Abandoning Affirmative Action

By Staff

Vol. 7, No. 3, 1985, pp. 1-2

The Reagan Administration stands on the verge of severely weakening affirmative action rules for federal contractors. As it is now drafted, a proposed Presidential Order eliminates existing requirements that deficient federal contractors set attainable goals and timetables for the employment of minorities and women in proportion to the number of available and qualified workers in a particular labor market. The draft order also forbids the Labor Department to statistically monitor contractors’ compliance with the goal of non-discrimination.

“Existing affirmative action programs need only two changes,” says Southern Regional Council interim director Ken Johnson, “stronger enforcement and presidential support.”

“In many Southern counties, white income is four, even five, times higher than black income,” Johnson continues. “Neither Sunbelt Boom nor economic recovery has altered that fact. We desperately need new and creative programs to increase minority economic opportunity and reverse the effects of past discrimination, not scrapping of policies which have proven demonstrably effective in eliminating discrimination in the Southern workplace. We must not halt the equal employment progress of the 1970s.”

Federal affirmative action programs affecting tens of thousands of government contractors have been tested and improved since the late 1960s. The strongest, most effective section of existing federal rules, which is the use of statistical goals, timetables, and measurement of results, was actually put in place during the Nixon Administration in a 1971 regulation usually called ‘Revised Order 4.’ Efforts made during four Presidencies to eliminate economic inequities felt by minorities and women have at last begun to bring visible results. The existing requirement that federal contractors statistically measure the makeup of their workforce does not impose quotas at all, as affirmative action opponents have often charged. Indeed, under Revised Order Number 4 “goals may not be rigid and inflexible quotas which must be met, but must be targets reasonably

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attainable by means of applying every good faith effort.”

To support the conclusion that existing affirmative action rules for federal contractors have been successful, the Southern Regional Council has analyzed statistics on black occupational representation in five Deep South states.

The Council finds that both in the South, where the harshest racial inequities remain, and nationally, significant numbers of blacks are beginning to move upward from low wage, low status jobs into traditionally white male, higher status jobs. The total number of jobs held by blacks has expanded, outpacing black population growth.

In the state of Georgia, for example, from essentially “zero” beginnings in 1961, blacks in private businesses or industries employing one hundred or more persons, or employed by federal contractors with more than fifty employees accounted, by 1981, for 7.5 % of all officials/managers, 7.4 % of professionals, 15.7 %o of technicians, 14.6 % of sales workers, 18.8 % of office/clerical workers, and 17.6 % of craft workers.

Drawing upon data from the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the SRC’s analysis shows that in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina black representation has increased from 1973 to 1981 in the higher status and traditionally white occupations, while blacks as a percent of all laborers and service workers declined. The five state representation of blacks among all officials/administrators stood at 2.8 % in 1973, but had risen to 6.6 % by 1981. The greatest gains–both in the South and nationally–were made following issuance of Revised Order 4 in 1971, with its requirements of goals and timetables for contractors whose work forces gave evidence of discrimination.

The results of several other recent studies demonstrate national progress in advancement of minorities and women under affirmative action policies. A 1984 study by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, covering over 77,000 establishments employing a total of 20.8 million workers, found that in 1974 non-contractors employed somewhat higher proportions of minorities than contractors in six of nine job categories. By 1980, contractors–operating under the more stringent affirmative action requirements of the ’70s–had surpassed or almost caught up with non-contractors in minority participation rates in six of the nine job categories used in job force analysis.

The Leonard Report, a study partially funded by the Labor Department and released in 1984, concluded that “while the targeting of enforcement could be improved, and while the impact of affirmative action on other groups is unclear, the evidence in this study is that affirmative action and Title VII (of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) have been successful in prompting the integration of blacks into the American workplace.”

If Reagan Administration officials such as William Bradford Reynolds and Edwin Meese have their way, the President will soon sign the draft executive order that undercuts affirmative action for federal contractors, setting his hand to yet one more action in the continuing effort to push back twenty years of civil rights gains.

Crackdown in the Black Belt: On to Greene County

By Randall Williams

Vol. 7, No. 3, 1985, pp. 2-5

Fifth of July “not guilty” verdicts by a federal jury in Selma have freed the voting rights activists known as the Marion Three. Stymied, for the moment, is the Reagan Justice Department’s effort to help local white officials reverse the electoral gains of black voters in many rural counties of the South since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

As the Marion (Perry County) defendants were acquitted, trials for five other activists from nearby Greene County began. At this writing, two of these cases have ended with hung juries in federal court in Birmingham.

The various trials and the situations from which they have arisen are complicated, involving multiple-count indictments, scores of witnesses, political infighting, and conflicts between the ideals and realities of voting procedures. Regardless, a central fact is becoming increasingly clear to courtroom observers:

These cases only incidentally involve voting; the real issues are power and control in the parts of the Deep South where black majorities are wresting public offices from

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historically entrenched white elites.

For a decade after passage of the Voting Rights Act, black population majorities in Alabama Black Belt counties were not transformed into electoral victories. Greene County was the exception, with blacks capturing all of the county’s elective offices as early as 1968. By 1975, others had begun to catch up. The school boards in the five counties where the FBI has been conducting its voter fraud investigations are good illustrations. In 1975, blacks held all five school board seats in Greene County, but only two of five in Sumter, one of five in Lowndes, and none in Perry and Wilcox. Following the elections of 1984, blacks filled all the school board seats in Sumter, Greene and Wilcox, and four of five in both Perry and Lowndes.

These gains came through hard work and through increasingly sophisticated voter registration efforts by black activists, most recently in conjunction with the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign which proved especially strong in heavily black rural counties.

The outcome of the voting rights revolution in Alabama, has been a bitter factionalization within the Black Belt counties. Lining up on one side have been almost all of the black leadership, the vast majority of black voters, and political organizations like the Perry County Civic League headed by Albert Turner and the Greene County Civic League headed by Spiver Gordon (whose trial begins in October). Within the past couple of years, beginning about the time blacks began winning all the elections, white dominated political action coalitions (commonly referred to as “PAC” or the “Coalition”) emerged in several Black Belt counties. The white leadership of these groups courted blacks to run as candidates who were less objectionable–to whites–than the black activists in the civic leagues.

John Zippert, a white civil rights activist who has worked for more than a decade with the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, describes a leaflet circulated by the PAC in Greene County opposing several measures proposed by the black community for the 1984 elections. Among these were an increase in county tax on parimutuel betting at the white-owned Greene County greyhound racing track; reallocation of some dog track revenues to give funds to organizations directly serving poor and black people; annexation of three predominantly black subdivisions into the city of Eutaw (whites still control thirty-three of forty-two city governments in the Black Belt), and an increase in ad valorem property tax rates in Greene County for the support of the public schools.

All of these measures were in the interest of most black people in Greene County. “After PAC’s initial meetings were held, ” says Zippert, “I learned that PAC had selected a slate of black candidates to run for the county commission and other offices. PAC stated that these candidates were ‘responsible,’ meaning in effect that they would take their direction from powerful white people.”

According to Zippert, the 1984 elections in Greene County came down to a choice between two slates of black candidates. “One slate was supported by the Greene County Civic League, dedicated to pursuing a course of action in the interest of establishing and maintaining effective political participation by low income persons of any race or creed and by blacks who comprise a majority in Greene County who traditionally have been excluded from political participation by whites; the other slate consisted of blacks who had made a deal with the whites and were willing to serve the interests of whites in the county.` Race and racial politics were the dominant factors in the 1984 local elections in Greene County.”

In those elections, both political factions vigorously campaigned and engaged in voter registration, including absentee registration. Neither side had great success recruiting from the other, although blacks in the “coalitions” outnumbered whites aligned with the civic leagues.

Voter registration figures for both blacks and whites in the ten-county Black Belt of west Alabama include dead people, folk who moved away years ago, and voters registered in the county where they live and in the county where they work. The latest figures available are inaccurate, but the relative numbers are nonetheless significant. From the pre-1965 era when there were essentially no registered black voters here, the 1982 registration figures show some 70,000 black voters and 62,000 whites.

The 138 blacks who currently hold public office in these ten counties account for nearly half of the state’s total of elected black officials, which is among the highest in the nation. With increased voter registration and the diminishing of old fears–black fears, that is; whites fear a different

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bogeyman and imagine they now hear him scratching at the door–comes the promise of additional black sheriffs, school board members, county commissioners, district attorneys and probate judges. With black political power comes control of county revenues, sufficient clout to secure black participation in government public works contracts and programs, several seats in the Alabama legislature, influence on the outcome of a Congressional seat, and the margin of difference in a close US Senate race.

On July 5, all of these prospects were on the minds of the Marion Three defendants as they embraced. waved to the press, and sang with their families and supporters on the steps of the Selma courthouse soon after the not guilty verdicts and after the courtroom audience had stood to loudly applaud, then cheer the departing jury. Albert Turner, the most prominent of the defendants, renewed his contention that the man with the most to gain from the intimidation of black voters in Alabama is freshman GOP Senator Jeremiah Denton.

The far-right Denton, who voted against the extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, who has defended Jerry Falwell’s attack on Desmond Tutu, and whose re-election in 1986 is by no means assured, has branded as a “nefarious lie” Turner’s view that Denton bears a measure of responsibility for the current Justice Department crackdown.

Yet, in several instances over the previous four years, Alabama’s junior Senator has intervened with the Justice Department in Alabama voting rights matters, taking the side of local white powerholders against the interests of black citizens. Too, the offices of the US Attorneys in Alabama now bulge with Reagan appointees made upon the advice of Senator Denton.

Proof of Denton’s involvement in the west Alabama cases is not necessary in order to appreciate the black activists’ fundamental claim that they are being selectively prosecuted as part of a larger effort to thwart the emergence of political power in areas of the rural South. Grassroots black organizers are convinced they are witnessing a second period of Redemption, when whites who have lost local power, as they did during Reconstruction, are using whatever measures they can to displace blacks from the political process. In the view of the Albert Turners of the Black Belt, the Reagan Administration is abandoning the black citizens whom the federal government championed during the Civil Rights movement and is placing its authority and might with the whites who previously held control and who want to again.

A General Accounting Office investigation of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, (based at Epes in Sumter County), is- seen as one recent example of federal pressure being applied after local whites made complaints against the black economic development organization. After several years of intense scrutiny of the Federation’s books turned up no wrongdoing, the investigation was closed, leaving the Federation badly crippled by the constant harassment.

Attorneys representing Union (Alabama) mayor, James Colvin, the first of the Greene County defendants to go on trial in Birmingham this summer, made allegations of similar politically motivated pressure from the Justice Department as they argued a selective prosecution motion.

Ira Burnim, a Southern Poverty Law Center attorney on Colvin’s defense team and the lead counsel in a civil lawsuit filed against the Justice Department (see Southern Changes, May/June 1985), tells of a conversation with Marshall Jarrett of Justice’s Public Integrity Section.

Jarrett made clear to attorney Burnim that the investigation and prosecution,! in Greene County are part of a larger effort by the government not only in the Black Belt of Alabama but in black majority counties of Mississippi. Burnim says there exists a letter from an assistant U.S. attorney general to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch which treats “the problem of voter fraud” as a single interconnected issue. Another Justice Department official has said that the investigations were brought on by “arrogance on the part of blacks.”

As arrogance is not yet a federal crime, the government needed other charges to place before grand juries. 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 which, in effect, enabled federal prosecutors to target black civil rights activists in Southern black majority counties. The FBI was ordered to Greene and the other Black Belt counties prior to the September 1984 elections to collect evidence. Judging by the testimony during Colvin’s trial, practically every citizen in the town of Union must have been interviewed by the FBI Colvin’s defense lawyers found it curious that the federal agents uncovered evidence of alleged wrongdoing only by people affiliated with the Greene County Civic League.

In a single summer’s day of interviews with voters in Greene County, Colvin’s defense team investigators identified eight fraudulent ballots, four fraudulently witnessed ballots, and other election offenses committed by political opponents of those who have been indicted by the government.

“We’re talking about vote fraud involving federal elections and not only members of PAC, but public officials as well,” Burnim maintains.

One person who has lived outside Greene County for years told a defense investigator that he did not vote in last September’s Democratic primary or primary run-off elections in Greene. Yet a ballot affidavit in his name was among the evidentiary materials collected by the US Attorney’s office. The ballot affidavit was notarized by a white Greene

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County public official who is a known supporter of the PAC.

After the September 1984 elections, FBI agents interrogated voters to determine if campaigners for the Greene County Civic League had cast fraudulent ballots. Meanwhile, Civic League leaders turned over to the US Attorney’s office evidence of similar alleged misconduct by their opponents in PAC. No PAC campaigners or officials have been implicated in the Justice Department investigation.

Burnim tells of numerous PAC-related incidents which an intense federal investigation should have uncovered. In one instance, an FBI agent approached a voter whose name and address appeared on two absentee ballots cast in the election. The voter identified her ballot, but told the FBI she had never seen the second ballot, which was witnessed by the signatures of two PAC supporters. The FBI apparently never questioned the two individuals who had signed the ballot.

Under Alabama law, it is illegal (indeed, it is so written on the ballot) for candidates to witness absentee ballots or give assistance to voters. Yet Burnim presented the court with evidence of several instances where PAC candidates were witnessing absentee ballots. None of those voters were interviewed by the FBI.

Other selective prosecution evidence presented by Colvin’s attorneys included cases of persons voting absentee who lived outside Greene County and were thus ineligible to vote. One person whose name appeared on an absentee ballot notarized by a public official affiliated with PAC told defense investigators he not only did not request to vote in Greene County but was registered in another state at the time of the election. The public official notarizing this ballot was not indicted.

Much of the evidence of PAC violations paralleled material which had been delivered to the Justice Department last fall by members of the Greene County Civic League, yet apparently none of it had been followed up by the FBI. “Is it not startling,” asks Burnim, “that all of the indictments have been against Greene County Civic League leaders when it took us just three days to uncover vote fraud by PAC? Wouldn’t it be striking if we can find misconduct on both sides and the government cannot?”

In a written opinion denying Burnim’s selective prosecution motion, a federal magistrate concluded that in terms of judicial resources the US attorney might be justified in indicting the Greene County defendants while not pursuing the complaints against PAC because the number of incidents revealed in the three-day defense investigation was less than the number gathered by the eight-month FBI investigation.

A more realistic assessment is that the Reagan Justice Department is cooperating with local whites intent on reversing and dismantling the black movement for democratic political empowerment.

This article is based on reporting by Southern Changes editors Allen Tullos and Randall Williams and on articles published in the Green County Democrat. Previous articles in this series have appeared in Southern Changes for March/April and May/June, 1985.

Organizing for Empowerment: The National Political Congress of Black Women

By Staff

Vol. 7, No. 3, 1985, pp. 5-9

Sidebar: Excerpts and Observations

Shirley Chisolm, president of the National Political Congress of Black Women: Ever since we started to put this organization together last August and September we’ve felt that Spelman-the oldest black woman’s college in this country-was the place to hold the first assembly of the National Political Congress of Black Women.

Black women have decided that the time has now come for our political empowerment as a group to be reckoned with. We no longer need and will not accept surrogates speaking for us. As a result of what happened last year in the Democratic Convention we came to the realization that even though we have been very involved in all kinds of alliances and groups, we had no real political clout of our own. Our sisters came back from that convention and decided, “Never again.”

Here, in the fiftieth year of the founding of the National Council of Negro Women, we are founding the National Political Congress of Black Women. Representatives from twenty-nine states are here, approximately 450 women in attendance. This Congress is a non-partisan organization. It is an organization in which to belong you don’t have to come from a certain social class. Today, we see grassroots black women, the backbone of their communities, here running for the board, getting up and speaking.

Mabel Thomas of Atlanta, youngest member of the Georgia General Assembly, board member of the NPCBW: I think this organization has come together out of the dissatisfaction felt by black women at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. During the convention, black women were ignored. Their votes were not lobbied for or respected. We could not even get Shirley Chisolm’s name put on the floor as a vice-presidential candidate. The machine that was in place didn’t want to look at the issues facing black women, they just wanted black women to vote with them.

Hazel Obey, a national boardmember from Austin Texas: I worked with Jesse Jackson’s campaign as field director for the state of Texas. When we got to the National Democratic Convention in San Francisco there was a concern there that a woman needed to be on the ballot. Yet when a vice-presidential was being considered, and although there were many qualified black women, none were interviewed. Out of that incident grew the concerns about forming this organization.

We have eight delegates here from Austin. Nobody had their way paid here. Everybody came out of their own pockets.

Our problems as black women are unique, different from those of white women. Even though I belong to the National

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Women’s Political Caucus-the “Anglo Caucus”-we need to have a group like this where we can come together as black women and deal with the problems we have. It gives us credibility and clout with which to be recognized. I hope that we can go back home and do some chapter building and some coalition building.

C. Delores Tucker, first vice-president NPCBW: The theme of our assembly this weekend is “Organizing for Empowerment.” Among our several missions is that of making certain that black women understand how to effectively involve themselves in the political process, how to run for elective office and how to achieve their parity within the appointive processes of our political divisions.

There are ten million black women of voting age in this country. Seven million are registered and three million are unregistered. Over half of these unregistered black women are under thirty-five. Our mission is to register these unregistered. Sixty percent of black women voted in 1984, the largest percentage of any single group voting in that election.

There is no other national organization of black women that has as its priority political empowerment. Within the next year we plan to develop this Congress within twentyfive states. By the year 2000 we hope will have more than 100,000 members and a thousand chapters. Building strong chapters of the Congress will provide a training ground. We will develop a political action committee through which by the year 2000 we intend to have $10 million.

We will develop a dialogue with both political parties.

We will endorse candidates. We intend to provide finance for our romance with the political system. We intend to develop and encourage black women to run for office at all levels. Even though we have the highest percentage of any group that participated last year, we have only twenty-nine.

black female mayors, seventy-five state legislators, fourteen state senators and one member of Congress.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, professor of law at Georgetown University and a founder of the NPCBW: I’ve been counsel to this Congress during its formation and I am pleased to report that the black women who have gotten together here have recognized that law is inferior to substance. We have passed by-laws in a shorter time and with more gusto than any organization I have ever heard of. We took only four or five hours to do what organizations usually take weeks to accomplish. The birth of this Congress signals another crossroads for black people in a journey through the American political process.

Carrie Prioleau, teacher, Sumter, South Carolina: I believe that the goal of the National Political Congress of Black Women to reach a large number of black women in the United States is excellent and I am with the organization. After I saw the list of names of the ladies who were a part of this Congress, knowing what they stand for, I wanted to become involved and be a part of moving our people on into political areas.

I hope to go back to Sumter and help organize a chapter of the Congress there. So many times we have capable people who want to run for positions and they do not have the funds to do so. This organization can help such women and the community.

Dorothy Height, the president of the National Council of Negro Women: Mary McLeod Bethune always gave two messages. One was that we need to work together. And that’s what this Congress is about. And the other was that we have to make our impact upon the political machinery. It’s been a long time coming, but I think the time is now.

There are many organizations represented here this weekend. But the uniqueness of this Congress is that we

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will be able to go directly to the heart of the political machinery, to endorse candidates, to select candidates, to promote candidates, to raise funds and to speak for ourselves.

I hope the message will go back to the members of the organizations represented here that we all need to be in this Congress no matter what else we are. Our power comes not from others, but from ourselves.

Sidebar: Highlights from the NPCB Workshop on Civil Rights

Mary Frances Berry , law and history professor at Howard University, member of US Commission on Civil Rights: Right now we are in a crisis condition, a hardening of the arteries, on civil rights issues. Mr. Reagan’s election was symptomatic of the change which has occurred in the country. We have seen the attempt to give tax exemption to schools that discriminate on the basis of race–the Bob Jones case. We have seen the change in interpretation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which is the section that says you can’t give federal money to institutions that discriminate on the basis of race. And on the basis of sex, in Title IX. We have arrived, in the area of fair housing, at a position in which anyone who brings a complaint has to prove that not only did people not sell you a house, but they intended not to sell it to you because you were black. And in voting rights we had a long struggle to get the Voting Rights Act re-authorized in 1982. Imagine, having to fight about that here in the 1980s.

Mr. William Bradford Reynolds, the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Justice Department, is working to see that more than fifty cities and jurisdictions get rid of their affirmative action plans under which women and minorities have been hired in jobs in police and fire departments.

In the Commission on Civil Rights, we have seen since 1980 the Commission trashed and demobilized in its effectiveness as an advocate for justice. I had a dinner one night about two weeks ago with two old war horses of the civil rights movement in Washington. They were there in 1957 when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act creating the Civil Rights Commission. They were telling me that the Commission was set up to advocate the rights of blacks. They were wondering why everybody has forgotten that.

The Civil Rights Commission is no longer an advocate for the cause of civil rights, but is a mouthpiece, a watchdog, an outhouse for the White House. The Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1985 still sits before the Congress. It would restore Title VI and Title IX and Title IV to what they were before the Reagan Administration succeeded in having them watered down. Now, as we sit here, institutions can get federal money and continue to discriminate on the basis of sex and race. The National Political Congress of Black Women puts itself behind the passage of this Act.

The Black Family Plan is advocated by the Black Leadership Roundtable. This is a proposal that we have private, affirmative action plans of our own. If the Justice Department isn’t going to enforce affirmative action, then we ought to enforce it ourselves. One way for us to do that is to go to these companies and corporations and hotels where we have conventions and to insist that they do something about the employment of our people if they want to keep our business. We must monitor them, give them ratings as to how well they do, then publicize our findings.

We also put ourselves behind the direct action strategies of the people in the Free South Africa movement. The example of trying to change public policy on the issue of apartheid in South Africa shows that an effective political strategy must involve both electoral politics and direct action. We also support the passage of the Anti-apartheid Act of 1985 in the US Congress.

Angela Davis, board member NPCBW; teacher, San Francisco State University: Yesterday, when we were trying to get this workshop on civil rights organized, Dr. Berry feared that it might not be very well attended since there is such an emphasis at this meeting as to how to run as a candidate and on the electoral arena. But when we came in for the first session, the room was packed and it has remained packed for all three sessions. The fact that this workshop is so well attended is an indication of our

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awareness of the need to combine the kind of direct action protests that Mary was talking about with the electoral strategy. Historically, that is the only way that black people have ever been able to win any gains. We have had to get out there and mobilize people, marching, demonstrating, picketing and boycotting. We understand that it is not enough to focus simply on getting elected and functioning as elected officials, however important that may be.

This is a very dangerous era. We’ve witnessed in recent years an intensification of racism that has been instigated by the most racist and most sexist president in the history of this country. ‘We’ve already talked about the attack on the Civil Rights Commission–on Dr. Berry herself–and the attack on affirmative action. There also has been a concerted assault on working people in general and because black people–and black women–are in our vast majority workers, we have received the brunt of the union busting strategy of the Reagan Administration. We have to realize the absolute importance now of developing organizing skills. We must talk about the importance of developing a mass movement. We can want to see a protest movement reemerge, but it’s not going to happen if we do not know how to build that movement.

People who do not have the experience of the 1950s and ’60s are sometimes under the impression that that movement just happened. Somehow black people reached a point where they were fed up and the whole thing exploded. Well, black people have been fed up for as long as we have been in this country. I can remember as a child growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, what our attitude was toward the segregated buses. We used to sit in the front of the bus. I can even remember friends that were arrested for doing that. But when Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus, there was an organization behind her action.

Rosa Parks had attended a meeting similar to this one prior to refusing to sit in the back of the bus. There was a women’s political council in Montgomery, headed by a woman named Jo Ann Robinson. And there were a lot of unnamed women who organized that bus boycott movement. They already had a leaflet prepared when Rosa Parks was arrested.

I could speak for hours about my own case and how the movement for my freedom developed. It was very well organized. There were some two-hundred committees across this country and that’s the only reason I’m free today. People may know my name, but they do not know the names of those people who called those meetings, who put out the leaflets, who organized the demonstrations, who developed the petition campaign. As organized black women we have the potential for making an absolutely indispensable contribution to this era which lies before us.

Dorothy Height: The whole effort to free South Africa is related to our civil rights. I was the guest of the Black Women’s Federation of South Africa four years ago at their convention. To show you how the system operates, I have never been on the front page of a paper. Yet I was on the front page of Johannesburg’s Rand newspaper, in color, leading a discussion group of the Black Women’s Federation. Seeing that you would get the impression that this was a very liberal, very welcoming climate.

I can assure you I was treated so well. Friends there said to me, “You know of course that you will be given the best treatment because you are here under such observance that you are really an honorary white.”

Two weeks after I left South Africa, the Federation was banned.

Now those women had come there against every kind of difficulty, including the fear of traveling in groups. But every province except Capetown got there and the Capetown people’s bus broke down along the way. Three hundred women risked their lives and came to that’ meeting. They were really concerned about what is happening to themselves and their children under apartheid.

I think black women have to speak out about what the impact of apartheid is on the whole society. But also its impact on women and children. On the sixteenth of June we commemorate the massacre at Soweto, a massacre of children. When we talk about the free South Africa movement, we’re talking about something very closely related to us, but it is not the same as our civil rights. Those people don’t want to have the privilege of going to the park or sitting anywhere on the bus. That’s not what their fight is about. Theirs is about governing themselves in a country in which they are a majority. I think we have a mission to help people, black and white, in our country to understand this.

I once heard Benjamin Mays say to a group of YWCA women in the days before Brown versus Board of Education, “the time is always right for justice and if you believe in

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justice then your job is to ripen the time.” And we’ve got to ripen the time.

Sidebar: The State of Black Women

Shirley Chisolm : How exciting it is to stand before you this morning and recognize that black women in the last part of this century have come to the realization that our time has come. I remember a few years ago when I said to several of my black sisters that it would be very necessary for us to bring ourselves together and speak out forcefully and assertively on matters of concern. I remember so vividly how many of our sisters felt at the time. “Shirley, we cannot move in that direction because certain elements would begin to question our motivation.”

Now, whenever white women begin to organize them selves, whenever white men begin to organize themselves, and whenever black men begin to organize themselves, there is not this kind of concern and this kind of question as to the motivation. But when black women begin to organize themselves, everybody sits up wanting to know “What are you all up to?”

Upon the basis of my observations and experiences of many years I sincerely believe that the reason so many persons become visibly concerned about the potential emergence of the black woman as a political force is because historically they know that we are resilient, we are strong, we have the stamina, the audacity, the courage, the perseverance to change this country.

Today the black woman deserves nothing less than the full equality which is supposedly the birthright of every American. As Dr. King has said, “We are through with tokenism and gradualism and see-how-far-we’ve-come-ism.” We can’t wait any longer.

For as long as we live, we fight. When the day comes for which there is nothing to battle, my sisters, that day is the day that you lay yourselves down and just die. We fight for a living, for a new way of life, for a spiritual blessing, for hope and strength. We fight for better health so that we may continue to fight harder. The first battle we fight is for belief in ourselves and we find that it comes to us while we are still battling. For we know about the legacy of starving to death while working for the minimum wage. We know about the legacy of watching helplessly as our babies were torn from our breasts. We know about the legacy of grandchildren of the oppressor. The history is there. The black woman has had to remain a pillar of strength against insurmountable odds.

The realities of our time are very difficult to face. Many have no desire to cope at all. Others are resigned to live only with the status quo. Well, we black women assembled here in Atlanta have no intention of living with the status quo. Some of us have faced the alienation of our family and our friends. Some of us have given up certain comforts and pleasures that there for the asking, some have endured cruel and viscious criticisms.

Will black woman power in the tradition of our sisters who proceeded us remain a vital force in current history or are we just going to sit back in our armchairs, not daring to accept the new challenges that confront us? Our conscience tells us that we must act.

It is our hope that the National Political Congress for Black Women will become the instrument for gaining the collective clout that we need in order to become an integral part of the decisions and plans that affect our lives and the lives of our children. We must be about the business of talking about the necessity for more day care centers in this country. Only women will go into the legislative chambers and not be afraid to stand up and fight for the most important thing that we have in this country. Fight for the preservation of conservation of our children.

The time has come when–in terms of what is happening to us at this very moment in America–we can no longer sit back and be the quiescent and complacent.

Black women should be speaking out more. We should be much more evident at the many kinds of public hearings that take place in our cities and in our nation. We must testify about how the military budget has a deleterious impact on the quality of our lives and the lives of our families. Our nation has to be brought to new principles by a new generation of women who are fighters, because the war that is being waged on our homefront today is truly a war for the elevation of humanity.

Sisters Chapel, Spelman College Campus, Atlanta. June 7-9,1985.

Figures of Speech: Fish We’ve Never Seen

By Allen Tullos, Photographs byTom Rankin

Vol. 7, No. 3, 1985, pp. 10-21

An annual highlight of the late summer in Fayetteville, North Carolina and neighboring Fort Bragg, the United States Army’s Heat and Death Festival was moved this year at the request of the Army Corps of Engineers to Columbus, Mississippi to coincide with the June 1 dedication and grand opening of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway. The Tenn-Tom, a 234-mile-long, nine foot-deep and three-hundred foot-wide trench stretching across northeast Mississippi and west Alabama, connects sixteen-thousand miles of mid-America’s navigable rivers with Elvis Presley’s boyhood home. Only after reaching Fulton, Mississippi, must Presley pilgrims transfer from the Waterway barges and travel west on US Highway 78 by air-conditioned tour bus for the few remaining miles to Tupelo. There they can choose to walk or ride down Canal Street toward Elvis Presley Lake, stopping on their way at Lawhon School where, in the fifth grade, Elvis won second place in a talent contest by singing “Old Shep.”

The Army, especially when it was This Man’s Army and had not yet become the New Action Army Concept, has always kept a warm spot for former Pfc. Presley. Madison Avenue still can’t do in a day the work The King once did for recruiters before nine in the morning. So, twelve years and two-billion dollars worth of dredging across the forests, fields and towns of two Deep South states became the Corps’ way of saying, “Aloha Elvis.”

Since 1972, when Alabama Governor George Wallace and President Richard Nixon broke ground in Mobile for the Tenn-Tom, not the Corps, nor the Secretary of the Army, nor the dozens of members of Congress, governors and other dignitaries present at this summer’s grand opening and dedication have been willing to talk freely about what most Mississippians, years ago, embraced as their Elvis Canal. Down to the present, officials continue to ballast speeches and press releases with projections of thousands of new jobs the Tenn-Tom will create in wood products, recreation, and the polymer resin industries. Yet, from Iuka to Paducah, the locals know that it is Elvis who will haul the freight for the Waterway’s foreseeable future.

“You have to understand,” says one community leader- Sheriff R. O. “Red” Leflore of Shelby County, Mississippi -a bit defensively, “mercenary training camps and the Elvis industry are two of the South’s hottest tickets for what’s left of the 1980s. Several states have jumped the gun on us with the mercenaries. But now that Tenn-Tom’s finished, we’re primed for the Elvis crowd, on their way to or from Graceland.

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“We’ve worked quietly in the trenches,” continues Leflore, “digging out 307 million cubic yards of dirt. That’s more than the Panama Canal could hold. With the Waterway in place, a family coming to Presley Park from Iowa City, will save over eight-hundred miles of travel. We harvest the difference at the Elvis Youth Center Gift Shop and Interfaith Chapel.”

As the mid-morning hour for beginning the Tenn-Tom dedication ceremonies approached on this first day of June, the sun spread waves of heat over the broad, straight rows of plastic folding chairs set out on a patch of river bank next to the Columbus Pool. Several hundred visitors trailed currents of sticky air into and out of three Army canvas circus tents erected to the Past, Present and Future of Mississippi. Dry clothes soaked through in minutes, whether one sat paralyzed near the display cases of the John C. Stennis exhibit or, dripping sweat and lemonade, walked the sawdust-covered Pathway to a Dream Trail connecting the three tents.

“They ain’t many people here,” said a muddy-haired woman wearing a straw hat, deck shoes and a cotton dress printed with dogwood buds and blossoms that offered little shade.

“It ain’t about people, it’s about progress,” said the red-faced man with her. A cap on the man’s head bore a drawing of a large-caliber revolver and the words: “I traded my wife for this.” An on-the-site radio crew urged the temperature toward a hundred degrees:

“Jim Bob, there’s not more than a few thousand people in attendance today. As many as ninety thousand were expected. But with twenty-some odd acres out here, no matter how many people you put on it, it would look like it’s not very crowded.

“If you’re listening, there’s plenty of room for you, but try to hurry because the dedication ceremonies look like they will begin any minute.”

“On the other hand, Linda, I’m sure this is a larger crowd than Sieur de Bienville expected when he suggested to Louis XIV the plan for a waterway connecting Quebec and Mobile Bay.”

“You’re right, Jim Bob.”

“You’re listening to a live broadcast of the Tenn-Tom dedication from the Gulf-Southern Radio Network. I’m yours truly, Jim Bob Bugles, here on the east bank of the Columbus Lock and Dam. Linda Comfort is talking with us from the west bank.”

“Jim Bob, all the dignitaries, such as Senator Stennis, et cetera, are taking their seats here on a ceremonial barge right on the edge of the water and that’s where the big ceremonies will be taking place. Our listeners might not know that one expected guest, Governor Wallace, will not be coming. Apparently, he talked with several of his advisors about a dream he had last night in which the Alabama State Capitol caught fire. President Reagan, also an announced guest, is also not coming.”

“Linda, as many as thirty members of Congress are on hand. Secretary of the Army John Marsh will be the principal speaker. Set to deliver short remarks are Mississippi Senators Stennis and Thad Cochran, Alabama Senators Howell “Judge” Heflin and Jeremiah “Blinky” Denton, Mississippi Reps Jamie Whitten, G. V. “Sonny” Montgomery, and A. K. A. “Tootle” Tutwiler. Alabama Representative Tom Bevill will be the master of ceremonies and will also speak, as will Mississippi Governor Bill Allain, Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander, and Kentucky Governor Martha Lane Collins.”

“Jim Bob, before things get going here, let’s go for a word back to Mike Mann at the WLQC studios.”

“Thanks Jim Bob and Linda. The Tenn-Tom dedication ceremonies are brought to you by another pioneer of the Waterway, Tom Soya Grain Company. The hard work you put into your crop is the same hard work and dependability Tom Soya gives you in storing and marketing your crop. Tom Soya is now accepting wheat, and booking for soybeans and milo. Call your nearest Tom Soya Grain Elevator with river locations in Aliceville and West Point or also in Macon, Hamilton and Muldoon. Plus, look for our new facilities to open soon in Amory and Aberdeen.

“Before we rejoin Linda Comfort and Jim Bob Bugles at the dedication site, let’s check in with Bud Trotter in our remote newswagon out on the Bypass. Bud, how’s that shuttle bus system working?”

“Mike, it’s just fantastic. As you know, there’s only one road in and out of the dedication site and no private vehicles are being allowed to enter. East Columbus gym, First Federal Savings and Loan, Franklin Academy, National Bank of Commerce, Waters Building Parking Lot, Fairview Baptist Church-those are just a couple of the locations you can go to park and catch a shuttle bus out to the Columbus Lock and Dam. It’s a fantastic system they have worked out, Mike.”

“Bud, tell our listeners just where you are now.”

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“Mike, I’m out at the Waffle House near Military Plaza. And I think if we could hold it here just a minute we could talk with a visitor or two…. Excuse me sir, what about sharing some of your thoughts about this great day for the Columbus area with our radio audience?”

“Sure. Well, yesterday they had some top flight entertainment-Little Boy Bluegrass, the Gospelettes-and no one was publicizing it. I’d like to get out there and hear some of that but I don’t care about going out there to listen to speeches and pats on the backs. We get enough of that anyway.”

“But it’s a milestone. And I hate that everybody’s shying away from it. But they’ve been broadcasting all week long, said, ‘Don’t you try to go out 45 North. Stay off 45.’ Everybody said, ‘Heck, I ain’t going out there to fight that crowd.’

“As for the Waterway, you got to outrun the skiers, but there’s outstanding fishing out there. From an ecological standpoint, enhancement of fishing, it has definitely improved. I’ll give them full credit for that. We’ve had a Coors Bass Tournament. We’re catching some sea run, some stripes and some hybrids out there. It’s real nice. We catching northern pike. Some folks carried some pike home, but everybody thought they was river trash fish–gar. We’re catching fish we’ve never seen. That what you want to know?”.

“That’s great. Have a good breakfast here at the Waffle House. Mike at the studio?”

“Okay. Thanks, Bud Trotter in our remote unit. Right now it’s ninety-seven degrees and that’s in the shade in Columbus in front of the radio station. We’re going to take you back out to the Lock and Dam and Jim Bob and Linda.”

“Thanks Mike, it’s close to a hundred out here because there ain’t no shade. The Corps bulldozed all the trees down to make the Waterway. I think Linda has something for us over on the west bank.”

“… tore violently…. Uhm, Jim Bob, we might say here that if you are out on the grounds and you need medical help, Red Cross has stations scattered out. You can see their big flags. Rescue and Search are out here in their yellow shirts. There are cool quarters back over here, a couple of units of air conditioners for those who need to just come in out of the hot weather. Plus plenty of ice water.”

“Linda, I was talking with one of the first aid volunteers at the water’s edge. We were watching the ski show that was really nice. And he said that the biggest problem was the folks that think, ‘Aw, it’s not that hot. I can keep going.’ He said that’s always the ones that faint.”

“You’re right, Jim Bob. You really don’t know the change of your body temperature. You do not feel real warm. But if you begin to feel just a little bit nauseated, or fainty, be sure to move into a shade. And when you drink ice water, don’t gobble it down in a big hurry because that will add to your dilemma.”

“Linda, with ceremonies about to begin there are still a few visitors coming out of the Past Tent here on the east bank of the Columbus Lock and Dam. Let’s see if I can …. Ma’am, would you talk with us a minute?”

“I’ve seen the beginning and I’ve seen the end.”

“Beginning and end of what?”

“Never you mind. I’ve seen the beginning and now I’ve seen the end.”

“Well, okay. Thank you. Let’s see about someone else here. Sir, your impressions of the Waterway dedication celebration?”

“I’ve done my thing and I’m leaving.”

“Would you tell our WLQC listeners what was your thing?”

“It was a multi-image audio visual program, it was a patriotic message. But outdoors is just not the place for an audio visual program. We were very fortunate to have good weather last night. I had to set up last night for it.

“It’s a religiously oriented patriotic program. I use 450 slides and seven projectors. It’s totally original. It started at 8:15.”

“Do you show it around?”

“I guess you might say I do. I’ve shown it over sixteen hundred times now in thirty different states. I guess I’m about to learn how to do it.

“The official title is “America, O America the Beautiful!” First of all it’s just a general survey of the beauty and majesty and splendor of America and then we go back and trace the history and the heritage, beginning with the American Revolution and touching on each conflict up through the Viet Nam conflict. It’s the kind of program you’d think would be prepared especially for Memorial Day type things, but it’s more general than that. Kind of about projecting Christ’s and America’s power around the world.”

“How long have you been out here?”

“I got here at eight o’clock yesterday morning and

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haven’t hardly left this hill. And I am bushed.

“There wadn’t a good crowd all day yesterday. Don’t look like much today either. I don’t mind sharing my personal thinking. I think they were so tight on the parking restrictions that it just scared people away. I tell you I’m generally a very mild type individual. I very seldom get perturbed or lose my temper, but I almost did last night. I’m a guest up here and I had to beg them to give me a pass to get on this place. I started to say, ‘I’ll take my projectors and go on back to Clinton.’ That just wadn’t necessary. I been in the Army, I been in the Pentagon with this program and I had less trouble up there than I have down here.

“I’ll tell you something I saw which just about says it all. Yesterday, just as I was finally getting my truck around this state patrolman who had his car straddling the only road in here, up comes a fellow in a pickup, loaded down with ice and something brown under the ice. Course, he has to stop at the roadblock. So he says, ‘Where can I deliver these crawfish?’ And the patrolman says, ‘I don’t know. If they was shrimp, I’d say leave ’em right here.”‘

“Well, thanks and we wish you and your equipment a safe trip back home.

“Linda, to you at the west bank. The ceremonies should be starting.”

“Jim Bob, our invocation is about to be given by Glover Wilkins, one of the Waterway’s several fathers, who from 1962-84 was Administrator of the Tenn-Tom Development Authority.”

Warm applause.

“Let us pray.

“Almighty God, we come to you today with hearts overflowing, with joy and appreciation for this great gift, the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway. We have gathered here today to dedicate it in thy holy name. May this great project-the engineering miracle of our time-which represents the collective dream of the people of this region fulfill their every expectation and bring to them a better way of life, needed economic development and expanded recreational opportunities. We appreciate all of the dignitaries who have done so much to bring this watercourse into being.

“Particularly do we appreciate those who continued to support the waterway even after suffering crippling infirmities.

“For these all your good gifts, we thank you, O God, Amen.”

“This is Linda Comfort for WLQC radio. Our live broadcast continues with the arrival, out of the blue, of more than two-dozen members of the US Army’s crack Hype-Jumpers Parachute Team. Each soldier, or fighting unit as they prefer, descending in a plume of self-activated smoke, will land right in front of the ceremonial barge, bringing a small vial of water representing a state connected with the Tenn-Tom Waterway network. The contents of each vial will be poured together in a large vat, then, when all the jumpers have made their drops, a symbolic spigot will be turned to empty the mingled waters into the historic Waterway.

“We’re expecting Representative A. K. A. “Tootle” Tutwiler, the sky-diving Congressman from Mississippi’s

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Ninth Congressional District to join us here in our WLQC broadcast tent after he free falls onto the site as a guest of the Hype Jumpers. Let’s see if we can pick up official announcer Mark Ledbetter as the Army parachutists deliver their fluids of American commerce.”

“. . . the Big Muddy provided a key link between East and West in our nation’s early development. The Missouri River holds great promise for flood control, recreation and hydroelectric development.

“The water from Wisconsin is from the Saint Croix River. The upper reaches of the Saint Croix is a wild and scenic river that is very popular with outdoor recreation enthusiasts. The lower portion of the Saint Croix is used to support commercial activities. This river is an excellent example of a multi-purpose resource.

“Michigan. Has sent water from the Great Lakes, which with their connecting channels to the St. Lawrence River, have been the key to development of the . . .

“This is Linda Comfort again, at the Tenn-Tom dedication where Representative Tootie Tutwiler has joined us, fresh from his parachute jump onto the Columbus Lock and Dam. Congressman Tutwiler brought a small container of ceremonial water from the Mississippi River, Father of Waters, collected at Vicksburg, to be mixed with the waters from the other states tied to the Tenn-Tom.

“What a thrill, Congressman! We’re happy to have you with us in our broadcast booth for the remainder of the ceremonies.”

“Thank you Linda. I’m very glad to be here today.

“Actually, I’ll share a secret with your listeners. I had already bailed out of the damn plane before I realized I didn’t have my Vicksburg water. Somehow, I found a Dixie Cup in my chute pack and managed to produce a little substitute by the time I touched down. But that’s between us.”

“Quite a presence of mind.”

“Quite a relief, but Linda, if I could just say one thing. There’s been all this talk by the media, not so much you folks at WLQC–all of us know and appreciate what a team player your boss Clyde Price is–but others, and especially the Northern and out-of-state papers, about the Elvis Artery or Elvis Canal, some call it. Well, I say that’s hitting below the Sun Belt. . . .

“I know as ranking member of the House Intelligence Oversight Sub-committee that the Tenn-Tom is a multiple use waterway, not built exclusively for the Presley pilgrims, as much as we love and welcome them with Mississippi hospitality. Nor is it merely a fatted calf for the Corps or politicians hired by-the timber and coal industry. Seeing that this is dedication day, I’ll say a little more.”

“Please.” . . .

“Well, Linda, I know your listeners know that for years the Army and Elvis shared the very same slogan, “Be All You Can Eat.” You see, and Army Secretary Marsh will make reference to this in his speech today, the Tenn-Tom provides us with a jumping-off place to attack Communist aggression in Central America, particularly Nicaragua and, El Salvador. The TennTom will enable us to follow the current Operation Big Pine in Honduras with Operation Heartbreak Hotel, if you get my drift.”

“Representative Tutwiler, this is exciting, and exclusive, news. All Southerners, not just Mississippians, can be proud of the way you and your colleagues in Congress from the South-both Democrats and Republicans-have hit upon the plan to reduce our foreign trade deficit by making counter-revolution America’s biggest export. And we are especially proud to learn of the Tenn-Tom’s role.”

“Thank you, Linda.”

“Congressman Tutwiler is going to stay with us here and offer some additional comments later. Now, let’s go back

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out to the ceremonies. The last of the Army Hype Jumpers has landed.”

“. . . water from the Ohio River, which provides the major arterial link to the Tenn-Tom. This water system will provide a large increase in commerce between the regions of our country.

“Illinois sends water from Blackberry Creek where Abraham Lincoln may have refreshed himself from its cool running waters. Today more than ever, water is the lifeblood of Illinois and is used and reused by cities, industry and commerce.

“Iowa has sent water from the Iowa River, an early transportation system for settlers.

“Nebraska. Sends water from the historic Platte River, which is a truly multi-purpose river. This river provides irrigation, aquifer recharge, hydropower production, recreation, wildlife habitat enhancement and aids barge transportation upon its confluence with the Missouri River.

“West Virginia sends water from the Kanawah River. This water system serves the central coal fields of West Virginia as well as the Kanawah Valley’s chemical manufacturing industries. The Tenn-Tom will shorten by five hundred miles the barge travel distance for thousands of tons of commerce.

“Arkansas . . .

“This is Jim Bob Bugles for WLQC radio. As the last of the parachuters arrive and before the official remarks begin, we’re going to let you listen to a pre-recorded portion of a press conference held earlier this morning in the Columbus Hilton with Mississippi Governor Bill Allain, Speaker of the Mississippi House, C.B. “Buddie” Newman-an uncapped well of the oil and gas industry, and Jerry Mc Donald representing the Tenn-Tom Development Authority. Can we roll that tape now?”

Governor Allain: Not to put cold water on the enthusiasm of people in this area, nor dampen their hopes of what this waterway can do here, but a job in any part of Mississippi helps all Mississippi. All of us must work together in a cooperative spirit in order to bring the kind of jobs we need in this state.

Buddie Newman: Is that fellow from Fortune magazine here today? He was telling me a story about this rich friend of his. Said he went out to Las Vegas in an eighteen thousand dollar Cadillac and came back home in a hundred thousand dollar Greyhound Bus. We don’t want that to happen to the Waterway.

In Mississippi we have an internationally recognized bidness climate. Bidness is going to be coming to make a profit. And I believe bidness will find they can make their profit in Mississippi.

Jerry McDonald: We will be marketing the Tenn-Tom for

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different types of industry. We are targeting two areas: polymer resin industry (plastics industry) and wood products.

You may ask, “Why plastics?” Number one: it has been identified as a growth industry. Number two: there is some plastic products industry in the region now, so we do have an available workforce. Number three: water is a precious commodity and the plastics industry uses less water than a lot of other industries. Buddie, you have another word?

Buddie Newman: Industry is looking for a good bidness climate where they can make a profit. Now they’re not coming here if they can’t make a profit. They’re not going to risk their capital if they can’t make some money. They’re looking for a good life for their bidness and their employees. On the Waterway, you’ve got water, recreation, hunting, fishing, swimming, boating. You can throw a rock and hit a junior college. So you’ve got it all in a package.

Governor Allain: It’s not boiler plated. The techniques of marketing remain the same: telephone solicitation, direct mail, advertising, and so on. There’s shotgun marketing and target marketing.

Buddie Newman: I can tell you that the members of the Mississippi legislature are free enterprise people and we are going to maintain this good bidness climate. Thank you for coming this morning.

“This is Jim Bob Bugles along with Linda Comfort, back live again for WLQC radio at the Columbus Lock and Dam. Governor Martha Lane Collins of Kentucky, who is also Chairman of the Tenn-Tom Development Authority is about to address the several thousand persons in attendance at the dedication barge.

Warm applause.

Collins: Thank you very much. Distinguished platform guests and ladies and gentlemen, I’m delighted to be here in my two capacities.

Today marks an historic day in the commercial life of the Southeast. Today our rivers are joined to Gulf ports by a new navigational artery. Today Mobile becomes our port.

The Tennessee-Tombigbee means more markets and lower transportation costs for Kentucky coal, for Tennessee timber, for Mississippi chemicals, for Alabama steel and for Florida produce.

Idn’t it great to be in Mississippi in the summertime?!–on our way here we saw a dog chasing a cat, and they were both walking. But seriously, we’re going to remember the hospitality more than the heat.

Right now, I’d like to introduce our host, a man who has presided over unprecedented growth in this great state. His support of the Tenn-Tom is living testament to that leadership. I give you now the Honorable Bill Allain, Governor of Mississippi.

Governor Allain: The other night I was in Tishomingo County. A lady came up to me from Holcut, Mississippi. Now many of you might not know where that is. I had to confess I didn’t know whether I’d ever been through there. But the town of Holcut lay, smack, in the path of the TennTom’s construction. The Army had to buy the town and destroy it.

And she said, “Governor, I love that town. I was born and reared there. My parents were born and reared there. My grandparents lived there.” But she said, “We willingly allowed our town to die to give birth to the Tenn-Tom.”

She said, “Governor, will you promise me one thing? That you will not go back to Jackson and the others go back to Washington and forget us. And forget the promises you made about the economic development, the jobs we’re supposed to have, and the kind of quality of life all of us will have because of the Tenn-Tom.”

And I promised her then, and I promise you now that we will work long and hard with the local administrations, with the state and the federal, to make sure that that little town of Holcut, Mississippi did not die in vain.

Feverish applause.

Governor Collins: And now to hear from representatives from our other Compact states, I call on our master of ceremonies, the man who for ten terms has been perhaps the Tenn-Tom’s biggest supporter in Congress. As chairman of the Energy and Water Resources Development Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, Congressman Bevill has been the author each year of the bill that provided funding for the Tenn-Tom. I’m proud to introduce Tom Bevill of Alabama.

Congressman Bevill: The dream of the Tennessee Tombigbee Waterway began in the early 1800s. It has been a long fight, an uphill fight, but today we are privileged to be very happy over this special occasion because we are dedicating the biggest manmade waterway in the world.

This country wasn’t built by the negative thinkers and if we had listened to them, we wouldn’t be here today.

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The opening of the Tenn-Tom comes at an opportune time. A time when in the last year we have witnessed the greatest international trade deficits in the history of our I country. The TennTom will help turn that around.

The current chief of the Army Corps of Engineers has served this country for more than thirty years and has worked closely with the Tenn-Tom. He is my good friend, an outstanding officer. It is my pleasure to present General Vald Heiberg.

Heated applause.

General Heiberg: This is a proud day for the Army. We’re glad to be with you here today and members of the Army. From the active Army, both the civilian and military part, including the Rangers that many of you met coming in, the advance force, these are the captains, the future leaders of the Corps of Engineers.

The Reserves and the Guard are here today to promote the One Army Concept that is preparing our defenses. Many of you crossed the ribbon bridge to get here put up by a couple of companies of the Alabama Guard. Many others from the Services stand here who have done a fine contribution. The United States Air Force. The United States Coast Guard. The United States Marines.

The Tennessee-Tombigbee is prepared. It is finished early. It always takes a few years to get the traffic going, but we are always surprised by uses that we do not expect when a waterway is finished.

On behalf of the Corps I salute all of you who have helped make this contribution to the generations of the twenty-first century.

Applause.

Congressman Bevill: Now, it is my pleasure to present to you the senior senator from Mississippi, my good friend John C. Stennis, without whom there would be no Tennessee-Tombigbee.

Standing applause.

Senator Stennis: Many years ago this June, I came here to this county and surrounding counties, a total stranger almost. I was a candidate for district prosecuting attorney. I’m back today.

That was during what they call now the Great Depression. I’m back here today where we’re in a period of uncertainty but I have no doubt that we’ll pull through our present financial situation.

Now let me mention, many could be mentioned, let mention just a few of the processes that I’ve seen over the years. I just mention, by way of gratitude, the work brought about, here’s our Waterway, connected-up with all the waterways in America and the United States. Well, it’s here at our doorstep.

I want to especially thank those who gave, whether willingly or not, of their land to make this possible.

I want to thank especially the United States Army engineers for their capacity to conceive this entire plan and prove their case and help obtain the money to make it come out even. I believe that of their type and their kind that they are truly the finest, greatest organization in the world when it comes to big time construction.

Applause.

We’re grateful too to the organization of the five states who helped make a tremendous difference in the push, the

POWER, behind this project to get the money: Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Florida . . . and the fifth one. . . umnh. . .

Voice from the behind Stennis: Tennessee.

Stennis: Yeah.

Now that’s not just a casual thing, this recognition, but they went in it at the time without any real expectation of getting the case to the world that they’re now going to get.

I know it means a lot. Bet’s take it quite seriously that we now are on this Waterway, the greatest and the lowest cost form of transportation the world has ever known. When it comes to gross products, lumber and lumber products, ore, coal, a host of other things that move on these barges…. very timely . . .

I go back to when we first had the boll weevil. . . change is on us again. . . I’m in full sympathy with farming in all forms. I know a little about it. I was born and reared on a farm in Kemper County, very small town, I know the problems of the little farmers, the little-little farmers, the medium-sized farmers and those a little above that. I was taught to plow a straight furrow, that that was the measure of a man.

We have this grand opportunity here now of working with others by giving business a real chance. I think we’ll put a straight furrow to our financial affairs in Washington, finally. We’ll come through it a strong nation and we’ll continue our pattern of having one era of growth and development after another and for a long, long time we’ll be the United States of America, the land of real freedom.

Applause.

“This is Jim Bob Bugles for WLQC radio at the Tenn-Tom dedication ceremonies. We’re going to break away from the official remarks for a minute to talk with Wendell Paris of Livingston, Alabama, representing the Minority Peoples Council here today. Mr. Paris, you’ve heard Senator Stennis speak and the other remarks here today. What are your thoughts and those of your organization about the opportunities the Tenn-Tom brings?”

“Well, Jim Bob, after hard and diligent efforts we were able to get minority participation almost In proportion to minority population in the Tenn-Tom region for only one

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year of its construction. Needless to say it’s nothing to be so overly proud of because the Army Corps of Engineers and the proponents of the Waterway never wanted to see that happen.

“As with most of the times that we have had to deal with the Federal government, this effort to gain participation has taxed us to our very limit. We didn’t have anyone from the government’s side who was willing to measure up at all to its pronouncements.

“As to the prospects for black citizens in the Waterway’s future, the Tenn-Tom will help communities develop economically in direct proportion to the indigenous efforts that are made here. It has been called a panacea for solving the problems of poverty in the rural Black Belt areas. That’s nonsense.”

“What do you mean?”

“Every community along the Waterway is now thrown on their own, out for themselves. Our argument down through the years is that this ought to be a coordinated effort. The Corps should have the same fervor to see that the development is done as they did in seeing that the physical construction of the Waterway was completed.

“The Minority Peoples Council has been very much concerned about the industries that are actually coming in. We have seen the arrival of the Chemwaste toxic waste dump site at Emelle in Sumter County, Alabama, which is one of the first industries to locate on the Waterway. Bringing the most deadly wastes from the eastern half of the whole country. And if that’s the type of industrial development that’s coming in, needless to say we don’t need it.

“We’re standing in the middle of some of the most impoverished counties in America. What people here need–black and white–are decent houses, plumbing, health care facilities, development that benefits all the community. Instead we have the Corps of Engineers digging this big ditch for coal companies in Kentucky and wood products companies in Mississippi and Alabama to float their barges. The benefits, the profits here, go to a very few people.”

“Thank you, Wendell Paris for the views of the Minority Peoples Council, casting a bit of a cloud over this otherwise historic day. The greatness of our country is that everybody is entitled to a view. We’re going to go back now to the ceremonial barge where Alabama Senator Howell Heflin is speaking.”

Senator Heflin: . . . There is one other I want to mention here. Governor James Folsom of Alabama (applause). Big Jim was the governor when the first funds were appropriated for the Tennessee-Tomigbee Waterway Development Authority way back in 1946.

There are those that say this is a boondoggle. We have faced that battle in the Congress. We see it still in the media today. I look back in history and I see that the Louisiana Purchase was called a boondoggle. That when the Alaska was acquired, they called it a folly. There were those in the media who criticized the purchase price of the isle of Manhattan, saying that twenty-four dollars was too much. History proved them wrong. And I think that history will prove the cynics and the scoffers and the pseudo-sophisticates wrong today. But I want contemporary history to prove them wrong. That means that we must have a promotional and sales effort in regards to the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway.

We’re going to have to sell it. I think that contemporary history will prove that this is a miracle, an economic miracle for this section of the country and also an economic miracle for those who use the Tennessee-Tombigbee. This is a day of dedication and let us reforge our efforts to sell the great Tenn-Tom. Thank you.

Applause.

Congressman Bevill: Our next speaker has served with devotion and great skills in the Senate. He is a retired admiral, a former prisoner of war for seven and a half years, an American patriot, an authentic American war hero. It is with great pleasure that I introduce to you my good friend, Senator Jeremiah Denton.

Applause.

Denton: Bright . . . and hot! Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests from great states, we are indeed fortunate to be here on this bright day sharing in the celebration of brighter days ahead. Today, by marking the dedication of this great public works project, we are marking new and hot economic opportunities for the nation and for the entire region lighted up on that big board over there.

As a Senator from Alabama I joyfully see the door opening to expansive export of the bountiful blessings God has bestowed and man has developed in our state of Alabama. Our wood products, farm products, coal, chemicals among others. The beneficial trade products are accompanied by enhancement to our national security and we are fortunate that the distinguished Secretary of the Army, Jack Marsh is our fortuitous choice as our principal speaker on

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this occasion.

Ladies and gentlemen, Tenn-Tom means more trade, more security. We’re ready and grateful for both. God bless you.

Applause.

Congressman Bevill: The people of Mississippi are fortunate to have our next speaker representing the first district of this state in the Congress. He is one of the most respected individuals ever to have served in that body. As dean of the House, Jamie Whitten has an enormous understanding of our government. He has been a part of it for nearly forty-four years. As Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Jamie is recognized as one of the most powerful members of Congress. He has been directly involved in the Tenn-Tom since before its authorization in 1946. His influence, dedication and determination helped insure this project’s completion. He and I have worked closely together to bring the funding legislation for this project to the floor of the House and to get it passed. Without Jamie Whitten, there would be no Tenn-Tom.

Congressman Whitten: The dedication of the Tenn-Tom marks perhaps the greatest man-made development of our nation, or any other nation in the world. May I say that we had all sorts of problems. We had to take an old authorization and bring it up to date, we had to change the Highway Act, we had to give instructions to start on both ends and meet in the middle. There have been hundreds, thousands at the local, state and national level who have helped get this thing through.

May I say that this brings the Southeastern part of the United States up to the rest of the country. And contrary to what I read now and then we didn’t whip anybody to get this. Thank you.

Applause.

“This is Jim Bob Bugles again for WLQC radio. I’m out at the water’s edge with Alabama National Guardsman Jerry Psenka, one of the Tenn-Tom footsoldiers who’s been on summer camp duty here for the last three weeks. Jerry, what’s doing?”

“We just finished up the temporary footbridge this morning. So visitors can walk for today only from the east bank to the west bank.”

“Do you get to go home tonight?”

“No sir, we get to go over to Anniston on Monday, Ft. McClellan, for the last week of our summer camp. I’ll be glad when this is over. We lost a boy and there wadn’t no sense in it .

“What?”

“Yessir. He got crushed while we were pushing the pieces of the bridge in place. That happened Monday. I’ll just be glad when we pull out of here. There’s been a mess of it. That’s all I want to say.”

“I understand. Thank you. Guardsman Jerry Psenka. Let’s go back to the barge where I believe Bob Dawson of Alabama, the Assistant Secretary of the Army, is introducing Army Secretary Jack Marsh.”

Dawson: …. this nation’s vital defense and the respect accorded our country all around the world. His emphasis on

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physical fitness, the Army family, leadership and victory have instilled a new pride, a new optimism and a new effectiveness throughout the Army. He is an example of the impact of one man, properly seasoned and inspired, can have in public service. So it is most fitting that he is here to dedicate the Tenn-Tom, the achievement of a dream.

Ladies and gentlemen, I invite you to welcome a great leader, a great public servant, representing the President of the United States, the Secretary of this nation’s Army, the Honorable Jack Marsh.

Applause.

Secretary Marsh Please sit down, please. Thank you very much Bob.

You know as we assemble here today to honor a great achievement, we should also take a moment to pause and recognize the sacrifices that have been made by some. I would like to pay tribute to a young Alabama national guardsman in the Corps of Engineers, Dewayne Hayes who gave his life in the last several days in the line of duty in the completion of this project. To mark that sacrifice and to insure his memory, the temporary footbridge nearby will be designated in his name.

From time to time there are events that happen that change the pattern and the course of this great nation. This is such an event. The American poet James Russell Lowell wrote, “Life is but a leaf of paper white, whereon each of us must write.” Well, these two rivers–the Tennessee and the Tombigbee–and the Appalachian foothills that once lay between them are our paper. The Corps’ pens are bulldozers and dredging derricks, and our ink is concrete. Enough concrete was used in the building of the Tenn-Tom to make a highway four inches thick that would run from Mobile to Atlanta.

The dedication today gives reality to a dream that began in another century. It shows us the primary importance to our country of the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, the Panama Canal. The health, vigor, and freedom of these places are of vital importance to us all. Almost fifty percent of our water-borne commerce transits the Panama Canal or the Caribbean, and over a half of our imported products travel these vital sea lanes.

Central America, on the coast of the Caribbean, is a troubled world. It is not a world that is half a world away. Although there has been marked progress in combating the insurgency in El Salvador, Nicaragua is building the largest army in Central America, having received arms and equipment from the Soviet Union, Cuba and other Soviet surrogates. Surely, it must be perceived that there is a growing threat to the collective security of this hemisphere.

In a troubled world, the Tenn-Tom Waterway is a demonstration of American strength and the achievements of the American people. It shows the resourcefulness, the vitality, of the American System and the American people. And it sends a message.

Now, Congressman Bevill, if you will join me here at the replica of the Waterway, we will release water from the twenty-three states which will directly benefit from this great project. As we turn the valve releasing the water, those of you in the audience can see on the giant billboard to my right the economic benefits flowing from this new link in our nation’s waterway system.

Applause. The Army Band strikes up “As the Caissons Go Rolling Along.” Hundreds of helium-filled red, white and blue balloons lose their fight to rise in the hot, saturated air. They drop into the water and drift away from the barge.

“This is Linda Comfort. Congressman “Tootle” Tutwiler has been with us here throughout the ceremonies. Congressman, some final thoughts about what this day has meant to Mississippi and the South.”

“Linda, this Waterway will be a tremendous shot in the arm no matter what color your personal flotation device. We’ve seen that reinforced here today. You know, I think recreation is the real sleeper here. So many opportunities are unfolding that are recreational in nature. Already this year, the first pleasurecraft, the 112 foot Viking Explorer with some thirty passengers, made its way down the Tenn-Tom.”

“Congressman, what exactly is a pleasurecraft?”

“Linda, it’s kinda like a drawing board out of water.

“And Linda, let’s talk jobs. I heard what Wendell Paris said earlier about how only the big landowners and corporations were going to benefit from the Tenn-Tom. Frankly, we don’t need that kind of talk. In Amory, Mississippi, Weyerhauser is building a ten million dollar plant to produce wood chips for making paper. That plant will employ twenty-five people. Now that may not sound like much to the Minority Peoples Council, but it’s twenty-five more jobs than we have now. And don’t think there won’t be some black workers in those woodpiles.”

“Congressman, how much land does Weyerhauser own

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in the Tennessee-Tombigbee region?”

“Well, Linda, it’s over 700,000 acres. Last year they planted nearly seventeen million pine seedlings in their forests in Alabama and Mississippi.”

“Incredible. That means, if the Army Corps of Engineers estimates are correct and three million expected visitors use the Tenn-Tom for recreation next year, that figures out to 4.28, which must be the highest seedling-to-tourist ratio in the country.”

“Yep. Even more than Alaska or Maine. And Linda–and I see you signaling that we are out of time–but let me say this as a way of summing up. Some people just don’t want to salute the ingenuity of man. But, and the Corps recognizes that-and you know we tend to forget that the Corps has environmental scientists of its own, good ones too–you have to tinker a little with nature anytime you join a powerful north-flowing river system like the Tennessee with a major southbound river, the Tombigbee–bodies of water that haven’t met in at least forty million years, perhaps never. Some fine tuning is inevitable in this. But the main thing is to get the bucks flowing in the right direction.”

The Southern Regional Council Beginning the Fifth Decade: Our Annual Report

By Staff

Vol. 7, No. 3, 1985, pp. 21-26, 28-30

1985 marks the forty-first anniversary of the founding of the Southern Regional Council. Today, as in the past, the Council’s vision of the South’s future radiates from a belief in democratic principles. And, as in the past, the Council’s task remains that of providing research, information, and technical assistance to individuals and groups who are able to bring change, and of providing forums out of which Southerners of goodwill can think and act together.

Our agenda for the future has been drawn around several broad concerns in which democratic principles must be affirmed and extended: the ballot box, the schoolhouse, the courthouse, ideas and information, the uses of technology and the workplace.

Sidebar: The Ballot Box: Democratic Government in the South

-extending research and technical assistance to assure that the Voting Rights Act is fully enforced in the South.

-drawing model redistricting plans to promote democratic government while avoiding dilution of minority voting strength. The SRC’s Voting Rights Project has drawn more than 350 state and local plans.

-providing state legislators in the Deep South with nonpartisan research, analysis, model legislation, and current information about issues relating to the poor and minorities.

-assessing policies at all levels of government that affect the poor and minorities.

-researching working conditions, rights and earnings of workers, and worker ownership.

-monitoring the South’s electric utility cooperatives as major democratic, economic institutions that provide vital services to rural people.

Voting Rights Project

The Southern Regional Council maintains the only project that systematically monitors compliance with Section Five of the Voting Rights Act in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida. We work with local community groups and their lawyers to oppose racially discriminatory changes in voting laws and jurisdictions. The Voting Rights Project examines proposed changes and assists local groups in preparing comment letters that demonstrate how the changes discriminate against black voters. The Project also files such letters on behalf of local groups.

To enable minority communities to elect candidates of their choice to public office, the Voting Rights Project reviews and designs redistricting plans, primarily–in the last year–for city, county, and school system governing boards. These plans are used by lawyers in Section Two litigation, by community groups seeking equitable representation, or they are submitted to the Justice Department for review under Section Five as fairer alternatives to discriminatory plans. All of our plans are designed to incorporate population and registration patterns that reflect real levels of political participation.

The Project is making special efforts to assist state and regional groups in developing their capacities and their constituents’ interest in voting rights enforcement. The SRC Voting Rights Project serves as a clearinghouse for information on voting rights issues. We are asked to provide counsel, courtroom testimony, legal and technical assistance, information, and referrals to community groups, the media, lawyers and scholars. In 1984 the Project began publishinga quarterly newsletter, The Voting Rights Review–an effort to develop a better system of sharing information among voting rights activists. Alex Willingham, a political scientist, expert witness and Rockefeller Foundation Fellow,

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edits The Voting Rights Review which circulates among community leaders, experts, lawyers, and government officials. A complimentary copy is available by writing the SRC offices in Atlanta.

Voting Rights Review is a quarterly newsletter designed to cover a broad range of issues relevant to voting rights. For information write to Alex Willingham, Southern Regional Council, 161 Spring Street, NW, Atlanta, Georgia 30303.

Local Redistricting

Constitutional challenges to at large election systems have increased substantially since extension of the Voting Rights Act. Community groups such as local chapters of the NAACP and local voter leagues seek legal remedies when governing bodies do not voluntarily abolish at large election schemes.

In 1984, the Voting Rights Project drafted sixty-six redistricting plans, as well as numerous revisions and modifications. Requests for SRC assistance came from Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, and New York.

Only a few sources exist which provide redistricting and mapping services that truly represent minority interests in the South. Some state agencies draw plans for local governing authorities. In Louisiana and Mississippi, private firms compete for lucrative contracts to prepare reapportionment plans for cities and counties. Without the assistance of the SRC Voting Rights Project, the interests of many black communities would get left out of the planning and decision making in reapportionment.

Section Five Monitoring

In 1984 the Voting Rights Project examined over 150 election changes in election laws for their discriminatory effects. We assisted community groups in twenty administrative cases under Section Five.

When called on to comment on election law changes at the Justice Department, we present information about the totality of circumstances in a community that inhibit black registration, voting, or election to office. We point out any retrogression which may be present in proposed election law changes, show the discriminatory results, and evident racial intent.

The Southern Regional Council has adopted the following goals for its continued involvement in voting rights activities in the South:

• Continue to draft model redistricting plans.
  • Monitor and assist in the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.
    • Assist groups to prepare for redistricting following the 1990 Census and to carry out more technical work for themselves.
      • Develop a systematic collection and analysis of the major indicators of political participation, such as voter registration rates, turnout rates, voting records and patterns.

      Southern Legislative Research Council

      The Southern Regional Council began a special project in 1979 to determine if improvements in non-partisan research, analysis and technical assistance would help state legislators better address the needs of poor and black constituents.

      The Southern Legislative Research Council (SLRC) has aimed its work in three directions. First, because the legislative black caucuses represent the greatest institutional presence for minorities and the poor in Southern legislatures, the SLRC has assisted the caucuses in developing a capacity for effective use and analysis of information in state government.

      Second, the SLRC has provided assistance to all legislators whose records and constituent populations suggest that its services could be useful on issues relating to the poor and minorities. Finally, the SLRC makes available its information to community groups, government staff members or any legislator.

      The Southern Legislative Research Council provides reference services on specific issues, as well as on the drafting and analysis of legislation. The project’s intern program assists legislators by monitoring daily legislation and committee work, by analyzing proposed legislation, and by providing summaries.

      The SLRC’s expert network includes researchers from institutions across the South who offer technical assistance in preparing materials. The SLRC’s information exchange consists of bulletins to legislators, interested groups and individuals about legislative events.

      In 1984, the SLRC helped increase the independence of its client legislators. The Alabama and Georgia black caucuses have incorporated and are seeking non-profit status. Now, both can receive outside funds for education: and research. Also, the SLRC helped the black caucuses hold successful fundraising dinners featuring nationally known

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      speakers. The Georgia Caucus raised over $60,000 and the Alabama Caucus more than $50,000.

      The Georgia Caucus has opened an office in the state capitol, hired a small staff, and has begun–with support from Atlanta University–an intern program. The Alabama Caucus is pursuing the development of an intern program.

      Grappling with the increasing cuts in federal funds, much of the SLRC’s effort in the past year has focused on state budget issues. Client legislators have won increased funding for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Medicaid programs, and education-including both public and private black colleges.

      Client legislators have also secured state money for sickle-cell anemia programs, health services to the poor, community action agencies, and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. Georgia and Alabama black caucuses were instrumental in the passage of legislation providing for increased minority firms’ share in state contracts; urban enterprise zones in economically depressed inner-city areas of Birmingham and Atlanta; stronger state regulation of employment discrimination; reform in voter registration and election laws; and the passage of state laws making the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a holiday.

      In the coming months, the Southern Legislative Research Council will extend its presence and its influence beyond the borders of Alabama and Georgia. The SLRC will

      • organize conferences for legislators in which model legislation will be produced around specific issues
        • expand its legislative bulletin to include analysis on regional issues throughout the eleven Southern states
          • expand the project to other states in the South, providing them with staff and intern support during the legislative session, and ongoing assistance during the interim period.

Sidebar: The Schoolhouse: Equal Opportunity to an Excellent, Integrated Education

-assessing educational reforms in the region to help maintain integration and improve education in the schools.

-examining the effects of segregation academies on Southern public education.

Equal Education Project

Thirty-one years after the Brown decision, hostility and neglect–in the South and in the nation–have rendered almost immobile the historical, broad-based movement for integrated public schools as an essential element of an excellent education. The Reagan Administration has opposed, and reduced appropriations for, almost every special educational program for the poor, minorities, and the disadvantaged while it has supported special treatment for already privileged students, and even for segregation academies.

The number of private schools in the South stands at an unparalleled high. Some are struggling, others are prosperous. A few have a handful of blacks, most remain segregated. In Alabama, for example, the most prosperous private schools belong to one of two state associations. There is the Alabama Christian Education Association with seventy-four elementary and secondary schools and the Alabama Private School Association which represents fifty four schools unaffiliated with any church. In these 128 private schools of the two associations, only a total of sixty black students are enrolled among a student population of

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65,000. The other thirty or forty private schools not in the two state associations apparently have no black students at all.

The continued growth of the private, segregated academy is having a direct, damaging effect on public schools. In the rural South, especially, many public schools remain virtually segregated because whites are attending segregation academies.

Too often, white parents South who send their children to segregation academies join ranks to oppose, successfully, sufficient financial support for the public schools. Because local taxes are a primary factor in school financing in the South, the growth of the private segregation academies has often resulted in the refusal of local white voters and rural white legislators to support increases in local taxes to keep up with inflation. The consequences have been a physical deterioration of schools and the use of inferior equipment.

Reform of school financing in the Southern states appears to find its strongest oppositon [sic] among legislators and officials from areas where segregation academies continue to operate most successfully.

Last year the Southern Regional Council held several meetings around the region to identify new opportunities for activities to promote equal education and to determine the best role for the Council’s research and technical assistance.

We are completing and will soon publish a computer based, annotated bibliography on the problems of Southern schools–especially the problems of desegregation–during the last ten years.

Also, the Council is preparing the first substantial study and analysis of private schools in the South in over a decade. Focusing largely on the role and impact of segregation academies on public education in the South, the final report should be completed in early 1986 and will become the basis for test litigation and proposals for changing public policies.

Sidebar: The Courthouse: Just Men and Women in the Institutions of Justice

• providing research and technical assistance to groups assessing employment practices of Southern state and federal courts.
  • analyzing the pattern of appointments of judges in the South to state and federal appeals courts.

  Southern Justice Project

  With some fourteen-thousand employees working in more than two-hundred courts, the federal court system is a major employer. Its practices with regard to equal employment opportunity set standards in federal and state courts. From 1978 through 1980, the Southern Regional Council reported on the appointment of federal judges, the prevalence of their membership in discriminatory private clubs, and the employment patterns of Southern federal courts. In 1979 the US Judicial Conference adopted its first affirmative action plan after Congressional hearings were prompted by the SRC findings.

  As federal courts become more integrated, they stand to become institutions with employees who appreciate the issues of equal opportunity and affirmative action in employment, housing, voting, and public accommodations.

  Most federal court employees work in the central cities of the major metropolitan areas where minority unemployment is highest. The jobs in the courts require a wide range of experience and qualifications, but most do not require law degrees. Commonly, court employees are concerned with the processing and use of information, a kind of occupation that is among the fastest growing in the country.

  Over the last five years, there has been no consideration of the changes and progress, if any, which federal courts have made in employment. The Council is beginning to do that study in a project that will collect and analyze the annual employment reports in all federal courts for 1979 to the present, examine and critique the adopted affirmative action plans of the federal district and circuit courts, and encourage compliance with affirmative action goals in the courts by acting as a referral and coordinating agency for openings in the federal courts in the South.

Sidebar: Ideas and Information

• assessing and reporting upon governmental activities and political participation.
  • publishing Southern Changes, our journal of opinion, and syndicating SRC-produced materials.
    • working to establish regional radio programming not now available in the South.
      • beginning production of alternative cable television programming.
        • preparing a unique microfilmed database with an on-line computer abstract and index of more than one million newspaper clippings (from 1944 to 1976) about Southern people and events.

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        SRC Reports

        While the Southern Regional Council continues to find practical ways for government to work for all people, it continues its long and useful tradition of monitoring and assessing government policies and levels of political participation with regard to the region’s poor, women and minorities. In 1984, the Council published two major reports on poverty and government programs for the poor. The findings of these reports document an unprecedented rise of poverty in the South and the nation and a dramatic decline in the federal assistance to the poor since roughly 1980.

        The Council’s report, Patterns of Poverty, found that poverty in the eleven states of the South had increased sharply since 1979, ending a twenty year decline. Poverty among blacks in the eleven Southern states has probably risen to thirty nine percent, a rate which means that almost two out of every five Southern blacks are poor.

        A second Council report, Public Assistance and Poverty, examined the claim that government benefits discourage the poor from working. We found that in 1982 seventy-nine percent of all major government assistance to the poor in the South went to households headed by women with children or by persons sixty-five years or older.

        Our reports show that the work ethic remains strong among the poor. Nationwide, in 1982, the majority of all poor persons from fifteen to sixty-five worked part-time or fulltime in 1982. We also found that when poor families headed by women with children under six, and by persons sixty-five years or older are excluded, almost three-fourths of the remaining poor families had someone working full-time or part-time in 1982.

        Public Assistance and Poverty revealed that almost one and a half million recipients of federal assistance in the eleven Southern states have been removed from federal poverty programs since 1980. Literally millions of the poor who continue to receive assistance have fallen significantly deeper into poverty because of reductions in levels of assistance. The largest number of recipients removed from the programs were children. The Council estimates that almost 680,000 children were among the 1.4 million recipients eliminated from poverty programs in the eleven Southern states.

        These findings of these SRC reports have been well publicized across the nation, but especially in the South. In fact, most of the major daily newspapers in the eleven Southern states gave the stories front page coverage. Many television newscasts included details and interviews. The reports were used as the basis for many local follow up stories.

        Helping to sustain an awareness and discussion of poverty and the government’s responsibility to address it, the Council’s reports are sought and used by a wide range of community leaders, poverty rights advocates, lawyers, and public officials in and outside the South.

        Southern Changes is the bi-monthly journal of the Southern Regional Council. It serves as a forum for ideas, opinion and analysis on issues and events of importance to the South. Southern Changes seeks to involve readers and writers both inside and outside of the South in reflections upon past circumstances, present conditions and future prospects for social and economic justice.

        SRC Newsclip Service

        The Southern Regional Council maintains a collection of materials that provides daily, detailed coverage of a thirty year period of extraordinary change in the South and the nation: the dismantling of the Southern system of racial segregation and the beginning of an end to white supremacy. The collection consists of more than one million newsclippings and three thousand rare, weekly newspapers. It is unique in the nation. No other collection of news clipping on the subject can match its scope and no collection of newspapers matches its ease of accessibility.

        Most of the collection was compiled from 1944 through 1974 by the staff of the Southern Regional Council. Over the years, the Council also has received limited collections of clippings from the US Commission on Civil Rights, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Southern Education Reporting Service.

        The SRC newspaper collection can serve the needs of researchers, activists, lawyers, reporters and others who

        Spectrum Cable

        Building upon our experience with the SRC-sponsored Southern Network–which telecast programming by

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        satellite to more than forty cable systems in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia each week night in early 1984–the Council is laying the groundwork for a national satellite network on cable television–called Spectrum Cable.

        From January through mid-March, 1984, the Southern Network sent out ninety hours of original programming on the presidential primaries in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia to an audience of between 600,000 and a million cable television viewers. The project involved the cooperation of some forty cable systems, two satellite companies and numerous political and community leaders. The programs were produced as an alternative to the encapsulated candidate’s “image” usually presented in paid campaign spots and network news coverage. Southern Network ran gavel-to-gavel debates and unedited campaign speeches from all over the region. The Network also produced programming that examined the key issues of the 1984 presidential election. The audience, and the reaction from the participating cable systems, indicate there is a strong interest in alternative forms of television programming.

        Spectrum Cable is now proposing a programming service which addresses the full range of issues in domestic and international affairs, includes cultural and musical programming, and provides a broad spectrum of progressive, civil libertarian, minority, womens and labor groups an opportunity to reach to a wider audience. A project of this scope requires extensive consultation with groups who have national and regional members and who produce programming. It also needs substantial funds and dedication over a few years to assure that it happens.

        We are now searching for ways to place these newsclips on microfilm and to develop a complete and easy computerized indexing system.

        Regional Radio

        No concept in broadcasting has been underused as much as regionalism. Because of the structure of the broadcasting industry, programming has usually been local or national in nature. Local stations cover and produce programming on local events, and national networks cover the nation and the world. As a result, regional programming has been usually spotty or only espisodic.

        Ad hoc regional networks are often formed to distribute programming that covers sporting events. Also, state networks offering news, sports, and information are commonplace. In this void, a regional radio network can provide a wide, rich variety of unique programming that covers the people, places and events of the American South through narration, interviews, music, and drama.

        The Council’s efforts to develop a regional network of radio programming has been slowed by a several costly technical problems in the proposed distribution system. One of the solutions to distribution may come as more radio’ stations obtain satellite dishes to receive programming from national networks. Meanwhile, the Council continues to capture on audio tape aspects of the South’s rich history and current affairs which escape the attention of the national media.

        Press Institute

        The Council continues to assist the news media in the region and the nation to understand the American South. Throughout 1984 the SRC staff consulted with producers and reporters on hundreds of occasions about developing news stories. The Council assisted almost every major newspaper and news weekly in the country, as well as reporters from national television and radio networks in analysing regional trends and in locating experts and local leaders who could articulate problems and issues.

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  Sidebar: More Democratic Use of Technology

  • developing specific, direct uses of inexpensive, accessible computers.
    • locating existing, inexpensive databases for use by community groups in the South.

    Project for Community Technology

    The application of computer technology continues to change every aspect of American society. Almost half the labor force in the United States now holds a job involved with the production, processing or distribution of information. Thirteen percent of all homes presently have computers. Almost 750,000 subscribers now connect their computers to a national databases. Micro-computers are now found in approximately eighty-five percent of the nation’s school systems. In the next five years the federal government expects to spend $23.5 billion on software alone.

    As in past societal transformations, the wake of the information revolution may leave the least resourceful of this generation as the least able of the next generation.

    Perhaps the most obvious barrier to new technologies is their cost. Many modest non-profit organizations face steep financial costs (up to $200 per hour) for the use of most available databases. A wealth of both private and public information, once available at little or no charge, is increasingly being converted to databases that require a high fee for access. Also, less than one percent of the currently available software is designed for any kind of not-for-profit organization.

    The consequences of this inaccessibility of non-profit groups to the new technologies could be far-reaching and severe. The capacity of groups who have been traditionally under-represented will be further taxed if their ability to use computers and other communications technologies does not grow.

    The Council is intent on increasing computer use by local and state community-based, nonprofit organizations who have a proven record of representing the poor and minorities in the South. While the SRC has used mainframe computers for various tasks in the past, we have operated our own computer system for only the last three years. In 1980, we helped to create a project that explores new means by which video technology may assist local community groups. The Council is building an internal computer library from the reports, documents, and statistics whit we produce. The SRC now uses some national database’ and receives as well as sends information, including the text of Southern Changes, by computer to locations across the country. Also, efforts are underway to increase access to and use of computerized census data in developing model plans for reapportioning local and state government districts.

  Sidebar: Economic Democracy and the Workplace

  • monitoring and reporting upon the South’s electric utility cooperatives.
  • assessing the rights and conditions of workers in the South.

  Co-op Democracy and Development Project

  Few private or governmental institutions play a more important role than electric utility cooperatives in the lives of the rural poor. These co-ops are the largest corporate citizens and the largest non-governmental employers in the rural South. Unlike investor-owned utilities which have huge standing plants, electric co-ops are largely distributors of electricity and have a potential, corporate self-interest in finding ways of conserving energy and creating jobs at the same time. By law, cooperatives are intended to be democratic institutions, supposed to be controlled by the customers they serve.

  The SRC’s Co-op Democracy and Development Project assists poor and black Southerners in rural areas in making electric utility cooperatives more democratic and more responsive to the needs of their local communities. From Arkansas to Virginia the aim of the Coop Project is to change

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  the role of the coop by changing the control of the corporation. In the Mississippi Delta, litigation is being pursued to halt the electric cooperatives’ mischief with democratic practices. In only two or three areas of the South have co-ops’ management made even small efforts to include blacks and the poor on their governing boards.

  The experiences of the Co-op Project and community groups in the last two years reveal the tactics that current cooperative managements use in order to stay in control of the corporation: denial of access to financial data and membership lists, the quick changing of by-laws and procedures to fit the management’s immediate needs, and the use of co-op resources–telephone, personnel, trucks, mailing facilities–to recruit support for the incumbent management. All of these maneuvers rest upon the coop management’s misuse of information and resources.

  The Council is completing a report on the status of co-ops in the South. A small portion of the report–relating to the absence of blacks on co-ops boards of directors–was pre-released earlier. The coverage led to meetings with the National Electric Cooperative Association to discuss the plans and progress of the coops.

  The forthcoming SRC co-op study addresses the cooperative managements’ self-perpetration; their exclusion of blacks, Hispanics, and women from decision-making positions on boards and management; their patterns of financial irregularities; poor employment patterns; high electricity rates; and their minimal efforts to create jobs.

  Southern Labor Institute

  One of the earliest areas of concern of the Southern Regional Council was the South’s workplace. In 1945, the organization’s first major publication criticized Southern states for their “attack on union organization” and tied the

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  South’s low standard of living with the region’s low wages. Since then, Council analysis has continued to show the damaging effects of Southern state policies that promote low wages and ineffective job training.

  The Council has worked to assure fair employment practices throughout the region. An early SRC project helped to launch successful campaigns that resulted in blacks being hired for the first time as policemen in major Southern cities. In the ensuing three decades the Council’s research helped to document the need for federal legislation to assure equal employment opportunity. SRC technical assistance contributed vitally in integrating public and private workplaces throughout the region.

  The Council’s concern for the workplace is more than a matter of history. We continue to report on employment patterns in the region and to help community groups and labor unions combat discriminatory practices when they are revealed. Because of the need to improve the level of wages and working conditions of Southerners today, the Southern Regional Council has created the Southern Labor Institute.

  The Southern Labor Institute strengthens the historical commitment of the Southern Regional Council to address the problems of low wages and non-union working conditions in the South and to unite the goals of the civil rights movement with the struggle for economic justice.

  Currently, the Southern Labor Institute is assembling data on the status of workers in the South, especially with regard to wages, working conditions, unionization, industrial trends, occupational hazards and discrimination. In the process the Institute is establishing a network of people, institutions, and organizations doing research and analysis about the needs and problems of workers in the South. Using the analysis and data of both SRC and others, the project is currently preparing a report on the “Workers Climate” in the South–a unique ranking of how states treat and reward workers.

  For more than four decades, the Southern Regional Council has assisted community groups concerned about political, social and economic change in the American South. Now, as in the past, the Council’stask is to provide research, information, and technical assistance to individuals and groups who are able to bring change.

Sixty five Years in Eufaula

By David Frost

Vol. 7, No. 3, 1985, pp. 30-37

I am DAVID FROST, Jr.

This is an account of my life in Eufaula, Alabama and my family struggle for survival.

This account parallels the struggles of Blacks in the rural south during this period. It presents a series of my experiences and is written with the dialect and grammatically terms of the section in question, and in my own tongue.

My New Year’s resolution for 1977 was to finish writing the story of my life, and the history of my family tree. I have started to write several times in the past, but I stopped. Now I plan to write every time I get a chance.

I was born January 22, 1917. So I have a long story to write. Maybe I can get it all in one book. I can remember back to the time I was three years old.

It was two things in particular that had lasting effect on my life.

No. 1–Watching my parents make moonshine in our back yard in a washpot, which I will write about later on in this book. No. 2–Listening to my parents tell the story of

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Willie Jenkins being lynched here in Barbour County? And how the Peterson boy was lynched here in Eufaula. My parents would tell it just like it had just happened.

However, later on I learned that the Peterson boy had been Lynched a little before I was born.

The Hegley girl (colored) worked for some white people on Cherry Street here in Eufaula. The Peterson boy was her boyfriend. Every night, the Peterson boy would meet his girl friend and walk her home from work. The streets were not lit up with lights like they are now and the Peterson boy would wait out in the street until his girlfriend get off work and then they would walk home.

But this particular night, a white girl came out the house. She was walking straight toward him like his girlfriend had been doing and he did not know she was white. Thinking that it was his girlfriend, he said, “Here I am.”

It frightened the white girl because she was not expecting anybody to be out there. So she screamed, which frightened the Peterson boy and he ran away.

The Peterson boy lived on the Bluff on the Chattahoochie River here in Eufaula. A mob got together, led by Dr. Britt, who- also lived on Cherry Street and they went to the Peterson’s boy’s home and took him away from his parents and sisters and brothers, tied him behind a wagon, and dragged him through the streets of Eufaula and took him out near Pleasant Grove Baptist Church. They took him and castrated him and hanged him on a large oak tree and they shot him to death.

In those days, when I was young, you could hear talk of white people lynching a colored person every week. I heard that in 1882 Tuskegee started to keeping records of lynchings in the United States. I wonder if Tuskegee has the record of the of the Peterson boy? Of course, I know it was many more lynchings that I did not hear about.

Listening to my parents tell about the lynching of the Peterson boy made me very afraid of white people. My mother taught me never to touch a white woman.

We lived five miles out the city of Eufaula on the Old Batesville Road. Going back and forward to town, we had to go through a place called Prime Bottom where a white man named Mr. John Brown and his wife used to run a store. Most of the time we would stop our wagon by the store and buy some things. One particular time we stopped and my mother had to hold the mule. She gave me a nickel and a stone jug and told me to go in the store and get a gallon of kerosene. I went in the store and the white woman drew the kerosene and went to hand it to me and her hand almost touched my hand and I dropped the jug of kerosene and broke it because I did not want that white lady to touch me. Mrs. Brown got another jug and gave us another gallon of kerosene. When I got back on the wagon, I got a good scolding from my mother for breaking the kerosene. I could not understand me being so afraid of white people and my mother was not.

My mother, Mary Bishop Frost, and my father, Samuel David Frost, Sr. married in 1916. In 1918 my parents rented a farm on the Brown place which joins the Major Frost plantation and when I first remember myself, my parents had a mule named Ada and a one-horse wagon and my mother was doing the farming and my father was working at the sawmill. I haven’t been able to figure out how my mother did so much work and, at the same time, having a baby every year. In 1919, I had another brother born in October. At that time, I was just beginning to remember things. My mother would take us to field on a wagon and leave me and my sister on the wagon in a cotton basket while she picked cotton.

After my mother had worked all day and my father had worked all day at the sawmill, my mother would cook and we would eat and when our beer was ready to run, which was in a 30 gallon barrel in the closet in the house, my parents would take it out of the house in the backyard and cook it in a washpot and run it through a pipe about as big as my finger and about half as long as I am tall. Sometime they would work all night and make enough to drink. I would stay awake and watch as much as I could.

A little before I was six years old, my parents stopped making moonshine for a while. My father bought a two horse wagon and by this time he had two mules, one named Maude and the other one named Rhodie. My father began to haul lumber for Hicks Lumber Company. I always got to go with my father.

We had to go through Eufaula and go through the covered bridge that reached across the Chattahoochie River to go to the Georgia side. We would always leave home before day in the morning. When day broke, I would be up on the lumber hack shelving lumber down to my father for him to load on the wagon. Every piece of lumber he loaded on that wagon, I shelved down to him.

Sometimes it would be so cold and frost all over the ground that father would make a fire to warm by. My hands

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would be so cold, I could hardly get down off the lumber hack to warm them. My mother bought me a little pair of brown gloves which helped a little but that lumber soon tore them up.

On my sixth birthday, my mother told my father that she wanted me to stay home and help her because she wanted to make me a birthday cake. They had an argument because my father told her he needed me to help him work. However, my mother won the argument and my father agreed to let me stay home with mother and she cooked me a birthday cake and that seemed to be the happiest day of my life. That was the first time in my life I had got enough cake to eat.

In February, 1923, my parents started to buying a small farm from Mr. Ray Irby, who was a very fine man and always helped us. My parents built a small two-room house of rough green lumber from the sawmill. Everybody in the community helped and they built the house in one day, except for the chimney which took a little longer. However, when that lumber dried, it was cracks in the house everywhere. My mother solved that problem by getting some paste board boxes and sealing the house.

That year my father went up north to Pittsburg to work in the steel mill. Before my father left, he hired our cousin Charlie Jackson to work and plow for us while he was away. Charlie was about eleven or twelve years old at that time.

We would work on the farm up until Thursday night. On Friday, Charlie and I would take the mules and wagon and go haul a load of lumber to the plainer mill at Lugo to get some money to help out. My father would send money from up north, but it seemed that we would always be in a tight.

In 1924, my father went back up north to work for the last time. He came back before the year was out and started to work for Reeves and Marshall Wholesale.

Along about then, a whole lot happened. My father started back to making moonshine and he bought his first car for $10.00. It was a 1914 Model T Ford.

We children would get to go to town often after my father got that car because he would carry us along to help push up those hills and for us to fix flat tires.

We had our small moonshine still and we would make moonshine at night, sometimes a quart, sometimes a half-gallon, and when we started to make a gallon at the time, we thought we were in big business.

Along about this time, we were still farming, also cutting and hauling firewood to town to sell. Also burning and selling charcoal. Also my mother would raise chickens. Every Saturday, my mother would carry two fryers to town to sell to Mrs. Hicks for 25 cents each. That was a lot of money. The rest of the people would pay my mother only 15 cents a chicken.

It was against the law to have any kind of whiskey. Only the rich white people could have whiskey and the law would not bother them.

About the time, a white man bought my father a copper still and taught my father how to make good moonshine. The white man would bring my father sugar to make whiskey. Sometimes our house would be full of white people with their girlfriends, drinking moonshine.

We were always afraid of the law, but when these white people were at our house they told us we did not have anything to worry about and the law never came. However, if a crowd of colored people gathered up around our house we would always see the law coming. Of course, when we saw the law coming, my parents would give one of us children the whiskey to run to the opposite side of the house from the way the law was coming and we would run and hide the moonshine in the woods.

One time, some of us children were in the yard and one of the laws, Mr. Marshall Williams, told us to go in the house. However, I did not go fast enough for him, so he kicked me. I turned around and hit him upside his head as hard as I could. Then the whole gang came after me. I could not get in the house, so I ran under the house. While they were figuring out how to get me out, my father came back. I came out then because I was now ready to fight.

Mr. Williams told my father, “David, that boy you got yonder ain’t got good sense. I told him to go in the house and he acted like he didn’t want to go, so I kicked his butt and he turned around and hit me and if it had not been for the good Lord, I would have killed him.”

My father told him, “That’s something I don’t do, kick any of my children and don’t you kick any of them.”

Mr. Williams asked my father, “Is you got good sense?” Mr. Williams told my father, “You teach that boy how to act when white people come around because I don’t want to hurt him.”

Somewhere down the line, after I stopped being afraid of white people, I began to hate most white people.

It is many colored people in their graves because they forgot to say sir to a white man. I remember one my uncles who forgot to say sir to a white man and the white

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man wanted to kill him. From that day on, my uncle and me stayed as far away from the man as we could. The man is now dead and so is my uncle.

However, all the colored people did not always lose when they came face to face with a white man.

I remember Bishop D. Ward Nichols in St. Luke A.M.E. Church in Eufaula, telling how everybody, no matter how little you think of them, is good for something. He said once he was in a small town in Florida, and his sister had been telling him how the white people there were and they did not like to see colored people dress up. He said he had to catch the train at a small station where they had to stand outside. He said a white man came up cursing every colored person that was there. He said the man started on just the opposite end of where he was and came toward him, cursing and asking the colored people where they were going. He said he was the Bishop and he was very scared and he did not know what he was going to tell the white man when he got to him. But, he said, just before the white man got to him, it was a colored man sitting down that did not look like he was fit for anything. The white man cursed him and asked him where he was going, old nigger. The colored person did not say anything. The white man asked again, “I say, where are you going, old nigger?”

The colored man said, “I was going to Atlanta, but if you call me a nigger again, I will be going to hell and I will send you on in front of me.”

In 1932, all the people that owed the bank were being foreclosed on. The bank was taking everything they had. When they came to our house, my mother was in the bed sick. Mr. Beasley was the boss, so he came in the house and told my mother how sorry he was to have to take the little we had, which was a little corn and one mule. In the meantime, while he was talking to my mother, he had already sent Mr. Edmond Drewery and the other man with him to our lot to catch our mule.

In the meantime, Mr. Beasley was walking out the house. We told mother that they had caught our mule. I had never seen my mother get out of the bed and put her clothes on so fast before in my life. By the time Mr. Beasley got out of the house and in the yard, my mother was out there too and told them to take the bridle off that mule and put her back in the lot. They got mad with my mother but she and all of us was ready to fight. That same day, they took everything from my grandfather, including his mule, wagon and buggy. That same day, they went and cleaned out my great-uncle, Rev. Lee Jackson. Mr. Beasley told Rev. Jackson that he had never seen such a nigger as my mother before, but he was going back and take every chair out of her house. Well, that has been 45 years and he hasn’t been back yet.

When my father was in prison, we still tried to make moonshine whenever we could get as much as 10 lbs. of sugar. My mother would send us children to make moonshine. We would make such a poor grade until our mother had to go with us and try her hand. However, we all failed and were no longer able to buy sugar, so we had to stop.

That year, 1932, coming up to the 28th of May, at night we ate everything in the house for supper. My mother thought all of us were asleep, I heard my mother praying and asking God to please make a way out of no way for us to get some food. I could not sleep all that night, laying in the bed and wondering how we were going to get our next meal of food.

However, soon the next morning, my mother’s prayer was answered. My Uncle Henry Bishop came by and bought a yearling cow from my mother to barbecue at Cedar Hill Church, celebrating the 28th day of May. The cow weighed about 300 or 400 lbs. My mother sold the cow for $3.00. In those days $3.00 was a lot of money. My mother took that $3.00 and went to town and bought enough groceries to last a long time. My mother knew how to make the groceries last. We never had quite enough to eat, but it was enough to

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keep us alive.

In our section, we did not celebrate the first of January, when we were freed from slavery. We all celebrated the 28th of May. My mother said, although we were freed January 1, we did not find out that we were free until the 28th of May, and that is why we celebrate that day. Along about this time, the government was giving away some dark brown flour. When my mother found out about it, she would walk to town and stand in line all day long and if she was lucky, they would give her a 24 lb. sack of flour.

When my father did get out of prison in August 1932, we were gathering our crop (pulling fodder). We were thinking that things were going to get better as soon as my father got home, but it did not work that way because my father could not find a job and the $10.00 that they gave him when he left prison was soon gone.

However, my father soon got hold of 25 lbs. of sugar and he went in with Mr. John Walker and he started back to making moonshine. Mr. John Walker was the father of Lloyd Walker. Mr. Walker was old and a former slave, but he knew how to make good moonshine.

While we were sitting around the still watching the moonshine run, Mr. Walker would tell us how things happened back there in slavery times. Mr. Walker said they would fasten his mother up with a large, big-limbed man and force her to breed from him. He said if she did not want to have the man, they would take her out and beat her and put her back with him. He said his mother had no other choice. He said his mother had three sets of children and her master sold all of them except him. He said he was sickly and looked puny and no one would buy him. He said his master sold one baby out of her mother’s arms to a man in Geneva, Alabama. He said they never saw him again. Mr. Walker said the plantation he lived on, when it rained, the slaves would sing, “more rain, more rest.” The master would ask what they said, they said, “more rain, grass grow.”

In 1938, I married Lillian Catherine Webb. She was a schoolmate of mine and a playmate. She went on to finish school, but I had to stop halfway through the seventh grade and go to work. Me being the oldest of 12 children was rough in those days.

After I married, I got me a job at the sawmill, working for Mr. Woodney Lawrence for $1.00 a day. I never could make ends meet, so I put me up a small still of my own, making two and three gallons of moonshine at a time. I would work at the sawmill at day and at night, once a week, I would make moonshine.

In 1939, somebody told the law that I had a whole lot of people around me on the weekend and I was making a lot of money. So the law set out to catch me to get some of the whole lot of money that they thought I was making.

One day the law came to our house searching for moonshine. After they could not find any, they went around my yard and in my crib and picked up all the empty bottles and jugs they could find and told me they were going to take me down and let me pay them a little fine because they had heard I was making a lot of money and I ought not mind paying a little fine. I told them that I was not going with them.

They told me, “Oh yes you are.” And told me to go in to the house and put on my shoes. I went in the house like they told me, but I did not come back out. I got my rifle and stepped out the back door and went down through the woods. By that time, my wife had fainted and a crowd had gathered around my house.

The law gave my father a bond for me to sign and told him to tell me when to come to court. They told my father they were not going to hurt me because I did not have good sense. My good judgement told me that they were mad at me and I should stay out of their way until court.

However, my cousin Elijah Snipes told me that he knew where a fortune teller named Rev. Gardner could fix me so the law could not bother me and they could not convict me in court. My cousin Elijah took me to Rev. Gardner. Rev. Gardner told my fortune. I mean he told me a lot of lies. He told me to give him a dime out my pocket. He took the dime and took some kind of little roots and sprinkled some kind of powder on it and he sewed it up in a small rag with my dime which make a joe-moe. Rev. Gardner told me to take my joe-moe and wear it in the toe of my shoe and when the law saw me, they would look the other way. He also told me to catch him nine ants and bring them to him and when the day of the trial come, he would fix those ants and take them to the courthouse and the judge could not convict me. Rev. Gardner charged me $3.00, which was over a half week’s work at that time.

Me being very young, I believed what Rev. Gardner told me and the next day, I went to town. Two of the city police saw me and they did not look the other way, like Rev. Gardner said they would. They arrested me and took me to

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the jailhouse and told me to get out the car and, as I was getting out the car, one of the laws knocked me down and got in my stomach, stomped and kicked me until I was almost unconscious. Then they put me in jail and told me they were teaching me some sense. A few minutes later, they sent Mr. Bill Irby to turn me out.

That day, I started to planning and trying to figure out how I could get all the white together who had mistreated me and kill all of them at one time. I was never able to figure out how to get all those people together at one time, because more than a dozen people had mistreated me. I knew that if I killed all those people, some of them would kill me. But I figured it was worth it.

However, all that hate I had bunded up against white people have disappeared now. In fact, it all did not disappear until years later when Dr. King continued to teach to love everybody. I have found out that I am a combination of Dr. King and Malcolm X because I will also fight like Malcolm X would.

The Supreme Court passed the law in 1954 that the schools had to be integrated. I was at PTA one night and Dr. T. J. Lee got up in the meeting and said the Supreme Court had ruled that the schools be integrated and we should prepare our children to be ready to go to integrated schools. The people started grumbling and told Mrs. Smith to make Dr. Lee sit his crazy self down because he knew very well that no colored and white was going to school together in the South.

Soon after the Supreme Court ruling, the white people got very busy in Eufaula to buy up all the colored people’s property that was close to the school. They also built the colored a new school which was better than the white school.

In the meantime, I was still living in the country, but I owned some property close to the white school in Eufaula and the Housing Authority was trying to buy my property for only $3,200. I had heard about Thurgood Marshall and I tried to get the group to hire him for our lawyer. However, we contacted Mr. W. C. Patton of Birmingham and he advised us to hire Atty. Fred D. Gray of Montgomery. We did hire Atty. Gray.

That was when I got a chance to meet the great Dr. M. L. King Jr. At that time, he was at his home getting well from the stab wound he got from that woman in New York.

Atty. Fred Gray sent me, Rev. Lee Holmes, Rev. Adolph Cuming, and Mr. Steven Tate by his home to see Dr. King.

In the meantime, Atty. Patterson had outlawed the N.A.A.C.P. in Alabama and most of the colored people were afraid to mention the name of the N.A.A.C.P. in Eufaula, but I was not. We had to stop having our meetings and stop paying our dues in Eufaula. That was in November, 1957. I took me out a life membership in New York. So far as I know, I am the only lifetime member of the N.A.A.C.P. in Eufaula la. Atty. Fred D. Gray went to work for us here in Eufaula la and, although the white people were able to get the colored people from around the white school, they had to pay all of us a fair price for our property.

In the meantime, the State of Alabama had come up with all kinds of tricks to keep colored people from voting. I took my wife to register to vote. They took out a book and asked her all kinds of silly questions and then told her she could not register because she did not pass. However, my wife and I studied and got the answer to every question that they asked. So when the board met again in the next two weeks, we had to drive 20 miles to Clayton to meet the board. When we got to the board, they would not let me go in with my wife. I had to stand out in the hall. My wife went in and soon came out. I asked her did they register her. She said, “No.”

I went to the door and asked why they did not register my wife?

Mr. Stokes jumped up and pointed his finger in my face and told me they had examined her and she did not pass and he did not want to hear any more about it. His face turned red like he wanted to fight.

My wife said they did not ask the same questions that they had asked before. They told her they had 200 different questions and they could ask her any on of them they pleased. I think history will record that those people at the board acted very childish. However, I came home that same day and wrote the Justice Department in Washington and Mr. Stokes did not hear any more about it until they had him in Federal Court in Montgomery.

When colored people started to registering to vote and we got Atty. Fred D. Gray in Eufaula so that we could get a fair price for our property, it made a lot of white people mad. They would ride by my house at night and throw rocks on top of my house.

The white people were determined to block me from making an honest living, so they sent three carloads of law to

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my night spot on Saturday night. My place was packed with people. The laws came in with their rifles and pistols and got in the middle of the crowd and took his rifle and shot two shots straight through the top of my building. They then went across the road to my house and started shooting at my porch light with their pistols and rifles until they shot holes all in my house and shot out my porch light.

That did the work for them. My customers stopped coming to my place and I had to close up. The holes that the law shot in my house and my night spot are still there for any one to see who wants to.

When you have the officers of the law enforcing economic pressure against you, you just cannot make it.

I had no other choice but to start back making moonshine. I had spent quite a bit of money building my night spot, so I was determined to make it pay off. So this time, I put me up a still in the basement. I would be making moonshine and peeping out the window and watching the law ride along the highway looking for my still. One of my white friends told me that the state, county, and city spent many thousands of dollars trying to catch me and send me to prison. I knew when I put that still in that building that sooner or later the law was going to catch me and probably send me to prison. But I figured that being in prison could not be any worse than being tormented by the law all the time.

As I said, I never gave up what I thought was right and I never gave up trying to get colored people registered to vote, so the law never gave up harassing me.

Since they had outlawed the N.A.A.C.P. in Eufaula and the colored people in Eufaula did not know what to do, so I went to Birmingham to get some advice from Mr. W. C. Patton. Mr. Patton gave me some information on how to organize a Barbour County Improvement Association. I went around and got a group of people to meet me at the Eufaula Baptist Academy. On a Thursday night, in January, 1962, we met at the school and organized the Barbour County Improvement Association. After organizing, they turned around and elected me president, which I did not want to be. I wanted somebody to be president that had more education than I had, but everybody was afraid. So I accepted the job because I did not have enough sense to be afraid.

The same night I was at the school and we were organizing the Association, the law was out to my house, setting a trap to catch me. My wife told me the dogs were barking all while I was gone. Of course, the law knew I was gone because they knew better than to hang around my house at night when I was home.

The law caught me in that trap the next morning. I had just taken my five year old daughter to kindergarten school in Eufaula, and I was supposed to pick her up that afternoon. However, I could not pick her up because, when I got back home, the law came by and made me unlock my building and they took me in to the still and put handcuffs on me and took me to jail.

While I was in jail my wife said it looked like everybody in town came out to look at my still and take pictures. There were people at the jail ready to sign my bond, but one of the deputy sheriffs took the bond and went off and hid. They wanted to keep me in jail until they could steal everything from around my house that they could get their hands on. My wife watched out the window while they broke in my workshop and took all my tools out. Mr. William Adams was the sheriff at the time and my wife watched him take my grandfather’s scales that he used to weigh cotton with.

Those scales had been in the family for many years and the family wanted me to keep them because they knew I would take care of them. We asked Mr. Adams for those scales and tools until he died, but he never gave them back to us. Mr. Adams had a son that is an attorney in Clayton, Alabama. We are hoping that one day his son will turn those scales back to the family. We forgive Mr. Adams and the rest of the laws for taking those other things, but we will never forgive them for taking those scales.

Judge Jack Wallace gave me a big surprise at my trial. I was looking for him to give me a year and a day, like he had been giving all the other people for making moonshine. But Judge Wallace gave me three years. Then I realized that the one year was for the moonshine and the two years were for my Civil Rights activities.

They sent me to prison in October, 1962. While I was in Clayton jail, waiting to be sent to Kilby, I started to writing to the officials in Barbour County, criticizing them for mistreating colored people. They got very mad with me while I was still in jail. While in prison, I got a chance to learn a whole lot.

There I was with all that concrete under my feet and over my head and steel all around me. I was exactly like Jonah in the belly of the whale and I did exactly like Jonah did. I began to call on God and God answered my prayers.

Soon I had to go before three doctors for them to examine me to see if I was crazy. When I went before the doctors they had a stack of my letters that I had wrote to Barbour

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County. They began to read those letters and asked me questions about them and had me to explain everything I had wrote on those letters. They also had a book that they asked me questions out of. I answered all of those questions correctly. Those doctors began to look at each other and said, “This man is not crazy.” They told me I only wrote facts and the people back in Barbour could not stand facts. They told me the ones that thought I was crazy, they were the ones that were crazy. They told me the trouble was there were some people back in Barbour County that did not want me back. Of course, I already knew that and I had planned not to go back to Barbour County when I got out of prison. But I had fooled on my own self, because as soon as I got out of prison, I went straight back to Eufaula and Barbour County and I started right back to making moonshine.

I did not make moonshine long before the law started tearing up my still again. But what made me stop making moonshine for good was, I found out I cannot run fast anymore. Most of the time when I ran, I caught a cramp and fell out. For that reason, I knew the law would catch me. I think I will have to stop making moonshine for good.

Mother Church

Will D. Campbell

Vol. 7, No. 3, 1985, pp. 37-38

Shortly after the spring thaw of 1573 a woman prayed for her children.

O holy Father, sanctify the children of Thy handmaiden in Thy truth, and keep them from all unrighteousness, for Thy holy name’s sake. O Almighty Father, I commend them unto You, since they are Thy creatures; care for them, for they are Thy handiwork; so that they may walk in Thy paths. Amen.

She was a cousin to some of us. Her name was Maeyken Wens, an Anabaptist woman of Antwerp, who had been arrested a few days earlier for proclaiming the Gospel of Christ as she understood it from her personal reading of the Scripture, and from study and discussion of it with others of her sisters and brothers.

Cousin Maeyken withstood the inquisition of ecclesiastics and the bodily torture of those in civil authority. When she would not recant after six months of imprisonment, and would not promise to cease her spreading of the Word, she was sentenced on October 5 to death. Included in the sentence read by the court was the instruction to the executioner that her tongue should be screwed fast to the roof of her mouth so that she might not testify along the way to the place of burning.

The next day her teen-age son, Adriaen, took his youngest little brother, three year old Hans Mattheus, and stood on a bench near the stakes so that her first and last issue might be present at the moment of her death. When it began Adriaen fainted, and was not able to witness her parting. But when it was over and the ashes had cooled he sifted through them and found the screw with which her tongue had been stilled. Three other women and a man died that day for the same offense. The remembrance of them makes me exult in my heritage.

Four hundred and eleven years later, June 13, 1984, many thousands of Maeyken’s spiritual relatives gathered in convention in Kansas City and resolved that women should not be ordained as ministers.

WHEREAS, while Paul commends women and men alike in other roles of ministry and service (Titus 2:1-10) he excludes women from pastoral leadership (I Timothy 2:12) to preserve a submission God requires because the man was first in Creation and the woman was first in the Edenic fall (I Timothy 2:1 395.)

The remembrance of that act brings no exultation to many of us who wear the Anabaptist alias, Baptist. I have heard of no fifteen year old sons picking up the paper clips from the discarded resolutions which recommended the silencing of their mothers. Perhaps it is just as well. For that resolution will no more stop their mothers and sisters from declaring the mighty acts of God, with or without the laying on of human hands, than the tongue screws stopped those daughters of Sarah in the sixteenth century. Or my Mississippi grandmother who in 1932, and with no apostolic sanction, stood in the finest prophetic and priestly tradition and said to an angry band of men about to beat a black child with a gin belt, “He’s fourteen years old and you ain’t gonna beat him.” And they didn’t. Again, I exult.

Many, it should be said, deny the kinship between contemporary Baptists of twentieth century America and that tough and radical little band of left-wingers called Anabaptists. But increasingly the scholars acknowledge and affirm the nexus. Among them are William Estep of the Southwestern Baptist Seminary in Fort Worth, Eric Gritsch of Lutheran Seminary in Gettysburg, the late Roland Baintain of Yale, and Donald Armentrout of St. Luke’s Episcopal Seminary.

Last week I sat in a hot and crowded courtroom in Glasgow, Kentucky and watched the continuing persecution of Maeyken Wens’s people. A young Swartzentruber Amish

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man was on trial for not having the state mandated red emblem on his buggy. To do so, he testified calmly, would be a sin. To him it would be a violation of the second commandment, and he made it clear that he had no intention of doing so. He refused the oath, refused to hold his right hand up in obeisance to a court of human law, declined to say, “Your honor,” or respond in any fashion other than the Biblical yea or nay. There was no talk of racks, drowning, or burning. But the suspicion of the state of those who dare to be different was much in evidence. Testimony showed that the buggy, with the reflective tape designed by the Amish, could be seen at night for almost six hundred feet. The issue did not appear to be safety. The issue was Caesar’s prescribed emblem. I observed this tiny vestige of where I came from with gratefulness.

One week before that courtroom scene 45,000 Baptists convened in Dallas in an atmosphere of shame and held a four day shouting match over which faction of the denomination, the conservatives or the slightly more conservative, should be entrusted with the tattered coat of Christ. The duly ordained Reverend President was flanked by armed guards. They were not country dunces riding into the city on their watermelon trucks to fight over who would get their picture on next year’s Sunday School quarterlies. Baptists are now a middle class and accepted people. The preachers of the victorious faction, largely unaware and uncaring of their antecedent, preach from Hebrew and Greek texts. The laity come from the professional elite, the major protagonist being a prominent Houston judge. (In the days of Maeyken Wens he would not have been allowed membership by virtue of being a magistrate. In 1985 he lobbies on the Phil Donahue Show to take it over.)

Though there is considerable opposition to the resolution on the ordination of women passed by 58 percent of those voting a year ago, the effort to rescind it did not make it to this year’s agenda. To preserve the spirit of alleged harmony women are still adjudged unqualified to be ministers because they discovered sin first. One might think that since they have been at it longer they would be more competent in identifying and casting it out. But logic has never carried much weight where mischief and foolishness reign.

The percentage of women clergy in my holy mother church is less than one percent. But if those who did not spring from the left wing of the reformation are looking down their sophisticated noses at backwater Baptists and are gathering boulders they might first consider some relevant mote. Among Episcopalians and United Methodists the ratio is about thirty to one. And among Roman Catholics it is . . . well, never mind.

All of us might also hear some words of Kenneth Chafin, a Baptist seminary professor known for neither toadying to special interests nor knee jerk liberalism, words of both warning and hope. They should be heard by Nashville, Rome, Canterbury, and the rest.

The best students I have at Southern Seminary are women. They’ve got better minds and better backgrounds. They are better at preparing sermons than anyone else I have in the class. And yet the most ill-prepared, uncommitted, limited man I have has a better chance for ministry in our denomination than some of the most brilliant people I teach. Until the pulpits of this land begin to deal with that, we are wasting not just half of our gifts, we are wasting probably sixty percent of our gifts.

There are today almost sixty thousand students involved in some theological degree program. Twenty-five percent of them are women. Where will they go? The number being trained is multiples beyond the number of professional jobs currently open to them.

Of personal concern to me in all this is that my firstborn daughter entered Divinity School this fall. I don’t want her bruised by institutionalized tongue screws nor silenced by resoluted bigotry.

Of concern to the steeples should be some words of St. Paul:

. . . and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent?

The writer was ordained a Baptist preacher in Mississippi forty-four years ago this month. This essay is reprinted from Christianity and Crisis.

The Women of Fairhope. Women of Fairhope, by Paul M. Gaston. Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures, No. 25. with foreword by Wayne Mixon. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984, 143 pages).

By Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

Vol. 7, No. 3, 1985, pp. 38-40

The charm of Paul Gaston’s The Women of Fairhope resembles that of treasured stories. Reading it makes you wish that you could have heard the lectures on which it is based. But whatever may have been lost in the translation from spoken to written form, the haunting attraction of the lives of the women he evokes has withstood the test. The grandson of the founder of the single-tax colony of Fairhope, Alabama, Professor Gaston knew the community to which they were bound. His loving tribute to them constitutes his tribute to the values of Fairhope itself, but his choice of women about whom to write reflects a historian’s self-imposed critical distance on what must be a very personal legacy.

For, if in writing of the lives of Nancy Lewis, Marie Howland, and Marietta Jackson, Professor Gaston is recreating three lives and telling three touching stories, he is also, very gently–almost too gently–saying something about the nature, limits, and interweaving of different women’s experiences in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. None of these women would, in the normal course of events, be taken as a preeminent historical figure: none, that is, would be taken to command a place in a standard history of the period. Yet each was extraordinary

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and significant, each a woman of courage, determination, imagination.

Fairhope, founded in 1894, does not figure in the familiar histories of “utopian” communities in the United States, not least because of its dates. By the time Fairhope was founded, Americans had been pouring their reformist impulses into such “mainstream” movements as populism and the Knights of Labor. And the even broader Progressive movement, with its attendant movements for social reform, was underway. Fairhope came too late to fit comfortably into the mold of utopian settlement typified by the Owenities’ New Lanark and John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida. Perhaps then, it was too practical–too insufficiently utopian. Professor Gaston is planning to tell the story of Fairhope itself in another book, and he here he drops only those portions he deems essential to his story.

Located on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, Fairhope embodied “a plan for justice and equal rights [that] emerged from the same ferment that spawned new movements in the late nineteenth century for women’s liberation.” The plan called for a proper balance between communitarianism and individualism, including equal rights for women and men. By the 1920s, among its many other attributes, it boasted a newspaper, a library, and two schools, one public, one private. Its women, although entitled to equal access to employment, appear to have followed the patterns of the larger society they were hoping to reform by example: only a shade more than one quarter of their adult numbers worked outside the home. Nor did they inaugurate any “grand domestic revolution” of the kind favored by radical reformers who sought to abolish entirely private kitchens and other arenas of women’s isolated, unpaid labor. Rather, most of Fairhope’s women appear to have favored the “social feminism” that was gaining such currency in the country at large.

The women’s Fairhope that emerges from Professor Gaston’s pages resembles nothing so much as a rarified realization of the dream of many Progressive, white, middleclass women. And even that modest, respectable dream required hothouse conditions. The women appear to have enjoyed the freedom to speak their minds without censure, to develop their physical and mental capacities, and to participate in their community as full individuals without the imprisoning dictates of gender that still curtailed the activities of many middle-class American women. Even with this freedom, the women–or perhaps the men, or the community as a whole–still held to conventional gender divisions. Fairhope offered no Fourieriste utopia of free love. The women’s freedom lay in living with one man and raising his children in economic security. Nor did these women see their own economic independence as a prerequisite for the equality they sought, however much Marie Howland tried to instruct them in its importance. They delighted in that elusive but persistent American dream of a small self-sufficient town, inhabited by contented and secure white families. They even delighted in private property, in conformity with Henry George’s single-tax doctrine, while supporting large community undertakings. This Progressive dream-down to the fragile balance between social science and William Morris-has had a tenacious career, which, as Professor Gaston ruefully avers, excluded blacks (and although he does not explicitly say so, apparently also excluded immigrant workers). It was the American dream without the “social” and “racial” problem.

Professor Gaston marvelously captures the spirit and dreams of Marie Howland and Marietta Jackson as part of the essence of Fairhope. In Fairhope, Howland, born Hannah Marie Stevens in 1836, ended a career that exemplified American reform and included “Lowell cotton mills; New York radical and literary salons; an industrial utopia in France; a rural New Jersey command post of reform agitation and happy living; a colony in Mexico devoted to ‘integral cooperation.”‘ A passionate, vibrant woman, Howland arrived in Fairhope with two marriages, varied experiences, a persisting loyalty to Fourieriste principles, and numerous writings including the novel Papa’s Own Girl (The Familistere in its third edition) to her credit. Her second marriage to Edward Howland, rather than her own employment, accounted for her financial resources and the thousand volumes that she gave to form the core of the Fairhope library. Fairhope thus crowned her career and, in important respects, embodied many of the abiding commitments that had informed her forays into other reform movements. Her experience, talents, and compelling personality earned her an important position in the colony and regular access to the pages of the Courier, of which she became associate editor. Above all, she stimulated the Fairhope women’s consciousness of themselves as women. Under her inspiration, they organized a panoply of social feminist women’s clubs, including the Ladies’ Henry George Club, the Women’s Single Tax Club, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Women’s Suffrage Society, the Women’s Social Science Club, and more.

If Fairhope provided the capstone for Marie Howland’s career, it provided the stage and substance for that of Marietta Jackson, who, born in 1864, arrived from Minnesota in 1902 with her husband and small son. She had devoted the early part of her adult life to teaching and, before arriving in Fairhope, had undergone “a conversion” after reading Nathan Oppenheim’s The Development of the Child. Fairhope provided the ideal climate and setting for the development and implementation of her passionate commitment to progressive, “child-centered” education. Not merely did she educate a significant number of children in her Fairhope private school, but she established an

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outpost–and garnered important financial support–in Greenwich, Connecticut as well.

Firmly convinced that adults existed to serve the child, rather than the reverse, she held that education should facilitate gently the unfolding of each child’s unique, individual potential. Professor Gaston makes a strong case for Jackson’s integral relation to the national development of the movement for progressive education. She lectured throughout the country, frequently to audiences caught in the spell of her dynamic personality; she trained teachers; and she taught children. Resoundingly endorsed by John Dewey, among many, her work attained considerable renown, especially in those middle-class circles that would foster the development first of progressive education and later of the study and nurture of the child in general. Like Howland, she captured an important tendency in the concerns of her generation throughout the nation. Yet she apparently always understood that, however broad the interest in her work, Fairhope offered her a special–perhaps unique–opportunity to do that work as she chose to do it. Professor Gaston is especially moving in recounting the close of her career during the Depression of the 1930s: her failing ability to mobilize resources, her own failing powers, the collapse of her dream.

Yet the collapse of her dream–however poignant the individual case–consists in part in the national tragedy of the depression and in part in the inescapable individual tragedy of mortality. The collapse of the dream of Nancy Lewis, with which Professor Gaston begins, resulted from more precise and, therefore, more painful historical conflicts. Nancy Lewis never belonged to Fairhope: Fairhope grew on the ruin of Nancy Lewis’s dream. Withal, Nancy Lewis may have, in her unrecorded life, transcended greater odds and realized, however fragiley, a more impossible dream than either Howland or Jackson. For Nancy Lewis, born a slave had, together with her husband, emerged from slavery to acquire a farm–that ubiquitous but elusive goal of the exslaves as a group, that unit of private property on which the values of white Americans rested. And Nancy Lewis had lost that farm to the founding of Fairhope–that project to perpetuate the values of honest, individual property holders.

Credit accrues to Professor Gaston’s grandfather for having refused to repeat that original expropriation when, a few years after the original founding, he had the opportunity to buy the smaller farm to which Nancy Lewis, a widow, and her children had retreated. And he refused even though the parcel was needed to round out the Fairhope unit. But only God can judge the first expropriation. History is not good enough, although Professor Gaston evokes it, pointing out that, in time and place, to include blacks in the Fairhope experiment was not a real possibility, however decent the values of the founders. And, after all, Nancy Lewis and her husband had had only such title to their farm as derived from occupation and the payment of taxes. Reconstruction southerners were notoriously unenthusiastic about letting exslaves buy land outright.

Professor Gaston draws no morals, historical or other. He staunchly refrains even from the modest temptation to pull these women’s lives together, or to set them explicitly in the context of the lives of the non-Fairhope women of their generation. Yet he has offered his readers a small jewel–a series of microcosms of individual women’s experiences. And he has offered those of his readers who so choose all they need to draw more far-reaching conclusions.