The Pittston Strike

By Charlie D. Thompson

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

AFTER CROSSING THE Clinch River and heading into the extreme southwestern corner of Virginia, the terrain begins to close in around you. The rolling farmland to the east gives way to steep mountains with valleys barely wide enough to fit both a road and a house side-by-side. It is the Clinch River which also informally marks the boundary to that separate region known as “the coalfields.” It is here that the black veins of coal, intertwined with the backbones of these ridges, are thick enough to extract. Since 1892, coal companies and the mountain people they hire have bitterly collaborated in this task.

The bloody history of Appalachian mining is central to understanding this region. Isolated behind the physical barrier of the mountains from the rest of the world and even from the states which claim jurisdiction here, the people of the coalfields have continually struggled for economic survival with little recognition from the rest of the country. Outside ownership of the region’s resources drains away much of the region’s wealth, causing unemployment, disability, and poverty which perpetually exceed national averages.

YET IN THE coalfields, as in many oppressed areas of the world, the human spirit blossoms. Appalachian people throughout coal-mining history have contributed much to the labor movement’s struggle for justice. Coal miners and their union, the United Mine Workers of America, have perhaps the most coura-

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geous and hard-fought story of organizing in our history, as the films Harlan County, USA and Matewan have depicted. Now another chapter of this story is unfolding.

The UMWA is fighting again for basic human rights against powers which attempt to discredit and even destroy it. Since April 4, seventeen hundred miners employed by the Pittston Company of Greenwich, Conn., have been on a “selective strike.” The remaining UMWA members throughout the region work to support them with 2 percent wage deductions. “The strike is not about economics,” said Bill Patton, a sixty-two-year-old miner and former Dickenson County Supervisor. “It is about social justice.” Wages are not an issue in this strike–miners are satisfied with their average salary of $15 per hour. The major concerns at the picket shacks and in miners’ homes are health care and job security. The company has proposed measures which weaken pensions and decrease health care benefits for fifteen hundred retirees, widows of pensioners, and disabled miners. Pittston also wants to relinquish the company’s responsibility for lifetime care for retirees and their spouses.

The strike, though necessary for maintaining all that thc union has worked for, was reluctantly called. After fourteen months of attempted negotiations, during which the UMWA ignored its own policy and worked without a contract, the union walked out.

Osborne Debert, a thirty-two-year-old miner from Lebanon, Va., states simply the reason: “They want to take a whole lot from us that we have already fought for.” In one of the world’s most dangerous occupations, miners virtually count on adverse effects from their occupations. Black Lung or other mining ailments will attack almost all miners at some stage in their lives. Previously, they had some consolation in knowing they and their families were to be cared for when the trouble came. Now without a contract, the Pittston miners, both active and retired, are again at the mercy of a resistant absentee owner when their work takes its toll.

The Pittston Company wants other major changes in long-standing labor rights including the repeal of the right to an eight-hour day. In other words, mandatory overtime would be a requirement. If Pittston gets its way, miners would be required to work seven days a week if thc company chooses. In Appalachia, where church and family ties are still very strong, this is particularly onerous. Still more examples of new “flexibility” proposed by Pittston include allowing for increased numbers of non- union workers in Pittston mines and subcontracting to other non-union companies (which are in some cases subsidiaries of Pittston, for work which is now done by union members.

Clearly the union had reason enough to head to the picket lines. With a resistant company refusing to bend on what it knows to be the undoing of standard labor practices, the strike was inevitable. Pittston surely knew this would occur–the contractual violations against the union challenge the most basic of rights. The company’s tactics seem to have a larger and more significant agenda. This challenge to the UMWA appears to many rank and file members to be a litmus test for not only the miners’ solidarity but for all of American labor. Bill Patton said, “They’re trying to break the

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union’s back and if we lose on this one we’ve lost everything.” The U.S. labor movement is indeed at a critical point in its history and this strike will demonstrate much about how unions will fare through the next decade.

The UMWA has shouldered this responsibility with impressive commitment and inspiration with a pledge to strike until their rights are reinstated. Sentiments like the following are expressed daily on the picket line: “We’ll be here as long as it takes” and “It ain’t over till we say it’s over.” Some like Elizabeth Cook, beautician, strike support worker and miner’s wife, promise to give all to help the cause. “I have to be honest with you,” she said, “I’d die for this union. I ask the Lord to help me be like Job in the Bible and endure to the end.” An overwhelming majority of the miners are steadfast with only one union member crossing the picket line during the entire strike.

Though spirits are high, no one dares believe the fight is almost over. Entire communities, pulling together for the long haul, are finding renewed closeness, a stronger sense of purpose, and new political awareness. Support from groups around this country and abroad adds significance. Elizabeth Cook, tired but determined, said, “This strike has been hard but it has been good for us.”

In November the town of Grundy, Va., elected local union president Jackie Stump to the House of Representatives by write-in ballot. The man he beat is the father of a circuit court judge responsible for numerous fines against the union. Even with only two weeks of campaigning, Stump won by a two-to-one margin against a legislator thought by some to be the most powerful in the state.

At Bill and Jan Patton’s home the police scanner blares out the latest police check of the picket lines. Every union home now has this tap into the activities of the Virginia

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State Police and Vance Security guards who keep constant surveillance on the union. “We used to respect the law here,” Bill Patton admitted, “but never again will the troopers get any support from any of the people in this community.” A large sign outside the M and R Store just a few miles away reads, “We respectfully refuse to serve State Troopers during the period of the UMWA strike.” Everywhere in the Virginia coalfields people have been shocked to find the state so blatantly supporting the company through the use of escorts for non-union coal trucks and thousands of striker arrests for small or nonexistent offenses. The union has been fined $32 million for practicing civil disobedience tactics like sitting in the road to block coal trucks.

On a bedside table in the Pattons’ home is Taylor Branch’s Partinq the Waters. All union leaders have been asked to read this account of the civil rights movement to learn more about the use of non-violent strategies. Minds are being broadened. Not a single union member has been arrested for violent offenses during this strike. Meanwhile, Pittston continues to guard its property with automatic weapons. At one mine a makeshift “pill-box” atop an equipment shed protects security guards. Scenes like this are ominous reminders of the presence of the hired outsiders some are again calling the “gun-thugs.”

In a small cove near Clinch River is a union campground known as “Camp Solidarity.” A community resident donated the property to provide lodging for the union’s support-

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ers during the strike. A gravel road leading to this refuge winds through the hills for miles. Here the mountaineers mingle with union members and supporters from as far away as Poland, Czechoslavakia, England, and even the Soviet Union, as well as many thousands from around the United States.

There is no official record of visitor numbers, but this small haven has provided up to sixteen hundred a place to eat and sleep in a single day. Liz Cook describes the operation of the union’s daily food service: “Pittston tried to shut us down by getting the kitchen here closed. But the Lord provided a way out and we started fixing food in our homes and bringing it in. I fixed forty pounds of macaroni salad in my kitchen in one day.” Union members who normally construct the wooden mine supports used their carpentry skills to build a permanent bunk house at the Camp just in time for winter.

Five miles from Camp Solidarity is the Moss #3 Coal Preparation Plant. For four days in September it was occupied in protest by ninety-nine miners and a clergyman. Nearly five thousand people stood outside blocking the gates. The picket shack is calm now, but the occupation is still referred to as an example of the power of unarmed people to physically overtake and control property and economics without force. High on the metal structure behind the gates new aluminum paint covers the bold words written during the takeover: “UMWA is here to stay.” Now, like the painted-over words, the occupation is not easily visible, but the results linger in the hearts of the miners. One man whose daily job is to inhabit the small picket shack outside Moss #3 said confidently, “I ain’t a bit afraid of them. We control things here.”

The Reverend Joe Johnson, an eighty-year-old former miner and active Freewill Baptist minister, sits quietly in his home with his wife listening to the latest on the police scanner. He remembers the days before the union, “I worked in water up to my knees for a dollar a day loading coal by hand, and if I said anything about it the boss would tell me, ‘If you don’t like it, there’s a barefoot man waiting outside ready to take your job.’ That’s what Pittston wants to get it back to.”

“I think Christian people ought to be the ones working (in the union) to get benefits for their people,” counseled Johnson, “The Bible says as you do it unto your neighbor, you do it unto God. Church people should work to help those in distress.” The State Police that travel the road past the Reverend’s house are not allowed to stop at his driveway and the nearby Maple Grove Church is a site where miners congregate but no troopers are allowed to turn around. Another church chained its parking lot entrance when it learned the state police were using the site. “We should love our neighbor and do unto them what we’d have them do to us,” said Johnson, “If we all bind together we can win this thing and I do believe that God’s will for us is to have a decent living.”

The Pittston strike continues as the weather gets colder. Snow has already fallen on the picket lines. The UMWA in a recent flyer said, “The campfires are blazing and the soup’s on at Camp Solidarity for the supporters who continue to stream in from around the nation and the world.” The strike seems firmly established in the hearts of the people of the deep mountain communities surrounding the Pittston land.

Results, however, are slow coming. Although Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole has visited the area, no federal action has been initiated as of this writing. To date, the State of Virginia has done little but aid Pittston’s continued operations. Pittston itself seems firmly entrenched in its position. The company claims it can last for another year or longer without a settlement.

Hidden behind these mountains is a pivotal struggle for justice and democracy by Americans. Yet many citizens of this country still know very little about our own current labor issues. In contrast, Lech Walesa was recently given the Medal of Freedom by George Bush, and the Polish Solidarity Union is known by every American with a television. In October, a Solidarnosc official, Jack Merkel, came to the coalfields without media fanfare and spoke to miners on the strike. He said, “This is the first time in the history of our movement that the workers of Poland have been able to support a labor union in the United States.” Before demands of the UMWA are met, they will probably need much more of the same.

Crossing the Clinch River is indeed like crossing a foreign border. This land of rich resources and hidden turmoil is tucked away from the mainstream. News coverage largely ignores its existence. Yet a strike of international dimensions is underway. Those who know this continue to come. Those who have always been here pledge to remain as solid as the mountains which surround them. They are not about to give in now.

The Court and the Black Community

By Julius L. Chambers

Vol. 11, No. 6, 1989, pp. 8-13

EDITORS’ NOTE: The following essay is an edited version of a talk presented November 15, 1989, as the second lecture in the Grace Towns Hamilton Lecture Series, sponsored by the African-American And African Studies programs at Emory University in honor of retired Georgia State Rep. Grace Towns Hamilton. Southern Changes expresses its appreciation to Prof. Delores P. Aldridge, AAAS chair and organizer of the Hamilton Lecture Series.

THIS IS A MOMENT in which I think we ought to pause and ask what have we been able to accomplish through the use of the law in improving black empowerment in this society. What kind of problems do we face today and tomorrow in advancing this objective? What role can each of us play in facing this challenge?

As most of you know, the Legal Defense Fund was organized in 1939 as an arm of the NAACP. The objective then was to set up an entity that could receive tax-exempt status and carry on the legal efforts of what was at that time a fledgling civil rights organization. There was a question whether law could be used as a means for empowering black people in this society. But, in fact there was not really much choice.

We had appealed to Congress, but Congress from the early to mid-twentieth century was dominated by Southerners. There was an interest in preserving a segregated society, because it allowed even low-income whites to say that they were at a higher status than other Americans, particularly black Americans.

In that era there was no opportunity to use the executive branch. President Roosevelt was telling the civil rights community that he could not do anything because he needed the votes of the Southern senators and representatives to advance his economic goals and war efforts. Even in the face of the rising number of blacks who were lynched, President Roosevelt was telling the civil rights community that the executive branch of government had no power to provide protection.

The only avenue that offered some means for black empowerment was through the courts and the law. There was a basis for that because the Reconstruction Congress had provided, through amendments to the Constitution, that all citizens in the United States were entitled to equal protection and due process of law–rather amorphous terms, but that same Congress directed the federal courts to decide what those terms meant.

Could the courts be used to evolve interpretations of the Constitution that would provide protection for minority Americans? The Supreme Court had already held with regard to due process and equal protection that the Constitution permitted a racially segregated–in the Court’s terms, “equal”–society.

Here, we pause to think about the rigidly segregated American society we faced in that period. Black people were relegated to second-class status. Schools, jobs, housing, voting, indeed all aspects of life were about like what we know of South Africa today. In fact it was worse, because South Africa tells us that it has made some changes. For black Americans in that time there was little opportunity for advancement. There was very little value placed on their lives because of the practice of white Americans–particularly white Southern Americans–of taking the life of any black person who threatened the existing arrangement.

Devising Strategies for Change

In the 1930s a group of lawyers got together and talked about strategies for effecting changes in the Court’s interpretation of the equal protection and due process clauses. We think of Charles Houston as the architect and of Thurgood Marshall and Bill Hastie and others as lieutenants who implemented or carried out those strategies.

The effort was to convince the Supreme Court that the equal protection clause and the due process clause imposed a responsibility on the part of the federal government to insure that all citizens would be treated equally. Segregating people by race was not treating people equally. The federal government must insure that no state or federal practices were condoned which would force the separation of people solely on the basis of race or color.

Today we do not think of that as a particularly tall order. But in the ’30s it was considered a very difficult, perhaps impossible, mission. The strategies included picking away at how the courts interpreted the equal protection and due

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process clauses until the ultimate issue was presented.

We ultimately achieved the goal in Brown v. Board of Education with the Court holding that the equal protection clause prohibits a state or the federal government from segregating people solely on the basis of race or color. Although Brown was a case involving education it was soon applied to other aspects of our lives such as voting, housing, and employment.

When Brown was decided in 1954, I remember how it was received in my community in North Carolina, how many people thought that the court had suddenly written an end to segregation and the pervasive racism that we knew. How we hoped that American society would quickly adhere to that decision and would proceed to implement practices that would eliminate segregation in the schools as well as discrimination in all other aspects of our lives. We were made aware quickly that the immediate implementation of that decision was not to be had. It was going to continue to be a long and difficult process.

We had achieved a major goal in convincing the U.S. Supreme Court to interpret the equal protection clause differently. Growing out of that decision we have seen some major changes in our society. But that decision left many problems unsolved. Just as we employed a number of strategies to achieve a decision like Brown, we would have to employ strategies to affect the courts’ determination of what Brown really meant.

A Continuation of Old Problems

So today we are continuing to face problems that reflect the ills of our society. For example, when the Court holds that no state may implement policies that segregate people on the basis of race or color, what does it mean by state or state action? What does the Court mean by intentional segregation or discrimination? If a practice disproportionately affects a particular group or an individual even though not “intentionally” discriminatory, do such practices violate the equal protection clause? Does the clause apply to blacks only? Does it apply to whites? Does it apply to religious groups? To the poor? Are there still possibilities for further evolving principles under the equal protection clause that would provide such protection?

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Does the equal protection clause impose an affirmative obligation on the part of the federal government and on the part of the states to insure that all citizens or that all people within the country are accorded equal protection of the law? Do affirmative action plans that are designed to remedy past discrimination violate the equal protection clause because of discrimination against white Americans?

Does the equal protection clause or the Fourteenth Amendment or our concept of federalism prohibit the federal government from reaching private practices of discrimination?

Finally, how are these questions relevant to black empowerment today and for the future?

An issue that now limits the effectiveness of equal protection is whether it limits the ability of courts or the legislatures to implement affirmative action or minority set-aside programs. Do such programs unconstitutionally discriminate against non-minorities?

Last term our U.S. Supreme Court imposed almost impossible standards governing the use of race-based remedies. That decision, coming out of Richmond, has some major implications for the South as well as the nation. Richmond, a city that is approximately 50 percent black and 50 percent white, had major problems in insuring that black people would be able to enjoy benefits under city contracts. So, like the federal government, it proceeded to implement a minority set-aside program designed to insure that 30 percent of city contracts would go to minorities. Just as the City of Atlanta has attempted to do to insure that minorities would be able to participate in city contracts. Those plans were race-based because they were designed and specifically provided for blacks to participate in city contracts.

Does the use of race in those plans violate the constitutional rights of white Americans? In the City of Richmond case Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor said yes, unless Richmond (or any other city) demonstrates that the plans were designed to provide remedies for specific victims or identified victims of discrimination. If that is to be the test we will get very few benefits from minority set-aside programs or affirmative action programs.

The Court said that Richmond will have to come forward with very stringent standards of proof that minorities had been deprived of benefits that were accorded by the cities and the states. What it did was to impose cost requirements such that Atlanta, for instance, now is spending over $500,000 trying to comply with this new requirement by demonstrating that slavery once existed and discrimination was once practiced in the United States.

What Happens If…?

And Richmond is not limited to set-aside programs or to affirmative action programs. What happens in Louisiana if LSU or Southern University, pursuant to state directives, increase the college admission requirements and those increased requirements disproportionately exclude black students? Can LSU or Southern implement an affirmative action plan that will address this impact or would such efforts violate the Constitution?

What happens when the University of Mississippi, in providing increased opportunities for minorities or the State of Mississippi with similar objectives, decides that black colleges can no longer be maintained? If it proceeded to desegregate by closing black colleges, would such prac-

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tices violate the Constitution? What happens in the University of Mississippi or the University of Alabama if black students insisted on an African-American or an African studies program? Would singling out race in those instances violate the Constitution? What happens when the NCAA decides to increase requirements for students to participate in intercollegiate sports? Does Proposition 42 or Proposition 48 violate the Constitution?

As presently interpreted each of these questions arguably would be answered against the interests of those who would ensure equal or effective black participation. The majority of the present Supreme Court could easily hold that race-based or set-aside programs pose an insurmountable problem under the Constitution. We would have a problem then of trying to develop effective remedies that would insure fair and equal protection of minorities. Although we have Brown v. Board of Education we would have new barriers that would perpetuate the same kind of practices we were trying to address before Brown.

To Reach Private Discrimination

There is a further problem that is left open by Brown: whether Brown limits discrimination by private entities.

Why is private discrimination important? Private discrimination affects in increasing importance what happens in employment, housing, health care, education. Private education plays a vital and pervasive role in our society today. Not only is there a question of the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment, there is also the question of the ability of Congress to act under the Fourteenth Amendment to reach private conduct and practice.

Did Congress overreach by enacting Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting discrimination in places of public accommodation? Did Congress overact in 1964 when it enacted Title VII? If one looks at six of the decisions of the Supreme Court the past term interpreting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 one begins to see a Court questioning how far Congress can reach in trying to protect individuals against private discrimination.

In 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court decided Griggs v. Duke Power Co. that applied Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Court held that if an employer uses a practice which disproportionately affects blacks or minorities there is a burden of proof that the employer will have to meet in demonstrating that the use of that practice was necessary for the successful operation of the business or was necessary to determine one’s ability to perform the job successfully. The burden of proof was on the employer. This year the U.S. Supreme Court held that it did not really mean what it said in 1971; rather it left the burden of proof of discrimination with the victim.

What the court in effect did was to change the cost for an individual litigating such a case in federal district court from $5,000 in 1987 to over $100,000 in 1989.

The Court also decided a case this term interpreting the

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1866 Civil Rights Act which was designed to prohibit public and private discrimination. The Court said that the 1866 statute only prohibited an employer from refusing to hire. Once the person was hired the employer could do what it wanted. A black person can now be hired, harassed, called names, and his or her life made unbearable with no legal protection under the Act.

But the present Court went further, holding that the 1866 Act not only provided no protection after one was hired but the act itself was of limited use in challenging practices by state or local governments.

In short, the U.S. Supreme Court in interpreting statutes that Congress had enacted to provide protection against private discrimination has proceeded to limit the reach of those statutes.

Extending Protection to the Poor

There is another issue that affects us today with regard to how the Supreme Court has interpreted the equal protection and due process clauses. It has held that those clauses provide no protection against discrimination by a state against individuals because of their economic status. If Georgia decides to discriminate against people today because they are poor, the poor may have no constitutional protection. The effects of these holdings are shown in public education where, for example, Harlem schools, primarily black, receive less dollars per student than schools in east Manhattan, primarily white. In Hartford, Connecticut, where concentrations of poor blacks and Hispanics are surrounded by higher income suburban white areas, several studies have found that it is impossible to insure an equal educational opportunity for poor children–white or black–if these children are concentrated-segregated–in one school by economic status. At present, this kind of discrimination, based on economic status, does not violate the Constitution.

In Alexandria, Virginia, the city in developing its housing practices provides no protection, or very limited protection, for poor people who cannot afford middle and upper income housing. In Boston, blacks have been run out of the city as whites, deciding to move back in, have converted housing from low income to middle and upper income. Again, there is no protection for the poor. In Mississippi, black people are having difficulty in getting health care because the state provides limited protection for the poor.

[The Legal Defense Fund thinks] that there must be efforts to insure that poor people are trained and employed. We along with other groups are pressing the federal government when it gives out its contracts to Boeing or McDonnell Douglas to make these companies set aside a certain percentage of their contracts for training and employment in those facilities.

Is it possible to evolve principles today that would convince the Court that like race and, recently, gender, the poor are in need of protection under the Constitution?

Can we today, as in the 1930s, map strategies to convince a U.S. Supreme Court to extend protection to minority Americans and now to others who are disadvantaged and who have no protection under the Constitution?

It is the mission of the Legal Defense Fund to pursue just that kind of effort. We believe that it is possible to use the courts, even in the 1990s, to achieve that kind of goal. We also believe that whatever interpretation is reached by the Court and whatever empowerment is won will

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come about through a collection of efforts and not just litigation alone.

David Garrow has written that he believes that the great advances in civil rights were achieved almost exclusively by demonstrations and public protests. I believe that demonstrations and political efforts will go only so far. It was important in 1954 to have a standard set by the Court that would enable those who were engaged in demonstrations and those who were involved in the political process to help in effecting change.

As we look at the possibility of further interpretations of the Constitution we have to engage those same factors in effecting the kinds of changes we would like. We are now drafting a bill that will address all of the decisions of the Supreme Court in civil rights in 1989. That bill will reverse the present Court in interpreting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and in interpreting the 1866 Civil Rights Act that I have referred to. We are also drafting a bill that would reverse what the court has done in interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment in Richmond with the minority set-aside programs.

Using the Political Process

Whether Congress enacts those bills will depend on what you and I do in using the political process for advancing and enhancing minority empowerment. If we do not convince the Congress to act we will have even fewer resources for effecting change in the future. The U.S. Supreme Court today is a much different court than it was in 1954. But we also know that we have more resources to turn to in the 1990s than we had in the 1930s and the 1940s. We have state courts and state legislatures. We have a U.S. Congress that is much more responsive than the Congress of the 1930s and the 1940s. We have black mayors and now a black governor. We have black legislators. It is extremely important that we turn to them. We have the right to vote. It is important that we use it.

One of the things that I think we ought to all appreciate is that there have been shifts in population since the 1980s and, according to a recent report by the Southern Regional Council that describes the potential impact of these shifts, perhaps as many as thirty to fifty congresspeople who today are sympathetic to causes of minorities and women may be lost from Congress in the 1990s and replaced by more conservative congresspeople. It is incumbent that we try to work to limit the impact of those population shifts and insure that people are elected to office who believe in the type of agenda that we are talking about.

Here I might add that a number of organizations like the Legal Defense Fund and the Lawyer’s Committee, the ACLU, the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, the Voting Rights Project of the SRC–just to name a few–are gearing up now to provide assistance in litigation if redistricting plans are devised following the 1990 census that unfairly dilute the voting strength of minorities. There are political efforts underway to deal with that issue and there are organizations capable of providing legal protection.

Facing the Dangers of the ’90s

Over the years all of us have been involved in the struggle to effect change and to empower black Americans to improve their opportunities in this society. We have made some progress. In the ’90s we face a much graver danger than we were trying to address in the 1930s. A danger in terms of complacency. A danger in terms of people believing that they have done enough to help the disadvantaged.

But there is reason for optimism. I was never so impressed as in the past three months getting about the country to talk to people about the need for reversing what the Court has done. In my opinion there is a groundswell of reaction not only in the black community but across racial lines.

As we attempt to make progress toward a better society for all Americans, the caution I would raise is this: we cannot limit that effort to race alone. We cannot ignore the plight of the poor. We cannot ignore the conditions of gays and lesbians. We cannot ignore the plight of the elderly. All across the country we have to accommodate a diversity of groups. We are going to have a multicultural world in the coming years. We must expand the reach of equal protection to make sure that it is inclusive of all groups who seek equal participation in society.

A former president of the Southern Regional Council and one of the country’s foremost civil rights attorneys, Julius Chambers has served since 1984 as director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in New Fork. Chambers’s work in the Charlotte, North Carolina, school desegregation case is considered at length in Frye Gaillard’s The Dream Long Deferred (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1988). Readers may also want to look at Chambers’s “The Collapse of Enforcement” in Southern Changes for March/April of 1985.

We the Baptists: Trading Away a Birthright.

Reviewed by W. W. Finlator

Vol. 11, No. 6, 1989, pp. 14-15

The Southern Baptists: A Subculture in Transition by Ellen Rosenberg (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989, 240 pp.).

There are times when the publication of a book is greeted with a Glory Be, Welcome Thrice Welcome, Amen and Amen! Such is my response to anthropologist Ellen Rosenberg’s The Southern Baptists, A Subculture in Transition, and I am sending her a letter of thanks for writing it and letter of congratulations to the University of Tennessee for publishing it.

Here is the story told in depth, in truth, and, perhaps in spite of the author’s clinical approach, in compassion, about what is happening to the Southern Baptist Convention, written by a Yankee scholar from far-away Western Connecticut State University. As Will Campbell observed: “We the Baptists. Ellen Rosenberg has shined a needed spotlight on us all.”

Not that we traditionally would have minded. Southern Baptists have a long history of indifference to what the outside world thinks of us. We have never yearned, with Robert Burns, for some Power the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us. Why should we? In terms of what we gauge as success, we have been preeminently successful: growth, numbers, influence, power, popular appeal, wealth, etc., while just look at what’s happening to those Protestant “main line” churches!

But now with the takeover of the Convention by the Fundamentalists, which Rosenberg traces so vividly and so accurately, and which I regard as a sad but well-deserved nemesis, our attitude toward outside opinion has undergone a sea change. Southern Baptists have fallen in love with the TV evangelists, and the Right is having a love affair with both. From these dangerous liaisons the national political landscape is being reshaped, remolded nearer to the heart’s desire of religio-political zealots who want to proclaim this a “Christian Nation.” The South is just not going to, the South has risen again. With the surging Fundamentalists at the heart of resurrection, you can bet your bottom tithe that Southern Baptists are now looking

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over their shoulder at world opinion, beginning with the White House. We may preach “Blessed are the Meek,” but no one can accuse our “subculture” of meekness.

The author’s shining spotlight is on us unmercifully at this point. Whether we are moderates, conservatives, or fundamentalists, we have long been mired in compromises, veerings and vacillations, rationalizations, evasions, self-deceptions, and hypocrisies making ourselves vulnerable for the eventual takeover. All this she exposes, sometimes with the tenderness of a Matthew Arnold saying “Thou ailest here and here,” sometimes with relentless objectivity, and sometimes like Amos the prophet.

And she knows whereof she writes. Connecticut may be her home, but she has dwelt among us. She has been on the campuses of our faltering seminaries, worshipped in our churches, attended state and Southern Baptist Conventions, read our publications, studied our documents, detected our chicaneries, probed our theology, questioned our bureaucrats, felt our agonies and our ecstasies, and come up with this timely and most creditable book which rejoices my heart and should be read far and wide. But it won’t be. How sad never to learn the message of a book that tells us so eloquently how we have traded our Baptist birthright of free speech, free conscience, protection of privacy and dissent, church-state separation, and rejection of creeds for the pottage of conformity, control, authority, inerrancy, status, power, and bigness.

And, oddly, just what the country most needs in this hour we Southern Baptists have forfeited.

W. W. FINLATOR, from his several North Carolina pastorates and especially until 1983 from the Pullen Memorial Baptist Church of Raleigh, has been a prophet–with and sometimes without–honor among Southern Baptists. Annually, the Ware County Civil Liberties Union confers on some worthy defender of Civil Liberties (1989’s was to Claude Sitton, editor of the News and Observer) the “W.W. Finlator Award.” Has any other Southern Baptist preacher been so honored?

Culture-Bound Southern Baptists and Their Exiles.

Reviewed by Joseph Hendricks

Vol. 11, No. 6, 1989, pp. 15-17

Churches in Cultural Captivity, A History of the Social Attitudes of Southern Baptists by John Lee Eighmy (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1972, revised 1987).

When John Lee Eighmy suffered a fatal heart attack in 1970, he had almost completed his important study on the influence of the social gospel in the life and work of the Southern Baptist Convention. Eighmy died at a time when the Convention seemed to be emerging from cultural captivity, and he could hardly have anticipated its dramatic turn into yet another era of cultural bondage. Fortunately, Samuel Hill has provided for the revised edition an expanded conclusion that extends the study to the present time.

Eighmy contends that the Convention, born amidst the pre-Civil War slavery debate, has conceived and pursued its mission in a manner that embraces rather than criticizes Southern culture. He ably demonstrates how this posture has been supported by Southern Baptist theology, a perspective radically different from that of the American (Northern) Baptist, Walter Rauschenbusch, who is often called the father of the’ social gospel in America. Eighmy cites a 1920 proclamation by the Virginia Baptist Conven-

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tion Social Service Committee that reflects Southern Baptist antipathy toward the social gospel.

The Baptist attitude toward all social reform, work, and service is that unadulterated gospel preached and accepted solves all social problems, rightly adjusts all industrial inequalities, remoras domestic friction, adjourns divorce courts and supplies adequate protection and uplift to the weaker part of humanity.

Such proclamations, however, can be misleading. As Eighmy points out, Southern Baptists have consistently addressed some social problems while ignoring others. They have vigorously fought alcohol consumption, Sabbath desecration, gambling, and obscenity; and, despite their subscription to a doctrine of separation of church and state, they have consistently called upon government to prohibit such practices. For the first half-century of its existence, however, the Convention-made no effort to extend this social concern to such problems as racial oppression, labor exploitation, and war which were deeply rooted in the socio-political structures of Southern culture–structures, notes Eighmy, that were perceived to be “divinely ordered.”

In its second half-century, efforts were made to enlarge the Southern Baptist social agenda. During this period, for example, W.L. Poteat, president of Wake Forest College, and his nephew, Edwin McNeill Poteat Jr., challenged the Convention’s Social Service Commission to expand its sphere of social concern. As the Convention entered its] second century following world War II, the Social Service’ Commission (later named the Christian Life Commission) was budgeted and staffed. Guided by such leaders as Hugh Brimm, Jesse Burton Weatherspoon, Aker C. Miller, and Foy Valentine, the Commission conducted educational programs designed to stretch the social conscience of Southern Baptists.

Such efforts required perennial sympathetic diplomacy by these leaders, and the success of their work is reflected in a 196S Convention resolution which confessed that Southern Baptists must share responsibility for the racial strife then sweeping the country.

Given the resistance that the Commission encountered, its accomplishments were impressive, but it must be noted that it pursued its mission in the wake of dramatic action by civil rights groups, other ecclesiastical organizations, and the federal government. For the most part, the Convention followed rather than initiated change; and, while it began to break with some outmoded traditions, it has never gained sufficient detachment from the culture to mount a sustained prophetic critique of it. Following Eighmy’s death, as Hill points out, the Convention leadership has turned to an alliance with the New Right, purged the Christian Life Commission and other agencies of progressive leadership, and replaced them with administrators who have returned the agenda to personal rather than structural social concerns.

There is another part of the story, however, that does

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not fall within the purview of Eighmy’s book. As was often the case with Israel and has been with the Church, the Southern Baptist prophetic social mission has been pursued more by its exiles than within the Convention itself. Innumerable Southern Baptists have departed from their denomination to pursue vocations in other churches and secular organizations. Two of the most formidable Southern prophets of social justice, Clarence Jordan and Will Campbell, were reared and baptized in rural Southern Baptist churches. Both were challenging Southern culture long before the civil rights movement gained momentum, and both were either nudged or driven out of the Southern Baptist fold.

Jordan, founder of Koinonia Farm, preached unrelentingly against the evils of war, wealth, and racism; and he devoted much of his later life to translating portions of the New Testament from Greek into the Southern vernacular. Campbell, who has been accurately called the chaplain of the civil rights movement, has challenged both the moderate and the fundamentalist factions of the Convention to learn from the sixteenth century Anabaptists–who are their spiritual if not their ecclesiastical ancestors–who found their identity in faith rather than a culture that had captured the Church.

These prophets and their lesser known sister and brother exiles have been anchored in Scripture and a tradition that recognizes the importance of not confusing culture and faith. Resisting seduction by secular or ecclesiastical institutions, they have served both the institutional church and the state by proclaiming the criticism they so desperately need. Through the lives of such exiles the Convention might catch a glimpse of how to be faithful in Southern culture without being of it.

JOSEPH HENDRICKS is chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at Mercer University, a Southern Baptist, and a long-time active challenger of injustice in Georgia and the South.

An Insider’s Account of Race and Politics in the Delta.

Reviewed by Michael Cooper

Vol. 11, No. 6, 1989, pp. 17-19

Even Mississippi by Melany Neilson (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989. xiv, pp. 199).

Part memoir and part campaign history, Even Mississippi is worthwhile reading for its insider’s account of race and politics in the Mississippi Delta of the early 1980s.

Melany Neilson grew up in the turbulent wake of the civil rights movement, but her earliest childhood memories are surprisingly similar to those of previous generations of white, well-to-do Southerners. She recalls the droves of black field hands working the family cotton plantation and lovingly remembers the family’s warm-bosomed black maids. Her father, Ed Tye, was a planter turned lawyer. The men of the family had been lawyers and planters in the same county for several generations.

The Neilsons were one of the prominent families of Lexington, the county seat of Holmes County, which is on

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the eastern edge of the flat alluvial plain known as the Delta. Welfare, cotton, and pulpwood are the country’s economic mainstays. Three-fourths of its 23,000 residents are black.

The civil rights movement redrew the lines of segregation in Holmes Country. Neilson remembers her third grade teacher, with trembling voice, telling the class that the following year, 1968, colored children would be coming to the school. That was the year that Neilson, along with nearly every other white child in town, enrolled in newly-formed Central Holmes Academy. The year 1968 was also significant because Mississippi seated its first black legislator since Reconstruction. He was Robert Clark from Holmes County. His election and public school desegregation added to the tension that was as palpable as the Delta’s August heat. “Every man in town, white and nigra,” Neilson recalls her father saying, “is hating someone for something.”

While growing up, Neilson recognized the schism between blacks and whites, but she accepted the status quo and anticipated living her life as a traditional belle. But her life changed dramatically while she was a graduate student in journalism at Ole Miss when, pretty much on impulse, she applied for a job in Robert Clark’s 1982 campaign for Congress. In Ed Tye’s opinion Clark was a “good nigra,” but that didn’t keep Neilson’s mother from asking, “Will you have to ride in the same car with him?”

Despite her mother’s and her own apprehensions, Neilson joined Clark’s campaign just days before the Democratic primary, a contest against two white candidates which Clark won with an encouraging 57 percent of the vote. In the general election Clark faced Republican Webb Franklin, and race was the dominant unspoken issue. Responding off the record to a reporter’s criticism that he was too timid with whites, Clark replied, “A black man reaching for a white woman’s hand’ll scare a lot of ’em. So will talking about race.”

While Clark couldn’t make race an issue, his opponent could and did, in ways subtle and not so subtle. Franklin began a stump speech before a mixed audience with the comment, “I didn’t just fall off a watermelon truck.” One of his campaign posters featured his photograph next to one of Clark with the caption, “The choice is yours for Congress.” Part of the inspiration for this poster came from a poll which found that a quarter of the voters didn’t know Clark was black.

But, hearteningly, the book shows that modern-day Mississippi politics isn’t divided completely by race. At a fundraiser in a posh home in Biloxi, Clark pressed the flesh with a crowd of successful men and women, white and black, who contributed some $5,000 to his campaign. In the Delta, at an all-black fund raiser where the fare was fried catfish and hush puppies, the hat was passed and filled with sweat-darkened dollar bills. The contributions were enthusiastic but meager until two white farmers drove upend handed over two checks for $500 each.

These and other insider accounts of race relations and politics in the Delta make Even Mississippi interesting reading. But readers interested in Deep South politics may be disappointed that there is so little about Robert Clark’s fourteen-plus years in the state legislature. Neilson’s summary of his legislative career reads like a press release. Clark is a pioneer black politician who has been a state legislator now for more than twenty years. A book that is in part about his political aspirations should have said more about his record.

Another bothersome aspect of the book is that Neilson’s prose doesn’t always make the reader feel the gravity of her experiences. Much of Even Mississippi is about the emotional trials of a young white woman from an old Delta family who violates deeply-rooted race, caste, class and gender taboos by going to work for a black politician. Not long ago, such behavior would have meant, at best, life-long ostracism. The Delta is an insular world that few outsiders understand.

Even Mississippi is strong, though, on recognizing human decency and courage. Neilson’s work for Clark took a heavy toll on her family. In the dead of night they received threatening telephone calls. Ed Tye’s law practice lost clients. Mrs. Neilson, tired of the condescension, quit the Garden Club. Her parents had misgivings, but they didn’t try to rein in their daughter. Ed Tye even endorsed

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Clark in a television commercial.

Despite solid victories in the primaries, Clark lost two bids for Congress, in 1982 and 1984. Webb Franklin won both elections because of a low turnout of black voters and his appeals to racism and conservatism. But in Clark’s defeat there were hopeful signs for the future.

In 1982, Neilson was the only white staffer working for Clark. His campaign also attracted a few white volunteers from northern colleges. In 1984, she was one of two white staffers, and they were aided by many volunteers, including several local whites. Having Mississippians work for a black candidate was a significant change and contributed to the overall pioneering effect of Clark’s two campaigns. His trail blazing probably helped Mike Espy defeat Franklin in 1986 to become Mississippi’s first black congressman in the twentieth century.

In its description of race relations and politics in the Delta, Even Mississippi provides a good sense of how slowly racial attitudes are changing. That point is painfully clear in the book’s evocative epilogue, which describes Neilson’s wedding, at which Clark was a reluctant guest.

On her wedding day, Neilson recalls, everything in the church, its trappings and the guests, was glaringly white–except for Clark standing uncomfortably in the back row, neither speaking nor being spoken to. At the reception in the Neilson’s white-columned home, he entered the back door. The only other black people there were the maids. Clark chatted briefly with the police chief, met Mrs. Neilson for the first time, and then slipped quietly out the back.

MICHAEL COOPER is researching the life of Hazel Brannon Smith, former editor and publisher of the Holmes County Lexington Advertiser.

An Unending Stream: History One Day at a Time.

Reviewed by Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 11, No. 6, 1989, pp. 20-23

The News and Observer, Raleigh, North Carolina, (Friday, November 17, 1989, five sections, $0.25).

We are swamped by information. The least of us knows, sort of, things that the wisest of old could hardly imagine; nor the most pessimistic know to dread. Historians are the reporters of what of the past is important to keep in memory; news reporters are historians of the instant, digesting for our minds each day’s memorable happenings.

I am a word man myself, and so I get nearly all my “news” from reading, not from television. I suppose, though, it is all the same: the stream is unending and unrelenting. Usually we take it passively, absorb what we can or want to and go on about our business. Every now and then, however, the weight of it jolts one into awareness. It is like catching a cold in the winter; there are germs swirling about all the time, but only sometimes are we vulnerable. The news of November 17 may not have been more overwhelming than on many other days, but it was one of mine for being vulnerable.

My morning paper is the Raleigh News and Observer. It is a good newspaper. Compared with what was for years my daily, the New Fork Times, it covers local and state news more adequately and its editorials are typically more intelligent and stimulating (even when wrong or annoying). National and international news it mostly cribs from the big national dailies, and does that very well. It carries probably too many columnists, and as the contemporary preoccupation with “balance” demands, selects them from a range of opinions; also in contemporary style, it pretty well ignores the left. Conservatives such as Safire, Kilpatrick, and Georgie Anne Geyer are not truly “balanced” by a centrist such as wicker–more closely by the occasional Mary McGrory but she is outnumbered several to one. Admittedly, America political opinion has not much “left,” but it should not really be hard to find pro-labor or pacifist or Marxist commentators. Nevertheless, the News and Observer is a paper of quality, has a manifest integrity about itself, and no one outside its home-town owns it; not yet at any rate.

Back to November 17. Look at the day’s front page, the mounting of the flood that was to break over me. The “top” story was that five Jesuit priests plus a lay one (later we would also learn that he was Jesuit), their cook and her daughter, were murdered in San Salvador, almost certainly by thugs in the employ of our side in a civil war which seems on the brink of turning El Salvador into another Lebanon, where death is an individual’s and the national society’s realistic expectation.

There was more on the front page. In one of the state’s towns, a twenty-year-old black mother of three children, ages two months, one year and two years, killed them all with a steak knife; no one seems to know why. In East Germany, non-communist parties entered the Cabinet; in South Africa beaches were de-segregated; and in the United States the House of Representatives “balances” reforms of its ethics by pay increases.

A political horror. A private horror. An advent of liberty. A small murmur for equality. A decaying of a once

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proud American institution. The news of November 17, 1989, would go on this way; one could sense history trembling in order to rise and claim it all.

In the following pages, George Bush, Jesse Helms (in the manner of a playbill, I am picking up characters in order of appearance), the five Senators who took the coin of a rotting savings and loan, Admiral Poindexter (does anyone believe that the subpoena he got, as this day reported, for Mr. Reagan to testify at his trial will actually be fulfilled?), Phillip Morris (that’s a corporation which will subsidize the government’s celebration of the Bill of Rights’ bicentennial), and Ms. Donna Bazemore–all these stride toward us.

Ms. Bazemore, not so incidentally, is a black woman of Ahoskie, North Carolina, who told a Congressional subcommittee what they (and probably the rest of us) would just as soon not hear; our enormous poultry factories are unsanitary places. Picasso came into the news, too; one of his paintings brought $40.7 million. (We were later to learn that a Japanese businessman was the buyer.) Congress surrendered to Mr. Bush on abortions for poor women, and Democrats there abandoned expanded child care for this session. The Navy was insistent–in a gloss on the meaning of loyalty–that one of its own seamen, not itself organizationally, caused the deadly blast on the USS Iowa, an old battleship brought out of its mausoleum by the Reagan administration to parade around the planet, “projecting power.”

I stop, even though I am only at page 14 of the first section. Read farther, and there will be news of Israelis and Palestinians. Bulgaria. Lebanon. Brazil. China (as I am swamped by news, that country is awash in too many cabbages). Nicaragua. Afghanistan. Lech Walesa. There will be editorials about oral sex, national youth service, and a state officeholder straying among the flesh pots of NewYork. Columns about Mr. Helms, Mr. Walesa, France’s children’s policies, fetal tissue research; and there will be Mr. Safire chortling over the USSR’s reported economic difficulties. There will be a cartoon about Mr. Bush’s “secret” plan to overthrow Noriega, another reminding us that it was labor unions which brought about change in Poland.

One “Letter to the Editor” affectionately remembered the Rev. James Reeb, murdered in Selma, Alabama, at the time of the 1965 march; another lamented threats to the state’s environment implicit in the $9 billion–that’s it: billion–road building program adopted by the legislature earlier this year; another by the manager of the huge Shearon-Harris nuclear power plant near Raleigh assured all that, as regards a recent fire at the plant, “at no time was the public in danger.”

Then there are Sports–lots–and Business. But it is enough. On the other hand, I suppose I should not leave out that there was a panel discussion of business ethics at the University of North Carolina, with several very important persons participating in this the concluding session of a conference on international competitiveness; or that Burroughs Welcome, a British company which has a big laboratory in the state’s Research Triangle Park, reported

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a bullish year, much of its profits coming from its AIDS drug and its antiviral drug for genital herpes; or that the Navy suspended IBM (!) from bidding on new contracts because of the revealed fraud of selling used equipment for new.

As said, enough, even though I am omitting the most interesting section of the whole paper today: the local news. But a reviewer should not tell everything. Buy the book.

How does this belong among book reviews?

First, for readers who want to know about the present United States or its southern region, what book would tell more? Granted, that from the above, and the yesterdays’ editions, everyone must be his or her own historian, must give it shape and meaning, must somehow contrive the formula that would put it all into understandable equation.

Second, the daily newspaper–if a good one such as the News and Observer–is in fact a standard of measurement, or seen from another angle an evaluator of the non-fiction that analyzes and interprets our place and time; for fiction too, that attempts that. The maddening complexity the journals report stands as a measure of what a book ought to represent, to “stand for.” A book cannot embrace it all. Somehow, though, the good book has to reflect an awareness of that same impossibility complicated, often chaotic and hurtful, occasionally fine, always on-rushing world and region which the good newspaper reports. Contemporary Southern writers, of both fiction and nonfiction, are often so intent on depicting (and typically these days unlike past ones, celebrating) the uniqueness of the South that any very lively sense of the region’s immersion in a larger world drifts and vanishes. Possibly that is a holding action, a clinging to what is still here yet is firmly on a one-way passage away.

A dozen or more novels could be made from the local news–the Section C news–of this day’s papers: University of North Carolina student precariously perched atop a radio tower protesting the CIA; eight North Carolina State University wrestlers on trial for brutally assaulting two men and a woman annoyed over having their lawn urinated on; an FBI agent convicted for drunk driving after wrecking an FBI-owned car; more on the trial of Eddie Hatcher, of Robeson County newspaper office fame; a citation of Duke Power Co. (!) for toxic contamination of ground water. Novels could be written, and no doubt similar ones will be. Their quality will depend on how well they connect their stories to the world beyond Section C, how well they are “of this world” as well as at home.

Third, the fact is there is some awfully good stuff in the region’s papers. I have for the past two years been a judge in the Institute of Southern Studies journalism competition. Some of the “feature” writing and investigative reporting around the region, from Texas to Virginia, is

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outstanding, and some series are (as I’ve wearily discovered) of almost book length.

And so finally, and for all these reasons, Southern Charges herewith invites reviews of your local newspaper. A friend–one who is often subject to fits of dear and therefore indignant observations of society–angrily remarked to me recently that there are three bodies of people who are never told to go jump in the lake (he used a more vivid expression; federal judges, foundation executives, and the editorial board of the New York Times. I’ll pass on the accuracy of what he said about judges, affirm that he is right about foundation executives (I was one for fifteen years, and no one–or hardly anyone–during those years spoke a cross word to me), and cannot here do anything about the Times. But if you, our readers, want to submit a review talking about your local newspaper, praising or damning, we shall read what you send to us, in the hope we may publish it. Can you write clearly and interestingly about the home-town paper, and not too lengthily? If you can and are moved to do so, we would like to see your work.

Encores, of November 17, 1989.

A crew of Marines rescued in bad weather five men from a sunk tugboat, eight miles at sea off Cape Lookout. Brave men there are still.

An old Woolworth’s lunch counter once sat-in in Salisbury, a videotape of the historic Greensboro sit-in of 1960, and a videotape of the killing of five by the Klan in Greensboro in 1979 are joined with an original draft of the Constitution in an exhibit at the state’s Museum of History.

The family of an Israeli soldier killed by Palestinian guerillas donated his heart to an Arab; the widow said, “If it is possible to save a person, I think it is a religious commandment.”

Hope is still ours by right of such as these, and of that young man, 175 feet aloft.

LESLIE DUNBAR is the review editor of Southern Changes.

The Cold Hard Truth

By J.L. Chestnut, Jr.

Vol. 11, No. 6, 1989, pp. 24, 23

The unspeakable and cowardly Sunday morning bombing and slaughter of the four children in Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church is like it happened yesterday. It will always remain so in the minds of many.

Scores of my associates cannot recall many days since that bombing when our lives, directly or indirectly, were not in some form of jeopardy. A black leader in Dixie whose life has not been seriously threatened at least twice is either ineffective or a fraud or both.

The current bombings are not a new problem for black leaders. The attack on white judges is new but hardly eliminates racism as a motive. A suspected drug connection also does not put racism to rest, all other things considered.

Since the first slave ship docked in America, it has been a life-threatening ordeal to offer or provide effective leadership to black people. It is perfectly safe to mislead blacks. In fact, that is how some blacks survive.

Martin Luther King Jr. knew he could not sit safely with white leaders in a quiet room and effectively negotiate racial progress in Dixie. Obviously, an apostle of nonviolence would have preferred a quiet, negotiated approach if it had held any hope of success.

Black progress in Dixie is always seen and defined as a diminution of white power, privilege and money; thus any black progress immediately becomes a classic power struggle between blacks and whites–a struggle almost never amenable to meaningful negotiations.

King discussed those very points in speeches and was even more vivid in private. Precisely because he understood, this apostle of non-violence consciously placed his life and family in serious jeopardy by assuming effective leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. As expected, his home and many others were bombed.

His life remained at great risk until it was taken on a hotel balcony in Memphis. That, too, was not really unexpected.

No person in America understood white power better than King. Few Presidents understood it as well. King knew he could become instantaneously rich, safe and even “honored” by every white leader in America if he would deliberately become ineffective as a black leader. He often laughed about it.

Ineffective black leaders are absolutely safe in America. No civil rights leader of late has been killed or even threatened (except the poor black lawyer the other day in Savannah) because collectively and singularly they are almost wholly ineffective. They surrendered our most effective weapon (direct action) and we have been ineffective ever since. And, of course, they have been safe. There will be no motel balconies for them.

If King had lived it would be as dangerous in 1989 t’ be a civil rights leader as it was in 1965, because he would be waging a struggle as effectively now as he was then. He would not be selling his people out for nickle [sic] jobs, empty titles and superfluous positions.

The next black leader who comes forward at a crucially tactical moment to nervously suggest “bi-racial negotia-

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tions” or “dialogue,” ask him to detail his past accomplishments for black people along those lines. Find out how safe and secure he is with white leaders. You might also ask what titles, jobs and positions have been given him.

On the other hand, unless you have lived in a cave isolated from everybody and everything you already know the answers to those questions.

Peace.

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