The Rights to Life

By Lynne McAnelly

Vol. 10, No. 4, 1988, pp. 1-4

Agriculture is on the edge of a revolution that could bring changes as profound as the industrial revolution. From soybean growers in Georgia to cattle producers in Arkansas, few Southern farmers will be able to escape its implications.

The engine of this new evolution is biotechnology-our ability to control and manipulate DNA, the genetic blueprint of all living organisms. With this power, it will be possible to use microbes, plants, and animals as living chemical factories, to endow living organisms with new traits, and even to create new kinds of living beings.

These advances in biology have the potential to expand our options for dealing with environmental and agricultural problems and for improving economic opportunities in agriculture. At the same time, however, there are concerns that some new developments may actually limit options for farmers and ranchers. Of concern to many farm organizations and livestock producers is a decision from the U.S. Patent Office in April 1987 that animals can be patented. This was one in a series of administrative and judicial rulings that pave the way for a corporation or individual to own the blueprints which specify living organisms.

The legal and economic consequences of these decisions have raised a number of concerns that have only been heightened by the recent Patent Office issuance of its first animal patent-for a mouse that is especially susceptible to cancer and can be used with great effectiveness in laboratory research. However, the patent for this creature is broader than it seems at first glance. The patent refers to any cancer-causing gene imported into any mammal. The implications are staggering.

Sidebar: Living Organisms and Patent Law

A patent grants monopoly rights to an invention for a specified period of time (seventeen years or longer). However, there are limits on what can be patented. The invention must be novel relative to information available at the time of the patent application. Even if it qualifies as

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“new,” the invention cannot be patented if it is obvious to a “person with ordinary skill in the art.”

Until 1980, living organisms were not considered patentable. Two separate laws, the Plant Protection Act of 1930 and the Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970, gave limited patent protection to plant varieties, implying to many, including the Patent Office, that Congress did not intend the Patent Act to generally cover living organisms. But in 1980, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Patent Act applied to genetically engineered microorganisms. In 1985 the Patent and Trademark Office extended this ruling to all plants, and, on April 3, 1987, to all animals, excluding humans “for the time being.”

It is not clear how patent law will be interpreted with regard to genetically engineered organisms. For example, although things existing at the time of the patent application are not generally considered patentable, things that exist in nature such as hormones, vitamins and proteins have been patented.

Even as seemingly obvious an “invention” as a naturally occurring microorganism isolated and grown in pure culture has been patented. This raises the possibility that existing genes could be patented and leads to questions that cannot be answered about the right of an individual or corporation to own the very genes that make up living organisms. If individual genes can be patented, then important naturally occurring traits that control food production could become private property.

For example, will a patent on a given trait preclude others from pursuing alternate ways of achieving the trait? There also are concerns that broad patents on fundamental traits such as oil production in seeds or milk production in mammals may then apply to all crop plants or animals developed with the trait. For example, a patent on a gene controlling milk secretion in mice might also be applied to cows, goats and horses. It remains for the Patent Office or Congress to decide on the scope of patent protection on living organisms, and the first patent granted is, as already noted, quite broad.

Sidebar: The Economic Power of Patents

The corporation or individual who holds a patent has exclusive rights to the patented object. The patent holder can collect whatever royalties the market will bear and impose restrictions on the use and the reproduction of the item.

The extension of these monopoly rights to the raw materials of agriculture-plants and animals-creates a whole new category of property ownership. And it is a kind of ownership which essentially will be closed to many people now in agriculture, from farmers and ranchers to livestock breeders, and many seed companies.

Due to the relatively high cost of genetically engineered livestock, it would be difficult for patent holders to try to get all their financial return from the initial purchase price. Therefore, according to William Lesser, an agricultural economist at Cornell, “it is highly likely that animal patent

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holders will attempt to enforce patent rights over subsequent generations.” According to the Patent Office, royalties would be paid on the sales of patented animals and on all the generations of their offspring produced over the seventeen-year lifespan of the patent. Such an agreement would be binding on the original purchaser and on subsequent purchasers of progeny. Lesser predicts that enforcing patent holders’ rights will be feasible in the livestock industry, especially in sectors where good breeding records are already kept.

A difficult issue to be resolved is how to determine the extent and value of expression of the patented characteristics in succeeding generations. A patent does not guarantee that the trait will show up in the offspring. Multigenic traits (most agriculturally important traits such as weight and yield are controlled by many genes) are quite likely to be “diluted” by recombination in subsequent generations.

In addition, patented animals are likely to be more expensive initially than conventionally bred animals. Farmers and ranchers, even those with large operations, will usually not be able to obtain animal patents or to take advantage of the benefits of patented livestock produced through biotechnology.

Another concern of farmers and ranchers is that animal patents will accelerate vertical integration and consolidation in the livestock industry as happened in the seed industry after the 1970 Plant Variety Protection Act. Large pharmaceutical and petrochemical companies have bought out scores of independent seed companies. Predictions are that ten to twenty major corporations will dominate the worldwide seed trade by the year 2000.

Referring to the concentration in the poultry industry, Cy Carpenter of the National Farmers’ Union testified to Congress in July 1987, “The almost total control of an industry by so few is a fear that haunts all segments of agriculture, and granting animal patents could turn those fears into a reality.”

In order to maintain control over the patent, the holder may decide to sell his animals only to a few select operations. Or the patent holder may decide to buy the means of production. The beef industry, for example, may be ripe for such a consolidation; Iowa Beef Packers, one of the “big three” meat packing companies in the United States, is already considering raising its own cattle. If the livestock industry responds to patent protection as did the seed industry, it would not be surprising to see Iowa Beef Packers acquire the means of production and then in turn be acquired by a major chemical/ biotech corporation such as Monsanto or Mitsubishi.

Farmers will have to cope with extensive paperwork to keep track of progeny from all patented animals for seventeen years through multiple middlemen. As complicated as the situation is with a single patented trait it becomes truly Gordian when an animal has more than one patented trait, each with separate ownership. As a number of livestock producers commented, the prospect of patents on farm animals presents a paperwork nightmare.

And who will be policing the biotechnology companies and the Patent Office? Challenges to Patent Office decisions can be initiated only by someone with a competing patent claim. Such legal means can be long and expensive-beyond the means of many smaller companies and individuals.

The justification for patents is that they are necessary to stimulate research and to provide the necessary incentive to undertake research projects that may or may not pan out. The biotechnology industry warns that without patent protection we risk losing the fruits of our research to foreign competition.

However, despite the absence of patent protection, research in crop and livestock improvement at land grant universities, at USDA labs and on private ranches generated numerous new plant varieties, livestock breeds and champion race horses over the last hundred years. Results from research at public institutions has usually been freely available, in the public domain. Furthermore, market mechanisms exist to protect new breeds developed by livestock producers and to ensure significant financial returns.

Sidebar: Patents and Research

The assumption that patents encourage corporations to engage in novel research directions has been challenged by various authors. For example, research may be channeled to already patented products. Even the new biotechnology research programs in some companies are being driven by patents the company already holds. Many agrichemical companies are developing genetically engineered crop plants that will require the use of herbicides or pesticides that the company already sells. In addition many fear that life sciences research at public institutions may become increasingly directed into production of patentable products with resulting decline in public domain research.

But most worrisome to many in the seed and livestock industries is a growing reluctance on the part of researchers to share information and germ plasm with other labs. This would be devastating to plant breeding research and, in some cases, could endanger the nation’s food supply, according to the American Seed Trade Association.

The issue of a foreign edge in patented animals is misleading. Only the U.S. and a handful of Soviet satellite nations currently allow animals to be patented. The European Economic Community specifically excludes animals

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from patent protection. This would not prevent foreign companies from obtaining animal patents in the U.S., however. Thus, as one farm organization pointed out, American farmers could be in the unfavorable situation of paying royalties to foreign biotech companies.

It is worth noting that although humans were excluded from the April 1987 ruling, Charles Van Hom of the Patent Office told the New York Times: “The decision says higher life forms will be considered and it could be extrapolated to human beings. But for the time being, we are not going to consider applications involving human life.”

This clearly implies that even human beings may eventually be considered patentable material.

Human genes are already components of biotech products that have been patented. These applications involve using human genes to produce pharmaceuticals such as human insulin and human growth hormone, substances of tremendous benefit. But eventually society may ask, at what point do we cross a barrier in manipulations with human genes?

Sidebar: Response and Remedies

A number of farm organizations including the National Farmers Union, the League of Rural Voters, and the National Farm Organization have expressed concern about the economic impact of animal patents on agriculture. Recently, almost 500 Texas livestock producers told the Texas Department of Agriculture that they are opposed to patents on farm animals.

The decisions granting full patent coverage to plants and animals were judicial and administrative rulings. However, in its 1980 decision the Supreme Court clearly left the door open for congressional action, stating that it is up to Congress to define the limits of patentability by amending the patent law. Many feel that it is time for public debate and congressional action on this issue.

Congressman Charlie Rose of North Carolina has introduced a bill, H.R. 3119, that would impose a two-year moratorium on animal patents. A two-year moratorium would allow time for investigation of the economic impact of animal patents and for discussion of the various issues involved in patenting living organisms. For many years, public dollars have supported the basic research that gave birth to the biotechnology revolution. Farmers and the consuming public deserve consideration of their concerns regarding patents on living organisms.

Plutonium Politics: The Poisoning of South Carolina

By Andre Carothers

Vol. 10, No. 4, 1988, pp. 4-5, 8-11

It’s not hard to attract attention at the Savannah River Plant, particularly if you are roaring along its southwestern boundary in a 250-horsepower speedboat, as we were, with a man in the bow training a telephoto lens on the far bank. Particularly since the private army that guards this nondescript stretch of South Carolina river is negotiating a new five-year, $300 million contract. And especially since, after thirty years of working quietly behind a smokescreen of secrecy and deft public relations, the lid has been blown off the business here, the business that has taken up a Chicago-sized piece of South Carolina pine forest, poured millions of gallons of toxic and radioactive waste into the groundwater and veiled the southeastern United States in a radioactive mist-the business of making plutonium and tritium for nuclear bombs.

So we weren’t surprised by the uniformed guards that followed in a cowled speedboat. Or the sheriff’s deputies who politely interrupted our lunch on the Georgia side of the river. But the helicopter, well, that seemed like a bit much, at least at first. But that was before I began to understand the psychological state of South Carolina and its relationship with things nuclear, an uneasy alliance called “schizophrenic” by one local activist and “downright insane” by another.

Today, South Carolina’s once-invisible Savannah River Plant, like its sister plant in Washington state and the entire U.S. government nuclear weapons complex, is under siege. Three decades of undercover production of plutonium and tritium have left South Carolina with more high-level radioactive waste than any known place on earth. The breakneck pace of warhead production set by the Reagan Administration has forced the Department of Energy (DOE) and its contractors to run roughshod over local laws and sensibilities and push the aging reactors well past the limits of safety and common sense. The DuPont Company, having managed the site since day one, is getting ready to pack up and leave because the place is such a mess they don’t want to be liable for anything that might go wrong. And South Carolina, the state that in the seventies was called “the most pro-nuclear state in the country” is now wondering if perhaps it hasn’t been burned, forever.

Origins of the SRP

If there had been a cultural historian on the staff after World War II, the Truman administration might have had second thoughts about choosing South Carolina as the site for a multibillion dollar “bomb factory.” This is the ultimate Southern state, General Sherman’s “hell-hole of secession,” where in certain circles the Civil War is still known as The War of Northern Aggression. This is the state whose econ-

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omy for its first hundred years had more in common with a one-crop Caribbean slave island than the industrial north. When the U.S. government announced in 1950 that the town of Ellenton and a few neighboring communities, comprising 1,500 families, a few small businesses and 150 cemeteries, would be uprooted to accommodate a military facility, South Carolina characteristically presented both faces. The invasion was at once condemned as a Truman plan to “import alien and northern voters,” welcomed as an economic boon, and accepted with both pride and resignation as a patriotic duty.

And so the Savannah River Plant (SRP) joined Washington’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation as one of two massive complexes supplying fuel for the nation’s nuclear arsenal. E.I. DuPont de Nemours Company was asked by the government to run it. For more than thirty years, DuPont has reigned here, Washington’s local emissary, managing state politics and opinion in a manner that mixed cloying summer camp paternalism with a Big Brother dictatorship.

The Savannah River Plant News, an employee newspaper published by DuPont, set the tone with reports on the softball scores of the teams carved from the facility’s 15,000 employees, the spotless safety record, the women’s knitting club and the latest promotions. DuPont tree specialists planted 40,000 seedlings a day, turning the condemned farmland into the state’s most productive tree farm. The happy family aura was pursued relentlessly and with great success.

Slowly the Memory Faded

Local businesses championed DuPont’s cause because the company pumped $350 million a year into the troubled rural economy. Politicians likewise rallied to the cause, in typical Southern fashion.

Legend has it that one state senator’s support for splitting the atom on the banks of the Savannah was guaranteed, “as long as he got his half.” The editor of the plant’s newspaper became editor of the nearby Aiken Standard, the town of New Ellenton was established, and slowly the memory of Ellenton’s death faded. The mammoth construction site, with its five reactor complexes, 230 miles of highway and 153 scattered dumps for toxic waste and radioactive debris blended chameleon-like into the porous, forgiving South Carolina soil.

Soft-spoken, almost fragile, with an air of kindness and gentility that is almost unnerving, Bill Lawless seems at first a most unlikely whistleblower. But in fact, just five years ago, he was one of the first to come out. That’s what they call it when someone breaks the code of silence and goes public with evidence of wrongdoing at the “Bomb Plant.” They come out–like a debutante, or a refugee.

Within a year of quitting his DOE post as project manager of the plant’s Burial Ground, where radioactive waste and toxic chemicals are buried or poured into pits, Lawless decided to testify at the trial of a handful of protesters who had been arrested for trespassing at the plant gates. Lawless’s testimony was the first revelation of the deceptive and unsafe practices that had remained secret since the 1950s. It would not be the last.

His most famous confession (“It always gets their attention,” he told me) is about the cardboard boxes. Radioactive wastes that are not so concentrated or dangerous that they must be stored in double-walled tanks were buried in cardboard boxes. Not special, reinforced, double-lined cardboard boxes, just plain old cardboard boxes.

Then he talked about the double set of books. DuPont and DOE, he said, have two sets of information from which they analyze the rate at which toxic and radioactive wastes travel through the sandy soil into the groundwater. One set of statistics is drawn from the “public” sampling wells, figures often manipulated by flushing the wells with water or pumping them out and then drawing a sample. The other is for internal use only. The internal figures are either unpublished or buried reports often labeled “draft” and thus protected from public requests under the Freedom of Information Act. And, most chilling of all, he talked about the waste contaminated with tritium and strontium-90 that was slowly leaking into groundwater.

This was the first deviation from the model-the way things ought to be, according to DuPont and DOE-versus the way things actually were. DuPont had models for how radioactive elements would move in groundwater, how radiation would disperse over surrounding communities, how safety records should look and how Dupont employees should act. Things that didn’t fit the model were not wrong, they just didn’t exist.

Growing Opposition to Polluters

Thus, for DOE and DuPont, Lawless’s testimony was more than just treason, it was insanity. “People suffer from a form of cognitive dissonance at SRP,” says Lawless, “They see things are wrong, but they are not supposed to be wrong, so they don’t see them. Radionuclide migration was something we weren’t supposed to see. Public records showed tritium levels two or three times the drinking water standard, but our own records showed levels a thousand times that. They said strontium-90 didn’t move, and they said plutonium didn’t move, but we found it happening. It just wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“The people that work at SRP are normal human beings, and they are great human beings, but there is a form of thought control here. If they tell you that things are sup-

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posed to look good, and they tell everyone else that things do look good, then you can’t expect people to go against management and say it is not so. It took someone very naive, like me, to write it up.”

At the same time Bill Lawless was undergoing a crisis of conscience about waste-handling inside the plant, citizens outside-from Columbia, Atlanta, Augusta, Savannah, and Charleston-were beginning to wonder about the wisdom of the region’s increasingly irrevocable relationship with the atom.

In the early seventies, Ruth Thomas founded Environmentalists, Incorporated, hoping to organize legal challenges to the state’s polluters. A few years later, Michael Lowe helped found the Palmetto Alliance, modeling it on New England’s grass roots, civil-disobedience-oriented Clamshell Alliance. These groups, in the words of Bob Alvarez, of the Washington-based Environmental Policy Institute, were the “midwives” of organized opposition to SRP.

Oblivious to the growing opposition, the Defense Department and its partners in the commercial nuclear industry persisted with the rapid nuclearization of the state. In the late seventies, Allied Gulf Nuclear Services neared completion of a commercial reprocessing plant, Barnwell Nuclear Fuel Plant, to recover plutonium and uranium from spent nuclear fuel. At the same time, Chem-Nuclear Services opened a low-level waste dump. Both were located in Barnwell County on the edge of the Savannah River Plant.

The final indignity came with the election of Ronald Reagan. Already, the aging nuclear weapons production plants were being pressed by outgoing President Jimmy Carter to increase production of tritium and plutonium, and Reagan pushed the schedule up still further. Reagan’s first “Stockpile Memorandum,” the Defense Department’s schedule for warhead construction (also known as “the shopping list”), set priorities for fifteen years instead of the usual eight, and proposed building 21,000 warheads inside of a decade.

The ‘Department of Bombs’

Meeting this demand would require restarting an old mothballed reactor at Hanford and one at Savannah River. It would shift DOE’s emphasis further into bomb-making, turning it, in the words of one weapons lab physicist, into “The Department of Bombs.” “Carter restarted the engine of the nuclear weapons complex,” says Alvarez, “and Reagan put the pedal to the metal.”

With the rekindling of DOE’s nuclear fires, South Carolina found itself facing a brand new nuclear future, just as a handful of investigators were digging into what was

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appearing to be a very frightening past. Inspired by the discovery in the University of South Carolina library of a document showing that DuPont had been keeping tabs on the waste stream and the radiation exposures of workers, Alvarez filed a Freedom of Information Act request and soon found himself the owner of three shelves of bound SRP data. “It was a great collection of information. We could analyze their operations based on their actual numbers-the releases, everything-not the reports that they had prepared from the numbers.”

Once again, reality began to conflict with DuPont models. Based on the reams of raw data supplied by DOE, Alvarez and his colleagues at the Environmental Policy Institute pumped out analyses showing, among other things, that people in the area were getting radiation doses fifty times what they should have been getting according to DuPont models. They discovered that the high-level wastes in the fifty-one underground tanks contained more plutonium (about fifty bombs’ worth) than safety and common sense would suggest. They showed that a cloud of radioactivity that DOE alleges had drifted over from a Nevada test in March of 1955 was more likely the result of a serious release from the reactor area.

They discovered a leukemia rate among workers twice what it should have been. They pointed out that if the U.S. Geological Survey was correct, and there was a decent, if slim, chance that the Charleston Earthquake of 1886 could repeat itself in Barnwell County, then a rupture of the high-level waste tanks was likely. In that event, more than a billion curies of long-lived radio-isotopes would be released in the southeastern United States, making the fifty million-curie Chernobyl accident look like spilled milk.

Whistleblowers’ Revelations

Alvarez’s revelations joined the criticisms of other courageous whistle-blowers. After years of trying to encourage reform on the inside, Arthur Dexter, a DuPont physicist, went public in 1985 with a report on a leak from a building called the canyon, where the reprocessing of spent fuel takes place. He became the leading critic of the reactors’ so-called “containment system.” Unlike commercial reactors, the military reactors have no concrete dome to keep in radioactive contamination in case of an accident. Instead, they rely on filters and carbon sponges, a system that Dexter considers far from adequate. “An explosion would destroy the air filters, and some water could render those charcoal beds worthless,” says Dexter, “And then you’d have radioactive iodine and other poisons pouring out of the building.”

Engineer Fred Christensen came forward to recount the story about the time the reactor almost blew up about the frantic control room engineer who barked out, “close the rotor valves” to stem a cooling water leak on the reactor floor. Had he not been countermanded by a senior manager, says Christensen, “the reactor would have gone off in a big whoof.” Christensen’s personal reactor safety plan, he confessed, involved using a pair of wire cutters he kept in his desk drawer to cut a beeline through SRP’s fences-upwind from the meltdown.

But it was Washington’s imperious push to open the L-reactor that finally broke the nuclear spell over South Carolina. “They basically said they were going to start up the reactor,” says Michael Lowe, “but they didn’t have to do an environmental impact statement. The idea that they could reopen a thirty-year-old nuclear reactor, dump contaminants into the ground, heat up Steel Creek with cooling water to 150 degrees and add to the already enormous pile of sizzling radioactive wastes and say that there is no significant environmental impact-it’s unbelievable.”

“What they were really saying is, ‘Look, don’t bother us with your rules and regulations. We’ve got bombs to build.’ And anyone who tried to stop them was ‘working against the national interest.’ well, people down here just don’t like to be pushed around that way.”

Frances Close Hart, a member of one of the state’s most prominent families, was one of those people. A Palmetto Alliance volunteer for a short time, she had just started her own group, the Energy Research Foundation, to pursue legal challenges to the bomb plant. Joining with the Natural Resources Defense Council, ERF sued the Department of Energy for refusing to do an environmental impact statement. Soon they were joined by several regional environmental groups such as Georgia’s Coastal Citizens For a Clean Environment and, halfway through the proceedings, by the state of South Carolina.

Two years later, they had won the lawsuit and significantly delayed the L-reactor start-up. But they had also changed the tenor of South Carolina’s plutonium politics. The damage to DOE and DuPont was far greater than the the two years in lost time and money. The state government had joined Frances Close Hart and a national environmental group in suing DuPont and the Department of Energy. Opposition to DuPont and the SRP had become acceptable, even respectable. “Here was one Southern state and a handful of Southern activists having a tangible effect on the arms race,” marveled Bob Alvarez. South Carolina, “the most pro-nuclear state in the country,” had grown up. Or, as one South Carolina activist with a sense of history put it, “We returned to our roots.”

After Chernobyl, it was no longer just a dozen other activists against the Savannah River Plant. Suddenly, everyone was peering into the Department of Energy’s military reactors to see whether the disaster upstream of Kiev could happen upstream of Savannah, or on the banks of the Columbia in Washington.

A Crescendo of Self-Examination

The flurry of self-examination reached a crescendo in 1987. The year opened with the revelation that the SRP reactors had been running at a power level beyond the capabilities of the cooling system, and the levels were reduced by a quarter. In January, a panel of experts convened by the Department of Energy recommended that Hanford’s N-reactor be closed for repairs; in an unusual dissenting opinion, two of the panel’s members, including the chairman, called for it to be closed down forever. A year later, it would be.

In March 1987, it was decided that the SRP reactors were still cranked up too high, and power was cut by half. Six months later, a memo from a House Subcommittee revealed that DuPont personnel had shut down sprinkler systems in the tritium facility because they were more worried about

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computers getting wet than the building burning down. And in October, the long-awaited National Academy of Sciences report on the Savannah River Plant came out. The National Academy of Sciences is the government’s reality check. It has been called in to look at the nuclear industry several times over the years, but never before has it turned in such a scathing report.

The 67-page critique called the oversight of DOE “ingrown and largely outside the scrutiny of the public.” All the reactors at Savannah River Plant are subject to corrosion, cracks and “other symptoms of acute aging.” Confirming Arthur Dexter’s criticisms, the report condemned the filter “containment system” as unlikely to withstand the hydrogen explosion associated with an accident. Some sort of rigorous oversight is required, concluded the National Academy of Sciences, to bring the Department of Energy and its contractors under control.

The Academy’s report was released the morning of Oct. 29,1987. Three hours later, DuPont announced that when its contract ran out at the end of 1989, it would leave.

On the first of March, a Tuesday morning, I drove through the Savannah River Plant on the state highway. At the entrance a guard checked the time, counted the number of people in the car and wrote the information on a card. I handed this card to another guard who looked me over when I came out, twenty miles down the road at the other side of the plant.

‘Security Means Jobs’

The scenery is pretty, mostly pine trees and the occasional soupy South Carolina marsh, broken by dozens of billboards that exhort the SRP employees: “Security Means Jobs,” “Security is Your Business,” and one curious admonition to “Play Safely.” Around lunchtime, over the radio, a broadcaster announced that a release of radioactive tritium had occurred at the plant at 6:18 that morning. It amounted to approximately 20,000 curies, the result of an equipment malfunction. At no time was there any danger to the public, the reporter quoted a DuPont manager as saying; the exposure at the plant boundary would be far less than an average chest X-ray.

It was difficult to feel reassured. I remembered Bill Lawless talking about how they pulled numbers out of the air. I wondered if the “exposure at the plant boundary” was calculated from one of the many computer-generated models DuPont had devised, based on the way they would like things to be. Obviously, tritium gas didn’t fan out in perfect concentric circles from the point of release. Didn’t the direction of the prevailing winds make a difference? The reassurance came so quickly from DuPont it had the mark of an oft-used and unthinking reflex, like arms raised to ward off a blow. [See news briefs; page 7.]

Arthur Dexter says these plants are too dangerous for humans to run. “You have to be perfect to do what they do there,” he said, “and nobody’s perfect. Eventually something will go wrong.” DuPont wanted to be perfect, so much so that it put an elaborate false front on the messy business of making bombs in South Carolina and painted a picture of a gleaming technological wonderland where nothing went wrong, where the only news allowed was good news. Such illusions, they found, become brittle with age.

Compared to the half-life of some of the nuclear particles in its soil, South Carolina’s infatuation with the atom was vanishingly brief. Like a giant sponge, the sandy soil will hold the millions of gallons of contaminated water from SRP indefinitely. To clean up the mess here, and the mess at Hanford, could cost $100 billion, or about a dollar for every three dollars spent on the nuclear arms race since 1943. The thirty-five million gallons of high-level waste are to be turned into glass and stored permanently, a dangerous and decades-long process. And many people are convinced that what we have learned about SRP’s dangerous legacy in the last eight years is only a small part of the story.

But the Defense Department is poised to begin again, evoking national security to support its demands for a new set of multi-billion plutonium and tritium production complexes. South Carolina is at the top of the list, but I doubt it will be so accommodating this time. Many people here are wondering whether the definition of national security shouldn’t include the preservation of the state’s environment and the health and safety of its citizens. “South Carolina responded to the call from Washington, and for a while, we forgot to take care of ourselves,” says Michael Lowe. “Now, I don’t know if we’ll ever think about our country’s security in the same way again. It’s taken on anew meaning down here. It’s a lot closer to home now.”

David Albright, a physicist with the Federation of American Scientists, has devoted years of poring over documents, radiation release reports and budget requests to answer two questions: how much plutonium and tritium do the United States and Soviet Union have, and how much do they need?

The questions are important ones, because although the U.S. plutonium and tritium production reactors are dangerously dilapidated, the Pentagon insists on running them. At

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the same time the military is also demanding up to $10 billion to construct a new production reactor.

The most annoying aspect of the problem is that the U.S. government refuses to outline its needs. In fact, it has lied. “In the past, the DOE has dramatically overprojected its needs for plutonium production for new warheads,” says Albright, “and the amount we have is barely a secret. Certainly the Soviets are familiar with it.”

When DOE Secretary John Herrington admitted last February that the U.S. is “awash with plutonium,” contradicting years of pleas for more production, he did not reinforce DOE’s reputation for honesty. “If we can’t believe the Department of Energy’s statements about plutonium,” says Greenpeace nuclear campaigner Jim Beard, “how can we believe it when they say we need a new production reactor?”

More Plutonium Production Not Needed

Albright and his colleagues have come up with a number of for the U.S. stockpile of plutonium-about 10,000 kilograms-and he thinks the Soviet Union has about the same. Since plutonium can be recycled from old weapons and essentially last forever, most analysts agree that more production is not needed.

Last November, a coalition* of experts and groups, including former CIA head William Colby, SALT I negotiator Gerard Smith, former Arms Control and Disarmament Agency head Paul Warnke, and MIT President Emeritus Jerome Wiesner, circulated the “Plutonium Challenge,” calling for a two-year ban on plutonium production. According to Frank von Hippel of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Yevgeny Velikhov, head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and top Gorbachev adviser, favors the idea.

Tritium represents another problem. Used since the mid- fifties to boost the explosive power of nuclear warheads, tritium decays-its half-life is about twelve years. Tritium’s short lifespan means that, without a steady resupply of the material, most nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal will eventually stop working. Tritium’s lifespan also creates a problem for the arms control community. Many environmental and arms control groups, while loath to support the construction of a new production reactor, find it hard to oppose a steady tritium supply in the face of arguments for “maintaining deterrence.” As Albright says, “tritium erodes political alliances.”

But for some the question is not hard to answer. “I say we shut the facilities down. They are just too dangerous,” says physicist Arthur Dexter, who for three decades worked for the Department of Energy at the Argonne Laboratory and then at the Savannah River Plant. Damon Moglen, director of Greenpeace’s nuclear campaigns, agrees: “Ensuring environmental health and safety requires that plutonium and tritium production stop. If this means the Soviet Union and the United States have to start thinking seriously about disarmament, then so be it.”

The Federation of American Scientists, Greenpeace, the Environmental Policy Institute, the Energy Research Foundation, Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Andre Carothers is editor of Greenpeace Magazine.

Hispanics Struggle for Parity in Texas

By Elaine Davenport

Vol. 10, No. 4, 1988, pp. 11-13

By the year 2010, Hispanics will be a majority of the population in Texas and will be more numerous than any other ethnic group, whites included, in California.

In sheer numbers and in buying power, Hispanics have growing clout. In America as a whole, the Hispanic market is now estimated at nineteen million and is expected to reach fifty-five million within thirty years. And in politics, both Democrats and Republicans count Hispanics as a potential “swing” vote in Texas, California, Florida, New York, New Jersey and Illinois in the November elections.

Yet Hispanics still suffer from discrimination in education, jobs and housing, and are currently launching widespread struggles for equality, much as blacks did in the 1950s and 1960s.

The struggle is especially evident in south Texas, where Hispanics are seeking a federal court order to make more state money available for higher education. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund claims deliberate neglect exists when just 3 per cent of the state’s higher education budget serves 9 per cent of the population.

Texas’s important universities are all located north of an east-west line running through San Antonio. South of that line are just two little-known four-year universities-where faculty salaries start at about $16,000 a year-and a long list of NO’s: No accredited medical schools, no accredited law schools, no accredited health science schools, and no doctoral program except in bilingual education. By contrast, cities such as Dallas and Houston are overrun with degree programs.

Equally grim statistics exist in other social categories in south Texas: Jobs-for the past two decades, counties in south Texas have led the nation in unemployment. Poverty-federal statistics put residents of south Texas among

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the poorest of the poor in the U.S., worse off than residents of Appalachia. Housing-researchers say more than 30 percent of the region’s housing is substandard, citing the so-called “colonias,” the make-shift slums that have sprouted along the Mexican-American border.

For now, higher education is where Hispanics are demanding equality. Dr. Juliet Garcia, president of Texas Southmost College in Brownsville, says the formula for dividing the annual $4.5 billion state expense for higher education has shortchanged south Texas.

Sidebar: Equal Opportunity Discrimination

“Everyone who lives in south Texas is being discriminated against without regard to ethnicity, or economic status, because we simply don’t have the diversity of programs available in other parts of the state,” says Garcia.

Students know there is bias: “A lot of people are forced into going to a vocational school because they don’t have the money to go somewhere else. They just settle for that and the cycle continues,” says Martha Luna, a senior at Pan American University in Edinburg. Ms. Luna will put off going north to medical school because neither she nor her family can afford both school fees and away-from-home living expenses.

Anyone with a high school diploma or the equivalent can apply to Pan American, and many rely on the university’s Learning Assistance Center for remedial help in reading, math and composition. Half of last year’s nearly 10,000 students used the Center. Of those, 34 per cent were from homes with less than $9,000 annual income; 82 per cent were first-generation college students, whose parents had attended an average of 8.1 years of school; and 46 per cent said English was their second language.

“That tells you our job is a tremendous one,” says Dr. Sylvia Lujan, director of the Center.

The lawsuit filed last December is part of a two-pronged attack on the decades-old problem. During its last session, the Texas State Senate passed a resolution asking the state’s two most prominent universities-the University of Texas and Texas AM University-to investigate ways of improving education for their poorer cousins to the south. Discussions between officials from north and south have ranged from bringing Texas AI University in Kingsville and Pan American into the state-wide systems of UT and Texas AM, and collaboration on improved programs for the south Texas colleges, including Laredo State University and Corpus Christi State University.

None of this sounds very promising to some Hispanic leaders, who have heard most of it before and now are trying to get something concrete done. In May, a joint legislative committee set up because of the Senate resolution heard testimony from Kenneth Ashworth, State Commissioner of Higher Education. He said that he would take steps to get the next state legislature to appropriate money for new programs at south Texas colleges.

State Senator Carlos Truan, who co-chairs the committee, made a blistering plea for action now: “In my 20th year in the legislature, I’m serving notice that we’re not going to take it any more and we want specific answers to the problems of south Texas. So far we get less than half the per capita funding for higher education in south Texas. We don’t have any professional schools. We have only one doctoral program and that being fourteen years ago, and we are demanding equity from you, the Commissioner of Higher Education, and the board you represent. We want to be fairly and equitably treated in the distribution of money, facilities and programs.”

It is no coincidence that the squeeze is on at a time when national politics is close to the top of everyone’s agenda. The Democratic presidential candidates held one of their debates in south Texas, in what is considered an important Democratic voter stronghold. And in June Democratic frontrunner Michael Dukakis stopped in San Antonio for the funeral of Willie Velasquez, 44, the man credited with igniting an explosion of Hispanic political power over the last fifteen years.

Velasquez, who died of cancer, was head of the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project, based in San Antonio. Much as Martin Luther King Jr. strove to put blacks on the political map in the 1960s, Velasquez began in

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the early 1970s, through sheer hustle and organizational abilities, to get Hispanics registered to vote. Over the past decade, the number of Hispanic voters in Texas has more than doubled, and Velasquez’s work in California has borne similar fruit.

Sidebar: A Critical Core of Lawmakers

Slowly, more Hispanics have been elected to office. The twenty-five Hispanics now in the Texas House and Senate make up about 15 percent of the 181 total members, whereas twenty years ago there was a bare handful. And of Texas’s twenty-seven members of the U.S. House of Representatives, four are Hispanic.

“Hispanic members of the Legislature now form a critical core of lawmakers who are forcing the state’s two premier universities to include south Texas in their plans for the future,” writes Jesse Trevino, a columnist for the Austin American-Statesman newspaper. “The votes Velasquez has harnessed have been the key to the turnaround in the academic and economic fortunes of this area of Texas.”

Nationally, more than four million voters are considered Hispanic, a generic category for persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and other Latin origin. That is still less than 5 per cent of all American voters, but their potential influence is great because they are concentrated in six states.

Sheer numbers are making Hispanics more visible and powerful, but there is also growing fear and suspicion of them. “Anglos are more scared of Hispanics now than they were of blacks in the fifties and sixties,” says columnist Trevino. “We’ve got a different culture, religion, and we’re slow to assimilate-to become American,” says Trevino. “There’s never been so large a population that’s bilingual and has a bond with a potential enemy-Mexico.”

In a recent column, Trevino wrote about the problem of Anglo backlash. A press release from Baylor, the large Baptist university in Waco, announced that Texas could be facing a situation similar to what South Africa is going through if projected population estimates hold.

“There are rising tensions among Hispanics, many of who believe they have not been treated fairly and will continue to be treated unfairly,” the press release continued. “Much of the state’s new population in the next ten to twenty years will not speak English but Spanish….The day is quickly coming when the Anglo Texan, the native Texan, will himself be a minority.”

Sidebar: A Fear of Two Texases

Alarmed, Trevino called the professor who had been quoted, and learned that the statements had been mangled by an energetic writer from the university’s information office. “I stopped worrying about it,” wrote Trevino. “But driving home that day, it occurred to me that someone did write it, and that someone believes that kind of future awaits Texas….The fear, of course, is that the state is on its way to becoming two separate Texases.”

“The old ethnic bugaboo refused to die,” says Trevino. “The fear is that now we have the numbers, something could set us off end we’d do un-American things.”

The numbers, as it happens, are elusive whether non-citizens as well as citizens are included. “This is a new distinction,” says Trevino, “and reflects what people fear most about us-our sheer growth in number. If you count non-citizens, Texas will gain representation in the U.S. Congress and get more federal money. Yet there is a reluctance to recognize reality.”

Other evidence of fear and loathing among the Anglo population includes a negative reaction to funding for bilingual education and an overwhelming vote in favor of a non-binding measure on the Republican primary ballot in March to declare English as the state’s official language.

Just at a time when Hispanics could use strong direction, one of the most important leaders, Willie Velasquez, has died prematurely. And Henry Cisneros, the mayor of San Antonio and widely considered the most important and visible Hispanic in the country, has put his political prospects on hold due to personal reasons which include the birth of a son with a congenital heart defect.

Cisneros was considered a strong contender for the 1990 governor’s race until he ruled himself out. And with that exit went much of the visibility of the Hispanic plight. Cisneros was a constant reminder that there is a tide of Hispanics who are good for the country and who spend money but who also need a good education, jobs and decent housing. Cisneros’s Harvard education and matinee-idol good looks made him and thus fellow Hispanics more acceptable and less of a threat to Anglos than they might otherwise have been.

“The Hispanic issue is still largely invisible,” says Trevino. “That just sets us up for a misunderstanding on where we should go as a state. With half our kids dropping out of school, what will the state have to look forward to when we’re in the majority? There’s going to be, and already is, a lot of anger on all sides.”

That same thought is uppermost in the mind of Reynaldo Garcia, who became the first Hispanic to serve as a federal judge when appointed in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy. “Education is the only thing to get the people out of the cycle of poverty, but if it isn’t close to home, they won’t have it,” he says. “If we’re going to be in the majority, you’d better educate us.”

Elaine Davenport is a reporter and producer who divides her time between Austin, Texas, and London, England

Robeson County’s ‘Third World Ills’

By Mab Segrest

Vol. 10, No. 4, 1988, pp. 14-16

Julian Pierce, a Lumbee Indian candidate for superior court judge in Robeson County, North Carolina, went to his door in the early morning hours of March 26, apparently responding to noise. A waiting assailant shot Pierce as he approached the door–first in the chest, then in the side as he fell, and finally in the back of the head. Pierce lay dead on his kitchen floor, the latest in the body count of this county which has, in the words of one local organizer, “Third World ills.” These include a potent combination of drugs, government corruption and racism.

Pierce’s death brought his home county into the national spotlight for the second time this winter. In early February Eddie Hatcher and Timothy Jacobs, two Tuscarora men, walked into the offices of the Robesonian, the newspaper in the county seat of Lumberton, and took nineteen people hostage, demanding an investigation of drugs, corruption and the county’s unsolved murders. They surrendered ten hours later–amid much sympathy not only from local residents, but even from some of their hostages–after Governor James Martin agreed to form a special task force to investigate their complaints. “Their requests were very reasonable,” said Martin.

Hatcher and Jacobs are to be tried in August or September on federal hostage-taking and illegal weapons charges. Their lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Christic Institute South plan to put the county on trial as well, with a “necessity defense” that the two acted in imminent danger of their lives after having exhausted legal remedies.

Robeson County is distinctly tri-racial, with 40 percent white, 35 percent Native American and 25 percent black citizens. One-fourth live below the poverty level, the unemployment rate is consistently one of the highest in the state, and the per-capita income is one of the lowest. Fifty-five percent of adults over twenty-five have not completed high school. Whites remain in most positions of power because the county’s minority residents have historically remained divided.

Poverty, Drugs and Violence

Not only poverty, but drugs and violence plague the county, which is on Interstate 95 about midway between New York and Miami. According to Assistant U.S. Attorney William Webb, four or five major drug organizations operate in the county. U.S. Attorney Sam Currin said that last year he got weekly calls from Robeson citizens that “drugs are being bought and sold openly on the streets.” Currin said that “cocaine people are just flooding the market” and that drug dealers believe they can operate at will, with local law enforcement incapable of stopping them. “Incapable–or bought off,” say many local residents.

The violence plaguing Robeson County is the South’s familiar violence bred by racism and poverty, and also a fearful new violence spawned by the drug trade. Since 1975 there have been eighteen unsolved murders, including execution-style killings said to be drug related. For example, on Oct. 9, 1985, three Lumbee men died when their vehicle was sprayed with bullets and crashed into an embankment. Other victims have been shot in the head and their bodies dumped on the interstate, in their backyards or in the Lumber River. Since the hostage-taking, according to a report on WRAL-TV in Raleigh, there have been fourteen more killings in the county.

Other deaths have raised the specter of racial violence. On Oct. 31, 1985, Joyce Sinclair, a black woman who had just been promoted to a supervisory position at a textile mill, was kidnaped from her home by a “white man wearing v site,” (said her daughter) and found raped and brutally murdered. Her murder is unsolved. Other black families have lost loved ones–for example, Halbert Patterson, a black resident of Maxton, who was shot down in the street by a white merchant because, according to the merchant,

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Patterson had closed a car hood on his head. In January of 1988, Billy McKellar, a young black man, died of bronchial asthma in the Robeson County jail where, his family feels, he was denied his asthma medication. The McKellar case was one of the issues raised by Hatcher and Jacobs during their ten-hour siege. Commented John McKellar, Billy’s father: “When I heard about the hostage taking, it seemed like a weight lifted off me. Maybe this will help some of what’s going on in Robeson County. The people in Robeson County are the ones being held hostage by Robeson County law officials. Eddie and Tim are the only two people who stood up to be free.”

Killing Ignited Citizens

The killing that most ignited local citizens, however, was the November 1986 shooting of Jimmy Earl Cummings, an unarmed Lumbee man, by Kevin Stone, county narcotics agent and son of Robeson County Sheriff Hubert Stone, on what should have been a routine drug search. Two weeks after the shooting, a hastily called inquest cleared Kevin Stone of any wrongdoing in Cummings death. The Cummings family was notified of the inquest only hours before and was not able to obtain legal counsel. District Attorney Joe Freeman Britt, in a highly unusual move, was present to question witnesses. He did not call Stone to testify, although other law enforcement officials presented conflicting accounts of the death. The coroner’s jury came back with a highly unusual verdict: “either an accident or self-defense.”

Kevin Stone was one of two deputies with keys to a locker from which $50,000 in stolen drugs and evidence in fifty drug cases had been illegally removed in August 1986. Members of Cumming’s family told state media that Jimmy Earl said he was buying drugs from the locker cache. In December 1986, Mitchell Stevens, a former sheriff’s deputy, and two other men were indicted for the locker theft. At their trial a State Bureau of Investigation agent testified that he had information suggesting another deputy might have helped in obtaining the cocaine stolen from the locker, and named Kevin Stone as one of two officers he suspected.

Cummings’s death, the possible whitewash from the legal establishment, and growing suggestions of law enforcement complicity ignited county residents. Soon up to 800 people–Native American, black and white–were attending mass meetings, They came together in a coalition, Concerned Citizens for Better Government, and began to rally the three races around a variety of concerns. These ranged from protests against violence and corruption to support for the merger of the county’s five school systems into one system that would more equitably educate the county’s minority children. On Easter Monday 1987, a march sponsored by the coalition brought 1,500 of the county’s residents into the streets in an unprecedented show of unity and opposition to what they perceived as a morally bankrupt power structure.

On Super Tuesday this year, the coalition brought people together in the ballot box as well, and blacks and Native Americans together voted for school merger, signaling a historic shift of power. Julian Pierce’s campaign for the position of Superior Court judge against District Attorney Joe Freeman Britt–by then regarded as a hated symbol of the white establishment–took on added energy, and supporters predicted Pierce’s victory.

Then Pierce was murdered. The law enforcement officer leading the investigation was Sheriff Hubert Stone (accompanied by state and federal agents), and the DA in charge

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of the prosecution was Pierce’s rival, Joe Freeman Britt. Within four days, Stone announced that the case was solved–and that the main suspect was dead of “apparent suicide.” Pierce had been killed by two Indians over a “domestic dispute,” he said.

According to Stone, John Anderson Goins, 24, was the boyfriend of Pierce’s fiancee’s daughter, and the young Lumbee had killed Pierce because he and her mother had sworn out a warrant on Goins to keep him away from the girl. Stone charged Sandy Chavis, whom he described as Goin’s companion, with Pierce’s murder, although Chavis denied participating in the killing, saying that he had driven Goins to Pierce’s house without knowing his friend intended to kill Pierce. A deputy and an SBI agent found Goins dead in a closet in his father’s unoccupied home after law enforcement had pursued him, the sheriff said.

Accusations of a Coverup

“My first reaction is that it’s a cover-up–or that they picked a scapegoat,” said Dail Chavis, one of Pierce’s sisters.” [sic] Julian Pierce wanted to clean things up,” a young black man who refused to give his name told a reporter. “So now Pierce is shot dead, and the sheriff right away says these two guys did it, and one of the guys just happens to kill himself. What would you think about that, if you was me?”

Governor Martin, responding to citizen demands, apparently pressured Britt into requesting a special prosecutor from the attorney general’s office. Maneuvering also occurred between Martin and the legislature. Part of Martin’s compromise in the wake of the hostage-taking was that Martin would ask the legislature to add a second judgeship for the county and that he would appoint a Native American to that position (rather than postponing the election to find someone to run against Britt as Pierce’s supporters originally requested). According to press coverage of the dealing between Martin and the legislature, the governor did push the legislature to create the second judgeship, but the legislature then declared that Britt would be senior judge, thus getting power to appoint magistrates and set the court calendar. The legislature also demanded a guarantee that the district attorney appointed to fill Britt’s unexpired term would be white. The legislature agreed, however, to the appointment of a black public defender, for which the coalition of Concerned Citizens and the Rural Advancement Fund had been steadily working in the county for some time. When all was said and done, however, the positions of real authority remained in the hands of Britt and the local white establishment.

The Hatcher-Jacobs trial will show evidence of drug trafficking and “how things happen when a system is controlled by drug cartels,” said Bob Warren, attorney for Christic Institute South. “The murder of Julian Pierce is a major example of what happens in such a system.” Warren says that the lawyers hope by the trial date to have the Pierce murder solved. “Our evidence now points to an assassination, not to a domestic dispute,” Warren commented.

On April 20, five blocks from the courthouse in downtown Lumberton, a bullet shattered the windshield of the car Bob Warren was driving. A later call explained it had been a warning shot. Warren says that he has heard from four different sources that there is a contract on his life.

The media are filled with stories of constant violence, corruption and drug-related problems in such countries as El Salvador, Colombia, and Panama. Yet we in the South do not have to look that far for examples of failed democracy. Robeson County lies halfway between New York and Miami; but what its people are suffering may be going on now or soon in other communities across the South.

Mab Segrest is director of North Carolinians Against Racial and Religious Violence. Her article is adapted from a copyrighted article in Christian Century, and appears here with permission.

A Letter from Lillian Smith

Edited by Rose Gladney

Vol. 10, No. 4, 1988, pp. 17, 19

Lillian Smith’s friendship with Carson McCullers and her husband Reeves may be dated to the late 1940s. After the Broad way production of Strange Fruit closed in 1946, Lillian kept an apartment in Brooklyn Heights, dividing her time between New York and Clayton, Georgia, and maintained a number of friendships in New York’s literary circles until the spring of 1953 when she discovered she had breast cancer and returned permanently to her mountain home. Still recuperating from a radical mastectomy, she had just completed her second work of nonfiction, The Journey, when Carson came to visit her November 17, 1953. Having recently left Reeves in Paris because of his alcoholism, Carson was working on an article about Georgia for Holiday magazine. Her visit with Lillian ended tragically only hours after it had begun when Carson’s sister called to say that Reeves had killed himself.

The following letter differs in tone from some of the more public letters selected for this series of Lillian Smith’s correspondence. Yet, it is equally important to our understanding of Smith’s life and work. Her attention to physical detail and personal feeling reveals what is most powerful about her writing. Furthermore, Smith makes the mundane occasion of writing a thank-you note the opportunity to express not only solace for a friend’s grief but also profound wisdom for living.

Her advice to Carson about heeding her inner knowledge concerning the reality of her relationship with Reeves, letting go what had ended in order to create something new, reflects the spirit and style of The Journey. Because of her fight with cancer, from 1953 until 1966 Lillian Smith would write very consciously under a death sentence. At her best, she would do so by using her past to speak and write about the future–the future of the South, of the world, of humanity itself.

Undated {January 1954)

A new year has begun. I hope it will be good, very good for you.

Dear Carson:

It is cold and bright like glass, today. Winds have stripped the trees clean and pale winy smoke color is drifting down on the mountain.

The kind of day when my tongue says “beautiful” and my heart mourns. Always those winds blow harder on my memory than on the mountain and I am driven back to an empty house and empty rooms that greedily spread over my whole life, sometimes; refusing to budge. Just taking over as if they have a right to stay. What happened on windy days long ago, I have no faint idea; but when such a day comes, I have to go back, like a ghost, to my childhood and wander it. Without map; without destination.

So, I write you from Clayton but really from a lonely corner somewhere in the past, to say hello and thank yow and wish you well. It would be nice to talk. I have never talked to you. Always we begin and there are–interruptions. Small ones, most of them; and the one big one which I pray you have somehow made your peace with. A hard six weeks you have had. I know this. I know there have been terrors and regrets, and sudden revelations, and grief, and a sadness that has no name. Always, if we could name the sadness, if we could find the word, we feel the sadness would lift. It is like stumbling across an old grave stone with no name and no date. Sorrow is like that. One cannot name it. If one only could…name it and find a little date in time for it. Then we could drop a small flower, a tear, and compose our life around it.

All of this you have felt, I know. And more. And I have been glad that you were compelled to work hard; to write “about Georgia”; to meet a deadline; to “make a little money.” It is harsh and right, this having to do the practical things when the deep breaks come. It glues us together; it drives us and pinches us back into some kind of shape. And while we are hardening ourselves, finding order in the chaos, we are at the same time growing within us new possibilities for life.

But it has been very hard. And I know this. I have thought of you, often. Paula has. We have talked about it with a profound dense of the pity of it, the sadness but, also, knowing a time comes when a relationship has ended. Death did not end it. You told me that, before you knew. It had ended before Reeves’ death. You felt this; saw it with a clarity; felt it in the honest regions of your self; and I hope that you have not forgotten. For no circumstance, even so hard a one as the event that occurred, can break what was already broken. To forgive another and one’s self; to accept all in another that one can and hold on to that. I feel you have done this; will do it; will cherish the bright moments; the gay, absurd, ridiculous and warm days; the tragic, too; and out of it all you will weave a new pattern, something real and Reeves will be a pert of your words; and all this will hold that common past close and make you glad of those years. I feel that you are wise enough to be grateful for those years; and not to regret them.

The flowers were lovely. And there is a funny quirk to it which will amuse you, I hope. The florist called from Toccoa, misery loading down her voice. She had an order from New York for an old fashioned bouquet for me. But she did not really have the right flowers for an old fashioned bouquet, she said. And how on earth could she get an old fashioned bouquet to me in Clayton! Could I perhaps come over for it? The voice was troubled. Was I going to wear it Christmas day? No, I said. There was no special occasion. Then, she sighed in relief, would it be all right to send me simply cut flowers? Yes, I assured her. But how could she get them to Clayton? She thought over long distance, too miserable to count her dimes. Finally she said while I held the silent phone, Oh yes; the paper truck came through Toccoa and went from there to Clayton. She’d just put those flowers on

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the paper truck and he would leave them at the drugstore. Would that do? Yes, of course, I assured her. So the flowers came bouncing in on the paper truck Saturday; the drugstore call e d to say “Miss Lil, we have some flowers for you;” Paula went to town for them and that night beautiful red carnations and blue irises were all over my dining room and looked very gay and very Christmasy too. Thank you for thinking of me in such a very nice way.

Please give my love to your dear mother, to that very nice sister Rita, and my warm affectionate wishes for the New Year.

My love, dear, Lillian

NOTE: This letter was copied from the original in the Carson McCullers collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

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

An Alabama Potter Stays with Tradition

By Darryl Gates

Vol. 10, No. 4, 1988, pp. 18-19

Jerry Brown has the thick, strong arms of a lumberjack. His large hands, broad shoulders and barrel chest complete the image. But it’s Brown’s gentle, slightly impish smile you notice first. This is a man, you think, who truly likes what he does.

Brown is a ninth-generation potter, perhaps the most traditional of the half-dozen or so traditional potters left in the United States, according to folklorists. He has devoted his life to digging north Alabama clay from a hardwood forest and turning it into churns, jugs and jars that were once a necessity in every rural kitchen. Brown’s pottery may no longer be needed in country kitchens, yet each piece now documents a cultural past.

“Jerry is pretty much traditional in every sense–from digging his own clay, to a mule-driven pug mill, to a wood-filled modified groundhog kiln,” says Henry Willett, regional representative for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Gradually, Brown’s old-fashioned practice of his craft have made him well-known. In 1984, he was one of a handful of traditional potters invited to show his skill et the Smithsonian’s annual summer folklife demonstrations. He and his work have been featured in books on Southern pottery and a documentary film is in progress.

Despite his growing fame, Brown lives a simple life. If his pottery shop resembles a hay barn, it’s because it was one; if his arms resemble those of a logger, it’s because he cut sawmill timber for twenty years.

As a child, Brown and his brother watched their father, Horace V. “Jug” Brown, turn out preserving jars and butter churns by the hundreds. “My brother and I were making small pieces back before we started first grade,” he recalls.

When Brown was twenty-two, his father retired from making pottery and turned the business over to his two sons. Then tragedy struck twice. Brown’s brother was killed in an automobile accident. Soon after that, the family’s pottery equipment was stolen. Brown gave up pottery for two decades.

But the logging business is seasonal and during the wet winter months, Brown and his family suffered financially. One rainy night he told his wife he was going to make a pottery shop out of the old hay barn. He sold the hay and bought an electric kiln; his cousin made him a foot-powered pottery wheel. Two weeks after selling his hay, Brown fired his first pot, but he admits it took him about six months “to get the feel.”

That was nearly seven years ago. Today his pottery shop in the Marion County foothills of northwest Alabama hasn’t changed much–it still looks like a hay barn with a wide brick chimney at one end. Nor have his tools changed much: an old sponge, a smaller sponge on a stick, a table fork, a paint brush and a metal “rib” used to smooth and shape the soft clay.

The electric kiln is gone, however. Brown couldn’t get the results he wanted so he built a wood-fired “modified groundhog kiln.” Old-timers built their groundhog kilns into the side of a hill for added insulation. Brown made his own hill from more than a thousand pounds of clay, now melted into a granite-hard dome.

He combines oak slabs and smaller pieces of dry pine in the kiln to produce temperatures up to 3,000 degrees. Pine resin released during the twelve to fifteen hours of firing

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puts a slicker finish on the glaze, he says.

Gone too is the foot-powered pottery wheel that forces a potter to stand on one leg and pump a foot pedal with the other. “I was glad to see those kick wheels go out of style,” Brown says with a smile. Two years ago he was able to recover the wheel his father and uncle used, the one made from a fifty-year-old automobile differential and powered by electricity.

In a typical working day, Brown makes one three-gallon churn after another. His clay-coated arms move effortlessly, pulling a perfectly formed churn from a lifeless lump of clay the color of a winter sky. When each churn is finished he picks up a worn piece of wood about the size of a tongue depresser to measure its opening, but he doesn’t need to. Each piece is exactly the same size. Perfect.

Brown’s pottery is formed from clay mined from a nearby pit, about a five-mile trip down dirt roads and a jeep trail that winds through thick woods. For a hundred years potters in the Hamilton area have been digging clay from that pit. Brown picks the clay himself and loads his pickup (during wet weather he often needs two mules to pull out the mired truck).

Back at his shop, Brown cuts up the hard lumps and dumps up to 1,500 pounds of clay into the only known mule-driven “pug” mill in the United States. The clay is mixed for a couple of hours with up to thirty gallons of water to reach a uniform consistency. Then the clay is fed into a strainer where a hydraulic piston pushes it through a screen, separating clay from small rocks and other trash. Pure clay–like strands of spaghetti–oozes out the other side. It’s now ready for Brown’s wheel.

When a lump of clay hits the wheel it looks like a lopsided cake waiting for frosting. And it’s heavy–a six-gallon churn starts out weighing thirty-two pounds. The largest Brown has made, a twelve-gallon churn, weighed sixty pounds resting on the wheel.

Brown’s strong arms literally pull the clay into shape on the rotating wheel. First, he makes the bottom round, then creates a “ball opening” by using his hands and a piece of wood to form a thick, short bowl. He closes the bowl inward, then, squeezing and pulling, raises the piece from the wheel until it looks like a squatty flower pot about eight inches high. With one arm inside pushing, he uses his knuckles of his other hand to pull the vessel another foot or so to its proper height in what’s known as a “knuckle pull.”

His next step is to take a thin piece of metal–the rib–in his right hand, place his left hand inside the vessel, and use the rib to smooth the outside. With his final pull, he gives the vessel its shape. He makes a rim for a lid and then sponges the vessel to smooth the rough spots.

About an hour after he makes a piece, Brown turns it over so it will dry without warping the rim. He makes a lid if the piece needs one, adds handles if he chooses, and dips the piece in one of his glazing solutions. Then it’s ready to be fired.

Brown dips his arms into a plastic bucket and washes off the crusted clay, then heads out to stoke his roaring kiln. Flames shoot about ten feet from the top of the kiln’s brick chimney and the sky above his shop fills with thick, black smoke.

Another reason I got back into this,” he says, “is because I didn’t want the tradition to die with me. I’m the ninth generation, you know. I’m the only one that makes and sells churns above three gallons, I reckon, in the United States. I’d like to see my family carry it on, you know.”

He has two sons in their twenties. So far they’ve shown interest in continuing the tradition, even turning out some pretty good-looking pieces Brown proudly displays in his shop.

“It’s a dying art,” he says, shaking his head. “It’a been a tradition in the South for years and years. It would be a shame to see it die out. I’m going to do my best to see it stay.”

Willett and Joey Brackner, folk arts program manager for the Alabama State Council on the Arts in Montgomery, have been working with a Kentucky film company, AppalShop, to produce a documentary on Jerry and his work. The film is expected to be ready by the fall, Brackner said, and will probably be shown on Alabama Public Television. The film excites Brown and he hopes it will help boost business.

“I’ve known all kinds of potters,” he says, abut I’ve never known one that was rich. We ain’t got a lot, but I know what we have, we came by it honestly.

Darryl Gates is the editor of AREA Magazine. Signed pieces of Jerry Brown’s pottery are available through his shop in Hamilton, Ala., (205) 921-9483.

Cameras on the Prize: Hollywood Finds the Movement

By HRW

Vol. 10, No. 4, 1988, p. 20

Maybe Philadelphia, Miss., wasn’t quite ready to host a movie fictionalizing its painful history, but elsewhere in the South, cameras have been rolling recently as the civil rights movement begins to join the peace movement and the Vietnam war on the silver screen.

The little town of LaFayett, Ala., rolled out the red dirt this summer for the filming of “Mississippi Burning,” in which Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe portray FBI agents investigating the murders of three unnamed civil rights activists, obviously based on the 1964 Philadelphia murders of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.

LaFayette allowed its streets to be covered with dirt and its storefronts, some of which had not changed anyway, to be returned to a 1960s look. Many of its citizens, black and white, lined up for roles as extras in the film. If they were uncomfortable with the subject matter, it was usually not obvious.

“Heart of Dixie,” based on a novel by Anne Rivers Siddon, is about conflicts over integration of Southern colleges and is being filmed at the University of Mississippi, where federal troops had to be called in to quell riots in 1962. “Everybody’s All-American” is being produced in Louisiana and depicts the adventures of a black man who becomes a civil rights activist in the 1950s, battles through the ’60s, and by 1980 has entered mainstream politics. Still another film, “Mississippi Summer,” directly depicts Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, though if focuses on the friendship between Schwerner and Chaney whereas “Mississippi Burning” tells the story through the eyes of the FBI agents. And Jessica Lange is set to portray-in “The Stick Wife,” based on a play by Darrah Cloud-the wife of a KKK member who took part in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

All of these Hollywood productions follow the success of the extraordinary documentary, “Eyes on the Prize,” which has been seen by millions on public television and on videocassettes. Producers say enough time has passed that people now want to re-examine the events of the 1950s and 1960s. Others say they sense a revival of the spirit of protest and rebellion.

The Avenue, Clayton City by C. Eric Lincoln. (New York: William Morrow, 1988. 288 pages. $17.95.)

By Frye Gaillard

Vol. 10, No. 4, 1988, pp. 20-22

Blind Bates began to caress the strings of his battered old guitar. This time he was playing for love. Love for a woman he had never seen, but whose love he had known not only through the meals she had fixed for him, or the shirts she had patched, but through the sharing of her time, her wisdom and her compassion.

Tears flowed from beneath the dark glasses covering his sightless eyes as he riffed the steel strings with the glass bottleneck on his little finger and launched into a song he had written in his mind for Mama Lucy. It was a sad, lonesome song.

Train done gone

Train done gone

The funeral scene stays with you for a while. The prose itself is haunting in its rhythms–as C. Eric Lincoln describes the little church, hot and crowded and overflowing with grief.

A leading black citizen has died, a matriarch of tenderness and strength, and her funeral was, as Lincoln writes, “an occasion licensed by the whole community to break down–to scream and to shout, to moan and to weep, to engage in the delirium of temporary relief from sadness, from fear, from hatred and frustration….All in the name and the presence of God.”

Lincoln is a scholar by trade, a professor of religion at Duke University, author of nineteen works of nonfiction, but never a novel until this year. Now, with the publication of The Avenue, Clayton City, he seems destined for a place in the front ranks of black writers.

The book is an alternate selection of the Literary Guild, with a large first printing of about 25,000. Paperback and movie rights are already sold, and critics are using such words as “masterpiece.”

Lincoln says he worked on the novel for more than thirty years, writing a chapter here and there and then putting it aside, and for much longer than that he has carried the stories and the characters in his head–the prototypes of life in the black rural South.

He knows the story firsthand. He was born in Alabama in 1924, coming of age in the little town of Athens, in the cotton country near the Tennessee line. He found bits and pieces of heroism there, traces of nobility during a time of segregation. But mostly what he saw–the enduring image that takes shape in his novel–was the crazy futility of life in those times, the lost and squandered dignity among his neighbors, black and white.

Lincoln was raised by his grandparents. His mother went away when he was four. She married a preacher and moved off to Pittsburgh, leaving her son in the care of Less and Mattie Lincoln.

Mattie worked for white families as a cook and a maid, and in many ways ruled her own family with a kind of ferocious generosity–quick to punish a misbehaving child,

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but ready to go to war if they were ever abused.

Less Lincoln, meanwhile, was a farmer. He did odd jobs for white people on the side, but his passion–his calling–was tilling his own field behind his wood frame house.

He was a gentle man, his grandson remembers, dignified, with iron gray hair that was tight and springy to young Eric’s touch, and the two of them were great friends. They would sit around the fire on a Sunday evening, roasting sweet potatoes on the hearth while Mattie was off at church.

For Lincoln, such memories are mingled with those of deprivation–the six-room house so cold some nights that ice formed on the floor–and also of cruelty, an ever-present possibility in time of white supremacy.

“My experiences with white people were varied,” he says. “I played with white kids and loved some of them. It was not unusual for poor whites and blacks to eat together, to hunt and fish together….Yet there was supposed to have been a hatred. I didn’t see much of that, but then, I wasn’t looking. I do remember one time that I was cheated and kicked, for the reason that I unwittingly challenged a white man.

“I was 13 or 14. My grandfather was on his deathbed, There was no food in the house, no fire in the house, no money in the house, My grandmother and I went out to the fields where the cotton had already been picked, not only our fields but those nearby, and we pulled the only bolls that were left.”

That night, he says, they picked the cotton from the bolls and the next morning, Eric put in in [sic] a wheelbarrow and took it to the gin. It was 7 a.m. when he arrived, and the owner, Mr. Beasley, was sitting on the porch.

“Whatchoo got there, boy?” he said.

“Cotton, sir.”

“Well, dump it out.”

So they put it on the scales, and the weight came to forty pounds, and young Eric made a quick calculation: At nine cents a pound, that would mean $3.60 for food, firewood and other family necessities. He was startled, therefore, when the white man casually flipped him a quarter. “Mr. Beasley,” he said, after a long hesitation, “I think you made a mistake.” Beasley’s face turned red, and he got up abruptly and bolted the door. At first, the boy merely puzzled. But then he found himself gasping, his lungs suddenly empty from a blow to the midsection, as the white man began to kick him and stomp at his head.

“He was in a frenzy,” Lincoln remembers, “and I’ll never forget his words: ‘Nigger, as long as you live, don’t you never try to count behind no white man again!'”

There are times, for Lincoln, when that story comes hard–when he tells it with such emotion that he has to stop for a moment and wipe the tears from his large, expressive eyes.

But there are other stories, too, he says–other experiences with white people of a very different kind. One man, for example, a high school principal named J.T. Wright, praised and encouraged Lincoln’s gift as a writer, and lent him $50 so he could go off to college.

“I was 14,” Lincoln remembers. “I had just graduated from high school in May of 1939, and I had an uncle in Rockford, Ill., who worked at what he called ‘an auto laundry’–a car wash, we would call it today. I was going to go there and take a job, and the principal, Mr. Wright, loaned me some money and said, ‘C. Eric, while you’re up that way, stop on by the University of Chicago.'”

Lincoln did and eventually emerged with a divinity degree. But there were some stops in between his enrollment and graduation–a couple of years in the Navy, several more at a black college in Memphis, and a singular job opportunity one summer that caused him to travel extensively across the South.

He became secretary-road manager to a Negro League baseball team, the Birmingham Black Barons. It was an outstanding collection of talent, he remembers (among its players was an Alabama teenager by the name of Willie Mays), and as Lincoln handled the team’s financial affairs, he got to know the South in a way that stayed with him.

Every town, it seemed was remarkably the same. Despite some colorful differences in detail, each had a similar cast of characters: a wise man, a fool, a chief bootlegger, a white patriarch.

They were prototypes, and they provided, for Lincoln, the images and building blocks of a novel about the South.

Not right away, however, for his major energies were soon channeled into scholarship. He taught over the next thirty years at Clark College in Atlanta and Fisk University in Nashville, at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary in New York, before finally coming to Duke in 1976. His best-known books during that time were The Black Muslims in America and The Negro Pilgrimage in America, which together sold more than a million copies.

But he also worked now and then on his novel, and last

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year sent the manuscript to his friend Alex Haley, seeking a critique. The response was encouraging.

Despite such encouragement and despite the strong prose and passion which make it easy to read, Lincoln was braced for mixed reviews.

The structure, for one thing, is unorthodox. Each of the ten chapters is a self-contained story, and, though some characters appear more than once, the chapters are connected more by theme than plot. They read almost like a collection of short stories that together produce a powerful portrait of a place.

In addition to that departure from the standard form, the novel may offend. It is as unflinching in its portrayal of blacks as it is of whites, for the people of the Avenue in Lincoln’s Clayton City are not always admirable, or even sympathetic.

There are some heroes–Mama Lucy, based loosely on Lincoln’s grandmother, or Roger McClain, a white educator who resembles the real-life principal at Lincoln’s high school. But there are also petty criminals and assorted other hustlers whose choices are self-centered and sometimes disastrous, and who only add to the debasement that white supremacy has produced.

Most of the characters, meanwhile, are somewhere in between, well-intentioned sometimes, but fundamentally bewildered, trying to survive the vagaries of the South as it was. And then there are one or two who decide to fight back, to take their own fateful stands against the order of the day.

One is Dr. Walter Pinkney Tait, an enigmatic black physician who had a profitable practice, a position of prominence among Clayton City’s blacks, and who had even grown accustomed to a certain respect among whites. Still, he hated segregation and the slow death of the spirit it inevitably produced, and he decided one day that he had had enough.

His decision took the form of a simple act of defiance, the refusal to obey the desperate order of a white man–a prominent citizen who was addicted to drugs and who wanted the black doctor to give him a shot. Tait refused, not because what was being asked would violate his principles, but because he was simply tired of the way things were, including his own life.

“If the canvas is rotten to begin with,” he thought to himself, “no matter what you paint on it, the colors will run and the texture will blister.”

Tait knew his decision, at the least, would cost him his practice and may beget him killed. But he also knew that the time had come.

All his life he had tried to walk the thin, wavering line between what it took to live in the white man’s world and what it took to hold on to some semblance of self-respect, but he had never been so bl unt with a ny white ma n be fore. Often, when his dignity was cornered, he had resorted to professional jargon to say what he would never say in plain speech, but never before had he had the temerity to look a white man–not just some poor cracker, but The Man himself–squarely in the eye and tell him precisely what he wanted him to know. It was a good feeling a liberating feeling–and he felt no fear except for the fear of not being afraid…

He sat motionless in his swivel chair and watched the evening shadows blot the dying sunlight from the room.

Frye Gaillard is an editor at the Charlotte Observer, where this article previously appeared.

The Freedom Quilting Bee

By Deborah Ellis

Vol. 10, No. 4, 1988, pp. 22-24

Both are stories of American business, but The Freedom Quilting Bee is as different from the current bestseller Trump: The Art of the Deal, as New York City is from Gees Bend, Alabama. While Trump’s book celebrates the triumph of individual success, Callahan’s story of a rural sewing cooperative emphasizes collective spirit. Success at the Freedom Quilting Bee is not in making millions, but in creating minimum-wage jobs for black women quilters. Callahan’s absorbing account, which relies primarily on extensive interviews with the quilters and outside supporters of the cooperative venture, shows how the Bee cooperative has formed and has been formed by those whose lives it has touched since it was established in 1966.

The Freedom Quilting Bee grew out of both the civil rights movement and the culture of the tiny, isolated Wilcox County, Alabama, communities of Gees Bend and Alberta. It was the civil rights movement that brought the Rev. Francis X. Walter, a white Episcopal priest and an Alabama native, down from New Jersey to head an interfaith civil rights project in west Alabama. Walter had left Alabama in 1961 after being refused work by the Bishop of Alabama because of Walter’s “interpretation of the gospel with regard to racism.” He came back to Alabama determined to help in a movement he realized was overdue and necessary.

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In December 1965, a few days after his arrival, he was lost on a country road in Wilcox County and came across three handmade quilts airing on a clothesline. He soon learned that many women in Wilcox County quilted, and that their quilts were worked in a particularly vivid and distinctive style. Walter’s wife, a painter, observed that “what distinguished Gees Bend quilts from all other American quilts I had ever seen was their bold patterns. They had self-confidence….These were extroverted quilts….They had so little influence from outside that their quilting tradition was unique to that isolated bend of the Alabama River.”

Gees Bend is an all-black rural community known for its isolation, poverty, and unique cultural history. While the town lies just across the river from Camden, the county seat, on a peninsula formed by a curve in the Alabama River, there is neither bridge nor ferry service. Consequently, it is over forty miles to Camden or Selma. This remote area was settled in 1816 by Joseph Gee, a North Carolina planter, who bought most of the Bend and named it after himself. After Gee’s death the property passed to a relative, Mark Pettway. The current inhabitants are descendants of the slaves owned by Gee and Pettway and many Gee Benders still are named Pettway. Gees Bend’s isolation has “prevented insiders from leaving, and kept outsiders from coming in,” keeping the community all-black and culturally homogenous. In 1937 a writer noted that “Gees Bend is an Alabama Africa. There is no more concentrated and racially exclusive Negro population in any rural community in the South than in Gee’s Bend.”

For the past 140 years the same group of people have cultivated the land; only the land owners changed. In Callahan’s words, some say the black inhabitants “bought the land, then bought it again, then again, and again: first as slaves, than as tenants, next as test-tube members of a co-op (part of Roosevelt’s Farm Security Administration), and finally as qualified individuals fulfilling a bargain with one more government group.”

People in Wilcox County were understandably suspicious of outsiders. Walter succeeded in getting local women to join his enterprise by offering them $10 per quilt-double what they previously earned. At first, the quilters worked in their own homes, and the quilts were sold at auctions in New York held by friends of Walter. The first sale, held in a New York photography studio on March 27, 1966, drew only forty people but they bought forty-two quilts at an average price of $27, and the Bee was on its way. Although the original idea had been to donate any profit to the Wilcox County SCLC, there was so much enthusiasm that it was decided instead to form a quilting cooperative; in March 1966 more than sixty quilters attended the first meeting of the new group. At the same time, Estelle Witherspoon, a Gees Bend woman who had heard about the “preacher going around buying quilts,” wrote Walter to volunteer her help “organizing ourselves to get these quilts sold.” The cooperative was incorporated in April 1966 with Estelle Witherspoon as president; she has led the cooperative ever since.

Those early auctions led to two important New York connections-Diana Vreeland, editor of Vogue, and the nationally prominent interior design firm of Parish Hadley. Vreeland and the Parish-Hadley firm were crucial to the financial growth of the Bee. With their backing, the Bee’s products sparked nationwide interest in quilts and patchwork, which was soon reflected in layouts in Vogue and House and Garden, and a promotion by Bloomingdale’s. The quilts struck a responsive chord partly because their bold patterns reflected the popular taste in abstract art: “The quilts had a dynamism resulting from their combination of geometry and brilliance in juxtaposition of primary colors…such opposition gave them a wonderful, almost Mondrian design.”

As the Bee’s business grew, the product naturally changed. The first quilts sold at the auction were made in designs handed down through generations, with names such as Star of Bethlehem (also “Stable Star”), Log Cabin, Climbing Vines, Stair Steps, Chestnut Bud, and Pig in a Pen. They were made from scraps of material, many of which were on a second life, having been cut from worn-out overalls, flour sacks or discarded dresses. As the Bee developed, and especially after a $20,000 order in 1968 from Bloomingdale’s, the need to standardize became apparent. In the beginning, the quilters did not even have tape measures; now, colors, fabrics, backings and patterns had to be standardized if higher levels of production were to be possible. In addition, as time went on the Bee expanded beyond quilts to make smaller items that were often profitable because they could be made by machine; for example, in 1972 the co-op entered into a long-term contract with Sears, Roebuck and Company to produce pillow shams.

In its first three years, members of the Bee sometimes gathered to work together in each others’ homes or in an old dog-trot tenant shack that had previously been Witherspoon’s home. The Bee’s acquisition of its own land and building in 1969 had both practical and symbolic significance for its status as a permanent institution. With

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the help of foundation grants and volunteer labor, the Bee built the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Sewing Center. The 4,500-square foot masonry structure stands out in the rural countryside. “To some, the ultramodern facade…conjured thoughts of a giant spaceship from another galaxy that landed accidentally on a sparse stretch of Alabama cornfield.”

The success of the Bee must be evaluated in relative terms. In Wilcox County more than 40 percent of family incomes are below the poverty level. As one observer noted, “We’re talking about Wilcox County, where if there were no quilting bee, people would not be working, period.” The Bee has met its goal of enabling workers to have a stable job where they make at least prevailing minimum wage and can receive Social Security benefits. Its achievements also include, beyond the quality of its quilted products, the fact that it is the oldest handcraft co-op still in existence that originated with the civil rights movement. And as the quilters repeatedly voice throughout the book, there are many benefits to working in a co-operative where each member has a vote in decision making, where a daycare center is part of the operation, and where pictures of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and John Kennedy hang on the wall.

In chronicling the story of the Freedom Fund Quilting Bee, Callahan tells a story that needed telling, and she tells it well. Exhaustively researched, the book goes beyond simply describing the growth of a business to document in detail the Bee’s relationship to the civil rights movement as well as its importance in reviving national interest in quilting. Callahan’s text is illustrated with many black-and-white and color photos of beautiful quilts. Her chapters at the end of the book on individual quilters are filled with extensive quotations in their own voices and are some of the strongest sections of the book. Less extensive use of quotes, however, would have benefited the earlier chapters, which are weighed down with extraneous observations of outside supporters and helpers of the Bee.

The Freedom Quilting Bee skillfully shows how the institution is itself like a quilt, an everyday object that in the hands of an artful maker transcends its utilitarian function and becomes an object of great beauty. The Freedom Quilting Bee is more than a successful small business; it is a symbol of how much can be achieved by people working together. Like a quilt, the Bee has endured.

Deborah Ellis works with the Women’s Rights Project of the ACLU, and previously was a lawyer in Alabama.