Letting Loose of Liberalism: Some Thoughts on Cultural Work and the Limits of Polite Discourse

By David E. Whisnant

Vol. 12, No. 3, 1990, pp. 1-11

IN Walker Percy’s story “The Last Donahue Show,” the topic of the day is “sexual preference.” Midway through, the show is interrupted by three intruders: a black-cloaked Calvin-like spokesman for the old culture of Puritan New England, handsome Col. John Pelham, a paragon of the gallantry and chivalry of the Old South, and a Cosmic Stranger from another planet. Calvin finds the concept of “sexual preference” completely incomprehensible, and Pelham considers the discussion unnecessary because “a gentleman knows how to treat women.”

Looking for all the world like Harry Truman, the Cosmic Stranger sees the self-indulgent maunderings of Donahue’s guests and audience as a symptom of a profound cultural disorder. Earthlings, he says, are “D.D.s” (dingalings, deathdealers, and deathlovers) who face an imminent apocalypse–explicitly atomic but implicitly historical and cultural. He confides that the only place of refuge is a cave in Lost Cove, Tennessee, which is stocked with corn, grits, collard greens, and sausage. The story ends with a question (“If you heard this Donahue Show, would you head for Lost Cove?”)

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and a box to check yes or no.

This story may seem an odd point of departure for thinking about the arts and humanities in the public sector. But to me it seems usefully provocative in this second (Bush-Quayle) phase of an era characterized on the one hand by Reagan’s narcolepsy, William Bennett’s meanspiritedness, the Valdez, fading ozone, and 82nd Airborne democracy, and on the other hand by Walesa, Mandela, Havel and falling walls everywhere. A bit less cosmically than the Cosmic Stranger, I read the story partly as a parable about vital small-scale vs. alienated mass culture–about soul food and straight talk vs. lean cuisine and Donahue drivel. In any case, you should know that the voice you are hearing comes to you as much from Lost Cove as from anywhere else.

I was raised, after all, not on what is usually called “good literature” and “good music,” but on the Reader’s Digest, late-night country music shows from WLS, WCKY, and WWVA, and the gospel music of the Southern Baptist church. Later, scouting the margins of elite culture, I spent years singing German lieder and Italian art songs in a thousand voice lessons, Monteverdi in madrigal groups, and Bach and Mozart and Brahms in oratorio societies. Still later, in my first timorous return to Lost Cove, it was Carter Family and Blue Sky Boys songs in a string band, and more recently it has been romantic and political songs from Latin America. I count myself fortunate to have realized in a few blessed moments of clarity that I can love it all, that I do not have to choose.

MY most transcendent cultural experiences have ranged across many boundaries: one was standing as a Georgia Tech freshman in an illfitting rented tuxedo in the top balcony of the Fox Theater in Atlanta and hearing the humming chorus from Madame Butterfly during the annual spring visit of the Metropolitan Opera to the Sahara of the Bozarts; another was hearing Cajun music for the first time as the Balfa brothers and Nathan Abshire sailed into “Pine Grove Blues” at the University of Illinois where I was a seared new assistant professor; another was hearing six aged black men from Port Deposit, Maryland, sing “I Don’t Care Where They Bury My Body” on the thirty-fifth anniversary of their performing together as the Little Wonders gospel

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quartet; still another one was watching my daughter and a Peabody Conservatory classmate perform the Bach double violin concerto on two violins I had built; another was feeling myself almost literally lifted from my seat when I heard “Dove song” from The Marriage of Figaro at the Staatsoper in Vienna; and–having grown up as monolingually as one possibly could–I was moved beyond words in any language when at the age of forty-eight I was finally able to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Cien anos de soledad in Spanish.

Thus whatever I have come to think about the politics of culture or about cultural programs and policy is grounded in my sense that all of this is good, that all of it is evidence of the magnificent creativity of the human spirit, and that if we are to keep our bearings, we have to read both Garcia Marquez and Faulkner, and to listen to both Mozart and Merle Haggard–not the “Okie From Muskogee” Merle who fascinated Nixon, but the Merle of “Mama’s Hungry Eyes,” who beneath the jingoism knows the cultural score.

My own work during the years I was stumbling through to learning these things has focused on the social and cultural history of the southern Appalachian region, on the music and culture of marginalized people, and upon the politics of culture, first in Appalachia and more recently in Nicaragua. In the public sector I have worked with folklife festivals and museums, state humanities commissions and national endowments, Foxfire and Highlander, film makers and record producers.

Through it all, my own evolving cultural politics have drawn from the most disparate of sources: from a San Francisco carpenter and shipwright; from a powerful Appalachian composer-singer who learned about Percy’s D.D. culture by watching family members being killed in coal mines and her sister becoming a prostitute on the streets of Baltimore, and who wrote songs about both; from Shaker cabinetmakers and Cremona violin makers; from a Sardinian who worked out much of his politics in a Fascist jail cell; from a North African psychiatrist, a Nicaraguan poet, a Uruguayan novelist, and a Quiche woman from the Guatemalan highlands. That is to say, I have learned in the first instance from those who have scribed indelibly the line between good work and poor work, but beyond that from those who have engaged with the

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politics of their circumstances, faced the contradictions, defiantly asserted their otherness, risked speaking their outrage, and crafted beauty and made sense out of their pain.

So how do things look to me in this arts and humanities sector of the public policy arena? Whose lips are really worth reading, whose tunes worth dancing to?

Obviously it is a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that the past twenty-five years have witnessed a long-delayed but on the whole healthy legitimation of the arts and humanities in the making of public policy in the United States. That process has paralleled a global resurgence of culturally energized political movements of both a progressive and a reactionary character: in the middle east, in the Baltic republics, in northern Ireland, in eastern Europe, in Tibet, in Latin America, in Africa, in the United States. Those movements have resonated to the rhythms of rockabilly, of Tex-Mex and nueva cancion, of rap and reggae, and more recently of long-forbidden national anthems.

All of that is good. But if you will permit me, I will focus–like the Cosmic Stranger–more on the bad than on the good news, for that is where the most vexing problems and demanding challenges lie, both conceptually and programatically.

One has to say at the outset that the social, political, and economic climate is not especially hospitable for our work, and that in some important respects it grows less so daily. At the same time that the data show increasing social and economic inequality, distress and dislocation, we find ourselves in the second Reagan-Bush decade of dramatic reductions in public expenditures for social programs of whatever character. The entire social infrastructure has been decimated. Sliding SAT scores, rising infant mortality, ugly racial incidents, a slew of toxic waste dump controversies, and new brands of cigarettes aimed at vulnerable young women and the Third World poor remind us that many of the promises of the sixties–relative to education, civil rights, the environment and women–have been deferred or reversed. Here in North Carolina, a university system that has no money to buy library books or xerox paper can afford a six-figure buyout for an arrogant, sleazy basketball coach, and a nation that can’t afford a few billion to feed or house the homeless can afford to buy out savings and loan sharks to the tune of hundreds of billions. In U.S. foreign policy we see a resurgence of culturally based jingoism, bellicosity, self-deception and simple-mindedness (in Grenada, Nicaragua, and Panama), of arrant cynicism (in China), of penuriousness (in eastern Europe), of timidity and temporizing (in South Africa and Lithuania).

In the cultural arena, public funds are drying up. Changes in the tax laws (as in the Tax Reform Act of 1986) are reducing private donations at the same time that the fact (and necessity) of increased dependence upon such donations threatens to make cultural institutions responsive primarily to well-heeled constituencies and corporate donors.1 Most public cultural programs are operating on bakesale budgets, and finding their work increasingly complicated by rising Helms-style censorship and intimidation, as was evident in the recent National Council for the Arts board meeting in Winston-Salem. An era in which the reactionary wife of the reactionary Secretary of Defense is head of the National Endowment for the Humanities is an era of serious threat to the work we are trying to do.

So what can and should we do in these hard times? I suggest that as a first step we admit that the liberal analysis and strategies we have long used to guide and shape our work are unequal to the tasks we face. What do I mean by “liberal analysis and strategies”? What are their limitations, and why are those limitations unacceptable?

At the risk of caricaturing rather than characterizing fairly, I will try to put it briefly: Within the usual liberal paradigm, cultural policy amounts principally to obtaining, allocating and monitoring direct public subsidies for established cultural institutions, which in turn build public collections, mount public exhibits and produce public

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programs. Characteristically, culture is thought of as a more or less self-contained sector, or as a superstructure. “Culture” means “the arts” (or more restrictedly, the “fine” arts), which are produced by “artists” and consumed by a listening/viewing/reading public. This public needs to be given information about, have “access” to, and “learn to appreciate,” the arts. Providing that information and “access” and engendering that “appreciation” is assumed to have a soothing, enlightening and together bringing effect–producing a unified public sensitive to and unthreatened by its own “rich cultural diversity.” Tacking on “the humanities” alters the paradigm only slightly, especially if by the humanities one means anything close to the National Endowment’s bland Shakespeare-Columbus-and-the-Constitution, great- works-and-great-men version of them.

It is no wonder that except for the Jesse Helms fringe, legislators don’t worry themselves unduly about the culture crowd. We can be thrown a sop; we can be tricked into scrambling for a few scraps; we can be depended upon not to challenge or upset the status quo in any serious way. Meanwhile, our low-budget exhibits and programs cast a comforting and legitimizing glow over business as usual.

So I suggest that the bland, essentially credulous liberal paradigm is pitifully unequal to the task if one conceives of the task in even moderately broad and sophisticated terms. Much tougher-minded analysis is called for if we are to get beyond these limits–even within our customary theaters of operation, to say nothing of within some larger and quite unfamiliar strategic arenas into which events are thrusting us.

So how do we get beyond these limits? What clarifications are possible?

In the first place, I submit that the arts (or fine arts) and humanities conception of culture has long since outlived its usefulness as an oasis for policy formulation, if indeed it ever had much. Culture is how people hold their babies, plant a garden, cook their food, answer the telephone, sing and dance. A little less palpably but even more importantly, it is how people love and raise their kids, and what they think is worth explaining to them. But most importantly, culture is also the basic orientation people have with respect to fundamental questions, the terms they use to make sense

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of things–like, for example, what they think it means to be male or female. Even more problematically, it is how people recognize and name what they love and hate and fear. It is how they decide who is us and who is them.

So why does this matter to us? It matters because if this is what culture is, it is therefore as productive of conflict as of harmony, as likely to divide and engender conflict across borders as to unite within them. We must therefore subject to serious scrutiny our habitual liberal confidence in the various forms of polite discourse–our touching confidence that multiethnic festivals and roundtable discussions and got-together “community dialogues” will be very serviceable. We must question our naive liberal expectation that when people come together to discuss their differences they will discover that they really don’t have very many, or that the ones they have aren’t very important, or that there are some low-cost solutions to them. Music may in some vague way be a “universal language,” but Pinochet killed Victor Jara for singing his songs nevertheless.

What I am saying–to take an example closer to our political and social realities here in the Southeast–is that the world of textile managers and their superiors in the boardrooms of the multinationals is not the same world as that of textile workers; the world of Alaska fishermen is not that of big-oil CEOs who build single-hull tankers because they are cheaper. And neither is their culture. The world of Bill Bennett and Jesse Helms is not our world, and we are not going to dialogue it out–not in a weekend seminar, and not in a thousand years.

Hence given the choice between arranging a “public dialogue” between any group of haves and any group of have-nots, or figuring out some way to help the have-nots understand the structural (and therefore inescapably cultural) relationships between the two, I would always choose the latter. There is no way of avoiding, it seems to me, the possibility that serious cultural work will sometimes lead to divisiveness, tension, and conflict. And the probability of conflict is directly proportional to the seriousness of the work.

Part of what this means, in turn, is that the familiar and reassuring walls between cultural and “noncultural” policy sectors must come down, and we must recognize that nearly all policy is cultural policy at some level: because it increases or decreases the life chances of some sector of the population, reinforces and affirms some and destabilizes and shames others, privileges and empowers some and marginalizes and disempowers others. Hence we must make ourselves cognizant of every area of policy, concern ourselves with it, and bring a culturally informed perspective and analysis to bear upon it. We must therefore conceive of our work as consisting at least as much in monitoring the cultural implications and impacts of policy in the noncultural sectors as it does in operating programs in the explicitly cultural sector itself.

Conversely, we must bear in mind that any analysis of or policymaking about culture has inescapable structural implications, and therefore must be consciously conceived in structural terms. A decision to fund a certain cultural form, practice, or sector is an inescapably social and political decision. If one funds elite culture, one inevitably legitimizes and solidifies the social position, values and selfunderstanding of the elites who mainly patronize it. If one funds a black performance or Hispanic folk arts exhibit, one inevitably affects public understanding (or misunderstanding) of structural inequality and marginalization.

Thus we must for example entertain the possibility that the time-honored practice of busing kids to symphony concerts or exhibits of oil on canvas may have shaming, alienating and disempowering–as well as affirming and liberating–effects. In the same way, we must think about the extent to which folklife festivals or exhibits of exotic and idiosyncratic folk art–if they present a simplistic and sanitized version of traditional culture–may confuse and mislead a naive public about the intensely conflicted and inescapably political dynamics of cultural survival and change.

A corollary to what I have just argued is that we must resist and subject to serious public scrutiny the increasingly prevalent argument that public funding for the arts and humanities may (or must) be justified in economic terms. It is common to argue these days that when one funds culture there are desirable “economic multiplier” effects–that for example museums and symphony orchestras make an attractive climate for new industries. Never mind that many of those industries are runaway ones looking for low wage, nonunion, female labor in the right-to-work sunbelt.

The economic justification argument for arts funding is dangerous and insidious. It concedes the legitimacy of the established economic and political order and turns culture into its uncritical handmaiden. It ratifies the facile assumption that economic considerations are primary and central, and culture superordinate and peripheral. It predisposes us to define culture in the terms preferred by managerial elites. Worst of all, it coopts and frustrates the transformative power of culture. It denies that the most vital culture

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is always critical, and more often than not insurgent and subversive–that it is precisely what scares the Bill Bennetts and Allan Blooms of the world to death.

I would go on to argue, moreover, that at the very center of the cultural policy and programming agenda must be the larger agenda of social critique and reconstruction. The time for quaint or pretty diddling around has passed. We are in a serious game, and the sooner we face that fact, the better. The primary question is not whether this or that exhibit is going to be mounted, concert held, play staged, or genteel “dialogue” arranged, but whether we can prove the Cosmic Intruder wrong.

We know in our guts that nation states as we have conceived of them are anachronisms–that they are not necessarily some universally and transhistorically functional mechanisms. We know in our guts that war is not a useful or acceptable instrument of policy, and that the environmental vector points toward disaster. We know in our guts that present gender definitions are not serviceable (for women or for men). What we may have less of a gut sense of–but which is profoundly true–is that all of these assumptions, forms, and issues are at their deepest level cultural. To the extent that that becomes clearer to us, our thinking and strategizing about cultural policy will get more sophisticated and our programming more effective.

It seems to me to follow, then, that in order to commit ourselves seriously and effectively to such an agenda of critique and reconstruction, we must think strategically and globally even as we plan and act tactically and locally. The days of fortress America are past; the myth of American exceptionalism has lost all credibility. After so many years of living mostly outside it, history has finally thrust itself upon us. Hence our work is not to “bring the arts and humanities” to people–or vice versa–but to help people shape and sharpen the analytical tools that will assist them in understanding their own historical and cultural circumstances.

Our work, I am suggesting, is about a kind of enlightenment that is neither conceptually nor practically separable from empowerment. Our work should be much less to provide essentially rarified aesthetic experiences for a small elite than to help the great majority of people come to an awareness of their own insight and knowledge, and of the links between knowledge and power.

Consequently our work is not mainly to “provide access”–as in the old liberal paradigm–but to push toward cultural equity and democracy in a period of intensifying social/political/economic conflict and the increasing consolidation of power. It is to demystify in a period in which obfuscation and public mystification have become such central functions of government that Dan Quayle signs a Jesse Helms fundraising letter one week and goes the next as an envoy for democracy to a Latin America already wracked by years of CIA-style democracy.

Finally, we must focus policy and programming increasingly upon cultural production rather than consumption, upon cultural action rather than passive “appreciation” or exhibition. This is necessary because for the culturally marginalized, actively making and doing culture are empowering, while passively appreciating is likely to have at least the secondary effect of rationalizing, legitimizing and solidifying the culturally marked boundaries of established power.

And so if we do all of this–or even some bits of it–will it be dangerous? Yes. Inescapably. If they begin to think that what we are doing will really change things very much, they will stop funding us. Period. It is that simple, for they may be meanspirited, but they are not stupid.

If they do stop funding us, there will be some real losses. But there would be gains, too, so that it is not at all clear to me that absent the public dollars the situation would necessarily be hopeless. Our own structural position as well as that of marginalized cultural groups would at least become clearer. The discourse might

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become sharper, more honest and sophisticated, and less bland, genteel and polite. Some limits would be recognized, and some more apt analytical paradigms might be discovered and employed. The inescapable politics of the cultural enterprise would be on the table for discussion, and we might get through to some further clarity about the operation of power in the cultural arena. We might even create some autonomous structures less subject to reactionary political pressure.

As we contemplate the risks, we should also bear in mind that public funds are by no means the only resources available to us. In the first place we have our own experience and knowledge–the knowledge we have gained from having conceived and put together scores of institutions and programs, as well as the negative but useful gut knowledge that makes us from time to time look up from writing yet another grant proposal and say (to no one more than to ourselves) “this is crazy.” The latter sort of knowledge tends to be mostly inchoate, but we have it nevertheless, and we can attach it to some energies that are also trying to move within us and amongst us.

There is also some extraordinarily pertinent analysis out there, bunches of books to be read that will tell us more that we need to know than shelves full of NEA and NEH annual reports or shamelessly elitist and ethnocentric tracts like Cultural Literacy and The Closing of the American Mind. The most useful analysis has been advanced, at least in my estimation, not by the too frequently alienated and elitist “theory” crowd, but by grounded, passionate, frequently self-educated intellectuals: by Paolo Freire and Frantz Fanon, by Rigoberta Menchu and Domitila Barrios, by Roland Bartes and Raymond Williams, by Carlos Fuentes and Eduardo Galeano, by Maxine Hong Kingston and Gloria Anzaldua, by Will Campbell and Vine Deloria.

We also have available to us the clarifying experience of marginalized subject peoples all over the world who are showing us how to use culture for purposes of challenge and liberation: Lithuanians and Estonians, the mothers of la Plaza de Mayo, blacks and Chicanos and Native Americans in the United States, Chinese students and smalltown working people in Michigan. We may end up grantless and on our own, but so are they. And they are teaching themselves to form organizations of their own, to stop dancing to the tourist industry’s tune, to talk straight to their opponents, to substitute lawsuits and injunctions for tediously polite discourse.

If we begin to do even part of what I have suggested, we will above all need a lot of historical and political perspective and considerable wit. Fortunately, there is a lot of it out there. One of my favorite country singers has the unlikely name of Kinky Friedman. Kinky is the son of a University of Texas psychology professor, and his shortlived band was called The Texas Jewboys (after the legendary Bob Wills’s Texas Playboys). Kinky spent a couple of years in the Peace Corps in Borneo just after college, and when he came back, he said that “Everybody needs to go to Borneo, wherever it is for them. A lot of wiggy things happened to me in that jungle, it anchored my mind to the past.” 2

During his short stay in country music, Friedman wrote some marvelous songs like “Wild Man From Borneo,” “They Don’t Make Jews Like Jesus Any More,” “Top Ten Commandments,” and the incomparable “Ride ’em Jewboy,” which synthesizes the historical agony of cowboys, the American West, and the United States itself, as well as the Jewish diaspora and the Holocaust. All of it is viewed–refreshingly wiggily–from Borneo:

Now the smoke from camps a-risin’
See the helpless creatures on their way.
Hey, old pal, ain’t it surprisin”
How far you can go before you stay….
While ponies all your dreams were broken,
Rounded up and made to move along.
The loneliness which can’t be spoken
Just swings a rope and rides inside a song.

My own Borneos have been the mountains of the Appalachian South and Nicaragua–the former of which I was born in but had to learn my way through almost as if it were some Borneo. Nicaragua I wandered into after having begun to learn the language beyond the age of forty-five, and I came to recognize its cultural history as more Appalachian than I ever would have believed. So I close with a little cultural parable about my two Borneos, written belatedly from Lost Cove.

Like many of us who are from the upland southeast, I grew up about as monoculturally as one could. In those tranquil preintegration days, the relatively few blacks who lived in that most un-Faulknerian part of North Carolina stayed docilely in Asheville’s small black ghetto and attended the all- black high school. Most of the city’s substantial Jewish population lived in Biltmore Forest and other upscale neighborhoods we had no occasion to go to.

I heard and spoke only English, of course, as did all of my white Protestant fundamentalist neighbors, and none of us had lived or traveled abroad. The only other cultural group we knew were the Dutch who had come over in 1929 to build and operate the rayon plant where my father worked: the Vanderhoovens, Schilthuises, and Vanderkaadens, who lived in the bigger houses of the mill village where we lived, sent their kids to private and parochial schools, and hired us to mow their lawns. I remember a vague sense of fascination with the way they talked and the things they had in their houses that we didn’t have, but mostly what I felt was confusion and inferiority.

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Not all the Dutch people in the village belonged to the elite, however. The Schoonderwoerds lived next door to us, and he was a mechanic in the mill. While certain theories might predict that our family would have felt some class solidarity with our working class neighbor–and indeed my parents were friends with Mr. and Mrs. Schoonderwoerd–culture appears in retrospect to have been a decisive (though completely unconscious) factor among us children in the streets. Their son Pete, who was our playmate, was Dutch, different, and the conflict between him and us was relentless. Hence our habit of making lightning guerrilla raids to bombard the fish pond and fountain his father had built in their front yard–a touch which I now recognize was for them an expression of their northern European habit of meticulous and artful custodianship of one’s own tiny bit of landscape, but which for us rowdies of the neighborhood was an alien object and thus an irresistibly magnetic focus for our resentment.

Since the white Protestant fundamentalist bubble in which we were encapsulated kept us apart from all other cultural systems except those safely remote African countries to which we vaguely referred when in Wednesday night prayer meetings we prayed that the Lord would “bless all the missionaries at home and overseas,” and about whose eternal salvation we solemnly strategized in the Baptist Training Union, I recall no other serious contact with or awareness of another cultural group throughout my school years.

My first adult encounter with a culturally distinct group was with the Hispanics who lived in my freshman dorm at Georgia Tech–Cubans whose wealthy pre-Castro fathers had sent them there to study. I didn’t know a single one personally, and recall feeling no desire to. We called them “spics,” and virtually all we knew about them was that they shouted to each other down the halls of the dorm in a language we didn’t understand. We eyed them from behind the cultural ramparts of the Baptist Student Union and the First Baptist Church of Atlanta, where ushers with a special color of carnation in their lapels were stationed as lookouts for any black worshippers who might try to force their way in in those tense days of the earliest bus boycotts and sitins. Hence although I spent five years in one of the biggest and fastest growing cities in the southeast, the cultural system in which I found myself was still about as parochial as might be imagined.

It was in fact nearly twenty-five years later, after many changes in my life, ideas and politics before I began studying Spanish, which turned out to be one of the most culturally useful and clarifying things I have ever done. Why did I start? At some deep level, I think, my passion to

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do so came out of the same threatened and anxious sense of cultural inferiority and encapsulation that had made me such a willing participant in our little hillbilly blitzkrieg raids on the fishpond. It seemed to me, I guess, that becoming bilingual might be an appropriate next step in what had by then become for me a multifaceted effort to deconstruct my own cultural world and break through to others of which I had previously known absolutely nothing.

In any case, I did start to study Spanish in the fall of 1984, and a little more than three years later I found myself in Nicaragua on a Fulbright, working on a book on the politics of culture there. During these past half-dozen years, I have immersed myself as much as I could manage in Latin American language, history and culture. It has been the most compelling, totally involving and joyful process of learning and change I have ever known, including the prior one that paralleled my Appalachian work.

More to the point here, it also has had a great deal to do with how I now think about working with culture in the public sector. Looking at things from this new angle has brought me to some poignantly ironic realizations. I will content myself with mentioning only one.

In 1851 Cornelius Vanderbilt secured an effective monopoly on the Nicaraguan canal route, turning himself into a power to be reckoned with in the national economic and political arena in Nicaragua and helping to shape the first major phase of U.S. intervention into Nicaragua’s affairs. About forty years later, his grandson George W. Vanderbilt came to western North Carolina, and in a similarly grand and imperial spirit bought 125,000 acres of mountain land and built a 300-room French chateau which he appointed with the finest European furniture, tapestries and paintings. His guests approached the estate through a half-timber and tile English village he built, named “Biltmore,” and outfitted with his own Episcopal

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chapel and curate.

Shortly after the Vanderbilt mansion opened in 1895, my grandfather and his brother left their small farm in Rutherford County and went up the mountain to Asheville looking for work. They found it driving streetcars–work my grandfather continued to do for the next fifty years, never returning to the house he had built with his own hands on the farm and had always meant to go back to live in some day. Many mornings when he arrived at the “car barn” at 3:30 a.m., he set out to make the Biltmore run.

About the time my grandfather died, my high school classmates and I were taken on a “field trip” to see the cultural wonders of the Biltmore House-to “expose” us to “great art,” of which we in our culturally benighted hillbilly ignorance presumably knew nothing. All I remember is feeling dwarfed by the scale of the place, and ashamed of my clothing and my ignorance. Whether that prepared me in any specific way to comprehend the concept and the realities of cultural imperialism years later in Nicaragua–to resonate with them in my gut–I do not know, but I have a feeling that it did.

When I was seventeen, however, my awareness of the Vanderbilt link between Asheville and Nicaragua, and of its significance in some larger political and social schemes–still lay years in the future. Standing in the carved walnut, multi-tiered library of the Biltmore House at that moment, I couldn’t have pointed out Nicaragua on the elegantly mounted globe if my life had depended on it, nor had I ever heard of the New York and Boston banks and corporations which had one firmly controlling hand on Nicaragua and were dabbling with the other in real estate and timber in the part of the mountains I could see out the window of my house. I didn’t even know the name of John Hill Wheeler, the North Carolinian whom President Pierce appointed minister to Nicaragua, who presided approvingly over the outrageous William Walker filibustering episode, and who declared that “the race of Central Americans have conclusively proved to all observant minds that they are incapable of self-government.”

I am embarrassed to admit that I began to make these connections only after spending a dozen years writing about the Appalachian region, exploring and mapping like a fascinated traveler in Borneo, and coming to understand it as something of an internal colony whose patterns of development were after all not that different from the Nicaraguas of the world. One of my most poignant moments of clarification occurred when I read that the vessel that carried U.S. troops from the Canal Zone and landed them on Nicaragua’s east coast to move against the rebel general Sandino in April 1931 was named the U.S.S. Ashville.3

Why have I reminisced about my wanderings through this personal-political landscape? To try to suggest that the dramatic political and cultural changes of the past little while in Latin America, in eastern Europe, in South Africa, are presenting us with yet another opportunity to make the politically and culturally clarifying connections C. Vann Woodward told us thirty years ago are there and have to be comprehended: connections between ourselves as southerners and the majority of the world’s people, who have also known poverty, exploitation, defeat, occupation, submission, humiliation, and cultural stigmatization. If we can admit and comprehend them, these connections offer us a splendid if psychically threatening opportunity for reconsideration, for clarity, and for realignment.

Until we get through to that, however, bland liberal strategies will continue to confuse us, confuse the public, and waste precious time and energy. Polite discourse with those in whose interest it is not to be persuaded (and within whose world views our reasons and our values do not compute) will continue to be at best ineffectual, and at worst obfuscating and depoliticizing. Unmonitored “noncultural” policy will continue to wreak its cultural havoc. Such status as our concerns and activities are grudgingly accorded, they will acquire by virtue of their perceived usefullness to whatever tawdry local versions of Trump-like boosters and “developers” happen to be on the scene. And most troublesome of all, the overarchingly important matter of social critique and reconstruction will remain outside our orbit of concern and work.

I submit, however, that such a scenario is not unavoidable. We know some things and have some skills and have developed some networks amongst ourselves that can help prevent it. We do have to question many of our fundamental assumptions and accustomed paradigms. We do have to seek new working alliances, thinking systemically and globally. We do have to accept some risks, and trust our resourcefulness. And we must continually re-ground ourselves in the lives of those whose labor and pliant acquiescence have heretofore been purchased far too cheaply by others who understand all too well the sector of culture in every equation of power. To the extent that we ourselves can remain clear about that, we will encounter a whole array of strategic and tactical possibilities we heretofore thought closed to us.

David E. Whisnant is on the faculty of the university of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published widely on traditional culture, the politics of culture, and the history of the Appalachian region. Currently he is working on a book on the politics of culture in Nicaragua. This essay was prepared for the southeastern regional meeting of the state humanities councils, May 19, 1990.

Politics the Beloved Commune: Arkansas has the opportunity to learn from the experiences of other Southern states

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 12, No. 3, 1990, pp. 13-16

THE YEAR 1990 may be remembered as a profound moment for Arkansas politics. This is the 25th anniversary of the passage of the Voting Rights Act, perhaps the most powerful instrument in the twentieth century for fairness in the U.S. political process. And it is this year that the voting rights movement, already spread across most of the Southern states, has finally come home to Arkansas.

Since January, the Voting Rights Act has fostered dramatic changes, as the federal courts have required the redistricting of the Arkansas Legislature so black voters would have the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice in at least ten legislative districts. Another federal court order may create new districts from which Arkansas state court judges will be elected more fairly and more substantially with the votes of black citizens. In all likelihood, this federal court will enforce the Voting Rights Act and create as many as fifteen judicial districts where black voters can elect the candidates of their choice.

These two court cases represent sweeping changes. Yet, they are only the beginning of a long journey in Arkansas from the politics of mere participation to the politics of inclusion. The empowerment of black voters though the creation of effective majority black districts has only begun. Almost every week the federal court dockets in Arkansas show more lawsuits against school boards, city councils, or county governments with election schemes that dilute black votes. No less dramatic will be the redistricting of the state’s local governments after the new Census data is available in 1991-1992. Recent projections by the Southern Regional Council suggest that as many as eighty new majority-black districts may be created through redistricting of the county governments in Arkansas in the 1990s.

All told, in this new decade, the number of officials elected by a majority of black voters could triple. Most of that growth will take place in the Arkansas Delta. So long as the Voting Rights Act is the law of the land, as it now stands, and so long as lawyers can find a federal courthouse, this trend is as certain and mighty as the southward flow of the Mississippi.

Arkansas will probably have the largest percentage of growth in the number of black elected officials of all Southern states during the 1990s. Of course, Arkansas will lead this category mostly because so much of this kind of change has already happened in other Southern states and so little in Arkansas. Making up for lost time, the decade of the 1990s may be the decade of unprecedented black political empowerment in Arkansas.

These changes, however, will not be easy and will not necessarily deliver Arkansas to the political promised land. These changes will not necessarily bring the politics of Martin Luther King’s “beloved community.”

But Arkansas can profit from the experiences of ocher Southern states over the last two decades. Both black and white Arkansans can learn from the trials and achievements of other Southern states in this process of change. Having come upon this historical moment later than most of the region, Arkansas has an opportunity to make more of the change than have some ocher Southern states.

As paradoxical as it may seem, as difficult as it may be, the political change now under way in Arkansas for the benefit of black voters will unite the white community more than it will unite the black community–at least in the short run. With the approaching political opportunities for black leaders will come painful divisions within the black community.

Make no mistake about it. Most of the white community and most of the white leadership in Arkansas will be united in opposition to this political change until the very last city council is redistricted and the very last vote in new redistricting plans is counted. Regrettably, opposition to change will become an article of faith in many parts of the white community, such as the Delta. Even white leaders who have been helpful to black communities in the past will oppose this political change in silence or with great clamor.

At the same time the transformation of politics will begin to divide parts of the black community and much of the black leadership. This is a rather natural consequence of the political process. With increased opportunities for political office will come increased competition among black office seekers. Some blacks will become candidates because they believe they are the best representatives of their communities. Some will become candidates because

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the local white leadership thinks that they will be the best representatives of the black community.

In addition, black voters will probably be more reluctant to vote for black candidates than many black leaders expect. In many places, black voters will continue to feel themselves too vulnerable to white incumbents and white leadership to break old patterns of voting. Lest anyone forget, in the excitement of the moment, a century of white control of thought and deed does not end with one redistricting plan.

Also, some black voters will be underestimated by black office seekers. While they are probably the least educated voting group in the South, black voters are also probably the most sophisticated voters of our region. Unlike their white counterparts in many sections of our region, black voters often have an ability to look beyond race. As a rule, they do not support black candidates only because they are black. Where a white incumbent is, in fact, bringing home

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the bacon, black voters will often continue their support.

Another challenge to Arkansas’s black political leadership may be even more ominous. Black political leaders and activists, especially in places like the Delta, should expect to be put under the microscope. In state after state in the South, the new politics has been accompanied by attempts by white officials to identify the weaknesses and the vulnerabilities of black leaders. At times these efforts have been aimed to eliminate black empowerment and entitlements to vote by eliminating black leadership from public office.

Recent Southern political history exhibits numerous black elected officials and unelected activists who have become entangled in a string of state and federal audits, local criminal investigations, civil litigation, and federal investigations and indictments on issues such as voting fraud, taxes, and malfeasance in office. Many of these inquiries have been groundless, and some have been

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almost conspiratorial. Federal indictments against voting activists in the Alabama Black Belt in the mid-1980s are a good example. Of course, some investigations have been on target, and black jurors have helped convict some black officials.

In some instances, this scrutiny may represent a double standard, but it is a standard that has to be lived with. Even where the investigation of a black leader or activist was racially motivated, the chances are that the accused will be convicted if he or she has violated the law. In essence, the climate requires that black politicians and activists who seek to take advantage of redistricting opportunities must avoid even the proverbial appearance of impropriety if they are to survive.

Because political power is often intoxicating and campaigns are often all-consuming, some leaders in the early days of this change may forget the real limits of political power. While political transformation, for example, is an essential part of what must change in the lives of poor blacks and whites in the Delta of Arkansas, that change alone will not transform poverty into prosperity. In the beginning days of this change, black candidates will have a tendency to promise too much and find themselves creating higher expectations than they can fulfill. Also, many new candidates may not be prepared to govern when elected. Simply because a candidate can campaign effectively does not always mean that he or she knows how to govern effectively.

Those seeking these new political opportunities will be well advised not to burn their bridges with those who hold economic power, even those whites who will not support any efforts to empower black communities in the politics of inclusion. People change; circumstances change; and in those changes come the possibilities of new definitions of self-interest. Common ground is necessary for the definition of self-interest if economic power and political power can become one force for moving communities out of poverty. In many cases, old opponents will have to become new partners for this union of purpose to take shape.

Another troubling trend also has become evident in the voting rights movement elsewhere in the region. There is a tendency for this movement to become only a lawyers’ battle. Because redistricting is usually required by court order, litigating attorneys have a rightful, pivotal role. But theirs should not be the primary or only role. Arkansas must be careful not to allow the creation of majority black districts by a lawyer’s writ to become a substitute for political activism and efforts to increase voter registration and turnout. If new districts are to become new opportunities for the black community, the community or its political organizations must be on the front lines of the redistricting process.

Finally, the recent Southern experience is a vivid reminder that efforts to empower black voters through the creation of majority black districts are the means, not the end, in the search for the politics of inclusion. For the sake of both black and white Arkansans, no one should be I allowed to forget that coalition politics is the ultimate goal–the politics of inclusion, the politics of the beloved community where the race of candidate or voter is irrelevant and where the needs and concerns of all citizens are paramount. Distinguishing between the means and the end is a political necessity no less than a political virtue. Throughout this process leaders in the black community must remember that controlling ten seats in the state legislature will not allow black voters to pass legislation only through black legislators, that controlling the Helena city council will not provide it with the state resources to improve public education, that controlling the county government of St. Francis County won’t necessarily provide the jobs, training, and opportunities that poor citizens need.

The political changes now underway are necessary to remove the burdens of the political participation from black citizens, to move the Delta and the state of Arkansas from merely allowing blacks to participate in politics towards allowing blacks and whites to become partners in using political power. Redistricting is only the means for arriving et that ultimate good. Therefore, while promoting the creation of majority black districts, African-American leaders in Arkansas must also promote the creation of coalitions that allow black and white candidates to be elected by a majority of white votes as well as black votes.

Already, Arkansas and the South have come a long way in the journey out of segregation. But there’s a long way to go. Wouldn’t it be a rare and cherished gift if the 1990s proved to be the time when the leadership of one Southern state learned from the mistakes and hazards of racial politics elsewhere in the region and gave to its own citizens a political future that includes all? Wouldn’t it be a remarkable legacy if Arkansas–so late in coming to the political empowerment of black citizens–was the first to reveal the promised land of politics, the politics of a beloved community?

Steve Suitts is the executive director of the Southern Regional Council. This article is excerpted from is May 1990 speech to the Arkansas Political Exchange in West Memphis, Ark.

Making Votes Count in Arkansas–Challenge to Plantation-Style Politics

By Dan Fleshler

Vol. 12, No. 3, 1990, pp. 14-15

Nearly every day this past year, M.C. Jeffers watched news reports of Eastern European crowds clamoring for meaningful elections, for the right to run for political office. He heard smug commentators explain that people in places like Romania yearned for American-style democracy. And he wondered if real democracy would ever reach the Mississippi Delta in Eastern Arkansas.

“I came up during the time of the poll tax,” says Mr. Jeffers, 67, an African American realtor in the Delta town of Forrest City, “when only a few blacks voted, and when they did, their votes didn’t do any good…Now we don’t have the tax but our votes still don’t do any good…Maybe this ruling’ll change that. .. Maybe we’ll get what everyone else in the world wants.”

He was referring to a recent Federal district court decision in Jeffers v. Clinton, an LDF case. After hearing evidence of the harassment of black voters and candidates, as well as the manipulation of district boundaries to dilute black voting strength, the court ruled that Arkansas blacks’ voting rights had been violated. And it ruled that state legislative boundaries drawn in 1981 must be redrawn.

The ruling, announced on December 5, 1989, called for the largest statewide redistricting ever ordered under the Voting Rights Act. Mr. Jeffers, one of 17 black plaintiffs, said he hoped the decision “would help blacks have real input into decision-making. Until we get it, conditions aren’t going to change.”

The 14 counties in Eastern Arkansas affected by the ruling have some of the world’s richest farmland, and some of America’s poorest people. Amidst fields abutting the Mississippi that yield abundant harvest of rice, cotton and soybeans, more than 40 percent of Delta residents live in poverty. Blacks comprise about half of the area’s population, but the vast majority of land in each town is owned by a handful of wealthy whites–many of whom are descendants of former slaveowners.

“They pay minimum wages when the fields need working,” says Clinton Harris, the black mayor of Wilmot. where unemployment hovers around 60 percent for macho of the year. “And in the winter, when the fields don’t need working, we just don’t have enough jobs.”

The Jeffers trial presented a sobering picture of the barriers to African Americans trying to change this bleak status quo through the electoral process. Although blacks comprise 16 percent of the state’s population, there is only one black in the 100-member House. In several majority black counties in Eastern Arkansas, white legislators have been elected with little black support.

The plaintiffs challenged the way in which majority black districts were carved up to submerge African American votes in larger pools of white votes by the 1981 reapportionment plan. While this plan created five legislative districts with majority-black populations, the plaintiffs argued that as many as 16 majority-black districts could have been created.

The court agreed, and ruled that the drawing of current district boundaries violated Section II of the Voting Rights Act, which requires proof of discriminatory results for electoral requirements and practices to be illegal. The decision called for “a new lawful plan” to be drafted in time for the 1990 elections.

In finding voting rights violations, the court also relied on extensive evidence of current “difficulties experienced! by blacks in electoral politics” in Arkansas.

For example, the court cited the experience of Roy

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Lewellan, a black lawyer in Marianna, Arkansas, who “ran for the State Senate in 1986 against a white incumbent… At about the same time, the Sheriff and Prosecuting Attorney instituted a well publicized criminal prosecution against Mr. Lewellan. Mr. Lewellan…gave a number of reasons for his belief that the prosecution was designed to discourage him in particular and black political activity in general. We find this testimony entirely credible.”

Interviewed after the trial, Mr. Lewellan noted that the man he had tried to unseat, State Senator Paul Benham, is a representative of the “Old South, from an old farm family, typical of the politicians who haven’t done a thing for black people in this district.”

Mr. Lewellan said that Senator Benham recently voted against a bill that would have exempted more than 60,000 poor residents from paying taxes. “His rich friends would have had to pay a few hundred dollars more in taxes, so he and other white senators opposed it…His friends know I’m in favor of helping the poor, and that’s why they didn’t want me to run against him.”

Many other examples of racially-motivated political harassment were presented at the trial. Helmet Mayor Harris testified that on election day in 1986, a gang of whites (including elected officials and a policeman with a gun) arrived at the polling place and prevented him and others from aiding illiterate black political voters.

Mr. Harris calls those responsible for the harassment “the Godfathers… They own the land, the mill, the bank.” He and other black political activists claim that the white power structure has openly resisted efforts to improve economic conditions for Delta blacks: “They don’t want industry coming down here, because factories’ll pay higher wages than they give to folks working the fields…”

The plaintiffs in Jeffers hope that black political empowerment gained through redistricting will help to counterbalance the power of “Godfathers” throughout the Delta.

Under court order, the Arkansas Board of Apportionment is currently drawing up new legislative districts, a process being monitored by attorneys Penda Hair, Dayna Cunningham, and Sheila Thomas of the Legal Defense Fund; P. A. Hollingsworth of Little Rock; and Olly Neal of Marianna.

Arkansas Election Update

Seven black candidates were nominated in March 29 primary elections in the ten Arkansas Delta districts affected by Jeffers v. Clinton. In one of those races, a black woman won the nomination for coroner of Lee County, the first county-wide electoral success for a black candidate in Arkansas since Reconstruction.

In addition to the seven black nominees, an old-line white conservative was defeated in another race by a white liberal. “The elections in some of the white-on-white races turned into referendums on the ‘good old boy’ political leadership in the region,” noted the LDF’s Dan Fleshier.

And voter turnout increased substantially–by 10 percent or more in some places–throughout the Delta.

Daniel Fleshler is director of communications of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. His article is adapted from Equal Justice: LDF News.

Human Heroics in Uniting an Old Culture to New Religion.

Reviewed by Charles Prejean

Vol. 12, No. 3, 1990, pp. 17-18

Ain’t you Got a Right to the Tree of Life? Recorded and edited by Guy and Candie Carawan, with a preface by Charles Joyner and an afterword by Bernice Johnson Reagon. (The University of Georgia Press, 1989, second edition, 240 pp., $29.95.)

This important book restates the values and updates the chronicle of a unique pattern of life, one guided, perhaps even driven, by influences of religion. It is the life story of the people of Johns Island, South Carolina. It tells of the natural striving of people to practice the human way in an organized society and under circumstances of inappropriate human intervention and interdiction. It is the story of the power and determination of the human will to live fully.

More particularly and dramatically stated, Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life? is a story of human heroics achieved by adherence to norms of a traditional African cultural folkway fused to a personalized and deeply internalized Christian faith. Seemingly, the result of this particular union of an older culture to a newer religion has enabled the people of Johns Island to transcend proscribed natural and legal rights and privileges.

This resembled much less humble submissiveness to the abuses of racism and misguided legal authority than recognition that undeserved oppression is a reflection of the depravity of the oppressor. Other people’s depravity is not an excuse to abort one’s effort to live well the precious and divinely-given gift of life. The experience contends, implicitly and explicitly, that life is bearable. It is a position sustained, from every indication, by what is evidently a highly developed consciousness of the Divine Presence in daily living. Endurance and the determination to live well is guided by belief that God will, so to say, “see them through”; or that wickedness will eventually succumb to the greater power of goodness.

The essential contribution of the traditional African cultural folkway seems to be ability to energize the human faculties of body and soul, the whole person, in the act of worshiping and daily living: worshiping and daily living are the same. It is body and soul in an ancient motion, tried and proven over the ages.

The Carawans, perhaps because of their own sincerity, perceptiveness, and appreciation for the quality of line practiced by the people of Johns Island, allow them to tell their own stow of life as they and their ancestry experienced it through the ages and under changing social orders. And the people do in these pages tell it through personal statements and songs’ lyrics that speak of difficulties, but even more of hope, faith, and appreciation for the many munificences of Divine Providence. Their songs’ music echoes the same, with variegated rhythmic patterns manifesting the whole person.

Photographs also tell the story of simple but elevated living under miserable circumstances. Looking at these photographs and recalling the content of the personal statement, one sees strength of character and determination being projected, not despair and submissiveness. The photographs of children at work, play, and as members of a family structure speak of wholesomeness and hopefulness.

The manner in which the people of Johns Island struggle, endure and progress reveal a human constructiveness that can serve for emulation. The personal statements and the words of songs, though they sometimes speak of pain and misery, reveal no hatred, bitterness, vindictiveness, or revenge. The Johns Islanders not only process to be, but are demonstrating that they are indeed a “New Testament People.”

Furthermore, given the regularity, spontaneity, and totality of their worship; the heightened consciousness of the presence of the Divine in their lives; the apparent ability to appreciate the preciousness of life, even its existence in those who oppress; the tendency to love rather than merely to give equal measure to others–all seem to evidence a people who have not only a highly developed level of Christian spirituality but also an exceptionally noble pattern of living, one consistent with our acclaimed ideal natural ways of the species. It is a life that finds no quarter in substituting illusions for reality. It is one that finds purpose and comfort in the unending struggle to have practice conform to universally cherished and spiritually sound beliefs.

I would be remiss not to mention the significance of the

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leadership role of Esau Jenkins in guiding and sustaining the modern growth and development of this community. He was a “Race Man” in the truest sense. His concern was for the social, civic, economic, and spiritual uplifting of the entire community. His leadership reflected the same quality of selflessness that was evident in the best of that historical African American leadership which has contributed to the progressive strides of the race. His leadership was bonded by the aspirations, traditional culture, and spiritual strengths of the community. It surfaced and was fed by a combined sense of life’s requirements and of a commonly shared life-force. Esau Jenkins’s legacy can still be observed in the continued civic and institutional progress of the community.

It is now the contemporary generation’s “watch” and its responsibility to determine how to incorporate the benefits of culture and religion in the lives of its members, under the circumstances of the changed society. Hedonism and materialism in the Sea Island environs notwithstanding, it is too soon yet to lament the disappearance of the traditional expressions of culture and religion. It may be that this influence is simply biding time, before evolving into an appropriate expression under the changed circumstances of the contemporary period, just as perhaps was the case in preceding social orders.

Charles Prejean, longtime executive director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, has been one of the outstanding leaders of the rural South. He is now teaching political science at Xavier.

The Importance of Race in the Classroom.

L. W. D.

Vol. 12, No. 3, 1990, p. 18

RACE, CLASS, AND EDUCATION: The Polities of Second-Generation Discrimination by Kenneth J. Meier, Joseph Stewart Jr., and Robert E;. England (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989, xiv, 194 pp., $37.50 cloth, $14.95 paper).

Three political scientists present the case for viewing education as a “political process.” They conclude that the most important determinant of discrimination against black children is the proportion of black teachers in the classrooms. “Without the political action that results in more black school board members, which in turn produces more black administrators, who in turn hire more black teachers, second-generation discrimination against black students would be significantly worse.” This is a book that should be useful to school reformers and administrators, especially those equipped to deal with statistics.

A White Progressive Sounds the Trumpet from Inside.

Reviewed by Anthony Dunbar

Vol. 12, No. 3, 1990, pp. 18-20

Hearts and Minds, A Personal Chronicle of Race in America by Harry S. Ashmore. Foreword by Harold C. Fleming (Cabin John, Maryland: Seven Locks Press. Revised Edition, 1988. $14.95 paper.).

It was an exceptional book when it was first published in 1982, and its 1988 revision, which extends to their finale Ashmore’s treatment of the Reagan years, fills out one man’s sweeping view of the civil rights struggle in America. Harold Fleming has contributed a fond and substantial Foreword to the revised edition, further enriching the book. The subtitle of Hearts and Minds has changed from the earlier edition’s “The Anatomy of Racism from Roosevelt to Reagan” to “A Personal Chronicle of Race in America,” a truer characterizing of the book.

Although there is enough sound history to make this book useful as a text, what gives Hearts and Minds its strength are Ashmore’s own glimpses of events and personalities as he knew them over five decades of living in and observing the South. As a South Carolina journalist and later editor of the Arkansas Gazette during the Little Rock crisis, and as an adviser to Adlai Stevenson and Eugene McCarthy in their runs for the White House, Ashmore offers profiles aplenty of people in their unguarded moments. I especially liked his picture of the young and pugnacious Thurgood Marshall.

Ashmore began his journalistic career at the “delivery end,” carrying the morning paper in Greenville, South Carolina, the type of area in transition from farms to factories in which the New South originated. His own transition toward objectivity about southern problems began with a two-week trip in 1938 through the Northeast to produce a six-article series exposing the condition of working people in New York City, New England, and Philadelphia. It was a defensive piece–the North is just as bad as the South–and it was enthusiastically reprinted in a number of southern papers. The reception made him uncomfortable, for it came to him that he was implicitly supporting the ill-treatment of southern workers.

He was a World War II infantry captain in Europe, saw blacks in service, and concluded in retrospect that their war experience “marked the real beginning of the civil rights movement.” He was disappointed in his own generation of

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white Southerners who fought totalitarianism abroad, who then returned home to stand for office and assert themselves in their communities but, under pressure from their elders, perpetuated the racial status quo.

In 1947 Ashmore became editor of the Arkansas Gazette, the year before Truman’s presentation of a civil rights package to Congress precipitated the Dixiecrat revolt. In those days Ashmore would argue with Walter White, director of the NAACP, that “total dismantlement of institutional segregation was a practical impossibility.” Ashmore was close to the Southern Regional Council and tracks its difficult struggle, under Alexander, Odum, Johnson, Mitchell, and Fleming, to grapple with defining a position on segregation that would not cause the withdrawal of supporters who had clout.

By 1951 the SRC was, if not denouncing, at least discussing the irrationality of segregation, and indeed its perhaps most politically influential whites did proceed to withdraw from the organization. Ashmore, however, when recruited by the Ford Foundation to direct a documentation of the racial disparities in educational programs of the South, which was also a handbook that could be used for post-Brown desegregation orders, drew upon the expertise of those who had stayed in the fray, principally John Griffin and Harold Fleming but other SRCers as well.

As an editor Ashmore placed his Gazette at the opposite dole on the spectrum of establishment press from James J. Kilpatrick’s Richmond News-Leader. The Gazette was the primary institutional target of segregationists during the battle at Little Rock’s Central High. In retrospect Ashmore claims that his own position was easy since, “By natural process of prior selection most of our close friends shared the views expressed in the Gazette, and those whose opinions shaded off to the right or left maintained our company because they enjoyed arguing with us.” He credits a fusion of the country club set and the black community, more than the presence of federal troops, for keeping the lid on the city and ultimately keeping control of the schools away from the allies of Governor Orval Faubus. Eisenhower, who like Reagan later had power to foster peaceful change but didn’t, is one of Ashmore’s special villains.

Ashmore took leave from the Gazette in September 1955 to work in Adlai Stevenson’s second presidential campaign as a speechwriter and crafter of positions. He takes credit for pushing Stevenson toward a clearer position on civil rights, which might he summed up as, the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown is right and is the law. President Eisenhower’s failure to affirm that, or even to convene white and black leadership to discuss how Brown could he implemented, earns him Ashmore’s contempt.

Ashmore began pulling up stakes in the South after 1959 when he became an officer of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California, and then editor-in-chief of a revision of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Consequently, his blow-by-blow account of the civil rights battlefield suffers, for he watched it from afar.

His appreciation of the anti-Vietnam War mobilization and of the political currents of the 1970s is strong. I would take issue with his description of the college student movement in the 1960s, as a disorganized collection of “partially educated free spirits who expected their further development to result not from disciplined intellectual inquiry but from the liberated libido,” as the viewpoint of a Southerner lost in California. It looked a little more serious to those of us who were on and off campus in those years. While Ashmore opposed the Vietnam War, he was not a marcher because, he says, of his aversion to those males who avoided military service not from moral conviction but from physical cowardice. I (a marcher) was fortunate to know more of the former than the latter.

The first person quality of Hearts and Minds trails off during the Nixon presidency, and the historian takes over. As for Jimmy Carter, he “came along after my time in the South, and I never knew him.”

The history of the civil rights movement has now become a well-paved road. What is special about Hearts and Minds is Ashmore himself, his own path, those whose paths he crossed, and the perspective–that of a white progressive within the Establishment–that he represents. Added value is given to the history he relates by Ashmore’s thesis–drawn from personal experience–that there was a humane and temperate quality in the South that made change possible.

What the South’s reactionary leaders of the 1950s, even its intellectual apologists like J. William Fulbright, ignored, and those who retrospectively evaluate the causes of change overlook, is, he says, “the fact that the Southern environment also contained a remarkable reservoir of interracial goodwill. Had this not been so, the Southern cities could not have opened their public and private facilities to blacks so rapidly and with so little disorder.

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When the federal courts unleashed the spreading blade protest movement and made it clear that there was no practical alternative to desegregation, ordinary white citizens proved to be ahead of their leaders; the new breed of moderate politicians who emerged in the 1960s did not produce the change, but were produced by it.”

In the new end revised Chapters, those dealing with the Reagan presidency, Ashmore soundly drubs Reaganomics, especially the president’s “failure to devise a system that could salvage underclass youngsters.” Of Reagan he says, “His insensitivity was rooted in his conviction that there was no serious racial discrimination in America, and indeed no enduring poverty.” It is a disturbing conclusion to Ashmore’s chronicle. For to him, the march toward civil rights is continuing and “may yet be reckoned the most profound social change mankind has accomplished without resort to violence.” I am pleased to report that a writer of Ashmore’s stature and vintage is still sounding that trumpet.

SRC member Anthony Dunbar is a New Orleans writer and lawyer. His latest book, Delta Times, reflects on Mississippi’s Delta and its people.

A Passionate, First-Hand Story of One Place in the Movement.

Reviewed by Michael Cooper

Vol. 12, No. 3, 1990, pp. 20-21

JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI: An American Chronicle of Struggle and Schism by John R Salter Jr. (Malabar, Florida: Robert E. Krueger Publishing Co., Inc. 1987. 256 pp., no price).

John Salter’s book, which evokes the emotions, the frustrations, and the fears of Jackson in the early 1960s, is particularly valuable because so little has been written about the civil rights movement in Mississippi’s capital and largest city.

Salter and his wife were drawn from Arizona to Mississippi in 1961 by the growing civil rights movement. A sociology professor, Salter got a job teaching at Tougaloo College. Soon afterward he became the sponsor of the local NAACP Youth Council.

Under his guidance the council’s eager young people became activists. They launched a boycott of the Mississippi State Fair. With leaflets, press releases, and word of mouth the youth group persuaded black people to shun the fair. This victory inspired a more ambitious project, a boycott of downtown Jackson businesses during the 1962 Christmas buying-season. A short list of demands was drawn up, bail money was raised, and pickets were selected to launch the boycott in early December. The first day downtown the young men and women were met by paddy wagons and an army of policemen who promptly arrested all six pickets. Undeterred by the overwhelming show of force, the young people picketed for weeks and the boycott I was a success.

The Youth Council had one impressive victory after another. In addition to its successful boycotts of the state fair and of downtown stores, the group had quietly desegregated public events at then all-white Millsaps College, conducted a voter registration drive, and campaigned for black politicians.

The catalyst for this activism was Salter. In a long foreword to the book, the Reverend R Edwin King, Jr., a native Mississippian and Methodist minister, says Salter was, “The key strategist in the massive community organizing effort.” As such, Salter joined the state’s small band of civil rights activists, which included Amzie Moore, Medgar Evers, Tom Johnson, and a handful of others. Being a prominent civil rights activist was a double-edged honor. To the ubiquitous Citizens Council he was an outside agitator, a man marked for retribution.

Despite harassing phone calls, the angry glares of white neighbors, and constant surveillance by men in an unmarked car, Salter persevered and the local movement attracted more and more participants. The national NAACP, however, wasn’t responding with bail money and other assistance. While praising the organization’s local officials, Medgar Evers and Aaron Henry, Salter is quite critical of the national NAACP’s role in Jackson.

“We knew, for example, that Aaron Henry had frequently felt that the national office was being slow to assist the struggle in Mississippi; and we knew that Aaron Henry himself had been criticized by the national office for his friendliness and cooperation with such groups as COR1S, SCLC, and SNCC.” Salter also says that the NAACP’s National Executive Board was indecisive on the use of direct action “as well as on the issue of involvement in Mississippi.” Overall, Salter felt that “the national office of the NAACP was not much interested in our campaign in Jackson.”

But that interest changed after sit-ins at Woolworth’s and a demonstration where five hundred young people were arrested and locked up in a barbed-wire stockade became national news. Not so coincidentally, Salter implies, the national NAACP suddenly took notice of the Jackson movement.

NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins flew to Jackson and joined a demonstration in which he and two hundred other people were arrested. Soon afterward the national NAACP took over the Jackson movement and moved it into a new phase, of less direct action and more legal action. Salter’s leadership was circumvented. Although he continued to argue for more demonstrations, the move meet’s momentum seemed spent until the murder of Medgar Evers incited Jackson’s black community.

The Evers funeral attracted five thousand people, in-

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cluding Martin Luther King Jr. Several hundred mourners made an impromptu march downtown resulting in a police riot and dozens of bloody arrests. Salter was blamed by both the white community and the alarmed black community for the march and the violence. Discredited in the eyes of the more cautious black people, he was maneuvered out of leadership.

Although no longer a principal leader, Salter was still the target of white hatred. In what might have been attempted murder, he and fellow activist Edwin King were seriously injured in a car crash. Both men recovered, and soon afterward Salter left Mississippi to work as an organizer in eastern North Carolina with the Southern Conference Educational Fund.

Some readers will object to Salter’s less than flattering portrayal of the national NAACP and of Jackson’s black ministers. As he describes it, the NAACP was too preoccupied with its own agenda and its own glory to worry much about the people of Mississippi.

Salter has too little empathy with local black ministers who didn’t participate in the protests. In Mississippi’s civil rights battles it’s not surprising there were so few brave people; it’s surprising there were so many. Black people in particular had everything to fear. Everything–home, family, friends, and livelihood–was at stake. At best a local black activist might suffer economic reprisals; at worst he or she might be gunned down. When Jackson turned violent, Salter’s wife and child went to Minnesota. And soon afterward Salter himself left the state. Few local black people could so move.

Salter’s book does not pretend to be objective journalism. He did not ask the NAACP officials or the black ministers for their versions. Rather, the book is a passionate, first-hand account of the Jackson movement by one of its central figures. Jackson, Mississippi was first published in 1979. The Robert E. Krueger Publishing Company deserves plaudits for this new edition.

Writer Michael Cooper has been researching Mississippi.

The Need to Pierce Self-Serving Veils of Economic ‘Expertise.’

Reviewed by Jacob Howland

Vol. 12, No. 3, 1990, pp. 21-23

Communities in Economic Crisis: Appalachia and the South. Edited by John Gaventa, Barbara Ellen Smith, and Alex Willingham (Temple University Press, 1990. xiii, 301 pp.).

Where should economic policy originate? Whom should it serve? What are its proper goals? The needs of any community include food, clothing, shelter, health care, a clean environment, and a good primary and secondary education for everyone as well as reasonable prospects for decent employment and a rewarding career for those who enter the job market. For many people throughout our nation, however, these basic needs are not being met. Why? Communities in Economic Crisis, which brings together sixteen case studies documenting instances of crisis and response in areas across the South, consistently tells a dismal story of negligence and foolishness (and sometimes worse) on the part of local, state, and federal governments. These studies show that in the current national and global economic environment, communities in the South can no longer place their welfare wholly in the hands of federal representatives and agencies, governors, mayors, development boards, and chambers of commerce.

Perhaps the book’s most important message is that ordinary citizens must penetrate the generally self-serving veil of economic “expertise” claimed by these authorities by providing themselves with a basic understanding of the economy and themselves taking a leading role in the formulation of economic policy. Communities in Economic Crisis offers proof that this essentially democratic education is both possible and politically effective. In addition, the book itself constitutes a substantial contribution to this process of education. This collection of essays is a detailed study of our democracy in action, and while it lays bare its past and present failures it also offers us hope for its future success.

The editors (respectively, a sociologist and MacArthur Fellow, a former research coordinator of the Southeast Women’s Employment Coalition, and a political scientist) have assembled contributions from a diverse group of community activists and academicians, many of whom played key roles in the political, economic, or environmental struggles they describe. The book’s Introduction summarizes the general economic crisis confronting the

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South (particularly the rural South, with the book is especially concerned). Regions dependent on traditional industries like coal, textiles, and tobacco have been hurt by diminishing markets, technological innovations, and competition with cheaper foreign labor.

During the 1970s, northern manufacturers came to the “smokestack-chasing” South in search of cheap, nonunion labor, but many of these firms have since shifted their plants overseas for the same reason.

So-called “service” industries have been unable to take up the slack, since they can provide neither the quantity nor the quality of employment offered by even low-paying manufacturing jobs: in depressed rural areas, service employment means waiting on tables, washing dishes, and the like. The result is a widespread climate of desperation and fear, in which employers regularly use “economic blackmail”–the threat of individual dismissal or plant relocation–to force workers to accept low-paying, hazardous, dead-end jobs.

Communities in Economic Crisis shows that southern states have regularly been prepared to sell themselves short in order to retain existing industries and attract potential employers. Kentucky, for example, did not allow local governments and school districts to tax mineral wealth as property until 1988, and had only a token state property tax on minerals. The mineral owners–mostly absentee corporations–paid little or no property tax, and as a result the impoverished communities of eastern Kentucky have been unable to afford decent schools and roads, and often lack public water systems and libraries.

Similarly, the state of Tennessee, Maury County, and the town of Spring Hill gave General Motors the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks, job training, and the like in order to entice GM to locate its new Saturn plant in Spring Hill. (Thirty-eight states had courted GM for this plant some offering over a billion dollars in inducements.) Tennesseans were shocked when GM announced that most of the 3,000 jobs at the plant would in fact be filled by out-of-state technicians. In attracting Saturn, Tennessee paid a high price for the mere image of economic recovery.

The book is divided into two parts: “Case Studies of Crisis and Struggle” and “Visions for the Future.” The latter includes essays contrasting development by corporate design with alternative, community-based avenues of economic development. The case studies combine generally careful investigation and research with a documentary style that often lets us hear the voices of those afflicted by hardship and involved in the struggle for change.

The book also includes a number of photographs and two poems arranged from interviews with a miner and a mine-workers’ union organizer. A coalminer tells us what it is like to be a safety inspector in a small, non-union mine, a weaver tells us about employer harassment arising from her support of a union, an illiterate pharmaceutical worker tells us how it felt to be terminated without worker’s compensation benefits after injury on the job. We also hear the voices of those who have successfully defended their communities, like the members of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, an organization which helped pass laws imposing property taxes on mineral owners, forbidding strip-mining without the surface-owner’s, consent, and

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allowing local governments to ban toxic waste plants. The editors have included in an appendix an annotated list of community-based organizations like KFTC.

The contributors are especially concerned with the plight of women and minorities. We learn that if present trends continue, almost all families in poverty by the turn of the century will be women and their children. Women earn far less than men, and tend to be excluded from all but dead-end, non-unionized jobs without unemployment compensation. are articles focusing on women’s attempts to break into coal mining and highway construction and maintenance and on organizing women for local economic development. The latter strategy seems especially promising, since it keeps revenues in the community, and since most new jobs across the nation are being created by small businesses, not large corporations. There is for example, a chapter on the Mayhaw Tree, a model business started by women in Miller County, Georgia, which uses the fruit of local trees to produce gourmet jelly.

Southern blacks are especially subject to economic blackmail. Because they lack the political and economic resources of their white neighbors, black communities in the South have been favorite targets for the location of toxic waste dumps, hazardous industries, and municipal waste-disposal facilities. A chapter entitled “Environmentalism, Economic Blackmail, and Civil Rights” documents this trend, as well as “the emergence of a small but growing cadre of blacks who see environmental issues as civil rights issues.”

Another chapter concerns women and blacks who have been injured in unsafe workplaces and terminated before they were able to collect worker’s compensation or unemployment benefits. Many of the case studies give damning evidence of declining standards in occupational safety and environmental protection during the Reagan years.

As one author suggests, the case studies can help teach how not to pursue regional economic development. While many lessons are drawn in the studies themselves, these are organized and extended in the book’s second part. The essays in this section focus on demystifying and redefining traditional notions of economy and development. These are somewhat uneven. One author, for example, wrongly argues that it was only with the advent of capitalist industrialization that “women alone began to take on child rearing and homemaking as their primary roles.” On the other hand, there are strong pieces, such as a beautifully written chapter which allows us to look at ourselves and our land from the fresh perspective of Creole tradition. Inevitably, the essays return to the questions with which this review began. Concrete answers to these questions, summarized in an “economic bill-of rights,” may provide a common set of goals for citizens’ groups across the nation as well as in the South.

Communities in Economic Crisis is an important book of impressive breadth. One especially hopes it will be read by those who claim to represent the welfare of communities that have fallen on hard times. Among its many virtues, it provides ample proof that economics need not be a dismal science, but can, and must, become a democratic and humane one.

Jacob Howland is on the philosophy faculty at the University of Tulsa.

The Cold Hard Truth

By J.L. Chestnut. Jr.

Vol. 12, No. 3, 1990, p. 24

There is a growing army of poor, suffering black souls all over America. They are the “Unreachables.”

They form the core of the crime and welfare problem. They make up the statistics on welfare cheats, crime increases, illegitimate children and the myriad pathologies that a society structured, in part, on racial hate exfoliates.

Totaling up these statistics and their racial substratum, many Southerners and more than a few unreconstructed Northerners are able to impute a covering veil of immorality to all black people. I get sick of hearing it.

But no race, no religion, no ethnic group is inherently bad, nor does any race have a monopoly on fostering social disintegration.

A given set of conditions–urban society, immutable racism, cultural conflict and hopelessness–will develop a pattern of racial hostility that finds expression in the lack of incentive and contempt for the established social order. It afflicts whites, Asians, Hispanics and all others.

In turn, some people turn to crime, get on welfare and even derive a secret joy in “getting back” at society by cheating.

These are the unreachables–the black people who somehow just have not been able to cope with society’s harsh denials of their essential dignity.

The NAACP hasn’t been able to reach these people.

The Urban League hasn’t.

Black politics has done little or nothing.

The churches have failed completely.

The unreachables will flourish and multiply as long as society ruthlessly segregates them in drab inner city public housing, relegates them to no or sporadic employment, and the police are permitted to beat and treat them like animals.

I know you don’t think it happens but it does. It happens every day.

These are the people to whom real estate brokers close their doors and who are confined to filthy, unlivable ghettos. They are the people who can’t find jobs anywhere and when they do are forced to accept jobs as underemployables. In essence, they are the people who just don’t give a damn.

These are the unreachables.

And, unless some of us, or some of our organizations, including our churches, start reaching them soon, they will continue to grow, and grow, and grow, and grow.

The world, in ways, has been good to me as compared to the unreachables. I have also worked hard. But, I must confess I identify completely with the unreachables. I am not impressed by the lucky ones among us.

And, I have no interest in reading George Bush’s Republican lips.

I have read the parched lips and contorted faces of innocent babies addicted to “crack” in the overcrowded, run-down wards of inner-city hospitals.

America would be better served if it read the Bible. Reading George Bush’s lips hardly helps.

Peace.

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