Southern Changes. Volume 7, Number 2, 1985 – Southern Changes

Games Registrars Play

Steve Suitts — Wed, 01 May 1985 04:00:01 +0000

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

Page 2

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

Allen Tullos — Wed, 01 May 1985 04:00:02 +0000

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.

Page 2

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

Page 4

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.

Page 5

“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

Page 6

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

Page 7

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.

Page 8

“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

Page 9

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

Page 10

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.

Page 11

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

Elise Witt — Wed, 01 May 1985 04:00:03 +0000

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.

Page 16

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-

Page 17

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

Page 18

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.

Page 19

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.”

Page 20

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

Page 21

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

Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919 – 1945

Fred Hobson — Wed, 01 May 1985 04:00:04 +0000

Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919 – 1945

By Fred Hobson

Vol. 7, No. 2, 1985, pp. 21-22

The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919 – 1945. By Daniel Joseph Singal. University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

In the quarter-century between the close of the First World War and the close of the Second, the thought and writing of the American South underwent a change that has been explained in various ways by various commentators. Allen Tate attributed the change in thought-in particular, the coming of a Southern literary renascence-to a “crossing of the ways,” an historical moment when agrarian past met industrialized future with particular intensity, causing a “double focus, a looking two ways” among Southern writers and intellectuals. Gerald W. Johnson and others attributed the change to the shock produced in Dixie when outsiders such as H.L. Mencken exposed the South as a cultural and literary desert and laid bare all its cherished institutions and myths. Daniel Singal’s approach is somewhat different. He explains what happened in Southern intellectual circles between 1919 and 1945 in terms of a progression from Victorian to Modernist thought. Thus certain Southern writers–historian Ulrich B. Phillips, economist Broadus Mitchell and novelist Ellen Glasgow–are “Southern Post-Victorians.” Others–William Faulkner, poets John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson and Tate, and sociologist Howard Odum–are “Modernists by the skin of their teeth.” Still others–publisher William Terry Couch, sociologists Rupert Vance, Guy B. Johnson and Arthur Raper, and, finally, Robert Penn Warren–are full-fledged “Modernists.”

Singal’s attempt–and in most respects, his accomplishment–is a noble one. For he attempts to impose order on a body of twentieth century Southern writing which, to some extent, resists the kind of order he imposes. Modernism, by its nature, is a many-faceted thing. As Singal notes, the Modernist tends to unlock the whole being (by employing Darwin, Marx, Freud, Jung and other thinkers); does not repress human vitality or deny kinship with other animals (as the Victorians did); plumbs the human psyche, believes the universe is unpredictable, and possesses “an ability to live without certainty.” True enough. But because of the protean quality of Modernism, one might-by focusing on some particular aspect of it at the expense of other aspects–take Singal’s thirteen Southerners and group them in many different ways. I would contend, for example, that Davidson and perhaps Odum were not Modernists at all, even by the skin of their teeth–and that Faulkner and Tate were closer than Couch to being the real thing.

But to focus on such distinctions is to miss the immense value of Singal’s book. In fact, The War Within is an enormously suggestive and important work, thoroughly researched and very well written. Singal’s first chapter, on the South and Victorian culture, is highly instructive: Victorianism is not so hard to pin down as Modernism. His treatment of Phillips and Mitchell is particularly good, and his discussions of Faulkner and of the Southern Agrarians, particularly Warren, are sound.

But it is Singal’s discussion of the Chapel Hill group–the “crusading” North Carolinians, as Donald Davidson called them–that is perhaps most valuable. Five of his thirteen subjects were associated with the University of North Carolina, and four of those five–Couch, Vance, Johnson and Raper–have not previously received their full due. Howard Odum, of course, is the most significant figure in the Chapel Hill renascence of the 1920s and 1930s. But what has not been previously explored-although it has been frequently acknowledged-is the contribution to Southern intellectual life of Couch and the University of North Carolina Press and the contributions of the second

Page 22

generation of Chapel Hill sociologists-Vance, Johnson and Raper-all of whom studied under Odum but who differed from him (and from each other) in their approach to Southern life and in their degree of militancy. Vance was more hard-boiled than Odum. Johnson was more the true social scientist. Raper was more militant. Couch quarreled with Odum. The “Chapel Hill group,” that is to say, was no more unified than the Vanderbilt group.”

As valuable as Singal’s discussions of Chapel Hill sociologists and Vanderbilt Agrarians are, he omits or dismisses several other Southerners of the period 1919-1945 whose inclusion would have made his study even richer. Although center stage for the intellectual debate within the South in the 1920s and 1930s was marked “whites only,” Southern blacks were hardly silent. Equally indefensible is the dismissal of a white Southern woman such as Lillian Smith who edited the most outspoken Southern journal of its time, South Today, between 1936 and 1945–particularly since, in many ways, Smith seems to have been a more representative Modernist than many of the author’s choices. More than any other Southerner of her time, Smith acknowledged all aspects of being human, truly plumbed the Southern psyche, relied heavily on Freud, and, in the 1930s and 40s, openly condemned racial segregation in any form it might take.

Singal does refer to Smith in passing on two occasions and acknowledges, in the book’s conclusion, that “with her the assault against the Victorian ethos reached maturity” and that she, “more than anyone else, brought the issue of race and segregation into the open.” He quotes her description of the white Southern mind–“Not only Negroes but everything dark, dangerous, evil must be pushed to the rim of one’s life”–and cites her belief that genteel Southerners had certain wishes and desires which “we learned early to send to the Dark-town of our unconscious.”

Yet Singal dismisses such pronouncements as “today [having] about them the ring of the commonplace.” “Her description of southerners as repressed, violent, and perverted strikes readers of the 1980s as extravagant and overdramatic. . .” And now “Smith’s insights have become stale.”

I do not think so. And, indeed, even if some of her logic should today appear “commonplace,” her message–in its time and place, when it mattered most–was both original and courageous. That she was heard is suggested by the attention she received, not always favorably, from Southern liberals. “A modern, feminine counterpart of the ancient Hebrew prophets,” Ralph McGill called her; the William Lloyd Garrison of the South, Virginius Dabney said.

Singal’s study, then, omits significant points of view within Southern society–blacks, women (except for Glasgow), outspoken prophets such as Smith, and others who spoke with radically different voices. The study is principally–with the notable exception of Faulkner and the Agrarians–a discussion of certain aspects of twentieth century white male Southern liberalism. To capture the full flavor of Southern intellectual life between 1919 and 1945 the author might have included some less established, less genteel Southern voices. But what Singal does he does well indeed: he understands well most of the mainstream intellectual and literary currents of his period, and he has written a book filled with energy and originality.

Fred Hobson teaches in the English Department of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. His most recent book is Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (L.S.U. Press, 1983).

Vengeance and Justice

Steven Hahn — Wed, 01 May 1985 04:00:05 +0000

Vengeance and Justice

By Steven Hahn

Vol. 7, No. 2, 1985, pp. 22-24

Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century South. By Edward L. Ayers. Oxford University Press, 1984.384 pp. $24.95

The glass and steel that now form the skylines over Atlanta, Birmingham, New Orleans, Houston, Greensboro, and a good many smaller cities may symbolize the South’s new found cosmopolitanism, but the recent spate of executions in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, North Carolina, and Virginia reminds us of the cultural peculiarities that began to distinguish the region by the early nineteenth century and still manage to leave their imprints. The code duello, lynch law, the convict lease, and the county chain gang have of course, passed from the scene. Yet, in the incidence of violence and the meting out of harsh justice the South continues to hold invidious distinctions: the highest homicide and assault rates, the greatest number of handguns, and the most inmates on death row. This is a nation experiencing unprecedented rates of violent crime and renewed acceptance of capital punishment.

The apparent continuity of Southern distinctiveness of these regards cannot fail to impress. It should not, however, obscure significant changes in the nature and conceptualization of crime and punishment, particularly during the 19th century as the South moved from slavery to freedom. For it is in the very changes that the meaning of Southern distinctiveness may be discovered. So Edward Ayers, a talented young historian at the University of Virginia, suggests, and his new book, Vengeance and Justice takes us far along the route of discovery.

The route is difficult and treacherous, replete with wart paths, false leads, and blind alleys. Much is shrouded in the haze of myth and shibboleth. Ayers is mindful of the dangers and respectful of those who have made the journey before him. Nonetheless, he pushes ahead boldly and ambitiously, shedding fresh light on older trails while charting many new ones. His scope is at once regional and local, sweeping across the Southern states and then focusing in upon three different areas of Georgia so as to explore patterns of crime and punishment in considerable detail: Greene County in the Black Belt; Whitfield County in the Upcountry; and Chatham County along the coast and dominated by the city of Savannah.

Ayers begins with the antebellum period and an examination of the social and cultural underpinnings of Southern violence and justice. Like Bertram Wyatt-Brown before him, he finds a system of honor-wherein one’s own worth was determined by the judgment of the community -to be the prevailing field of force, encouraging extremes of behavior, acute sensitivity to insult, and personalized settlement of disputes. Unlike Wyatt-Brown, he situates honor within a specific grid of social relations while recognizing the strong countervailing currents produced by the South’s links to the increasingly bourgeois North and the increasingly important market economy. Honor, Ayers

Page 23

reminds us, thrived historically in hierarchical, economically undiversified, and localistically-oriented societies, and its roots in the South would have withered, as they had withered in the North, were it not for slavery. More than anything else, the master-slave relationship helped insulate the South from the economic and cultural forces associated with the alternative system of dignity and self-worth. But the insulation was never complete, and although traditional patterns of crime and punishment persisted in many areas up to the Civil War, Southern states began to build penitentiaries and white Southerners began to debate the issue of institutional confinement in a language of republicanism that touched the entire nation.

Ayers highlights the parameters of continuity and change in his meticulously researched local studies, where he utilizes quantitative and literary evidence. Thus, in the rural plantation and nonplantation counties, violent crime loomed largest, relatively few cases went to trial, and convicted offenders normally received fines as penalties. Defendants, for the most part, came from middling economic ranks and if they had not committed an act of violence it was likely that their offenses involved drinking, gambling, or sexual misconduct. Indeed, fluctuations in the “crime rate”had little to do with the cycles of the marketplace and a good deal to do with various campaigns against “immorality.” Crimes against property-ever pronounced in the North- were rare, but at the same time punished most severely: of the few rural offenders sent to the state penitentiary, the majority had committed property crimes. The affected parties, of course, were white and usually male; slaves were subjected to plantation justice lest their offenses were capital or committed off the plantation when the state stepped in and, significantly, devoted careful attention to proper procedure. Significantly, too, when cases involving slaves reached the courts, the conviction rates were about the same as for whites.

In antebellum cities such as Savannah, where ties to the market economy and bourgeois world were more extensive, the dimensions of crime came nearer to approximating the North. White offenders tended to be outsiders, often immigrants, from the poorer classes; property crime proved more common; authorities resorted to the penitentiary more frequently; and the onset of economic depression, as in the late 1850s, triggered a dramatic rise in incarceration rates. Still the majority appearing before the local courts had committed an act of violence, testimony to the power and pervasiveness of the South’s code of honor.

If Savannah anticipated some of the vectors of social change, the Civil War and Reconstruction propelled them forward while giving them a distinctive aspect. With the bonds of enslavement severed, black people entered, however ambiguously, the South’s civil society; and the relations of the marketplace spread, however haltingly, through the region. With the plantation system in disarray, landowners surrounded private property with newly defined and sharpened hedges so as to limit the economic alternatives available to ex-slaves. The result was a rather different “configuration of crime and punishment,” yet one that would “endure for generations to come.” The ebb and flow of crime, in town and country alike, came to follow the fortunes of the economy, with a considerable surge evident during the depression ridden 1870s. Offenses against property furthermore, became increasingly common, and defendants in the plantation counties were now overwhelmingly black. Finally, institutional confinement, especially for the swelling number of convicted black offenders, emerged as the first rather than last resort.

The numbers soon overtook the institutions, however, and although Southern legislatures planned to build larger penitentiaries, county and state officials looked for alternatives to the already crowded jails. They eventually found one in the convict lease. But as Ayers demonstrates in an excellent chapter-length account, there was nothing automatic or inevitable about the rise of the lease, and its early history was filled with irony. Indeed, while many Southern states turned to the lease as a temporary expedient, blacks as well as whites, Republicans as well as Democrats, share some responsibility for perpetuating it. The 1860s and 1870s saw “cautious experimentation,” as leases ran for relatively short periods and convicts worked chiefly as agricultural and railroad laborers. By the 1870s and 1880s, the lease’s moorings had been firmed and convict labor concentrated most heavily in mining, particularly in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and Tennessee. Handsome profits there were, both

Page 24

for the state governments and the lessees.

Yet Ayers perceptively views the lease as more than one of the many parvenu schemes befitting the “great barbecue”; he views it as an integral part of the larger transition from slave to capitalist social relations. For in the South, as in other post-emancipation societies, various forms of forced labor bridged the path from the old order to the new. It required a lengthy campaign on the part of free workers and the urban middle classes before the lease was laid to rest; even then the death throes were protracted and the legacy ambiguous.

Ayers concludes his study with a close consideration of the vigilante violence-lynching and whitecapping-that swept the Black Belt and Upcountry during the 1880s and 1890s. Reluctant to “over-explain,” he nonetheless sees the contradictory intersection of honor, republicanism, and the market provoking a social crisis. Intensifying white dread of black men violating white women did reflect the premium that honor placed upon female chastity, male virility, and the integrity of the patriarchal household. But by the 1880s a new generation of whites and blacks eyed each other across an ever-widening chasm, adding fears born of ignorance to the deeper fears born of the tenuous social balance that had characterized relatively insulated and hierarchical communities. Lynching harked to the tradition of retribution and public humiliation, and it was no accident that black victims were often considered outsiders by both races in a particular neighborhood. The great upsurge in lynchings, however, also dramatized the disintegration of relations and norms that had given the antebellum system of honor some structure of order. And it was not simply a question of race, for the increasing penetration of the market into white counties turned the wrath of communities against whites who violated local custom or represented the intrusive forces of the outside world, whether they be Mormons or federal revenue agents. If slavery served as the foundation of Southern distinctiveness before the war, the gradual and peculiar transition to capitalist relations continued to set the region apart. Jettisoned by the educated middle class, honor and its code of vengeance were perpetuated during the twentieth century by smalltown folk, and the lower classes, white and black.

Vengeance and Justice is at its weakest in examining the legal re-definition of crime after the Civil War and the very specific social contexts in which “crimes,” as distinguished from general acts of violent retribution, occurred. We learn relatively little about what Ayers acknowledges to be a wide-ranging process whereby the law mediated the transformation of social and property relations: changing patterns of crime provide evidence more of the impact than of the substance and historical meaning of the transformation. At the same time, we do not get much of a feel for the subjects or circumstances in the story; we are, by and large, offered aggregate statistics instead. It should be said, of course, that the court records leave much to be desired in this regard and Ayers has done an impressive job simply in compiling the cases. Nonetheless, given the challenging insights into the social dimensions of crime that have come, most notably, from recent studies of sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century Europe, Ayers could have culled a bit more even from his limited resources. That he did not do so in part reflects some of the book’s thematic ambiguity: Vengeance and Justice is both about more and about less than crime and punishment in the nineteenth century South.

Shortcomings aside, Edward Ayers has written a book of enormous interest and genuine importance. His work contributes compellingly to the debate over the character of the South and the transition from slavery to freedom, and will serve as an indispensable guide for students who wish to pursue the many lines of inquiry that Ayers has opened up. Without question Vengeance and Justice helps to raise the discussion of Southern distinctiveness and the South’s painful legacies to a new level of sophistication.

Steve Hahn teaches history at the University of California at San Diego. He is author of The Roots of Southern Populism. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1983).