political sophistication and organization during the 1970s, hopeful of implementing fair plans for the 1980 census. Unfortunately, in many instances, Reagan and his appointees to the Department of Justice displayed as little sympathy and understanding of fairness during their first two years in office as had Nixon and his appointees.

Early in 1983 however, the supporters of fair plans began to notice a shift in the way Justice reacted to the submissions for preclearance. The DOJ has written objections to a greater proportion of the plans during the past year than in the previous two. Perhaps the shift has come with Reagan’s increasing awareness of claims that he is sympathetic to the proponents of continued racism. Yet, some fear that if Reagan is re-elected, he and his supporters will abandon any attempt to appear sympathetic to the development of fair reapportionment plans.

A Gazetteer of Inequality

A fair reapportionment plan is one which, following the “one person, one vote” principle, gives every significant population group the opportunity to elect representatives of its own choice. Each district should contain more or less the same number of people. Districts should be compact, with few twists and turns to their boundaries. The perimeter of the ideal compact district might resemble a square or a rectangle, or follow recognized boundaries such as a major highway or river. It should be contiguous, not chopped into more than one part (an example of a non-contiguous district is Louisiana’s St. Martin Parish in the south-central portion of the state).

The most common techniques used by incumbent white elites to prevent the development of fair reapportionment plans are dilution, packing, gerrymandering, packaging and rationalization.

Dilution fragments concentrations of black residents into as many districts as possible so that no one district has a sufficiently large black vote.

Packing puts as many blacks as possible into as few districts as possible. Packing often occurs when the white power structure realizes that the proportion of blacks in a jursidiction’s population is so large that it will be impossible to draw a plan without at least one majority black district.

Gerrymandering distorts the shape of a district, abandoning the ideal of compactness to create a district whose voting majority supports the incumbent power-holders.

Packaging is resorted to when a jurisdiction that has developed an unfair plan tries to present it publicly and to the Department of Justice in such a way as to fool potential critics. Some jurisdictions hire specialists who put the plan in a slick form–perhaps as a booklet with charts, tables, maps and other details. Packaging may also include outright lying.

Rationalization involves the submission of an unfair plan while claiming that for some reason or other, it should be accepted by the DOJ anyway. One form of rationalization argues that the proposed plan uses districts which are already in place for another purpose.

The Department of Justice and the courts follow a number of criteria in assessing whether or not a plan is fair. Included are retrogression, intent, effects and totality of circumstances.

Examining a plan for retrogression involves making a comparison to see if the percentage of majority black districts in the proposed plan is fewer than in the existing plan. If so, then the DOJ will invariably object to it. In 1981 and ’82, retrogressive plans were the only form of discriminatory plans that the DOJ was likely to object to. During the first two years of the Reagan Administration, the DOJ precleared many proposed plans from jurisdictions which had no majority black districts in their existing plans. As a result, blacks in many jurisdictions with sizable black populations still do not have the opportunity to elect any representatives of their choice. Barring litigation, they will have to wait until after the 1990 census and for a more sympathetic administration.

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The criterion of intent involves documentation of the intention to develop a plan which discriminates against blacks. These days, only a few politicians are as publicly bold as the chair of Georgia’s legislative reapportionment committee who vowed, during this past year’s congressional redistricting process, not to support the creation of even one “nigger district” in the state.

To demonstrate intent in the absence of blatant public pronouncements requires documentation of a history of repeated attempts to thwart minority groups’ efforts for a fair plan. A case for intent can be built out of such evidence as failure to hold public meetings, failure to give serious attention to plans presented by black community groups, failure to submit plans for preclearance and the continued use of such devices as dilution and packing.

It is much easier to establish that a proposed reapportionment plan will have the effect of discriminating against blacks than it is to prove intent. Until recently, however, the DOJ did not consider this a sufficient basis for requesting an objection. A narrow interpretation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by the DOJ and many courts allowed the implementation of many discriminatory plans after the 1970 census and again, immediately after the 1980 census. When it was renewed in 1982, the Voting Rights Act was strengthened to make it easier for Justice to object to plans having discriminatory effects. And, throughout 1983 there has been a perceptible movement in the DOJ towards more frequent objections on these grounds.

The criteria of retrogression, intent and effect are all relatively specific in the data and analysis they require: Are blacks worse off under the proposed plan than they were under the existing plan? If so, then the plan is retrogressive. Did designers intend a discriminatory plan? Will the consequences of the plan be such that the black electorate will not have fair representation? If yes, then the plan’s effect may be assessed as discriminatory.

There is yet another criterion, not as specific as the preceding three, but one that can be used to argue against unfair plans. Designated by the legalistic term totality of circumstances, this criterion involves a much more extensive analysis of the lives and positions of blacks in the jurisdiction with special attention to the nature of black participation in political life. With regard to the plan itself, one can ask: Was there black involvement in its preparation? Were discussions of the plan public? Were blacks intentionally or unintentionally excluded from the discussions? If blacks made public their criticisms of the plan, were they taken seriously? More generally, one can ask: How have whites responded to black efforts at increased political participation? How have white leaders responded to black attempts to mitigate the effects of the legacy of segregation and racism?

Answers to many of these questions often come from the personal archives kept by many blacks involved in struggles for fair treatment. Their letters, leaflets, clippings, old maps, lists tables, charts, etc., provide a wealth of details not only about their particular situations “but about the operation of power in their jurisdictions. Information from these archives along with interviews and quantitative data from a variety of sources can be combined into a powerful analysis of the level of local discrimination.

Four Recent Cases

Each of the following cases. all from 1983, involve a reapportionment map submitted by a jurisdiction to the Department of Justice for preclearance. In each, the Voting Rights Project of the Southern Regional Counci1 consulted with a group of black citizens in the jurisdiction who felt that the plan was discriminatory. We gathered as much data as we could in preparation for a “comment letter” in which we asked the DOJ to object to the plan. To show what a fair reapportionment plan would look like, we also drew alternative maps. In each of these cases, the DOJ did object to the jurisdiction’s changes.

The four jurisdictions include Caddo and St. Helena parishes in Louisiana, Williamsburg County in South Carolina, and Winston County in Mississippi.

Caddo Parish

Caddo Parish is located in northwestern Louisiana. Over eighty percent of its population lives in its largest city–Shreveport. The parish submitted a plan for the reapportionment of its police jury (analogous in structure and function to other states’ county commission) which was a textbook case of retrogression.

Under the existing plan there are twenty members of the police jury. Six, or thirty percent of them, are black. Under the proposed plan, in which the police jury was to have shrunk to twelve members, only two of the twelve districts or 16.7 percent were majority black. A third district was almost, but not quite, majority black. Even if this district were counted as majority black, the plan would remain retrogressive (black representation declining from thirty percent to twenty-five percent).

White parish officials rationalized that their plan was identical to a school board plan already precleared by Justice. Upon a closer look, however, the school board plan appears to be retrogressive, too, insofar as it doesn’t provide for three well-defined majority black districts. Also, the school board plan had been precleared early in the Reagan Administration when the DOJ was not objecting as frequently to discriminatory plans.

There were other grounds for suspecting Caddo Parish’s proposed change in the police jury. The demographer hired by the parish to draw and present the plan was president of a company which, according to its own advertisement, had prepared reapportionment plans for many other jurisdictions, including over half the parishes in Louisiana. He was surely aware of the retrogression criterion and of the likelihood of objection by the DOJ once it realized the plan was retrogressive.

The Voting Rights Project sent a letter to Justice with a statistical analysis indicating the retrogressive effect of the proposed plan. We also drew and sent an alternative, fair plan. Caddo Parish is thirty-eight percent black. We argued that the fairest plan would provide five majority black districts in a twelve district plan. We showed that because Shreveport is so segregated, it is possible to create six majority black districts, so there is no excuse

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for Caddo Parish not to provide five.

St. Helena Parish

St. Helena is a rural parish northeast of Baton Rouge. It has a six-member police jury and is slightly more than fifty percent black. A fair plan should provide for three majority black districts. Instead, the parish submitted a plan which provided for only one majority black district. St. Helena did not hire a demographer, but drew the plan on its own. Without a professional’s tricks, their proposed plan was transparently discriminatory. The parish’s white power structure packed the one majority black district that they couldn’t avoid drawing, adding to it a gerrymandered slice from an adjacent district and hanging this slice, like a tail, down from one corner (see accompanying map).

In the comment letter which the Voting Rights Project wrote to Justice, we analyzed this plan and some of the factors which helped account for it. We found that the parish was run in a manorial style by whites who held essentially feudal attitudes and committed rather unsophisticated sins. A television reporter from nearby Baton Rouge showed that some of the names on the voting rolls were the same as those on parish gravestones. Votes were bought seasonally at a local sporting goods store. There is a pattern of harassing black leaders which has forced several to leave the parish because of firings or threats.

St. Helena Parish presented an additional difficulty. We were unable to send a fair alternate plan along with our comment letter because of the unavailability of detailed census data. The white incumbents didn’t have the data either. They simply made their own head counts, but provided no information about how they did it. When census data are not available, Justice says it is reasonable for jurisdictions to make their own counts, but only if all groups in the jurisdiction agree on how the counting will be done. Blacks in St. Helena are attempting to get the white leaders to agree to this process. Otherwise, they will have to go to court in pursuit of a fair plan.

Williamsburg County, South Carolina

Williamsburg County is sixty-one percent black. Its county council has seven members. Before reapportionment there were three majority black districts. This enabled whites to hold a four to three majority on the council. The reapportionment plan proposed by the council was designed to preserve the white majority. A fair plan, however, would provide four majority black districts out of seven, a proportion which comes closest to the percentage of blacks in the county.

Blacks had no opportunity for discussion of the proposed plan at public meetings because no meetings were held. Under South Carolina state law, a county’s representatives to the state legislature have authority over the development of new reapportionment plans. In Williamsburg, one state senator had the main voice in development of the new plan. He and other state legislators met with the county council at a closed meeting to present the already developed plan to the council members. Neither the press nor the public was notified. A local reporter, tipped off about the meeting. was allowed to stay only through the insistence of a black count councillor–a councillor who, under the proposed plan, was to lose his well-defined black majority district and be thrown into a non-majority black district with a white incumbent whose father happened to be the state senator who supervised the development of the proposed plan. When the reporter asked for a copy of the plan, the senator refused, saying it might “confuse the public.”

In a front page editorial, the newspaper pointed out that the secrecy of the meeting violated South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act and was also solid evidence that the county did not intend to allow black community participation in the development of the plan. Despite newspaper stories and protests from the black community, the county approved the plan, sent it to Justice, and without waiting for preclearance, prepared to put the plan into effect for upcoming county elections.

In order to dilute three adjacent districts, the proposed plan packed a large proportion of the county’s blacks into a single district which one observer said was shaped like a “crawling snake.” It also fragmented a large concentration of blacks in one of the poorest regions of the

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county into three separate districts.

Black leaders in Williamsburg County contacted the Voting Rights Project and asked that we write a comment letter requesting the Justice Department to object to the proposed plan and that we draw an alternate.

It was relatively easy to draw a fair seven-member plan- with four compact majority black districts. The Justice Department objected to the proposed plan and subsequently, the county adopted a fair plan resembling the one we had drawn. It will be used in the next election.

Winston County, Mississippi

Winston County is thirty-eight percent black but no black has ever served on its five member county commission. Using an extraordinary bit of gerrymandering, the county submitted a 1983 plan which fragmented the black community in the county’s largest town (Louisville) among four of the five districts so that no district would be majority black. One proposed district (see accompanying map) extends for some twenty-six miles as it contorts its way from the northern boundary of the county through Louisville, finally extending in a strip to the eastern boundary of the county. This district narrows at one point to the 190 foot width of a cemetery.

The other proposed Winston County districts also had a lot of twists and turns in them as they moved through Louisville, especially in the black residential areas. Besides gerrymandering the black community out of a district, the odd shapes make it difficult for people to know what district they actually live in. Such confusion is a further inhibitor of political participation.

Winston County hired a private firm which sent the proposed plan to Justice in a slickly packaged booklet. On the booklet’s first page a demographer flatly stated that the plan conformed to all the standards of a fair plan according to interpretations of the Voting Rights Act. He claimed that there was no dilution of the black vote despite, as we showed in our comment letter to DOJ, his managing to achieve an almost ideal example of dilution this drawing of districts.

Along with our comment letter, we sent in an alternate plan. A fair plan in this thirty-eight percent black county would provide for two majority black districts out of five. In this case however, the segregated residential patterns of the county are checkerboard rather than ghetto style in their segregation, and thus do not al low for the drawing of two black districts. Our plan provides for only one, suggestive of a need to consider other measures to give blacks an opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.

Drawing the Lines

Only one of the four cases just described has yet been resolved. In the other three jurisdictions, blacks are attempting to negotiate with white political leaders in order to reach a consensus which includes a fair reapportionment plan. Illustrative of both the strength and the limits of the Voting Rights Act, if the negotiations are unsuccessful, blacks may have to go to court.

The Voting Rights Act has not been interpreted to mean that the Justice Department take an active role in

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securing fair reapportionment plans. Usually, a jurisdiction’s black citizenry, relying upon limited resources, must initiate litigation. A Justice Department objection letter or the documentation of failure to submit a new plan for preclearance may provide strong supportive evidence but don’t necessarily mean that the courts will rule favorably or that a fair plan will be adopted. Without the Voting Rights Act, blacks might still be excluded completely from the reapportionment process in the South and be absent from elected positions altogether. Yet, much more white resistance must be overcome before blacks will gain fair treatment.

Brian Sherman is a clinical sociologist who works as a research analyst for the Voting Rights Project of the Southern Regional Council. He has drawn alternate reapportionment plans for over twenty jurisdictions and is author of an empirical study of voter discrimination in Georgia: Half a Foot in the Door.

Black Women’s Health Conference

Betty Norwood Chaney — Sat, 01 Oct 1983 04:00:05 +0000

Black Women’s Health Conference

By Betty Norwood Chaney

Vol. 5, No. 5, 1983, pp. 18-20

In 1970 Byllye Avery had it made. She was married to a wonderful man. He was college educated and had a good job. They owned their home, had a station wagon and two children. They were a black family achieving the American dream.

Suddenly, Byllye Avery’s husband died of a heart attack at age thirty-three, a casualty of hypertension (killer of one out of every four blacks). Only after years of cardiovascular stress, usually producing no symptoms which require medical attention, does high blood pressure result in major complications: stroke, heart attack, heart or kidney failure and the premature death and disability of hundreds of thousands of people each year.

High blood pressure occurs more frequently among blacks than whites; it develops earlier in life, is more severe and causes higher mortality at younger ages. Deaths from hypertension before age forty are six to seven times more common in blacks than whites.

The loss of her husband changed Byllye Avery’s life. Realizing that degrees, jobs, money or middle class trappings matter little without good health, she began a crusade to improve health care education and conditions for blacks.

Avery co-founded the Gainesville (Florida) Women’s Health Center and Birthplace, Alternative Birthing Center. Her discoveries about the conditions of black women’s health appalled her. Not only was the incidence of hypertension in black women double that of the rest of the population, but so were the rates of diabetes, cancer and lupus. And because black women-headed households make up fifty-three percent of all U.S. households in poverty, the demands of living for black mothers lead to psychological distress for more than half of the black female population. Additionally, the problem of teenage pregnancy is a major health and social concern and black infant mortality rates are twice those of whites.

“If sickness and suffering among blacks is to be reduced,” Avery said, “it will be through the development of a new consciousness about health and well being among black women.”

Over two years ago, Byllye Avery conceived the idea of a national conference on black women and health. Sponsored by the Black Women’s Health Project and the National Women’s Health Network, the conference convened this summer on the campus of Spelman College in Atlanta. Over sixteen hundred health care providers, health educators and interested women attended from across the country, overwhelming and almost tripling planners’ expectations. The three-day gathering featured workshops, speeches, films, self-help demonstrations, exhibits and cultural and physical fitness activities. Discussion topics included hypertension, diabetes, cancer, lupus, domestic violence, stress, maternal and infant health, teenage pregnancy, elderly abuse and occupational and environmental health.

Dedicated to Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977), activist and freedom fighter, the conference theme was “I’m sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,” words which Ms. Hamer said often as she struggled to effect change in rural Mississippi. According to conference coordinator Eleanor Hinton-Hoytt, the theme symbolized not only “the struggles and suffering of black women, but also our commitment to seize control of these conditions which affect our lifestyles and health.”

Keynoting the conference, Dr. June Jackson Christmas of the School of Bio-Medical Education, City College of New York, insisted that “we must do more to learn and understand the causes of our being sick; the reasons for our being tired. Black women face the triple jeopardy of being black, female and poor in a racist, sexist and class

Page 19

structured society.”

The goal was to help black women learn to take care of their bodies and take charge of their lives. “At the conference,” says Byllye Avery, “we tried to take care of black women in the way that we think we need to be taken care of–in a way that nobody has taken care of us before.” Sixty workshops ran concurrently with films, exhibits and self-help demonstrations. You could be tested for sickle cell anemia, see a film on natural childbirth or a photo exhibit on black women’s life cycles. The second and third days began with yoga and physical fitness sessions.

All the workshops were well attended but the most popular ones dealt with the psychological conditions of black women. Many illnesses that black women suffer develop amid living conditions of continuous emotional stress. “If we are going to improve our health,” argues Avery, “we first have got to deal with our minds.”

The most popular workshop was, “Black and Female: What is the Reality?” This session, designed and conducted by Lillie Allen, a family medicine educator at the Morehouse School of Medicines’ Family Practice Center. was held three times to overflow crowds. Allen sought to dispel the myth that black women have to be eternal pillars of strength. The women who attended (whites were excluded) shared deeply personal, often painful experiences. The conclusion of this workshop found hundreds of women in tears, embracing one another. “We felt,” said one woman, “tremendous relief.”

“It was amazing,” Allen says, “how one person in talking about an area that was difficult for her helped the other women present. They were able to relate to it and it opened them up. By the end of the workshop the women had become genuinely interested in and supportive of each other.”

Allen’s workshop has prompted the Black Women’s Health Project to make the formation of self-help health

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groups across the nation a major goal over the next few years. Already there are more than twenty such groups under the sponsorship of the Project. Although they all share the emphasis on reaching lower income black women and increasing their access to and knowledge of health care services and principles, these groups are very diverse in focus. A Florida self-help group, for instance, aims at reducing high blood pressure through diet and exercise, while a Georgia group has hosted a women’s health weekend in a rural area which included demonstrations on breast self-examination and gynecological self-help.

While the popular cry at the end of the Atlanta conference was for another gathering next year, Avery cautioned that “the real work has yet to be done.” She does not project another national conference until 1986. In the meantime, the BWHP has set as a goal the creation of fifty new self-help groups, a newsletter, a report and a handbook on health issues, regional conferences, and production and distribution of video health education materials and the production of a documentary on the national conference to be shown on Cable Atlanta and other cable television systems.

Individuals or groups who seek more information should contact the Black Women’s Health Project, M.L. King, Jr. Health Center, 450 Auburn Avenue, Suite 157, Atlanta, Georgia 30312, (404) 659-3854.

Betty Norwood Chaney, a former editor of Southern Changes, lives in Atlanta where she is a teacher, mother, and freelance writer.

Findings from U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, A Growing Crisis: Disadvantaged Women and Their Children, May 1983.

Staff — Sat, 01 Oct 1983 04:00:06 +0000

Findings from U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, A Growing Crisis: Disadvantaged Women and Their Children, May 1983.

By Staff

Vol. 5, No. 5, 1983, p. 19

In its 1982 report on health insurance coverage and employment for minorities and women, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights noted that black, Hispanic, and other minority women were disproportionately without any type of insurance coverage in case of illness. The report found that because of continuing discrimination in employment, many minorities and women are not found in those groups normally insured by private insurance companies. Noting that the insurance industry is not adequately equipped to meet the needs of these minorities and women, the report endorsed passage of national health insurance legislation.
Minority women and children have extraordinarily high rates of morbidity and mortality. For example, in 1979 black women had a maternal mortality rate about four times that of white women and their children were twice as likely to die as white infants. The substantial differences in maternal mortality and infant mortality between groups and differences in utilization of services suggest that significant barriers to good health exist that are not related to differences in need.
Disadvantaged women, particularly minority women, suffer from a variety of health problems associated with poverty and, in some instances, their race or ethnicity. Disadvantaged black women have higher rates of breast and cervical cancer than other groups. Among Hispanic women, who make up a large proportion of the migrant worker population, health problems are compounded by exposure to potentially harmful pesticides, debilitating living environments, and little or no access to health care. Poor, rural, white women have health care problems compounded by the extreme deprivations of poverty, poor-sanitation and malnutrition.
Significant barriers to health care confronting disadvantaged women are (1) lack of a regular primary source of care for routine services; (2) language and cultural differences for Hispanic women; (3) the cost of health care; and (4) inadequate transportation to facilities relocated outside of inner cities.
Research documents that the medical establishment tends to diagnose a majority of female complaints as psychosomatic while treating the complaints of male patients more seriously. This has led to a tendency to overprescribe drugs to women more than to men, particularly mood-modifying drugs.
Poverty, particularly when linked with single parenthood, poor education, and the presence of young children, is a major cause of emotional stress. Stress can elicit destructive responses, such as alcoholism, drug abuse, depressive violence, and various forms of mental illness. Disadvantaged women living in poverty experience higher lovers of stress than other subgroups.
Disadvantaged children have a greater susceptibility to serious health complications than other children. Poor children are also less likely to receive immunizations against dangerous childhood diseases or have routine checkups than are their peers.

For many black, white, and Hispanic women. poverty means inadequate and infrequent use of medical services, reduced employment opportunities, and increased household responsibilities. Children, when their mothers live in poverty, run an increased risk of birth defects and malnutrition and subsist in an environment that could interfere with education and future employability.

As more and more women and children enter the ranks of the impoverished, the implications for the future of our society become overwhelming. To ignore these implications is unconscionable negligence. The bodies, minds, and spirits of millions of women and children are being inevitably and ineluctably affected by the dispiriting hand of poverty.

Testing for Competency

Hortense Dixon — Sat, 01 Oct 1983 04:00:07 +0000

Testing for Competency

By Hortense Dixon

Vol. 5, No. 5, 1983, pp. 20-22

Twenty-one states now base teacher certification on the results of competency tests. These tests measure what is considered to be “basic knowledge” appropriate for the eighth grade level. At the same time, an increasing number of states and metropolitan school districts are requiring the passing of a standardized test as a requirement for receiving a high school diploma. Those who fail the test will receive either a certificate of attendance or a diploma noting recipients’ deficiencies in basic skills.

In the city where I live, the Houston Independent School District recently adopted competency testing for all currently certified teachers and standardized testing in all subjects in grades nine through twelve with the passing grade for the subject determined by the standardized test results. The Texas State Board of Education has conducted hearings on major curriculum changes that would require more time on the study of science, math and English. The President of the United States has placed his stamp of approval on a “return to the basics.”

The national search to discover what has gone wrong with our schools has drawn a tiny circle around teachers, students and standardized test results. This search seeks the comfort zone of an earlier time in a simplistic return to the tree it’s. Such a tightly drawn circle zeros in on minimal considerations of what knowledge teachers and students must have today and on the least powerful tools for learning.

Of course teachers and graduates must be capable of reading, writing and computing. But they must also be excellent in comprehending what they read, of analyzing what they hear, of synthesizing new and old information and of judging what is of immediate and what is of long-term value. It is only within a large circle of interpretation that we can make sense of ourselves and of the people and events that are moving us into the twenty-first century.

We are in the midst of a transformation from an industrially oriented society to a society of high-tech, information and education. An historical shift as significant as that from an agricultural to an industrial society is underway. As individuals and groups within American society grapple with the shape, direction and speed of this transformation, the educational system reflects the current fuzzy state of misunderstanding.

Teachers and school administrators, trained for what used to be, are caught between the demands of an educational program designed for the industrial society that is passing and the fuzzy and contentious terrain of emerging patterns of leisure and work.

Sources of information are stratified by special

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interest, fragmented and frequently without conceptual frameworks and disseminated in a variety of media and modes. Learning occurs in many settings outside the classroom and in a highly informal fashion. Our children know about things that their parents and teachers know and understand least. They know more about outer space, ecology, drugs, electronics, computers and the criminal justice system than most adults. They question and challenge the contradictions and paradoxes that their parents and teachers have been taught to accept or dismiss. Teaching them is much more complex than ever before.

Our children have knowledge in areas with which the school has not been historically concerned. Much of their knowledge is attuned to the emerging society. While the educational system enforces the old curriculum, young people are already looking beyond the schools trying to figure out a way to satisfy their interests and needs. Educators continue to teach and test for the simpler skills of an older day. Alarmed, they think competence can be attained by getting tougher and by adding on more years of the same old thing.

Parents, both literate and illiterate, find their education, knowledge and skills useless and obsolete as they are “laid-off,” never to be recalled to what they believed to be their life’s work in industrial society. They, too, know that their education no longer serves them well. No wonder that they wonder about their children’s education, still very similar to their own.

Why don’t our children learn to read? Is it because they receive most of their information from sources other than books and printed material? Is it because what we teach them to read is out of touch with the world as they know it? Is is because they learn twice as much from what they see and hear than from what they read? The answers to these questions will not come through competency testing or stratified diplomas.

We did not discover in 1970 or 1980 that “Johnny could not read.” It was posed as a question in the 1950s. The most significant answer then, as it is today, concerned the relationship between poverty and learning. We know today, just as we knew then, of the destructive effects of socioeconomic deprivation into which many children are born and continue to live. These findings. which require drawing the larger circle, have yet to be integrated into discussions of educational policy.

Other answers, learned in the 1950s and still outside the circle, showed the importance of caring teachers and of the attention given to developing self-concepts and creative adaptations of the curriculum linked to the child’s experiences and exposures. Another fifties” lesson taught us that the expectations of teachers have more to do with students” performance than do IQ scores.

How do we measure a teacher’s skills in helping students from impoverished backgrounds overcome their circumstances? Can such learning be measured by a standardized test? Or such teachers by a competency test?

How do we measure the important role that many black colleges and universities have played in educating black youngsters even while these institutions themselves suffered under discriminatory circumstances? Given this history, what are we to make of the fact that five black colleges in Alabama had the lowest pass rates on the Alabama teacher competency test–with percentages ranging from zero to sixty-five–while the white schools’ pass rate clustered in the eighties and nineties with only four falling below seventy-five percent. Such figures raise serious questions about the competency test used, its design and standardized process, the selection criteria and cultural bias.

Such test results also demonstrate how blacks may be more adversely affected by the competency testing movement. The number of black teachers in the South may be reduced at a time when more and more education is required if students are to have hopes for a satisfying future. If there are fewer black teachers, we can expect fewer black students to persist. For we have also recently learned that a major factor associated with the completion rate of students is whether or not there are teachers who are like them, teachers with whom they can identify. Still another generation of under-educated and uneducated blacks stand on the edge of perpetuating a black underclass.

But there is a further failing with regard to competency testing. What the testers are satisfied with–a narrowly conceived “body of knowledge” known as eighth grade competence–gives a false impression to teachers, parents and students that such minimal skills, and these precise ones, are sufficient for “success” in society. Actually, these skills will prepare students to fill some 600,000 new janitor and sexton jobs or 800,000 new fast food and kitchen helper jobs whose low pay and un-unioned status represent the foundation of exploitation upon which the economic inequalities of the South will be perpetuated. Another generation of cheap and contented labor?

As the movement toward standardized testing and “basics” teaching sweeps the South we must see it in relation to this section’s old habits and tendencies. We must raise, even if we cannot yet answer, some familiar sounding questions. Is the racial dilemma that has dominated educational decision-making in the South since the Brown decision intertwined in the standardized competency testing movement? Is the historical use of education as a political power chess board and a tool of disenfranchisement flying under a new banner? Is the love affair of Southern elites with economic structures that preserve inequalities undergirding this movement? Are we, in the rush to simple-minded basics, about to position the South for the back-end rather than the front-end of the economic, social and cultural revolution that is already underway?

A new society is unfolding in America and in the South. Its key lies in learning how to learn. In requires

Page 22

greater attention to an expenditures for education than we have ever committed. It requires, if we are to honor our pledge toward the promotion of equality, the pursuit of public policy not private advantage.

As we work toward the creation of a just society in the South, we must be sure that what we teach is of value and that how we teach fosters an unquenchable desire to learn. Competency testing does neither.

Hortense Dixon is profesor of home economics at Texas Southern University and serves on the executive committee of the Southern Regional Council.

Bertram Wyatt-Brown. Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. Oxford University Press, 1982.

Lynda Morgan — Sat, 01 Oct 1983 04:00:08 +0000

Bertram Wyatt-Brown. Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. Oxford University Press, 1982.

By Lynda Morgan

Vol. 5, No. 5, 1983, pp. 22-24

In his History of the Southern Confederacy, published in 1954, Clement Eaton noted that students of the American South needed to pay more attention to “Southern honor” and its role in the secession movement, although he was careful to add that the real issue concerned the safety of slavery. Twenty-eight years later, Bertram Wyatt-Brown has provided the first important assessment of the problem Eaton recognized. Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, the first volume of a projected trilogy, is an elaborate and expansively documented study which explores the functional aspects of honor, here described as the sine qua non of the wealthiest and most powerful slave society in the New World. This culture of honor was a lily-white and largely classless ethic that fueled secession and had little or nothing to do with the institution of slavery. “I have not placed slavery at the center of Southern concern,” Wyatt-Brown explains. “White Southerners seldom forgot the presence of blacks; nevertheless, what mattered most to them was the interchanges of whites among themselves.” As an idea virtually imbued with a life of its own, honor “existed before, during and after slavery . . . The South was not founded to create slavery: slavery was recruited to perpetuate the South. Honor came first” and existed distinctly “apart from a particular system of labor, a special region of the country, and a specific time in history.”

It is difficult to understand how a notion like honor, foreign to or at least defined differently by those of us living in the late twentieth century, could hold so much power over 7i~eil and events. What exactly was honor? For nineteenth-century white Southerners it defined a system of ethical principles virtually synonymous with reputation; it was the culprit behind the South’s high incidence of violence; and it generally excluded women, children, and slaves from its exactions. Honor, which is also to say personal worth, was conferred or besmirched by other members of the community; it was entirely external in origin and application. If a man were held dishonorable, he remained so until he had proven otherwise, usually through some form of physical violence. Personal worth came not from within, as increasingly it did among nineteenth-century Northerners (and as it later would for Southerners), but from without: you had only as much honor as others said you had. These tenets applied to individuals, families, communities, and eventually, the entire region, insofar as these terms describe white male society. It was an “ancient ethic,” “the cement that held regional culture together,” a precept that arrived in the South partly via the cultural baggage of the unruly Scots and Scots-Irish, who enjoyed a preponderance among immigrants to the Old South. And it caused civil war. “The inhabitant of the Old South was not inspired to she

Page 23

his own or another’s blood for the right to own slaves,” says Wyatt-Brown. “Ever since man first picked up a stone to fling at an enemy, he has justified his thirst for revenge and for public approval on the grounds of honor.”

These are sweeping claims. While we are indebted to Wyatt-Brown for a provocative new approach to the Southern past and to a topic long neglected, Southern Honor contains errors of conceptualization and credits the cultural and ideological precept of honor with vastly more importance than it merits. The relegation of slavery to obscurity is the worst fault and the one which will be most fully discussed here. But the inability to integrate cultural concepts into the wider social, political, and economic context, the unfortunate tendency towards ethnocultural determinism, and the inattention paid to how societies change over time–inattention, that is, to the very stuff of history–are other problems that mar the book throughout.

Disregard for some of the most important historiographical insights of the last three decades bespeaks a certain indiscretion. Remarkable for their absence in Southern Honor are the findings of two of the most eminent Southern historians of our time, C. Vann Woodward, of whom Wyatt-Brown was once a student, and Eugene D. Genovese. Two major and widely accepted themes emerged from their most influential works, Origins of the New South 1877-1918 (1951), and Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1972), respectively. Origins emphasized the discontinuities rather than the continuities of Southern history; stressed socioeconomic and political as well as ideological conflicts; and rejected the then prevalent consensus approach which envisioned a homogenous white South, an approach perhaps best illustrated in the writings of U.B. Phillips. Genovese’s classic Roll, Jordan, Roll carefully detailed antebellum slavery from the slaves’ perspective and painstakingly delineated what is now a commonplace in Southern history that is ignored at considerable peril: “Masters and slaves shaped each other and cannot be discussed or analyzed in isolation.” Woodward too had underscored this point in 1964 in the preface to a book of essays entitled American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue, when he said:

The ironic thing about these two great hyphenate minorities, Southern-Americans and Afro-Americans, confronting each other on their native soil for three and a half centuries, is the degree to which they have shaped each other’s destiny, determined each other’s isolation, shared and molded a common culture. It is, in fact, impossible to imagine the one without the other and quite futile to try.

This is precisely the error that Southern Honor makes–it describes white Southerners without regard for the impact of Afro-Americans on their lives and their culture, if whites can be said to have had a “separate” culture. For even if it were true that intraracial exchanges assumed priority with antebellum white Southerners, the fact is that slaves fundamentally influenced every aspect of white society, especially honor. Indeed, the very fact that honor in its American incarnation lasted longest in the slaveholding South

Page 24

indicates that slavery played no small part in the development and character of that ethic.

The dynamics of this master-slave dialectic as they applied to honor need to be more fully explained. Even on the rare occasion when Southern Honor discusses master-slave relationships, the interaction tends to proceed from master to slave, rather than between master and slave. Wyatt-Brown claims. for example, that honor required “the unfeigned will ingress of slaves to bestow honor on all whites . . . if slaves merely pretended to offer respect, the essence of honor would be dissolved; only the appearance, shabby and suspect, would remain.” But a slave’s willingness to bestow respect was typically an insincere appearance, though a sophisticated rather than a shabby one. As a survival technique, the facade of obedience ironically provided slaves with the very sense of inner personal worth that was so illusory to slaveholders themselves, and which they could do nothing to destroy in their slaves–if indeed masters were even aware of it. These attitudes, far from dissolving honor, affected it profoundly and, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, made honor “a vast and awful thing.” No matter how much whites would have liked to believe it, slaves were hardly social ciphers. As Genovese so aptly noted, slaveholders “wallowed in those deformities which their slaves had thrust upon them in the revenge of historical silence–deformities which would eventually lead to their destruction as a class.”

Although Wyatt-Brown insists that honor existed strictly apart from socioeconomic factors and untouched by time and place, Southern Honor is hardly persuasive on this point. Honor may have been an ancient ethic, but in different societies and at different times it expressed itself in different ways. Neither honor in the Mediterranean nor “primal” honor were the same as Southern honor. In the American case it would seem that the nineteenth-century move to industrial capitalism, a change which was accompanied by the end of slavery and the advent of new forms of social and productive relationships, would have had an immense impact on cultures North and South. Wyatt-Brown does hint that change occurred: honor is clearly in decline in the North by the early nineteenth century, though why and what replaces it are unclear. Honor also eventually departs the South, and its decline dated from the Jeffersonian era and was linked to the rise of Southern evangelicalism. Since Wyatt-Brown promises to address honor’s demise in a subsequent volume, it is unfair to fault him for his brief treatment of it here. Hopefully his later works will take these questions into fuller consideration.

In writing Southern Honor, Wyatt-Brown has performed yeoman service. This initial foray into an important and hitherto unstudied realm of Southern history has brought us to a fuller understanding of what life in the Old South was like. His description of honor, more anthropological than historical, sheds light on another antebellum Southern culture, perhaps better described as a sub-culture. Yet the book has left many questions unanswered: questions of time and place, of class and race and of the changing socioeconomic environment and its impact on culture. In short, there is more to Southern honor than Wyatt-Brown is telling us.