The Second Greensboro Verdict

By James Reston, Jr.

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

During the filming of “88 Seconds in Greensboro,” the PBS Frontline treatment of the 1979 Greensboro, North Carolina killings by Ku Klux Klansmen, I was standing behind the lights, chatting casually with one of our willing extras. He was known simply as “Big Man” for obvious reasons, and he towered over me, as he waited to shoot a sequence on the breath machine that we were using to visualize how cotton mills test for brown lung disease. The disease, so widespread in the cotton industry, was the grievance that had attracted the young Communist doctors to the cotton mills of Greensboro, an attraction which eventually led to their death. Big Man’s role in the documentary was simply to blow as hard as he could into a tube, while a gauge measured his lung power. The sequence is what is known affectionately in the television business as “wallpaper,” for narration on the cotton mills would eventually be laid over it.

As we watched another mill worker huff and blow into the tube under the instructions of Marty Nathan, the widow of Dr. Michael Nathan, who was slain on November 3, 1979, and Dr. Paul Bermanzohn, who had miraculously survived a bullet in the brain, Big Man observed offhandedly how everyone had cleaned up their story in the three years since the shooting. Since his friends were the victims, I was intrigued, and I asked him what he meant. He proceeded, through my insistent prodding, to reveal a startling new detail about the Communist Workers Party (COOP) planning for November 3, for he had been present in the important strategy sessions in the days before the “Death to the Klan” march.

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With speed, our filming schedule was restructured for the following morning, and braving a driving rain, we took Big Man to the corner of Everitt and Carver in Greensboro, the site of the televised killings. There, with slow and deliberate precision, he pointed to the apartments in the seedy Morningside Homes project where in the days before the March, the CWP had stashed weapons including rifles and shotguns, presumably in anticipation of a blazing showdown with the Klan.

Because “88 Seconds in Greensboro” was an exploration of the role of Edward Dawson, the police informer who led the Klan to the point of confrontation, rather than a reconstruction of the event itself, the Big Man sequence did not make the final cut of the film. It was, however, there in spirit. The narration had characterized the five dead as “far from innocent victims.”

As the second Greensboro trial drew near and after I received a call from a defense lawyer about the “outtakes” of the film, I worried about the protection of the Big Man segment and sought assurance from WGBH in Boston that no outtakes would be turned over to the trial. It was not so much that the Big Man interview altered the essential facts of the case. It did not. Those essential facts remained: A peaceful demonstration had been underway. Klansmen drove into the neighborhood, led by Dawson. No police were present. After a few sticks rained down on Klan cars, a stick fight broke out. Moments later, the Klansmen strode back to their cars, removed their weapons, and in the most public killings in memory, captured by three local television crews, they mowed down five people. None of this was altered by Big Man’s information. In the brutal eighty-eight seconds, the Communist arsenal had never been retrieved.

Rather, the essential facts of who did what to whom were in jeopardy of being overwhelmed by image. The center of justice had come unstuck. The easiest way to digest this event had become to think of it as a shootout of two equally despicable groups, each equally culpable. The lawyers for the Klansmen, of course, played upon that public perception. My Big Man sequence was sure to be waved like a bloody shirt as “proof” that the Communists were just as blood-thirsty as the Klansmen.

In relating the Big Man story to a few trusted friends in the past year, I have been struck by its ability to shock. It is as if even progressive minded people, perhaps particularly that type, must have a pure image of heroes and villains, before they will rally to the cause of the victimized. But heroes and villains in real life are seldom pure. The victims of Greensboro were “far from innocent,” and perhaps that denies them the status of martyrs that they coveted. But they remain victims of a vicious murder, and to me, the fact that they might have been unsavory makes the principle of their protection all the more important to uphold. When a democracy can let violence occur against its unsavory elements, it is in trouble. Whatever their beliefs or manners, the Communists were murdered in exercise of their constitutional rights as Americans.

Many Northerners hold that federal justice in the South should somehow be different from state justice, hence, the shock of the second acquittal in federal court. This is an outdated notion for the South is no longer like Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964, where state justice was so unfair and racist that federal court was the only remedy to fix it. The question of this case is not so much the racism of the South, as the art of the courtroom. By perfectly legal, dignified procedures, two all white juries have now considered the Greensboro case, and that is wrong. By the strictures of the court, the federal prosecutor in the second trial was evidentally unable to prove a racial animus on the part of the Klansmen, and that is ridiculous. In the first trial, through a perfectly fair election, the jury chose a foreman who was a former member of an anti-Castro, CIA supported freedom fighting group. Could he completely suppress his anti-Communism in judging a crime against Communists? And after the first verdict, another juror confessed, as was his right, that to him, killing Reds was not the same as killing people.

In some ways, the second Greensboro verdict is irrelevant. In the 1980s, murder should be murder, not the denial of civil rights, and as this second verdict shows, the transfer to federal court of such a brutal crime brings with it a host of new and often restricting rules. It becomes an exercise of trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. The federal prosecution was a fixit job from the start, foisted upon Reagan’s justice department by the outrage of the first acquittal. The Justice Department was never enthusiastic about undertaking the job, not in an administration which has slackened the restrictions on covert surveillance nationally and covert provocation internationally.

The only new aspect of the Second Trial was the presence of Edward Dawson in the dock. To some, Dawson was the symbol of an official conspiracy, but the trial never aired that issue fully because Dawson never took the stand. His relation to the FBI and the Greensboro police department

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has not been explored in a court of law. The extent to which he felt he was operating under official orders that day goes to the question of official complicity in the event. But that question must await yet another forum.

The forces behind the victims claimed after the second verdict that the formulation of the federal charges were too narrow. To blame failure on a technicality of legal regulations after a four-month trial and a four-year trauma for a city seems to get everyone off the hook…except the city of Greensboro. For as justice continues to be denied for whatever reason, new forums are found, and the case goes on and on. For after the second acquittal, many asked again in astonishment, how can it be that such a public, televised crime can happen in America, and no one be punished for it?

Now, the focus shifts to the third arena: the $49 million civil case of the victims against the city of Greensboro and the federal government. It is regrettable that it has taken this long to get around to the question of ultimate responsibility. The Greensboro citizens are sure to plead that they have suffered enough already from this case, but the fact is that the city’s role in the affair has been skirted through the first two major rounds.

For all the sophisticated evidence like the FBI acoustical tests on the video tape to determine the location of each of the thirty-nine shots fired in the eighty-eight seconds, there are several simple questions which finally will have to be addressed:

Would the Klan ever have found the gathering at Everitt and Carver Streets that morning, if they had not been led there by the agent of the city of Greensboro, Edward Dawson? All but Dawson in the Klan caravan were from towns far away from Greensboro.

In our documentary, “88 Seconds in Greensboro,” Dawson freely admits to a leadership role at every important moment on that fateful morning. To what extent, did he have guidance from his police contact? If there was no guidance, does this amount to official negligence? Or what does it say generally about the entire system of police undercover agents in America?

Why did Dawson, the agent of the city, hurl out the first provocative taunt at the curbside demonstrators from his lead truck, an act that began the chain of events?

Would the massacre ever have happened, if the police had been there in force at what was clearly a volatile and dangerous situation?

One can hope that the questions of ultimate responsibility for this troubling case will finally be laid to rest by the civil proceedings. But from hard experience–through the Joan Little case, through Nixon and Watergate and even the Jonestown disaster, all of which I have written about–I cease to expect from a court of law any clean consideration of moral or social or philosophical problems. We know that on November 3, 1979 in Greensboro a dastardly crime was committed. But if there was a conspiracy, it was more than a criminal conspiracy. The Greensboro disaster was the product of historical as well as criminal malfeasance. Secret societies within our government, we have learned, can be just as dangerous as secret societies without. Official omissions at the very least joined with racist commissions.

The Greensboro tragedy has a lot to do with the American South in the late 1970s, but it also has much to do with America itself in the mid-1980s.

James Reston, Jr. lives in Hume, Virginia. His film “88 Seconds in Greensboro” appeared in the Public Broadcasting System’s “Frontline” series. He is the author of Sherman’s March and Vietnam, forthcoming from MacMillan.

Government in South Carolina: Taking Care of Business

By Jim Walser

Vol. 6, No. 3, 1984, pp. 3-13

State Senator Tom Smith was angry–and the South Carolina General Assembly was about to discover the reason.

It was February of 1983, weeks after the South Carolina House of Representatives began debating a plan designed to cut sharply rising homeowner property taxes, reform the state income tax system (one of the most regressive in the nation) to make the rich pay more, and send some financial help to the state’s eleven-hundred public schools, then taking a public flogging for producing the lowest average scores in the nation on the college-entrance Scholastic Aptitude Test.

Designed by Governor Dick Riley as the cornerstone of his new second term, the tax package died quickly in the House.

One reason–perhaps the major reason–for the derailment of the package was the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce, a high-profile coalition of over eighteen-hundred state businesses and 3,700 individuals with an annual lobbying budget of over one-million dollars a year.

Weeks earlier, on the eve of the House debate, Chamber officials warned that Riley’s plan would frighten new businesses away from South Carolina and prevent current ones from expanding. According to the Chamber, a 1982 Harvard-MIT study proved that “relative tax burdens” are the “single most important consideration in decisions (of industries) to relocate from the Frostbelt to the Sunbelt.” Lowering homeowner property taxes, the Chamber concluded, would shift the property tax burden back to industry. And higher property taxes for industry would cost the state new business, jobs, and prosperity in the 1980s.

It is an argument that is heard a great deal across the South today as highly financed and organized business coalitions fight unions, pro-worker legislation and higher corporate taxes, attempting to carve out a more profitable business environment in Southern states which are increasingly pitted against one another in recruiting out-of-state industry.

But on this occasion, Smith, a sharp, forty-five-year-old, drawling Pamplico, SC, farmer-lawyer with a few populist tendencies, rose in the wreckage of House debate to call the Chamber’s bluff.

“We have been lied to,” Smith announced to a hushed Senate. “For the past many weeks, the Chamber has attempted to stampede the members of this General As-

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sembly into making serious decisions based on bad and false information.”

Smith produced a letter from the author of the Harvard tax study, Rober W. Schmenner, who said “tax incentives for industrial location are not the most important” factor in industrial relocations.”

“The Chamber of Commerce is doing a grave injustice to the people of South Carolina, ” said Smith. “It has put us in a very, very bad light . . . (and) . . . has sowed seeds of dissension and confusion among this state’s citizens by sending a message across this nation which interferes with tour industrial development.”

Responded Chamber executive vice president Lowell Rease to Smith: “For a politician to be calling the Chamber of Commerce a liar is like a frog calling us ugly.”

Government in South Carolina is undergoing a change in command–a subtle but significant realignment of power that is altering the way the people’s business gets done.

Dominated for decades by a small band of rural potentates sent to Columbia to operate a bare-bones government whose main purpose was to perpetuate a segregated society, these days the sessions of the SC General Assembly sound more and more like corporate board meetings–replete with executives, their lobbyists, and a what’s-good-for-business theme rippling through debate on nearly every piece of legislation.

Gone are the days when patriarchs like former State Senator Edgar Brown of Barnwell, the thirty-year (1942-72) chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, ran state] government like it was a personal checkbook – frugally, with little advice and no consent.

And with the passing of Brown and his successor as Senate President Pro Tempore, Marion Gressette, in March, new forces are moving into the somewhat chaotic breach.

Chief among those forces is the state’s business cartel, using money, wall-to-wall lobbying, and a unity of influence that some legislators say borders on political blackmail in a small, poor, mostly agricultural state where forty years ago there was hardly any business at all, a state hungry for jobs and eager enough to accept just about any kind.

The governmental objectives of these business-and. banking interests are simple, succinctly stated in the 1983 editions of South Carolina Business, the Chamber’s annual magazines: “Avoid bad legislation; maintain a union-free environment; reduce health care costs.”

What has made it easier for business to establish a beachhead in South Carolina is an almost complete absence of any organized opposition from unions, consumer, or civil

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rights organizations.

Most consumer activist groups have long-since vanished in the state, or, like the local branch of Common Cause, operate on lean budgets which limit public visibility and impact. Some antinuclear groups, including the Palmetto Alliance, the Grass Roots Organizing Workshop, and the new SC Energy Research Foundation, have won some court battles over environmental safety at nuclear power plants and the federally-owned Savannah River defense plant near Aiken. But the impact of consumer and environmental groups is rarely felt inside the capitol dome on a day-today basis.

Women’s groups, punctured by the Senate’s 1978 decision to scuttle the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, have a low profile in the General Assembly. Some women do hold key policymaking roles in more traditional lobbying vehicles, such as the eighteen-thousand member SC Education Association, a teachers’ group. Other women’s groups organize primarily around single pieces of legislation. Recently, Sistercare, a Columbia-based women’s shelter, has lobbied with some limited success on domestic violence legislation. But as one legislative organizer said, “There’s no umbrella organization of women’s groups and it really limits the effectiveness of lobbying women’s issues.”

Civil rights organizations seem more concerned with electing more black members of the General Assembly than affecting specific legislation. That’s an understandable concern in a state where leaders have apportioned blacks out of the legislature for decades, with a succesion of county-wide and multi-member district plans limiting black elective chances.

Currently, only nineteen of the state’s 124 House members and only one of the state’s forty-six senators are black. That should change later this year, when the Senate’s long battle to reapportion after the 1980 census is heard in a Washington courtroom. The state NAACP and others are seeking to carve out as many as nine majority-black Senate districts, though even in the best of circumstances only four or five of those districts would meet the accepted threshold of being truly winnable for black candidates. Only 325,000 of South Carolina’s 596,000 voting-age blacks are registered–and even registered blacks tend to vote in lower percentages than white voters in the state.

Black legislators optimistically predict that even four or five black senators would alter the dynamics of moving social and progressive legislation through the General Assembly.

“A lot of times you will find that the Senate will kill things the House has passed,” said John Matthews, a House member and chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus. “Check the record and you’ll find that most issues that have a direct impact on minorities are brought up in the House. I think when you get five or six members (of the Senate) who will speak up for minority issues, you’ll find a new sensitivity.”

Other observers, including some white legislators sympathethic to minority causes, aren’t so sure. They cite votes when the black caucus was unable to agree, even on such emotionally charged issues as removing the Confederate flag from the House chamber. Others say blacks are susceptible to pressure from business groups, too, since many represent rural areas where the resident industry carries even greater clout than those in urban areas.

Nearly 93,000 South Carolinians belong to labor unions, but that is the least percentage (7.896) of any state’s workforce in the nation. Frustrated labor organizers are simply trying to survive in an atmosphere where the instruments of finance, the press–and, increasingly, government–lie in the hands of a small group of textile, banking, and manufacturing executives.

“It seems labor organizations always are a whipping boy for some of the politicians,” says Randy Kiser, twenty-nine, the young president of the South Carolina AFL-CIO. “It makes good headlines and propaganda, especially if not many of the voters are unionized.”

While a succession of SC governors has boasted how the hundreds of new factories and plants have radically altered

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the makeup of the SC economy in the last two decades, the surge of building, development and progress has nevertheless left the state forty-eighth in the nation in per capita income and as high as fiftieth in many health and quality-of-life statistics. While business complains about corporate income and property taxes–and actively seeks to elect a General Assembly full of representatives pledged to curtail them – the state’s public school system is one of the nation’s poorest: forty-seventh in per-pupil spending, forty-fourth in teacher pay, and forty-sixth in adult illiteracy.

“There’s a lot of bragging all about how we don’t need unions and we’ve never had unions,” says Kiser. “But in the figures we’re always coming up on the bottom.”

From their finely appointed offices in a downtown Columbia high-rise bank building, the staff and corporate sponsors who run the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce can oversee the architectural heart of state government.

From there on the fifth floor they can view the nineteenth century Roman Corinthian State House, where metal stars mark the spots Sherman’s cannon balls bounced off the walls over a hundred years ago, and where, inside, legislators launch government policies that alter the political landscape. Beyond the State House, the vista is dotted by a half-dozen new concrete-and-steel state office buildings, named after a succession of rural political barons–Brown, Blatt, Gressette, and Dennis–who once ruled the state with virtually unchallenged authority. There, thousands of state employees stoke South Carolina’s governmental engine.

To many South Carolinians, the Chamber of Commerce’s vantage point is more than fitting symbolism.

Many legislators and political observers now consider the Chamber of Commerce, its corporate clients, its local branches, and the broad business establishment it represents much more than just another lobbying group.

Nobody agrees more with the assessment of a rising business role in government than the born-again free enterprisers who run the Chamber of Commerce itself.

“Without any question, I think the state Chamber reached the heights of its political influence in the state,” executive vice president Reese says proudly of last year’s business effort to convince the General Assembly to kill Riley’s package. “Business did have a significant role in the whole debate and it turned out favorably for us. Members got involved to a great degree. I feel like we had a great impact.”

To many, the wave of businesses and manufacturers arriving in the state since World War II–united under the banner of the state Chamber and the closely allied SC Textile Manufacturers Association–is now the fourth branch of government in South Carolina.

Though unelected and prone to conduct most of its business in private, the new branch is not necessarily the fourth most powerful, either.

After all, South Carolina is a state where author V.O. Key writing in Southern Politics, called the governor “little more than a ceremonial chief of state.” Later, authors Jack Bass and Walter DeVries, updating Key in The Transformation of Southern Politics, dismissed the state Supreme

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Court as “an institutional defender of the status quo,” elected by and consisting wholly of former legislators.

For years, as those authors noted, power in South Carolina resided in the all-white, all-male Senate, where a collection of near-dictators ruled with the help of the most strictly seniority-based system of government in the South.

But in the last twenty years, changes have swept the Senate. The US Supreme Court’s one-person, one-vote rulings and subsequent reapportionment forced an end to the one-senator-per-county system. Home rule stripped the senatorial power to control load budgets and the subsequent loss of patronage and authority hurt senators’ prestige. Some of the older senators died, and others were defeated for re-election. By the 1970s, federal aid flowing to state agencies, with the money governed by federal guidelines, stripped away another layer of senatorial influence. Finally, rules changes inside the Senate, forced by younger senators and outside pressures, somewhat loosened the iron grip of seniority.

These days, the SC Senate isn’t what it used to be–for better or worse.

Three or four senators still hold disproportionate influence, but there are days when even members of the Senate–like poor Tom Smith–wonder aloud who is running the governmental show in South Carolina.

For years, there was little question. Even into the early 1980s, Senate President Pro Tem Marion Gressette of tiny Calhoun County and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Rembert Dennis of rural Berkeley County near Charleston, himself the son of a state senator, remained the two most powerful legislators. Gressette was elected to the SC House in 1924 and to the Senate thirteen years later. Beginning in 1953, the Senate Judiciary Committee he. chaired became know as “Gressette’s Graveyard,” a reference to the chairman’s inclination for killing bills–especially progressive ones. Gressette was credited with almost singlehandedly stopping passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in South Carolina. Dennis’s Finance Committee rewrites the appropriations bill when it arrives from the House each spring. Senators with pet projects pending in the appropriations bill are rarely inclined to confront Dennis on other issues. Dennis, sixty-five, is now the Senate President Pro Tempore.

“Cronyism, and that’s the popular word for it, is a fact of life in everything we do up here,” says Smith. “We’re a small state. The financial power and the business power is within a mile, almost, of this State House, and the university (the University of South Carolina) too. Because we are so small everybody knows everbody. They all went to the same school together, that kind of stuff.”

But many legislators and observers consider the days of aging symbols like Dennis numbered. Single-member district representation is coming to the SC Senate, after decades of legislative and court fights to avoid it, including a current confrontation with the US Justice Department to limit the number of majority-black Senate districts. (See Southern Changes, May/June, 1983.) That fight might not be decided in time for the 1984 elections, but almost any resulting plan will guarantee at least five or six blacks in what was the South’s last all-white legislative body until late 1983–when longtime civil rights activist I.D. Newman won a Senate seat in a special election.

There are predictions and talk that the new 1985 Senate will throw out the seniority system Gressette and his allies worked decades to preserve. And, finally, there is age. Gressette, in poor and declining health for years, died on March 1, flashing a new tremor through the foundations of the Senate.

Ironically, it was the irascible Gressette, of all people, who stood between the state’s business community and one of its most prized goals–a constitutional amendment to severely limit the future state spending and taxation. The off-shoot of anti-tax sentiments in high-tax states such as California and Massachusetts, the spending limit was considered by Gressette as an intrusion by business interests into the affairs of government. Gressette didn’t mind

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telling business leaders to butt out.

“We just don’t need that set in concrete,” Gressette said before his death. “The General Assembly is capable of approving a balanced budget. It always has.”

Over five years, Gressettee repeatedly frustrated attempts to pass the amendment, which had as many as ninety co-sponsors in the House, after intense lobbying by SC businesses.

This year the spending limits bill is back on the General Assembly’s agenda. With Gressette gone, and the Senate’s decades of prestige teetering from outside forces, South Carolina’s business community rests in an unparalleled position to move into the vacuum. Already, the line between what’s-good-for-government and what’s-good-for-business is becoming less and less distinct in South Carolina.

“My impression is that with any major legislation, such as the sales tax package, there are certain people in the state you’ve got to run it by,” says Smith. “The Chamber group in the Bankers Trust building. The (former Gov. Robert) McNair law firm (also located in Bankers Trust). People of that nature. The business community is very, very powerful. There isn’t any question about it. Maybe that’s good, but it’s a fact.”

By mid-1983, Gov. Dick Riley, had certainly reached a similar conclusion.

As Riley began preparing a new education-improvement package and considering ways to get it through the 1984 General Assembly, his first steps were aimed at locking down business support. He courted corporate executives over lunch at the Governor’s Mansion, stalked out new Chamber president John Huguley, a Charleston businessman, and attended a series of business conventions specifically to push the need for improving the state’s eleven hundred public schools–and the advantages such improvement afforded business.

“We have done less to increase the funding of education than any other southern state except Alabama,” Riley told the Textile Manufacturers Association last May. “Florida and North Carolina, states which we compete against for economic development, are in the process of launching major new funding initiatives for education. And they already spend $15,000 more per classroom than we spend in South Carolina.”

Later in 1983, Riley appointed a select committee to draw up a blueprint for improving South Carolina’s schools and another committee to recommend the ways to pay for it. He loaded both committees with business executives and bankers, naming Greenville businessman Bill Page as chairman. By November, the committees recommended a $210 million program which featured teacher pay increases (the state pays teachers less than all states except one), remedial programs for the state’s 200,000 below-average students, and a statewide building program to improve school facilities in the most impoverished districts.

Deep in the plan, however, were attempts to appeal to the free-enterprise, results-oriented inclinations of the management representatives on the committees. There was the expected talk about merit-pay for “better” teachers, which many teachers and school professionals consider little more than a public relations gimmick. A particularly interesting twist was pushed by some businessmen on the panel: cash bonuses for schools where students perform well, and incentive programs for teachers and even students to earn cash bonuses for good work. Finally, after months of cajoling from Riley, the state Chamber endorsed the one-cent sales tax increase in early 1984–but only if no other realistic way could be developed to pay for school improvements. The SC Textile Manufacturers Association disagreed with that conclusion, and worked actively against the plan. But the influence of the Chamber’s endorsement helped push the 1984 bill through the House. It awaited passage in the Senate in late May.

Charlie Daniel would have wanted it this way.

Daniel, the Greenville construction magnate who built his firm an international reputation, was probably the first SC businessman to understand the value of a legislature that would help–not hinder, meddle, or tax–private business.

“To Daniel’s way of thinking,” wrote Fortune magazine in October, 1954, “the greatest weakness of the northern states was that their governments were either hostile to industry, taxing it unfairly, or indifferent to its welfare. In the South, particularly in South Carolina, there was no hostility to business, and the tax situation was generally favorable to it. What Daniel was anxious to see, however, was a South Carolina government conspicuously friendly to industry, aggressive in working to bring in new business, and capable of inspiring business with confidence in its stability.”

In the wake of World War II and Korea, Daniel and others set about to get rid of what they called “jackleg” delegates to the legislature, to put into office men who knew the value of good government, who would create the proper blend of regulation and taxes. Usually, that meant less of both.

The results came swiftly in the mid-1950’s: a “right-to-work” bill to discourage unionism, a three percent retail

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sales tax to pay for schools (replacing a property tax which put much of the burden on industry), tax exemptions for manufacturing equipment, rescinding a franchise tax on out-of-state corporations, and outlawing blue laws prohibiting women from working in mills on Sunday (thus interrupting some textile processes requiring twenty-four hour-a-day monitoring).

Northern plants streamed southward, drawn by this new tax climate, and the absence of unions. A New York textile company, Deering-Milliken, was one of the earliest and the most enthusiastic recruits, moving its corporate headquarters to Spartanburg and tying its fortunes closely to research and to graduates of Clemson University. Board Chairman Roger Milliken, an avowed anti-unionist who fought the longest battle in history with the National Labor Relations Board over the closing of Darlington mill where workers voted to unionize, formed an immediate friendship with Daniel and Daniel Construction built Milliken plants across the Carolinas and Georgia–without so much as a written contract. And when Clemson University needed a new president in the mid-1950s, Clemson board chairman Charlie Daniel reached out and recruited a Milliken plant manager, Robert C. Edwards.

Daniel died in 1964. These days, no one symbolizes the industrial strength of South Carolina like Milliken, whose two billion-dollar-a-year, Spartanburg-based company is the country’s largest privately-owned firm, with twelve thousand employees.

Milliken, who rarely grants interviews, is influential in several business organizations, a lifelong backer of Republican Party causes. He helped Barry Goldwater’s rise to the GOP nomination in 1964, raised over $360,000 in campaign contributions in a few days for Richard Nixon in 1972, and, at one point, turned down a cabinet job in the Nixon adminstration. His personal attorney, George Dean Johnson, has been chairman of the SC Chamber and is one of its most high-profile lobbyists at the State House. Another business group Milliken spearheads, the Palmetto Business Forum, is considered even more conservative than the Chamber. In 1980, Johnson and Milliken allies helped form a group seeking to block a constitutional amendment allowing a gubernatorial succession–an effort many interpreted as a move to shift power from the legislature to the governor. Business lobbyists like their chances of influencing targeted legislators, elected by smaller constituencies, rather than a candidate elected statewide.

Perhaps none of the current crop of 170 members of the SC General Assembly personifies the new legislatures like House Speaker Ramon Schwartz, a portly, good-natured attorney from Sumter, a small town twisting around Shaw Air Force Base forty miles east of Columbia.

Schwartz, fifty-nine, was elected speaker in 1980, replacing state Rep. Rex Carter, a Greenville attorney who now frequently lobbies in the General Assembly for the Chamber of Commerce. His style of leadership is steeped in loyalties and good-old-boy networking.

In 1982, when the Legislative Black Caucus was pushing for a black to be appointed to the all-white University of South Carolina Board of Trustees, Schwartz agreed that the caucus’s proposed candidate was qualified. But Schwartz refused to withdraw his support from a friend, his white accountant and golf partner who frequently accompanies Schwartz to USC football games. Schwartz’s friend won the election, angering black legislators.

“I think black representation on the boards of universities is an idea whose time has come,” Schwartz, who represents a district less than seventeen percent black, said afterward. “But I’m not willing to let it come with my good friend Sam Benson as the sacrificial lamb.”

Schwartz makes no bones about his other friends and loyalties, boasting of his close relationships with state business leaders. In 1981, he was the Chamber’s “Legislator of the Year,” awarded the honor at a three-day, all expenses paid party for the General Assembly at Myrtle Beach.

In early 1983, Schwartz emerged as an outspoken critic of Riley’s attempt to reform the state income tax system, which would have cut taxes for anyone making less than $22,000 annually–and increased taxes for those making more.

By late 1983, Schwartz joined Lt. Gov. Mike Daniel to tour the state trumpeting the virtues of the constitutional state tax and spending limitation, blocked by Gressette’s opposition and only lukewarm support over the years from Riley.

Why would the speaker of the House of Representatives

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barnstorm the state to promote a piece of legislation weakening the authority of the House he leads?

Critics point to Schwartz’s obligations to those who salvaged his office for him in the fall of 1982.

Schwartz faced the toughest reelection campaing of any House Speaker in memory from a political neophyte named Jim Ross.

Ross, a retired military officer, became the lightning rod for Sumter voters offended by Schwartz’s wholehearted support for a new $600 million Union Camp paper mill to be built on a site at the mouth of the state’s Santee-Cooper lake system. Santee-Cooper, a world-reknowned bass fishing outlet, stretches seventy-five miles through the heart of the state and attracts millions in tourism, fishing and tax revenues each year. Union Camp, a paper products manufacturer based in New Jersey, operates mills in Savannah, Georgia, and Franklin, Virginia where fish kills and offensive odors have been linked to the plants.

The Union Camp fight quickly became a classic of jobs-versus-environment confrontation. When Schwartz refused to join activists demanding that the US Army Corps of Engineers order a full-scale Environmental Impact Statement, a normally routine gesture to assess the damage a mill might do, Ross’s campaign was born.

Eventually, Schwartz defeated Ross by a 115-vote margin out of nearly 4,500 votes cast, in a race filled with so many election irregularities that the Sumter Democratic Executive Committee ordered a new election. Later, SC Democratic Party officials, including many of Schwartz’s long-time allies, overruled the county party and certified Schwartz as the winner.

But Schwartz’s victory wasn’t easy or cheap. To win, Schwartz set a new spending record for a local House race, raising and spending $34,075 to attract just 2,281 votes in a race for a $11,000-a-year job. Thousands of dollars were contributed by the state businesses whose interests Schwartz frequently supports in Columbia: realtors, banks, electric and gas companies (including some which don’t serve his district), and textile companies.

When Ross, who spent only nine thousand dollars questioned the acceptance of such donations, Schwartz told reporters it was “most flattering” that business had enough confidence in him to back his re-election.

“I don’t see any conflict of interest in taking campaign contributions from utilities,” said Schwartz. “I had an extremely close race and I would have hated to test the waters without it (money).”

In early 1984, Schwartz became the primary opponent of Riley’s latest plan–a pure one-cent sales tax to benefit public education in South Carolina.

“He’s right in their pocket,” said a Riley aide of Schwartz’s as a spokeman for business. Schwartz faces another bitter primary fight against Ross this summer, a confrontation which could turn into another cause celebre for corporations and political action committees.

Another politician who was the beneficiary of business largess in 1982 was the current Democratic lieutenant governor, Mike Daniel. Similar business support in 1986, which appears likely, could propel Daniel into the governor’s office for eight years.

Daniel, a forty-four-year-old Gaffney attorney and the son of a loom repairman, emerged as the favorite son of the state’s textile-and-banking establishment as he spent over $500,000 winning the $34,000-a-year lieutenant governor’s job two years ago. A lieutenant governor in South Carolina has few official duties, but it has historically proved to be a key stepping stone to the governorship.

Daniel is already seen as the business cartel’s designated candidate in the crowded field seeking the governorship in 1986, a race most state voters haven’t given one thought to. It’s an informal endorsement, of course, but it could be crucial with up to a dozen men who would be governor already itching to announce. The 1986 winner will likely serve for eight years, since South Carolina’s new gubernatorial succession law (as have others across the South) has left incumbent governors virtually unbeatable for reelection.

What kind of governor would Daniel be?

His record shows that, politically, he will make no waves. And his 1982 campaign was a textbook example of how valuable well-heeled friends in high places can be in a close, hard-fought statewide election.

Daniel’s chief opponent for the job was former State Sen. Tom Turnipseed, a controversial, confrontational and maverick populist and an outspoken critic for ten years of the state’s business establishment especially utility com-

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panies and big banks. (See Southern Changes, August/September, 1982)

Daniel’s campaign was built on a foundation of business support. At cocktail party, after drop-in, after reception, Daniel raised over $200,000 for the race in the early stages. Included was a thousand-dollar-per-person cocktail party at Columbia’s exclusive Palmetto Club, with the invitations signed by Bankers Trust Chairman Hootie Johnson and Citizens and Southern Bank Chairman Hugh Chapman, member of a prominent state textile family.

Still, Turnipseed led the first primary with forty-four percent of the vote, drawing much of his support from among South Carolina’s black voters, who make up nearly thirty percent of the registered voters. Daniel finished second with thirty-one percent of the vote in a five-candidate field. Though Turnipseed seemed poised for victory, he lacked the fifty percent majority needed to avoid a runoff. Daniel and his supporters used the two-week interim to launch a television-and-telephone campaign portraying Turnipseed as an irresponsible and dangerous radical.

It took money to organize and Daniel was able to raise it. In ten days, Daniel raised at least $101,000, nearly half as much as he raised in the previous four-months of the campaign. Much of the money, about $70,000, arrived in gifts of a thousand dollars or more, including gifts of up to $10,000 from Riegel Textile Corp., $6,000 from Springs Mills, $5,000 from Greenwood Mills, and $4,000 from Liberty Corp., a Greenville-based insurance and holding company whose board chairman, Francis Hipp, is a prime mover in the Chamber of Commerce.

One of Daniel’s phone banks was based at the State Chamber of Commerce headquarters in Banker’s Trust Tower in Columbia, provided free by Reese, who says now he’d do the same thing anytime to defeat Turnipseed. Seventy-nine fulltime callers contacted registered voters in key white, upper-middle-class voters, including Republicans, with the message: “Can I tell Mike he can count on your vote Tuesday to help us stop Tom Turnipseed?”

Turnipseed, meanwhile, was able to raise little money for the Democratic runoff, and depended on the momentum from his first primary, when he led Daniel by 39,000 votes and swept thirty-nine of the state’s forty-six counties.

But it wasn’t enough. The new strategy–backed up by fresh money–turned the election around. Daniel, who other House members could never remember sponsoring or leading a major piece of legislation through the chamber, won the nomination by eight-thousand votes.

“They just bought the election, that’s the only thing you can say,” said Turnipseed. “It was extremely negative politics, and if you’ve got the money you can get the message out to defeat anyone.”

In the general election, running against maverick Republican State Sen. Norma Russell, Daniel’s advisors attempted to flesh out his fuzzy image by linking him to reform legislation.

At one press conference, Daniel called for stricter limits and tougher disclosure rules for lobbyists working the State House. Later, Daniel advocated more stringent guidelines for the burial of nuclear waste in the state at nuclear dumps in Barnwell, SC.

But late in the campaign, when Daniel’s advisors decided he needed an extra push from television advertising to ensure victory against Russell, Daniel borrowed $100,000 from Bankers’s Trust. His co-signers were several veteran State House lobbyists, including one who represents the nuclear waste dump.

Daniel won the general election easily. Since then, Daniel has joined Schwartz to become the two primary elected officials pushing the Chamber’s tax and spending limitation in the General Assembly and to the public.

Records show his $100,000 campaign debt from ’82 is gradually disappearing. During late 1983, while Daniel toured the state for the Chamber pushing the amendment, he received thousand dollar contributions from Hootie Johnson, Hamrick Mills, Burlington Industries, and Spartan Mills Chairman Walter Montgomery, and dozens of smaller contributions from textile executives, bankers, and their political action committees.

Some of the legislative and electoral activism by business groups is considerably more circumspect than the Schwartz and Daniel campaigns, or the red-white-and-blue conventions the Chamber of Commerce sponsors each autumn for legislators at one of South Carolina’s coastal resorts.

But it is a testament to the level of influence achieved by the Chamber and allied business groups that on some key General Assembly votes they have been quietly able to win over the most skeptical of enemies.

Take the General Assembly’s Legislative Black Caucus, for example.

Most of the state’s nineteen black House members are suspicious of big business and its expanding role of influence in state affairs. In part, that’s because the state’s business-and-banking community is run by an almost exclusively white executive power structure. And, in part it’s because business’s legislative agenda, including tax breaks, means that other groups–including the poor–end up paying more. And in South Carolina the poor are often also black.

“I think the influence of the special (business) interest groups has increased substantially in the ten years since I got here,” said state Rep. John Matthews, forty-four, a school principal and farmer who is chairman of the Black Caucus. “I don’t think it’s good for the state. What happens is, they (business groups) don’t tend to look at the state as a whole, from a balanced point of view. They only look at it from whatever position they are pushing.

Yet when the Chamber and its allies speak, even some black legislators tend to listen.

In April, when the business lobby’s constitutional tax and spending limit package came up for a key House vote, it was expected to attract little, if any, black support. But when the votes were counted, six members of the caucus voted for the amendment on second reading and it passed by eighty-three to twenty-four, one vote more than the eighty-two votes (two-thirds of the House) needed for a constitutional amendment. Even Matthews, who was absent on second reading, voted for it on the routine third reading despite his reservations.

“I was not totally sold on the idea,” said Matthews later. “I still have mixed emotions about it.”

Matthews and other blacks deny it, but one reason for

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the unexpected and ultimately critical shift of black votes on the issue could have been lobbying by the state’s large banks on another, unrelated program.

The day before the House vote on spending limits, a black lobbyist arrived in the House to meet with the Black Caucus.

The lobbyist was Moses Clarkson, a well-known black businessman and chairman of the SC Department of Health and Environmental Control, who also lobbies for the Chamber of Commerce on certain projects.

Clarkson was there to explain a ten-million-dollar loan program for minority-owned businesses in South Carolina, a proposal being considered by a group of SC bankers.

Both Matthews and Clarkson denied any connection between discussions of the loan program and how black members voted on the constitutional amendment (which must still pass the SC Senate this year to go on the ballot).

But one member of the caucus told reporters there was definitely a quid pro quo.

“It was a bone being tossed out . . . come out and help us and we’ll sweeten the pot on the other side,” one legislator told The State newspaper of Columbia, saying Clarkson had “indicated what could open on the horizon, depending on the outcome of the (spending limit) vote.

Why would seven black legislators vote for a constitutional amendment which critics say could freeze or cut social program which have greatly benefited SC minorities over the last fifteen years?

“Some of them just thought it was an idea whose time had come,” explained Matthews recently. “Some thought it may work.”

Of course, neither hardball lobbying nor passing out campaign donations to politicians is anything new for business–in South Carolina or any other state.

For years, big utilities such as Duke Power, SC Electric and Gas, and Carolina Power and Light gave not only campaign donations, but also kept many legislators who were also lawyers on healthy retainers. This practice is now largely abandoned, mostly because of pressure from Turnipseed and other activists in the early 1970s.

But the size of the current campaign gifts, the increasingly formal network collecting and disbursing the donations, and the level of access and influence in the General Assembly this organized activism seems to be giving business, is unparalleled.

A study of campaign contributions to members of the SC House in 1981-82, conducted by University of South Carolina-Aiken political science professor Robert Botsch, found that eighty-three percent of all campaign funds given to winning SC House candidates in 1982 came from interest groups–business, lawyers, or health care groups with a direct interest in legislation.

“There are virtually no labor groups, no consumer groups, no environmental groups in South Carolina,” said Botsch. “And I think the biggest surprise to me was no agricultural groups. Put all the business and corporate contributions together and it amounts to $270,000.” Botsch’s figures don’t include donations from private individuals who are major corporate chiefs, such as Milliken, who prefer to give under their own names.

“In effect, you have a very conservative estimate of the amount of money given by business groups (eighty-three percent),” said Botsch. “And it’s still by far the most of any state I’ve ever heard of. One study found fifty-four percent in Arizona. That’s about the highest previous figure from interest groups.”

There are contributing questions about the motives driving business to assume their new role in politics in South Carolina.

Businessmen, particularly professional spokesperson like Executive Director Reese of the Chamber, insist industrialists are interested in expanding the state’s shaky economy and lifting the quality of life in the state for everyone.

However, critics, including former Greenville mayor and state Development Board Chairman Max Heller, an Austrian immigrant and self-made millionaire, describe the new role of business as one of self-interest and obstruction to prosperity.

“They (the state Chamber of Commerce) have been an advocate of tax reduction. They have been an advocate of greater incentives. They have been an advocate of investment tax credits. They have been advocates of reducing taxes . . . regardless of what they are,” Heller, now retired and living in Miami Beach, told the Greenville News last year. “To the best of my knowledge, they have never helped to bring an industry in.”

Industry’s role in obstructing the recruitment of new business is an old but largely untold story in South Carolina.

On the presidential campaign trail earlier this year, US Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings of South Carolina talked about his experiences as governor (from 1959-63), telling audiences he not only had to fight poverty and undereducation, but the state’s business establishment as well, in finding and persuading new industry to come to a job-starved state. It’s a story Hollings has rarely, if ever, told publicly in South Carolina.

Recently, when the Japanese auto firm Mazda selected Greenville as one of three possible sites for its first US auto plant, some upstate businessmen were upset. Eugene Stone, the seventy-seven-year-old patriarch of Stone Manufacturing Company of Greenville, warned of unions, a

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higher wage base, and a shortage of workers if the four-thousand employee plant arrived in town.

“We wouldn’t like to see a big union plant coming in here in a big way,” said Stone. “We’d much prefer our boys and girls not to have a union.” Stone Manufacturing is active enough in SC politics that one of its executives, Tom Marchant, is a member of the General Assembly and spends much of his time in Columbia.

Some members of the General Assembly, though unwilling to criticize the Chamber and its business brethren publicly, say many executives don’t understand the function of government.

“They say they want to run the state like a business, but how many businesses have to worry about 400,000 people on food stamps?” asks one legislator privately. “The functions of government are very broad. You can’t look at it like a profit-and-loss statement. We’re dealing with human lives, and a lot of our people are untrained, illiterate and losing out.”

For years, surveys have ranked South Carolina’s business climate among the best in the country, but Chamber officials continually cite surveys and their research showing the state faltering.

Recently, State Senator Tom Smith drew up a list of at least $115 million in business tax exemptions already on the books in South Carolina. Included were five-year exemptions from property taxes for new and expanding industries, exemptions on certain inventories not sold on retail level, exemptions for pollution-control equipment, fuels used in production, and equipment used in mining and quarrying, and many others. Up to $5.6 billion statewide is exempt from county property taxes, according to Smith, costing counties thousands of dollars.

Smith, standing outside the Senate chamber, had to excuse himself quickly and get back to the floor for a debate.

Inside, the Senate was considering repeal of the state tax. On retail inventories. Merchants and business groups said it would give the state an advantage over North Carolina and Georgia in recruiting new industry.

Business lobbyists have been after the General Assembly for years to approve the exemption. This year, it looked like it just might pass.

Jim Walser, thirty-four, has been a member of The Charlotte Observer’s bureau in Columbia since 1979. From 1972 until l977, he was managing editor of Osceola Newsweekly, also based in Columbia.

Voting Rights in Edgefield County

By Laughlin Mcdonald

Vol. 6, No. 3, 1984, pp. 13-14

Edgefield is a small, rural county in South Carolina, lapped along its western boundary by the stately Savannah River. Local residents work on farms, pick the peaches that ripen each year in the hard, often savage, heat of early summer or drive to nearby Aiken and Augusta for regular city jobs. The principal town and county seat is also called Edgefield. On most days it appears deserted, except for a granite monument in the middle of the town square that keeps a mute but perpetual vigil for the Confederate dead. A handful of stores just off the square advertise U-Need-A-Biscuits, dry goods and second-hand shoes. The trade, however, is indifferent.

Across the way stands the historic old courthouse, the shutters drawn tightly against its graceful floor-to-ceiling-length windows. Upstairs in the quiet and musty chamber of the main courtroom, faded photographs and oil paintings of Edgefield’s most famous native sons hang from the walls in solemn and numerous procession–Thomas Hugh Wardlaw, the author of South Carolina’s Articles of Secession, Preston Smith Brooks, the Congressman who knocked Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner insensible to the floor of the Senate with a gutta percha cane for making an anti-slavery speech and unfavorable comments about a favorite uncle, General Martin Witherspoon Gary, the famed “Bald Eagle of the Confederacy,” B. R. “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, a reconstruction era terrorist who later led the movement for “legal” disfranchisement of South Carolina blacks, ten governors, any number of congressmen and judges, and Senator Strom Thurmond, who, during most of his political career, was foremost in the fight for white supremacy and against effective civil right laws.

Edgefield County, taking a chapter out of its rich Confederate past, recently returned to confrontation and open racial controversy when it refused to comply with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by submitting for preclearance its 1966 law adopting at-large elections. Jurisdictions such as Edgefield which have long, aggravated histories of discrimination in voting are required by Section 5 of the Act to preclear any new election practice, either by submitting it to the Department of Justice or by bringing a law suit in the federal courts for the District of Columbia and proving that the practice does not have a discriminatory purpose or effect. Edgefield refused to do either, despite the fact that the attorney General notified local officials that the county’s at-large elections were unenforceable.

Prior to 1966, Edgefield’s county government was appointed by the Governor upon the recommendation of the local legislative delegation. This system of appointed government had been established throughout the state by Tillman when he was Governor in 1894 as a way of insuring that blacks could not elect locally their own representatives. The appointed system worked just as Tillman envisioned it would–no black ever served on Edgefield’s county government. The appointed system was changed in 1966, however, in part because of reapportionment and the likelihood that Edgefield would lose resident members of its legislative delegation by being paired with a more populous neighboring county.

The new form of government established for Edgefield in 1966 was a three member council elected at-large. Although the new procedures were clearly covered by Section 5, the county made no effort to comply with the Voting Rights Act. Blacks subsequently ran for the county council on numerous occasions, but because a majority of Edgefield’s voters are white, and because voting is strictly

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along racial lines, no black was ever able to win a council seat. Indeed, no black in this century has ever won a contested at-large election in Edgefield.

In 1971 Edgefield amended its 1966 law to enlarge the county council from three to five members. This time it requested the Attorney General to approve the voting change. It did not, however, request preclearance of the earlier 1966 legislation, nor did it indicate that at-large elections were a post-Voting Rights Act election change nor that an appointed system of local government had ever been in effect. The Attorney General, after reviewing the increase in size of the council, concluded that it did not have a discriminatory purpose or effect and granted preclearance.

In December of 1980, blacks in Edgefield learned for the first time that the county was using at-large elections illegally after a search of documents by the Department of Justice turned up the fact that the 1966 Act had never been submitted for review, and after the Attorney General wrote local officials a formal “please submit” letter. When the county refused to make a submission, a group of local blacks brought suit asking that the federal district court enjoin any further use of at-large voting until the county complied with the Voting Rights Act.

The district court dismissed the Edgefield County blacks’ complaint, concluding that the Attorney General–despite his assertions to the contrary,–had in fact precleared the 1966 Act, and, moreover, that the legal effect of -preclearing the 1971 increase in size amendment was to preclear the underlying 1966 Act adopting at-large elections. On February 21, 1984 a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court disagreed and reversed. McCain v. Lybrand, 104 S. Ct. 1037 (1984).

The Court held that the Attorney General had not considered and precleared at-large elections in Edgefield County when he precleared the increase in size of the council in 1971, and that there was no such thing as constructive, or legally implied, preclearance. According to the Court, the Voting Rights Act requires that covered jurisdictions submit their election law changes to the Attorney General “in some unambiguous and recordable manner…with a request for his consideration pursuant to the Act.” Edgefield had done neither.

Edgefield has not been alone in failing to comply with the preclearance requirements of Section 5. From 1965 through 1968, neither Mississippi, Louisiana nor North Carolina submitted a single voting change for Section 5 review. Alabama submitted one in 1965, but none for the next three years. Georgia made only one submission during the first three years of the Act, and Virginia made none. Submissions have increased sharply in recent years (the current rate is approximately 1,000 submissions a month from all covered jurisdictions), but surveys by the Department of Justice, the Southern Regional Council and others reveal that Section 5 jurisdictions are still using hundreds of uncleared voting practices, such as Edgefield’s at-large elections.

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Edgefield County case closes a possible loop hole to the many jurisdictions which continue to violate Section 5. No longer can they claim that once they precleared any amendment to an unsubmitted voting practice, the unsubmitted practice itself was also precleared by implication. A contrary ruling would have allowed covered jurisdictions to play a kind of shell game with Section 5 by enacting innocuous amendments to fundamentally discriminatory voting practices, and contending that preclearance of the former constituted approval of the latter.

McCain v. Lybrand may be a break with the racial and political traditions to places such as Edgefield where blacks have been excluded from the electorate and where the Voting Rights Act has been ignored, but it is a positive step in the direction of enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment and realizing its promise of equal political participation for all citizens.

Laughlin McDonald is director of the Southern Regional Office of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Roadside Theater

By Sharon Hatfield

Vol. 6, No. 3, 1984, pp. 14-18

The small room at the Brumley Gap Coon Hunter’s Club in Poor Valley, Virginia was so cold that the slide projector had to warm up before the show could begin. But the coal stove and the rapidly growing crowd soon filled the room with warmth. By the time the first lines of Red Fox/Second Hangin’ were spoken, the chill had long been forgotten.

Framed against the projected photographs of nineteenth-century Appalachia, the actors began spinning a tale of hardship and violence in the early coalfields. They told of Bad Henry Adams, a man who shot and killed his neighbor without rising from the supper table. (The quarrel, they said, was over a dog.)

“There was an old man sitting right up front, and he looked bored as hell,” recalls actor Don Baker. “I was determined to get some kind of response out of him, so I said, ‘You’re Bad Henry Adams, pretend you’re eating.’ I looked real menacing at him and pointed my fingers like a gun. When I did that, he just put his hand in his pocket and whipped out a knife. I jumped back and said, ‘Okay, you don’t have to if you don’t want to.’ After the show I found out he was stone cold deaf.”

Roadside is a folk theater that draws on the heritage of the Cumberland Mountains in southern Appalachia. It takes its art to people who may never have been inside a theater. On that particular night at the Coon Hunter’s Club, Roadside’s benefit performance helped pay lawyers who were representing Brumley Gap citizens in their fight to block a proposed pump-storage electric project in their community. The citizens eventually prevailed and were able to prevent their bottomland farms from being flooded to make way for the project.

“Grassroots art means trying to have people not only be moved aesthetically by the quality of the art presented, but to encourage people to get up and work from their own resources,” says Dudley Cocke, director of Roadside Theater. “Art should encourage people to do something with their lives and communities. That transformation is an important factor in art.”

This sense of possibility that Roadside imparts to its audiences has carried the small theater company far from its home base in the coalfields of Eastern Kentucky and Southwest Virginia to Off-Broadway, Lincoln Center, the

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Midwest, California and rural Nevada, and to a host of settings in the South. They have often found urban populations as receptive to their improvisational storytelling as people who have grown up in the rural, oral tradition.

A region abundant in folkways and myth as well as in coal and timber, Appalachia carries an image of backwardness and ignorance due to what outsiders have written and said about it. In an area where over half the land in many counties is still owned by corporations based elsewhere (some as far away as London), exploitation of natural resources and native people has been an all too common occurrence since the late 1800s. Roadside’s original full-length piece, Red Fox/Second Hangin’, for example, tells the story of the collision of ways of life that led to a legal lynching in Wise, Virginia, during the country’s first coal boom in the 1890s.

When Roadside founder Don Baker returned to his native Wise County from a job as arts counselor in Washington, DC, in 1971, he did not encounter the pristine environment often sentimentalized in novels about Appalachia. Cars, electricity, radio and TV had been present for decades, but a more recent technology–strip mining–was on the verge of an unprecedented and unencumbered heydey. Another coal boom was underway with it would come another alteration of both the social and actual landscape.

Roadside Theater’s director, Cocke, believes that despoilation of the land goes hand in hand with the uprooting of indigenous cultures in southern Appalachia. “It’s a whole process of impersonalization.” Perhaps it was this sense of loss that led Don Baker and his fellow actors to seek out the richness of the past through the oral tradition instead of more contemporary, conventional forms. “We tried to figure out what kind of theater made sense here,” Baker explains. “We had neither the time nor the inclination for costumes, or elaborate staging but we all had storytelling in common.”

The framework for Roadside Theater’s existence was already ID place when Baker returned to the coalfields. Appalshop (The Appalachian Film Workshop) was a collective set up in Whitesburg, Kentucky, by the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1969 to train mountain people for media careers. Paradoxically, there were almost no media jobs available in the region. After OEO funds dried up in 1972, Appalshop secured grants from private foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. Today, Appalshop’s media center in Whitesburg is home to a record company and recording studio, film and video artists, photographers, the theater company, a central administrative corps and a soon-to-be-completed community radio station.

Roadside was formed in 1974 from the Appalachia Actors’ Workshop, which had performed traditional plays like Peter Pan and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Instead of using established scripts, Roadside chose to draw its resources directly from the collective memories of the community. The young theater company acknowledged that conventional theater seldom reaches the hollows, farm communities and mining camps that make up so much of central Appalachia; and when it does, it makes little impression. Roadside chose to build upon the strong theatrical heritage of the mountains–the church services, music and storytelling.

What emerged was a style of storytelling that did not depend on props, costumes or staging effects. The human voice, magnified by two or three storytellers speaking simultaneously, could reach an audience of five-hundred with the same power as when it entertained a few neighbors on a summer evening. “We began by telling traditional tales that we had all grown up hearing,” explains Baker. “We told these tales together, batting lines back and forth, saying some phrases in unison, feeding off each other’s rhythms.”

Roadside’s first show was a collection of stories called Mountain Tales. The stories combines familiar Appalachian settings and music with archetypes found in folk literature throughout the world: Mutsmeg and her two wicked sisters (similar to Snow White and her wicked stepkin); Wicked John and the Devil (a humorous Faustian tale) and the Jack or quest tales — all contain symbols identifiable to many people.

“We were in Zuni three days,” recalls actor and writer Ron Short about a recent Roadside visit to the Zuni pueblo in New Mexico. “There, our stories became real. Many of them deal with hunting, tending sheep, spirits, giants. The Indian kids understood every bit of that. We told the story of the swamp snake, and after the show they calmly showed us a picture of theirs. On the other hand, kids in Arlington, Virginia, for example, would say, ‘That’s impossible, that snake died millions of years ago.”

“Kids in places like Arlington have been deprived of the chance to believe in myth,” agrees Cocke. “That’s why they turn to figures like ET. People like myth and need it. Our mountain tales, like those of the Native Americans, are mythological.”

Roadside’s second project was to script an original fulllength production in the mobile, popular form they had developed with Mountain Tales. The result, Red Fox/Second Hangin’, is a departure from the whimsy of

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Mountain Tales to what might be called revisionist history at its best. Don Baker had long heard tales of M.B. “Doc” Taylor, a preacher and former US marshal! who was the second of seven men hanged in Wise County before 1900. Red Fox, as Taylor was called, was revered by many mountain people but was convicted of murdering an entire family. Baker decided that this was a paradox worth exploring.

In researching the Red Fox story, Baker enlisted the help of Dudley Cocke, a friend from his study days at Washington and Lee University. “We began by reading history books,” says Baker. “It wasn’t until we began interviewing older people who had known Doc Taylor or whose families passed along stories about him, that our research began to differ markedly from the written version. We sensed that in these interviews we were getting closer to the truth.”

Baker and Cocke collected old newspaper clippings, as well as letters and diaries of the period. They spoke with one elderly man who actually witnessed the hanging. The breakthrough came in the attic of the Wise County Courthouse when they found the original transcript of the Red Fox trial. The transcript suggested that the preacher had been framed by powerful men in the burgeoning coal industry.

Using a conversational tone, actors Gary Slemp, Frankie Taylor and Don Baker merge sixty different characters into a gripping detective story. A series of slides made from original photos of Doc Taylor’s life and times gives the story a firm setting, and a ten-minute file segment re-enacts a crucial event.

Like Red Fox/Second Hangin’, the musical Brother Jack also draws from folk memory and old documents. While the title story and several of the songs were written by actor Ron Short, other tales were adapted by Baker from material collected within fifty miles of Roadside’s home by the Federal Writer’s Project in the 1930s. In Brother Jack, storytellers Angelyn DeBord, Tom Bledsoe and Short spin yarns alone and in unison, trade-off lines and sing to banjo and fiddle accompaniment. The mood changes from that of “acting a fool” in a wrestling story to one of quiet drama in the tales of murder and coal mining disasters. A sense of the despair and fatalism that sometimes pervades mountain life is offset by the protagonist Jack (the archetypal Jack of Jack and the Beanstalk), who is always “wishing for something better.”

“The whole concept behind Brother Jack is how we in the mountains got here,” says Baker. “We talk about death, about men and women, about the Civil War–and we’ve tried to deal with them in a lot of different ways.” The play also explores the perpetual question of human purpose. “We use religion, prayer, mystical stuff, even jokes to try to understand it, so we have a good time. But right in the middle of the good times, something taps us on the shoulder and says, ‘Hey, you can’t forget’.”

Roadside’s fourth major production, South of the Mountain, premiered in October 1982 at the Regional Organization of Theatres South (ROOTS) festival in Atlanta and enjoyed a three-week run at the Dance Theatre Workshop in New York City in September 1983. In this musical, author Ron Short depicts his boyhood world in Dickenson County, Virginia, through original songs and the reflections of his family.

A common thread which runs through Roadside’s productions is a search for cultural identity. In the words of Short, the 1980s are “a time of conflict” for many ethnic groups in this country. “Like here in Appalachia, people are asking, ‘Should we mainstream? Should we change the way we talk or think?'”

In South of the Mountain, Short deals with these questions directly as he explores the choices that individuals must make when their society changes from an agriculturally-based one to an industrial, coal-mining community. One New York drama critic complained that questions like these are no longer valid in today’s modern world. In contrast, Short recalls being overwhelmed after the performances by people from the audiences who could relate. “The second generation Italian people were saying to me, ‘This is the story of my life’,” Short says. “the hillbilly thing was less important.”

In April, Roadside toured several predominantly Navajo communities in southern Utah on a Western States Art Foundation tour sponsored by the Utah Rural Arts Consortium. In the West, Cocke and Short were amazed by parallels between the Native American cultures and their own rural Southern one. In the Indian villages the actors found a strong affinity for the land, an oral history tradition, and conflicts between old and new.

In the Native American communities, says Cocke, “There’s a wide deep gulf between the traditional way and the modern way. Two seemingly irreconcilable ways of

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being. The two tracks go parallel but it’s a no-man’s land in between. I was sitting in a house waiting for an ancient religious dance to begin, and ever so often out the door I’d hear bells and see a dancer or two running by to join his group. Directly the drumming started, and in the corner I noticed that Love Boat was on TV. The program never looked so strange.”

The tour was perhaps a learning experience for both visitors and hosts. Some of the Roadside cast members, with their long beards, were objects of curiosity to be sure. Actor Tom Bledsoe, who sports a red beard and long blond hair, was the object of some good-natured teasing from Indian children who thought he looked like a band member of ZZ Top. But beyond that, the Roadside cast may have been quite unlike most Anglo people the Native Americans had seen, an example of a possible bridge between the modern and the traditional. “After all,” notes Cocke, “we were white people doing something between the two extremes.”

In talking with some of the teachers at Montezuma Creek, Short learned a truth about his own art. “They were wondering about the possibility of developing their own kind of Appalshop. The great conflict was how do they cross over from that religious all-sense and tell their story so it still has meaning. I had to ask this question of myself and my work too.”

During the past year Roadside has enjoyed the artistic fellowship of other regional theater companies who are attempting to maintain a sense of cultural identity. Roadside was a part of Tell Me a Story, Sing Me a Song, a touring performance festival which included the Free Southern Theater from New Orleans, A Traveling Jewish Theater from San Francisco and El Theatro Campesino from San Juan Bautista, California. Through their use of indigenous storytelling and music, and by re-examining their people’s history, the four companies have produced some of the past decade’s most exciting original American theater.

In the spring of 1983, the four groups performed simultaneously in the San Franciso Bay area. Last December, the joint tour included a festival at Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Alabama, produced by Josephine Ayers, a pest producer of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. The show also traveled to Roadside’s home base in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and the groups will probably collaborate on future tours.

In bringing their art to a large, non-theater-going audience, Roadside has spent nearly ten years on the road. The company maintains a schedule of two hundred performances and workshops annually, as well as a summer tent tour of coal camps and back hollows. Many of these are one-day stands.

For most of its existence, Roadside has had no resident theater, instead rehearsing in church halls, living rooms or even outdoors. According to Cocke, the peripatetic lifestyle has given Roadside an uncanny ability to size up an audience and set the tone accordingly. “You can imagine that some of the groups we run into have no clue who we are,” he says. “But the idea has always been to go with the space we find ourselves in and to meet the audience more than halfway.”

Coupled with the rigors of the traveling life is the need for Even with the opening of the 160-seat Appalshop theater in 1982, the theater-going audience in the Whitesburg area is so small that the company could never hope to survive on ticket sales alone. Government grants play a large part in keeping Roadside afloat.

In Lee County, Virginia, a man auctioned off a cow and used the proceeds to help pay for the performance. Roadside was able to match the cow’s sale price with a state arts grant.

“Theater is losing ground nationally,” observes Roadside’s director, “and some smaller theaters are falling by the way. We just keep trying to hold on. We’re like a company with just one car (in this case a blue Ford van), while other larger companies have a fleet of limos. They may lose their limos because they can’t pay for them, but we keep plugging along with our one car.”

Finances have played a large part in Roadside’s decision to tour beyond Appalachia. The actors reject the notion that one must leave the mountains “to be somebody” but they know the value of media exposure and interaction with other professionals. “Touring outside the region wasn’t necessarily what we wanted to do at first,” explains Cocke, “but we made the decision to do so in 1976 or 1977. We had to get some stamp of approval before we could convince the national funding agencies–and ironically, the even less flexible state agencies–that we did qualify. We’d still like to find a way to travel less.”

Roadside’s five full-time and eight part-time employees form a community that stretches over the three counties and two states in which they live. Touring is sometimes a family affair. Eight-month-old Jubel Slone has been traveling with actress-mother Angelyn De Bord since he was eight weeks old. A full-time staff at Roadside’s Whitesburg office handles bookings, mailings and fundraising. For the most part, the company is traditionally taught. Roadside tries to keep a reservoir of trained talent that can be called upon for various productions. Writers Short and Baker are both currently working on new plays.

A criticism of Roadside’s work voiced by some political activists is the charge that the shows aren’t political enought.

“There are a lot of ways to get at politics,” responds Cocke. “Some would say a Zuni dance isn’t political. Much of Roadside’s work comes from the perspective of a whole culture, way of life.”

Adds Short, “Our work takes something as fragile as cultural identity and places it in a public forum.” Short says his work has been termed apolitical because it does not openly advocate social change. “I feel that a political statement, like life, is a whole lot broader than that,” he says: “It’s an exploration of human values that I’m most interested in. In watching a play which explores these values, people are free to get their own ideas.”

One way in which the theater company is exerting considerable influence is through their work in the nation’s school systems. “Taking it to the schools is just like taking it to the streets,” observes Jack Wright, an early Roadside member.

The actors are committed to the idea that a good performance doesn’t end with the applause. Cocke notes: “One criticism of arts programs in general is that they don’t have a conception of the more basic values they’re trying to promote beyond the immediate performance. I’m interested

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in things that go beyond immediate aesthetic value. We hope the people who see our shows will gain a sense of possibility about their own lives and communities.”

In many of the school tours, the ability of the actors to ignite this sense of worth in one’s own heritage is evident. A teacher from Chincoteague, an island off the coast of Virginia that was isolated from the mainland until 1930, wrote to say that she hoped Roadside could return to “help the students appreciate and develop the marvelous supply of tales and remembrances in their own area. Our area is very rich in this valuable resources, but there have been only isolated efforts to explore and appreciate what we have. It would be a wonderful experience for our entire community to have someone direct efforts to explore our own folk history.”

According to Cocke, Roadside would like to develop the financial resources to be able to embark on these community treasure hunts for two or three weeks at a time in different localities. He notes that funding sources generally lean more toward the twenty-shows-in-twenty-four days tour than to supporting a long term residency in one community.

A climate of uncertain financial support places pressure on the company to come up with consistently good productions. While this may explain Roadside’s good track record, Cocke says it “doesn’t encourage chance taking with new writing. We know some things we’d like to try, like a summer works-in-progress festival to encourage local people to write for us, but we just are not in a financial position to do so.”

One indication of an outreach toward new writers is a play opening in May at the Appalshop theater in Whitesburg. Drama students at Whitesburg High School will present In Ya Blood, which is based on a film by the same name which was produced by Appalshop in 1973. Under the direction of Roadside’s Jeff Hawkins, the students wrote an original script about the choices young people must make in deciding whether to leave the mountains or stay and face the limited opportunities for employment.

After a decade of writing and production, another challenge facing Roadside is one which confronts many independent artists across the country: how does one gain access to the media? While the company has succeeded in keeping a busy touring schedule, it has yet to reach a wide radio and TV audience. Both Red Fox and Brother Jack have been recorded as radio serials, but both have yet to find a buyer. Similarly, a video presentation of Red Fox was completed in 1983, but is still awaiting nationwide distribution.

“What we’re facing with TV–I mean all of Appalshop’s work–is that the PBS system is not responding to independent artists,” says Roadside’s director. “It’s very difficult for film and video people to get their work on PBS and get paid for it. It’s a political problem because our message generally is contrary to the message that has been selected for viewing. Also, there is a certain style that producers getting the money have figured out. But what PBS is forgetting is that audiences will respond to content.”

“The gulf between traditional and modern life is not just a concern of a particular ethnic group like the Native Americans,” Cocke maintains. “Appalachian people are struggling with the same things as people in other parts of the country. More than anything, it’s a question of finding a path through life.”

Sharon Hatfield is a free lance writer who lives in Virginia.

Morality and the MX

By Claude Sitton

Vol. 6, No. 3, 1984, pp. 18, 20

Self-appointed guardians of the nation’s morals on the radical right usually fall silent when the arms control issue comes up. I have in mind the Reagan administration’s supporters of moral majoritarian stripe–the Jerry Falwells, the Jesse Helmses and the like.

How can these radicals work themselves into a lather over food stamps, sex on TV and abortion while ignoring a nuclear arms race that could cut short humanity’s earthly tenancy and turn the world into a cinder? Their moral priorities seem a bit skewed.

In May, the US House of Representatives approved construction of fifteen MX missiles to be added to twenty-one already being built. Never mind that our nuclear arsenal, as is true of that of the Soviet Union, has tripled since 1969, when each nation had enough firepower to destroy the other no matter which launched the first strike.

The events that could suck the two countries into a nuclear conflict grow more common. Those of recent weeks suggest how real the danger is.

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The Iranians and Iraqis began a new round of attacks on oil tankers and appear determined to turn the Persian Gulf into a lake of fire. The influential International Institute for Strategic Studies announced in London that US relations with the Soviet Union had sunk to their lowest point since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Hostilities in Central America and US overt and covert involvement there grew apace.

No one has a sure way to halt this rush toward mutual annihilation. President Reagan’s approach hasn’t worked. if anything, it has pushed the world nearer the brink by the massive, and costly, weapons buildup. But an alternative was suggested the other day to by Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, the archbishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Chicago, in a commencement speech at Emory University in Atlanta.

Bernardin headed the informal committee of Catholic bishops last year that issued the pastoral letter “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response.” Unlike the radicals of the political right, he thinks moral purpose has a vital role to play in this area.

To ignore the moral dimension of foreign policy, says the cardinal, is to erode both the religious and constitutional heritage of America. The first provides for moral assessment of public policy through the insights given us by religious pluralism. The second supports such moral values as respect for life and reverence for the law.

“In the past,” says the cardinal, “war was used as a last resort to protect key political values. In our time, the use of nuclear weapons would threaten all our values–political, cultural and human. Such an acknowledgement drives us to the conclusion that the prevention of nuclear war must be given primacy in the political process.”

Bernardin represents no peace-at-any-price faith. Catholics, as he points out, have had a long and painful experience with communism, in Lithuania, Hungary and Poland, for example.

“We cannot be naive,” says the cardinal. “Some cold realism is needed, as we stated in our pastoral letter. But the depth and seriousness of US-Soviet divisions on a whole range of issues should not make us lose perspective concerning a central moral and political truth of our age:

“If nuclear weapons are used, we all lose. There will be no victors, only the vanquished; there will be no calculation of costs and benefits because the costs will run beyond our ability to calculate.”

Bernardin thinks that giving first priority to prevention of use of nuclear weapons requires that arms control be insulated from other US-Soviet differences, an end to the policy of “linkage” pursued by the Reagan administration. Without that separation, he argues rightly that there always will be enough division to block arms control.

No doubt the cardinal shares the concern of the moral majoritarians over sins of the flesh. But his concerns reach far beyond their narrow perspective. Unlike them, Bernardin knows that Americans no longer live in a world in which war can be used as a tool of foreign policy, for that could lead to the most immoral of all acts, the destruction of humankind.

Claude Sitton is editor of the Raleigh News and Observer

Southerners in Congress Save the MX

By Staff

Vol. 6, No. 3, 1984, p. 19

More than a year ago, in May of 1983, when the US House of Representatives and Senate approved flight testing of the MX missile and development work on the Reagan Administration’s latest proposal to base the MX, Representative Les AuCoin (D-Ore) warned his colleagues how difficult it would be to stop production of the missile once any money had begun to be spent. “No strategic weapons system that has ever passed this stage of funding . . . has been permanently cancelled,” he said. With House votes in November of 1983 and in May of 1984, the MX has indeed moved to the production line.

In the November House vote and again this May, no region of the country supported the MX so strongly as did the members of Congress from the eleven Southern states. In both instances, the switching of only a handful of votes would have blocked the MX.

Attempts to stop funding of the MX failed by a vote of 208 to 217 on November 1, 1983 and by a vote of 212 to 218 on May 16, 1984.

Southern members of Congress provided eighty-six votes in support of the MX this May. Fifty-one of the seventy-two House Democrats who supported continued funding were Southern Democrats. Particularly damaging were the votes of six Southern Democrats who had opposed the MX in November, but who switched and supported it in May. North Carolina Democrats Ike Andrews, Tim Valentine and Charlie Rose; South Carolina’s Robin Tallon; Florida’s Claude Pepper; and Ron Coleman of Texas.

“Y” signifies a Yea vote to stop the MX. “N” signifies a Nay vote, in support of the MX. Vote #1 was taken 11/1/1983; vote #2 on 5/16/1984.

ALABAMA	1	2
Bevill (D)	N	N
Dickinson (R)	N	N
Edwards (R)	N	N
Erdreich (D)	N	N
Flippo (D)	N	N
Nichols (D)	N	N
Shelby (D)	N	N
ARKANSAS
Alexander (D)	N	N
Anthony (D)	N	N
Bethune (R)	N	N
Hammerschmidt	Y	Y
FLORIDA
Bennett (D)	Y	Y
Bilirakis (R)	N	N
Chappell (D)	N	N
Fascell (D)	Y	Y
Fuqua (D)	N	N
Gibbons (D)	Y	Y
Hutto (D)	N	N
Ireland (D)	N	N
Lehman, W (D)	Y	Y
Lewis, T (R)	N	N
MacKay (D)	Y	Y
Mack (R)	N	N
McCollum (R)	N	N
Mica (D)	Y	Y
Nelson (D)	N	N
Pepper (D)	Y	N
Shaw (R)	N	Y
Smith, L (D)	Y	Y
Young C (R)	N	N
GEORGIA
Barnard (D)	?	N
Fowler (D)	Y	Y
Gingrich (R)	N	N
Hatcher (D)	N	N
Jenkins (D)	N	Y
Levitas (D)	N	N
Ray (D)	N	N
Rowland (D)	N	N
Thomas, L (D)	N	N
Darden (D)	N	N
LOUISIANA
Boggs (D)	N	Y
Breaux (D)	N	N
Huckaby (D)	N	N
Livingston (D)	N	N
Long, G (D)	Y	Y
Moore (R)	N	N
Roemer (D)	N	N
Tauzin (D)	N	N
MISSISSIPPI
Dowdy (D)	Y	Y
Franklin (R)	N	N
Lott (R)	N	N
Montgomery (D)	N	N
Whitton (D)	Y	Y
NORTH CAROLINA
Andrews (D)	Y	N
Britt (D)	N	N
Broyhill (R)	N	N
Clarke (D)	Y	Y
Hefner (D)	N	N
Jones, W (D)	N	Y
Martin, J (R)	N	N
Neal (D)	N	Y
Rose (D)	Y	N
Valentine (D)	Y	N
Whitley (D)	N	N
SOUTH CAROLINA
Campbell (R)	N	N
Derrick (D)	Y	Y
Hartnett (R)	N	N
Spence (R)	N	N
Spratt (D)	Y	Y
Tallon (D)	Y	N
TENNESSEE
Boner (D)	N	N
Cooper (R)	N	N
Duncan (D)	N	N
Ford (D)	Y	Y
Gore (D)	N	N
Jones, E (D)	N	N
Lloyd (D)	N	N
Quillen (R)	N	N
Sundquist (R)	N	N
TEXAS
Andrews (D)	N	N
Archer (R)	N	N
Bartlett (R)	N	N
Brooks (D)	Y	Y
Bryant (D)	Y	Y
Coleman (D)	Y	N
de la Garza (D)	N	N
Fields (R)	N	N
Frost (D)	N	N
Gonzalez (D)	Y	Y
Gramm (R)	N	N
Hall, R (D)	N	N
Hall, S (D)	N	N
Hance (D)	N	?
Hightower (D)	N	N
Kazen (D)	N	N
Leath (D)	N	N
Leland (D)	Y	Y
Loeffler (R)	N	N
Ortiz (D)	N	N
Patman (D)	N	N
Paul (R)	Y	Y
Pickle (D)	N	N
Stenholm (D)	N	N
Vandergriff (D)	N	N
Wilson (D)	N	N
Wright (D)	Y	Y
VIRGINIA
Bateman (R)	N	N
Bliley (R)	N	N
Boucher (D)	Y	Y
Daniel (D)	N	N
Olin (D)	Y	Y
Parris (R)	N	N
Robinson (R)	N	N
Sisisky (D)	Y	Y
Whitehurst (R)	N	N
Wolf (R)	N	N

Benjamin Elijah Mays 1894-1984

By Samuel DuBois Cook

Vol. 6, No. 3, 1984, pp. 21-24

As I have said so often, I am one of Bennie Mays’ “boys.” I have been one of his “boys” since I was a kid in the rolling countryside and on the red hills of Griffin, Georgia, and I will be one of his “boys” until I die.

Dr. Mays had a love affair with the basic and perennial values of the human enterprise: excellence, decency, justice, non-violence, love, good will, reason, nobility, concern for others, compassion for human suffering, respect for the dignity and worth of every man, woman, and child, sensitivity to human needs, a heightened sense of personal and social responsibility, and the love of God. He was so many things: prophet, scholar, educator, apostle of social justice, champion of human excellence, author, humanist, humanitarian, teacher, voice of the voiceless, a chief founder of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Revolution, a major architect of the New South, inspirer, motivator, and transformer of youth, and peerless spokesman of the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth.

Dr. Mays was a hard taskmaster. I sometimes thought that it was easier to please God than Dr. Mays. His standards for himself and others were inordinately high, lofty, and demanding. Truly, they could never be fully satisfied–thank God. He kept us stretching, striving, aspiring, and always looking up.

I have told him that the title of one of his books, Lord, the People Have Driven Me On, was a great misnomer. The Lord knows that Bennie Mays drove the people on. And I told him that Bennie Mays drove the good Lord on. He was always inexhaustible, creatively restless, irrepressible, tireless, always dreaming of new worlds to conquer, new

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mountains to climb, new rivers to cross, new tasks to tackle, new challenges to meet. Life, for him, could never be finished. No wonder that, in spite of the spate of books he wrote, he was working on three more when he died. And he always thought that his best book, on the Brown public school desegregation case of 1954, was yet to be written. He lived in the world of anticipation, and not simply in the world of memory. He lived in the creative world of hope. He died dreaming. He died aspiring to greater things and loftier heights. What a magnificent way to die! Dr. Mays was a daring, incurable, and incredible dreamer. Dreams were a central part of his longevity, productivity, meaning, zest, and inspiration.

Dr. Mays was born free. He lived free. He died free. Always courageous, he was a prophet to the core of his being–always emphasizing the creative tension between the “is” and the “ought,” promise and fulfillment, the Kingdom of man and the Kingdom of God. He never forgot the prophetic responsibility to speak “truth to power.” He was always his own man, always a man of great moral courage, rebellion, and affirmation. Fierce independence and individualism, nobility, and supreme integrity were hallmarks of his great life. “Never sell you soul” was a central theme and imperative of his teachings and life. His soul was never for sale to anybody at anytime for any price. In a world of constant pressures and counter-pressures, he had supreme integrity, character, and incorruptibility.

Bennie Mays taught us how to live. He also taught us how to die. Miss Cordeila Blount, his devoted niece, said to me the day of his death: “Bernie was so remarkable. He was remarkable in life. He was remarkable in the twilight of life and in death.” Yes, our beloved Dr. Mays lived with grace and dignity, and died with grace and dignity.

Even as he confronted the frailties of age and death, Buck Bennie was mighty tough. He made a game of wrestling with, and defying death. He was utterly defiant and outrageously uncooperative. More than once, he escaped the cold clutches of death, with the clarion call “I ain’t got time’ to die.” “I’m too busy serving my master.” Until the final encounter, he won every battle with death. This was so symbolic of the man. Dr. Mays was always a great fighter–whatever or whomever the foe.

Mrs. Sally Warner, his superb confidante, great friend, and assistant, told him, after he had been in intensive care at the hospital a few months ago, that she had called several people. Alert and sharp as always, he got the message. As only Bennie Mays would and could say, he commented: “I fooled you, didn’t I?” He fooled all of us so many times.

“The time and place of a man’s life on earth are the time and place of his body,” said Howard Thurman, “but the meaning and significance of his life are as vast and as

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far-reaching as his gifts, his times, and the passionate commitment of all his powers can make it.”

Dr. Mays touched, enriched, inspired, educated, motivated, transformed so many lives–black and white, rich and poor, male and female, learned and untutored, Gentile and Jew, Protestant and Catholic, Northerner and Southerner, religionist and secularist. So many owe him so much.

Dr. Mays lived a long life. But longevity has no intrinsic merit. As Dr. Mays reminded us so often, it is not how long but how well. It is not the quantity of years but the quality of service that counts. Dr. Mays gave to life the highest and the best we can give to life: the gift of self. He followed his own advice that “Lives are saved by giving them away.” “The truly great men of history are not those who hoard and keep,” said Dr. Mays, “but those who dedicate their lives to some great cause and who give themselves to the benefit of the people.” Again, “the only way to save our lives is to give ourselves to others in some worthwhile service. Giving is the inherent in living.”

Dr. Mays was one of the world’s greatest educators and

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philosophers of education because he applied the Christian conception of human vocation and service to the whole educational process.

With ringing eloquence and prophetic power, Bennie Mays insisted that

The search for happiness is an unworthy goal. y you go out looking for happiness, you don’t know what to look for or where to look. yyou marry looking for happiness, it is an unworthy aim. People should marry because they love each other; not for happiness, but for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer.

It is

Not important that people be happy. Was Moses happy? …. Was Socrates happy? …. Was Jesus happy? …. Was Mahatma Gandhi happy? ….

We argue still further, what right have we to be happy? They tell me half of the people of the earth are starving Why should we have bread enough and to spare while our brother starves? To be personal, who am I? I am no better than my starving brother. Who am I to be happy? But for the grace of God. I, too, might be starving Who am I to ride around in Pullman cars and jets while others starve?

Where may happiness be found?

If happiness is to be found, it will be found in noble endeavor, endeavor that gives satisfaction and is beneficial to mankind. It will be found in struggling, in toiling, and in accomplishing something worthwhile. Happiness, if it is to be found, will be found in a job well done ….

If happiness is to be found, it will be found in pursuing and accomplishing something worth” while, and the quest must be continuous–no complacency and no satisfaction.

If happiness is to be found, it will be found in noble living A man lives nobly when he has an honest conscience, when he can say: The community is better off because I gave my best to it. I did not exploit people for my personal gain . . .

If happiness is to be found, it will be found when we live more for others than we do for ourselves.

Yes, Bennie Mays represents the Kingdom not of this world. The Kingdom not of this world is the Kingdom of God. It is the Kingdom of truth, love, righteousness, human service, social and racial justice and caring–beyond race, color, creed, sex, ethnicity, culture and other boundaries of estrangement.

What greater legacy can a person leave to his loved ones, friends, disciples and fellow human beings than the precious, unique and enduring legacy of Bennie Mays?

You and I must make his vision, legacy and work our own. Because of the death of Bennie Mays, you and I, all of us, must do a little more to promote the cause of excellence, decency, justice, the higher possiblities of history and culture and the Beloved Community of all of God’s children. To mind come the words of Micah: “He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

So, our very special Dr. Mays, our beloved Bennie Ma. our “Buck Bennie,” who has meant so much to so many, we mournfully and yet with joy, say: Hail, thanks, love and farewell.

Samuel DuBois Cook is President of Dillard University and a member of the executive committee of the Southern Regional Council. Dr. Cook’s remarks are excerpted from his eulogy to Dr. Mays.

Excerpts from the eulogy by Samuel DuBois Cook, March 31, 1984.

–From the funeral tribute to Dr. Mays by Hugh M. Gloster, President of Morehouse College.

–Benjamin E. Mays, Born To Rebel (1971).