The Attack on Voting Rights

By Laughlin Mcdonald

Vol. 7, No. 5, 1985, pp. 1-3

The Reagan Administration continues to widen its attack on minority voting rights. In its latest depredation, it has filed a friend of the court brief with the Supreme Court arguing that the election of even a single black to office forecloses a challenge to a disputed election plan under the Voting Rights Act.

The case in which the brief was filed, Thornburg v. Gingles, involves North Carolina’s 1982 legislative reapportionment. In oral argument before the US Supreme Court, heard on December 4,1985, the Reagan Administration was represented by Solicitor General Charles Fried. Julius Chambers, director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (and a former president of the Southern Regional Council), argued against Fried and North Carolina Attorney General Lacy Thornburg on behalf of a group of black North Carolinians. Chambers told the Court that “blacks do not have and have not had an equal opportunity to participate in the electoral process and to elect representatives of their choice.”

The Department of Justice originally approved the state’s plan under the special preclearance provisions of Section 5 of the Act, but a three-judge court later ruled that features of the reapportionment–six multi-member and one single-member districts–violated another part of the Act, Section 2, because they had the result of diluting minority voting strength. The court said that even though a token number of minorities had actually been elected in the challenged districts, this electoral success was “too minimal” and “too recent” in history to support a finding that race was no longer a significant adverse factor or that the elections were fair. Justice, however, in an effort to defend

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its prior approval of the plan, is now arguing that the minimal minority success at the polls is a total bar to a further Section 2 challenge. Reduced to its essentials, the argument is the familiar one emanating from Reagan officials these days: that anything more than tokenism in civil rights is a quota or a form of prohibited affirmative action.

The Administration, despite its frequent rhetoric to the contrary, has never supported strong voting rights laws. When the extension of the Voting Rights Act was debated in the House in 1981, the Reaganites, saying they were “studying” the question, kept silent on the critical issue of whether or not to continue Section 5–which requires certain jurisdictions with long histories of discrimination in voting to obtain federal approval of new voting laws prior to implementing them. After the House voted overwhelmingly to extend Section 5, the Reagan Administration finally showed its hand. It labeled the House Bill “extreme” and lobbied the Senate to cripple it by enacting two amendments, one of which would have exempted a large number of jurisdictions from compliance with preclearance, and another that would have made it easier for the remaining jurisdictions to enact new, potentially discriminatory voting laws. The Senate rejected the proposed amendments and adopted a version of Section 5 similar to that passed by the House.

Reagan and friends also vehemently fought the strengthening of Section 2 of the Act. Section 2 is a general prohibition against discrimination in voting and is enforced in traditional lawsuits brought by the Attorney General or by private parties. Unlike Section 5, it applies nationwide and to both old and new voting practices, even to those which may have been precleared by the Attorney General.

The civil rights community advocated the amendment of Section 2 to include a “results” test for voting rights violations. The issue was important because the Supreme Court had indicated in a 1980 decision, City of Mobile v. Bolden, that direct proof of a racially discriminatory purpose was required in voting cases, regardless of how discriminatory a particular procedure was in practice. Given such a burden of proof, minorities could rarely expect to challenge successfully even the worst of discriminatory practices.

Attorney General William French Smith testified before the Senate on behalf of the Administration in January, 1982 and urged that Congress reject the amendment of Section 2. He called the amendment “bad legislation” and a “dramatic change” in the law. It would, he said, require racial “quotas” for office holding and “proportional representation.” The Senate brushed aside the Attorney General’s objections and voted eighty-five to eight to adopt the results standard. The President later signed the Act into law in a Rose Garden ceremony, pronouncing the right to vote “the crown jewel of American liberties,” and, without betraying a trace of irony, said the new legislation was evidence of his Administration’s “unbending commitment to voting rights.”

In light of Attorney General Smith’s Senate testimony, it is not surprising that the current Administration has taken a hostile view of Section 2 in Gingles. What makes Gingles critical is that the Court has never before revised the application of Section 2 to the particular facts of a given case, and has frequently said that the opinions of the Attorney General are entitled to deference–at least in cases involving Section 5 in which the Attorney General has unique enforcement responsibilities. Whether or not the Court will defer to the Attorney General’s opinion in this case, and whether it will establish restrictive guidelines for the implementation of Section 2, will weigh heavily on minority voting rights in the years ahead.

The government’s arguments in the Gingles case, however, are refuted by Section 2 itself. The statute requires that political processes be “equally open” to minorities and that they not have “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” As the statute makes plain, the right protected is one of equal, not token, political participation.

In addition, the statute directs a court to consider “the totality of circumstances” in evaluating a violation, and provides that the extent to which minorities have been elected to office “is one circumstance that may be considered.” If black electoral success is merely one of a number of circumstances which may be considered in a Section 2 case, a finding of minimal or any other level of minority candidate success could not, as the government argues, be sufficient.

Congress, in fact, expressly considered and rejected the very argument now being pressed by the Reagan Administration in the Supreme Court. The Senate Report which accompanied amended Section 2 provides that while minority electoral success is a significant and relevant factor, it is n_ the be all or end all–it is not dispositive.

Otherwise, the majority might evade the statute by manipulating the election of a “safe” minority candidate to

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give the appearance of racial fairness to a discriminatory election system. According to the Senate Report, which drew upon the language of prior voting rights cases, “were we to hold that a minority candidate’s success at the polls is conclusive proof of a minority group’s access to the political process, we would merely be inviting attempts to circumvent the Constitution.” Lower federal courts in Alabama, Texas, Louisiana and Illinois have decided cases on the basis of the new law and have predictably rejected the claim that minimal or token black success at the polls forecloses a Section 2 challenge.

The necessity of considering factors other than the election of minorities in the North Carolina case is particularly apparent in House District 21 (Wake County) and House District 23 (Durham County), where black candidates have enjoyed perhaps their greatest electoral successes. One black has been elected to the three-member delegation from District 23 since 1973, and a black was elected in 1980 and 1982 to the six-member delegation from District 21. This success, however, as the trial court found, was the result of single-shot voting by blacks, i.e. blacks giving up the right to vote for all delegation members and instead concentrating their votes on a few black candidates. Black voters in District 23 forfeited up to two-thirds of their voting strength and black voters in District 21 forfeited up to five-sixths of their voting strength in this fashion in order to elect candidates of their choice to office. Whites, by contrast, can vote a full slate without forfeiting any of their voting strength and still elect candidates of their choice. Such a system does not provide black voters equal access to the political process and is another reason the mere election of minorities to office should not foreclose a dilution challenge. The totality of circumstances must always be considered.

Aside from being contrary to the statute and legislative history, the government’s Section 2 argument is in opposition to the whole thrust of modern voting and civil rights enforcement. Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act in 1965 as an “uncommon exercise of Congressional power” designed to combat the “unremitting and ingenious defiance of the Constitution” by some jurisdictions in denying minority voting rights. Based upon the continuing need for voting rights protection, Congress extended and amended the coverage of the Act three times–in 1970,1975 and 1982. It would be illogical to suppose, that in amending Section 2, Congress suddenly retreated from its general commitment to racial equality in voting and adopted a statute providing only tokenism and minimal political participation.

Modern congressional enforcement of civil rights in other areas has similarly not been one of minimalism. Congress, for example, clearly intended to protect more than token access to public accommodations or employment when it enacted the Civil Rights Act in 1964, or token service on juries when it enacted the Federal Jury Selection and Service Act in 1968. It makes no more sense to say that token minority success at the polls forecloses a voting rights challenge than to say the renting of a single motel room to a black forecloses a challenge to a discriminatory public accommodations policy, or that the presence of a few blacks in the jury pool bars challenge to a discriminatory jury selection system.

If the Reagan Administration prevails in its Supreme Court argument, it will be impossible to eradicate discriminatory election procedures in places where minority candidates have had some success. On the other hand, jurisdictions in which blacks have had no success will be encouraged to manipulate the election of a token minority and block challenges to their discriminatory election schemes. There will be no incentive for voluntary compliance with the Voting Rights Act and every inducement for circumvention. The Reagan Administration will have accomplished in the courts what it failed to do in the Congress–to significantly retard the nation’s twenty year progress in minority voting rights.

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

The Importance of Black Legislators

By Alex Willingham

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

The Southern state legislature, once the incarnation of backwardness in Southern politics, now stands to become a center for innovation in regional affairs. The formerly all-male, all-white, one-party bastions of prejudice and reactionary social policy have been changing in recent years. More change lies ahead. Political moderates, Republicans, women, and labor representatives have won seats, lending a bit of diversity to the legislatures. Blacks, whose lack of power has characterized the South’s “peculiarity,” have been elected in unprecedented numbers.

Before 1963, when Leroy Johnson served in the Georgia senate, no black had won election to a Southern legislature since early in this century. Whites in the post-Reconstruction

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era eliminated blacks from public office–indeed, from registration and voting. Disfranchisement of blacks (and by the early 1900s, of poor whites as well) was the linchpin of the modern South’s undemocratic order. The effects of disfranchisement have been shared not only by Southern state legislatures but by county and city governments.

Today 176 blacks–almost half of all black legislators in the country–serve in the legislative chambers of the eleven Southern states. Change, once begun, has been swift and dramatic. In Louisiana, where blacks account for nearly a third of the population, there was only one black in the legislature as late as 1970. Today, there are eighteen, one of whom has been selected to the second ranking position in the state’s lower house.

As important as these Southern changes have been, they co-exist with old continuities. For example, the racial composition of Southern state legislatures does not yet reflect the black population. Black legislators make up only ten percent of all Southern legislators, yet blacks exceed twenty percent of the South’s population. The forty-six member South Carolina senate received its first black member in 1983 (see Southern Changes, May/June 1983). The number increased to four in 1984, but an additional ten blacks would have to be elected before the senate would be representative of the state’s black population.

The situation is the same in the other Southern states. It would be necessary to more than double their current numbers for black legislators to achieve parity. In addition, reflective of continuing racial polarization, the overwhelming majority of those so far elected come from single-member districts composed primarily of black voters–districts created in recognition of the special difficulties facing black candidates.

And, resistance continues. The creation of single-member electoral districts has come under attack in North Carolina (see Laughlin McDonald’s article in this issue of Southern Changes) where state and Reagan Administration officials have defended, before the US Supreme Court, a state legislative election plan that would make tokens of single-member districts and black voting strength.

Recent resistance has also taken the form of Justice Department collusion with state and local white powerholders in a so-far unsuccessful two-year campaign involving the intimidation of rural black voters and the prosecution of voting rights activists in the Alabama Black Belt (see Southern Changes, May/June 1985).

Blacks who do win legislative office find the chambers that await them are fundamentally inhospitable to change. The accumulated wealth and practiced despotism of business interests make for fierce resistance or tempting accommodation. Setting out to represent the hopes of their largely poor and powerless constituencies, black legislators can find themselves stymied by the immovable, or swayed by the irresistible.

Winning Without A Majority

The problems and prospects facing Southern black legislators were discussed at a meeting in early November in Atlanta. Two questions dominated the talk of black legislators and their staffs: To what extent can the newly elected officials protect and expand their ranks? What can they do to be effective in their present situations?

“Winning Without a Majority,” a conference paper prepared by Steve Suitts addressed the question of effectiveness. “For continued strength and increased clout,” Suitts observed, “black legislators as a group cannot depend upon a growth of their numbers. They must find other means by which to make their current numbers count for more in the legislative process.” Several strategies were suggested: jawboning presiding officers, influencing the implementation of policy at the administrative agencies, proposing “local legislation”, creating study commissions, and blocking or changing legislative proposals that require an extraordinary majority (i.e., a two-thirds or three-fourths majority). Black state legislators now have the opportunity and the numbers in most Southern states to win some important issues without a majority of the votes. Suitts drew examples from several states; legislators in attendance suggested others.

Blacks in Southern Legislatures, 1985

State	Reps.	Senators
Alabama	19	5
Arkansas	4	1
Florida	10	2
Georgia	21	6
Kentucky	1	1
Louisiana	14	4
Mississippi	18	2
North Carolina	13	3
South Carolina	16	4
Tennessee	10	3
Texas	13	1
Virginia	5	2

Illustrative of one tactic are the Sanders Bills, so named for Alabama State Senator Hank Sanders of Selma. These “local bills,” passed as custom decrees by the Alabama legislature upon request of the legislators from the affected counties, allow local governments in Senator Sanders’ Black Belt district to change their method of county elections from at large to single member districts. The Sanders bills should insure proportional, bi-racial county and municipal governments in these majority black counties.

The effectiveness of black legislators will also be determined by their tenure. Seniority will not only make them more “equal” with their long-serving white colleagues but will let them look back on their own experiences, make adjustments, form alliances.

As for black increases in the present number of state legislators, certainly the numerical potential exists throughout the South. In Georgia, for example, which has the largest number (twenty-seven) of black legislators, an additional thirty-two would have to be elected before

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the racial make-up of the general assembly represented the state’s population. Black representation in the South Carolina Senate is only ten percent of what it would be if proportionate to the population; Mississippians would need to elect forty additional black legislators.

It seems clear, however, that the “easy” advances have already been made; the “tough” cases remain.

Most black representatives are elected in urban areas. Their districts have compact populations, ready availability of candidates, higher prospects for registration and voting, and a broader tolerance for bi-racial politics. These patterns are nearly reversed in rural areas where few blacks have been elected to the legislatures and where opposition has been most persistent in opposition to black political participation.

In the past, and at least through the 1990 census, most hopes for increasing the number of black legislators have lain and will lie with redistricting. Now, with a visible, if small, number of blacks among their ranks, white, Southern state legislators will claim even more reason to resist substantial additions. The presence of even a few blacks becomes a justification for no change.

Token change in the racial make-up of Southern legislatures will kill the promise of recent years. This would be tragic. In the coming decade, state policies will be crucial in dealing with plant closings, community development, job training, and in finding sources of money for health care and public education.

Business and corporate representatives are pressing their state legislative agendas with the intention of avoiding anything and everything which does not contribute to profitmaking. Moral guardian groups are intent on retaining the death penalty, assaulting welfare programs, and invading personal privacy. The election of black legislators–like any search for popular participation strategies–should speak to all Southerners who seek to counter the powers of reaction.

Alex Willingham lives in Shreveport, Louisiana. As a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, he is writing a book about Southern reapportionment.

Economics and a Murder Trial

By Eliza Heard (Virginia Durr)

Vol. 7, No. 5, 1985, pp. 14-17

The road to Hayneville and Selma (No. 80) leads to dreams of asphodel and honey. The old cotton fields are now meadows filled with slow-moving fat cattle that drift from one patch of shade to the other, and in the Spring they are covered with waves and sheets and masses of the loveliest and most fragile flower that grows, the wild primrose. It varies in color from deep pink to white and it covers the fields, the banks, the center stretches of the road and is accented and made even more beautiful by patches of purple vetch and crimson clover. In the Spring it brings the Black Belt glory and along with the primerose comes the honeysuckle, which is almost too sweet to be borne and drugs one’s senses with its overpowering perfume.

The day of the first Liuzzo trial I went alone through the empty countryside. A gentle wind rippled the primroses and brought the scent of the honeysuckle and I felt I was in Sleeping Beauty Land, everything was silent, empty and stretched for miles and miles under the empty sky. I began to feel a keen loneliness and was glad to pull in at a filling station to ask my way of a Negro youth who was keeping the station and the store. “Where was she shot?” I asked him while he serviced the car.

He knew at once whom I meant and said: “Just half a mile down the road on the left hand side.”

I went just half a mile down the road and there on the left hand side were still the skid marks, scarring the dirt where the car ran off the road with her dead hands on the steering wheel. And on this day in Hayneville a man accused of murder was on trial charged with shooting her fair in the face as he and others came abreast of her car. A cold-blooded, calculated, planned and above all impersonal murder was charged, for she was said to be utterly unknown to them, and simply killed on “principle.”

When I finally got to the Courthouse in Hayneville, through more miles of deserted countryside, I found the Courthouse surrounded, by cars and by State Troopers, great, burly men with guns on their hips. I went past the Courthouse and up the pleasant street of white, green-shuttered houses and parked in front of one of the nicest, with a lovely, flowering garden of azaleas. I noticed a string along the fence with red rags tied to it and I thought it was to keep birds away until a woman called to me from the porch, holding the screen door half open. Her voice was not pleasant when she said: “You can’t park there, I don’t want anyone parking there in front of my house. Didn’t you see the string?”

So the red rags were not for the birds but for me, and this set the tone of the reception the “outsiders” received in Hayneville that day. I finally found a parking place and came back to the Courthouse, thinking, “I’ll never get in, there’ll

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be such a crowd.” But when I did get in the courtroom was only half filled. It is a beautiful, tall windowed, high ceilinged old room, and a bird kept flying through the windows which were framed in green. Inside the courtroom, the jurymen were being chosen, sunburned, angular, lean, and white. They looked like all of the other thousands and thousands of white men I had seen all my life in all of the little country towns of the South and I liked their looks and felt at once a sense of kinship with them, so I resented the whispered comment I heard in front of me, “Just a bunch of red necks.”

This came from the newsmen who filled the front of the spectator side of the courtroom. There were over half a hundred: a clotted group of handsome, squat, powerful, long haired and well dressed Englishmen on the front row, and behind them the taller, cigarette smoking, nervous Americans from all the great papers, magazines and TV and radio chains, and mixed in with the Americans and English, a few others from all over the world, notably one young Swede who seemed to have the most feeling about the murder of anyone there.

When lunch time came I was invited by a local reporter, a red-headed boy from Tallapoosa County, to have lunch with the newsmen on the lawn in front of the old white Courthouse. Every drug store and restaurant was closed tight against the “outsiders” but we were permitted to stand in the street and get a cold drink and food handed to us through a wicket. We sat in a circle and the Tallapoosa boy and I were the only ones in the whole group who looked for a conviction. All of the newsmen were intelligent, experienced, polite and cynical and, I must also add, contemptuous. They looked on this trial as just another of the folkways of a barbaric Southland, for which they felt no affinity and no responsibility. They spoke casually of “fascism” and Nazism, compared the South to South Africa and seemed to think that here in the South was the repository of original sin.

Since none of the white residents of Hayneville would speak to them, they asked me a thousand questions: “Was it true that one man in Lowndes County was known to have killed 15 Negroes and never even got indicted?”

I had heard the same tale, and thought of an old Negro who came by once to cut the grass and in the course of the morning I found he had come from Lowndes County and worked for Mr.——-, whose reputation as a killer was so bad. I asked him, “Weren’t you afraid working for Mr. ——?”

The old man shook his head, “No, Ma’m, I won’t scared of him. He won’t no bad man, he wouldn’t do nuthin’ to you–that is less you ‘sputed wid him.” Evidently the old man had “sputed wid him” as he was seeking sanctuary in Montgomery County.

I also remembered the tale of Walter Jones. The first white man ever hung in Montgomery County, he had come up from Lowndes County where he too was known as a killer, and had hunted down his enemy, a white doctor who was sitting in a train at the Union Station, and poked his gun in the window of the train and “blown his head off.” I had heard that tale with embellishments a hundred times. And the tale always ended the same way, “The mistake he made was doing his killing in Montgomery County. If he had just waited till Dr.—— got back to Lowndes County he would never have been hung.”

By the second day it was plain to see that the man charged with Mrs. Liuzzo’s killing would not get hung and probably not convicted. The feeling in the courtroom was not one of horror at the slaying but resentment that it had taken place in Lowndes County.

During that day’s recess the reporters and I again had dinner on the grounds. Here, various groups sat rigidly to themselves, all eating from the same kinds of boxes and on the same ground, but having no word to say to each other.

The KKK group was large. There were there, also, weary looking women, handsome children and sunburned men, country people, some who had gone to town and worked in the steel mills and suffered the torments of Hell in the burning mills and the dirty, smoky, town of Bessemer. Such as they are not only exploited but looked down on by the other citizens of Birmingham and Jefferson County. “Poor white trash” is the usual term applied to them. I remembered from way back when the men in the mills worked twelve hours a day and 24 on the swing shift in heat and flame and danger, with no union and no protection or compensation for the injuries they received. They lived when they were off work in dingy company houses, traded with scrip at dingy company stores, and all day the smoke hovered over them, lit by the flames at night. We used to ride out to see a “run” and watch the little figures working with the molten steel and wondered how any human beings could stand the heat.

And out of this life had come many Alabama Ku Kluxers, the men looking slightly askew and their women weary and with that vague, wan look that suggests pellagra some time in their lives. Some looked as if they had had pellagra of the body, mind and soul. And I thought once more of the times when the mills closed down and the men were out of work and the credit cut off at the store and while the mules were watered and fed, the people were thrown out of the houses, not fed, not watered, and expected to provide for themselves. I had worked with the Red Cross all during the Depression and I could look back now and see vividly just these same kinds of people coming to the door, so ashamed of having to take charity and trying to excuse themselves for their failure, as if it was their fault. And I remembered the gaunt, fanatic preachers who hollered at them that they had sinned and that their suffering was the price of their sinning, and who, as though they did not have Hell enough on this earth, sent them to an even hotter Hell each Sunday.

Out of these conditions had come these fanatic, joyless, pitiful and ignorant people who were filled with hate of the “riggers” and of all who helped them out.

There was a public relations man at the trial, looking like a parody of an old southern colonel, big, black hat, string tie, dirty white shirt and dirty white whiskers, passing out hate literature which went after not only the “riggers,” but the Jews, Communists, and Catholics, the U. S. Supreme Court, the President of the United States and the United Nations. Hatred seemed to take in just about everybody.

Sitting close to the Klan was the Law, the big, powerful state troopers, not only close to them in presence but it seemed in spirit; there was a communion there between the Kluxers and the troopers that could not be missed. Once

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again the newsmen said contemptuously, “Storm Troopers.” Sitting to themselves were the County Prosecutor and his Assistant and the Judge, proper gentlemen doing a painful duty, and not happily.

The third day was the worst when the defendant’s lawyer, Matt Murphy, began his wild tirade to sway the Jury. A massive man, he had the same noble brow and handsome looks of all the famous aristocratic Percys from Mississippi. His uncle and grandfather had been general counsels for the steel mills and had been gentlemen and men of integrity, and had both died of their own hands.

But here was a descendant of the Percys, having descended into the Pit and dragging all of the rest of us with him. He was unutterably and unnaturally vile. He accused the poor, dead woman of the nastiest sort of sex mania and the Negro boy of even worse. She had only come South for purposes of sex, she was driving with the Negro boy for purposes of sex, she was going out to park with the Negro boy with no other purpose than sex. He piled vileness upon vileness until the whole courtroom stank. And all in the name of “Southern Tradition and pure white Southern Womanhood.”

The visiting reporters were not so polite that day. I was the only example of pure, white and certainly southern womanhood they could talk to and they made it plain that they did not think I was worth the vileness that had taken place in my name and in the name of all “pure, white southern womanhood.” Since I am an old time grandmother I did not get offended as I agreed with them; I, too, felt shame that such a cesspool should have overflowed into the courtroom in the name of “southern womanhood.” I did not feel we women deserved it but then I did not feel we protested enough against it, and still again I did not think we were the real reason.

Killing may be done in our name but the real reason is much deeper and has been there forever, since the beginning of man, and that is the desire of one man to keep another man in bondage to him, so he may live at ease and the other man must do the hard work.

Life is pleasant in Hayneville and in all the other little southern towns; that is if you are white and have even a small amount of money. You wake up in the morning to the sound of someone stirring in the kitchen, and come in to a hot breakfast. During the middle of the day, you sit on your porch and direct a black man digging in the yard while another black woman cooks the dinner, cleans up the house, washes and irons the clothes and, above all, looks after the children. Cheap labor is one of the greatest luxuries of life, and to give it up is one of the hardest things there is to do.

And it is cheap labor and the power over cheap labor that is at the heart of Bloody Lowndes. The men accused of killing Mrs. Liuzzo were jobless steel workers.

Many southern white men have been brutalized and oppressed themselves and given nothing to comfort their souls but that “they were better than riggers.” They feed their souls on it and when that support is removed, they must face the fact that they are nothing but “poor, white trash” with no one to look down on, but rather looked down on from above with the same kind of contempt and disgust they show Negroes.

There in Hayneville, the white men who own the county

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and control it simply want to “keep the Negro in his place.” They are determined to do so and when the jury came with a mistrial I realized that even this was better than I had hoped for. Matt Murphy had not won them over with his mad cries of “race mixing.” As the jurymen said for the newsmen, “That guy must have thought we were awful ignorant.” (But they did not find the Ku Kluxer guilty. In a second trial, a jury exonerated him. The defendant and other Ku Kluxers had taken delight in their actions and were still proud of themselves after the first trial was over, as they went to konclave after konclave to be worshipped and admired.)

I drove back by myself after the trial was over. Still alone in the empty countryside, for the first time I became afraid, and for a moment I had a feeling of terror such as I never had before. Just halfway between Hayneville and the junction with No. 80, on. a perfectly empty road with empty fields stretching on either side, I saw a big red car coming behind me which must have been going at least 80 miles an hour, and I thought it was going to strike me deliberately and knock me off the road. It came close but it did not strike, and I saw those pale, fanatic, askew faces of the defendants, Matt Murphy beside them as they roared off up the road. I stopped the car until I could get my breath and my heart could stop beating so hard. I knew killing would strike again. For the white people of Hayneville had condoned the killing whatever they might say; there was killing in the air.

And it did strike again. This time a young white Episcopalian priest was killed by a white man who comes from one of the “leading families” of Lowndes County and a young Catholic priest lies at the point of death from the same man. Bloody Lowndes is living up to its reputation and this time it is not just “uppity riggers” they are killing but “outside agitators” who come “meddling.” I remember a white woman I knew from Hayneville who told me once, “I simply love living there; it is all just like one big family.” Of course she meant the white people, and they do all stick together; the idea that the white man who killed the Rev. Mr. Daniels would be convicted was absurd.

Matt Murphy was not at this trial. he had been killed in an automobile wreck not long after the Liuzzo trial. But vileness was there, and this time the charge was merely manslaughter, and the verdict–not guilty.

I cannot see that just the “right to vote” is going to change these kinds of counties very much, and they are the dark heart of Dixie. Lowndes County has a population of 81% Negro and 19% white, but the white people own almost all the land and practically all the businesses. So the Negro people are economically entirely dependent on the white community. Even if the federal government does come in and insist that they be registered and their right to vote protected, what can the government do about giving them a living if they are fired? After the Civil War the federal army was down here to protect the right of the Negroes to vote, but they never got the 40 acres and a mule, and much good voting did them. As soon as the federal troops were withdrawn, the Negroes were thrown back into bondage.

Into these Black Counties have gone the SNCC kids, jeans, beards, sandals and long haired girls, with courage that seems almost beyond belief. They live in the Negro communities, work and eat there and never walk alone, every minute in danger, and they know it. Suppose they do get every Negro registered, what then? How are the Negroes in Lowndes County going to make a living? The landowners were already going from cotton to cattle to get rid of labor, and now they are mechanizing as fast as they can to get rid of even more labor. Lincoln said “a necessitous man is not a free man” and I see no way to make them free until they have a way to make a living, and in Lowndes County I don’t see how they are going both to live and be free. Will Bloody Lowndes live up to its name again and again before it gives the Negroes life, freedom, and a living?

(Editor’s Note) In October 1965, the Southern Regional Council published “Economics and a Murder Trial” in its journal New South. The essay, a first-person account of the Hayneville, Alabama, trial of a Klansman indicted for the murder of civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo, was one of several written in the mid-1960s by Virginia Foster Durr under the pen name of Eliza Heard. At the time, Virginia and her husband, attorney Clifford Durr, lived on a small farm near Wetumpka, Alabama. (See the accompanying article in this issue of Southern Change.)

“I was the only Southern white woman who went to the trial,” Virginia Durr recalls. “I drove over by myself to Lowndes County every day. And all the journalists–who had come from throughout the world–wanted to take my picture. I said, ‘You think you’re doing me a favor, but you ‘re just going to ruin me. All that will come out in the papers, you’ll be gone to the next story, and I’ll be the one who gets the late night phone calls and the threats. ‘ So they didn’t run the pictures.

“For the same reason, when I wrote about the trial for Maggie Long (editor of New South)–and I had to write about it because I was so mad–I felt I couldn’t sign my name. Cliff and I were in enough trouble already. So I thought of Eliza Foster–my great-grandmother on my father’s side–and Virginia Heard–my father’s mother–and I signed “Eliza Heard.”

Grace and guts

Virginia Durr

Vol. 7, No. 5, 1985, pp. 17-21

Steve Suitts:

I have the privilege of introducing Virginia Durr, a remarkable Alabamian whose life, spanning more than eight decades of Southern history, chronicles the best aspirations of our region. In the great movements which the South has witnessed, which it has endured, and which it has triumphed in this century, Virginia Durr has been an irreplaceable part. It started even as she was a child.

At the age of six, in Birmingham, she went out to take a place in the day’s great crusade–for prohibition in Alabama. Virginia, the daughter of one of Birmingham’s most respected Presbyterian ministers got ready to march. She was handed a sign that read: “Please save my father from the demon rum.”

Even at six she knew that the daughter of a well-known minister ought not make such a public declaration. For the first and perhaps only time, she decided to forgo participation in a political movement.

Not too much later, when across the South working people began to organize and the struggle of the times became one between labor and capital, Virginia Durr took up with labor. When the Depression hit, Virginia-vice-president of the Junior League of Birmingham–didn’t see just the small niceties of country club parties, she saw the hungry bellies. She saw the children wearing flour sacks, and she began to make a difference in the way she lived her life and in the way that people had to endure their lives in the South.

Ten years before the creation of the Southern Regional Council, Virginia Durr became one of the young men and

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women who went to Washington with the New Deal. When Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that the South was the nation’s “number one economic problem,” Virginia Durr already knew that. She was already working with a variety of Southerners concerned with the problems of poverty.

Virginia Durr was never, thank God, the soul of discretion. When, after World War II, the nation began to tolerate the intolerance of McCarthyism, when white liberals separated themselves from long-time friends and stood silent when they were persecuted, Virginia Durr stood up and shrieked in protest. When people were ostracized, Virginia Durr would invite the accused to dinner and drinks. She protested that people cannot be guilty by their associations.

Twenty-five years before the creation of the Southern Regional Council’s Voting Rights Project, Virginia Durr knew that one of the keys to a democratic South lay in the voting rights of blacks and poor whites. She successfully led the anti-poll tax efforts throughout the region and in the halls of Washington.

Now for most people that would be a lifetime of accomplishment. But Virignia Durr was only getting started. When she returned to Alabama from Washington–because she would not hold her peace during the days of McCarthyism–she continued to work and to live a life which deserves all honor. When Rosa Parks decided she was not going to get up on the bus, Virginia Durr was there supporting that effort as an activist, as a friend, and as a white liberal.

When the Civil Rights Movement began to grow, the Durr farm near Montgomery was a center of activism, of retreat, and of planning for the defense of the defenseless. Long days and nights were spent there by many prominent leaders–and by many whom you never will know.

During the development of the anti-poverty programs, and later, the anti-war movement, the Durr farm continued to be a place where young men and women could understand that there had been others who came before them and that these would be others who would suppport them.

With the advent of the feminist movement, Virginia Durr was there. She said, “I’ve been doing that all my life.” And she had. When it comes to speaking her mind, Virginia makes a few exceptions about being a Southern lady.

And now, in this age in which not fear but indifference causes inaction, Virginia Durr’s continues to be the voice of encouragement. She is a woman who combines grace and guts. Her upbringing and even her voice reminds us of the accent of an aristocrat, of Southern high culture. But her beliefs, her actions, and her works are those of an egalitarian.

It’s hard for me to recall Virginia without also recalling Cliff Durr. Their lives together showed how social commitment and personal loyalty to another can be lovingly and effectively combined. When Virginia faced Mississippi’s Jim Eastland before the Senate witch hunt committee that he conducted in the South to find the communists and bolsheviks, she said, “My name is Virginia Durr. I’m the wife of Cliff Durr.” A woman whose accomplishments were her own, she recalled herself in association with the person she most loved.

For a long time Virginia said about her sister Josephine and her brother-in-law Hugo Black that their lives were a marriage of justice and mercy. Virginia should know. For she is one of the region’s models of both cherished qualities. Today we’re privileged to have a Southerner whose contributions to a democratic South have been a mighty force in shaping the opportunties that exist in the region. But just as important, Virginia Durr has given us the loveliest example of how to conduct a life with a commitment of love for those around us.

Virginia Durr:

I have to explain that a few of the remarks just made about me, which were absolutely beautiful, were not true. The only reason I went to a prohibition meeting when I was age six is that my uncle, Malcolm Patterson, who was the governor of Tennessee, was running on a prohibition ticket. I went to hear him speak and ask people for votes, which he didn’t get.

I got interested in the labor movement in Birmingham because my brother in-law, Hugo Black, was the lawyer for the unions. He used to have terrific fights with Forney Johnson who represented the big corporations. Because they didn’t have any workman’s compensation, Hugo would win big awards from juries. So I’d go to the courts sometimes to hear him argue.

I was delighted to hear that my father was a distinguished Presbyterian preacher with the South Highland Church in Birmingham. But my father actually was thrown out of the church. There’s a reason if you want to hear it.

My grandfather, who lived in Union Springs, Alabama, was quite well off. He thought the Civil War was the stupidest thing in the wide world and the “fire-eaters” as he called them, William L. Yancey and all, he couldn’t stand. So he sent his cotton to Liverpool and told the merchants there to save his money until after the War. Nearly everybody else in Alabama had nothing but Confederate money–which wasn’t worth starting a fire with–but he had gold.

I was brought up to be very much ashamed of him because he wasn’t a Confederate. My other grandfather had fought with General Nathan Bedford Forrest and was in the last battle at Selma; he was the hero of the family–this great dashing Confederate Colonel. But my grandfather in

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Indian Springs was not mentioned very much except that he was rich–“thank God.”

My father had the opportunity of a very good education. He went to Southwestern, then to Hampden-Sydney, then Princeton, and on to Edinburgh in Scotland. He travelled to Berlin and Heidelberg. He went to the Holy Land. When he came back from his long tour he had some slight doubts in his mind as to whether every word in the Bible was literally true and dictated by God. He wrestled with it for a long time but he never said much about it.

In fact, I used to go to church, Sunday School, evening service on Sundays, prayer meeting on Thursday night. We’d have morning prayers every morning and I’d sit there praying for food.

In those days, preachers sent you to hell at every meeting, and hell wasn’t just somewhere down yonder, it was right under the floor. So I grew up in absolute terror of hell.

My father preached hell fire and damnation but he did have his doubts. One day the session of the Presbysterian Church came to him and said they’d suspected he wasn’t really very orthodox, in fact they thought he was heretical. They told him he had to swear that he absolutely believed that the whale swallowed Jonah and then spat him up alive three days later just as happy and healthy as he ever was. They said they’d give him a week to decide.

My poor father came home and walked up and down for a week. We took him coffee. My mother cried. I was only seven or eight, and I cried. My brother and my sister cried.

He was in a terrible fix for a man in his forties. He had a wife and three children, and while his mother had that plantation down in Union Springs, you know it wasn’t as good as it used to be in the old slavery days.

At the end of the week he came back and said he didn’t believe it. They threw him out of the whole Southern Presbyterian Church and declared him to be a heretic. And I swear to God that it was easier to be raised in Birmingham as a communist than as a heretic.

My father had to go into business, and of course he wasn’t trained to go into business. And, I hate to tell this, but my father had been raised in the days just after slavery and he really thought every black person had been born to wait on him. So to be poor and struggling too, and he went into an insurance business where he sold insurance to black people.

Steve Suitts said in his introduction how aristocratic I was, well, I can assure you the poorer we got the more aristocratic we became.

But you see my trouble has been–and the reason that I have caused so many rifts–is because I cannot differentiate between politics and people. If I get into a movement, then I like the people or I don’t like them. So when I got into the civil rights movement, I liked the people in the movement. I really adored Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune. I felt like they were fighting for me. I was fighting, but they were fighting for me.

Because to be a sweet Southern girl in the South during the days that I grew up you were just like you were a prisoner. You couldn’t do anything. You couldn’t even kiss the boys without feeling guilty. The great ambition of a Southern girl’s life was to marry well.

I got into voting rights and civil rights almost by chance. I got to Washington during the New Deal. My husband was working in the Reconstruction Finanace Corporation. I was free to go into town and take part in the women’s division of the Democratic National Committee. I was urged to do that by my brother-in-law, Hugo Black. Hugo really believed that women’s place was in the home; he certainly believed that his wife’s place was in the home. But he encouraged me–I never knew why, but he did.

So I went in and got thrown immediately into the fight to get rid of the poll tax. I won’t go all into that, but we did get rid of it. Now everybody can vote. And, in Alabama, guess who they vote for? Year after year after year? George Wallace. They voted for him over and over and over and they’ll probably vote for him this time if he’s breathing.

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Then came the question of the segregation and one heroine of that era in the South was Rosa Parks. My husband went down and got her out of jail.

When you talk about heroines, you take a woman who makes twenty-three dollars a week in Montgomery, who has a sick husband, sick mother–she has to support these two people herself. Living in a public housing project. And she’s a very well-educated woman.

As you know, there were a number of Yankee women who came South after the Civil War and started missionary schools for black women. The school that Rosa Parks attended there in Montgomery was called Mrs. White’s School. These Yankee school teachers taught these black women reading, writing and arithmetic–but also to be citizens.

Rosa Parks claimed the right of being a citizen of the United States. She sat there on that bus and was arrested and taken to jail. But it was a beginning of the end of segregation.

What we have to tackle now is poverty–no jobs, no money, nothing for people to do. And infant mortality. Let me give you an example.

Is anybody here a Baptist? Well don’t get your feelings hurt when I talk about the Baptists and what happened in Montgomery, Alabama.

The Baptist Hospital in Montgomery, Alabama is the biggest hospital in the city. It has a fine neo-natal care center and doctors who make lot of money. It has a beautiful statue out front: Jesus holding out his arms, saying, “Suffer all little children to come unto me.” So poor, pregnant women–many of them teenagers–began to bring the little children unto them. They brought them from hither and yon, from all over South Alabama.

What did the hospital do? They closed the beds. Those big white bellied Baptists closed those beds and said, “If they can’t pay, they’ve just got to die.” And they didn’t even take the statue of Jesus down.

Well, my son-in-law got real mad. He’s a very nice guy, although he is a Yankee, he’s not as much a Yankee as he used to be. He led several marches and helped get back some of the beds, not all of them by any means. NQW this is a rich hospital with a rich bunch of trustees and what they’re doing is killing these children.

Now people tell me, “You can’t go back to the New Deal. The New Deal is over. It’s a new time.”

Well it may be a new time, but hell, the New Deal took people who were without jobs–black and white–and put them to work. They had WPA and CCC and NYA and PWA.

And I think the government ought to give people jobs now. And if it takes public ownership of the means of production–now that’s a serious phrase, that’ll get you in jail every time if you say it at the wrong place. But I believe that to let people be idle and let the country go to hell while we put all our money into Star Wars is insane.

I believe all the nice things I’ve heard this morning about what to do about food stamps, or about public housing, or

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about learning a new skill. But what the hell use is it to learn a new skill when you can’t get a job?

We’ve got to do something. Fiddling around isn’t going to do any good. I don’t think we can just make it a little better here and a little better there. We’ve got to do something more drastic.

Now you all in Georgia have the lousiest bunch of congressmen–except for Wyche Fowler–that I have ever known. We have an even worse bunch of congressmen in Alabama. We have a crazy man, a senator named Denton. I mean he’s not just crazy in a polite sense of the word, he’s crazy in the medical sense of the word.

And, of course, you cannot run for office in Montgomery, Alabama, or anywhere unless you get on a television. And the people who get on the television the most seem to get elected the most. In Montgomery we’ve got Bill Dickinson, probably the worst congressman in the United States. He’s on the television every fifteen minutes because he’s paid for by the war contractors. He is the head of an armed services committee.

So, are we going to be run by this bunch of bastards or not? I mean this is what we get down to. They’re corrupt. They’re stupid. They’re absolutely lacking in any compassion. And Reagan is the worst.

Are we going to sit here and go to hell with the atomic bomb and become specks of dust or are we going to get busy and get mad and do something?

I mean Meese, Reagan–they’re just such terrible people, they’re not even real. They’re just reflections of tv or movies. We’ve got to get busy because the people who are now running the country seem determined to destroy us. We’ve got to get together and stand up for ourselves or we’re all going to be dead.

During the forty-first anniversary meeting of the Southern Regional Council, held in Atlanta in early November, civil rights advocate Virginia Durr spoke at a luncheon held in honor of the publication of her autobiographical recollections. (Virginia Durr’s book, Outside the Magic Circle, edited by Hollinger Rarnard of Birmingham, is available from the University of Alabama Press.) Below, Southern Changes presents excerpts from Virginia’s luncheon talk, as well as the introductory comments of SRC executive director Steve Suitts. Steve Suitts.

The Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott

By David J. Garrow

Vol. 7, No. 5, 1985, pp. 21-27

Jo Ann Gibson Robinson moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in the late summer of 1949 to join the English Department at all-black Alabama State College. A thirty-three year old native of Culloden, Georgia, twenty-five miles from Macon, she was the twelfth and youngest child of Owen Boston Gibson and Dollie Webb Gibson, landowning black farmers who prospered until Owen Gibson died when Jo Ann was six years old. As the older children moved away, operating the farm grew more difficult for Mrs. Gibson, who eventually sold the property and moved into Macon with her younger offspring. Jo Ann graduated from high school there as the class valedictorian, and went on to earn her undergraduate degree at Fort Valley State College, the first member of her family to complete college. She took a public school teaching job in Macon and married Wilbur Robinson, but the marriage, heavily burdened by the death in infancy of their first and only child, lasted only a short time. Twelve months later, after five years of teaching in Macon, Jo Ann Robinson moved to Atlanta to take an M.A. in English at Atlanta University and then accepted a teaching position at Mary Allen College in Crockett, Texas. After one year there, Mrs. Robinson received a better offer from Alabama State, and moved to Montgomery.

Mrs. Robinson was an enthusiastic teacher and responded energetically to her new position at Alabama State. She also became an active member of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, which many Alabama State professors attended, and she joined the Women’s Political Council, a black professional women’s civic group that one of her English Department colleagues, Mrs. Mary Fair Burks, had founded three years earlier when the local League of Women Voters had refused to integrate.

It was a blissful fall, Mrs. Robinson later remembered. “I loved every minute of it. ” Just prior to Christmas she made preparations to visit some relatives in Cleveland for the holidays. Storing her car in a garage, she boarded a Montgomery City Lines public bus for the ride to Dannelly Field, the municipal airport. Only two other passengers were aboard, and Mrs. Robinson, immersed in holiday thoughts, took a seat towards the front of the bus. Suddenly, however, she was roused from her thoughts about her family by angry words from the driver, who was ordering her to get up.

“He was standing over me, saying ‘Get up from there! Get up from there,’ with his hand drawn back,” she later recalled.

Shaken and frightened, Mrs. Robinson fled from the bus. “I felt like a dog. And I got mad, after this was over, and I realized that I was a human being, and just as intelligent and far more trained than that bus driver was. But I think he wanted to hurt me, and he did . . . I cried all the way to Cleveland.”

That experience convinced Mrs. Robinson that the ‘Women’s Political Council ought to target Montgomery’s segregated bus seating for immediate attention. “It was then that I made up . . . my mind that whatever Icould add to that organization that would help to bring that practice down, I would do it,” Mrs. Robinson recalled. “When I came back, the first thing I did was to call a meeting . . . and tell

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them what had happened.”

Only then did Mrs. Robinson learn that her experience was far from unique, that dozens of other black citizens, primarily women, had suffered similar abuse from Montgomery bus drivers. Over the previous few years several black women, Mrs. Geneva Johnson, Mrs. Viola White, and Miss Katie Wingfield, had been arrested and convicted for refusing to give up their seats. Earlier in 1949, two young children, visiting from the north and unfamiliar with Montgomery’s practice of reserving the first ten seats on each bus for white riders only, even if black passengers were forced to stand over vacant seats, also were hauled in for refusing a driver’s command to surrender their seats. Some oldtimers in Montgomery remembered how the black community had mounted a boycott in the summer of 1900, when the city had first imposed segregated seating on Montgomery’s street cars, a boycott that had won a refinement of the city ordinance so as to specify that no rider had to surrender a seat unless another was available. Nonetheless, drivers often made black riders who were seated just behind the whites-only section get up and stand so that all white passengers could sit.

Mrs. Burks thought black toleration of those seating practices and other driver abuse, such as forcing black passengers to pay their dime at the front, and then get off and board the bus through the rear, side door, was scandalous. “Everyone would look the other way. Nobody would acknowledge what was going on,” Mrs. Burks remembered. “It outraged me that this kind of conduct was going on,” and that so far no black community organizations had done anything about it.

Black activism did exist in Montgomery, even though it had not yet focused upon bus conditions, despite the widespread complaints. Several years earlier Arthur Madison, a New York lawyer who came from one of black Montgomery’s most prominent families, had returned home and tried to stimulate black voter registration, but white legal harassment had forced him to return to New York. The outspoken pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Rev. Vernon Johns, who had come to Montgomery in 1948, regularly denounced the bus situation, but many blacks viewed Johns as too unpredictable and idiosyncratic to assume a leadership role in the community. The brutal rape of a black teenager, Gertrude Perkins, by two white policemen earlier in 1949had led Rev. Solomon S. Seay to repeated efforts to obtain justice in the case, but white officials had brushed off his complaints.

Another visible black activist was Pullman porter Edgar Daniel Nixon, a member of A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a local leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NMCP). Nixon served as Alabama state president of the NMCP in 1948-1949, and also devoted much time to his Alabama Progressive Democratic Association, a black alternative to a state Democratic Party that continued to discourage black participation despite the 1940s’ demise of the “white primary.” Nixon regularly mounted one initiative after another; in 1954 he succeeded in winning 42 percent of the vote in a losing race for a seat on the party’s Montgomery County Democratic Executive Committee, a tribute not only to the more than 1,500 black voters that Nixon and other activists like businessman Rufus A. Lewis had helped register, but also to the grudging respect that many whites felt for Nixon’s tireless efforts.

Lewis, a well-known former football coach at Alabama State College, had been especially active not only in encouraging black registration but also in trying to unify black Montgomery’s civic activism. Although some colleagues viewed Lewis and Nixon as low-key rivals for top leadership, Lewis’ Citizens Club served as a regular hang-out for politically-minded blacks; his Citizens Steering Committee, formed in the fall of 1952, looked to find ways to exert some black political influence over Montgomery’s city policies.

Equally if not more important to the political life of black Montgomery than Nixon’s Progressive Democrats, the NMCP branch, or Lewis’ Citizens Committee, however, was Mrs. Burks and Mrs. Robinson’s Women’s Political Council. By the early 1950s Robinson had succeeded Burks as president, and the core membership of regularly active participants numbered at least thirty women such as Thelma Glass, Mary Cross, Irene West, Euretta Adair, Elizabeth Arrington, and Zoeline Pierce, who were either faculty members at Alabama State, teachers in the local, segregated public schools, or wives of relatively well-to-do black professional men. More than either Nixon’s circle or Lewis’, these middle-class women were the most numerous, most reform-minded group of black civic activists in Montgomery.

The first notable opportunity for black political influence to make itself felt came in November, 1953, in a special election to fill one vacant seat on the three-member Montgomery City Commission. The black-supported victor, Dave Birmingham, a genuine racial liberal, won fifty-three percent of the vote in a contest that involved little discussion of race and allowed Birmingham to construct an electoral coalition of blacks and lower-class whites.

Impressed by their success in representing the balance of power, black civic activists, led by the WPC, met in late 1953 with Birmingham and his two racially moderate colleagues, Mayor W. A. “Tacky” Gayle and George Cleere, to voice three complaints about the racial practices of the municipally regulated and chartered bus company, Montgomery City Lines. Blacks having to stand over empty, white only seats on crowded buses was a constant insult and problem. So

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was most drivers’ practice of forcing blacks to board through the rear door. Additionally, while buses stopped at every block in white sections of town, it was only every other block in black neighborhoods.

The three commissioners, Birmingham in particular, listened politely, but nothing came of the session.

Undaunted, Mrs. Robinson, who served as the WPC and black community’s principal spokesperson, obtained another audience with the commission in March, 1954, and reiterated the three complaints. The WPC, which historian of Montgomery J. Mills Thornton III has accurately termed “the most militant and uncompromising organ of the black community” in pre-1956 Montgomery, also presented the commission with specific details of driver abuse of black passengers. This time the city officials agreed to alter the bus company’s practice of stopping only at alternate blocks in black areas, but they and the city’s lawyers insisted there was no way, under Alabama’s state segregation statutes, that any changes or improvements could be made in bus seating practices. Robinson and other black representatives contended that elimination of the reserved, whites only seats, and a halt to the practice of making blacks surrender seats to whites on overcrowded buses would eliminate the most serious problems, but the white officials rejected the WPC’s proposal that the front-to-back seating of whites, and back-to-front seating of blacks, with no one having to stand over an empty seat or give one up after being seated, would in no way offend the state segregation law.

Mrs. Robinson and her colleagues were unhappy over the city is refusal to show any flexibility. In early May, the Commission did approve the hiring of Montgomery’s first four black police officers, but many black Montgomerians attached greater importance to the ongoing prosecution of a black teenager, Jeremiah Reeves, who faced the death penalty for the supposed rape of a white woman in 1951.

Mrs. Robinson was already thinking of how to put more pressure on the Commission to improve bus conditions when, on May 17, came a news announcement that strengthened her determination. The United States Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and five companion cases challenging racially segregated public schools, ruled that governmentally-mandated school segregation was unconstitutional and that the sixty-year-old doctrine of “separate but equal” was no longer valid.

Four days after the landmark Brown decision, Mrs. Robinson typed a letter to Montgomery’s Mayor Gayle, with a copy to Montgomery City Lines manager J. H. Bagley. She, thanked Gayle for the March meeting and for the change in the buses’ alternate block stopping practice, but reiterated the WPC’s great unhappiness at the ongoing seating policies. Then she politely voiced the threat she had quietly been recommending to her black leadership colleagues.

Mayor Gayle, three-fourths of the riders of these public conveyances are Negroes. y Negroes did not patronize them, they could not possibly operate.

More and more of ourr people are already arrangin with neighbors and friends to ride to keep from being insulted and humiliated, by bus drivers. There has been talk from twenty-five or more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of buses. We, sir, do not feel that forceful measures are necessary in bargaining for a convenience which is right for all bus passengers. We, the Council, believe that when this matter has been put before you and the Commissioners, that agreeable terms can be met in a quiet and unostensible manner to the satisfaction of all concerned.

Mrs. Robinson pointedly noted that many Southern cities, including Mobile, already were using the front-to-back, back-to-front segregated seating plan that Montgomery refused to implement. “Please consider this plea, and if possible, act favorably upon it,” she concluded, “for even now plans are being made to ride less, or not at all, on our buses. We do not want this.”

Despite the extremely gentle and tactful language she employed in her letter to Gayle, Mrs. Robinson was hoping that black community sentiment would support a bus boycott to force the Commission’s hand. Another meeting with the white officials on June 1 registered no progress, but Mrs. Robinson found only modest interest in her boycott idea throughout much of the black community, and placed the idea on a back burner for the time being.

Next to bus conditions, the second civic concern troubling the WPC and other black activists was the decidedly inferior quality of the segregated parks and recreation facilities; available to black Montgomerians. One step the WPG had identified as a partial remedy was the appointment of a black member, such as WPC member Mrs. Irene West, to the

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city’s Parks and Recreation Board. Mrs. Robinson voiced this request at a January, 1955, meeting of the City Commission, but despite supportive comments from Birmingham and Mayor Gayle, nothing happened. Instead, attention turned to the upcoming mid-March city elections, and a public candidates’ forum that E. D. Nixon’s Progressive Democratic Association held on February 23 at the black Ben Moore Hotel.

All three incumbents, plus their major challengers, Harold McGlynn for Gayle, Frank Parks for Cleere, and Sam Sterns and Clyde Sellers for Birmingham, attended the first-of-its-kind event and faced questions about bus conditions as well as the Parks and Recreation appointment. A majority of the contenders endorsed a black appointment to the Parks Board, while others avoided any specifics on either topic. Although the open soliciting of black votes by so many white candidates seemed impressive, one of Birmingham’s challengers, former Auburn University football star and state highway patrol officer Clyde Sellers, saw the convocation, and Birmingham’s sympathy for black concerns, as just the opening that was needed to cut into Birmingham’s previously solid white working class electoral support.

Sellers’ strategic desire to make race an election issue got a coincidental boost on March 2 when a fifteen-year-old black girl, Claudette Colvin, refused to give up her bus seat, well toward the rear of the vehicle, so as to accommodate an overflow of newly-boarding white passengers.

Police officers were able to drag Colvin from the bus only with considerable force. The incident immediately sent the black leadership into action. Mrs. Rosa Parks, a seamstress and long time NAACP member who was adult advisor to the NAACP Youth Council, to which Claudette Colvin belonged, immediately began soliciting financial assistance for the her legal defense, as did Mrs. Parkst good friend Virginia Foster Durr, one of Montgomery’s few racially liberal whites.

Rufus Lewis’ newly formed Citizen’s Coordinating Committee, yet another leadershipunity organization which included E. D. Nixon and the WPC’s Thelma Glass among its top officers, quickly sent out a mimeographed letter, “To Friends of Justice and Human Rights,” seeking Colvin’s acquittal, a reprimand of the bus driver involved, and clarification of the oft-ignored city provision that no rider had to give up a seat unless another was available.

Nixon and Mrs. Robinson, thinking that Colvin’s case might supply an opportunity for a court challenge to the constitutionality of Montgomery’s bus seating practices, interviewed the young woman, but concluded that her personal situation and the particulars of the arrest precluded using the incident as a test case. Robinson and others met, unsuccessfully, with city and bus company officials to seek dismissal of the charges.

Claudette Colvin was quickly convicted for both assault and battery and violating the segregation statute at a March 18 trial, only three days before the city election. When Colvin’s attorney, young Montgomery native Fred Gray–who had been one of Mrs. Robinson’s Alabama State students before attending law school in Ohio–filed notice of appeal, the prosecutor indicated that he would pursue only the assault and battery charge, not the segregation issue.

On the 21st, Sellers narrowly bested Dave Birmingham, who declined a possible runoff because of bad health, while Frank Parks, who had received black support, defeated Cleere. Disappointed both by the Colvin outcome and Birmingham’s loss, the black leadership hoped for other opportunities.

In June, Mrs. Robinson, Gray and other black representatives met once again with city and bus company officials. Despite Gray’s observations about Mobile’s practices, the white officials, particularly bus company lawyer Jack Crenshaw, adhered firmly to their contention that no changes could be made legally in bus seating practices. Popular complaints about the seating situation and driver abuse remained at high levels, but no further organized initiatives were undertaken.

One relative newcomer to the city, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had succeeded Vernon Johns as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in mid-1954 and accompanied Robinson’s delegation to the early March meeting with the city, attributed a good part of the inaction to what he later termed “an appalling lack of unity among the leaders” and a “crippling factionalism.” More of a problem than competition among the active leaders, King thought, was the pervasive indifference of many middleclass black Montgomerians to any political or civic concern. Economic vulnerability and fear of white retribution understandably inhibited some, but “too much of the inaction was due to sheer apathy,” King later wrote.

Although Mrs. Robinson still husbanded her hope that the WPC could at some point launch a boycott of the buses, the late summer and fall of 1955 passed with relative quiet; the October 21 arrest of one black woman, Mrs. Mary Louise Smith, for refusing to surrender her seat became known to most of the black leadership only several months later.

On Thursday evening December 1, Mrs. Rosa Parks, the NAACP activist who had assisted Claudette Colvin’s defense, felt tired and weary from her seamstress work at the Montgomery Fair department store when she boarded one of the Cleveland Avenue route buses at Montgomery’s Court Square for her regular ride home. One stop later, after taking a seat in the first row behind the ten whites-only seats, Mrs. Parks and the three other black passengers in that row were ordered by the driver, J. F. Blake, to get up so that one newly-boarding white man–who could not be accommodated in the front section–could sit. Although the other three people complied, Mrs. Parks silently refused, and two police officers were summoned to place her under arrest and transport her to the city jail.

Word of the incident spread quickly. E. D. Nixon called the jail to learn about the charges, only to be refused an answer by the officer on duty. Knowing that attorney Gray was out of town for the day, Nixon called white lawyer Clifford Durr, who like his wife Virginia, already knew Mrs. Parks. The Durrs and Nixon drove to the jail to sign the bond for Mrs. Parks’ release. A Monday trial date was set for the charge of violating the city’s segregated seating ordinance.

While attorney Durr explained to Nixon and Mrs. Parks that they could win her acquittal since there had been no other seat available for her to take when driver Blake demanded hers, Nixon argued that the arrest of Mrs. Parks,

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a widely-known and well-respected person in black Montgomery, was precisely the opportunity the black leadership had long-awaited for challenging the entire bus seating situation. With some hesitance Mrs. Parks agreed, and Nixon went home to plan his next steps.

Later that evening Fred Gray returned to town, learned of Mrs. Parks’ arrest and immediately called Mrs. Robinson, who he knew to be the “real moving force” among the black leadership. Mrs. Robinson in turn called Nixon. They quickly agreed that the moment for launching the long-pondered boycott of the buses was at hand.

Nixon would make the calls to set up a black leadership meeting Friday evening; Mrs. Robinson and her WPC colleagues would immediately start producing and distributing handbills calling upon black Montgomerians to stay off the buses on Monday, December 5. “We had planned the protest long before Mrs. Parks was arrested,” Mrs. Robinson later emphasized. “There had been so many things that happened that the black women had been embarrassed over, and they were ready to explode.” They knew immediately that “Mrs. Parks had the caliber of character we needed to get the city to rally behind us.”

Wasting not a moment7 Mrs. Robinson sat down at her typewriter with a mimeograph stencil and typed the same message on the sheet several times:

This is for Monday, December 5, 1955

Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down.

It is the second time since the Claudette Colbert (sic) case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing This has to be stopped.

Negroes have rights, too, for if Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate. Three-fourths of the riders are Negroes, yet we are arrested, or have to stand over empty seats. If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother.

This woman ‘s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don ‘t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday.

You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus.

You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off of all buses Monday.

The stencil complete. Mrs. Robinson called one of her Alabama State colleagues, business department chairman John Cannon, who had access to the school’s mimeograph room and readily agreed to join her for a long night of work. By daybreak they had run off thousands of sheets, cut them into single copies, and organized the brief flyers into batches for distribution to dozens of WPC members and their friends. After teaching her first morning class, Mrs. Robinson and two students set out in her car, dropping off the bundles to helpers all across Montgomery. Thousands upon thousands of the leaflets went from hand-to-hand throughout black Montgomery.

While the WPC’s network put the boycott into effect, E. D. Nixon made dozens of phone calls to assemble the black leadership. Like Robinson and her WPC colleagues, Nixon knew that for their protest to win mass support, the city’s ministers, not always in the forefront to black civic initiatives, would have to be convinced to give the effort their full and active support. The WPC’s post-haste distribution of the announcements, Robinson and Nixon knew, ought to short-circuit any arguments that now was not a good time for a boycott, even before they could be voiced. As Fred Gray later emphasized, “the ministers didn’t know anything about those leaflets until they appeared.”

Although the Friday evening leadership caucus had some difficulties in overcoming the autocratic style of one black pastor, agreement was reached on further publicizing the Monday boycott and on holding a Monday evening mass rally to assess the first day’s success. The leadership would meet again Monday afternoon to plan the rally, and amidst scores of weekend phone conversations between the various black activists, a consensus gradually emerged that perhaps a new, all-encompassing community organization ought to be created to oversee this unique effort.

Mrs. Robinson and the WPC membership knew that with the protest going public, their state-payroll positions at Alabama State, and the budgetary vulnerability of the college to white political retaliation, required that they

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remain in the background. As Mrs. Burks later noted in explaining why the origin of the boycott leaflets was treated as a closely-guarded secret well into the 1960s, “the full extent of our activities was never revealed because of the fact that we worked at State.”

Monday morning the amazing success of the protest was readily apparent as onlooker after onlooker observed no more than a handful of black bus riders on Montgomery’s largely empty vehicles.

Also on Monday, Mrs. Parks, in a very brief trial, was convicted of failing to obey-the driver’s command to surrender- her seat. Hundreds of black Montgomerians, in a remarkable scene, gathered at the courthouse to show their support. That afternoon, when the black leadership assembled, Rufus Lewis–to be certain that leadership did not fall into unskilled hands–quickly nominated his pastor, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., to be president of their new community group, the Montgomery Improvement Association. A surprised King hesitantly accepted, and the leadership agreed to make continuation of the boycott beyond their one day success, contingent upon mass sentiment at the evening rally.

A huge and enthusiastic turnout for the evening event quickly and convincingly answered that question. Now the community leaders turned their efforts to organizing substitute means of transportation for the thousands of black Montgomerians eager to forsake a transportation system that most had assumed was an unpleasant but unavoidable fact of daily life.

Thursday morning, with the boycott four days old, more than half a dozen MIA representatives, including King, Robinson and Gray, met with city and bus company officials under the auspices of the bi-racial Alabama Council for Human Relations. Even though King emphasized to the whites that “we are not out to change the segregation laws,” but only to win the driver courtesy and first come, first seated front-to-back and back-to-front seating policy that the WPC had been requesting for well over a year, the white officials would not budge from their insistent refusal that no changes in seating practices could be implemented.

The whiles’ complete intransigence, in the face of a black community effort of such impressive proportions, surprised the black leadership, who had entered into those: first negotiations believing that their modest demands ought to make for a quick settlement. Since “our demands were moderate,” King later recalled, “I had assumed that they would be granted with little question.” Only in the wake of that unproductive meeting did the MIA leaders begin to realize that it was the very fact of their challenge, and not the particulars of their demands, that had meaning for white Montgomery.

To the city and bus company officials such as Commissioner Clyde Sellers and attorney Jack Crenshaw, the real issue was not which precise seating plan was legally permissible, but the defense of segregation’s policies as an exemplar of the underlying doctrine of white racial supremacy. On that question no compromise could be possible; there either was superiority or there wasn’t. “They feared that anything they gave would be viewed by us as just a start,” Mrs. Robinson later reflected. “And you know, they were probably right.”

An often shy and resolutely self-effacing person. Jo Ann Gibson Robinson is now almost seventy and lives quietly b. herself in retirement in Los Angeles. Only with some gentle encouragement will she acknowledge herself as “the instigator of the movement to start that boycott.” Even then, however, she seeks to avoid any special credit for herself or any other single individual. Very simply, she says, “the black women did it.” And she’s right.

Sources and Suggested Further Reading

First and foremost, my understanding of Montgomery is based upon my personal interviews with many of the principals–Mrs. Robinson, Mrs. Burks, Mr. Nixon, Mr. Lewis, attorney Gray, Rev. Seay, Mrs. Durr and the late Jack Crenshaw, as well as Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, Juanita J. Abernathy, Robert D. Nesbitt, Robert Williams, Rev. Robert S. Graetz, Maude Ballou, Lillie Armstrong Thomas (now Brown), Elliot Finley, Rev. Robert E. Hughes, and Jack Shows. I have also benefitted greatly from the interviews with some of the principals that are on deposit in the oral history collections of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. Washington, DC; the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Atlanta; and the Highlander Center, New Market, TN, as well as from the interviews that have been shared with me by David Levering Lewis, Milton Viorst, and Worth Long and Randall Williams. I also strongly recommend the Statewide Oral History Program collection of interviews, compiled in 1973,by the Alabama Center for Higher Education, copies of which are on deposit at all of Alabama’s traditionally black colleges.

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There are a number of invaluable, unpublished manuscripts which shed crucial light on the boycott, particularly Mrs. Robinson’s “The Montgomery Story,” which the University of Tennessee Press will publish later this year, and Ralph D. Abernathy’s “The Natural History of a Social Movement: The Montgomery Improvement Association,” a 1958 M.A. thesis in Sociology at Atlanta University. Also extremely valuable are Sheldon Hackney and Ray Arsenault’s “The Montgomery Bus Boycott: A Case Book”; Peter C. Mohr, “Journal Out of Egypt: The Development of Negro Leadership in Alabama from Booker T. Washington to Martin Luther King,” B.A. thesis, Princeton University, 1958; Thomas }. Gilliam, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 19551956,” M.A. thesis, Auburn University, 1968; Gordon L. Hartstein, “The Montgomery Bus Protest 1955-1956: What Precipitated, Sustained, and Prolonged the Boycott,” B.A. thesis, Princeton University, 1973; Lamont H. Yeakey, “The Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott, 1955-1956,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1979; Steven M. Milner, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott: A Case Study in the Emergence and Career of a Social Movement,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1981; and Donald H. Smith, “Martin Luther King, Jr.: Rhetorician of Revolt,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1964.

Among published works, the serious student will benefit from not only chapter two of Dr. King’s Stride Toward Freedom (New York: Harper Bros., 1958), but also Preston Valien, “The Montgomery Bus Protest as a Social Movement,” in Jitsuichi Masuoka Valien, eds., Race Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), pp. 112-27; Aleine Austin, “Behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” Monthly Review 8 (September 1956): 163-67; and Ralph H. Hines and James E. Pierce, “Negro Leadership After the Social Crisis: An Analysis of Leadership Changes in Montgomery, Alabama,” Phylon 26 (Summer 1965): 162-72. Far and away the most valuable and insightful published analysis of the protest, and the place where anyone with further interest should begin, is J. Mills Thornton, III’s “Challenge and Response in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56,” Alabama Review 33 (July 1980): 163-235.

David J. Garrow is associate professor of political science at the City College of New York and the City University Graduate School. He is the author of Protest at Selma (Yale,1978)and The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Norton, l 981), as well as the forthcoming Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1955-1968, which William Morrow Co. will publish in the fall of l986.

The Journey Is Home by Nelle Morton. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. 248 pp. $21.95.

Reviewed by Carter Heyward

Vol. 7, No. 5, 1985, 29-30, 32

Among feminist theologians, the name Nelle Morton conjures up images of courage, intelligence, and friendship. Morton was the first (and for years only) woman on the faculty of the Theological School of Drew University; a worker for civil and other human rights; and a leader in the Southern Presbyterian Church and in the ecumenical global community. She is a theologian whose book many of us have been awaiting as if for the birth of a child. This remarkable book has arrived at last.

The significance of The Journey Is Home is not primarily in the logic of either its structure (ten occasional pieces–lectures and essays that span the 1970s) or its content (a carefully crafted interplay of history, autobiography and theory that focuses on language and metaphor). It is a well structured, deeply intelligent book, but the power of its impact resonates beyond the printed page. Beginning with its title, The Journey Is Home is a metaphor–which, as Morton shows, is not something that can be explained or analyzed discursively.

Emphasizing the vital role of metaphor in feminist theology, Morton writes that it “begins with the concrete and demands total presence.” [It] cannot be defined. It can only be actively followed on its journey and perceived in its functioning…. [It] is not metaphor unless it is on the way.” It involves a “shattering of inadequate image[s] . . . and [an] ushering in of [a] new reality.” In these words, Morton conveys a sense of how her own book affected me. The Journey Is Home is the concrete, daily, lived experience of one woman who is inviting open-ended participation by others who cannot expect to have our way defined for us by the author. We can only follow this woman’s journey and see for ourselves what happens.

I was shaken as I read, which is why I often shut the book for days at a time, saying to friends who asked what I thought of it, “I’m not sure.” One can be sure about what one thinks of most theological works–including most feminist texts. But one cannot be clear in the moment about a book that rattles the brain as it churns the gut, pushing to expand even seasoned feminist sensibilities. In patriachal time/space, one is not prepared, logically or reasonably, to meet the theologian as an eighty-year-old white Southern woman whose “wild and bizarre” blood cells are keeping her alive; whose “cunt” is sacred space; and whose lifelong liberation journey with marginalized people of different colors, classes, and creeds has plumbed new depths during

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the past decade, carrying her to the point at which, in her own words, “I am now in search of new positive images faithful to woman experience.”

“Woman” experience is no grammatical or typographical error, any more than it is, for Morton, an historical aberration. The journey that unfolds in these pages is not merely about “women’s” experiences or the “women’s” movement.

“The women’s movement” [implies] something tangible and more organizational, such as NOW…. To say “the woman movement” . . . opens up a whole, moving, pervasive way of perceiving–an emerging, accelerating, enlarging, powerful, growing potential that cannot be contained by the use of the possessive “women’s”.

Morton’s dynamic journey becomes, for her and for this reader, woman home. She tells of the place that is no place–and every place–for the woman who is shackled within the politics of patriarchal logic and, in the same historical moment, is “heard into speech” by those who are willing to listen to her find her own story rather than attempt to tell her what it is.

Nellie Morton tells us nothing about what feminists ought to believe (which is one reason she suggests that this book is not “theology”). She tells us what being Nellie Morton involves and, through the lens of her particular life, something about what may be the costs and consequences, losses and gains of being ourselves in a world that is harsh with those whose love for life and justice knows no bounds.

Shaken in a woman world

Many Christian feminists may be troubled by Morton’s unequivocal indictment of God the Father. Unless we see, however, that the turmoil into which we may be spun is not Morton’s fault, nor our own, but rather is rooted in the contradictions of living life as self-respecting women in a world/church that does not teach us to value women, we will miss entirely the purpose of this woman book and the power of this woman journey. Post-Christian and other non-Christian feminists are likely also to be shaken by Morton, specifically because her woman home includes the church. For her, the Christian church is no place for feminists to get stuck–but it is a place for Christian feminists to sojourn along the way that cannot be contained within patriarchal fixtures of institutional space or chronological time.

Morton realizes what many feminists lust after–to be empowered/empowering women in a woman community that cuts across lines that divide us in patriarchal space. Christian/post-Christian, lesbian/straight, “academic”/ “common,” older/younger are categorical pitfalls into which Morton does not fall. She sees that common women are not to blame for the vicious consequences of patriarchal structures, including those which separate woman from woman–such as compulsory heterosexism, religious imperialism, racism, classism, and sexism.

Because Morton has been for several generations a public antagonist to white supremacy and economic exploitation, I was surprised and disappointed that she made no attempt in this book to integrate an analysis of racism and classism into her compelling metaphoric treatment of sexism and heterosexism. This is a serious problem–not with Morton’s life-journey, but with her analysis, since no structure of oppression can be understood adequately without some analytic attention to other structures that help hold it in place. What is autobiographically apparent is Morton’s awareness that the truths of which she speaks cannot be measured adequately simply by those who share her own race, class or gender. She recognizes the limits of her own autobiography and does not pretend to transcend them. Moreover, she has lived the struggle that moves beyond the lives of white middle class women, and the resources from which she draws her book have been cultivated by her engagement with the global work of liberation. She sets several of her essays and lectures explicitly in this context, not to “prove her credentials” but rather to help bring the written word into the praxis of real human struggle.

Morton makes no claims to speak authoritatively for or about the universal and daily liberation work of all people who are oppressed. She speaks with confidence only of that which she, a white middle-class woman, believes. And, from her own struggle for justice, what Morton has come to believe is that God the Father is the supreme deity of racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism, and that he is the deadly foe of all truly human liberation.

The last three essays of this book bear witness to Morton’s most recent spiritual sojourning. It is here that we are introduced to the Goddess. She has come to Nelle Morton via a number of woman-loving groups and occasions, and most especially through meeting, “in a river of blood”–and becoming–her own mother. In this reunion, Morton–already a strong, empowering woman to others of us–was reborn into a “new child,” able at last to respect herself (and her mother), newly empowered to embody the heights–and depths–of her woman being.

Morton writes that no one whose imagination and creativity are inhibited by the rationality of patriarchal theology will be able to hear what she is saying, and she is correct. For here is an empowered woman, a citizen of planet earth in a pervasively patriarchal time/space, whose power is emerging full force through the aegis of other women as she moves into and beyond her eightieth year. Here is a formerly liberal Christian woman who was born again, if you will, in

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meeting the Goddess. Morton has been moved to speech by a womanpower literally unavailable within the limits of patriarchal reason. She has experienced the creative power of God the Mother, not God the Father: Wisdom, not Word; being heard to new life, not being taught new insights. She writes, “[In] a sexist culture and sexist religion the option for the Goddess may be the only, the only sane, redemptive move.”

Morton is an honest woman who is speaking the truth not only of her own life but moreover of the power of images in the life of the world/church. The symbol of God the Father (which, Morton suggests, has lost whatever metaphoric power it may once have had) does not empower men to respect women or women to respect ourselves–no matter how He is dressed up, not even if He is called “She.” The metaphoric, imaginative images of the Goddess–God the Mother, woman God, sister God, lover God–may be indeed the “only sane, redemptive” spiritual resource left for self-respecting woman.

As we come into our power, regardless of our patriarchal affiliations, we can begin to live as self-respecting, woman-loving, life-affirming, justice-making women whom the institutions of our lives have no power to break or destroy. Our strength to love ourselves despite patriarchy does not derive from our escaping patriarchy but rather from our Goddess-given knowledge that each of us is more than simply herself. We are women connected to women. Our power and community carry us beyond the boundaries of our own skins into the past (which teaches us), the present (which presents us with our life work), and the future (which we are co-creating, and which belongs to us, although we may not, as individuals, live to taste the fruits of the harvest we sow).

Morton’s faith rings with the same moral commitment and metaphysical implications that characterize other theologies of liberation, but her radical feminist bias reveals what is missing from all nonfeminist liberation movements; a deeply woman-rooted, woman-loving power. The Goddess’ is with us, not above us. Her realm is sexual, not disembodied; organic, not dualistic; inclusive, not exclusively the domain of those who think right, look right, speak right, or have the right genital structure. She is celebrative and permissive, not morbid and proscriptive. Her spirit is rooted and grounded in justice making, not in law and order. Most notably for Morton, the Goddess is not merely another face of God. She is the antithesis of everything that the patriarchal deity has come to symbolize.

If other women want to spend energy trying cosmetically to touch up God the Father, to transform Him into an androgynous figure and thereby to “create the false impression of having arrived,” Morton will not attempt to thwart us. It is simply the case that she herself is moving on. Lest we imagine that her vision is too facile for this oppression laden world, we should recognize that, for Morton, the journey is struggle. It is as bloody, angry, and conflictual as it is tender, playful, and celebrative.

Nelle Morton has not only shaken me to the core of my patriarchal remnants. She has also, with this book, made me a wiser, happier feminist. For she is herself a metaphor, an image of what can happen to little Southern girls who “go barefooted and take off our winter underwear every spring” all the while aware that something bad is the matter with the world into which our mothers have borne us. Many of us have been there, and many are yet to come. Nelle Morton offers us fresh water for the journey.

Carter Heyward a native of Charlotte, N. C., is professor of theology of Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge Mass, she is the author of Our Passion for Justice: Images of Power, Sexuality, and Liberation (Pilgrim, 1984). This review of Nelle Morton’s book is copyright 1985 by Christianity and Crisis, and reprinted with permission.