Contras in Dixie

By Eric Guthey

Vol. 10, No. 3, 1988, pp. 1-6

In 1984 an assassin’s bomb intended for Contra leader Eden Pastora killed eight people, including an American journalist, at the Contra outpost of La Penca on the southern front of the U.S.-sponsored war against Nicaragua.

Four years later, the shock waves of that explosion still reverberate along the southern front of another, even more secret war being waged against the democratic principles of the U.S. Constitution and the will of the American people.

Revelations of illegal activities in support of the U.S.-backed Contras continue to crop up in local communities around the South. The revelations contribute to the case that the Christic Institute, a Washington-based public interest law firm and policy center, has mounted in a Miami federal court against members of the criminal conspiracy it believes was behind the La Penca bombing, behind an extensive guns-for-drugs campaign, and behind the rest of the untold story surrounding the Iran-Contra affair.

* In Miami in 1986, convicted drug pilot Michael Tolliver landed a plane carrying 25,000 pounds of marijuana at the Homestead U.S. Air Force Base. Tolliver has testified before Congress that his action was part of a massive guns-for-drugs operation to resupply the U.S.-backed Contras.

* In Mena, Ark., local law enforcement officials are trying to shed light on a drug smuggling and Contra supply airstrip which they were told not to investigate because it was an official covert operation of the CIA.

* In Marietta, Ga., alleged arms merchant Gary Best continued until very recently to run the company he took over from local toymaker Robert Fletcher to use as a front for his illicit dealings. Fletcher says that Best, who has close ties to former major general and indicted Iran-Contra co-conspirator John Singlaub, threatened his

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(Fletcher’s) life and forced him out of the company after he refused to become involved in arms smuggling to Angola.

* And in nearby Atlanta, Fulton County Chief of Detectives E.E. Nixon testified in early May concerning his aborted 1984 investigation into a warehouse allegedly containing C-4, the same type of plastic explosive that killed American journalist Linda Frazier at La Penca in the spring of that year. According to the Chicago-based weekly IN THESE TIMES, Nixon called off his investigation at the request of former Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North.

These and many other equally lurid goings-on point to the extent of the Iran-Contra affair–corruption which has penetrated local communities across the South and around the nation with drastic and lasting consequences. Largely glossed over by the President’s Tower Commission, by the Congressional Iran-Contra Committees, and even by special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, the pattern of subversion and illegal activity that resulted in “Contragate” has been reduced in the public eye to little more than a problem of executive management style, an aberration on the part of otherwise well-intentioned “national heros.”

Christic Institute Challenges the Whitewash

Although still ignored for the most part by the mainstream press, the Christic Institute has been digging up the real story behind the Iran-Contra affair for over three years. Christic filed its federal civil lawsuit against several of the key figures in the scandal a full six months before Attorney General Ed Meese reluctantly released the story to the public.

The Christic Institute’s staff has since swelled from fifteen to over sixty members, all of whom work for no more than $15,000 per year. Christic’s main office in Washington, with a budget of more than $80,000 per week, now works exclusively on the Contragate suit. Christic funds its operations through private donations, through support from national church and peace groups, and through national foundation grants.

“When we filed the suit in May of 1986, a lot of people thought we were crazy,” says Sara Nelson, the Institute’s executive director. “They didn’t know these names, and they couldn’t imagine that there was this massive illegal military supply operation to the Contras.”

“Six months later the [Eugene] Hasenfus plane went down in Nicaragua,” Nelson recalls. “Our defendants’ names surfaced in Hasenfus’s business cards and telephone records. The press came to our office to find out what we knew. Then the Iran-Contra scandal broke, and there were more of our defendants–Albert Hakim, Richard Secord–in the middle of the Iran weapons sale.”

Christic has discovered that all of the principals in the Iran-Contra scandal also worked for the “Secret Team” or “Enterprise,” a covert, privately-funded, anti-communist organization made up of present and former U.S. military and CIA officials. According to Christic, members of the Secret Team, “acting both officially and on their own, have waged secret wars, toppled governments, trafficked in drugs, assassinated political enemies, stolen from the U.S. government, and subverted the will of the Constitution, the Congress, and the American people” for the past twenty five years.

“These are people who believe that they are above the

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law, who are perfectly willing to lie to protect their programs, who think that their agenda is so important that our representatives do not matter and neither do we,” says Nelson. “We never voted for death squads. We never thought that this is what they were doing in our name. We believed them when they said ‘We are spreading democracy. We are fighting for freedom.’ But that is not what has been going on.”

La Penca and the Contragate Lawsuit

Christic filed its $17 million civil lawsuit against twenty-nine members of the Secret Team on behalf of American journalist Tony Avirgan and his wife and fellow journalist, Martha Honey. In 1984, Avirgan had been covering Eden Pastora’s La Penca press conference for ABC News when he was severely injured by the failed attempt to assassinate the Contra leader. On a recent, nationally televised episode of the PBS series, FRONTLINE, Avirgan recounted how the wounded Pastora was spirited away in the only boat available at the remote river outpost, and how the rest of the victims of the attack lay on the floor for a full nine hours before help arrived. That same night, the U.S. Embassy in San Jose, Costa Rica, falsely reported that no Americans had been injured in the bombing, and refused to offer any assistance. FRONTLINE quoted George Jones, the deputy in charge of the embassy, as elating at the time, “We are not in the rescue business.”

After Avirgan recovered from his injuries, he and Honey began to investigate the bombing, fully expecting to find that it had been carried out by the Sandinistas. But every piece of information they uncovered led them to believe that the operation had been launched from the Costa Rican ranch of American millionaire John Hull, an alleged member of the Secret Team and now a defendant in the Christic lawsuit. Honey and Avirgan discovered that the Secret Team had decided to eliminate Pastora because he refused to follow CIA directives or to associate himself with other Contras who had been part of Anastasio Somoza’s National Guard, members of which had murdered Pastora’a father.

Honey and Avirgan also uncovered substantial evidence that Hull’s ranch was being used as a trans-shipment point for cocaine entering the U.S. and arms coming back to the Contras.

In 1985, after Honey and Avirgan published their findings, Hull sued them for criminal libel in a Costa Rican court. According to a sworn affadavit [sic] from Christic Institute general counsel Daniel Sheehan, who defended Honey and Avirgan, several witnesses for the defense were kid-

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napped and tortured on Hull’s ranch. According to a member of the Costa Rican Rural Guard, one of their key witnesses wee executed there as well. A Costa Rican judge threw Hull’s case out of court.

The allegations by Honey and Avirgan about Hull’s drug smuggling and arms dealing activities in support of the Contras have recently received independent confirmation from Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) during hearings on the Contra-drug connection. On Frontline, Hull still denied any wrongdoing but said, “If it were within my power, people like [Senator Ted] Kennedy and Kerry would be lined up and shot tomorrow.”

Other defendants in the Christic lawsuit include retired general Richard Secord; Robert Owen, Oliver North’s private courier; Contra leader Adolfo Calero; and Thomas Posey, head of Civilian Materiel Assistance (formerly “Civilian Military Assistance”), an ultra-right wing group involved in supplying the Contras out of Decatur, Ala. Christic asserts that the Secret Team is headed by defendant Theodore Shackley, who served as CIA Deputy Director in charge of worldwide covert operations under the agency’s former director, George Bush.

Christic has refrained from naming any present members of the U.S. government in its suit in order not to bring the Justice Department into the case on the aide of the defendants.

In testimony before the Iran-Contra committees, Robert Owen called the charges against him “scurrilous.” In an article in the ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION, Shackley called members of the Christic Institute “practitioners of character assassination through legal terrorism” whose charges amounted to “rubbish.”

But defendants in the Christic lawsuit participate in character assassination of their own. During the Iran-Contra hearings, former CIA operative Glenn Robinette testified that Richard Secord paid him more than $60,000 in funds diverted from the Iranian arms sales to carry out a smear campaign against the Christic Institute.

In the December 1987 issue of Soldier of Fortune magazine, retired major general John Singlaub said in a funding appeal, “If I were back in Vietnam in a firefight, then I’d ask for an airstrike to blow the bastards away. But to win this fight we need money. To fight the damned Christic Institute lawsuit takes money.”

Christic’s lawsuit charges the twenty-nine defendants with violating the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO Act. Under the statute, Christic’s lawyers must prove that each defendant committed two offenses contributing to the conspiracy within a ten-year period. But Christic asserts that the Secret Team has been committing terrorist acts from positions both within and outside the government for the last twenty-five years.

Christic Focuses on the South

Although the Christic Institute wants to see the members of the Secret Team brought to justice, it also views the lawsuit as an opportunity to inform the American people of the crimes being committed in the name of their country. “If we don’t speak out and say we want to know about all this–as long as they can keep these things covert–then we can’t begin to correct the injustice and the immorality that is going on under our noses,” says Sara Nelson. For this reason the Christic Institute devotee half of its efforts to getting out the word about their lawsuit and about the illegal dealings of the Secret Team.

We can uncover the facts and conclude them in a court of law and resolve the debate about what is true and what is not,” Nelson says. “But it is going to take a massive public education and organizing campaign if we are going to develop a groundswell of pressure on our institutions to get them to do their part in solving these problems.”

Recently, Christic has stepped up its public education and organizing campaign in the South. “We hope that we can bring out some of this information here

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and that other groups will continue to work with it,” says Christic’s Director of Southern Outreach, Tennessee native Jenny Yancey.

“The biggest issue here in the South is moving people to feel that they have the power to do something,” says Yancey. “And this information is power.”

The Christic Institute has a strong history of legal action on behalf of local communities and individuals in the South. Dr. Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Council sits on the Christic board of advisors. Christic conducted the investigation and successful lawsuit against the Kerr-McGee nuclear power plant in Oklahoma on behalf of Karen Silkwood, who died mysteriously while trying to go public about her massive exposure to radiation at the plant. In 1985, Christic won a verdict against four Klansmen, two members of the American Nazi Party and two members of the Greensboro, N. C., Police Department for the murder of five anti-Klan demonstrators.

Christic also successfully defended Stacey Lynn Merkt of Brownsville, Texas, the first Sanctuary Movement worker arrested for harboring Savadoran refugees, and Eddie Carthan, the first black mayor elected in the Mississippi Delta since the Reconstruction, who had been falsely accused of murder. Christic attorneys worked on behalf of defendants in the Reagan Justice Department’s unsuccessful prosecution of civil rights activists in the Alabama Black Belt [see SOUTHERN CHANGES, May/June, 1985]. Most recently, Christic South’s office in Durham, N.C., provided legal and organizing services to the residents of Keyesville, Ga., where a fifty-year ban on self-government had left black residents with out such basic services as plumbing, sewers, a fire department or a school. In elections held last January, Keyesville residents elected their own town council and installed Emma Gresham, a black retired school teacher, as mayor.

In April, Nelson and Yancey traveled to Atlanta for four days of speaking engagements and organizing meetings. On Wednesday, April 21, Nelson spoke at a service at the Cathedral of Faith, a black Pentecostal church in south Atlanta. A few weeks before a six-year-old child had been shot in both legs in south Atlanta, caught in the crossfire of a crack-related shootout. Nelson emphasized that the Reagan administration’s obsession with the Contras has severely aggravated the drug problem in America’s inner cities, because administration officials have been at the very least looking the other way so that drug money could be used to fund the Contras. Dr. Jonathan Greer, pastor at the Cathedral of Faith, drove the point home in a rousing sermon.

“It’s not the folks out here that are the problem,” Greer said of the increased drug-related crime in Atlanta and other cities. “It’s the folks in Washington. They speak out against drugs, but they’re just playing a game. They tell us ‘Just Say No’–but they say ‘yes’ behind the scene because the money’s right!

“All the politicians come in here saying ‘We’re going to beef up our protection and round up the dealers.’ Well, I say start downtown! START IN WASHINGTON! Because if you can get that cleaned up, you won’t have to worry about down here!”

Nelson also spoke at a conference on theology, peace and politics held at Emory University and the Carter Presidential Center, and participated in a panel at the conference of the National Alliance of Third World Journalists at Clark College. She and her husband, Christic’s general counsel Daniel Sheehan, met with television executive Ted Turner to discuss the progress of their lawsuit and its coverage in the media.

Meanwhile, Yancey discussed with local organizers strategies for spreading the message about the Christic lawsuit. Yancey, fellow Christic staffer Eva Berkham, and the small group of organizers, which included representatives from area churches, a student Central America network, Pledge of Resistance, and Clergy and Laity Concerned, discussed advertisements, petition, leaflet and letter-writing campaigns, contacting local politicians for support, and a possible vigil in front of the Federal Building. Christic and the various Atlanta groups will try to coordinate their activities around the week of May 30, the fourth anniversary of the La Penca bombing.

Christic efforts come at a crucial time. Judge Lawrence King in Miami has placed certain severe restrictions on Christic’s lawyers, setting an early June 29 trial date and stipulating that Christic must prove ten years of illegal activity on the basis of only a four-year discovery period.

An obvious reason for Christic’s interest in Atlanta is the upcoming Democratic National Convention. Christic’s members see the election year as an opportunity to encourage voters to press for the kinds of change that might put an end to the state-sanctioned terrorism carried out by the Secret Team. “We want to keep working with people between now and the elections to raise these questions and get them into the debates so that the candidates are forced to come to grips with this,” says Nelson.

“It’s important that we don’t blow this year,” says Georgia Robeson, one of the Atlanta organizers working with Christic. “It’s essential that George Bush does not become the leader of this country–because he does know more about all of this than he has admitted.” Indeed, press reports continue to indicate that Bush’s chief advisers met with members of the Secret Team on several occasions. These reports, along with all of the other evidence that has come out about the Iran-Contra scandal, push the “plausible deniablity” of Bush, Reagan, and other top administration officials ever further into the realm of fiction.

Local groups in New Orleans also plan to make the Christic message heard during the Republican National

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Convention later this summer. “There are many things in the planning stage–including major demonstrations–and certainly the Iran-Contra drug connection will be an important part of the issues raised,” says Ted Quant of the Institute of Human Relations at Loyola University in New Orleans. Quant is particularly concerned about the Christic Institute’s evidence that the Secret Team and the CIA have been involved in drug running to benefit the Contras.

There’s been a tremendous drug problem, particularly among the young people in our community,” says Quant. “Then we learn through Christic that a tremendous amount of the drugs in our community were actually flown in by the CIA. That means our kids are being used as cannon fodder for the Administration policy of trying to overthrow another country that is trying to establish a decent life for its children as well.”

The South presents “fertile ground” for “the type of paramilitary program that you see with the Iran-Contra affair,” Quant says. “The South has a history of support for this sort of paramilitary behavior going back at least to the Ku Klux Klan–and the role of extra-legal terror has continued until recent times. We know for example that the Klan has often traded its white robes for paramilitary garb to allign [sic] itself with the fight against Communism.”

Quant has witnessed first-hand the disastrous effects that the successful exploitation of this right-wing brand of Southern nationalism has had in the New Orleans community. “In a way the South has been treated as sort of a second-rate colony by these people–a place where they can dump these drugs to finance this war.”

The Scandal of the Eighties

The Iran-Contra Committees brushed aside a horrifying story of state-sponsored terrorism by focusing on the question of whether the president knew what was going on. But as Noam Chomsky writes in his book THE CULTURE OF TERRORISM, Reagan is “largely a creation of the Public Relations Industry,” and the question of what he knew retains significance only “in the world of imagery and illusion in which ideologists must labor to maintain the pretense that the public determines policy guidelines by voting for the chief executive.” The scores of conflicting and erroneous statements that have come out of Ronald Reagan’s mouth about the Iran-Contra scandal serve to confirm his irrelevance to real issues in the real world. Whether or not Reagan knew what went on, it happened–a secret government waged wars, murdered at least one American citizen and many others abroad, flooded the country with drugs, and flouted the will of the American people. A president with any degree of competence would have to be held responsible.

The defense of choice around the White House these days adheres to the revised slogan “Just say I don’t know”–a defense in which Administration officials are proud of the fact that they kept themselves uninformed or, better still, that they haven’t been indicted yet. George Bush’s continued assertions that he stayed “out of the loop” as far as the Iran-Contra affair was concerned illustrate just how far the Reagan gang will go to insult the intelligence of the American people. Recent press reports indicate that Bush may try to manipulate the debates before the election in order to avoid being confronted with his complicity in the Iran-Contra scandal and the operations of the Secret Team. He must not be allowed to do so. And the Democratic candidates must be carefully questioned as well–to make sure that, if elected, they will put an end to such threats to the Constitution and to the people’s right to know how their country is being governed.

On May 2, Oliver North addressed the graduating class at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. Falwell likened North’s current legal trials to the sufferings of Christ, and the teary-eyed patriot said that he wore the accusations against him as “a badge of honor.” The heart of the Iran-Contra scandal is that very perversion of the American dream, where a U.S. marine can become a terrorist, and a terrorist can become a national hero of Christ-like proportions. Such a display of misplaced values thrives on ignorance–ignorance of what North did, ignorance of what those like him have been doing for years. By insisting that they just didn’t know, Reagan and Bush proudly uphold this ignorance as an example for the American people.

If Americans need to ask themselves whether patriotism means remaining ignorant of what goes on in their names, Southerners need to wonder why a figure like Oliver North receives such a sunny reception in Dixie. Capitalizing on traditional Southern support for quasi-religious nationalism and militarism, North depends upon Southerners to remain unaware of the facts, to buy into the slogans of gung-ho symbolism, to look the other way while right-wing ideologues conduct paramilitary operations in our own back yard.

For More Information

“Contragate Affidavit” by Daniel Sheehan, $10; LA PENCA REPORT by Avirgan and Honey, $8; Contragate Video: “The Shadow Government,” $20. Order from Christic Institute, 1324 N. Capitol St., NW., Washington, DC 20002.

Eric Guthey is a student in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University.

Just a Little Guy Who Got Hit by the Arms Truck

By Eric Guthey

Vol. 10, No. 3, 1988, p. 3

I RAISED MY children according to the principle that if you see something that’s not right,” you report it, says Bob Fletcher, the former Marietta, Ga., toymaker who says his company was taken over by arms merchants with ties to the secret team.

Fletcher’s story begins in 1985, a full year and a half before the Iran contra story became public knowledge. “There’s no way that I could have dreamed this stuff up and and [sic] have it come true a year and a half later,” he now insists.

Fletcher recounts how Gary Best bought out his toy company and kept him on to run the business. Soon Fletcher started to notice Telex messages from locations like Angola and Pakistan. His new associate was forever flying to Geneva, Switzerland, and to other countries and never seemed to spend any time on the toy business. Eventually Fletcher confronted Best and asked how he made his money. “Without batting an eye, he said, ‘I sell armaments,'” Fletcher recalls.

Fletcher now believes that Best let him in on many of his dealing activities with the intent to recruit him. “All of these different covert actions–Angola, Pakistan, Nicaragua, POW/MIA missions, the Rambo-type stuff–all of this was being coordinated out of my company by Gary Best.”

At a certain point, retired Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, who has since been indicted in the Iran-Contra affair, became a consultant to the company. Bill Kenney, an associate of Oliver North, also came in and out frequently.

Finally, Best asked Fletcher to run courier missions to Angola–at a salary of $2,000 per trip. Fletcher says Best told him if he talked to the wrong people about the operation he would be killed. Fletcher declined the offer and Best forced him out of the company after he complained about the shady goings-on.

Fletcher eventually contacted the Congressional Iran-Contra committees to tell them about what he knew. But two of the committees’ investigators, Thomas Polgar and Bob Bermingham, seemed to have no interest in Fletcher’s story or in its relation to the Iran-Contra affair. “Polgar and Bermingham are old-time employees of (Thomas) Clines and (Edmund) Wilson, and of Singlaub and (Theodore) Shackley [all alleged members of the Secret Team and defendants in Christic’s lawsuit],” Fletcher points out.

Fletcher is committed to making his story heard. “I’m not a radical–I’m just a little guy that got run over by these bastards,” he says. “But people have to understand what is going on here. They lied to the Senate, they lied to the public, and they’re still doing whatever they please.”

Cubans in Limbo

By Joe Dolman

Vol. 10, No. 3, 1988, pp. 8-9

The Atlanta Federal Penitentiary was weirdly luminous in the bleak November dusk. U.S. Army floodlights, hauled in on long flatbed trailers, bathed its granite walls and gray cellhouses. Hovering helicopters played thin beams of light into the prison’s courtyard. Yellow flames from the remains of the industrial building flickered over rooftops and walls. And across McDonough Boulevard, with this scene as a backdrop, dozens of television reporters stood before their own spotlights, nervously waiting to do 6 o’clock “live shots.”

The Cuban detainees had finally won our attention. In Oakdale, La., one federal lockup already lay in smouldering ruins as a hostage standoff there entered its third day. In Atlanta, inmates held more than a hundred prison workers captive. They were making a point: They would not be permanently separated from their families and deported to an uncertain future in Cuba without a fight.

It would be eleven more days before every hostage was freed unharmed. The riots were harrowing, destructive and wrong-but in the end, they did force the government to acknowledge one of the strangest lapses of justice in our history.

Since the 1980 Mariel boatlift, the Justice Department has imprisoned thousands of “excludable aliens” arbitrarily and indefinitely. Some were classified as dangerous and locked up soon after they landed here. Most were “paroled” into society but then ran afoul of police or immigration officials. Because Castro had forbid their return to Cuba, the feds held them without sentences in prisons and jails across the country. By November, six thousand waited in this limbo.

A few were dangerous: murderers, rapists and the like. Others had been convicted (or merely accused) of crimes as minor as marijuana possession. Some had done nothing more than violate technical parole rules. Many had family members in the United States. They were a collection of good people and bad, hardened criminals and victims of circumstance, hopeful strivers and chronic misfits.

Yet the government made no distinctions among them. As excludables, all were in effect legal nonpersons. Despite their years in the United States, they had no constitutional rights in the rule of the federal courts. They were thrown together in squalid lockups to be held until the Justice Department decided that freedom was appropriate, or until the day that Castro might allow their deportation to Cuba.

If this travesty is unique in our history, it does have an ugly cousin: the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II. The similarities are instructive. In both instances, the government-faced with an unfolding crisis-summarily took action against a specific ethnic group for reasons that seemed to make sense at the time. In neither instance did Congress, the Supreme Court or most citizens lift a hand to protest such un-American denials of freedom. On both occasions, the nation let its apprehensions overwhelm its ideals.

In 1980, crime was our great fear. It was not wholly imagined. Castro had sprinkled a small number of criminals (as well as mental patients) among the 125,000 refugees who left through the port of Mariel. Other refugees, accustomed to life in a totalitarian society, hadn’t a clue how to provide for themselves in a free society. Some turned to crime.

In 1942, subversion was the great fear. This was not an irrational worry, either. America was still reeling from the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Our West Coast might easily have been the next target. Anything was possible. Moreover, many Japanese-Americans did maintain close ties with the old country. Where did their loyalties lie? On signal, could a group of saboteurs mine our harbors? Bomb our oil pipelines? Destroy our shipyards? It was not beyond question.

The problem is: We panicked. In both cases, we decided the Bill of Rights was not up to the challenge at hand. The peculiarities of each case gave officials a way to wiggle out of their constitutional obligations, and they did.

On Feb. 19,1942, President Roosevelt acceded to a military request and authorized the Army to exclude, when necessary, any citizen or alien from any area on the West Coast. Instead of using due process of law to determine who was safe and who was not, the government simply rounded up all Japanese-Americans-indiscriminately-and packed them off to relocation camps.

A military officer criticized the internments in the October 1942 issue of HARPER’S. “The entire ‘Japanese Problem’ has been magnified out of its true proportion,” he wrote, “largely because of the physical characteristics of the people. It should be handled on the basis of the individual, regardless of citizenship, and not on a racial basis.” Yet two years later, the Supreme Court ruled that wartime necessity indeed justified this mass detention.

The Cubans face a different predicament. Excludable aliens have no constitutional rights because the United States can’t logically be expected to open its court system to any foreigner who shows up at its borders. But what happens when the government is unable to deport the people it wishes to exclude? There is only one reasonable approach. After a certain length of time, the government must trust the efficiency of its Bill of Rights. That is, it must prove its case against each person and, if successful, must ask a judge for an appropriate sentence. Yet forty years later, the Cubans fared no better before the Supreme Court than did the Japanese-Americans. The court upheld the denial of due process for Mariel detainees.

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As with the Japanese-Americans, prejudice is surely an underlying cause for such treatment. Gary Leshaw, lawyer for detainees in the Atlanta penitentiary, observed that if his clients were Scandinavians, say, instead of Cubans (many of them black), the government would never think of locking them away for years on end without due process.

With time, Americans have grown ashamed of the wartime internment. Last September, the House voted to appropriate $1.25 billion in reparations [In April, the Senate also approved reparations] to 62,000 surviving internees. The vote came after U.S. Rep. Norman Mineta of California read aloud a letter from his father, which recounted the family’s experience in a relocation camp: “We lost our homes, we lost our businesses, we lost our farms, but worst of all, we lost our most basic human rights.”

The Marielitos may also wait a long time for a public apology. Nevertheless, in an odd way, the November riots did help turn public opinion more to their favor.

The disruptions began when the government announced it had reached a deportation agreement with Cuba. Typically, no one had thought to brief the inmates. Only 2,500 Cubans may be deported, which means most detainees will stay here. But the inmates didn’t know that. All they knew was that they could be separated forever from their families (who would stay here) and returned to a place where they would have no guarantees of safety.

So they fought. Suddenly, the older exile community of Miami, fiercely anti-communist, embraced their cause. With that, the Justice Department began to show a new flexibility. And a revisionist line on the Marielitos emerged: Any group that preferred American imprisonment to a life in Castro’s Cuba perhaps deserved the benefit of the doubt.

Today, the government has established a review process to determine who should be deported, who should remain behind bars here, and who should go free. It isn’t due process, and it is still inadequate-but it is the government’s best attempt yet to deal fairly with the Cubans. Many prisoners are now scheduled for release. Meanwhile, congressmen Pat Swindall of Georgia (a religious right conservative), Romano Mazzoli of Kentucky and Bob Kastenmeier of Wisconsin have introduced a bill that would give the Mariel detainees certain due process rights. The measure is their best chance yet for fairness.

When World War II came to a close, not a single Japanese-American had been convicted of a crime against the United States. When the prison riots of 1987 ended, not a single hostage had been harmed. In retrospect, neither the Japanese-Americans nor the Cubans were as dangerous as we had imagined. But hindsight isn’t good enough. At a recent symposium on the detainees, Ira Glasser, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, put it this way: “The only true test of morality is when it counts. The only true test of morality is to take the fair position during the time that the victims are suffering, and not afterward, because there is no way to repair what happened.”

How can we recognize the fair position when it counts? We can start by adhering to constitutional principles-even when our instincts tell us to panic.

Joe Dolman writes editorials for the ATLANTA CONSTITUTION. His observations on the Cubans in federal prisons earned a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize.

A Time to Cast Away Stones

By Kathryn J. Waller

Vol. 10, No. 3, 1988, pp. 10-11

It seemed an unlikely situation. I was driving to a farmer’s rally in Conway, S.C., to hear speeches from local politicians, mostly white, building up to the keynote address by political activist Jesse Jackson. It was spring of 1986, and no one yet (except Jesse) was thinking of the presidential race. The farmers were thinking of survival: meeting daily the threat of failure and destitution. But anyone who really farms, who wakes up in darkness and labors hard until after the sun is gone, is not apt to lie down and become an easy victim, not if there’s any way to stay on your feet. These “at risk” farmers were standing up, standing together, and plowing new ground-not in their fields, but in kitchens and church basements, and in the halls of legislatures and the U.S. Congress.

For most urban Americans the greatest impact of the farm crisis, so far, has been exposure to a lot more Willie Nelson music than they might have ordinarily heard. Many people do not yet see the larger implications of land loss for the nation’s economy, and for democracy itself. Most have never had any direct contact with grassroots farmers, the ones facing the wrong edge of the scythe.

In the crowded parking lot of Conway’s National Guard Armory I found Betty Bailey. She’d given up an overdue vacation to help this fledgling group, the United Farmers Organization (UFO), pull the rally together. It showed in her face. Exhausted, the large turnout kept her smiling, and last minute details kept her moving. Inside the armory were hundreds of farmers–men and women, black and white, mostly older but some in their twenties and thirties, and more filing in the door all the time. At a table inside, Linda Clapp, a dairy farmer and former UFO president, was greeting friends, and selling hats and T-shirts.

I was apprehensive. Not about the T-shirts but about how the rally would go over. Eight years of working in the rural South had taught me that attitudes hadn’t changed much since the volatile heyday of the civil rights movement. I couldn’t help but wonder how these grizzled white Carolina farmers would respond when Jesse Jackson took the stage.

And take the stage he did. Took the whole room. Took the audience in the palm of his hand. “Let’s be sure we understand each other,” Jesse said. “It’s not black loss or white loss. We all have a stake in holding on to the land. If the black farmer goes out in the morning, the white farmer follows in the afternoon!” Black and white men and women were on their feet cheering and holding hands in song and prayer. In that room I could see old walls beginning to fall. Family farmers are discovering that no matter what their skin color, they are together a new kind of American minority–an economic minority.

The small part I’ve played in helping the United Farmers Organization grow has since shown me that what I saw at that rally goes far beyond a South Carolina armory. All farmers have problems, but all farmers’ problems are not the same. Black farmers, for instance, have struggled for generations with the issues of land loss and access to credit that many white farmers have only seen since the start of this decade.

The divisions are more than black and white. Row crop farmers have interests separate from dairy farmers. Peach growers don’t really have time to worry about the needs of poultry producers; people with tobacco allotment and a small hog operation are not overly concerned about the beef industry.

But by focusing first on the common needs of family farmers as an economic minority, the diverse needs of these various groups become a common agenda, breaching barriers rather reinforcing them. This is what is happening among Carolina farmers in the UFO. Row crop farmers call their legislators advocating a bill to protect poultry growers’ rights. White farmers support a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination in FmHA lending practices. When UFO tobacco farmers won a court decision allowing access to their co-op’s books it was a victory for all commodity growers.

A year later and another farmers’ meeting: George Ammons, a black North Carolina turkey farmer who was 1987 UFO vice president, is at the podium. “Black farmers have been in a continuous crisis for the past fifty years. Blacks are losing land at an annual rate of 500,000 acres. There are only 181 black farmers under the age of twenty-five in the United States. If this current trend continues, blacks will be a landless people within the next ten years.” It is not news. The statistics have been reported before. What is different is that here white farmers share the stage, and these views. When George leaves the microphone, Tom Trantham, a white South Carolina dairy farmer and current UFO president, steps up and says “I’ve been working with George in the UFO for over two years now and I am proud to call him my brother.”

Time after time the UFO has sent delegations of black and white farmers to meet with political officials, to show the strength of unity. Each time the UFO has presented testimony about farm problems and recommended remedies, the particular problems of discrimination and the startling rate of black land loss has been stressed. Often a UFO spokesperson who is white raises the issue of black land loss, and the UFO’s proposed solutions. Other times a UFO spokesperson who is black will list that issue among

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the many pressing concerns shared by all farmers.

It’s a pattern that’s repeating and growing stronger in the Carolinas, as the UFO grows. Now with some 1,500 members, the UFO counts a rising number of victories, small and large, all the result of cooperative effort between traditionally independent people, people of different ethnic backgrounds and different farming backgrounds. From advocacy–including major input to the farmers’ rights portion of the new farm credit legislation–to the start-up of purchasing co-ops, to halting foreclosure sales, farmers are discovering that united they have a fighting chance to stand their ground.

A black farmer, Leon Spaulding, stands at the edge of a crowd gathered for the court-ordered auction of his land, his house, and his farm equipment. UFO members, black and white, distribute one-page leaflets among the crowd telling Leon’s story. Bold print at the top of the page urges “Don’t Bid On Your Neighbor’s Farm.” The result: few bids are offered; one small piece of land is sold. The buyer is so ashamed he later offers to sell the land back to Spaulding, financing it himself at low interest.

When drought, the worst on record, struck the Southeast in l986 thousands of farmers learned the value of the UFO’s solidarity.

What began as an offer of help from one farmer in Iowa to one South Carolina farmer grew into a massive relief program, bringing many tons of hay and thousands of bushels of seed for replanting to financially strapped Southeastern farmers. North Carolina agriculture officials were derisive of the idea that farmers could initiate and implement distribution, but working side-by-side farmers of the UFO got the job done. When the dust cleared over 3,500 farmers, most with small holdings, had received substantial aid. The program was more timely, and of greater benefit to small farmers, than any drought-relief effort of the government.

Kathryn J. Waller is executive director of the Rural Advancement Fund.

Dollars and Schools: Resource Development

By Stuart. Rosenfeld

Vol. 10, No. 3, 1988, pp. 12-14

Today, attitudes toward education have changed–though not necessarily for altruistic or philosophical reasons–from the traditional view that human resource development meant higher priorities for training than for education. Education still responds to the needs of the private sector and economics. The difference now is that the educational demands of jobs have risen and require more conceptual skills. It’s competitiveness that’s pushing interest in education today, despite debate about whether work is going to require greater or less skill and knowledge, whether technology will skill or de-skill jobs. But the reality of the impact of technology doesn’t affect education in the South as long as the accepted view of educators and employers is that more skills and knowledge, not less, will be needed.

Four key education issues in the South are: adult literacy; elementary and secondary school expenditures; vocational education; and blacks in graduate education.

Adult Literacy

The strongest and most specific recommendation of the Commission on the Future of the South was to reduce rates of adult literacy significantly by 1992.

FIGURE 1 reflects education in the past, the rates of adult illiteracy in the South. The measure is of the number of adults who had not completed eight years of education at the time of the 1980 census. Nonmetro rates are nearly twice the metro rates in many states. And if you think that it doesn’t affect jobs, look at FIGURE 2, the relation to unemployment rates. Those counties with the highest rates of functional illiteracy had the highest unemployment and those with the lowest, the lowest unemployment rates.

It would seem that there is an all-out war on illiteracy. Every Southern state except Alabama has a special task force or commission on literacy. But much of what is happening is still a war of words. The level of resources, is not nearly at the level of attention. It’s a good start but only a start. The federal government spends only $100 million on all adult education, or $3 for every adult with less than nine years of education. States are increasing their funding. But in most states, the total annual funding is still less than the average annual expenditures in just one medium-sized, medium-wealth school district.

Resources

It’s true that more money won’t necessarily improve education, but its hard to have good schools with insufficient resources, and its not fair when some children get much more enriched educational environments than others. There are two issues here.

One is interstate disparities. Some states spend less than others either because they are poorer or because they place less value on education. Historically, Southern states’ spending was at the bottom nationally for both reasons–they were poorer and made less effort.

As FIGURE 3 shows, Southern states still spend less for education than most other states, about 20 percent less in 1985. It’s only that high because Florida, the most populous of Southern states, is above the national average. Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee all spent at least 30 percent below the national average.

But there’s more to those numbers than meet the eye. They consist of revenues from local, state, and federal sources. Federal funds, however, are mostly targeted to special needs and are not available for the core educational program such as teachers’ salaries, supplies, or facilities.

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Southern states have more children from low-income households and with special needs and thus get more federal money than states in other regions. Removing the federal resources brings the Southern states even farther from the average of the non-South.

The Commission on the Future of the South recommended a 25 percent spending increase in 1986. Low taxes are no longer a major inducement to industry if the result is poor schools. The fastest growing states today are the highest taxing states. George Bragg, president and CEO of Telex Computer Products in Oklahoma, told the annual meeting of Southern Legislators last summer, “Many states make the mistake of assuming that a low tax base will encourage companies to come and stay. You get what you pay for, and I would encourage you to think more about the quality of services–which may mean higher taxes.”

The other issue is intrastate disaparities [sic] . Beginning in the late 1960s, families of students who were getting shortchanged by the education system–getting poorer quality education–went to the courts claiming that the state owed all of its students roughly equivalent educational opportunities.

FIGURE 4 examines ten Tennessee districts to show the extent to which disparities still exist. Here are last year’s per pupil expenditures in the five districts that spent the most and the five districts that spent the least. The high spending district is nearly twice the low spending district. The per capita incomes of these ten school districts are just what you’d expect. The differences are not extreme, but there is an obvious relationship between wealth and educational revenues. The 1986 Commission on the Future of the South made recommendations here, too, suggesting state equalization formulas to balance the disparities among districts.

Bear in mind that these per pupil expenditures include federal funds. The federal share is about twice as high in the poorer districts, but those funds are earmarked for special purposes, not for the normal costs of education. Remove the federal share and the ratio of spending is much more than two to one.

But federal spending for education is declining in real dollars. Between 1980 and 1986, federal spending for Chapter 1, compensatory education, the largest program, decreased by 23 percent and served 500,000 fewer students. Bilingual education decreased by 47 percent and education for the handicapped decreased by 11 percent. Moreover, in all the states improving education in the past few years, there were almost no major reforms addressing special needs. The Committee for Economic Development, in its report Children in Need, stated that a dollar spent today to prevent educational failure will save $4.75 in future costs to society.

Vocational Education

For two decades, vocational education has been the accepted link between education and economic development, the aspect of education that was included in the old business climate indices. States have played to industry and subsidized training to recruit industry. In a case study of a new plant site in rural Kentucky I asked the CEO whether the many training subsidies were a factor. He said, “Not at all. I can get them anywhere. The form may vary a bit from state to state, but everyone is doing the same thing.” In other words, the subsidy no longer matters unless you don’t provide it. But a good vocational education program that combines technical and occupational skills with sound basic education is an important part of public education, both to the student and to the community.

One effect of the link between vocational education and economic development in the 60s and 70s was that the Economic Development Administration and the Appalachian Regional Commission stepped in to support vocational education facilities. It’s a little known fact that the two agencies invested well over a billion dollars in vocational education facilities, much of it in depressed rural parts of the South.

Vocational education in the South has great opportunities and room for exciting and positive changes. States are rethinking their high school programs and making them more academically challenging and less occupationally specific. And the two-year technical colleges are upgrading and improving their degree programs and becoming more imaginative in supporting technology transfer to existing manufacturers, small businesses, and local development in general while also providing community services including literacy programs. The community and technical college no longer simply recuits [sic] factories and provides subsidized, customized training. It has become a community focal point

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for retraining and for economic development.

The federal government plays a small but crucial role in vocational edudcation [sic] . Federal funds are just under 10 percent of the total, but their uses are important. Most are targeted, 22.5 percent to disadvantaged students, 10 percent to handicapped, and smaller amounts to women reentering the labor force, displaced workers, and others. Many would not get the special services they need without the earmarked funds. The rest must be used for program improvements, in some ways that make voc ed better than it was before, and can’t go into the operating budget. The federal voc ed funding is the oldest support for elementary and secondary voc ed, going back to 1917. In 1986, the Reagan administration recommended zero funding.

The Commission on the Future of the South was quite specific in its desire to support vocational education but to revamp high school vocational education and to transfer much of the responsibility for job-specific education to the two-year colleges.

Higher Education

A critical issue is the inability to improve black enrollment in graduate schools, especially in the sciences and engineering. Blacks are no longer increasing their enrollments in higher education and are still very unrepresented in graduate schools. Only a limited number of universities contribute to the small pool of black degree recipients in the sciences.

FIGURE 5 shows the change in the percent of blacks enrolled in Bachelors, Masters, and PhD programs in the South. The percentages of Bachelors and PhDs are down slightly from ten years ago, but the percent of Masters degrees is way down. FIGURE 6 shows black and female enrollments in the sciences. About 45 percent of the advanced degrees of blacks in the sciences are from the traditionally black colleges in the South.

These trends are important because technology playing a bigger and bigger role in the economy and it’s the scientists who are becoming the entrepreneurs and controlling more of the capital. The latest occupational demand projections by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows a large anticipated increase for technicians, engineers, and scientists, while the programs into which minorities have been going, the social sciences and human services fields, are declining.

Much of the cause is attributed to the quality and quantity of high school math and science preparation. Fewer blacks are taking four years of math and science. That relates to the quality of inner city schools and to the counseling and curriculum advice blacks get in school. Later the admissions practices at colleges and availability of financial aid affect enrollments.

It’s not hard to find the federal responsibility in all this. It goes back to support for compensatory education, to providing access to better schools, end to sufficient financial aid for higher education.

The Commission on the Future of the South recommends that the states assume some responsibility by expanding scholarships for minorities, disadvantaged, and rural students and providing more remedial education to college-bound students. The committee on technology and innovation was even more specific, recommending that each state create and fund a Top Scholars program for math, science, and technology and identifying and selecting qualified women and minorities.

Summary

It’s not enough to raise averages of measures of educational quality. Equal opportunities are equally important, and the pot of federal dollars, as small as it has been, has been directed at equity and is far more important than its size indicates.

Stuart Rosenfeld is director of the Southern Technology Council of the Southern Growth Policies Board This article is adapted from remarks he made at the annual meeting of the Southern Regional Council in November 1987.

‘Time to Revitalize’ Southern Labor

By Paul McLennan and Vicki Trifiro

Vol. 10, No. 3, 1988, pp. 15-16

For William Winpisinger, the message to corporate America from the 5,000 workers gathered in an Atlanta parking lot on April 30 wee to remind corporate America that “workers are mad as hell.”

Winpisinger, president of the International Association of Machinists, wee master of ceremonies of a spirited “Jobs with Justice” rally that coincided with the conclusion of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s “Martin Luther King Memorial March for Jobs with Justice,” which had set out from Memphis on April 4 and traveled through Mississippi and Alabama before ending in Atlanta.

Airline workers and janitors, taxi drivers and electrical workers, homeless workers and community organizers–all rubbed shoulders and lifted their voices in labor songs led by folksingers Peter, Paul and Mary. SCLC’s Dr. Joseph Lowery spoke, as did Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower, Bernice King (daughter of Martin Luther King Jr.), and Maxine Green of the National Tenants Association. Testimony about today’s economic climate was given by workers and homeless people.

Calling attention to the conditions of workers in the 1980s and fighting current attacks on workers’ rights is the mission of the Jobs for Justice national campaign. The coalition demands the following:

• the right to a decent standard of living rather than wage cuts and the elimination of jobs with decent wages;
• the right to job security rather than growing insecurity in an economy that ses [sic] two million jobs permanently lost to plant and facilities closures every year; and,
• the right to organize a union and bargain collectively, which underpins all other worker rights.

Jobs with Justice wee launched July 29, 1987, in Miami when more than 11,000 workers attended the biggest labor rally in Florida history. In an emotion-filled moment, the Miami Beach Convention Center rocked with chants of “Jobs with Justice!” The thousands present recited and signed the Jobs with Justice pledge: “During the next year, ‘I’ll be there’ at least five times for someone else’s fight as well as my own. If enough of us are there, well start winning.”

In conjunction with the Miami rally, the House Education and Labor Committee conducted a rare field hearing to get first-hand statements about worker abuse. Workers, union representatives and community leaders testified about the devastating effects on working people of deregulation of the airline and communications industry and subcontracting of public sector jobs.

In November 1987, 8,000 rallied in Nashville in support of paper, mine and electronic workers as well as in support of tenants’ rights. James Motlatsi, president of the National Union of Mineworkers of South Africa, drew cheers from the Tennesee [sic] crowd when he labeled as “destructive engagement” the Reagan administration’s refusal to impose economic sanctions on South Africa. A month later, 3,000 marched in Texas in support of a union contract fight for food service and nursing home workers.

“The strength of the Jobs with Justice campaign has been its ability to mobilize union members to fight in the battles of other workers–workers maybe not in their own union, and maybe in no union at all–and to build coalitions not only among the labor movement but between the labor movement and its natural allies in the broader community–the churches, the civil rights and women’s groups, the tenants’ unions and the farmers, and all the organizations who understand that the defense of workers’ rights is essential to their own fight for social justice,” said Howard Samuel, president of the Industrial Union Department.

In more than twenty U.S. cities, the Jobs with Justice movement is taking root, building these bridges between labor and its natural allies. In the South, the time has come again to revitalize such a movement.

Southern Labor Institute director Ken Johnson believes that “in the deep South, the interests, concerns, and wellbeing of working men and women have been kept silent and invisible by political and economic leadership which promotes an environment of cheap land, low taxes and low wages. Jobs with Justice represents a gigantic step for those

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who understand that the South and indeed the nation’s wellbeing is best measured by how workers themselves benefit from economic activity. Increasing worker participation in policy making and in the workplace is vital to economic growth.”

Awareness grows that social justice and economic justice cannot exist independently of one another. Jobs with Justice seeks to tear down walls between groups who have common interests but who may not have worked together before. In Atlanta, for example, this movement is taking shape in support of the Service Employees International Union’s Justice for Janitors campaign and with the Teamsters’ help for the homeless.

“Community-wide problems call for community-wide solutions,” said Linda Riggins of SEIU Local 679.

Paul McLennan is president of the Southern Labor Press Association Vicki Trifiro is campaign director for the Public Assistance Coalition.

Labor, Environmental Coalition Wins Bill Passage

By Stewart Acuff

Vol. 10, No. 3, 1988, p. 16

It’s not often that the environmental movement and the labor movement can find enough common ground to work together in a mutually beneficial effort. It is difficult for any coalition to hold itself together long enough to make an impact, and that difficulty is even greater without a history of cooperation.

The labor movement and environmental movement wrote a little history curing the 1988 Georgia legislative session.

Led by the Georgia State Employees Union (Local 1985 of the Service Employees International Union) and the Georgia Environmental Project, the two often disparate movements joined forces in a dramatic and exciting fight that led to the passage of HB 503, the Public Employees Hazardous Protection and Right to Know Act of 1988.

HB 503 requires that state employees be informed about chemicals on the job, be trained in the safe use of those chemicals, that an advisory council be formed to administer the bill, and that no state employee be forced to work with any chemical she or he is not familiar with.

HB 503 was drafted four years ago by State Rep. George Brown of Augusta, who is himself in a high risk category for bladder cancer because of exposure to carcinogens at an Augusta chemical plant where he worked as a teenager.

Brown’s original bill covered all Georgia workers and included citizens’ right to know. But that bill was made obsolete by federal legislation designed to protect private sector manufacturing workers and residents of neighborhoods close to chemical plants.

A new proposal did not make it out of the House in 1987; its most active and vocal opponent was the Georgia Department of Transportation, whose maintenance workers and lab employees are subject to the bill’s provisions.

Labor and environmentalists fought hard; more than 400 GSEU members came to the Capitol on “State Employees Lobby Day.” The Georgia Environmental Project helped build support by making the effort “a public policy fight rather than a wrestling match about working conditions.”

When Gov. Joe Frank Harris signed HB 503 in an April ceremony attended by union members, environmentalists, and legislators, it wee the first time in his two terms that any AFL-CIO union had been in the governor’s office for a bill signing.

A Letter from Lillian Smith

Edited by Rose Gladney

Vol. 10, No. 3, 1988, pp. 16-17

The letter below, written to the editors of the ATLANTA CONSTITUTION though it was never published there, is the fourth in a series from the correspondence of Lillian Smith. The letter did appear in the NEW YORK TIMES, June 6, 1954.

Smith’s strong position against racial segregation had been clearly established for more than a decade prior to the Supreme Court’s historic 1954 ruling. What is significant about her stand against segregation, however, is not only her timing–that she spoke out as early as she did–but her perspective and depth of understanding. Because she saw racial segregation as symbolic and symptomatic of many other aspects of human nature and society, it is not surprising that her first public response to the BROWN decision would contain broad and far-reaching interpretations of the new law.

Her passing reference to the ruling as a “powerful political instrument against communism” was not a new argument for Smith or for many others who for years had

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pointed to the hypocrisy of America’s willingness to defend freedom abroad while blatantly denying the rights of citizenship to black Americans. At the same time, her use of anti-communist language reveals a certain blindness in Smith’s otherwise clear vision of the relationship between means and ends in any struggle for social change. Although she clearly intended to defuse the red-baiting tactics of those who called “communists” the Supreme Court and all others who worked to end racial segregation, her willingness to use the anti-communist rhetoric–even against itself–leaves her vulnerable to charges of feeding the very red-baiting she would otherwise deplore.

In the remainder of the letter, Smith’s strategy was brilliant. To call the Brown decision “every child’s Magna Carta” was at once to move the subject out of the realm of black versus white or federal government versus state and local school boards and to place it in the tradition of freedom for the individual that even the most staunchly Celtic descendant would have to revere. Simultaneously, she pushed beyond the stereotype of race by renaming skin color an “artificial disability” compared to “real disabilities” of physically or mentally disabled children.

Smith’s knowledge of the legal, social, and educational plight of differently abled Americans was grounded in extensive research. At the time of this letter, she and Paula Snelling were compiling materials for an anthology on the subject. Although never completed, the proposed book as outlined in correspondence with her publisher included autobiographical experiences of a number of differently abled people, a bibliography of resources, and a list of relevant state and federal laws.

Her perception that the BROWN decision would affect differently abled children as well as children of color was truly prophetic. Few, if any, of its defendants or opponents were even considering such far-reaching implications in 1954, yet educational historians now look to that decision as a major precedent for the extension of educational access to all children, culminating in the 1975 enactment of Public Law 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act.

Smith’s confidence that “millions of other southerners” would “wholeheartedly” accept the challenge of the Brown decision reflected her basic educational strategy for social change. She believed that people would rise to the vision of their leaders; and she herself always tried to embody the vision she held for the South. She would develop this appeal and outline specific creative responses to court-ordered desegregation in her 1955 book NOW IS THE TIME.

Unfortunately, voices like Lillian Smith’s did not receive the media coverage given those who dissented loudly or even moderately, as did William Faulkner when he pleaded for the white South to be given a little more time. If in hindsight we wonder at Smith’s optimism in 1954, we must also acknowledge that her vision is being realized, that her prophecy came true.

To the Editors,*

The Atlanta Constitution

Atlanta, Georgia

Dear Sirs:

May 31, 1954

I have read, again, the recent decision of the Supreme Court. It bears rereading. For it is a great historic document–not only because its timing turns it into the most powerful political instrument against communism that the United States has, as yet, devised, but because of its profound meaning for children.

It is every child’s Magna Carta. All are protected by the magnificent statement that no artificial barriers, such as laws, can be set up in our land against a child’s right to learn and to mature as a human being.

There are, perhaps, 5 million children in the U.S.A. who are colored. There are close to 5 million other children who would be directly affected by this decision. I am not speaking, now, of “white children”-many of whom have undoubtedly been injured spiritually by the philosophy of segregation. I am speaking of disabled children:

Children who are “different,” not because of color but because of blindness, deafness; because they are crippled, or have cerebral palsy; because they have speech defects, or epilepsy, or are what we call “retarded.” These children we have also segregated.

There are more than 40 states with laws forbidding a child with epilepsy to attend public school–even though most children’s convulsions can now be controlled with modern drugs. Little blind children are segregated in schools from sighted children; our deaf from the hearing. Many cerebral palsy children are kept out of school not because they are unable to attend but because there are teachers who do not want to teach them. And yet, a basic principle of rehabilitation is that acceptance and a natural relationship with his human world is necessary for the disabled child, if he is to make a good life for himself.

All these children–some with real disabilities, others with the artificial disability of color–are affected by this great decision. Then why are so few politicians protesting so angrily? Perhaps because they feel THEY will now be handicapped if the old crutch of “race” is snatched away from them.

It is true: this decision may shackle a few politicians. But it frees so many of our children. I, for one, am glad. And I believe millions of other southerners are glad, also; and will accept wholeheartedly the challenge of making a harmonious, tactful change-over from one kind of school to another. It will be an ordeal only if our attitude makes it so; there are creative, practical ways of bringing about this change. And in the doing of it, we adults may grow, too, in wisdom and gentleness.

Sincerely yours,

Lillian Smith

*From a carbon copy in the Lillian Smith Papers, Special Collections, University of Georgia Libraries

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

The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It by Jo Ann Gibson Robinson. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987. 190 pp. $12.95.)

By Gregg Barak

Vol. 10, No. 3, 1988, pp. 18, 20

The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It is a historically significant contribution to the study of the civil rights movement. The book establishes the essential background information on the events leading up to the bus boycott of 1955-56, and also provides an examination of black activism in Montgomery prior to and during the boycott. [See “Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott” by David Garrow, SOUTHERN CHANGES, Oct.-Dec. 1985].

In retelling the story, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson–one of the female activists who instigated the boycott–takes the reader through the joys and sorrows of some 50,000 blacks who refused to ride public city buses until the demeaning, humiliating, and intolerable conditions of segregation were removed.

Robinson’s memoir provides documentary evidence that it was black women of the Women’s Political Council (WPC), a group of mostly professionally-trained educators, social workers, nurses, and other community workers, who actually initiated and set into motion the Montgomery bus boycott, rather than Rosa Parks, E.D. Nixon, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or other ministers and black civic leaders. While many people were well aware of the debilitating effects of segregation on blacks and whites alike, it was these women who formed the WPC for the “purpose of inspiring Negroes to live above mediocrity, to elevate their thinking, to fight juvenile and adult delinquency, to register to vote, and in general to improve their status as a group.” And when the time was right and the black population of Montgomery was ready to stand up against segregation, the WPC was prepared to act.

Perhaps more importantly, Robinson’s story provides a personal narrative on the human situation and on the various racial struggles against injustice, oppression, hatred and violence as these relate to both the individual and the collective condition.

In successfully integrating the private and public aspects of a political struggle, Robinson reveals how she and her associates of the WPC were conscious that they were “laying their all on the line in organizing themselves to defeat segregation in the heart of the Confederacy.”

These women fully understood that by publicly challenging the codes of segregation exemplified by Montgomery’s laws on riding municipal buses, they were opening themselves up to public ridicule and private ruin. They also understood that the “double double standard” implicit in the patriarchal and racial relations of the Old South afforded black women more opportunities to come forward with their protest than were available to their more threatening male counterparts. Robinson declares, “We were ‘women power,’ organized to cope with any injustice, no matter what, against the darker sect.”

Robinson’s manuscript is as much a sociological and psychological treatise on race relations and human wills as it is an important historical work. In offering a first-hand account of racial inequality under siege, Robinson gets inside the pained psyches of black men, women, and children who were constantly under all forms of physical, verbal, and emotional assault at the hands of the dominant white culture. With ease and passion, she communicates the calm as well as the exhilaration of well-organized Southern blacks who, with determination, self-sacrifice, and discipline–and with the assistance of people attracted to their cause throughout the nation and the world–were able to turn back the legalized bigotry of the South.

Robinson demonstrates her profound insight into the human condition when she is able to relate the personal ambivalence of both blacks and whites toward the struggle. But what I found particularly impressive was her ability to avoid vilifying her adversaries. She evokes a sympathetic, even empathetic appreciation of the plights of the seemingly unlikely coalition of Southern white gentlemen, illiterates, “ne’er-do-wells,” and others “disappointed in life” who came together to form the White Citizens’ Council. The text vividly depicts the feelings and attitudes of the black experience while also exploring the varied white reactions.

Among the many interesting reflections in THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT, there are three that particularly illustrate Robinson’s perceptive analysis of race and social change. First is her discussion of how a lack of social self-esteem caused by racism may increase the incidences of intraspecific crime and deviance, especially those acts involved in domestic violence. On the other hand, she points out how the humiliating experiences of racism and the associated deviant behavior may actually be reduced through organized community action for civil rights. Not only are these astute observations on the relationships between crime and racism similar to those made by Franz Fanon in his classic analysis of race and colonialism in The Wretched of the Earth, but they have also been verified in social science literature as far back as 1965.

Second is Robinson’s portrayal of the politically sensitive covert role played by Alabama State College in the movement to end busing discrimination. As a predominantly black institution–the only four-year public college or university in Montgomery before the sixties–Alabama State had to maintain a low public profile while actively participating in the boycott.

In the sixties, when integration was court-ordered in Alabama’s public universities and colleges, branch campuses of Auburn University and Troy State University were established in Montgomery to provide the city with “white campuses” and to circumvent racial integration on any terms other than white majority. Today, Alabama State remains almost exclusively black, and the three university

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systems along with others have been involved for several years in a federal lawsuit over charges that Alabama maintains a racially segregated system of higher education. Until such time as the several public university systems are integrated into a statewide university system, and until such time as the legacies of institutional segregation are eliminated, the political roles played by members of the ASU community will remain highly sensitive ones.

Third is Robinson’s treatment of the contradictory legal battles of the boycott, in which white and black leaders found themselves to be both accused and accusing. In describing the get-tough policies of the city administration, the harassment of the boycotters, and the indictments and arrests of 115 black leaders for committing the misdemeanor crime of “conspiring to boycott” which resulted in the lone prosecution and conviction of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Robinson reveals how boycotters’ consciousness of the political and constitutional implications of their actions contributed to the dialectic that enabled the “powerless” to prevail, in this instance, over the “powers that be.”

Robinson has written a truly remarkable book that will be cited by historians for generations to come. But more important, her story about love and hate deserves the attention of all people. Especially in today’s racially tense America, this book should not only be widely adopted in high schools and colleges, but it should be made into a film or video production. For this story needs constant telling, not for the purpose of condemning the discriminators per se, but to remind people that the struggles for justice–racial, economic, and political–continue.

Gregg Barak is chair of the Department of Criminal Justice at Alabama State University. He also serves as book review editor for CRIME AND SOCIAL JUSTICE and is the author of IN DEFENSE OF WHOM? A CRITIQUE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM.

Matewan

By John P. David

Vol. 10, No. 3, 1986, pp. 20-22

Matewan (Written and directed by John Sayles. Filmed by Haskell Wexler. Music by Mason Daring. With James Earl Jones, Chris Cooper, Mary McDonnell, Will Oldham.)

Many people know that working people in the United States were not Federally protected in their right to organize and bargain collectively in the private sector through representatives of their own choosing until passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (Blue Eagle Act) of 1933.

When the Blue Eagle Act was declared unconstitutional in 1935, it was replaced in part by the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) of 1935, which the labor movement labeled as its “Magna Carta.”

The history of working people and the labor movement prior to 1933 is poorly documented. It comes to us in vignettes about courageous individuals such as Harriet Tubman, Mother Jones, Eugene Debs, Big Bill Haywood, William Silvis, Samuel Gompers, Sojourner Truth, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and major news events such as Haymarket Square, Ludlow, the Molly McGuires, Patterson Silk, and textile strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Perhaps no state witnessed a bigger collision between capital and labor than did West Virginia prior to 1933. West Virginia, born out of the struggle of the Civil War, went into the Union with ties to wage labor and northern industrial

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labor unionism, while Virginia went into the Confederacy with ties to slave labor that later became the so-called “right-to-work” South. The Civil War division, however, did not resolve the question of which economic interests would “develop” the state’s coal resources, and two primary forces emerged.

One came from the industrial north and the other from Richmond and Roanoke, Va. This activity was accompanied by various efforts to unionize the coalfields, first by the Knights of Labor, and later by the United Mine Workers, West Virginia Miners Union, National Miners Union, and others. The need to organize in West Virginia was clear to the leadership of UMWA. The UMWA could not maintain contracts in Pennsylvania and Illinois and build an ongoing union structure while coal-rich West Virginia was basically non-union. The same problem also occurred locally within West Virginia; as various miner unions began to establish toeholds in the Fairmont, Kanahwa, and New River fields, it was apparent that contracts could not be maintained as long as southern West Virginia and the Pocahontas Fields developed by the Norfolk and Western were non-union.

Thus, southern West Virginia became the battleground for some of the fiercest and bloodiest labor-management fighting in the world. In the past few years, a number of efforts have documented worker struggles, including films (MOLLY McGUIREs; JOE HILL; HARLAN COUNTY USA), books (Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina and BLOODLETTING IN APPALACHIA by Howard Lee, and TV/video (“And Even Heaven Wept” by West Virginia Public Television and the Humanities Foundation of West Virginia). The latest effort is John Sayles’s film, MATEWAN, which is about a massacre in Mingo County.

Sayles does an incredible job in portraying one of the best-known struggles that occurred in the early 1920s during the Mine War period. What may be difficult for the viewer to comprehend is that the Matewan Massacre actually occurred. It was only one of many inhuman, unbelievable, bloody events that occurred during the Mine Wars as miners and their families struggled for dignity and economic survival. The context for the struggle needs to be understood. The post-World War I period was a difficult time for workers and fledgling labor organizations. President Coolidge canceled child labor laws, union contracts were laughed at and thrown on the scrap heap, groups of workers were pitted against one another in order to wring concessions and prevent unionization, and the “yellow dog” contract, a company document that workers had to sign that stated one would not join a union or talk to an organizer, was upheld as legal by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1919.

One coal company in the Matewan vicinity of Mingo County, the Red Jacket Coal Company, began utilizing the “yellow dog” contract extensively in 1920, in response to efforts by the UMWA to stop wage cuts in the non-union southern coalfields. Thus, the conditions of the Matewan Massacre were established.

Interestingly, MATEWAN was not made in Matewan but in Thurman, Fayette County. Thurman was actually along the competing CO Railroad and was the center of the New River coal fields, which, ironically, had a strong union presence since the 1880s. In fact, black miners, who were stereotyped as strikebreakers imported from the South in MATEWAN, were the leading force for early unions in the Thurman area, perhaps because the area had more of a connection with the Kanawha fields and the industrial north than the McDowell and Mingo County areas. Perceptive viewers may notice in the film various markings that pertain to the CO and Thurman, but for the most part Sayles did an excellent job in re-creating the town of Matewan within the constraints of an extremely low budget. He had the help of excellent cinematography by Haskell Wexler and the beautiful scenery of the New River Gorge, which is now under development by the National Park Service.

The viewer of MATEWAN is quickly drawn into the struggle against the coal company and its private army, the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency headquartered in Bluefield, W.Va. The hatred against the company and the “hired thugs” is accurately portrayed and is typical of the experiences of coal miners in many places in southern West Virginia such as Paint Creek (the Bull Moose Special), Cabin Creek (Tent Towns), and Logan County (March over Blair Mountain). Elsewhere, miners in eastern Kentucky struggled against the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and miners in Colorado struggled in Ludlow against the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company and the Pinkertons.

MATEWAN is important because working people in this country have been denied a full account of their struggles. Their struggles are an untold story about people who overcame unbelievable obstacles as they built this country’s industrial base. While numerous books have been written about the Mellons, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Carnegies, and others, there is little question that working people resent the impression that these Robber Barons built America. Local audiences loved the film because they viewed it as “their side” of the story, as well as a chance to view a flashback of a period only talked about cautiously by their parents and grandparents. Local residents who were extras in the film jumped at the chance to play roles from their family scrapbooks. Furthermore, the film clearly shows the people involved as the honest and hardworking people that they really were as opposed to traditional Hollywood stereotyping.

The weakest character in the film is Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper), the union organizer. He was consistently portrayed as a pacifist and an outsider, which was actually unlikely. His suggested relationship with the Industrial Workers of the World was also curious, since the UMWA Constitution states that members of the IWW, along with the National Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, and the Ku Klux Klan, “shall be expelled from the UMWA.” Of course, all of this must be weighed against the knowledge that Mother Jones, who helped found the IWW in 1905 and was a major union organizer in West Virginia, is still revered by older UMWA members, and Ralph Chaplin, who wrote labor’s best known song, “Solidarity Forever,” was an IWW organizer at Cabin Creek, W.Va.

MATEWAN is a film with a message and one must be cautioned not to view it as a historical aberration. The fight for a union and economic dignity was not won in the final

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scene and is still being fought today. One can view a modern-day version of the same struggle in the same Mingo County in the Appalachian documentary on the A. T. Massey/ UMWA conflict titled, MINE WAR ON BLACKBERRY CREEK.

John David is professor and chairman of the social sciences department at West Virginia Institute of Technology, Montgomery, West Virginia.

EDITOR’S NOTE: MATEWAN has for the most part concluded its theatrical run but is available on videotape at most rental outlets and is scheduled for cable distribution around the end of 1988.