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.

Shirley Chisholm Gives Democrats Some Advice

By Felicia Lewis

Vol. 9, No. 2, 1987, pp. 18-19, 22

At 62 the first black woman elected to Congress and the first black woman to run for president has neither slowed her pace nor quieted her voice: “Most persons recognized that Shirley Chisholm says what she has to say.”

And among what Shirley Chisholm has to say is that the Democrats need a Southerner on the ticket in ’88, that the Democrats should be cautious about continuing to take the black vote for granted, that black women have and increasing-though difficult-role to play in U.S. politics, and that Jesse Jackson definitely should run.

“People may say Jackson will split the party again,

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that he can’t win. Catalysts for change in a society, however, know they have to set the tone, chart the course and gain a bit each time. When I ran in 1971-72, nobody was ready for me. I was not only a black person, I was also a female person. But I started something. We cannot achieve things through revolution in this country, therefore the only other course is through evolution.”

She believes “Super Tuesday” will work to Jackson’s benefit. “There’s no doubt that he would end up with a tremendous number of votes. And that would definitely push him as a real force to be reckoned with. I think that is why so many politicians have a fear of what Super Tuesday can really do because they do know that Jesse went over very big in the South. And when you see that concerns of the black population, blacks again will move behind Mr. Jackson and this concerns the power boys.”

Chisholm says, “The Democratic Party is in trouble with black people in this country. It has had as its most faithful followers through thick and thin the black population of America. But over the past 40 years the white ethnics have deserted the Democratic Party from time to

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time. They deserted the Party in 1980 and ’84 when Reagan was elected president. Now our Democratic Party is saying we have to get back the white ethnics if we’re going to the White House. We recognize how important it is to get back those wonderful persons who made up the great coalition of labor, minorites [sic] and women, but in trying to call home these groups, blacks have been taken for granted once again.”

She said labor unions are reassessing their political situation and suggests a similar reassessment is needed by blacks. “All these blue collar people who are in labor unions went for Reagan. Labor leadership went for Mondale for labor has always been allied with the Democratic Party. But they coln’t deliver the labor vote in ’80 and ’84.”

The party’s attitude is, ‘Where are blacks going to go anyhow? They don’t have anyplace else to go. So even if they get mad, they still have to come back to us.’ But a lot of black folks today are saying, “Oh no, we don’t have to do that at all.’ They are not afraid to move in other directions.”

Republicans are giving Democrats hope for 1988, provided the Democrats can “get their act together,” Chisholm said. “The economic situation in this country has placed a lot of people who were middle class yesterday into the lower class today and has brought about disproportionately high unemployment all over this country.”

She said it is vital “that we have a Southerner on the Democratic ticket in 1988. We missed the boat last time out in putting tow Democrats who were essentially of the same philosophical ilk on the ticket, thus leaving out a large section of the country.”

Chisholm sees an increasing role in politics for black owmen. She is the national chairwoman of the National Political Congress of Black Women. “Its broad-based objective is the political empowerment of black women. Four members on our board of directors ran for elections this past time and won. However, it’s going to be difficult for black women to be elected to the the [sic] United States Congress. When Barbara Jordan, Shirley Chisholm and Yvonne Burke left, our places were not taken by black women.”

It is difficult for a black woman to run, and difficult to be elected, she said. “Two of the reasons are that people, black people also, still have feelings about supporting women for office, whether they are black or white. And secondly, to run a Congressional campaign takes tremendous money. And unless you have good fund raising mechanism and unless you have the where-withall to have knowledgeable sources to plan the strategy, the tactics for your campaign, it’s most difficult.”

According to figures from the League of Women Voters, Rep. Cardiss Collins of Illinois is the only black woman currently serving in Congress. Women overall hold only twenty-five of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives and no Senate seats. Of fifty governorships, women hold three. And of a total of 7,450 state legislators, only 1,105 are women, although more than one-half of all Americans are women.

Felicia Lewis is editor of the Alabama Tribune, a black-oriented newspaper. Her interview was conducted while Chisholm was in Montgomery recently to speak at a fundraiser for a local organization.

Supporters Say Jesse Can Win Nomination

By Odies C. Wilson III

Vol. 9, No. 2, 1987, pp. 19-21

Jesse Jackson ’88 Exploratory Committees are being formed in over 30 states. The initial success and enthusiasm of these efforts have received very little coverage in the Arkansas media. This is quite understandable because it is a rule rather than an exception that the positive accomplishments or undertakings by blacks are not objectively and factually reported. Positive portrayals of blacks are not objectively and factually reported. Positive portrayals of blacks in the media are usually the products of the efforts of a concerned individual, usually a black, who makes a special effort to compile and submit well documented facts for a feature publication. The lack of sensitivity of local media accurately reporting the positive aspects of the scope and potential of a Jesse Jackson presidential candidacy must be supplemented by concerned blacks writing and speaking out on this issue.

It is a simple fact that many people of all walks of life feel that Jesse Jackson is a serious candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Many others feel that he is the best candidate in the field, announced or unannounced from either political party. Further, there are many elected officials, political analysts, civic leaders, ministers, and laypersons who feel that Jesse Jackson has a realistic and very good chance of capturing the Democratic presidential nomination or at a minimum he can capture a lion’s share of the Democratic convention delegates in Atlanta and have a strong say as to who Wl11 or will not be the Democratic presidential nominee.

A question being asked in political circles across the nation is “Why should Jesse Jackson run for President in 1988?” It is also a question most often answered from a negative and usually uninformed perspective. Far too many people are spending far too much time reading or listening to what a handful of so called “political experts” in mass media and the Democratic Party’s Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), or more appropriately “Democrats for the Leisure Class,” have to say about the potential, direction, effect, dangers and objectives of a Jackson candidacy. For the most, these are the same experts who wrote Jackson off in 1984.

“Jackson would be lucky to get one million votes or one hundred delegates.” “He will not make Super Tuesday.” “He will not make the Democratic Convention.” Those “political experts” or “dream busters” were wrong in 1984. If Jesse

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Jackson runs in 1988 he will prove them wrong again.

If Jackson runs in 1988 will he do as well as he did in 1984? Block Jackson strategies have been springing up since 1984. Four years of negative and ill-conceived plans of little men in big places have failed. Campaign professionals have analyzed Jackson’s 1984 campaign and his current political strengths. The results of their analyses have affirmed what Jackson supporters knew all along. Jesse Jackson can win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988!

So the answer to the “Why should Jesse Jackson run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988? is simple, “He can win.”

Jesse Jackson is the national leader who best expresses the issues and platform which affect the interests of the Rainbow Coalition–blacks, workers, farmers, environmentalists, peace activists, feminists, Hispanics, Asian, Indians, and progressive whites. He has a long and distinguished history of dedicated work on behalf of these constituencies.

Jackson’s core constituency is the Democratic Party’s base, the voters who stick with the party no matter what. Blacks voted over 90 percent for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980 and about the same for Walter Mondale in 1984. But Jackson is much more than an ethnic politician. “A black candidate does not mean an exclusive black agenda, but an inclusive agenda that grows out of the black experience in America.” (Jackson, 1983) Jesse Jackson collects the discontent–a coalition of the rejected–the real silent majority.

He has emerged as the authentic “favorite son” of the constituencies in the Rainbow.

He is doing well in recent polls, and the Roper Poll of twelve Southern states indicated a growing acceptance of his “economic justice, invest America” message among whites. The Roper Poll also showed him with 30 percent of the Hispanic vote.

Jackson has been broadening his base among (white) farmers, laborers, high school and college students, peace activists, Jews and liberals generally. In addition, he has been cultivating an Asian base (Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Korean Americans), and others.

The ’88 election will be the first since Humphrey vs. Nixon in 1968 with a non-incumbent running in the general election from both parties.

Given the numbers and Jackson’s natural base, it is not impossible that Jackson could win outright on Super Tuesday in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. Certainly he will run strong elsewhere, too–especially if he does well in Iowa.

There were those who ignored Jesse Jackson in 1984, but his growing popularity and political activity may make him the Democratic spoiler during the next campaign.

His January visit to Iowa showed the depth of attention he commands. Jackson went head-to-head with the NFL Super Bowl and drew 800 people to a church potluck supper in a small all-white town (population 2,100). The feast has not gone unnoticed in a state where Democrat Gary Hart and Republican Bob Dole had to settle for much smaller audiences. Besides the United Auto Workers, groups helping Jackson organize his trip included churches, Democratic activists and the Iowa Farm Unit Coalition.

Jackson received 3.2 million votes (compared to Mondale’s 6.8 million and Hart’s 6.2 million votes) in 1984–some 21 percent of the total.

There are 20 million eligible black voters–thirteen million registered and seven million unregistered. It is significant to note that the Mondale-Ferraro ticket receive. 10.5 million black voters in the general election–almost [???–page obscured]

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million more votes than he received in the primary process to get the nomination. Clearly any combination of 10 million votes will win the nomination. The Rainbow Coalition can win.

Jackson can “win” without getting the nomination. With a powerful bloc of delegates to the Democratic National Convention, the Jackson coalition can determine who will win the nomination, and negotiate the terms for support. He will go into the convention with an agenda/contract reflecting the coalition’s maximum and minimum requirements for support of any candidate. The coalition’s interests can be projected and protected. That would constitute a major victory for the coaliton.

The Jackson for President Campaign will help empower the coalition at all levels through massive increases in voter registration and strong voter turnout through targeted campaigning We can elect more council persons, city board members, mayors, Justices of the Peace, commissioners, state legislators, Congresspersons, and affect the outcome in key Senate races (as we did in 1986). This mobilization for empowerment will have significant impact on reapportionment in 1992.

The Jackson for President Campaign will strengthen long-term political empowerment through enhancing coalition-building, networking and the development of permanent political organizations and institutions.

In 1984 over 20 percent of Jackson’s 3.2 million voters were non-black. This percentage should increase significantly when he runs in 1988, but the fact remains that the initial base of Rev. Jackson’s support is black. It is time for blacks to put aside their own petty personal feelings, anxieties, fears, jealousies and examine the facts of the giant potential of a Jesse Jackson Presidential campaign from a black perspective. There are enough registered black voters alone to deliver the Democratic nomination to Jesse Jackson.

You do not have to absolutely like Jesse Jackson’s attitude, ego, personality, point of view, dress, or deodorant before we can have solidarity in our struggle for equal justice, jobs, and participation in the economic and political power in our state and nation. You don’t have to agree with everything Jesse Jackson says or does to support him. Just like you don’t have to agree with everything Dale Bumpers, David Pryor, Tommy Robinson, or Beryle Anthony, Bill Alexander, Bill Clinton or any other white politician says or does to support them.

Every black voter should find more common ground with Jesse Jackson than any other possible candidate from either political party. Blacks must give Jesse Jackson a solid base to win our party’s nomination. To accomplish this goal we need to reverse the current trend whereby far too many blacks are selling out the well-being and vested interests of their communities for some personal and private idiocyncrasy.

Let’s be bold enough to win with Jesse Jackson in 1988. Jesse Jackson should run for President in 1988! Jesse Jackson should win the Democratic nomination in 1988. He is undoubtably the best candidate.

Odies C. Wilson III is a coordinator for the Jackson campaign in Arkansas. This article is adapted from the Arkansas State Press, a black weekly newspaper published in Little Rock.

Voter Participation Is Now the Challenge

By Alex Willingham

Vol. 9, No. 2, 1987, pp. 21-24

Since the enactment of the Voting Rights Act, black voter participation has improved dramatically, often operating as an integral part of winning coalitions. However, under-registration and low voter turnout continue to handicap the black population in the South. This is the uncomfortable fact behind claims of an influential black vote made after the Jesse Jackson campaign in the 1984 presidential primaries and again after the 1986 elections. Such claims were fueled by certain black political leaders and also by conservative whites smarting over the defeat of incumbent Southern senators who failed to attract black votes in 1986. Both groups have a special interest in exaggerating the importance of the black vote. But the reality is that blacks in the South, even some in key jurisdictions, are neither registering nor voting in respectable numbers.

A case in point is the 1986 campaign in Georgia’s Fifth Congressional district where John Lewis won election over Julian Bond. The district is centered in Atlanta and includes black voters with an active history of participation. Both Bond and Lewis are well-known veterans of the civil rights movement and voter registration work. For the heated run-off between them less than sixty percent of the eligible blacks in Fulton county (the bulk of the district) were registered to vote, and barely more than a third actually cast ballots. Limited registration and turnout did not prevent the election of a black Congressman there, but only because court-ordered redistricting provided a large black majority; in a district with the same black registration and turnout, but with a smaller black majority, a viable white candidate might have beaten Bond or Lewis.

In the Second Congressional district in Mississippi, black citizens–though a majority–were unable in 1982 and 1984 to elect a U. S. Congressman. In 1986 when the district elected Mike Espy to become Mississippi’s only black congressman, it was considered an upset although he was elected over a white in a district with 57 percent black population. Despite the large percentage of blacks in the South, Lewis and Espy will serve with just two other black colleagues among the 138 Southerners in the 100th Congress.

In a real sense, these are protected victories, won through the reapportionment process. And reapportionment, the most important election reform strategy of recent years, has been so successful it is now nearly exhausted as a remedy. The single-member district is now widely used throughout the South. From courthouse to statehouse,

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thousands of at-large elective offices once unattainable to minority candidates have been transformed into districts which give ample expression to black voting choices and, due to segregated housing patterns, just about assure election of black candidates.

The momentum for districting remains strong. The Alabama legislature has enacted local courtesy laws enabling a cluster of Black Belt counties to convert to singlemember districts for the election of county governing bodies and school boards. Another l70 Alabama jurisdictions may convert to single-member districts under terms of a pending lawsuit. In Mississippi all county supervisors are elected from single-member districts. Even Southern legislatures, the bodies responsible for reapportionment, are elected from single-member districts in eight of the Southern states; only a few multi-member districts remain in Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina.

Generally, the federal courts have upheld single-member districting as one effective remedy for electoral discrimination even as legislative and administrative policies have moved in regressive directions. In Thornburg v. Gingles, a 1986 decision on North Carolina’s legislative reapportionment, the U.S. Supreme Court disallowed several at-large features of a districting plan and specifically emphasized that the election of racial minorities should be considered a critical factor in evaluating election systems. The Thornburg decision has been considered pivotal because the Reagan Administration entered the case and made a special argument, rejected by the Court, that would have restricted the reach of reapportionment law.

Mere conversion to single-member districts does not settle the issue of discrimination in elections. The problem is illustrated in cases such as that of the Mississippi county supervisors where, despite single-member districts, blacks account for only 38 of the state’s 410 supervisory positions although blacks are a substantially larger percentage of the state’s population. A similar pattern holds among the Southern state legislatures. Even with the large-scale conversion to single-member legislative districts, for example, blacks would have to more than double their present number of state legislative seats merely to match their numbers in the region’s population. As single-member districts come more into use, a remaining issue–and one likely to dominate the 1990 round of reapportionment–is how to draw districts so as to create effective minority constituencies.

Recent reforms have been based on certain key assumptions which justify the priority given to the reapportion-

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ment strategy: that Southern state voting policies would be retrogressive, that blacks would under-participate relative to whites, that cross-racial coalitions would be unlikely, and that minorities would not be elected to single executive and state wide offices. These assumptions can now be reviewed.

Southern state policies on voter participation, traditionally hostile to the black voter, have been improving. Flexible voter registration hours, satellite registration sites and deputy registrars are now more common. Election officials in several states publicly and systematically encourage voter registration.

While barriers to voting have diminished, differential rates of voter participation continue. And when this is combined with white racial bloc voting the results could be an artificial constraint on the political development that will come to the region. In the past, allowance has been made for underparticipation by using the redistricting process to draw black districts with extraordinary majorities. This practice has been effective in the short-run but has serious drawbacks as a long-run tactic. Such compensatory districting may encourage packing, a new wrinkle in racial gerrymandering which could be a threat remaining long after the classic vote dilution techniques–including at large voting–have been swept away.

One danger is that ostensibly black-controlled districts may be intentionally drawn where powerful white factions continue to control political office. For example, by putting most of the 30 percent black population of a given county in a single almost exclusively black district, blacks might elect one of five commissioners, who would consistently be on the losing end of 4-1 commission decisions. The remaining blacks in the county might be split among several majority white districts where they compete with a dominant voting bloc and have no ability to influence decisions. A perception of representation might develop, among both blacks and whites, which reduces the minority community to its “own” elected officials. This result would lead to disillusionment as surely as the failure of blacks to win offices in districts with only slight black majorities.

Recent reforms have been based on a pessimistic assumption about the prospects of cross-racial voter coalitions. The reality of white racial bloc voting, particularly when combined with the differential rates of participation, is a strong factor in assessing the racial impact of election mechanics. But voter coalitions are critical to future advances. The building of such coalitions will depend, in large measure, on racial attitudes of white voters, but a key ingredient will be maximization of the voting potential of the minority population.

Furthermore, single-member redistricting reforms do not reach certain levels. They have brought mixed results in Congressional races; they are ineffective in single executive and state-wide offices. Except for the special case of judges, only one black holds a state-wide elected office in the South.

The significance of voter registration and education are clear. Yet there is growing doubt that current efforts and organizations will be capable of meeting the challenge. The Voter Education Project (VEP), historically responsible for increasing black voter participation in the region is facing major problems. For several years now it has been in serious financial, organizational and structural disarray. Even before its current troubles, the political dynamics in the region were presenting an increasingly difficult challenge to voter registration efforts.

The crisis at VEP was not entirely caused by internal factors. It grew out of two things. First there was the overall shift in voting rights efforts from community organizing to formal litigation, a shift that came to dominate voting rights strategy in VEP’s Deep South territory. Second, there was a shift in the object of organizing from support for overall consensus candidates (often at the presidential level) to mobilization in the context of highly partisan local campaigns. Key elections sometimes feature competition among black candidates in majority-black single-member districts; at other times they consist of black incumbents unopposed for reelection.

In 1985, when the national philanthropic foundations issued the report criticizing VEP, the focus was on over allocation of money to administration as opposed to field work. But VEP, or any other organization doing effective voter participation work, will have to come to grips with the changing conditions of Southern politics and of the role of minority voters therein. Some dramatic efforts to address the issue have had little impact. In 1984 lawsuits were filed in several southern states seeking to compel state officials to affirmatively register voters. VEP itself shifted tactics and went to court over registration practices in Georgia.

But this overall effort has stalled and cannot be expected to bring results in the near future.

The Jackson Campaign and its Rainbow Coalition proposed a seductive way out of the voter participation dilemma–charismatic leadership based in black church organization. Whether that will have a long-run impact on minority voter participation is doubtful (there is some reason to believe that black church politics is an extension of the partisan pattern now emerging). In the short run the Jackson mobilization has not significantly expanded black voting and, indeed, Rainbow candidates have become one more element competing for support within the same restrictive franchise.

The Jackson method also places heavy emphasis on race in its mobilization drives. But conditions in the South today require an active voter to exercise the franchise in circumstances where such cues are not dependable guides because election choices are more matter-of-fact calculations. Powerful white factions seeking to realign Southern politics, and restrict bi-racial governance, encourage racial cueing by blacks as a strategy for delegitimation. Emphasis on the racial cue also invites counter mobilization by elevating this visible aspect of the candidate (or proposition) among Southern white voters a group not unaccustomed to making its election choices by such a standard. Depressed voter participation in the Southern black population remains despite the Rainbow Coalition suggesting the challenge for groups seeking an open and responsive political process.

Counting VEP, about fifteen organizations now conduct

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voter participation work in low-income and minority communities. Only two of these are based in the South, although half of them have operations somewhere in the region. The proliferation of voter registration groups has intensified competition over scarce dollars, local constituencies, and skilled organizers, without providing local capacity to respond to basic participation problems. In local communities, groups historically constituted for voter participation work now struggle without much assistance and are actively solicited by partisan factions.

Partisanship is a fact of life in the new Southern politics, posing difficult problems for traditional tactics. Partisanship will be exaggerated by the increase in black elected officials. Conclusions about the precise impact of partisanship are difficult given the rapid pace of change. However, certain features are clear. The new mobilization is not a strategy for empowerment. It is primarily effective in influencing the direction of the vote rather than the quality of participation or input beyond election day. It is beneficial insofar as such mobilization helps sustain some voter turnout. Partisan mobilization tends to be episodic and personality-driven. It seems to increase the role of money in elections. It is of limited impact in low-profile elections even when the issues being decided are vitally important to minorities.

Current levels of registration and turnout suggest that partisan mobilization is not a viable substitute for traditional voter registration work. It does not seem capable of addressing the legacy of discrimination or the sense of uncertainty about the efficacy of the vote that is behind minority under-participation. To leave the exercise of voting rights to partisan mobilization will mean that the historic struggle to enfranchise black Southerners will lose its potential as a democratizing force and become reduced to mere politics-as-usual.

What can be done? Nothing easily. Because philanthropy gives its funds to non-political groups, its predisposition favors litigation strategies which are safe from charges of partisan involvement. As we have seen, however, the benefits to be expected from litigation are diminishing and low voter participation among minorities may actually have begun to undercut the benefits of redistricting. Proponents of voter registration should avoid putting so many eggs in the litigation basket and return to providing support for organizational community-based work designed to register and vote the population. This is no simple matter. Persisting underparticipation and partisan domination of the electoral agenda raise difficult strategic problems for groups working to expand minority participation.

Improvements in official voting policies are still needed at both the state and federal levels. But formal changes in state policies are not a substitute for community-based organizational work. Any overall strategy will necessarily develop out of experiences in local communities–rather than top down. Targets of opportunity must be pursued by placing resources in places where there are realistic chances of making gains. A regional organization, in the tradition of VEP, could be pivotal in the process.

Above all some organization needs to plunge in to systematically collect and analyze information on what is happening in the aftermath of the recent reforms. Research associated with voting rights litigation provides some interesting illustrations about how to answer these questions. But the case-by-case nature of this work does not facilitate the systematic generalization needed now.

The Voting Rights Act, the federal courts, and an experienced bar remain in place to protect against wrongdoing by state officials, but the main line of defense against vote dilution is increasingly becoming that of informed citizens taking action in local communities. Strategies to promote full participation in Southern politics have varied over time as activists have struggled to overcome voting practices that were among the nation’s most restrictive and discriminatory. Successful adjustments have resulted in significant change yielding a more open political process today. Another shift is necessary now if the historically disfranchised are to consolidate past gains and continue the march towards a just political system.

Political scientist Alex Willingham is research director of the Southern Regional Council.