Figures of speech–High Tech Drifter

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 6, No. 2, 1984, pp. 1-3

There is an unmistakable glint in Dirty Gary’s eye as he takes point blank aim at the man who holds the Democratic Party hostage. “Go ahead Mondale, make my day.”

“Dry up and blow away, Gary, ” snaps the bleary Fritz, his arm tightening around the neck of the Nomination as he backpedals toward San Francisco.

As the Live Eye opens, the hawk-faced Coloradan is taking questions.

“Senator, your rapid rise this primary season brings to this reporter’s mind the recent blockbuster movie ‘Sudden Impact.’ But just how long can you continue to build a presidential campaign out of Clint Eastwood scripts?”

“Just as long,” counters Dirty Gary, “as Eastwood continues to call himself an independent, Western, charismatic, Jeffersonian Democrat, not especially big on gun control.”

“But Eastwood’s not fresh,” argues a columnist. “He’s a dinosaur. Why don’t you get with the team?”

“It’s true,” says Dirty Gary, “Eastwood’s films have roots in the vigilante past, but they respond to the hidden agendas of the new idealism of self-interest. They are for youngsters of any age. They also happen to be the only scenarios which can beat the Death-Valley-warmed-over plot lines of Reagan in November. I offer a choice between the past and the future: government on horseback and by twenty-muleteam or the digital cowboy on the microwave range–the Western Sizzler.”

“Aren’t you getting a bit ahead of yourself? What about Mondale?”

“Mondale is mush. Until after New Hampshire all he did was retreat beyond understatement. He’s part of the complacent, back-scratching, bloated menagerie of Washington insiders who have the look of losers. Their butts have the shape of the chairs behind their desks.

“Eastwood,” continues Dirty Gary, “always has to move against the corrupt, bureacratic organization men–the bosses on the take–at the same time as he pinches

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off the heads of the low-life hoodlums who make life hard for young, urban professionals in parking garages and in the elevators of fitness centers.”

“How do you respond,” asks a savvy anchor, “to the often heard criticism that both you and Eastwood are steely, aloof loners with an Irish fatalistic sense of inevitability?”

“Look,” snaps Dirty Gary, “I put on my business suit like everybody else–one Lucchese boot at a time. I’m often called detached and laid back. That’s just the way I am.”

“Senator, what do you mean when you say, ‘People will know about me through what they read or what they see’?”

“I mean television spots, airport fly-ins and full page newspaper ads. As you know, our campaign has set the pace in making democracy safe for television. Iowa and the New England states were our test markets, but I’ve given up more than a year to learn how to appeal to the young and the restless–the voters who can decide the ’84 election.

“Mondale dared to be cautions for too long while we have taken the initiative in making caution look daring. Consider my defense proposals for instance. I call for an increase even beyond Reagan’s military budget and at the same time am able to appear both modern and pragmatic, and to lay claim to the high moral ground of the Nuclear Freeze.

“We’re patching up voter indifferences with a play to the young at heart. Computer graphics give us the look of the future in our video ads. We’ve benefited from my easily communicated maverick astringency and hatred of phoniness. We’ve also gained from Mondale’s own TV appearances with his crime boss’ wet look, banker’s suit and leaden eyelids. And, once the primary votes began to come in, Mondale–despite his fighting phrases–has not yet been able to wipe the chagrin off his face–even after Illinois.

“Then,” continues Dirty Gary, his words coming in an uncharacteristic rush, “you know the advertisement that the New York Times runs for itself? The one that goes, ‘Every message is at the mercy of its environment’? Well, we’ve made our media shots with that ad in mind. First, we’ve concentrated on the main entertainment shows of television–the local newscasts. You’ve seen how in a single hour at an airport I can appear live on the news shows of every station in a local market. Also, we buy commercial time as close to the newscasts as we can get. Our spots look and sound as technically flashy and as newsy as the news appears entertaining.

“Second, we choose key words, dramatic moods and poses in our ads to resemble those in commercials which are popular with the same audience that we are targeting. That way, successful products reinforce our message. Every time Chrysler touts the New Chrysler Technology, or ATT flashes up their futuristic hardware and logo while talking about A New Revolution from ATT Information Systems, we benefit. Think of what happens when Michael Jackson sings and dances for Pepsi: There’s A Whole New Generation Out There. My biggest mistake in the campaign so far is letting Mondale beat me to ‘Where’s the beef?’. It’s a real underdog’s slogan–hype that pays upon the consumer’s current distrust of hype.”

“I don’t understand,” confesses a reporter. “How can you expect to benefit from the New Chrylser when everyone has heard that you voted against the bail-out.”

“Never mind. That’s the past. My image of the new reminds you of other new images, they remind you of me and that generates the character of the emerging environment–which wouldn’t be complete without Michael Jackson and the New Chrysler Corporation and ATT and Gary Hart. Bunkmates with the future.

“We intend to make our place among a fast moving and exciting ensemble of leading-edge imagery,” says Dirty Gary through his rugged good looks. “Many citizens of the electronic village don’t want their lifestyles to get out of phase. We want to be as necessary to their poise and moods of desire as a Pepsi.”

“Senator, it seems more and more likely that the party’s nominee will not be chosen until this summer’s convention. How are you going to keep track of delegates, particularly the uncommitted?”

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“That’s simple enough,” answers Dirty Gary. “I’ll do what Eastwood–or, for that matter, what Jack or Buddy Kennedy would do–break down the delegates’ hotel room doors and see if they’re dressed like neo-liberals. If not, I’ll open fire. A final question?”

“Yes. What happens when the Great Communicator hears about this?”

“Reagan puts on his coat and tie just like I do,” Dirty Gary replies, “one shoulder holster at a time. I think it’s clear that the New is not new enough for both of us.”

Meese and Civil Rights

By Ralph G. Neas

Vol. 6, No. 2, 1984, pp. 3-4

We are here this morning to announce that the Leadership Conference will strongly oppose the confirmation of Edwin Meese to be Attorney General of the United States.

In the course of its thirty-four years, the Conference has only rarely taken a position on a presidential nomination. Indeed, this is the first time in more than a decade that the Conference has opposed a Cabinet or Supreme Court level nomination. Only an extraordinary situation could compel such a decision.

The Conference position is not based primarily on the considerable differences that we have had with the substantive policies and programs initiated and developed by Mr. Meese in his role as coordinator of deomestic policy for the Reagan Administration. If such a standard had been applied in the past, we would have opposed more than a few nominations advanced in the last for administrations.

Bluntly put, we oppose the nomination because, on the basis of our observations over the past three years, we do not believe Ed Meese, as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, would enforce, vigorously and objectively, our nation’s civil rights laws.

The extreme civil rights positions taken by Mr. Meese and the Reagan Administration are scandalous. Their efforts to defeat a strong and effective Voting Rights Act, to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment, to relax the obligations of school systems for educating handicapped children, to restrict constitutional remedies that have long been available, and to generally weaken almost all our civil rights laws, have demonstrated repeatedly the Administration’s insensitivity, unfairness, and indifference to women, minorities, the disabled and many other victims of discrimination.

Regrettably, a brief look at the Administration’s decision-making process on a number of critical rights issues will demonstrate that Ed Meese lacks the commitment to ensure that the laws are fully enforced and too often encroaches inappropriately upon the constitutional responsibilities of the Judicial and Legislative Branches.

The Bob Jones fiasco is perhaps the best example of what we are talking about. Since the early 1970’s, it has been well established law that the government could not grant tax exempt status to schools which discriminate on the basis of race. Apparently, Mr. Meese and others wanted to change that policy. Rather than ask Congress to enact new legislation or ask the courts to reverse past rulings, the Administration announced on January 8, 1982 that it would no longer deny tax exempt status to schools like Bob Jones and Goldsboro Christian.

Because of the political firestorm that erupted, President Reagan, Mr. Meese, and others began a series of confusing and contradictory explanations. Eventually they backed off. But not until it became painfully apparent that Mr. Meese and his allies in the Administration were more than willing to refuse to enforce a law with which they disagreed. Subsequently, of course, the Supreme Court repudiated the Administration’s legal position by an eight to one vote.

Another example is Mr. Meese’s involvement in the Legal Services Corporation. It has long been clear that Mr. Meese has worked hard to abolish the Legal Service Corporation.

Furthermore, once Congress overwhelmingly rejected the Reagan Administration’s attempts to kill the Corporation, President Reagan, through Mr. Meese and his staff, proceeded to do everything possible to gut it by executive action. Contrary to congressional intent, attempts were made to control the Legal Services Corporation by appointing individuals who would dismantle the Corporation from within.

Finally, there is the death of the independent U.S. Civil Rights Commission. For twenty-five years, no President had ever fired a member of the Commission. But thanks to the leadership role of Mr. Meese, President Reagan has fired five commissioners who disagreed with his civil rights policies and replaced them with commissioners who reflect his views. We now have the Reagan Commission on Civil Rights.

The actions and attitudes of Edwin Meese as presidential counselor are, by themselves, deeply disturbing. But when you combine the possible confirmation of Ed Meese with the Department of Justice’s current record of non-enforcement with respect to civil rights laws, you have a Justice

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Department in constant conflict with the Constitution and the courts, and the rule of law itself is imperiled.

While the Justice Department constantly uses the issues of busing and quotas to deflect attention from its abysmal enforcement record, its record cannot be hidden from full public scrutiny too much longer. For example, in the first thirty months of the Reagan Administration, it had filed one school desegregation suit. And that suit was pursuant to a court order. In fair housing, it had filed six cases, compared to forty-six cases filed by the previous administration in the same amount of time. With respect to all civil cases filed, the Reagan Administration had filed forty-two, compared to 124 cases for the Carter Administration, a precipitous decrease of sixty-six percent.

It is no wonder that based on the Department’s rhetoric and its record of non-enforcement, minorities, women, the disabled and others no longer view the Justice Department as the champion for those who have been the victims of discrimination. Rather they consider the Department of Justice their adversary.

The confirmation of Ed Meese, someone who has already demonstrated that he is not committed to vigorously enforcing our civil rights laws, would only reinforce that belief. I he Senate must only confirm an individual who will enforce the law, someone who will be an Attorney General for all the people, not just for the privileged few. To do less will compound immeasurably the tragedy of the Reagan record on civil rights.

An excerpt from the statement of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights opposing the nomination of Edwin Meese to be Attorney General. Ralph G. Neas is executive director of the Leadership Conference, a coalition of 165 national organizations representing blacks, Hispanics and Asian Americans, women, labor, the disabled, the aged, religious groups and minority businesses and professions.

Deep South Votes With Feet, Not With Hart

By Staff

Vol. 6, No. 2, 1984, pp. 4-5

According to a Southern Regional Council analysis of 106 targeted voting precincts in Alabama and Georgia, black voters in these two states turned out in almost unprecedented numbers in the March 13 presidential primary while whites generally stayed away from the polls.

The SRC study, the first-detailed examination of actual voting patterns of the March 13 election in the two states, showed that almost half of all predominantly black precincts had more than fifty percent of their registered voters turn out on election day. The highest turnouts in black precincts were found in places such as Wilcox County, Alabama; Thomas County, Georgia; and Albany, Georgia.

In contrast, almost three out of five of all predominantly white precincts in the study showed turnout rates below thirty percent. The turnout in predominantly white precincts was lowest in rural areas such as Worth County, Georgia and Choctaw County, Alabama.

“On election day some counties witnessed both the highest and lowest rates of turnout seen in primary elections in and lowest rates of turnout seen in primary elections in decades,” says Steve Suitts, SRC director and author of the study. In Greene County, Alabama, for example, a predominantly white precinct turned out at a rate of only fifteen percent while a nearby voting precinct with a majority of black registered voters turned out at a rate of sixty-three percent. In Albany, Georgia one precinct turned out at a rate of less than ten percent while two predominantly black precincts voted at a rate of more than eighty percent.

While primary elections usually have smaller rates of voter turnout, a few black precincts showed turnout rates higher in the primary election than in the 1980 general election. While only fifty-three percent of the voters in a predominantly black precinct in Thomas County turned out in 1980 to vote for Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan, sixty-nine percent came out in the March 13th primary.

The SRC study also found that presidential candidate Gary Hart led all other candidates on March 13th in attracting white voters. Hart carried twenty of the fifty-two predominantly white precincts studied in the report. (John Glenn carried nineteen precincts and Walter Mondale won eleven precincts targeted for the study).

Hart attracted support in a variety of white precincts. He carried the urban, white, liberal precinct of Morningside in Atlanta, a predominantly white, strongly conservative precinct in Choctaw County, Alabama, and a white, strongly democratic precinct in Rome, Georgia. Yet, Hart was also strong in the targeted white precincts in Georgia which Ronald Reagan carried in 1980.

“The strength of Gary Hart in white voting districts has Lo be balanced by the failure of a large percentage of whites to vote in the primary election,” Suitts says. “Most whites–unlike blacks–voted with their feet by staying home. Apparently, their candidate was not on the ballot in the Democratic primary.”

The large turnout of black voters evidently was motivated by Jesse Jackson’s candidacy which received the lion’s share of the votes in black precincts. In the SRC study,

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Jackson carried more than four out of five of all majority black precincts. “And usually by margins of more than twenty percentage points.” While Jackson’s largest margins of victory were in rural precincts, he also did well in urban areas. In precincts such as Morehouse College in Atlanta where a larger number of black students vote, Jackson received eighty-nine percent of the precinct vote.

Jesse Jackson also carried some predominantly white precincts. In the SRC study, two of the fifty-two precincts with a majority of white registered voters were won by Jackson. In a fifty-five percent white precinct in Camilla, Georgia, Jackson received thirty-five percent of the vote–more than any of his competitors–and in Waynesboro, Georgia the precinct where almost two out of three voters are white, Jackson received the largest vote with thirty-four percent of the total.

“Given trends elsewhere,” Suitts observes, “Jackson’s victory in these white precincts is probably the result of a high black turnout and a low white turnout within the precinct itself. The result was a plurality victory in white precincts for Jackson.”

Walter Mondale carried the other remaining black precincts although only in a few places in Alabama did he receive more than fifty percent of the vote of the precinct. His strongest showings in black precincts were in Birmingham where Mayor Richard Arrington, the city’s first black mayor, had endorsed Mondale and in other places such as Montgomery and Choctaw County, where the Alabama Democratic Conference–the state’s largest black political group–has a strong presence. “Mondale was able to reverse the tidal wave of Jackson support in black precincts only when-there were exceptionally well-organized black groups working for Mondale,” Suitts says.

Gary Hart and John Glenn carried no predominantly black precinct included in the study.

While Walter Mondale carried both Georgia and Alabama, the precinct study shows his support was seldom strong in any one precinct. Usually, Mondale carried a precinct with less than forty percent of the vote. At the same time, Mondale was able to receive some important support in all precincts. In all 106 surveyed precincts, Mondale always received at least eleven percent of the vote. “Mondale’s strength which gave him enough votes to win the two states was in its breadth and not its depth of support.” Suitts says.

For more information on the study, contact the SRC office.

LEAF

By Tim Johnson

Vol. 6, No. 2, 1984, pp. 5-9

Atlanta environmentalist Deborah Sheppard was organizing a state conference for a coalition of environmental groups in 1982. Among the offers of volunteer help she received, one stands out.

“This woman called. She was a mother of two, a former nurse with the World Health Organization and a law student at the University of Georgia. She was a ball of fire–talking about all the things she and her partner were doing. Upon graduation, they planned to open an Atlanta office of LEAF, the Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation.

“She overwhelmed me with her energy and enthusiasm,” Sheppard says. “Then she said that she was the low key partner.”

When Vicki Breman called, very few Georgians knew her or her partner, Laurie Fowler. But they had been laying groundwork for years, and eighteen months later, were among the best known and most effective environmentalists in the state.

Breman began law school at age thirty-seven. At Athens, she met Fowler, twenty-five, also specializing in environmental law.

After hearing Birmingham attorney Suzi Ruhl talk about the LEAF office in Alabama, Fowler and Breman decided to start their own firm in Georgia.

“We weren’t sure if we should be a LEAF chapter or merely model ourselves after what LEAF was doing,” Fowler recalls. “We talked with activists all over Georgia about what the needs were and we decided to join with LEAF.”

A native of Marietta, Georgia, Fowler had worked with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund in San Francisco, the National Clean Air Coalition in DC, and environmental attorney Roger Leed in Seattle.

In its short existence, LEAF has become a remarkably effective tool for environmentalists in the Deep South. Its offices in Atlanta, Birmingham, Knoxville and Tallahassee, have opposed strip-mining, the spraying of paraquat in Georgia’s mountains, the construction of a nuclear power plant, air pollution, and hazardous disposal of toxic wastes. And, belying the usual sprout-eater image of lawyer-environmentalist groups, LEAF has targeted its resources to come to the aid of poor and working-class Southerners, the traditional victims of industrial toxins and chemical wastes both on the job and in their neighborhoods.

Toxic waste dumps, sanitary landfills, notorious polluting industries and major highways appear with more than coincidental frequency near poor neighborhoods.

In Alabama, where LEAF was organized by Birmingham attorney Ruhl in 1979, much of the group’s efforts have

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dealt with toxic waste disposal: currently operating landfills, abandoned dumps that contain chemical wastes and proposed dumps.

LEAF’S Jeff Roseman, an Alabama epidemiologist, helped in investigation of the health of residents of Triana, and black community whose water was poisoned with DDT by the Tennessee Valley Authority and the US Army. DDT levels in fish and in Triana residents were the highest ever recorded in a US population. The government settled out of court, paying residents more than twenty million dollars.

In promoting alternatives to the dumping of toxic wastes in Alabama, LEAF argues that virtually all toxics now created by industry can be safely disposed of with current technology. (Radioactive wastes are a major exception.) It has filed comments with the state of Alabama in support of applications for alternative disposal technologies and has drafted model legislation to provide tax incentatives for the applicants. Alabama’s toxic law, which LEAF has targeted for reform, now automatically grants a permit to dump within ninety days of application if the state doesn’t act on the request.

“Our goal is to make Alabama’s law at least as stringent as the federal law,” says Suzi Ruhl. “If not, then we will move to have the federal government take over enforcement.”

Currently, underground injection of toxics is prohibited in Alabama, but Stanley Graves, one of seven commissioners of the state’s Department of Environmental Management, owns a well drilling company and is pushing for injection. So far, LEAF has successfully opposed Graves.

Alabama LEAF is also fighting a DEM effort to allow blanket permits for emitting pollutants into state waterways. Present law requires a permit for each water site that a company wants to pollute. LEAF is opposing a change in the law which would allow one permit to cover all the discharges of a company. With the law changed, a coal company would need only a single permit to dump wastes into streams anywhere in Alabama.

“If the law gets changed,” Ruhl points out, “a coal company could apply for a discharge permit on June l, then there would be a hearing on June 15. Then, in December, you might hear that the company was going to pollute the water in your community, but you would not get a hearing because the company would already have its permit.”

Citing the legislative history of the Clean Water Act, LEAF has argued in written comments that the single permit proposal violates the intent of Congress. “If the change goes through the legislature,” Ruhl says,” we’ll sue. They’re probably waiting for us to disappear,” she adds, referring to the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, “but we won’t.”

LEAF is also grappling with air pollution in Alabama. It organized a state conference and is a cofounder of the Alabama Coalition for Clean Air. Pointing to deleterious

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health effects. it is opposing Alabama Power Company’s efforts to convert two natural gas fueled steam generating plants in downtown Birmingham to coal.

In addition to providing counsel for individual members, LEAF-Alabama serves as the legal arm for two chapters of the Audubon Society, the Alabama Conservancy and the Sierra Club.

Even as attorney Ruhl sets about to organize a LEAF office in Tallahasse, she continues to coordinate the work on Alabama toxics issues while attorneys Larry Putt and Sally McConnell carry on other concerns.

“We’ve grown faster than I ever expected,” says Suzi Ruhl. LEAF is currently operating in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Florida. The goal is to expand into seven more Southern states. All the staffers are natives, most are women.

“Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council and the other national environmental law groups are very active in other areas of the nation,” LEAF boardmember Ogden Doremus notes, “but they don’t have offices down here. So we’re doing it ourselves.” Doremus, an attorney from Metter, Georgia, has argued many environmental cases over the last thirty years.

Stones in Their Pathway

Florida is the nation’s fastest growing state and many developers there see ecological concerns as nothing more than stones in their pathway to profits. LEAF-Florida, which did not begin operations until January of this year, is already involved in several efforts to protect the state’s close-to-the-surface groundwater from contamination and from depletion under the pressures of population growth and development.

LEAF-Florida is monitoring a state department of health epidemiological study of the impacts of the controversial fungicide ethyl dibromide (EDB).

Joining with the Romona Civic Association and residents of Jacksonville, LEAF is involved in a PCB clean-up and public education project at a chemical storage site which exploded, contaminating the surrounding community. One of the aims here is to have the site included on the Superfund list, making it eligible for federal money.

LEAF-CAO

The LEAF-Central Appalachian Office opened in Knoxville in 1982 with support from the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation. Attorney Carol Davis left her job with the US Department of Interior’s Office of Surface Mining to work on strip-mining issues. Attorney Gary Davis, an appalachian native and former aide to California Governor Jerry Brown, is covering toxics. Davis set up California’s program for alternatives to land disposal of toxic wastes, a model. LEAF boardmember Neil McBride, an attorney with Rural Legal Services in Tennessee, has worked with Ralph Nader on

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environmental issues, including a well-known investigation of pollution on the Georgia Coast described in the book The Water Lords.

In Tennessee, LEAF has taken on the US nuclear facilities at Oak Ridge where, from 1950 through 1963, nearly 2l/2 million pounds of mercury were dumped into the surface and groundwater–threatening the health of residents along the Clinch River.

Current standards used at Oak Ridge for toxic waste dumping include “unlined surface impoundments” (Department of Energy jargon for holes in the ground) which, says Gary Davis, “don’t even meet the standards of the 60s.”

The DOE, which operates Oak Ridge, says that the toxic waste laws don’t apply. It claims that the Atomic Energy Act exempts facilities involved in nuclear production from other regulation, a contention which Davis disputes. LEAF represented SOCM (Save Our Cumberland Mountains) on the Oak Ridge issue in state administrative proceedings and, in September of 1983, LEAF and the Natural Resources Defense Council filed suit in federal district court in Knoxville against the dumping. If LEAF wins, the case will provide a precedent for other DOE operations, including the Savannah River Plant.

In Memphis, LEAF-CAO is assisting the League of Women Voters’ review of the Superfund cleanup of the Hollywood Dump–where Velsicol Chemical Company dumped toxics.

“The state people know we’re here,” says Gary Davis, pointing to notes of a meeting in which Tennessee regulators said they would have to comply with “the letter of the law since LEAF will be out there watching.”

The lack of enforcement of strip mining laws by the Tennessee Division of Surface Mining led, in the summer of 1983, to LEAF’s serving as legal representative for a coalition which included SOCM, Tennessee Citizens for Wilderness Planning, the Tennessee League of Women Voters and the Tennessee Environmental Council. On behalf of the Sierra Club, LEAF has filed notice with the Division of an intention to sue unless substantial progress is made in the enforcement of strip mining law. Barbara Kelly of Chattanooga, active with the Sierra Club and SOCM, believes that state efforts to control strip mining “have fallen apart.”

On behalf of SOCM and TCWP, LEAF filed motions to intervene in a class action suit in Campbell County chancery court. Forty-nine coal companies were arguing that they should be given more time to comply with the state strip mining law. The case was removed to US district court in Knoxville whereupon the companies withdrew.

As it challenges the state’s overall laxity, LEAF is aiding various citizen groups in efforts to protect particularly fragile locations from the erosion, flooding and water pollution which accompany surface mining. It is representing citizens seeking protection for land adjacent to the Frozen Head Park in Morgan County and for the Douglas Branch Watershed in Campbell County.

In an effort at harassment, the M.C. Coal Company of Chattanooga sued the Sierra Club and Tennessee Friends of the Earth in March 1983, alleging libel in the groups’ request for a hearing concerning M.C.’s water quality permit and for articles in the Tennes-Sierran (the Club newsletter) which dealt with violations in the strip mining law. Following presentation of a brief and an oral argument by Carol Nickle of LEAF, the case was dimissed.

LEAF-Georgia

LEAF-Georgia opened its offices in Atlanta in July of 1983. Six months later it had become one of the busiest and most effective environmental organizations in the state.

In August of 1983, LEAF-Georgia challenged the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) use of paraquat on marijuana plants in the North Georgia mountains. Local residents and campers were outraged as helicopters sprayed the deadly substance (a half-ounce on the skin can be lethal) onto small patches of marijuana as DEA movie cameras whirled. The DEA intended to convince the government of Colombia to adopt spraying, in spite of Colombia’s questioning its safety. Area residents organized Citizens Opposed to Paraquat Spraying and asked for LEAF’s help.

LEAF worked with private attorneys David Walbert, John Bell and Paul Hermann who obtained a restraining order in August from federal court in Georgia’s Northern District. Meanwhile, LEAF joined with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and three other national organizations in a successful suit in US District Court for the District of Columbia preventing the spraying of paraquat on all federal

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land unless and unfit DEA prepares an environmental impact statement.

Following the DC court’s ruling, in a January 1984 hearing in Atlanta (which DEA called a “scoping session”), DEA officials suggested that critics of the spraying were smokers and growers who were hiding behind environmental issues. (The DEA photographed all oponents at the hearing.) White County Presbyterian preacher Jerry Brinegar said that the citizens of area would be happy to go in with the DEA and pull the marijuana plants up by hand. Pointing out that the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River (which supplies drinking water for Atlanta, Columbia and towns below) rise on National Forest land, LEAF attorney Vicki Breman concluded that “Georgia’s water supply and wildlife are seriously threatened by the use of paraquat and other herbicides.”

The Forest Service’s use of the herbicides tordon and velpar are being challenged by LEAF Georgia on behalf of residents of Rabun County. These herbicides, explicitly labelled not for use in areas where water contamination is possible are being applied in the nation’s second-rainiest county. Both of these herbicides have been linked to health problems. Tordon, called “Agent White” when used in Vietnam (and chemically close to Agent Orange) is presently being investigated by the government of Brazil as the suspected cause of forty-two deaths along the route of a power line where it was sprayed. LEAF is raising money to test the Rabun County water and to publish an organizing handbook for residents.

Acting as legal counsel for the Campaign for a Prosperous Georgia (see “Money on the Mainline,” Southern Changes, March/April; 1983), LEAF has also prepared a petition for intervention against the Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant now under construction by the Georgia Power Company. Plant Vogtle, the most expensive construction project in state history, is being challenged on environmental, safety and economic grounds. It is a prime example of economic and environmental concerns paralleling, not contradicting each other. If completed and placed in the rate base, Plant Vogtle would cause the largest electric rate hike in Georgia history. LEAF will provide ongoing assistance to citizens groups working to stop the plant.

LEAF-Georgia is working on many other issues: trying to force the state Department of Transportation to install promised noise barriers along the interstate highways near Atlanta residences; attempting to stop construction by Oglethorpe Power of a high-voltage line through a historic district of White County; presenting comments on the proposed restart of the L-Reactor at the Savannah River Plant where tritium and plutonium for nuclear weapons are produced; and providing technical advice on legal environmental issues to private attorneys around the state.

LEAF has financed itself through a variety of means. Most of the support for the Alabama and Tennessee offices has come from the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation. LEAF-Georgia has gathered money from individual donations and fundraising events A benefit concert by the new-wave band REM brought in more than six thousand dollars; an auction raised another thousand According to Sissy Kegley, administrative coordinator, LEAF-Georgia already has some 150 members who pay annual dues or monthly pledges.

LEAF’s rapid emergence and its frequent successes come with the dedication of its staff, the sophistication of their work and familiarity with the issues and the region, and–in view of the traditional tentativeness of established conservation groups in the region and the single-minded development policies often followed by Southern governments–from the fact that there is so much to do in the South.

Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation (LEAF)

Alabama
2330 Highland Avenue, South
Birmingham, Alabama 35205
205-324-0932

Florida
203 North Gadsden Street
Tallahassee, Florida 32301
904-681 -2591

Georgia
1102 Healey Building
57 Forsyth Street, NW
Atlanta, Georgia 30303
404-688-3299

Central Appalachian Office
602 Gay Street, Suite 507
Knoxville, Tennessee 37902
615-637-5172

Tim Johnson is executive director of the Educational Campaign for a Prosperous Georgia.

Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place. New York: Viking Press, 1982. Penguin, 1983.

By Trudier Harris

Vol. 6, No. 2, 1984, pp. 12-13

Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place is a volume destined for long life. A collection of nine sections which together form a unified whole, the volume is powerful and strikingly well written. It captures the pain, suffering and futile attempts at happiness of a group of black women transplanted to a northern city’s deadend street known as Brewster Place.

Most of the women in Brewster Place have their origins in the South. Mattie Michael, who is the center of the first section, was born and raised in Tennessee. Sheltered by a father who witnessed the birth of his only child late in his life, Mattie is suddenly tumbled by Butch Fuller, the local dandy, into the mire of humanity. The pregnancy that results from Mattie’s one sexual encounter with Butch causes her to be thrown out of her father’s house. In order to save her father from the murder she knows he will commit she refuses to name Butch. Instead, she moves to Asheville, North Carolina to live with her friend Etta Johnson until the baby is born. Although Etta moves on rather quickly after the birth, Mattie’s “temporary” stay ends more than thirty years later when her own sheltered son skips bail instead of facing an assault charge, causing Mattie to lose the house she has put up to ensure his court appearance.

Mattie’s tale forms the backdrop against which the lives of several of the women of Brewster Place are to be viewed. She moves into Brewster Place upon her son’s abrupt and permanent departure. Mattie’s loss enables her to listen sympathetically to the tales of despair she hears and to understand the pain she witnesses. She manages to rein in her own pain consistently enough to offer guidance and comfort to others.

Mattie has an expansiveness of human feeling which allows her to watch patiently as Etta, also in her fifties, chases the ever illusionary dream of marriage to a respectable man. Etta has spent her life in “business opportunities” with men but Mattie knows that she is fast using up her assets. A minister picked for the husband role consents only to be her gigolo, forcing Etta to see that the only love and caring she is likely to experience will come from Mattie.

Other women on Brewster Place, are not so directly tied to Mattie. One, Cora Lee, fell in love so desperately with dolls as a child that she began to produce “real babies” as soon as she discovered where they came from. Another resident, Kiswana Browne, is a middle-class militant who has moved across town from “Linden Hills” to help unfortunate black brothers and sisters on Brewster Place. Saved from anachronism only by her commitment, Kiswana tries to form the residents of Brewster Place into a tenants union; they plan to fight in court for the many improvements the complex needs. In her commitment, Kiswana is just the opposite of the two young women who are the focus of “The Two.” Lesbian in a place which is hostile to their relationship, their different coping strategies illustrate how truly isolated they are; Theresa compensates by pretending not to care about the opinions of the neighbors, while Lorraine is driven to seek approval.

In one of the book’s most painful and disturbing scenes, Lorraine is raped repeatedly by the young black toughs of the neighborhood who have no place for a “dyke.” Pushed into insanity and retaliation by the rape, Lorraine commits murder.

Naylor’s heart-wrenching account of Lorraine has a counterpart in the tale of Lucielia Louise Turner, the granddaughter of Etta Johnson, the woman who had befriended Mattie after birth of her child. Ciel finds herself on Brewster Place in a common-law marriage with Eugene, for whom she has an abortion when he asserts that all she is good for is “babies and bills.” Several months later, when Eugene declares that he is leaving, Ciel’s claim that she loves him evokes, “that ain’t good enough.” While the two are fighting, their five-year old firstborn child, playing in

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another room, electrocutes herself by sticking a fork into an outlet. In the face of the rejection she believes God has shown her, Ciel determines to starve herself.

The pain, numbness, and death-in-life that define Ciel after her child’s funeral are relieved only when Mattie takes her into her arms and rocks the damned-up suffering into expression. That scene is a combination of conversion, renewal, and rebirth in which Mattie serves as preacher, guide, and sustainer. Indeed, Naylor’s description of Mattie’s role evokes that of Jesus in James Weldon Johnson’s “Go Down, Death: A Funeral Sermon,” and it can be compared to the change Avey Johnson experiences on the Caribbean island in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow. Yet, in the writing and in the power of the passage, Naylor’s voice is distinctively unique.

Ciel moaned. Mattie rocked. Propelled by the sound, Mattie rocked her out of that bed, out of that room, into a blue vastness just underneath the sun and above time. She rocked her over Aegean seas so clean they shone like crystal, so clear the fresh blood of sacrificed babies torn from their mother’s arms and given to Neptune could be seen like pink froth on the water. She rocked her on and on, past Dachau, where soul-gutted Jewish mothers swept their children ‘s entrails off laboratory floors. They flew past the spilled brains of Senegales infants whose mothers had dashed them on the wooden sides of slave ships. And she rocked on.

She rocked her into her childhood and let her see murdered dreams. And she rocked her back, back into the womb, to the nadir of her hurt, and they found it–a slight silver splinter, enbedded just below the surface of the skin. And Mattie rocked and pulled–and the splinter gave way, but its roots were deep, gigantic, ragged, and they tore up flesh with bits of fat muscle tissue clinging to them. They left a huge hole, which was already starting to pus over, but Mattie was satisfied. It would heal.

Naylor’s presentations of human emotions ring so true that we sing our “Amens” from the knots in our stomachs or the tears in our eyes. There is verisimiltude in characters who are in their twenties as well as those who are in their fifties and older. In one scene between Kiswana Browne and her mother, who insists upon calling her newly remained daughter Melanie, Naylor astutely presents the clash of generations and the games parents and children knowingly play. In this instance, neither mother nor daughter win out; instead, both realize that they can learn from, and must allow respect for, each other.

Throughout, Naylor maintains a narrative style suffused with images that cause us to pause. She writes of the boys who attack Lorraine: “When they stood with their black skin, ninth-grade diplomas, and fifty-word vocabularies in front of the mirror that the world had erected and saw nothing, those other pairs of tight jeans, suede sneakers, and tinted sunglasses imaged nearby proved that they were alive”, and of the possible death of Brewster Place: “No one cries when a street dies. There’s no line of mourners to walk behind the coffin wheeled on the axis of the earth and ridded by the sky.”

But Brewster Place is not dying. Women like Mattie resist its demise as spiritedly as the images used to describe it. It is a testament to Naylor’s large talent that, in this her first novel, she handles the task so well.

Trudier Harris teaches literature and folklore in the English Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Mary, Wayfarer, An Autobiography, by Mary E. Mebane. New York: Viking Press. 1983.

By Nell Irvin Painter

Vol. 6, No. 2, 1984, pp. 13-14

In the second volume of her autobiography, Mary Mebane again talks of desegregation and takes aim at the black bourgeoisie–or more exactly, the brown bourgeoisie. Early in Mary, Wayfarer, she fires a telling shot:

One of the ironies of life in the South is the fact that the black professional class, thinking that under integration it would entrench its position vis-a-vis black folk, instead found itself in many

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cases as discomfited by the changes as the whites were.

But the people with whom Mebane identifies herself, poor, dark-skinned blacks, “could not have cared less; any change at all was a decided improvement for them.”

Perhaps Mebane is too sharp. In Mary, Wayfarer, as in Mary, she reserves her bitterness for blacks of the better class, particularly those in her home town of Durham. But for all her social myopia, she has exposed a little-discussed aspect of desegregation: a sort of equalizing of educated blacks, regardless of skin shade or economic background. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Mebane spent twelve years, she says that some people “respected my gifts, and that was a first for me”–even though all her previous schooling and teaching had been in black institutions.

Better-class black Durham’s presence in Mebane’s life is devilish but significant, if the number of pages she spends denouncing its prejudices, weaknesses and hypocrisies supplies a fair measure of her fixation. She teaches a lesson that most sensitive Americans already know about black life: Light skin carries connotations of beauty and wealth, and beauty and wealth attract people, especially men. The revelation is not new, although Mebane delivers it with unusual intensity.

New here is her gleeful exposure of what her betters lost through integration. She tells of a light-skinned woman, a fellow student at Carolina, who was pained when a white woman confused her with poor blacks. Mebane also reports hostility from black, better-class colleagues at North Carolina Central University, when she was well received at the University of North Carolina.

Mebane says the cream of the cream of black society at NCCU in the 1960’s saw the university as an enemy disturbing their social order. “By opening its doors to all blacks, and not limiting its admissions to blacks of a certain class or color,” Mebane says the university inadvertently broke one of black society’s unwritten rules–that only the elite were to garner such rewards.

As a dark-skinned non-Southerner who was (mercifully) brought up in the West, I nonetheless felt a certain satisfaction in watching Mebane prick the bourgeoisie. But the pain in this woman’s life diminished my relish. This is an angry book, although the emotions are muted in comparison with the first volume, Mary.

Even so, I found myself drawn into Mebane’s autobiography The material on black Durham is most fascinating But I also learned from her descriptions of the civil-rights years in Durham and Chapel Hill. I made a mental note, too, that Mebane is one of a growing list I am keeping of black women who find that they cannot keep their sanity and continue to teach in some white, male-dominated situations. (My list now numbers six women–and I am on it–who left white departments to preserve their mental health.) Here again, Mary Mebane’s autobiographies are enlightening.

But Mebane also provokes pity and annoyance. Reading her painful descriptions of her unloving and drunken family–whom she was not able to leave until she was in her mid-30’s–and of her frustrating encounters with men, her school-girl ideals about elegance in love compared with her squalid encounters, I sympathized with this woman who never felt valuable until she came to Chapel Hill. Her feelings of worthlessness are raw and exposed, and I wonder to what extent she succeeds in convincing other readers that her experiences may be taken as typical. For my part, she represents an unusually sad case, and this impression carries over from the first volume to the second, although the second is more smoothly written, its emotions less aroused.

Both Mary and Mary, Wayfarer suffer from the author’s lack of distance from her tormentors–her mother, her family and Durham’s black bourgeoisie. Years of therapy have finally allowed her to see her mother as a victim of poverty and segregation. But leaving the South–she now teaches at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee–has given her little insight into social dynamics. She cannot see that the pretensions she deplored in Durham and the snobbery she attaches to North Carolina Central University occur elsewhere among other groups of people. Pretension and snobbery remain the monopoly of better-class black Durham, and Mary Mebane’s anger at them remains unabated.

While Mary, Wayfarer and Mary lack the warmth and humane vision of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings or Pauli Murray’s Proud Shoes (much of the latter set in Durham), the narrowness and bitterness of the Mebane books point to the anger that those at the very bottom of the black hierarchy can harbor against other blacks. Mary Mebane tells awkward truths about class, color pnd sex, but her truths are true anyway.

Nell Irvin Painter teaches history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She grew up in northern California and is the author of The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South. This review first appeared in the North Carolina Independent.

Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeomen Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

By Bess Beatty

Vol. 6, No. 2, 1984, pp. 14-16

When Frank Owsley completed his study, The Plain Folk of the Old South, in 1949, he considered the title “The Forgotten Man of the Old South,” but rejected it as too flamboyant. Three decades later this rejected title, enlarged to include the Forgotten Woman, would still be appropriate for a work on the white yeomen farm families who made up the majority of nineteenth-century Southerners. Southern image makers have generally continued to relegate the Southern common folk “either to obscurity or to oblivion” while they focus on the white elite, on blacks, and even on the bottom rail of white society, “the poor white trash.” As a result, Southern history remains distorted, and a large number of Southern people remain estranged from their past. Although most historians accept Owsley’s contention that “the core of the [Southern] social structure was a massive body of plain folk who were neither rich nor very poor,” they have rarely given this group in depth attention. There are hopeful signs, however, that the forgotten people of Southern history are beginning to find their historians. Steven Hahn’s The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeomen Farmers and the Transformation of the

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Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 joins a small but significant list of Southern studies that focus on the region’s plain folk.

Historians of Populism have given considerable attention to the issues yeomen farmers confronted and to the leaders who mobilized their protest. For the most part, however, the many good studies of Southern Populism have paid little attention to the activities and reponses of the average members of this group. When “we turn to the thousands of Southern rural folks,” Hahn explains, “the shadows rapidly steal forth.” Lifting the shadows in fraught with enormous difficulty. Yet, as Hahn notes, more written sources exist for the yeomanry than is usually acknowledged or consulted by historians. Hahn’s extensive and skillful use of a wide variety of available sources–including newspapers, letters, census returns, tax reports and various other government records–enables him to to substantiate abundantly the general story he tells. Despite Hahn’s efforts in the libraries and archives, much of the feel and sense of the yeoman culture still comes up missing in The Roots of Southern Populism. A couple of months spend living in or travelling through Georgia’s Upper Piedmont, talking with descendants of the late nineteenth century farmer folk, listening to their stories and music, looking at their family photographs and heirlooms, might have enriched and deepened Hahn’s work. Faulkner’s Flem Snopes is not enough of a substitute for the Georgia yeomanry. Neither are the written views of Floyd County planter John Dent, who appears under several guises, a large enough representation of the typical planter assessment of the times. Yet in fairness, The Roots of Southern Populism, is not intended as a study of folk culture.

Although his subjects are agrarian rather than industrial workers, Hahn’s story is strikingly similar to the recent work in American “new labor history” which has been so influenced by Edward P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. Hahn does, in fact, challenge the common view that agrarian rebellion is of a nature fundamentally different from industrial. Hahn’s Georgia yeomen, like their industrial counterparts, tried to retain autonomy and to resist the encroachments of capitalism–in their case commercial agriculture–by clinging to precapitalistic norms and prerogatives.

Establishing the cultural and economic roots of Populism over a forty year period forces Hahn to confront one of the most perplexing questions of Southern historiography: If, according to conventional wisdom, “Southern yeomen were touchy and isolated individualists,” how could they have been lured by the Populist vision of a cooperative common” wealth? In his penetrating analysis of the multi-faceted nature of yeomen independence, Hahn offers a significant new perspective on the question. Although he agrees with the traditional contention that yeomen economic organization based on the household and fee-simple landownership “fostered the bourgeois traits of individualism, acquisitiveness and deep adherence to private property”–traits that meshed well with the emerging ethic of laissez-faire economics–he also argues that “strong countervailing tendencies” existed. In direct contrast to the laissez-faire ethic, a “preindustrial republicanism” convinced many of the Upcountry ;yeomen that the state should control productive resources and actively defend petty producers. Further more, Hahn contends, yeomen independence also “hinged on social ties, on ‘habits of mutuality’ among producers, that impart to their culture a communal, prebourgeois quality whose equalitarian proclivities sharply distinguished it from that of the planters.” As a result of his careful analysis of the meaning and limits of independence in the economic and social lives of the Georgia yeomen, Hahn concludes that Populism was not an aberration in Southern Upcountry life but a product of a deeply embedded world view.

Before the war, class conflict resulting from distinctive planter and yeomen world views was latent, muted by planter efforts to unite their region in the growing struggle with the rest of the country. The yeomen enjoyed a large measure of autonomy; popular laws and customs, such as the homestead exemption and access to common lands, were protected. But the social fabric which sustained yeomen autonomy began to unravel under the strains of war. War-time privations combined with Confederate taxation and impressment policy made the yeomen increasingly resentful and generated “growing class antagonisms,” which were further exacerbated by severe economic dislocations in the wake of Confederate defeat. Hahn rightly argues that transformations in the lives of the Upcountry yeomen “during this period elucidate the larger meaning of the Civil War itself.”

Central to the economic change which these people confronted was the transformation of the Georgia Up-

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country from an area of subsistence agriculture on the periphery of the cotton economy to the mainstream of commercial agriculture. In a period of such widespread destruction and rapid change, these farmers could no longer opt for the “safety of diversification.” They rapidly lost their self-sufficiency as they were forced to plant cotton, the only crop on which they could receive credit. As a result, the Upcountry, previously “the domain of yeomen freeholders,” fast became ” a territory of the disposed.” Merchants, protected by lien laws, replaced the communal prebourgeois network of exchange characteristic of antebellum Upcountry society. “By the 1880s,” Hahn finds, “an elite deriving surpluses from both land and commerce held the economic reins in the upcountry.” Increasingly the “republicanism of petty producers” was arrayed against “the values of the free market.”

The inevitable postbellum class conflict took on a uniquely Southern tone because of simultaneous racial conflict. Hahn offer important, but sometimes contradictory, analysis of the old question concerning how much coming together there actually was between the South’s poor black and poor white farmers. Georgia Republicans, he asserts, had a chance after the war to build a biracial coalition, but they failed to do so. However, Hahn presents so much evidence of deep-seated yeomen racism that he undermines his own argument. He is more persuasive in claiming that the Southern yeomen viewed blacks, both in slavery and freedom, “as symbols of a condition they most feared–abject and perpetual dependence–and as a group whose strict subordination provided essential safeguards for their way of life.”

But racism was not sufficient to keep the yeomen loyal to elitist Democracy. By the 1870s election returns revealed “emerging divisions between town and countryside and between rich and poor farmers.” The issue that most polarized Upcountry white society was the question of grazing rights which, Hahn claims, “revealed the cultural, as well as economic, dimensions of political struggles, and . . . paved the road to Populism.” Since colonial days both law and custom had required that crops be fenced so that farmers could allow their animals to graze on open lands. To small landholding farmers as well as to tenants, the right was an essential prerequisite for self-sufficiency. In the post-war world, when a new elite pushed for laws requiring the fencing of stock, the yeomen, still informed by a preindustrial ideology of republicanism, fought, not only for “local custom,” but also for what they perceived as their “natural right.” It was the struggle over grazing rights, Hahn contends, that first aroused the upcountry yeomen; “the appearance of the Southern Farmers Alliance and then the People’s party promised to transform defensiveness into a humane and progressive force.”

Hahn successfully challenges most historians of Southern Populism with his compelling argument that the appeal of Populism to Upcountry Georgia yeomen farmers was more than a factor of their increasing impoverishment; the movement also offered a vehicle to restore “a producers commonwealth” which had been overwhelmed by the encroachments of the free market. To the yeomen who joined the Populist revolt, the party’s goals were “a vision informed by historical experience.”

For myriad reasons Populism quickly failed. One important reason, according to Hahn, was the two-sided nature of the yeomen sense of mutuality which made this cooperation possible. He argues that the “very networks and norms of the household economy partially disguised class distinctions and probably discouraged reliance or. supralocal, unfamiliar, and more formalized organizational’ structures.” This meant that, art least in the Georgia Upcountry, Populism rested on “a tenuous foundation.” But to Hahn, as to Lawrence Goodwyn, author of Democratic Promise, the most important book on American Populism, the rapid failure of Populism should not be construed to minimize its historical importance and ideological legacy. What Goodwyn describes as “the largest democratic mass movement in American history” is to Hahn “a watershed in the history of industrializing America.”

Steven Hahn’s book is excellent history, but it is more than that; it is also an excellent study of the interaction of the powerful and the powerless. The descendants of these Upcountry yeomen know little of their ancestral legacy of cooperative republican and rebellion. Goodwyn has written that “more often than not, the triumph of the received culture is so subtle it is not apparent to its victims. Content with what they can see, they have lost the capacity to imagine what they can no longer see. Ideas about freedom get obscured in this way.” The importance of Hahn’s book is as current as it is historical.

Bess Beatty is assistant professor of history at Shorter College in Rome, Georgia.

The 39th Year Report of the Southern Regional Council, 1983

By Staff

Vol. 6, No. 2, 1984, pp. 16-20, 22-24

The Southern Regional Council, the South’s oldest biracial organization, consists of 120 Council Members in eleven Southern states. The work of the Council is supported by foundations, labor unions and corporations and by the contributions of individuals and institutions as Council Associate Members. The Council maintains a small staff in Atlanta where it carries out research, provides technical assistance and offers educational programs which address primarily the issues of poverty, racism and ignorance in the American South. Through its work, the Council also attemps to develop regional leadership concerned about these enduring problems.

While the Council’s membership is limited to 120, any number of people may become associate members, participate in the functions of the Council and receive its bimonthly magazine, Southern Changes.

During 1983, the Southern Regional Council has continued to work for a better South through a number of projects.

Voting Rights

Not since the passage of the original Voting Rights Act in 1965 has political participation been at so critical a stage in the South as in the last few years. The passage of the Act was endangered for almost a year, and while the Act has

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been renewed once more for a temporary extension, this renewal will probably be the last; moreover, critical changes have been made in some of the legislation’s provisions, and these as well as the unchanged sections must be interpreted and applied rigorously by the US Justice Department and the federal courts if the Act is to sustain its major force for equal suffrage. In addition, most legislative bodies, including state legislatures, have been reapportioning their districts which will set in stone the structures of government in the region for the next ten years.

To meet the critical needs relating to voting rights, the Southern Regional Council has carried out a program of reserach and technical assistance for the enforcement of the preclearance provision of Section 5, the review of reapportionment plans for local and state legislative bodies in the South, and the assessment of the past level of enforcement and influence of the Voting Rights Act.

For the last four years the Council has maintained the only organization that systematically monitors Section 5 compliance in the Southeast. The project’s work is designed to examine changes submitted to the Justice Department that affect voting in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. When potentially discriminatory changes are identified by the project, contacts are made with local community groups and copies of the full proposals presented to Justice are obtained. Working with local leaders, the Council then carries out an analysis of the effects of the proposed change on the local system of elections and voting. When the analysis shows racial discrimination in effect to purpose, the Council assists the local group in requesting the Justice Department to object to the changes. At times, the Council itself files such a document on behalf of the local group.

In 1983, the Project reviewed over 175 Section 5 submissions. This was done by contacting community leaders in affected jurisdictions and seeking their impressions of proposed voting changes. The bulk of our monitoring involved redistricting because of the amount of local redistricting which occured in Louisiana and Mississippi.

We were involved in twenty-six Section 5 cases either by assisting community groups in contesting discriminatory changes or representing them directly in the administrative process.

Representation of client groups meant doing extensive research and community analysis and preparing detailed comment letters to Justice Department officials. The project prepared twelve comment letters in 1983. On the basis of these letters, the Justice Department imposed objections in eight localities.

We have been called on by community groups throughout the South to supply model redistricting plans for city and county governing bodies–plans which would increase the potential for blacks to elect candidates of their choice. We drafted seventy-eight plans in 1983 and had requests for at least twenty-five more. (See “Drawing the Lines” in Southern Changes (October/November, 1983) for a discussion of the process of drawing reapportionment plans.)

In 1983 the Voting Rights Project continued to provide information on voting and election issues to requesting parties throughout the nation. Inquiries ranged from wanting to know the number of black elected officials in a particular area to developing a list of people to testify at public hearings during the national PUSH convention. Requests were received from attorneys, members of Congress and the press.

The work of the Project has taken its staff into many towns throughout the South, contacting voters leagues, NMCP groups, concerned citizens’ organizations and individuals.

In the last year in North Carolina, the SRC has continued activities in and out of the courtroom to develop a redistricting plan for the state legislature which protects minority voting strength.

All in all, there may be as many as a hundred new black elected officials and an even larger number of new, more responsive white officials by 1985 as a result of the Council’s reapportionment work.

Southern Legislative Research Council

A continuing concern of the Southern Regional Council since its founding in 1944 has been the removal of restrictions against the right to vote and to hold public office. Beginning with its first published research on the all-white primary and literacy tests in the South, the Council has documented the barring of black citizens’ participation in both elected and appointed positions. The Council has also provided technical assistance to community groups and to minority elected officials over the years on a wide range of problems and issues including education, employment, health care and housing.

Despite these efforts and the work of others, the impact of blacks, women and other elected officials representing poor and minority constituents remains too limited; often their first problem is the reality of small numbers. For example, blacks comprise less than ten percent of the Georgia General Assembly in a state that is twenty-seven percent black. In Alabama, blacks represent less than fifteen percent of the state legislature, while comprising twenty-five percent of the state’s population. In Mississippi,

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almost forty percent of the state’s population is black, but less than ten percent of the state legislators are minorities.

Although limited by numbers, the impact of these legislators is further reduced by the lack of support available to them for the performance of their duties. In more than half of the legislatures outside the South, staff and office space are provided to both house and senate members; but in most Southern states resources are severely limited. In Alabama, the access to research and secretarial staff is directly controlled by the house leadership. In the senate, only committee chairs have access to even secretarial staff, and this is generally limited to the session. Any research needed on a specific piece of legislation or the budget must be done through the individual members’ own resources, or by staff directly controlled by the house and the senate leadership. In the Georgia Senate, each senator shares a secretary, and a year-round research staff is available to that body. However, the research staff is directly answerable to the president of the senate and the staff to legislator ratio is one staff person per twelve senators. Some Southern states have intern programs, but these are often limited to assistance during the session only, and directly controlled by the governor and legislative leadership.

The decade of the 1980s has brought a substantial increase in demands on legislators representing poor and black constitutents in the South. To meet the challenges, these legislators must develop their own expertise on issues and lead the way for changes. They must comprehend the issues and the legislative process itself, and understand how to use the process to benefit their constituents.

In 1980, the Southern Regional Council began the Southern Legislative Research Council (SLRC) as a special project to provide research, analysis and technical assistance to state legislators who represent the interests of black and poor citizens in Alabama and Georgia. Upon requests, the SLRC assists both black and white legislators, effectively increasing their capability to use information and analysis in state government.

The strength of the SLRC has come from its ability to combine four components–a reference service, an intern program, an expert network and an information exchange–to aid “client” legislators and, at times, community groups. The project has gained recognition for its accurate and thorough analysis and dependable and reliable research. Without advocating positions on legislative proposals, the project’s staff works only to respond to requests for hard data and objective comparisons that are not often available from advocates or other legislative services.

During the first three years of the SLRC, legislators in Alabama and Georgia have shown remarkable growth in their knowledge of issues and effective representation of the interests of the poor and blacks. As these legislators have begun to establish increased expertise on issues, their credibility among colleagues and the legislative leadership has increased. Just as important, there has been a growing awareness between black and white legislators who represent poor and black citizens that they share the same constitutents and, therefore, must address the same concerns.

In 1983, the work of the SLRC paralleled the concern of the Georgia and Alabama legislatures with the state budget and the loss of government money for social, educational and health care programs. In both states, the SLRC staff introduced new legislators to the budgetary process and carried out analyses of state appropriations. Among the successful proposals for which the project provided research assistance was Alabama’s approval of funds for kindergarten. In Georgia the legislature underwrote a sickle-cell program and supported the operations of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. The SLRC also monitored the progress of a federal court desegregation order under which the Georgia state university system is currently operating.

Additional work involved developing research papers and model legislation on employment discrimination. In Georgia, the legislature did pass a comprehensive act covering this subject. The Alabama staff of the SLRC compiled a report on the impact of hiring practices in the governmental departments of that state. Staff assistance in Alabama in 1983 also went into the analysis of options for the final state legislative reapportionment plan. The plan result in the election of twenty-four blacks, including five senators (the largest number of blacks serving in the Alabama legislature in modern history).

The Southern Legislative Research Council also assisted the Legislative Black Caucuses of Georgia and Alabama in developing formal structures. During 1983, both caucuses have incorporated. In Georgia, a caucus clearinghouse network and a committee structure have been organized as well as a yearly legislative weekend to meet with community groups and state department heads. In early October, with the SLRC’s assistance, the Georgia Caucus held its first major fundraising event, netting over $25,000 to be used to

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hire a full-time legislative staff within the next calendar year.

The SLRC is also developing ways that will allow its research, analysis and technical assistance to be used beyond Georgia and Alabama. We have a list prepared of the most helpful documents produced by the project and will distribute this list to legislative bodies in other Southern states, and to individual legislators or community groups, upon request. In addition, the SLRC is developing a list of experts within our legislative network who can provide assistance to legislators representing poor or black constituents throughout the South. The project is also attempting to identify persons who can provide long distance written research, expertise and analysis on a timely basis on a specific issue that is widely viewed as important.

At the request of client legislators, the SLRC is planning a series of Southern conferences of legislators. These meetings will bring together legislators, experts, and community groups from throughout the South to discuss issues as well as the legislative process. The initial conference will focus on the ways that legislators can be more effective in the legislative process, especially the budget process. The second conference, planned for the late summer or fall of 1984, will focus primarily on such issues as taxation, education, and economic development.

The initial conference probably will be limited to black legislators, and will attempt to identify general goals and objectives of black legislators throughout the South. The second conference, focusing on prevailing legislative issues will include other legislators and community groups representing poor black constituents.

Coop democracy

The SRC’s Cooperative Democracy and Development Project is designed to work with community-based organizations in the rural South that are attempting to develop and execute strategies of legal activities, technical assistance and organizing to achieve democratic control of utility cooperatives. Rural electric and telephone cooperatives in the South probably have six billion dollars in assets, own forty percent of the distribution system for electricity, maintain twenty percent of the phone systems and serve most rural counties. Few private or governmental institutions play a more important role than electric coops in the lives of the poor. These coops constitute the largest, corporate citizens in the rural South and are the largest non-governmental employers in the area. Coops not only provide electricity, they also have an important role for developing new models for conservation and job-creation. Unlike investor-owned utilities which have huge, standing plants, electric coops are largely distributors of electricity and have a self-interest in finding ways of conserving energy and creating jobs.

Perhaps the most non-traditional role of a utility coop offers the most sweeping promise for the Black Belt and similar areas. Coops have the capacity to act as prime financing agents for local economic and social development.

During the last twelve months the Coop Democracy Project has worked with coalitions of leaders in more than twenty different areas of the rural South in their efforts to make cooperatives lower the cost of electricity to low-income consumers; to redirect financial resources to provide for local job-creating industries; to finance low-cost, energy efficient housing in poor areas; and to undertake similar developments with the coops’ own resources. Primarily, the Project is aimed at accomplishing these efforts through supporting local groups who wish to elect alternative members to the boards of directors of the coops.

As a result of Project activities over thirteen hundred consumer-members were for the first time directly involved in community-based efforts to elect minority representatives to six coop governing boards in North Carolina, Mississippi, Virginia, Louisiana, and Georgia. Community leaders received training and information on the electric coops and their potential in these states and in Arkansas, South Carolina, and Alabama.

The process of bringing about democracy in electric coops has been both difficult and, at times, dangerous. Earlier this year in Mecklenberg, Virginia one of the local black leaders who supported a challenge to the local coop spent much of her evening at the coop’s offices observing the election and returned home to find her house broken into and flammable liquids poured around several rooms. The intruder had departed hastily.

The activities of the Coop Project have not yet succeeded in changing the control of very many coops. The Project however, has made some important progress. It has informed a number of consumers for the first time about their rights as members of the coop and of the potential of the coop to deal with their problems. In a few instances the coops have made some changes as a direct response to challenges. In Mississippi, a black staff member is finally inside the Greenwood office of the Delta Electric Power Association because of activities and allegations against the coop. In North Carolina, information presented to community leaders is now being used in negotiations with the coop to garner support for a financial investment to save black land loss. In other instances the Project has been partially responsible for the election of alternative boards of directors such as in Louisiana with the Dixie Electric

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Membership Cooperative. We have established a sizable body of legal research which will be helpful to the Project and others in protecting and exploring the rights of coop members. And, the Project has documented the widespread patterns and practices of coops in the Deep South through extensive research at the Rural Electrification Administration offices, the supervising federal agency for electric coops, and through monitoring of coop meetings. All of this effort has established an important base of information and interest for ongoing activities.

The last year has also evidenced a wide range of primary techniques and maneuvers available to coop management to manipulate and frustrate the efforts of challengers. These techniques include the denial of access to vital information such as membership lists, financial data, and bylaws; the changing of by-laws and procedures to fit the management’s immediate needs; and the use of coop resources— telephones, personnel, trucks, and mailing facilities— to recruit support for the incumbent management. All of these maneuvers rest on the coop management’s control of information and resources.

The Project’s experience has also revealed the most vivid examples of bedrock racial hatred which still persists in this area. In places suc!1 as Mississippi, coops have gone to extraordinary trouble and expense to bar any possibility of even one or two black board members on a coop. Of the more than 750 coop board members in Mississippi, none is black, even today. In Mecklenberg, Virginia, the mere possibility that three of twelve black board members would be elected prompted more than two thousand whites to turn out at an annual meeting where fewer than seventy people had attended over the past fifteen years. In every place, “race-baiting” has been used as a primary tool by which coop management spurs white support when faced with challenges.

The Project and local community leaders have also faced resignation and hopelessness among poor black coop members. Although concerned with increasingly high utility bills and the need for jobs, many members feel little urge to attend annual coop meetings. Nonetheless, the first year o. full activity for the Coop Democracy and Development Project has seen the beginnings of a base of strength and experience.

Lillian Smith Book Awards

Lillian Smith, Georgia thinker, activist, author and Southern Regional Council Life Member, died September 28, 1966. The SRC created the Lillian Smith Book Awards to honor her life, her work,: and her commitment, and to recognize in her name those who have contributed to our understanding of the South, its people, its strengths, problems and weaknesses. The Smith Awards are given each year to fiction and non-fiction works which best carry on Lillian Smith’s vision of the South.

Civil Rights History for Radio

Moving toward a final stage of production is a series of twenty-eight radio broadcasts documenting recent civil rights history in five Southern state capitals. A phase of this project, completed in January of 1984, involved the preparation of scripts and/or in-depth treatments for five programs in each of the following cities: Jackson, Little Rock, Columbia, Montgomery and Atlanta. This first phase also called for three scripts or treatments for the region as a whole.

The Project’s inital efforts focused on staff organization and administration, and included the organization of five person advisory committee, and several part-time re-

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searchers and consultants; review with radio consultants of recording procedures and standards for broadcast; acquisition and testing of sound equipment suitable for broadcast quality tape recordings; development of a plan for field interviews, office procedures and transcriptions; and planning execution of two meetings with advisory committee scholars for reviewing the progress and focus of the project.

The balance of the Project’s work has been in four major areas: interviewing, transcribing tapes, researching, and writing, and writing.

The Project staff has recorded more than forty field interviews in Jackson, Columbia and Montgomery. Preliminary interviews have been conducted by phone in Little Rock and Atlanta.

The interviews have included participants at all levels of the movement, from those who marched in the bus boycott to those who sought early admission to segregated schools, from picketers to policemen who arrested picketers, from ministers to lawyers, from teachers to insurance salesmen. (For examples of these interviews see Southern Changes for October/November and December, 1983.)

In order that the approach to and understanding of change could be more readily compared from place to place, the interviews have been structured so that each interviewee would be asked a consistent set of questions. To be sure that the spontaneous responses which make good radio were brought forth, the interviewees were also asked appropriate background questions that allow them to place their personal histories and experiences in the context of the civil rights movement.

About one-third of the interviews have been fully transcribed and extensive notes have been taken on the rest. All tapes were reviewed several times in preparation for scripting. This process has been tedious and time-consuming, but the range and volume of material and volume of material covered by the project demands that the tapes be transcribed to allow for careful scripting. Transcription has also proved necessary because of the historical value of the recorded interviews to other researchers, writers, and producers. On going field and library research during the Project has been necessary to verify and amplify the outlines of the planning phase. Project workers have conducted an extensive review of documentary materials and scholarly research related to the civil rights movement so that the interviewers could ask better questions, and so the writers of the scripts and treatments would be better able to know when the oral histories given by the interviewees needed support or when other sources should be sought for clarification.

The Civil Rights History Project expects to finish production in 1985 and to distribute the programs around the region by 1986.

Southern Changes

Southern Changes is the bi-monthly magazine of the Southern Regional Council. It is one of the nation’s few publications which provides reporting and analysis with a regional perspective.

One issue of Southern Changes in 1983 prompted author Kurt Vonnegut to write: “When I was a boy, my father promised me that if this became a better country, it would have to do so without the help of Southerners or Catholics. That was a long time ago. How wrong he was.”

Regional radio

The Council is exploring the creation of a regional radio network that will offer programming including news, analysis, public affairs, documentaries, musical entertainment, and coverage of special events through contracts with existing commercial broadcast stations. A marketing survey and demonstration tapes have been completed and in the next year the Council will seek financing and contractual commitments from radio stations throughout the South.

The Atlanta Media Project, Inc.

The Atlanta Media Project, Inc. (AMP), was established in 1980 to find new ways to address the major problems of access, employment, and the effective use of the electronic media by blacks, the poor, and others. In partnership with predominantly black Clark College’s school of communications, the project was created by the work of the NAACP of Atlanta and the ACLU of Georgia, represented by the SRC in negotiations with national broadcasters. Responsible for securing more than one million dollars in commitments for the construction of Clark’s new school and its own future operations, AMP began operations in late 1981 when the Council housed its temporary offices.

Historically, the absence of blacks, women, and Hispanics from the airways in the South has been paralleled only by the paucity of programming about the primary concerns of these groups. During much of the last two decades, the principal efforts by civil rights advocates to remedy these

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problems were aimed at regulating the conduct of broadcasters and cable companies. With breakthroughs in communications technology and increasing deregulation. AMP represents a unique enterprise which will help capture the opportunities to develop new ways to redress the historical exclusions from the airways.

AMP was a co-sponsor with the Southern Regional Council in producing the Southern Network. Other projects in last year including the production of professional quality public service announcements for the Voter Education Project, Inc.

Southern Network

In a unique experiment in cable television and public affairs programming, the Southern Regional Council and the Atlanta Media Project coordinated the coverage of the presidential primary election campaigns in Florida, Georgia and Alabama for cable television systems through a temporary Southern Network. Some ten hours of coverage per week began in late January, 1984 and ran for two months. Each participating cable system set aside time for the Southern Network programming on one of the system’s local origination channels. More than forty cable systems in the three states carried the programming of Southern Net–a potential audience of one million households. Southern Network programs featured gavel-to-gavel speeches by each candidate, discussion programs with news reporters covering the campaigns, debates by candidates’ representatives and in-depth examination of candidates’ positions on issues.

Surveys by the Southern Network showed that at least one in four households watched some of its programming. In late 1984 the Network may provide coverage of the general election. Other experiments in cable may be initiated in 1985.

Southern Rural Alliance

The Southern Rural Alliance was created to pool together the planning, strategies, and resources of its members–the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, the Emergency Land Fund, the ACLU Foundation Southern Office, the Voter Education Project, and the Southern Regional Council–to enable more rapid political and economic change in the rural South.

In 1983, the Alliance’s efforts were focused on three counties in Alabama–Choctaw, Greene, and Sumter. While this limited and targeted effort represented a major revision in our original scope of work, the Alliance’s efforts in one, limited location was designed to demonstrate the impact and viability of the organization’s cooperative approach to political participation.

The first task of the Alliance was to obtain a complete and accurate picture of black voter participation for Greene, Sumter, and Choctaw counties. The results of the analysis were at times revealing to both the Alliance members and to local leaders:

* While there is room for improvement, voter registration in the three-county district is not the major problem. Indeed, over 75 percent of persons 18 and over are registered to vote. The difference between blacks and whites is small.

* The larger problem for this district is the level of voter turnout. Voter participation levels among blacks for the three-county area is somewhere around 60 percent In Greene County, the level is somewhere around 49 percent.

* In several boxes and beats, past elections show significant support for white incumbent candidates who were in races against well-respected black candidates.

Using the results as a guide, the Alliance began its work. The Alliance was somewhat successful in developing a comprehensive list of precinct leaders for the target counties. It was this list that was used in putting together a people’s nomination convention. A number of workshops were also conducted with the precinct leaders from the three-county area. The thrust of these workshops has sought to identify strategies for getting out the vote. Demonstrating the past election results, participants were asked to analyze the causes for such poor turnouts and to explore methods for increasing the turnout. While registration was not the largest problem, efforts were aimed to improve the level of registered voters in some low beats. The recent appointment of two blacks to the local board of registrars in Greene County has permitted the Alliance to

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counsel those officials about methods to increase voter registration.

The primary election analysis shows that voter registration and voter turnout did increase in the November election probably as a partial result of the Alliance’s work.

Maps of the South

Using data from the 1980 census, the Council worked in 1983 to prepare multi-colored maps of the South, showing–county by county–the distribution of poor and black population. The maps are accompanied by state reports on changes in population and poverty since 1970. Both maps and reports are scheduled for release in late April 1984 and are available to the public.

Agricultural Marketing Project of Georgia

The Agricultural Marketing Project of Georgia provides a means by which small, marginal farmers can develop and maintain markets for their produce and low-income consumers can have fresh food at low costs. Since its inception in 1979, AMP-G has operated under the the administrative and financial controls of the Council.

In 1983, Project activities reflected a changed emphasis of work, away from food fairs and toward consumer work in the Atlanta area, associated with the Atlanta Produce Exchange. Because the various farm groups which the Project has established was running food fairs around the state smoothly on their own, primary assistance was no longer needed.

Most staff time was devoted to the development and the operation of the Altanta Produce Exchange which is now independently incorporated, with its own board, whose members include two farmers and three consumer group representatives. The Exchange is designed to operate as a broker between small farmers and buying clubs and other bulk purchasers of fresh produce. It is set up to function entirely in the future on revenues generated by the sale of produce.

Southern Roundtable

Each month representatives of regional groups and state coalitions meet in Atlanta for the Southern Roundtable, an opportunity to discuss, question and explore common or emerging issues, problems and concerns in the South. More than fifty groups receive the Roundtable mailings and attend meetings in Atlanta. The Council hosts the Southern Roundtable.

“Winners of Lillian Smith Award”

By Staff

Vol. 6, No. 2, 1984, p. 21

1968 George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South

1968 Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro

1970 Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed

1971 Tony Dunbar, Our Land, Too

1972 Robert Coles, Children of Crisis, Vols. II and III

1973 Harold Martin, Ralph McGill, Reporter Alice Walker, Revolutionary Petunias and other Poems

1974 C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3d rev’d ed.
Albert Murray, Train Whistle Guitar

1976 James Loewen and Charles Sallis, Mississippi: Conflict and Change
Reynolds Price, The Surface of Earth

1977 Richard Kluger, Simple Justice
Alex Haley, Roots

1978 Will Campbell, Brother to a Dragonfly
Garrett Epps, The Shad Treatment

1979 Marion Wright, Human Rights Odyssey
Ernest J. Gaines, In My Father’s House

1980 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry
Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

1981 John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness; Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley
Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline

1982 Harry Ashmore, Hearts and Minds: A History of Racism from Roosevelt to Reagan

1983 John Ehle, The Winter People
Fred Hobson, South-Watching: Selected Essays by Gerald W. Johnson
Roy Hoffman, Almost Family

Critical Attitudes

If the work of building the new South is to go forward to best advantage, the South must develop its own critics. They can criticize most effectively, in the first place because they have the Southern viewpoint, and can therefore be understood, and in the second place because they have the most reliable information, and therefore can most frequently spot the joints in Southern armor. For the same reasons they can best interpret the South to the rest of the nation.

But if they are to affect either the South or the outside world, they must be critics, not press-agents Too much has been said of the South’s need for “sympathetic” criticism. This demand has resulted in some so-called criticism that is sympathetic, not with the South, but with the South’s least admirable traits, with bigotry, intolerance, superstition and prejudice. What the South needs is criticism that is ruthless toward those things–bitter towards them, furiously against them–and sympathetic only with its idealism, with its loyalty, with its courage and its inflexible determination. Such criticism will not be popular, for it is not in human nature to hold in warm affection the stern idealist who relentlessly exposes one’s follies and frailties and continually appeals to one’s better nature. But it will be respected and in the end admired. And above all, it will be effective.
Gerald W. Johnson, 1924.