Southern Changes. Volume 9, Number 5, 1987 – Southern Changes

Waiting for the Gag Reflex

Tom Teepen — Tue, 01 Dec 1987 05:00:01 +0000

Waiting for the Gag Reflex

By Tom Teepen

Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, pp. 1-2

The killing is picking up, not that anyone notices much any more.

We killed a man in Georgia the other night. The paper front-paged his execution, but most of the TV stations ho-hummed it. Just another electrocution, now commonplace enough that it was reported somewhere around the fund-raising banquet for the musically incontinent, TV’s equivalent of a newspaper fate among the truss ads.

There were three executions on a recent Friday, in Alabama, Utah and Florida. Even the hat trick didn’t attract great notice. The last time three had been executed in one day was twenty-five years ago, but the event this time was a big yawn.

You can expect an increased rate of executions–and of general indifference about them.

A majority of the U.S. Supreme Court’s justices kissed off a major challenge to the death penalty in April–the last major challenge, most experts feel-by saying they don’t really care if the death penalty is applied with apparent racial or other inequity. That put a number of death sentences, held in abeyance, back on the killing track.

The persons who follow such matters do not expect exactly a blood bath in the nation’s death chambers, but on the other hand the prospect is for a steadily rising frequency. The court of last resort has made it plain that it is impatient with challenges and doesn’t want to be bothered on the point.

The previous high for any year since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 was twenty-one executions, but there have been about thirty this year, with a month to go. We are working our way back to the time when executions occurred every other day, or

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more often. There were 199 in 1935, the record. We may be only a few years from the dubious achievement of rivaling, or even exceeding, our worst year.

There are 1,900 men and women on the nation’s death rows. About 250 are being added annually.

Is all this killing doing any good? No, if by “good” you mean reducing either the general crime rate or specifically the murder rate.

There were 18,784 murders nationally in 1976, and 20,616 last year. In between, the numbers rose to a high of 23,044 in 1980 and dropped to a low of 18,692 in 1984. Georgia had 692 murders in 1976 and 653 last year, with a low of 460 in 1983 and a high of 877 in 1979.

And if executions are supposed to deter murder, the lesson loses even the possibility of working when it becomes so common it goes virtually unreported.

The simple truth is that the death penalty brutalizes our society without providing any offsetting advantages. It does nothing more, or finer, than throw bodies to a public bloodlust. And far from deterring killers, the death penalty may incite them. It is a statement, officially endorsed, that killing is sometimes a good way to solve problems.

We are not only failing to send the right message with executions. There is a very high risk we are sending just the wrong one.

Most countries that presume to the description “civilized” have quit this pointless business. Britain’s and Canada’s parliaments recently have firmly rejected proposals to resume the practice. The few putatively civilized nations that retain capital punishment used it rarely.

Execution is quite the popular thing with Americans just now. All the polls show it. All the polls know it. It is not going to be stopped, at least not anytime soon.

But we are killing the retarded without serious qualm. We are near the point of killing persons for crimes they committed as children. And it is increasingly difficult not to notice and admit we are mainly executing people of marginal intelligence, doubtful sanity, debilitating poverty. The death penalty has become an act of class warfare, fought top-down against the poor and incompetent.

America may no longer have a heart in such matters, but perhaps, at some point, we will prove still to have a gag reflex.

Tom Teepen is editor of the editorial page of the Atlanta Constitution

As We Have Sown: The new struggle is the same old fight to make enough to survive

Mark Ritchie — Tue, 01 Dec 1987 05:00:02 +0000

As We Have Sown: The new struggle is the same old fight to make enough to survive

By Mark Ritchie

Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, pp. 5, 7-11

History is a good place to begin. The important thing about agriculture in the United States from the beginning of European colonization is that from the moment this country was founded, small-scale subsistence farming was everywhere. That is how we think of our nation-as a nation founded by small farmers.

We were about 99 percent small farmers and somehow it has declined to about 2 percent now. We get the image of an inevitable natural process. However, agriculture in the U.S. until about the mid-1890s was pretty well split-the rural people who were small subsistence farmers, farming for themselves primarily and maybe a little trade, and the farming that today we call commercial agriculture. From the very start of European colonization, the latter was formed into very large-scale industrial units: chattel slavery and the plantation system in the South, Spanish land grants with huge haciendas in the West, bonanza farms. Not until the mid-1850s did families begin to control land and to farm in a commercial way-where farm families themselves could build their productivity to produce crops large enough to be sold on a more commercial basis.

From almost the first moment when families began being the dominant unit of commercial production, family farmers and the family ranchers of that time entered into the same kind of struggle that we face today, a struggle between the high prices of things they needed to live on the farm and the low prices they could get for their products.

At different times between the 1850s and the early 1900s that squeeze was enough to cause what we call a depression but was then called a panic, a much more useful term. We had five or six panics when what farmers were getting for the crops was too little to pay what they owed their creditors. In each panic rural people reached a point of desperation. Then they began to get organized. Sometimes they came together into cooperatives to defend themselves. Sometimes they came together into political parties-the Greenbacks, the Populists.

By the early 1900s it became clear that it was going to take more than just farmers getting organized locally to defend themselves. Farmers began seeing that they had to move nationally with federal legislation if they were to

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begin leveling the playing field between the monopolies that were providing them with everything they needed to live and the monopolies they were forced to sell their products to on the other end.

In the 1920s, following the collapse of farm prices after World War I, farmers entered probably the most serious depression they had faced up to that time. They organized nationally and passed-three different times-federal farm legislation called the McNerry-Halgan bill. Three times that legislation was vetoed-once by Coolidge and twice by Hoover-with a pretty blatant public comment that they needed to keep food prices down so they could keep wages down. In each instance farmers knew they had to come back and keep pushing. Farmers were discouraged just as they are discouraged now. But they kept coming back and pushing and pushing and finally in the early 1930s-unfortunately not until after their depression had rolled into the cities and brought real misery to urban areas, too-they passed and made the President sign federal farm legislation to begin giving some security back to rural people, to farmers and ranchers.

That first farm legislation, often called the parity farm legislation or the Roosevelt farm legislation or the New Deal farm legislation, was based on three principles. First, prices in the marketplace had to be high enough so that farmers

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could pay their bills and keep their families alive. The Roosevelt farm legislation through the Commodity Credit Corporation put a floor under prices. Second, that legislation tried to bring supply and demand into balance. Things would occur-the weather, insects, all kinds of issues-that farmers as individuals were unable to control but that influenced supply and demand for them as a group. The legislation effectively allowed farmers participation through national referenda and voting on establishing supply management that would help them keep supply and demand in balance. The third principle was protection for consumers. In the thirties we also had some droughts and dust bowls and all of a sudden we would find ourselves with the grain in the hands of the grain companies and a big shortage on the farm. Prices would suddenly skyrocket. Under the Roosevelt farm legislation, when prices rose to a certain level national reserves were released into the market to bring the prices back down so that they were kept within a fairly narrow range to make it possible for farmers to keep their families going but to keep prices from skyrocketing for consumers in the cities as well.

The farm programs that started in the thirties rested on these three bases for a long time. These programs were not without their own problems. The first programs were declared unconstitutional because there was a tax on the processors. Some of the benefits were not passed to the sharecroppers and tenant farmers. The same racism and discrimination that prevailed in this country was felt through those programs as well. But there was a struggle throughout the thirties to make those programs right, to find the formula, as in all of society we were looking for different ways to solve our economic crisis. By the end of the 1930s people had really settled into a good solid pattern of federal farm legislation that was to serve our nation well through the early fifties.

THESE PROGRAMS WERE a big success for a lot of people. They held farm prices to a fair level and consumer prices were also very low. We had a strong comeback for young farmers coming back onto the land. Farmers who had been foreclosed on in the thirties were able to come back onto their homesteads and continue farming. We had an explosion in soil and water conservation programs. The founding of the Soil Conservation Service and putting a few

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dollars back into farmers’ pockets made it possible to begin terracing land to recover land and fix some of the things that we had done that had caused the great dust bowl.

The other place the programs were a success was for the taxpayers. Because the programs were based on getting a price for farmers out of the market the farm programs themselves actually generated profit. The farm program from 1933 to 1953 on storable commodities made about $12 million for the federal government. Now that is not much money, but if you compare it to spending $32 billion last year on the federal farm program you can see a pretty big difference between the programs of those days and what we have today.

Some people didn’t like those farm programs. We should be clear about this. In the same way that in the 1800s and the early 1900s farmers had to struggle with the people that were supplying them and the people they were selling to, those were the same forces that were opposed to the parity farm programs in the thirties and forties and early fifties. On the one hand the chemical fertilizer-seed companies felt that if farmers were imposing supply management, that if they were not planting every acre fencerow to fencerow, then the companies were selling less chemicals and less seed. Which was probably true. Somehow the companies did not notice that farmers needed to make a profit to be able to pay their bills. It turned out we had very very strong opposition from the agri-chemical and machinery companies as well.

On the other side we had opposition from the companies that were buying from the farmers. The cotton ginners, grain corporations, and meet packers felt that if the farmers had government assistance to put a floor under prices, that the commodity buyers were not going to be able to get those commodities at lower and lower prices, which is the way they thought they were going to build bigger markets. Also the speculators felt that if the government intervened to keep prices fairly stable, then this cut into their action quite a bit. IN FACT, IT CUT INTO the action of these corporations so greatly that they organized to repeal the parity farm legislation, for the most part, by the early 1950s. The corporations argued that cheaper food was needed to build industry. These arguments took place in the context of the McCarthy era when everything was defined in black and white and when racism and red-baiting were rolled together into one national hysteria. They were able to argue that the farm programs that were helping the family farmers were somehow communism or bolshevism or socialism. They were able to say that things that were keeping black farmers on the land were somehow anti-American. They rolled that sentiment together into a successful national lobbying effort to repeal laws, especially those on grain crops and some of the crops that were heavily developed in the midwest.

(I point out to Yankee friends that because the South had strongly organized itself in Congress, the crops that the South was very dependent on at that time-tobacco, peanuts, sugar, dairy products, and fruits and vegetables- were able to hang on. In fact, they have been defended until today though they are certainly under assault now. Tobacco companies are importing all kinds of tobaccos in order to break the tobacco program. There is an assault on the peanut program every time it comes up. But in the early 1950s when major parts of the parity farm legislation were being repealed, Southerners in Congress were able to keep some of those programs for some crops in the South. The effect is seen in the more stable conditions that some farmers in the South have had. A state like Kentucky that still has 115,000 farms is able to hold on to them because of the small tobacco quotas. Some of the success in Georgia has been that people have been able to hang on to those programs.)

From the late 1950s and early 1960s there was chaos in agriculture because these programs were being taken away. There were some production increases because when farmers saw their prices being cut, they intensified production to make up for what they were losing. Big surpluses built up so bad the government would then shut down whole counties and the soil bank was a really big program. Whole regions were shut down.

The 196Os were also a time with a lot of industrial development in this country. We were kicking a lot of people off their farms. It was an especially intense time for small black farmers being kicked off their farms in the South. There was the pull of the urban area and urban jobs, the

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auto industry and the steel industry. In some ways the farm crisis of the late 1950s and early 1960s was masked by the ability of people to move to industrial jobs.

By the early 1970s the crisis, particularly for the Northern grain farms, wheat and corn and soybeans, became pretty intense. In the early 1970s, in Des Moines, Iowa, farmers were marching down the street and on the one side were anti-war demonstrators because Richard Nixon was in town, but on the other side farmers were throwing pitchforks at Nixon. By the 1970s federal farm legislation had forced down prices so much that many family farmers were in a rebellion. Nixon and Congress chose a solution consistent with the Great Society notion of that time, which was not to challenge corporate power but to throw some money at the problem to keep people quiet. Don’t make corporations open up jobs, instead make them give a little bit of money to a summer youth employment program. In 1972, Congress developed a new approach to farm legislation in which we had a floor under prices at a very low level and we provided farmers with what was called a deficiency payment. How about that for language?

For the first couple of years the low prices and the deficiency payments were enough for farmers to survive. But when Congress started this program-in the midst of the Vietnam war and our trade deficits and everything else in the early 1970s-they asked how much farmers need in a deficiency payment to come out okay. Soon they started asking how much they could afford to give farmers this year. It did not take too long between the Vietnam war and the rest of our foolishness to not have enough money to give the farmers. Soon, the low market price and the deficiency payment to farmers were not enough combined to cover the cost of production. Then we began rolling into the crisis that we face today.

WE HAD ONE MORE trick up our sleeves to keep this whole crisis covered up. The nation was on an inflation binge so farmland prices, like everything else, were moving up rapidly. You could go into the bank at the end of the year and say, “I lost money on my corn this year,” and the banker would say, “That’s okay. You lost money on your corn but your land went up another ten percent this year. By golly, I can just loan you more money-by the time you retire you’ll be a millionaire. Don’t worry about losing money on your corn ’cause you’re going to be a millionaire pretty soon.”

Year after year people lost money on their crops but borrowed money on their land. Farm debt went from around $20 billion in the early 1970s to a peak of $225 billion by 1983-a thousand percent increase in farm debt in a little over a decade. Not because farmers were being greedy and expanding, but because they were borrowing money to make up for what they were losing. They were borrowing money to pay for tractors that were doubling and tripling in price in the course of three or four years. They were borrowing so much money that by 1983 about a million farmers held a debt that was twice the foreign debt of Brazil. At the end of the decade, as land prices began to fall, the first young farmers who had borrowed to the limit were not able to borrow any more money, so their banks sold them out. Other farmers saw their land values go down and banks would tell them they no longer had enough collateral in their land and move them out.

The crisis of the 1980s has been that downward spiral land values have fallen 60 percent in my state. U.S. farmers have lost $300 billion.

As in other times when we have had crises farmers have begun to respond and get organized. Farmers in Tennessee in the early 1980s did a sit-in at a FmHA office and farmers from around the country came with them. Nationwide there has been a movement of farmers re-entering the political process to find a solution. Enough people were concerned about this in 1984 that although Ronald Reagan swept the country in some states, Democrats who took a strong position on the farm crisis were able to stand against that tide and get elected.

By 1986 farmers had organized enough so that the farm crisis was a motivating factor in moving millions of people to the polls. In Georgia 10 percent of the people who voted in 1986 said the reason they went to the polls and the reason they chose to vote was the farm crisis. I think that is the tip of the iceberg that is beginning to develop now.

Farmers are not only getting out voters but they have been in Congress writing legislation for new ways to approach the debt problem. They are also trying to reestablish those successful farm programs that put a floor under prices that was fair, and those supply management programs like you still have on peanuts and tobacco that kept supply and demand in balance and that were good for keeping rural populations on the land so they are not being forced into the cities.

The concerns of farmers today have moved beyond their own situations and their own financial problems. Farmers are looking at the environmental effects of legislation. If you are being paid a subsidy on each bushel you are forced to make the land grow more and more. Farmers know that is tearing us up. We also know that these low farm prices hurting our farmers here have ruined agriculture around the world; when we put rice at $3.50 here, you can imagine what that does to rice growing in west Africa and other parts of the world. Farmers are also concerned about where this

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rolls into our trade legislation. We talk about “free trade.” What that means is turning over the world’s food system to that half-dozen corporations who control it now. We are talking about free trade with Canada. That means moving all our meat packing jobs to Canada. President Reagan is talking about removing subsidies for farmers worldwide. What they really are talking about is wiping out farmers around the world so that the crisis we now face here now will be worldwide.

It is not only that we have had a farm crisis but it is also a social crisis. The farm crisis has brought farm people back into the mainstream of the social justice movement. Farmers are worried about the same issues that urban people are. We need to bring that coalition together concretely, realistically, politically-not just to solve this farm crisis, but to solve the national and international crisis of human spirit and of health and safety.

We need to bring these people together to address those crises as a political coalition because that is the only way we will solve them-together.

Edward Pennick is director of the Emergency Land Fund. Mark Ritchie, a native Georgian, is an agricultural policy analyst with the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.

The articles by Pennick and Ritchie are based on remarks they made recently in Atlanta at the conference, “Urban Connections to the Rural Crisis,” sponsored by the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and the National Council of Churches.

As We Have Sown: At current rates, blacks will own no land by the end of this century

Edward Pennick — Tue, 01 Dec 1987 05:00:03 +0000

As We Have Sown: At current rates, blacks will own no land by the end of this century

By Edward Pennick

Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, 5-7

For black Americans the rural crisis is not limited to any region, profession or economic class. It touches us all though probably nowhere is the farm crisis more acute than in the rural South.

The decline in black land ownership over the past twenty years is alarming and unabated. The problem is so severe that a different approach is now needed, one that appeals to survival instincts of both white as well as black individuals.

Like their counterparts in the Midwest and other parts of the country white farmers are facing a serious economic problem. Many will not survive. That will have adverse effects on entire rural Southern communities and economies. Unlike their Midwestern counterparts most Southern white farmers are reluctant and even refuse to organize against those institutions and politicians responsible for putting them in this crisis situation.

White farmers for the most part are hesitant when it comes to joining with other groups whom they consider outsiders or anti-establishment although we at the Federation of Southern Cooperatives have noticed a significant increase in the numbers of white farmers seeking assistance from us. Still, white farmers’ need for assistance and our positive response does not translate in most cases into those white farmers’ willingness to join forces with us to deal with the common problem-the unfair agricultural system in this country. So the small white farmers for the most part continue to suffer mostly alone while still believing that the present system will rescue them. They refuse to believe that the key to their survival may mean joining forces with black farmers and landowners. Unfortunately

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these beliefs are encouraged by many of our private, public and religious institutions that are either too scared to rock the boat or they recognize the almost unlimited potential of a black and white Southern rural movement, a movement that would totally destroy the age-old Southern strategy of divide-and-conquer.

The Southern rural crisis is unique and complex. Yet for Southern white farmers there is a glimmer of hope because whether they organize or not they will benefit from a successful conclusion to the current crisis. I believe that in the end the family farmer will prevail. This does not, however, mean that the black family farmer will prevail. Theirs is a different plight that requires constant struggle. When there was no rural crisis black farmers were out of sight and out of mind. Only recently has their situation been viewed by some as worthy of inclusion in the future of American agriculture.

More than 90 percent of black-owned land is located in the South. The problem is that blacks average nearly 30 percent of the Southern farm population while they receive only a small fraction of the state and federal government agricultural services.

In fact, less than 25 percent of all black farmers have received assistance from the Farmers Home Administration. Given the current problems we are having with the FmHA some might consider that a blessing. Still, the point is that blacks as a whole have been denied equal opportunity to participate in programs mandated by Congress as a resource to farmers. This is true even though statistics show that blacks are more dependent on their farm operations for survival than are their white counterparts. In Mississippi, for example, 43 percent of all farmers are black yet they receive only 7.7 percent of FmHA loans. The same pattern exists in other Southern states. Not only do they not receive timely and adequate financial assistance, black farmers also under-utilize other government-sponsored agricultural programs. Their lack of knowledge of the number and range of available rural development programs causes them to miss many needed and beneficial services. When blacks do attempt to utilize these programs their efforts are often hindered by under-staffed, poorly qualified, even prejudiced personnel within the various county agricultural offices. The bottom line is that even with the often heroic efforts of FSC and other concerned organizations and individuals, blacks are still losing land at a rate of a half million acres annually, over twice as fast as white land owners and farmers.

Depending on whose statistics you believe, blacks own between three and one-half million and six million acres of land. No matter which numbers you use, at the current rate of decline blacks will own no land by the end of this century.

LET YOUR IMAGINATION take you to the year 1998. It is an election year and the major black political, social and religious leaders have called a national press conference in Atlanta to bring to the public’s attention the fact that black Americans who once owned nearly fifteen million acres of land are now a landless people. They are forming a select committee to determine what led to this tragedy and to develop strategies to force the candidates to make black land acquisition a part of their overall platforms. Meanwhile, rural America has become a hub of America’s economy and farming is once again a family affair. There are very few blacks in rural America except for the farm laborers and the elderly who are physically and economically unable to leave. The overwhelming majority of blacks are concentrated in a few urban areas that are all but ignored by the government even though they are controlled by black politicians. These areas are quickly deteriorating and their occupants have all but lost hope for a better way of life.

Unless something dramatic is done today this imaginary scene will come true. The responsibility for preventing it falls first on those holding our imaginary press conference for it is they who should be dealing with the struggle for blacks to maintain, even increase their land holdings in this country. One can ask where they are today. Land ownership affects all blacks. Some estimate that nearly half of the blacks who hold ownership interest in rural land are living in urban areas. It baffles me how some of our political leaders can speak of economic development and independence and ignore the land issue.

Too many black political and economic leaders still consider black economic independence to be synonymous with more jobs. By jobs they mean working for the typical

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industries located primarily in urban areas. The fact is, these jobs are actually increasing black economic dependence. This becomes apparent when one looks at the present unemployment picture for blacks in these urban areas, many of whom had left the rural South in search of the American dream. So to push for jobs alone is not the answer. We must pressure the black leadership to accord the land issue the same attention and respect it does the more glamorous issues such as voting rights, integration, and stopping Bork. This is not to say that Bork is not important, but you can have nine Supreme Court justices, all of them black, and if you cannot feed yourself it does no good. The leadership must recognize that.

Land ownership-development is just as important and may well make it easier for us to accomplish our objectives in these other areas because we can then operate from a position of economic strength, not just as consumers. In short, economic independence through the control of natural resources-in this case, land-enhances political and social independence. During the coming months when the black vote will be a valuable commodity, we must make black land retention and development an integral part of the test by which we will judge political candidates and those individuals and organizations that support them.

Also key participants in our imaginary press conference are our black religious leaders. The church has always been the source of inspiration for blacks, especially during periods of intense struggle and suppression. We must have the black church’s support during this crisis; it is their membership that will suffer most if the trend of black land loss is not stopped. Many black ministers do not see black land ownership as important to their agenda. I cannot argue with the fact that there are other important issues, however, being the good Christian that I am, I believe that it is a sin not to be good stewards of the land.

Our foreparents have a history of good land stewardship. It was through recently freed slaves-freed, uneducated and deeply religious slaves-that we were able to amass that fifteen million acres of land in the early 1900s. They recognized the importance of nourishing and being nourished by the land. It was obvious that land stewardship was deeply ingrained in their religious faith. Modern-day black Christians have somehow lost the connection between the land and God. Like the politician, the church too must be judged and held accountable by how it stands and participates on the land issue.

FINALLY I WANT TO SAY to our white brethren in the religious, political and grassroots arenas that the so-called rural crisis can never be over unless blacks are full participants in its solution. You cannot advocate agricultural legislation or programs that do not contain remedies for the black land-loss problem. For you, too, must share in the blame for the current state of blacks in agriculture. Prior to the current crisis blacks were fighting the battle virtually alone. Yet in too many cases it was the white and his friends at the courthouses and the county FmHA offices that were causing blacks to lose their land-land that was used to increase white operations. We have been and continue to be more than willing to welcome you to the struggle and even fight for issues that may not have a direct bearing on the small black farmer. We do this because we believe that a policy detrimental to any family farmer is wrong and should be fought. But one of my fears is that once the current crisis is over blacks again will be left to fight alone.

I see encouraging signs in the joint efforts of black and white farm organizations like the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, Prairiefire, Family Farm Coalition, and others. I think we are on the verge of creating a movement unparalleled in American history. We must take advantage of the opportunity for it will not present itself again. If we do miss this opportunity then it is possible that grassroots and progressive white leaders will also be participants in our imaginary press conference, because the farms will be owned by a few corporations that will give us all a lesson on what it means to control the land.

Rural Advancement Fund Celebrates 50 Years of Farm Advocacy

Robert Amberg — Tue, 01 Dec 1987 05:00:04 +0000

Rural Advancement Fund Celebrates 50 Years of Farm Advocacy

By Robert Amberg

Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, pp. 11-15

This year the Rural Advancement Fund/National Sharecroppers Fund celebrates its fiftieth anniversary as an advocate for family farms and rural communities. Initially formed as an annual “National Sharecroppers Week,” cosponsored by the Workers Defense League and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, the formal organization began without a paid staff and served as the non-profit, funding arm for the fledgling Southern Tenant Farmers Union. National Sharecroppers Week evolved into the National Sharecroppers Fund (NSF) in 1943 and in 1966 created the non-profit Rural Advancement Fund to receive donations from supporters. Through the years RAF/NSF has grown in both scope and influence to become an award-winning organization with an international program and a staff of twenty-three that continues to argue forcefully for the rights of small farmers around the world.

In 1937, though, NSF’s focus was the South. While the nation as a whole was still mired in the depths of the Great Depression, the South and its predominantly rural population were faring worse than most. Agriculture was being revolutionized by mechanization, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and big business, with the result that millions of sharecroppers, tenant farmers and farmworkers were displaced or forced to work for less-than-minimal pay. The estimated annual income for sharecropper families of the period was only $300, and the substandard living conditions contributed to diseases like pellagra, hookworm, syphilis and malaria. Educational opportunities for sharecroppers were nonexistent and the illiteracy rate was the highest of any occupational group in America.

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Norman Thomas, a six-time socialist candidate for president and a long-term supporter of the National Sharecroppers Fund, speaking on a CBS radio broadcast for National Sharecroppers Week, described the situation: “We are speaking tonight in behalf of a group which conservatively estimated amount to 7 or 8 percent of our entire national population. We have life at its lowest economic level in America. They work, black and white alike, under armed riding bosses. In large areas they, especially the colored workers, have no right which the bosses are bound to respect. At best they are charged ten cents on the dollar at the plantation commissary for the credit advanced thousands of them, and they end every season in debt to the landlord, which means in practice that they are tied to his land. Other more direct forms of peonage–let’s call it slavery–are fairly general.”

Against this backdrop of misery and exploitation, eighteen men–black and white–met in July 1934, in a schoolhouse in Tyronza, Arkansas, to form the STFU. They were led by H. L. Mitchell [See Southern Changes, March 1987] and Clay East, admirers of Thomas. The union’s goal was to work collectively for better working conditions and greater benefits for farmworkers hard hit by the labor-reducing Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933.

While the goals seemed simple, the union had the weight of history and culture against it. The union was interracial when Jim Crow was still law. Further, STFU’s constituency worked outside the typical industrial setting and often viewed themselves as independent producers. Finally, the union’s leaders, Mitchell, East, J.R. Butler and Isaac Shaw were Southerners who had been heavily influenced by and eventually gravitated to socialism, the kind of socialism that had incubated in the immigrant ghettos of the urban Northeast and been practiced by many of this country’s industrial labor unions.

By 1936 the union had a Southwide membership of over two thousand and a continual shortage of cash. In an effort to ease the cash crunch, Sidney Hertzberg, a young staff member of the Workers Defense League who had worked with STFU during the summer, came up with the idea of a National Sharecroppers Week. From 1937 to 1944, this educational and fundraising event was held annually in New York. The week of manuscript and print auctions, concerts and plays eventually included as sponsors such celebrities as Fiorello LaGuardia, John Steinbeck, Margaret Bourke-White, Eleanor Roosevelt, Upton Sinclair and A. Philip Randolph.

World War 11 slowed the organizing efforts of STFU and by 1943 it was obvious that an ongoing committee to raise funds year round was necessary. The Fund would regard STFU as its primary responsibility and take over the running of National Sharecroppers Week. But, as reflected in the minutes of the first meeting of the National Sharecroppers Fund, the incorporators took a step toward moving the organization in a direction independent of STFU when they said that “gifts should be given rather to functional groups and pressure groups working in the general field of improvement and eventual abolition of the sharecropper system.” This step eventually transformed NSF from a labor organization to a farm-rural-international organization.

BY WAR’S END, THE changes in agriculture begun during the thirties had radically altered the lives of small farmers and farmworkers. Many abandoned their native South in search of industrial jobs in the North. Others, lucky enough to own land, stuck it out in the face of increasing competition from their better-equipped and

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better-financed neighbors. Still others, landless and without marketable skills, became a new class of farmworkers whose work was restricted to the planting and harvesting of crops. NSF chose to work with the last two groups–the small farmers who had opted to stay and the migrant farmworkers who had little choice.

In 1950 NSF established the National Committee on Agricultural Life and Labor. NCALL pressured state and federal governments by distributing information and focusing the collective efforts of over forty individual organizations working with rural issues. The establishment of NCALL signalled a more direct role in politics for NSF and a recognition that the problems of farmworkers are sometimes solved away from the fields.

NSF was guided in this period of transition and growth by Fay Bennett and Frank Porter Graham. Bennett became executive secretary of NSF in 1952, a post she held for eighteen years (she continues to serve on RAF/N8F’s Board). She saw NSF in the role of an umbrella organization, and with Graham, a former U.S. Senator and President of the University of North Carolina who served as chairman of the board of directors, moved NSF in that direction.

While NSF had broadened its range of political activities, it continued funding like-minded organizations working directly with rural people. In 1953, NSF sponsored the formation of the Migrant Children’s Fund, an organization devoted to addressing the health and educational needs of migrant families, and throughout the fifties NSF supported organizing efforts by the National Agricultural Workers Union (formerly STFU).

In 1962, the year of NSF’s 25th Anniversary, NSF sponsored the Bricks Conference, a three-day meeting on rural affairs which was widely attended by government officials, ministers, farmers and community leaders and represented another change in direction for NSF. In the past NSF had worked in opposition to most government agencies, but now, because of the influx of federal monies and FSF’s reputation as an advocate for rural people, the organization was asked to work with government.

SHORTLY AFTER THE BRICKS Conference NSF began work on the first of many contracts with the U.S. Department of Labor and the Office for Economic Opportunity. Offices were opened in Atlanta and Knoxville and programs implemented on illiteracy, job training and placement for displaced farm workers, the construction of self-help housing and the formation of rural cooperatives. With funds generated by NSF’s new tax-exempt subsidiary, the Rural Advancement Fund (RAF), NSF set up day-care and

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education centers, housing programs and a rural credit union. A Washington office was opened during this period to increase NSF’s lobbying efforts and to take better advantage of new federal programs.

The late sixties and early seventies brought new internal changes to RAF/NSF with the departure of Fay Bennett and the death of Frank Porter Graham. Jim Pierce, a labor and civil rights activist, took over as executive director and began building a rural demonstration and training center. The Graham Center, located in Anson County, N.C., opened in 1974 based on the idea that “creative approaches to the farm problem could make good and profitable use of marginal land and resources.”

THE GRAHAM CENTER’S free training program was aimed towards small farmers and their families and offered comprehensive training in all aspects of practical small farm operation and management. Courses in soil management, biological pest control, marketing, and crop and livestock production were supplemented by courses putting agriculture in a social and historical context. The Graham Center also housed a resource center which offered research and public speaking on rural, political and economic issues to church, university and farm groups.

The Graham Center’s approach to problem-solving–bringing farmers to one site for conferences and demonstrations–represented a real change in tactics for RAF/NSF. In the past the organization had always gone out to the farmers and their problems, meeting them on their own ground. Now, the situation was reversed and many members of the staff and board were uncomfortable with the change. In addition, federal money had begun to dry up and the Graham Center was proving to be a constant drain on capital and resources rather than the self-sufficient model it was chartered to be.

This fiscal and identity crisis precipitated the phasing out of training programs at the Graham Center in 19814 Kathryn Waller, executive director since the late 1970s, moved RAF/NSF back to its roots by instituting a traditional, grassroots organizing effort in the mold of STFU. Waller, along with program director Cary Fowler, also charted new territory for RAF/NSF by instituting an international program to address Third World problems and the worldwide loss of plant genetic diversity.

Beginning in 1982, RAF sent representatives into the field in North Carolina and South Carolina. The goal was to organize farmers into a cohesive, multi-racial, farmer-led unit that could address issues affecting farmers and rural communities. The United Farmers Organization (UFO) is now a 1,500-member organization active on a number of fronts. UFO operates toll-free hotlines with volunteers trained by RAF to offer advice to farmers facing foreclosures. UFO’s legislative committee, with other farm groups, recently won a victory when the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Agricultural Reform Bill to ensure the rights of borrowers. Benny Bunting, Chairman of UFO’s legislative committee, said, “This takes a giant step towards the preservation of family farms. It also sends a message to FCS and FmHA of Congressional intent to help the farmers; maybe now, a little compassion will be forced on them.” In the winter of 1987, UFO and other farm groups distributed $2.5 million worth of donated seed corn to farmers suffering the effects of the 1986 drought in North and South Carolina. Most of these farmers would not have been able to plant without this gift of seed.

Seed is the foundation of Rural Advancement Fund International (RAFI). While the struggle for worldwide genetic conservation appears to be only distantly related the struggle facing farmers in the American South, the mandate is clear. As RAF program director Cary Fowler

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says, “The type of seeds we have available to plant into the ground have a lot to do with the kind of agricultural systems that we’ll have as well.”

RAFI works globally for plant genetic conservation and the control of this invaluable natural resource by its rightful owners. Most of the world’s plant genetic diversity exists in the Third World. It is the critical raw material needed by U.S.-based multinational seed and pharmaceutical companies in the production of new varieties. Thus, those who control this genetic diversity control the very future of agriculture.

RAFI advises governmental and non-governmental agencies on how best to preserve their genetic resources, argues on behalf of Third World countries at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, and assists in the development and dissemination of innovative seed-saving strategies through publications like The Community Seed Bank Kit.

RAFI is also involved in the rapidly growing field of biotechnology and its effects on agriculture. RAFI publishes Communique which serves as an early-warning signal for Third World countries of impending changes that could radically affect their agricultural economies.

In the 1980s, RAF/NSF has also moved to diversify its efforts in rural communities. Volunteers trained by RAF monitor courtroom procedures for the poor and disfranchised in Robeson County, North Carolina. Robeson County has a long history of racial injustice and its present district attorney has successfully prosecuted more capital murder cases than any prosecutor in the United States. RAF staff members in Robeson County have built community coalitions that seek a public defender for the county, a citizen’s review board for the county’s legal system and equal justice for poor people.

In this decade, RAF also instituted a voter registration project in eastern North Carolina. This effort produced an increased turnout of 30-40 percent in some key precincts in the last election which, in turn, helped elect a number of minority candidates to local and statewide office.

As RAF/NSF celebrates its fiftieth year of service to family farmers and rural communities one appropriately recalls words from STFU’s Ceremony of the Land:

“In man’s greed for gold, he has destroyed the fruitful ness of the earth In his lust for power and dominion he has brought misery upon us all. The land cries out against those who waste it. Thy children cry out against those who abuse and oppress them. Speed now the day when the plains and the hills and all the wealth thereof shall be the people’s own and free men shall not live as tenants of men on the earth…”

Robert Amberg is communications director and photographer for the Rural Advancement Fund. A book-length history of RAF/NSF by Tevere MacFadyen will be published this winter.

Lost Causes &Then Some

Stetson Kennedy — Tue, 01 Dec 1987 05:00:05 +0000

Lost Causes &Then Some

By Stetson Kennedy

Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, pp. 16-24

This is the second of two articles on the once and future South, as viewed from the perspective of a life-long organizer, activist and writer. Forty years have elapsed since publication of the author’s book, Southern Exposure. The players have changed, but in too many respects the game remains the same.

World War II, as anticipated, generated a degree of black disaffection which came up against American apartheid after the manner of the proverbial irresistable [sic] force against the immovable object.

“They ain’t agonna do it–not so long as Gene Talmadge is Governor, they ain’t!” the “Wild Man of Sugar Creek” was bellowing.

As is the wont of those enamored of the status quo, ’twas said that legislation would be of no avail against race prejudice, and that only education could do the job “in time.” But America’s blacks had had enough of gradualist soft-soap. When a Southern judge admonished a black woman before the bar, “You people can’t expect equal justice all in a minute,” she retorted, “God knows it’s been a long minute!”

In all of my scrawling and drawling I contended that there was no more educational a process than the experience of working, studying, playing, praying, living and traveling together-and hence the efficacy of civil rights legislation in all these fields.

I went on to point out that Southern blacks, during Reconstruction and ever after, had proven that they had no desire to supplant white supremacy with black. And to my white compatriots I argued further that desegregation would not hurt, and that they would feel much better about themselves when it was all over. And I often concluded with the observation of the preacher who said, “Since we’re all hopefully headed for an integrated Heaven, we might as well start practicing now.”

My first book, Palmetto Country, appeared at the outset of the war. Charged by someone to pick it to pieces, Florida academia concluded sadly that it could find no error. A “premature anti-fascist” before the war, I was prevented by a back injury from joining the armed forces. With all my classmates headed for the shooting war, I resolved to fight fascism at home by infiltrating the Klan and other terrorist groups. There were plenty of people inveighing against the Klan, but no one seemed to have the hard evidence needed to take it into a court of law.

First on my list of some twenty groups eventually infiltrated was the White Front of Miami, which even after Britain got into the war was still distributing Nazi Propaganda Ministry materials, and threatening to drive “all the Jews on Miami Beach into the sea.” As the war progressed, I put together a manuscript for another book, under the working title The Four Freedoms Down South.

Meanwhile, Palmetto Country had caught the eye of Dr. George S. Mitchell, who in 1944 invited me to join him in Atlanta as editorial assistant at his post as Southeastern director of CIO/PAC. My job was to write educational materials suitable for the union’s rank-and-file.

“Stick to four-letter Anglo-Saxon,” Mitchell said. “I don’t want to see any Latin derivatives whatever.”

I did as directed, turning out a series on the poll tax, white primary, and other restrictions on voting in the South. After being first published in the SRC’s Southern Frontier, reprints were ordered in the 100,000-range, and distributed to CIO locals throughout the region, apparently with good effect. One of my union buddies, Georgia-boy R. E. Starnes, organizer for Steel, had a way of enhancing the effect by handing them out with the admonition, “I wouldn’t spit on a union man who wouldn’t give a dollar to help reelect FDR!”

In 1945, word came from Frank McCallister of the CIO’s advisory council to the War Labor Board that the president of the Senate had relied heavily upon my “Plain Facts About the Polltax” in introducing an anti-poll tax bill. Rather than let Uncle Sam do it for them, the poll tax states busied themselves abolishing it on their own. In Georgia, even Ole Gene Talmadge jumped on the bandwagon, writing in his Statesman, “I decided that the best way to keep the negroes from voting is to let all the white folks vote, and then pass the word that Mr. N—–r is not wanted at the polls.”

When I approached him in my nomme de Klan guise as

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“John Perkins,” I tried to pull his leg by saying that Ellis Arnall was claiming credit for abolishing the tax. Ole Gene just smirked, “Well, you know credit is like water–it sort of flows around.”

The disunity/cheapness of Southern labor was no less of a depressant than black exclusion. While Operation Dixie was striving mightily to organize the unorganized, I ventured to voice to director Van Bittner my concern that while his staff was doing its job of getting people signed up, the unions were doing an abysmal job of making confirmed unionists out of them once they were in. After scant reflection, Bittner replied, “Millions for organizing; not a penny for revivals.”

I was not surprised, therefore, when for example the Lockheed plant shut down in Marietta, Georgia, the brethren and sistren of the union local voted unanimously to empty its treasury for a farewell beer and barbeque binge, after which they went back to being the same old non-unionists they had remained at heart.

In those days journalist George Seldes (now 97 and still producing) was putting out his newsletter In Fact, dedicated to “exposing falsehood in the press” (it would take a lot more than four pages today), to which I sometimes contributed. Seldes knocked himself out, trying to convince labor that if it didn’t launch its own media it could not hold its own, much less prevail, against all the anti-labor propaganda being leveled against it. The union bosses paid him no “nevermind,” and labor has paid the price ever since.

By 1946 my wartime book manuscript had changed its name to “Southern Exposure,” and was scheduled for publication by Doubleday. But then came a telegram from editor Bucklin Moon: “Get here fast as you can. Bring all documentation. Lawyer says everything in it libelous.”

When my cartons and I reached the lawyer’s offices on Wall Street, he howled, “Whadaya mean calling Prentiss a fascist? I play golf with him every weekend!”

But those were the days when publishers had a measure of principle and courage, and we went to press with nothing changed.

The impact of the book was all I had hoped for, and more. In Atlanta it was banned, ostensibly for using (once) that fourletter word (Hemingway had just done it in To Have and Nave Not, so I thought I could too). Sales jumped appreciably.

Mississippi’s Sen. Theodore “The Man” Bilbo was more to the point. From a hospital bed where he was being prepped for surgery for cancer of the mouth he called in reporters and read to them from Southern Exposure and Lillian Smith’s Color Blind. He much preferred his doctor’s throat-cutting style, he said–they were going to cut up and

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down, while books such as these cut across.

On the other hand, Ellis Arnall graciously reviewed it for the New York Times, and sat down to write his own The Shore Dimly Seen. Dr. Clark Foreman asked me to help research one for him, and I started under the title Moneybags Scalawags, but the money ran out. From the black and labor press came endorsement of my strategy for achieving “total equality.” Perhaps most encouraging was a review in a Virginia paper, titled “Under Exposed.” After dutifully castigating it, the writer concluded, “But perhaps you should read it after all, and search your own conscience, and make up your own mind.” I took this to be one more sign that the South might yet change its apartheid ways with less bloodletting than was generally being prophesied.

TOGETHERNESS A MANY-DOORED THING

Integration was destined to enter through many doors. For a long time, whenever some “visiting fireman” from up North came to town, anti-apartheid Southern whites and blacks received them with what hospitality they could muster, but behind tightly-drawn blinds, lest someone hurl a stick of dynamite. At Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, small groups of whites and blacks braved fire and shotgun blasts in order to studying organizing, and do a little square-dancing. At Clayton, Georgia, Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling hosted interracial weekend rap sessions on the iniquity of Jim Crow.

The unsegregated annual meetings of the SCHW demonstrated that what had not been possible in Birmingham was entirely possible in New Orleans. And the SRC, true to its promise, was using its good offices to persuade, for example, the city fathers of Macon to hire a black policeman (with the proviso that he not carry a gun, and not arrest any white folks). History took it from there–

From my vantage point, however, it seemed to me that the CIO deserves more credit than any other single organization for softening-up the white South for righteousness. Without regard to the degree of success which its Operation Dixie achieved in terms of members of locals, it was the CIO which gave the South’s white and black working folk their first taste of solidarity, and I saw it happening.

When we first started holding union meetings at CIO HQ, 75 Ivey Street, Atlanta, Mitchell and I were dismayed to see that whites and blacks segregated themselves, front and rear. We thought we had found the solution when we jumbled all the chairs in such manner that there were no discernible horizontal rows. But we had left the aisle down the middle, and the brothers and sisters promptly segregated themselves left and right. Finally we wiped out the center aisle, too. This time they got the idea, and sat down wherever they could find an empty chair.

Another of those traditional chasms was crossed when a union local decided to have a covered-dish supper. The perplexing problem of who would serve whom was solved by the white ladies taking it all upon themselves.

Then there was the matter of the drinking fountain at union headquarters. In the dark of night, some journeyman plumber took it upon himself to run a pipe three feet off to one side and attach to it a smaller auxiliary fount. No signs were affixed, but everybody knew which was who’s. Again under cover of darkness, someone disconnected the auxiliary, and it stayed that way, a mute symbol of a South in transition.

Many a native white organizer “came through” in a well-nigh religious sense on the race issue. Steel’s Starnes was a sterling example. Inside the lionheart which enabled him and others to stand before a mill and say “I’m going to organize it” there was a poet, and he often sent me samples. One came with the handwritten note:

Stet look this over. Be sure to correct the spelling the typewriters they are making now days dont know how to spell. Let me know if the PAC can use it but don’t put it in the Union Leader with my name on it if these people knew how I felt on this subject they would lynch me before night. In fact I think they have already got the tree picked out to hang me on.

What he sent me was:

Since we Rebels joined forces with the Yanks
We’ve felled the Axis with their hateful pranks.
Our Bosses tell us to “hate the n—r,”
But thair is one thing that I can’t figure–
We all go to work day and night
Regardless of wheather [sic] we’re black or white.
The pay we get decides our fate
In spite of all our petty hate.
So it’s time we workers were getting wise,
and forgetting our hates, organize!

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There were also the likes of Bishop Shaw of the AME Church, Birmingham, who got up before a CIO regional convention and said, “When I first heard of this CIO, I asked ‘What does it stand for?’ The answer I got was, ‘White and colored in the same union.’ when I heard that, I put on my war-boots and my preachin’-coat, and I been preachin’ the principles of CIO-ism ever since!”

Bishop Shaw went on to relate how, as a member of a CIO bargaining committee, they got into the “front elevator” of the mill boss’s skyscraper, and rode up to his offices on the top floor. They told the secretary to tell the boss that the bargaining committee was there and wanted to talk to him. In no time at all the boss popped out, saying “Come right in, boys! Seddown and have a chair! Have a cigar!”

“Power was on the throne!” Bishop Shaw exulted. He concluded by relating how he had told the boss, “We made you rich, now you let us live decent!”

Nor will I ever forget the black coal miner from Kentucky, who spoke of the difficulty of telling, when the miners emerged from the pit all covered with coal dust, what color they were underneath.

“White or black, you’re a coal miner still,” he said. Referring to the equal rights language in CIO charters, he went on to say, “I think we ought to either live up to it, or take it out.” And he concluded, “If we ever goin’ to get anywhere, we got to get there together!”

WHEN THE SIGNS CAME DOWN

I am not going to take space to tell how it was that blacks and whites did get together in the fifties and sixties, and march on and on until apartheid had been overcome and they could shout “Free at last! Great God Allmighty, free at last!” While I marched with King at Albany, Oxford, Selma, and St. Augustine, and chronicled the period in the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier, those events are still fresh in human memory, and need little recounting just yet.

What may be worth stressing is that the motive power came from blacks themselves. And while there was adult leadership and participation, in a very real sense the freedom marches were a children’s crusade (as what war isn’t?). It was the spectacle of skinny-legged sub-teen girls who did not flinch when inches away police dogs gnashed their teeth that finally moved the American public and all three branches of Government to remedial action.

I recall how, on the morning after the Supreme Court decision of ’64 rending asunder the integument of apartheid, the first black I saw was riding a bike.

“Okay,” I said silently to him and myself, “you’re on your own from here on out. At last you’ve got the same legal legs to stand on as all the immigrant groups who have hacked their way into the Mainstream.”

It wasn’t that I begrudged the lifetime I had spent in The Cause–far from it. I was as elated at having lived to see the outcome as he must have been. But I was tired, and there

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were so many causes crying out.

My personal contribution to the Jubilee was to gloat in The Courier, “Every day, gains are being made which can never be taken away!”

Some speech-writer for that other Kennedy (the one in the White House) must have picked up on it, for soon the Nation had the message on no lesser authority than that of JFK.

I, as a student of Reconstruction and human struggles for liberation generally, should have known better. I don’t know why he was so confident, but my faith was based upon black militancy. I didn’t think blacks would ever allow anyone to take any of it from them. Now, a single generation later, it is all too apparent that the gains of the Second Reconstruction, like those of the First, can and are being whittled away.

It is not the bedsheet brigade this time (though they are with us yet), but plainclothed Klux in Washington, whose stock-in-trade is not to terrorize but bamboozle.

Before getting into that, let me say what a great day it was when the “White” and “Colored” signs came down all over America. I raced from dumpster to dumpster, retrieving them as artifacts for some future Museum of Horrors. (Alas, termites got them, which may be just as well.) Best of all was watching Woolworth’s clear its shelves of what had so long been best-sellers. Perhaps they can recycle them as “Open to the Public,” or even “Welcome” signs, I mused.

I must say I was extremely proud of the good grace which I most of my white Southern brethren were able to muster for the desegregation process, after having sworn for so long that they would “die first.” Perhaps the fundamentalist churches, albeit unwittingly, deserve a bit of the credit, having so often put them through the paces of redemption and being born again. In any event, Mr. and Mrs. Charlie came through with flying colors. I was utterly enthralled when the ladles of both colors sat down to luncheon together for the first time. For once the tradition of chivalry stood the South in good stead, as they vied with one another not merely in civility but conviviality. Nor was my enthusiasm more than slightly dampened when I recalled that lynchings, too, had sometimes been carried out with a certain air of noblesse oblige.

CHANGING, FOR BETTER OR WORSE:

To be sure, the South has changed mightily–oft-times for the better, but not always.

Ever since its conquest by Europeans, until recently, the South was something of a self-contained continuum, with nobody much to deal with but damn yankees. Yet today the future of the South does not rest exclusively in the hands of white Southerners, nor white and black Southerners, nor those folks up yonder. While all of these still count, the fate of the South may hinge upon decisions made in such faraway places as Geneva and Tokyo.

This is not to say that the old hallmarks of Southern progress–the Constitutional formula for counting blacks as three-fifths of a person, Dred Scott, Secession, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Klan terror, Deal of ’76, Booker Washington’s half-a-loaf and Henry Grady’s New South–have lost any of their historical meaning. It is just that if you’re dead, you’re dead, and all causes are lost ones. We need to watch out, in other words, for such things as mushroom clouds, aerosol cans, AIDS virus, and the penis rampant.

The very logo of the SRC–progressing as it has from map of the South, to map of region within the Nation, to region upon the globe–reflecta our emancipation from the old provincialism. While there will always be a role for old-fashioned regionalism, the only regionalism which holds forth the hope of salvation nowadays is that which looks upon Earth as a region of the solar system.

The very concept of progress, as applied to the Southern scene, has itself been subject to change. During the first half of this century we were quite confident that one gain led to another, and that the path of the species led onward and upward. If we look to Starnes on the cutting edge once again, in 1947 he was going around saying, “Things really are getting better. They used to kill you for trying to organize a union. Now they just knock all your teeth out.” Starnes is still around, but I do not know what he would say today, when anti-union propaganda has reached such a state-of-the-art as to almost make unionists hate themselves.

By mid-century I had already become sufficiently’ alarmed to conclude my remarks with the caution, “Great

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progress is being made; but reaction is making great progress too.” Within a few years, the terror known as McCarthyism had demolished much that was decent and caring about America (in much the same fashion that government’ industry, agriculture, transport, environment, and solvency are being wrecked now). In one of those Question Answer periods a little old lady who had given her entire life causes to help make a better world asked me tearfully, “Was it all in vain!”

I did not know the answer then, nor do I now. It all depends–

HOW NOW TO PROTEST?

Someone, after reflecting upon mankind’s unending struggle to create that better world, concluded somewhat cynically “The forms of exploitation change from time to time.” That being true enough so far, it would seem to behoove us to consider whether forms of protest and struggle should also change accordingly. How best can we defend, consolidate, and advance–during what remains of this century–the gains which have been made?

Many of the traditional forms will never become outmoded–we need all the petitioning, lobbying, voting, organizing, sitting-in, meeting, marching, and confrontation we can get. One thing we do not need more of, however, are the liquor-and-TV riots which erupted during the “long hot summers” of several years ago. While I for one am capable of looking upon these as a form (albeit inappropriate) of reparations for the nest eggs blacks never inherited because our ancestors robbed their ancestors of the fruits of their labors, going after TVs and Jack Daniels is no way to go after civil rights. I happened to be in Budapest during the Hungarian revolt of ’56, and while all shop windows were smashed, nothing was touched. “A testament to the purity of our revolution,” a Hungarian said to me.

As for the “burn, baby, burn” approach some blacks resorted to when Mainstream America turned a deaf ear to the demand that doors be opened, it was an effective attention-getter (like hitting the mule over the head with a 2 x 4), and even had its roots in folksay, “Throw your trunk out the window, and let the whole damn row bum down!” Whether the scene be Watts, Miami, Philippines, S. Korea, Haiti, or some place else, the gasoline cocktail has been one of the few weapons within reach for the assertion of People Power. Burning down one’s own neighborhood, however, can hardly be described as a well-directed form of protest. It is too much like the foreclosed mid-western farmers who blew out their own brains, as if they were somehow at fault.

I do have a couple of suggestions on tactics for the future, one of which I would call “Non-Stop Protest.” Discrimination has a way of being non-stop, of going on forever unless someone puts a stop to it. In the sixties it was so gross and omnipresent you could strike out in almost any direction and land a telling blow. Nowadays it is more insidious, and needs to be ferreted out and targeted.

Once an offending public or private enterprise has been identified, the offended community would serve notice for it to cease and desist, or face non-stop picketing until it did so. Ephemeral pickets are one thing, but picketing “in perpetuity if need be” by community organizations on a rotating basis would be a prospect few establishments would care to face.

The other suggestion is that we make massive use of protest posters. Throughout Europe the poster is not only a potent weapon but a recognized art-form. We have the artists, ideas, and plenty of walls which could use some decoration and dedication.

American labor would also do well to look to its defenses and consider new forms of struggle. Actually, labor is in need of an awakening not unlike that brought on among blacks by the Montgomery bus boycott and Winston-Salem sit-in. There is no way that labor can “overcome” until it comes up with a mind, programme, platform, and media of its own, capable of contending successfully against the phalanx of industry-subsidized institutions arrayed against it. So long as American labor continues to swallow the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid that its interests and employer interests are one and the same, its doom is sealed. Knowledge of which side one’s bread is buttered on is essential to the survival of any group, labor included.

What’s more, labor must make common cause with women, minorities, and other short-changed groups, and not let its well-known patriotism get it suckered in by any jingoist who comes out of the wings. Any time you find labor and management backing the same candidates, you can bet your boots that somebody is being suckered–and that it isn’t management.

Beyond all this, the globalization of industry and the labor market is posing–in the form of wage rollbacks and plant closings–a threat to American labor of the same magnitude as the Klan terror which negated black rights after the Civil War. The unions may be able to follow

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industry from Ruse Belt to Sun Belt, but the bottom line question is: How can even a Japanese-run plant in the South compete with its own Made-in-Japan models, except by paying U.S. workers Japanese wages?

Anyone who has lived in as many has-been world powers as I have would hate to see it happen to us, for the economic and psychic consequences are traumatic indeed. Toynbee (of whom let it be said that no man ever amassed so many facts or drew so many erroneous conclusions from them) said with reason that the fate of nations is decided by their response to challenge. Are we a flash-in-the-pan nation, or aren’t we? How can labor participation help American management, design, and engineering compete? Must the world’s industrial wages be brought up or our’s go down–

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or is there some other answer to this dilemma?

TOWARDS THE THIRD RECONSTRUCTION

While I may or may not have been the first to raise the standard of a Second Reconstruction to carry out the unfinished business of the First, I do not want to miss this opportunity to call for yet a Third.

That the South does indeed stand in need of further reconstruction is self-evident. The agenda is replete with items of both Old Business and New.

To arrive at specifics we need only look back to what we were, around at what we are, and ahead to what we would like to be (as compared to where we seem to be going).

Where once our region was beset by a complex of problems somewhat peculiar to it, today we are caught up, along with every other region on the planet, in an on-going freeway pile-up of problems which make the Flood, Plague, World Wars, and Great Depression seem like Sunday School picnics. While some of these problems are amenable to regional amelioration, many are not. It took virtually the entire human race, actively or passively, to get us into the messes we are in, and it will take no fewer to get us out.

Even so, the day of Operation Bootstrap is not done. States and regions can still take it upon themselves to clean up their own acts, and hope and prod that others may do likewise. It is high time something more constructive was being done in the name of state’s rights and regional cooperation than secession, Dixiecrat bolts, and the abortive attempt of the erstwhile-Confederate states to avoid the integration of higher education by setting up a jointly funded regional college in Atlanta to which each state could ship its blacks. Time now for regional action on such matters as dumping, acid rain, offshore drilling, pesticides, and unplanned development.

To whom should we look for salvation? While there is much talk of God and Country, Mammon is on the throne, devouring all things, including the elements. Is our only hope perhaps to make remedial measures more profitable than the on-going destruction?

In a simpler age, we fancied that all we had to do was join a good union, register, and vote. Now it is plain to see that nothing less than a network of Debriefing Centers can keep us from voting against ourselves. We used to take pride in our ability to see through bunco-artists, but after being twice hooked on Reaganism, what can we say?

There are some who are saying, “Thank goodness, we’ve put all that racism behind us!” But don’t you believe it. It would be nice if it were all over and done with, and we could sit back and enjoy the Promised Land of Equal Opportunity and Justice. But we are not there yet. In a great many essential respects, we are very far from it. There is such a thing as desegregated racism, and we’ve got it.

We may no longer be Jim Crowed, but we are just as black ghettoed as ever.

Instead of just a token black here and there, we have a whole token black middle class, but the black masses remain as impoverished, jobless, and hopeless as before.

There is one item of unfinished business that we may as well forget–the forty acres and a mule promised all Freedmen during the First Reconstruction. We can charge that one off to Profit Loss, since it now takes upwards of 1,000 acres to make a go of it in agribiz, and we stopped making mules. Even if we were to start them up again, there wouldn’t be anybody around who knew “Gee” from “Haw.”

Cottonpicker came, and blacks went; but here come the robots, who can’t tell a blue collar from a black skin, and won’t do nothing for you anyway unless you can talk to them in Japanese.

Nobody dares call anybody “n—-r” anymore, but injury without insult is injury right on.

We may have the vote, but where can we find a people’s candidate who can afford to run?

Lynching has gone into limbo, but look who’s on Death Row.

Sure, we stopped putting the blowtorch to Bootjack McDaniel, but any time the bugle sounds we join forces with the Yanks to firebomb thatched villages, with the best intentions in the world.

No more chaingangs, just concentration camps for black males.

No more sweatbox, just a rapacious cellmate with AIDS.

Ole Strom Thurmond and the latter-day Dixiecrats all gone over to the GOP–an outfit which folks say isn’t exactly anti-black, it just doesn’t care about people.

Nowadays you hardly ever see the attorney general of Mississippi up before the Supreme Court, arguing against things like school busing and affirmative action; mostly it’s the U.S. Attorney General.

Same old Klan out in the woods rehearsing for a black holocaust, but decked out now in battle fatigues and armed

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with automatic weapons.

Time was (1940) when the per capita income of Southerners was $309. That presented problems of sorts, but nothing like the $2,370,000,000,000 national debt that somebody has run up on our credit card. This is not conservatism, nor even reaction; it is anarchy and drunken-sailorism. (Reminds me of the refrain of a poem penned by a tippling classmate of mine: “There’ll be muckle moaning at the bar, when my turn comes to pay.”)

One remarkable thing about our plight is that we seem to be blissfully unaware of it, like the patient who having been prepped for surgery goes to the table in such a state of euphoria he doesn’t care whether he lives or dies. In our case, we have been administered tranquilizers and painkillers in the form of lowered taxes and increased plastic spending power–a sort of nothing down, cash rebate, pay later proposition which few seem able to refuse.

Where all the talk used to be of Black Belt and Bible Belt, now all we hear is Rust Belt and Sun Belt. The big idea seems to be to persuade industry to forsake the Rust Belt altogether and get a fresh start in the Sun Belt. Still baiting our hook with those old-reliables–free land, tax exemption, and non-union labor. (What we fail to realize is that it was organized labor, and nobody else but, who made the American standard of living what it is today.)

Strike-breaking and union-busting “ain’t what it used to be,” since the command post was moved from the Pinkerton Agency to the White House.

Mean old slave trade a thing of the past; nowadays we just leave ’em and work ’em wherever they’re at. All it takes is a few dime-a-dozen whipping bosses to keep them from getting any notions about free speech, solidarity, elections, and stuff like that.

No need to worry so much now about a Southern wage differential, as a S. Korean.

Stopped bringing in coolie labor a long time ago; doors still open to wetbacks and islanders, but American industry is solving that problem for us by pulling up stakes and moving offshore and across the border.

Offshore industry is not all we’ve got. We used to say that America would never be in any danger of takeover by a military junta, but now we have seen how offshore government has been formulating foreign policy and waging wars in our name and at our expense, but outside of our laws and Constitution.

An unlamented loss is the Southern demagogue, whose distinctive flavor was exceeded only by his deviltry. In place of Ole Gene and The Man in the Senate cafeteria demonstrating the respective merits of crumblin’ or dunkin’ cornbread into pot-likker, we have such mainstream models as a Marine colonel playing Rambo and a Dude Rancher cast as President.

Dies, Rankin and McCarthy all gone to their graves, but who needs thought-control when all you have to do is scatter a few cliches and flags around, and people will vote “Right” every time.

Problem used to be: unfree people who wanted to be free; problem now is, unfree people who think they are free.

Thought we had a Magic Bullet to stop VD, but now you need a wetsuit to go out on a spree.

Long before anybody else had heard of drugs, some residents of the black ghetto were sitting around “on the nod” from cocaine. Now all the world seems to be on the nod from one thing or another. Can it be because we are fast turning the world into one big ghetto, with all that that entails in emptiness and despair?

Anybody remember the good ole days when we had the likes of ITT for absentee owner, instead of the Sheik of Bahrein?

Sho nuff, Ole Massa and Mr. Charlie done both gone with the wind, but here come Mr. Takahiro!

Our agenda could go on and on, but you see what I mean when I say that ye olde problem-of-the-South has not only been transmogrified but transcended. We may have been Problem No. 1, but we don’t need any final solutions. Like the man said, all the world’s a stage, and if the thing catches fire there will be no way to save the South Wing.

Talk about Lost Causes–if Life and Earth make the list, the UDC and SRC alike can hang it up. Old South and New; North, East and West; white, black, brown, and yellow; rich and poor; free and unfree; sinners and saints–we’re all in the whale’s belly together, and the whale is headed for the beach.

Somebody do something, quick!

Stetson Kennedy, a Florida native, played a prominent role in the pioneer civil rights movement of the thirties and forties. Taking it upon himself to infiltrate the KKK and a score of other racist/terrorist bands, his books Southern Exposure, I Rode With the KKK, and Jim Crow Guide were the first by a white Southerner to raise the standard of “total equality.” They not only helped “soften up the South for righteousness,” but, translated into a score of foreign languages, served to give Uncle Sam a global hotfoot to “do something.” At 71, Kennedy lives near Jacksonville, Fla., where he is putting together a selection of his writings under the title, “Land Be Bright,” and an autobiography, “Dissident-at-Large.”

South Leads in Black Officeholders

Staff — Tue, 01 Dec 1987 05:00:06 +0000

South Leads in Black Officeholders

By Staff

Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, p. 25

Mississippi leads the nation in total number of black elected officials and Alabama has the highest percentage of black officeholders in the United States, according to the annual Black Elected Officials: A National Roster, published by the Joint Center for Political Studies.

Although blacks in the South continued to post electoral gains, the overall increase in black officeholders slowed for the January 1986 to January 1987 period surveyed; the nationwide increase last year was 4.1 percent, compared to 6.1 percent the previous year and 6.2 percent two years ago.

The ten states with the highest numbers of black elected officials are Mississippi (548), Louisiana (505), Alabama (448), Georgia (445), Illinois (434), North Carolina (353), South Carolina (340), Arkansas (319), Michigan (316), and California (293). Nationally, the total increased from 6,424 to 6,681.

Not surprisingly, the geographic distribution of black elected officials closely parallels the distribution of the total black population in the U.S. The South has 53 percent of the nation’s black population and 62 percent of all black elected officeholders. The second largest concentration of black officeholders, 19.2 percent, is in the North Central U.S., where 19.8 percent of the nation’s black population is located. The Northeast, with 18.5 percent of the total black population, has 10.6 percent of black elected officials, and 5.7 percent of all black elected officials are in the West, where 8.9 percent of all blacks live.

Southern blacks have had good success in translating their population concentration into electoral gains at the state and local levels but have managed to win few federal offices. Only three of twenty-three blacks in the U.S. House of Representatives are from Southern states–Reps. John Lewis of Georgia, Mike Espy of Mississippi, and Harold Ford of Tennessee.

A total of 71 black elected officials were elected last year in jurisdictions where no black American had ever before held elective office. Also, the number of black women elected officials continued to climb (to 1,564), and has now almost tripled since 1975 (530).

Seven blacks hold statewide office and 410 serve in legislatures. At the municipal level, 303 blacks serve as mayors and 2,485 as council members. The number of black mayors in cities larger than 30,000 population increased from twenty-eight to thirty-four.

There is a direct correlation, the Joint Center for Political Studies said, between black voting age population and the number of black elected officials. Mississippi leads in black elected officials but also has the highest proportion of voting-age blacks (30.8 percent). Voting-age blacks are 66.6 percent of the total voting-age population in the District of Columbia, where 67.8 percent of all elected officials are black.

There are no black elected officials at all in Idaho, Montana and North Dakota, where blacks are less than .05 percent of the total population.

For a copy of Black Elected Officials: A National Roster, 1987, send $29.50 to Publications Office, Joint Center for Political Studies, 1301 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., #400, Washington, D.C. 20004.

Sermonette on the Movement

Casey Hayden — Tue, 01 Dec 1987 05:00:07 +0000

Sermonette on the Movement

By Casey Hayden

Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, pp. 27-29

Mary King is like her ancestors. She walks a very straight line for a long time. She was always like that: solid, linear, historical, careful, analytical, objective, thorough. And stouthearted. The amazing thing is that she wrote this book at all. To have gone back over all this history had to be such an emotional experience, so heavy. A strong persona, Mary, made of strong stuff. In the Freedom House at Tougaloo Mary set her hair in pink curlers when the rest of us could hardly keep up with our combs. When she left there she went with cartons and cartons of WATS line reports, pots and pans, and little scraps of paper. The Packrat. This is definitely the kind of head it took to write this book. It is so full of so many details, specifics.

It is, I think, a good book. It is personal, of course. Everyone’s memories–everyone’s slice of it–are personal, different. But she has spoken well and carefully to a good many of the major questions of the period. This book will be widely read in years to come, disputed and quoted as an authority. Primarily, however, its value will be in keeping alive a time which is rapidly becoming forgotten and/or misunderstood. Blacks today are viewed vaguely, if at all, like any other immigrant group. Like the Irish, they should just kind of meld in, (without intermarriage, of course). We’d like to forget slavery and the rigid caste system that followed. Really, slavery, Slavery. Not easily overcome. So it is good, Mary, to keep this information alive. You do history a favor.

I appreciate getting to write about your book. The movement was everything to me: home and family, food and work, love and a reason to live. When I was no longer welcome there and then when it was no longer there at all, it was hard to go on. Many of us in this situation, especially the Southern whites, only barely made it through. I count myself lucky to be a survivor. But that is another story. For old times’ sake, Mary, here are some comments on this story.

The Movement

This story in Mary’s words, meticulous Mary, comes out sounding like what we were doing was the most natural and proper thing in the world, that we were heroines from the very beginning, that each move was carefully planned. I think for her, it probably was. Actually, as I recall, one thing led to another and it was all quite underground, illegal, dangerous and on the road. There was a lot of bumming of cigarettes from each other and long cross-country drives in the night to meetings and a lot of going home with someone afterward, or taking someone home. It was outrageous, really. Exciting, liberating, spicy, when we were young and in the South. Sometimes I have longed for the movement so profoundly. The only nostalgia that compares is for my grandmother’s backyard when I was a child–the pomegranates and ripe figs, roses and swast peas, ferns and irises and crepe myrtles and oleanders, pecans and walnuts and swings and wet grass on little bare feet in the summer time. The movement was rich like that. And in like manner there is no going back.

There was a comfort in that time that was born of the

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absolute certainty that what I was doing was the right thing to be doing. Nothing compares to that except the carrying, bearing and nursing of my children. When we were young and in the South we were so beautiful and naive. It was a children’s crusade, really. We were the fairhaired girls and nothing could touch us. Looking back we marvel at our courage, but at the time there was no courage, no fear. We were protected by our righteousness. The whole country was trapped in a lie. We were told about equality but we discovered it didn’t exist. We were the only truth-tellers, as far as we could see. It seldom occurred to us to be afraid. We were sheathed in the fact of our position. It was partly our naivete which allowed us to leap into this position of freedom, the freedom of absolute right action.

I think we were the only Americans who will ever experience integration. We were the beloved community, harassed and happy, just like we’d died and gone to heaven and it was integrated there. We simply dropped race. This doesn’t happen anymore. And in those little hot black rural churches, we went into the music, into the sound, and everyone was welcome inside this perfect place.

We were actually revolutionaries, in my opinion. Mary will tell you we weren’t, but I think we were. We loved the untouchables. We believed the last should be first, and not only should be first, but in fact were first in our value system and it was only the blindness of everyone else not to recognize this fact. They were first because they were redeemed already, purified by their suffering, and they could therefore take the lead in the redemption of us all. We wanted to turn everything not only upside down, but inside out. This is not mild stuff. It is not much in vogue now. We believed, pre-Beatles, that love was the answer. Love, not power, was the answer. All the debates about nonviolence and direct action and voter registration, in my view, were really about whether love or power was the answer. And we did love each other so much. We were living in a communtiy [sic] so true to itself that all we wanted was to organize everyone into it, make the whole world beloved with us, make the whole world our beloved, lead the whole world to the consciousness that it was our beloved and please come in to the fire, come in here by the fire. Come on in with us here by the fire and break taboos left and right. This is where it is truly safe.

The movement in its early days was a grandeur which feared no rebuke and assumed no false attitudes. It was a holy time.

This is of course, just my personal experience, as is Mary’s experience, as is all of life.

On Being Radicals

Some of us were radicals. We liked to think of being radical as going to the root of things. Of course, I was with the New Left folks a lot, the rowdies, although they were quieter and more scholarly then, before the war. Unfortunately radicals of the right came up with clearer answers to the questions we raised than we did. And better P.R. The failure of liberalism which we correctly identified has in fact issued forth in a right swing. I don’t know any left-wing radicals today, really. However, in reading Mary’s book, and in memory of the old days, I found myself making marginal notes in some parts of the book. The following approach to the women’s movement is an example of the style in which we thought, mostly at the time about race. Even for those of us who do not pretend to be politically involved it is good to do these exercises now and then for old times’ sake, to keep the form intact: Traditionally, the notion that women are trapped by and need to be liberated from their childbearing function, their biology, is widely accepted in the women’s movement. I think it’s incorrect. If carried to its logical extreme this position would result in the eradication of the human race.

Why not take biology, the body, as positive and see the problem in the society, the culture’s attitude toward birth? No one talks about labor much anymore, and never about labor as a source of value and seldom about labor as in bearing children. Both are undervalued and their place in the rewards of the culture are not reflective of the truth of their value to the experience of being human. Anyone who is present at a human birth, and especially the conscious mother, knows a great secret. Freedom is not a question of the control of the birth function (although certainly that is useful to have at our command) so much as recognition and dignification and reward of this function and the child-rearing function that follows from it. This line of reasoning carries one into deep waters, of course. We used to think like this all the time, these radical approaches with astounding implications.

Mary talks about organizing lower class women, a mass movement. We used to refer to the movement as a mass movement, back when it was happening. The word masses, like the word labor, is seldom used. What are some issues which touch all women rather than primarily or disproportionately benefiting upwardly mobile professional women?

I think about this one: Why is every second woman I talk to over thirty suffering from irregular and heavy menstrual periods? Why are the doctors giving out hormones, DNC’s and hysterectomies with abandon to handle the problem. What is the root cause? What is the relation of all this to the hormones we eat, for instance, in all meat and dairy products? Is anyone testing for this? Who should decide what we eat, anyway? (One can get into this one on cancer and pollutants and petroleum by-products and nuclear power, also.) Similarly, given the value of the experience of giving birth, and the need for women to claim it as their own, what is the feminist reaction to the shutting down of birthing centers nationwide by the insurance companies? It is the insurance companies who control the experience of the woman in the act of giving birth, the insurance companies and the AMA. This issue is as important as abortion. The conscious experience of birth changes the relationship of the mother from unconscious to conscious and thus contributes to the survival and spiritual development of the human

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race. The next logical step in this thinking is to look at nursing homes, the profit motive’s impersonal and depressing answer to how to orchestrate life’s other most significant transition.

Of course, the AMA and the insurance companies are big groups to take on. This didn’t slow us down. We were brash and young. To address these issues means to address basic societal restructuring. It means all the same things it used to mean when we were into it. These issues cut across class lines. This is as it should be, as Mary suggests. These issues are about survival and spiritual truth. This is also as it should be. We need to think radically, even if it sounds a bit mad. Very few people, after all, know how.

What Goes Around Comes Around

I know there is for you, Mary, something of a full circle in this book. I know it took you twenty-five years to come to terms with much of this history, with yourself. This means a healing. The idea of coming full circle is important. Very important now in my life. It was important then, too. We used to hold hands and stand in a circle to sing “We Shall Overcome.” When we were debating how to continue to work and create together at Waveland after the summer of 1964 (which was a momentous time and a time when we couldn’t seem to get at deciding what to do anymore) I remember talking about circles. Instead of lines and boxes and hierarchy in the diagrams of how to organize SNCC I was drawing circles indicating people working together and the circles overlapping other circles as we all generated programs and things to do together. That was how the movement really was. Our side lost. But we were right. Hierarchy could not replace the circle dance (as Milan Kundera has also pointed out, I found out after writing this).

Bob Moses changed his name to his mother’s maiden name, around this time of the women’s memos. It was going back to something else to make the present full, to say an understanding. He was the only one who knew what to do. Bob wanted to do his doctorate at Harvard on the philosophical differences in Swahili and English, I understand, after he and Janet and the kids got back from Africa. After the SDS reunion there was some money left over which came to the New York group and we used it to throw a party to raise some more money for a film on Ella Baker. At the party Bob spoke and he talked about a Swahili word which meant the mother of the tribe, the spiritual guide of the community. He said Ella was that. He told about when he was a kid in Harlem and his family was very poor and the only way they could afford milk was through a milk co-opt Years later in the South he learned that this milk co-op had been organized by Ella Baker.

Things do not always fall apart. Sometimes what looks like falling apart is only part of a coming full back around. I think we have to hope for that, for a time when the truths women and old organizers know will be honored and the secret compassion we have secured in our hearts will find value in the population, among the people. Or that the people will find we have shared this all along. Somewhere in the questions that the Swahili/English text would raise must be the question of whether history is linear or circular, or maybe spiral. What is progress, really? How is history to be served? How do we serve each other? What is to be done?

This was the question which led to my drafting of our second memo, the Kind-of-Memo. It was so painful to see all the floundering about trying to figure out what to do, to be burning out oneself, and to see the community dissipating. It seemed like one should at least keep talking about what was really happening, what really mattered, with whoever would listen, whoever would talk back. That seemed to be what was to be done.

Tell It Like It Is

When I was working several years ago with Elaine Baker, another Tougaloo Freedom House grad, on an oral history project in a remote part of southern Colorado, we came up with this idea of putting tape recorders and tapes in the local library. Then we had the idea to get a grant and do it all over the country, so anyone anywhere could come in and record their life history and put it in the local oral history archive. We were working on an old SNCC axiom that everyone is as valuable as everyone else, and so is everyone’s experience as valuable as everyone else’s. Radical equality, like a mother’s love which sees each of her children as equally valuable. Mary can be an inspiration to all us survivors. We can, like her, write it down, record it, somehow pass it along. We can seize the time and make it our own, make our story our own, in our own style and fashion, as Mary has. For instance, a book about my life would look like a sixties comic book and be called “The Amazing Life of Casey Cason Hayden Cason, How She Escaped Death and Lived To Tell About It.” Getting it published or broadcast is not the main thing. We all remember the discrepancy between reality as we experienced it in the movement and what we read about that reality in print. We know that publication does not validate experience, nor do we need it for our experiences to be valid. What you record will be used, be useful, someday. It will be a service to the future. Save it for your grandchildren.

Well, this is not a review, exactly. It is more like a sermonette combined with notes scribbled down the side of a page. But it is part of the healing and the moving forward and upward which is the root of this book. So in closing I will say the only thing that I really do want to say a great deal and which I think you will be glad I said, Mary:

For the Zen teacher body and mind are one. So for a brief time in history, in our very own lives, art, religion and politics were one. Those of us with SNCC in the South in those days were political, it is true, but more radically, we were observers, participants, and midwives to a great upheaval, uprising, outpouring of the human spirit. This was the spirit of the thousands and thousands of poor Southern blacks who were in fact the movement. The form, the style, the very life of the movement was theirs. They were there when we got there and there when we left. Many of them could not read or write and they could barely speak the English language. They will never see this book. They, and not we, were the heroes, the heroines. I was privileged to have been their servant for a while. To them, for all I learned from them and for all the beauty I witnessed, I extend my most sincere and humble thanks.

Editor’s Note: Freedom Song by Mary King, William Morrow and Co., $22.95, 592 pp.) appeared this year and has been hailed by many reviewers as a monument to the civil rights movement. Ms. King worked for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee during the early sixties and has recorded her experiences during this time. In 1986 she sent the first draft of her manuscript to Casey Hayden (a Texas native lately of the Southern Regional Council staff, who now works for the City of Atlanta) and asked if Hayden would like to write a statement of her own which might be used as an introduction. The following was Hayden’s response to this request. The essay appeared in abbreviated form as a preface to Freedom Song and is presented here as a reflection on the period and the book.

Avedon’s West

Art Ponder — Tue, 01 Dec 1987 05:00:08 +0000

Avedon’s West

By Art Ponder

Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, pp. 30-31

Richard Avedon is generally known as a fashion photographer, the man who creates the “idealized,” sexist icons for the covers of such magazines as Vogue and Self. Others may know him as a contributor to Rolling Stone or the photographer who turned his large format camera on the influential and powerful, making revealing portraits of numerous “movers and shakers,” George Wallace, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter among the herd. His most recent effort, however, is in sharp contrast to those earlier identities. In “In The American West,” a traveling exhibition recently on view at the High Museum in Atlanta, he takes as his subject not Vogue stereotypes, but the dispossessed, the drifting, the working class, the “ordinary people” of an American region. He does so in such a way as to startle nearly any viewer, and, in the end, make an ambiguous comment about the West, a comment devoid of humanity and thirsting for understanding.

In 1979 Avedon began what developed into a five-year project, in which he attempted to, as he says in the foreword to his book In The American West, photograph “the men and women who work at hard, uncelebrated jobs, the people who are often ignored and overlooked.” Toward this end, Avedon roamed the West, visiting events and places such as county fairs, rodeos, coal mines, and slaughter houses, looking for faces and bodies that would serve his vision of the West. For Avedon, this is a process akin to auditioning actors for a play or film, though here potential actors have no idea they are under consideration. After selecting a person, he and his crew of three or four assistants would erect a piece of large white backdrop paper, always in the shade to give flat, even, light to all his photographs, and position the subject for his or her portrait. Using an 8×10 view camera, capable of rendering the most minute details with clarity, Avedon would make his picture. About these subjects and the subsequent results, Avedon has said: “These disciplines, these strategies, this silent theatre attempt to achieve an illusion: that everything embodied in the photography simply happened, that the person in the portrait was always there, was never encouraged to hide his hands, and in the end was not even in the presence of a photographer.”

Such could not be further from the truth, for all of Avedon’s pictures radiate with the presence of the photographer nearly as much as the subjects themselves. Like the portrait “Gordon Stevenson, drifter, Interstate 90, Butte, Montana, 8/25/79,n all of Avedon’s subjects float in negative white space, rooted to nothing but perhaps the edge of the frame, stripped of place and context, able to speak only through their physical appearance.

In Avedon’s view of the West no one is given the dignity to be viewed in their personal landscape. No one is seen in relation to place. For students of Southern culture, this resonates with exploitation, as Southerners have long been characterized as being dependent upon a relationship to place, or in Eudora Welty’s overused notion, to have “a sense of place.” Who would not look alienated, who would not look dispossessed when asked to stand rootless against seamless white paper? What would we think of Lewis Hine’s photograph of a young spinner in the Roanoke Cotton Mill if Hine pictured her in an empty white space rather than with the spinning machine she saw too much of? When pressed by critics concerned with the perceived exploitative approach, Avedon invariably hides behind the artist’s veil. In a recent interview for Atlanta Art Papers, he quipped: “…let’s assume that it’s correct that I take advantage of people. What has that got to do with the business of an artist? What difference does it make if I am a good or a bad man? We are talking about the works of art which will live long after I’m gone….But are the photographs true to the human condition? And has damage been done?” He asks his own question and his exhibition answers with a profound “yes,” when we understand that he is offering a misinformed, distorted and exploitative vision of an American region that, by the nature of its circulation and hype, influences the views and opinions of many.

ONE OBSERVER OF THE exhibition commented that “many look as though Avedon had stormed their homes and forced them up against the white seamless backdrop paper, their pants unbuttoned, hair disheveled, and their demeanor reflecting utter resignation before this master of control. Others seemed to have been dragged from their jobs…” (Spot, Fall 1985). Avedon, however, contends that with portraiture “the surface is all you’ve got. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface.” This leads him to abstract all his subjects in a white background. In Avedon’s portrait of the West there are no causes for dispossession and despair, simply dispossession and despair.

The show at the High Museum was sponsored in part by Rich’s, Atlanta’s large department store chain; shows in other cities were also underwritten by department stores, reflecting the high regard bestowed upon Avedon by the corporate fashion machine. At the grand gala opening in Atlanta, with Avedon in attendance, the museum patrons and art aficionados wandered amidst the larger-than-life portraits of drifters, miners and such, facing the working class of another region in a way they may never have observed folks of similar plight and occupation in the South. That Avedon’s work forces viewers, some reluctant ones, to look into the eyes of victims in America is one of the powerful triumphs of the exhibition. One Atlanta Journal-Constitution writer overheard a shocked Atlanta matron responding to the show: “I know Jesus says you are supposed to love everyone, but I just can’t. I just can’t. I can’t love dirty people or fat people.”

A VIEW OF THE AVEDON show (or the book) is like viewing the collection of a well-traveled entomologist; we see many types, all recorded by the collector in a similar fashion, but we know nothing of any of them except their name and where they were found. Like a collection of insects, Avedon’s collection of faces and occupations from the West are clear, sharp and well-presented, but without the slightest bit of humanity. In a public lecture in Boston earlier this year, he explained his right to photograph people however he wants: “To say it in the toughest way possible, and the most unpleasant way, what rights do Cezanne’s apples have to tell Cezanne how to paint them.” Avedon knows no difference between the inanimate and the animate. Years of fashion photography have conditioned him to only be interested in the surface and the form, but not the person or the life. In an Avedon session, he and the camera are the animate forms and whoever the subject–factory worker, drifter, rancher–are inanimate forms to be directed, arranged, and “framed” by the heavy black lines of his large film format. Most tragically, his subjects are silenced. Richard Bolton, a critic and an artist in Boston, reflects on Avedon with sharp criticism: “His approach is reminiscent of police photography–in the police photograph, one cannot help but look like a criminal; the format itself communicates guilt.”

Countless viewers of the Avedon show, unaware of exactly how they feel about his work, offer such gut reactions as “powerful,” “moving,” and “disturbing.” The power of Avedon’s work rests with the ability of these large, voyeuristic images to awake horrors in the minds and hearts of viewers. Not unlike the tabloid report of human suffering or catastrophe, Avedon’s work provokes shock and horror. The real tragedy, however, is that the provocation is an end in itself, and his approach never gets beyond the surface he holds so dear, generating not the least bit of understanding. Devoid of understanding and compassion, his subjects are left to drift helplessly and silently, with no voice to offer us their sagas of life and work.

Art Ponder is a drifter and a sometimes contributor to Southern Changes who is currently stationed in Atlanta.

Women and ‘Men’s Work’ During the War Years.

Mary Martha Thomas — Tue, 01 Dec 1987 05:00:09 +0000

Women and ‘Men’s Work’ During the War Years.

By Mary Martha Thomas

Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, pp. 31, 38-39

Riveting and Rationing in Dixie: Alabama Women and the Second World War by Mary Martha Thomas. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987.145 pp. $16.95, cloth.)

Beyond the dull, dull, dull style there’s an impressive research job and an intriguing view of social change in Riveting and Rationing in Dixie.

Some women, of course, had always worked outside the home, notably blacks and poor whites. But the war, for the first time, created a large need for women to fill tradition-

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ally male occupations. Thus the female labor force increased by 6.5 million from 1940-45, and the proportion of women who were employed increased from 25 to 36 percent.

As always, race mattered. “Before the war, white women had worked in laundries, restaurants, hotels, and retail and wholesale trade. These are all fields characterized by low pay and poor working conditions.” During the war, white women moved up to higher-paying male jobs. Some black women moved up from “from agriculture and domestic work to the trade and service jobs that the white women had vacated.”

The engineers of the war effort–all male, naturally–faced two large problems: first, to convince housewives to take jobs in manufacturing and labor; second, to convince the women to give the jobs up when the war was over and the heads of households had come home.

This inherent conflict led to rather schizophrenic recruitment. Some ad campaigns depicted welders–helmets

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pushed back–applying lipstick, to show that femininity could be undiminished in a temporary male job. Meanwhile, women workers at the Huntsville Arsenal were being called “modern Amazons.” A foreman bragged on “a slim girl, weighing merely 105 pounds but ‘can take it’ better than any man he ever saw.”

Author Mary Martha Thomas, a history professor at Jacksonville State University, observes a “certain uneasiness about women assuming these new roles.” Early in the war effort, she writes, Alabamians supported the effort to recruit women to the war effort with a great concern over day care and other obstacles to working women. But by 1943, “social workers, the press and the public shifted their concern to what they saw as the rising tide of juvenile delinquency” and called on women to “pay more attention to their maternal duties.” Similarly, women’s leaders began as early as 1942 to argue that women, substituting so well in other areas for men, should be allowed to serve on juries. But a committee of the Alabama House of Representatives defeated such a proposal in 1945.

By 1950, statewide female employment was only slightly higher than in 1940. In short, says Thomas, the “forces of continuity seem to have prevailed over the forces of change during the war years in Alabama.”

A Letter from Lillian Smith

Rose Gladney — Tue, 01 Dec 1987 05:00:10 +0000

A Letter from Lillian Smith

Edited by Rose Gladney

Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, pp. 32-33

As writer, intellectual, and social critic of 20th century Southern and American life, Lillian Smith corresponded with a variety of notables about subjects of major historical, political, and cultural interest. The following selection from her correspondence with Eleanor Roosevelt (copied from the original in the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York) provides a glimpse of the extent, variety, and timeliness of the interests and concerns that underlay Smith’s goals and achievements as a writer. It is from the first volume of Selected Letters of Lillian Smith, forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press.

Prior to the publication of her best-selling novel Strange Fruit (1944), Smith supported herself by directing Laurel Falls Camp for Girls near Clayton, Georgia. However, her public writing career began in 1936 when she and her assistant camp director Paula Snelling decided to co-edit a magazine, first called Pseudopodia, then North Georgia Review, and finally South Today. Designed to encourage fresh critical views of Southern literature and culture, it quickly became the region’s most liberal literary voice, publishing and reviewing the works of blacks and whites, males and females, and calling for an immediate end to all forms of racial segregation.

In 1937 the Julius Rosenwald Fund, which had since 1928 focused primarily on developing black education, established a fellowship program open to Southern whites as well as to blacks in order to broaden its efforts to improve race relations. Because of the related interests and focus of their magazine, Smith and Snelling applied for and received joint Rosenwald Fellowships in 1939 and 1940, enabling them to travel widely throughout the South studying economic, political and cultural conditions.

In 1942, ’43, and ’44, they were again employed by the Rosenwald Fund to travel throughout the South in search of potential fellowship recipients among the region’s college students. Eleanor Roosevelt was also involved with the Rosenwald Fund; indeed, her response to this particular letter indicated that she would be unable to meet Smith because she would be “in Hampton attending a Rosenwald meeting.”

As the following account indicates, Smith’s impressions of Southern college students and her assessment of major issues facing the region in 1942 sound eerily familiar some forty-five years later. Likewise, as in Smith’s correspondence as a whole, this letter reveals the mind and spirit of a woman keenly observant of the world around her, especially conscious of the importance of all aspects of human relationships, and clearly aware of her role in shaping and interpreting the age in which she lived.

April 7, 1942

Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt,

The White House,

Washington, D.C.

My dear Mrs. Roosevelt:

Paula Snelling and I have this past week completed a trip through the South during which we have interviewed for the Rosenwald Fund the young Negro and White college seniors who have applied for Rosenwald scholarship-aid grants.

We have found these interviews profoundly stirring and want in some way, to share our findings with you. Some of our talks with the young Negroes were very disturbing, some most heartening, nearly all sincere and realistic. We found in the young whites–though there were exceptions–a shocking ignorance of their South, a concern primarily with their personal affairs, a restlessness about the future,

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little awareness of the international picture and our place in it. We found few educated whites who had ever met an educated Negro; few young Negroes who had met a racially unprejudiced white. We interviewed only the “cream” of the senior classes in 22 colleges.

Throughout the South, as we expected, we found many liberals giving up their liberalism “for the duration.” Especially did this seem to be true of those who are labeled “friends of the Negro.” The Negroes feel this too and are depressed and disheartened by the knowledge that many of their white friends disappear when crises arise.

Down in the Delta we found reaction rising like a great wave. Cotton is 26 cents in the Delta now and the general attitude among the planters is that neither Mr. Roosevelt nor God Himself is going to keep them from making some money while the making is good. There is a childish desperation in their attitude that would be awfully funny were they not so powerful. (Among my various activities is that of being a director of a summer camp for little rich girls. Some of these planters send their children to me in spite of my “liberalism.” But this spring I find them on the defensive, very antagonistic to all liberal movements, growing suspicious of what I am teaching their children in my camp; so suspicious and antagonistic that I dared not tell them that I was on Rosenwald Fund business for their hospitality would not have been equal to such a strain being put upon it!)

There is something heartbreakingly valiant about the young of the Negro race, so eager to prove to white America their willingness to die for a country which has given them only the scraps from the white folks’ democracy. There is resentment also; a quiet, strong resentment, running like a deep stream through their minds and hearts; something I think few white Americans are aware of, or want to face.

I shall be in Washington Friday, April 10th, at the Hay Adams House. I shall call Miss Thompson Friday morning and shall be honored to talk with you if you wish me to do so. I know you are a very busy person and I do not want to burden you further by a talk with me unless you think it will be useful to you to have in more detail this recent skimming of southern opinion.

Should you let me talk with you I would like to discuss with you also the possibilities for making this new venture of the Rosenwald Fund a more creative and vital youth project. Some of us think–and Dr. Embree shares this opinion–that the project should be more than a mere selection of young whites and blacks for graduate study. Could they feel themselves a part of some big and creative effort, something that had to do directly with their South, that had adventure in it, it would become a significant experience for them, rather than merely one more year of university study. They need somehow to be brought together, to have actual experience with each other, though heaven only knows how we can work it out in a South where such an idea can be mentioned now only in whispers. But how can the South ever work out its bi-racial problems when its intelligent and educated young whites and Negroes have never met an educated member of the other race?

I believe Miss Lucy Mason recently wrote you about Paula Snelling and me and our magazine The North Georgia Review which has now changed its name to South Today. I merely mention this kindness to us so that it will help you identify us.

There are many of us who are deeply grateful to you for your unwavering stand for the democratic decencies.

Most sincerely yours,

Lillian E. Smith

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