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.

---

Page 2

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

---

Page 3

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

---

Page 4

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

---

Page 5

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-

---

Page 6

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.

---

Page 7

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

---

Page 8

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.

---

Page 9

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

---

Page 10

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

---

Page 11

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

---

Page 12

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

---

Page 13

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

---

Page 14

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.

---

Page 15

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.

---

Page 21

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

---

Page 23

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

---

Page 24

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.