A Southerner in Nicaragua

By David E. Whisnant

Vol. 10, No. 5, 1988, pp. 1-5

David E. Whisnant, longtime commentator on Southern Appalachian culture who is perhaps best known as the author of All That Is Native and Fine (The Politics of Culture in an American Region CINC Press, 1983), returned this summer from a five-month visit to Nicaragua as a Fulbright scholar. Whisnant, a professor of English, American studies and folklore at the University of North Carolina, was interviewed in Chapel Hill in June by Southern Changes editor Allen Tullos. The topic was Whisnant’s trip and the historical study of the politics of culture in Nicaragua that is his current project. His edited comments follow.

THINK THE FIRST thing to say is that I came to Nicaragua from a different direction and with a different set of expectations than those which were characteristic of many of the internacionalistas (and there were many) whom I met there. Some of them came out of a history of political activity that goes back in their families for a generation or so. One of my acquaintances was the son of a Communist Party organizer from New York in the 1930s. There were people who had come out of SDS or other kinds of 1960s organizing. I did not. I came there with political awarenesses and interests that had developed relatively late in my life, primarily through work I was then beginning to do in the Appalachian region.

As I got to know more people from the U.S. who were in Nicaragua, I discovered some other Southerners. I had a few discussions with a couple of them about whether and to what extent their being from the South had anything to do with the way they experienced being in Nicaragua.

One reaction we turned out to share was that as Southerners we frequently had difficulty conversing with Nicaraguans. The difficulty seemed not to have much to do with the language barrier, since we all spoke Spanish. As well as I could understand it, it had to do with people’s accustomed styles of verbal interaction. For a number of

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reasons, Nicaraguans, particularly Nicaraguan men, tend to be highly verbal and domineering in conversation. Such a style and dynamic are uncongenial to me, mainly I think because in the mountains where I grew up, people talked relatively little and listened a lot. They tended to be self-effacing in conversational situations. But most of the Nicaraguan men I met weren’t.

When a Nicaraguan man begins to talk, I learned to my utter astonishment, he may talk for an hour and a half without stopping. Although he may give certain verbal cues which are (at least formally) invitations for response, it is clear that he really doesn’t expect you to respond, because no time is left for a response to occur. I found that difficult to deal with, and so did the friends I made there from the South.

Men and Women in Nicaragua

I had more serious difficulties with Nicaraguan men’s treatment of women. Having grown up in the South, I am not unfamiliar with macho behavior, and I know also that macho, though it has a Spanish name, is a virtually universal phenomenon. Nevertheless, what I witnessed in Nicaragua was frequently shocking and depressing. In conversation among a group of adult married couples, for example, men frequently would literally shush their wives when they tried to say anything. Such a gesture offended me; I had never seen anything like it. Although women in the mountains where I grew up were somewhat more taciturn than men, when they did talk they were usually listened to.

Partly to try to avoid seeing such behavior, I spent a lot of time talking with women–frequently about machismo, about the ways Nicaraguan women and men interact, and about the general situation of women there.

Margaret Randall and others have written eloquently of the central and heroic roles Nicaraguan women played in the armed struggle preceding the overthrow of Somoza, and of their continuing importance in national reconstruction. What has not so often been talked about is that machismo is still a fundamental fact of life for virtually every man and woman in Nicaragua. Indeed a number of women told me it is worse now than ever. It takes a larger variety of forms than I ever imagined before I went. I had never imagined how pervasive it was, how many aspects of life it affects or even determines, how brutal it can be and frequently is. And how ultimately dysfunctional it is for a social order that is trying to go through the transformations that Nicaragua is trying to go through.

Besides being degrading and painful to individual women, machista attitudes and behaviors (personal and institutional) block and frustrate the potential contributions that a vast number of very bright, sensitive women could make and are trying to make to the process of reconstruction. They are making contributions nevertheless, basic and crucial ones, but much less efficiently and effectively than they might, and at an unconscionably high personal cost.

What Nicaraguan women say about machismo varies depending upon who one is talking with–on how self-consciously ideological they are, on their social class and profession. One woman friend of mine–a highly transitional professional who has suffered considerably from the operation of machismo–said in essence that dealing with this and some other women’s issues has to wait because the first priority must be the solidification of the revolution. In her mind there was a hierarchical ranking between the urgent needs of “the revolution” and the urgent needs of women. My own feeling is that it is artificial to partition those two dynamics in such a way. It is also damaging, because it leaves things too much in the hands of men, who are still for the most part setting the parameters of the revolution and controlling its institutions.

If one talks to working-class women–and I spent a lot of time talking with maids, with the women who came to wash clothes and iron, with women who were working in the markets–one finds that the forms machismo takes in their lives are sometimes very brutal. Wife-beating is quite common, and there is a great deal of drinking and philandering. Women know it and know what it costs them, and have little protection against it, though some recent laws expressly forbid such behavior. In any case, working-class women seemed to me less willing than some more ideologically oriented professional women to excuse machismo, or to comprehend it within some higher critique.

If I frequently felt out of sync with Nicaraguans in conversations, and if I felt put off by machismo, I also felt that we Southerners had a real commonality of experience with them in certain other ways. We knew in the first place what it was to be in a subjugated, dominated and deprecated culture. More particularly, as a hillbilly I felt that I had some intuitive feeling of what Nicaraguan people had experienced culturally and politically vis-a-vis the U.S. And that helped me in some ways with what I went there to do.

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Culture and National Reconstruction,/hi

I went to Nicaragua to work on a book on the politics of culture there, to follow up some questions I had dealt with in All That is Native and Fine. I took as my focus for talking about the politics of culture the development of cultural policy and programs under the Sandinistas since 1979.

But one obviously cannot begin to talk simply about what has happened since 1979. So I tried to do a lot of historical work on the dynamics of cultural change in Nicaragua since the middle of the nineteenth century. As soon as one begins to look at Nicaraguan cultural history it becomes clear that one must talk about intervention.

Certainly the Spanish conquest was a massive and destructive cultural as well as economic and political intervention. Many of the most fundamental dynamics of Nicaraguan cultural and social history since the 1600s flowed from that conquest: the virtual extermination of the original population, mestizoization and catholicization, the east/west division of the country, the Liberal (Leon) vs. Conservative (Granada) antagonisms and wars.

But the Spanish intervention was not the only or the last one by any means. The British, for instance, intervened in the seventeenth century on the east coast and dominated life there until the 1860s. Serious U.S. intervention began in the 1840s and has continued with few interruptions since. One of the best known nineteenth century books about Nicaragua, Nicaragua: Its People, Scenery, Monuments and the Proposed Canal (1862), was written by Ephraim G. Squire, the U.S. consul who was sent to Central America to do reconnaissance in preparation for building the proposed canal through Nicaragua. Passing up the San Juan river, Squire noted that a few American business establishments were already there, and some Nicaraguans had already picked up a few phrases of colloquial American English.

The arrival of the U.S. Marines in 1912 was a cultural as well as military and political intervention. The national sport of Nicaragua, for example, is baseball, brought there by the Marines. Following the ascension of the first Somoza to power in the mid-1930s, Nicaragua became a major consumer of the worst of U.S. commercial popular culture. That pattern continued through 1979 and in some degree still continues, though it has been modulated considerably by Nicaraguan’s lack of money to travel or buy goods, and of course by the Reagan trade embargo.

What have the Sandinistas done about those historical patterns? My answer is that the original intention was to institute a whole range of policies that were culturally sensitive and responsible, and they have attempted a number of things, some more successfully than others. They have tried in the first place to counter the history of cultural intervention, particularly that emanating from the U.S. They have also tried to democratize cultural activity, to make it more accessible, to legitimize more forms of it, to disperse cultural institutions throughout the country. Nicaragua had very few cultural institutions before 1979, and Managua had become almost the only center of institutionalized cultural activity. So an effort was made to build a new set of cultural organizations and institutions–museums, libraries, theater and dance companies–and to distribute them throughout the country.

They have also focused more on cultural production than on consumption–on empowering and training people to think of themselves as producers of culture rather than as passive consumers. They have tried to integrate cultural concerns into other arena of development policy, such as economic policy and housing policy.

Such a projection seemed very attractive to me when I began to read about it several years ago. After all, I had just spent a couple of years reading about cultural policy in the United States, and it was precisely the lack of such concerns–for democratizing cultural institutions, for extending respect to non-elite culture, for sensitivity to cultural values in other policy sectors–that seemed to me to characterize most cultural policy in this country, where there has been any at all.

So I went to Nicaragua with a very positive set of expectations. And having been there, I still feel that the Sandinistas’ intentions in the area of cultura1 policy were good. But the situation proved to be much more complicated than what I had read led me to expect.

In the first place, at present most efforts at social or cultural reconstruction are effectively at a standstill and have been for several years–as a result of the war. Unfortunately, the militarization of Nicaraguan society has been necessary to confront the real threat that U.S. policy has presented. The past eight years have made it clear that there is nothing the Reagan administration won’t do to

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destroy the Sandinistas if they think they can get away with it. Whether they can get away with it is the only consideration. So one cannot know what the Sandinistas would have done in the cultural arena if they had had the tranquility (and money) to do it.

If you look at the national budgets from 1979-81, what you find is that military expenditures were taking less than 10 percent. By 1987-88, it was about 50 percent. And the problem is not only the expenditures themselves, but also the social and cultural distortions that occur when you’re putting that percentage of the budget into warfare. Virtually all young men over the age of sixteen, and many young women, are going to end up in the military. And there are many losses because of that. People who might be poets, who might be writers, who might be singers or dancers or whatever are not doing those things with proper concentration and intensity. The years between sixteen and twenty-five, after all, are crucial years for the education and artistic formation of any creative person.

So the loss of human potential is enormous, and in a small country of three million people such losses are especially critical. The distortion of institutions, including cultural ones, is also serious. The country has managed to open several small new museums, start a number of new dance and theater companies, an art school, a school of dance, and so on. But the facilities of all are pathetic; there is no other way to describe them: tiny buildings minimally converted from other uses, and virtually no equipment. Clearly, things have not happened on anything like the scale envisioned in the heady days of late 1979.

On the other hand, as some Nicaraguan artists and writers have pointed out, revolution and war can also offer new creative challenges and possibilities. Nicaraguan poetry during the past quarter-century is a good example. If one reads it not only from 1978-79 and later, but also from the early 1960s on, one sees that it is remarkable in both quantity and quality. The forced transformations of people’s lives and consciousness led to enormous creativity. Poetry by FLSN people who were imprisoned by Somoza in the 1970s–such as that written by Ricardo Morales Aviles from Managua’s La Aviacion prison–is deeply moving and beautiful, and it could not have been written under any other circumstances. Similar things occurred in music and theater.

But the war and its economic consequences have not been the only problems in the area of post-revolutionary cultural development. It turns out that some of the Sandinistas’ thinking about culture, and therefore their programmatic projection of it, has not been as well-grounded as it might have been. The most dramatic case of their lack of cultural sensitivity and sophistication was of course their treatment of the Miskitos on the east coast. That has been much discussed. It arose out of a complex set of circumstances, but central among them was the fact that like the majority of Nicaraguans, the Sandinista leadership was from the west coast and knew very little about the east coast of their own country.

It also seems to me that there has been some tendency to romanticize and simplify the cultural history and the contemporary cultural realities of the country. In a way this is understandable because so little has been written about either. The kinds of detailed cultural studies that exist in abundance for the United States and for many other countries simply have never been done in Nicaragua. A researcher in the area of culture or cultural history in Nicaragua cannot hope to have the kind of research materials and facilities that would be necessary to do the job well. Archives, where they exist, are small and poor. So in some ways it is hard even for Nicaraguans to learn about their own cultural past or present.

Moreover, a good many of the Sandinista leadership came out of urban, middle-class backgrounds, which afforded them limited understanding of the culture of the majority of Nicaragua’s rural, agricultural population. So in a curious way I see the Sandinistas making some of the same kind of romantic assumptions that were made by the New England ladies who came to protect and revive Appalachian culture at the turn of the century: projecting some of their own somewhat romantic and simplistic cultural fantasies on a situation that is complex and dynamic, reviving “traditions” of debatable authenticity, and so on.

For instance, there is a fairly extensive folk dance movement in Nicaragua, supported by the Ministry of Culture and Sandinista Association of Cultural workers (ASTC). Some of the dance groups are splendid, and it is in any case extraordinary that such things are going on at all under such difficult economic and social circumstances. Nevertheless, as has happened at other times in many other places (the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico, to cite one well-known example), some of the dance productions amount to a rather prettified and romanticized version of what they may once have been.

Nevertheless, what is going on now in dance in Nicara-

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gua is far healthier culturally than what was going on before 1979, which was mainly importing second-rate ballet companies from the U.S. or Europe to perform for the Managua elite in El Teatro Ruben Darzo itself an Edward Durrell Stone white marble copy of Edward Durrell Stone’s Kennedy Center.

Perhaps what ought to be said finally is that these things are difficult and perilous to talk about. The processes are subtle and complicated, and I feel uneasy about making any generalizations at all. Although I have read a vast amount about Nicaragua, and have spent some time there traveling, talking, reading and observing, I am acutely aware of the dangers of commenting on the cultural situation in such a cursory way.

On the other hand, it is important for U.S. people to know these issues exist–that the cultural life of a nation moves forward even under the most difficult of circumstances–and must be understood if we ever are to play a positive role in the reconstruction of a small and struggling country we have done so much for so long to confuse and destroy.

I would hope that people in the South who have been put down culturally for so long by so many, who have been stigmatized as rednecks and hillbillies and crackers, who have been the pitied objects of many a cultural missionary effort, who live in a part of the world the snobbish and sophomoric H. L. Mencken dismissed as the Sahara of the Bozarts at about the same time the U.S. government was trying to discredit and destroy Augusto C. Sandino as a bandit–may find themselves able to draw upon their own experience to comprehend and empathize with the struggle of Nicaraguan people to survive, decolonize, recover and reinterpret their own cultural past, and shape a cultural future for their children.

Pursuing the Shadow Government

By Eric Guthey

Vol. 10, No. 5, 1988, pp. 5, 8-9

Last May, Southern Changes reported on the work of the Christic Institute, a Washington-based public interest law firm that has a strong history of legal activism throughout the South.

The Christic Institute had filed a civil suit in a Miami Federal court against twenty-nine alleged members of the “Secret Team” Christic believes to be behind the Iran Contra Affair, behind a massive guns-for-drugs campaign to fund the U.S.-backed Contras, and behind a whole litany of covert acts of right-wing terrorism stretching back over twenty-five years. The defendants included retired Major General Richard Secord, retired General John Singlaub, Oliver North’s aide Robert Owen, businessman Albert Hakim, former CIA operatives Theodore Shackley and Thomas Clines, and Thomas Posey, a self-styled mercenary and head of the Alabama-based Civilian Materiel Assistance, a Contra-support group (Posey is currently under indictment in Miami on separate charges of violating the Neutrality Act).

The lawsuit held out the possibility of forcing key figures of the Iran/Contra affair to answer tough questions that had not even been asked by the mainstream press, by the Tower Commission, by the Congressional Iran/Contra Committees, or by Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh.

But on June 23, just four days before the trial was to begin, Chief U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King threw the case out of court, maintaining that it wee based on hearsay and inadmissable evidence.

The Christic Institute had filed its $24 million suit under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization statute (RICO). Under the statute, the Christic Institute would have to prove that each of the defendants committed at least two acts contributing to a criminal conspiracy that also resulted in the injury of the Christic Institute’s client, journalist Tony Avirgan, during the 1984 assassination attempt against former Contra leader Eden Pastora (another alleged operation of the Secret Team). In 0a ruling, Judge King said that the “causation link” between the injury to Avirgan and the various criminal acts cited by the Christic Institute was missing.

Charging that Judge King’s ruling was “arbitrary” and full of “gross legal errors,” the Christic Institute immediately appealed the decision, and will bring its case before the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta sometime later this year.

In a funding appeal mailed to supporters shortly after the decision, the Christic Institute suggested that political motives were behind the abrupt dismissal of their case. “Apparently, Judge King looked at this evidence and realized that his Miami

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courtroom was going to become center stage for a riveting political drama–right in the middle of the ’88 election campaign. So he stopped the trial,” the mailing said.

But Judge King is not the only one to question the Christic Institute’s “Secret Team” theory. In an article written before King’s decision but published just afterwards, David Corn of The Nation called the theory a “political device” intended to rally opposition to the national security apparatus as well as an “ambitious historical thesis that purports to explain much of U.S. foreign policy since 1959.” (“Is There Really a ‘Secret Team’?”, The Nation, July 2/9, 1988) According to Corn, the Christic Institute uses the Secret Team hypothesis to portray the secret war against Castro, the CIA assassination program in Vietnam, the covert war in Central America, and a whole slew of other covert operations as ventures of the Secret Team and therefore private, non-governmental acts. Said Com, “This lets the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department and various administrations off the hook.”

Corn also noted that the Christic Institute emphasizes the “dark conspiracy” overtones of the Secret Team hypothesis because it is “easy to package and offers a highly visible target for the institute’s crusade.” (For example, the Christic Institute’s mailing that came out immediately after King dismissed the case stated, “We must continue to expose the Secret Team for who they are–private operatives of a “shadow government” that wages secret ware, assassinates innocent people and smuggles drugs to finance illegal foreign policy operations.” [Christie Institute’s emphasis]) Corn claimed, however, that the Secret Team hypothesis is merely a legal necessity which glosses over the historical reality of government covert activity in order to win a case in court. Corn therefore charged that the Christic Institute, “in pursuit of its educational and political mission, is offering this version of history to the public at $15 a copy” and is therefore placing a historically “problematic document” in the hands of its constituency.

Responding to Corn’s criticisms last month, Christic attorney Andrew Love said that the Christic Institute has always recognized a certain amount of tension between its litigation and public information efforts. “But, legally, we have to work within the constraints of the RICO statute,” he said.

Love said that for this very reason the public version of the Christic Institute’s legal declaration, which is entitled Inside the Shadow Government, includes an introduction which explains why RICO requires the Christic Institute to concentrate on the activity of the Secret Team. “We wish that David Corn had read that introduction more carefully,”

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Love said.

Love also reiterated that the legal focus of the case is not intended to deflect criticism away from the U.S. government, but rasher to expose connections between the Secret Team’s private operations and the government. “I don’t think we’ve ever said that the Secret Team is removed from the government,” he said. “But we’re not going to come out and say that everything they did was sanctioned by the government–because that could be interpreted as a defense for them.”

“We can’t take on the government–we would be thrown out of court right away,” Love explained further. “So we’ve taken on the next beat thing. The whole idea of going to trial is to expose what’s going on–and we assume that this process will expose connections with the government along the way.”

The Christic Institute’s investigation has indeed uncovered considerable evidence that a “shadow government” has been waging war in the name of the American people and without their knowledge or consent. But Christic’s focus on the Secret Team should not be taken to suggest that the shadow consists solely of a radical fringe of rogue operative I perpetuating such countersubversion outside of the government and outside of the law. Studied carefully and in the context of Reagan Administration policy, the evidence provided by the Christic Institute suggests that covert acts of a terrorist nature have become a legal commonplace within our system of government–and this conclusion can be supported by the findings of other investigations.

For example, investigative journalists Frank Snepp and Jonathan King recently reported in the New York Times that federal authorities knew of Tom Posey’s violations of the Neutrality Act for over three years, but did not move against him because his illegal activity served Administration purposes. King and Snepp maintain that the Justice Department felt compelled to take action against Posey and his associate, Jack Terrell, “only after Mr. Terrell soured on Administration policy and began criticizing it openly–and only after Congress began investigating.” (“Iran-Contra Folly,” New York Times, July 31,1988) Meanwhile, Snepp and King point out, government officials who encouraged Posey and Terrell or conducted similar operations of their own go unpunished, and the investigations of those former Administration officials who have been indicted (i.e., Oliver North and John Poindexter) are being deliberately hampered by federal intelligence agencies unwilling to release relevant documents.

Two recent books also reveal the extent to which the U.S. government is willing to mislead the public and subvert the legal system where Administration policy is concerned. In A Candid Inside Story of the Iran-Contra Hearings, Maine Senators George Mitchell and William Cohen (a Democrat and a Republican, respectively) assert that the Congressional Iran-Contra Committees on which they both eat failed to ask important questions or to follow up significant leads uncovered in the course of their hearings. And Jane Mayer’s and Doyle McManua’s new book, Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988, made the headline, this month because it revealed that Administration officials actually discussed relieving President Reagan of his duties on the grounds of incompetence. But the not-so-surprising news about Reagan’s ineptitude is just the prologue to Landslide, which actually focuses more broadly on the Iran-Contra affair. Among other things, the authors conclude that George Bush had “laid before him in clear, unsparing terms” the Iran arms-for-hostages swap as early as July 1986, and that he did absolutely nothing about it. Bush has vigorously denied any knowledge of the initiative.

In such a state of affairs, when the agencies of government cannot be depended on to uphold the Constitution and when candidates for president are willing to lie repeatedly, any efforts to shed light on the shadow government–including the indirect efforts of the Christic Institute–deserve recognition and support.

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

Living the Day Labor Life

By Randall Williams

Vol. 10, No. 5, 1988, pp. 7, 20

Earlier this year, the Southern Regional Council published a lengthy investigative and analytical report of the growing temporary manual labor industry. Workers in these “labor pools” are among the least protected and most poorly rewarded persons in the U.S. labor force. The SRC report, entitled Hard Labor: A Report on Labor Pools and Temporary Employment, contained first-hand accounts by many unemployed and homeless men who rely on labor pools for their meager existence. One such worker is Wade Wagner, who was interviewed in Austin, Texas, by Randall Williams. Wagner’s edited comments follow. To obtain the complete forty-eight-page report, with illustrations and a statistical appendix, send $10 to the SRC, 60 Walton Street, Atlanta, GA 30303.

Monday, I had the flu. It took me till Tuesday to feel like going outside and getting a job. Wednesday, I get up and go out there about 8 o’clock. I worked about three hours yesterday. Trimmed trees. A contractor came through that I had been helping all along. I made about 16 bucks. That’s it up to this point. And I was standing around over there at Salvation Army when you came up. That’s been my week.

All I did was go in, get a shower, get something to eat. Actually, that diet, sometimes you have to eat food to satisfy your hunger but actually didn’t satisfy the taste buds at all. I got me a shower, and then a guy came through about 8 o’clock, and said, was anybody interested in going to church? And I said, I might go. “Will they have any refreshments?” And he said, “Yeah, I’m quite sure they will. I can’t say definite, but they usually have refreshments. Sometimes we have used clothes and things, too.” So about four of us jumped in this van and went and had services. And then after service, they didn’t bring any refreshments, so the church guy brought us back and on the way he stopped by a chicken place. So we all had chicken. Had a pretty nice time of it.

The Salvation Army can be okay. It can help a person because when people are living in the streets, and they have been living under normal conditions, you always like to have a change of clothes. At least every two days, you want to get out of ’em and change. But anybody that has lived normal like that, they’re going to find out, if they’re living in the streets, they can only carry what they carry in a bag. So therefore, you have to leave your bags, and they find that very hard to do. You know, in a safe place. And then going over here and taking a shower, where they’re going to sleep [at the Salvation Army], putting back on the same clothes they got out of, that they’ve been wearing two or three days or longer, actually it’s not going to do you much good to take a shower.

Another place you can stay is the labor hall’s bunkhouse. There’s a guy that sits there in the office. You go in to the window and pay your rent. They assign you a bunk. If you are a regular you can get a regular bunk assigned to you.

It is definitely adequate. I ain’t going to say it’s spic and span. But it’s clean enough. The linens are clean. It’s sanitary. It’s safe. Well, actually, anytime you have a bunch of men together, you’ll always going to find some disturbances. Somebody may have too much to drink, start a fight. Normally it’s just fists, but there has been some stabbings in the past. But usually everybody gets along fine. You can come and go as you please. Stay out all night if you want. No curfew. TV is usually off by 12 but sometimes they leave it on all night. You can play cards. You can gamble. You can have alcohol.

But getting back to the Salvation Army, in the dorm I was in, there was probably close to a hundred.

I got up and ate breakfast–about 4:30 they woke us up. Actually, I tried to eat breakfast. It was oatmeal and to tell you the truth, I couldn’t quite eat it. Even from a child I never could eat oatmeal. So then I walked over on Sixth Street to this 7-11 store and

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had myself a good cup of coffee. Then I walked down on Second Street. It was real cold. Everybody was not going to get work. So then I walked back down on Seventh Street to the labor hall. But there wasn’t much going on this morning.

Most days are routine like that, if you can come up with enough to eat and get a place to sleep. Going back to what makes people happy, everybody likes to eat the best food that they could possibly get, like meat, vegetables, you know, an adequate diet, a nutritional diet. There are places where you can show up and get food. It might not be real tasty and it probably ain’t got that many vitamins but it’ll get something in your stomach.

With my cheap labor, I mostly have enough to cover coffee, cigarettes and food. What else do we spend money on? Everybody could probably get all the outside clothes–pants, shirts, tee-shirts–that he could humanly possibly carry around. He wouldn’t have to spend his money on that. Buying a car is completely still out of anybody’s income bracket. Bus fare is fifty cents, costs you a dollar to go round trip anywhere around town.

I don’t know any program that’s going to cover any medical expenses. I’ve been lucky. I’ve had flus and colds, but–Eckerd Drug has been my doctor, what with buying cough medicines, aspirins.

You asked about recreation. Well, we used to shoot backcourt ball down at the bunkhouse. I used to jog up to last year. There’s a track by the riverside, real nice. I used to jog but I found out my diet was not sufficient to jog, so therefore I was going to do more body harm by trying to jog on malnutrition than I was going to help. I like to go to movies but I usually don’t have the money. There’s a dollar movie over on Red River and fellows go over there if they have a dollar. Otherwise you can’t go. If you got in a card game and won $25 or something like that you might do it. But if you want to go to Antone’s, or a club with entertainment, if you like blues, and I am a blues fan… I’ve been trying to get there but I never can afford the $20 it takes.

U.S. Community Organizer Wounded by Contras

By Carter Garber

Vol. 10, No.5, 1988, p. 8

The Rev. Lucius Walker, of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization was wounded in August while leading a study tour to Nicaragua. Walker is the founding director of IFCO, a national, ecumenical, social justice agency.

Walker and nine other tour members were on a civilian ferry from the Atlantic coast to the inland town of Rama when the boat wee hit by gunfire and mortars. Of the 197 people on board, two Nicaraguan civilians were killed and twenty-nine others were wounded including Walker. He was fortunate only to have been grazed by a bullet.

Walker said the attack was deliberately aimed at civilians and was an attempt to sink the ferry. Contras have attacked the express boat three times in the past, but have not previously denied responsibility as they did in the August 2 incident. Walker suggested the denials for the recent attack were due to the presence on the ferry of U.S. citizens. Walker said Nicaraguan civilians continue to be “wounded and terrorized in contra attacks,” despite ceasefire agreements.

This study tour was one of many that have taken North American community and church leaders to Central America. An estimated 70,000 U.S. citizens have traveled to Nicaragua in the past decade. The IFCO study tour lost no time in communicating what they had experienced, holding press conferences in Managua, Miami, New York, and Washington. Walker urged concerned citizens to ask their representatives to reject all further aid to the contract, and to encourage the Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs to hold hearings on destabilization of the peace process by the U.S. State Department and the increased attacks by the contras on civilian targets (Contact: Rep. George Crokett, Chair, 2235 Rayburn Bldg., Washington, DC 20015; 2022252261).

The majority of IFCO’s work is in the U.S. where the twenty-two-year-old group fosters church support for community organizing. IFCO provides technical assistance and training in proposal writing, program planning, and organizing. It serves as a fiscal agent and is initiating a fellowship program so that Third World organizers can take a sabbatical to improve their work.

Walker said organizers need a broader world view to understand the context of problems they face locally. “Fine basic issues on which communities organize–poverty, unemployment, homelessness–are similar in both North and Central America,” states Walker. IFCO study tours are intended to help North Americans learn why and how Central Americans are organizing and changing their communities. IFCO also sponsors Central American Information Weeks during which speakers are made available throughout a state. Such events were held recently in South Carolina and Kentucky. For information, contact IFCO, 402 W. 145th St., New York, NY 10031; 212-926-6757.

From Protest to Process: Ann Braden’s Inside View of the Rainbow Campaign

Interview By Cliff Kuhn

Vol. 10, No. 5, 1988, pp. 10, 12-15

Sidebar: I. Winning and Losing at the 1988 Democratic Convention

As a supporter of the Rainbow Coalition and the Jackson campaign I felt pretty good about the convention. Now, some people didn’t so that’s going to be a topic of discussion for some time. It depends on where you start from. I felt that Jesse Jackson and our movement–generally the peace and justice forces in this country–set the tone of the convention. Although we didn’t have the power, we had the moral authority. Hardly a speaker got up to that podium that wasn’t plagiarizing Jesse Jackson. I felt that you could see many of our ideas in that convention. We didn’t come there with enough votes to get what we really wanted which was the nomination for Jesse. We’ve just got to face facts, we didn’t. I think partly that the Democratic machinery was rigged against us, and some of that is going to change in 1992 with the new rules that we got adopted. But we came with an awful lot of votes and we represent a lot in this country. Jesse Jackson and other people who spoke at the convention who are a part of our movement–Ron Dellums, Richard Hatcher, and others–really lifted up a new vision for a new direction for this country.

There was some discussion about where we go from here. Obviously people are asking, what did we get out of this? Certainly you will hear some people say that we didn’t get anything. Some of us haven’t done much for the last year except work in the Jackson campaign. We’ve let other things go and maybe important things we should have done. I was especially concerned about increasing our white vote, which I was not satisfied with in 1984; I wasn’t satisfied with it this year either although we did a lot better and there was a more conscious effort to do that.

I know there were some people who were disillusioned. Not with Jesse, not with our campaign, but with the whole system and whether it was worth it, and how can you crack the Democratic Party, and everything’s rigged against us and is it really worth it? And did we win anything? I think we won a lot.

You would not know it to read the establishment media, because they tried to do everything from the very beginning of Jesse’s campaign to destroy it in one way or another. First they belittled it, and when he obviously was getting a lot of votes then they began to figure out different ways to attack him. They looked for some scandal in his background. That didn’t work. The whole line, ‘he can’t win,’ came from the press. We were not really successful in overcoming that psychology.

If everybody who thought Jesse was the best candidate had voted for him, I really think he’d be the nominee today. Our main failure was that we couldn’t overcome the ‘can’t win’ thing, which was nothing but giving in to racism. He could have won. On the floor the night after Jesse spoke I ran into Merle Hanson, the farmer advocate, who was with the Iowa delegation. He said what is just so heartbreaking is when you listened to Jesse’s speech last night and saw the reaction to it from people both there and in other places watching it on TV you know he could have won. He’s able to overcome all those barriers once people can actually hear him.

But we didn’t win the nomination. I want to talk about what we did win. Jesse’s whole performance was practically a miracle. Everybody knows the figures. He got seven million votes. He won ninety-two congressional districts. He carried state after state and came in second in the others. He got more convention votes than any runner-up has ever gotten-1218.5 at the end.

The mass media played it up as the Jackson forces have been defeated. In fact, the day after the vote on the platform they played that we were defeated on those two planks therefore the Jackson forces had been defeated and Dukakis was firmly in control.

I don’t think Dukakis was in control of that convention. Jesse was in control morally. He was setting the tone. It has been played up as a defeat, when it wasn’t. We came there a tremendous bloc of voters who cannot be ignored in this country.

At this convention more than any other in history there was a real rainbow in the racial sense and more delegates of non-European descent-not just black, but Asian and Latino and Native American. You felt a real sense of pride on the part of everybody that we represented this quilt. Jesse presented it as a thing to be proud of. The rainbow means a lot more to us than the racial quilt, but that’s one element of it.

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It doesn’t make headlines that before we ever got to this convention because of the force of the Jackson movement we had basic changes in the rules of the Democratic Party. We won everything the Jackson forces went into the rules committee asking for. Well, not entirely; we’d like to cut out the superdelegates entirely, but in 1992 they’ll be cut down by a third. The winner-take-all system that really did us in in some states will be eliminated. The bonus delegate thing which worked against us will be eliminated. There are some other technical changes which add up to be important. Somebody calculated that if the rules now in effect had been in effect this year Jesse would have come to Atlanta with 400 more delegates and Dukakis with 400 fewer. We would have had a different scenario. We won that.

We’ve changed the equation within the Democratic Party. In terms of the way the Democratic leadership looks at this movement, it’s been legitimatized; it’s gotten respect. The visible expression of that fact is that they’ve added these members to the Democratic National Committee who are Jesse’s nominees. How much power that represents, I don’t know, but they recognize that this is at least a wing of the party that is a significant movement in this country.

Sidebar: II. A Platform Worth a Fight

To some people the platform doesn’t matter. A platform is usually ignored by candidates and forgotten once they get in office. But a good platform gives you something to fight about. We got a fairly good platform though people didn’t realize it because they read that we got defeated on the two planks that went to the floor. One was for a no first-strike policy–I don’t know how anybody can be against that–and the other one was tax-the-rich. The Jackson forces were basically saying that we will not increase taxes, in fact we will try to reduce taxes on low-income and middle-income people, but that we will go back at least to 1977 in terms of the taxes that the corporations and very rich people are paying. Most of us, since most of us aren’t rich, should be for that. It’s a policy trying to reverse the unfair trend of the tax structure, not just since Reagan came in but since World War II, because the tax burden in this country has shifted dramatically since World War II. Sixty-something percent of the tax revenue came from corporations and very high income people. But now that’s completely reversed and the largest share, maybe up in the 70 percent range, comes from poor and middle income people. All the Jackson forces were asking was that you undo what Reagan has done, which has been robbing from the poor to give to the rich. As Jesse said in his convention speech, they’ve had this party, let them pay for it. The people who argued against that plank were really dishonest. I don’t mind somebody being against me if they’ll be honest. They were presenting that platform proposal like it was going to be taxing poor people. “We can’t do that or we won’t get elected like Mondale.” It wasn’t that and they knew it.

Those were two planks we lost and it was heartbreaking. But of the thirteen points of dispute on the platform, we won in negotiation on nine of them. They are not worded as strongly as if we’d had the votes to elect Jackson but they are pretty good planks. On Central America, on nuclear testing, on health care, on headstart and programs for children, on budget priorities. We got in our concepts of what the priorities should be for human needs.

The one plank that did not go to a vote but that we think was a victory in that we were able to have our speaker on the floor was on the question of self-determination for the Palestinian people. A lot of people who were watching TV that night had an opportunity to hear a viewpoint they just haven’t heard. That was a victory in itself.

The other thing that people don’t realize is that the whole thrust of that platform was what Jesse has been pushing since 1984 basically economic justice at home and peace abroad. It really is there and of course we have to bring it to life. I was wandering around the floor that night after we lost those votes, wandering around like everybody else; nobody listened to the speakers. Suddenly I heard Richard Hatcher at the podium speaking on one of the platform planks. Ron Dellums was speaking on the South Africa plank. This platform calls for declaring South Africa a terrorist state. I thought, “Gee, I’d better sit down and listen to what’s going on. Because this is our platform.” It really is.

In 1984 in San Francisco one of the disputed planks that we lost was affirmative action. This time that’s in there. People ought to look at it. We know it can be a scrap of paper that doesn’t mean anything. But it also gives us something that we can hold those two candidates accountable for. We can use it as a litmus test for other candidates who want our support. I think the very fact that Jesse could set the direction of that platform shows again that we have taken a major step toward our real objective–to change the

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direction of this country.

We came out of this election season the winner in the sense that the movement for peace and justice in this country is stronger than ever. It has legitimacy. It has a power base within the Democratic Party. It gives us certain advantages. There are disadvantages. I think more advantages than disadvantages at this point in history. It gives us a platform from which we are going to reach millions of more people before 1992.

When we came to Atlanta we knew Jesse wasn’t going to be the presidential nominee. We really didn’t think he was going to be the vice-presidential nominee and a lot of people didn’t want him to be. I don’t know whether he wanted to be. Jesse talked for a couple of hours with his delegates on Friday morning in Atlanta. One of the things he said was, “You people are saying they didn’t get nothing. That’s like if you go to the grocery store and your family is really hungry and your people need something to eat and they haven’t got any steak. You come home with an empty sack. And money in your pocket. Yet there was hamburger and sausage and pork chops and you didn’t get them. Is that what you are going to do?”

We didn’t get the steak but there was a bit of sausage and hamburger and we’ll get the steak next time.

A lot of people keep saying, “Let’s get out of this mess” of the Democratic Party. But Jesse has said since ’84, “No, the conservatives hope we’ll leave. They are scared we’ll stay and take over the party.” He thinks it’s possible to use this machinery to further a peace and justice agenda.

So far he has been right.

I think we are in a new stage of history. Jesse said the other day this is not a short sprint. It’s a long-distance run. I think we passed a major milestone this year.

Sidebar: III. Beyond Protest

My first political action was forty years ago in 1948 in the Progressive Party, which was an alternative program not too different from what we’re working for now. Henry Wallace–a lot of younger people don’t even know who he was now–was the standard bearer. He was talking about the same thing–justice at home, peace abroad–and it was just when the cold war was starting and the segregationists and racists were gaining strength in the South. That was a powerful movement. It was destroyed. That was a special period, the cold war and everything.

Henry Wallace, who had been in the Roosevelt administration and then started this third party movement because the Democratic party was going on a different direction, was a good guy. To lead the kind of movement we need, frankly, he was the wrong color. He was white. I’m white and you’re white and there’s nothing wrong with white folks. We’ve got a role to play. But because of the whole history of a racist society, I think it’s inevitable that the only way this inclusive coalition that we need can really come together is with the leadership of people of color.

Forty years ago black people, especially in the South, were just being able to struggle and emerge out of the seventy-five or almost a hundred years of terror. But they were organizing and lining up to vote at the courthouses all over the South. I was a young newspaper reporter then watching them line up in Birmingham where one of them got registered. Veterans coming back from World War II and all that sort of thing. That was going on.

That movement for black freedom had to emerge and develop to bring to the fore leadership that could pull together the coalition that would include everybody. That has happened now. At the founding convention of the Rainbow in 1986 I really got to thinking about it. That was the first time I heard Jesse talk about the quilt–how one patch isn’t big enough but you put all the patches together and you’ve got a quilt. He said that to poor white people in the mountains of Kentucky during this campaign–a big rally up there. He says, “Your patch isn’t big enough, but you put it together with all the farmers in the Midwest and the paper workers in Mobile and we’ll get together.” When we come together this way we are the new majority. We are not minorities anymore.

Most people want a government that reflects humane policies. But all these people who want a new direction are coming from different directions. You go to meetings and talk about forming a coalition. We sit in a meeting and plan it but it doesn’t happen. Until now.

That is the new element that makes it possible to talk about this new majority running the country. That is not rhetoric. I think we are going to do it. But it is such a shift of gears for people like me who spent the last forty years–all my adult life–protesting. Your psychology gets to the point that you think that’s what the social justice movement is-protesting. We are real good at picketing and we know how to descend on city hall and raise hell and get some things done. You can beat city hall. We do it a lot.

But it almost never occurs to us that we could be running city hall. I remember in the ’50s and I can remember a different group in the ’60s, revolutionaries, that would sit around and talk about seizing power. I don’t think they believed it. About two years ago I started thinking and it was like I had to change the gears of my thinking. We don’t always have to be a protest movement on the outside. Our movement can take power and run this government and change the policies. That is like a new thought.

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A lot of us think we need a real two-party system in the

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country. The traditional Democrats and the Republicans are so much alike that you can’t tell them apart. The current Democratic leadership is having to acknowledge Jesse Jackson now but of course we know they came out of the ’84 election with this strange analysis that some way they could win all these voters if they sounded more like Republicans than Republicans. That never made any sense. If somebody wanted to vote for that they’d go vote Republican.

Jesse has given them a different way to win, to offer an alternative program to the country. In practicality, the advantage to building this movement through the Democratic Party is that without it I’m not sure we as a movement would have reached millions of people this year with our message. A lot of people have heard the truth from Jesse Jackson and those who have worked with him this year. I am not sure that would have happened if we had not been in the Democratic structure. Somebody told me a hundred million people were watching Jesse on TV. It was information they needed.

We are talking about power. We are tired of being a protest movement. The objective of this movement is to take governmental power. That scares some people. We have seen power corrupts and all that. Some of us think that the policies of our government are so bad that we’ve got to be about taking power and changing them.

For example, if Dukakis wins it is possible that within six months we will get official government action declaring South Africa a terrorist state. That is not just semantics. That sets up certain things sanctions, stopping trade, stopping trade with countries that are giving South Africa arms. If you are outside that structure you do not have access to that governmental power. It is a debatable question. This is the course that Jesse Jackson has set and I think it is working in the interests of the people right now.

Sidebar: IV. Of Men and Movements

Martin Luther King wasn’t the movement although people are not learning that now, unfortunately, the way King is being presented. On the other hand this movement wouldn’t be at the stage it is without Jesse Jackson.

I do not like to compare Jesse with Dr. King because it gets you into all kinds of crazy things. They are two very different people, very different personalities. I think you can make some leadership comparisons. I had the deepest respect for Martin’s character, and I do for Jesse’s, too. I saw Martin take some very courageous stands. He would do what he thought was right whether he was going to get glory for it or not. But I’ve always felt that the real genius of Martin Luther King was that he was able to articulate and bring to the attention of the country the message that many people were feeling in their inner beings. Therefore he became a catalyst that did not create the movement at all; he didn’t even create the Montgomery movement as we know, but that role as catalyst did raise it to a different level. In the process I think the movement made Martin. I think he changed and grew under the impact of that movement. He responded to it and to the challenge of history and what was expected of him.

In a sense you can make a parallel with Jesse. His great genius is that he is able to articulate what everybody’s longing for, in terms of a new direction, a new vision. It is something that is welling up from the people and he is able to give a voice to that. He has risen to do that at this time. He has become the catalyst. The movement as I see it, with a capital ‘M,’ has never stopped. We got repressed in the late sixties. Some people got co-opted in the seventies. People went on strike. They went on to doing different things. Jesse has pulled it back into a national focus. It is growing because of that and much faster than it would have otherwise. In the process it is creating Jesse. He is changing and growing under the impact of that movement. I think that is the way it should be.

He isn’t perfect. Martin wasn’t. None of us are. We are all a bundle of contradiction But Jesse gets more blame for it. The problem is that if you are in leadership the mix of good and evil gets exaggerated. People can tell you all the bad things about Jesse. Before Martin got put on a pedestal they could tell you all the bad things about Martin.

I think that Jesse has developed into a great leader under the impact of this movement. Obviously he had the potential to do that.

Sidebar: V. In the Embrace of the Party

I think Jesse has enough sense not to become co-opted, though that is the strategy of the traditional Democratic Party at this point. They would like to have ignored this movement until it went away. It hasn’t gone away. So the next thing is to try to co-opt it. If they are not able to do that they may start trying to crush it. That has been the history–if they can’t co-opt you they repress you. We are not to that stage yet.

The convention was orchestrated to try to make it look like the traditional Democrats had taken Jesse and his movement in to their fold and they are in control. Our people weren’t thinking that way. The most vital meeting that happened outside of the convention hall was the Friday morning meeting with Jesse with his delegates. They all came–Dukakis and Bentsen and [DNC Chairman Paul] Kirk and Kitty Dukakis. They all trooped on the stage with Jesse. I think they were impressed. There were these hundreds of delegates up at eight o’clock in the morning. I bet they couldn’t get their’s up at eight o’clock in the morning.

Someone said, “What do you mean by co-optation?” I had to think about it. Somebody asks you what you mean by

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something when you’ve been using the word for years. I think what I mean by co-optation is that there’s a dominant force that tries to co-opt a movement by pulling in our people one by one, using our energy and our commitment for their agenda so that our agenda gets lost. They might co-opt some individuals. I don’t think they’ll co-opt Jesse. I don’t think this movement as a whole is co-optable. I think it’s too strong.

Jesse has sort of laid out a practical agenda–not an issue agenda; we know what the issues are–of things that people need to be about now. He is saying that people need to really work in the November election. Some people are going to have a hard time doing that. Some people may not do it. There are arguments for doing it. The most essential thing right now is to remove from Washington those people who have been running the government for the last eight years.

Dukakis has pledged he is not going to support contra aid. He is not going to support UNITA in Angola. He has said that. You have got a platform that says we will declare South Africa a terrorist state. You can’t say there is no difference because there is even though it is not our program, our candidate. Jesse is saying that the first thing we have got to do is get those folks out of Washington. The only way to do that is to work for the Democratic ticket and see that they get elected.

That is not all. He told people to go home and do at the state, city, county and congressional district level what we are doing at the national level–create a new equation in the Democratic Party. Make sure that our forces are represented. That hasn’t been done in a lot of states. He uses Mississippi sometimes as a model because after ’84 they went home and organized and now the Rainbow forces or the Jackson forces have taken over the leadership of the Democratic Party. He is also saying, “Run for everything.” Run for the Senate, run for the Congress, run for mayor, run for city council, run for dogcatcher. Get your Rainbow candidates to run. That started in ’84.

He keeps stressing the census process in 1990 because if that isn’t done right it can screw up a lot of things on the numbers that give you your representation. Then be organized to deal with the legislatures in 1991 on reapportionment. By then we are into another presidential race. There is plenty to do.

In tangible expressions of respect for the Jackson movement, the Democratic leadership has committed itself to support some really important legislation. The Dellums bill on complete sanctions against South Africa will probably pass now. Another is the D.C. statehood bill which affects all of us, because with the present power relationships in Washington it means two more progressive Senators and another progressive governor. There has also been a commitment to comprehensive child care. They have also promised to implement the economic set-asides for minorities. That is millions of dollars in goods and services that would amount to a community investment program in minority communities.

There is commitment to the Conyers bill for on-site, same-day registration so that people can go on voting day and register to vote. Jesse Jackson and all the forces around him feel that that this measure is critically important for expanding the electorate; it already exists in some states. It would make a a difference. I was working at Jackson headquarters on Super Tuesday. People were coming in droves wanting to know where they could vote for Jesse Jackson. We said, “Where’s your precinct?” They didn’t know anything about a precinct. “Are you registered?” They weren’t registered. It just occurred to them that day they wanted to go vote. That is what this bill says they would be able to do. All the election officials are going to scream and holler. The bill includes money for the states to set the machinery for this, the necessary computers to make it possible. There’s plenty to do.

Sidebar: VI. Politics, Power and Possibility

I think a lot of people who have been in protest movements almost shy away from actually taking over. Do we really want power? We have seen what power does and power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Maybe we’d rather be out here real pure, picketing all our lives. I’ve thought about that, too. It seems to me that we really think that the policies of the government are so destructive and are destroying people here and all over the world. Threatening the existence of this plane-then we’ve got to think about taking power and changing those policies. Now it is really possible. It is going to happen. I think it is going to happen soon. I think it could have happened this year. The problem is that even if we had been able to nominate and elect Jesse as President this year–if that miracle had happened–we might not have been ready for it because we didn’t have Congress. We can have Congress. We won ninety-two congressional districts. One thing he’s telling people is to go home and see whether your representative in Congress is representing what that vote stood for. If he isn’t then he or she needs to be replaced. All that can happen pretty quick. I started saying a year and a half ago that we’d have a Rainbow government in Washington by the year 2000. This year I thought maybe 1988, maybe 1992. I think it will happen soon. I hope it happens in my lifetime. I would like to live to see a government in Washington that really cared about the people of this country. That was committing our resources to meeting the needs of the people of this country and working with the people struggling for a better life all over the world instead of trying to crush them in my name and using my tax money.

I grew up during the New Deal which I think did have those commitments–or the movement forced it to have them. Ever since World War II we just haven’t had that. We’ve had to be ashamed of our government. Now wouldn’t it be nice to be real proud of our government for a change.

I think we are going to live to see that.

Henry Wallace’s Campaign Foreshadowed the Movement as Well as the Rainbow

By Patricia Sullivan

Vol. 10, No. 5, 1988, pp. 11, 16-17

Late in the summer of 1948, presidential candidate Henry Wallace embarked on a week-long tour through the Deep South. For a brief time, he was able to break through much of the Cold war hysteria that clouded the Progressive Party, and focus public attention on a fundamental issue and purpose of his third party campaign. Wallace’s Southern strategy grew out of President Roosevelt’s earlier efforts to address the South as the nation’s “number one economic problem.”

In order to carry New Deal reforms forward, Wallace embraced the emerging civil rights struggle as essential to realizing the economic and political potential of the region, and the nation. He attacked segregation from North Carolina to Mississippi, and encouraged black Southerners in their burgeoning effort to dismantle the structure of white supremacy. Henry Wallace’s Southern campaign was about hope and inclusion, and a notable chapter in the politics of progressive reform. It is also a reminder that the roots of the civil rights movement go deeper than the 1950s and 1960s.

The Progressive Party was part of the ferment, sparked by the New Deal, which would transform twentieth century Southern politics. The New Deal had “aroused the political interests and political hopes of classes of people left unmoved by traditional Southern politics,” wrote V.O. Key. Franklin Roosevelt’s unsuccessful attempt to purge Southern Conservatives from office encouraged grassroots efforts to mobilize the New Deal’s constituency in the South–particularly blacks, and working class whites–a constituency that was largely disfranchised. During the 1940s Southern New Dealers joined with the NAACP and other organizations in a campaign to eliminate disfranchisement laws enacted at the turn of the century. At the same time, black civil rights activists, labor organizers and Southern progressives supported local voter registration efforts throughout the South.

Following the Supreme Court’s 1944 decision outlawing the white primary, black voter registration in the South increased dramatically. When South Carolina resisted the Court’s ruling, black activists John McCray and Osceola McKaine organized a separate party, the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP). In 1944, twenty years before the well-known challenge of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party, the PDP took a delegation to the Democratic National Convention to contest the seating of the all-white delegation. Osceola McKaine ran for the Senate on the PDP ticket that November to stimulate black political participation in the Palmetto State. The number of registered black voters in South Carolina increased during the 1940s from 3,500 to 50,000.

In tandem with the early voting rights movement, civil rights organizations worked with local communities in preparing for a frontal assault on the segregation system. As early as the mid 1930s, the NAACP’s Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall joined with black lawyers around the South and initiated the legal challenge to racial discrimination in education. Their efforts would culminate with the 1954 Brown decision. In 1947, CORE staged the first “Freedom Ride” through the upper South following the Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregation in interstate transportation.

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Building on these earlier efforts, the Progressive Party’s Southern campaign provided another means for challenging the segregation system, while stimulating political interest and participation. Southerners who organized for Henry Wallace in the South had been active in the voting rights movement of the 1940a They included: Louis Burnham of the Southern Negro Youth Conference; Palmer Weber, of the CIO Political Action Committee and member of the executive Board of the NAACP; Virginia Durr, of the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax; and Clark Foreman, president of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.

Other supporters linked the ’48 campaign with the movement of the 1950s and 1960s: Dr. Sam Williams, who was Martin Luther King’s philosophy teacher at Morehouse in 1948 and later national chairman of CORE; Rev. and Mrs. Maynard Jackson Sr., parents of Atlanta’s first black mayor; Daisy Bates, who led the effort to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock; and Randolph Blackwell, then a student at North Carolina A T College who became a top aide in the South to Martin Luther King Jr.

Tactics Previewed the Movement

Progressive Party organizers used tactics that previewed the sixties movement. Northern student volunteers came South in the summer of 1948 to help with voter registration and the petition drive to get Wallace on the ballot. Black candidates ran for office on the Progressive party ticket throughout the region. And participants and supporters routinely challenged the segregation system, a practice that drew national attention when the former vice president came South late in the summer of 1948.

The issue of race overshadowed the candidate’s appeal for an expansion of the New Deal programs and increased federal aid to the poorest region in the nation. Wallace attacked segregation and the one-party system as endemic to the South’s economic problems. He refused to address segregated audiences, and would not patronize hotels or restaurants which excluded blacks. Several near riots and a stabbing marked Wallace’s first full day of campaigning in North Carolina, and captured national headlines. Pete Seeger, the young balladeer of the Progressive Party campaign, recalled that Wallace’s advisors were anxious to cancel the rest of the tour. But Wallace refused to concede to terror and lawlessness. They continued on, deeper into Dixie.

The entourage of campaign workers and reporters traveled alternately by bus, train, and motorcade, taking most of their meals picnic style along the highway. “An integrated group, traveling through the South in 1948…We were sitting targets expecting to be blown up at any minute,” recalled a reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American. A Life reporter sported a large “I’m for Thurmond” button in a feeble effort to distinguish himself from the group.

Birmingham, Alabama, previewed the violence and police terror that would distinguish that city fifteen years later. Police Commissioner Bull Connor, “a Horatius at the bridge of Alabama’s states rights,” was prepared for a showdown. A hostile mob of several thousand greeted Wallace’s motorcade armed with pipes and baseball bats. Connor used a rope to segregate supporters waiting for Wallace on the courthouse lawn. A campaign worker read a brief statement, noting Wallace would maintain his policy of not addressing segregated audiences. Police, armed with tear gas, stood by as a jeering crowd surrounded Wallace’s car, and began to rock it, hollering “kill Wallace.” The police finally cleared a path for the motorcade. Palmer Weber, who had instructed everyone to keep their windows closed and not leave the cars, said they could have been killed in Alabama. Those reporters who had viewed the Wallace campaign in the South as a cynical effort to stir up trouble in the South in order to gain votes in the North began to see it differently. “They were terrorized,” Weber recalled. “They knew they had been on the edge of hell. They realized if we wanted to create a riot we could have done it very easily. It was very educational for these reporters,” he said with

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a trace of sarcasm, “very educational.”

Wallace went on to Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee and addressed mostly peaceful gatherings on the steps of local court houses, in black churches, and in a baseball park. He reached back to the South’s Populist tradition when he reminded audiences that “greedy men, the Big Mules…have ruled the South for generations and kept millions of common people in economic poverty and political bondage. They have fought trade unions bitterly. They have kept wages in the South below those in the North….Their profits are multiplied by keeping people divided–section against section, race against race, farmers against workers.”

But Wallace reached beyond the economic arguments of Southern populism. Race, he said, was the major obstacle to the South’s economic and political development. He also appealed to the religious tradition of the region, explaining that segregation was more that an economic liability. “Social injustice is sin…segregation is sin,” Wallace said, a violation of “the fundamental Christian and democratic principles in our civilization.” Finally, he warned that, in the postwar world, segregation had serious implications for national security. In a press conference towards the end of the tour, Wallace told reporters that segregation was the nation’s number one problem, threatening America’s position of leadership in a world where the majority of the population were people of color.

James Wechsler of The New York Post reported that Wallace “shattered a wide variety of political precedents during his tour.” He faithfully boycotted Southern restaurants and hotels, sleeping alternately in pullman cars and private homes. He addressed the first unsegregated public meeting in Memphis since Reconstruction. He was the first presidential candidate to address unsegregated meetings in the South. President Truman cancelled his tentative plans to tour the region that fall, and no future presidential candidate would ever address a segregated audience in the South again. Wechsler praised Wallace for “saying a good many things that needed to be said on Southern property, and establishing in at least a dozen…places that unsegregated meetings could be held without a civil war.” A founder of the ADA who had viewed Wallace’s campaign as little more than a communist front, James Wechsler was shaken by the Southern tour. He later recalled, “in that atmosphere, the ideological distinctions I talked about didn’t seem to loom as large. In the South it was a campaign for civil rights.”

Wallace’s civil rights effort is vaguely remembered as a political challenge which forced a reluctant President Truman to address the issue. Beyond the desegregation of the armed forces, however, little action followed at the national level. The primary significance of Wallace’s Southern campaign was twofold. In the shadow of the Cold War, he attempted to educate America about the real and present danger to its democratic system, which was home grown. And, more importantly, he participated in the movement already underway to smash Jim Crow and democratize Southern politics. Palmer Weber reported to Thurgood Marshall, “the various Negro communities were electrified and tremendously heartened to see one white man with guts willing to take it standing up….By and large I find the Negro leadership fighting for the ballot as never before. The only limitation is full-time workers.” Wallace and his supporters engaged and endorsed those Southerners who would carry the struggle forward–at the ballot box, in the courts, and in the streets.

Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign is a measure of how far the country has traveled since Henry Wallace headed South forty years ago. Born of the struggle that finally transformed the South, Jackson is carrying the progressive movement forward. By remembering the early organizing efforts of the 1940s, we can better understand the rich texture of reform politics in America, and the broad significance of the civil rights movement. And, by remembering, honor those civil rights pioneers for, in Palmer Weber’s words, “not faltering on the simple principle of human rights.” Reflecting on the 1948 campaign as the McCarthy decade got underway, he wrote Wallace, “we owe it to ourselves to hold that torch firmly and high regardless of the consequences because that is the way forward. There is more than one way to measure political success.”

Patricia Sullivan is the assistant director of the Center for the Study of Civil Rights at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies, Charlottesville, Virginia.

A Holiday Shopper’s Guide to Alternative Giving

By Kelly Dowe

Vol. 10, No. 5, 1988, pp. 18-20

When my mother was a little girl in Centreville, Alabama, she received the gift of an apple–not a real apple, but a wooden one with a tiny wooden tea set inside. The cups were no bigger than the tips of her fingers.

I loved hearing about that apple tea set as a child. For me it represented pure romance as I knew it, and it somehow captured the sweet mystery of my mother’s life before me. When I was about ten, I found in my Christmas stocking an apple tea set of my own. The apple was a rich enamel red. It was the size of a real apple, at least the big one in my Christmas stocking, and the dishes inside were no bigger than my fingertips.

Which was better, the apple tea set of my mother’s stories or the real thing? Who cares? I now tell my own daughters, aged five and nine, about both apples and they berate me for not saving my apple for them.

As Christmas and Hannukah approach, all of this brings to mind the choosing of gifts and the work we want our gifts to do. We want each gift to complete ourselves or the recipient (preferably both); we want to give joy, warmth, pleasure and romance. What we often do instead, as depressing memories remind us, is the reverse. Succumbing to the pressures of last-minute shopping, local supply and personal finances, we present a child we love with another molded plastic toy. We regale people we care about with boxes of powder. Uninspired shirts and ties, best-selling trash in hardcover, and gift-wrapped, waxy candy…and all after we have promised ourselves, “This year, I won’t.”

Happy chance!

A shopping helper has arrived in the form of “alternative” mail order companies. These businesses have mushroomed in the last five to ten years, and sell generally good quality, hard to find items, often at modest prices. Such companies are “alternative” because they are usually connected to a social cause organization, such as UNICEF, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, or Koinonia Partners, into which they pour excessive earnings. Most, though not all, are non-profit.

Other, profit-making, businesses in the “alternative” category dedicate themselves to a particular purpose or philosophy. The Earth Care Paper Company of Madison, Wisconsin, for example, sells mostly recycled paper products. A number of toy and book companies, such as Hearth-Song: A Catalog for Families; Tryon Toymakers; Animal Town Game Co.; and Chinaberry Book Service, are dedicated to the idea of teaching kindness and good values to children through healthy play. Each sells beautifully made toys and books in luscious, natural materials. Customers shop by catalog, which are obtained by writing or calling the company. (Even heavy users of mainstream catalogs are not on many alternative catalog mailing riots.)

Imagine these among your holiday gifts to loved ones:

• Beautiful, handmade quilts, in patterns such as Bear’s Paw, Coat of Many Colors, and Grandmother’s Dream, made by the Freedom Quilting Bee, a women’s sewing
  

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  cooperative, in Alberta, Ala. Quilts cost from $395 for single bed size to $695 for king size. FQB also makes butcher-style aprons for $9 and potholders for $3, among other items (prices are approximate). For a catalog write: The Freedom Quilting Bee, Route 1, Box 72, Alberta, AL 36720.

• A solar-powered re-charger for a car battery. Just set it on the dashboard and plug its adapter into a car or RV cigarette lighter. Cost: $39.95. Sold through the Renew America Catalog, which supports renewable energy. Other solar powered products include a calculator ($19.95), music box ($19.50), refrigerator ($1,560) and child’s construction kit ($14.95). The catalog offers many other energy-saving products. Renew America Project, 1001 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 638, Washington, DC 20036.
• A child-sized, handmade wooden carpenter’s box, and a small hammer, ax and saw to use with it. Tryon Toymakers of Campobello, S.C. The carpenter’s box is $12 and the tools $12 per set. Other toys, all hand-crafted and painted, include: a Noah’s Ark with animals ($35, small, and $65, large), a magic wand ($4), puzzles ($6 to $30) and a rocking horse ($80). Tryon Toymakers, Route 3, Box 148, Campobello, SC 29322.
• A delightful book for a child is Paper By Kids by Arnold E. Grummer, a treatise on how to make paper at home by recycling your junk mail. For fifth graders and up. $10.95. Earth Care Paper Co., 100 S. Baldwin, Madison, WI 53703.
• To organize the sizable alternative holiday catalog offerings a different way, one might look for:
• Food Items–Koinonia Partners, of Americus, Ga., a Christian farm community which provides low-cost housing and other services to its neighbors, sells gift-boxed fresh pecan products noted for their high quality. They include: shelled and unshelled pecans, pecan dates, pecan bark, fruitcake and granola. Koinonia Partners, Route 2, Americus, GA 31709-9986.
• Music–Appalshop, Highlander Collections and Flying Fish sell acclaimed music selections on records, tapes and compact discs:
  • –An arts and education center in Kentucky, Appalshop has Lee Sexton’s bluegrass banjo “Whoa, Mule Whoa” on LP and cassette, and “Blues For My Kentucky Home” by the Buzzard Rock String Band, cassette only. Both are $8. Appalshop Sales, 306 Madison St., Whitesburg, KY 41858, or call 1-800-545-7467.
  • –Highlander Center sells a selection of records and tapes celebrating social activism through the years, including “Come All You Coal Miners,” produced by Guy Carawan, and “Sing for Freedom,” featuring Bessie Jones and Doc
    

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    Reese. Most are $7. Highlander Center, Route 3, Box 370, New Market, TN 37820.

  • –Flying Fish sells records, tapes and compact discs including “Carry It On,” an anthology of union songs sung by Pete Seeger, Jane Sapp and Si Kahn. Flying Fish, 1 304 W. Schubert, Chicago, IL 60614.
• Clothing–Amish work pants, with button-drop and buttons for suspenders if desired. $24. A favorite with customers of Co-op America, a nonprofit association of businesses which share a commitment to peace. Other offerings: Peace Fleece–Soviet and American wools blended into knitting yarn, a range of craft items, and home products. Coop America, 2100 M Street, N.W., Suite 310, Washington, DC 20063.
• Another source of distinctive imported clothing is One World Trading Co., which functions as a direct link between you and Mayan producers living in Guatemala. By eliminating a middle agent, it offers consumers good prices for high quality items, while insuring the Mayans a fair return. Goods include blazers, belts, shirts and other handmade garments of lovely, all-cotton fabric. Write to One World Trading Co., c/o Plenty, P.O. Box 310, Summertown, TN 38483-0310.
• Cards, stationery and calendars–Although these are stock items of many catalogs, special mention should go to:
  • –The National Wildlife Federation for its line of holiday cards with wildlife artwork. From portraits of a dramatic snow owl to impressions of a flock of Canadian geese, its offerings are rich and captivating. Its cards cost from $12 to about $20 for most boxes.
  • –UNICEF, which works to ease the high mortality rate among children in the developing world, offers a wide range of note cards and stationery in its catalog. These include no-occasion cards illustrated with seventeenth century Ching Dynasty depictions of spring flowers ($5.50 for ten cards and envelopes) and stationery with delicate bird illustrations by Tran Phuc Dyen of Viet Nam ($9 for ten note cards, fifteen writing sheets and twenty-five envelopes). Write to UNICEF, One Children’s Boulevard, Ridgely, MD 21685, or call 1-800-553-1200.
  • –The Fellowship of Reconciliation, which helps finance work for peace and social justice worldwide, offers a line of cards, posters and calenders [sic] which are stark testimonials to the cause of peace. A package of plain white stationery with the words “Practice Nonviolence” in dark blue and cherry at the top costs $6 for thirty sheets with plain envelopes. Greeting cards with “Peace” in both Hebrew and Arabic on the cover and the message, “Peace is our hope” inside, cost $5 for ten folded cards with envelopes. Fellowship of Reconciliation, Box 271, Nyack, NY 10960.

Writer and editor Kelly Dowe lives in Tuscaloosa, Ala.

A Letter from Lillian Smith

Edited by Rose Gladney

Vol. 10, No. 5, 1988, pp. 22-23

This is the final letter in a series published over the last year by Southern Changes exploring the correspondence of Lillian Smith. The selection for this issue was written in the fall of 1955 after Smith had spent a month as writer-in-residence at Vassar College. While there she learned that her book The Journey had been selected by the Georgia Writers’ Association to receive an award for the best book of nonfiction with the most literary value written by a Georgian in 1954 In late November, shortly before her time at Vassar was scheduled to end, she also learned that her home in Clayton had been burglarized by two young boys and that a fire, resulting from their activities, had destroyed her bedroom and study. Almost all of her personal belongings, unpublished manuscripts, notes, and thousands of letters were lost.

The following paragraphs are taken from a thank-you letter to Helen Lockwood, who was head of the English Department at Vassar and responsible for Smith’s visit there. The selected passages reveal much that epitomizes Smith’s response to the circumstances which shaped her life and, in many cases, determined her perceived status as a writer. Lockwood and Smith had become good friends during their month of working together, and Lockwood knew of the Georgia Writers’ award as well as the terrible shock of the fire. With such a friend Smith shared the sense of humor and awareness of life’s absurdities that fueled Smith’s profound critiques of Southern culture.

This sixth and final selection in the Series of Lillian Smith letters was taken from a carbon copy of the original in the Lillian Smith Collection at the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia, Athens.

Clayton, Ga.

Dec. 2, 1955

Dear Helen:

The award was an absurd occasion–full of the grotesque, the stupid, the sweet, the good in other words: it was “the South” giving Lillian Smith an award with a trembling hand. I laughed until I was weak; I wanted to cry and didn’t; and I suddenly felt proud, proud that these people had found somewhere the courage to do it. I did not attend the first day of the conference but came in the second day and attended the luncheon where Flannery O’Conner spoke; also attended a fantastic round-table discussion of booksellers who were telling writers “what the public wanted.” It was so bizarre that it was unbelievable, this talk. The high point was reached when the booksellers agreed most gravely that what the public really wanted was a book about “how to meet sorrow.” “A big book or a little book?” some one asked. They conferred about this, then the chairman said she believed that what the public wanted was “a dollar book on how to meet sorrow.” Paula was in the back of the audience; I was midway in the crowd; but I could not restrain myself from turning and looking at her. It was altogether wonderful. I wouldn’t have missed it.

The night I received the award there was a big crowd at the dinner. I had not been asked to speak; they feared I might drop a bomb of some kind, I suppose. I don’t know. Anyway, I had not been asked. Hyman (No Time for Sergeants) who is a Georgia boy had been asked to speak. But when they met me Thursday morning they said to each other and even to me “Oh, she’s nice; such a lady, isn’t she? Oh my, and dressed like Park Avenue; let’s ask her to speak; she must speak to us.” Well, I must admit I had on my Sunday beat and my Paris hat (the only one not burned) and my mother’s manners. Well, I spoke (without preparation) and I melted most of them down. Not all, by any means; but MOST. Fully two-thirds of them came up after the dinner and shook hands with me. A Baptist minister said he was going to use some of my talk for his Sunday sermon…. A young doctor said he had never read one thing I had written but now he was going to read everything. An old lady said I was so sweet and well bred, she knew I had the beat intentions in the world, no matter what I said in my books. It went on and on. Afterward, I went to a friend’s house (I don’t have but two or three houses in Atlanta now that I am welcome in, but I went to one of them) sank into a chair and weakly asked for the biggest drink she could get in one glass. It was truly a whale of an experience. Flannery’s talk was one of the funniest things I ever listened to. Do you know–I don’t believe she had the vaguest notion how she shocked the crowd. She told em off; told Georgia off; told the South off; told would-be writers off. She is a little on the grim side in personality and not personally very attractive but she gave a hell of a good speech. There were about thirty of us there–they might not feel I should be so cozy as to include myself in the number–who enjoyed every word of it. But the stuffed shirts and the would-be writer (the place was full of them) began listening and smilingly because they had heard she was “literary” and “talented” and nothing she wrote threatened anybody, certainly not on the conscious levels of their life. But after about two paragraphs they realized that a nice little snake was sinking her fangs deep into their little complacency and they began to look at each other and shake their coiffeured heads and whisper, “Well….what do you know….”

Next morning, Friday, the WSB-TV actually asked me to be on the noon news spot. I dashed down and did it. First time, since Strange Fruit that my presence in Atlanta has ever been acknowledged. Everybody said everywhere, “Why, you nice person, have you kept yourself hidden away all these years, making us miss knowing you?” Honest to God, they said it.

I smiled and said nothing during the first twenty times it was said to me (a new myth in this myth-making South is being created and that is that nobody knows me in the South because I have deliberately kept people away from me) but the twenty-first time it was said, I said “I’ll tell you why. It is because you have never invited me before. And Ill tell you why you have never invited me: it was because I write highly controversial books and you feared to do so. But now that you have, let’s forget why and enjoy each other.” The South cannot bear the truth–not even a teeny-weepy

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truth, if there is any lie, any fantasy, any myth they can grab hold of instead. When I said the truth, in a very soft voice, the person’s eyes bugged out. She was as shocked as if I had said two dozen four letter words.

Well, it was fun. And I must admit it helped me get over the shock of the fire.

Affectionately,

Lillian

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

The Cold Hard Truth

By J.L. Chestnut, Jr.

Vol. 10, No. 5, 1988, pp. 24, 23

In the fall and winter of 1984, fifty white FBI agents came bustling into five west Alabama black-majority counties. The feds visited more than 1,000 black voters, often late at night, and many of them elderly. Alabama State Troopers later joined the feds, and it was once again a time of rotten infamy in Alabama [Southern Changes, July-September 1985].

I have been black in Alabama for almost sixty years and I wee outraged. The feds announced they were investigating vote fraud in regards to absentee ballots. For twenty years, the feds had refused to investigate a single complaint by black voters of intimidation. I announced that the feds were frauds themselves and using federal criminal law to help the racist Republican administration in Washington.

As usual, I was accused by hypocritical whites and know-nothing blacks of overstating the case and seeing racism everywhere. As usual, some people felt the authorities were correct because they were the authorities–classic, circular logic. Also, there is another group who automatically supports the activities of the FBI.

I knew that from 1979 to 1981, federal agents had prowled almost daily through records of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in Sumter County. The Federation was a training base for black political leaders in the Black Belt. For that reason, a really sad bunch in Alabama and Washington was upset with the Federation.

The feds, of course, found no wrong-doing, but they crippled the Federation and severely hampered fundraising for a very long time. That was the intent at the outset. U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby (D-Ala.), then a Congressman, was a key force behind the bogus investigation. He knows I know. He was representing a few white, local political leaders and ignoring blacks.

As to the vote fraud probe, eight blacks and one white were indicted on 210 bogus charges that could have meant more than 1,000 years in prison. Elderly black people were saying, “I’ll never vote again.” Certain blacks, as always, were claiming the investigation was not racial and just a matter of enforcing the voting laws. I listened quietly and wondered how much of this black nonsense was ignorance, fear or opportunism. I still don’t know.

The federal election in 1984 was crucial in Alabama and Washington. At the time it was felt that black voters might make the difference in the re-election or defeat of U.S. Sen. Jeremiah Denton (R-Ala.), and Republican control of the Senate might hinge on whether Denton was successful (Demon was defeated in 1986 by Shelby). In addition, Ed Meese had a long history of helping his friends.

Not one of the 210 vote fraud charges held up in court. Recently, I filed a motion to vacate the remaining charges and a guilty verdict by an all-white jury against voting rights activist Spiver Gordon. The government eagerly joined the motion and the motion was granted on September 9, 1988.

The federal Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals had said, “…Gordon has sufficiently established the essential elements of the selective prosecution test…” Thus, Gordon is entitled to “discovery of the relevant government documents relating to the local voting fraud cases the government has prosecuted and any voting fraud complaints which they have decided not to pursue.”

Rather than provide that information to defense lawyers and the public, the U.S. Attorney called and said if I filed a motion to dismiss all charges against Gordon, the govern-

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ment would join the motion. How about that for vote fraud? Was there racism here?

The appellate court took note that Gordon had “informed the district court that in two similar voting fraud prosecutions, the government had used five of six peremptory challenges to strike black jurors in one case and four of six to strike black jurors in the other. This proffer was sufficient under the circumstances to entitle Gordon to a hearing…” on that issue.

In the interim, however, Clarence Mitchell III, black legislator from Maryland who came to Alabama and helped us in the vote fraud mess, has been convicted in a bribery case investigated by the FBI and prosecuted by the Justice Department. In 1984, Clarence went around the nation saying, “The Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens Council can close up shop, because the Justice Department is doing their work for them.”

Earlier this year, U.S. Rep. Mervyn Dymally placed in the Congressional record an affidavit by former FBI informant Hirah Friedman. In his sworn affidavit, Friedman stated that a program within the FBI named “Fruhmenachen” (German for “primitive man”) has been established to investigate black public officials without probable cause. Friedman said the FBI assumed “that black officials were intellectually and socially incapable of governing…”

I made a similar assumption about the FBI and the current Republican administration way back in 1984.

Recently, black FBI agent Donald Rochan charged white FBI agents with a constant campaign of racist harassment against him and other black agents. He said much more. The John Edgar Hoover legacy together with White House racism impact heavily on the FBI.

Black voters are not the only people harassed by that motley crowd in Washington. Activists in the peace, labor and civil liberties movements have had their problems. Two Congressional committees have documented the outrageous, unconstitutional activities of the FBI regarding people who oppose the Reagan-Bush Yankee nonsense in Central America.

Lord help us.

Peace.

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