Crackdown in the Black Belt

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 7, No. 1, 1985, pp. 1-5

In an apparent attempt to intimidate black voters in the rural South and push back electoral gains made since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, federal prosecutors in Mobile, Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama are currently seeking and obtaining federal grand jury indictments–on charges of voting fraud–against leading civil rights activists in the Black Belt.

The first to be indicted are Albert Turner (a former chief aide to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), his wife Evelyn, and co-worker Spencer Hogue, Jr., all from the town of Marion in Perry County. Essentially, the Turners and Hogue are charged with changing the absentee ballots of a number of black voters in the Democratic primary election of September 4,1984. They face a twenty-nine count indictment handed down on January 25,1985 by a federal grand jury in Mobile. Punishment upon conviction carries a maximum of 115 years in prison and $40,000 in fines. The trial for the Turners and Hogue will be held outside the Black Belt, in Mobile, and is scheduled to begin June 17.

Additional indictments of perhaps a dozen or more grassroots black leaders are expected soon in Greene Sumter, Lowndes and Wilcox counties. The list of likely defendants includes sheriff John Hulett of Lowndes, school board chairman Wendell Paris and county commission employee Adeline Webster of Sumter County, Eutaw city council member Spiver W. Gordon and retired schooteacher Rosie Carpenter in Greene County, and Rev. Thomas Threadgill and county commissioner Bobby Joe Johnson of Wilcox County.

Since the September 1984 primary, hundreds of persons who voted absentee have been interviewed by the FBI in Perry, Greene, Sumter, Lowndes and Wilcox counties. Voters were shown their ballots and asked if they voted for particular candidates. In October, the FBI raided the office of Booker T. Cooke, Jr., coordinator of election activities in Greene County, seizing all his office’s voting materials. Cooke is also on the list of expected indictees.

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On one occasion in the past several weeks FBI agents loaded more than two dozen subpoenaed black witnesses (many of whom are elderly citizens who remember all too well the era of segregation) onto buses, then carried them–with the automobile escort of Alabama State Troopers–to testify before the federal grand jury convened in Mobile’ In both Mobile and Birmingham, witnesses were photographed, fingerprinted and required to give handwriting samples.

Using provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act which allow for federal intervention in instances of alleged state and local election law violations, the offices of US Attorney for the Southern, Middle and Northern Districts of Alabama are preparing to prosecute many of the black community leaders who helped assure the Act’s original passage in Congress and its extension in 1982. “The intent of the Voting Rights Act has been turned on its head,” says Steve Suitts, executive director of the Southern Regional Council.

Civil rights and voting rights workers throughout the South see the impetus for the federal investigations and indictments as coming from old nemeses among the white power structure in the Black Belt who have glimpsed encouragement in the Reagan Administration’s Department of Justice. Community organizers in the five southwest Alabama counties where the investigations are going on also see the hand of Alabama’s Republican US Senator Jeremiah Denton.

“This whole FBI investigation of absentee voting and the: scheduled trials,” defendant Albert Turner argues, “were set up to stop the political progress of black people in the Alabama Black Belt. The power structure wants to turn back the hands of time in Perry County and throughout west Alabama. I would encourage black people not to let my indictment stop them or discourage them. We need to vote in even larger numbers because they are trying to take our right to vote away again.”

In moving first against Albert Turner, the Federal agents and attorneys have targeted one of the Black Belt’s toughest and most saavy black political leaders. An experienced and dedicated community organizer for nearly thirty years, Turner has worked in Perry and surrounding counties to help black Alabamians gain their rights as citizens. In the early 1960s, Albert and Evelyn Turner initiated the lawsuit which first brought federal registrars into Perry County to assist blacks in getting their names on the voting roles in significant numbers.

In 1965, as the Alabama Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Albert Turner assisted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the major campaigns of the civil rights movement. “I was with Dr. King everywhere he went in the 1960s,” he recalls. “And I helped to lead the mule train which brought him to his final resting place.”

Turner remained as state SCLC director until 1972 when he headed a Perry County program to assist black students in coping with school integration. A small farmer and an insurance agent, he has worked with the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and has been the general manager of the Southwest Alabama Farmers Cooperatives Association (SWAFCA).

Through their community-based organization, the Perry County Civic League, the Turners and Spencer Hogue, Jr. have pursued the cause of fair legislative and municipal representation for black citizens in their home county and in the town of Marion. Over the course of many local elections, they have mobilized voters to overcome generations of white minority rule. With its growing success in assisting black candidates to win local and state offices, the Perry County Civic League–and other groups like it throughout the Black Belt–have put the old-guard white elite on the defensive.

Speaking to a demonstration of some 150 supporters on the steps of the federal courthouse in Mobile on January 31, the day that the Turners and Hogue pleaded innocent, Wendell Paris, chairman of the Sumter County School Board said, “The Alabama Black Belt has made more progress in the area of voter registration, voter education and electing black officials than most areas of the nation. This is why the efforts are being made to stop us. Local powers in Perry, Greene, Sumter and Lowndes counties have now gotten the support of US Senator Jeremiah Denton and the Reagan Justice Department in the fight to undermine the progress we have made in the twenty years since the passage of the Voting Rights Act.”

At present, the trail leading to Senator Denton remains circumstantial. His Washington office denies the Senator has had any involvement with the investigations, and demurs on further comment at the present time. Denton, a former Vietnam War POW, and Alabama’s only Republican US Senator in the twentieth century, won election in 1980 with solid white support and Ronald Reagan’s coattails. Denton’s extremely narrow margin of victory state-wide was 36,000 votes out of some 1 1/4 million cast. In the Black Belt, Denton lost handily to his Democratic opponent. As a

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sampler of black voter sentiment in the 1980 election, the nearly all-black voting beat of Boykin, in Wilcox County, supported Denton’s Democratic opponent by a margin of 233 to zero.

Since entering the Senate, Denton’s voting record and public pronouncements demonstrate that black Alabamians know who their friends aren’t. With his support for deep cuts in domestic spending and for large increases in military appropriations, the Senator has proven himself to be at odds with the aspirations of his home state’s poorest citizens–the residents of the Black Belt.

As he eyes his re-election prospects for 1986, Denton sees another strong Democratic challenge as inevitable. This time, however, there will be no Reagan windfall from a presidential campaign. Clearly, Denton stands to benefit almost as much as the local white politicos do from the intimidation of Alabama’s black voters that may result from the persecution-and prosecution-of black community organizers. Certainly too, the US Attorneys involved in the Black Belt investigations were appointed by the President upon the advice of the Republican US Senator from Alabama.

“We believe that with the re-election of Reagan, old line Black Belt politicians can go directly to Reagan’s Justice Department via Senator Denton,” says Wendell Paris. “The number of incidents and their timing lead us to believe that this effort at intimidation is being geared up from Washington itself.” How else, Paris wonders, can one explain the current circumstance in which three separate federal district attorneys are simultaneously investigating voter fraud in five Black Belt counties, all of which are predominantly black and all of which have substantial numbers of black elected officials?

Alabama State Senator Hank Sanders, whose Selma law firm–along with Oakland, California civil rights attorney Howard Moore–will represent the Perry County defendants, also points to the larger-than-local importance of the current pattern of federal investigations and indictments. “There are national implications in this and other investigations of black voting across the South and the nation,” says Sanders. “For the fifteen years, from 1965 until 1980, the federal government effectively enforced the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which protected the poor and minorities in this county. Now it is obvious that the government is abusing the provisions of the Act and is attacking us with sledgehammer blows, to try to kill the few hard-earned gains we have made.”

That attorney Hank Sanders now sits in the Alabama Senate comes as a result of years of grassroots efforts pursued by black community organizers such as the Turners and Hogue. A November, 1983 special election which enabled Sanders to take his place in the state legislature followed from a court-ordered redistricting plan that redressed the discriminatory reapportionment schemes which had helped white elites in the Black Belt maintain their governmental power. The federal court’s re-drawing of several Alabama senate and house districts allowed Sanders to run and win election from a new, black majority district. The boundaries of Sanders’ Alabama Senate District 23 includes three majority black state house seats, each of which is now filled by black state representatives.

Apparently, the white effort to involve the federal government’s investigative powers and the resulting focus upon absentee voting began in the aftermath of Sanders’ successful 1983 election campaign.

Absentee balloting emerged as a matter of serious concern to Black Belt white elites in the late 1960s, after the possibility of broad black registration began to become a reality. For at least a decade, white absentee landowners and former residents who have ties of kin and friends “down home,” but who now live anywhere from Birmingham to

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Chicago to New York have continued to vote in Black Belt contests at the request of local white officeholders and candidates. On election nights throughout the early 1970s, white officials found electoral deliverance inside dependable absentee voting boxes filled with lopsided margins. Federal and state authorties took little notice, and obtained no indictments, against any whites on charges of absentee voter fraud despite a series of complaints and lawsuits offered by resident blacks.

Black community organizers sought to counter white abuse of absentee balloting not only by registering complaints, but by registering a greater number of black absentee voters. They have worked to make the election process easier and more accessible for elderly blacks, for those attending college away from home, and for the many county residents who must commute to jobs across county lines.

Black Belt counties are the state’s poorest. To find jobs, many workers must travel out of their home county every day. Census data for 1980 shows that thirty-one percent of the working population in Perry County (home of the Turners and Hogue) work outside the county. In nearby Lowndes County, the number reaches almost fifty percent. To vote, these commuting workers must miss work or obtain absentee ballots.

In addition to being impoverished, the Black Belt contains a substantial elderly black population–fifteen percent of Perry County residents are sixty-five years of age or older Like those Perry Countians who work outside their county of residence, the elderly often have difficulty in registering to vote and in getting to the polls on election day.

Over the past twenty years, blacks in the ten southwest Alabama counties where the federal investigations are now underway have gradually won local elective offices. Prior to 1965, whites controlled all ten county commissions, eleven boards of education and thirty-four town governments. Since the Voting Rights Act, blacks have emerged to fill the majority of the seats on five county commissions and five school boards. Blacks now direct the municipal governments of nine towns, while whites still remain in control of five county governments and thirty-three of forty-two towns, including every county seat.

One major obstacle to further black electoral success can be found in the local boards of voter registrars, whose members are appointed by the governor of the state, George Wallace. Throughout the counties of the Black belt, the offices of voter registrars and their deputies remain in the hands of whites who are often hostile to black attempts to register. Typically, registrars’ offices here are open ten days out of each month. During these days, registration hours

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may extend only from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m., minus an hour for lunch. Unlike the practices now found in such cities as Birmingham or Montgomery in which, for instance, League of Women Voters’ volunteers register prospective voters at shopping malls, the pathway to registration and voting remains filled with obstructions in much of southwest Alabama.

In 1981, the white legislators in the Black Belt convinced the Alabama legislature to enact a “reidentification” law. Over the strongest objections of black citizens, the Justice Department allowed existing voting roles to be wiped clean in several counties. Persons who wished to vote were required to appear, identify themselves and re-register. The predictable effect was the loss of a significant number of black voters who had registered during the voting drives of recent years.

When they began to lose control of the election machinery in the Black Belt, the white powers-that-be also turned for help to a justice system in which there are no black district attorneys or circuit judges. The current investigations and indictments remind many Alabamians of the 1981 conviction of Maggie Bozeman and Julia Wilder by an all-white jury in Pickens County on state charges of absentee voter fraud.

Although all but one of the black witnesses against Bozeman and Wilder recanted or changed their testimony, later indicating that they asked for the women’s assistance in voting, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld their convictions. After serving time in Tutwiler State Prison, Bozeman and Wilder’s conviction was overturned in federal court. Their case, however, seems to have left the lingering effect of reduced black voter participation in Pickens County.

Black absentee voting must be seen in light of present conditions, customary practices, and the historical context of white power in this majority black area. The hardships of contending with the Black Belt’s day-to-day political weather underscore the importance of the journeyman efforts of people such as the Turners and Spencer Hogue, Jr., and the significance of groups like the Perry County Civic League which seek to make the ballot accessible to black residents.

Like the Bozeman-Wilder trial, that of Albert and Evelyn Turner and Spencer Hogue, Jr.–as well as the other trials which now seem certain to follow–may come down to little more than swearing contests. Each side will offer witnesses to substantiate their claims as to whether absentee ballots were marked in accordance with, or at variance from, a particular voter’s preference, with or without his or her knowledge. Given the strong-arm methods which have been used to secure testimony, federal prosecutors may come to find their witnesses revising their accounts when intimidating circumstances become less frightening.

As in the current national political scene with its black neo-conservatives-and its Reagan apologists on the US Commission on Civil Rights–a few self-proclaimed community leaders will put their integrity in the employ of their community’s enemies. Yet, for those who know, and for those who care to learn about the Black Belt’s history, the alleged legal violations which suddenly-zealous FBI agents and US attorneys are using to form indictments must be understood in terms of the long revolution through which black citizens have engaged the pursuit of justice.

The Rising Tide of Poverty

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 7, No. 1, 1985, pp. 5-8

“A rising tide lifts all boats,” President Reagan explained four years ago when asked how his administration’s policies would affect the poor. l hose were the days when Admini-

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stration officials declared poverty no longer existed in the United States. Today, Census Bureau data and independent reports tell that since 1980 the number of poor has increased by nine million in the nation and 2 1/2 million in the South. And, in February of this year, the Physician Task Force on Hunger concluded that hunger is now a national epidemic.

From their sinking perspective, the poor may rightfully conclude, as did the defeated Walter Mondale, that in the Reagan Administration a “rising tide lifts only yachts.”

Abandoning its attempt to abolish poverty by declaration, the Administration now argues that poverty is the result of past programs of big government which have maintained the poor in a state of dependency and wiped away their incentive to work. “We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead,” writes Charles Murray, the author of the Reaganites’ new bible on the subject, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980. “We tried to remove the barriers to escape from poverty and inadvertently build a trap.”

These curious words rely especially upon the fact that in the late 1970s budgets for poverty programs expanded, but the number of poor in the nation began to increase. Their analysis of this event does not look at developments since 1980, nor does it recognize that government assistance to the poor is only one of three major areas of policy which fundamentally change the status and numbers of poor. Poverty has been influenced largely in past decades by three factors: changes in government assistance, the rates and duration of unemployment, and underemployment (low wages and short work weeks).

No matter how much it tries to ignore the present, the Reagan Administration must share much of the responsibility for influencing each of these and should take the blame for the unparalleled rise in poverty and hunger since 1980. With the rise in the rate and number of poor have come unprecedented reductions of people from poverty programs in the South and the nation.

Reviewing, in 1981, President Reagan’s proposed changes in assistance to the poor, a report of the Southern Regional Council concluded that, if adopted, the policies would “transform the war on poverty to a war on the poor.” Our most recent report analyzing the actual developments of the last four years, Public Assistance and Poverty (March, 1985), documents this horrific conclusion. Since 1980 almost 1 1/2) million recipients of four major poverty programs have been removed in the eleven Southern states. The substantial majority of these recipients were cut from the food stamp program although reductions occurred in each of the three other programs, Medicaid, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and Supplemental Social Security (SSI).

The elimination of more than a million recipients from the food stamp program in the South probably has affected the working poor more than any other group. Yet, the study clearly indicates that a majority of the 1.4 million Southerners losing assistance in all four programs are children. It is those who are too young to work, to protect themselves, who may be denied food, clothing, or decent shelter due to these reductions.

The people–primarily the children–who’ve been denied further assistance are only part of those severely affected. In the last four years the levels of government benefits to those receiving aid have been reduced or have stagnated. For example, the level of AFDC assistance given to recipients in Arkansas decreased by eight percent from 1980 to 1984. In Louisiana, the increase in AFDC payments was a mere two percent. When compared with the increasing cost of purchasing non-food items, the real benefits of AFDC recipients were cut by almost one-third in the South. In other words, due to the flatened benefits and increasing costs of buying non-food items, “real” AFDC payments in 1984 were thirty percent less than in 1980.

The families and individuals who receive both AFDC and food stamps are primarily the poor who do not work. For these poor, the combined real value of AFDC payments and food stamps for food, clothing, and shelter has been cut more than twenty percent during the last four years. In Tennessee the combined benefits of food stamps and AFDC payments dropped by two dollars a year from 1980 to 1984. With an increase in the cost of living during the last four years, food stamps and AFDC benefits dropped thirty percent.

The decreased levels of assistance in the last four years have pushed families deeper into poverty and contributed to increased hunger. In North Carolina, a family of four depending upon AFDC with an income that was twenty-five percent below poverty in 1980, now find that their income has dropped to fifty percent below the poverty level.

The immediate effect of these changes in budgets and policies is tragic, but the consequences over time may come to be devastating. The past is ample evidence that government assistance has had an important role in reducing poverty. At times, however, such as in the late 1970s, increases in government assistance alone were not enough to override changes in unemployment and underemployment. Yet, at no time in the last twenty years have we had policies of the federal government in public assistance that pushed substantial numbers of people deeper into poverty. If public assistance has not always reduced poverty over time, the policies have at least maintained the general status quo of the poor. Today, and over the last four years, the Reagan Administration has pushed millions of Southerners and poor across the nation deeper into poverty.

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A clear recognition of the failures of the Administration should not obscure the importance of government policies that affect unemployment and underemployment. Most people, ranging from bleeding heart liberals to heartless conservatives, carry around misconceptions about the poor and the role of poverty programs. These mistaken notions often limit our view of what causes poverty and what are remedies that reduce it.

In Patterns of Poverty, released in December of 1984, the Southern Regional Council found that most of the benefits of AFDC, Food Stamps, Medicaid, and other government assistance go to families headed by the elderly or by one female parent with children at home. On average, almost eight out of ten of all families receiving benefits in the South in 1982 were confined to households headed by someone sixty-five years or older or by single, female parents with children.

These statistics tell us that public assistance in the South is going largely to people who need it and who are least able to work. Under the circumstances, it is difficult to understand the criticism that government benefits are offering the poor an opportunity to evade work. In fact, the benefits are going largely to households headed by persons who cannot work, should not work, or are least able to work by circumstances.

Despite the myths, the fact is that a majority of the poor families are working. In 1982, almost two out of three of all poor families across the nation had at least one person who worked part-time or full-time. When families headed by females with children or persons sixty-four years or older are excluded, approximately three out of four of all poor families in the United States probably had someone working part-time or full-time in the 1980’s. The data suggests strongly that poor families in our society today, like most American families, are working families.

These facts tell us that the influences on poverty go beyond the level of public assistance and reach to government and private policies concerning wages and the workplace. Policies that shape peoples’ wages and the available jobs also determine whether the government is conducting a war on poverty or a war on the poor.

Although the Council has not finished its analysis of the recent effects of unemployment and underemployment on poverty in the South, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is one important group who has come to understand the

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inextricable link between economic policies and levels of poverty. Last November, in a draft pastoral letter, the Catholic bishops stated that government has an obligation to its people to assure that its economy does not maintain high rates of unemployment and low earnings. The bishops raise the proper concern, especially as the economies of the South and the nation radically change the nature and duration of jobs. Yet, they have not-nor has anyone else–marshalled enough public debate on the economic policies that can attack poverty.

The war on poverty, begun twenty years ago, was not an unblemished success. In its best times, the poverty programs helped to reduce the number of people whose incomes and benefits did not offer a decent life. In its worst moments, until 1980, the programs usually offered the poor enough to sustain their economic status, if not their hope for better opportunities. Since 1980, policies governing public assistance have cut hundreds of thousands off and have deepened the poverty of millions who continue to receive aid. In a prosperous nation, a prosperous region, these policies have a bankrupt spirit.

Yet, until we realize that policies governing our economy also determine, in large part, our poverty rates, we will be unable to replace harsh criticism of the Reagan Administration with a working vision of how this prosperous country can undo poverty and how it can enfl the enlarging economic and spiritual separation between the poor and the non-poor. In the worst of times, we must begin to chart the course out of the rising tide of poverty to the best of times.

The Reagan Response

The head of the Reagan Administration’s food stamp program, Robert Leard, responded to the recent SRC report, Public Assistance and Poverty, by telling the Associated Press that the welfare rolls shortened during the last four years because employment increased. “The big reason for your change is quite frankly the unemployment rate going down,” Leard stated. No one has informed the unemployed or the US Department of Labor of this progress in reducing unemployment, however. In most Southern states, the unemployment rates in late 1984 continued to be higher than rates in 1980 or 1981. In Alabama the 11.5% rate of unemployment in November 1984 was considerably larger than the 8.8% unemployment rate in 1980. In Tennessee, where 186,000 food stamp recipients were removed as of late 1984, the rate of unemployment in 1980 was 7.2%. In November 1984 it was 8.7%. While unemployment rates did not decline in most Southern states, the number of recipients of public assistance fell by almost 1 1/2 million. Since there was no general decline in rates of unemployment in the South from 1980 to the end of 1984, this could hardly cause the reductions in public assistance to the poor. The Administration has not given up its old practice of proclaiming problems away.

Steve Suitts is executive director of the Southern Regional Council. He is the author of the two reports discussed in this essay. Both are available from the SRC: Patterns of Poverty (Dec. 1984. $5.00) and Public Assistance and Poverty (March 1985. $7.50). When ordering these reports, please add $2.OO for postage and handling. Minimum order$15. Quantity rates available.

The Civil Rights Act After Twenty Years: Part One: Where We’ve Been and Where We Are

By Harry S. Ashmore

Vol. 7, No. 1, 1985, pp. 8-10

One of the things that disturbs me when people look back at the history we’ve lived through–some of us have lived through a good deal more of it than you younger ones–is that we tend to forget its contemporary context. A great deal has happened since 1964 and the passage of the Civil Rights Act. But a great deal had to happen before Congress could be persuaded even to put civil rights on its agenda. There was the long, lonely effort of NMCP lawyers in the federal courts that finally ended the white primary and gave blacks the ballot. And, of course, ten years before the Civil Rights Act there was the Brown decision by the United States Supreme Court ordering desegregation in the public schools. But Brown did a great deal more than that.

Precedents and Pressure

The Brown decision dealt not only with the specific matter of public education but also, for the first time since Reconstruction, threw the full weight of the federal government behind enforcement of the civil rights of black individuals. It did that by reversing the old states’ rights doctrine that had let the states of the South pursue whatever kind of restrictive policies they cared to impose upon their black citizens.

Those of you who are old enough to remember what the South was like thirty years ago when Brown came down will recall that it was virtually as segregated a society as the one that exists in South Africa today. There was no public intermingling of the races. There was no permissible social contact between the races. Blacks and whites were separated in the schools. Blacks, denied the ballot, effectively had no voice in public affairs, and had little opportunity to move toward their own economic advancement.

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The practical results of Brown followed when black Southerners began to understand the implications of that decision. White Southerners did not choose to carry out the desegregation mandates of the courts–that would take years–but blacks began to realize that they now would have the support of the federal government if they chose to take their case into the streets and defy recalcitrant whites situated in the courthouses and the state houses of the Southern states.

And so began what came to be called the Civil Rights Movement–the mass protest in which for the first time in our history blacks were moving under their own leadership and in their own right to demand simple justice. They began to get results. They had mounted political pressure that had to be recognized.

First, then, came precedents set by the federal courts with their relative independence from the popular vote. Then came pressure brought by blacks and their white supporters–the protest marches that provided the high drama we all remember. It took all that to move a reluctant Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act.

From Civil Liberties to Civil Rights

Also, I think we need to remember that it required further action by the courts to implement the Civil Rights Act and the measures that followed. Simply declaring that blacks had a right to attend any school that was maintained with public funds didn’t result in any real change. What came to be called affirmative action was adopted when the Supreme Court recognized that decrees ordering the Southern school districts to integrate their separate schools into single systems were being accepted only in theory. As long as the courts held that the test would only be whether the schools were moving in good faith toward compliance, there was no real movement except in the border states and a few of the upcountry Southern districts with small black populations.

Real compliance began when the judges–I think reluctantly–had to assume the assignment powers of local school districts and establish a qualitative test of racial balance to affirm good faith. Once they did that the barriers began to crumble.

Following the courts’ lead, Congress was persuaded to move in other fields where something more than a court decision was required to insure that black citizens were entitled to rights previously reserved for whites in housing, education and employment. This marked the transition from the traditional concept of civil liberties to civil rights. The main instrument for enforcement was the withholding of federal benefits.

Mr. Reagan’s Arrant Nonsense

Now affirmative action these days–in some strange and remarkable way–has become a negative term. I suppose we have to recognize that one of the results of the last election was to affirm the position of the Reagan Administration, which at the outset proclaimed that affirmative action is not only unnecessary–since economic growth will take care of all discrimination problems–but is actually a violation of the professed purposes of this sovereign nation.

Mr. Reagan and his neo-conservatives supporters go so far as to contend that the results of the programs which were put into place following the declaration of a War on Poverty during the Kennedy-Johnson years not only were wrong in principle as well as being practical failures, but actually proved to be a handicap that delayed black progress.

I find this astonishing.

In Los Angeles a few weeks ago I took part in a session held on the thirtieth anniversary of the Brown decision. One of the people on the panel with me was Linda Chavez, staff director of the US Commission on Civil Rights. I listened in disbelief to her argument that all the positive changes that have taken place over the last thirty years took lace despite federal programs, not because of them, that blacks and other minorities would have been better off had none of these programs existed. Now for anybody who has lived through these years, whether in the South or outside it, this has to be considered arrant nonsense.

Certainly, many federal programs fell short of what we hoped for them. We had reason to be critical of some, then and now. But T find the argument that the federal government has no affirmative role in the slow and agonizing process of bringing minorities into the mainstream is about

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as shocking as anything I’ve heard in covering politics for fifty years–yet that is the position of the Reagan Administration.

Where We Are

When the Reaganites talk about a new federalism what they really mean is the old federalism. They would repeal the Brown decision and go back to Plessy–contending that the states should have the final word on all these matters, and that it’s no concern of the federal government if black citizens are deprived of their declared constitutional rights.

I don’t think that this Administration is going to get away with the repeal of Brown, but we are certainly going to see–as we’ve already seen in the last four years–the emphasis continue to shift away from the pursuit of affirmative action on behalf of civil rights for minorities.

When we look around today we can agree that certainly there has been a great deal of progress. People in this room know that as well as anybody. The black middle class–which is about a third of the black population–has more or less been accepted by the white middle class on more or less equal terms. The working poor-another third of the black population-benefited for a considerable time from the affirmative efforts of government. Now, they’re suffering heavy penalties through the cutbacks in federal programs under the Reagan Administration.

Then there’s the last third–what’s now called the underclass–the people below the poverty line. This group includes about a third of all blacks and about ten percent of the whites. Their situation is about what it was before there was a Civil Rights Act. In many cases it is probably worse. The programs that were intended to help them to move out of poverty are the ones that have been abandoned or are being condemned today by the Reaganites–the people who say that this is a problem that is beyond the reach and scope of the federal government and, if it really exists, should be left to state and local government.

I think anybody who knows our history knows what the results of that would be.

So this is where we are. I don’t think the Reagan Aministration [sic] is going to completely undo the progress we’ve made in these twenty years; but certainly effective movement toward guaranteeing equality of opportunity for all Americans has been halted.

During the fortieth anniversary meeting of the Southern Regional Council, held in Atlanta this past November, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Harry Ashmore, Julius L. Chambers-director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and former SRG executive director Harold Fleming reflected upon the status of civil rights twenty years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. An additional comment was offered by Paul Gaston, professor of history at the University of Virginia and current president of the Southern Regional Council. In the following pages, we present the perspectives of these long-time observers of, and participants in, Southern changes.

Harry S. Ashmore’s most recent book is Hearts and Minds: A History of Racism from Roosevelt to Reagan (McGraw-Hill), winner of the Southern Regional Council’s Lillian Smith Award in 1982.

The Civil Rights Act After Twenty Years. Part Two: The Collapse of Enforcement

By Julius L. Chambers

Vol. 7, No. 1, 1985, pp. 10-13

During the past week I have attended four meetings where we were discussing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1984 election. It has been a very depressing week.

At a meeting last night, for example, we were addressing the question of whether we should continue with affirmative action. Several very strong advocates of civil rights who were present were talking about ways to compromise affirmative action.

I attended another meeting this week where we were talking about poverty. Some very strong advocates of civil rights suggested ways that we could compromise some of the advocacy that we were pursuing in order to make our position more palatable to our opponents.

Then I attended a meeting in Cleveland with black educators and heard opposition to school desegregation. I heard advocacy for the development for black institutions because those institutions were needed in order to protect and preserve the interest of blacks. Reflecting on what has happened over the twenty years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, one can begin to appreciate why the current pessimism exists. A brief review of the history of the Act’s provisions regarding employment discrimination (Title VII) is instructive.

Proving Employment Discrimination

In 1971, the US Supreme Court held in Griggs v. Duke Power Company that an employer did not have to intend to discriminate to be in violation of Title VII. It was sufficient to show that the employer used practices which had an adverse or disproportionate impact on a group or class

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covered under Title VII, and that such practices were not necessary to determine or to predict successful job performance. This was the legal theory of disparate impact.

In 1977,in US v. Teamsters the Court discussed the method of proof which had developed in Title VII litigation. In addition to disparate impact, there existed the legal theory of disparate treatment (i.e., intentional discrimination). Thus, in employment discrimination cases, one proves a claim either by disparate treatment or disparate impact. The problem with Teamsters is the emphasis the Court placed on proof of intent which is required in disparate treatment cases. At best, proof of intent is difficult to establish. The emphasis placed on intent in Teamsters has led some lower courts to require practically impossible standards on proof.

During the past four years, the US Department of Justice has been moving toward a point where disparate impact will not be valid proof of employment discrimination. It will be necessary to establish disparate treatment in every instance.

Recently, this theory was laid out in the Justice Depart meet’s brief in Williams v. City of New Orleans, one of our (Legal Defense Fund) cases which involves the exclusion of blacks from employment in New Orleans’ police department. The Department argued that the affirmative action incorporated in a consent decree was “reverse discrimination,” in violation of Title VII. The Department maintained that one had to be an established victim of discrimination in order to be eligible for affirmative relief. As a practical matter, this would rule out affirmative action in class actions.

In another case, Memphis Firefighters Local Union, No. 1784 v. Stotts, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling that protected from layoff black workers hired under an affirmative action plan. The Justice Department asserts that under Stotts, one must be a victim of intentional discrimination in order to be provided affirmative relief, a position which would, in fact, abolish affirmative action.

Under these standards of proof, nobody will be able to prove employment discrimination. Let me give you an example:

Three or four years ago in North Carolina, we tried Anderson v. Bessemer City, which involved a black woman who applied to head the Bessemer City recreation department. Her qualifications were superior. She was rejected by everyone except the sole woman on an otherwise all-male board. A federal district court agreed that we had proved intentional discrimination. The city appealed.

The Fourth Circuit sided with the city. It held that if the men on the board employed women in other capacities, or if their wives worked, then they obviously could not intentionally discriminate against this particular woman. If one analyzes this rationale, one could never prove intentional discrimination.

Take, for instance, the case of a qualified black person who is denied a promotion by a white employer and seeks to show discrimination. Under the standard set by the Fourth Circuit in Anderson v. Bessemer City, if the white employer had ever promoted a black person, a claim by any other black employee of intentional discrimination would not be considered. Fortunately, after hearing oral arguments this past fall, the US Supreme Court has overturned (March, 1985) the Fourth Circuit’s decision; the earlier finding of discrimination has been reinstated.

Between 1965 and 1977 it was possible for a plaintiff to establish a violation of Title VII through disparate impact, and even disparate treatment. The proof required was a showing that one was treated differently. Courts did not emphasize proof of intent. But, in 1977, Teamsters changed all of that. And today, with respect to enforcement of Title VII, plaintiffs in many instances are being denied effective remedies.

The Point of No Relief?

There is another aspect of Title VII relief that has undergone significant change. For example, previously, if one accomplished the near-impossible and proved intentional discrimination, the courts directed broad relief. Today, we get much less. Even when an individual is entitled to affirmative relief, he or she is not, in the language of the law, “made whole.” Again, let me give you an example.

If it is proven that an individual was denied a promotion because of race or sex, the person does not automatically move to the new position and bump the incumbent. He or she must wait for another vacancy to occur. In the interim, the victim is given “front pay” to compensate for the loss, and is given preference to fill a comparable vacancy when–or if–it occurs.

But does that “make whole” the person who has suffered discrimination? What about interest on the lost wages? What happens when no vacancy occurs within a certain amount of time? Should the employer be required to find a comparable slot and, if appropriate, train the individual to fill it? These are pressing questions, but I, for one, do not anticipate that courts today will deal with them.

Another example of the difficult problems that are encountered in Title VII litigation. We filed an employment discrimination case in 1974 on behalf of a class of four hundred black workers in a large paper mill in North Carolina. The case, Albemarle Paper Company v. Moody, has been to the US Supreme Court, back to the lower courts, and through numerous legal proceedings. Despite eleven years of litigation and over $400,000 in costs, only one hundred black workers have moved from low-paying, dead-end jobs in the woodyard to machine operator’s jobs inside the mill. One cannot but conclude, after examining the data, that most of the black workers have not moved up because

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they are not able to operate the machines. Is the lack of capability their fault? Is it the fault of the employer for not providing training? Is it the fault of the state for not ensuring that individuals are offered equal skills in order to enter the job market? What kind of relief do those three hundred black workers need?

Which leads me to mention that civil rights groups today may be focusing too much on the problems of middle-class blacks. It is time that all of us begin to address the needs of the two thirds of the black population who constitute the “underclass” and the working poor–those individuals who are not necessarily benefitting from the advances in civil rights law of the Past twenty years.

Title VII-A Dead Statute?

To return to Title VII. A third problem is the question of who is responsible for enforcement of the law. Over five thousand employment discrimination cases were filed in 1983. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which has the authority to bring Title VII lawsuits, was involved in less than one-third of them. Most were brought by private litigators–at extraordinary cost. It used to be possible to litigate an individual case for $5,000 to $10,000. Today, one case will will [sic] cost $50,000 to $70,000. A class action that used to cost $50,000 to $100,000, now costs between $300,000 and $500,000. I have been involved in a case for four years that was brought on behalf of a relatively small class–about twenty-four individuals. To date, it has cost over $400,000. The defendant has spent over $3.2 million. If we win everything to which our plaintiffs are entitled, the monetary relief would total approximately $100,000–and this to obtain rights we believe are spelled out in Title VII.

But that is where we are today. In my visits to LDF’s cooperating attorneys around the country, I am told by most that they do not want to litigate any more Title VII cases. It costs too much. It takes too long for them to recover costs. And, the courts are not favorably disposed. Even if successful, the relief is too limited and the amount recovered in attorney fees is much too little for the time, effort and risk that these cases entail.

If the private bar is not going to enforce Title VII, if the Justice Department is not going to enforce Title VII, if EEOC is not going to do more in terms of litigating these cases–is Title VII not going to become a dead statute?

To summarize: Initially the courts interpreted Title VII liberally–procedurally, substantively and with respect to relief. Despite reluctance by the Department of Justice and the inability of EEOC to become involved, an active private bar brought a number of cases–most often without adequate compensation. Today, courts are interpreting Title VII more strictly, limiting what can be obtained in relief, and deterring individuals who want to bring cases.

Title VII and Education

It is also worthwhile to discuss here the status of school desegregation. Since 1964, I have been involved in legal efforts to desegregate the Charlotte-Mecklenburg [NC] public school system. Eventually, through our lawsuit, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, and others, we moved the Supreme Court from a limited interpretation of Brown to a position that effective desegregation required affirmative steps.

Within the Charlotte community, we have moved from al reluctance to accept desegregation, to active support. During a pre-election visit to Charlotte, President Reagan criticized court ordered busing, calling it a “failure.” The Charlotte Observer responded with an editorial, “You Were Wrong Mr. President.” All of us are proud of what has been accomplished with Charlotte Mecklenburg’s desegregation plan, which includes busing.

Many other communities have had problems in desegregating their school systems. Those are communities in which the Southern Regional Council, indeed all of us, must be available to help.

Then there are communities that remain untouched by desegregation efforts. I refer to majority black school districts in urban areas. A recent report stated that over sixty-eight percent of the black students in Harlem drop out of school. Many schools in urban areas are as bad as the segregated school I attended before Brown.

Are we devoting as much attention as we should to what goes on in urban public schools–whether or not they are desegregated? Why are black students not performing well on standard exams? On SAT’s? Why are more black students not entering college, graduate programs, professional schools?

Black high school graduates do enter college at about the same rate as whites. But although the enrollment of black students has increased in undergraduate schools, black enrollment in graduate and professional schools has decreased. Our future well-being depends on our ability to address these issues and find answers to the problems they present.

This must be done within the constraints of the realities we face today. Despite lack of support from the federal government, we must work to reinstate the approach to implementation of Title VI and other sections of the Civil Rights Act, and to the enforcement of Brown, that we had several years ago.

Deja Vu at Chapel Hill

Before the November election, I returned to the University of North Carolina campus at Chapel Hill. I was disturbed by

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what I saw. The attitude of white students reminded me of the 1950s when I was a student in the law school. For those three years, even as editor-in-chief of the law review, I could not attend the school’s social functions because they were held at a segregated establishment. This year I saw some of that same attitude among white students. That ought to bother all of us. I could not help but wonder whether Mr. Reagan was contributing to this attitude.

Despite such pessimistic observations, I remain an “optimist. Even as one considers the plight of the underclass, of minorities, of women, it is possible to take some solace if we contrast today’s reality with the mood of the country in the 1940s and ’50s. It took a lot of work, a lot of litigation and legislation to change things. We cannot quit now. We must press ahead.

In the 1930s and ’40s, few people would have predicted that by 1954, the Supreme Court would decide Brown v. Board of Education the way it did. Today we can develop similar efforts to urge the courts to consider new interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment, perhaps the establishment of poverty or economic status as a protected classification. I agree that moving the Court that far will be difficult. We can, however, begin to lay the groundwork.

Other issues which must be considered by the Southern Regional Council include the seventy-five vacancies on the federal courts. President Reagan will have these, and perhaps several vacancies on the Supreme Court, to fill during the next four years. The Council should be prepared when appointments to the federal courts are made. With respect to Supreme Court and other federal judicial nominees, we should raise our concerns where necessary and appropriate. Even the Senate may listen if it hears a unified voice.

Some candidates who have been advanced for appointment to the federal bench lack qualifications. A recent nominee for the Fourth Circuit had never practiced law a day in his life. By forming alliances we can provide the Senate with information it needs to investigate the qualifications of candidates for federal judgeships.

It has occurred to me also that we ought to focus more on the potential for progress in civil rights at state and local levels. The Council has been effective in helping good people get elected to state government, state legislatures and city councils. The Voting Rights Act has been a major and significant tool in this effort. In North Carolina, after reapportionment, a few more blacks were elected to the state legislature. Throughout the states, despite Mr. Reagan’s victory, we have elected legislators who are responsive to our concerns.

Is it not possible for us to work through the Council and other organizations to push states and municipalities to enact laws similar to the Civil Rights Act of 1964? This might enable us to build support at state and local levels that will influence what happens at the federal level.

We have means today that we did not have years ago. We have new attitudes among blacks and some whites that will surely result in speeding the change we seek. The Council has a role in mobilizing these groups and working with them to advance our agenda. We must be more assertive in using news media outlets to present our viewpoint as a counterbalance to the conservative “think tanks” and fundamentalist religious groups who oppose a fully integrated society.

As we observe the evolution of equal rights and opportunities during the past twenty years, we can point to progress. Some of the old obstacles have been removed, but new ones have taken their places. But that should not and must not deter us from trying to make this a world of equality and justice for all.

During the fortieth anniversary meeting of the Southern Regional Council, held in Atlanta this past November, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Harry Ashmore, Julius L. Chambers-director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and former SRG executive director Harold Fleming reflected upon the status of civil rights twenty years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. An additional comment was offered by Paul Gaston, professor of history at the University of Virginia and current president of the Southern Regional Council. In the following pages, we present the perspectives of these long-time observers of, and participants in, Southern changes.

Julius Chambers, a past president of the Southern Regional Council, is director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

The Civil Rights Act After Twenty Years. Part Three: Comments

ByHarold Fleming

Vol. 7, No. 1, 1985, pp. 13-14

I’m want to footnote some of the things said in the excellent statements that Harry and Julius have just made. And I’m going to try not to celebrate the problem anymore than I can help.

Among the many anniversaries we’re having here, I’m having my thirty-seventh anniversary of association with the Southern Regional Council. Things do look bleak now and it’s very disturbing, but I do get a little comfort by casting my mind back four decades and thinking how really hopeless things looked then.

I want to second what Julius has said about emulating some of the efforts of the past. There is a similarity in the situation now and the situation leading up to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. What was happening then was an effort to destroy a race mythology in the South and the nation. That effort required a great deal of work of different kinds by different people: the litigation, the student protest, the work of groups seeking to educate public opinion, the work to get the ballot and make it effective.

Parts of that mythology are enjoying a resurgence today. I’m sad to say that we haven’t had enough advocates and forceful speakers, enough people of persuasion and prestige on our side to offset the constant stream of simplistic statements which say that blacks and other minorities would be better off today if there had never been such a thing as affirmative action, if there had never been the court

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rulings and the legislation, the supportive federal programs. When people hear this enough–especially people who didn’t live through that history-it begins to sound very plausible. They begin to nod yes and say “That’s right.” Especially when they hear it from some blacks who, incredibly enough, seem to have persuaded themselves–although some of them would not be where they are today were it not for those programs and for affirmative action–that ability is enough and is always rewarded.

I think the job before us now–just as an agenda was created during the 1940s and the 1950s that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964–is to build a new agenda that is designed to expose and to counteract the body of racial mythology in its present form. I think what we need is not so much another Civil Rights Act, as we need enforcement of what we’ve got at all levels of government. We need voices who will explain to people why its in the self-interest of this society and country to have all its citizens well educated, well housed, and treated without discrimination. We must win this battle for public opinion in this country which we’ve been losing badly.

I think some of us have to reexamine some of our strategies, to see how unintentionally, in the effort to accent how acute many of our problems still are, it becomes fashionable not only to say that things are bad but that nothing has been accomplished–that blacks and minorities are worse off today than they were twenty years ago. Well, of course this is not true. To say it plays into the hands of the makers of the new mythology, into the hands of those who falsely proclaim that nothing helps, that the programs don’t work, that the people don’t respond, so why throw all this money uselessly at problems.

We have to go back and show again that these many efforts, these maligned programs do produce results, and these results are seen in the achievements of millions of black and minority Americans who never had any chance in the old days.

Many of the things in Southern Regional Council’s history are very well suited to the debunking of the neoconservative mythology and to the building of a new agenda. That’s what the Southern Regional Council was started to do and what it’s been all about for all these years. We’ve always recognized that you’ve got to win some of the battles in the public argument; that you’ve got to be out there at the state and local level–worrying about what people are, hearing, about what they’re feeling and about what they’re thinking, about what kind of facts they’re getting. We helped do it before, we can help do it again.

During the fortieth anniversary meeting of the Southern Regional Council, held in Atlanta this past November, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Harry Ashmore, Julius L. Chambers-director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and former SRG executive director Harold Fleming reflected upon the status of civil rights twenty years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. An additional comment was offered by Paul Gaston, professor of history at the University of Virginia and current president of the Southern Regional Council. In the following pages, we present the perspectives of these long-time observers of, and participants in, Southern changes.

Harold Fleming, director of the Potomac Institute, is a former executive director of the Southern Regional Council.

The Civil Rights Act After Twenty Years Later. [Response]

By Paul Gaston

Vol. 7, No. 1, 1985, pp. 14-15

Prompted by Harold and Harry’s discussion of the new mythology–and particularly by Julius’ recollection of his student days at Chapel Hill and his recent return visit–I would like to tell a brief anecdote about my own teaching at the University of Virginia.

It seems to me that I see among white students in my Southern history class greater evidence of this conservative wave of recent years, and it’s been extremely troubling.

About the time I started to teach Southern history I read an article that James Baldwin published in Harpers’–this was in 1958. He said that for white people in the South to watch segregation taken apart and dismantled was going to be to watch an entire way of life of being discredited and that was going to be an enormously painful experience for them.

It was about that time that some of my students started dubbing my course in Southern history “Pain Infliction 102.”

Well, this pain infliction course was a great joy to teach because increasingly larger numbers of Southern students would shift from a belligerent attitude of open hostility to one of more open inquiry. Then, during the 1960s, a large number became converts and they wanted to join the movement and see that Southern history was made whole.

This year, the course in pain infliction continues to be taught. The students are required to read–among other books–Dan Carter’s book about Scottsboro, and we spent a long time on Richard Kluger’s monumental study, Simple Justice, which is an absolutely brillant and moving account of how the Brown decision came to be written.

There’s a significant group of white students in this class who, it seems to me, typify what’s happened. They don’t deny that all of the achievements that we’ve made are good, but these students are unreachable. A group of eight of them led a discussion of sixty students last week. Their subject was Kluger’s book and the origins of the Brown decision.

They were logical. They didn’t say anything offensive. They were coherent in their analysis. They discussed the move from Gaines to Sweat vs. Painter to Brown vs. Board of Education, and they weren’t touched by one bit of it.

After awhile I couldn’t stand it anymore. About fifteen minutes before the end of the class I got up and said, “You know you’re reading one of the most . . . you’re reading a magisterial work. You’re not likely to read many books like this in your lifetime. And it’s a book about one of the great movements for human liberation that you’ve never experienced. Where is the feeling? Where are the guts? Where are . . .”

Well, there was great silence.

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I’m not sure that they were touched. They know that I have these periodic outbursts. But I present them as evidence of this growing sense of conservatism-the teflon-coated group that can’t be reached, but they’re going to say the right thing.

The happy part of the story is that there are still some white students in the class who are on my side, but more importantly there are some black students in the class now and they, more than 1, make it uncomfortable for those students simply to pass this off as another work of history that you have to memorize and pass a test on. I came out of this a born-again historian.

During the fortieth anniversary meeting of the Southern Regional Council, held in Atlanta this past November, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Harry Ashmore, Julius L. Chambers-director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and former SRG executive director Harold Fleming reflected upon the status of civil rights twenty years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. An additional comment was offered by Paul Gaston, professor of history at the University of Virginia and current president of the Southern Regional Council. In the following pages, we present the perspectives of these long-time observers of, and participants in, Southern changes.

Paul Gaston, professor of history at the University of Virginia, is president of the Southern Regional Council.

The South and the World Community

By Sue Thrasher

Vol. 7, No. 1, 1985, pp. 20-1, 23-24

At some moment during the 1950s and ’60s, many of us in this room made a decision about where we were going to work and what we were going to work for–a decision that made us take a stand for the future of the South and for what we believed was right. In my own coming of political age in the 1960s, that was an easy decision. The issues facing our region in those years were clear-cut.

I was in school in Nashville at the time and remember very distinctly when it all came together for me. I was driving from my hometown in western Tennessee back to Nashville when I heard on the radio about a church bombing in Birmingham where four young girls had been killed. All of you remember that particular moment.

I made a decision then that the people who bombed that church on behalf of the white South–did not speak for me. They did not represent me. If I were to be a citizen of this country, and a Southerner, I had to provide an alternative voice to what those people were saying.

Today, in the mid-1980s, I think that where we stand as a country in our relationship to the rest of the world is similar to where we as Southerners stood in the 1950s and ’60s. Again, we have to make decisions and personal commitments. I don’t intend to let Reagan–or any of the people who make national policy in this country right now–speak for me on the issues of Central America and the rest of this world anymore than I let the voices of the white South speak for me in the 1960s.

“Today, where we stand as a country in our relationship to the rest of the world is similar to where we as Southerners stood in the 1960s.”

Two years ago the organization that I work for, the Highlander Research and Educational Institute, located in New Market, Tennessee, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. In 1932, when Highlander began, Myles Horton, its founder, said what remains true today “the issue of the coming decades will be economic democracy.”

Initially, Highlander worked with the labor movement, training many of the South’s labor leaders in the 1930s and ’40 . It stood for civil rights in the 1950s and ’60s. Working out of Highlander in the 1950s, a woman that the Southern Regional Council is honoring this year, Mrs. Septima Clark, helped establish the citizenship education schools. Mrs. Clark and these schools helped thousands of people in the South register to vote.

In the 1960s and ’70s, Highlander turned its attention toward Appalachia and involvement with the poor peoples’ movements in that region.

In the 1980s, we’ve continued our concern with Appalachia, with labor, with civil rights-with a just society. But today there are new questions, new issues to be considered.

In the 1960s it made all the sense in the world to focus our attention entirely on this region, and to work as much as possible to focus the attention of the rest of the world on the rural South. Our task then was to put forth a new vision of what we thought the South should be. The difference now is that we have to advance a vision of what we want the world to be, of what kind of world we want to help create.

Perhaps it is a mild case of Southern chauvinism that leads me to believe that because of our own history of struggle for the last thirty years, we are in a unique position to shape a vision of a just and equal society that slips over the MasomDixon line and more/importantly at this particular time in history, slips across our southern border to our Latin American neighbors.

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At Highlander, we’re talking about what our work should be in the years ahead. And, we have made a commitment to bring an international perspective whenever we can. Regional institutions should be able to relate what’s going on in the rest of the world directly to our own work at home. Nor is it hard to find these ways. Let me give a few examples.

Last week I saw a work in progress–a film that should be finished very soon and that all of you should see. You may remember “Babies and Banners,” the film about the women in an historic Detroit auto workers struggle. One of the women who helped make that, Lorraine Gray, is finishing a new film called “Women and the Global Assembly Line.”

Lorraine’s film shows women around the world in a “global” assembly line–a line that shifts and moves in search of cheap labor and cheap raw materials. We previewed the film recently as a work-in-progress, wondering if we might use it with Appalachian and Southern women as a springboard for discussion of their own work situations and as a means of educating them about the particular problems faced by Third World women.

The filmmaker was especially concerned to know how women workers in this country would respond to the film. Would they see the women as competitors for their jobs and simply blame them for plant closings in the US? Or would they be able to see the commonalities of all women workers as the assembly line becomes more global?

We sent the film back not really knowing the answer to her questions, with an illustration of something that we have to grapple with in years to come. How are we going to talk to people in this country about the fact that a lot of the jobs are leaving? They’re not coming to the so-called Sunbelt anymore, they’re going further South, for much lower wages and, in most cases, for less than human working conditions.

“Another thing that is coming South, and being sent further south, is toxic waste.”

The other thing that’s coming South, and going even further south, is toxic waste. In the past five years we have had numerous workshops at Highlander in which we bring people together who are organizing against toxic waste dumps, usually in their communities’ backyards. We have found that people can organize against a toxic waste dump in an Applachian holler, but the chances are ten to one that if they win, the toxic waste will be shipped to the Chemwaste pits at Emelle, Alabama in Sumter County. If the Sumter County people can keep it from coming there, it will be dumped on someone else.

The latest plan for doing away with toxic waste, by the way, is to truck it down the highway to Mobile, put it on a barge and burn it in Mobile Bay. You can imagine there are a few people in Mobile who are concerned about that. Will we soon be shipping our toxic waste to Latin American countries just as we have shipped them pesticides and drugs that have been banned in this country? Toxic waste is an issue that faces us in this region but I don’t think we can talk about doing away with it here only to get it shipped somewhere else.

Another example that illustrates why we need to understand the international economy came to our attention last year in one of the Appalachian communities that we’ve worked with–a West Virginia coal town called Gary. Nearly a hundred percent of Gary’s work force is employed by the United States Steel Company which runs several mines and a cleaning plant in the area. About a year and a half ago US Steel entirely shut down its operations in the Gary holler and ninety percent of the work force became unemployed.

When US Steel began to call people back to work, after many weeks of unemployment, management called the miners into the company offices one by one. They did not ask to come to a union meeting and talk. The company told the miners, “If we’re going to keep this mine open in this holler, we have to increase production by ten percent. Otherwise we close this mine entirely in March.”

Production at Gary increased fourteen percent during the first month of the mine’s reopening. Since then the mine has been kept partially open. But the significant thing about this situation is that US Steel began closing down the mines

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in Gary, West Virginia at the same time it was buying new mines in South Africa. The economic situation of Gary is directly related to US Steel’s ability to seek cheaper, non-union labor and offer far less safety protection for its workers.

Another instance:

At the Highlander Center we have long been interested in adult education. Earlier, I mentioned Mrs. Clark’s work in the citizenship schools in the 1950s. Right now one of the best laboratories of adult education in the world is Latin America. Perhaps you know of the work of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian who has helped to shape many Latin American and African educational programs. Two years ago, as we were talking about an international perspective to our work, we joined with Freire’s organization, the Council for Adult Education in Latin America (CEAAL), the International Council on Adult Education (JCAE)–headquartered in Toronto, and the Vice-Ministry of Adult Education in Nicaragua, to organize an “encuentro”–an exchange between adult educators in Latin America and adult educators in North America.

The week-long conference was held in Managua. In addition to learning about literacy and education projects throughout Latin America, we also learned about Nicarauga–its postrevolutionary reality and its attempts to “reconstruct the country” by providing for basic food needs, health care and education.

What we were most impressed by in Nicaragua and what we have kept close to our hearts since returning, were the adult education projects and the tremendous efforts to teach “people how to read and write. Within the first year after the Sandinista revolution the Nicaraguan government instituted a country-wide program, Alfabetizacion, an effort that reduced basic illiteracy from over fifty percent to approximately twelve percent. As in the citizenship education program at Highlander in the 1950s, the intention in Nicaragua is not just to teach people how to read and write, but to teach people how to be good citizens. The adult literacy programs constitute part and parcel of what it means to be involved, active citizens in the life of your country.

We saw several adult literacy sessions at work. In one building–that served as a school during the day, and an adult education center at night–there were about eight different classes going on the evening we were there. I went to a class with twelve to fifteen people, mainly women in their fifties and sixties. They were learning how to read and write. Most of these women worked as maids; there are still upper and middle class people in Managua who have maids.

The teacher was a young man who had learned how to read and write in the literacy program of 1980. He had gone through all five levels of the adult literacy program and was now teaching people at the first level. I watched as the older women went go to the blackboard and very painfully tried to write sentences. From writing and reading, they went to a session on mathematics, and again, painfully and slowly attempted to subtract four figures, one from the other.

There was no shame or embarrassment at any time, but rather a great deal of pride and dignity in the room. Pride in themselves and in their ever-increasing abilities and pride in their “new” country, a country that now included them in its future.

These women come to that class five nights a week, two hours a night, to learn how to read and write. By the time they are through they will have gone, like their teacher, through all five levels of the adult literacy program.

In Nicaragua you get a sense of such commitment–not just to teach people how to read and write–but to truly liberate people so that they might become active and productive.

What we saw in those sessions was a process of empowerment. We also saw the same process at work in the countryside in the health program. Having seen what is going on in Nicaragua and knowing the commitment of the people there-people that we made friends with, that we enjoyed rum and coke with, people with whom we talked about mutual dreams and commonalities–it is indeed sad to think that the United States might intervene in the same way that it did in Vietnam.

US intervention in the internal affairs of Nicaragua–and by that I mean our current intervention through so-called covert activities, not some planned military intervention in the future–is interferring with the process of democratization that we witnessed. For indeed, one of our strongest impressions was of people finally being able to participate in the decisions which affect their lives. The spirit was contagious. Everywhere we went we found Nicarguans [sic] intensively engaged in building their own future and, therefore, their country’s future.

When we were planning the adult education conference, the vice-minister of adult education, Ernesto Vallancillos, came to Highlander and spent a week with us in the mountains of East Tennessee. He said that he had been in

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this country twice before but that he had spoken only at big universities where the question that people had asked him was whether or not he was a communist.

While he was visiting us, we took him up to Appalshop in eastern Kentucky, and we took him around in Harlan County-“Bloody Harlan” where some of the fiercest union battles were fought in the 1930s. He sat and talked for two hours with a community group that has been organizing against the polluters of a creek in Middlesboro, Kentucky. He saw a side of the United States that he never had seen at Yale University or Stanford.

As we were driving through the Southern Appalachians he was absolutely stunned. He said, “I didn’t know that you had poverty in this country. This is not our image of what your country is like.”

Since we returned from Nicaragua, we’ve maintained ties with the vice-ministry of education. We’re trying to determine our own works in relationship to what is going on there-not just in supporting a revolutionary movement in Central America-but with regard to the kinds of work we’re doing and the kind that they are doing. The more people in Latin America who get to know people in United States communities who are engaged in struggle, the larger becomes the international community who share the same understandings and beliefs. I hope that there will be increasing numbers of people in this country who will feel that they cannot support the policies that lead to intervention in Nicaragua.

There is one more thing that I want to say about international issues.

Last summer two other Highlander staff people and I travelled to Scandinavia where we visited a labor folk high school in Sweden. We were there during a special summer session for workers and their families from all over the country. During the week the families met in small workgroups, to carry out projects around the week’s theme: their fears.

One group produced a play, another an exhibit, and another prepared some art work based on fairy tales. On the final day of the week the groups presented their projects to the entire body. All of these projects had to do with nuclear war.

When we asked one of the teachers why this was the only issue that was being raised, he looked at us as if he couldn’t believe what we were asking. His reply was simple and direct, “We are all afraid here. You have deployed your cruise missiles all around us and we stand to lose our lives here.” That was the single most educational moment for us on the visit. Missile deployment for us was another news item; to the Swedish workers and their families it was an ominous threat.

He replied, “You have deployed your cruise missiles all around us and we stand to lose our lives.”

As we go into the late 1980s and think about what we want the years beyond to be like, I don’t know how our day-to-day work will change, but I do know that we constantly have to be searching for ways to be in solidarity with poor and working class people in the rest of the world–just like poor and working class people here. We have to reach out and create the future with them. We can’t stand alone as a region or as a nation. Our beloved community–as we called it in the 1960s–must be much broader this time.

Sue Thrasher is on the staff of the Highlander Center, New Market, Tennessee. She is a contributing editor to Southern Changes. This essay is a revised version of a talk given to the Fortieth Annual Meeting of the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta this past November.

Games Registrars Play

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 7, No. 2, 1985, pp. 1-2

Two decades after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, no one really knows how many black citizens are registered to vote in the South today. While no better basic standard exists by which to measure an open democracy, the level of voter registration is unknown in the region because many local white officials, especially in rural areas, continue to keep meaningless information and thereby promote unfair political practices.

In the 1940s, the Southern Regional Council began estimating the levels of black registration in the South because most Southern officials refused to keep or distribute information about the race of registered voters. Without official numbers verifying the insignificant size of registered black voters, white politicians in those days maintained that they were color blind while using all-white primaries, literacy tests, and poll taxes to keep blacks off the voting rolls and out of the ballot box.

Today the practices of non-information continue in the South. In Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia–five of the eleven Southern states–officials in charge of voter registration cannot tell how many blacks are registered to vote. In these states the best source of information is sample surveys of the US Census Bureau carried out only at the state level every four years.

Records of registration kept by white registrars in predominantly black populated counties in the rural South are unbelievably bad. In Mississippi in 1980-the latest date for a count of the voting age population of counties- rural, predominantly black Coahoma County had 23,246 people of voting age (eighteen years or older). Yet, according to the Mississippi Secretary of State who keeps registration data, 24,273 people were registered to vote there. In Yazoo County, Mississippi there were less than eighteen-thousand citizens of voting age population in 1980 while more than

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18,500 people were registered to vote.

In fact, in the Second Congressional District of Mississippi, the state’s only district with a majority black population, one-half of its twenty counties have more registered voters on the rolls than people of voting age.

Mississippi is not the exception. In Wilcox County, Alabama, eighty-five percent of the total population was registered to vote in 1980, according to the reports of the county’s board of registrars; however, only sixty-two percent of the county was old enough to vote that year. In predominantly black Lowndes County, where whites also control the registration board, eighty-two percent of the total population of the county was registered to vote in 1980, although only sixty percent of the population was of voting age.

In other Southern counties where registration rolls are better kept, some local officials know more than they are telling. In Alabama, the Secretary of State’s office says that most counties do not keep voter registration data by race. Yet, in Sumter County, local white registrars–appointed by the governor of Alabama–have the information. They just don’t distribute it. Less than two years ago, an SRC representative discovered on his third visit to that registrar’s office that registration data was being kept for each precinct, by race on computer. White officials simply did not wish to distribute the information and had denied its existence until it was inadvertently seen.

These inaccuracies and duplicities retard local efforts to increase real voter registration and turn-out; they hide local officials’ caprice and hostility to black voters; and, too often, they permit former residents of a county and current residents of the local cemetery to vote.

Proposals for reform offered by registration boards and their political allies would often have the same effect as the problems they are supposed to correct. In southwest Alabama, for example, recent proposals of reform would have’ wiped away all names from the voting rolls and required all citizens to re-register to vote within a few months. Opportunities for registration in most of these counties are restricted to less than ten days a month and usually only from nine to five (and closed at lunch time). Most registration can only occur at the local courthouse.

While farmers doing seasonal work might once have been able to re-register under these conditions, the fact is that most blacks in these rural areas now work regular shifts and must get the permission of white employers and miss a day’s work to register. And for a large part of the elderly blacks who have no transportation, this type of reregistration would mean no registration.

In effect, these reforms would eliminate in two months a level of black registration that has required twenty years to build. Thus, blacks in these counties have been offered a political Hobson’s choice: useless registration data or crippled black registration. Most blacks have chosen to block the devastating reforms and live without hard, accurate registration data which could often help them target registration drives.

Thirty-five years ago, V. O. Key stated in his authoritative study, Southern Politics, that “every local registration officer is a law unto himself ….” In different circumstances today, the same conclusion applies to much of the South’s Black Belt. Southern local and state governments must begin to collect accurate information on registration by race and to implement procedures that help–not hinder–people to register. Until we know how many blacks and whites are registered to vote in the South’s precincts, we should assume that officials continue to hide mischievous practices which prompted the passage of the Voting Rights Act twenty years ago.

Steve Suitts is executive director of the Southern Regional Council.

Crackdown in the Black Belt: Not-So-Simple Justice

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 7, No. 2, 1985, pp. 2-11

In a trial that should reveal the distance the Reagan Justice Department will travel to cooperate with local white officials in suppressing the voting rights of black citizens, the case of United States of America v. Albert Turner, Spencer Hogue, Jr., and Evelyn Turner moved into a federal courtroom in Selma, Alabama, on June 19.

Meanwhile, US attorneys continue to supervise investigations and bring similar indictments against grassroots civil rights leaders for alleged violations of absentee voting laws in five west Alabama Black Belt counties. Indicted in Birmingham on June 11 were five Greene Countians, including longtime activist and Eutaw city council member Spiver Gordon, the black mayor of the town of Union, James Colvin, and three voting rights workers.

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Other targets of the investigations include sheriff John Hulett of Lowndes County, and–from Wilcox County–Rev. Thomas Threadgill (often regarded as the spiritual leader of the Black Belt) and county commissioner Bobby Joe Johnson.

Arguing that the Justice Department’s investigations of absentee voting practices in Alabama arise from a Reagan Administration policy of singling out black voting rights activists for prosecution, a group of nine black citizens (including four elected officials) from Greene, Lowndes, Perry, Sumter and Wilcox counties filed a class action suit on June 11 in federal district court in Montgomery challenging this policy and asking that the current, discriminatory, investigations be stopped.

Named as defendants in the federal suit are US Attorney General Edwin Meese; William Bradford Reynolds, Acting Associate Attorney General and head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division; Stephen S. Trott, who oversees Justice’s Criminal Division; and the US Attorneys for the Northern, Middle and Southern Districts of Alabama. The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Southeastern Office of the American Civil Liberties Union are representing the Black Belt citizens who have brought the complaint.

“We think it’s unfair the way the investigation is being conducted and felt this was the only way to let the people know what was going on,” said Wilcox County Sheriff Prince Arnold, one of the plaintiffs.

The civil suit charges that Justice Department officials and US Attorneys “are engaged in a concerted effort to unlawfully interfere with black citizens’ associational and political activities” in the Black Belt, and that the current investigations discourage citizens from exercising their right to vote. Federal and local officials are also accused of ignoring numerous citizens’ complaints as well as other information (such as that collected by federal election observers) with regard to electoral fraud and intimidation committed by whites and by black political opponents of the targets of the investigations.

In recent weeks, a clutch of FBI agents operating out of Mobile, Montgomery and Tuscaloosa offices have questioned as many as a thousand black absentee voters about the casting of their ballots in September 1984 elections. Civil rights leaders in the region wonder where these agents have been during the long years of white intimidation and violence that have accompanied the challenge to minority rule in the Black Belt.

The involvement of US Attorneys–whom local black citizens have taken to calling “federal persecutors”–in actions that intimidate voting rights organizations and voters in this majority black region of the South presents yet another face of the Reagan Administration’s national effort

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to push back two decades of civil rights gains. While not as widely known as Justice’s moves to overturn affirmative action programs in state and local governments across the country, or its recent decision to oppose (in a US Supreme Court brief) North Carolina’s single member redistricting plan, the trial of the “Marion Three” and the ongoing Black Belt investigations threaten to reverse the substantial electoral gains made by grassroots black majorities since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The discriminatory nature of the Justice Department’s Black Belt investigations can be traced to a Reagan Administration policy change. Prior to 1984, Justice deferred to local authorities in cases of mixed federal-state elections in which an alleged crime had no effect on the outcome of a federal election. Just such an election was the September, 1984 primary from which the current indictments have sprung. In the summer of 1984, Justice Department officials–including William Bradford Reynolds and Stephen Trott–devised a new policy for federal investigations of election offenses. Now, federal officials could begin to investigate “political participants” who “seek out the elderly, socially disadvantaged, or the illiterate, for the purpose of subjugating their electoral will” or under whose “watchful eye” a voter happened to “mark his or her ballot.” According to Justice’s manual on election crimes, this policy is aimed at persons who “exploit . . . the franchise of dependent voters.”

The Justice Department has applied this superficially helpful new policy in an explicitly racial and regional manner, targeting for investigation only black civil rights activists in Alabama Black Belt and other Southern majority black counties. According to materials filed by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in a pre-trial motion on behalf of Perry County defendant Spencer Hogue, Jr., Assistant Director of Justice’s Office of Public Affairs John Russell is quoted as saying that “civil rights leaders and religious leaders” have been targeted for investigation because of “arrogance on the part of blacks” in the region.

“They have come in here, with their indictment papers in their pockets, to wipe us out,” says Sumter County schoolboard member Wendell Paris, one target of the investigation. “There’s another Reconstruction headed this way. If they get the people they’re after, that’s the end for the foreseeable future of black sheriffs in the Black Belt of Alabama, that’s the end of black state legislators, that’s the end of officials elected by the majority of black people.”

At stake in the Black Belt is the coalescence of black political power over a multi-county region which has historically been dominated by some of the Deep South’s strongest white politicos. At stake are scores of local elective offices, administrative control of revenues, resources and policies, sufficient clout to secure black participation in government public works contracts and programs, several seats in the Alabama legislature, influence upon the outcome of a US Congressional candidacy, and the margin of difference in a close Senate race.

Over the past twenty years, blacks in the ten southwest Alabama counties affected most by the current prosecutions have gradually won local elective offices. Prior to 1965, whites controlled all ten county commissions, eleven boards of education and thirty four town governments. Since the Voting Rights Act, blacks have emerged to fill the majority of the seats on five county commissions and five school boards. Blacks now direct the municipal governments of nine towns, while whites still remain in control of five county governments and thirty-three of forty-two towns, including every county seat. The 138 black elected officials in the ten west Alabama Black Belt counties account for forty-four percent of all of Alabama’s black elected office holders. Among this number are three sheriffs, one probate judge, three state representatives and one state senator.

Although anything close to exact voting registration figures for blacks and whites in this ten county area (indeed, throughout the South) are both hard to come by and reflect voting rolls from which the dead, departed and duplicitous of both races have not been cleared, the relative numbers tell a story. From the pre-1965 era when there were essentially no registered black voters in the Black Belt, 1982 registration figures show more than 70,000 black voters and 62,659 whites.

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“The local white powers and the feds have said that the Black Belt has gotten too politically strong,” says Wendell Paris. “That’s what this is about. This isn’t really about a few absentee ballots. And they’ve begun by indicting Albert Turner because he is the bellcow of the Black Belt.

“Do you think that they’re going to come through here and put Albert and Evelyn in jail, Spencer Hogue in jail, Spiver Gordon and Rosie Carpenter in jail, John Hulett, Reverend Threadgill in jail–and you think black folks would come back to the polls”

The success of the strategy of collaboration between local and federal officials to thwart the emergence of black political power in this majority-black region of the South will be significantly affected by the outcome and the public reaction to the trial of the three defendants from Perry County.

After months of a joint local-federal investigation in which white law enforcement officials, US attorneys and FBI agents targeted black civil rights leaders, violated the secrecy of black voters’ ballots, eavesdropped upon the activities of a grassroots voting organization, intimidated grand jury witnesses, and ignored evidence of election wrong-doing committed by the largely white, political opponents of the defendants, federal prosecutors have assembled the approximately two dozen absentee ballots which the Turners and Hogue are accused of altering, falsely witnessing and mailing and for which they face years in prison and tens of thousands of dollars in fines.

Like Black Belt circumstances in general, the Perry County situation must be understood in an historical context. For twenty years Albert Turner, Evelyn Turner and Spencer Hogue, Jr., have worked through the community organization which they founded, the Perry County Civil League, to improve the lot of black citizens in their home county and region. From 1965 until 1972, Albert Turner directed the Alabama activities of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He was a chief lieutenant and confidant of Martin Luther King, Jr., driving the highways and backroads of Alabama during the height of modern white resistance.

“There’s no explanation in the world as to how I’m still living,” Turner has said. I ran the state SCLC office. I was the top rigger. And I didn’t back off of nothing. I went in every county in this Black Belt and preached and left at twelve o’clock that night and drove home by myself. And ain’t never looked back. Now you tell me there ain’t no God. I don’t listen to that kind of talk.”

In the mid-1960s, voting rights activities of the Perry County Civic League first began to move the county toward political democracy. The group faced an intransigent land holding class, descendants of ante-bellum Black Belt planters, who owned the area’s resources, and controlled the local governmental offices. Supporters of the Perry County Civic

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League also faced the deferential customs, deep fears and historical powerlessness of the black population in this region where economic survival has been tied for generations to the fortunes of local white families.

The PCCL helped local blacks to fight the battles for integration of public facilities and institutions. It assisted poor, elderly and disabled black citizens in making application for federal food, medical and financial aid. And, over a period of years, using the wedge provided by the Voting Rights Act, the PCCL chipped away at white rule in this county where today sixty percent of the population is black.

Throughout the Black Belt prior to 1965, blacks were shut-out of the electoral process. No blacks were elected to public office in these counties for nearly a century following Reconstruction. The Turners, now under indictment for alleged voting law violations, initiated the lawsuits that first brought federal registrars into Perry County to aid blacks in becoming registered voters. PCCL supporters have carried voters to the polls, accompanied them past the uniformed presence of armed white lawmen, and upon request, have gone with them into the voting booth. As in surrounding counties where similar efforts were underway, black registration in Perry County grew steadily, increasing from twelve voters in 1965 to the over five-thousand names that are on the current rolls.

Blacks who protested their historical inability to vote in Perry County were met first with hostility, arrest and violence. In March 1965, Jimmie Lee Jackson, a black voting rights activist was murdered. When racial violence diminished, white resistance continued with public and private institutions fighting against integration and democratic control. Today, Perry County, like the rest of the Black Belts remains at the heart of Dixie’s private school, “Christian academy” movement.

“The effects of this history,” observes Steve Suitts, SRC executive director, “are real and direct upon many elderly blacks who have been victimized by a history of racial exclusion and violence–and by the low levels of education obtained as a result of government-enforced segregation.

“For example, a black woman at the age of sixty-seven today in Perry County has spent almost three-fourths of her life in segregation where blacks could not vote, could not attend white schools, could not use public toilets, and had to have a white person vouch for her in order to obtain loans or government services. This is why it is important that the black elderly, who make up fifteen percent of the Perry County population have private citizens whom they trust to assist in exercising the right to vote. For many of these blacks, merely approaching a courthouse or polling place means overcoming a lifetime of custom.”

“We have problems,” says voting rights worker Rosie Carpenter of Greene County, “because we are competing with white bankers, doctors, lawyers and businessmen. They sit near the polls to intimidate the black voters. Dr. Joe P. Smith, a local doctor here, came over to the black precinct at the Eutaw Activity Center and there were black people afraid to vote their conviction because he was sitting at that table.

“A black lady told me when I went to show her how we were voting, ‘I tell you what I’m going to do. Dr. Joe P. been to my house and he gave me this card and showed me how to’ vote. You know he’s us doctor. I’m going to vote the way that the black people are voting, but I can’t let him know it because he is us doctor and we will need him.’

“This same doctor,” Ms. Carpenter continues, ” had white folks picking up and hauling black folks. Out at the armory I saw white ladies bringing in their cooks and maids. I had never seen that before in history. The white mistresses were bringing their cooks in.

“When Spiver Gordon was running to be the first black elected to the Eutaw city council,” recalls Ms. Carpenter, white policemen were posted at black voting boxes, in their uniforms and with pistols.”

Absentee balloting emerged as a matter of serious concern to whites in the Black Belt during the late 1960s, as black registration became more common. For at least a decade, white absentee landowners and former residents who have ties of kin and friends “down home,” but who now live anywhere from Birmingham to Chicago to New York have continued to vote in Black Belt contests at the request of local white officeholders and candidates. (See “Crackdown in the Black Belt,” Southern Changes, March/April, 1985.) On election nights throughout the early 1970s, white officials found electoral deliverance inside dependable absentee voting boxes filled with lopsided margins. Federal and state authorities took no notice, and sought no indictments, against any whites on charges of absentee voter fraud.

“Do you know why the roads to white folks’ cemeteries are paved in the Black Belt?,” Wilcox County Commissioner

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Bobby Joe Johnson asks. “It’s so people won’t get their feet wet if it rains on election day.”

Black support groups such as the Perry County Civic League sought to counter white abuse of absentee balloting not only by registering complaints, but by registering a greater number of black absentee voters. They have worked to make the election process easier and more accessible for elderly blacks, for those attending college away from home, and for the many county residents who must commute to manufacturing and wood-cutting jobs across county lines.

“You can’t win an election in the Black Belt of Alabama if you don’t have a sophisticated get-out the-absentee vote effort,” points out Annie Thomas, Rosie Carpenter’s sister and another experienced organizer in Greene County.

Among the black absentee voters in the Black Belt counties are a disproportionately high number of voters who are illiterate or otherwise incapable by themselves of understanding the intricate procedures required in order to apply for, fill out, witness and return absentee ballots in the proper form. “Without the assistance of persons knowledgeable about absentee voting procedures and the issues and candidates involved,” says the SRC’s Suitts, “many rural black voters in the Black Belt counties of Alabama, although fully qualified to vote absentee, would be unable to do so and accordingly would be deprived of the franchise.”

Virtually all blacks in the Black Belt over the age of twenty-five were educated, if at all, in substantially inferior, segregated schools. The level of education for the adult population, especially the elderly, is very low. By the 1980 census, only forty-three percent of the total population over the age of twenty-five in Perry County had a high school diploma, although fifty-seven percent of all Alabamians of that age had high school diplomas. For the elderly and black the level of education is much lower. For example, the number of persons twenty-five years or older with four years of high school education in 1950 in Perry County–those who would be fifty-five years or older today–was only 110 of 5,780 blacks.

Black Belt counties are the state’s poorest. To find jobs, many workers must travel out of their home county everyday. Census data for 1980 shows that thirty-one percent of the working population in Perry County (home of the Turners and Hogue) work outside the county. In nearby Lowndes County, the number reaches almost fifty percent. To vote, these commuting workers must miss work–and jeopardize their jobs with white employers–or obtain absentee ballots.

Job and housing discrimination in Black Belt counties has restricted many blacks to housing in widely dispersed rural areas, distant from voting locations. For these citizens, absentee balloting has meant increased participation in elections.

The right to vote in the Black Belt also remains impeded by practical barriers. The number of days, the location, and the times at which a citizen can register to vote this region are limited severely in comparison to more urban and suburban locations in Alabama.

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“There ain’t nobody else out there who understands this stuff like we do,” Albert Turner has said with regard to the efforts of community organizers to gather the rural black absentee vote. “I mean you got to know the laws, you got to have dedication. You’ve got to get up off your ass and get out there and go to them folks’ houses. This ain’t no playtime.”

The Perry County Civic League’s get-out-the-absentee vote organization merits awards rather than indictments. The PCCL has taken a foothold in the Voting Rights Act and climbed toward political power by squeezing every possible vote from the county’s black communities.

About ten or fifteen group leaders are responsible for the different communities of Perry County. Group captains first identify potential absentee voters and help them fill out applications for ballots. State law requires county officials to post, daily, the names of persons requesting absentee ballots and also requires the ballot to be sent on the day the county clerk receives the request. Black Belt voting rights workers watch the courthouse bulletin board to see when a ballot is in the mail.

“And we get out there,” says Rosie Carpenter, who performs a similar task in Greene County, “and make sure the voters get their ballots before anybody else can get them.”

“Over the last several years,” says Steve Suitts, “elderly black voters in the Black Belt have come to depend upon black citizens, often civil rights advocates, to assist them in filling out their ballots. The relationship between the activists and elderly blacks is based upon trust, oral communications and shared assumptions. The advocate must often interpret the oral instructions of the voter in light of their past relationship and understanding.

“For instance, several years ago, I traveled with a black civil rights worker in the Black Belt as he visited with and assisted absentee voters. I remember in particular one person we stopped to see.

“‘I want it done like last time,’ said an elderly black voter, telling the organizer how she wished to vote. Yet, on this election’s ballot there were fewer candidates than ‘last time.’

“Because I was present,” Suitts continues, “the black organizer asked the woman a question he later told me he already had answered for himself.

‘You want to vote for the blacks that are running?’

‘You know that’s it,’ she said. ‘ Don’t you make fun of an old woman like me.”‘

Oral tradition and black community consensus inform the political culture of the Black Belt. To be effective, civil rights advocates must make make good faith interpretations of oral instructions, which may not be plain in meaning to others who do not know the assumptions established over time in their relationship. Yet, if community organizers approached many elderly and non-literate voters differently, they would discourage many of these folk from voting, and they would not have achieved the increased registration and turnout in the Black Belt since 1965.

Not all elderly black voters who need and ask for assistance fit the customary image. “We have some very shrewd and determined old folks among the elderly population in this Black Belt,” says Wendell Paris. “They are our best voters because they were the ones out there in the streets getting their heads beaten in 1965. Anybody who was fifty years old in the movement is seventy years old today. They are our best voters. They’ll get on the telephone and call you and say, ‘When are you going to come and get my vote?’ They are serious about voting.”

After ballots are marked, they are collected door to door by the group captains and brought to a central meeting. Perhaps one person picks up twenty-five ballots in her community. A man in another community may gather seventy-five or a hundred ballots. All the ballots are brought together in order to know exactly who has been contacted and how many will be mailed. In Perry County, the marked ballots are then taken to the county seat of Marion to be mailed, using postage purchased by the PCCL. In the September 4, 1984 primary Albert and Evelyn Turner mailed about 350 ballots; Spencer Hogue, Jr. mailed perhaps 150.

“If you mailed a ballot from the end of the county, out in the rural area,” says Rosie Carpenter, speaking from her experience in Greene County, “it probably never would get to town.”

White opponents have been known to go through the backwoods roads of Perry County and take enough ballots out of the mailbox to change an election.

“This is what folks like Albert Turner went through the

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black belt teaching people,” say Wendell Paris. That’s why the white folks consider him as the instigator of this.”

When black communities are organized so thoroughly, all the potential absentee voters are easily identified. “We know,” says Annie Thomas, “who is going to college, who’s sick, who goes out of the county to work. And that’s what the FBI can’t understand. That’s the reason they look for conspiracies and think there’s so much fraud. They know that there is no way for any a single individual to honestly be able to go out in all these places and know who’s sick or who’s going out of the county to work. What surprises the FBI is the fact that we have a system whereby a local person who knows the community gets people these applications and ballots. They don’t believe anybody could know all these people and their situations. But you can’t do it any other way and hope to win elections.”

With gradual but steady success, the Perry County Civic League has identified, promoted and help elect candidates that represent the majority of the county’s black voters. Yet, as the current prosecutions demonstrate, the PCCL continues to face a core of diehard enemies among the county’s traditional white leadership, as well as a small but significant number of black political rivals who at one time or another failed to get PCCL endorsement for their candidacies.

White powerholders in the town of Marion and the county of Perry have not taken kindly to the PCCL’s persistent attempts to perpetrate democracy. The beginnings of the current trial go back to the fall and winter of 1982-83 when state district attorney Roy Johnson of Marion convened a grand jury to consider his allegations that the PCCL’s voter-assistance programs were not conducted lawfully. This investigation targeted Albert Turner and Spencer Hogue, Jr., and arose from the successful efforts of PCCL endorsed candidates in the September, 1982 primary and run-off elections. Throughout the Perry County drama, District Attorney Johnson has acted the defender for the interests of the county’s good white society.

After Johnson presented his evidence against Turner, Hogue and other PCCL supporters, the grand jury found no grounds for any indictments. In preparing the final report of the grand jury, however, he inserted a passage referring to vote “tampering” and requested an “outside agency, preferably federal to monitor our elections.” Subsequently, Johnson and others in Perry County, including Probate Judge Floyd Cooke appearing on local television, have relied upon this statement in the grand jury report as proof of a local desire and need for a federal criminal investigation. Interviews with the grand jurors themselves, however, have established that they did not intend to request a federal criminal investigation, but were merely endorsing the kind of routine federal voter assistance and monitoring which blacks in the area have been requesting and receiving since passage of the Voting Rights Act.

By the time that the majority black, locally constituted, state grand jury had failed to indict any members of the Perry County Civic League, District Attorney Johnson was already looking for federal friends in high prosecutorial places. In October of 1982 he wrote to Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. Johnson charged that the situation in Perry County with regard to absentee voting abuse and intimidation at the polls was “becoming explosive.” He said the county sheriff’s office was unable to protect citizens’ voting rights. Johnson suggested the need for a federal investigation and asked, not for the usual federal observers, but for federal marshals to supervise upcoming elections. In reply, Assistant Attorney General Reynolds wrote Johnson that under provisions of the Voting Rights Act, the office of Attorney General could not SCLC federal marshals to conduct local elections. Reynolds suggested that Johnson take his information to the FBI or the US Attorney for the Southern District.

Roy Johnson persisted. Sometime in 1984, the Justice Department and US Attorney Jeff Sessions of Mobile (who came to his prosecutorial office the grace of Alabama’s first term Republican Senator Jeremiah Denton), agreed to join Roy Johnson in a federal-local investigation of members and supporters of the Perry County Civic League. Conveniently, this effort coincided with the change in US Department of Justice selective-prosecution policies with regard to alleged voter fraud, and with the 1984 federal elections.

In the summer and fall of 1984, with the encouragement of the Department of Justice, District Attorney Johnson began to pursue an investigation of the political and voter assistance activities of PCCL supporters. County officials and would-be officials worked in concert with the US Attorney and FBI agents to secure prosecution of PCCL

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supporters in order to undercut the organization’s political effectiveness. The investigation included the assigning of the local law enforcement officials to monitor PCCL meetings with listening devices and to conduct surveillance of PCCL voter-assistance activities leading up to the September 4, 1984 primary election.

In addition, after consulting with US Attorney Sessions in Mobile and Department of Justice officials in Washington, District Attorney Johnson advised several Perry County candidates or former candidates for local public office–all of whose candidacies had been or were being opposed by the PCCL-to file a lawsuit in September of 1984 with Circuit Judge Anne McKelvy. This suit’s request, which was granted, permitted white Perry County Circuit Clerk Mary Auburtin (a long time PCCL opponent) to number all absentee ballots and envelopes–without the knowledge or consent of absentee voters–in such a way that the names of each voter and the candidates they voted for could be known to law enforcement officials.

After the September election, FBI agents took the numbered absentee ballots, went to the homes of dozens of elderly black citizens, confronting them with ballots which they thought had been cast in secret, and began questioning them about “ballot tampering.” By law, federal actions affecting the custody, secrecy and integrity of ballots must be supported by probable cause and authorized both by federal court order and the prior approval of the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice-none of which occurred in the Perry County investigation.

The next step in the federal-local effort was the convening–in the fall of 1984–of a federal grand jury, not in the Perry County area where all the relevant documents, witnesses and targets were, but in Mobile. Unlike the state grand jury convened in the Black Belt by District Attorney Johnson in 1982, selection of members of a federal grand jury–as well as the jury for the Selma trial–drew upon a jury roll heavily weighted with white, male, Mobilians.

In the weeks between the September, 1984, primary and the November general election, dozens of elderly, black Perry County absentee voters were interrogated at their homes, then–with the help of FBI agents, Alabama State Troopers, several Marion city police officers and a game warden–were loaded on buses, and with a Trooper escort, were transported two-hundred miles to testify about who they had voted for and who had given them assistance in casting their ballots.

These tactics of threatening, frightening and intimidating elderly and uneducated witnesses, and of leading many of them to believe that their absentee voting somehow violated the law, resulted in inaccurate and misleading testimony. Among the witnesses whom the Government carried to Mobile were several whose health was threatened by the trip; a man in his nineties suffered a stroke and a woman, a ninety-year-old woman had a relapse of heart trouble. The Mobile ordeal has convinced some black citizens of Perry County never to vote again.

Mobile is not the Black Belt and the federal white grand jurors who were selected there had little understanding of or sympathy with the defendants’ voter-assistance and voter advocacy activities. Although members of the Perry County Civic League–and participants in similar groups across the South–engage in constitutionally protected activities in helping voters obtain absentee ballots, by endorsing candidates, and by aiding elderly and illiterate voters to cast their ballots, these practices offended some of the Mobile grand jurors’ strongly felt beliefs that voting is only proper when each individual voter votes in total isolation and privacy without the knowledge or assistance of anyone else. A twenty-nine count indictment was brought and the trial set for Selma.

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One other theme must be wound into the present story of the Marion Three and the Black Belt’s prospects for political democracy. By 1982, two local groups–the White Citizens Council and Concerned Citizens of Perry County–were working actively against the Perry County Civic League to elect white candidates and the few black candidates willing to fly a flag of convenience. The appearance of a number of black “coalition” candidates, as they currently describe themselves in the Black Belt, represents the most recent innovation in the effort of white elites to ignore the handwriting on the wall.

In Greene County, where the “coalition” movement stirred to life in early 1984 (and where blacks, who count for seventy-eight percent of the population, have held all of the county’s elective offices since 1968), a published handbill announcing the “coalition’s” organizational meeting argued that “if the forces of the radical Black front” were to be defeated, the “key for the 1984 County election is to support good, responsible Blacks and to keep Whites out of the race.” This strategy of combining white votes from the town of Eutaw with an obliging minority of black votes led to several victories in the 1984 Greene County election.

“In the long run,” Wendell Paris observes with regard to the white strategy of divide and conquer, “single-member districting is the best way. Ain’t no doubt about it. You see, you can always get a few of these blacks who ain’t into nothing, who just want prestige, and a white man tells him, ‘I’ll elect you, cause you are a good guy.’

“Of course, what hurts these white folks so bad is that we did that to them. When we first got started we couldn’t beat the entrenched white politicians. So what we did as black people was vote for a milder white man to move out the giant. And came back then with a black to beat the rookie white. They’re reversing that on us.

“What they’re doing at this point is getting a Tom black elected and next time they’re going in themselves because they hope to have us split.”

To head off the “coalition” strategy that cripples black voting strength, Alabama state senator Hank Sanders of Selma along with state representatives Lucius Black of York, and Jenkins Bryant of Newbern (black legislators whose own elections testify to the growing self-determination movement in the Black Belt), navigated a redistricting bill through the Alabama legislature during the 1985 session. The new law provides for the replacement of the present at large method of electing county commissioners with new single member district plans for the counties of Greene, Wilcox, Sumter, Lowndes and Perry. Already, white probate judge Floyd Cook of Perry County-a stalwart of old guard opposition-has asked the Justice Department (under the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act) to object to the new state law.

“The local people in Marion,” observes Wendell Paris, “would almost rather have war than for the legislature to have passed the single-member district plan. They believe that Albert Turner will run for one of the soon-to-be created districts and be elected. If he does, he could turn out to be chairman of the county commission, which would be tantamount to being probate judge. They were hoping Albert would be in jail by now, or on probation with his record ruined and his influence at a dead end.”

The prospect of representation on Black Belt county commissions in proportion to the racial distribution of the population is unprecedented in the region. Supporters of the Perry County Civic League and voting rights groups in the neighboring counties soon to apply the colored pencils of redistricting to huge county maps like the one which fills a living room wall at Albert and Evelyn Turner’s home in Marion.

“Free the Marion Three” reads the 1960s-style slogan on a tee shirt now being seen from Selma to Port Epes on the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway. Above the slogan appears a black and white drawing of the Turners and Spencer Hogue, Jr., as they pose in front of a map of Marion drawn in single member districts. Will the census tracts belong to the people?

“So now,” hopes Sumter County schoolboard member Paris, “white voters in Perry County will get their two seats and we will get our three. In Greene they will get their one and we will get our four. In Sumter they will get their two and we will get our four. One person, one vote and a surer chance at fairness for black and white.”

And so the importance of the current trial in Selma.

Consorting with the Enemy

By Elise Witt

Vol. 7, No. 2, 1985, pp. 15-21

February 3. Miami, the cultural intermediary. Tropical vegetation, flowering bushes in February. Sultry air and a heavy, full moon. Spanish signs on Cuban stores, Spanish being spoken. We share a Cuban seafood meal by the Miami River.

In the bilingual airport we try out the Spanish we have studied the last few months. The Aeronica gate and our flight are filled mostly with Nicaraguans. Three North Americans are aboard to meet a cotton brigade. There are two students from Boston and California and an older Mexican American woman who tells us she grew up picking cotton. “Going to Nicaragua to help with their harvest is the least I can do to lend support,” she says.

After two hours of flight, someone spots land. At the moment of arrival in Managua a huge space within me lights up.

February 4. We get to know our hosts at the Managua Center for Popular Culture (CPC). The country wide CPC’s are community arts centers which will serve as our sponsors in each town we visit on our sixteen-day tour. We meet with Arelhy Suarez, head of International Cultural Exchange, and Cleopatra and Janet, staff members at the CPC National Office.

With Cleopatra, we eat our first Nicaraguan lunch. Tortillas, salad, including pickled cucumbers, carrots and squash, plantains, beans with cream–my two favorites–and a huge pile of queso fresco–fresh, white cheese, similar to that my father makes out of goat’s milk in North Carolina.

After lunch, we decide on a walking tour of Managua. Straight out from the Hotel Intercontinental–the center for visiting foreign “dignitaries”–we wander through blocks of empty grass and concrete, vestiges of the 1972 earthquake and Somoza’s bombs. Skeletons of buildings are everywhere. Populated neighborhoods ring a vast, empty, city center. Somoza pocketed most of the world-donated relief funds after the earthquake.

The Palacio Nacional is now the Palacio de La Revolucion. At the Plaza Carlos Fonseca Amador the stone reads, “His body is dead, but his spirit lives on in every Nicarguan.” Fonseca, a hero of the revolution, founded the Sandinsta party.

The city of Managua is quiet on this first day of our visit. People have gone to the countryside to pick coffee. The Ministry of Culture is in the mountains, lending a hand.

We walk to the Plaza Park, an outdoor amphitheater. On Election Day, November 2, 1984, all of Managua gathered here for a fiesta. The great cathedral in the middle of Managua was also ruined by the tremor of the earthquake, but the frame still stands and we climb to look over the sanctuary and catch another view of the city.

From the cathedral we ride the bus. It is as crowded as everyone told us buses would be. We lose Mary, Rick and Steve when we get off. They have to ride a stop further before they can make their way to the back door and step out.

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Walls are covered with folk art and graffiti. And there are the billboards: “In Construction Is the Solution.” “In Five Years We Have Built 1500 New Schools. This Is What We Are Defending.” “After the First Step We Will Never Stop Walking.”

February 5. We leave Managua for the countryside in a minibus driven by the CPC’s Don Felix. In sight of a large lake and volcanos, one still smoking, we head northwest toward Leon. Beside the road, trees hang with coconuts, mangos, grapefruit.

We are met in the university town of Leon by Carlos Sanchez, the city’s CPC director. The Leon CPC is the former home of a rich somocista who has fled the country. A huge garden is surrounded by terraces. Much of the house is roofless and unused but the core of the CPC is comfortable and well kept. In the library I notice technical books for workers and a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Spanish. Children come every afternoon for folk dancing lessons. Many people use the center for rehearsing, playing music, painting, and as a gathering place.

CPC worker Enrique Sandoval takes my guitar and shows me a new song: “La Consigna,” which tells about the struggles the Nicaraguans have gone through before and since the triumph in 1979. It’s a singable song that everybody in the country seems to know.

Enrique says he has a guitar but no strings. I had heard that there was a shortage of strings-indeed of almost any kind of musical supplies. Before leaving Atlanta I had gotten a donation from GHS Guitar String Company in Michigan, and now Enrique has a new set. Together, we play and sing “Guantanamera” by the Cuban, Jose Marti, and “Flor de Pino,” a Nicaraguan song about Sandino.

Late in the afternoon we walk over to a Leon bank where the workers are sitting in class listening to a professor of literature from the University. At first I don’t understand a word. Slowly, the Spanish starts making sense. The professor is telling of Ruben Dario, the poet laureate of Nicaragua who gave a new identity to Nicaraguan literature and thought. “Hispanic culture must not be swallowed up by English culture. The two must live side by side in the Americas.”

The bank employees have been at work all day and, afterwards, like Nicaraguans throughout the country, they’ve sat through a class. Nonetheless, they receive us enthusiastically.

We start with “Yo Solo Quiero” which is upbeat and carries a message of international solidarity.

At last we are making music and our sense of purpose and belonging seem clearer. This is our first concert in Nicaragua. The introduction of the songs, in Spanish, begins to flow. The audience, at first quiet, becomes warm and responsive.

The program is balanced between our North American songs–particularly lively jazz tunes–and our international repertoire: “Bella Ciao,” a revolutionary Italian song which is understandable in Spanish, and “Paidu Vyidu,” a Russian acapella love ballad. We end with “Flor de Pino” which we don’t know well yet, but which we know means much to our audience.

The best part of the concert comes afterward. People step up to talk, at first shyly, hesitantly, then more enthusias-

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tically. A half-dozen conversations jumble together. A group of five bank workers take up where Enrique had left off in leaching me “La Consigna.”

Afterwards, we walk out of town to the University where we share the women’s dorm with students who are there. They rise at four in the morning to pick cotton until noon, then return for school work all afternoon.

February 6. George King has the video equipment out today and is shooting a walking tour of Leon led by Enrique. Since George asks him to repeat explanations and descriptions several times, I’m really understanding most of what Enrique is saying about Leon’s history and its importance during the revolution as the center of the student movement. He shows us the Cathedral, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the prison of the Somoza guards.

We walk in the cells where barbed wire hangs in vines through the open roof. Here, prisoners were packed a hundred to a cell. Tomas Borge, now one of the leaders of the government, was held in such a cell for six and a half years.

That afternoon, aboard a truck used for hauling crops, Small Family Orchestra and a group of young folk dancers ride to where the students are picking cotton. Along the way we see parakeets and small, bright yellow birds called gorriones sitting in orange, flowering trees. “Zopilotes” (turkey buzzards) float over us for several minutes, following the truck. We pass chacara seca (dry banana), a small group of houses that belonged to a somocista, but is now a state farm.

Oscar, the leader of the student volunteers, asks me if I know “El Arado” (“The Plow”) by Victor Jara. We begin to sing it together on the bumpy, dirt road to the cotton plantation at Miramar.

At Miramar young students who have come from the fields sit around us as we rehearse. Five lie in a hammock–which later breaks with their weight. Others stretch out on the ground. They clap and sing along.

We try out “El Arado,” then “Quincho Barrilete,” a song about a ten-year-old boy, killed in the revolution. Sitting in front of me is a boy who knows all the words.

At the evening concert, we share the stage with the wide-skirted folk dance group who came with us from Leon. We sing a Carter Family song and “Save the Bones for Henry Jones,” the sound echoing over the audience and against a volcano up into the starry sky.

February 7 . Before we leave the dorm this morning, Maribel, one of the students gives me a red and black Sandinista scarf which she sewed herself, then ironed carefully. I trade her a Photosouth baseball cap from Atlanta.

We drive from Leon to Granada.

At an evening concert at Estado Mayor we are proceeded by a solo singer who sings in a rich full voice the new songs of Nicaragua. Two folk dancers and a comedian, Jose Senteno, follow. Then we sing. At the end we are given a copy of The Living Thoughts of Sandino and a kiss from the companero who presents it to us. Before the bus takes us home we sit around and share American songs–North, South and Central.

February 8. We practice an Appalachian spiritual, “Bright Morning Star.” An Indian word in the Nahualt language calls the morning star Nixtayolero, after the corn (nixtayol) tortillas are made from. So we have translated “Bright Morning Star” into Spanish. The harmonies fill up the huge room, the high ceilings, the balcony of the Granada CPC-a former social club for the rich.

Walking down the street in Granada, we hear that a young doctor from that city at work in the north of the country has been killed by contras only hours before. Flags in the city go to half mast.

In the afternoon we ride by open jeep to Jinotepe, to celebrate the return of brigades of coffee and cotton pickers. Nearly four thousand student-aged brigadistas, just arrived, are gathered on the town square. Each brigade has its own name and group spirit and there are prizes for the best pickers. There is a parade and fireworks, and children everywhere.

Knapsacks are piled on the sidewalks and coffee beans are being tossed into the air. A truck passes by decorated

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with stalks of cotton. Between speeches by various brigidistas, we are introduced, the norteamericanos. After we sing and play there are more speeches. We sit and talk with a group of children. These ten and eleven year olds tell us about studying Spanish, English, history, natural science, mathematics, music and drawing in their school. They all have on red and black scarves. One of them, Karen, gives me the button that she earned during the Literacy Campaign. I give her a figurine of a horse that I have from Germany in my guitar case.

On the way back to Granada we stop at a fiesta where a band from the Atlantic Coast, Dimencion Costena is playing. An eight man group, they play music from the black-Creole, Atlantic Coast culture of Nicaragua–a mix of reggae and calypso. This is a band that we hope to bring to the US as the other half of our cultural exchange.

February 9. As we drive to the mountain town of Boaco, we are joined by our new guide, Cruz, from Rivas in the south of Nicaragua. Even in the mountains, we are traveling through palm trees and tropical vegetation.

The microbus is having problems carrying a fifty-five gallon drum of gas, five musicians with instruments, a video producer with three packs of gear and from three to fifteen Nicaraguans. On several of the hills, we get out and push.

our evening performance is at the movie theater of Boaco, where we’ve replaced the evening’s feature film. It’s the first full length concert we’ve done since the one for the bank workers. We include many Spanish songs as well as our new Southern songs. The faces in the audience give back a lot and many mouths are singing the Spanish words. At the end, after “Flor de Pino,” we invite the audience to come and talk, ask questions, offer criticism. We are quickly surrounded.

A man with a sleeping daughter draped across his shoulder asks many questions. He is a schoolteacher who, with his students, is collecting regional history and folklore.

“What do the people in the United States think of Nicaragua?,” he asks. “What news do they receive?” “Upon your return, you must speak at every concert you play, with every person you talk with, about what we are trying to do here. We want peace and the freedom to develop our lives and our own history. We feel a kinship with the people of the US and want to maintain bonds of friendship, not be separated by misunderstanding.”

February 10. Norman, a twenty-three year old architecture student who speaks beautiful English that he learned in Nicaraguan schools tells me, “Someday I would like to travel to visit the United States and many other countries. But who knows when that will be possible. Who knows if that will ever be possible.”

Norman is in the middle of his university studies. But he has to wait a year, two years. For now, he must pick cotton and coffee and go to the mountains to protect schools, hospitals and towns from contra attacks. “Please tell your people, ” he says, “that we want to continue our development as a young country.”

By the time we left Nicaragua, it felt like everyone we met had lost a relative or a best friend, either during the revolution or fighting the contras.

“At least one student from every classroom has fallen,” says Norman. “When you hear that the three most promising students in your class have been killed, what else can you do but step forward and take their place? When a child sees his parents killed by the contras, what else can he do but join the fight himself, even though he is ‘too young.’ They put these children in service as cooks or other non-combatant duties, but they usually wind up in combat by choice.”

February 11. We have breakfast with Eunice, Nelly, Roberto and the other CPC workers who have been traveling with us. My sister Mary is giving Mateo a crash course in reading music. Conversations buzz around the table.

Abel, the regional director of the CPC’s in the mountains, thanks us for our visit with a brief speech and presents each of us with a copy of a book by Ahmed Campos, a young poet, a friend who was killed in the early 1980s by the contras. With a heartfelt speech, I thank them for the three days that we have shared.

A long bus drive takes us to Matagalpa, into the northern coffee-growing mountains of Nicaragua, near the combat zone.

At the Matagalpa CPC we meet Jose Manuel Chamorro Rios. Forty-eight years old, Chamorro has six children. In our presence, he rarely speaks without guitar accompaniment. It seems there is no music he cannot play. He begins with a beautiful Nicaraguan folk melody, then blithely changes to an intricate “As Time Goes By,” followed by a B.

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B. King tune, then punctuates his last sentence with a Flamenco hot lick. Students are coming in and out, asking advice, playing duets with Chamorro.

Although he is one of the best players I’ve met anywhere, he is playing a beat-up guitar. Many of his students come in with instruments missing strings, machine heads, screws and other parts. We promise to send parts and art supplies to the CPC’s we visit.

We sleep at the National Training School for Theater Instructors. There were supposed to be twenty-three people in this, the first, class, but only twelve are here now. The others are away in the military.

February 12. In the evening we play a concert at a small art gallery where there is a show of Nicaraguan paintings. People wander in from the streets, look at the paintings and hear some of our quieter songs.

We return to the theater school and stay up talking with the students. “Every night I dream of a white devil who flies over and swoops down attacking me,” begins Oscar, who is studying to be a theater instructor. “I have a lot of trouble sleeping. I was on the front for a year. It has made me very nervous. For that year I could not eat hot food because that would have required a fire. We lived on canned milk and had to be on our guard every minute. You would enter a home or school that had been attacked by the contras . . . young children killed and mutilated. You were there, but you really didn’t see, you couldn’t bear it.”

We trade songs with the students. Beth and I sing Joyce Brookshire’s “Whatever Became of Me?: Ballad of Cabbage town,” and Tim Krekel’s Kentucky love song “In My Heart.” A Bolivian student sings a ballad from his country, then one of the wilder students cranks up the favorite “All the Nations Like Bananas.” Soon, we’re all singing and dancing.

February 13. We spend the day at the farm of the theater collective, Nixtayolero, outside Matagalpa. Alan Bolt, the director of Nixtayolero, is also the director of the Nicaraguan national theater. “People come to this farm,” he says, “from all over the country to participate in theater workshops. We make plays with them which deal with community problems. And while they are here, they learn to eat vegetables.”

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The rice, beans and corn which make up much of the Nicaraguan diet are full of protein but lack necessary vitamins and minerals. Bolt’s collective uses theater to teach nutrition. Nixtayolero’s farm, besides growing grapefruit, oranges, bananas and coffee, has introduced many new vegetables into the familiar agriculture.

That night we play a concert in town on the recreation square. People are lined up on the edges at first, but as we play, they move in closer. Afterwards I sit and talk with three girls named Maria. They sing a song they’ve learned in school. It’s one I learned in German as a child, “Ach du lieber Augustin.” My friends are your friends. Cuando somos juntas me sientofeliz.

February 14. The Matagalpa CPC is organizing the festivities for the town’s 123rd birthday party. This evening there is to be a street dance. Claudia and Cruz have spent the afternoon teaching us several Nicaraguan folk dance steps and showing us how to salsa.

At the dance two bands play on opposite ends of the main street. We wander between the bands and the waves of dancers.

I’m dancing with Chamorro’s son Ernesto and Orfilia, one of the workers from the Managua CPC who has come up to pick coffee. As we approach, each band seems to be playing “Acarizieme,” a Latin pop song that we have heard often on the radio.

As a slight drizzle falls we move to sit on the steps under the roof of a little house that looks out onto the festival. The door is wide open and we can see several generations of a family inside. They invite us in for coffee and bring out their photos. Their grandmother has 120 grandchildren.

February 15. We go to San Ramon to pick coffee. As we arrive, food is being prepared to take to the pickers. We ride in a truck piled high with tortillas, enormous pots of beans, coffee and milk.

The coffee bushes grow on steep slopes and I feel I could fall straight down. I wear the basket tied around my waist and peel the beans off the branches. I prop my feet against the trunk of the tree and lean against the slope of the mountain. Usually only the red beans are picked, which means going through the trees on several different days.

“Today we’ve started picking every bean-from the greenest to the most rotten,” explains Marcia, a volunteer worker from Canada. “A coffee picker was killed by contras five kilometers away last week,” she says, “and then, day before yesterday, a Honduran cigarette package was found just two kilometers away. So we’re getting everything we can.”

Three days later we read in the newspaper that workers and children had been killed three kilometers from that farm. It was now a war zone.

February 16. We return to Managua, Nicaragua’s city, and feel the trip almost over.

That evening Beth and I attend the Misa Campesina at the church of Santa Maria de los Angeles. The church was destroyed in the earthquake and rebuilt by the community. Every panel of its octagonal shape is painted with a mural expressive of Nicaragua’s history. The mural in the front arches up over the altar set up in the middle of the church. The people sit all the way around.

The priest wears a black cassock with a brightly colored, woven, Latin American band around his neck. He directs a small group of musicians near the altar and leads the singing, moving easily around the church. Over six hundred people are here tonight.

The Misa Campesina was written by Carlos Mejia Godoy. It contains some of Godoy’s own songs as well as traditional Nicaraguan melodies. The mass is interspersed with speaking and celebrants’ rising to talk.

This evening the mass is also a funeral service for a young boy killed by the contras only two days earlier. The mother of the boy gets up to speak. In tears her words flow forth. Someone plays a tape of the son before he went to combat. He speaks of his dedication to the church, to the

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cause of Nicaragua, to the people of his family and his neighborhood.

Beth and I are asked to sing. We choose John McCutcheon’s “No Mas, No More,” a song that insists that the people of the world can no longer be separated by our governments’ economic and political interests. As I sing, I look around the church and see faces from Scandinavia, Europe, from the Orient, from Africa and all the Americas.

It is our last night in Nicaragua.

“I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, find that the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States and hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat.”-From the executive order of May 1, 1985.

Editor’s note:

The Reagan Administration’s Mayday embargo on US-Nicaraguan trade was accompanied by an even more belligerent action: an ordered end to direct travel between the two nations.

By closing US ports and airfields to Nicaraguan ships and planes, the Administration diminishes the opportunities and makes the means more difficult for US citizens and Nicaraguans to visit each other. Reagan’s executive order seeks to control and shape public perceptions, knowledge and discussion about Nicaraguan life and the Sandinista government. Beyond this, the Administration’s unilateral actions take us a step backward from any ideal of unrestricted travel across international borders. In this instance, Nicaragua becomes the more open, welcoming society.

Prior to Reagan’s measures of May 1, many North Americans of varying political persuasions had traveled to Nicaragua and returned with views and interpretations of everyday life and national spirit in that country which consistently contradicted official US pronouncements. Among the passengers aboard an Aeronica Airlines flight from Miami to Managua one day in February were the five members of an Atlanta musical troupe–Elise Witt and the Small Family Orchestra, on their way for two weeks of performances throughout Nicaragua. Accompanying the group, camera-ready, was independent video producer George King. Excerpts from Elise Witt’s journal of the trip (printed below) suggest the sort of personal cultural exchange that the embargo has now taken away–as have other, related, actions such as the recent denial of a US entry visa to Nicaragua’s Minister of Culture, the poet Ernesto Cardenal.–AT