Congressman Espy from Mississippi

By Bill Minor

Vol. 8, No. 6, 1986, pp. 1-3

A studious, mild-mannered Yazoo City attorney, thirty-two years old, wrote Mississippi political history on November 4, when he became the first black sent to the U.S. Congress from this state since 1883.

Mike Espy, a former assistant state attorney general, was a political unknown when he entered the Mississippi Second District race against Rep. Webb Franklin of Greenwood, a conservative white Republican and staunch supporter of President Reagan.

The last black Mississippian to sit in the U.S. House was John R. Lynch, a Reconstruction-era Republican. Espy is one of the young breed of black Democrats who have risen in the South in the post-Civil Rights era.

The Second District, covering the rich Mississippi River Delta, was created by the federal courts as a black-majority district with fifty-three percent black voting-age population. But the black voter edge was based on 1980 census statistics, and current estimates place the ratio of white to black eligible voters almost even. Twice-in 1982 and 1984-Robert Clark, a veteran black state legislator from Ebenezer, challenged for the Second District seat, each time losing to Franklin by one per cent of the vote. In both races, Clark got the white votes thought necessary to win (about twelve percent of all white Democratic ballots), but his black support fell short.

Espy’s victory–by a margin of 4,850 votes (2.3 percent of the total)–was primarily credited to his highly organized campaign that got out the black vote in impressive numbers, but there were several other important contributing factors, not least among them the disastrous farm economy in the Delta which many

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white farmers blamed on Reagan farm policies.

Several thousand white farmers who formerly supported Franklin are believed to have “voted with their rumps” by staying home on election day. However, many other white farmers deliberately went to the polls and did something they never dreamed of doing before–they voted for a black to represent them in Washington.

Espy had won endorsements from influential white Democratic politicians, among them the sheriffs of Warren (Vicksburg) and Grenada counties. Generally, more white politicos in the district publicly identified with Espy’s campaign than they had with Clark’s. Two highly regarded young white Democratic state elected officials, State Auditor Ray Mabus and Secretary of State Dick Molpus, campaigned in the district with Espy.

Espy’s $50,000 campaign deficit–small by comparison with most major Democratic bids for Congress in recent years–was quickly erased three weeks after the election at a thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner sponsored by Gov. Bill Allain and Mississippi Democratic Chairman Steve Patterson. Some of Jackson’s biggest bankers and businessmen came out to meet with Espy.

When Clark twice failed to whip Franklin, the political wisdom indicated that blacks would have to wait until after the next census and another court-ordered redistricting to win the Second.

Consequently, no “name” black politician would take on Franklin in 1986. Without fanfare, and without seeking the blessing of the black political elders, Espy quietly gave up his job in the state attorney -general’s office and began to organize his campaign in November 1985. At first, many veteran black politicians resisted Espy. They felt he had not worked in the vineyard during harder times. Others were wary because he comes from a somewhat privileged background in the black community. (His family for years has owned a chain of funeral homes and burial insurance companies across the Delta.)

Eventually, most of the black political veterans warmed up to Espy’s sincere, hard-working style and helped pull him through the Democratic primary last June over two well-financed white moderates who aggressively sought black votes. Some, like Mayor Charles Evers of Fayette, never came around. Evers supported Franklin, saying “I stick with the ones in power, cause they can help me.”

From the start, many political observers underestimated Espy’s political ability because of his shy, reticient personality. Franklin discounted the latest black threat after a July poll showed him twenty points ahead of Espy. After that, Franklin took no more polls. For that matter, neither did Espy, who conserved his money for his last three-week media campaign, and to put gas in cars to get voters to the polls.

Espy deliberately ran a low-profile campaign through September and early October, partly to keep down racial polarization and also to keep his opponent guessing. Then in the stretch, he went head-to-head with Franklin on farm policy, Social Security, drugs and any other issue he could tie to Franklin’s voting record. He held his own with Franklin in a televised debate less than a week before the election (by comparison, Clark, a less-polished speaker, might have been outmatched).

Hand-picked by no organization, Espy maintained independence in running his campaign, in contrast with the 1984 Clark campaign which was virtually taken over by the AFL-CIO. Nor did Espy allow the Rev. Jesse Jackson to visit during the general election campaign, a move that some observers believe could have resulted in last-minute white backlash.

In October, Espy had been taken to a National Democratic Party Gala in Washington as a guest of white Clarksdale attorney Walter Thompson, a member of the Democratic National Finance Council. Espy was seated at a table with Joseph P. Kennedy III, the Congressional successor to Tip O’Neill. Espy and Kennedy apparently became instant friends.

The bright young Espy shies away from historic comparisons as the first black Mississippi Congressman in a hundred and three years, or as a new hero of his race. He has often said, “I just want to be known as Mike Espy,

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Mississippian.”

Whether Espy can be Mississippian and Congressman after the 1988 elections is the unanswered question from his victory in 1986. In the election aftermath, observers debated the size of Espy’s white vote district-wide. Exact figures are unavailable because racial breakdowns at the precinct level are unreliable in Mississippi’s electron system. Espy’s own campaign people and State Democratic Party officials believe his white vote exceeded the twelve percent Clark is believed to have had in the benchmark 1982 race. A spot-check of a ninety percent white precinct in Warren County, for instance, indicated Espy got twenty-four percent of the white vote.

But white civil rights activist Rims Barber of Jackson disagreed. Using selected precincts, Barber’s analysis indicates that Espy may have gotten a smaller percentage of white votes than Clark.

Because of the importance of understanding the racial voting patterns, the Joint Center for Political Studies, a black-run research institution in Washington, is reported to be planning a comprehensive study of the vote in each of the district’s three hundred and eighty-two precincts.

Such analysis is especially significant in the ongoing debate over what percentage of black eligible voters a district must have to be a “safe” black seat. Espy’s electoral margin over Franklin was whisker-thin, and appears to have been at least partly due to white voters staying home.

Whatever the percentage of white crossover votes, the turnout numbers of 1984 strongly suggest that Espy may have to get twenty thousand more votes, black and/or white, if he is to prevail in a re-election bid during a presidential election year.

Bill Minor, a veteran observer of Mississippi politics, lives in Jackson.

Locking Up Liberty in the Atlanta Pen

By Joe Dolman

Vol. 8, No. 6, 1986, pp. 3-5

The granite fortress occupies the ridge on McDonough Boulevard with imperial authority. Its gray steel and concrete outer wall stands as tall as thirty-seven feet and as thick as four feet; it seals off twenty-eight acres. In its eighty-five years, the bloody and decrepit Atlanta Federal penitentiary has housed prisoners as different as Al Capone and Eugene V. Debs. Yet nothing can quite match the task to which it is now put.

Today the pen holds some eighteen hundred Cuban inmates in absolute disregard of constitutional principles, in conditions of crowded squalor and in an atmosphere of persistent violence. It contains a travesty that has few parallels in our history.

Its inmates were among the 130,000 Cuban refugees who arrived in the United States in the 1980 Mariel boatlift. Between three hundred and four hundred of them have been imprisoned in Atlanta for more than six years; the others trickled into the pen later, after an initial period of freedom in this country. As “excludable aliens,” they are not entitled to constitutional protections. Yet as Cubans, Fidel Castro has forbidden their return home. So year after year, the federal government “detains” them. The question of who remains locked up and who eventually goes free is determined by administrative decree; terms of imprisonment are open-ended.

It is a policy that has proven disastrous. Between May 1980 and September 1986, there were ten inmate murders in the pen, seven suicides, at least one hundred and fifty-eight serious suicide attempts and more than four thousand episodes of self mutilation. While Atlanta’s Cuban inmates are just five percent of the total federal prison population, they have accounted for ten percent of the system’s homicides, more than a third of its inmate-to-staff assaults and half of its inmate-to-inmate assaults.

Now maybe it is reasonable to wonder: aren’t most of these inmates violent criminals anyway? Murderers, rapists and the like? Well, that is what the U.S. Justice Department has long argued. But the truth is, the Cuban prisoners are a diverse lot.

The first wave of inmates wound up in Atlanta after they answered “yes” to the questions about previous imprisonments in Cuba. Never mind that some had simply misunderstood the question or that others had done time back home for such crimes as stealing food. All were sent to the pen, where their institutional behavior, not their purported crimes, determined whether they would be released. (Cuban records are not available to federal officials.)

Those who didn’t go straight to the slammer–the overwhelming majority of refugees–eventually entered American society as “parolees.” Most handled the adjustment well. Still, paroles could be revoked at athe government’s pleasure, and as the number of original inmates declined, failed parolees took their place. The feds revoked parole if a refugee had no visible means of support, no fixed address or no American sponsor. Some refugees wound up in the pen for violating curfews or travel restrictions or for failure to participate in certain government programs.

To be sure, others landed in the pen after they ran afoul of American laws. Some were convicted of serious crimes here such as murder, armed robbery, drug dealing and assault. But others were sent to Atlanta for lesser infractions like driving while intoxicated. Sometimes criminal charges alone (rather than convictions) could send Marielitos to the pen. Sometimes regufees were transferred to Atlanta after they had completed sentences in state and city lockups.

Some do leave federal custody eventually, after Immigration and Naturalization Service decides they are eligible. Interestingly, of the two hundred inmates INS has released to halfway houses since September 1985, not a single person has gone back to prison. Until recently, the feds clung to the flimsy hope that the other Marielitos would remain behind bars until they could be returned to Cuba. Although two hundred and one inmates were

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returned during a brief thaw in relations several years ago, Castro scrapped the program when the White House put Radio Marti on the air.

Finally, in November, the administration softened its stance. It announced a program to move hundreds of Cubans (nobody knows the precise number yet) from Atlanta to a new minimum-security lockup in Oakdale, Louisiana, in preparation for parole. It’s an improvement, but a limited one. INS standards for eligibility remain vague; the agency simply says it will look for inmates with good prison records whose offenses were not violent. Moreover, the feds plan to replace them with Marielitos considered unreleasable who are now imprisoned in other institutions. (In all, the government has two thousand, five hundred “detainees” in custody.)

So, despite the new parole policy, the dilemma will remain. It is exacerbated by this fact: the pen has long been considered a dangerously dilapidated place. A prolonged series of murders by American inmates in the late 1970s made the feds decide to close it, and by 1980 the U.S. Bureau of Prisons had begun to relocate the inmate population. Then came the Cubans.

At times since the arrival of the Marielitos, the overcrowding has been almost unbelievable. When investigators from a House judiciary subcomittee visited in early 1986, for example, they found as many as eight men jammed into cells that measure two hundred and ten square feet (an average of seven feet by four feet per inmate). A stem-to-stern renovation is in the works now, but details have not been released. In any case, the remodeling will be decades late. Today the joint is a monument to outdated notions of penology.

Its five massive cellhouses resemble–literally–warehouses inside, where one sees nothing but steel bars, brick walls and concrete floors. Each house contains five tiers of dark, fetid cells. Human voices and clanking doors and food trays create a mad cacophony that would have inspired Dante to new levels.

Until recently, about half the pen’s inmates were held in their cells for all but an hour a day as punishment for a 1984 riot (that consisted mainly of expensive vandalism). As of last March, only twenty-seven of the staff’s two hundred and seventy-nine guards spoke Spanish. In late September, reports in the Atlanta media disclosed a federal investigation of charges that payoffs were made to INS officials in exchange for the early release of some inmates. Apparently, the case is still open.

In such conditions, it’s no mystery why prisoners routinely get violent or lose their sanity and mutilate themselves. The real question is: Why hasn’t the government done more, and acted sooner, to relieve this situation? Ultimately, the government is a prisoner, too- to a policy that costs $40 million a year and puts guards and prisoners alike in constant danger. It’s not as if suggestions for a resolution to this mess were never heard. In fact, three years ago, U.S. District Judge Marvin Shoob of Atlanta formulated a rather neat solution.

He ruled that the government does have the authority

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to detain excludable aliens indefinitely. But, he said, “after an initial period of time during which detention may reasonably be imposed,” further incarceration must be justified with evidence that a detainee, if released, is likely to abscond, pose a risk to national security or pose a threat to American persons or property.

Shoob granted the inmates limited constitutional rights–including a right to counsel, a “presumption of releasability,” and a right to prior written notice of factual allegations supporting continued detention. In short, he told the Justice Department: Either prove your cases against the inmates or set them free. Unfortunately, this order and others like it have been shot down by an obstinate Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The volleys between the two courts have grown remarkably personal. In January 1985, Circuit Judge Robert S. Vance complained that Shoob had exceeded his “very, very narrow” authority and poached on the prerogatives of the executive branch. “The issue here is whether the president of the United States or the attorney general…has to go into Judge Shoob’s courtroom and prove to him why he did what he did,” Vance grumbled in an opinion. Earlier Vance had told an attorney for the inmates in court: “The government can keep them in the Atlanta pen until they die.”

For now, Vance’s word is law–but what a strange kind of law it is. The Justice Department holds itself hostage to an administrative nightmare. It inflicts on the Cubans misery equal to anything Castro might have devised. At bottom, its policy expresses lack of confidence in some bedrock, American, tried-and-true constitutional principles. What is everyone so afraid of?

Joe Dolman is an editorial writer for the Atlanta Constitution.

Palmer Weber, 1914-1986

By Patricia Sullivan

Vol. 8, No. 6, 1986, pp. 5-7

In 1948, Palmer Weber and Louis Burnham organized Henry Wallace’s third party campaign in the South. Building on earlier voter registration and education efforts, the Southern campaign focused primarily on the issue of civil rights. Wallace’s Progressive Party also challenged the segregation system and culminated with his tour of the region in the fall of 1948. Despite a violent reception, Wallace campaigned in seven Southern states and was the first presidential candidate to address nonsegregated audiences in the South. On election day, the Progressive Party suffered a disastrous defeat at the polls, but “defeat” was not an operative word for Palmer Weber. A year after the election, he wrote to Wallace praising his enormous courage during his Southern tour, “which gave profound heart to all the oppressed elements in the South.” He chided those who would lose hope: “The mere fact that the battle continues, that we get tired and discouraged is no proper measure of accomplishment. We have no right to even stop so long as one person’s rights are not fully sustained. This is the most simple and accurate moral principal which has sustained you and your leadership.”

Continuing effort on behalf of political, economic and social justice was the leitmotiv of Palmer Weber’s life. It was a life that incorporated a wide variety of experiences and associations, accented with good cheer and enormous generosity of spirit. Palmer often referred to himself as “an accumulation of accidents.” But there was a simplicity of purpose and steady determination that shaped his sojourn. Palmer’s creative participation in the major reform movements of the twentieth century will be remembered by historians. The significance of this life, however, speaks of a man who mastered the art of living.

Palmer Weber was born in 1914 in Smithfield, Va., a small rural town on the James River. Diagnosed at the age of twelve as having tuberculosis, he was sent to the Blue Ridge Sanitorium outside Charlottesville. Palmer remembered this as “a fabulous piece of luck.” While selling newspapers on the wards of the sanitorium he met a variety of adults who undertook to educate him. They included socialists, Gandhiites, Baptist ministers–“a whole collection of people in the midst of dying and getting well, all of whom were concerned about the state of the human soul, the state of economics and politics.” Palmer was reaing Foreign Affairs and Current History at the age of thirteen. He read the first volumes of Plato’s Dialogues, the Buddhist Sutras, and Gandhi’s Young India. It was, he recalled, “a magic mountain type of experience where you had a continual dialogue going on.” At seventeen he enrolled in the University of Virginia with a determination to study philosophy knowing that he “wanted to be a wise man, a good man an ethical man.”

Palmer came to the University on scholarship and to maintain it worked diligently to stay at the head of his

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class. He succeeded in doing so not only in philosophy, but in economics, mathematics, Greek, and biology as well. Virginius Dabney’s history of the University of Virginia describes Palmer as probably the most brilliant student at Virginia during the 1930s. In addition to his studies, he immersed himself in student politics. He was, he recalled, “a Christian-Socialist, Buddhist, Ghandi type person…any kind of variation where it was a questioning of authority or where an effort was made to bring justice.” Palmer organized the Marxist study group, joined in establishing a branch of the National Student League at the University, and successfully led a challenge to fraternity control of student government. His political activities also addressed the broader concerns of race and class stirred by the depression. He helped to organized a union for hospital workers at the University hospital, and worked as a labor organizer at a local textile mill. From the beginning, civil rights was central to Palmer’s political concerns. He raised money for the Scottsboro defendants and campaigned for the admission of Alice Jackson, a black woman, to the University of Virginia. The Jackson case marked the beginning of the NAACP’s twenty-year legal battle for school desegration, culminating in Brown v. Board of Education. In his column for the student newspaper, Palmer called for federal legislation against lynching, decrying the South’s “decades long violation of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution.” By the time he was awarded his Ph.D., it was not surprising that this most brilliant student was unable to obtain a teaching position in a Southern university.

Undeterred, Palmer Weber found his way to Washington where he worked as an economic advisor to several Congressional committees, and wrote speeches for a number of Senators. Palmer embraced the New Deal as a reaffirmation of national citizenship rights and found opportunities to try and implement his social ideas. He organized a legislative campaign to abolish the poll tax, lobbied for the continuation of the Fair Employment Practices Committee (which prohibited racially discriminatory hiring practices in defense industries), and led the fight for a Soldiers’ Vote Bill. When it became clear that conservatives in Congress could effectively block all New Deal legislation, Palmer joined the newly established CIO-Political Action Committee. In addition to working for the election of New Deal candidates, this first national PAC concentrated on strengthening the New Deal coalition through a nationwide voter registration effort. Largely due to Palmer’s initiative, the CIO-PAC coordinated its effort with the NAACP, in what became the most ambitious voter registration drive in the South up to that time. From 1944 to 1948 the number of registered black voters in the South tripled. In 1946 Palmer became the first Southern white man to serve on the National Board of the NAACP.

In an article on “The Negro Vote in the South,” written while still a student at the University of Virginia, Palmer observed that reform “lost its most valuable ally, when the Negro was denied active citizenship. Equal access to the ballot, Palmer believed, was essential to securing a more just society, and he dedicated himself to that struggle. His commitment and unique abilities helped shape the early civil rights movement. Virginia Durr, who first worked with Palmer in the anti-poll tax fight, recalls: “Palmer could get hold of something, organize it and set it into motion, action, and people began to develop around it. Palmer was the moving spirit behind eveyone else. He was full of vitality and able to attract people. The essential thing was that he had such a burning desire to get this thing done, to get the people in the South the right to vote, and to end the segregation system.”

Henry Wallace’s 1948 Progressive Party campaign in the South was a continuation of the New Deal-inspired movement to open up the political process to the region to whites and blacks. Palmer Weber co-directed Wallace’s southern effort along with Louis Burnham. Looking back on that campaign thirty years later,

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Palmer recalled, “if there was one thing the Progressive Party did positively and effectively in the South it was to challenge the segregation system everywhere–in public facilities, public speaking, blacks running for public office. In every city we conducted registration drives to register black voters. For example, in Greensboro, N.C., at AT College we managed to have about thirty-five black students. They qualified three thousand black voters and the next year they elected the first black city councilman since Reconstruction. Randolph Blackwell ran that campaign.”

For Blackwell, his association with Palmer Weber in the 1948 Wallace campaign helped shape his life-long commitment to advancing economic and political justice. Blackwell remembered, “Palmer had as much influence on my professional development as anybody. We were always delighted when Palmer would come to North Carolina AT during the ’48 campaign. He had a great influence on those of us whose lives he touched to dedicate ourselves to the task of ridding the society of racial discrimination.” (After completing a law degree at Howard, and several years of teaching, Randolph Blackwell went on to work with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1966 he founded Southern Rural Action, a non-profit corporation dedicated to helping small, poor and mostly black communities in the South become self-reliant economically and politically).

The Progressive Party campaign was also the culmination of the New Deal-inspired movement for economic justice and political reform in the South. During the 1950s, Palmer, like so many others, was subject to Congressional investigation of his political beliefs. As organizations and individuals collapsed in the face of McCarthyism, Palmer Weber and his compatriots from the Southern Conference for Human Welfare defended basic civil liberties. He and Clark Foreman helped found the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. In 1954, Virginia Durr, Jim Dombrowski, Myles Horton, and Aubrey Williams drew national attention when they defied Senator Eastland during his hearings on “subversive activities” in the South. Palmer praised their heroic behavior which he likened to a blood transfusion. “How wonderful you have made it to be Southern again!” He then went on to strategize on how they might “maintain and also spread out the pattern of moral resistance which you five established in New Orleans.”

These early opponents to racial discrimination recognized the obvious–that without securing the liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, the civil rights movement had no foundation. Palmer’s old friend, NAACP counsel and strategist Charles Houston, echoed this sentiment in response to President Truman’s loyalty program. “The only way I can make sure of my own liberty of action and freedom to agitate for what I believe to be right is to fight for the liberty of action and freedom to agitate for every man.” Wall Street, which prized financial acumen over “loyalty” tests, enabled Palmer to make a living for his family. He used that base during the 1960s to organize Businessmen against the War in Vietnam. And helped raise over $2 million on behalf of Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign.

Returning to his home state of Virginia in the 1970s, Palmer turned his attention again to voting rights. Equal participation in the political process had yet to be realized in many black communities throughout the South. Often, at-large systems of voting continue to inhibit black political representation. Following the renewal and strengthening of the Voting Rights Act in 1982, the Virginia ACLU affiliate began a legal challenge to at-large districts throughout the state. Palmer Weber and Leonard Dreyfus generously supported this effort and Palmer helped raise additional financial backing. Thus far, the Virginia ACLU has won every case it has filed. Early this past summer, Palmer convened a meeting of state and national officials of the ACLU to plan a long-term campaign which would implement the Virginia strategy throughout the South. Chan Kendrick, director of the Virginia ACLU, recalled that Palmer was one of the few people who had a sense of how much work still needed to be done. The civil rights movement of the 1960s had eliminated the most blatant forms of legalized discrimination. Full political participation, however, has yet to be realized and remains essential to securing full citizenship. As an organizer during the 1930s and 1940s, Palmer learned that the battle for political and economic justice required continuous, systematic effort.

Palmer commented shortly before his death that “Justice” was a key word for him, much as it was in Plato’s Republic. He asked, “What is your responsibility as a citizen to see to it that the body politic embodies justice?” Palmer spent a lifetime considering this problem and acting on it. He greeted the efforts of others engaged in its pursuit with great enthusiasm and generous support. All the while he was a master teacher, conducting a “floating seminar.” Nearly forty years ago, Palmer commended Henry Wallace “for not faltering on the simple principle of human rights which is not so simple after all, considering it underlies the American revolution of 1776 and the whole panorama of colonial movements throughout the world today.” During a half century of political activism, Palmer Weber never faltered.

Patricia Sullivan is associate director of the Center for the Study of Civil Rights and Lecturer in History, University of Virginia.

Behind the Numbers on Black Crime

By Gregg Barak

Vol. 8, No. 6, 1986, pp. 8-9

According to FBI figures for 1985, the four largest cities in Alabama–Birmingham, Mobile, Huntsville, and Montgomery–all registered increases in their crime rates that exceeded the national average of four percent. An overall increase in the crime rate of ten percent in Montgomery was the largest increase, more than doubling the national average.

Montgomery’s Mayor and the Chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, Emory Folmar, equated the increase in crime with the persistent problem of black-on-black crime. Referring to the annual FBI report or crime index totals, Folmar said, “if you look behind the numbers, you’ll see the major problem is still black-on-black crime.” The implications of his statement, heard not only in the South but in the North, East, and West as well, is that: if blacks would only stop murdering and raping each other then the problem of crime, for the most part, would go away.

The problem with Folmar’s analysis and that of so many other politicians and media commentators alike, including the law-and-order right, the neoconservative centrists, some of the more liberal democratic left, and far too many members of the black middle class, is that this analysis never actually looks either behind the official numbers of crime or behind the incidences of black-on-black crime. There are at least three related problems that arise out of these oversights.

First, everyone who takes these kinds of official explanations of crime seriously, fails to comprehend other dangers in the South and throughout the U.S. which pose far greater harm and threat to the vast majority of Americans, black or white. Second, these types of “blame the victim” analyses of crime tend to mystify black-on-black crime by focusing almost exclusively on the “symptoms” rather than on the “roots” of the problem. Third, by misdirecting our attention these explanations support the call for the expansion of public policy practices which have already increased the political and legal repression aimed not only directly at the victims and perpetrators of black-on-black crime, but also indirectly at the rest of the so-called law-abiding society through a reduction in all of our individual, constitutional, and civil rights. In a nutshell, these explanations of crime are dangerous precisely because they feed ammunition to those strategies of “crime control” which serve to exacerbate rather than to ameliorate the problem, inside and outside of the black community.

Crime, black-on-black or white-on-white, is not simply a question of individual “free-will” nor is it a question of racial and cultural “determinism.” Making sense out of all forms of “crime,” including those defined as against the law as well as those protected by the law, requires that we also examine the political and economic arrangements of a given neighborhood, community, state, region of the country, etc. All of these factors and others are important in sorting out the “roots” of crime, and all must be addressed if we are seriously interested in turning-the-tide against crime, whether we are talking about “street” crime or “suite” crime, whether we are talking about child neglect or wife abuse, environmental pollution or drug abuse.

Much of the distortion or mystification about crime has to do with the way criminals and crimefighters are portrayed in the news and on TV shows alike. AB the Washington Post has informed us, for example, “TV crimes are almost twelve times as likely to be violent as crimes committed in the real world.” Even when the media and various politicos are not focusing attention on black-on-black, brown-on-brown, or poor-on-poor crime, they are still misrepresenting the problem. The current preoccupation with drugs focuses almost entirely upon illicit cocaine and marijuana rather than licit alcohol and tobacco.

Sometimes, however, even the middle class and the affluent are depicted as engaging in ordinary, everyday criminal activity. But here the media, especially TV, once again misleads us by erroneously suggesting that these crimes take place in the streets rather than, more accurately, in the American workplaces and in the executive suites. This wrong impression sustains a false consensus that represents the dangers of crime as stemming from the relatively powerless rather than the relatively powerful.

As a consequence of these projections, blacks and whites alike are falling victim to the myth that black-on-black street crime represents the single most dangerous threat to the survival and well-being of the black community. In other words, to discuss black-on-black homicide without discussing homicide or crime in general, is to provide a partial picture of the crime story at best, and at worst, it is to be guilty of what Rev. [Joseph] Lowery of the SCLC has called “another form of racism.” By placing the statistics of black-on-black homicide in particular and of murder in general into a larger framework than the one provided by the FBI or the major networks, we are able to understand how the dangers of violent crime are distorted by emphasizing the killings in the street, especially those among the black underclass. After all, are there not other forms of external victimization to blacks, involving homicides and other assaultive acts short of death, that pose equal or more serious threats to the survival and unity of the black community?

We could discuss, for example, police homicides of civilians where blacks constitute forty-five percent of the

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deaths even though they represent about twelve percent , of the population. The Police Foundation in Washington, D.C., informs us that more than one-third of the killings of blacks and whites by the police have been unrelated to any type of crime whatsoever. AB for the state of affairs here in the South, Bernard D. Headley, formerly a Research Associate and Principal Investigator at Atlanta University’s Criminal Justice Institute, has recently written that “specific incidents of police homicide involving blacks as victims can be recalled ad infinitum.”

We could also cite victimization at the workplace or economic victimization in general to further dispel the myth of black-on-black crime or of poor-on-poor crime as the most disturbing threats to working class communities, black or white. AB Jeffrey Reiman’s well-documented book, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison (1984) reveals: workplace injuries cause some 14,200 deaths annually, and some 100,000 people die each year of diseases that can be traced to coal tar, dust, asbestos, and other substances. Almost all of these deaths are preventable by safety devices and/or by the enforcement of existing and non-existing laws designed to protect workers’ hearth. In the South where unions are weak or non-existent and where “right to work laws” prevail, it is a safe bet that we receive our disproportionate share of workplace victimization. The point, in any event, is that street crime may take a life every twenty-three minutes, but a death resulting from a preventable industrial cause occurs every four minutes.

With respect to economic victimization, we could argue as Headley has done “that the daily rip-offs that black and other low-income groups experience at the hands of ghetto merchants represent an even greater economic and material threat than do ‘street’ property crimes.” Whether we are referring to bait-advertising of goods that are sold out, refusals to return deposits, misrepresentative sales contracts or coercive pressures on buyers, these types of market relations and others like them as David Caplowitz has argued in his book The Poor Pay More, occur with the full connivance of major banks and other lending institutions.

These larger political and economic arrangements cannot be severed from street and suite crime; market relations are responsible, in part, for the alarming rates of black-on-black crime. Most people, unfortunately, prefer the simplistic analyses of crime that, on the one hand, ignore altogether the ever-present dangers of occupational and corporate “crimes,” and on the other hand, implicity or explicitly argue for the class-based and racist explanations that attribute crime to some inherent difference between poor people, especially poor black people, and the rest of us. Rather than seeing the South’s higher crime rate as reflected in her higher rates of functional illiteracy, teenage pregnancy, and impoverishment, or in her lower expenditures per capita on education, health care, and other essential services, it is still politically preferable, at least in Alabama, to point fingers at the individual offenders rather than at the institutional arrangements of the old and new South alike, I and at the same time, to call for stricter forms of punishment where severity is already the name of the game.

Contrary to the wisdom of some of our leaders in the South and elsewhere, the problem of crime cannot be reduced to the problem of black-on-black crime nor will it be resolved by the get-tough strategies of the law-and-order right. Such policies, in vogue for more than a decade, have already proven themselves inept in the “war on crime,” only as of yet nobody has had the political courage to officially declare them bankrupt. In the final analysis, as long as people in the South and elsewhere refuse to view crime and punishment in its totality, black-on-black crime in particular and poor-on-poor crime in general will continue to serve as very convenient scapegoats for the many problems that confront us here and across the country. So long as we remain locked into a mind-set that sees our collective well-being as threatened by isolated individuals and not by organized political, economic, and social relations, then all forms of crime and punishment as we have come to know them, will continue to eat away at the very foundations of this great society of ours.

Gregg Barak is Chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice at Alabama State University, Montgomery, and is the author of In Defense of Whom? A Critique of Criminal Justice Reform (Cincinnatti: Anderson, 1980). This article is adapted from a speech delivered before the Alabama New South Coalition, a black political organization, in Birmingham in October 1986.

A Southerner in South Africa

By Paul M. Gaston

Vol. 8, No. 6, 1986, pp. 9-15

Few visitors return from South Africa these days with good news or give us much reason to be hopeful. Like those who have visited the country, most Americans fear and expect the worst from it. We are all a little like those northern Southwatchers of the early 1960s who shook their heads in amazement each night, transfixed by the latest visual evidence of some new outrageous violation of human dignity, some new strain on conscience and credulity.

Like them, we have good reason to believe that the worst is happening in South Africa. A few constructive-engagement emissaries indulge Reaganesque fantasies and dress P. W. Botha in imperial reform raiment, but few of us are deceived. Despite government censorship, reporting on south Africa overwhelms us with awareness of police-state brutality, victimization of the nation’s black masses, and the obstinancy of Afrikaner nationalism.

It is easy to submit to a sense of doom. The terrors of the apartheid regime are so pervasive and its powers so vast and impregnable that the Armageddon we see on the horizon seems sure to end in a tragic victory of the forces of evil over the forces of good. Blacks will not accept the fate the ruling whites have decreed for them and their rejection of it, given the present odds, insures the bloodbath against which we are daily warned.

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Many of us also believe that only pressure from the outside–from the world that is South Africa’s “North”–can change the white intransigence and avert the calamitous bloodletting. Southerners in particular ought to understand this kind of thinking. We know that it took northern intervention to break the logjam of our history, once to end slavery and later to dismantle segregation.

Thoughts like these were among those running through my head as I prepared to take my first trip to South Africa. I had wanted to go there for many years, partly because friends there urged me to come to teach my Southern history course. Perhaps, we reasoned, the study of liberation struggles in another racist society might help South African students understand better their own situation.

Eventually I received an invitation to come to the University of Cape Town to teach a course on the history of the Southern civil rights movement. My wife, meanwhile, was invited to participate in the work of a Cape Town group that helped communities in the black and so-called colored townships who wished to set up educational day care centers and helped to train teachers and administrators to staff them.

By the time the formal invitation arrived we had both begun to feel that the idea was one whose time had passed. The country was in turmoil. For months we had been seeing on television the awesome Casspirs (military tanks) roaming the city streets and crushing black protest in the townships.

At the same time, letters from Cape Town friends told us much we didn’t see on television or read in the newspapers, and gave us a vivid sense of the mounting repression and anxiety:

* “The phone rings all the time and it is lawyers, friends with more news. The latest is that the eighty-five who were taken yesterday are to be placed under the emergency laws, which are immensely wide. Cape Town was declared to be in a state of emergency yesterday. Meetings are banned, of course.”

* “I have just returned from the fruit and vegetable market where I have a friend whose husband was arrested at 4 a.m. yesterday. She is a lovely, energetic, sensitive and immensely warm person. Her eyes fill with tears which she quickly brushes away.”

* “Last week-end a friend telephoned us from her home in Guguletu (a black township on the outskirts of Cape Town) to say that the police were lined up outside her house, were taunting the people, who were taunting them back… A tiny incident in a myriad of horror and death.”

* “This has been a heavy week for me. The morning of the emergency meant the arrest of one of our staff members, the Tuesday morning the detention of another plus the husband of another, plus the necessity of another to become unavailable. People have been picked up left, right and centre. One has the sense of ruthless determination.”

* “Our history is poised on the brink; you can almost smell it. And what will it be?”

What might it be, indeed! And who would make it? Those questions, and the chance to be where history was “poised on the brink,” urgently called us to press on with our plans to visit, despite the rising tide of repression and resistance. People whose judgment we trusted reassured us about safety, even after a crushing new state of emergency was declared on June 12.

My wife and I arrived in South Africa in early July, I to stay ten weeks, she seven. Most of our visit was in Cape Town, where we worked, but we had a long weekend in Johannesburg and a week at a mountain retreat in the Eastern Cape.

Those weeks of immersion in South Africa’s “history on the brink” were moving and totally absorbing. Privileged to meet many of what in the civil rights days we would have called “movement people,” we came back enriched by their friendship and their example. And we discovered in them, in their struggle for a new South Africa, comradeship, character, courage, and vision that inspired hope for the future. Far from feeling America should be a good “North” and lead South Africa to freedom, we came back wanting Americans to listen to the voices of the new South Africa, struggling to be born.

To return from South Africa optimistic, let alone with what one of my friends cynically labels my newfound South African utopianism, is to be out of the mainstream of reportage and judgment. But I cannot make this response credible without some report on the

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state’s repressive power and apartheid’s web of cruelties. Evils are there in great abundance. We met them, were personally touched by them, wrestled with them in one way or another every day we were there, even though we were white and privileged.

The newly arrived visitor is first of all struck by the amazing reach of segregation. Even an unreconstructed southerner would blink at the legislation that assigns living and working space exclusively on the basis of racial classification and confines blacks in urban townships, rural reserves, and single-sex workers’ hostels–all hidden away from the white world. The blacks who have built and whose labor runs the modern, urban, industrial state are shuttled away at the end of each day, hidden from the eyes of white people in cement-block ghettos or hovels and shanties huddled on the sandflats.

On the outskirts of Jollannesburg we visited Alexandra, a one-square mile township housing 100,000 people. I wrote in my diary of watching a shanty being built of poles that support corrugated tin sides and roof, about 15′ x 10′, will house 8 to 12 people, perhaps more. One has a sense of huge numbers of people shoe-horned into squalid hovels. Crude outdoor privies. No houses have plumbing, few electricity. And this is said to be “one of the better townships.”

We were told about the political crisis in Alexandra–the struggle of young community people to overthrow the rule of co-opted black officials–and of a “great sense of community solidarity, much support from comrades of clinic and community-service endeavors.” But this was not the community spirit the government approved: “army pitched tents just outside townships,” I wrote in my diary that night. A police car took some notice of us, but drove off in another direction without asking questions.

One must go looking for Alexandra to see it something most whites in Johannesburg have probably never done. It was the same everywhere we went. Outside Cape Town, where a new township had recently been established adjacent to a main highway, the state’s bulldozers had raised high sand dunes to block the view. No motorist need look on those homes. One wouldn’t have known there were black people on the other side of those dunes of it hadn’t been for high light poles which we were told kept the community as bright at night as in the day time–all for good security reasons!

Along with segregated lives comes a peculiar immunity from reality. Most ordinary whites we met, people uninvolved in any sort of dissent or political activity, sooner or later brought up “the troubles,” indicating the crisis and conflict were on their minds. But their daily lives, we felt, insulated them from the harsh world apartheid sustained. One can live in total isolation from all this, as most do, I wrote in my diary. Newspapers say little about the ‘unrest,’ as it is called. In fact, they are muzzled so they can’t. Television news is unbelievably bland uninformative. All ‘unrest’ areas are surrounded by police or cordoned off by road blocks. Few whites see them or have a picture of what is happening there. Life in middle-class neighborhoods like ours goes on cheerfully: folks see only ‘cheerful’ blacks who smile and say ‘yes, master.’

In Parliament one afternoon I watched a fierce debate between Helen Suzman, of the opposition Progressive Federal Party, and the leaders of the ruling Nationalist Party. Here I thought I might learn what the country’s leaders thought about the “unrest,” get some hint of how far the world of apartheid had shielded them from what seemed obvious realities to us. I was lucky to see a debate at all. Parliament has almost become an anachronism, abandoned by many serious antiapartheid leaders. Frederik Van Syl Slabbert, one of the several inspiring Afrikaner foes of apartheid I met, had resigned his position as leader of the opposition party earlier in the year, despairing of parliamentary politics as a means of bringing change

The occasion for the debate I witnessed was the August massacre of blacks in Soweto. There were conflicting reports over what had happened with eyewitness accounts differing sharply from the government version. Mrs. Suzman, a tenacious woman in her fourth decade in Parliament as an eloquent critic of the government, had introduced a resolution calling for the appointment of a judicial inquiry to determine the facts. No one gave the resolution any chance of passage but the debate promised to tell something about the myths and assumptions the Nationalists lived by. Mrs. Suzman seemed tired when I first met her a few days earlier. But there was fire in her this day.

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Armed with published eyewitness accounts and her own inspection-tour findings, she accused the government of covering up its complicity in provoking the violence. It was not the first time, she said, recalling earlier massacres followed by predictable government distortions and denials of the truth. With rising emotion she looked directly across the narrow aisle at Minister of Law and Order Louis le Grange: “There has been a terrible spiral of death, and I lay it at the feet, the very large feet, I must say, of the minister.”

Government replies, and a level of abuse and heckling I found astonishing even in this astonishing country, came from top-level cabinet ministers. Led by the state president, some studiedly insulted her by chatting while she spoke. Others shouted insults. The minister of Constitutional Development said the trouble was caused by communists and comrades, another thought Mrs. Suzman’s remarks were “scandalous,” and the minister of information spoke for the rest when he denounced her “1ack of patriotism.”

Mrs. Suzman’s words were strong ones. “Shooting people in the townships will not bring the new South Africa,” she said, lamenting what seemed to her the obvious truth that “the entire world has become our enemy.”

No decent respect for the opinions of mankind, certainly not for Helen Suzman, was evident in Parliament that afternoon and I returned to the home where I was staying full of an innocent’s outrage. Former opposition party leader Slabbert was there, amused by my innocence. My host marched me into the house, stood me in front of a floor-length mirror and asked me what I saw. At a loss for the right answer, I was given it: “You are looking at a man who has seen the South African Parliament for the first time!”

The segregated lives, the insulation from reality, and the siege mentality of the Afrikaner ruling class were all vital parts of the South African social order we were struggling to understand. So also was detention, the South African term for political arrest. The new state of emergency, declared on June 12, was nationwide and all encompassing. The greenest new police recruit had authority to arrest any person he suspected of being a threat to the state. Once detained, the victim had no recourse to anyone on the outside and might be kept hidden away in prison indefinitely. No one yet knows how many persons have been locked up since June 12, but reliable estimates are in excess of twenty thousand, a very large portion of them children.

Political arrests were nothing new to South Africa in 1986. The state had depended on them, along with the banning of dissident groups and individuals, for its very existence almost since the moment the Nationalists came to power in 1948. Systematically it had been cutting off new opposition leadership at the knees every time it appeared. The new emergency decree, wider than any previous one, was therefore only an extension of the fundamental state policy of maintaining rule by intimidating and terrorizing its opponents.

Our introduction to the world of intimidation and arrest was immediate. On our first day we learned from one woman of a family member’s idealism, brave resistance, imprisonment, and death from cancer in jail. The second day a warm and gentle academic told me of his arrest, of interrogation without being allowed to sleep for twenty-four hours at a stretch, of solitary confinement, and, as I wrote in my diary, “of his struggle to find ways to maintain his dignity, to carve out areas in which he would not cooperate, areas of some privacy, some way of distancing himself from the police.”

By the time we got to Cape Town our best friends had been jailed briefly and arrests were constantly on our minds. We found the woman who directed the program my wife was to work with in distress because her daughter, a university student, was in Pollsmoor prison. She would remain there for two months. Other friends were concerned about a high school classmate of their daughter, also at Pollsmoor.

At the University of Cape Town, where I was to teach my course on the civil rights movement, I began making mental notes about the many similarities between it and my own university. But the differences were more striking. In the familiar looking student lounge a bulletin board carried notices of students in detention and announced meetings to protest the state of emergency. Every Wednesday a vigil for the detained students was held. The student newspaper, vigorously anti-apartheid, carried a communication in one issue from the student-body president under the headline “President speaks out from hiding,” telling us that he had gone underground to avoid arrest.

In the previous year, during the time I was debating whether to come, UCT students had marched against apartheid. Police broke up their demonstrations and came on campus more than once with tear gas. By the time I arrived the new state of emergency was in effect

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and there were no more demonstrations. Chafing perhaps more than before under the police-state rule, the students knew that demonstrations would send them directly to prison. A fresh report from UCT’s Institute of Criminology, which I found in my packet of faculty orientation materials, was headed “83~o Claim Torture in Detention” and went on, with soberingly persuasive statistics and graphic examples, to justify that claim.

There were thirty-three students in my class, twenty white and thirteen black. (The government assigns three classifications to those persons it does not call white: Black (African), Indian (Asian), and Colored (mixed race). Politically sensitive Indians and Coloreds call themselves black in protest against the government’s racially-based classification system and as an expression of their solidarity with the African majority.*) UCT is an “open” university, refusing to accept a quota system mandated by the government. Its student body of 11,845 is fifteen percent black.

The course was not a study in comparative history and social movements, but the students were drawn irresistibly to comparisons. Toward the end of the semester I asked them if they had been more impressed by the similarities or the differences betwen the two liberation struggles. Unanimously they replied the differences, and quickly ticked them off. Their conversation then turned to the similarities, for it was those that engaged them most: the mixture of material and psychological forces undergirding white supremacy; the common experience of suffering and exploitation; the heroic will to overcome oppression; and the search for appropriate liberation strategies, leaders, and ideologies.

Most of all, my students were impressed by the resilience, hope, and vision of the future they saw in the Southern movement.

Echoing them, I said that I would take back with me the same impression of their liberation struggle -a deep respect for the resilience of the people, their hope, and the vision of a new South Africa I had encountered so often.

Explaining this sense of optimism in the face of the despair and human destruction we saw can perhaps best begin with an account of my visit to Crossroads.

I was told it might be impossible to visit Crossroads. Army Casspirs were everywhere and it was sealed off. The huge squatter community had gone up in flames in a violent small war just a few months earlier. That was before the television censorship had become complete, and we had seen the shanties burning and the people fleeing. Thousands of persons had been made homeless and much of the talk when we were there was about how best to provide for the dispossessed.

Crossroads has a special place in the history of the South African liberation struggle. I had first learned about it in 1979 when I saw a film that explained its origins as an act of defiance and resistance against influx control and pass laws–against the state’s grand scheme for what it called separate development. Under this plan black men were allowed to come to the cities to work, but their wives must remain back in the homelands to which the husbands might return for a brief yearly visit. Protesting against this, the founders of Crossroads, with women in the forefront in the early days, built their own shanty town out of materials their ingenuity secured. Crossroads grew and so did the government’s determination to wipe it out. International pressure mounted at one point to prevent it from being bulldozed, the fate the government had in mind for it.

By 1985-86 it still stood–vast and sprawling and now wracked with internal dessension that had been fostered by the government. Playing a crucial role in May of 1986, the government saw part of its aims achieved when many of its worst enemies were burned out. Still, Crossroads stood there and was apparently finding its way back to some form of stability, despite the enormous strains that had been place on it and despite the resident autocrat, well ensconced with government support.

At the end of August word came that the Casspirs previously patrolling the section of the township we wanted to visit had moved elsewhere, at least for the day, and that we might slip in for a brief visit. My guide, a physician associated with a nutrition clinic we were to visit, drove past charred remnants of the May war, including a burnt out small bus, and led me on foot through the maze of shacks down a sandy path that a street sign told me was a recognized thoroughfare, even though it was largely under water left by a recent rain. I had watched the Crossroads documentary, seen the township on television, and read a long research paper on its history, but I was not prepared for the feel of it, the vastness, the closeness of the shanties to each other, the narrow sand roads, the sense that a stranger could get lost here and never find the way out.

The clinic was small and packed with women and children. On a table resting on a scale–the first thing I saw as I entered–was a baby with a distended stomach. I was quickly introduced to a woman, a Crossroads resident, who would take us on a brief tour. We saw the rest of the clinic, then went outside to admire the vegetable garden, a small patch of green that was a powerful statement of faith in the future as were the occasional fruit trees I saw planted in sandy front yards. We sat briefly in one of the homes. The walls, lined with newspaper, made me think, as I had several times since I had arrived, of James Agee and of his Let Us Now Praise Famous Men with its meticulous,

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evocative, and loving description of the homes of three Alabama tenant families of the 1930s. I wished for his ability to see and record.

Outside again I exchanged greetings with small children, smiling, playing games, eyes alert. I thought of Agee again, and almost recited a passage from Famous Men: “In every child, of whatever condition or circumstances, is born again the potentiality of the human race.” Crossroads, far from depressing me, was lifting my spirits. The adults had a vibrancy, an ability to make contact, to put a stranger at ease, that I am not likely to forget. Later the doctor answered my questions about how it felt to work with the women and children in such circumstances. I recorded the answer in my diary that night: “Isn’t discouraged or depressed by working with these people: they give life more meaning because you see they are not beaten down. They look to have a future.”

I also recorded some of my own responses that night drawing political lessons from the day’s visit: Thoughts on Crossroads: Again impression of enormous resilience of SA people and incredible friendliness. Warm welcoming people determined to make a life for themselves in this place, their own turf. Immense blindness of PW Co. to the reality of their own people. How to get them to see it? Probably impossible. Probably too blinded by ideology, privilege circumstances of their lives to be reached. Only way is for power to transfer, circumstances of lives to change, and new views and senses of reality to emerge out of altered circumstances.

Of course I had no idea how power was to be transferred to change the circumstances of their lives. No one seemed to believe that incremental reform would phase out apartheid and introduce power sharing within the existing social framework. Here was a fundamental difference between the South African liberation struggle and the American civil rights movement. As one friend put it to me: “In the U. S. the civil rights movement was fighting for incorporation into the American dream while we are struggling for a new society.”

It was this struggle for a new society that we came back remembering most vividly, impressed by most deeply. We did not see much of the young people in the townships, the controversial comrades who are filling the vacuum created by the state’s systematic elimination of adult leaders. Brave in many ways, they engage in acts of violence that trouble deeply those in the struggle we came to know.

Our closest contacts were with the intelligentsia–writers, academics, filmmakers, clerics, lawyers, and doctors (black and white)–who had linked their professional lives to the struggle. They contrasted sharply with their counterparts in the States, blurring almost completely the distinction Americans make between activist and detached observer. They had all the professional integrity we prize, but they seemed to value it primarily for its power to facilitate social change. Thus, they moved easily into what we would call “activist” organizations without sacrificing their professionalism.

Sharing such company was exhilarating. The intensity caused by the constant threat of the security forces gave life a keen edge and nurtured a sense of sharing and support. It also gave a richness to ordinary social intercourse where we found none of the inanity that poisons the social gatherings of American professionals. Instead, virtually every group we joined turned its moral and intellectual energies to the crisis and to discussion of the social order of the new South Africa.

As a scholar, I was struck by the flood of writings about the country. At a conference on the history and problems of the Western Cape, nearly every monograph had implications for the liberation struggle. I said to one of the participants that South Africa seemed to me the most studied society in process of change of any I knew. He agreed. After this I began to ask authors why they wrote. What did their books mean to them? The answers

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followed a pattern. Like scholars everywhere, they wrote to understand, to explain to themselves. They also wrote to make the truths they saw part of the record, to undermine the myths of the state. But most of all, perhaps, they wrote because they believed their ideas would have consequences and this meant, as one influential political scientist told me, that “we have faith there will be a future.” Like the people of Crossroads who plant their vegetable gardens and fruit trees, these allies in the academy believe their ideas about the new South Africa will take root and flourish.

Shortly before I left I had a long luncheon with a friend whose educational training ranged from eleven years as a political prisoner on Robben Island, where he was a classmate of Nelson Mandela, to graduate seminars in a European university. What, I asked him, should I tell Americans about the South African struggle?

“America,” he began, “needs to be educated about the truly revolutionary changes that are in South Africa’s future.” Describing the tight web of American involvement in South African life–from philanthropy to multinationals–he warned against thinking of a new South Africa in American reformist, liberal-democratic, capitalist terms. The nonracial democracy of the future, he told me, will not be built on an American model. But neither will it follow a Soviet model. Nor would it be a Cuban or Mozambican model. Non-capitalist, because only with some form of socialism could there be any hope for a decent distribution of wealth and opportunity, the model for the new South Africa was constantly emerging from the ferment of specifically South African conditions.

It was this ferment that I found infectious and encouraging. Discussions–in luncheons like this one, at clandestine meetings, in public forums–ranged over every aspect of the ideal society. “All kinds of fundamental rethinking, at odds with traditional society, is going on,” my luncheon companion explained. “It’s not enough to talk of the politics of a nonracial democracy or the economics of a socialist state. We are examining, and planning for, new educational institutions and philosophies appropriate to a free society, rethinking the roles of the sexes, and questioning all forms of elitism.”

It was from conversations like this one as well as the daily encounters with compassionate people joined in a struggle they know will not end soon-and from the resilient people of Crossroads-that I drew the optimism I brought back. Optimism may be the wrong word. I don’t mean by it that I see clearly the best possible outcome. In fact, the opposite may well happen. These gentle revolutionaries I have come to admire may well be crushed by the fanatacism of counterrevolution. It has happened before.

But no one can predict the future, and if by optimism one means that there are hopeful aspects of the situation to stress, then there is abundant basis for optimism in South Africa. From the people who give rise to this optimism one can draw courage. One can also identify with them and look to them for guidance in the long struggles ahead.

Paul M. Gaston, Professor of History at the University of Virginia, is president of the Southern Regional Council and a contributing editor of Southern Changes.

Row Upon Row: Sea Grass Baskets of the South Carolina Lowcountry

By Dale Rosengarten

Vol. 8, No. 6, 1986, pp. 17-24

Coiled sea grass basketry flourishes today in the tidewater region of South Carolina. In all seasons, or any given day, travellers to Charleston can find dozens of basketmakers from the surburban community of Mt. Pleasant, showing their wares on street corners in the city and on crudely constructed stands along Highway 17. On Market Street and the corners of Meeting and Broad, arrays of baskets in a multitude of shapes and sizes grace the edge of the sidewalks, while their makers sit behind them, talking and sewing new forms. North of the historic city, across the Cooper River Bridge, as you drive past the shopping malls and subdivisions that have sprouted in Mt. Pleasant, you might not know which state you were in, if it weren’t for the palmetto trees and the basket stands.

Contemporary Mt. Pleasant baskets descend from an ancient African folk art that was introduced in Carolina late in the seventeenth century. The African peoples who were brought to America to cultivate rice and other crops carried with them skills they had used in everyday life. Pottery and woodcarving, boatbuilding and netmaking, as well as speech patterns, folk songs, and musical instruments, all survived the Atlantic passage and resurfaced in new plantation communities. In the lowcountry, where blacks outnumbered whites as early as 1708, coiled basketry was one of several viable African “carryovers.”

The early history of Afro-American basketry parallels the rise of rice cultivation on the southeastern coast. Even before Carolina was colonized, rice had been proposed as a staple for export. Around 1690, after two decades of experimentation, settlers began producing a “plausible yield,” and by the mid-eighteenth century, rice was the principal crop of what was to become the wealthiest group of planters in America. From the start, lowcountry plantations proved to be friendly environments for the production of Afro-American sea grass baskets. Indeed, rice could not have been processed without a particular coiled basket, called the “fanner.” The fanner was a wide winnowing tray used to “fan” rice-that is, to throw the threshed and pounded grain into the air or drop it from a basket held at a height into another basket, allowing the wind to blow

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away the chaff.

Utilizing the natural materials of their new environment, Afro-Americans made fanners and other large agricultural baskets out of black rush, an abundant marsh grass, bound with thin splits of white oak or strips from the stem of the saw palmetto. As rice culture spread, so did the manufacture of these coiled work baskets. After the Civil War, men and some women continued to sew rush baskets for use on those plantations which weathered Reconstruction and on small, family farms which were carved out of the old estates.

The anonymous nature of early Afro-American basketry belies its range and importance. At one time the craft must have been practiced along the whole length of the coastal rice kingdom, from its southernmost outposts on the St. Johns River, in Florida, to its northern reaches in Lower Cape Fear, North Carolina. Nine-tenths of the ante-bellum rice crop was grown in South Carolina and Georgia, however, and it is here that sea grass baskets have left a historical record. It is easy to see why coiled basketry persisted along rice-growing tidal rivers, yet it also took firm hold on those Sea Islands where commercial quantities of rice were not produced. There, rice was cultivated as a provision crop, for local consumption; slaves from rice-growing regions of Africa were said to ‘1anguish without their favorite food.” In some cases, the dietary preferences of Afro-Americans apparently were as important as the profit motives of their masters in determing whether coiled baskets would be made. Well into the 1 900s, black farmers throughout the lowcountry planted small crops of “upland” or “dry” rice and processed the grain in the African way, using flails, mortars and pestles, and fanner baskets.

Despite the coiled basket’s steady use as an implement of American rice culture and as a common household object, it is difficult to assemble a precise history of the craft. Because grasses and wood fibers are highly perishable and wear out in normal use, and because they lack the intrinsic value of porcelain or silver, discarded baskets in early times were assigned to the woodpile or left to rot in the shed.

A revolution in materials, forms, and functions occured at the turn of the twentieth century in Mt. Pleasant, where a community of landed black families began mass-producing and l selling “show baskets” made of sweetgrass. Sweetgrass baskets had been sewn before, but never on a scale to rival rush handwork. During the agricultural depressions following the hurricanes of the 1890s and early 1900s and the arrival of the boll weevil in 1918, show baskets provided a source of cash. Mt. Pleasant basketmakers and Charleston retailers saw alike possibilities in a new tourist market. Sweetgrass baskets, sewn with strips of palmetto leaf and adorned with longleaf pine needles, became a local specialty, and women came to dominate the craft.

While Mt. Pleasant sewers turned their talents to sweetgrass, rush “work baskets” continued to be made in isolated communities along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. At the Penn School, on St. Helena Island, “Native Island Basketry” remained an important part of the “industrial” curriculum for fifty years. But as agriculture declined and resort development began to alter the face of the lowcountry, rush baskets went out of use and almost disappeared. In recent years, however, sweetgrass has become increasingly scarce around Charleston, and Mt. Pleasant sewers are using rush again -not as the sole material in their baskets, but as an element incorporated with sweetgrass to add strength and color to large sculptural forms.

Why has coiled basketry persisted in Mt. Pleasant? The answer has to do with the strategic location of the community and the sewers’ responsiveness to a growing market. Mt. Pleasant began making show baskets, made for sale to tourists and Charleston retailers, differed from traditional agricultural or household work baskets in several ways: in the use of palm leaf instead of palmetto butt; in the proliferation of styles and decorative motifs; and in the basketmakers’ concerted appeal to buyers. Adapting traditional forms and inventing new ones, sewers developed a large repertory of functional shapes–bread trays, table mats, flower and fruit baskets, shopping bags, hat box baskets, missionary bags, clothes hampers, sewing, crochet, and knitting baskets, spittoon baskets, wall pockets, picnic baskets, thermos bottles or wine coolers, ring trays, cord baskets, cake baskets, wastepaper baskets, and platters in the shape of small fanners.

The sewers’ first wholesale marketing venture was inaugurated in 1916 by prominent Charleston merchant and civic leader named Clarence W. Legerton, whom basketmakers remember today as “Mr. Lester” or “Mr. Leviston.” Through Sam Coakley, acting as an agent for basketmakers in his community, Legerton commissioned quantities of baskets and sold them wholesale through his Sea Grass Basket Company and retail in his bookstore on King Street.

Legerton continued to buy baskets directly from Mt. Pleasant sewers through the 1940s. His second son, Clifford, recalls that his father “tried his level best to get them to organize to mass produce.” No doubt, Clarence Legerton’s steady patronage was a tremendous impetus to the basketmakers in and around Hamlin Beach, and may account for the settlement’s heavy concentration of sewers. “Manigault Corner,” at one end of Hamlin Beach, consists of a dozen households including about sixty people. Basketmaking is an habitual activity in most homes there, and as the girls mature many of them keep up the work. Mary Jane Manigault, an elder of the community and a daughter of Sam Coakley, Legerton’s agent, is widely acclaimed as a master basketmaker. In 1984 she won a National Heritage Fellowship, a prestigious award given by the National Endowment for the Arts to draw attention to a lifetime of excellence in “a local tradition that has reached a really high level of artistry.”

Within fifteen years after Legerton began trading in Mt. Pleasant baskets, sewers developed a strategy for selling directly to tourists. The paving of Highway 17 and the construction of the Cooper River Bridge made the coastal route which passes through Mt. Pleasant a major north-south artery. Around 1930, basketsewers began displaying their wares on the road. Mrs. Betsy

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Johnson is reputed to have had the first “basket house” on the highway in front of her home. She and her daughter, Edna Rouse, would hang a few baskets from wooden “arms” nailed to a shed, to advertise that they had baskets for sale. To increase their stock, they would buy baskets from other sewers in the community. By the 1940s, Mrs. Johnson was commissioning work from numbers of people to fill “big orders,” and sending “great boxes” of baskets away.

Over the years, basketmakers have had many local patrons, but the chief clientele at basket stands always has been tourists. In 1949, the News cad Courier’s Jack Leland described “gleaming…automobiles, driven by persons from the large modern centers of this country’s industrial areas” who stop to look “at an importation of the artistry of African workers.”

In the 1980s, tourist traffic flows past the basket stands twelve months a year. Today’s structures look a lot like the oldtime stands and shed. Bare of baskets, they appear flimsy and make-shift, but in use they hold lively exhibitions of original art. Basketmakers may sit beside their stands, conversing with their neighbors, or sew in the privacy of their vans or station wagons, some of which are equipped with kerosene heaters, small televisions, and picnic coolers.

Despite the modern conveniences, selling on the highway entails risks and discomforts. High noise levels can make talking, even thinking, difficult. The danger of automobile accidents is real, with so many busy feeder roads emptying onto the highway and ever-increasing commercial and residential traffic. Air pollution irritates the people who stay with their stands all day and injures the baskets as well. Exposure to sun, rain, and dirt makes many baskets “go bad” before they can be sold. Besides these possible misfortunes, sewers who don’t own houses on the highway face the insecurity of not knowing whether they will be allowed to keep their stands where they are, or be forced to move them to make way for new condominiums or supermarkets.

An activity that under slavery gave men a measure of independence, under freedom has provided economic opportunities and avenues of expression for women. The negative side of its persistence is that it reflects a reality of dismal alternatives. Until very recently, the only jobs available to black women in the lowcountry were poorly paid and menial, such as working in the fields or cleaning homes, hotels, hospitals, and restaurants. The women call these jobs “hard work,” “working out,” and “working for nothing.” Older basketmakers learned to sew when they were girls as an extension of farm life, in a tradition of independent producers and entrepreneurs. Some continue to make baskets because they must; besides being the best way they know to supplement their income, basketmaking has become so much a part of their lives they couldn’t give it up. Maggie Polite Manigault, for example, explained to

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a granddaughter that she makes baskets “because she has been doing it for so long that she would feel lost if she didn’t sew at least once a day.” Many younger women have returned to basketmaking after searching in vain for jobs that “pay something.” Some have taken up the craft part-time while they are at home caring for small children or aging parents. Still others, drawn by the desirable qualities of the work, have chosen basketmaking over “outside” jobs. Basketmakers enjoy an autonomy which is rare in today’s working world; they can set their own hours for weaving and selling, exercise their own judgment and intelligence, and work with family members in a collective enterprise.

Most sewers regard basketmaking first as a source of income, and their moods rise and fall with daily or seasonal fluctuations in sales. Some basketmakers–though generally not the youngest ones–find the work therapeutic. “Even though basketweaving is time consuming,” says Mae Bell Coakley, “I enjoy it because it’s relaxing, kind of therapy.” Making things with your hands keeps your head together,” Mary Jane Manigault reflects. “When you sew baskets, you just concentrate on that one thing. You have to have long patience. You can’t be a nervous somebody and make baskets. You have to sit in one place and really get into what you are doing. You can’t have your mind running on all kind of different things. You have to have a settled mind.”

Not the least of the satisfactions of making baskets is the chance to be paid and appreciated for doing your work well. While sewers unanimously complain that people don’t want to pay what a basket is worth, basketmakers as a group have begun to enjoy a new status. “I think the biggest change,” Jannie Gourdine told a Charleston journalist in 1980, “is that people look at us as artists now instead of just basket weavers.”

Coiled basketry has spread near and far as Mt. Pleasant women have married men from other areas or moved away pursuing jobs. Some sewers who have settled in nearby communities such as Awendaw, McClellanville, Charleston, Johns Island, and Goose Creek, have enlisted the help of their husbands and in-laws in gathering materials, making baskets, and marketing. Other basketmakers have moved to more distant South Carolina towns, such as Rock Hill, Sumter, and Frogmore, and as far away as New York, Baltimore, Cartersville, Gal, and Jacksonville, Fla. These emigrant sewers maintain close ties with home. Most acquire their materials and sell their baskets through relatives in Mt. Pleasant, and some spend summers there too.

Basketmaking has expanded from settlement to settlement within Mt. Pleasant, as Mt. Pleasant itself has grown. In 1949, thirty-one stands were counted along a two-mile stretch of Highway 17, in the vicinity of Christ Church. Today twice that many occupy sites on both sides of the road all the way from “Four-Mile” to “Ten-Mile.” (Neighbothoods in Mt. Pleasent are named for distance from Charleston) The number of highway shops peaked in the mid-’60s, when over seventy were reported. At this point sellers seem to have gotten ahead of their market. Sewers complained of too many stands, lower prices than five years before, and intense competition for the tourist trade.

Few people could depend on basketmaking for a living. Most used it to supplement income earned doing housework or farm labor. “Some sell baskets in the winter and then work on a farm picking tomatoes and cucumbers in the summer,” a basketmaker told a reporter for the State in 1966. “Some days, don’t make nothing,” declared Victoria Milton, a sewer for over thirty years. “Some weeks, don’t make nothing or make no more than four or five dollars.” Apparently, basketmakers were earning about the same in the 1960s as they did in 1952, when the Charleston Evening Post estimated an average daily income at two dollars. Medium-sized baskets were selling for two to three dollars, larger wastepaper baskets and picnic hampers for six or seven. Prices were slow to rise. In 1971, ten dollars was a top price for carry-alls, serving trays, and handbags. “Just enough profit to keep body and soul together,” sighed one long-time sewer. “The tourists won’t pay any more than that because most of them figure that’s all it’s worth.”

Depressed prices were just one of the chronic problems afflicting the trade. By the 1970s, the number of basket stands had dropped to about fifty, with some 300 women engaged in the craft. Fewer stands did not mean a contracting market; instead, basketsewers were leaving the highway to try promising new outlets–craft shows, shops, galleries, commission work and, especially, the Charleston market. Nevertheless, observers felt that lowcountry basketry was in grave danger.

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“Rattlesnakes, a shortage of grass, and a lack of apprentices,” reporter Tom Hamrick predicted, “will some day soon bring down the curtain on the centuries-old business of hand-woven basket making in Charleston County.”

Snakes always have been seen as a danger by the people who gather materials. To go into the “swamps” to pull sweetgrass, Mary Jane Bennett explained, “I used to put turpentine on my shoe. Snakes run from turpentine, and I just had to hope they didn’t run toward me instead of away.” New and more serious threats to the craft were the scarcity of sweetgrass and the disinterest of the younger generation. As Mt. Pleasant developed into a sprawling suburb, local sources of sweetgrass were paved over or rendered off limits. Tropical storms and hurricanes which have struck the Carolina coast over the past few decades also have taken a toll on sweetgrass. Gatherers began travelling to Johns Island and Kiawah, but soon sweetgrass habitats in these places, too, were decimated by housing and resort development.

“I was fortunate enough to go on Seabrook Island before they started building up,” Mary Scott relates, “and they had the beautifulest grass over there. Nobody knew about it till the people start surveying to get the golf course straight…and then our people saw the grass and we had a chance to get over there before the building start. The prettiest kind of grass you want to see was over there…and all these years those grass was there and nobody knew about them.”

At this critical juncture, in the early 1970s, Mt. Pleasant basketmakers again demonstrated their resourcefulness and versatility. Running short of sweetgrass, they rediscovered rush, and began using it to increase the strength and enhance the beauty of their baskets. Although this “new” material has made up in part for the dwindling supply of sweetgrass, it has not replaced it as the basket’s primary foundation material. Today, most sweetgrass comes fiom coastal Georgia and northern Florida, gathered for the basketmakers by men in their families or small-time entrepreneurs. The costs of these trips are borne by the sewers, who pay as much as twenty dollars for a bunch of grass you can just put your hands around. Even if they are able to recoup this expense when they sell their baskets, sewers have to plan for a major outlay of capital at the end of each summer, when they must stockpile enough grass to last until the gathering season begins in the spring.

The difficulty of interesting young people in the work–the second major threat to the craft’s survival–has proved hared to overcome. The problem is two-fold, the sedentary nature of the work makes it unappealing to active youngsters, and its marginal economic rewards cannot compete with the legal minimum wage. “This is a boring way to spend all day,” one basketsewer remarked, “and my children won’t have nothing to do with basketweaving.” Predicting that the “business will die off” when the current generation dies, another basketmaker

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bluntly defined the trouble: “This is just too much monotony for the kids today. They don’t want to sit all day and half the night and weave with their fingers and a little sawed-off spoon for a shuttle because they can make more money doing almost anything else.”

Children under the age of ten appear eager to learn to sew and feel privileged to participate in the work of their elders. As adolescents, however, they become preoccupied with social life, school work, television, and athletics, and they lose interest in the craft. “We don’t want to sit down and do this kind of stuff,” eighteen year-old Melony Manigault confides. “We want to get up and go.” When pressed some youngsters reveal a deep ambivalence about making baskets. On the one hand, they feel coerced and impatient when they are expected to sew. On the other hand they know the importance of the craft to their parents and their people, and want k, see it outlast their generation. Melony, for example, a serious girl and an heir to generations of sewers, expects to keep making baskets, “but not as steady as grandmama and mama.” Sewing “one day out of the week,” as she does, is “not good enough if you want to sell. You got to make ’em every day.”

Melony plans to attend college and doesn’t think she will live in the lowcountry after she graduates. By the age of thirty, women who have stayed in Mt. Pleasant usually have settled down and started raising families of their own. Many pick up basketmaking again as a means of earning a few extra dollars. Those who pursue the craft generally find compensations in the work other than money. “I just love to do it,” say Sue Middleton, who quit her job about six years ago to sew fulltime. Considering the time it takes to make a basket and the cost of materials, “you never get what you put in,” she says. “If you’re just doing it for the money you’ll never do it.” You have to like it.

Coiled baskets appeal today to a broad and varied audience, from souvenir hunters to collectors of folk art, from people who want a bread basket to set on their dining table to museum curators who want to document the craft and preserve examples in a dust-free, climate-controlled cabinet. Prices have risen dramatically since 1971, nearly doubling every five years. Small baskets now sell from ten to fifteen dollars, though most sewers keep on hand a number of two and five dollar items, such as bells, wreaths, Christmas stars, toy baskets, and the work of children. Middle-sized baskets range from twenty to eighty dollars, and very large baskets command prices in the hundreds and even thousands of dollars.

Considering the current market, sewers are more likely to spend the time making big baskets. Rush, with its thick blades and great rigidity, is structurally suited to large baskets, and encourages sewers to work on a grand scale. “I really love the large one now even more than I like the small one, ” says Marie Manigault,

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“because the large one show up prettier.” Grouped together on a display table at the edge of the highway, these big baskets catch the traveller’s eye. They sell slower than small pieces, sewers report, but eventually they do sell.

With their conical covers and bigbellied shapes, modern Mt. Pleasant baskets appear more African than earlier forms. Indeed, some sewers are influenced by exposure to African basketry, either through books or through examples of tribal crafts brought home by families travelling abroad. In size and color, large contemporary baskets also bring to mind the traditional rush baskets that were used on rice plantations and family farms during the nineteenth century.

Mt. Pleasant basketmakers tend to be guarded about their craft–protective of their livelihood and of a skill that sets them apart. “As long as nobody takes our baskets away from Charleston, from me and the black people here,” Jannie Gourdine told a New York Times reporter in 19S3 “then we’ll never be obsolete. These baskets are part of us.” With the new public respect shown for their work younger basketmakers have become less fearful than their elders about teaching the craft to people outside their community. Workshops in coiled basketry are offered regularly by museums, schools, adult education programs, and community centers throughout the lowcountry. In social profile, the people who attend these classes resemble the white middle-class women who filled the ranks of

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the Arts and Crafts movement at the turn of the century and took up the art of Indian basketry as a pastime.

Coiled basketry survived the loss of its old functions because basketmakers found new ones and developed the aesthetic side of their tradition. The hand production of baskets remained feasible because sewers did not expect more than marginal income from it, and because there were few competing opportunities. As economic prospects for black people improve, basketmaking will become less appealing as a way to earn an income. Yet, by enduring into the 1980s, sea grass basketry has become subject to forces which make its immediate future bright. Charleston’s tourist traffic shows no sign of let-up, and the flow of potential buyers soon will be expanded by the convention trade.

A small collectors’ market underwrites the trend toward greater recognition and higher prices. How many people the demand for baskets as art can support is uncertain, but the impact of this new market is likely to be greater than one would guess from the limited number of sewers who cater to it. We can already see the tendency toward larger, more showy baskets; the emphasis on regular stitching and elaborate surface decoration; the rise of innovation and the eclipse of the basket’s historic provincialism and primitivism–the results, albeit indirect, of pressures and tastes exerted by buyers looking for expressive forms.

As society becomes more technical and craft skills become the province of specialists, the value of handmade objects will increase. Mt. Pleasant basketmakers should see more income from their craft, and those who want to may be able to spend more time sewing. Many sewers will never be adequately paid for their time and labor. The hidden costs in a basket are simply too great. But regardless of market conditions, some people will continue to sew. As tokens of loved ones and links between the generations, baskets are meaningful to them in ways buyers cannot fathom.

Louise White, a reflective and devoted basketsewer, explained that while she was keeping house for a certain family she would examine a set of sweetgrass placemats her mother had made many years before. If she found a place that needed repair she would “carry a palm from home in my pocketbook” and mend the break, “just to see how long Mama basket will be there.” She plans to give each of her children an example of every type of basket she makes, hoping to provide them with models from which to sew. “I always want them to have something to remember in days to come,” she muses. Perhaps they will be inspired to take up where she leaves off. “It may be hard for them to see it, but days will come whey will sew baskets….This basket here is strictly just in the lowcountry, and if the generation don’t take it up when we gone, it’s going to die away. But they will sew baskets. They will, time will come, they will sew.”

Baskets are live eloquent forms, firmly rooted in a lineage and a tradition. In a world of abrupt shifts and dislocations, the old shapes and techniques have always been elements of stability. One can sew a familiar form and transcend the insecurity of the moment. Making a basket takes self-discipline; it gives self-possession. Even if the basket serves someone else’s purpose, the act of sewing connects the basketmaker to a proud inheritance that cannot be diminished.

Dale Rosengarten, of McClellanville, S.C., served as guest curator for the exhibition, “Row Upon Row: Seagrass Baskets of the South Carolina Lowcountry,” presented by McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, during, the fall of 1986. Support for the exhibition and for the publication of the catalog, from which the present essay has been formed, was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Folk Arts Program and the South Carolina Arts Commission.