Aborted Rights in Arkansas

By Brownie Ledbetter

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

In the November elections, Arkansas voters–by a 52 to 48 percent margin–moved the abortion debate to a new level. The issue in Arkansas is no longer whether a woman has the right to have an abortion, but whether she has the right not to have a child.

Under the guise of a constitutional referendum to restrict state funding for abortions, Arkansas voters have approved a measure that in theory requires the state to force women to complete all pregnancies, even in cases of rape or incest.

In the words of some of the proponents of the three-part referendum, rape may indeed be a traumatic experience, but rape or incest victims should deliver and raise any children that might result.

The Arkansas referendum was the third attempt in six years to eliminate all possibility of abortion (a 1984 “Unborn Child Amendment” was removed from the ballot by the state’s supreme court on the grounds that the popular name was misleading). In 1988, pro-life forces collected enough petition signatures to have the issue again placed on the ballot, described as an amendment to restrict abortion funding.

The first section of the amendment prohibits public funding of abortions except to “save the life of the mother.” The second section calls for the state to “protect the life of every unborn child from conception until birth to the extent permitted by the federal constitution.” And, the third section declared that contraceptives would not be affected nor would the state be required to appropriate any funds.

Arkansas does not have public funding of abortions, but most voters were unaware

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of that. Pro-amendment radio ads implied that the issue was whether voters would rather see their tax money go for roads and education or for abortions. In newspaper interviews, some proponents claimed that the amendment would have no effect unless, the U.S. Supreme Court reverses Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision protecting reproductive choice on the basis of a woman’s right to privacy. Throughout the campaign proponents claimed the amendment would have no effect on birth control.

Reproductive health advocates opposed the amendment primarily on the issue of forcing rape and incest victims to complete their pregnancies, and on the issue of government interference in family decisions about such incidents. Opponents aired television ads pointing out that there is no public funding of abortions in Arkansas and demonstrating the potential effect the amendment could have on a rape victim.

However, opponents’ concerns about the amendment were even broader. The amendment was opposed for many reasons, most of them difficult to communicate in a culture where reproductive health issues are rarely discussed and where sexuality education is taught in only a few of the state’s 330 school districts.

Protection of a woman’s private choice about her reproductive life is a major concern as is protection of all forms of birth control. This is particularly significant in Arkansas, which has the second highest teenage birth rate in the nation. Right-to-life advocates have long opposed birth control and now seek to restrict the term “contraceptive” to forms of birth control that are effective prior to conception; all other contraceptives, in their view, are “abortifacients,” and are therefore no different from abortions.

Opponents of the amendment saw it as yet another attempt to outlaw many forms of birth control including intrauterine devices and many of the medically safer birth control pills that are effective after fertilization. The “morning after” pill, commonly used for rape victims, was an intended target of the amendment, but the Arkansas Governor’s Task Force on Rape has already requested and received an opinion from the state attorney general which declares–for the moment–that the “morning after” pill can continue to be used.

Advocates of such legislation have attempted in many state legislatures and court cases to bestow “personhood,” with accompanying legal rights, to fetuses from the “moment of conception.” The legal ramifications are of great concern to those who work in reproductive health care, not to mention in other areas of the law such as decedents statutes and statutes that could affect working conditions for women of fertile age.

Ironically, in-vitro fertilization, a procedure which allows some infertile couples to have a child, is clearly outlawed by the language of the amendment since “conception” takes place outside the woman’s body, in a laboratory. The legal mandate of protecting a fetus from “conception until birth” rules out such procedures because there can be no practical way of insuring that all ovum fertilized in the laboratory can be placed in a woman’s uterus to be “protected” and born.

Other medical procedures such as amniocentesis, research that enables advances for infertile couples, and potential cures for Alzheimers disease, can tee prohibited by this language.

Of particular concern is the fact that the first amendment section prohibiting public (Medicaid) funding of abortions penalizes low-income women. In addition, the language in this amendment is more restrictive than the federal prohibition on Medicaid funding of abortions. The only allowable exception in the Arkansas amendment is “to save the life of the mother” while the exception in the federal statute is in “life-threatening” situations. Many doctors have pointed out that they can prescribe effective procedures for low-income pregnant women whose progressive diseases would threaten their lives, but under the new language, the doctors feel they would have to let a patient’s condition degenerate to the point that it could be legally proven the patient would die without an abortion.

No doctor can pick an absolute point in time at which a person will die. Understandably, doctors are also worried about their medical liability in such situations.

Brownie Ledbetter is vice president of public affairs for Planned Parenthood in Arkansas. She is also a member of the Southern Regional Council.

Women and the Civil Rights Movement: Roles Too Long Unexamined

By Sharron Hannon

Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, pp. 4-5

The year 1988 wee a time for looking back. Twenty-five years ago a church was bombed in Birmingham, thousands marched on Washington and the President was shot in Dallas. Twenty years ago, assassins’ bullets felled Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. These are not happy anniversaries in our nation’s history but they must be marked.

“Those who cannot remember the peat are condemned to repeat it,” said philosopher George Santayana. That’s motivation enough to look back. But there are other compelling reasons.

We look back because history is cyclical and because you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. We look back, too, because we are disillusioned with the present. How did we get here, in this poet-Reagan era, about to install George Bush as our President far the next four years? What wrong turn did we take and when?

By searching the peat perhaps we’ll find pieces of the puzzle that we need to make sense of the world and our lives today.

But that will only tee possible if we look in the right places and ask the right questions. And we don’t do that. No, twenty-five years later, the burning unanswered question from the Sixties (to judge by the number of prime-time TV specials) is whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Meanwhile, who is exploring what makes men and women put aside personal concerns for the collective goof, as so many civilrights activists did back then? Who is trying to figure out what confluence of personalities or events produced such a readiness for social action in the Sixties?

Fortunately, these questions aren’t being altogether ignored. In Atlanta in 1988, two conferences were held which explored such topics while providing a generous dose of the “herstory” of the civil rights movement. The first conference was sponsored by the Carter Center last February, the second by the King Center in October. Georgia State University co-sponsored both.

What’a the difference between history and herstory? A lot. The former focuses on the headlines, the big events, the men out in front of the crowds. The latter looks at the day-to-day workings of people’s lives, the behind-the-scene activities that produced the big events, and the women who, unheralded, carried them out.

The Carter Center conference was titled: “Women and the Constitution: A Bicentennial Perspective” and was wideranging in its scope. But an underlying theme was the interconnectedness of the civil rights and women’s rights movements. Coretta Scott King spoke on “The Civil Rights Movement’s Impact on Women’s Rights,” while Mary King tied the package together during the closing session. I sat in the audience with a friend from the University of Georgia, a well-read woman who works in women’s studies. During Mary King’a speech, she leaned over to me and said, “This woman is amazing! I can’t believe I’ve never heard of her before.” Ah, if only we knew more herstory. If only every school child in America grew up with stories of amazing’ women. Instead, we get these stories in bits and pieces–if at all. And we have to put the pieces together ourselves. I’ve been collecting pieces of the puzzle for ten years since moving to the South and getting actively involved in the women’s movement.

I started the search incredibly ignorant, having passed the summer of ’63 in sheer oblivion to national events. I was l6 years-old, had just gotten my driver’s license and had little else on my mind. Perhaps the images of marchers and police with dogs and fire hoses flickered past on our TV screen in a suburban Boston town, but I don’t remember them. It wasn’t until I was in college that I began to catch up with the civil rights movement.

The year was 1968 and I was attending Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., not exactly a hotbed of activity. But few campuses were untouched by the times. That spring the black students at Purdue–every last one of them, I believe, even the football players–marched to the administration building with bricks in hand. There they presented a fiat of demands and unfurled a banner reading, “Or the fire next time.”

It wee a powerful demonstration and as a wide-eyed reporter for the campus paper, I was significantly impressed. Especially by the fact that it had been largely organized by a female student, Linda Jo Mitchell.

Among the demands presented that day was a need for courses in Afro-American studies, and so it happened that the next fall Linda Jo Mitchell came to be teaching a course’ labeled Industrial Management 590A. The course had absolutely nothing to do with industrial management, met at night and was discontinued after one semester. But what a semester that was! Our class was composed of students and a few professors as well, and was integrated by sex, race and age. We read James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., and had hot and heavy discussions that lasted well past our scheduled hour.

What I didn’t notice at the time was that all these authors were men. It wasn’t until almost twenty years later that I learned about women like Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer and the significant roles they played in those times. At the King Center conference, titled “Trailblazers and Torchbearers: Women in the Civil Rights Movement,” one participant noted: “This conference has done something I didn’t know needed to be done. Using the lens of memory, I look back and see women.”

Overlooking women in history is a shame. It denies half the population role models of courage. But it does more damage than that. It clouds our understanding of how things come to be. For when we overlook women, we overlook grassroots activism. And then we begin to think that the only way things happen is from the top down. And we sit and wait for a leader to come along and change things, relieved of the responsibility of doing anything ourselves. That’s not the lesson we should be taking from the Sixties.

I left both Atlanta women’s conferences inspired to take action. And with Black History Month in February and Women’s History Month in March, the time seems ripe: Let’s share stories of the women of the civil rights movement and learn from them. Fortunately, some of these women have been telling their stories lately. Does your local library have a copy of Mary King’s Freedom Song, (Quill, 1987) or JoAnn Robinson’s The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, (University of Tennessee Press, 1987). If not, ask them to order these two intriguing memoirs.

Tell friends about these books. And let’s get herstory into the schools. The National Women’s History Project (P.O. Box 3716, Santa Rosa, CA 95402) is a great source for books and other materials for elementary through high school years. Looking through last year’s catalog, I spotted Selma, Lord, Selma about the girlhood memories of Sheyann Webb and Rachel West, and Ready From Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement, a first-person narrative.

But let’s go beyond books. In our communities across the South, there are women with stories to tell. Let’s find them and listen to them and honor them. They have something to say to all of us.

Sharron Hannon is a freelance writer end former editor and publisher of Southern Feminist newspaper.

The Press as Company Store, Atlanta Style

By Eric Guthey

Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, pp. 8-10

To doubt the current charming presentations of Southern growth and prosperity is to bring anathema on one’s head. What! The South not prosperous. Impossible, they cry, and the individual who questions is an idiot.–Lewis Harvie Blair, The Prosperity of the South Dependent on the Elevation of the Negro (1889)

Although Harvie Blair, native Virginian and former Confederate soldier, wrote his description of such defensive, pro-Southern attitudes a hundred years ago, his words apply just as well to the South today. The survival of this mixture of the New South creed, corporate-expansive boosterism, and belligerent local patriotism is not breaking news. But when Bill Kovach abruptly resigned as editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in November, the papers’ corporate managers who accepted his resignation and the community members opposed to it lined up on both sides of the myth and pushed it into the national headlines.

Atlantans who supported Kovach and liked what he had done with the papers during his two-year tenure claimed the corporate elite-who traditionally have promoted New South posturing and urban boosterism to bolster their own power-had forced out the former New York Times Washington bureau chief because of his tough coverage of the Atlanta business community. Publisher Jay Smith and David Easterly, president of the papers’ parent company, Cox Enterprises, denied that business pressure had anything to do with their acceptance of Kovach’s resignation. He had resigned and they had accepted because of a lack of “mutual trust,” they said.

But Smith and Easterly defended their actions against a barrage of national criticism by doing what all good New South boosters do-retreating to a stance of intense regionalism and denying any problem existed. In an article in The Wall Street Journal, Easterly responded to a comment from Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee by telling him to “stuff it.” Meanwhile, good ol’ boys like Journal-Constitution sportswriter Furman Bisher and columnist Lewis Grizzard, both of whom had been at the papers long before Kovach, gloated as the crowd they saw as “Northern invaders” from the New York Times lost the battle for the control of the papers. Said Bisher: “Maybe now we can get back to covering Dixie like the dew.”

To many, though, that meant the papers would return to the previous state of mediocrity which had chased serious Southern journalists away and allowed local talents like Bisher and Grizzard to thrive. “These papers have never attempted to excel,” said Dudley Clendinen, a former Timesman who had joined the papers in 1986 as Kovach’s assistant in charge of local news and who resigned two weeks after Kovach’s departure. “They’ve always been content to have to find their reputation in a single editor of conscience and great writing ability. But those editors always felt threatened: Ralph McGill spent every day afraid that he was going to be fired. Gene Patterson was forced out.”(In 1967, Constitution editor Eugene Patterson lost his job for running a column criticizing Georgia Power’s request for a rate hike).

“The [Cox] family takes the profits,” Clendinen said. “It doesn’t involve itself in the conduct of the paper, to see to it that they produce are cord of quality. That’s always been the case here in Atlanta, and because it has, people don’t know better. They’ve always lived here, always read these papers. If they’ve lived elsewhere they’d know better.” According to a recent ranking in Advertising Age, Cox Enterprises, an empire originally built around newspaper money from Dayton, Ohio, is the thirteenth largest media company in the world, and pulls in the ninth largest revenues from newspaper operations (over $710 million in 1987). According to the Forbes 400 listing, the sisters who control the family business, Anne Cox Chambers and Barbara Cox Anthony, together share the distinction of being the eighth richest people in the United States. Each is worth $2.25 billion.

Kovach joined the Journal-Constitition in 1986, reportedly after being passed over for the position of editor at the New York Times. The local community and the national media heralded his hiring as a signal the Cox sisters had decided to convert the Journal-Constitution from the haven for mediocrity and soft business coverage it had become into an institution that commanded national respect. Kovach himself declared that he intended to turn the Journal-Constitution into a world-class news organization.

As business institutions, large U.S. city newspapers at their best are never more than instruments of liberal reform, criticizing their business communities within certain “acceptable” limits. Bill Kovach tried to expand those limits at the Journal-Constitution, and his improvements were encouraging compared to the papers’ dismal record. Under Kovach, the papers ran lengthy investigative pieces exposing the Atlanta banking community’s discriminatory lending practices in black neighborhoods, the alleged bribing of Russian officials by Coca-Cola representatives, and Georgia Power management’s coercion of employees to make political contributions to the campaign of Public Service Commission candidate Bobby Rowan.

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The papers’ coverage of the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta last summer also drew national attention. In fact, even the papers’ senior management publicly praised Kovach as the man who had turned around the Journal-Constitution and likened him to the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Constitution editor Ralph McGill, under whom the papers were said to have had their best years. At a party in the newsroom on the convention’s last night, Smith stood atop a desk and declared: “These are no longer the newspapers of Ralph McGill. These are the newspapers of Bill Kovach.”

But five months later, Smith was explaining that he and Kovach had never been able to establish a relationship of “mutual trust.” In a November 12 editorial, Smith instated that the company had let Kovach go because he was impossible to work with. This very well may be the immediate reason why the papers’ management got rid of Kovach. Kovach himself conceded that direct pressure from the business community had nothing to do with his leaving. Some of Kovach’s own hirees admitted he had a hot temper, and may have threatened to quit one time too many.

Yet, it doesn’t matter if a corporate conspiracy to Iynch Kovach didn’t exist. New South boosterism does not work that way. Rather, it is a pervasive consciousness, a framework of attitudes within which serious analysis and criticism-especially of the New South’s booming capital-are just not welcome. Complaints from Atlanta business leaders over what they saw as Kovach’s unfair coverage merely reflected and contributed to that ethos. So did Kovach’s protracted arguments with Smith and Easterly, who wanted the papers to look more like USA Today, the shallow but highly successful paper replete with short stories, bright graphics, and a decidedly “up-beat” approach to the news. The Cox chain’s desire to emulate USA Today indicates that it places a higher premium on marketing strategies and revenue than on solid news coverage. All of these factors add up to a situation in which the Cox corporate managers find themselves predisposed to think that someone like Kovach would be difficult to work with.

“I no longer respect or believe in the ownership of the paper, or the corporate managers more particularly,” Clendinen said, adding he lamented Kovach’s departure in part because it signaled the end of an important experiment for the region. “There’s never been a great regional newspaper in the South,” he explained. “Serious editors and reporters have had to go North because there’s been nothing to aspire to. What we had here with Bill Kovach was an effort to create a paper that would report on and examine and reflect the culture of the South.”

Clendinen still bristles over the way he, Kovach and city editor Wendell “Sonny” Rawls, who also joined the papers in 1986, have been portrayed as an intrusive “New York Times Mafia” Kovach and Rawls are both from Tennessee and both worked at the Nashville Tennesseean before going to the Times. Clendinen is from Tampa, Fla., went to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and his family’s roots are in Georgia, where his great-grandfather was surgeon general during the Civil War. “The foreign implant, if you will, are the five people from Dayton, Ohio, who now run the Cox corporation,” Clendinen said.

“This is representative of a tradition that has existed in the South since the Civil War: that is, much of the choices that have been made in the South have been given over to Northern, Midwestern industrial money,” Clendinen said. “The Dayton ownership, the Cox family ownership, has been happy to play to and to patronize Southern impulses, a set of impulses which has been true also since the War-this defensiveness, resistance to outside influence, ‘We’re just fine, thank you, just as we are.’ You know, the Lewis Grizzard line-if you don’t like it, Delta is ready when you are-that whole business…This was not an affectation, this was part of that dug-in Southernness. And the papers, owned by Ohio money, played on that fact.”

The real issue, though, Clendinen insisted, is the quality of the public record. “These papers, this ownership-we thought-had made that commitment, had joined the circle of the few who re really committed to the quality of the record as opposed to the size of their profits first. In retrospect, it most certainly seems a mistaken impression.”

At a protest rally held outside the papers’ downtown offices on November 12, one week after Kovach resigned, journalist Hodding Carter interpreted the incident in much the same way-as the latest battle in a war for the soul of American journalism. “Is it going to be packaging or the product? Is it going to be reality or is it going to be happy times? Is it going to be speaking truth to power or speaking power’s truth? And each time that question is asked today too often the answer comes back: packaging not product, happy time, not reality, power’s truth, not truth to power.”

Carter also stressed that the issue was important not just for Atlanta, but for the South and for the nation as well. “In a fight like this, in an issue like this, there aren’t really any outsiders at all. Because in the most basic way all of us, whether we’re in journalism or outside it, are being treated as outsiders by the fewer and fewer who own the more and more in this life called journalism.”

Also at the rally, novelist Pat Conroy attacked Lewis Grizzard, whom he saw as the premier representative of the insular Southern attitudes that had contributed to Kovach’s downfall. He read to the crowd of about 250 concerned community members and Journal and Constitution staffers the contents of an ad that Grizzard had considered taking out in the Constitution in which Grizzard said, “In fact, we might even benefit from

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[Kovach’s] departure, with apologies to those who enjoy exhaustive series on what’s doing in Africa.” Grizzard was referring to a series on the devastating famine in the Sudan.

Conroy responded to Grizzard, “Because I too am a redneck, I want to translate for all your readers and for the Cox chain what you meant… You wrote it in code but the translation is this: Atlanta doesn’t care if niggers starve.”

However accurate might be Conroy’s emotional indictment of the racism undergirding Grizzard’s attitude towards investigative journalism, it does not change the fact that the papers’ corporate management-not Grizzard and not its readers or its staff-retain the final say over what news in Atlanta will be like. In which direction they will lead the papers now that Kovach is gone is not clear. But there have been indications in recent weeks that the changes bode ill for the public’s need for more responsible coverage in Atlanta and throughout the region.

“The publisher and the corporate managers will now get the kind of paper that they want” says Dudley Clendinen. “It’s all a question of direction, emphasis, and aspiration. Look at the front page in the last three weeks-Christmas trees, Santa Clauses, warm, optimistic business stories and tender family stories. What you see is a reflection of the wishes of the corporate management. They want a marketing tool, as opposed to a record of quality.”

“USA Today has become the symbol of how you compete with people who are drawn to the images of television. You create a package, an information package, which is not so much a newspaper as it is a packaged digest of information bytes, like sound bytes. And that is the paper that Easterly likes to cite-I don’t think anyone would argue that it is a record of quality.”

Perhaps an even stronger indication of the Cox chain’s intentions is its choice of a successor for Kovach. Arnold Rosenfeld has been in the Cox chain since 1969. He will take over the papers for the next six months, search for another editor, and then move further up in the corporation. Rosenfeld most recently has served as the editor of the Cox chain’s Austin American-Statesman in Texas.

“He’s just another guy from Dayton,” says Clendinen. “So he knows what they want, which is not very much.”

Even though Rosenfeld will be directly in charge of the papers for only six months, his hiring sends out a definite signal. In the past few years, community members in Austin have complained about that paper’s blatant boosterism as well. And last spring, Rosenfeld’s Statesman fired reporter Kathleen Sullivan because, according to accounts in Texas Monthly and The Columbia Journalism Review, Sullivan had aggressively pursued stories on worker safety in high-tech industry while the city itself was trying to woo just such companies to the area. In other words, many believed that Sullivan was fired because she was “a skeptic, not a booster.”

The paper also offered Sullivan over $8,000 to sign a severance agreement which would have prevented her from criticizing the paper or running the story anywhere else. She refused.

Committed reporters and editors remain at the Atlanta papers who would refuse to bow to such pressure as well. But many say they no longer have any incentive to initiate potentially controversial articles or major investigative projects. If the papers’ management can get serious and find an editor equally as committed to the quality of the public record as Kovach was, then perhaps those staffers will stay on and continue to improve the papers. Otherwise, Harvie Blair’s characterization of defensive, New South boosterism will still to apply to the Coxes’ Journal-Constitution and to Atlanta another hundred years from now.

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

Principle, Conviction and Fate in the Remarkable Career of Judge Elbert Tuttle

By Bill Steverson

Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, pp. 11-14

One of Elbert Tuttle’s earliest memories, aside from the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, is of a black woman standing at a trolley stop outside his parents’ house in Washington, D.C., near the turn of the century.

While he and his mother watched from their window, several trolleys, driven by white men, passed but failed to stop for the woman, although she signaled for each one.

Tuttle remembers that his mother became so angry that she finally went out to the woman, stood with her on the curb and waited for the next trolley. When it came, she signaled for it to stop, helped the black woman on board, and with a few choice words to the driver, made sure that the woman would be taken to her desired destination.

Much has been written about the brilliant judicial career of Elbert Tuttle, who with his fellow Fifth Circuit judges and a handful of equally strong District Court judges, made the federal courts the primary instrument of progress toward civil rights in the late 1950s and 1960s. Less well-known are Tuttle’s youth and his law career prior to being appointed to the Fifth Circuit in 1954. Instances like those mentioned above, together with the vivid stories his mother told him about his grandfather’s imprisonment in the infamous Andersonville Prison while a Union soldier during the Civil War (a horror that broke his grandfather’s health and led to his early death), made a strong impression on young Tuttle, and perhaps provide clues to his later years as Senior Judge on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals (formerly the Fifth Circuit).

Tuttle’s is a career steeped in the post-Civil War ethic of the Republican Party and one that had some strange and coincidental turns of fate.

For example, had not Tuttle and his brother-in-law, William Sutherland, concluded that Atlanta was slightly cooler in the summer than Dallas, the two probably would have established their law practice in Texas rather than Georgia. And had Tuttle not lived several years of his youth in Hawaii during a time when virtually every white person in that future state embraced the Republican Party and its tariff protection for sugar growers, he perhaps would have never become a leader of the Republican Party in Georgia, thus setting the stage for President Eisenhower to appoint him to the federal bench.

And, though he now laughs at the story, Tuttle came close-very close-to going down in history as the person who first formally suggested the name of Richard Nixon as the Republican vice presidential nominee in 1952.

At 91, Tuttle is still active on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. Although his caseload has eased since he took Senior Judge status, he still shows little sign of retiring, despite the urgings of his wife, Sara, who has been at his side for almost seven decades.

Behind his desk are two autographed photographs of Dwight Eisenhower, and he makes no secret of his long admiration of the president who appointed him to the bench. “You know,” he volunteers, “It was during Eisenhower’s administration that the first Civil Rights bill was passed.”

Born in California on July 17, 1897, Tuttle moved with his parents and older brother to Washington while still a small child. It was there, he says, that he first remembers his Mother’s stories about the South, and of her father’s inhumane treatment in a Confederate prison. “She was very bitter towards the South. She had strong feelings about it,” he said.

After several years in Washington, his family moved to Hawaii, where his father worked for the Hawaii Sugar Planters’ Association. He and his brother attended the multi-racial Punaho School (founded by missionaries). But aside from his contact with Hawaiian and Asian children in school, Tuttle remembers that his family, like all white families on the island, had little contact with the local population.

By the time he had finished high school, Tuttle had already decided on a career in law. He also remembers that he had become entrenched in the Republican Party.

“It was just natural,” he says. On his Mother’s side, the Republican Party was still the party of Lincoln and Emancipation. On his Father’s side, it was the party of the Hawaii business community, and the fledgling statehood movement.

Tuttle attended Cornell University, and as an undergraduate he met William Sutherland, who was attending law school at Harvard. They decided that once they both finished law school, they would establish a practice together. Sutherland also became Tuttle’s brother-in-law around that time.

After a short stint in the Army Air Force near the end of World War I, Tuttle and Sutherland were ready to set up

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their practice.

“We were looking for a city away from New York or Washington that was going to grow,” he said, “a city that would have branch offices of the big Fortune 500 companies that would need legal services.”

So they studied a map of the United States and narrowed their choices to Atlanta and Dallas. “Those were the days before air conditioning, and we decided that in the summer, Atlanta would probably be a little bit cooler than Dallas,” he said. “so we chose Atlanta.”

“I had absorbed a lot of my mother’s feelings about how wrong the Southern states were to attempt to leave the Union and their support of slavery. I had a rather strong feeling about the treatment in the South of black people. That didn’t cause me to feel that I didn’t want to live in the South. As a matter of fact, I started fairly soon after I got there identifying myself with some efforts to ameliorate the conditions of the black people I ran into.”

The first such experience, occurring soon after Tuttle’s arrival in Atlanta, was frightening. With his service as an officer in the Army during World War I (and he would later have an heroic career in the Army during World War II), Tuttle applied for a commission in the Georgia National Guard, and was given the rank of major.

One night in 1931 he was telephoned by the State’s Adjutant General about a “near riot” in Elbert County, Georgia. “He wanted me to come by his office and pick up some (tear) gas grenades and take them over there and see if I could stop this riot.” He said, “I’ve called the Elbert County unit [of the National Guard] on active duty and they are trying to protect these people. The mob is overrunning the sheriff’s house and thejail is upstairs over the sheriff’s house.’ I said, ‘I’ve never seen a gas grenade.’ He said, ‘Well, you’ll know how to handle it.’

“I came down (to the Atlanta Armory) and got a friend of mine. We went tearing over to Elbert County, about sixty five miles from here. We got in just at dusk, just as the sun went down. We pulled up in front of the sheriff’s house and here was a mob yelling and hollering out in front of the cellar. Obviously they were trying to get in…I pulled the plug out of the gas grenade and threw it over from this automobile. I threw it in front of the mob and they backed up a little bit from the gas.”

“We walked on into the house, my friend and I. I was in uniform. I went on to the back of the house and ran into some concrete stairs upstairs to the cell block. Just as I came up to it, there was a burst of machine gun fire that came down the stairs. I realized that one of our people was sitting up at the top of the stairs and he would turn loose a burst of machine gun fire every few minutes to keep the mob from coming.

“He’d saved these two black prisoners. They were after two prisoners. They didn’t know which, if either of them, had committed the crime [the charge was rape of a white woman]. So we gradually tried to push the crowd out of the house. Finally I called for more help from Atlanta and they sent another company of National Guardsmen with rifles and bayonets attached. As we gradually pushed them out, we put these black prisoners in National Guard uniforms and got them in trucks and brought them back to Atlanta.”

Tuttle is convinced that had his National Guard troops not hurried the two black prisoners away in the dark of the night, the mob would have lynched them. “You can’t stop a mob with a machine gun. Everybody knows you are not going to turn a machine gun on the mob. Those were the only arms we had. When I got the company up there with rifles and bayonets on them, that was a whole lot different. No one wants to get in front of that bayonet. They gradually got the prisoners out. It was pretty violent.”

But Tuttle’s involvement that strange night with John Downer, the prisoner accused of rape, didn’t end there. Downer was convicted and sentenced to death, but one day while walking down an hallway at the Fulton County Courthouse, Tuttle was approached by one of Downer’s defense lawyers who asked him to help in filing an appeal.

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That appeal reached the Supreme Court and resulted in Downer being retried.

“I just recognized that this man had been convicted and sentenced to death without due process of law,” he said. “There was no way you could justify it. As I say, in Georgia at that time if a black person was ever charged by a white woman of rape, no grand jury would ever fail to indict him. If he’s indicted, no member of the jury would ever think of voting to acquit him. As long as a white woman was going to testify against him, he was as good as dead the minute he was arrested.” The appeal resulted in a second trial, in which Downer was also found guilty. He was executed, although he protested his innocence to the end.

The appeal was based on the fact that the first trial had been conducted under mob control. While the Supreme Court had ruled several years earlier in the Leo Frank case that if a trial is held under the threat of mob violence, the defendant is denied due process, the Downer case was still viewed as an important step in the march towards civil rights in the courts for blacks.

Because of that trial, Tuttle says modestly, “I got a reputation of sorts around here. The black community apparently took some notice of it. Some of the black leaders recognized that here was a white lawyer in Atlanta who would be willing to fight the battle of an impoverished black field hand. Shortly after that I was asked to go on the Board of Trustees at Spellman College and then Morehouse and Atlanta University. I served on those boards somewhere in the middle of the Thirties right on down for about twenty years.”

Two other cases also served notice that Elbert Tuttle wasn’t afraid to take on the legal and social establishment when basic human rights were at stake.

In a case involving a Marine accused of passing counterfeit money, Tuttle filed an appeal that resulted in the Supreme Court ruling that an indigent accused of a federal felony is entitled to legal representation. That decision came more than a quarter century before other Supreme Court rulings applied the same rights to defendants in state courts.

In another case, Tuttle played an important role in getting the Supreme Court to uphold the First Amendment rights of a communist activist, Angelo Herndon. “He was a black communist who came down from New York to agitate in the South trying to persuade the subordinated black people to join the Communist Party and separate from the United States. He was making speeches around. He was reading some literature off the courthouse steps when he was arrested. He was arrested and convicted under a Georgia statute that says any person who directly or indirectly incites to insurrection shall be guilty (and sentenced) to death or not more than twenty years. Fortunately he wasn’t sentenced to death, but he was sentenced to twenty years in a Georgia chain gang.”

Two or three years later, Tuttle and his law partner, William Sutherland, joined New York lawyer Whitney North Seymour in filing an appeal to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the Georgia statute was unconstitutional.

“We got some adverse criticism for that,” Tuttle said. “People said, Well, if he’s a communist he ought to be in jail.”

“As a matter of fact, it wasn’t a crime to be a communist in those days. Congress tried to make it a crime, but they didn’t succeed.”

But even then, Tuttle said he didn’t feel ostracized by Atlanta’s white community. “I guess part of that was due to the fact that I was not a Southerner by birth or origin and I guess they didn’t expect anything better from me.”

Throughout his legal practice, Tuttle played increasingly important roles in the Republican Party.

“The Republican Party in those days consisted of three groups. One group was the black citizens who wanted to be active in politics, who could not participate in the Democratic Party because it was the white Democratic Party. By statute it was a white Democratic Party. They could not participate. Also they recognized the Republican Party as the party of Lincoln.”

“Another group was those of us who had grown up in Republican parts of the country and other Republican principals who had moved to Atlanta. We continued to think that the Republican Party was certainly best in the State of Georgia.”

“A third group was what we called the ‘Post Office Republicans.’ That was the group that when the national conventions were held would organize a group to go to the national convention. If their man was nominated and elected, then they would dispense with all the patronage. Those were the Post Office Republicans.”

“I recognized the frailties of this kind of a situation because really we were trying to carry water on both shoulders. We were trying to create a new local party that was pure and undefiled in many ways. We knew full well what had happened once the Post Office Republicans prevailed. We knew that the great majority of the people of Georgia were in favor of white supremacy forever and didn’t want to have anything to do with any black people who wanted to be active in politics. Their whole social and political philosophy was to keep the black people without a vote. That was what I came into.”

In 1948, Tuttle had risen high enough within the Georgia Republican Party to be selected to attend the party’s convention in Philadelphia, at which Thomas Dewey was nominated. And in 1952, he attended the Republican convention as chairman of the Fulton County delegation, and was firmly in the Eisenhower camp.

“While I didn’t think that Eisenhower would be an ideal president because I didn’t think he had a sufficient knowledge of American politics, I realized that most of his work as Supreme Commander had been political rather than military. After all, his main job was making people work together. I don’t know if he ever heard a gun fired during the Second World War. I guess he did, but that wasn’t his principal job.”

Tuttle’s leadership of the Fulton County delegation was instrumental in giving Eisenhower the majority of delegate votes from Georgia, and that was important to his nomination. “As a result, here I am as a federal judge,” he laughs.

His role at the convention also got him chosen to be part of a small smoke-filled room crowd that selected Richard Nixon as Eisenhower’s running mate.

“After Eisenhower was nominated, I think about twenty of us were called on to go into the smoke-filled room to pick

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the vice-president, and of course we all assumed that Eisenhower would make it known who he wanted.”

“John Wisdom [a prominent Louisiana attorney who later served with Tuttle on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, also playing a pivotal role during the court’s civil rights period] and I were both included in that group of twenty because both of us had been leaders of delegations that were responsible for Eisenhower’s nomination on the first ballot. As we went into the room General Lucius Clay, who was General Eisenhower’s closest friend in the military tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘if nobody puts in the name of Richard Nixon, will you put his name in?’ I said, ‘Yes, I’ll be glad to.’ But fortunately I didn’t have to. Someone else did.”

In the general election, Tuttle was responsible for arranging an Eisenhower campaign visit to Atlanta. “Eisenhower made his first campaign speech in Hurt Park here in Atlanta. We had to hold it there because it would be against the law in Georgia for blacks and whites in the convention hall. So we had to have it outdoors. That was still a crime, a misdemeanor, for blacks and whites to meet together in Georgia.”

“When Nixon ran for President, he sort of embraced the Southern strategy which involved the George Wallace strategy. He alienated all the blacks at that time. Some of the former Republicans have never voted again for a Republican candidate for the Presidency. I won’t comment about my own position because I shouldn’t. I, of course, took the veil in politics when I went on the court.”

“The fact is that the New Deal was a great financial and economic benefit to the underprivileged in our society. The black communities in the South were large representatives in that underprivileged community. They would have been ungrateful if they hadn’t recognized what the Democratic Party nationally had done for them economically. In spite of the fact that they might well have remembered that just a year or two or three before the Democratic Party in this state had excluded them.”

After Eisenhower’s election, Tuttle became general counsel for the Treasury Department, and stayed in that post until August 1954 when he joined the Fifth Circuit.

Did he know at that time that the Fifth Circuit Court would play such an important role in reshaping the civil and social structure of the South? “I couldn’t help but know that,” he said. “Of course, the Supreme Court had just decided the Brown case, the first Brown decision, and when I told my colleagues up there (in Washington) that I was going back to go on the Fifth Circuit they said, ‘You haven’t seen what the Supreme Court did recently.'”

“I said, ‘Well, the Southern states will fall in line.’ I believed it because I was aware of the fact that the people of the United States generally had accepted the Supreme Court’s edicts as being binding on everybody and there wasn’t much use in fighting against the odds. Once the Court had spoken, that was it.”

An Alabama native, Bill Steverson is a writer and editor in Signal Mountain, Tenn.

A 1988 Report from the Southern Regional Council

By Staff

Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, pp. 14-15

EDITORS’NOTE: The following material is excerpted from the 1988 Annual Report of the Southern Regional Council. The report outlines past and present activities of the SRC in five key areas: voting rights, labor and the workplace, civil and criminal justice, education, and information and the exchange of ideas. The report is sent to SRC members and associate members. Others may obtain a copy by writing to Steve Suitts, executive director, SRC, 60 Walton Street, NW, Atlanta, GA 30303. Membership information for joining the Council is found on page 23 of this issue of Southern Changes.

For more than four decades the Southern Regional Council has promoted democracy and opportunity for all people of the South and beyond. The Council’s staff carries out research, provides technical assistance, develops educational and experimental programs, and brings together Southerners of good will to address important regional issues. We seek to engage both public policy and personal conscience.

Through its 120 members and a small staff, the Council has become perhaps the nation’s premier regional organization. No group knows a region better nor has been more consistently effective in it. The Council is the South’s oldest interracial organization. SRC members usually include major public officials, college presidents and noted educators, labor and business leaders, community organizers, civil rights leaders, and others. As a Council of local, state, regional, and national leaders–men and women, black, Hispanic and white–who live across eleven Southern states, the organization keeps up-to-date on changing problems and opportunities. Over time, SRC has developed several institutional strengths accounting for its longevity and effectiveness. These strengths emanate from:

* our capacity for data collection and analysis, aided by developing accessible technologies;

* our network of diverse leaders and activists who help to identify issues, opportunities, and trends and to understand practically how to address these in the region;

* our ability to focus public attention and media coverage in the South on issues and developments;

* our understanding of decision-making processes and how information actually shapes and influences those decisions;

* our institutional memory about the region, its people, and its places.

Before the Southern Regional Council moved from its former headquarters at 5 Forsyth Street in Atlanta, Gunnar Myrdal revisited some of the organizations then still occupying the old structure, which was slated to be torn down. “This,” Myrdal told a New York Times reporter, “is where it all began.” “Where what began?” he was asked. “Why the New South, young man,” he replied, “the brand

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new American South.”

The opinions of others echoed the same sentiment. Newspaperman Ralph McGill (one of SRC’s founders) said, “I think of that old wreck as a sanctuary for renegades who insist on telling the truth.”

“Sooner or later,” Julian Bond said, “the people who work there figure in most of what is important to the South and much of what is important to the nation.”

Of course, not everyone agreed: “The whole place is crawling with subversives,” charged former segregationist governor Lester Maddox.

“As a result of their efforts,” the Times concluded, “schools and a variety of other institutions have been integrated, a million black people registered to vote, elections won and lost, white politicians tempered, and popular racial traditions challenged and changed.”

Many of the Council’s original objectives have been achieved, but its work continues to be vital to the South and the nation. Indeed, the very achievement of many goals has had the ironic effect of disguising new ways in which opportunities are blunted, the disadvantaged abused, and democracy denied.

Now, as in the past, the Council’s teak is to provide research, information, and technical assistance to individuals and groups who are able to bring positive change, and to provide forums for Southerners of good will to think and act together.

In a new era aptly called the “Age of Information,” the Council is uniquely suited to help shape the region’s future–and the nation’s–for the better.

Looking Back . . . SRC and the Nation

By Staff

Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, p. 15

In 1919 the Commission on Interracial Cooperation was started. Thirty-five years later the Commission was reorganized as the Southern Regional Council. Over the past seven decades, Southerners of good will have worked as one within these organizations to achieve a better place to live.

Some of the organization’s most important accomplishments during these decades include:

• Helping to end lynchings in the South;
• The first network of biracial state councils in the South providing the major support for public schools for all children;
• Documenting the need for the first federal executive order barring racial discrimination;
• Documenting the need for the first federal civil rights act in this century;
• Helping to register more than two million black voters in the South;
• Research prompting federal intervention to protect the lives and safety of civil rights workers in the 195Os and’60s;
• A Citizens’ Board of Inquiry into poverty and hunger–work credited with spurring the first national anti-hunger legislation;
• Planting the seeds of an integrated cooperative farmers movement in the 1960s and 1970s;
• A Southwide governmental monitoring project that documented the failures of the Nixon Administration’s “New federalism;”
• A model demonstration project that successfully placed more than 400 black women in managerial positions in the South. This project later became a major initiative in the federal government labor programs;
• A task force on Southern rural development offering a blueprint for a national rural policy;
• Research in the 1970s that led to the adoption of the first nationwide affirmative action plan in the U. S. courts;
• Helping to bring more democratic governments to almost a thousand jurisdictions across the South.

Initiatives in Southern Education

By Staff

Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, pp. 15-18

After almost a decade of reform, education in America remains a significant state and national issue. The United States Department of Education now releases a yearly report card comparing general educational achievements for each of the states. Legions of private national commissions and task forces continue to study education problems, issuing a variety of recommendations. After adopting education reforms, many states continue to implement them, with and without changes in their original plans. New approaches, such as the “effective school” movement and the “essential school” reforms have entered our professional vocabulary and some schoolhouse doors.

These reforms have been sustained by an enlarging awareness of the central importance of education in the nation’s future. For the first time in decades, leaders of the public and private sectors throughout the country understand that improving education–including the education of the disadvantaged–is necessary to safeguarding our national future. Through a variety of programs, community leaders, business executives, and labor leaders have become more involved in public schools because their institutions have a stake in the success of the education system; they now realize that, without educated poor and minority students, America cannot have an educated workforce in the future.

In the American South, especially, these cooperative efforts signal a new era in the region’s development. For almost 30 years after the United States Supreme Court’s

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decision in Brown v. Board of Education, issues of school integration suspended most meaningful, local collaboration on education. Throughout the South, massive white resistance to integration and the accompanying divisions between blacks and whites immobilized local cooperative activities, leaving the design of policy and problem-solving in education most often to the federal government and courts. Today, this history of local inactivity and neglect in education is coming, at long last, to an end.

The local control of public schools, especially in the urban South, is more democratic today than it has ever been in this century, primarily due to the Voting Rights Act. As a result, minority and poor voters have a real voice, often a controlling one, in determining who sits on the school boards and who decided the local policies for education.

This change in local control of schools now allows minorities and the poor in the region to engage others in real, local partnerships for solving problems of education instead of depending almost exclusively on the long enforcement arm of the federal government.

Today, community leaders, including many business leaders, now see more clearly than ever before both the community interest and their own institutional selfinterest in a well educated future workforce that includes minorities. Almost every community leaders in the South’s urban areas acknowledges the importance of addressing the education of minority and disadvantaged students. Their own willingness in recent years to become involved in local schools and local partnerships in the schools is clear evidence of this changed circumstance.

State governments are also beginning to recognize that the needs of disadvantaged students is the large unsolved issue of education. In all Southern states dropout rates have alarmed even the most seasoned educators and in some Southern states that require exit exams, teat scores clearly evidence that those who are failing to achieve are primarily poor and minorities. As a result, education departments in most Southern states have begun to take their first serious steps in establishing program and policies to face these issues. (See SLRC Bulletin, 1988.) While their work and thinking continue to take shape, the issues of education of the disadvantaged are emerging as a major concern for Southern states.

Finally, the role of the federal government is also changing. For the first time in ten years the Congress passed and the President signed legislation which returns attention and resources to the issues of educating the disadvantaged. For example, the new education legislation provides in 1988-1989 $50 million for dropout prevention; $30 million in an “improvement fund” to encourage local schools to develop new approaches to problems especially those involving parents in the schools; a new basic skills program for high school students has been authorized at $200 million; and states will be required to use a portion of their block grants for education to help local school districts develop measurable characteristics to make schools more effective for all pupils.

These are encouraging trends, but they ought not blur the fact that the problems of education for poor and minority youth persist in the South. Oversized rates for dropouts linger, primarily among minority, poor youth; test scores for comprehension, reading, and math remain dismally low for poor students. For example, more than 40 percent of students receiving free lunches in Mississippi schools failed state-mandated tests last year. Not surprising, many minority and poor students continue to forego college and technical schools. At a time when education is recognized as a national priority and when the involvement of community and business leaders in schools have become widespread, the performance of poor and minority children is education’s moat significant failure.

While improving education is universally supported, improving the public schools is not. In the South segregation academies and other private schools are growing, too often at the expense of the children in public schools. This trend not only frustrates the integration of public schools in many places but also drains resources and support from the need to educate well all our children.

The problems in the South’s public schools derive, in large part, from social and economic factors that go far beyond the capacity of any one individual school. The fact that poverty is the most reliable, single predictor of poor academic performance underscores that schools alone cannot remove all barriers for disadvantaged students. At the same time, schools and community leaders are not helpless to do much more in addressing these problems. In the past, many school boards and city officials have failed to make the education of disadvantaged children one of its highest priorities in the allocation of resources and talent. Some local school systems have not targeted poor and minority students for additional, available resources such as counseling and tutoring. Many school systems have responded far more urgently to the state standards of education reform than they have to the local needs of disadvantaged students in each of their schools.

By the same measure, many of the cooperative activities that parents and community leaders have undertaken at the schools have little to do with such fundamental problems. Far too often, local leaders in business, labor, and community work have participated in what the chairman of the board of Xerox Corporation described as “feel good” partnerships. “Business and education have largely failed in the their partnerships to improve the schools … because they keep shoring up a system that needs deep structural changes,” he stated. To be sure, the opportunity to solve locally in the South the problems of educating an children is now re-emerging. What has not yet appeared is a certain and sustained collective will to make fundamental changes in the way we focus our resources and educate all our children. That challenge is now before the South.

Dropout Prevention Project

In the summer of 1986, the Southern Regional Council conferred with groups and school officials in a dozen urban areas across the region to determine if their communities and school systems were interested and capable of establishing local partnerships to develop and carry out a plan for addressing the problems of students dropping out of the public schools. By the end of 1986, community/school groups had been formed in six cities: Atlanta; Baton Rouge Louisiana; Columbia, South Carolina; Little Rock, Arkansas; Memphis, Tennessee; and Savannah, Georgia. These

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local collaboratives received small grants from the Ford Foundation for planning activities.

During the last two years each of these local collaboratives has sought to understand the causes and factors of dropouts in their own communities as well as the available services–in the schools and in the communities–currently offered to prevent and assist dropouts. More recently, the local groups developed local plans which describe their collective judgment about what needs to be done locally to prevent dropouts in the future.

Each collaborative has had some difficulty in making choices, in establishing a sense of priority among the different possible approaches. Although they came to a rather easy agreement on the local factors of dropout, all of them were of more than one mind in deciding exactly what changes will be most effective and most appropriate. The process understandably developed a far greater sense of informed will to act than of collective judgment on precisely how to act.

The plans and analysis of each community are quite different, but they do have similarities. At least four school systems–Atlanta, Memphis, Columbia, and Savannah–revised their own definitions of dropouts and the procedures by which they collect internal data as a result of the collaboratives’ deliberations. In these systems, the changes represent substantial revisions in school policies and practices. In a fifth school system, Baton Rouge, the collaborative documented a very high rate of suspensions and expulsions as a result of administrative practices.

Not surprising, virtually all the collaboratives call for extensive administrative changes in identifying, documenting, and tracking dropouts and potential dropouts. In Columbia, the plan calls for the development of an extensive internal database by which the school system can locate students who are showing the early signs of dropping out. Most collaboratives call for revising suspension, expulsion, or attendance policies.

Without exception, poor classroom performance and classroom boredom were identified by the collaborative as one of the major reasons students drop out of school. In Memphis, the collaborative found a strong correlation between dropouts and a history of falling behind in grades. In Savannah, the most cited factors for dropouts were failing grades and boredom. The other collaboratives came to similar conclusions. As a result, most of the collaboratives are encouraging schools to revise curriculum or classroom activities in different ways. Columbia, for example, proposes additional teacher assistance and tutorials. Atlanta proposes an approach of “esteem building” and new curricula. Memphis is suggesting a pilot program including new teaching materials and a special curriculum.

In-school training is also being planned by the collaboratives. Memphis envisions an “awareness” campaign about dropout problems within the schools. Columbia and Atlanta are looking for additional counselors and social workers to be available for all grades (an approach intimated for the future by the Memphis proposed pilot program as well). Little Rock already has carried out a retreat for school counselors on dropouts and intends to do more in this direction.

All the local collaboratives included improving, coordinating, or starting out-of-school programs as part of their dropout prevention plan. For instance, Savannah and Atlanta stressed parental involvement; the Columbia and Memphis plans include publicity campaigns for the general public; and all the collaboratives’ plane involve programs for jobs or pregnancy counseling.

With the plane established, the Council’s work nowadays is to provide technical assistance to the collaboratives, particularly assuring that community and parental representatives of blacks and the poor maintain an active partnership in the work to implement the plane. We are also assisting in developing and using tools of assessment and evaluation for local efforts and aiding the collaborative, its leadership, and staff in handling the ongoing problems of structures and personalities.

The importance of these local efforts is as much in their process as in their products. The local collaboratives have been able to set in motion developments within the school systems which probably would not have taken place without their work. In this respect, the collaboratives’ future can be reflected only in part in their plane and proposals. While their analysis and plane have merit, their strength and their future role reside primarily in the process of community involvement which they have already begun and hopefully will continue.

School Accountability Project

The Southern Regional Council is also beginning a program to promote school-based accountability for improving the education of all students in the middle grades, in five or six other sites in the urban South. In several carefully selected communities, the Council will work with a local community-based organization (or coalition of such organizations) to build partnerships of local business, community, and labor leaders in association with local school officials, parents, and teachers to assess how well the schools of the middle grades are meeting the needs of its students who are falling behind. These local partnerships will work to improve the quality of involvement in the task of improving the performance of disadvantaged students in the middle grades of local schools. Hopefully, they will establish a new system of accountability by which local educational systems determine how well each school is meeting the needs of its students at risk of failure; and determine what changes in resources, activities, and policies are needed to assist each school in meeting the needs of these students.

To help achieve these goals, the Council is establishing an advisory board composed of educators, parents, and community leaders active in the field of education. The board will help select the site for local work; provide general advice and guidance to the project; and assist in disseminating information about this approach to improving accountability and performance in education for disadvantaged

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students.

The project focuses on the middle grades both because of the need to limit the number of schools involved in the program (to assure a manageable lot) and because of the importance of the adolescent years in determining a student’s success and ambitions. Any program designed to effect systemic change in the way schools treat and educate disadvantaged youth is well-served by concentrating on the middle grades, and this program has such a focus.

Like our dropout project, this program focuses on creating a local coalition of concern and activity to help educate the students who are falling behind. It differs by concentrating on the middle grades, and particularly, local schools within an educational system. Both, nonetheless, are attempts to find ways to mobilize local communities to address the problems of educating well all of their children in the public schools.

Poverty Rate Climbs Despite Recovery

By Cindy Noe

Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, p. 18

Although the nation is in its fifth year of economic recovery, some eight million more Americans were poor in 1987–a total of 32.5 million–than in 1978, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The Center, a Washington-based independent, non-profit research organization that specializes in the analysis of data and policy issues affecting low-income Americans, bases its figures on the recently released Census Bureau data on poverty. The Center found that the economic recovery has been uneven, according to director Robert Greenstein, with the poor sharing less fully in the gains than in prior recoveries, while the most affluent are moving farther ahead.

An equally disturbing fact found by the Census Bureau wee that although the employment rate was about the same in 1987 and 1978, poverty rates were substantially higher in 1987 than in 1978. The unemployment rate wee 6.2 percent in 1987 compared to 6.1 in 1978. But the 13.5 percent poverty rate in 1987 was far above the 11.4 percent poverty rate in 1978. Although more Americans were employed last year than in 1978, the poverty rate was higher, contrary to peat patterns when generally poverty rates declined as the unemployment rate dropped.

Among racial and ethnic groups the poverty rates rose. Poverty rates for black Americans climbed significantly in just the last year, from 31.1 percent in 1986 to 33.1 percent in 1987. This means that one of every three blacks were living in poverty last year. The number of poor blacks rose from 700,000 to 9.7 million.

Poverty rates also rose a full percentage point for Hispanics, from 27.3 percent to 28.2 percent, although the Census Bureau said this poverty rate increase was not statistically significant. The number of poor Hispanics rose from 353,000 people to 5.5 million people.

The largest increase in black poverty rates occurred among married couples, up 1.9 percent. The poverty rate among female-headed families, rose at a statistically insignificant rate, according to the Center’s findings. The proportion of poor living in female-headed families actually decreased from 38 percent in 1978 to 37 percent in 1987.

According to the Center, the poverty rate for whites dropped from 11 percent to 10.5 percent.

The Census also found that poverty rates among children of all races remained far above the levels of the 1970s. Some 13 million children (under 18) were poor in 1987 compared to 6.9 million in 1978. That’s 20.6 percent of all children in 1987 and 15.4 percent in 1978.

The poverty rate for black children rose from 43.1 percent to 45.8 percent while the poverty rate for Hispanic children climbed from 37.7 percent to 39.8 percent. One of every two black children under age six were poor in 1987.

An increase in the number of very poor children occurred among both black and white children. In both races the number of children falling below half of the poverty line in 1987 ($4,528 for a family of three) was more than 50 percent greater than in 1978. An interesting note in 1987 was the increase of white children falling below the poverty line at 69 percent while 54 percent of black children fell below the poverty line. The “poorest of the poor” children totaled 5.4 million in 1987, some 2.2 million more than in 1978.

The poverty rate for the elderly edged downward in 1987 compared to 1986 for the elderly as a whole, but rose for the black (31 percent to 33.9) and Hispanic (22.5 percent to 27.4 percent) elderly.

In addition to showing that the poor have grown poorer, the new Census data show that in 1987 the gap between rich and poor families hit its widest point in at least forty years.

The Census data shows that in 1987 the wealthiest 40 percent of American families received 67.8 percent of the national family income, the highest percentage ever recorded, while the poorest 40 percent of families received 15.4 percent of the national family income, which was one of the lowest percentages ever recorded.

The 20 percent of American families in the middle of the income spectrum received 16.9 percent of the national family income, another of the lowest percentages ever recorded.

In 1987 income gains were much larger for upper-income families than for low- and moderate-income families. The income of the typical family in the bottom 40 percent of all families rose just $57 from 1986 to 1987, after adjusting for inflation. By contrast, the income of the typical family in the top 40 percent of the population rose $699 last year, while the income of the typical family in the richest 10 percent of the population grew $1,021.

The income of the typical family in the poorest 40 percent of families was $741 lower in 1987 than in 1978, after adjusting for inflation. By contrast, the income of the typical family in the top 40 percent was $3,031 above 1978 levels, while the income of the typical family in the top 10 percent was $8,119 above 1978 levels.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says that some who have tried to downplay the gravity of the new poverty data have cited non-cash poverty measures, which’ yield lower poverty rates.

Radio Series Showcases Mississippi Blues

By Adam Nossiter

Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, p. 20

This is how Lee Andrew “Cotton” Howell, 72-year-old ex-sharecropper and small-time bluesman from Holly Springs, Miss., describes the birth of a blues song, in a new public radio series:

“Id just play. Make up something, and sing to it. Just the sound with the music. That’s the way they was made up, back in them days.”

Howell is expressing in words what this new series graphically demonstrates. For the blues musician of the country juke joint and the fish fry like Howell, the line between everyday speech and the sing-speech of the blues was a fine one. Rhythms and phrases of everyday speech, with the help of harmonica and guitar, became song.

In “The Original Down Home Blues Show,” a new series of radio documentaries about the works and days of country blues singers, we hear how close are the speech patterns of rural Southern blacks like Howell to their music.

The twenty-four shows consist of interviews with ten bluesmen from north-central Mississippi, punctuated by recordings of famous players the bluesmen listened to and idealized in years peat, as well as with their own efforts. The programs were produced with the help of the Blues Archive at the University of Mississippi, a branch of the university’s library. The archive is the largest collection in the world of blues recordings and documentary material about the blues.

Broadcast already on fifteen public radio stations around the country this year, nineteen more are elated to air the program, said one of the show’s producers, Craig Koon. He is talking to potential underwriters in order to distribute it free to all 347 public radio stations.

The interviewer on the programs is the research associate of the Blues Archive, a Swiss-born blues artist named Walter Liniger who plays harmonica for well-known bluesman Son Thomas.

Liniger’a aim wee to cull memories of work and social conditions from rural Mississippi blacks, so in these programs he deliberately stayed away from blues musicians like Thomas who have achieved renown. Conscious of the exploitation rural musicians have suffered at the hands of eager Ph.D. candidates, Liniger instated on paying them.

His artists do not, for the moat part, have memories of standing in recording studios. Their music is considerably rougher and more uncultivated than those who do. Moat are like 76-year-old Stonewall Maya, who spent much of his life milking cows: “Back in them days, they’d give a little fish fry,” May remembers. “I’d play guitar. And man–we’d get things going!”

Even more compelling than the memories of life on the white man’s plantations–which have, after all, been gathered elsewhere–is the language of the old bluesmen.

It is the poetic language of the songs, delivered without accompaniment: “I come up the hard way. Didn’t have no shoes on my feet…Didn’t have no mama or daddy. Just out there by myself,” remembers Wilburt Lee Reliford, a blind harmonica player who once played with Howlin’ Wolf.

The language in that reminiscence is both figurative and literal: the absence of shoes summarizing succinctly a childhood of hardship and deprivation; “out there by myself” abstracting the loneliness of an orphaned youth.

He lost his eyesight at an early age, Reliford remembers, and “cried for about ten years.” This is the semi-exaggeration of song. Eyesight is valuable, he explains, because you can see things before they get to you.” [sic]

Reliford, 62, still plays a powerful speaking harmonica–which he keeps in a brown paper bag, according to Liniger.

Famous blues artists like Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Boy Williamaon, and T Bone Walker do make musical appearances in the show. Liniger asked his interview subjects to choose the music they listened to in their youth. That music, pulled from the Blues Archive, helped bring to the surface their memories of life forty and fifty years ago.

Liniger, an intense blues enthusiast who says he reamed much of his English listening to blues records, wee searching for the “subjective remembering of facts” the musical memories would stir.

Sometimes, the music is a direct reflection of those memories. In the interviews, Howell, Mays, and Reliford talk about getting behind a plow at the age of six, going without shoes, the ravages of the boll weevil, and the hard times during the Depression. Then we hear Charley Patton singing the “Mississippi Boll Weevil Blues,” or Sonny Boy Williamson plaintively pleading that he not be “sent down to that welfare store.”

“We have a blues archive here,” explained Liniger in the cavernous room at Ole Miss which houses, among other things, B.B. King’s record collection.

But what we actually have is a documentation of the industry. What we don’t have is field recordings documenting the region we’re in.”

That region provided a harsh livelihood for these old men: “It was pretty rough,” remembers Howell; “It wasn’t easy at all,” says Mays. And yet they remember their lives with a surprising absence of bitterness. Their life reminiscences are spiced with memories of the things which made life pleasurable: women, fried pies, even hard work–and above all, the life giving blues.

“They’d pay a dime to dance. Then they’d dance round and round,” remembers Howell.

Adam Nossiter covers Alabama and Mississippi for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. To learn when the series will be broadcast in your area, or for more information, call Walter Liniger, Blues Archive, University of Mississippi, 601-232-7753.

Southern Documentary to Air Nationally

By Staff

Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, pp. 21-22

“A Singing Stream: A Black Family Chronicle”–the first film to trace twentieth century African-American history through the musical traditions of one family–will be shown nationally on public television at 10 p.m. EST on Feb. 12, 1989. (Broadcast times may vary from station to station; check local listings.)

“A Singing Stream” presents the Landis family of rural Granville County, North Carolina, and examines the cultural resources with which this black family faced the enormous changes of the twentieth century South. Co-produced by independent filmmaker Tom Davenport, Southern Changes editor Allen Tullos, and Daniel W. Patterson of the Curriculum in Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “A Singing Stream” is a feature presentation of Black History Month on public television.

In the lifetime of Bertha Landis (born in 1898), the woman who becomes the film’s central subject, her family has experienced small farming (as tenants and as landholders), racial discrimination in the Jim Crow era, northern migration, post-World War II industrialization and the currents of modernization, the transformation of the agricultural economy, the Civil Rights Movement, return migration, and a grandchildren’s generation of expectations.

“A Singing Stream” features a wide variety of musical performances by a family whose repertory includes black religious song styles ranging from nineteenth century spirituals, to unaccompanied shape-note singing, to “jubilee” style performances, to contemporary gospel. Featured in the film are The Golden Echoes, a male gospel group that includes three members of the Landis family. “A Singing Stream” explores the relationship between the music the family creates and the family’s history.

The hour-long documentary seeks to show how singing at church, in gospel concerts, at the annual family reunion, and in their “home house” has served four generations of Landises.

In her eighties during the years in which “A Singing Stream” was in production, Bertha Landis remained active and articulate, participating in community, school, and church affairs, writing a regular column of neighborhood news for the local paper, and offering her musical observations to the newly-forming groups of her grandchildren’s generation.

Mother to eleven children and grandmother to nineteen, Mrs. Landis regards singing as a having been a powerful force in disciplining, motivating, and uniting her family. Highly conscious of the musical gifts of her family, she speaks of a “singing stream” which flowed from her parents through her into her children and grandchildren. Landis family singers have reached a high level of musicianship in church and gospel singing, feeding a thriving performance tradition in this part of the Carolinas that sits between the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain.

In San Francisco this past summer “A Singing Stream” won one of television’s highest awards, first place in the independent productions category of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Local Programs Awards, winning over

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nominees from WGBH in Boston and WNET in New York. For further information on the February showing of “A Singing Stream,” or to inquire about rental or purchase of video or 16mm copies of the film, contact Davenport Films, Rt. 1, Box 527, Delaplane, VA 22025. Major support for “A Singing Stream” was provided by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute, and the North Carolina Arts Council. The Southern Regional Council acted as fiscal agent for the production.