Life As We Knew It

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 11, No. 3, 1989, pp. 1, 3-6

LIKE OTHER NOSTALGIAS, the notion of Southern folk cultures in transition used to seem simpler, easier to track, cut and dried. If you ever have heard the Red Clay Ramblers introduce their version of the Golden Melody Boys’ song “Cabin Home,” you will know what I mean. “There are two places in old time music where the singers of the songs don’t want to be,” Tommy Thompson or Jim Watson will say. “One place singers don’t want to be is home, and the other is away from home. If they are home, they want to get away from home. If they are away from home, they want to be home.”

Even in the late twentieth century South where plumbers don’t make house calls, double-wides travel by night on the Lee Highway, and electronic villages post their city limits signs by modem, the Ramblers’ insight remains a good first principle of cultural transition as it affects songs of the South. Weary pilgrims, restless fools, poor boys a long way from home, rank strangers, friends and loved ones left behind have filled out much of the demographic profile of the South’s folk and working class music, sacred and secular, black and white, young and old, male and female.

Yet things have also been changing. And, as eras change so do the meanings of words such as “home” and “away from home,” and even the meanings of “natives,” and “strangers,” and “loved ones.” You can hear the

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Southern changes of the 1980s as easily on major-market country radio stations as well as anywhere else. “I sang ‘Dixie,’ as he died,” sings Kentucky hillbilly outmigrant Dwight Yokam. “People just walked on by, while I cried.” Or, in another current country hit by Kathy Mattea:

I loved life as we knew it
I still can’t believe we threw it away
Good-bye, that’s all there is to it
Life as we know it ended today

If there is a scent of the post-mortem South in the air it is charred from the bonfire of the self-interested 1980s. You probably won’t hear Webb Wilder’s “Is This All There Is'” on your local top forty country station, but neither should you forget the lyrics: “You walked off the scene when I couldn’t make your life like Southern Living magazine.”

So what has changed in the South and what remains the same?

First of all there remains something called the South. This is the South in which Vann Woodward insists its people have a shared, rather unpleasant historical experience distinct in America, the enduring South seemingly without end that sociologist John Shelton Reed continually labors to document in that territory which he describes as lying below the Smith and Wesson Line, the South that this summer is being bound together between the covers of The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.

Perhaps it is helpful to think of the South as a section of the United States. A section, like the West, or Northeast, which contains many regions and sub-regions. More about these Southern regions later.

Enclaves of Disparity

The South of the 1980s has become a place in which certain white enclaves of affluence, such as the suburbs of Northern Virginia and northern Atlanta, are home to some of the wealthiest householders in the nation. At the same time overall conditions for working people, and for the poor, continue to be the worst of any section of the nation.

Today there are more poor people in the South (some twelve million) and a larger percentage of the South’s population living in poverty (about 18 percent) than nearly a decade ago. Southerners from the mid-1970s down to the present have seen, or have chosen not to see, a war by the wealthy in business and government against the poor? and against working people who often hold fulltime jobs yet remain in poverty. The gap between the nation’s wealthiest and its poorest has never been as large as it now, nor has so large a portion of this wealth been held by so few people.

For the year 1987, 44 percent of the nation’s total income went to the top one-fifth of all U.S. families (up from 41 percent in 1973), while only 4.6 percent of the nation’s income went to the bottom one-fifth (down from

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5.5 percent in 1973).

What is true for the nation is truer for the South which has seen, in the last decade, rising poverty rates during a time of declining unemployment. Not only are many jobs worth shoving, but poverty rates for children have climbed enormously.

The Southern Labor Institute, a Southern Regional Council project that has among its duties the biennial gathering and analysis of national, state, and local data for the preparation of its report, The Climate for Workers in the United States, finds that the South ranks lowest when compared to other sections of the country with regard to workers’ earnings and income, workplace conditions, worker protections such as unionization, unemployment benefits, disability compensation, and overall quality of life.

One index among several that were considered in the Southern Labor Institute study-in the “quality of life category”-was infant mortality. The United States has now fallen to a tie for last place among twenty industrialized nations in preventing babies from dying during their first year of life. In the U.S., eight of the twelve states with the highest infant mortality rates are Southern–with Alabama ranked at the bottom. Although a few states stand out as mild exceptions to thc rule, Southern states when considered as a section remain the poorest in the nation with regard to median family income.

If you look at states in which blacks are employed in what have traditionally been predominantly white-male occupations-better paid, higher skilled, higher status jobs, there is much that seems historically and familiarly Southern. At thc low end of the scale, where fewer than one-quarter of blacks work in thc better occupations, there you find a heavy concentration of Southern states. In 1987, most states of thc South also ranked in thc bottom twenty with regard to thc percentage of women employed

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in occupations traditionally dominated by white men. And so on.

If I have so far talked mostly about working people–wage earners, factory workers, keyboard operators, clerical workers, construction workers, temporaries, labor pool hands, fast food workers, janitors, agricultural laborers, farmers–it is because I consider them, and their families in the 1980s,to make up a large number of the Southerners who have become our contemporary “folk.”

Although most of the South’s current country songs don’t address themselves directly to the statistics I’ve mentioned, the facts and figures help shape the context in which thc music is made and heard. These days, although I tend to hear only musicians who have major label contracts, even here the current misery loves company. I’ve already mentioned Dwight Yokam. Consider such songs as Steve Farle’s “Hillbilly Highway,” “Someday,” or “Nowhere Road.” Nancy Griffith’s “Trouble in These Fields” with its evocative, but ultimately ineffectual solution to the assault on family farming. Lyle Lovett’s “This Old Porch.” And even Randy Travis’s realistic, ol’ boy centered, “The Reasons I Cheat.”

Despair and Myth

If I were to venture into contemporary Southern black secular music forms, especially rap, about which I know all too little, it would be easy enough to fill a list of songs which carry angry and pointed social complaint. Even in recent recordings of older forms–such as the talking blues–Southern Changes’ readers have sampled the fare of North Carolina bluesman Richard “Big Boy” Henry’s “Mr. President,” a reelection upon the demography of trickle-down: homelessness, cuts in assistance to the those most in need, lack of empathy with people in poverty, absence of commitment to low-income housing and decent jobs, cuts in education. “Come live with me a little while,” sings Big Boy Henry. “Find out how the situation is here ,’ [Southern Changes, August-September 1984]

On the other hand from this enduringly grim and callous South, recent years have seen the anxiety over the South’s supposed demise be replaced by an increasingly more mythical, superficial South of merchandising. Although I could point to numerous projections of this mystique of Southernism–in movies, television, and travelogue–the best example is that of Southern Magazine. Here, advertisements embodying Southern regional “lifestyles” (not “ways of life,” which would imply something deeper and less easily packaged for quick sale) cannot always be distinguished from upbeat articles. In its three year existence Southern Magazine has grown to a circulation of 260. In Southern Magazine folk and working class cultures can be prettified, transformed into vehicles of purchasable nostalgia, and kept at armchair length. Black faces, when they turn up, are in their comfortable roles as entertainers and athletes.

This spring Southern Magazine was purchased by Southern Progress Corporation, the publisher of Southern Living magazine–itself a subsidiary of New York-based Time, Incorporated. The households of Southern Living’s two million plus subscribers have a median income of $42,000. No doubt many of these readers have family roots deep in Southern folk cultures. But what these two magazines do best is skim and package a colorful cream that rises above past and present unpleasantness.

Beyond the enduring South of history, and in addition to the mythical South, lie a couple of other Southern changes that need mention.

In early autumn of 1988 a film, Sataam Bombay, which told of street life in Bombay, India’s red light district, won a first prize at the Cannes Film Festival. When asked about her next project, the film’s director Mira Nair described to a New York Times reporter a fiction film that would tell the story of “an Indian family expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in the 1970s, who now own a motel in the black Bible Belt of the South.”

The South (and particular cities and states of the South) is becoming home to significant numbers of immigrants. Nearly 90 percent of immigrants to the U.S. between 1983

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and 1986 settled in twenty states. Five of these twenty are Southern: Texas, Florida, Virginia, Georgia, and Louisiana. Atlanta, for instance, now has 100,000 Hispanics, 25,000 Koreans, 11,000 Indochinese, 10,000 Indians. Houston’s Hispanic population is over 425,000. Miami- no longer even considered Deep Southern-has 600,000 Hispanics.

The South’s history with regard to race relations can hardly encourage the expectation that these newest Southerners will be warmly and quickly embraced. The first Vietnamese resettled along the Texas Gulf Coast met Klan violence and intimidation from anxious Anglo fishing communities.

Folklorists will have much to do in interpreting new and existing Southern cultures to each other. With the coming of all these people–including the still increasing numbers of Yankees and other regional Americans–and the recognition that there are some 190,000 Native Americans living in the contemporary South, Southerners will be “obliged,” as Flannery O’Connor anticipated in her short story “The Displaced Person,” “to give new thought to a good many things.” Not the least of the new thoughts prompted by the settling-in of new ethnic immigrants will be those that disclose the unsuspected in the South’s old racial arrangements.

Briefly, a few observations about the continuing emergence of regions within the South. Regions such as the Delta, the Black Belt, Southern Appalachia, the Low Country, the Ozarks, Northern Virginia. These regions are as genuine and persistent, if still emerging, as the South of which they are portions. At the level of day-to-day life, these regions are frequently more significant to the people who live in them than is something called the South.

A French Gulf Coast cultural resurgence is well underway in Louisiana, as is an Appalachian consciousness in the Southern Mountains. In the Alabama Black Belt, the legacy of the civil rights and voting rights movements have resulted in unprecedented political power for black people of that region, and most recently in cultural projects ranging from the production of a newspaper to a regional folk festival to discussion about a civil rights tour along the route of the Selma to Montgomery March.

Movements Held Hostage

Yet, these emergent regional cultures face familiar troubles. They are not immune from the same sort of celebratory mythmaking and merchandising which affects Dixie as a whole. Consider what has become of all things “Cajun” for instance. French Louisiana is also experiencing an intensifying ecological crisis. And, in two of the regions that I mentioned–the Black Belt and Southern Appalachia–absentee ownership of most of the land and economic resources threatens to hold hostage the movements for regional self-determination.

Finally, there are changes which affect the South’s “folk” that only can be briefly noted here. The rise of suburban Republicanism, like the surge of evangelical fundamentalism, is symptomatic of civic and moral retreat. The fragmentation of many Southern emotional, spiritual, and cultural institutions continues helter-skelter. New possibilities of critique and reintegration–whether feminist, socialist, ethnically pluralist, or ecological–have hardly won the day. For now, the emotional landscape seems simultaneously alienating and liberating. Bobbie Ann Mason captures it for a moment in her recent short story, “Memphis.” “Beverly and Jolene,” writes Mason, “ate at a Cajun restaurant that night, and later they walked down Beale Street, which had been spruced up and wasn’t as scary as it used to be, Beverly thought. The sidewalks were crowded with tourists and policemen…

“. . . Beverly’s parents had stayed married like two dogs locked together in passion, except it wasn’t passion. But she and Joe didn’t have to do that. Times had changed. Joe could up and move to South Carolina. Beverly and Jolene could hop down to Memphis just for a fun weekend. Who knew what might happen or what anybody would decide to do on any given weekend or at any stage of life?”

Southern changes.

Southern Changes’ editor Allen Tullos presented a version of this essay at the “Sounds of the South” conference on Southern traditional music held in April at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In the Governor’s Year of the Child, a Call for Alabama Arise

By Carolynne B. Scott

Vol. 11, No. 3, 1989, pp. 7-9

Governor Guy Hunt has proclaimed 1989 to be the Year of the Child in Alabama. For the poor child whose mother receives Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), this is hardly cause to celebrate.

How much can a welfare mother buy with $118 per month for a family of three–the average size of a family receiving ADC benefits? Add food stamps and Medicaid to that, and the mother’s total benefits rise to $438 per month. Very likely, the $118 is the only cash that comes in.

Medicaid benefits, which help considerably in a health crisis, may force the mother to remain on the dole, for if she happens to find odd jobs, and if those jobs push her annual income over $1,428, then she will not qualify for Medicaid at all.

Although federal authorization for the ADC program is included in the Social Security Act, ADC benefit levels are left to the individual states, and Alabama in this Year of the Child provides the least cash assistance in the nation.

The ADC cash and food stamps’ value together equal less than half the federal poverty level for income ($9,044 for a family of three) . The base payment in Alabama has not increased since 1976, and then only 0.5 percent. Of some 45,000 individuals on ADC benefits in Alabama, 31,500 are children. Two-parent families do not qualify unless one parent is handicapped.

While still inadequate, ADC benefits are somewhat better in Georgia where a three-person family can receive $263 per month. In Florida, the allotment is $264, and in Kentucky, $197. The Southeastern average is $193. At the national level, the median benefit for a family of three in 1987 was $359.

Vexations of the Poor

Kay Samples, a middle-aged mother of four (and a single parent for seventeen years), explained some of the vexations surrounding assistance for the poor at a hearing in Gadsden recently. The hearing was mandated by the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Pastoral Letter on the Economy and was one of five set up by the Peace and Justice Office of the Birmingham diocese. “I wanted to go to school, to technical college,” Mrs. Samples recalled, “but if I got scholarship money, I lost my Medicaid. If I worked, I lost Medicaid. A lot of us that have special children need help to get a job and be able to keep the children on Medicaid.” Mrs. Samples has a chronically ill daughter.

Still, Mrs. Samples is grateful for the public housing assistance she did receive. She recalled that “if you live in a HUD project and your utilities get cut off, you can’t keep the apartment.”

“I drew $118 per month, and when I paid my utilities I didn’t have anything left. I had to pay my gas bill one month and my power the next.”

In 1986, Mrs. Samples married a retired military man who pulled her out of poverty, then died of lung cancer within one year. His Social Security and military benefits now support her and two daughters still living at home, and she works at the Baptist Mission Association in Gadsden to help others.

Most Benefits Less Than Two Years

Mrs. Samples received ADC benefits for seven years, but most families do not stay on the program that long. Nationally, only 25 percent of ADC recipients stay longer than two years.

For utility assistance, as Mrs. Samples pointed out, the mother must turn to churches and charities. Alabama Power cuts off some 90,000 customers per year and Alabama Gas some 20,000, according to Angie Wright, of Greater Birmingham Ministries. GBM has estimated that 50 to 80 percent of its direct assistance budget goes for help with utilities. Yet many poor families lose their heat and lights, or, worse yet, sell their food stamps to pay the bills.

The situation has become even more critical since the latest federal budget reduced federal aid in the form of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) by 9.6 percent. Children of low-income families suffer an increasing risk to health and life due to lack of electricity or gas.

With the wealthiest fifth of Americans controlling 43.5 percent of the income and the poorest fifth only 4.6 percent, the situation for the poor grows steadily worse. As Sister Mary Roy, who operates the Anniston Interfaith Center of Concern (a welfare agency providing emergency food, clothing and cash assistance) pointed out at the Gadsden hearing: “Little by little, the gap between the

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haves and the have-nots is widening. The backbone of society has been the middle class, but now, many of them are needing help, too.”

Enter Alabama Arise–a coalition of churches, social services providers, and legal and political groups as diverse racially, politically, and ideologically as the American Civil Liberties Union and the League of Women Voters, Mobile Catholic Social Services and the Loveman’s Village Tenants’ Council in Birmingham.

The concept of a statewide network of advocates for the poor was spearheaded by Greater Birmingham Ministries and the Auburn-based Alabama Coalition Against Hunger. “We realized individually that we did not have the power to make an impact on the legislature,” says Sandra Lawler, church and community organizer for GBM.

“We introduced the idea and worked hard by telephone and through letters. Very quickly, we got a number of interested groups. They decided there would be one representative from each organization and that we’d come together for an all-day meeting to set priorities.” That was in June of 1988. Now there are fifty-one organizations with a well-tuned social conscience who pay $100 to $500 to support Alabama Arise’s efforts.

Alabama Arise has retained Jim Littleton as its legislative coordinator in Montgomery. A soft-spoken black businessman, Littleton worked as an aide to former Alabama governor Fob James during his administration and has lobbied for Alabama AM University and “the Electric Cities,” towns which have their own electric companies.

At a recent meeting of the Direct Services Network, a coalition of some sixty organizations addressing issues affecting the poor, Angie Wright of GBM and Lucille White of Partners in Advocacy gave Alabama Arise’s strategy; “Activate the phone tree at night, and we can have 4,000 calls into the Legislature by the next morning.”

Through these calls, as well as personal visits with legislators and Littleton’s efforts, Alabama Arise hopes to ensure utility service for the poor fund adequate maternal and health care, raise ADC benefits, and initiate tax reform.

“We don’t expect to have all this happen in one session,” says Angie Wright, “but it is realistic to think we will make some of our goals.”

By mid-April, $4 million, which would provide a 15 to 20 percent increase in monthly ADC benefits had passed both the Alabama House and Senate to become a conditional appropriation. “That means that if the state takes in more than it has budgeted, Governor Hunt will decide what to do with it,” Ms. Wright said. “Last year, he was in favor of an increase in benefits,” she added. “It will be a priority of Alabama Arise to lobby him this summer.”

A Political Power Play

Alabama Arise’s other trump–a $0.25 surcharge on residential power bills and a 0.4 percent charge on businesses–came up as House Bill 761 before the House Ways and Means Committee on April 19. Wright, Public Service Commissioner Charlie Martin and the Rev. Joe Elmore of Vestavia Hills Methodist Church testified on behalf of the bill.

Wright pointed out that the bill would provide between $10-$13 million for assistance, in effect doubling the LIHEAP monies now available.

Commissioner Martin added that one of eight Americans lives below the poverty level. “While the federal government is decreasing LIHEAP monies, we’re increasing the numbers who are cold.”

Representatives of Alabama Power Company, Rural Electric Cooperative, and the City of Dothan testified against the bill.

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Oscar Walker, Alabama Power’s manager of rates and regulatory matters, pointed out that under LIHEAP only ercent goes for electricity while 35 percent goes for liquid petroleum gas, and 30 percent for natural gas. (In other words, electric companies do not benefit as much as other suppliers from those LIHEAP funds which the surcharge would swell.)

He said that only 9 percent of Power Company customers now participate in Project Share, a voluntary program through which they contribute a dollar at each billing to help the poor with utilities. Walker added that it is hard to get large industrial companies to locate in Alabama, and the 0.4 percent tax might discourage them further.

He also objected to the fact that TVA industrial customers along the Alabama/Tennessee line would not be taxed under this bill. Commissioner Martin explained that Alabama cannot tax a federal entity, but that municipal utility customers of TVA would be taxed.

House committee members asked numerous questions indicating a real interest in the bill and the distribution of funds through the Department of Economic and Community Affairs.

But at the end of the session, Rep. Bill Fuller of LaFayette, one of four co-sponsors of B 761, introduced a substitute bill that would make the tax voluntary, reduce it to ten cents for residential customers and 0.2 percent for businesses.

Rep. John Buskey, Montgomery, who had introduced the bill, said this would “do irreparable harm to the program,” and moved to table the substitute. By voice vote, the committee concurred. Rep. Taylor Harper, Grand Bay, committee chairman, heard it differently, however. He said the “no’s” carried and promptly put the substitute to a vote. It passed.

Alabama Arise proponents left the chamber in shock.

Moments later, lobbyist Littleton was vowing he’d get the original bill introduced through the Senate. “We”ll keep working,” Angie Wright added.

If each affiliate organization of Alabama Arise develops a telephone committee of five to ten persons, who, in turn, contact five to ten others, 4,000 calls to legislators might indeed be made the night before the key vote.

Calling for Clout

Will it work? This was the tactic Partners in Advocacy used to bring about rudimentary changes in perinatal health care for low-income mothers. “Four years ago, we were in the same place Alabama Arise is,” Lucille White told a DSN meeting recently, referring to her group’s effort to win funding for pre-natal and delivery care.

At that time, Alabama had the worst infant mortality rate in the country. Less than 20 percent of pregnant women without doctors were poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. Even if they could qualify, benefits to physicians and hospitals were the lowest in the nation. Wilcox County had an infant mortality rate of 34.2 deaths per thousand births, three times the national average and as high as in many Third World countries.

“A woman had to show up at the hospital already in delivery to be admitted,” White added. Now, besides its other goals, Alabama Arise is joining in the Partners’ concerns by trying to get the Medicaid eligibility income ceiling raised and to let older children up to three be covered also.

Whatever the long and arduous outcome of future legislative efforts, the children of Alabama at least have found a voice.

Carolynne Scott teaches fiction writing at the University of Alabama-Birmingham and writes for Catholic Charities.

Margaret Long: March on Montgomery

By Margaret Long

Vol. 11, No. 3, 1989, pp. 9-11

EDITOR’S NOTE: Margaret Long, editor from 1961-1966 of New South, the Southern Regional Council publication that was one of the forerunners of Southern Changes, died in February in Tallahassee, Fla.; she had been ill for several months. Her recounting, below, of the conclusion of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March remains as a testament to her gifts as writer and observer. Thc article originally appeared as Long’s regular column, “Strictly Subjective,” in the March 1965 issue of New South.

A pearly light glowed gray-bright through the rain clouds over Montgomery and bathed the beautiful old city in a humid, soft glare. The overcast day of the March on Montgomery was deceptively luminous so that the spacious, serene streets, the great trees fuzzed green and gold, the romantic old white houses behind magnolias and sugarberries, the teeming mud-soaked squalor of the back streets of Darktown and the commodious suave slow white downtown with its low skyline, crowned by the State Capitol at the high end of Dexter Avenue, all showed themselves in picturesque pause as “the Negroes” and their white Yankee friends–from 25,000 to 50,000 strong–marched from the red brick buildings and brown mud quagmires of Catholic St. Jude City three miles to the Capitol.

We hastened late to St. Jude City to meet the March, which was two or three hours late getting started, with plenty of time for the familiars at such events to greet one

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another as we moved about, pulling our shoes precariously out of the sucking mud each step–journalists, radio men black and white interviewing Negro notables and oddly talking their stylized air-waves talk into their little mikes; obscure young Negro heroes from the violent vineyards of the Deep South; a middle-aged Jewish devotee of Civil Rights, jail and the heady camaraderie of the Movement; hurried notables hastening to the front line of the March forming inside the gate of St. Jude.

The March gathering inside St. Jude–to the hideously amplified sound of some emcee or other insistently shattering the pearly expectancy of the air with his banal bellowings–took shape with famous figures in the front line: Dr. Martin Luther King and his handsome young wife Coretta, her curly dark hair blown black in the damp breeze; Dr. Ralph Bunche, moon-faced and beaming with the felicity and pride he brings to such occasions; Whitney Young, head of the National Urban League, massive, handsome and smiling; Bayard Rustin, tall and gracefully genial; John Lewis, Chairman of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, tenderly baby-sitting a little brown girl he held by the hand; and other leaders black and white. James Baldwin, small, black and bug-eyed, hung back with the field hands and marched, some ten thousand people behind, with James Forman, Executive Secretary of SNCC, Forman wearing his Snick trademark denims. Baldwin marched in a grave business-like way, and occasionally exhibited an elegant, warm charm in a quick smile or wave to an acquaintance.

They were all very grand, the leaders, great white churchmen, dramatic and girlish nuns and the famed black and white entertainers. Somewhere in the crowd which the press estimated at 4,000 to 25,00 and 30,000 and Rev. Ralph Abernathy called more than 50,000, were Anthony Perkins, the actor, Shelley Winters, the actress, Dick Gregory, a bunch of famous folk singers, distinguished Negro entertainers and, I think, Leonard Bernstein. At any rate, the great maestro appeared the night before at the St. Jude program of celebrities come from all over the country to show they want Deep South Negroes to vote and be free Americans, even in Alabama.

Bearing Witness

Thus they bore witness to the best American feeling for our civil rights and liberties, and as one beset and outcast white Montgomery liberal (who had to cook for one hundred of the distinguished visitors crowded out of hotels and restaurants) said, they were “the conscience of the country converging on Montgomery.”

Still, with all their beauty, talent, distinction and feeling I felt the biggest and most absorbing show was staged by the Negroes of Montgomery as the thousands, black and white, marched through their ghettos to downtown and the Capitol.

As dun-colored white boys of the Alabama National Guard, formidable in heavy helmets, boots and khaki coveralls, and sternly impassive perhaps in confusion at their federal role of protecting Negro marchers and Yankee outsiders, lined the sidewalks and as Army helicopters rattled above in the gray sky, we passed a sagging, paintless house where six or eight Negro children watched the march from their porch, the shy, pigtailed little girls in doe-eyed, docile wonder and the little brown boys smiling. And a fat three-year-old man child suddenly attacked a buzzing helicopter in a fierce show of joyful valor. He laughed, he shouted, he threatened, he shook his fists and waved his arms, he flung himself about mightily, stomping and hollering to drive the intruder from his sky–baby refutation of the popular thesis of the demeaned Negro male–while his brothers and sisters giggled and rejoiced at his ragings.

Walking on “Nice” Streets

We walked on Cleveland Avenue, a “nice” Negro street with a white columned apartment house, a tasteful big gray house and grassy yards with budding trees and gold-showering forsythia and the faint scent of crabapple blossoms in the beginning pink bloom, and the well-dressed Negroes on the sidewalks watched their protesting, marching friends blandly and non-commitally.

The March broke into song off and on–“We Shall Overcome” on one block which drifted offend swung into “Which Side are You on, Boy?” two blocks ahead, started by the five thousand Negro high school and college students Snick organizers go out for the March (young Negroes who have never before set foot in the street, ten years after Dr. King’s Montgomery bus boycott) and the parade tramped smiling and dense into the muddy streets and lanes of “niggertown,” dingy stores, ramshackle houses, big trees, budding white spirea and yellow Dutch broom, slick dirt sidewalks, and the poor, black, brown and golden people, beaming, waving, clapping, beholding their Negro greats marching for their freedom, and the strange, comradely whites from North and South come, at

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last, to befriend them.

An old patriarch, a sallow, mustached ninety-year-old color of a green olive, sat in a rocking chair on his paintless porch, watching with aged, narrow eyes, while his brown daughters waved and smiled at the marchers and his great-grandchildren ran about and shrilled out “We Shall Overcome.”

Half a dozen boys on the dirt sidewalk hollered at a round-faced black boy in the March and he smiled and waved at them, and a group of dark women waved and called to their high school girls and boys walking by. Some old men and young women raised their voices to join in the March’s chorus of “We Shall Overcome, black and white together, brothers we shall be-ee,” and a nun’s high soprano met the clear contralto of a young mother holding a fat golden baby in dirty diapers in the soaring, mournful assertion of “Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day.”

Smiles in Grateful Greeting

An old black grandmother in a white apron over her colorless dress raised her heavy eyelids to look at, smile at and wave at white women in the March, to welcome the strange friends from far away. On porches, on the dirt sidewalks and in the mud streets, the young and old women with shy grace and great effort met the white faces to smile in grateful greeting. A brown slattern, her belly distended with another baby under her streaked and faded red dress, her crisp hair swathed in a dirty head rag, her feet in shoes run down to the soles, lifted her weary, bitter face to nod and smile at a white woman walking by.

Nicely garbed young and old Negro women and Sunday-dressed children waved and clapped as the marchers passed, in sweet hospitality for the marching guests.

We passed a drab stretch of sagging houses, dirty store fronts and grassless yards, and suddenly blooming like a brilliant zinnia bed in a dirt alley were a dozen or so children in a baby delegation marshaled by two pretty young colored women, who exchanged grown-up smiles with the marchers and passers-by appreciating the lovely little ones. Their deep-eyed, tender faces, black, beige, nut brown and nearly white, smiled shyly and their little pink-palm hands waved like petals in a wind. I can’t imagine what the black two-year-old boy or the bronze, pigtailed ten-year-old girl in a starched yellow dress thought it was all about, but their welcome was entrancing.

Here and there a watching Negro joined the March. A thin old black lady in a white dress, beside herself in the wonder and pride of the event, left the March to greet by-standing friends and pull some of them into the parade with her.

And, when the throngs got to town, passing a poor white section edging on the Negro neighborhoods where white girls amiably took pictures, workmen watched wondering and undecided and a shabby fat man cursed the marchers and reporters and photographers, they were a great army of Negroes, distinguished white Americans, foreign delegations, and the black poor of the Alabama countryside from Selma to Montgomery.

Negroes in the movement are always talking about the “confrontation,” of which it seems to me, for all their efforts, they have had very little, since the white folks they would “confront” like to turn their eyes away, put the Negroes in jail and behave as if their dark neighbors are somebody from New York, Moscow or Peking. But in Montgomery there was a “confrontation” when what looked to me like 40,000 or 50,000 Negroes and white people walked up Dexter Avenue, past the big hotels and office buildings and the stunned, solemn, smiling whites on the wide streets and in office windows and hotel balconies, and proceeded singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, toward the State Capitol of Alabama, which loomed like an alabaster dream palace in the sky at the end of the avenue. This first Capitol of the Confederacy must be the most beautiful state building in the country, with its elegant high dome, its white columns, graceful wings and tiers of marble steps, splendidly gleaming on bright greensward and among high old trees.

Easter Egg Troopers

And that March Thursday, a row of state troopers with bright green helmets, green ties, khaki shirts and green trousers stood guarding the dream ramparts of the Old South in bright and gala array like so many festive Easter eggs as the black and white Americans marched singing to the steps. Behind the Easter egg troopers stood hundreds of white state officials and employees, while scores more leaned out of office windows to hear the glorious singing, the great oratory, the outsiders’ American assertion and the Alabama Negroes’ vows to vote, sit in the legislature and equally participate in political power in Alabama.

I don’t know what the white folks so spectacularly confronted thought. But they stood on the marble steps for four hours hearing every pounding song, every surge of laughter, every black shout of ridicule and every rousing ring of the orators’ echoed promise to march, vote and demonstrate until Alabama belongs to black and white together.

A Turn for the Worse. A Turn in the South by V.S. Naipaul. (Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. 307 pages. $18.95.). Library Service in Black & White; Some Personal Recollections, 1921-1980 by Annie L. McPheeters. (The Scarecrow Press Metuchen, N.J., 1988. xvi. 152 pages. $22.50.)

By Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 11, No. 3, 1989, pp. 13-14

A Turn in the South is, the author says, a travel book– “travel on a theme”–, which is, I suppose, his way of saying that it is an interpretation of the present-day South gained from visiting some of its parts. What he finds is a South “of order and faith, and music and melancholy”; or, as he writes in a full-blown passage, which testifies to a sort of epiphany: “Music and community, and tears and faith; I felt that I had been taken, through country music, to an understanding of a whole distinctive culture, something I had never imagined existing in the United States.”

In the wondrous process by which our cultural clergy, the New York City and New England cloisters, certify works of art and literature as agreeable and acceptable to it, this book has been granted “importance.” It has none in itself. It has a lot, in the evidence it pressed on us regarding the standards of our cultural tastemakers. The New Yorker magazine ran three lengthy portions; once upon a time, the New Yorker had Calvin Trillin roving now and then the South, as good a stylist, to say the least, as Naipaul and one who, besides, knew what to look for and what and whom to believe.

But it was the New York Review of Books which sealed the book’s “meaning,” by choosing the pages which describe “rednecks” for its December 22, 1988 issue. The review which the NYRB subsequently gave the whole book was captioned “The Reddening of America”; the reviewer called the “redneck” piece “a miniature masterpiece.” Naipaul praised it himself, calling it “full and beautiful and lyrical.” “Rednecks” in this treatment are practically synonymous with all low-income Southern whites–and with the yearnings of many who are better off as well; they are depicted as something above junkyard dogs, but not far above. No other discrete minority (as in Naipaul’s understanding they are one) would be so dishonored and lampooned in the pages of the NYRB, nor, for that matter, in a book published by Alfred A. Knopf. It is always interesting to observe what racism and overt prejudice are admissible in polite society. These days, the white Southern working class is fair game.

And country music, most particularly including Elvis Presley, is capstone and key to the South’s “distinctive culture.”

The “redneck” story is told, of course, by an interviewee, but throughout the book Naipaul carefully lets his readers know which persons interviewed he likes and which he doesn’t. The few I can recall whom he likes but little are black. Sometimes he is frank enough, as with Atlanta’s Marvin Arrington, to let his disapproval show dearly, and as arising from temperamental differences. And a few blacks he did like; Atlanta’s Hosea Williams was one. But there are far fewer blacks than whites in this interpretation of today’s South, and the whites are predominantly from that stratum known as “moderates.”

Mississippi is an outstanding example. By my count, he reports on an outdoor prayer meeting of blacks, as well as fourteen individual interviews, exactly two of which are with blacks, and one of those not consummated. Even more amazing was his selection of those two, both rather nondescript men, in a state as rich as is Mississippi in strong black leadership, both women and men.

Naipaul can insist upon the exclusivity of his theme, but

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this book, with all its hype, will be taken as a study of the contemporary South. It is a distorted one. A few of his interviews are insightful: I think particularly of those with Robert Waymer of the Atlanta School Board and Judges Alex Sanders and R.P. Sugg of South Carolina and Mississippi, respectively. Some of his own apperceptions are on target, though by now fairly commonplace; such are his statements that blacks have had by various stratagems to cope with the “irrationality” of the South, or that blacks have won political positions that do not insure actual social power, or that the old South was violent and lawless. The interpretations of the South which dominate this book come, however, from tradition-hallowing or politically conservative whites; nor does he ever challenge or balance a single one of their several disparaging remarks about blacks.

If Naipaul has read any of the classic white interpreters of the white South–Cash, Lillian Smith, Myrdal, Dabbs, Woodward, Leroy Percy, others–, there is no evidence of it. He has read Up From Slavery several times and admires it, as he does Booker T. Washington author. He has nothing good to say of W.E.B. DuBois, nor of his The Souls of Black Folks, which has “too pretty ways with words,” a strange criticism from this particular writer. Some of Naipaul’s prose is wild, his description of kudzu, for one example: a long incomplete sentence, broken by a parenthetical clause set off by dashes, and a like one inside that, topped off with a complete sentence within parentheses, being as entangling as the vine itself.

There are mistakes of fact scattered throughout the book; most are small and come in the interviews. Neither an informed writer or editor would, however, have indulged them. The publisher has done, on the other hand, an exceptionally handsome job of bookmaking and printing.

“TELL ABOUT THE SOUTH. What’s it like there.” Is anyone really interested anymore? If so, Naipaul is not a guide to follow, not if one cares to find the reality of it. Better to read, among other things, Annie L. McPheeters, Library Service in Black White; some personal recollections, 1921-1980. No fancy foot-work here. Only clear, syntactical sentences (and clear photographs), that truths about the South. Mrs. McPheeters served the Atlanta Public Libraries for over thirty years, half of them as head librarian of the West Hunter Branch, the principal facility for blacks; after retiring in 1966, she became the first black faculty member of Georgia State University.

At one place in the book, she sets down a chronology of library services for black Atlantans between 1902 and 1959. The first item records that W.E.B. DuBois and a committee of black citizens petitioned the Carnegie Trustees for a library. It was denied, though in 1903 some funds were provided to Atlanta University, for citizen use. The last item, May 24, 1959, records that Mayor Hartsfield announced the desegregation of the public library system, and that Whitney Young, for the Atlanta Council on Human Relation, “reported that the Council was pleased that race was no longer a barrier to use of the library.” What a march of events, of struggle and striving, lay between those two dates! Mrs. McPheeters chronicles it, and in her doing so we learn of the white and black people who confronted each other, and revealed some truths about themselves to each other, and to us.

This is an honest book. The final chapters are autobiographical, and enrich the earlier pages; the chapter on “early life and education” is a bright gem: indeed, Mr. Naipaul, “lyrical.”

Leslie Dunbar is the new book editor of Southern Changes. His earlier affiliation with the Southern Regional Council began in 1958. He was Director of Research during 1959 and 1960, and Executive Director 1961-1965. He lives now in Durham, North Carolina.

The Cold Hard Truth

By J.L. Chestnut, Jr.

Vol. 11, No. 3, 1989, pp. 16, 15

With all the recent useless and stupid killings by blacks there is budding concern by some decisionmakers into the real causes of black crime and violence. Up to now, when that question was raised all we received was a racist wink and, “Well, you know how some blacks are!”

Black violence, like drugs, now threatens even white neighborhoods; hence a belated but urgent white concern in the genuine causes and effects of black criminality and violence.

For forty years I have been concerned with the outrageously disproportionate number of black people who end up in prison and on death row. Poverty, despair, rage, and hopelessness are only part of the problem. Racism in the criminal justice system and in the society at large are also problems.

Blacks comprise about 12 percent of the national population, but 46 percent of those incarcerated in jail are black and almost 41 percent of those on death row are black. These statistics are both true and misleading.

Black people account for 60.7 percent of those arrested for robbery. Caucasians account for 74.8 percent of the people arrested for embezzlement. Fewer than one percent of people convicted for robbery are given probation. More than 85 percent of all convicted embezzlers are placed on probation.

The crimes that are seen as most dangerous also have a racist twist. A lone black street robber is treated as more dangerous than corporations who violate plant safety laws and cause numerous deaths. Moreover, in certain predictable states the incarceration rate of blacks exceeds the national average.

In the same predictable states, far fewer blacks serve as top law enforcement people, lawyers, judges and even jurors. That procedure guarantees the predictable result. It always has. That was one of the reasons for political discrimination and the wholesale denial of the right to vote.

People of color have the fewest resources and are the most vulnerable to the consequences of poverty, disease, despair and rage. A consistent message made by the predominant white culture is that blacks are less than whites and are bad, ugly end generally “no account.” Self-hate and insecurity have been watchwords in black America for 350 years.

Self-worth, pride and dignity are lessons taught by many black families, some black leaders and so-called activists. These lessons, however, are often overshadowed by the awesome and overpowering gap between the “haves and have nots.” Blacks make up 32 percent of the homeless in the United States. Black unemployment is double that of whites.

This stifling poverty translates into poorer schools with a higher dropout rate. A primary method for raising school revenues is property taxes, but schools in poverty areas have a much smaller tax base. I can take you to schools with cockroaches crawling the walls and to classrooms where

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the ceilings are crumbling.

These conditions cannot be corrected by building more prisons. A plausible argument can be made that incarceration increases criminality. A thinking society should be developing alternatives to incarceration as punishment, especially for crimes merely against property and not against people.

After thirty years as a trial lawyer, I say without blinking that the United States’ criminal justice system is being used to destroy people of color, most notably black people and the poor. There must be a change in the part it plays in maintaining the current power relationships in the U.S.

Most of what politicians and public office holders say about crime is not worth listening to. The more they talk the worse the problem gets.

Peace.

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