More Cuts for the Poor

By Staff

Vol. 9, No. 1, 1987, pp. 1-2

Most attention to President Reagan’s proposed 1987 budget has been placed on the overall size of the budget and the record-breaking deficits. But this budget is also important because it continues the Reagan effort to cut programs that serve the poor.

An analysis of the proposed budget by the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), says that one-third of the $18.7 billion cuts would come from programs that aid poor people. The proposed Reagan budget would cut Medicaid, student financial assistance, low-income energy assistance, low-income housing, and Indian health programs most severely. In addition, the proposed budget proposes to eliminate another fourteen programs altogether including Legal Services and the Community Services Block Grant. Legal Services would be dropped immediately, Community Services funding would be phased out over four years.

“Winners” would be the departments of Defense, State, Justice, and NASA. “Losers” would be departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Transportation, and Agriculture.

According to the CBPP analysis, these shifts indicate a pattern in which “agencies with military-related spending generally receive sizable increases in their budget, while agencies that operate domestic programs generally receive reductions.”

These cuts have come as the toll from sustained high unemployment levels leaves large numbers of Americans, particularly among unskilled or blue-collar workers, either without jobs or competing for a small number of low-paying jobs.

Typical are the experiences reported by an Auburn University researcher who studied the small Black Belt community of Benton, Ala., following the closing of a textile plant there in 1985.

The Dan River Mills cotton sheeting plant had begun operation in 1966, finding an instant work force among the poor in the area, many of them displaced from newly mechanized farming; more than three-

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fourths of the Dan River workers were black. Then, in October 1985, with less than three months warning, the company laid off 246 employees, many of whom had worked at the plant for more than ten years. The company blamed foreign competition for the shutdown.

Researcher Mike Trend’s surveys report that only 24 percent of the laid-off workers found new jobs within two months. Only 46 percent had found new jobs within nine months. Of those who were employed again, 40 percent described their new jobs as temporary, and the average commuting distance was sixty miles a day.

Though Trend’s figures indicate that wages paid by Dan River at Benton were generally much lower than wages paid for similar industrial jobs in non-South states, the laid-off workers who got new jobs typically took salary cuts of four to five dollars per hour.

And the workers who took the greatest salary cuts and had the hardest time finding new jobs were women and blacks. “Being white, being male and being married were all associated with an increased probability of becoming employed after the plant closing,” said Trend’s report.

Many of the former Dan River employees were unaware of or unable to secure meaningful assistance from so-called safety net government programs.

Cutbacks during the Reagan years were initially justified as part of a strategic effort to decrease the growth in federal spending and eventually balance the budget. During the Reagan years, the deficit has grown and the few reductions made have come disproportionately from domestic aid programs that constitute a fraction of the total budget.

This particular combination of cuts grows out of a deeper Reagan ideology about the role of government that has no real connection to budget philosophy.

That deeper ideology is revealed in another report from Washington dealing with welfare and also reviewed by the CBPP. The report, released by a special White House Task Force appointed by Reagan, maintains that federal aid to the poor does not work, that federal money now spent on the poor is inefficient (twice as much is spent as is needed), that there should be a freeze on federal programs, and that special pilot programs should be instituted at the state level to explore alternative strategies for public assistance.

The Welfare Task Force report, though prepared by persons with access to the full range of government program data, amounts to a restatement of long-standing Reagan views that federal government aid programs ought to be terminated. Significantly, it does not address the question in terms of federal deficits or show how such a cutback would aid the movement to balance the budget.

The CBPP analysis of the White House welfare report finds it insufficient. The report fails to give proper weight to domestic aid programs that do help the poor, and it “grossly overstated” the inefficiency of the current dollars spent.

The problem of helping the poor in America persists. Unemployment is consistently high, the earning power of employed persons is threatened, and there has been a “sharp increase over the past decade in poverty among children.”

“What is needed,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says, “is leadership in developing bipartisan consensus on effective actions that we can take now.”

H.L. Mitchell A Lifetime of Organizing and Hell-Raising

By Mike Land

Vol. 9, No. 1, 1987, pp. 3-7

The way H.L. Mitchell figures it, the central mission of his life has been to “raise hell.”

“I always believed that if you raised enough hell, something would be done about a problem,” he said, smiling.

“And I always tried to do that.”

Armed with a socialist’s convictions and a cutting dry wit, Mitchell has raised that hell far and wide. In 1934 he helped found the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union. In the forties he became president of the National Farm Labor Union. The fifties found Mitchell leading migrant workers in California; the sixties put him in the bayous of Louisiana, organizing sugar-cane workers.

And even though he retired to Montgomery Ala., in 1973, Mitchell is still raising a little hell in 1986. He writes newspaper columns and letters to editors about the need for a new homestead act to help the small farmer; he has written his autobiography, Mean Things Happening In This Land, and he tours the country each year on college lecture circuits.

“One thing I can say,” the eighty-year-old observed, “Since that first meeting in 1934 I’ve never been bored. I’ve been mad and upset and all sorts of damn things but I’ve never been bored.”

Harry Leland Mitchell was raised among sharecroppers in west Tennessee. His father, Jim, did some sharecropping. He was also a fundamentalist preacher who dropped out of his family’s life for long periods of time. Combine his father’s disappearances with the atmosphere in Tennessee during the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” and one has the beginnings of Mitchell’s dissatisfaction with organized religion.

“These people like Pat Robertson, there have always been religious pirates like him,” Mitchell recalls. “In my time, we had Billy Sunday preaching against evolution and breaking up strikes. Now we have these people calling their opponents’ humanists–which

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strikes me as a pretty good thing to be.”

So it was that as a teen-ager, Mitchell developed an “independent kind of faith.” One’s religious impulses “had to be pragmatic, as far as I was concerned.”

And what seemed pragmatic to him was socialism. He learned about it by responding to a newspaper ad that declared, “To Oppose Evolution, You Have To Know What It Is.” He began to receive a succession of Little Blue Books about different topics, including socialism.

As Mitchell is fond of saying, he heard his first socialist speech in 1920 in “Moscow-Tennessee, that is.” That was where he lived when Dr. John Morris, a veterinarian, passed through and gave a speech on socialism. Mitchell followed him around the rest of the day, asking questions.

The seed had been planted. Nine years later, after the Crash of ’29 brought on the Great Depression, Mitchell was married to first wife Lyndell, had a family and operated a cleaning business in Tyronza, Ark. A fellow Tyronza businessman, gas station owner Clay East, befriended Mitchell

East, unlike Mitchell, had a college education-but, also unlike Mitchell. had little awareness of alternate political philosophies.

“One day,” Mitchell recalled, “CIay came in my place and said, “Hey, there isn’t enough business here for three gas stations. We should work out a deal so each of us takes off different days. Then all of us would have some time to do some fishing. “I said, ‘Well Clay, you know that’s a socialist idea, don’t you?’ And he told me not to call him a socialist, that he wasn’t any such thing. I told him I was going to give him some books to read on the subject. He said he didn’t want to read any book if it had to do with socialism.”

Not many months later, Mitchell had converted East into a socialist so dedicated that East would slip socialist pamphlets and newspapers into the automobiles of customers, and demand that traveling salesmen read the publications if they wanted his business.

Mitchell and East organized their local chapter of the Socialist Party of America and met with its presidential candidate, Norman Thomas. In 1934, Mitchell was part of the Arkansas delegation at the SPA national convention. In that capacity, he watched a rift develop between the New York founders and Midwest members that, in his estimation, ultimately sealed the party’s doom. The older members advocated the cautious tact of working through the vote. Others, Mitchell included, believed that unions-thought “dead” at the time-offered a way to strike more directly at the economic base of power.

Later that year, eleven whites and seven blacks met to form the STFU in a rural Arkansas schoolhouse. Mitchell’s course had been forever diverted onto the union route.

The STFU had its ups and downs, the latter largely imposed from outside by plantation owners and the fear they created. In 1935, authorities in a rural town jailed a black preacher speaking at an STFU meeting. East and Mitchell couldn’t talk an ACLU lawyer into leaving Memphis to free, in the lawyer’s words, a “Nigra preacher.”

East voiced the doubt that if the STFU couldn’t find a lawyer to get a preacher out of jail, the union may as well end. Mitchell was more stubborn and the preacher was released, but the STFU was definitely on the brink of collapse.

Then, however, plantation owners lowered the rate paid per hundred pounds of cotton to sharecroppers from $1 to 75 cents. The STFU swelled to an estimated all time high of 31,000 by 1936. The STFU would go on until the mid-forties. Mitchell, East and other leaders dodged Iynch mobs and night riders, making strategic night runs through hostile territory to reach sharecroppers.

Mitchell still finds sad irony in one violent episode of ’36. In the aftermath of a mob’s attack on a group of white and black marchers, in which black marchers died, a white man and woman investigating were beaten in the woods.

Mitchell immediately arranged for the press to pho-

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tograph the beaten whites. As Mitchell wrote in his book, “The beating of a white woman and a white minister became a nationwide human interest story. No attention was paid to Eliza Nolden, a black woman soon to die from the effects of a severe beating, nor to the serious condition of white sharecropper Jim Reese, nor to the fact that Frank Weems, a black sharecropper, had presumably been beaten to death. After all, these three people were just sharecroppers.”

Mitchell managed to continue to get attention for sharecroppers-attention from as lofty a couple as Franklin Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt.

In 1939, Mitchell was attending a meeting in New York City when he opened the New York Times and saw pictures of “people I knew sitting on the roadside” in Missouri. They had been dumped there by a plantation owner after a conflict in negotiating a contract. Mitchell immediately went to Washington to seek emergency help for the 1,700 homeless sharecroppers.

After several setbacks, Mitchell managed to win an audience with Mrs. Roosevelt. “Aubrey Williams set it up and I drove up in a taxi cab right through those iron gates, the same ones where Reagan always stands and waves with all those damn dictators,” he said, “I waited for a long time to see her. When she walked in, she apologized to me for being so long. She said, ‘Mr. Mitchell, you know how long it takes us ladies to get ready.’

“I thought she was one of the most attractive women I’d ever seen. I told her the situation, and was thinking that maybe the president could order the National Guard to send down tents and field kitchens. She told me she would put a note on the president’s bedside table and that it would be the last thing he saw before he went to sleep and the first thing he did in the morning.”

FDR’s order was circumvented by the Arkansas governor, who had all the sharecroppers broken up in small groups out of sight, far back from the road. But Mrs. Roosevelt, who wrote a national weekly column, had asked Mitchell what the sharecroppers needed, and her two writings about the problem yielded $5,000 in donations.

“That’s like $50,000 today,” said Mitchell.

Later, due to Mrs. Roosevelt’s aid, 595 houses were built for homeless farmers in Missouri.

Despite such dramatic flourishes, Mitchell and others could see harder things ahead for sharecroppers. Mechanization, they sensed, would soon make them jobless altogether. In anticipation, an inter-union program was worked out which sent twelve thousand sharecroppers to new jobs in Northern cities.

“We were,” Mitchell says, “the only organization that encouraged people to leave. Sharecropping was brutal. If they could get jobs in the city, they were encouraged to do so.”

By the end of 1946, Mitchell had moved on himself He had divorced Lyndell and later married the former Dorothy Dowe of Montgomery, whom he had met when both worked in New Deal programs in Alabama. Dorothy was also active in the farmers’ labor movement.

After World War II the STFU became the National Farm Labor Union, with Mitchell as its first president. The NFLU joined the American Federation of Labor. Soon Mitchell crossed the country to help organize migrant workers in California.

Then, in ’55, Mitchell investigated the White Citizens Councils that arose in the South after the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in favor of desegregation. Never one to be falsely complimentary, he called the councils the “KKK in business suits.”

In 1960, Mitchell moved to Louisiana, where he organized everyone from sugarcane plantation workers to fishermen.

He retired from full-time work in 1973, but he has carried the concerns that dominated his career with him.

Time has tempered his views somewhat. For instance, he does not expect the revolution once envisioned by socialists.

“Some of the things Roosevelt did along the lines of welfare were socialist,” he said. “But there has been no basic socialist revolution in this country, because there have always been plenty of jobs, plenty of free land and things of that sort. There has been no major change in the economic structure.”

And, in some ways, he’s even glad about it.

“If we got the government too involved, it would mess up everything,” Mitchell said. “I used to think the government should own everything, but now I’ve seen it make too many messes of things.”

However, Mitchell would object strongly if anyone said he was becoming conservative in his old age. Last summer he had a non-malignant polyp removed from his colon. It was, he observed, “the only thing I’ve had in common with Reagan in 40 years.”

He still believes in unions, despite the corruption that he says exists in many of them. He figures the

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STFU was relatively clean in that department. “George Meany once told someone that we were too small to ever attract a good-size racketeer,” Mitchell says, laughing.

But he also indicates that the problems of the small farmer today are worse than the problems of the STFU sharecropper. The STFU, he said, encouraged people to leave farming because the union could line them up with industrial jobs, many of the openings coming as a result of World War II.

“Now there’s no place for people to go,” he said, mentioning the problems of cities filled with unemployed individuals untrained for an increasingly mechanized business world.

Mitchell advocates a homestead act giving families modest acreages with which to farm. He believes small farms are more efficient, particularly if a group of small farmers form co-operatives. The co-ops could be used to acquire equipment and other necessities.

“Some people would tell us co-ops are a Russian idea,” he said. “But there were co-ops in this country long before the Russian Revolution.”

Mitchell also deplores the role of the Farm Bureau, which, he says, is run “just like the Communist Party -from the top down.”

“They’ve done nothing to help the small farmer,” Mitchell said. “They’ve encouraged the building of larger and larger farm units.”

But he worries that farmers are too small in number to cause changes in public policy anymore. “Fifty years ago, 30 percent of our population farmed,” Mitchell said.

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These days, it’s down to 2 percent.

“The Reagan Administration knows that. They’re not worried about what the farmers think.”

Which means Mitchell has something yet to achieve.

“I keep thinking a homestead act is bound to happen,” he said. “But I’ve been talking about it for 50 years. I haven’t made much progress.”

But he’s still “raising hell.” And Mitchell hopes he will continue to be an irritant to wrongdoers-even, according to the conclusion of his autobiography, after his death:

“When I shall have lived out my life I have asked that my body be cremated, and that my ashes be scattered in the wind over eastern Arkansas. Then, if any one of the plantation owners or their descendants who know of me still survive, may they some day look up to the sky, and if something gets in their eyes, they can then say: “There is that damned Mitchell again.””

Mike Land is a reporter for the Alabama Journal in Montgomery.

Popular Education in Nicaragua

By Marty Collier

Vol. 9, No. 1, 1987, pp. 7-9

“Watching the Nicaraguan popular educators reaffirmed my own experience that to do popular education, you have to start from people’s own experiences. In SALT this is what we do,” said Linda Martin, a staffer of Southern Appalachian Leadership Training (SALT). Martin is one of thirteen community workers and educators from Tennessee who traveled to Nicaragua in January to deepen an international relationship between adult, popular educators in North and Latin America.

What is popular education? Why have leaders from communities in the United States traveled to Nicaragua to learn about it?

In March 1980, less than a year after the Sandinista revolution overthrew the Samoza dictatorship, the new government fulfilled one of its promises: to help the majority learn to read and write–something never attempted under Somoza. In the enthusiastic response, 60,000 young people and teachers volunteered to leave their hometowns and participate as “popular teachers” for five months in the National Literacy Campaign. This massive volunteer effort reduced the country’s illiteracy rate from 50.3 percent to 12.9 percent, and won two prestigious awards from the United Nations.

Southerners joined the tour hoping to benefit from the award-winning approach being used in the continuing adult education work in Nicaragua Participants came from the Highlander Center, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, Mountain Women’s Exchange, Southern Neighborhoods Network, Commission on Religion in Appalachia and other groups. Their common focus is work among poor people in the South. Their educational work–to enable participants to organize themselves to solve common problems–has objectives similar to those of Nicaragua’s popular education program.

The visitors were invited by the Nicaraguan Department of Education (MED) as part of a relationship fostered over several years between Nicaraguan popular educators and community-based organizations in the South. Since 1983 there have been several delegations of Latin American popular educators visiting the United States, and staff of the Highlander Center and other alternative educational centers in the United States visiting Nicaragua.

In 1986 many Southerners had the chance to meet Eduardo Baez, from MED in Nicaragua. His speaking trip

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to the United States was coordinated by Highlander and led to participation in January’s tour by some of the same organizations and communities which had received Eduardo, deepening both the professional and personal relationships.

POPULAR EDUCATION is used in the Nicaraguan Literacy Campaign to teach math, science, and technical subjects to adults after they become literate. The method emerged from the reality facing Nicaragua after the Revolution: great shortages of formal schools and teachers, few technical schools in rural areas and a largely adult population with tremendous practical and political knowledge. These factors demanded an education process preparing people to make decisions, solve massive problems of production and agriculture, and at the same time respect their experience. These adults could not simply be lectured to or taught in traditional methods. Therefore a participatory, problemsolving approach was developed, based on themes from the people’s own history and revolution, which aimed to prepare the poor majority to participate fully in all aspects of society.

In Nicaragua’s educational method, study and problem solving are based on the life experiences and needs of participants–not on abstract concepts. Terry Keleher, a community organizer from eastern Kentucky, went with several other tour members to a northern region of the country. The group talked with peasants on a coffee cooperative who are in popular education classes. One of the peasants went through six levels of adult education and learned to be an accountant for the cooperative.

Keleher said of his trip to Ocotol, “I saw very sophisticated levels of community organization and democracy in this area. The stress of these educators was on knowing in order to change society. Education here is integrated into all facets of life–not compartmentalized like most of the formal education in the United States. The idea is not just to teach people basic skills like reading, writing and arithmetic but to also help them understand their situation, and give them the power to change it for the better.”

In contrast to the United States’ “each one, teach one” approach to literacy education, popular education in Nicaragua is a group experience. Workers, students, peasants and housewives gather in small groups for two hours a day to discuss community problems and solutions. Reading and academic skills are taught through the examination of these themes.

The purpose of the lessons is to determine as a group how to solve the problems at hand and master the skills needed, including learning how to run the many organizations and businesses of which Nicaraguan society is composed. Anne Hablis, a staff member of Mountain Women’s Exchange (an educational and economic development organization in East Tennessee) attended a gathering of parents, children, and popular educators in a region southwest of Managua. She said, “I was impressed by the transformation taking place in people’s thinking. They [people in the adult education programs] had a commitment to the philosophy of the revolution and what it’s trying to accomplish. They are not just trying to master technical, educational skills. They had an awareness that through education they could solve community problems by cooperating with one another–not relying on somebody from the outside bringing them answers or information.”

The Nicaraguan educational approach places priority on preparing people to participate more fully in the processes that affect their lives. “Literacy and popular education are political, because all education is political,” Father Cardinal, the Catholic priest who heads–the country’s educational system, told the group. “It either maintains the status quo in the world, or helps build a new, more just social order. The aim of education in Nicaragua is to strengthen the orgnanization [sic] of people so they can really exercise their power and so that this revolution will represent their interests.”

Nicaraguans understand democracy as more than having elections for public officials. They consider democracy the opportunity to participate in solving their own problems and creating their own future. Luis Aleman, head of popular education programs for MED, explained that many cooperatives have been formed after the revolution, but farmworkers lack the reading, math and analytical skills needed to make financial and management decisions. MED has joined other government departments to develop special pilot educational projects addressing the learning needs which the farmworkers have identified as most important in their work. In a small country where owning land and producing one’s food is so important, these pilot projects are enabling farmworkers to live better and have more control over their future.

NICARAGUA HAS BEEN accused by the United States media and the counter-revolutionaries (“contras”) attacking Nicaragua, of using popular education to indoctrinate citizens. In response, Nicaraguan officials say indoctrination is not needed when the agenda is in the best interests of the majority. Facts, statistics and international awards bear witness to the reality that in Nicaragua the Sandinista-led government, duly elected by its citizens in 1984, has made tremendous strides in initiating a process in the interests of the vast majority–the very poor. Infant mortality, illiteracy, preventable diseases, and hunger have all been dramatically reduced in the last eight years, in contrast to other Central American countries neighboring Nicaragua.

Participation, and not indoctrination, is evident in

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many of the current popular education projects underway in Nicaragua. A country-wide effort to combat remaining illiteracy is now underway. Churches, youth groups, members of cooperatives, housewives and workers make up the overwhelming majority of popular teachers who work in their own communities and workplaces to teach others with less experience. Nicaraguan literacy workers say a largely volunteer staff of many thousands of people, working in the same communities in which they live or work, would even be ineffective at an indoctrination campaign. The popular educators maintain that teaching people to read is itself a liberating act, that once people are literate, no government, political party, or religion can control what they read.

Another example of democracy at work in the educational programs of the Nicaraguan government is the production of educational materials. Many localities produce their own educational materials, orienting them to local needs. Linda Martin, also visiting Ocotol, reported that she was very interested in how popular educators put together their own educational materials (at the local level), as opposed to only using what the national office in Managua produced. She said, “I saw ways I could work with our program to help leaders develop their own curriculum materials for leadership development training.”

PROBLEMS IN THE NEW Nicaragua were not denied by people meeting with the visiting Southerners. In fact, Nicaraguan education officials had already raised many of the problems seen by tour participants. Representatives of the Ministry of Education admitted mistakes had been made and problems exist.

A major problem in MED, which the staff pointed out themselves, is that not all of the department heads and teachers are convinced of the importance of the popular education method. Many still feel education is a teacher imparting facts to ignorant people. The popular education staff must struggle against this kind of thinking, and provide positive proof that popular education works more effectively than the traditional approach.

Teresa Barajas, a Mexican who now has United States citizenship, does volunteer work in a low-income, Catholic community of San Antonio, Texas. She joined the Nicaragua tour to see how literacy education is done “from the base” because her church is planning a literacy program. “I found it extremely interesting that in Nicaragua they teach people about their history, what causes poverty,” she said. “At the same time they teach literacy they raise consciousness about the whole situation in their lives. They teach people from their own level of understanding; for example, peasants from the perspective of land, beans, and agriculture.”

Barajas visited the mountaneous region of Matagalpa, where much of the country’s coffee crop is harvested. She met with popular teachers and community members involved in adult education classes. She was impressed with the flexibility the popular educators used to make education meet their student’s needs.

Barajas discussed several problems she observed. She spoke frankly to many people on the streets, in restaurants and rural areas where the group visited. Being an outgoing, friendly person and fluent in both Spanish and English, she constantly gathered and shared information with Nicaraguans she met. She said, “I talked to common people on the street who felt their situation was still very bad. Some people do not see a lot of changes in their lives. They seemed to not have had the opportunity to learn why their situation is as it is. It is true that the ideals of the revolution have not been completely fulfilled. Undoubtedly the war and poverty they started with explain much, but not all the problems that still exist. There are still inefficiency and bureacracy.”

“The war is the main reason for many of the country’s major problems, like shortages of food, lack of personal income, and difficult living situations. This makes it difficult for people with problems to get to the top. There is still a big need to educate people about why problems exist, and who to go to with what problem.”

It was clear to tour participants that Nicaraguans have the consciousness, commitment and political channels to direct their own future, despite whatever difficulties and shortcomings exist. In addition, participants felt that the revolution is a participatory one in which the majority of the country’s people are involved to a remarkable degree in improving their country. Since the majority is quite poor, it has opted for a leadership and national program with priorities on redirecting political power and resources to the poorest sectors of society.

In previous periods in United States history those advocating greater power and resources to the poor have been labeled “communist” when they were promoting basically democratic political reformat Now in Nicaragua the charge of communism has also been used by the United States government and the “contras” to support a war in which over a hundred popular teachers have been killed, along with thousands of other Nicaraguans.

Participants saw that community service and education programs in the South and in Nicaragua are both being attacked by the same philosophy and political forces.

Many Nicaraguanas asked tour participants to take a message back: Tell the people in our communities the truth about Nicaragua, and do everything we can to stop the war against their country. They also asked us to continue the exchange created by the trip. They need help in obtaining valuable materials, such as pencils, raincoats and lanterns for the teachers who travel to rural areas with no electricity. They would love to come to the United States to learn more about our educational work and talk to people about their work. They encouraged participants to send others from our country to visit. The groundwork has been laid for many of these things to occur. Participants on the tour plan to meet to discuss what they hope will be an on-going, international exchange. More information about the trip and future plans can be obtained by writing the Highlander Center, Route 3, Box 370, New Market, TN 37820.

Marty Collier was a participant on the tour and is currently living in Nicaragua studying and writing about popular education. She has been a member of the editorial board of and has worked in popular education through the Southern Neighborhoods Network, P.O. Box 121133. Nashville, TN, 37212.

Building the Union in an Anti-Union Age

By Stewart Acuff and Robert Sarason

Vol. 9, No. 1, 1987, pp. 10-11

How does a labor union organize and represent a group of employees who neither have a collective bargaining contract nor any federal or state collective bargaining legislation under the protections of the National Labor Relations Act? In light of the Reagan Administration’s repeated efforts to gut the National Labor Relations Act, many national leaders have struggled with that question.

A group of state employees in Georgia is seeking an answer by organizing with the Georgia State Employees Association (GSEA), Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1985/AFL-CIO. Since public employees are not covered by federal law and since collective bargaining for public employees is illegal in Georgia (and most Southern states), GSEA Local 1985 is using other less traditional and more militant ways to organize and represent its constituency.

The short history of Local 1985 is full of creativity, democratic, mass actions, rank-and-file involvement, and sophisticated political maneuvering.

GSEA was founded in 1974 as an independent association for state employees. After years of frustration and limited effectiveness with state government the leadership decided in 1985 to affiliate with the Service Employees International Union. In September 1985 the local hired Stewart Acuff as executive director, who came to the local with a background in community organizing and labor organizing at Beverly Enterprises Nursing Homes.

Three hundred workers from every area of the state gathered for the founding convention in October 1985 in Milledgeville, home of the huge Central State Hospital. It was the largest labor gathering ever of state employees in Georgia. A significant part of the day was the adoption by all three hundred workers, after a two-hour discussion, of a legislative agenda.

Over the next two months, eighty workers in Rome met with their state legislators and thirty workers in Augusta met with their legislative delegation. On December 18 the new union brought one hundred hospital workers to the State Capitol to jam a legislative hearing and describe their working conditions and their proposed legislation to improve those conditions.

The Georgia Legislature began their annual forty-day session in January. By then, GSEA Local 1985 had put together a network of legislative activists from all over the state, recruited four legislative interns from Morehouse College, and made a number of friends in the Georgia Legislature–their first two bills had thirteen cosponsors. But the peak of the session for these state workers was Lobby Day on February 20. Some three hundred and fifty union members converged on the Capitol that day to personally push for better pay, a more equitable pay raise formula, less restrictive political activity rules for state employees, better sick leave and grievance legislation, and day care facilities for state employees.

Hilda Stonebreaker, the current president and former executive director who engineered the affiliation with SEIU, described the first Lobby Day and the entire first session as huge successes: “We got more money out of the governor than was recommended by the Merit System and his budget people. We got even a little more from the legislative appropriations committees, we passed a day care bill on the last day of the session, and we got a study committee created to look at two other bills. We got more than we expected. Even more importantly, the whole process of grassroots lobbying and flexing our muscles on Lobby Day was very empowering for our members. It gave them the sense that they had more political strength than they had ever considered.”

But Local 1985 wanted to be much more than just a good lobbying organization. The members wanted to hold and exercise power at the worksite–regardless of what the law said about collective bargaining for public employees. And that would take nuts and bolt organizing. The leadership decided to focus early organizing on employees of Georgia’s mental health and mental retardation hospitals and facilities.

The first target was Georgia Retardation Center in Metro Atlanta. After a three-month organizing drive twenty employees marched from the entrance to their admin-

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istrator’s office to demand meetings between management and employees and to demand informal recognition. Those employees took with them Herb Mabry, President of the Georgia AFLCIO, Richard Ray, President of the Atlanta Labor Council, and James Orange. organizing coordinator of the Industrial Union Department and a leader in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

On that day in late January twenty workers met with their administrator for three hours, set a regular schedule of monthly meetings, and Local 1985 had a proven, workable organizing model.

With a significant subsidy from the international SEIU, Local 1985 hired two veteran organizers, Lou Sartor and Jean Davis, in February 1985 to organize Central State Hospital in Milledgeville.

By August, nearly half of the hospital’s 2,500 eligible workers were union members.

The drive had three major milestones. In June, fifty union members held a news conference in front of the facility outlining their reasons for organizing, detailing their grievances, and appealing to the community for support. The next month the union held a rally and picnic at a Milledgeville park. James Orange and Thunderbolt Patterson, an ex-professional wrestler, were guest speakers. About 1,900 workers came to eat barbequed chicken and show their support. Finally, on July 28, one hundred Central State Hospital workers gathered again at the facility’s entrance. This time the employees demanded meetings and informal recognition as their counterparts at Georgia Retardation Center had already done.

After a brief rally and a march of about fifty yards, they were met by the Central State police force. The officer in charge announced that all state employees who proceeded with the march would be detained and subject to dismissal and all non-state employees would be arrested for criminal trespassing. The marchers knelt in prayer, sang two songs, and Acuff stepped across the line into the hands of the police [at this writing, Georgia attorney general Mike Bowers was prosecuting Acuff]. The march turned into a picket line which stayed up the rest of the day.

Just a few weeks later, seven workers from Central State interrupted a Department of Human Resources board meeting to demand monthly meetings in Milledgeville. James Ledbetter, DHR Commissioner, granted the workers’ request on the spot. One day later, Ledbetter reversed the decision after Central State Superintendent Myers Kurtz drove to Atlanta and made a direct personal appeal to Ledbetter.

The union decided not to get bogged down in a lengthy fight in Milledgeville but to continue organizing at additional facilities and to use the pressure of more workers at more facilities organized to push the department. The local also hired a veteran organizer to work with employees at Gracewood Hospital in Augusta.

On October 2, 1986, two hundred workers from Central State, Gracewood, and the Georgia Retardation Center converged on Atlanta for the most militant and exciting action the union had held. The day started with workers crowding into the DHR Commissioner’s office to demand an immediate meeting and resolution of the grievances. Commissioner Ledbetter was out of town, but the group chanted and sang till they got a short meeting with Reuben Lasseter, DHR Director of Personnel. After that meeting the workers marched the three blocks to the Capitol for a rally which featured speakers from every major union in the Atlanta area. During the rally, six rank and file union leaders along with Rev. Fred Taylor of the SCLC met with members of Governor Joe Frank Harris’s staff.

Two weeks later, three hundred union delegates and members from all over the: state gathered in Augusta for their second convention. They set their legislative agenda, raised their dues so the local could hire a lawyer, attended workshops on grassroots lobbying and grievance handling, and made their 1987 plans.

Immediately after the convention, organizers Lou Sartor and Daisy Hannah (who had replaced Jean Davis) began a second organizing drive at Georgia Regional Hospital in Augusta and Mike Tatham began an organizing drive at Northwest Regional Hospital in Rome.

In January 1987, the legislative session began and the local is fighting for more pay and a more equitable pay raise formula, overtime pay, on-call pay, more political freedom, a state employee hazardous chemical protection and right-to-know act, and progressive changes in sick leave policy.

Before the legislature convened one hundred and fifty workers met in grassroots lobbying sessions in Rome, Gainesville, Milledgeville, and Augusta. Additionally, the local leadership has laid out their legislative agenda with the governor’s staff. After the governor in early January recommended a 2.5 percent raise for state employees, union members placed two hundred phone calls to members of the House and Senate appropriations committees to ask for more money. This was to be followed up with a second mass Lobby Day at the Capitol.

As the local grows in membership, as the number of organized worksites increases, as the union’s leadership becomes better versed in Georgia’s politics, and as the tactics are refined, the pressure will build and change will come.

Stewart Acuff is the executive director of GSEA/SEIU Local 1985. Robert Sarason is a regional coordinator of SEIU.

Lillian Smith: A Southerner Confronting the South. By Anne Loveland. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986. $22.50).

By Rose Gladney

Vol. 9, No. 1, 1987, pp. 13-14

Before she died in 1966 Lillian Smith was contacted and sometimes interviewed by several prospective biographers. Because she knew her worth, Smith cooperated and compiled a rather extensive collection of autobiographical notes, chronologies, and lists of significant friends and references. After Smith’s death Paula Snelling, as executrix of her literary estate, continued the process by preparing and selecting Smith’s correspondence and other papers for deposit in the University of Georgia Libraries. Students and friends of Smith have waited twenty years for a serious, thoroughly researched biography. Anne Loveland is to be congratulated for being the first to master the sheer volume of material in the Lillian Smith papers and for placing Smith’s life in the mainstream of twentieth century American social and intellectual history.

Because she wee publicly praised and honored for her work with the civil rights movement during her lifetime, Smith knew she would be remembered for her early and continued call for a complete end to racial segregation. However, what Smith most wanted was to be valued as a creative writer and thinker. Accordingly, Loveland chose as the informing theme of her biography what Smith had called the struggle to relate the “Mary” and “Martha” aspects of her life, the conflicting impulses between her writing career and her work for social reform. While the use of this theme in her analysis provides important insights into some of Smith’s works, Loveland fails to establish her own aesthetic criteria for evaluating Smith’s writing. Instead, after offering little more than reports of the critical views of Smith’s contemporaries and noting Smith’s own acknowledged appreciation of other philosophers and theologians such as Tillich and Teilard de Chardin, Loveland concludes: “Regrettably, her philosophical thinking was generally derivative and superficial and her literary effort unexceptional. Her primary significance lies in the role she played in the Southern civil rights movement of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.”

Although Smith’s contribution to the Southern civil rights movement should not be underestimated, the value and significance of that contribution cannot really be separated from the quality of her writing and thinking. Behind Loveland’s assessment of Smith’s literary and philosophical capabilities lies a seemingly unexamined acceptance of the necessity of separating creative writing and social activism. This failure to examine the implications of Smith’s choice of self-definition is one indication of the absence of an essential ingredient in Loveland’s analysis: a consciousness of the power of gender in shaping a life and in influencing one’s perception of life in general.

Without that awareness, Loveland fails to see the tension between the “Mary” and “Martha” aspects of her character as a function of gender and the frustration in Smith’s life as a product of seeking affirmation and validation from the very forces she rebelled against–the patriarchal structure which perpetuates a racist and sexist society.

Additional evidence of Loveland’s lack of feminist consciousness pervades her discussion of Smith’s analysis of the roles of Southern women. Although Loveland notes Smith’s “comprehensive challenge against sexual convention,” she seems to accept uncritically Smith’s rather limited definition of feminism. While observing that Smith “thought of herself as specially qualified to help break the long silence about women,” and that her challenge to white supremacy and racial segregation “inevitably threatened two major supports of sacred womanhood,” Loveland maintains that “[Smith] was clearly not a feminist writer, for lesbianism was only a minor theme in her novels and none of her works was written to promote women’s rights or liberation.” I question the logic of so

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limited a definition of feminist writing.

Loveland’s lack of feminist consciousness is further demonstrated in her analysis of Smith’s personal relationships. While acknowledging that Smith’s closest friends were women, and that the strongest support and appreciation of her work came from women, Loveland devalues the significance of that support by implying that those female friends praised Smith’s work because they “recognized how much Lillian desired approval and praise.” Downplaying the effects of thirteen years of battling cancer, the 1955 fire which destroyed her home and most of her unpublished manuscripts, and the reality of patriarchal biases in treatment from male critics and friends, Loveland concludes the chapter on relationships: “She seemed to expect ill treatment from people, especially men, and purposely looked for indications of it to confirm her suspicions. At least some of the frustration and disappointment marking her life and career was of her own making and the result of an inability to take satisfaction in anything less than unconditional praise or loyalty.”

Although Smith’s tendency to resist identification as a feminist may be at least partially attributed to the absence of a well-developed, supportive feminist movement during her lifetime, it is not so easy to excuse Loveland’s adherence to an anti-feminist interpretation in light of the influence of feminist theory on recent historical scholarship. Whether or not Smith can be called a feminist writer, her biographer should recognize the power of patriarchal values in shaping Smith’s life. Smith knew that her sex made an important difference in her experience, perception, and treatment as a writer. She even associated the “Mary” or creative side of herself with her knowledge of women. Yet she wanted to be valued as though sex did not matter. The illusion that such approval can be “objective” is in itself a product of patriarchal thinking. Ironically, we finally learn from Smith’s life what neither she-nor Loveland could fully see–the power and the cost of self-creation and the necessity for self-validation in a woman’s life.

Loveland’s biography values in Smith what was acknowledged by the ruling males of her day and ours: Smith’s contribution to the civil rights movement. Correspondingly, the biography undervalues the importance of Smith’s life and work with other women. If Smith’s life is to be re-created so that its richness and complexity may be fully appreciated, her biographer must push the boundaries of patriarchal thinking even further than Smith did.

This carefully researched example of traditional scholarship has reported the facts of Smith’s life, but a full recreation and appreciation of her character remains to be written.

Rose Gladney is assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

Myth, Media, and the Southern Mind By Stephen A. Smith (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986.)

By John Egerton

Vol. 9, No. 1, 1987, pp. 15-16

If anything is more prolific than kudzu in the South, it’s mythology. The collective imagination of Southerners–romantic, gothic, adventurous, heroic, humorous, instructive–has thrived in courtroom and classrooms, pulpits and porch swings, since the plantation South emerged as a self-conscious entity in the wake of the American Revolution.

Social psychologists and psychiatrists and philosophers have never come up with a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon. We don’t know why Southerners thrive on stories, parables, imagination, rhetoric, exaggeration, legend, mythology–but they do, and they always have. Myth is embedded in the fiction and poetry, the newspaper and magazine writing, the song lyrics, the preaching, the language of lawyers and judges, the letters, the oral tradition, the ritual, ceremonies, the radio and television programming, the advertising.

It’s even in the history. “I may not have the facts just exactly right,” a keeper of useful myths of Southern history once explained to me at the end of a long and winding tale, “but what I’ve told you is the honest truth.” In a more negative vein, the South has also suffered from some historians whose myths and facts bore little resemblance to the truth.

Think of the descriptive names the South has gone by–how sweeping, how colorful, how misleading: Old South, New South, Deep South, Solid South, Populist, Progressive, Agrarian, Bourbon, Jim Crow South. Moonlight and magnolias, gentlemen of honor, ladies on pedestals, happy darkies singing in the cotton fields, belles and beaus glorifying the Confederacy, the Lost Cause, the pride of Dixieland. The intertwining tendrils of fantasy embrace and encompass reality in the South like wisteria on a backyard door.

All of which makes a book like Stephen A. Smith’s Myth, Media, and the Southern Mind so useful and welcome. Smith is a University of Arkansas professor of communications and rhetoric and a former staff aide to some Arkansas politicans. He has been immersed in rhetoric both as a scholar and as a specialist for skilled practictioners [sic] of the art; he is an ideal person to analyze and interpret the cultural myths that have dominated the historic and contemporary South.

To set the stage for his major points, Smith devotes the first three chapters of his book to a synthesis of Southern history and to his own careful and persuasive reinterpretation of it. At the risk of oversimplifying his own simplification of a complex story, let me compress his narrative into a few brief paragraphs:

The South didn’t emerge as a discrete, distinct region until after the Revolution. By the early 1800s–fully two centuries after Jamestown–the forces of slavery, agrarianism, economics, and geography were slowly beginning to shape the Southern social order. Institutions of politics, religion, education, and business reinforced the identity. As the century wore on and the South lost control of Congress, the White House, and public opinion, an oppression psychosis set in; the white aristocrat’s way of life was under attack, and his response was aggressively defensive. The planter-politician-businessman enforced a uniform white attitude based on loyalty and honor and fear, and though there were whites who did not agree, they were effectively intimidated into silent acquiescence.

Through the crucial middle decades of the nineteenth century, through the Civil War and Reconstruction and the resurgence of white supremacy, one petrifying and imprisoning myth after another kept the white South solid. Turning defeat and humiliation into pride and nostalgia for the “good old days,” the ruling planters turned-“colonels” learned to glorify defeat, to justify bigotry, and to purify their hearts with religious and literary mythology. “Separate but equal” was invented in this

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pre-twentieth-century period.

Henry Grady’s “New South” movement of the 1880s was a variation on this theme in that it tried to define the region’s future, not its past–but as Paul Gaston made abundantly clear in The New South Creed, the Grady Bunch managed to cling to white supremacy and the Southern status quo. The Populist movement of the same period did try to redefine the Southern past, and for a brief time its leaders sought to elevate democracy by uniting the powerless majority of whites and blacks But Jim Crow leaders fumed the movement around, and egalitarian yeomen became racist demogogues. Southern Progressives of the 1920s fared no better, and the literary Agrarians of the 1930s were unabashed reactionaries who yearned for antebellum white paternalism and privilege.

It was not until the 1940s that the white supremacy myth showed the first signs of weakness. The democratizing influences of the New Deal and World War II stirred Dixiecrat reaction, and when that failed, increasingly alarmed racists dusted off some antique myths–massive resistance, interposition, nullification–to hold the tide. But the solid South of the White supremacists began to lose its powerful grip as black resistance swelled, the courts compelled change, the nation and the world condemned racism, and more Southern whites joined the crusade against racism.

The old guard said it was the end of the South, but wiser Southerners observed that it was only the end of the myth–and out of that notion came the impulse to create new myths and symbols and rhetoric suitable for the modern South.

The second half of Stephen Smith’s provocative book identifies three new mythic themes in the contemporary South: equality, distinctiveness, and a sense of place and community. These ideas aren’t developed as thoroughly as they might have been, and that is perhaps the weakness of the book. But Smith’s modern themes, like his synthesis of Southern history, may serve the purpose he intended: not to present a definitive argument, but simply to introduce a new way of looking at things.

The theme of equality involves a revision of history, a redefinition: the rediscovery of libertarian documents (the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights) advanced by Southern Presidents (Jefferson, Madison); the impulse of Jacksonian Democracy; the prophetic dissent of Justice John Marshall Harlan, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the “separate but equal” ruling of 1896. Smith cites historians such as C. Vann Woodward and George Tindall, journalists such as Ralph McGill and Harry Ashmore, politicians such as Terry Sanford and LeRoy Collins, and activists led by Martin Luther King Jr. and many others as the vanguard of a new Southern tradition of equality.

In support of his second new theme, distinctiveness, Smith argues that the South is still different from the rest of the country, as it always has been–but now often in positive ways, from its music, food, language to its literature and oral traditions. This and the final theme–the sense of place and community (by which he means such characteristics as family ties, attachment to land and nature, etc.)–are harder to sustain as examples of a new mythology. In fact, Smith acknowledges that growth and other manifestations of contemporary Southern life pose serious threats to the survival of a progressive new mythology in the heart of Dixie.

Understanding the cultural myths that thrive in a society is an important step in the direction of understanding reality–the true meaning of our past, present, and future. Thanks to Stephen Smith’s insightful book, we have more much-needed help in understanding the once and future South.

The Color of Death

By David Bruck

Vol. 9, No. 2, 1987, pp. 1-3

According to the headlines, the Supreme Court’s McCleskey decision last month on race discrimination and the death penalty was a disastrous defeat for the effort to abolish capital punishment in this country. But the executioner’s victory in McCleskey was a costly one.

There are two reasons why this is so. First, the Supreme Court’s pronouncement that it can’t and won’t do anything about the huge racial disparities in death sentencing is certain to produce even more questioning about a death penalty system that requires us to cut back on our most basic notions of racial fairness in order to provide elbow room for the executioner. And even more importantly, McCleskey may mark the beginning of the end of this country’s irresponsible and deadly illusion about the death penalty: the illusion that the Supreme Court will save us from our own mistakes.

In McCleskey , the Supreme Court was faced with proof that the state of Georgia is more than four times more likely to sentence a convicted murderer to death for killing a white person than for killing a black person-and likelier still when the prisoner is black. But even though this evidence was far stronger than that usually relied upon to show racial discrimination in jury challenges or employment cases, the Court said that where capital sentencing was concerned, more is needed. In death cases, the Court ruled, the condemned prisoner must do the impossible by somehow presenting direct proof that his or her own prosecutor and jury consciously discriminated on the basis of race.

If this argument sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve heard something very similar from the tobacco companies for more than twenty years. Every time someone who’s dying from years of cigarette smoking produces statistics to show that smoking makes people sicken and die, the tobacco industry’s lawyers and flak men come back with this line: “Well, maybe a lot of people who

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smoke all their lives get sick, but how do you know that that’s why you got sick?”

Warren McCleskey established a link between race and death in Georgia two-and-half times greater than the proven link between smoking and heart disease. But just as no dying smoker can prove that her particular case of heart disease or lung cancer came from cigarettes, McCleskey can’t prove that he wouldn’t have been sentenced to death in a color blind system. All he can-and did-prove is that a lot of people on Georgia’s death row are probably there because of race, and that he’s probably one of them. What he proved, in other words, is the risk of race discrimination. And whether we’re willing to tolerate that risk depends on just two things: how much we care about eliminating racism in our justice system, and how badly we want to get on with killing the nearly two thousand people on Death Row.

Now the Supreme Court, five votes to four, has said that if this country wants to strike that balance on the side of death, we’re free to do so.

In the aftermath of McCleskey , the Supreme Court’s refusal to face up to race discrimination must surely be reckoned as one of the heaviest costs of the death penalty itself. We’ve already discovered how the death-selection system drains the money, time and energies of our courts, distorts our response to the victims of crime, puts innocent lives at risk, and makes celebrities out of criminals. Now, in McCleskey , we have seen how the pressure for death is even starting to overtake the way this country is supposed to think about racial justice.

To be sure, Justice Lewis Powell’s majority opinion in McCleskey tried to limit the effect of its decision to criminal sentencing. But opponents of racial integration will surely argue before long than they shouldn’t be required to do more to justify a racially-suspect hiring decision or public school assignment than Georgia was required to do in justifying an execution. That’s why McCleskey v. Kemp may well erupt a few years from now, like a forgotten land mine, as precedent for further decisions cutting back on the ability of civil rights plaintiffs to prove discrimination.

But it’s not at all clear that Americans are willing to compromise any part of our hard-won victories over racial inequality for the sake of more and faster executions. The immediate effect of the McCleskey decision may be a slight increase in the trickle of executions across the South. But in the long run, McCleskey is going to leave thoughtful people wondering whether this dreary and dangerous game is worth the candle.

The other effect of McCleskey is to make us understand that the death penalty is not a matter for the courts, but for

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the sound moral and political judgment of the American people. We’ve all become used to letting the Supreme Court make our hard decisions for us. However much or politicians may rail against the Court, its presence lets them pass the buck. They can-and do-pass sweeping death-sentencing laws without much thought for the results. The legislators get on the evening news, and the courts are left to sort out the details-like who, if anyone, gets killed.

Every other Western democracy has already abolished capital punishment. In each country-in Canada in England, in France, in Australia-public opinion still favored the death penalty, but legislators faced up to the facts recognized that the death penalty achieved nothing of any value, and did away with it. The reason for these acts of courageous political leadership was that the leaders of each of these countries were themselves responsible, and felt responsible, for whether executions would continue. By contrast, much of the explanation for the shallowness of the death penalty debate in the United States has been our politicians’ knowledge that the real decision would be made at the Supreme Court-and that there was some easy political advantage to be gained in the meanwhile.

McCleskey is the end of our collective evasion of responsibility for the moral and public policy catastrophe of our current death row explosion. The Supreme Court has accepted that the system is weighted by race, and has responded by telling us that if that is the sort of system we want, we can have it. McCleskey reminds us that the Supreme Court only determines what we can legally get away with. What’s right and what’s wrong are questions that we now have to answer for ourselves.

David Bruck is a lawyer in Columbia, S.C., who frequently writes and lectures on capital punishment.

Arthur Raper, 1899-1979: A Life Looking ‘for the Heart of the Thing’

Interview by Cliff Kuhn

Vol. 9, No. 2, 1987, pp. 4-10

Introduction

No Southerner had a deeper commitment to regional reform than sociologist Arthur Raper. Born on a farm in Davidson County, North Carolina, in 1899 and schooled at the University of North Carolina, where he studied with Frank Porter Graham and Howard Odum, Raper mirrored the South’s problems and promise. His books on sharecropping-Preface to Peasantry, Sharecroppers All and Tenants of the Almighty-powerfully described the causes and devastating human and environmental consequences of plantation agriculture. His work The Tragedy of Lynching remains the classic work on the subject. Through his work with Gunnar Myrdal on An American Dilemma and as research director for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, forerunner of the Southern Regional Council, Raper played a leading role in interracial activities that informed and anticipated the transformations of the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1979, Arthur Raper gave what proved to be his final interview for community radio station WRFG’s “Living Atlanta” series, depicting life in Atlanta between the World Wars. The interview ranged broadly and represented a looking backward by one of the South’s seminal figures shortly before his death. Following are excerpts.

Parts of the interview can be heard on two radio documentaries produced by non-commercial station WRFG. In addition to the fifty-part “Living Atlanta” series, in 1986 WRFG produced a three-part series, “A Southern Profile: The Life and Times of Arthur Raper,” addressing such issues as Raper’s place among the regional sociologists and intellectuals, the etiquette of race relations in the South, and the transformation of Southern agriculture through a look at Greene County, Georgia. For more information, contact Cliff Kuhn c/o WRFG, P.O. Box 5332, Atlanta, GA 30307.

Radio Free Georgia Broadcasting Foundation, Inc.

BEFORE I CAME to Atlanta I was at Chapel Hill with the Institute for Research in Social Science, Odum’s operation, and there I worked with Guy Johnson and Rupert Vance and the other fellows. I was very much interested in what Vance, particularly, was doing in his work.

The way I got to Atlanta was that I was in my little cubbyhole one day and I heard Odum and Alexander-Will Alexander-coming down the hall. I’d met Will Alexander at Fisk or when I had been at Vanderbilt, one or the other, in ’24 or ’25, getting my master’s. They were coming down the hall at Chapel Hill, and I heard Odum say to Alexander, “Now, let’s stop in here. You might like to talk with this fellow a little.” So they came in and Alexander-I recognized him of course, and I think he remembered me a little bit. And he said, “Why don’t you come down to Atlanta where the people are? You have brick buildings and things here. Why don’t you come down there and work with us?

He said about two more sentences and I said, “When do you want me to come?”

And so he named some time which wasn’t very distant away. Maybe that was in the spring and I went down there in the fall.

My original position in Atlanta was secretary of the Georgia Interracial Committee. The Commission on Interracial Cooperation had state committees, and my original job was to be secretary of that state committee. They had urban or county committees, mostly urban committees in the leading urban communities in Georgia. Practically every place it was the elite whites and the elite blacks in their separate worlds that were on these committees. I don’t think that’s wrong. I think that’s the kind of committee you need. If you’re going to do something in a Southern community as of at that time in the field of race relations, that’s exactly what you needed. Now, what could come later in a way was built on that, because that had to happen first, I think. I think those people had to be so they could be in touch with each other and be known and be appreciated and respected across the line. I think much of what happens grounds back on that.

And they would talk about what the situation was. Maybe some trouble is threatened over here because there’s so many people unemployed, or there’s people over here–

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likely to be some trouble because it’s said that a black man, a Negro, insulted some creditor when he challenged his debt, or something like that. These people would sense when something was coming up that was going to get hot, and they tried to take care of it before it got to that stage. It was not a committee to solve problems. It was a committee to anticipate where problems might arise. And in that extent, it’s a very, very basic concept, and you can’t have-you can’t have a good interracial committee without that kind of insight and that kind of commitment. They were committed to this community and to this relationship.

There was the assumption that if you didn’t have more equitable educational facilities, if you didn’t have more opportunities for people to participate in the political process, if you didn’t have more opportunities for people to have access to health facilities, equitable health facilities, why, you were building up problems for yourself. Well, this one I remember was used in the field of health, and this was told with great relish at one of the annual meetings, about the Negro maid who was in the home of her employer, and she says, “Why, that child there is coming down with diphtheria just like my children have had for a couple weeks.” Okay. You can see that. You can respond to it. You can get a public health facility understood and financed. You can illustrate the whole way through the same type of things. You don’t ignore and demean a part of your common life of a community without paying the price for it.

And I began going to those communities and talking with these interracial committees, and I soon found that I wasn’t too excited by that. It wasn’t too challenging. But something that was tremendously interesting to me was that when I got to Atlanta I realized, of course, that Floyd Corry who I had been very closely associated with at Vanderbilt, lived down in Greene County. He was there, was running his own store, and his uncle was one of the leading lights left in the county.

And when I got there, Father Corry, Floyd’s father, just latched onto me. He had lost his property. He was sort of a scion of a rundown part of the family. But he still had the name and he had the kinship contacts. He was buying cows and selling them. This was in the Depression there. And he would tell me about, well, now, this old house up here on the hill with these pines all around it and everything gone to pot here, but this was where somebody lived, and he told me his name and who his connections were and what had happened to him and the whole business. And so part of what comes out in Preface to Peasantry and later comes out in Tenants of the Almighty was because I had this entree to this family that had roots there way back, and had status. Because I was accepted so utterly by this family who was so genuinely a part of the picture there.

The plantation was already crumbling. It was already propped up with very high-priced gear and fertilizer, and propped up with a lot of borrowing and propped up with a lot of tenants that couldn’t pay back their credit-priced stuff that they had consumed while they were producing a crop, and then that threw the landlord into a hard place to handle. Well, all of that was going on, and then came the boll weevil, and it just knocked it down. And that was well before the ’30s. It was ten years before the ’30s, in 1918,’19 and ’20 in that particular area. Plantations closed down. In Greene County, more than half the people left some parts of the county. The cotton crop fell from 20,000 bales one year to-I don’t remember the exact figures, but this is the order of it-from 20,000 bales to, say, 6,000 bales to 1,500 bales to 323 bales, I remember, from 20,000 just two or three years before that. And, actually, the fertilizer that they had spent on the cotton crop-not this last year when it was 323, but the crop before that-the cotton hadn’t even paid for the fertilizer bill, to say nothing of all the rest of the expenses you have in growing cotton. It just simply went broke.

And when I’d get back to Atlanta I would go over to the city welfare office there in Atlanta where Ada Woolfolk was director, and she wanted me to help her think about, now, what can we do with these people that are coming in here, and they’re stranded and they don’t have anything and they’re not well and they have no skills and no education, very little, most of them, and what can we do with them? And I began to develop maps to see where they came from

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in Georgia, and a lot of them had come from Greene County and surrounding counties where the situation was practically the same as it was in Greene. And it was then in 1926 end ’27 that I got the lead into this refugees to the city that later became tremendously significant and an evident fact. But I saw it very, very early.

Then they set up this study of Lynching and they asked me to be secretary of that, which I did. They had 20 more Lynchings in ’30, and they said, “What the heck happened here? Let’s find out.” You’ve got to prevent Lynchings with facts about why people Lynch. Well, who got Lynched? What was he accused of?

See, the irrationality quotient in the Lynching phenomenon was tremendous. There was just an assumption in some areas that you had to have a Lynching every now and then to preserve equitable race relations. The phobia was black men abusing a white woman. And part of that is reflected in this tremendous emphasis that your Southern politicians in the filibusters and what not had always been talking about, Southern white womanhood.

Before we’d gone very far we had these statistics about how many of them had been-the South, how many of them had been black, how many had been for this crime and the other, and what the relationship was between the number of lynchings and the price of cotton, and all this and that and the other. Most of it was not for sex or sex-related crimes, as reported by the white newspapers. It was mostly economic and etiquette matters. Even the statistics that we had where about one-sixth of them were accused of sex-related crimes-it wasn’t that much. It wasn’t as much as a sixth, because there was an element-and everybody knew it-there was an element of fabrication built into that to protect the status quo.

When we had got that research together and got the thing said, and it was getting into the newspapers getting accepted, because the kind of people we had on the Lynching commission in the South, you don’t say-when those men-and, incidentally, there wasn’t a single woman on that Lynching commission-but when those men came out and said, “This is our report. These are our findings,” they were accepted, and they’ve been accepted ever since. Well, when you find out what you’ve been Lynching for, and when you get it from a source that you can’t challenge-and it wasn’t challenged-well, then you are on a different basis to call the sheriff or say, “Well, let’s just don’t let this thing happen.” And of course the women did come in and played a tremendous role there.

WOMEN HAD been sort of shut out of the church: they couldn’t become preachers. They were shut out of the courts: they couldn’t be judges. They were shut out of the sheriff’s office. They wanted to do something. They were hurting to do something. So here, now, was this Lynching thing, and we’d done the statistical work on it. Jesse Daniel Ames just grabbed onto it like a puppy that’s hungry for a bone-or like a big dog that’s hungry for a bone. “This we will do.” And she got them organized very quickly. They were women that had ability and they wanted to do something. And she had this emphasis on working with women and knowing how to work with-and she did know how. So she got the women organized here pretty quick, and she’d call them in there to a meeting, you know, and they would come. And what these women have done-they have signed that they are going to prevent Lynchings in any way they can, and that they are going to call on the sheriffs and they are going to call on the police and they are going to call on the judges and they are going to be active in this thing. And, my gracious, they were. And they were going to tell the politicians, “Lynchings don’t protect our virtue. We don’t need anybody to protect our virtue. And if you get up in the Congress of the United States and say that you are Lynching to preserve our virtue, we’re going to call you down. Now, don’t you do it.” And all of this filibustering, that’s full of that stuff, up till 1930 and ’31, it dropped out.

It gave them something to do, something that was important, something that was vital. And they had a very good organization there for nearly a decade, and I think it did have something to do with the decline of Lynchings. I think the overall situation was moving in that direction anyway, but that was one of the things that was in the overall situation was these alerted women throughout the South to be on their toes about this thing.

When the federal anti-lynch legislation came up, she was very much opposed to that. I don’t think she ever concurred in it as a desirable thing. I didn’t think it would be easy at all. I’d never been in a community where I’d really gotten acquainted with the people where I didn’t find some people willing to testify against the Lynchers, if they could do it without their barns getting burned down or without their church being split wide open or people stop buying at their drugstore. They wanted to. They wanted–it seemed

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to me, they wanted to be put in a position where they would take an oath and say, “Well, yes. I didn’t want to bring this into the open, but I had sworn on the Bible to tell the truth. They asked me this question and I answered it.” They sort of wanted to do that, I thought, and I thought we’d be way ahead if they did and had the opportunity, had a protected situation within which they could give their testimony, because when you’ve got a Ku Klux Klan judge and a prosecutor who sympathizes with him, and then jurymen that they select by their own processes with Negroes not on it and women not on it, at that time. a very closed operation.

Why, you could do anything in the courts. And they did. And this, I thought, would open that thing up some and would be real boon for the region.

I was with Myrdal, because I thought, well, what Myrdal was doing here was important. I didn’t run away from Alexander. I just, with Alexander’s not too enthusiastic permission, went to work with Myrdal.

Myrdal comes down to Atlanta and says he wants to talk with two people. Well, who are the two people? The head of the Ku Klux Klan and Mrs. J. E. Andrews, the head of the Association of Women for the Preservation of the White Race. So he gets out with Mrs. Andrews and is talking with her, and she was saying that what I was doing at Agnes Scott was that I was over there pretending to teach but what Raper is really doing is making white women available for nigger men. And Myrdal knew me somewhat, and he said-it just got too much beyond him, and he said, “Well, wait now, Mrs. Andrews, have you ever had sexual relations with a Negro man?” And she didn’t know what to say and couldn’t say anything hardly. And they went on with their conversation and he left.

AND MYRDAL CAME back to our office. He was somewhat agitated and what not. And we went on out to the house with Ralph Bunche and we ate a meal out there at our house, which was verboten, of course, but we did it anyhow. And then we went on down to Greene County. And by the time we got to Greene County we learned that Mrs. Andrews had sworn out a warrant for Myrdal, that Myrdal had insulted her. She got to thinking about it later and she decided she had been insulter!. So she could get a warrant all right, because she had connections in the political set-up with the Klan. So she got her warrant, and called up Martha to know where I was. She wanted this warrant served. I was with Myrdal. So Martha kept her on the phone for-how long? Half an hour? Forty-five minutes? Then she got in touch with me as soon as she could.

Incidentally, we’d had dinner that night with the chain gang in Greene County. Because somebody raised the question some little pipsqueak said, “What do we do with Dr. Bunche?” And once the question was raised, everybody had to protect his flanks, you see. But if the question hadn’t been raised, why, they’d have done the same things that we did with Ralph Bunche when I took him to my house and we had dinner. We’d have just eaten and then gone.

Oh the piece de resistance on this one is the people, when they decided that they wouldn’t let Bunche come in and eat with the whites, they had sent him a plate of filet mignon, just like all the rest of us, out into the black camp.

I said to Myrdal, “Now, look, they’ve got this warrant sworn out for you.”

He said,”What do we do?”

I said, “Whatever you decide to do.”

He said, “Well, hmmm. What do we do?”

Oh, he’d been asking me to run for governor of Georgia. I should run for governor of Georgia. “What else can you do here if you won’t take political responsibility and stand up to these bozos and he]p educate them? Let them count the votes. Go out there and do it. You’re scared, Raper.”

I said, “No, I’m not scared. I live here.”

He said, “What we going to do?”

I said, “Well, the best lawyer in town was with us down at that convict camp dinner tonight-Colonel Fawlkes. You can go talk with him and he can tell you.”

The sheriff was there, too. So we went down to Colonel Fawlkes house, and Colonel Fawlkes called the sheriff. The sheriff said, “Well, I will not be in my office for official business until 9 o’clock tomorrow morning.” This was about 10 o’clock at night. So I said to Myrdal, “You just decide what

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we’re going to do. I live here all the time, and this stuff is going on always, as you heard Mrs. Andrews this afternoon.”

He says to Colonel Fawlkes, “Well, look. What would they do?”

“They’d have a trial.”

“Have a jury?”

“Yeah, they’d have a jury.”

“Who would select the jury?”

“Well, they’d be selected by the outfit in Atlanta.”

“This would get in the papers, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, it would get in the papers.”

“Well, I’m an international figure.”

And although he wanted me to run for Governor of Georgia and stand up for my principles, I noticed that he wasn’t taking the warrant and standing for his. He said, “This would make it an international incident, and I’m here for the Carnegie Corporation. They put a lot of faith in me. I’m a well-known social engineer.” So we decided that he’d better leave before that warrant got there at 9 o’clock the next morning.

So we rode all that night and we went across the rickety bridge-it was then-down between Fort Benning and Phenix City, Alabama, 2 o’clock that morning, and got over to Tuskegee, and we took our rooms and they had a little bath connection between us, you know. We went to sleep, and the next morning about 8 o’clock he came stomping in there. “Raper, what in the hell happened at Runnymeade? Now, you tell me. What happened at Runnymeade?”

I said, “What happened at Runnymeade was that the people made King John sign some papers.”

“Yeah. And what? What happened?”

I said, “Well, one of the papers was that you can’t arrest anybody unless you’ve got a warrant. But Mrs. Andrews has a warrant for you.”

Well, there we were. I haven’t ever been inspired maybe but once or twice in my life. But that was one of the times. And, incidentally, he never did ask me any further about running for Georgia.

Then I went back to the study of rural Georgia. I went with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Argicultural Economics, to Greene County in the fall of 1940. And I was busy as six bees, keeping myself propped up on every leaning side down there so I didn’t get thrown out.

In the meantime I was running all over the South, checking on things, and going to committees and conferences, and accepting invitations here, yonder, and there, to help write a report and the like. I had an advantage. I had a travel account. And all these organizations that are looking for a speaker-well, they’re frequently looking for somebody that don’t cost them anything. So, from that point of view, I was very attractive, just from the logistical point of view. But they also was willing and even eager, seemingly, to have somebody get up there and talk about the plantation system, and have somebody get up there and talk about the unevenness of education between whites and blacks, between the educational expenses in Atlanta and in the rural counties, of the soil washing away and filling up the rivers and rendering people very, very poor.

I was amazed and frankly very pleased at the invitations that I had to speak. I remember to the Kiwanis, I guess, in Atlanta, the name of my speech was “It Could Happen Only Once.” And I took the forests and the soil then the installment buying and this and that and the other. I had the thing worked out on about ten points. And I look back at it every now and then and I think it was quite insightful. But they took it. They listened to it. I saw those folks later and they would talk. I’d meet them in other meetings, you know.

Then came the New Deal, and it did have an NWA program, and it did have a WPA program, and it did have something for the schoolteachers, and it did have some notions about some clinics and the like. And Gay Shepperson presided over a sort of resurrection of hopes and spirits of the people of Georgia. I had ready access to her office on any kind of public information that she had, and I worked out for every county in Georgia how much money was going for CWA, Civil Works Administration, for the whites, and how much for the blacks, and how much per capita, if it was on a basis of people employed; if not, on a basis of the population. And we had that whole thing for all of those, all of those agencies. And we had, with the Rosenwald Fund, worked up some figures on what the disparity of costs were for education for whites and blacks in Georgia by counties, then when this New Deal program came in for education and they were going to give something to the teachers, how much of it went to these that were getting so little and how much went to these others, how much went to Atlanta to the whites and how much went to Atlanta to the blacks.

Wherever the general standard of education was the highest, the differential between the whites and the blacks was the least, and where the general education expenditures were the lowest the differentials were the greatest. And that was something that we’d documented to the hilt. So we were interested to see where these New Deal funds went. And they were usually on the side of the angels. If they didn’t get the whole way to heaven, why, they at least were sort of in that direction.

WELL, MR. TALMADGE thought this was all pretty bad. And in his Statesman, you know, the weekly paper that he had, he railed about this, these programs every week. But they just went right on. He was railing, and a lot of people were asking him to snap his red galluses. But a lot of other people were glad to have some money coming down to the county. And somehow or other they had said “We like Talmadge. We like old Gene. But we also want the WPA money to come down here. We want the money to come. Whatever money is to come down here, we want it to come.” And I think they wanted that to happen more than they wanted to praise Talmadge.

I don’t know how much of the renaissance in the South came out of the New Deal, but I think–I expect if you analyze this back–and this would be a good thing for a historian to do–analyze that back, you will find more coming out of the New Deal than almost any one thing that’s happened in the South in the last 100 years. I would be pretty sure of that. Especially changing attitudes of people toward themselves is the greatest change it made. The NYA helped some kids get an education. The CCC helped some kids plant some trees and get their stomachs full of good

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food and get their faces clean and their feet clean. But the main thing it did is it gave these people maybe a first chance they had had to believe they could ever be anything except a sharecropper’s son or a sharecropper’s daughter. More poor kids got to school under the NYA than anything else that’s happened in the South-the National Youth Administration. This is what they went out there to do, and this is what they did. And they-they just saw a different world from what they had up until then been able to even envision.

See, when I was working in Greene County, working on this Tenants of the Almighty that we published, MacMillan, 1943-I had working in my office five NYA youngsters, and those kids-no one of them would have ever been associated with a project like interviewing farmers and asking them what they would have expected to get from the Unified Farm Program, and what difference has it made when they had canned fruit, or what difference had it made when they had a fenced garden, or what difference had it made when they were able to get a production loan at a low rate of interest, what difference did it make when they had a clinic, and this and that and the other. Well, those kids just simply saw a new world when they were working with that material. And then the pictures that Jack Delano made there in Greene County-and we had them up on the wall, and we were talking about–“This is what they’re doing for the land erosion back over here, and here’s what they’re doing in this area to get a forestry going. And fire towers–be sure if the fires break out that they get them put out before they burn the whole business up.” And the whole way through, those five kids there were just an illustration of the process that was going on.

And another thing that happened here was this tenant purchase contract that they had with the Farm Security Administration. I can tell you a story about that. Alexander had been saying, and he wrote in Preface to Peasantry, that what we had to do was get the ownership of the land into the hands of these producers, that that was the only way we could have an adequate civilization here. He had worked on that. We had talked about it. He had promoted it in every way he could. And so he called me into his office one day– this was before he left Atlanta–says, “I think we got it. I think we got it. I think we got it.”

I said, “What?”

He said, “I think we got this tenant purchase thing. I think we got it. John Bankhead thinks he thought it up.”

Well, Alexander was the kind of guy who had very practical sense, and if he saw that it was the way to get John Bankhead to promote that legislation, why, he would devise every scheme in the world he could to help get John Bankhead reconfirmed every morning that he had thought that up.

Well, these tenant purchase contract folks-there was, back here, this dream of 40 acres and a mule, and that had been dashed. Then here comes along an agency that says, “You can have this land. It’s yours. You can pay off your indebtedness with a low rate of interest.” And there was practically no hanky-panky in that program. It was done by local committees, and the elite, again, made up most of the local committees. But the elite didn’t get the farms. The rung down, not the bottom of the tenant but the top of the tenant group got those farms. And out from those farms went children who have done anything that has been done in America.

We know one family in Greene County. They lived right next door to us. And we said to the Hopkinses, “Now, look. Why don’t you apply for one of these tenant purchase contracts?” They were right beside of us and were working on the land there on that old plantation we were living on when we were in Greene County.

And they said, “No, we won’t do it.”

Why? Well, I talked with the man about it, Mr. Hopkins, Frank Hopkins, and Martha talked with Mary Hopkins, his wife, that, well, this would be a good idea to do.

“No, there’s a joker in it. We’ll get squeezed again.” He said, “My father tried twice to move from sharecropper into ownership, and each time bad years came. he had to give up everything he had and go back into sharecropping. I’m just going to sharecrop.”

Well, we kept saying, “No, you don’t need to do that now.” I think they saw we were sincere, and then they saw some of these other people moving onto these farms. And

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they did move onto their own farm. They paid for it in five years. Well, there it is. I’m glad that it happened. I’m glad that I was associated with something that is that vital.

Of course, I didn’t anticipate, then, frankly, agribusiness and what that has done in terms of this tremendous emphasis on bigger units to finance and pay for bigger machines and to pay bigger fertilizer bills and pay for bigger insecticide bills. I didn’t anticipate that then.

There was, when I left, in, say, the middle of ’39-there was still the assumption on the part of most, I think, of the Interracial Commission members that segregation-we would make it as best we could. We wouldn’t openly challenge it. I had openly challenged it, but I just did it personally. And I think I didn’t earn any points with Odom and Alexander when I did it. I went to the Southern Conference on Human Welfare in ’38 [the first SCHW meeting was held in Birmingham in 1938] and took a very active part and was a sponsor to the one they had in ’40. Alexander and Odum both had the feeling that this Southern Conference on Human Welfare was sort of a flash in the pan, as indeed it was. But the people that I knew in the South were nearly all there, and I wanted to be there with them, and I was.

And in some ways they were right. But in other ways I think the South in race relations is very much farther along by having had the southern Conference on Human Welfare, even if it did later on peter out, and for good and sufficient reasons. But it did something. The people got together and they talked and they looked at each other. It was a plus, I think, and I’d do it again. If I had been ten years older, I think, I don’t know whether I would have done it or not. I was still under forty. But if I had been fifty, I don’t know whether I would or not. Maybe I would have been with Alexander and Odum. The Interracial Commission had its backgrounds and it had its committees and it had its-never did write down what it believed in. Alexander said, “We won’t do that. We’ll decide as we go along.” He was right in doing it, because couldn’t anybody pick it up and say, “This is what the Interracial Commission believes in.” The whites and blacks at the Interracial Commission had always chosen their place of meeting. It had always-it had never been secret, but neither had it been advertised in public. It was purposely kept sort of quiet because it didn’t want to be annihilated. “We can grow,” we thought, “if we don’t kill ourselves.”

Well, then, the police and some of the folks in Birmingham looked around a little bit: “Hmmmm, we better go over and check on this thing.” So they came over and decided they had to segregate us, and when they did it made us mad. We were here and we had this meeting set up, and this was the way we were going to go, and now you won’t let us go. “We’ll have a meeting only after this where we can have it unsegregated.” That came out of that meeting in 1938. “We will not have another Southwide meeting where we have to be segregated.” That came out of that meeting. That was a part of the findings of the meeting. It was put in the newspaper.

Okay. So that-and, as I say, I didn’t gain any points by having been identified with something that was pushing up on the mores, as that was. And that was exactly what it was doing.

Every member of the Interracial Commission was an ultimate integrationist. He had nowhere to go except towards integration or else deny his affiliation with the whole effort. Now that’s the dynamism of that earlier work that was done with the Interracial Commission when it was being careful, when Alexander wouldn’t put down, “This we verily believe.”

I think what happened was that the people who were in this process knew in themselves that, insofar as this better thing to be done, why, everybody was going to feel better. You feel better when you have been considerate of this other fellow who is treated inconsiderately by so many people. You feel better. You see he feels better, or she feels better. You sleep better. The doors on your house don’t have to be locked quite so securely. The laws don’t have to be quite so demanding in terms of restrictures here and here and here in life.

I think the people who were the farthest along with it were happy that they saw other people every now and then coming towards their side. They thought they were with the future. This is the future, therefore I can abide it somewhat. It hurts, but let’s keep going.

I don’t think your ultimate integrationist ever thought integration was going to solve the whole thing. I think some of the other people who had been against it and then flipflopped over to it made demands on it that some of us who had worked through the process never expected. We didn’t think it was going to make a tremendous, immediate difference. But it was a process which had to be entered into and carried on through. And the sooner and saner you can get started, why, the better off you are.

When you look at the Southern situation, the racial situation, so far as the mechanics of the thing is concerned, it has made more advances than many of us in 1940 could have expected. But these advances that have been made haven’t gotten the heart of the thing. The heart of the thing lies deep in the culture of the white man and in the culture of the black man.

So that’s where the real problem is-the integration, we had to come through that phase. But we ain’t there yet. We ain’t there yet, and we’re not anywhere close to that. But we’ve gotten up the mountain far enough that we car be over it and see what some of the other peaks are and how high they are. The latter and more troublesome half of the journey is still there.

Historian Cliff Kuhn was a co-producer of the “Living Atlanta” series and the producer of the “A Southern Profile” series.

Black Women’s Economic Development Project

By Carolyn Caver

Vol. 9, No. 2, 1987, pp. 15-16

One black woman is having trouble naming her business; another walks past ten other black women to get a black man’s opinion; musing aloud, another says women just don’t have the stamina to stand up under the pressure of business; another wants to get ahead but continues to hire staff who don’t perform. These women are linked by two r invisible yet powerful threads. Each woman is committed to the social and economic development of black Americans, including themselves. And each faces powerful barriers that block her success.

External barriers from a male-dominated power structure conspire to keep black women in subservient and secondary positions in our society. Latest statistics show the median income of white men to be $15,401; $6,421 for the white woman; $8,967 for the black man and $5,543 for the black woman.

In addition to being detrimental materially, external oppression in the form of social disapproval, low expectations, and little encouragement has damaged black women emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. After having her leadership doubted for hundreds of years, is it a wonder that the black woman harbors doubts about herself? In effect, black women see themselves through the eyes of whites and black men: inferior, powerless, less smart, and less capable, especially in business.

We have internalized these negative messages. They have become negative “scripts” guiding our self-defeating actions as blacks and as women. They have become internal barriers, complementing the external barriers that created them. The external barriers are real, and we do not make light of them; however, the Black Women’s Leadership and Economic Development (BWLED) Project believes that internal barriers, the ones in our own heads, are the real killers.

The goal of the project is to identify and break down barriers that stop black women from operating successful economic ventures and taking responsibility for our own welfare and that of the black community. The project provides an avenue for black women to love and support each other and, at the same time, challenge each other to dream, to envision what we want, and then to get it.

The following example illustrates the great need for the Project. A black woman in south Alabama created a catering business. Happy and excited, she got her business off to a good start. The community received her and her product well. With the market tested and the prognosis good, she soon had more callers than she could handle alone. She asked her husband, who had not been supportive of the venture, to keep her business books. He said he would, but he didn’t appear to have any real energy or interest. Her business seemed like heaven, an avenue out of her dead-end agency job to independence–but within a matter of days it slowed to a trickle. She began to feel torn between her responsibilities as a wife, mother, and new entrepreneur. Her initiative to find business declined. When asked about it, she only says, “My family was not very supportive and I was being pulled in too many different directions.” Today the business amounts to another unfulfilled dream.

The above woman is “scripted” both racially and sexually to feel inferior, powerless, not quite good enough, unable to “know” her own personal power. She would find support and identification for her struggle from other women in the BWLED Project as she and they attempted to understand how internal barriers robbed her of her dreams, energy, and initiative.

According to Sophia Bracy Harris, the executive director of FOCAL (Federation of Child Care Centers of Alabama), “Women all over the country affirm that internal barriers are real and they find the objectives of the project exciting.” Based in Montgomery, FOCAL provides technical assistance, training, and advocacy for a network of about ninety

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nunchild-care centers; it is particularly active in training low-income black women to take leadership roles in their communities. Sophia got the initial BWLED Project off the ground in April 1984, after she attended a workshop sponsored by the National Black Women’s Health Network.

In working to break down the feelings of inferiority and to help women see themselves as peers with others and each other, the project adopted FOCAL’s guiding set of concepts and principles:

• Vision: seeing and defining what we want;
• Responsibility: taking leadership and responsibility for our own lives and the realization of our human potential;
• Proactive thinking, behavior, and planning: getting away from the powerless position of reacting, petitioning, rebelling, and protesting in order to get the powerful to fix things, provide for us, accept us;
• Risking: choosing to experience fuller measures of our true reality;
• Moral and ethical behavior: choosing a morality that is consistent with our vision and dreams of a world overflowing with unity, justice, love, and progress.

The project’s main energy centers on having women declare a vision (what it is they want). Black women are so accustomed to thinking about why we can’t succeed that when it comes to saying what it is we want (if no barriers exist), nothing comes. Black women stop dreaming. This project will see black women dream again.

One core project member, Martha Hawkins of Montgomery, recently shaped and launched a vision: Martha’s Home Cooking, a catering service. Martha says the Project had everything to do with her getting the nerve to try catering.

Martha says she was terrified at first; she was concerned about what people would say if her business failed. She eventually said, “I’m gonna give it all I got, full-time.” Today, twelve months later, she is amazed that she is paying other people to work for her. Martha’s Home Cooking primarily caters lunches for industrial sites. With business booming, she says, “I am now scared and excited all at the same time, and it feels wonderful.”

Some Project members currently envision offering a tutorial service, running a baking business, owning a house, changing jobs, running a cooperative.

The Black Women’s Leadership and Economic Development Project offers training and seminars in selling, marketing and starting businesses. Its Technical Assistance Resource Team aids and encourages women to enter into economic development ventures.

For more information, write to P.O. Box 214, Montgomery, AL 36101.

Carolyn Caver is coordinator of the Black Women’s Leadership and Economic Development Project. A longer version of this article originally appeared in Southern Exposure.

Super Tuesday? Titanic Tuesday? South’s Stake Large On Super Tuesday

James Clyburn and Victor Mcteer

Vol. 9, No. 2, 1987, pp. 16-19

Sidebar: James Clyburn

I want to thank you for inviting me here this evening, but before I say anything I want to make it clear that I’m not too sure exactly why I should be discussing the Southern regional primary. South Carolina, as you probably know, decided to forego changing anything regarding presidential elections and we still are planning to nominate or select our delegates by caucus. Of course, that will take place in March and it may influence a few votes.

The Southern regional primary comes almost naturally from the 1984 presidential elections when the South voted overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan. That fact led many Southern Democrats to complain that the National Democratic Caucus did not heed its warnings and did not give ample opportunity to a more conservative candidate for president. Southern Democrats also felt and did not hesitate in expressing their feelings that the Republican caucus in 1984 was much more in tune with the South’s problems as well as the South’s concerns.

Tom Murphy, the Georgia Speaker of the House, summarized [a common] attitude when he said that “the South is tired of the Northern press saying who is going to be the next president.” Therefore, we now have in front of us the Southern primary which is supposed to give the South a different say-so in the political agenda of the country.

Proponents of the primary, or Mega Super Tuesday as it is now being called by the Northern press, have several goals. Number one, they hope to increase the number of Southern candidates and hopefully increase the chances of winning.

Second, they hope to increase their chances of at least influencing the presidential nominee and hopefully capturing the vice-presidential slot.

Three, they are attempting to influence the nomination of candidates who have views that they consider more in tune with what they consider to be the Southern way of thinking.

And fourth, they hope to encourage both parties to focus on regional issues.

Inherent in all of these reasons is the desire to attract

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many white male voters back into the Democratic fold. Whether or not the South shall rise again-as some have said will happen as a result of the regional primary-to my way of thinking is open to question. The Iowa and New Hampshire primaries will take on added significance in the wake of a Southern regional primary. It is possible that a Northern liberal could do quite well in the Southern regional primary just because of the appearance of being a winner.

A more crucial question to me is, what will be the impact of the 25 percent black vote that makes up the electorate in the Southern region? There is the opportunity for further strife and division. If the regional primary is used as a platform for a conservative agenda, what will be the position of black leadership in terms of their agenda?

Any question of a Southern primary also has to take into consideration the so-called Jesse Jackson factor. Jackson, who is all but certain to run in 1986 could walk away with a lion’s share of the black votes and also a good many white votes. Now, if this scenario develops, what will be the position of the white voter that’s left in the South as well as white voters in the other four or five distinct regions of the country? There is a possibility of further alienation and therefore a repeat of 1984.

I have several concerns about the motives [behind] the Southern primary. First, there is the presumption that the primary backers are trying to create a bloc of Southern delegates to use in bargaining or trading at the convention. Now I don’t know how many of you have had the opportunity to participate in the Democratic convention as official delegates, but it’s been my pleasure or displeasure to participate as an official delegate in the last four national Democratic conventions, and in two of those conventions, especially the one in 1972 and then the one in 1980, I was in the middle of the trading and bargaining that goes on behind the scenes. If you think black delegates who happen to have gotten elected in their state caucuses or their primaries wield any kind of influence in those back rooms, you’ve got another think coming. What happens when these blacks get together? I can tell you there are just a few people who will end up controlling those blacks. I’m not too sure that that is what we have in mind, those of us who are sitting in this room.

Another concern is that it seems to me a little bit ironic that all of these years of hearing the black vote described as a “bloc vote,” we now see our white counterparts finding that same strategy appealing.

Secondly, what are the compelling issues which create the community of interest among these Southern states? When you start looking at the Southern Democratic voters you have to realize that there is a big difference in the interest of the black Southern voters and the white Southern voters.

What causes the assumption that these states can find national candidates who agree with their positions? In fact, agreements under these kinds of issues are pretty hard to come by. If there is agreement, I suspect it has a lot to do with what you might call traditional Southern thinking about things.

Thirdly, if the South can have a primary, how long will it be before we have a mega Super Wednesday in the West or a super, super Thursday in the Midwest or a big Saturday in the East? Is that the direction we wish to see our politics headed?

And finally, if we create this bloc of Southern states loosely by the so-called traditional Southern issues, where does that leave black voters? Keep in mind that black citizens of the South have not fared all that badly with presidents from states like Missouri, Massachusetts, or Texas, for that matter. Will we be creating a bloc within a bloc? Does the Southern primary even further dilute black influence in these states…just when it seemed that we were about to find our way into this nation’s political and economic mainstream?

Sidebar: Victor McTeer

I wish to preface my comments by saying that I’m not speaking for Jesse Jackson; I speak for myself and as a Jackson delegate.

I handed out some documents listing the dates of each one of the caucuses or primaries. My secretary and the person that did these forms made a mistake. I had told them to call it “Super Tuesday” and inadvertently they called it “Titanic Tuesday.”

Super Tuesday, as a concept, grew out of white conservative [thinking]. The concept was basically that the South was the key to electoral success; that it would allow for a heightened impact and heighten attention to the area.

In the South we know that this will be the weekend where the minority vote will have the greatest single impact. This is obviously due to the large percentage of black population there. It is also an area, however, where whites predominated in terms of their historic control.

We know that in the rural South the party has suffered a massive white disaffection from traditional party alliances in a startling move towards two-party politics. Now this disaffection is a crucial fact. Why is it that the white folks decided to leave?

Number one, I suggest, is because of the entry of blacks into the process. Number two, the use of racialist politics and tactics by Republicans to play upon and benefit from historic anti-black attitudes of the white community. And number three, a distinct inability by white Democrats to be able to produce anything for black candidates other than very substantial noise.

Therefore, in states like Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, we have seen some of the greatest black advancements in politics coupled with the most stringent white opposition. It is this area that the Democratic Party chose to make its Super, Titanic Tuesday primary the showplace of the nation.

Well, now that we’ve moved from the outhouse to the White House, from slave ships to championships, now that the ships on the bottom have started to edge up, and now, while we know we prefer Roosevelt in a wheelchair rather

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than Reagan on a horse, now that we know that we’re picking up our rocks all over the place, we must ask ourselves the essential question, will the white folk ever get out of the ditch?

I want to ask Jim [Clyburn] here a few questions.

Will whites essentially return to the party primary process in the party elections? Will the white folks come back?

Number two, will Democratic Party candidates attempt to organize both the white and the black communities or will Rev. Jesse Jackson’s obvious and potential advent into the process (1) assure him the minority vote and (2) assure that whites will not attempt to organize in the black community?

Will the solid South (at least as it is perceived by some white candidates) actually become the split South?

Now think of it like this. Suppose you give up as a white candidate on being able to take Mississippi, Alabama. Why? Black folks. You know Rev. Jackson’s gonna do well there. What you do is you go to Florida and Texas. Why? Strong, white, traditional leanings. Texas. The Chicano vote has not yet crystallized at all. There is not yet the strong black activity. You can pick up enough delegates in those two states to counteract the rest of the remaining South.

Is it possible that Bert Lance, Charles Manatt and Rev. Jackson sat down one day and said, “Let’s assure Reverend Jackson 600 votes for the Democratic National Convention.” What do you think about that? We had 384 in 1984 when the highest projection prior to the convention was that we would come out with approximately 200.

What will be the impact of Jackson’s candidacy? First, I suggest to you that it will be very difficult for most black people to walk into a polling place and see Jesse Jackson’s name on a ballot and not cast a ballot for him. I suggest to you that black moderates, who in 1983 and ’84 scoffed at a Jackson candidacy, would be extremely hard-pressed to scoff at that same candidacy in 1988.

The essential problem for Rev. Jackson is a problem of get-out-the-vote and get it out in a massive nature. Of course, we know the black church will be available to help him. But it also seems evident that the Democratic Party process will not be effective in attempting to organize.

The next question is how will whites react to the Jackson candidacy? There is something called the Jesse Jackson mystique: on one side of the coin that Jesse was able to bring black people out to vote in a fashion unlike any other politician in the South. But there is a negative side to the mystique, primarily fostered by Democratic politicians, which is damaging to Rev. Jackson’s campaign as well as damaging to the overall democratic process, and that is that Jesse’s involvement in the political process will assure substantial white opposition.

It is possible that as a result of Super Tuesday we will see a redefinition of the term “South.” There will probably be a little South and a big South. The little South will be everything that Jesse wins, the big South will be everything that everybody else wins.

I suggest to you that there are serious rumors afoot that many of the potential candidates will simply give Jesse the little South and will not engage in significant get-out-the-vote, believing that there are two aspects to this campaign; pre-the convention and post-the convention. Pre-the convention they will attempt to ignore the issues of the black community in an effort not to upset the white men. Post- the convention, since they will judge that black folk have nowhere to go, they will expect that blacks will in turn support the Democratic nominee. There will be no discussion about patronage, appointments, restructuring of priorities. There will be little organizational discussion about issues in the black community-in the little South.

[Do] you remember the term “brokered convention,” the scenario where there’s no clear winner and there must be negotiation. It is not inconceivable that a Jackson candidacy with four to six hundred delegates, in the absence of a clear candidacy for numerous whites, could develop into a brokered convention. That could mean something substantial, not just for Jackson delegates, but also for the black moderates who may choose to support other candidates.

Jesse, if he is to have a vital candidacy, unfortunately must do well on Titanic Tuesday. Its interesting to know that while the Manatts and the Lances created this evident monster in order to benefit a Southern candidacy, it has in a sense become a linchpin for Rev. Jackson. If he does not do well on Titanic Tuesday, then he will have problems in other parts of the country. On the other hand, because of the likelihood that he will do well, it seems evident that many Democratic party leaders will attempt to downplay the importance of Titanic Tuesday.

It seems unlikely under these circumstances that we

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can win. I would suggest to you that Jackson as well as the other blacks who will run on his coattails in legislative, federal, and other races will do certain things.

First of all, they will personalize issues. One of the most interesting aspects of the Mike Espy campaign [See Southern Changes, Vol. 8, No. 6] was the affirmation of issues in a Mississippi campaign. The fact that the farm issue should become a distinct linchpin of a black candidate’s position in the state of Mississippi was indeed unique.

This will not be an unusual tactic in 1988. What should happen and will continue to happen is that blacks will demand their fair share of the political process. I’m really not sure that this Democratic Party is prepared for massive numbers of Southern blacks to feel disaffected as a result of the events occurring at a convention as occurred in 1984. Black people may vote with their feet. They may not come.

It will be essential, I believe, that either we approach the prospect of a brokered convention or that we make demands for specific benefits, specific announcements, specific guarantees, appointments, patronage, and other aspects of the party process if we will effectively play the game in 1988.

Titanic Tuesday, in all likelihood, will be an event that we may never see again. I earnestly believe that we will see a heightening of black participation. We will probably see more black candidates running than ever before. We will probably see black candidates and black leadership in the South defining issues. The important questions for white Southerners and Democratic purists is whether they will join in the redefinition of issues as opposed to the constituency of race.

EDITORS’NOTE: The theme of the 1986 annual meeting of the Southern Regional Council, held in November at a retreat center near Atlanta, was “Electoral Politics and Political Participation in the South: Strategies for the Future.” James Clyburn, South Carolina Commissioner of Human Affairs, and Victor McTeer, a Greenville, Miss., lawyer and Jesse Jackson supporter, were among the panelists at a session considering the potential impact of the 1988 Southwide presidential preference primary. Edited portions of their exchange follow.