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.