Gradualism, South Africa, and Civil Rights

By Steven F. Lawson

Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986, pp. 1-3

In February 1986, a white student from the University of Cape Town in South Africa paid a visit to my campus at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Twenty-six years after black students in the southern United States initiated their wave of sit-ins against segregation American style, this young South African offered his thoughts on eradicating his country’s version of apartheid. Rather than supporting divestment of funds from companies doing business in South Africa, he counselled against any economic sanction that would interfere with the Botha regime’s commitment to bring about change “in a peaceful and orderly fashion.” To do otherwise, he argued, would only succeed in plunging his nation into financial chaos, injuring both black and white South Africans alike and pushing the government further to the political right.

On the surface this native South African sounded reasonable. He was advocating the dismantling of the “dehumanizing system” of apartheid, and he cited the progress that had been made toward this end. Within the past two years, the Botha administation had repealed the Mixed Marriages and Immorality Act and announced modification of the Group Areas Act to permit blacks to own property in their designated townships. These measures, he asserted, have strengthened the hands of those like himself who are dedicated to working for change from within to “bring about peace and justice for all in a country with tremendous wealth and potential for all her inhabitants.” Accordingly, the correct position for Americans to take

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was to back the “constructive engagement” policy of President Ronald Reagan.

Reading these remarks as they appeared in my school newspaper, I was immediately struck by their similarity to those put forth by moderate segregationists during the Civil Rights Era. Though significant differences exist between the situations in the U.S. and South Africa, in both countries the response of ruling whites was much the same. In neither case did they want to alter fundamentally the system of racial control or share political power in any equitable arrangement. Like the Pretoria regime today, “enlightened” southern whites a generation ago advocated gradualism as the best approach to resolving racial conflicts. Willing to accept desegregation in principle, they attempted to delay its implementation for as long as possible. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s pronouncement in Brown, moderates opposed school closings and other extreme measures of white massive resistance but devised pupil placement laws and freedom of choice plans to keep integration to a minimum. Furthermore, though the courts and Congress had struck down practices denying the right to vote on the basis of race, southern whites continued to employ literacy tests to keep three-quarters of adult blacks disfranchised.

Throughout that period, southern moderates pleaded for understanding and sufficient time to solve their own problems. They criticized meddlesome northerners for not comprehending the unique pattern of race relations that had developed in the South over three hundred years and warned that attempts to overturn longstanding folkways would plunge the region into violence and cause more harm to blacks than to whites. Just as white South Africans admonish that blacks will suffer most from economic consequences of divestment, so too did moderates warn that blacks would be harmed if the federal government cut off funds to segregated schools. They presented their brand of gradualism as the antidote to the racist potions of the likes of George Wallace, Orval Faubus, the White Citizens Councils, and the Ku Klux Klan. Nevertheless, their prescriptions for change called for more deliberation and less speed, civilities more than civil rights.

The record of Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida illustrates the dilemma of the southern moderate. Elected to two terms beginning in 1955, on each occasion Collins defeated arch-segregationists in the Democratic primary. As governor he advocated modernization of Florida’s economic and governmental structures through attracting industry to the Sunshine State, expanding educational opportunities, and reapportioning the legislature. In the aftermath of Brown and Little Rock, Governor Collins pursued a middle course designed to keep public schools open, maintain the dual system of segregation, and avoid violent confrontations that would tarnish the image of the state with northern investors. Consequently, he refused to endorse legislative resolutions nullifying the Brown opinion, but at the same time he also supported laws permitting local school boards to assign students and teachers to segregated schools based on criteria other than race, such as intelligence, character, and potential for disruption. The governor insisted that the state did not have to defy the US Supreme Court to assure “that there will be no integration in our public schools so long as it is not wise in the light of the social, economic and health facts of life as they exist in various localities.”

In his final year in office, Collins began to reconsider his position in a fashion that should be instructive for his South African counterparts.

In 1960, blacks throughout the state mounted sit-in demonstrations to desegregate lunch counters in five and dime stores and other facilities. The governor publicly urged white Floridians to reevaluate the morality and fairness of a policy that prohibited blacks from eating in an establishment where they were allowed to shop. In addition, he created a biracial committee to facilitate the desegregation of these businesses. After leaving office, Collins moved even further toward embracing the goals of the civil rights movement as well as recognizing the necessity of federal intervention to achieve them. In 1965, he played a key role as President Johnson’s emissary in arranging an agreement that averted bloodshed on the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. In the span of a single decade, LeRoy Collins had marched on his own personal odyssey toward the attainment of first-class citizenship for blacks.

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Activism rather than gradualism had triumphed.

Had the United States moved at the pace desired by southern gradualists, blacks would have continued to live under the yoke of second-class citizenship well into the twenty-first century. As Martin Luther King wryly observed during the Selma voting rights campaign in 1965, it would have taken 103 years at the rate they were going for local registrars to enroll all the qualified blacks who applied. Realizing that freedom is indivisible, black Americans and their white allies refused to wait that long. They not only resisted the new forms of segregation instituted to slow down racial equality, but also challenged the federal government to abandon its constructive engagement policy of allowing the South to manage its own affairs, as long as it did so in a respectable fashion. In the end, coercion by means of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, not voluntarism, broke the back of Jim Crow. Frederick Douglass summed up the lesson long ago: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

The cosmetic reforms of the Botha regime are as intellectually shallow and morally bankrupt today as were those offered by southern gradualists during our age of civil rights. They did not succeed then, and they are doomed to fail in South Africa.

Steven F. Lawson is Professor of History at the University of South Florida, Tampa, and author of In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965-1982 (Columbia University Press).

Women in the Rural South: Scraping a Living from Two-bit Jobs

By Barbara Ellen Smith

Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986, pp. 5-8

Southern working class women are survivors. No message emerges as vividly from the stories in this booklet, Picking Up the Pieces. All of these women scraped their livings out of rocky soil and two-bit jobs; all got by on little but their own muscles and wits. Many bore children at a young age, and struggled for the better part of their lives to put food in their mouths and shoes on their feet. All endured the personal insults, self-doubt and, in several cases, physical violence that are the lot of women in this country; many faced the additional barrier

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of racial abuse and discrimination. Their stories are not romantic or pretty; poverty is neither. But they are stories of great courage, humor and strength in the face of formidable odds.

These women are but one generation in a long succession of southern women with similar stories to tell. The history of women’s survival in the South is bound up with the history of agriculture, which remained the foundation of the region’s economy until well into the present century. The first women to eke their livings out of the southern earth were of course Native American. Encroachment and enslavement by European settlers shattered their traditional way of life, but members of the Cherokee, Lumbee and other tribes have survived, especially in North Carolina and Oklahoma. Native Americans were the first of many rural people in the region to be dispossessed of their most precious economic resource–land. They were also among the first to be enslaved in the labor system for which the South became known.

The eighteenth century saw the flourishing of plantation agriculture in the South, based on the labor of African women and men. Although slavery was formally abolished in 1863, the reorganization of agriculture into the sharecropping system ensured the continued poverty of most black families. Concentration of land ownership in the hands of a white upper-class minority denied economic opportunity to successive generations of rural Southerners. Women–both black and white–labored long and hard in cotton fields and on tobacco farms, but remained for the most part landless and in debt.

Industrialization came to the South on a large scale during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Mines, mills and factories proliferated amidst regional fanfare over the construction of a “New South.” Allocation of the new industrial jobs according to race and gender established a pattern of occupational segregation that is visible to this day. Hard pressed to secure an adequate labor force in the rugged Appalachian mountains of the upper South, coal operators sought workers of all races and nationalities–but hired no women. In the more densely settled piedmont to the South, textile mill owners preferred the low-wage labor of rural white women and originally children. They refused to hire black workers, save for a few menial jobs, though certain other southern employers, such as tobacco processors, relied heavily on black labor. All segregated their workers by race and gender into distinct physical locations and job categories. Coupled with enforced social separation under Jim Crow, occupational segregation maintained a divisive hierarchy of opportunity among Southerners who were increasingly members of the same working class.

Southern women’s present economic status reflects the persistent, detrimental impacts of their segregation into low-wage, often labor-intensive jobs. In the coal-dependent economies of east Kentucky, southern West Virginia and areas further south, women are largely excluded from the most important source of high-wage employment industry, the mining industry. As a result, they have few economic opportunities and extremely low labor force participation rates: in 1984 in West Virginia, 39.2 percent of adult women were in the labor force, the lowest rate of any state in the nation. Over the last ten years, women have fought successfully to gain access to mining jobs; today, however, many coal miners–including most women–are unemployed.

In the piedmont counties of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, women remain concentrated in the low-wage manufacuring industries where they were first employed one hundred years ago. Nearly two-thirds of southern textile and apparel workers are women, and the great majority are rural. Today, women of all races find employment in the mills, but they receive some of the lowest wages in the country for their efforts. In 1983, average earnings in the apparel industry were $5.37/hour, about half the average in manufacturing industries like chemicals and primary metals, where men predominate.

As is true throughout the United States, the rapid growth of the southern service sector has been based on the labor of women. For black women, dependence on service jobs is nothing new; they were long consigned to domestic service, the lowest wage job in the nation. As recently as 1960, nearly half of all employed black women in the South were domestic servants. Many now engage in a commercialized variation of the same activity; they are cooks in restaurants, maids in hotels, laundresses in hospitals. Over one-third of all employed black women in the South work in the service sector.

Southern white women, by contrast, are more heavily concentrated in pink collar ghettos of retail sales and office work. In the urban South, slightly more than half of employed white women are cashiers, secretaries,

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and related workers. In the rural areas of the region, the larger role of manufacturing somewhat offsets dependence on these sectors, though nearly 40 percent of employed rural white women are secretaries and sales clerks. The higher status of this pink collar work does not necessarily bring a higher wage or greater job satisfaction. Southern women of all races often earn scarcely more than the minimum wage: in 1984, half of those with any income at all received less than $6,700 a year; among those who worked full-time the entire year, half earned less than $14,312. Median earnings of black and Hispanic women were over $2,000 a year lower than those of white women.

As the lowest paid workers in the lowest wage region of the country, southern working class women bear a heavy burden of poverty. Their role as caretakers of children magnifies their economic needs and spreads the implications of their poverty to the next generation. Poverty is most severe among those who experience the intersecting discrimination of class, race and gender: working class black women who are single mothers with young children. Over sixty percent are poor. Other southern women of all races live constantly on the margin between destitution and survival–one month unemployed and down to the last dollar, another month with a small paycheck and an uncertain job, yet always without genuine opportunity.

Women survive despite their lack of economic resources by using skills passed down for generations. This is true not only of those who live in remote areas on the margins of the wage economy, but also of women in “developed” locations who work hard for wages yet always remain poor. Both produce and circulate with their neighbors the goods and services necessary for their families’ survival: they patch and sew, swap child care, watch for sales and clip coupons; in rural areas, they also garden, raise chickens and perform other agricultural tasks. In general, women have learned to substitute their own hard work for the commodities that they cannot afford to buy.

Women who have made much out of little may have to do with even less in the future. Current economic trends do not bode well for southern women, especially those in rural locations. Fueled by international competition and the loss of markets, US corporations are engaged in a global search for reduced production costs; their strategies include technological innovation, relocation to lower wage areas, and sometimes a combination of both. For workers, the domestic impacts of this economic transformation include unemployment, irregular work and lowered wages. Labor-intensive manufacturing has been especially hard hit; this is precisely the industrial sector that once favored the rural South and the labor of southern women.

These trends are apparent in mining and manufacturing industries throughout the South. In West Virginia, for example, the unemployment rate has topped all other states’ for over two years. Technological innovations in underground mining, coupled with declining markets for certain grades of coal, have drastically diminished employment in the coalfields. Women who once worked in the mines now stand in unemployment lines with former waitresses and secretaries from the boarded-up businesses of rural county seats. Further south, women who worked in the textile and apparel industries also find that jobs are scarce. Bankruptcies, plant closings and layoffs have swept through the piedmont during the past ten years. Between 1973 and 1983, the work force in textiles and apparel dropped nationwide by over 500,000. Although advocates for protectionist trade policies assert that “unfair competition from producers in Southeast Asia” is the source of declining employment, the situation is far more complex.

Large corporations in the textile industry have transformed the production of cloth from fiber. Since the mid-1970s, they have brought robots, electronic knitting machines and other technological innovations into the mills; the result has been rapidly rising productivity and wide-spread displacement of workers. Although it is true that textile imports have boomed in recent years, they are by no means the sole cause of unemployment. The US textile industry is undergoing a massive shakeout: less productive mills are closing; less well-capitalized companies are going bankrupt. Meanwhile, the larger producers are concentrating production in modern, relatively automated plants. Manufacturers of apparel have taken a different approach to the pressures on international competition. Although some have invested in new, highly productive technologies, many have roamed the globe in search of cheap labor, and have found it among poor women in Hong Kong, Mexico, Taiwan and elsewhere.

Some producers have even found they no longer need to leave the United States to take advantage of Asian and Hispanic women’s cheap labor; there is evidence that rising immigration and high unemployment rates have enabled a return of the sweatshop to cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Women laid off from textile mills and garment factories rarely find a job in the new manufacturing industries that have recently located in the South. Since

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World War II, businessmen in heavy industries have been drawn by the region’s low wages, nonunion work force and accomodating political tradition, which equates “economic development” and the “right to work.” Particularly for capital-intensive operations, in which long-term security of expensive plants and equipment is a serious concern, the political conservatism and stability of the South give it an edge over alternative locations in the Third World. Manufacturers of chemicals, machinery, rubber and other products have all constructed plants in the South. Location of the Saturn automobile plant in rural Tennessee is only a recent and relatively well-publicized example of this larger trend, which has generated considerable regional rivalry, especially during periods of recession in the North. These so-called “emerging” or “non-traditional” industries bring opportunities for some of the highest wages paid to southern workers. But for women, they bring very little: employers in these industries rarely turn to women for their production work force, which is over seventy percent male.

The growth industries in which southern working class women find employment are primarily in the ubiquitous sectors of services and retail trade. The more fortunate land a relatively secure job with the government, which in the postwar era has been an important source of service sector expansion and increased job opportunities for women. Nearly one-fourth of all employed women in the South now work for the government; among black women, public employment is even more significant, accounting for nearly one-third of all jobs. In much of the service sector, however, jobs for women may be plentiful but genuine opportunities are few. Pay in the lower ranks of service employment rarely matches even the $5 an hour that women received in manufacturing. In rural areas where tourism has generated a boom in shops, motels and restaurants, earning a living wage is yet more difficult. Jobs for women in tourist-dependent businesses are frequently seasonal, the hours are often part-time, and the wages are almost invariably low.

Most southern women will no doubt survive the present economic crisis, as they have done for generations back. That does not diminish the injustice of their situation, however. There is a shameful gap between the economic contributions of southern working class women and the economic resources that they actually control. The southern economy has long been dependent on the labor of women. Black women were essential to southern agriculture, white women were central to southern industrialization; and now, women of all races are primary workers in the key growth sector of the economy–services. Moreover, as the unpaid laborers in families and households, women have long maintained the southern work force, and made possible survival in a regional economy premised on subsistence-level wages. Women’s poverty is no indication of their contribution to the southern economy; indeed, it is a terrible indictment of the southern economy. Working class women must share in the benefits of southern growth and prosperity. Justice decrees it, equity requires it and, increasingly, southern women demand it.

Barbara Ellen Smith is director of research and education of the Southeast Women’s Employment Coalition, Lexington, Kentucky. Her essay is the introduction to Picking Up the Pieces, a new booklet by the Highlander Research and Education Center, in which thirty women from ten communities throughout the South talk about their lives–their growth as community leaders, their struggles for integrity and economic survival. Picking Up the Pieces is $5 per copy plus $1 postage from Highlander Center, Route 3, Box 370, New Market, TN 37820.

Women in the Rural South: Toward Economic Equity

By Leslie Lilly

Vol. 8, No. 2, 1986, pp. 5, 8-11

There is a sense of place and time about the South that distorts even as it amplifies its outward character to the nation. We are a region of great diversity even as we pursue the rejection of that diversity. We market our stereotypes at the same time we deplore them.

We are haunted by an historical wishfulness to act and think in terms of privilege.

Our geography is that of rural and small town communities. Our economic progress has been confounded by this ruralness. We have been used as a hinterland–our timber, our coal, our minerals, our water, our agriculture, and even our people exploited as export commodities.

Our political experience is distinguished by a rigid conservatism. Its most ardent expression has been the need to defend and explain about the South. Generations

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of racial role-playing have left a terrible legacy of poverty and powerlessness among the disfranchised. The inertia is seductive. There is a hopelessness about thinking that things can ever be any different. Our self-blame is deeply ingrained. We are primarily a poor and working class people, a people for whom change has meant hard, bitter, and often violent confrontation.

Proclamations demanding rights for women found few initial supporters in the South. What movement there was had a delicate nature due to the hothouse of its growth–an old confederacy of geographic circumstance, steeped in a unique regional history, dominated by a rural and agrarian political economy. If the “southern question” had troubled national politics for more than a century, it was no less a barrier to women working to improve the status of women. From the earliest era of activism in behalf of women’s rights, to the more recent struggle to win southern states’ ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, the enrollment of a southern constituency has been problematic.

Ironically it seems that political support for women’s equity in the South could not be pursued on the basis of equity. To have done so would have raised an issue that is still controversial: to whom is equity entitled? The implications of this issue are nothing short of revolutionary. That racism should overtake the vision for universal equity was preordained in the South. Alliances across race and privilege were divided by political tactics that required the oppressed to settle first on which oppress-

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sion was of greater priority in the determination of specific reforms.

There is one lesson to be learned from this history. Racism, classism, and sexism mean that women always lose. This reality is nowhere more stark than in the South. Women’s historical inheritance is economic subjugation. Their children must necessarily share in this experience since their role of women as bearers and caretakers of children has not significantly changed.

But it isn’t as though women haven’t fought injustice. Women have a history of struggle as leaders, fighting to end slavery and lynching, as workers in the labor movement, as citizens fighting for franchise, as advocates against child labor, as organizers to achieve civil rights, as supporters of social welfare reforms, as entrepreneurs in development, as voices in behalf of global peace and justice. Racism and sexism are not mutually exclusive, and privilege cannot substitute for the right of self-determination. We came to know this about slavery. We are only now beginning to know this about women.

We are an organization devoted to this struggle. We believe economic equity is at the heart of the effort to achieve civil equality in the United States. Civil equality has limited meaning in the absence of economic resources sufficient to ensure basic quality of life. The issue of economic equity is paramount for women especially. Female-headed households are the fastest-growing segment of the poverty populations in this country. Children are carried on their mothers’ breasts throughout households that can’t adequately provide educational opportunity, food, shelter, clothing, or health care. Gender, race, and class are the most powerful ingredients in the formula which determines who shall be poor. The final ingredient is geography. In the South and Appalachia, there are few who enjoy escape from the destiny that their birth to this equation implies.

We believe that this report, Women of the Rural South, will underscore the extent to which change must be advocated. We believe that women have the burden of leadership in calling for that change, and that their responsibility to do so is clear. The problem of economic injustice is not solely a women’s issue, however, nor will resolution be achieved by women alone. But there is a change of attitude that must be cultivated, and some intellectual reckoning that must occur.

Social movements cannot be sustained if they fail to support the participation of women. Women cannot develop leadership nor mobilize to follow leaders without recognition of the special responsibilities they also have in regard to children. Poverty and vulnerability are inherent in roles of dependency–forced or voluntary. Improvement to the quality of life for all Americans and challenges to the causes and sources of poverty cannot succeed in the absence of an analysis about the economic and political status of those citizens for whom change is being sought. Women of the Rural South is an attempt to provide the anatomy of the problems women are facing in the rural South so that we can more clearly understand the nature of the struggle before us, and the depth of reform that will be required. Strategies to achieve social and economic justice must explicitly recognize the political economy of women if they are to succeed.

And, if we do succeed? Ours is a vision for economic development in the South that is inclusive of women and

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minorities. It is a vision for an economy that is self-sustaining, and that has the capacity to distribute the income necessary to enhance the quality of life throughout our communities, but most especially among women and minorities. It is development that inspires rejuvenation of the old and innovation of the new, and a respect, regard, and appeciation for the human resource upon which economic development depends. It is development that is integrally rooted in a wider sphere, with self-reliance at the heart of its purpose, and with education, community, and independence as parts of its vision. In that spirit, we call on: Policymakers to repudiate the century-old policy of promoting economic growth on the cynical guarantee of low wages and poverty among southern workers. Specifically, we urge them to:

* Allocate fifty percent of state economic development funds to projects benefitting primarily women, and additional funds to projects benefitting people of color in direct proportion to their representation in the state population.

* Earmark a specific portion of economic development funds for rural areas, directly proportionate to the distribution of the state population.

* Establish affirmative action requirements for the civil service and for private contractors rendering services under contract with the state. Initiate strong enforcement of laws guaranteeing nondiscrimination in private and state workforces.

* Arrange immediately for a job evaluation/comparable worth analysis of the state and local civil service systems; and appropriate the funding necessary to close the gaps between workers of different race and gender who perform jobs requiring comparable skills and responsibilities.

* Establish a more favorable political climate in support of working people, and repeal the right-to-work law in your state.

* Bring public assistance payments, specifically AFDC, up to the national average.

* Subsidize locally-owned, quality child care in rural communities.

* Provide vocational education extension courses in rural areas that currently lack opportunities for training, and actively recruit women for nontraditional vocational courses.

* Identify and actively recruit women into positions of policy and decision making at every level.

Grantmakers, especially those in the South, we ask you to evaluate your present funding priorities according to criteria of social responsibility, and to revise your policies accordingly. Specifically, we urge you to:

* Allocate at least fifty percent of your total annual budget to projects that organize and empower the economically disadvantaged.

* Allocate at least half of that amount to projects that address the needs of women, particularly women of color.

* Recruit women from the ranks of community leadership as staff executive officers, board members, and trustees in philanthropic endeavors.

* Collaborate with women community leaders in a process that will eliminate attitudes and beliefs that are barriers to working together in addressing issues of poverty.

* Develop peership with grantseekers on issues of strategy, and build a process for mutual evaluation that reveals the strengths and weaknesses in our collaborative attempts to foster change.

Leaders of Southern Churches and Synagogues, we call on you to speak out for economic justice, and to minister to the economic needs of low-income people, especially women. Specifically, we urge you to:

* Educate your congregations as to the economic injustice experienced by women and people of color in the South.

* Provide food pantries, soup kitchens, shelter, transportation and other services needed by the poor.

* Provide active support for local efforts to organize and empower women.

* Encourage the leadership of women in all areas of religious activity.

* Build on the vision of liberation theology and apply it to the responsibility of your church among the poor and disfranchised in your own communities.

Southern Education Institutions, we call on your faculty, staff and trustees to incorporate the experiences and contributions of women into all areas of the curriculum, and to address the needs of women as students and as employees. Specifically, we urge you to:

* Hire faculty with expertise in women’s studies, particularly in the areas of southern working class women and women of color.

* Evaluate existing curricula, especially in the social sciences and humanities, as to their coverage of the experiences and contributions of women and people of color.

* Develop and implement new curricula to remedy identified deficiencies.

* Recruit women and minorities as students.

* Seek scholarship funds and establish financial

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aid policies that enable the attendance of low-income.

* Establish and enforce strict affirmative action procedures for hiring, salaries and promotion, including the granting of tenure, among all faculty.

* Arrange for an evaluation of the comparability of all staff jobs, and revise pay scales according to the principle of comparable worth.

* Establish and enforce affirmative action procedures, hiring, and promotion of staff.

* Establish programs that make the educational, research and other resources of your institution available to the local community, expecially to low-income members, in order to serve needs that they themselves identify.

Finally, we call on Southern Women to come together across the barriers that historically have divided us. Unite! Organize! This report will justify your anger, and support your resolution to act. A single voice can become a mighty shout in the presence of a shared vision among women about what must be different in our lives. No one else can “give” us equity or set us free! We have nothing to lose in this struggle but our poverty and the diminishment we experience because of our oppression. We are powerful and we are needed. Let your children be your inspiration, your sisterhood be your sustenance, and a movement for race and sex equity, your vision. We have generational responsibility to uphold and the strength and capability to meet its challenges. Stand up, reach out, and let the future unroll as if you mattered. In this movement, every person counts!

Leslie Lilly is executive director of the Southeast Women’s Employment Coalition. This essay is taken from an extensively researched report: Women of the Rural South. For order information see page 6.

Maggie Lee Sayre–A Glimpse of Shantyboat Life

By Tom Rogers

Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986, pp. 12-14

Maggie Lee Sayre, born deaf, never heard water slap boat thwarts. Yet during her half century on the Tennessee River she compiled an unrivaled record of life there.

Her record is a rare stream of more than four-hundred photographs shot while she lived on the river in a houseboat, or “shantyboat,” as many called the floating wood homes. Her photos were displayed-and she was on hand to discuss them-during the Tennessee River Folklife Center’s dedication celebration April 19. The Center is at Nathan Bedford Forrest State Historical Area at Eva, Tennessee.

Organizers of the twentieth annual Festival of American Folklife, to be held this summer in Washington, D.C., have invited Sayre as one of about ninety Tennesseans who will make up the Festival’s spotlight on the Volunteer State this year. The festival is presented by the Smithsonian Institution and National Park Service.

And later this year, from September 8 to October 15, Mud Island at Memphis will present the first showing of the traveling exhibit of Sayre’s photos, “Maggie Lee Sayre: Pictorial Narrative of a River Life.” The Tennessee Folk Society, with a grant from the Southern Arts Federation, is preparing the exhibit, which is to tour for two years.

Excited by the recognition coming her way, Sayre still sees her riverine life as precious, closeknit years with her parents, Archie and Mary Sayre. Using simple box cameras, she froze those years in snapshots she keeps now to “remember always.”

In one series of four photos, made in 1938, she recorded the process of tarring hoop nets.

“Archie Sayre and helper Charlie dyed black tar,” she explained of the sequence. “Papa stirred around the nets in the big barrel for two or three minutes, then pulled

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them out of the barrel to hang the nets in trees. When the nets were made they were white.”

Another photo, of a visitor boarding the Sayres’ moored houseboat, brought from her an explanation of how her family had tied a forked stick to a tree on shore to hold the houseboat safely off the bank. A picture from 1938 shows the “live can” Archie Sayre used to keep his catch fresh to increase its market value.

Another shot, of friends fishing from the houseboat deck, shows on the wall behind them the rolls of line from which the Sayres uncoiled lengths to mend snag nets.

Sayre said her father preferred fishing the Tennessee River because it yielded bigger fish than other waterways. She said he caught “any kind of catfish, buffalo, carp, spoonbill.”

“Did you ever have a name for your houseboat?” she was asked.

“Never know to call a name,” she answered.

“Home?”

She nodded “Yes” and mouthed the word: “Home.”

Spry and good-humored at sixty-six-her birthday was April 4-Sayre communicates by written note. Seldom does she move about without a pen and notepad.

She and her sister, Myrtle, were born a year apart. Myrtle, also deaf, died at sixteen. Maggie Sayre’s father, who survived her mother, died in 1977. Maggie Sayre has lived in a nursing home since then.

Between the ages of seven and nineteen she attended a school for the deaf at Danville, Kentucky, and spent summers on the river. When she finished school, in the late 1930s, she returned to live on the river year-round.

Here’s her account:

“Archie and Mary met her at the depot and they all returned home and were very happy.

“They moved to the Tennessee River. They sailed the houseboat and motor boat to Tom Creek. They stayed there for three years. They continued to sell fish to a market.

“They then moved to Click Creek near Sugar Tree, Tennessee. After that they moved to several places down the Tennessee River and stayed a few weeks in one place.

“They decided they like Click Creek best, so they moved back. Maggie’s mother got sick and was taken to Jackson Hospital. She later died. She was buried in Paducah, Kentucky.

“The houseboat was getting old, so they moved to a house on Brodie Road. This was in 1971. Archie liked to hunt and they enjoyed eating ducks, squirrel and rabbits.

“Archie became sick and had to stop fishing in 1974. He died March, 1977.”

Their three-room floating home was sold and moved ashore to be used as a home. Today it is unoccupied and crumbling. Some folklorists hope to preserve it.

The Sayres’ boat was larger than most, and its motor gave them a mobility most houseboaters lacked, according to Tom Rankin, who worked with Sayre in 1982-83 when he was doing research for the Tennessee River Folklife Center.

The Sayres stayed on the river longer than most shantyboaters, said Rankin, who now is Director of Programs with the Southern Arts Federation.

Shantyboat life “was mostly a drifting life,” he said. It was “pretty extensive up until the 1930s,” but the New Deal signaled the beginning of the end for the gypsy-like houseboaters, and “by the 50s and 60s they were told to get off the river.”

Although the shantyboat life is part of the past, the river still draws and shapes those who live near it,

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according to Nancy Michael, folklorist at the Tennessee River Folklife Center at Nathan Bedford Forrest park. Today more than two thousand persons in the seven counties bordering the river hold commercial permits to take fish and mussels, she said.

So Sayre felt at home at the Center’s celebration. Many persons whose photographs or handiwork are displayed in the Center’s exhibits were also part of the day’s events.

“As you walk through here you will see a lot of people who are coming,” explained Michael. “That’s what we’re trying to do, get as many people as possible who have been contributing.”

Like T. J. Whitfield of Holladay, whose twenty-five foot-long musseling boat, Betsy, is the museum’s centerpiece.

The festival officially dedicated the $315,000 center, which opened last year.

River people, Michael said, are marked by “their independence…and their aesthetic sense. When they talk about the river it’s obvious they have a sense of it, a love of it.”

She pointed out a display board with river woman Ada Roberson’s words:

“I ain’t got but one thing to say: Enjoy everything you do. Get all the experience you can at anything you can. I wouldn’t take nothin’ for the years I spent on the river.”

“It’s a healthy way of livin’. You get plenty of fresh air and sunshine. You work hard…in the way of a job. One thing-it’s not nerve rackin’ like factory work. You ain’t got somebody on your shoulder yelling ‘Make production, Make production’-If there comes a day that you don’t feel like going out there, you can stay at home. It’s a good way of life.”

Tom Rogers is a staff writer for the Nashville Tennessean–where this article originally appeared.

The Risks at Oak Ridge

By Joanne Thompson

Vol. 8, No. 2, 1986, pp. 15-16

Ever since World War II, under the protective umbrella of national security, nuclear facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, have operated with minimal outside scrutiny. Companies under contract with the federal government have been able to get legislative and agency waivers to continue operations, while at the same time refusing to disclose their methods of handling and disposing of radioactive and toxic materials. Only in the recent past have citizens been made aware of the true extent of the problem. In 1983, local media exposed the fact that the Y-12 weapons facility illegally released over 2.4 million pounds of mercury into the environment during the many years the facility had been in existence. Mercury poisoning causes nerve and brain damage, and birth disorders.

The transformation of Oak Ridge from a backwoods community to the center of weapons research and production of weapons was never questioned at the time. In the 40’s, the country was at war. Security was tight and who could argue with 80,000 federal jobs being brought to east Tennessee. Oak Ridge and surrounding communities became dependent on the federal government to sustain the local economic base. With Oak Ridge jobs now down to 10,000, former workers developing cancer, and landfills contaminating groundwater supplies, the price of national defense is only now being realized.

The recognition of the federal government’s failure to be accountable to its citizens comes at a time when the Department of Energy is proposing to make Oak Ridge the site for the first facility to re-package and store high level radioactive waste. DOE proposed the development of this facility at the same time it announced the shut-down of the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant, effectively laying off over 2,000 workers. The promise of jobs to help the local economy has always been the “big carrot” in reducing local opposition.

TRACK RECORD

Tennesseans have grown increasingly skeptical that DOE can indeed construct and operate such a facility safely in light of its own track record on worker health and environmental damage. While DOE officials claim that there are minimal worker risks at their facilities, there is increasing evidence to the contrary. A paper. by Bob Alvarez of the Environmental Policy Institute documents serious occupational health problems at Oak Ridge facilities:

* Leukemia mortality at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory–workers in maintenance jobs who worked less than ten years show a 91 percent increased risk of leukemia. Those who worked longer showed a risk 212 percent greater.

* Cancer mortality at the Oak Ridge Y-12 weapons plant–research found that the risk of brain tumorsfor workers employed five to ten years was 489 percent greater than expected. Leukemia and aleukemia risks were 900 percent greater than expected.

An October 11, 1984 issue of the New Scientist indicated additional problems:

* Overall, workers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory have a 49 percent excess leukemia mortality compared to the general public;

* Janitors, laborers, maintenance men and construction workers at the Laboratory have a significant excess risk of radiation-associated cancers;

* Between 1943 and 1947, workers at Oak Ridge’s Y-12 uranium processing plant had “significant excesses of deaths from lung cancer when compared to US white male rates”;

* Workers at Oak Ridge’s Y-12 plant had “excess death from cancer of the lung, brain, and central nervous system, Hodgkin’s disease and other lymphatic tissue,” and

* Workers at Oak Ridge’s Gaseous Diffusion Plant exhibit “excess deaths due to lung and brain cancers and respiratory disease.”

In addition, a study of 19,000 women working between 1943 and 1947 at the Y-12 plant was never finished–officals claimed that it was difficult to follow up on research subjects who did not have Social Security numbers and changed their names upon getting married. In late 1985, DOE officials announced that nine years of health data of workers had been destroyed or lost.

During the mercury investigation, it was discovered that workers at the Y-12 plant curing the 1950’s breathed doses of mercury vapor as high as thirty times the prevailing health standards.

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The track record for environmental damage is as scandalous. In addition to the 2.4 million pounds of mercury illegally released into the environment, we have the following:

* Over twelve million cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste was buried at the Oak Ridge Reservation since World War II–enough to fill the 95,000-seat University of Tennessee football stadium;

* TVA has identified more than 140 dangerous chemicals and radioactive materials present in Oak Ridge creek bottoms, including lead, cadmium, methylene chloride, thorium, and perchloryethlene;

* Over the years DOE engaged in poor disposal practices, including dumping wastes into poorly sited and constructed trenches and ponds which have resulted in serious underground water contamination;

* In 1985, DOE admitted to having dumped over fifty million pounds of uranium chips into Dempster Dumpsters, then buried them in shallow trenches;

* In an eight-year period, DOE has had 740 NPDES (National Pollution Discharge Elimination System) violations at its three Oak Ridge facilities; and

* Recent spills of strontium-90 resulted in shutting the water intake system for the City of Kingston. City officials were notified one day after DOE had notified workers at the Gaseous Diffusion Plant not to use the water.

Notwithstanding other unknown dangers, DOE has estimated that the cost for clean-up of their facilities will run to over $800 million. As recently enacted laws, such as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and Superfund Law (CERCLA), and recently promulgated standards, such as National Emission Standard for Hazardous Air Pollutants, are applied by the federal and state EPA’s, more information will become known about DOE past disposal and operating practices.

The Tennessee Valley Energy Coalition (TVEC) is one Tennessee citizen organization leading the fight to keep the proposed temporary nuclear waste facility out of Tennessee and to make DOE correct past sins before proceeding with any new projects. TVEC has recently organized Americans for a Clean Environment, a local group which is monitoring past and future DOE activities at Oak Ridge. The organizations recently delivered petitions to the state capitol representing the opposition of over 100,000 Tennesseans to the MRS facility. The Sierra Club Radioactive Waste Campaign is working with TVEC, the Highlander Center, Tennessee Chapter of the Sierra Club, and other Tennessee groups to halt the spread of groundwater contamination from Oak Ridge facilities.

Joanne Thompson, Ph.D., is executive director of the Tennessee Valley Energy Coalition and an adjunct faculty member with the University of Tennessee School of Social Work. TVEC’s address is 1407 East 5thAuenz e, Knoxville, TN 37917. Call 615-637-6055. This article, and the one following [Debra Castaldo. “Oak Ridge Wastes Varied, Extensive”] are reprinted from The Sierra Club Waste Paper, published quarterly by the Sierra Club Radioactive Waste Campaign, 625 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

Millions of Pounds of Uranium–Oak Ridge Wastes Varied, Extensive

By Debra Castaldo

Vol. 8, No. 2, 1986, pp. 16-17

The Oak Ridge Reservation (ORR) located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is owned and operated by the US Department of Energy (DOE). The ORR includes three plants: Y-12 Plant, Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant (ORGDP) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

The Y-12 and ORGDP plants produce nuclear materials for research and development and national defense. ORNL is involved in research and development. The Y-12 plant has four major responsibilities: (1) production of nuclear weapons components, (2) processing of source and special nuclear materials, such as highly enriched uranium, (3) support for weapons-design laboratories, and (4) support to other government agencies. Activities include the production of lithium compounds, the recovery of enriched uranium from nonirradiated scrap materials, and the fabrication of uranium and other materials into finished parts and

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assemblies for use in the plutonium production reactors at the Savannah River Plant.

The ORGDP is a complex of production, research, development and support facilities located at the western edge of the City of Oak Ridge. The primary function of ORGDP is the enrichment of uranium hexaflouride (UFO) in the uranium-235 isotope. Extensive efforts are also expended on research and development associated with laser isotopic separation and the gaseous diffusion and gas centrifuge processes. DOE is closing down the production of UFO at ORGDP.

ORNL is a large multi-purpose research laboratory. Facilities consist of nuclear reactors, chemical pilot plants, research laboratories, and support facilities.

Hazardous wastes, such as lead, cadmium, methylene chloride, thorium, uranium, perchloryethlene, mercury, and various radionucleides contaminate local groundwater. Fifty-one million pounds of uranium are buried at the ORR. One of the main pathways of pollution to humans is through drinking water supplies. Water that drains the ORR enters the Clinch River and is subsequently conveyed to the Tennessee River at Kingston, Tennessee. The Clinch River is the source of most water used in the Oak Ridge area. Water supplies for Clinton, Oak Ridge, Kingston and DOE facilities are drawn from the Clinch River. In addition, waste waters from ORR are discharged directly and indirectly by a system of tributaries in the Clinch River.

Water analysis of the Clinch River shows the water quality to be highly turbid. Cadmium, copper, iron, lead, mercury, nickel, silver, and zinc concentrations all exceed EPA criteria for protection of acquatic life. Iron and manganese exceed drinking water standards. ORNL was issued a notice of non-compliance by the State of Tennessee (October 26, 1983) for water pollution violations. In December 1985, strontium-90 levels in the Clinch River exceeded even DOE’s lax standards, and water intakes for the City of Kingston were shut down.

DOE is considering centralizing the ORR waste disposal facilities. Currently each facility has its own disposal area. Proposals for a central waste disposal facility for all ORR plants favoring a trench system were published in a Draft Environmental Impact Statement September 1984. Since soil permeability is quite low, the landfill alternative is favored over an above-ground system. But the hydrogeology of the site is quite complex, and migration is difficult to predict.

Debra Castaldo is a freelance writer with ten years experience in private industry and state/federal government environmental management programs.

Claude Ramsay, 1916-1986

By Bill Minor

Vol. 8, No. 2, 1986, pp. 17-18

In death, Claude Ramsay belatedly was paid homage the other day by a lot of big politicians and some of his long-time foes around the Legislature as the best friend working people in Mississippi ever had.

It was extraordinary, of course, for a labor leader in this state to be accorded such recognition because organized labor has never been regarded as a political force here comparable to most other states. Nor was Ramsay a beloved figure in many political circles.

No doubt, the Ramsay family and those who toiled with Ramsay in the vineyard to keep the labor union movement alive in Mississippi were pleased that Claude was appreciated.

But it occurred to me that if people in government and those who influence government want to pay a more lasting tribute to the memory of Claude Ramsay, it would be to correct one of the chief wrongs in our state that Claude spent the last years of his life trying to correct.

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That is the unconscionable system of compensating injured workers in Mississippi, a system in which benefits allowed by state law border on cruel and inhumane punishment of those so unfortunate to be hurt on the job.

Mississippi was the last state in the nation to enact a Workers Compensation Law in 1948, to assure compensation for workers who suffer job-related injuries or illness without having to go to court or prove who was at fault.

For years Ramsay had been the point man in trying to get the Mississippi Legislature to upgrade benefits for injured workers to a level of decency comparable to most other states.

The sad facts are that Mississippi’s benefits for job-related injuries have fallen behind all other states to the point that the economic worth of a Mississippi laboring man or woman seems to be only a fraction of other American workers.

A Mississippi worker who loses an arm on the job can expect to be compensated $25,200, while an Alabama worker with the same injury would receive $48,840; a South Carolina worker $63,144 and a worker in Iowa–a farm state which in many ways resembles Mississippi–would be paid $133,250.

The loss of an eye by a Mississippi worker carries only $12,600 in benefits, but $24,800 in Louisiana, $27,280 in Alabama, $21,862 in Arkansas and $92,400 in Pennsylvania.

At the heart of the inadequate Mississippi workers’ benefits is the pitifully low maximum weekly benefits permitted an injured worker in this state. Now at $133 a week, it is considerably below every other state in the nation (Alabama $303, Louisiana $248).

Ramsay had waged a losing battle against the powerful business lobby which consistently in the past worked on the Legislature to hold down the maximum weekly benefits to only small annual increases.

While most states have adopted a system of maximum weekly benefits based on two-thirds of the state’s average weekly wages, the Mississippi Legislature has held the line to a specific amount.

Translated into a yearly amount, the $133 weekly payment allowed an injured Mississippi worker adds up to $6,916, which is below the poverty level. That means, for instance, a truck driver making $600 to $700 a week who injures his back and is laid up for six months would have only $133 a week in compensation to take care of his family.

Although Mississippi Workers Compensation Law is now almost forty years old, the maximum 450 weeks of compensation, regardless of injury, has remained in the law.

Some business organizations have even touted Mississippi’s low compensation as a selling point to attract industry to the state. In 1981 the state Supreme Court held under the existing state law, a worker in Mississippi had no job protection if he filed a worker’s compensation claim. The court went so far as to suggest that the Legislature should adopt the Texas law which guarantees a worker cannot be fired for filing a compensation claim.

Ramsay had valiantly tried to get the Legislature to outlaw retaliatory firings of any workers who made compensation claims, but again he met a wall of business resistance led by the Mississippi Manufacturers Association.

Hoping to break the long-standing stalemate in the Legislature over upgrading the injured worker’s benefits, Marshall Bennett, chairman of the Mississippi Worker’s Compensation Commission, two months ago brought the opposing forces together with legislative chairmen who handle compensation leglislation in hopes of reaching a compromise on revising the law.

Ramsay, as labor’s spokesman, and a representative of the Mississippi Trial Lawyers Association, which sides with labor in the controversy, sat down with the manufacturers and other business representatives, the legislative leaders, and Bennett. They hammered out a compromise just a week before Ramsay died.

Although the compromise measure emerged intact from the House Insurance subcommittee, House members failed to pass the bill.

Claude wasn’t around for the demise of this year’s workers’ benefits bill. But in lieu of eulogies and flowers, I’m sure he would rather see injured Mississippi workers get a better deal.

Longtime Mississippi political columnist Bill Minor lives in Jackson.

Claude Ramsay-A Life for Mississippi workers

By Steve Riley

Vol. 8, No. 2, 1986, pp. 19, 21

When Claude Ramsay retired late last year, the longtime Mississippi labor chief started shopping for a shotgun. After twenty-six turbulent years of fighting racism and anti-union sentiment in a state steeped in conservative traditions, Ramsay said he was ready for the serenity of the piney woods and the open water.

“I’m getting ready to do some fishing and hunting,” Ramsay told an interviewer in September.

Ramsay’s hunting season was short-lived, however. He died in his sleep at his home in west Jackson January 18, barely a month after stepping down as director of Mississippi’s AFL-CIO. While Ramsay, who was sixty-nine, had talked a good game about relaxing in retirement, few who knew him believe he would have strayed far from his primary passion: assisting the less fortunate, particularly through politics.

“He was always pulling for the underdog,” said Wayne Dowdy of McComb, Mississippi’s Fourth District congressman, whose shocking 1981 election was made possible by Ramsay’s endorsement. “He was going to stay right in the middle of politics. He gave me every assurance he would be active. That was Claude’s way. He wasn’t one to sit on the sidelines.”

Sitting on the sidelines would have been safer during the turbulent 1960s. While Mississippi boiled with racial turmoil, Ramsay took perhaps the two most risky positions for a white Mississippian still living in his home state: he tried to build a base of organized labor and supported-no, campaigned for-equal rights for blacks.

“He was really in double jeopardy,” said Norman Hill, a former civil-rights worker and now president of the A. Phillip Randolph Institute. “He showed tremendous courage.”

Herb Mabry, head of the Georgia AFL-CIO, summed up Ramsay’s positions succinctly. “He had guts when it took guts to have guts,” Mabry said. Ramsay also had something to back up his guts – a double barreled shotgun he carried on the front seat of his car during his travels across Mississippi. That gun was stolen after the civil-rights battles died down, and Ramsay never had it replaced. But he never regretted arming himself. “In November 1975, I went to a victory party for (former Governor) Cliff Finch,” Ramsay said in September. “A little sawed-off bastard came up to me and said, ‘Claude Ramsay, you’re about the ugliest SOB I’ve ever seen.’ He said he was a former member of the Ku Klux Klan and that he had an assignment to bump me off one time. I said, ‘I’m glad you never got around to it. It may have been that you were scared you might get your ass blown off.’

“I didn’t come back from World War II to run from some SOB with a sheet over his head.”

As Ramsay told that story, he chuckled with a degree of self-satisfaction. His always raspy voice had grown gruffer, his prominent nose looked larger and redder than in years past. A bout with throat cancer had forever extinguished what had been an ever-present cigar. But as he approached retirement, Ramsay appeared content–not that he had accomplished everything he had wanted, but that he had given it his best arm-twisting effort.

It was never easy for labor and Claude Ramsay. In 1959, when he was elected to his first term as president of the state organization, Mississippi labor unions counted 35,000 members. Ramsay’s work boosted membership to 50,000 in 1960; it peaked in 1980 at slightly above 100,000. Membership since then slipped to about 80,000 which Ramsay, a hard-line Democrat, attributed to anti-labor actions by the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan.

Even as the labor ranks swelled during the 1970s, Ramsay’s influence on state government was never overpowering. Though he influenced a sizeable chunk of votes, his bouts in the Legislature often ended in disappointment. Mississippi’s workers’ compensation laws remain among the nation’s weakest, and Ramsay’s ultimate goal, a state Department of Labor, remains a dream.

But Ramsay is given credit for effective voter-registration drives in the 60s, which syndicated columnist and veteran political observer Bill Minor said “helped blacks more than they will ever know.” And his coalition of labor and blacks also was a positive factor in

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the landmark education reform legislation in 1982.

Ramsay backed his share of political losers, going it alone in 1972 for George McGovern, a most unpopular politician in the Deep South. He also campaigned hard in 1964 for Lyndon Johnson, a national winner who was swamped by Barry Goldwater in Mississippi.

Ramsay often said his political “high-water mark” came with Dowdy’s election in 1981. In a special election to replace the resigning Jon Hinson, Dowdy stunned Republican Liles Williams in the GOP-dominated Fourth District. Dowdy had emerged from a crowded Democratic field after he endorsed extension of the Voting Rights and Ramsay rallied the labor troops.

That victory was heady stuff for the Ocean Springs, Mississippi, native, who got his first involvement in union organizing in 1939 when he went to work for International Paper Company in Moss Point, Mississippi. That job had come about after Ramsay’s fiery personality had helped ease him out of higher education. He briefly attended Gulf Coast Junior College, where he had a job milking cows.

“I got into a cuss fight with the guy who was in charge,” Ramsay recalled.

He then left school and went to work at the paper company, where he helped organize one of the state’s first industrial unions. He served in Europe in World War II and later returned to his Moss Point job as a shop steward. In 1950, he was elected president of his union local and in 1959 he was asked to direct the AFL-CIO.

It was in the Army that Ramsay met a soldier who would strengthen his already growing resistance to racial hatred. He said a black French Moroccan joined his unit and “became a favorite of everybody in the company. And all of them were Southern boys. I was never taught to hate black people. But it set me to thinking.”

Those thoughts started to crystallize in the early 1960s, when Ramsay faced some tough choices. Ramsay said he worked and spoke out for civil rights because racial tensions were chasing away industry and because he thought segregation was wrong.

A speech in 1962 to the Metal Trades Council in his native Jackson County thrust him into the civil-rights spotlight. In the speech, Ramsay spoke out against racism, saying violence could prompt the federal government to take contracts away from Ingalls Shipbuilding, a major defense contractor. And he came to the defense of a Pascagoula newspaper editor Ira B. Harkey, Jr., who had written that a group of local citizens were “goons” after they traveled to Oxford to support segregation at the University of Mississippi.

Harkey won a Pulitzer Prize for his civil rights editorials and later wrote a book, The Smell of Burning Crosses. He credited Ramsay with turning the tide in Jackson County. “It was a helluva gutsy thing to do,” Harkey said. “Without him, God knows what would have happened.”

At the time of his retirement, Ramsay took the title president emeritus and turned over his authority to Thomas Knight, who had served under Ramsay as secretary-treasurer since 1960, and Neal Fowler, took Knight’s old job. Fowler said Ramsay wanted to stay involved.

“Just the other day he and I were sitting and talking about plans,” Fowler said. “I think it really struck him that day. He realized he was going to retire. I can remember seeing tears in his eyes. It’s a shame that he didn’t get to enjoy his retirement.”

Others said Ramsay just wasn’t the type to sit around. “The kind of life he lived made up for not getting a long retirement,” said Robert Walker of Vicksburg, a Warren County supervisor and former field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. “He didn’t work for that.”

Steve Riley is a staff writer for the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger.

Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee by Robert J. Norrell. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. $19.95

Reviewed by Howard R. Lamar

Vol. 8, No. 2, 1986, pp. 21-24

In the preface to Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee, Robert J. Norrell writes that: “It is about power: whites trying to keep control of their society and blacks seeking more autonomy. In a larger sense, it is the story of two communities, one white and one black, in the painful process of merging into a single if different community.” On first impression that sounds like a political scientist or a sociologist speaking of revolutionary social and political change in abstract terms. Nothing could be further from the truth, for Reaping the Whirlwind may well be the most articulate, moving, personal and compassionate scholarly case study of the impact of the Civil Rights movement in the South to appear to date. It is both a tour de force of effective writing and a model of fairminded reporting. The interplay between the parade of vivid personalities in this book-judges, sheriffs, mayors, voter registrars, academics from the Tuskegee Institute and administrators from the local Veterans Hospital, is brillantly handled.

Reaping the Whirlwind focuses mainly on the thirty-

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one years between 1941 and 1972 when blacks and whites fought an intense battle as to who would control political offices in the City of Tuskegee, Ala., and the surrounding County of Macon. It was in 1941 that the softspoken Tuskegee Institute sociologist, Dean Charles Gomillion, organized the Tuskegee Civic Association, a group of black men and women, to achieve “civic democracy” by pressuring the Macon County Board of Registrars to enroll blacks as voters. That crusade came to an end, as it were, in 1972 when newly registered blacks, now the majority of voters in the County, elected blacks to nearly all the city and county offices as well as representatives to the state legislature. Best known among the winners were Lucius Amerson, a black sheriff who had held that off ce since 1966, and Johnny L. Ford, a former worker for Senator Robert Kennedy and Vice President Hubert Humphrey in the presidential campaign of 1968, who became Tuskegee’s first black mayor.

What distinguishes this study from many others, however, is that Norrell is as determined to understand the white conservative rationale for resisting black political power as he is in detailing the story of the triumph of the black voter. Norrell feels that the thoughts and actions of white conservatives were shaped by the community’s experiences during Reconstruction when recent ex-slaves were elected to political office under a Reconstruction state government. Believing that they had not only lost the Civil War but would lose control of their community, they organized to intimidate and drive out black political leaders between 1870 and 1874, when the election of governor George Houston symbolized the end of Reconstruction in Alabama. Norrell offers convincing evidence that memories of Reconstruction provided whites with the example of what would happen again if blacks ever gained political power.

After the violence of Reconstruction came a detente of sorts when whites, fearing that blacks might leave the county in such large numbers that the labor force would be depleted, sought to achieve “Perfect Quiet, Peace and Harmony”–a white conservative’s phrase–in race relations, in part by providing training schools. As has long been known, Tuskegee town fathers cooperated with Booker T. Washington in 1881 to found the Tuskegee Institute as a trade school, operating on the model of Hampton Institute in Virginia. Norrell, having seen Washington in the context of the actual situation in Tuskegee, comes away with a renewed respect for Washington’s realistic approach and his generally beneficial efforts for his race. At the same time he concludes that despite the presence of both Washington and George Washington Carver, the Institute actually did little for agriculture and the black farmer in Macon County.

Beginning with Washington and continuing through the term of his successor, Robert R. Moton, both Institute officials and Tuskegee whites worked to create a harmonious “model community” based on the separation of the races. Nevertheless Norrell contends that a black civil rights movement of sorts never ceased between 1870 and 1972. During his lifetime Washington was continually protesting anti-black state legislation, the poll tax, and in particular the disfranchisement of voters, both black and white, in the conservative State Constitution of 1901.

The hidden conflict surfaced anew in 1923 when a Veterans Administration Hospital for black soldiers was located in Tuskegee, and whites sought to control the key administrative positions. When they failed to do so, the long-term state senator from Tuskegee, Richard Holmes Powell, lamented that “The Negroes are gradually taking things away from us by contesting every inch of ground, refusing all compromise, and fighting to a finish.” Eventually the Veterans Hospital employed 1500 blacks with high-paying jobs. “In that base of economic independence,” writes Norrell, “lay the potential for challenging conservative control of Macon County.” Ironically, educated blacks with economic independence, two main themes of Booker T. Washington’s teaching, proved to be the key to success of the civil rights movement in Tuskegee.

The actual drive for voter registration started on an almost innocent note when Charles Gomillion, vouched for by two whites, registered to vote in 1939. He did so in part to secure paved roads and better water and sewage facilities for the black residential areas around the Institute. Norrell finds that Gomillion was a gradualist who felt that by cooperation between black and whites some kind of “civic democracy” could be achieved. The remainder of Reaping the Whirlwind is, at one level, the progressive disillusionment and political education of Gomillion, who, by the 1960s, had been replaced by a more militant black leadership which sought full power and not shared power. But until the 1960s it was Gomillion and the Tuskegee Civic Association who led the fight for registration, who instituted a successful boycott of local merchants, and who insisted on a gradual approach.

In 1941 with the coming of World War II, a third major force of potentially discontented blacks appeared in Macon County when Tuskegee Institute President Frederick Patterson persuaded the federal government to locate an Army Airforce Training Field in Tuskegee, a move the NAACP denounced as continuing segregation in the armed forces. Segregation between white officers and black trainees-many of the latter from the North and the Midwest-and conflict between black military police and white county police threatened major disruptions. A sense of escalating crisis developed as blacks from the Institute, the Hospital and the air base challenged the Board of Registrars in federal court in the case of Mitchell v. Wright. When the Board of Registrars resigned or registered white voters clandestinely, Governor James Folsom managed to find a religious farmer, W. H. Bentley, who believed all men equal in the sight of God, to serve as Registrar. Bentley registered 449 blacks in 1949, but was soon removed, and voter

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registration slowed again.

Norrell finds that paradoxically as white candidates came to depend more and more on black votes to be elected, the two sides had actually stopped talking to one another. Thus what Gomillion and the Tuskegee Civic Association and the new spokesman for the white conservatives, state Representative Samuel M. Engelhardt, Jr., had to say has to be told like two separated narratives. There followed in the 1950’s, in dramatic sequence, moves and counter moves. When Engelhardt and Mayor Richard Lightfoot got the state legislature to pass a law redefining the city’s boundaries so that most black voters would be excluded, the Civic Association responded by imposing a successful boycott on white merchants. Then in 1958 the newly formed United States Commission on Civil Rights heard evidence on voter discrimination in Tuskegee and ordered fuller registration. Meanwhile in Gomillion v. Lightfoot, the Supreme Court struck down the law gerrymandering the city’s boundaries.

At this point, cautious liberals in Tuskegee began to question the wisdom of Representative Engelhardt’s total denial of political rights for blacks; an accomodationist Mayor and City Council were elected in 1960, and a deeply religious local banker, J. Allen Parker, began to try to bridge the gap between the races through talk and action. Then suddenly the issue of school integration came to Tuskegee when the local school board was ordered to accept thirteen qualified black students into the all-white high school. School integration rather than voter registration, writes Norrell, “proved to be the first major transformation in race relations in Macon County,” for it split the white community in scores of ways, setting friend against friend, husband against wife, ministers against their congregations.

Norrell traces these schisms as well as the public conflicts between Governor George Wallace and the federal courts as represented by Judge Frank M. Johnson of Montgomery. He also explains the rise and success of the private school movement. In this recital he tries to be fair to all parties, but he is understandably less patient with the various Alabama governors who played politics with Tuskegee’s dilemma during the civil rights and school desegregation movements. In the end, school segregation was maintained and with the exception of the Church of Christ, the local churches did not integrate.

Paralleling the agonizing dissensions on the white side, there was a split between Gomillion and the more militant Non-Partisan League led by Paul Puryear, a young faculty member at the Institute, and by Detroit

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Lee of the Veterans Hospital, who sought to elect blacks to all offices. Soon thereafter a new movement by Institute students began, reflecting national black unrest during the 1960s and using the popular techniques of marches, demands, and sit-ins to secure jobs for blacks in white-run Tuskegee stores, to have the Confederate statue removed from the town square, and to register voters. Their acts led to conflict between the students and the Institute Board of Trustees and to a tragic individual confrontation when a black student, Samuel Young, was shot by a white gas station owner. Yet it was the students who managed to enroll 1600 rural blacks as voters and thus tipped future elections in favor of black candidates.

Understandably Norrell cannot suppress his excitement that somehow out of this painful saga, majority rule democracy had come to Tuskegee and had affected all sectors of life except for the integration of schools and churches. Yet while acknowledging that a major social and political revolution had occurred in this small Alabama community, he believes that there is continuity between Washington and Gomillion and between the Confederate veterans of 1870 and their successors, Probate Judge William Varner, the Board of Registrars, the mayors, Representative Engelhardt and the White Citizens Councils.

However, I think there is a third unstated continuity in Reaping the Whirlwind which helps explain both the long and tortured progress towards civil rights for blacks in Tuskegee and the American South, and the behavior of nearly all the protagonists in this troubled story. It is that tradition of deference found in all class and settled societies, exacerbated in the South by racial feelings. It is deference not merely of black for white, but black for black, white for white, sons and daughters for parents, men for women and women for men in the American South. That deference helped preserve segregation by stifling a dialogue between races; it suppressed debate within the white community; on occasion it may have forced violence to come before an honest exchange of views. Perhaps the greatest revolution in Tuskegee since the 1960s has been that so many contending groups have found their voice. The views of liberals and conservatives, of blacks and whites can be found in the local paper, and there–in hundreds more letters–can be found so many ideas, suggestions and protests that they suggest a latter-day revival of the reformers of the Jacksonian Period. Norrell is right in concluding that democracy with all its virtues and faults has now come to Tuskegee.

Even so there is also a new tone of mutual deference discernible in the Exchange Bank, in the Big Bear Supermarket, at the Veterans Hospital and among the mixed faculty at the Tuskegee Institute. It is this continuity, in a new context, that had led Norrell to speak with deep respect for the career and ideals of Charles Gomillion who, as he writes, “had been an emblem of interracial cooperation, a value which appears to be in ascendance in the county again by the late 1970’s.”

Based on many personal interviews, a careful attention to federal state, local records, newspapers, and the works of other scholars, Reaping the Whirlwind displays a thoroughness and a sensitivity to all points of view that it is exemplary. It avoids stereotypical heroes and villains, accepts no easy answers, and eschews moralizing. Reaping the Whirlwind has set high standards for future case studies–which are needed, for as Norrell himself has noted, “only when many of these stories are told will the South’s great social upheaval be well understood.”

Howard R. Lamar is William R. Coe Professor of American History, Yale University, and a native of Tuskegee.