Native Southerners

By Theda Perdue

Vol. 11, No. 5, 1989, pp. 1, 4-8

Southerners do not think very much about Indians unless, of course, they are vacationing in the Great Smoky Mountains or perhaps south Florida where the Cherokees and the Seminoles/Miccosukees maintain tourist attractions. Instead, Southerners tend to associate native peoples with the region’s distant past (Pocahontas) or with the West (cowboys and Indians). Yet in 1980 the South’s population included almost 190,000 people, excluding nearly 170,000 others in Oklahoma, who identified themselves to census takers as Indian. Of these, approximately 14,000 live on reservations while others maintain their ethnic identity without federal recognition, a land base, or a governing structure. The South’s native peoples are enormously diverse, yet they share a complex ancient culture and a recent history that has challenged them to preserve that cultural tradition in remarkably creative ways.

Today’s Southern Indians are descendants of people who have lived in the region for thousands of years. In the millennia before the arrival of Europeans, they developed an agriculturally based economic system and organized themselves into large centralized chiefdoms. These native Southerners were not hunters who roamed the forests in isolated bands: they were farmers who lived in towns. Only recently, in fact, has the South once again become as urbanized as it was on the eve of

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European “discovery.” The rich bottomlands, a long growing season, and ample rainfall made it possible for the region to support a population as dense as many areas of Europe. In

Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983)

, historical demographer Henry Dobyns, for example, suggested that the current state of Florida was home to nearly a million people. Quite clearly, the South was not a wilderness in 1492.

The demography, economy, government, and belief system of these people promoted a sense of community and cooperation: they joined together in performing large tasks such as planting and harvesting and they maintained public granaries for visitors and villagers who fell on hard times. The responsibilities and obligations of kinship governed one’s behavior; a strong community ethic balanced considerable individual autonomy; and cosmological order demanded temporal harmony. They did not operate in an individualistic way; the community ethic was foremost.

European invasion disrupted this way of life in several ways. Most profound was the impact of disease. Native Americans had no resistance to the diseases of Europe, and they suffered horrendous casualties not only from common killers such as smallpox but also from milder diseases such as measles. Dobyns and other demographers have suggested that as many as 95 percent of native Americans died in the first hundred years of contact with Europeans. In addition to disease, warfare and slave-raiding claimed victims. Furthermore, Europeans, particularly the English, demanded native land and allegiance. A growing dependence on European goods left Indians little bargaining room, and so they relinquished territory and sovereignty.

Sidebar: Indians in Slavery

In the South, the colonial economy quickly came to depend on agriculture. In the early years, native peoples sustained this economy through their land, which the colonists seized by the foreign practice of treaty-making, and native labor, acquired by enslavement. Indian prisoners of war took their place alongside African captives in the tobacco and rice fields of colonial plantations. In 1708, for example, South Carolina’s population of 9,58O included 2,900 Africans and 1,400 Indian slaves. In

The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indians in the Old South (New York: The Free Press, 198I)

, historian J. Leitch Wright asserted, however, that the number of Indian slaves actually could have been much higher because of imprecision in recording the race of slaves. Furthermore, he contended that many of the characteristics of African American culture may be native in origin rather than African because of the high proportion of native people in the slave population.

By 1820, the native population in the South had declined to approximately 100,000 people. Many of those who survived belonged to five powerful nations-the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles-who had begun to adopt European culture in varying degrees. Except perhaps for the Seminoles, they had centralized their governments, recorded laws and established courts to enforce them, and engaged in commercial agriculture. Some welcomed missions and schools,

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adopted the English language, and bought African slaves. These peoples came to be known as the “civilized” tribes, yet their “civilization” offered little protection from the land hunger and racism of the white South. In the 1820s and 1830s, the vast majority of these people, through fraudulent treaties or by force, surrendered their homelands in the South and moved to what is today eastern Oklahoma.

Remnants of some of these peoples remained in the South. A group of Cherokees held on to land in the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina, some Choctaws retreated to the swamps and sand hills of central Mississippi, the Creeks living along Poarch Creek in southern Alabama retained their homes, and the Seminoles took refuge in the Everglades of south Florida. In addition to these remnant nations, other native peoples who had not been subject to the removal policy struggled to maintain their status and identity as Indians in a South that increasingly defined itself as biracial, that is, black and white.

Sidebar: Coping with a “Biracial” Society

For those Indians who constituted sizeable communities of readily identified historical peoples, the task was somewhat simpler. The Eastern Cherokees, for example, never had to defend their “Indianness” although the means by which to incorporate them into North Carolina’s political system was long in doubt. However, the native people, now known as Lumbees, who lived in Robeson County had considerable difficulty in resisting designation as “free people of color,” that is African American, in the ante-bellum period. With their origin in question and their culture largely indistinguishable from that of frontier whites, North Carolina questioned their claim to be Indian. In the Civil War, the Confederate army welcomed Cherokee enlistment, but officials conscripted Lumbees as forced laborers building coastal fortifications. The Lumbees responded with a guerrilla war that lasted through Reconstruction. Historian William McKee Evans has suggested that North Carolina’s failure to defeat the Lumbees insured their designation as “Indian,” since Southern racial ideology made failure to win an Indian war more acceptable than inability to subdue a black uprising. The result was state recognition of the Lumbees as “Indian,” creation of separate Indian schools in Robeson County, and establishment of Pembroke University as a teacher training school for Indians. The United States Bureau of Indian Affairs, however, has never extended full recognition or services to the Lumbees, and they have continued to experience racial harassment despite their highly publicized rout of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s.

Smaller, less powerful Indian peoples have had a far more difficult time than the Lumbees in achieving recognition as “Indian.” Until the second Reconstruction of the 1960s, many southern Indians shared the indignity of segregation with other non-whites. When facilities specified “white” and “colored,” law and convention forced most Indians to use the latter. White officials usually barred them from “white” schools; their own racism plus a desire to preserve their ethnic identity meant that Indians rarely attended segregated schools. Parents sometimes raised funds for private “Indian” schools, but the precarious financial situation of most Indian communities limited this option. In the late nineteenth century, the Catawbas in upcountry South Carolina welcomed Mormon missionaries who promised help in educating their children, but other communities struggled along with far less satisfactory solutions.

Native Americans also found that they had few political rights in the segregated South. The fifteenth amendment presumably protected the right of non-reservation Indians to vote (reservation Indians were “wards” not “citizens” of the United States until 1924), but many native peoples had difficulty exercising the franchise. The same prejudices and tactics that kept African Americans from the polls denied

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the vote to Indians. Those who lived on reservations finally received the right to vote by Congressional act in 1924, but many found that the grant of citizenship was an empty gesture. Southerners simply applied the literacy test and poll tax to Indians with predictable results, or they invented new legal subterfuges in order to exclude native peoples from the political process. The Democratic-controlled counties of western North Carolina were so desperate to keep the Republican Cherokees from voting that the legislature insisted that the 1924 act did not apply to them. A separate Congressional act in 1930 that specifically enfranchised the North Carolina Cherokees still did not mean ready access to the polls. As recently as 1988, some Lumbee leaders were calling for a United States Justice Department investigation of political corruption and discrimination in Robeson County.

The lack of educational opportunities, legal segregation, and political disfranchisement compounded the economic problems experienced by Southern Indians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Living on marginal lands, they barely survived through subsistence farming or sharecropping. Sometimes they even lost what land base they had to unscrupulous individuals or state governments eager to profit from the sale of lands for which no recorded titles existed. Most Southern Indians lived far from urban areas, and whatever industrialization and prosperity came to the “New South” passed them by. Furthermore, racial discrimination excluded most Indians from all except the most menial jobs. While New Deal programs brought some relief to Southern Indians who lived on reservations, most native Southerners lived so marginally that they barely noticed the waxing or waning of the Great Depression.

The boom in tourism that followed World War II provided minimal economic benefits to the Seminoles and Cherokees whose locations near national parks made them tourist attractions. Certainly tourism meant employment opportunities, but the jobs usually paid poorly and the work was seasonal. Furthermore, tourists’ expectations of Indians forced native peoples to project a stereotypical image that many found demeaning, and the tasteless shops, restaurants, and motels built to cater to the tourists gave native communities a cheap carnival atmosphere. Most Southerners have driven down the strip in Cherokee, North Carolina that is lined with shops selling foreign-made “Indian” souvenirs and Cherokees dressed in polyester Plains Indian garb for tourists to photograph. While some may have been appalled, this was most expected of Indians and Indian reservations, and until recently, the limited economic resources of the Cherokees gave them little alternative to catering to these expectations.

Sidebar: Debating Federal Termination

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some native peoples did manage to secure a reservation, a commonly held tract of land whose title was protected by the federal government, and the services of the Bureau of Indian Affairs including schools, health care, and financial support for various tribal ventures. In the 1950s the federal government’s termination policy threatened these benefits. Most Southern Indians who had federal recognition sought to avoid the termination of their relationship with the federal government and the allotment of their assets, including land, to individuals. Among the Cherokees and Seminoles, however, considerable dissension existed from different quarters. Highly acculturated Cherokees sought termination because they felt that federal restrictions on the alienation of land thwarted free enterprise, while very conservative Seminoles organized a separate Miccosukee tribe in order to disassociate themselves from federal programs they believed undermined traditional culture. Neither the Cherokees, Seminoles, nor Miccosukees were terminated, but the Catawbas of South Carolina and the Alabama-Coushatta were.

Mississippi Choctaws, Eastern Cherokees, Florida Seminoles, and Miccosukees today have federally recognized reservations on which most of their members live. Other peoples such as the Tunica-Biloxi and the Poarch Creeks have won federal recognition and are acquiring land to be placed in trust. Only people whose names appear on the official membership rolls of these tribes enjoy federal status as Indians. The health, education, and other benefits that accrue to these people are limited to those indi-

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viduals who are on the rolls; that is, a Cherokee grandmother does not automatically entitle a person to BIA services unless her/his name appears on the roll. These benefits are not a special kind of Indian “welfare” but represent payment for ceded lands and fulfillment of federal obligations.

Most native Southerners do not have federal recognition. Some Southern states operate state reservations; other states acknowledge Indian groups within their borders but provide relatively little in terms of services. State reservations, recognition, and organization of Indian councils, however, represent official acceptance of these people as Indian by the larger society. Furthermore, most non-recognized tribes have incorporated pursuant to state law. Nevertheless, federal recognition is a goal for many because of the expanded services and sovereignty involved.

Federal recognition, which can be pursued administratively through the Bureau of Indian Affairs or legislatively in Congress, is difficult for Indian peoples to achieve. First of all, they must demonstrate identification as a specific native people through time. In other words, a group of people cannot merely assume an Indian name and expect federal acceptance as Indian. Furthermore, they must demonstrate that they have long occupied a particular site as an Indian tribe and that a tribal government has exercised continual influence over the group. Historical circumstances make these provisions almost impossible for most native Southerners to meet. Many tribal groups in the South are composites of remnant peoples who joined together to forge a new tribal identity. This is true not only of nonrecognized peoples but also of some such as the Catawbas, whom the BIA at one time recognized, and the Seminoles. Furthermore, many native peoples fail to occupy traditional lands through no fault of their own; indeed, whites forced many of them to relinquish their homelands. By the same token, state governments denied political authority and sovereignty to tribal governments, and so their inability to govern often had little to do with the wishes of their own people.

Federal recognition, however elusive, offers native Southerners an opportunity to reaffirm their Indian identity in a political and economic sense as well as their public image as Indians. Federally recognized tribes come under the jurisdiction of the federal government which, in recent years, has been more protective of the civil rights of minorities than state and local governments. This is particularly important to peoples like the Lumbees who have been subject to overt racism in recent years. Furthermore, federally recognized Indians can govern their own lands and establish their own priorities for their communities. Federal recognition gives tribes a corporate identity under which they can file suit, enter contracts, and apply for grants (this also applies to the tribes that have incorporated under state law), and it usually removes them from the jurisdiction of state law. Since federally recognized native peoples acquired far greater control over their own affairs in the 1970s, these advantages have provided a means to challenge the poverty and impotence they historically have suffered.

As a result of the expanded sovereignty that federal recognition provides, many Southern Indians have significantly improved their economic situation. The most controversial exercise of sovereignty and economic ingenuity is the opening of bingo parlors on Indian reservations. The pioneers in this enterprise were the Seminoles. In the 1970s, at their reservation just north of Fort Lauderdale, the Seminoles set up a “smoke shop,” where they sold cigarettes without paying state tax, and a high-stakes bingo parlor, which violated state law. Later they added establishments at their Big Cypress reservation near Fort Myers and on tribal land in Tampa. The state of Florida tried to close the businesses, but in 1982 the United States Supreme Court ruled that bingo and smoke shops were legal and were not subject to state law. Since then, the Cherokees have followed suit and opened a high stakes bingo parlor in North Carolina, as have the Poarch Creeks in Alabama.

Bingo is big business for Indians whose reservations are so remote and poor that few other economic opportunities exist. In 1985 Seminole tribal chairman James Billie told the Florida legislature that the Seminole tribal income was over seven million dollars; of this, two-thirds came from bingo. The effects on the tribe have been significant. The employment rate has increased by twenty percent. More Seminole children can afford to go to college, and bingo revenue has provided services ranging from health care to day care. Each enrolled Seminole also receives an annual dividend which she/he can use to improve her/his life through the purchase of a new stove or the payment of college tuition. The tribe also offers loans to members who want to begin their own businesses. Indeed, the Seminoles

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have used bingo revenue to expand and diversify their economy because they realize that bingo is not a very secure source of funding for the long term, particularly if the state legalizes gambling. The Seminoles like many other native Southerners are adapting their traditional corporate ethic to the modern economy. Rejecting a rigid free enterprise ideology, the tribe actively tries to improve the economic life of all its members, and it marshals community resources to accomplish that goal.

In some ways the Choctaws pioneered this approach to solving tribal economic problems. In 1969 the Choctaws formed a development corporation that built over four hundred houses and upgraded another two hundred. Furthermore, the Choctaws have used tribal land and federal loans to construct an eighty-acre industrial park. One of the industries that located here manufactures hand-finished greeting cards while another makes electrical harnesses for GM automobiles. Many Choctaws work in these industries but so do non-Indians: today the Choctaws are the largest employer in Neshoba County. In addition to providing employment these industries generate profits that fund tribal services. In an era of federal budget cuts, such non- government sources of income are essential. This is a major reason why the Cherokees, for example, acquired a mirror company that is not located on the reservation. Although its factories will employ few Cherokees, the income the company produces will help improve the lives of all the people who live on the reservation through expanded services.

The growing independence and self-confidence of native Southerners has led to a renewed interest in their past and a desire for more authentic representations of their culture. Native peoples have become involved in protecting archaeological and historic sites. The Cherokees, for example, joined environmentalists in trying unsuccessfully to stop the Tellico reservoir in east Tennessee. Although Cherokees no longer live there, the valley contained some of their most important eighteenth-century village sites. The Seminoles acquired land in Tampa and built a cultural center (and a bingo parlor) because the site had historical significance for them. Many native peoples have constructed modern museums and “living villages” in order to help visitors understand their ancestors’ way of life. Powwows and community centers strengthen community bonds and ties to the past.

Perhaps the most authentic way in which Southern Indians have embraced their past and reasserted their culture, however, is in using their traditional communal ethic, which emphasized the welfare of the group over the individual, to modify the institutions of twentieth-century America. Native peoples such as the Choctaws have employed the tools of capitalist America to provide social services, offer educational and economic opportunities, and preserve ethnic integrity and independence. Contrary to current conventional wisdom, they have improved substantially the standard of living on their reservations not through trickle-down economics and free enterprise but through direct aid and a commitment to community. Although some leaders verbally have rejected the idea of preserving distinct native cultures and communities and have advocated assimilation, the effect of native economic expansion has been to reaffirm “Indianness” and offer us an important model for economic development. Native peoples, not white bureaucrats, clearly are the best engineers of their own futures. Unfortunately, the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ stringent requirements for recognition deprive most native Southerners of the institutional structure needed to benefit fully from this model. Because the South has so many non-recognized Indians, it is a matter of regional concern and may well be a pressing cultural and racial issue of the twenty-first century.

Land of Deepest Shade: An Interview with John McWilliams

Tom Rankin

Vol. 11, No. 5, 1989, pp. 10-14

EDITORS’ NOTE: “Land of Deepest Shade,” an exhibition of more than a hundred photographs by John McWilliams, is currently on view at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. A book by the same title–with an introduction by Theodore Rosengarten and more than sixty of McWilliams’s photographs–was published jointly by Aperture and the High Museum of Art. “Land of Deepest Shade” is at the High Museum through January 7 when it will travel to museums across the region and the nation, including the Gibbs Museum in Charleston, S.C.; the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S.C.; and the Columbus Museum in Columbus, Ga.

Southern Changes photo editor Tom Rankin discussed the exhibition and the book with John McWilliams.

How did you get to the South?

When I got out of graduate school I kind of wandered around aimlessly for about three years. I had jobs, but I didn’t know how I was going to deal with my photography and I think what I needed was a kind of adventure, to take off somewhere. Jim Dow [Boston-based photographer and Walker Evans protege] and I made a trip south. We

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were gone for about a month. I had read a lot about the South, like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. And Jim knew more than I did about the region.

I realized when I went back that I was really dissatisfied with being up North. I looked around for different things and I eventually got offered this job in Atlanta at Georgia State University teaching photography. That was in 1969. I’ve been teaching there ever since.

Do you remember your first successful pictures in the South?

I think the first ones were when I started to go out into the country and I initially photographed architecture. Those pictures would lead me into pictures I really cared about, pictures about the atmosphere, the architecture versus the vegetation. The conflict that might exist there. And I remember going up to Roswell which is very different now-I haven’t been up there in years, but it was all very wild then. Nowhere near the development that’s up there now. I started going out and exploring more. I was ranging farther and farther away. Especially down to the coast. One thing about Atlanta is that it’s not a real magical place. And I think you have to go outside of this city to really find these places where you get a sense of history, of something more to the land than just development. When things got really ridiculous in Atlanta I used to go to Savannah and stay in this big old hotel. It’s no longer there. I didn’t know anybody there. I would wander and photograph. I finally ended up in McClellanville.

How did you come on McClellanville?

I was on the coast and, you know that Robert Frank photograph of the barbershop? I always loved that picture. And I was looking at a map and I found McClellanville. I said I have to go there. At that time it was a sleepy little village tucked away from everything and Highway 17 was still two lanes. So it still had a very mysterious feeling about it. I drove into the village and the big live oaks and the hanging moss was like I’ve never seen it since. The moss was so thick that it was like curtains. And it was white. Now you think of the moss as sort of gray. I’d never seen anything like that. Never. And I’ve never seen it since. I wanted to move there. I made a connection with this village. I’d never found anything quite as special. There are other towns that are similar, but none quite the same.

In your acknowledgments you thank Greg Day for “opening my eyes at the beginning.” Who is Greg Day?

Greg was an anthropology student at Georgia State. He took some classes from me in photography. Greg is a very smart fellow. He had been doing research with basketmakers in South Carolina. He eventually moved down to Mt. Pleasant where many of the basketmakers live. Just my dialogue with Greg over a number of years gave me much insight into the South, the kind of diversity and the underlying currents that one might not perceive right off, the decadence of some and also the strong sense of history. Greg was really good at articulating these things and we talked about it a lot. He and I used to go out and try to find old plantation sites. There are some pictures in the book from those times.

Over the years you have photographed in other places besides the South. When did you start to see the Southern pictures as parts of a whole?

I think back from the beginning when I was working with the 8 x 10 view camera I felt I was capturing a sense of atmosphere and a sense of light about the region. And I always thought that sometime I would pull that stuff together and make it into something. And when I had an opportunity to do the show and the book I realized it was time. I have fine pictures from Alaska and the British Isles, places up North, all over, but I realized that I did not want to do a show or a book that was my “greatest hits” over the years. I think that books that are merely based on a chronology are not usually successful. And so I wanted to concentrate on the Southern work.

Some of the strongest work depicts the South’s land-either in a state of change or completely transformed, usually by man. When did this work begin?

Around 1975, maybe 1974. To me the whole involvement with photographing the South has been an organic recognition. It started in my own backyard, in my own tomato patch, making nude portraits back there. Then I moved to the architecture, to ranging out more and more and exploring and eventually to the land forms. At first the land forms were pretty much piles and holes. I used to like to photograph from out of the context of the bulldozers so that they had no scale reference. This way they have other possibilities. Then as I moved out I got more and more involved with landscapes.

The photograph of the tree covered with cotton lint that’s on the cover of the book is central to your work. Did you happen on that sort of image or were you out looking for them?

I took that in ’75 or ’76. I was definitely looking for things like that. I was on the road a lot and I was specifically looking for those things. I had the sense of-I almost had a preconceived idea in my mind-but it wasn’t like I thought about it intellectually so much. But I had this idea of looking out from underneath bridge abutments. And that strong afternoon, golden light. Somehow being initiated from these big concrete forms. And somehow trying to make sense out of all that.

The book and show begin with a real recognition of

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place and history, reflective of an old South. But by the end you recognize and deal with a much newer, different South. Where are the connections?

Being in the South at that time I found things were changing rapidly. You would go to these places and it was just startling sometimes. The land was being completely transformed and changed. You really didn’t have to look very hard to find the juxtapositions of new with the old, the scarred land of development and that sort of thing.

There’s a photograph I have to ask you about. It’s the image taken in a prison where a black man is looking through the bars of his cell and a white man in a shirt and tie sits on the electric chair. How did that come about?

When I was out traveling around I made a point to swing by Reidsville State Prison which is way out in the country west of Savannah. As I was driving around the prison outside of the barbed wire I could look in and see those twisted bar bells. I felt like photographing the prison was a really important thing. If you look at it intellectually it can be a metaphor for what our society represents, what is important, what is taboo. Our society is reflected in the prisons.

So I had won the Governor’s Award in the Arts in 1975 or ’74. So I called up Governor Busbee’s office and said, you’ve given me this award, it establishes my credibility in the state, so therefore I want you to get me into Reidsville so I can photograph. They bought that. I had to write my reasons. And I had to go for an interview at the Commissioner’s office. A few months later-I had given up-this deputy commissioner called me and said can you go in a couple of days. So he came and picked me up and we stayed for three days.

And they let me photograph anything I wanted to. And I went all over, working with a 5 x 7 view camera. I wanted to deal with it as landscape. And the one of the guy sitting in the electric chair came from a kind of situation where a lot of times people just don’t know what you’re doing. And they don’t know you’re taking their picture. And it’s funny how you can just mask it with activity. He was sitting there in that chair, being real macho. He was an administrator. He was sort of there while I was photographing. There were two people with me at all times: the deputy commissioner and somebody from the prison. And so this guy was there with me, he was sort of haughty and acting real macho. It was a long exposure, probably about a half minute. And it’s one of those things where I knew it was a good picture. I started talking to him while I was making the picture so he wouldn’t move. He didn’t move. All the odds are against you making such a picture, but somehow you can do it.

You ended up buying land and building your own cabin in McClellanville?

I always kept coming back there. To me it’s one of the few

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places that is relatively wild. When I was doing the landscapes that deal with analogy and irony I was really trying to make some sense of the landscape outside myself. It was not so personally motivated, other than that it was something I recognized happening in front of me. And I wasn’t alone in this. There were other people doing landscape photography that were interpreting it in different ways, but basically dealing with the same thing I was dealing with. But going back to McClellanville, there’s something very personal about that. About the wildness of that landscape. The mystery.

The title “Land of Deepest Shade” and the epigraphs for your book come from the nineteenth century hymnal, The Sacred Harp. How did you settle on that?

I originally titled the book “Promise Land.” But there was a lot of resistance to that title, mostly because Aperture was publishing a book that was very close to that title about Mexicans crossing the border into America. So I started thinking about alternative titles. And Kelly Morris (editor of the book and curator of “Land of Deepest Shade”) suggested I look to The Sacred Harp. I had heard sacred harp singing when I had been with Kelly in the past. Different functions that Kelly has had would always end up with singing from The Sacred Harp. I was familiar with it for a long time. And we discussed it. We re-read some verses. And as soon as we read over “land of deepest shade” I knew it was really important. Because it deals with the idea of light and the sense of heavy shadows in the region, with the potential to reveal things. So then we started thinking about the epigraphs. We went over The Sacred Harp together and separately and came up with a bunch of verses that we thought might be appropriate.

What is Kelly’s relationship to shape-note singing, to The Sacred Harp?

He organized a sacred harp sing in Grant Park in this old church. He invited me to come down there and said we’ll sing “Idumea,” the hymn that contains the verse “land of deepest shade.” So I went down there one Saturday morning and it’s a thing that lasts all day. They get pretty worked up. There are a lot of older people there. Young people too, but a lot of old people. This is a tradition that is fading. But these people came from all over to attend. And it was wonderful. There was a leader of each hymn and that leader beats a rhythm with his or her hand. And they start singing the notes -Do, Re, Mi and so on-and sing the notes. And once they have gone through that and everybody had gotten into it, then they would go into the verses. It brings down the house. It’s all part-singing. Just beautiful. I had my kids with me and I really love that kid of singing. I used to sing choral music and I love choral music. And this is the root of it all.

Land of Deepest Shade ends on the water. After a strong series of pictures of land and of man’s intemperance with the land, what are we to make of the watery ending?

I spend a lot of time on the water, on my boat. When I got out of graduate school one I spent a year as a boat carpenter in Rhode Island. I love boats. I love working on them. There is something about building a boat where you really understand what’s involved. You know every nail that goes into it. It sort of gives you a sense of confidence about what you can do with it.

I was down in McClellanville for Hurricane Hugo and photographed immediately after it. Obviously, Hugo has had an enormous impact on the coast. And on me. I know it will affect how I see in the future. Right after the storm when I came back to Atlanta is when we had that four days of rain. And the rivers were starting to flood out. I went around the rivers at the height of that. I just had this burning desire to get out there. The rivers swollen, flooding. I don’t know what it all means. But I’m really drawn to it.

I really want to make photographs that deal with the ocean. And photograph it from the land, from the water. I want to photograph what goes into it, what comes out of it. The kind of power that the ocean has for us in terms of being a source of life. But also the sense of the cesspool, the dumping ground that it can be. I really want to explore that.

Portraits from Slavery.

Reviewed by Emory S. Campbell

Vol. 11, No. 5, 1989, pp. 15-16

Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks by Peter H. Wood and Karen C.C. Dalton (University of Texas, 1989. Paper, 144 pp. $19.95.)

Until the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the Civil War and Reconstruction years were the most significant period of events for freedom and equality in the history of African-Americans. The rise from the brutality of slavery, through the efforts of abolitionists and eventually the destructive Civil War, to freedom produced a tremendous challenge, for the African-American themselves and for the nation. It is one as well for the recorders of history.

Although the Civil War and Reconstruction have been well documented, Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks reveals another outstanding dimension to this pivotal period in American history, and particularly African-American history.

Winslow Homer was an American artist who is best known for his paintings of the sea and symbols of rugged individuals of the sea. Born in Boston in 1836, Homer was employed by Harper’s Weekly during the Civil War to illustrate war scenes. But his interest in the plight of black people began during his childhood, when discussions of slavery and the abolitionist movement were very much a part of his daily life.

Peter H. Wood, professor of history at Duke University, and C.C. Dalton of the Menil Foundation, carefully and learnedly explain the life of Homer and his paintings of African-Americans. The authors, in examining fifty-eight very graphic paintings, have in essence produced a fitting eulogy for both Winslow Homer, who was obviously a compassionate artist, and the portrayed African-Americans as they struggled to achieve freedom and self-determination.

Wood, whose earlier work, Black Majority, is proudly acclaimed by both black Americans and scholars of black history, and Dalton, an equally enthusiastic and accomplished historian, not only bring light into a dark period with their interpretations, but explore the development of Homer the artist through childhood and young adulthood. Homer’s parents encouraged “his interest in drawing from an early age,” and, although his parents moved to Cambridge (nearer to Harvard) from Boston to give him a chance to attend Harvard, “Win wanted to draw,” and elected not to attend Harvard.

Wood and Dalton skillfully point out that Homer’s motivation for drawing images of blacks, and their struggle for freedom, could very well have come from his own personal experience while working “for the Boston lithographic firm of John Buford and Saws where he undertook a tedious apprenticeship that lasted until his 21st birthday”; …”and since the day he left it, he has called no man master.”

Homer’s parents were opposed to slavery and were members of Boston’s Hanover Street Congregational Church, where Lyman Beecher, father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was the preacher. The Rev. Beecher, who was oblivious to slavery, moved his flock to Bowdoin Street, and was later replaced by a popular younger clergyman

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named Hubbard Winslow. Mrs. Homer also transferred her membership to Bowdoin Street and named her infant Winslow, “in accordance with a common practice of the time.” But when in 1837 William Lloyd Garrison began “to organize a Children’s Antislavery Crusade,” ironically the clergyman for whom Winslow Homer was named denounced the organization, and the Homers moved to Cambridge with abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Perhaps the strength of the authors’ text lies in its interpretation of Winslow’s sensitivities to the subject, as they relate events to appropriate paintings. For an example, they see two possible interpretations of the painting, View of Mount Vernon and North Colonnade, of 1861. One, that Homer’s only objective was to display the exterior view of the dilapidated home of the nation’s first president, at a time when a national fund drive to purchase and preserve it gave way to a “struggle to preserve the Union itself.” But another, they say, may have been Homer’s main purpose. They propose that since small, remote, figures are coming from a dark cellar, Homer was describing the fact that “enslaved persons were beginning to emerge from beneath the large and darkened structure of plantation society.”

The authors puzzle over the painting, The Baggage Train: Was Homer, they seem to ask, likening freed citizens of color to “excess baggage–men who refuse to pull their own weight?” Then, as if to present the other side, Wood and Dalton interpret Homer’s Blossom Time in Virginia–a young boy proudly plowing a field, “in preparation to planting” — : “this springtime scene embodies the hope born in Afro-Americans after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.”

This book is more than a scholarly interpretation of the works of one of the nation’s famous artists. It is also an excellent guide for learning about the events leading to the Civil War, the Civil War itself, and the Reconstruction era. I for the first time was able to see real character in African-Americans during and after the Civil War era. Heretofore, I envisioned confusion and despair among the contrabands. Indeed, the paintings exude tremendous emotions: hope, joy, and a sense of direction and place. And the accompanying text produces a welcome array of interpretations that reach other dimensions.

For those who enjoy art without assistance in interpreting the artist’s subjects, the comments by Wood and Dalton could be annoying and even boring. Sometimes the obvious is explained. On the other hand, those same readers will enjoy the authors’ meticulous comparison of Homer’s images with those of other artists: e.g., Thomas Nast’s He Wants a Change Too with Homer’s Carnival, pointing out distinct differences.

Although Peter Wood’s Black Majority could be considered the pinnacle of most historians’ careers, readers of this book will be glad that was not his last work. This book rightfully belongs in every American home, especially if one is of African-American descent. It is a wonderful reminder of the great achievement of black people from slavery to freedom.

EMORY CAMPBELL is director of the historic and still vibrant Penn Center of the Sea Islands, on St Helena Island, South Carolina.

A New Heaven and Earth.

Reviewed by Mary James Dean

Vol. 11, No. 5, 1989, pp. 16-18

The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989. 416 pp. $19.95.)

Alice Walker in The Temple of My Familiar creates a mythical saga, a journey to the source of unity behind our racial, sexual, and cultural diversity. Walker’s compression back to the “African Eden” provides a vision of a new heaven and a new earth, which gives energy to propel the soul forward with a revised cosmic understanding.

The novel leaves characters serving theme and events subordinate to mission. While the characters are believable, the plot is so dispersed, in eons of time, that the reader is asked to abandon logic and coherence in a “willing suspension of disbelief” and embrace a surreal blending of people, animals, cultures, countries, and sexes in a black, feminist, evolutionary view. The whole globe is caught up in a sensual, spiritual, liberating experiment toward an unfettered life.

The narrative voice shifts repeatedly as different characters tell their stories and add threads to the cloth in a Faulknerian weaving of a mythological past that becomes history.

The narration, although it is telling many stories, is always plaintive, simplistic, and almost ethereal in its timeless wisdom. It is both stream of consciousness and unconsciousness; as she says, “There was no seam. It was whole cloth. ” Out of this whole cloth, she renames people and events with brilliant use of language. Drawing from history, theatre, art, literature, psychology, she recreates a new universe with remnants of the old.

The five major characters in the novel–Fanny, Suwelo, Carlotta, Arveyda and Lissie–all become symbols for the contemporary voice that searches meaningful linkage to the past. In their separate journeys, they are bound together in strange and convoluted ways, perhaps signifying the ultimate unity of all persons. Fanny’s line goes back through poor blacks in Georgia and on back to Africa. Fanny’s grandmother, Celie, we met in The Color Purple. But that is only a taste of the many linkages of people, throughout time and places, visioned in the book. Lissie, the cornerstone of the entire novel, has been many people in different centuries, has been lover to men called Hal and Rafe, having children by both, but this is only one of her lives. Other lives take her back to Big

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Mama Eula May who dipped snuff, made sugar tits, and said, “Ooo Wee” and also forced radical changes on the Island of the Gullahs off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina. Another life finds her in Africa being sold by her uncle to Arab slave traders. Still earlier, she was in a harem in North Africa, a cousin to black and white tree dwellers, an ancient priestess, Earth Mother, lover of men and women, daughter of a lion, and claiming to have had both black and white, male and female existences.

Behind the genealogies, Lissie’s and the others, that overlap black and white, Jew and gentile, slave and free, male and female, there is constant quarrel with male/ white/materialistic/sexless history, and there is a search for a “first glimpse of ourselves before we, and all Britain, all Europe, became pressed into the forms created for us by civilization.”

This search comes to focus not on what divides races, cultures, countries, but on what unites the globe and binds us essentially to the rhythm and generativity of life. This is not a linear search, but a circular, cylindrical one that traces power back to “Isis, mother of Horus, sister and lover of Osiris, Goddess of Egypt. The Goddess, who, long before she became Isis, was known all over Africa as simply the Great Mother, Creator of All, Protector of All, the Keeper of the Earth, Thc Goddess.”

There are women in all the genealogies that lay claim to the noble earth mother tradition, but it is Lissie in whom the vision is consummate. She is as many lives as the imagination can create, each building on a blend of primal instinct, imagined history, and sensual fantasy. It is through Lissie that connections are made about people, animals, selves, passions, truths of time and space, for she is lesbian, man, woman, black, white, lion, goddess, priestess, warrior. She dates back to a time when human and animal were totally free and blended in harmony. But when men began to rule, they became jealous of women’s preference for animals and, thereafter, hunted animals mercilessly. Women lost their their [sic] animality and were only “familiar” with men; they lost their passion and their wildness.

It is this return to the generative passion that is Walker’s vision. The New Gospel is circular, Blakean, Laurentian, reaching back to all that has gone before and incorporating it into a prophetic unify of ourselves today. “Artists. . . were simply messengers. On them fell the responsibility for uniting the world.” Alice Walker has become an artist to unite the world.

Interestingly, she uses Laurentian symbols to describe the “familiar” and its “temple.” The “familiar” is an animal–part bird, part fish, and part reptile, (reminiscent of the phoenix and Quetzlcoatl imagery in D.H. Lawrence.) Its “temple” is a Native American adobe hut, representing freedom and rebirth. Walker describes the bird as trapped beneath a metal washtub (its naturalness stifled by white, metallic, middle-class restrictions on the natural self.) Centuries of slavery of mind and body, and particularly of the genitals, have all but crushed its free spirit. But, wonder of wonders, it breaks through the metal washtub to be free, rising like the phoenix, with “wings it had never used

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before,” a victory of the solar plexus, the archetypal, primordial self.

This is, perhaps, the most irreverent holy book I have ever read, in which nothing is sacred and everything is holy. But, like other holy books, it is an overlay of stories, people and events that start, stop, and repeat as if compiled over centuries of time. Its mythology places black women at the center, for a return to the source of life in the African sun goddess.

But the sun may lure us, as it did Icarus, toward disaster if we fly too high or desire too much. Alice Walker has desired much in Thc Temple of My Familiar. She has soared in all directions, with no boundaries. The reader is left with little sense of focus on an organic plot, but with also a great sense of something masterful being done.

Although the cosmic connections are there, this is essentially an interior vision. The characters come together primarily to tell their stories and experience sexual and emotional revitalization, with little realistic relationship to everyday life, love and work. The novel stays trapped between the cosmic vision and the interior psychological struggle, so that the flesh and blood characters are important for their contribution to the symbolic imagery of the unity of all people.

The message remains clear, however. It is a celebration of oneness, peace, and forgiveness in the midst of diversity. As Mama Shug says, “Helped are those who love all the colors of all the human beings, as they love all the colors of animals and plants; none of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any part of themselves, shall be hidden from them.”

The universality of Alice Walker’s profound message of ultimate unity may be seen in this white reviewer’s own Mississippi history, as I remember that my grandmother was also called Big Mama. And she dipped snuff, made sugar tits, killed hogs, ate sorghum and fatback, spat offthe back porch, and said “Ooo Wee!”

MARY DEAN, M.A., D. Min., a native and long-time resident of Mississippi, now lives in Rochester, N. Y., where she practices marriage and family therapy.

Victorian Reformer.

Reviewed by Harold G. Fleming

Vol. 11, No. 5, 1989, pp. 18-19

Lugenia Burns Hope: Black Southern Reformer by Jacqueline Anne Rouse (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1989. 192 pp. $25.)

If a truly definitive history of the South is ever written, some of its best pages will be devoted to those unsung women of the region who led the way in the battle for social justice. Aside from a few who achieved national recognition, like Mary McLeod Bethune and Lillian Smith, their names and deeds are not to be found in the standard historical records.

This admirably succinct and understated biography is a valuable addition to the meager body of writing that seeks to cure that neglect.

Lugenia Burns Hope (1871-1947) was a prominent member of a network of Southern black women who banded together in such organizations as the National Association of Colored Women, the Southeastern Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, and Atlanta’s Neighborhood Union to find remedies for the wretched conditions in which most blacks were obliged to live. As was the case with most of her collaborators, Hope was animated by a spirit of nobolesse oblige. She was an educated woman of proud family background and the wife of a prominent educator–John Hope I, the first black president of Atlanta University and himself a leading reformer, or “race man.” Conventionally, a woman of her status was expected to serve mainly as an adjunct and adornment of her prestigious husband, a devoted mother, gracious hostess, and bellwether of the social elite.

Lugenia Hope’s advantaged position, however, drove her to give first place to a duty of another kind–to fight for the dignity and well-being of the less fortunate, especially the children of the black slums. Her intense commitment to this cause took precedence over all other concerns, even her own health and comfort and the many claims of family life. (Her husband’s illustrious career imposed its own heavy demands of work and travel leading to long periods of physical separation and presumably loneliness.) She was a rarity on yet another count: Her independent spirit and assertive manner made it all but impossible for her to play the accommodationist role adopted as a pragmatic strategy by most of her black contemporaries. While her forthrightness won admiration in some quarters, it often subjected her to painful criticism.

Rouse has given us not only an account of an inspiring life. but also an insightful view of black community life in the South, dating back to the beginning of the century. The racial customs of those years would seem quaint if they were not so egregiously inhumane. The protracted struggle required of Hope and her allies, first to get a “black” branch of the YWCA established, and then to wrest control of it from condescending white Southern women, is one of the milder examples.

There is a certain quaintness, too, in the

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Victorian values that Hope and her network brought to the reformist crusade. The Neighborhood Union prided itself on ridding black neighborhoods of immoral elements that threatened to corrupt the youth of those areas. The records of the organization include the following:

February 1911: “Mrs. Barnett succeeded in getting two families out of her district who indulged in doing things that were immoral such as breaking the Sabbath and gambling.”

August 1912: “The Mildred Street Case has been satisfactorily disposed of. The Holy Rollers were made to move on the grounds of disorderly conduct.”

Victorian principles and all, our society today could do with some brave and dedicated reformers like Lugenia Burns Hope.

HAROLD FLEMING was on the staff of the Council continuously from 1947-61. From 1957-61 he was executive director. Since then, he has led the Potomac Institute, in Washington, and in countless other ways served civil rights and the enlargement of American justice.

Transformed Color

Reviewed by Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 11, No. 5, 1989, pp. 19-20

The Mississippi Chinese by James W. Loewen, with a preface by Robert Coles. (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1988, second edition. Paper, xii, 257 pp. $8.95.)

Whatever has set off the South from other societies, set off its politics, social order, its culture even including its literature and music, has been owing to the black presence, and its subordinated status to the white race. Consequently, what to do with, how to think about, other peoples, ones neither clearly black nor white, has always been a distracting question, wherever such peoples appear. The pre-Civil War division between free persons and slave implied at least the potential of there being a class between or beside the two colors, but after freedom that possibility hardly existed; whites would not allow even some of their own offspring to have a separate status, like the “colored” of South Africa: it must be black or all-white.

But other peoples there have long been. Perhaps as widely known as any, despite their small number, are the Chinese of the Mississippi Delta, and that because of fumes Loewen’s book, which first appeared in 1971 and is now in a second edition, with a preface by Robert Coles, good photographs, and an afterword by the author that brings the story to date. It sparked a widely shown documentary film, a very instructive issue of Southern Exposure (July/August 1984), and other studies.

But as well, on the other side of their state, there are the Choctaw Indians, quietly (for the most part) living outside the currents of Mississippi history. Other Indian tribes and groups are about the region; one group of them, the Lumbees of Robeson County, North Carolina, and vicinity, is many times more numerous and every bit as interesting as the Delta Chinese. There is also a scattering of small groupings, whose origins seem more cloudy even than are those of the Lumbees and the Mississippi Chinese: twenty-six years ago, in the pages of New South, one of this magazine’s predecessors, the estimable Ira Kaye wrote of one such, the Turks of Sumter County, South Carolina.

In more recent days, other new groups have appeared, and with no mystery about their comings. The Cubans of southern Florida (unlike the long established ones of Tampa) arrived with verve and muscle. Other Hispanic and Asian peoples seem in small numbers to be everywhere about.

It is tempting to tender another contrast with South Africa. That mad country is obsessed with separateness, holding even Afrikaans- and English-speaking whites at a distance from each other, trying to hold each black tribe from the others, holding the Indians and the colored from everyone else, everybody pushed into an assigned and graded place. Our South, on the contrary, has wanted but one division and distinction–either white or black–and some inner social force drives other peoples one or the

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other way, unless they are Indians who stay on reservations.

So it has been with Jewish Southerners. Some of them resist, but blacks clearly have decided that Jews are simply white, differing from other whites no more than Catholics or Episcopalians differ from Baptists. By and large, save for a few social anachronisms, so have decided whites. And so, as Professor Loewen shows us, it has become with the Delta Chinese, and even more dramatically. When they first appeared, in the 1870s and 1880s, they were treated as Negros. By the 1970s, they were “white.” They had made the transition in a special way: by selling groceries to blacks.

How this happened Loewen, who is a sociology professor at the University of Vermont, tells authoritatively and well. I suspect many readers will, as I did, find its story of the Chinese mainly of interest as bring a prism reflecting sharper understanding of the situation of the Delta’s blacks. Thus does the old division concentrate our thoughts!

One chapter in particular tells not only a lot about the Chinese but also about whites and blacks, about the United States and blacks, about the place of the poor of our country. It is chapter five, its title is “Opposition,” and Loewen regards it as his “most important single contribution to the theory of race relations.” Its conclusion can be briefly stated, though without doing justice to its merits. The argument is that the upper stratum of Southern society determines its values, including its racial norms and practices. Against the commonplace charge that discrimination, and worse, are the fault of poor whites, never of “good people,” Loewen stands resolute. “I was not trying to prove the lower class free of prejudice. Rather, I attempted to show that status pressures impinge upon the lower white strata from the white status structure.” In short, “racism originates in the upper class.” Whether or not this is a theoretical discovery, it is a clear-eyed observation; and whether or not it can be applied to other situations in other societies, Loewen makes the case convincingly that it is a truth about our South.

As benefits of one of the protegee of that great and good man, the late Ernst Borinski (Loewen taught for a number of years at Tougaloo College), Loewen has written a book not only sensitive and keen but concerned for the humanness of its subjects. The book is sound social science. It is not a book one cannot put down, but it is one that rewards the reader who keeps at it.

LESLIE DUNBAR is the book review editor of Southern Changes.

Politics of Nativism.

Reviewed by Larry Kilbourne

Vol. 11, No. 5, 1989, pp. 20-21

The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to New Right in American History by David H. Bennett (University of North Carolina Press, 1988. 509 pp. $29.95.)

Right wing extremist groups are scarcely a neglected subject. Persistent survival from one era to another, violence, paradoxical relationship to a country which they profess to love while repudiating its values of equality and tolerance, these characteristics have won and will continue to win them the attention of critics and historians. Most interpretations have followed Richard Hofstader, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Martin Lipset. For these authors, the racist, religious, and anti-alien hate groups endure because they appeal to the displaced and marginalized, to those whose social positions and cultural norms have been threatened by too rapid change. As consolation to the. orphans of change, abandoned in a social landscape grown suddenly unfamiliar, right wing movements offered rituals and ceremonies which restored the feeling of community that modernization had eroded.

On the whole, William Bennett, professor of history at Rutgers University, accepts their thesis. From the several themes of right wing rhetoric, however, he isolates one–nativism, the irrational fear and hatred of foreign peoples and foreign ideas–as the primary attribute of the traditional right. For Bennett “Americanism,”–as defined by the dominant Anglo-Protestant culture–is the binding thread. Newcomers, with unfamiliar religions and customs, became convenient scapegoats for resentments that could not be safely expressed otherwise. In the colonial and early national periods, Catholics from France, Germany, and Ireland served this function. Later, nativist animosity focused on eastern European immigrants, and the virus of anarchist and socialist ideas they were presumed to carry.

Much of this is familiar. Bennett’s originality lies in his contention that with the assimilation of the ethnic groups that arrived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries nativism gradually lost its force, and that the new right which has emerged in the last two decades is largely free of this preoccupation. In Bennett’s treatment, Father Coughlin, the radio priest of the 1930s, emerges as a pivotal figure who, by directing his attacks at foreign ideas rather than at groups and by adding the WASP

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establishment to the right’s customary list of villains, was able to make nativist themes appealing to Catholics who were themselves of immigrant German and Irish stock.

Can Bennett’s contention, that recent developments on the right show a decline of nativist bias, be accepted? I would question whether the psychological dynamics underlying nativism have died out, or merely been deflected. Rather than vanishing, the anger that once drove religious and ethic hatred has merely been refocused, so it appears to this reviewer, on subcultures and lifestyles perceived as alien. The poor, the homeless, homosexuals, and AIDS patients have become the objects of a hatred once directed at immigrants. Moreover, when viewed in larger perspective that includes other competing hatreds, nativism seems a less pervasive, less central preoccupation than racism. For throughout American history, blacks more than any other group have played the roles of the “disturbing alien,” the vaguely threatening “outsider,” to mainstream white society.

Yet even traditional nativism may still possess more vitality, albeit latent, than Bennett imagines. The retreat of nativism during the last few decades was linked to the decline of immigration and the acculturation of the descendants of the immigrants who had arrived around the turn of the century. But the nation is now once again receiving large numbers of immigrants–this time from below the Rio Grande and the Caribbean, from southeast Asia and Korea, from Africa once more–and the middle years of the century may be a trough between the crests of two waves. If so, the weakening of nativist sentiment may prove equally transient. Thus far new Americans from the Pacific rim have met with relatively little hostility, certainly far less than their turn of the century counterparts. On the contrary, their success in adapting has been praised in the news media and compared to the supposedly poorer performance of older minority groups. All this could change: nativism thrives on hard times, and might return with added overtones of racism should the economy drop.

The ecumenicalism of the religious right, which Bennett points to, doesn’t, I think, go very deep. The alliance of Southern Protestant fundamentalists and conservative Northern Catholics–to which President Reagan owed much of his support–is a marriage of convenience that might dissolve under other circumstances. An off-the-cuff remark of Jerry Falwell’s cited by Bennett, about the unlikeliness of Mother Theresa going to heaven without first undergoing the born-again conversion experience, bears witness to the contradictions within this coalition. Why should someone who feels called upon to reshape society according to the literal word of God be less incensed by doctrinal heresy (the Virgin Birth, Papal Infallibility, Transubstantiation) than by secular apostasy (Darwinism, abortion, religiously neutral schools)? Indeed, given that many Vietnamese and most Hispanics are Catholic, the conditions may exist once again for coalescence of religious and ethnic hatreds. Intolerance is implicit in the logic of the religious right.

LARRY KILBOURNE graduated from Brandeis University and is now a U.S. Air Force historian living in Ohio.

The Law.

Reviewed by Laughlin McDonald

Vol. 11, No. 5, 1989, pp. 21-23

Whose Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights by Abigail M. Thernstrom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. 316 pp. $25. Paperback edition, 1989, $10.95.)

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has had a profound impact on minority political participation in the South, and increasingly in the nation as a whole. In some jurisdictions registration and turnout of minorities are now equal to those of whites, while the number of minorities elected to office-not simply blacks in the South but Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans in the North and West-has grown steadily each year. Significant disparities remain but this progress is encouraging, representing as it does the growing fulfillment of the long deferred promises of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, as well as an increasing national consensus in support of minority political participation.

The Act has always had its critics, of course, but they were usually from the expected quarters. They were mainly disgruntled Southern solons who complained that the legislation was punitive and regionally based, whites whose political and economic control was threatened by voting reforms and those who supported racial segregation and “the Southern way of life.”

Now, ironically, comes Abigail Thernstrom, not a Southern malcontent but a Senior Research Associate at the Gordon Public Policy Center at Brandeis University. Armed with a grant from the prestigious Twentieth Century Fund and the new conservative’s hostility to affirmative action and race-conscious remedies for civil rights violations, she argues in her book, Whose Votes Count?, that the Voting Rights Act has been transformed, wrongly and dangerously, from a law whose “single aim” was to remove blatantly discriminatory barriers to registration and voting into “an instrument for affirmative action…to promote the election of blacks to public office.” She is particularly critical of single member districts, a form of neighborhood or community voting, which she sees as basically a scheme to achieve proportional representation and unfairly protect minority candidates from white competition.

The Supreme Court and Congress disagree with Thernstrom that the Act was concerned only with vote denial. Congress was certainly concerned with the difficulties blacks had in registering, but it was also

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concerned with practices that could dilute the effectiveness of a ballot actually cast.

Congress knew that prior voting rights laws had failed in part because local jurisdictions could always think of new ways to discriminate and stay one step ahead of the federal courts. As soon as a court invalidated an objectionable practice a jurisdiction could, and generally did, simply enact another to take its place. For that reason Congress not only banned such discriminatory practices as the literacy tests for registration, but it provided in Section 5 of the Act that certain “covered” jurisdictions had to preclear any new voting laws with federal officials and demonstrate that they did not have a discriminatory purpose or effect.

In the Supreme Court’s first decision construing the scope of Section 5, in 1969, Allen v. State Board of Elections, a majority of the justices concluded on the basis of the legislative history that Congress intended to require preclearance of all laws enacted by covered jurisdictions which altered election practices in even a minor way, including the adoption of procedures such as at-large elections that could dilute minority voting strength. The Court has applied this standard in every subsequent preclearance case.

Moreover, when Congress extended preclearance in 1970, 1975 and 1982, it discussed and expressly approved the Supreme Court’s interpretation of Section 5. Had Congress felt that the Voting Rights Act had the sole and narrow purpose of eliminating only discrimination in registration, it could have said so and taken corrective action. But it did not.

In concluding her discussion of Allen, Thernstrom does an anomalous and abrupt about face. While she professes not to like its prohibition on vote dilution, she concedes that Allen “was both correct and inevitable.”

Thernstrom is highly critical of the 1982 amendment of Section 2 of the Act in which Congress provided that voting practices, whether or not subject to preclearance and whether or not purposefully discriminatory, are unlawful if they “result” in discrimination. The amendment passed, she says, not on its own merits but because Congress was “slapdash” and “inattentive.” The press was guilty of “distortions” and reported only “partial truths.” The real villains, though, were the civil rights activists who supported the “result” standard. They had a “self-proclaimed moral superiority.” They hewed “to a hard line.” They were “diehards.” They had set out merely “to peddle a product.”

Arrayed against these forces of Congressional, communications media, and civil rights sloth and zealotry was a stable of academics collected by Senator Orrin Hatch to testify at the Senate hearings. According to Thernstrom, they were “distinguished…a balanced and impressive group.” But the “deck was stacked so mightily against” them and against Hatch, that their warning went unheeded that if the result standard were enacted single-member districts would spread “like a blight across the nation.”

The reason Section 2 was amended, and it is a reason Thernstrom generally ignores, is that the case was fully and fairly made in Congress that race is still a factor in American political life and that the result standard was needed to combat continuing discrimination in the electorate. According to Congress, which carefully considered and repudiated the charge, calling the remedial use of single-member districts in racially polarized jurisdictions a blight was “like saying that it is the doctor’s thermometer which causes high fever.” Experience has shown, in fact, that single-member districts, and the black electoral success associated with them, tend to break down racial isolation by bringing minorities into the decision-making process. They also tend to make government at all levels more responsive to minority concerns.

At the end of her book Thernstrom again confronts the hard line of new conservatism and again she flinches, effectively answering her own argument that single-member districts are an unfair form of affirmative action.

She conceded that where ‘racial politics…dominates the electoral process’ and public office is largely reserved for whites, the method of voting should be restructured to promote minority officeholding. Safe black or Hispanic single-member districts hold white racism in check, limiting its influence. And where whites- and often blacks-regard skin color as a qualification for office (in part because no experience suggests otherwise), the election of blacks helps to break both white and black patterns of behavior.

Few civil rights activists would disagree.

Where there is considerable disagreement is in how many jurisdictions are dominated by racial politics. For Thernstrom there are very few. One does not have to be a prophet of racial doom or deny the fact of change, Thernstrom suggests, to appreciate that race is still dynamic in American politics. One should have to be naive to believe that it isn’t.

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The extent of Thernstrom’s naivete shines through in her discussion of South Carolina politics, which she believes is far removed from the racial vulgarities and excesses of other Southern states. South Carolina, she writes, has “an unusual commitment to law and orderly change, stemming perhaps from an aristocratic respect for civility.” As evidence of this, she reports that blacks and whites can be seen standing side by side in Charleston markets picking over the local okra, depicting “a life that in significant ways was shared.” And, she adds, in 1963 “South Carolina governor Donald Russell held an inaugural barbeque that was attended by both blacks and whites.”

Thernstrom would have rendered a more accurate account of the significance of race in South Carolina politics if she had told more about life beyond the imagined intimacies of the okra bin, if she had reported, for example, that Governor Russell, following his inaugural barbeque, became a United States Senator and cast one of eighteen votes in the Senate against the Voting Rights Act of 1965, or that South Carolina led the challenge to the constitutionality of the Act immediately after it was passed, or that modern voting rights cases continue to document extremely high levels of racially polarized voting, or that nearly all of the black elected officials in the state were elected by constituencies in which members of their own race were in the majority. One of the failings of Whose Votes Count? is that, despite being eight years or more in the making, it contains very little original research and relies primarily upon court decisions and interviews, many of which are anonymous and essentially impressionistic.

Thernstrom believes that the ideal electorate is one composed, not of black, brown or white voters as such, but of “a community of citizens.” Most civil rights proponents do, too. Thernstrom, however, apparently thinks a community of citizens is a present day reality and that minorities need only look for the protection of their rights to “the political process left substantially to its own devices.” I cannot imagine anyone even casually familiar with the protracted struggle for civil rights in this country taking that advice, and therefore this book, very seriously.

LAUGHLIN McDONALD is Director of the Southern Regional Office of the American Civil Liberties Union. Perhaps no other attorney has been responsible for as many redistricting cases. (An abbreviated version of this review appeared in Foundation News, May/June, 1989.)

The Cold Hard Truth

By J.L. Chestnut, Jr.

Vol. 11, No. 5, 1989, pp. 24, 23

I spoke recently in Pittsburgh at an annual NAACP banquet. Ordinarily, NAACP types are leery of me because they often naively believe every societal problem in the world can be settled in the courts. That is one of the reasons many of them don’t march or walk picket lines.

For three decades I have preached about the severe limitations on the law as a tool for positive social change. So, why was I asked to come and speak at a NAACP banquet in Pittsburgh? Good question.

The very conservative Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court recently acknowledged the racism surrounding and undermining the death penalty in America but sanctioned it anyway. I didn’t have to say, “I told you so.” The court said it for me and in a most eloquent manner.

In addition, the so-called pro-lifers recently won a stunning victory against abortions in the Pennsylvania legislature. The conservative Republican Attorney General of the United States, Richard Thornburg, was U.S. Attorney in Pittsburgh before he became governor and is a major pro-lifer.

The general is also a loud advocate of the federal death penalty. Many black Pennsylvanians are beginning to question his sincerity as he preaches the pro-life gospel on one hand and the death penalty on the other.

The Pittsburgh NAACP groups raised the same questions when Thornburg nominated Bill Lucas to head the civil rights division at Justice. Several black Pennsylvania politicians, close to Thornburg, were in Detroit trying to drum up support for Lucas. They failed.

These Pennsylvania politicians were singularly ineffective. First, they were unaware Thornburg had taken a stand on the federal death penalty. Second, they were not knowledgeable about the civil rights connection with capital punishment and knew next to nothing about the death penalty generally.

A few days ago in Birmingham I discussed capital punishment in Alabama before an audience of blacks and whites. Only the blacks were uncomfortable. Shades of Detroit!

I recited the following facts in Birmingham.

There are 106 people under sentence of death in Alabama. Fifty-one percent of Alabama death row inmates are black, though we comprise only a fifth of the-population. Eighty percent of death row sentences were imposed in cases with white victims. Alabama has never executed a white person for a crime against a black; regardless of how outrageous or brutal the crime. Seventeen death row prisoners received the death sentence from a circuit judge who overruled a jury recommendation of life without parole.

Alabama has five women on death row, the largest number in the nation per capita. Two juveniles are under sentence of death. At present there are approximately 126 people charged with capital murder awaiting trial or sentencing in Alabama. Ten people have been sentenced to death in the last six months.

Since Alabama resumed executions, six people have

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been put to death at Holman Prison. The pace of executions has escalated in recent months; there have been three executions since May of 1989. Arthur Julius is currently scheduled for execution on November 17, a few days away.

If the foregoing facts make you nervous, don’t blame me. Blame the truth.

I am often amused by certain blacks with certain jobs–in Alabama, Pennsylvania and elsewhere–who will blame me for reciting or publishing the foregoing facts but will voice no opinion on the process that produced those facts. My critics are often classic frauds.

The western Pennsylvania NAACP membership was hardly unanimous in approving my visit or anticipated speech; otherwise the visit wouldn’t have been worth the trip.

Peace.

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