The Poverty of Reaganomics

By Staff

Vol. 9, No. 4, 1987, pp. 1-2

In its twilight years the Reagan Administration is returning to its extravagant rhetoric about having created the “opportunity society.” According to Administration officials–proud of low inflation and a proposed treaty with the Russians–President Reagan will leave office with the world safer and the American people richer than ever before.

Braggadocio, of course, is nothing new among politicians of both parties nowadays, but these claims go beyond self-congratulations. They are reckless and alarming misstatements that invite the American people to ignore dangerous trends within this country. They call cruel realities “opportunities” and enlarged poverty “riches.”

A recent report from the Children’s Defense Fund in Washington amply illustrates the unreality of these claims. Its report on the declining status of young men tells vividly that no societal group in this country is assured of a future that is safe or enriched. The key findings are summarized below:

Young Men’s Earnings

Between 1973 and 1984, the average real annual earnings among males ages twenty through twenty-four fell by nearly thirty percent (from $11,572 to $8,072 in 1984 dollars). This sharp drop affected virtually all groups of young adult males, athough [sic] young black men suffered the most severe losses (nearly fifty percent).

Nearly sixty percent of all males ages twenty to twenty-four were able to earn enough to lift a family of three out of poverty in 1973. During the 1980s, however, the ability of young men to support a family plummeted, leaving only forty-two percent with earnings above the three-person federal poverty line by 1984.

Earnings, Education and Basic Skills

Young men between the ages of twenty and twenty-four who had not completed high school suffered the largest percentage drop in their real annual earnings during the 1973-1984 period–forty-two percent.

The percentage of all male dropouts ages twenty

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through twenty-four with earnings above the three-person poverty line dropped by nearly half, from fifty-nine percent in 1973 to thirty-two percent in 1984. Only four in ten white male dropouts, fewer than three in ten Hispanic dropouts, and a shockingly low one in nine black dropouts earned enough in 1984 to support a family of three.

The level of basic academic skills makes a difference even among young adults with the same amount of schooling. High school dropouts with strong basic skills have average earnings more than twice as great as dropouts with weak basic skills. Similarly, high school graduates with basic skills ranking in the top fifth among their peers have earnings nearly double those of graduates falling in the lowest fifth.

In 1973 young male college graduates earned twenty-five percent more than dropouts; by 1984 their average earnings were nearly twice those of dropouts.

Because they are disproportionately poor and frequently reside in communities with inferior schools, minority teenagers are particularly likely to leave school without the basic academic skills they need. Despite substantial gains that have narrowed the black/white achievement gap over the past decade, the average black seventeen-year-old now reads at the same level as the average white thirteen-year-old.

Youths who by age eighteen have the weakest reading and math skills (in the bottom fifth when compared to those with above-average basic skills) are nine times more likely to drop out of school before graduation; and five times more likely to be both out of work and out of school.

Young black male dropouts experienced a stunning sixty-one percent drop in real annual earnings between 1973 and 1984. Young black high school graduates fared only slightly better, suffering a fifty-two percent loss in real earnings. In contrast, young black college graduates actually increased their earnings.

The percentage of young black men working year-round has fallen by one-third, from forty-eight percent in 1973 to thirty-two percent in 1984. Only twelve percent of black male high school dropouts ages twenty through twenty-four had no earnings in 1973. By 1985 nearly half–forty-three percent–of all black male dropouts ages twenty through twenty-four failed to obtain any employment whatsoever.

Among young black men who had dropped out of school, the proportion with earnings above the three-person poverty line fell from forty-four percent in 1973 to twelve percent in 1984. The percentage of young black male high school graduates with such earnings also plunged from sixty-eight percent to thirty percent during this period.

Earnings and Marriage Rates

As recently as 1974, roughly two in five young men ages twenty through twenty-four were married. Over the next decade, however, the rate for such young men fell by half.

Regardless of their race or level of educational attainment, young men ages twenty through twenty-four with earnings above the poverty threshold for a family of three remain three to four times more likely to marry than young adult males with below-poverty earnings.

The decline in real earnings and resulting drop in marriage rates have been most severe among high school dropouts and graduates not going on to college–those young people who have tended in the past to marry and bear children earliest.

As a result of declining marriage rates, a larger percentage of children now are born out-of-wedlock. In 1984, fifty-six percent of all births to teens and twenty-five percent of all births to women ages twenty through twenty-four were to unmarried women–a dramatic increase from 1970’s thirty percent and nine percent respectively.

Youths ages eighteen through twenty-three who have the weakest reading and math skills (in the bottom fifth when compared to those with above-average basic skills) are eight times more likely to have children out-of-wedlock.

Poverty Rates

The poverty rate for families headed by a person younger than twenty-five has nearly doubled since 1973, reaching thirty percent by 1985. Poverty rates among young white families more than doubled, from twelve percent in 1973 to twenty-five percent in 1985. Poverty rates among young black families were higher to begin with but still increased by nearly half, from forty-three percent in 1973 to sixty-two percent in 1985.

Nearly one-half (forty-eight percent) of all children living in young families in 1985 were poor–nearly double the twenty-six percent rate in 1973.

The South Revisited

By Stetson Kennedy

Vol. 9, No. 4, 1987, pp. 4-7

“One difference between you and most of the Southerners who pioneered in the reform movement of the Thirties and Forties is that you are still alive,” one of the editors of Southern Changes said to me. “That is why we would like to get from you, against the background of your experiences then, your view of what is happening in the South today, and its prospects for the future.”

So, across the span of the 40 years which have elapsed since my book Southern Exposure, here goes. My intent- I suppose I should warn at the outset-is not to harp upon “great progress made,” out rather to suggest that there is urgent need now for someone (else) to write a Southern Exposure II, calling for yet a Third Reconstruction.

With a view to getting our hearings, let’s start with a backward look at the South that was.

No matter how you looked at it, the 1930 Census was a revolutionary document. Not only the statistics, but the bowlegs of pellagra attested that the American South was one of the major hunger areas of the world. And the Great Depression was making an already-horrendous situation infinitely worse.

The honest observer had no choice but to characterize the South as a feudalistic, colonial, undeveloped, largely illiterate, disease-ridden Jim Crow apartheid society ruled by a racist one-party white oligarchy. (And so I did.)

Anyone interested in getting a quick fix on the way it was (if not satisfied by my Southern Exposure) need only turn to the collection of oral histories gathered by the WPA Writers Project and published by W. T. Couch as These Are Our Lives at Chapel Hill, and to the mirror held up by Erskine Caldwell and photographer Margaret Bourke-White in You Have Seen Their Faces. Beyond that, for an in-depth focus, the literature is copious.

The feudalism which had replaced chattel slavery was characterized by the commissary system, peonage, share cropping, and tenant farming. Family “dirt farmers” were being “tractored off the land.” The specter of a mechanical cottonpicker loomed over the horizon, threatening to make rural blacks “surplus people.” (Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge’s solution was to plant cotton along Peachtree Street “so city folks could see what it looked like.”)

Industry remained largely extractive, with discriminatory freight rates conspiring to keep the South a colony of the industrial North. The last of the South’s timber fell to the “cut out and get out” lumber barons, and naval stores (turpentine) shifted from the Carolinas to Georgia and Florida and back again, as slash pines were bled to death and then given time to replenish. When in rare instances an FBI agent would venture into a camp in search of peonage, he was jailed for trespass.

Malaria, dengue (“breakbone fever), and hookworm were endemic, the incidence of the latter being one hundred percent among rural Southerners at some point in life (principally acquired by going barefoot to the outhouse). Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins observed that “A social revolution would take place if shoes were put on the people of the South,” to which Senator Duncan Fletcher of Florida rejoined, “There is a considerable colored population in the South who would regard it as a distinct punishment to be required to wear shoes.”

In the early Thirties most of the South’s roads were still made of clay, and everybody waved whenever an automobile went by in a cloud of dust. “Rural electrification” was still largely a New Deal promise, and rural housing com-

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monly lacked running water and window screens. FDR was putting it mildly when he said that one-third of the nation was ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-housed. One of my black neighbors put it even more eloquently when he described his shanty as having “so many cracks in the walls you could see as much of the outside from the inside as you could if you went out the door.” He went on to state that once a week the company commissary offered “all kinds” of fresh meat-“pig feet, pig tail, pig ears, neckbone, sowbelly, hog maw, and all such as that.”

Black children who were in school at all were typically to be found-all ages-in one-room structures, presided over if they were lucky by a teacher paid by the Rosenwald Foundation.

The Jim Crow system of compulsory racial segregation-our American prototype of apartheid-was all-pervasive, unchallenged by any but a few random black martyrs. The Klan said that Jim Crow was here to stay, and just about everyone, no matter how they might feel, was obliged to agree that it looked that way. Through the centuries, the institution had taken on the aura of the sacrosanct, and those of us who were so inclined, and took to heart Sandburg’s admonition to level “old walls and crumbling foundations,” were hard put to find any fissures.

In housing, transportation, accommodations, recreation, education, religion, employment, government, and the armed services, segregation was de rigeur. Not just the South but the USA was no less an integrally racist society than is the U of SA today. And if anyone thinks Botha is being intransigent, he should have been around (in 1935) when Oklahoma Gov. “Alfalfa Bill” Murray swore to circumvent a Supreme Court ruling against racial zoning by invoking martial law in perpetuity if need be.

I mean, those were the days when the Florida Times Union reported, “Marion* sang well last night,” and ran classifieds reading:

Neat colored girl wanted for maid. No Yankee talker need apply.

Just what this sort of thing meant to the black domestic was fully explained by one, who told interviewers from Fisk, “I feeds white folks with a long spoon.” With my own eyes I saw blacks refrain from getting in line to buy a postage stamp, until all white folks had gotten theirs. Myrdal notwithstanding, a black old-timer said it all: “When you in Rome, Georgia, you got to act like it.”

As for the halls of government throughout the South, they were “lily-white.” White rule-even in the 191 counties where (counted) blacks were in the majority-was made easy by a combination of state – and vigilante-terrorism, and such institutions as the white Democratic primary and a poll tax as a prerequisite for voting. With the electorate in these “free elections” thus reduced to a minimum, the same old rabid racists were resumed to Congress time after time. What with the committee chairmanships they garnered by virtue of seniority, the “South” was firmly in the saddle.

Up against a system so entrenched and seemingly formidable, we of Uncle Sam’s Loyal Opposition could not help but feel like Li’l David sallying forth to meet Goliath. There was never any shortage of individual blacks, of both sexes, to defy the system at the risk of life or limb. They paid the price, but results were not immediately apparent. As for whites, one could become an instant agitator merely by shaking hands with a black. Breach of the interracial etiquette was quite enough to get one driven into internal exile.

In my own case, I was still in attendance at Robert E. Lee High School when my classmates began to ask each other, “What got into Stet?” They were simply at a loss to understand why I did not want to take part in their favorite sport, sideswiping black grocery-delivery boys on their loaded bikes.

Not many years later, one of my sisters remarked at table, “I do believe you would rather be with n-s than with us,” whereupon I rose and said, “As a matter of fact, I would.” It was on those terms that my family and I parted company, and the separation has continued by mutual consent through all the decades since, with no other communication than an occasional poison-pen letter addressed to “Mr. BLACKsheep.”

Such cases are not uncommon in Southern history. They had their prototypes during Reconstruction, when the press exhorted “Southern womanhood” not to “bestow any favors” upon any man, Southern or Northern, who allied himself politically with blacks. A more recent example was that of Federal Judge J. Waites Waring of South Carolina, who in 1947 handed down a major decision against the white primary. He was obliged to take his family out of the South, at least for a time.

All thought of somehow changing the system was up against the fact that there was no organizational channel through which to do it. A few people, taking a fundamentalist view of Marxist texts, tried to sell the notion that the only hope for black liberation was through proletarian revolution. But blacks refused to listen, much less buy.

The only mass black organization around was the church, but it was no longer the church-militant of Reconstruction, when the AME had led its flock out onto the railroad tracks in a forlorn effort to halt the first Jim Crow coaches.

Although Thurgood Marshall, as chief counsel of the NAACP, was waging his perennial fight in the Supreme Court against that cornerstone of American apartheid, the spurious “separate-but-equal” doctrine, leadership of the Southern NAACP branches was largely in the hands of “hanky-head” churchmen-with some notable exceptions, such as the Evers brothers in Mississippi, and Robert Saunders and Harry Moore in Florida. As for the Urban

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League, it was locked into its traditional preoccupation with the problems of the rural blacks who were flocking to the cities.

And as for the widespread economic and social problems besetting white and black Southerners alike, the worldwide Depression had stirred critical faculties to a degree seldom equaled before or since. There was general apprehension that such crises would prove to be cyclical, and therefore the system itself must be at fault, and in need of integral revision. Under the heading “Never again!” it was not only legitimate but fashionable to probe for roots of the problem.

My father, an agrarian turned merchant, avowed that all of man’s problems began when he began to take his food from a paper bag instead of the good earth. “Back to the land” subsistence farming movements proliferated, but to little avail. Town or country, those were “root-hog-or-die” days.

The New Deal came by way of response. By surrounding himself with guys and gals of goodwill (as contradistinguished from gimlet-eyed corporation lawyers), FDR came up with a broad array of redemptive measures: Social Security, unemployment compensation, a twenty-five cent minimum wage, the right to organize and bargain, WPA and CCC jobs on public works, farm loans, public housing, and regional development projects like TVA and Grand Coulee. Except for subsidies of their own operations, the “economic royalists” denounced the entire package as “inspired by Moscow.”

Roosevelt also appointed a Commission of prominent Southerners, who in 1938 produced a Report on the Economic Condition of the South, labeling the region “the Nation’s economic problem no. 1.” This document was destined to prove even more of a turning-point in Southern history than the compromise peace sealed by Booker T. Washington or the New South speech of Henry Woodfin Grady.

Indeed, the Report was to become the Magna Carta of all of us who were interested in regional reform, and it was pursuant to it that the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) was launched later that year. Compelled by police to segregate at its first meeting in Birmingham, the SCHW pledged never again to meet where it would be required to segregate, and it did not.

We inveighed, resolved, educated, exposed, petitioned, and protested with all our might, but it was mostly indoor activity, and a far cry from the sit-ins, freedom marches and confrontations that were yet to come. Even so, it was the victories won then, the exercise of the rights to organize and vote, and the campaigns to curb lynching and Klan terror, which paved the way for the Big Push of subsequent decades.

It was in the mid-Thirties that the CIO announced it was coming South “to organize the unorganized, white and black in the same union.” To this the KKK responded, “We shall fight horror with horror”: What the Klan had in mind was exemplified shortly afterward, when five men picked up CIO organizer Frank Norman at his home in Lakeland, Fla., and drove off with him-forever.

It so happened that while the Klan et al. were going about the business of perpetuating apartheid and white rule in America, a man named Hitler set out to impose “Master Race” dominion over Europe.

The coming of WW II was seized upon by employers all across the country as an opportunity to tell workers that it was their patriotic duty not to strike, and for white supremacists to tell blacks it was their patriotic duty not to protest. Happily, blacks refused to listen to such nonsense. My fellow Floridian, A. Philip Randolph, put it neatly on the

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letterhead of his March on Washington Movement: “Winning Democracy for the Negro is Winning the War for Democracy.”

As wars sometimes will, WW II gave rise to speculation as to what it was we were fighting for. At the outset, the Army put out a four-page indoctrination pamphlet on “Fascism,” but it was speedily withdrawn, and no one in official U.S. circles has used the word since. FDR eventually came up with his “Four Freedoms” (who can name them now?), and the CIO waxed eloquent about “jobs for all” and a voice in management. From Britain came the Beveridge Report, with its vision of the “Garden Cities of Tomorrow.” Seemingly out of nowhere came the war song:

There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover Tomorrow when the world is free…

In short, all over the world, everybody who was anybody (or thought they were) was inspired to expound upon “The World We Fight For.” I saved every bit that came to hand, and, a scant 20 years later, sent a file drawer full to the New York Public Library. From Acquisitions came the tart reply: “In future kindly query us before sending such stuff, as we have no room for it.” Sic semper casus belli.

After the manner of Lincoln, who sugar-coated the Emancipation Proclamation by billing it as a war measure to weaken the Confederacy, Roosevelt promulgated by executive order a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), billing it as a win-the-war necessity for employers to make the most of manpower reserves. The foot leading to black liberation was in the door. The Klan’s contribution to the war effort was to try to slam the door shut by running want-ads “Are You on the Job? The KKK Is Watching You!”-the intent being to keep blacks picking crops at pennies-per-pound instead of seeking more lucrative defense jobs. FDR in effect countered by having the IRS tack a $670,000 jeopardy tax lien on the KKK’s Imperial Palace in Atlanta, effectively shuttling it down for the duration, the Wizard simply boarding it up and retiring to Miami.

It had been a very long time indeed since blacks had issued any ultimatums, but in the Durham Statement, adopted in 1942, they served notice that Jim Crow would have to go. By way of response, the Southern Regional Council was formed later that year, absorbing the old Commission on Interracial Cooperation. At birth, the SRC was engulfed in controversy as to whether it should stand four-square with the Durham Statement against segregation per se, or-as a matter of conviction or strategy-delimit its programme to seeking amelioration of discrimination. The fear was that if “Mr. Charlie” were told up front that the end goal was desegregation, he would stonewall every attempt at movement.

The magazine Common Ground, edited by Margaret Anderson, became a focal point for airing the controversy. Lillian Smith got in the first words: “Not much is going to be done to bring about racial democracy by this group until its leaders accept and acknowledge publicly the basic truth that segregation is injuring us on every level of our life and is so intolerable to the human spirit that we, all of us, black and white, must bend every effort to rid our minds, hearts, and culture of it.”

In a subsequent issue, SRC director Guy Johnnson was given the opportunity to respond:

“Our goal is democracy and equality of opportunity. We are striving to improve the social, civic, and economic life of our region in spite of a deep-seated and undemocratic pattern of segregation…Personally, I should rather capture the foothills…than merely to point out the distant peak…”

Then, “to kick the controversy another step forward,” Anderson published a chapter, “Total Equality, and How to Get it,” from my forthcoming Southern Exposure. The strategy I proposed was for blacks to arm themselves with ballots in one hand and union cards in the other, and then, arm-in-arm in solidarity with their white union brothers, launch an all-out frontal assault upon all barriers.

Sad to say, wartime America was not all that keen on white/black solidarity. Although some GI Joe was being quoted as saying, “up front, you’re damned glad to see somebody in the right color uniform, regardless of what color his skin is,” on the home-front what were virtually anti-black pogroms took place in Texas, Detroit, and elsewhere.

There was talk in some circles, not only of war against the Reds when the war against the Axis was over, but war against blacks as well. When in 1944 the Supreme Court dealt a death-blow to the white primary, a portent of the struggles to come could be heard in the typical reaction of South Carolina state senator John D. Long: “As for the Negro voting in my primary, we’ll fight him at the precinct meeting, we’ll fight him at the county convention, we’ll fight him at the enrollment books, and, by God, we’ll fight him at the polls if I have to bite the dust as did my ancestors!”

Stetson Kennedy wrote extensively for the labor and black press, was Southeastern editorial director of CIO-PAC, and is the author of Southern Exposure, Palmetto Country, and I Rode With the Klan. He lives near Jacksonville, Fla.

Tuscaloosa’s Solid-Waste Turkey

By United Citizens Against Toxic Chemicals

Vol. 9, No. 4, 1987, 8-9

Your city is actively considering buying an incinerator. Should you have one? Tuscaloosa, Ala., thought it should, but it now knows better. We are a citizens group from Tuscaloosa and we don’t want you to make the same mistakes we did. Here’s our story, as told by the newspapers.

First, you will be told how wonderful incinerators are:

Unlike the landfill it replaced, the facility is not just a place to d ump garbage and trash, but is a place that produces revenue and has the power to operate three times what it is doing now. I’ve seen a great number of recovery plants across the country, and I, for one, am glad to know we had the foresight to invest in such a project.–John T. Lancaster, director, Tuscaloosa County Solid Waste, quoted in the Tuscaloosa News.

You will be told that your incinerator is new, state-of-the-art, not like other incinerators in other cities or made by other companies. This is not true. All incinerators are basically the same and they all have problems. At first, the problems are kept quiet. Some stories never appeared in our local paper, but only in a paper published in Birmingham, 60 miles away:

The Alabama Department of Environmental Management is investigating complaints that Tuscaloosa’s new $9 million trash burning steam plant is creating strong odors and pollutants that are making some residents ill.–The Birmingham News, October 19, 1984.

Officials from the Alabama Department of Environmental Management met with concerned residents of Tuscaloosa County here in a tense, three-hour meeting Tuesday night over Tuscaloosa’s often malfunctioning garbage incinerator.–The Birmingham News, Nov. 21, 1984.

Finally, in 1985, the local newspapers started to cover the story and the local citizens became aware of some of the problems. The plant was well beyond its “shake-down” period and was still breaking down. We knew, of course, that other incinerators broke down a lot, but we had been told new state-of-the-art incinerators would not:

A coolant system breakdown at the Tuscaloosa garbage incinerator forced the plant to close for three days while repairs were made, a state officials said Friday.–The Tuscaloosa News

And then, at last, a front page article about the “bottom line”:

The City of Tuscaloosa has given full backing to a$256,000 bank loan to prevent the Tuscaloosa Solid Waste Disposal Authority from technically defaulting on a bond payment of almost $800,000… The governments are under contract to help meet any deficits in operating expenses of the authority… Though the Authority needed $406,000 to make bond payments due Thursday, the governments were asked only to back $256,000 of the shortfall because the authority received the remaining $150,000 through another loan from First Alabama Bank backed by a stockholder of Consumat Systems, Inc.–The Tuscaloosa News

This “revenue-producing” incinerator was, in fact, eating up more money than this small community can afford. A very clear contract meant that local taxpayers’ pockets were being emptied to keep the expensive incinerator running. By the summer of 1986, when the waste authority finally figured out that they had been bamboozled, they sued:

The Tuscaloosa Solid Waste Disposal Authority was expected to file a $20 million federal lawsuit today against Consumat Systems, Inc., charging the company with fraud, breach of contract, and negligence in the design, construction, and operation of the Tuscaloosa garbage incinerator.–The Tuscaloosa News, May 16,1986

A couple of months later, the waste authority board decided they didn’t want to take the heat, the responsibility, or the counter-suit, and the headlines read:

“Tuscaloosa’s Solid Waste Authority Resigns.” The resignations followed months of disagreement among the governing bodies of the city, Tuscaloosa County and Northport concerning the proportionate share each should pay to cover operating shortfalls at the deficit-ridden garbage incinerator.–The Tuscaloosa News, August 8,1986

These were not the first resignations, nor would they be the last. But by spring 1987, everyone was trying to pretend that the problems were solved and everybody was happy:

“Better days may be ahead for the incinerator…” Local government officials said Friday they hoped a new agreement this week will lead to a fresh start for the city’s financially troubled solid waste incinerator.–The Tuscaloasa News

Of course, there was one little detail:

“Incinerator tipping fees will double… “New rates for the incinerator’s commercial users will be increased from $9 per ton to $18 per ton…the new rate will not affect INDEC, a private, for-profit garbage pickup service, or the local governing bodies of Northport, Tuscaloosa, or Tuscaloosa County…whether the tipping fees for INDEC and the three governing bodies would be lower, higher or even with the $18 tipping fee… “I ‘m not prepared to say what [the negotiated fees] will be,” said Rutherford, executive director of TSWDA.–The Tuscaloosa News, February 22, 1987

What’s this negotiated settlement?” For now, it means much higher fees. And, as soon as more problems crop up, it means more fees and more lawsuits.

Finally, after three years, the state admitted what we had known all along:

Jack Honeycutt, chief of the solid waste section of the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, said earlier this week that preliminary tests of incinerator fly ash conducted in mid-February showed the presence of high levels of cadmium and lead, created when garbage is burned at the

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incinerator…fly ash was found to have contained dangerous levels of cadmium and lead. The Tuscaloosa incinerator produces. . . approximately 100 tons of fly ash collected daily.–The Tuscaloosa News, March 19, 1987

But you will be told that you’re running out of landfill space and that an incinerator will reduce ninety percent of the garbage, and that it’s the only solution.

That ninety percent figure is nonsense. The best plants can do is about seventy percent. Ours does about fifty percent. The rest of the garbage still needs to get dumped.

Consider that fifty percent of garbage is paper. All you have to do is recycle the paper and you’ve got a fifty percent reduction of garbage–the same as our expensive “Turkey.” You’re still healthy and you can sell the recycled paper. You can also recycle aluminum, steel, glass…

But you will be told that recycling isn’t practical. Oh? How come all Japanese cities and towns separate out their paper, aluminum, etc., and recycle. How come the state of New Jersey has mandated at least minimal recycling for all five hundred plus of its muncipalities [sic] .

Why the big push for incinerators? Because combustion chamber manufacturers have run out of markets one is building new power plants, heating plants, or large ships–so they want to build incinerators. One of the biggest names in the game is Babcock and Wilcox, the firm that gave us Three Mile Island.

If you would like to know more about the Tuscaloosa Turkey, write United Citizens Against Toxic Chemicals, Box 7953, University, AL 35486. Our saga continues. If you’re smart, you won’t let yours start.

United Citizens Against Toxic Waste is an affiliate of Citizen’s Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes, Inc., P.O. Box 926, Arlington, VA 22216 (703-276-7070). This article is reprinted with permission from Everyone’s Back Yard, a newsletter published by CCHW. Three full-time CCHW field organizers help grasroots groups in the South fight a broad range of environmental hazards. The field organizers are: Linda King, P.O. Box 1608, Harvey, LA 70058 f 504-340 2321), Clay Carter, P. O. Box 31329, Birmingham, AL 35222 (205-322-4762), and Linda Meade, P.O. Box 11077, Charleston, WV 25339 (304-343-7650).

The Making of A Judge

By Nancy Callahan

Vol. 9, No. 4, 1987, pp. 9-13, 16

In 1816, North Carolina planter Joseph Gee bought a massive tract of land in a bend in the Alabama River, in Wilcox County. On his death in 1824, his plantation-Gee’s Bend-fell to his nephews, Sterling and Charles Gee. Charles managed the behemoth holdings; Sterling returned to North Carolina to run another family inheritance. And it is thought by some that in the ensuing years they used Gee’s Bend to run a slave-trading network between Alabama and North Carolina.

By 1845, the two were in debt to their nephew, Mark H. Pettway, for $29,000. Pettway’s payoff was Gee’s Bend, thousands of acres of dark, fertile soil, an agricultural dream illustrating why that region of Alabama came to be called the “Black Belt.”

Pettway and his family rode to Alabama in a caravan in 1846. Traveling with them were more than one hundred slaves who, except for a cook, walked every step of the way. The episode set in motion one of the most powerful black histories in all the South.

Mark Pettway changed the names of all his slaves to “Pettway.” After Emancipation, they became tenants or

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sharecroppers–on that same, white-owned Pettway land. In 1895, ownership of Mark Pettway’s original four thousand acres left the family, but his name remained with his former slaves and their children, who continued to work the soil . In 1900, the VandeGraaff family of Tuscaloosa bought the Pettway land plus three thousand adjacent acres. Still, the black Pettways stayed.

Leaving would have been hard, if not impossible. As the crow flies, Gees Bend is only seven miles from Camden the county seat. But a ferry across the Alabama River was unreliable, and by land the trip was forty miles each way. Staying where they were, in a totally black culture save for the few white landowners and their families, was the practical thing for the Pettways to do. Practical, but isolated.

The Great Depression had a shattering impact on the black farmers of Gee’s Bend. Cotton prices were too low to sell, and when a Camden merchant who had given credit died, his widow liquidated sixty Gee’s Bend families, her agents collected everything from hogs and chickens to still standing sugar cane. With a diet of plums and nuts during the winter of 1932-33, Gee’s Bend residents would have starved had it not been for staples shipped in by the Red Cross.

In 1935, isolated, poverty-stricken, all-black Gee’s Bend became a focal point of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Resettlement Administration, which became the Farm Security Administration (FSA). In came the federal government with its blueprints and money to fashion an ideal community, the archetype for future projects nationwide.

In 1937, the VandeGraaffs sold Gee’s Bend to Farm Security’s state branch, the Alabama Rural Rehabilitation Corporation. With the bend in government ownership, Roosevelt’s people put together a cooperative, Gee’s Bend Farms, Inc. The result was a hundred new farms of sixty to one hundred acres, each with a new house, barn and modern trimmings–such as pressure cookers. It was a life like that outside the bend. Co-op members acquired the homesteads through low interest government loans, and rented crop land from the government and farmed it cooperatively.

From the government drawing boards also came a school, health clinic, canning center and blacksmith shop; fresh-faced experts appeared with knowledge about medicine, home economy and agriculture.

However, in 1945, Congress ended the FSA, which in turn had to get rid of the Gee’s Bend government-owned farms. The land passed to a new agency, Farmers Home Administration (FmHA), which by 1947 enabled Franklin Roosevelt’s friends, the Pettways, to buy that government land-the land their ancestors had begun to work after walking from North Carolina a hundred years earlier.

The government still wasn’t through. In 1949, a post office was erected, and by mandate the community’s name was changed to “Boykin” as tribute to its congressman, Frank Boykin of Mobile, whom none of the Gee’s Benders had ever seen. In 1962, Congress authorized a lock and dam at nearby Miller’s Ferry, and in 1968, when that expensive facility opened, a third of “Boykin” was turned into a lake. Then in 1974, federal courts closed the high school in this all-black enclave-because the school was segregated. Thus, Gee’s Bend students began daily one-hundred mile bus rides to another school which, due to white flight, was by then also all-black.

Despite its isolation, Gee’s Bend citizens participated in the civil rights movement. Even Martin Luther King came one rainy day to preach at a local church. Through his urgings, people joined the civil rights movement centered in Selma, and were on hand for the lesser-publicized protests in Camden. They marched, went to jail, and finally registered to vote.

Perhaps the most momentous political event came in the summer of 1984, when one of their own was sworn in as district judge of Wilcox County. Jo Celeste Pettway, an honors law graduate of the University of Alabama, was appointed by then-Gov. George C. Wallace, who twenty-one summers earlier had attempted to block a black from enrolling at his alma mater.

Judge Pettway, now thirty-five years old, is the first black woman judge ever in Alabama. To those of her name, she is history’s way of correcting itself. She is the final granddaughter who has given meaning to those hundred slaves who in 1846 would never have even dreamed of her possibilities. She is the ultimate Pettway.

Dressed in a solid, bold-pink dress behind her office desk at the courthouse annex in Camden, Judge Pettway is sensitive to her family heritage.

What does it mean to be a Pettway?, she is asked.

“It means being a member of perhaps the best family in the world,” she replies, “because there is a great history in that name that goes with this region of the country. When

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I go places and people ask me, ‘Where are you from?,’ I say, ‘My folks are from Gee’s Bend, a small town in Alabama.’ Then they say, ‘I know a Pettway from such-end-such,’ and I always say, ‘If they’re a Pettway, they had to come from Gee’s Bend because it’s where all the Pettways come from.’

“When you go to that place and you see it, you say,’Well, it’s not the best place in the world because they don’t have a lot of facilities and luxuries, but it’s where my father was taught by his grandmother who raised him that you’re supposed to work and strive and earn a living and do good. It’s something that community instilled in its children and they in theirs. I wasn’t raised in Gee’s Bend but having a father and a great-grandmother who were, those traits are instilled in me and hopefully will be passed down to the children I have.”

Pettway also links herself with a heritage beyond Gee’s Bend or mid-19th century North Carolina-to the “Middle Passage,” when slaves were brought to the United States from Africa.

“You always hear about how many who voyaged across the Atlantic Ocean did not survive, and you always think that those who actually survived the Middle Passage and landed on this continent had to have been the strongest and the best.

“That would mean those hundred who came from North Carolina would have to have been stronger and better. So we’re talking about a good stock of people; they survived the Middle Passage. Whether they were actually the ones who came from Africa or descendants of those who Came, that strength and that blood enabled them to survive.”

Still other survival stories note the strength of Judge Pettway’s ancestry. She says her maternal great-great-grandmother, also a slave from North Carolina, was the mother of six children. When she was sold to Alabama bringing all her children with her was not part of the deal. Four had to stay behind. And of the two who accompanied their mother on the journey to Mobile, one died.

“Just one survived, but that one child had 16 children who, in turn, had so many more.”

Likewise, Judge Pettway’s great-grandmother had 10 children. She and her husband divorced. She was a sharecropper and raised the children by herself.

“And she was a successful woman. So on both sides of the family there are horrible stories where people blossomed and multiplied out of adverse circumstances. Just knowing that you come from people who are strong and did well compared to circumstances makes you feel good about yourself and makes you believe you can do things when other people think you can’t.”

Judge Pettway’s parents are Joseph and Menda Gamble Pettway, who have long lived in the community of Alberta, 24 miles north of Camden. Her mother had wanted to be a nurse, but in her day, there were no Alabama nursing schools for blacks, so she graduated from Alabama State Teachers College in Montgomery, with tuition paid by her mother’s egg and chicken money, and became a teacher. On the birth of her daughter, she left the classroom and ran the family store, Pettway’s Place. Joseph Pettway started as a laborer in 1940 with Southern Railway and had worked his way up to foreman when he retired in 1968.

Celeste herself attended Alberta Elementary School, then Catholic schools in Selma and Birmingham, and finally Alabama Lutheran Academy in Selma, where she graduated. Much of her growing up took place on weekdays in the homes of various Selma relatives, followed by weekends with her parents, then return trips to school in Selma on Monday mornings.

When Judge Pettway was a child in the late Fifties and early Sixties, the Dallas/Wilcox region, as it had for a century, had a black-majority population but white-dominated politics.

“I don’t know as a child that you thought so much about things like that. The schools I attended were black schools, but they were never talked about as being inferior. The attitude always was: We are not getting the money that we need, but we’re doing well with what we have; and I always thought that if we had gotten a very proportionate amount of money, our schools would probably have been excellent because I started off in a one-room school with a partition that separated the one room into two rooms. There were eight grades in those two rooms. One teacher taught four grades and did a wonderful job, I think.”

The word “discrimination” was not in her childhood vocabulary, largely because her parents never taught it to her.

“My parents never said, ‘You can’t go to this place.’ We would go shopping in Selma. The water fountains said ‘white’ and ‘colored.’ As a child you don’t know there’s a difference, and a lot of times I would head over to the fountain marked ‘white.’ Mother would let me drink out of it. She would say, ‘She’s a child; she doesn’t know.’ And my folks never said, ‘You’re different,’ or ‘You’re inferior.'”

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The first time she remembers being hit in the face with segregation was in 1962 on a thirty-mile Greyhound bus trip by herself from Selma to Alberta.

“When I got on, there was one seat open and it was a front seat. I sat there and when the bus driver came on, he made me get up and move to the back. I had to stand up for 30 miles. All the way home I looked at the faces of the people on the bus and wondered why he made me get up, why those people allowed him to do that, why wouldn’t they stand up and say, ‘Let this child sit down.'”

As Celeste grew older, she asked questions.

“My folks would say, ‘This is what the law says. That doesn’t mean it’s right, but you abide by the law.’ I felt the law was wrong because my folks said it was wrong and I knew my folks wouldn’t lie to me. It was a feeling that somebody for probably selfish economic reasons made those laws to discriminate against us. We had to endure them but it didn’t mean we were inferior. It just meant we would probably have to work harder and do better.

“What kept us going was our faith that God wouldn’t let us stay like that always. You know, people deserve to be free and deserve an opportunity to do as much as they can. All our parents knew that sooner or later, things were going to change.”

Prior to Martin Luther King’s campaign to achieve voting rights for blacks, Menda Pettway had become a registered voter in Dallas County, but Joseph Pettway had been denied that right. So they joined Dr. King’s movement. It became common practice for Celeste’s father to go to Selma on days when the voter registration office was open and take the test. She said he had been determined to achieve his right to vote since the 1952 presidential election, because at noon on that election day, the whites with whom he had been working left to vote, while the blacks had to stay behind.

“Daddy said it just incensed him that he was an American, living and working here, but could not participate as a first-class citizen.”

Consequently, every time the voter office was open, Joseph Pettway would be there to take the test. His daughter estimates that he was refused registration at least 75 times, the letters always saying he had flunked the literacy exam, when, in fact, he could read. And for his efforts, his grocery store was boycotted one summer by white wholesalers.

When the Selma campaign peaked in 1965, Celeste, age 13, was a student at St. Elizabeth’s in Selma. The family plan was for her mother and brother, eight years her junior, to be in the marches, for her father to march when he did not have to work, and for Celeste to stay in school and attend only the night-time rallies.

“My folks said,’We’ll do the marching. You go to school.'”

At Brown’s Chapel and First Baptist Church, she saw and heard the stars of civil rights: Dr. C. T. Vivian, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Rev. Hosea Williams-and Dr. King.

“There’s nothing to compare with hearing those great orators and then seeing Dr. King enter the church. The crowd became as one. It was as though this was the anointed one who was going to lead us from slavery to freedom, like with Moses. But Moses probably did not command the respect, attention and obedience that Dr. King did, because the children of Israel constantly battled against Moses and disobeyed. With Dr. King, everybody knew, ‘Now this is the man who’s gonna do it.’ His presence was something I have never experienced before or since.”

Judge Pettway says from the time she was six years old she knew she wanted to be a lawyer even if she didn’t know exactly what it meant. Her early role models were Orzelle Billingsley and Peter Hall, black Birmingham attorneys who handled civil rights cases in the 1950s, and Constance Motley, the first black woman appointed to the federal bench in New York. Billingsley and Hall would associate with local white lawyers and try cases in courtrooms filled with blacks, including the Pettways, who learned, if nothing else, that it was possible for a black person to become an attorney

“Sometimes my folks would go sit in courtrooms and listen to them. They would come back home and talk about how they sounded and how the crowds reacted to them. To my folks, the law was seen as the way things were going to change. It was going to be the instrument by which things were going to change. And it was seen as a way of helping people to make things happen. So I always wanted to be a lawyer, always, my entire life. And it didn’t change. I got side-tracked but it never changed.”

Her first side-track was Auburn University, where she enrolled as a freshman in 1969. Of fifteen thousand students, Celeste was one of ten black women and about fifty-five black males.

“I had some bad experiences at Auburn,” she relates with great sadness. “I had a professor in my major, political science, who said, ‘I use nigger, negro and black interchangeably. Whichever word I choose on this particular day, it all means the same thing.’ I had to sit in that class with that man saying nigger and negra for a quarter. I talked to the chairman of the department and said, ‘I can’t sit in here with this man saying that. It doesn’t make any sense. Why is he still using these words this day and time?’ He said, ‘Well, he’s tenured. There’s nothing I can do about it.’ I had a girlfriend who graduated from Auburn in 1979. She said he was still doing the same thing then.

“And I remember sitting through a history class and the instructor trying to tell me that my ancestors enjoyed slavery, it was a wonderful state and purely economical. Nobody was ever branded. No one was ever beaten. Children were never taken away from their parents. It has always been in somebody’s imagination. Having to sit through that crap for a quarter leaves a bit to be desired, but I got through it. I wouldn’t go through it again, I don’t think. It was a balancing act. There were good people and bad people, but you live and learn, you grow and go on.”

The future judge received her B.A. from Auburn in 1973, and, unable to find a job with her political science major,

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went back to Auburn for a teacher’s certificate. When she still could not obtain employment she enrolled at the University of Alabama, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in social work, then joined the staff of the Children’s Aid Society, in Birmingham, an adoption agency; she later worked for the Alabama Department of Pensions and Security.

By 1977, she was back in school working toward a master’s degree in social work from the University of Alabama. She got her diploma in 1978, and spent 1978-79 teaching social work at Miles College in Birmingham. Finally, in 1979, she entered law school at the University of Alabama, where she received her degree in 1982.

Of some 550 law students during Pettway’s three-year stay, possibly thirty-five were black. But her experiences as a black were totally different from the ones she encountered at Auburn. She does not recall even the first racial incident during her study of law.

~What helped in law school was anonymous grading. Each semester we were assigned a different number. When we took our exams at the end of the semester, the only thing on there was our number. Supposedly, no one knew who’s paper they were grading. I had heard some professors there did not like women or blacks. I think that is the reason they started using that system.”

In 1982, Celeste Pettway, 30, entered law practice with the black Tuscaloosa firm of John England and John Bivens. Two years later she set up a solo practice in the same city, not making much money but doing lots of juvenile case work, traditionally thrown by judges there to the lawyers with fresh careers.

But events were transpiring in Wilcox County that would change her life and Alabama history.

Circuit Judge Edgar P. Russell Jr., who had presided over the five county judicial circuit that includes Wilcox County, announced his impending retirement. A few months later, Gov. Wallace elevated Wilcox County District Judge Anne Farrell McKelvey to the circuit judgeship and named Jo Celeste Pettway to fill the district judgeship vacated by McKelvey.

Pettway did not campaign for the job, but many others did on her behalf, including a Wilcox delegation that met with the governor’s office and argued that the time was ripe for such an appointment. Supporting that mission was the Rev. Thomas Threadgill, a black Presbyterian minister from Camden, who had brought Dr. King into Wilcox to lead voter registration after the Selma-to-Montgomery March.

“We let it be known to the governor that we wanted her appointed,” says Threadgill. “In fact, I just insisted through Hollis Curl (publisher of the weekly Wilcox Progressive Era) and everybody I thought who had any pull in any way. I just insisted that she was the person for this position.

“I had heard of her ability and of the decency of the person. Her parents are very strong, sound people, always making contributions to the church and the community. That was one of the reasons I just knew even before I knew her well that she would be the person.”

On August 9,1984, Jo Celeste Pettway, who remembers standing for a thirty-mile bus ride because her skin is black, was sworn into office. Holding the Bible for the ceremony was her father, Joseph Pettway, who in 1952 had watched his white co-workers leave work to vote for president while black workers stayed on the job.

The courtroom where she now presides was packed with people of both races. Giving the invocation was Rev. Dennis Nolen, a white Presbyterian minister in Camden. “That was unusual,” says Threadgill. “The white ministers here get so much pressure from their congregations and their peers, they can’t do a lot of things they want to do.”

In 1986, Judge Pettway ran for election to a full term; she had no opposition, but campaigned anyway.

“Some people said they might run,” she said of her lack of opposition, “and I just told ’em if they wanted a good kicking to come on, ’cause I was in the kicking business. It didn’t matter with me who came out ’cause I enjoyed what I was doing and I was gonna try to keep doing it.”

Although black lawyers practice in Wilcox County, the handful of those who live and work in Camden are white. One is Donald M. McLeod, the assistant district attorney, who grew up in the town. He is before Judge Pettway’s bench at least weekly and often daily.

“She has a good legal mind,” he says, “and she’s prepared when she sits on the bench. In a number of cases that I’ve handled before her, she’s been appointed as an acting circuit judge. At that level the cases are more difficult, but I’ve found that she’s done her homework before she gets there. In one case in particular, I could tell she had researched the law because she had the same cases and citations that I did. A lot of judges don’t do that. I guess I deal with her more than any lawyer here and I’ve never considered race to be a factor. It’s a non-issue.”

Nor has Judge Pettway seen any racial problems stemming from her being black in this county of seventeen thousand (83 percent black).

“I think there’s a respect for the judicial system,” she offers. “I had a white attorney say something to the effect, ‘I don’t particularly respect YOU . but I respect the position ‘ And I don’t have any problems with that. I’m not here for people to like me or love me. I’m here to do a job, and as long as I think I’m doing a good job, I want to stay. As long as they follow the rules of the court, they can hate me; I don’t care.”

“I realize,” says she, “that being the first black woman district judge in Alabama is historically significant, but my attitude is that it could have been anybody. I know a lot of black women lawyers who could have been the first and they

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would have done a good job. I really feel blessed that I’m a district judge.

“Sometimes people look at me skeptically when I say this but I think it’s all part of God’s plan for what I’m supposed to be doing. I feel like I have a real purpose and a special opportunity to help children. I’ve been a social worker. I’ve always loved children, and being a district judge, I get to work with juvenile court and try to help change lives while they’re young.”

Part of her motivation, too, is in being a member of her family.

“My parents always told us about the sacrifices made by grandparents and great-grandparents to give us a strong idea of where we’ve come from and a hope for where we could go. My maternal grandmother never let her children go hungry because she would work the entire summer to get ’em through the winter: canning plums, putting up muscadines and pears. And she would make quilts from old clothes. When those quilts wore out she would use them to start making other quilts, so everything was recycled. And inside their home they would look up at night and see the stars, look down and see the animals through the cracks in the floor. Lots of times they had nothing to show for it because my maternal grandfather was a sharecropper who never owned property. They moved from one place to another. But my grandmother always wanted the children to have an education. She would sell things to get a little money to help.

“And when Mother went on to college, she said she had two pairs of socks. She knew she had to wear one and wash the other so she would always have a clean pair. And she had one dime a day to spend for lunch.

“Knowing that gives you a sense of purpose. To me, it says you can’t let your ancestors down. When I think about my maternal grandmother and my paternal great-grandmother, the kind of women they were, the kind of man my Daddy is and the kind of woman my Mother is, you don’t let people like that down. You don’t get to a point and say,’I can’t do it.’ You look back at them and you say, ‘Whatever I want to do, I can do it, because look what they did.’ And you just go on, and it’s good. Yeah, it’s good.”

Nancy Callahan is a freelance writer from Montgomery. Her book, The Freedom Quilting Bee, will be published this fall by the University of Alabama Press.

The Cold Hard Truth: Wishing Justice for Bork

By J.L. Chestnut. Jr.

Vol. 9, No. 4, 1987, pp. 15-16

WASHINGTON-This unstable, political, kooky town is in an absolute frenzy, even if measured by its own unreal standards. My favorite Washington cab driver and political philosopher, Jack Curtis, who also happens to be black, was so busy denouncing “Tint? White Washington Establishment” he drove off with my luggage and left me standing on the airport curb. He had to turn around and come back.

Consistent with Jack’s extremely low opinion of lawyers, he angrily assumed my two recent visits are somehow connected with helping extricate “that black skunk” (the black mayor of Washington) from his legal problems. I don’t represent the mayor and barely know the man.

But, Jack’s immediate concern is the nomination of the man he viciously described as “Watergate Bork and his fascist sponsors.” I share Jack’s apprehensions not quite his intemperate language.

Bork, as a private individual, is as far right and racist as his chief sponsors-President Reagan, Edwin Meese and Brad Reynolds.

In a 1963 article in his favorite magazine, New Republic, Bork was outrageously wrong about the proposed public accommodations bill that would require hotels, restaurants and other publicly accessible establishments to serve blacks.

Such a law, Bork wrote, would cause “a loss in a vital area of personal liberty” because it would interfere with the freedom of individuals “to deal and associate with whom they pleased for whatever reasons appeal to them.” Apparently, Bork would deny that same freedom to black and white Americans who sought to associate together in these establishments.

In a 1968 article entitled “Why I Am For Nixon,” in his favorite magazine, Bork wrote that Nixon represented “classical liberalism” and the Democratic Party was “an encroachment” on that liberalism. The man has a unique facility for prostituting words and truth.

In 1971, Bork wrote in the Indiana Law Journal: “constitutional protection should be accorded only to speech that is explicitly political. There is no basis for judicial intervention to protect any form of expression, be it scientific, literary or that variety of expression we call obscene or pornographic.”

Such foolishness makes a mockery of the Constitution in general and the First Amendment in particular.

As expected, in a confirmation hearing as a District of Columbia appellate judge, Bork backtracked and explained his 1971 article was an “academic exercise…theoretical argument” written as a Yale law professor.

“As a judge,” he added, “what is relevant is what the Supreme Court has said, and not my theoretical writings in. 1971.” In a narrow sense, he was somewhat truthful in that assertion and I will look at a few of his rulings as a judge.

But first, a word or two on Bork. Nixon and Watergate.

In 1973, as U.S. Solicitor General, Bork bowed to Nixon and the ill fated criminal conspiracy commonly known as Watergate by firing Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox after Attorney General Elliott Richardson and his deputy, William D. Ruckelshaus, refused to do so.

Nine years later, Bork claimed he knew the Watergate investigation would continue without Cox. Bork also said Cox would have been fired in any event. That self-serving speculation diminishes in no way the fact that Bork fired Cox to please a criminally conspiring Nixon and to further Bork’s professional career.

Bork, however, deserves some credit, as Richardson said recently, for standing up to Nixon and telling him to appoint another special prosecutor-Leon Jaworski. We will never know what Bork actually told Nixon but you can be sure it was less than the whole truth.

On the other hand, Bork, as a District of Columbia appellate judge, has on occasion submerged his far right opinions, followed legal precedent and written with passion on subjects in a manner which surprised the left and startled the right. However, it must be also noted he was

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writing with the Supreme Court looking over his shoulder. That is different than sitting on that Court and writing precedents. Especially for one who would embrace Watergate to further his career.

On the District of Columbia appellate court, Bork ruled against conservative students who wanted to picket outside the embassies of Nicaragua and the Soviet Union. He decided in favor of an artist who sought to put a poster mocking Reagan in the Washington subways.

In backing the right of a free press, he went further than his liberal colleagues. Libel suits that would stifle vigorous journalism, he suggested, should be dismissed almost summarily. That is a world apart from what he wrote in the New Republic as a law professor.

In dismissing a lawsuit filed by a homosexual kicked out of the Navy for that reason, Bork curiously reasoned that the implied constitutional right to privacy does not cover homosexuality but somehow “is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her-pregnancy.” What hokum!

Incidentally, the Supreme Court last year adopted that same hokum in dismissing a challenge to a Georgia anti-sodomy law.

I do not wish Bork well in his bid to become an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

I wish him hell.

How about that, Mr. Jack Curtis?

Peace.

J. L. Chestnut is an Alabama trial lawyer and writer.