Farther Along
The Next Phase of Cultural Work in the South
By David E. Whisnant

Vol. 13, No. 2, 1991, pp. 1-10

THOSE of you who know something of my work over the past two decades will not be surprised to hear that being asked to think about promoting Southern cultural heritage” would stir a lot of things in me. And indeed it does- more than Tam able to make sense of in my own head. But my hope is merely to draw us momentarily together to think about some common concerns.

I begin with three vignettes which I hope at least will convey a bit of the complexity we face at this historical moment. The first is of my father’s little shop off his carport in a suburban neighborhood in Anderson, S.C. It is as compact and orderly as a submarine galley. Tools collected over a lifetime line the walls. Shelves and drawers and neat stacks of labeled cigar boxes hold salvaged bits of metal and plastic, bushings and bearings, clips and hangers, links and shims, springs and switches, gaskets and fuses. Junk to some people, maybe, but to him a world of possibilities: a tin can poured full of lead and neatly painted black is a stand for

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a work light; a scrap of plastic and a bit of nylon fishing line automatically lowers the burglar bar against the sliding door to the patio; an old lawn mower starter serves as a motor to raise the anchor on the twenty-two-foot pontoon boat that at the age of seventy-six he still hooks behind his truck several times a week and takes to the nearby Corps of Engineers lake.

If Levi Strauss didn’t say it, he should have: bricolage is the method of the have-nots, born of have-to but raised to the status of cultural principle. Though my father’s circumstances are now in fact rather comfortable, they became so only late in his life, and the combination of the necessity to make do and the generationally-transmitted Germanic demand to do it well or not at all evoked early in his life both the habit of bricolage and a finely-honed sense of design. At length both became central features of his personality and world view. When I recently asked him to get me a router arbor I couldn’t find in Chapel Hill, he sent me two: one he had bought for $12.50 and another he had made out of scrap for thirty-seven cents.

My second vignette: a Labor Day festival in the tiny

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community of Silk Hope in northern Chatham County near Chapel Hill–skillfully rebuilt steam threshing machines and sawmills and lovingly reconditioned antique tractors scattered about the grounds under the trees; churches serving barbecue and fried chicken suppers; five-gallon churns cranked by Rotary Club men in John Deere and Southern States Coop hats, turning out innumerable big Dixie cups full of ice cream; bleachers full of part-time farmers and full-time textile workers facing a stage set up on a flatbed truck, listening to the Kearns, Buchanan and Swicegood brothers from Welcome, N.C., performing as the Sounds of Joy with drummer Kevin Buchanan laying down the oldtime ragtime gospel beat on a state-of-the-art drum synthesizer, and the elegantly stylish wife of the lead singer selling Sounds of Joy cassettes at a card table just off the corner of the flatbed.

Songs like “Fill My Cup Lord” and “Living In Canaan Now” capture me with memories of my own high school years singing in gospel quartets.

My final vignette: Driving back east a month later on U.S. 76 from Clayton, Ga., to Greenville, S.C., on a Sunday morning after attending the Foxfire board meeting–dropping fast out of the north Georgia hills to the Carolina Piedmont, body memory bringing back the swaying rhythm of the winding mountain roads I learned to drive on when I was barely sixteen: watch down the mountain for the clear curves ahead, roll with the bank, drift across the center line to stretch the radius, feel the reverse tilt as you catch the inside of the next one.

Up on the red clay banks the cultural panorama slides by: tumbledown brickpaper shack follows neat brick rancher; a jumble of single- and double-wides, and satellite dishes everywhere; bushels of apples and jugs of cider lined at roadside stands; one billboard says “Come to Jesus,” and another just says “no”; junk yards and church parking lots jammed, gun shops taking their one day of rest; gospel preachers and sports commentators on the radio, borrowing each other’s metaphors, offering your choice of binary worlds where things begin at the beginning and end at the end, where winners absolutely win, losers absolutely lose, and there is no column for politics. And on nearly all the mailboxes, yellow ribbon after yellow ribbon.

Dropping across the South Carolina line, back into the right-to-work country of Strom Thurmond and Roger Milliken, I recall that back up the mountain one local Foxfire board member (a wonderful and gentle man, and a good flattop picker to boot) is trying to help his fellow workers, non-union and anti-union as ever, fight Burlington Industries’ most recent stretch-out and speed-up demand, backed up (as ever) by a threat to close the plant, the town’s major employer.

The initial point of my vignettes, of course, is that when we start to talk about promoting or preserving “Southern cultural heritage” we are talking about an awesomely mixed bag. To try to sort through that bag a bit, I raise a few simple questions, no one of which has a simple answer: What have we done so far? Where do we find ourselves at this historical moment? Where is it that we are trying to go? What are we up against? And most importantly, what are the more and less usable bits of what we cultural bricoleurs have to work with?

The answer to the “What have we done?” question is relatively easy and rather comforting. Through these past several decades we have done a lot more than we were ever formally trained to do, most of us, a lot more than we really had the wherewithal to do with, a lot more than a sober reading of the odds might have suggested we could do. Mostly bricolaging our way through, we have learned to do festivals–a lot of them, and to do them well. We’ve started archives–good ones, important ones. We’ve organized and run oral history projects. We’ve established journals and published books, and made films and phonograph records. We’ve organized tours, mounted exhibits and opened museums in the mountains, across the Piedmont, down in the Delta and along the coasts. We’ve founded organizations and started academic programs about mountaineers and blacks and Native Americans and Cajuns. And in the process we’ve challenged a lot of neglect, cynicism, ignorance, badly-written history and bad policy.

All of this is good. We have good reason to be proud of

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it. We should defend it and try to keep it flourishing.

What has happened while we have been doing all this, however, is that the political ground has shifted seismically beneath our feet. As we project our work from this moment, we must remind ourselves continually that most of what we thought of and taught ourselves to do was conceived and took most of its characteristic forms in the narrow breathing space between the reactionary 1950s and the in-some-ways more reactionary 1980s. Consequently, we find ourselves with a set of assumptions, analyses, and organizational forms and activities, formed alongside of the political fault line, which are increasingly unequal to the challenges on this side.

Think about it coldly for a moment: What do the Reagan-Bush-Helms-Bill Bennett years mean for our work? With a rather grotesque symmetry, the Reagan epoch opened with the breaking of the air traffic controllers’ union, peaked with Irangate, and terminated with the savings and loan scandal. The social, political, and cultural costs are incalculable. Public discourse has become so corrupted that taxation itself rather than the uses of tax monies emerged as an absolute evil. Federal funding mechanisms for social programs were dismantled, and private institutions (including especially universities) were starved, cannibalized and sold bit by bit to private enterprise. One after the other, regulatory bodies were shamelessly sacked, defunded, and left to twist in the wind. The common good virtually disappeared as a conceptual category, and issues of power, control and domination were skillfully mystified. Gunboat diplomacy came back in Granada, Nicaragua, and now the Middle East. At length the very idea of humane government itself virtually disappeared from the dominant discourse.

In sum, as we are all painfully aware, the Reagan

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imperium is a period which surely historians will note primarily for its ugly machista and jingoistic swagger, its selfishness and stinginess, its policy cynicism and shortsightedness–for a level of malfeasance and flagrant criminality unmatched since the days of the Grant administration, the robber barons or Teapot Dome.

I recite these familiar details because we need to have them freshly if painfully in mind as we think about where we’ve been, where we are going, and what the odds are. The core dynamics of Reagan-Bush politics are especially critical to us because we have chosen to try to work in the public sector with the have-nots. Having just watched Ken Burns’s Civil War television series (a not unmixed boon, I think), I can’t resist comparing our strategic situation to that of Lee’s army just before Appomattox: some brilliant successes behind us, but confronted by an overwhelmingly superior force, and with the historical tide running heavily against us.

So what do we do? How do we maneuver from here?

We need at the outset, it seems to me, to take a fresh and more toughminded look at the culture of the South, question many of our accustomed assumptions, elaborate some more serviceable analytical and explanatory systems, reorient some programs and practices, and restrategize politically. So I would like to suggest some steps we might take, at least conceptually. What can and should happen practically will depend too much upon local resources and circumstances to generalize about very comfortably. That will be for each of us to figure out in our individual places of work.

If I have a central thesis here, it is that if our emerging cultural analysis and agenda are not fused to and integrated with a larger progressive agenda for social, economic, and political transformation, they will not be worth spending time on. Why? Because the relentless movement of the reactionary juggernaut in the years ahead will make transformation such a preeminent structural necessity that any oppositional cultural agenda not centered on transformation will be self-marginalizing.

We must not forget for even a moment that these are ugly, hardball times. I have little doubt that when the roll is finally called up yonder, this will go down as one of the ugliest, most willfully ignorant, corrupt, narrow-minded, meanspirited periods in the history of the United States government The Mapplethorp and NEA flap, tragic as it is, ultimately has little directly to do with art; whether clean or dirty; it is merely one of many red herrings being used to mask a broader and deeper ideological and political agenda of mystification and domination.

So how, in the midst of such times, do we achieve some clarity? How do we maneuver our ragged little battalion into the most advantageous position? What objectives must be given strategic priority?

In a recent piece in Southern Changes, I marked out what seems to me an unavoidable first step: to recognize the severe analytical and functional limitations of our accustomed set of essentially liberal assumptions and approaches to cultural work.1 I reemphasize the nub of that article as my point of departure: the grand fallacy of the recent silly and vacuous political campaign arguments over liberalism is that liberalism is far too little rather than too much, too puny rather than too strong, too circumscribed rather than too encompassing.

We must get ourselves beyond a liberalism that naively invests its energies in polite discourse with knaves and fools, grants outright the legitimacy of virtually every established institution, and makes easy peace with gradualist and meliorist approaches to urgent social needs.

More specifically, we must subject the very notions of “tradition” and “heritage” to more thoroughgoing criticism than we have usually been disposed to engage in. Central as those notions are to our discourse and practice, they are soft, ill-focused, and obfuscatory in some ways that have been problematic in the past and will be increasingly so in the future.

Through the last twenty years in which I have in some way been involved in these kinds of activities, “tradition” has been the pivotal buzzword. To call something traditional has been to say it is good, worthy of filming, recording, writing a book about, archiving, or putting on a stage or in an exhibit. Of course we recognize that there are bad traditions. So when we say tradition we implicitly mean good traditions, but even that understood correction is not sufficient The fact remains that we have hung much of our analysis and programming on a term that needs far more careful scrutiny than we have yet given it.

We all know, of course, that there are overtly reprehensible traditions: of violence, oppression, racism, sexism, bigotry, jingoism, xenophobia and the like. Part of what is so disturbing about David Duke, Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and their like is that so much of what they are and do is profoundly traditional, and that the millions of southerners who vote for them (as well as the tens of thousands of nonsoutherners who send them money) recognize it as such. Thus when we contemplate the current regional, national or international scene, it is essential to remind ourselves of the scale at which “tradition” is implicated. One might indeed argue that as a source of mischief and grief in the world at present, traditional values, beliefs, practices, and structures easily

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hold their own with corporate cynicism, ideological rigidity and nationalistic fervor.

I suggest, in fact, that “tradition” is problematic precisely because it functions so readily as a kind of analytical short circuit, causing us to gloss over the internal politics of cultural systems (perhaps especially the gender-linked politics), not to raise certain questions, and not to push others as far as they need to be pushed. One could cite numerous areas in which the need for such pushing is indicated in our beloved southland. Some that come immediately to mind are the traditional anti-unionism of so many southern workers; the traditional disregard for the environment; the traditional sexism, anti-intellectualism and political regressiveness of much southern religion; the latent and overt violence of southern sports and car culture; the macho swagger and jingoism of much southern country music, and so on and on.

If one sums all of those traditions (and more of the sort) into “heritage,” it is clear that we have a good bit of toughminded self-criticism, reconsideration and restrategizing to do, and that the necessity to do it comes as much out of the unfortunate stability of the heritage itself as it does from the new political landscape produced by the seismic shifts of the past quarter century. My little vignettes were thus meant to suggest that while there is great strength and much to admire in southern culture, there is also much that is at once both profoundly problematic and profoundly traditional. Those problematics are abundantly in evidence in our new Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and in a raft of recent books.

The paradox that emerges from this mix is that we find ourselves engaged in a counter-hegemonic struggle with a dominant culture that has already (and long since) achieved substantial hegemonic control of and integration with southern culture. Hence we are armed with a double-barrelled weapon, one barrel of which is aimed straight at our foot if not back into our face.

What I am saying, then (to leave that grotesquely contorted image), is that “tradition” and “heritage” are not fine enough screens for the tasks that face us. The years to come are going to require some better analytical and programmatic instruments. As a starter, I would suggest that we accustom ourselves to subjecting every element of both “tradition” and “heritage” to at least two higher order tests: the test of serviceability within the cultural group itself, and the test of generalizability beyond it. Though both need careful definition and exploration, I hope two brief examples will suggest what I mean.

The first is all too familiar: though it is certainly traditional for cultures to be split antagonistically along gender lines, such a split is not serviceable within a culture because it displaces energy in unproductive directions, distorts and rigidifies potentially creative social processes, and denies and frustrates human potential.

And what of the generalizability test? Consider for a moment the fact that probably there is no more traditional aspect of southern life than the commitment to absolute private property rights. “This land is mine,” a Kentucky coal fields resident told me years ago, “and if I want to dig a hole in the side of the mountain, I’ll dig it.” More dramatically, many Ashe County, N.C., residents demonstrated in the latter stages of their years-long struggle against Appalachian Power Company’s plan to dam the New River that if it came to a choice between the dam and accepting Wild and Scenic Rivers Act restrictions on their absolute right to use “their” property, they would take the dam. (See Stephen W. Foster, The Past Is Another Country: Representation, Historical Consciousness, and Resistance in the Blue Ridge (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).)

Clearly such positions are neither serviceable nor generalizable. They are not serviceable because when used by others–multi-national coal and energy companies, for example–they serve as a rationale for precisely the forms of exploitation that historically have left so many southerners in poverty and servitude. And surely in the midst of the growing ecological crisis it is clear that such positions are not generalizable; this old creaking planet has already been poked so full of holes that it is screaming in protest.

So what faces us, I am suggesting, has at least as much to do with transformations as with continuities: the recent transformation of the political landscape; the consequent requirement to transform our own analysis and practice; and the absolute necessity to conceive of what we do culturally in the context of broader social and political transformation. What I want to focus on is the required transformation of some of our analysis and practice.

The first task, I fear, is no less than to help our constituency move with us from one explanatory system to another which, if not entirely new, is markedly different. Unfortunately, we are terrified by the interval, the chasm between deconstructing and dismantling one explanatory system and the emergence of another one. Moreover, most people, it turns out, have a rather low tolerance for indeterminacy and ambiguity in the first place. I sometimes think this may be especially true in the South, where most of us were raised on aphorisms, proof texts and a historical schemata rather than nuanced dialectical and historicized argument. (Within a broader frame one could of course argue that this sort of formation is characteristic of the people of the United States in general, but my concern here is with its implications in the South.) Such a predilection turns out to be particularly dysfunctional in

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times like these, when the structural subtleties, ambiguities, indeterminacies and contradictions of the interlinked social, economic, political, and cultural systems in which we find ourselves mount daily.

I think there is also a cultural preference for unidimensional, essentially exotic explanations of social and cultural phenomena, rather than systemic and structural ones. It matters little whether the exoticism is religious (sin or God’s will), economic (free enterprise or taxes), social (drugs or welfare cheaters), or political (communism or demonized despots); give the public the choice between an exotic, unidimensional explanation and a systemic, multidimensional one (which Lord knows they actually have access to seldom enough) and most will choose the former nearly every time.

Paradoxically, these preferences, traditions, and predilections are central structural features of both of the cultures we are dealing with: the mainstream hegemonic culture and the remnants of most subsystems that remain doggedly in opposition to at least some aspects of it. Regionally, they help account for the ugliest parts of the history of the South; nationally, they support George Bush’s simpleminded thousand points of light voluntarism, a commitment to an idealized free enterprise that has never existed in the world and never will, a destructive hegemonic masculinity, a biosphere-raping policy of open-ended growth, and the political Ludditism of minimal government and taxation. Internationally, they lead to (among other things) a rhetoric-shrouded, military-backed and hypocritical neo-dollar or petro-diplomacy. This suggests that the first part of our agenda is somehow to orient our cultural work toward a heightened understanding of multidimensional, nuanced and structural rather than unidimensional exotic and symptomatic explanations.

Hence it seems to me that our principal task in the future is no longer to preserve, conserve, protect or

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promote a whole culture as conventionally conceived, but to insure the health of, and a healthy trajectory for, a significantly reconstructed and integrated social, political and cultural order. And beyond that, to help ourselves and our neighbors to understand and accept the necessity for that reconstruction, and deal with the terror of bridging the chasm between the old explanatory systems and emerging ones that promise to get us beyond the present order to some new one.

If we are to begin to do either of these things, we are going to have to search through the traditions, the heritage to locate their most humane, progressive and transformative elements. We must look first of all for the transformative elements of southern culture, and then for ways to link their transformative possibilities to a larger humane agenda for change. This means that we are going to have to search through and relate ourselves to some other cultures as well, ending our cultural isolationism and reaching toward some kind of global solidarity.

This latter necessity derives from the inadequacy of our past analysis, from the tectonic political shifts I have already referred to, from emerging political cultural dynamics elsewhere in the world, and from the recent and ongoing demographic transformation of the South from a primarily bi- or tricultural region to a multicultural one, a demographic transformation that offers us at once a challenge and an opportunity. So what are some possible models, or components of models, and where are they?

What happens if we look for them first at home? Obviously it is a good news/bad news situation. The bad news is first of all that with Native Americans we blew it virtually completely. Genocide, ghettoization and forced removal rendered much of that critical and transformative potential forever irrecoverable. The remaining vestigial potential for creative syncretism continues to be mostly ignored and wasted. With blacks the record is more mixed, of course. There the bad news is about as bad as could be imagined, but we also find more good news. Much was destroyed, much was lost, but much remains, and the ongoing syncretism will continue to benefit the whole South. The arrival of so many Hispanics and Asians offers us yet another opportunity; hopefully we won’t blow it as badly with them as we did with Native Americans and blacks.

As an exemplary longitudinal example of the potential, one need only look at the development of southern music and southern rhetoric; as a dramatically transformative-political cultural event, the civil rights movement stands as paradigmatic. Other political cultural movements come to mind as well: the southern abolitionist movement, the anti-lynching movement, the populist movement, the brown lung and black lung movements, and of course numerous isolated strikes and other political actions.

So we are not without instructive resources within our own regional history. The problem is that political struggles have too seldom been fused to culture in a conscious way in the South, and even when they have, the fusion has too often either appealed to the most reactionary elements of the culture, or (even if that unfortunate scenario was avoided) they have not had much of a culturally transformative effect.

Moreover, far too many initially and explicitly cultural movements in the South have aborted politically. One thinks, for example, of the birth of country music in the 1920s, the growth of bluegrass in the 1940s, the advent of rockabilly in the 1950s and sixties, and the Appalachian and Cajun revitalization movements in the 1960s and seventies. Each arose out of some of the deepest structural contradictions of American life; none has yet pursued those contradictions as rigorously or as far as they beg to

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be pursued. The one I know best for the moment–I’ll call it hillbilly nationalism–for the most part stopped at the boundary of private property and free enterprise. Others stopped at still other marked or buried boundaries.

Fortunately, we are not left dependent entirely upon our own purely regional history and experience. There are important conceptual, analytical, and strategic lessons to be learned, and policy modules to be borrowed from other sectors: from the women’s movement, from gays and lesbians, from the peace and antinuclear movements, from the environmental movement Fortunately, the literature about all these is growing, and is instructive, the organizations are growing and proliferating, and a new generation of young people is coming along.

We also have much to learn from current Native American struggles. Through 400 years they have had ground into their minds and hearts and bodies the elemental truths that the juggernaut is relentless and essentially without conscience; that the vast majority of its agents cannot and must not be trusted, that whatever the rationalizing language; the agendas are at bottom cultural; that it is not inches they are interested in, but miles; that liberal consensus constructed across major boundaries of power is neither trustworthy nor durable; and that achieving clarity about one’s own culture and history is an essential guide to tactics and strategy.2 The next most proximate examples lie to the south in Latin America. The powerful new genre of the testimonial opens to us the experience of countless working class and indigenous people who have drawn upon the more transformative elements of their culture for purposes of political struggle.3

The post-1960s nueva canción movement that blended traditional music with politically transformative texts is also instructive.4 The journal Cultural Survival regularly documents not only the decimation of indigenous groups in Central America, the Amazon rain forests and elsewhere, but also their imaginative culture-based strategies of organization and resistance. Some are international in reach, such as the ethnopolitical Coordinated Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (CIOAB) ,designed to defend indigenous values, reinforce the unity of indigenous communities, press their interests before national governments and international bodies, and push toward autonomous and environmentally sensitive development outside dominant paradigms.5

I suggest, then, that we can no longer afford to keep ourselves so isolated from such analyses and dynamics, so great is their potential for cultural and political clarification, as well as for the building of crucial alliances. We must not only ally ourselves with such groups and movements, but must come to understand our own political cultural dilemma characteristically and habitually in the context of those insistently analogous ones of Quebec Mohawks, Quiché highlanders, Somoan islanders, Khmer refugees, and Andean campesinos.

In July 1990, to raise one specific possibility, representatives of 120 Indian groups met in Quito, Ecuador, to celebrate 500 years of Indian resistance to colonial and neo-colonial oppression, discrimination and exploitation. For some of us to begin to turn up at such meetings would constitute not only a major step forward but also a promising reorientation of our political-cultural vector. Such connections would at the very least open our own cultural past and present to more nuanced examination, but beyond that they would be inherently politicizing. And they would almost inevitably lead to an awareness of links to larger structures, and hence to a vitally necessary habit of structural analysis.

A potentially useful clarifying metaphor for this work would be one drawn from Frantz Fanon: the overall transformative task that faces us may usefully be thought of as a task of cultural decolonization and transcendence. Speaking of the agonized and violent decolonization of North Africa in the late 1950s, Fanon said that for “cultured individuals of the colonized race (or region, in our case) … the demand for a national culture and the affirmation of the existence of such a culture represent a special battlefield. While the politicians situate their action in actual present-day events, men of culture take their stand in the field of history.”

At least so far, our particular historical field is more tranquil than Fanon’s was, though it is less so every day. In any case, we must bear clearly in mind that it is a

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historical field on which we find ourselves arrayed. And that field–textured by swamps and bayous, paved over with highways and shopping malls, folded into mountains and valleys, punctured by deep mines and high rises, laced with creeks and rivers–has witnessed both many a lassy making and many a lynching, many a corn shucking and many across burning, many a hoedown and many a shutdown. We grew up to the whine of fiddles and of spindles, the clack of cloggers and of looms, the lonesome wail of honkytonk singer and of factory whistle. Our rhetoric is the rhetoric of talltale teller and snakeoil hawker, of black preacher and white television evangelist, of squaredance caller and mobile home salesman.

So our job is above all a job of sorting, of ransacking cultural systems here and elsewhere for their serviceable, generalizable, transformative elements. This is the difficult and threatening but also familiar bricolage job of imaginative reassembly that at its best has in the past produced the varieties of southern speech, built environments, dance and music. The difference now is that we must begin to pay less attention to what has pleased us in the past or pleases us in the moment than to what will serve us in the future.

As we do so, we must take great care that our work not be pacifying, mystifying, and depoliticizing. In his book Gender and Power, R.W. Connell notes ruefully that within the politics of gender, intellectuals are frequently finetuned into system serving behaviors: priests blessing the established sexist forms of social practice, male psychotherapists talking the tensions out of wealthy urban women and drugging or hospitalizing rural poor ones, social planners adjusting the welfare system to mute the evidence of structural, gendered inequality. Such tendencies are no less present in the politics of culture. As we try to move beyond defensive and celebratory regional strategies to critical and transformative global ones, it is supremely important that we keep our self-reflexive critical senses sharp.

One of the most moving and clarifying books I have read lately is Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. Anzaldúa is a Chicana lesbian feminist who understands what it means to grow up as a border woman in the midst of multiple contradictions. Addressing herself at one point to what she calls “movements of rebellion and cultures that betray,” she speaks of how her own rebellion was complicated by the dominant paradigms of Latino culture–paradigms that shackle, shame, and cripple women particularly, but which “make macho caricatures” of men as well. “Conozco el malestar de mi cultura,” she says; “I know the sickness of my culture,” and “I feel perfectly free to rebel and rail against [it].” So although like a turtle she4 carries her cultural home on her back, she refuses, she says, “to glorify those aspects of my culture which have injured me.” With other dark-skinned women who have been “silenced, gagged, caged, bound into servitude,” she “stokes the inner flame” and looks toward a new mestiza culture that may at last break through the “despotic dualities” of the past.

Anzaldúa’s images of borderland and turtle and flame are instructive, for our South is an ever more contested borderland between two ancient hegemonic orders. Like Anzaldúa we carry our culture on our backs as impediment, as refuge, as reminder of who we are and how we were formed. Like her, we can speak of those movements of rebellion that we have in our blood (movimientos de rebeldia que tenemos en la sangre). Like her, even as we love and defend the culture that is ours, we must keep clear about those parts of it that have betrayed us–perhaps most of all by denying us the freedom to move confidently and unapologetically into those new borderlands where elements of a newer, more vital, more humane culture must be forged.

David E. Whisnant teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Since 1970 he has worked extensively with local, state, regional and national cultural Programs, folklife festivals, filmmakers and record producers, and private cultural institutions. He is currently working on a book on the politics of culture in Nicaragua.

Notes

1. David E. Whisnant, “Letting Loose of Liberalism: Some Thoughts on Cultural Work and the Limits of Polite Discourse,” Southern Changes 12 (August 1990): 1-11.

2. For the colonial period in North America, this history is laid out in abundant detail in James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), and for the post-Revolutionary period in Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

3. See for example I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman of Guatemala, edited by Elizabeth Burgos (London: Verso, 1984), and Moema Viezzer, Si me permiten hablar: testimonio de Domitila, una mujer de las minas de Bolivia (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1977). For an excellent compact survey of culture-based resistance movements, see John H. Bodley, Victims of Progress, (3rd. ed., revised; Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing, 1990).

4. See Nancy Morris, “Canto porque es necesario cantar. The New Song Movement in Chile, 1973-1983,” Latin American Research Review 22, no. 2 (1986): 117-36.

5. Stefano Varese, “Los dioses enterrados: el uso politico de la resistencia cultural in digena,” presented to Smithsonian Institution symposium Seeds of Industry, Oaxtepec, Morelos, Mexico, September 6-8, 1990, pp. 13-14.

The South Gets Its Own Network

By Gwendolyn Glenn

Vol. 13, No. 2, 1991, p. 11

A new radio network has been established in Atlanta, Ga., to produce and syndicate documentary programs on the South. These programs will air nationally, mainly on public radio stations.

The network is called the Regional Radio Network (RRN).

“Other networks produce stories on issues in the South from time to time,” said RRN director Gwendolyn Glenn, “but no one is focusing exclusively on the region on a national level. Putting this network together is an exciting challenge because there are many interesting stories throughout the South waiting to be told.”

The network’s premier program, “Southways,” began airing nationally via satellite on May 3,1991. It is a weekly half-hour program consisting of documentary style reports, produced by reporters who travel in or cover the South on a regular basis. Many of these reporters have national experience.

“Southways” covers a broad range of topics: politics, education, the environment, cultural events and individual profiles, to name a few.

“This will be a great opportunity to take listeners on a journey through the South, through sound,” said Glenn.

Glenn is also the producer and host of “Southways.” Since 1981 she has worked as an independent producer and reporter for National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. For the past four years, she produced reports for NPR’s award-winning news program “All Things Considered.”

“‘Southways’ will attempt to meet the needs of all its listeners,” said Glenn, “from the Southerner who wants to hear more on the air about the region, to those in other parts of the country who are not familiar with the region and want to learn more about the South, to the Southern transplant eager to hear news from home.”

The Regional Radio Network is a project of the Southern Regional Council, and is funded by a grant from the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation.

On the Line: Working Life in Arkansas

By Nancy Peckenham

Vol. 13, No. 2, 1991, pp. 12-15

For weeks in early 1990, Deborah Abdullah woke up every day to face the problems plaguing many workers in the state of Arkansas. One of the seven percent of workers on the state’s official unemployment rolls, Deborah had to overcome two obstacles in her job search: her race and her sex. As a black woman and a single mother, she faced limited employment opportunities in a state ranked 49th in the union for its Worker Climate.

Across town in North Little Rock, another single parent, this one a white woman, is learning just how tough it can be to break into a male-dominated field. Jennifer Morris, a mother of five children, is trying to get off welfare in a state with the fourth lowest paying jobs in the country.

With an average manufacturing wage of $364 a week in Arkansas, an industrial worker could earn about $18,928 a year in 1988. Among that elite in Arkansas’s industrial sector are workers like Dave Robb, who earns $520 in a normal 40-hour work week. Yet as a highly skilled mechanic, he could be earning a lot more in states like Ohio and Michigan, where the average manufacturing wage tops that of the best-paying jobs in Arkansas.

The Parkers, pillars in Little Rock’s black community, have seen their fortunes rise and fall. Elizabeth and Charles, both in their 50s, secured well-paying jobs in the 1960s. Their children all went to college and they added a spacious addition to their comfortable brick home. Then, both were disabled and for the past year they have discovered what it is like to live on disability.

Each of these workers embodies the personal traits, strengths, and aspirations associated with living in a state among the nations lowest in protecting and rewarding its working families.

* * *

“Today’s poor aren’t lust the ones out on the street; it’s the people working hard trying to make a decent living.” Jennifer Morris speaks over the whir of fans moving the hot summer air through her dining room. “I wish there was something that could be done to make it just a little bit easier. It seems like sometimes it’s not worth it to work.”

Jennifer belongs to the fastest-growing segment of poor in the United States–single mothers. “When we were together,” remembers Jennifer, “we were doing all right.” Her husband walked out, leaving her with the children. “I applied for housing and, with the Lord’s help, got this place where we’ve been for six years.”

Since then, a patchwork of federal assistance has kept Jennifer barely above water. The government pays her $320 monthly rent and sends a $39 check for utilities every month. With food stamps and a monthly check of $286 from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), The family has always had enough to eat.

This amalgam of public assistance is about to change. Last year, Arkansas introduced Project Success, a program designed to get people off welfare and into the job market. Jennifer signed up, was tested and decided to work toward a journeyman electrician’s license.

“The educational requirements for working in Arkansas are getting higher and higher,” says Jennifer. “I had a two-year degree as an instrument technician. It helped, but it was not as valuable as a college degree.”

Most Southeastern states traditionally attracted new industries by offering an abundant supply of workers willing to work for relatively low wages. As a result, little emphasis has been placed on education. Arkansas has been among the worst, allotting only $2,402 for the education of each student in 1986-87.

More recently, companies nationwide have begun to demand a more highly-skilled workforce, a phenomenon that is occurring in Arkansas as well, where employers are raising standards. The state government appears to be responding to this demand. The impression of several workers interviewed in Little Rock is that of a renewed commitment to higher educational standards statewide.

“I learned this job because I wanted some kind of trade

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that pays enough to let me take care of my family, just like anybody else,” Jennifer’s voice rises defiantly. “Even though the pay’s not so good right now, it will be better in the long run.”

As an apprentice, Jennifer earns 35 percent of an electrician’s pay. That amounts to $5.48 hour on a union-scale job. After five years as an apprentice she’ll be eligible for a journeyman’s license. Besides the relatively low pay, there’s the problem of regular work. She goes from job site to job site, and since she started working in March, Jennifer’s been laid off twice.

Federal assistance has filled the gaps.

“My last paycheck was for a partial week. It was $110–just enough to mean that I won’t be able to get AFDC any more,” she said.

If there is one change Jennifer would like to see, it would be a way to keep some assistance coming until she gets back on her feet. She’s working now, but she’s still not going anywhere.

“I spend about $50 a week on gas, with my old car going 40 miles each way to work in Pine Bluff every day. Then I pay $40 a week to have someone watch my two youngest kids during the day. That’s $90 right there–and I only made $110!”

A further difficulty is being a woman in a traditionally male job. In Arkansas, women have made few inroads into male-dominated job fields. Electrical work is one of those and Jennifer feels rejection from men at the job site whom she believes don’t want her around.

Despite the daily difficulties, Jennifer maintains her faith in God and in the future. “There’s times I wished I was dead. The loneliness is so bad. On welfare, you’re embarassed and ashamed; people act like you’re less of a person. But we’re making it.”

* * *

Sitting on the stoop of the small house she rents on the outskirts of Little Rock, Deborah Abdullah talks about her job-hunting efforts that took her to Atlanta, Georgia, and then back home to the familiarity of Arkansas. Recently divorced, she was re-entering the job market after years of occasional, part-time work.

In both locales, Deborah was looking for work as a nurses’ aide, a service-sector job that on average pays

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much better in Georgia than in Arkansas. In Atlanta, she found that her lack of a college degree stung when she went to apply for work. With just one year to finish a degree in gerontology, she hoped to convince people in Atlanta to give her a chance as a nurse’s aide. She was unsuccessful.

“They just said, ‘We’ll call you when something opens up in the laundry,'” says Deborah of her job hunt in Atlanta. “See, when they have a variety to choose from, they’ll pick a person with a BA before they pick someone without one.”

Unable to find a job in Atlanta, Deborah returned to Little Rock with her two young sons. If nothing else, Arkansas offers a slightly better quality of life than Georgia, certainly less crime than the streets of Atlanta. In June, Deborah started knocking on doors across Little Rock, looking for work. While the unemployment rate in the Arkansas capital this year fell to 5.5 percent, well below the statewide average, Deborah still had the handicaps of membership in the two groups of people with the fewest opportunities–blacks and women.

Finally, she reached Timber Ridge, a rehabilitation center in Benton. “They gave me a chance and I really appreciated it. I work with patients and am getting experience for the future.”

At $4.50 an hour, with a 30-minute drive each way, Deborah doesn’t expect to accumulate much savings. But the difficulty of being alone with her two young sons is easing. “Every time I get to worrying, the pay check comes and I can pay off the bills a little bit at a time.” She gets by on that with $200 a month in child support from her ex-husband.

In spite of the hardships, Deborah is glad to be home. “Here in Arkansas, we believe in building our families. We have plenty of time to sit on the porch and have conversation. It’s friendly and we spend a lot of time working on our hearts.” For Deborah, that’s some of the most important work a person can do.

* * *

Dave and Aleta Robb rent a three-bedroom house in Jacksonville, Arkansas, just north of Little Rock. A neatly trimmed lawn, with a Jeep and pick-up truck parked outside–all the makings of the American dream.

In fact, Dave has the kind of industrial job many folks long for. He’s a mechanic at Lockheed, making $12.97 an hour. And even though he works a second part-time job and Aleta is employed as well, their lives are riddled by insecurity about what the future holds. living in debt is their number one concern.

Both Dave and Aleta migrated to Arkansas because of the air base in Jacksonville. He was in the Air Force. Aleta came from Kentucky with her first husband as a military wife. Dave has lived all up and down the East Coast. They’re modem Americans: mobile and willing to move in pursuit of a better job and higher wages.

The Robbs started their life together two and a half years ago. Both had previous marriages. Although Dave had plenty of maintenance skills from his years in the Air Force, he enrolled in a nearby vocational-technical school. With some $500 a month from the G.I. bill and a part-time job for income, Dave started accumulating debt as he struggled to stay afloat, paying $200 a month in child support.

When Aleta’s first marriage broke up, she went to work as a telemarketer, bringing in $375 every two weeks. Then she married Dave and returned to school to study drafting with a grant of$110 a month from the federal government. ‘There were a few weeks in late 1988 when we did good to put food on the table,” remembers Aleta. “We became Olympic champions in bill juggling. Things started to look up in 1989.”

Dave got his job at Lockheed that year and made a total of $27,000, just below the average family income in the state of Arkansas, the lowest in the United States. With Aleta’s son, Brian, the only child at home, they were able to get by.

In November 1989, just before Aleta received her certificate in drafting, she set out to find a job. Arkansas’s unemployment rate is higher than the national average, yet it has improved since 1987 when it was 8.1 percent By 1989, the statewide rate had fallen to 7.2 percent.

Arkansas has had some job growth, increasing employment by 26,000 statewide between 1988 and 1989. National press attention has praised an aggressive industrial development program for attracting new industries to the state. Yet workers in the state are more skeptical, suggesting that while some new industries are locating in Arkansas, other older plants are closing up.

For Aleta Robb, it seems that the figures hid the real picture. She had a difficult time finding a job.

“I talked to every engineering firm in town and answered every ad in the newspaper for a drafter. I averaged one interview a week and it took me from November to April to get a job. I was about ready to give up.

She’s been working now for three months, and although company policy won’t allow her to reveal her hourly pay, she and Dave have been able to pay off about $6,000 of their debt in three months. Dave took a second job, working nights at a commissary on the air base for $6.50 an hour. He doesn’t get much sleep, but he’s living for the future.

“In one year, if everything works like it is now, we’ll be debt-free and I can quit my second job,” says Dave. “But

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until then, we’re not slowing down.”

Two dark clouds cover this promising future. At Lockheed, a major supplier went bankrupt and may result in the cancellation of the contract to produce C-130 transport planes.

“If the contract folds,” says Aleta, “we may be moving to Ohio, Georgia, wherever there’s work. We’ll hop in the U-haul and start all over again.”

And if they stay, they will have to confront the reality of living directly across the street from one of the deadliest toxic incinerators in the United States. Arkansas ranks 51st in environmental protection and for months, Aleta has been attending community meetings to learn about the deadly effects of the dioxin emitted from the nearby plant. For 15 years, it turned into Agent Orange, and former workers are suing the manufacturers. Local residents are scared, trying to protect their own lives.

If Governor Bill Clinton has his way, the dioxin dump will soon start burning 2,800 barrels of dioxin, turning it into ash and smoke. For the Robb family, a sudden shutdown at Lockheed may be the luckiest twist of fate they could have asked for.

* * *

Life can always play unexpected tricks on you, even when you’re doing well, as Charles and Elizabeth Parker discovered a year ago. The Parkers, both in the early 50s, are natives of Little Rock–and they live in the house they bought when they married 31 years ago.

In the mid-1960s, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, opportunities began to open up for them in Arkansas. In 1966, Elizabeth, with a degree as an LPN, was hired at the VA Hospital in Little Rock. She worked there for 21 years, a model employee who was the first black worker to receive the national Hearts and Hands Award for service.

Charles worked as a bricklayer. In the early 1970s he decided to go to college, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in social service and started towards a master’s. In 1978, he went to work for the state office of economic opportunity. For the next six years he helped low-income families find housing. Then, he returned to the lucrative construction industry. Charles and Elizabeth started saving $500 a month, planning for their life after retirement.

Inside the Parker family album, photos of a smiling family, healthy sons and daughters–even neighborhood children taken into the Parker fold–fill page after page. A picture of prosperity–fragile still.

On New Year’s Eve, 1986, a mentally-deranged patient jumped Elizabeth and their plans changed abruptly. After the incident, the VA hospital denied worker compensation benefits that Elizabeth believes she is due. Far worse, she was terminated for her disability and is unable to afford therapy to repair severe spinal damage. She has been dealing with a complex bureaucracy a thousand miles away in Washington, and nearly four years after her accident she has yet to receive any benefits.

“You see, when you can’t work, you’re a liability to a company, so they put you out to pasture,” remarks Charles.

Despite Elizabeth’s injury and dispute with the VA hospital, she found great comfort in her family. Four of her children have college degrees and one is still in school. One daughter is a registered nurse. A son started out at minimum wage, sweeping floors at Coca-Cola, but worked his way up into the accounting department.

The Parker family believes that such opportunities are gone from little Rock. Businesses are closing their doors, Charles says. “If you get a job, they hire you on at minimum wage, and you stay there.”

The youngest Parker son went to work last summer with Charles, who was earning $52,000 a year as a bricklayer foreman in Little Rock. He had gone to Kansas City to find work after construction slowed down in Little Rock, but the pay was good and the work steady.

Suddenly, in September, Charles contracted a rare virus that attacks the nervous system. He lost muscle control from the nerve damage–and hasn’t been able to work since. Because he was an independent contractor, he is not eligible for state disability, which at $226 a week, is among the ten lowest in the country.

“We had goals and we were at the point when we could do something for ourselves,” says Charles. “Now, we just don’t know what the future holds.”

The Parkers started getting assistance for the first time this spring. Charles gets $577 a month in disability payments from social security. They each get $11 a month from Supplemental Security Insurance (SSI). That totals $599, just one dollar short of the cut off for Medicaid, which covers their medication.

“I went to the food stamp office and people talk to you so harshly, it’s degrading,” says Charles. “I never went back.”

The family has received donations of groceries and Charles looks forward to the day his viral infection and muscle strength improves and he can return to work. Yet they have learned that it is a very thin line between financial security and financial ruin.

“You miss four or five months of income, and it depletes what little savings you DO have,” says Elizabeth. “We didn’t have any income for seven months. But we’re a strong knit family and our religious belief has kept us together.”

This article by Nancy Peckenham, an Atlanta-based writer for CNN World Report, appears as a case study in The 1990 Climate for Workers in the United States. The Southern Labor Institute of the Southern Regional Council produces this report every two years to examine on a state-by-slate basis the conditions, laws, wages and other factors affecting working people in the U.S.

Reclaiming Liberalism

Reviewed by Harry S. Ashmore

Vol. 13, No. 2, 1991, pp. 16-18

Reclaiming Liberalism, by Leslie W. Dunbar (W.W. Norton & Company, $19.95, 208 pp.)

When I referred to him in print some years ago as a certified idealist, Les Dunbar took mild umbrage, complaining that application of the designation is ordinarily limited to accountants and lunatics.

I had intended only to indicate that he is one of those singular intellectuals who not only profess high ideals but live by them. In Reclaiming Liberalism he has amply borne out my certification. While he describes this short, compelling book as an essay in political theory, he notes that theory requires continual reference to practice. And the liberalism he seeks to reclaim is a vocation or calling–“a work to which one is summoned and cannot rightfully resist.”

Dunbar’s response to the call prompted him to waive the usual choices that come with the doctorate in political science he earned at Cornell. He might have pursued the life of the mind in an academic sanctuary, or found a place in government. Instead, seeing politics as a ceaseless conflict between power and justice, he positioned himself outside the establishment, but within reach of it.

“I have myself spent many years trying in a grab bag of ways to influence political decisions,” he writes. “I want to believe that I have been on the side of justice; of a certainty, I have held no power. I have been a part of that world of private organizations absorbed with issues and causes.”

The causes Dunbar served were those of America’s underdogs, blacks in particular as executive director of the Southern Regional Council, the poor in general when he moved on to the Field Foundation. This placed him on the front line in defense of what he deems to be the first principle of liberalism, the proposition that legitimate powers of government require the consent of the governed. And at every critical juncture he has seen his causes founder in the face of issues raised by defenders of the nation’s “civil religions”–manifest destiny, entrepreneurial preeminence, white supremacy, and anti-communism.

This has prompted his search for a bedrock principle that addresses liberalism’s failure to offset breaches in the version of the social contract presumably embodied in the nation’s founding documents. Although the concept of inalienable human rights based on natural law goes back to Aristotle as interpreted by Aquinas, it was divorced from divine provenance in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Yet the most critical issues of our time have been raised by those who, in the name of God or His secular equivalent, invoke the state’s right to limit the freedom of the individual.

In political combat this tends to disarm the liberal, who is by definition a skeptic. As a nation, Dunbar concedes, “we cannot, if we would, unwrap ourselves from Christianity. It has become us: ego for the strongest, superego for more, id for all of us non-Jews of the West, and maybe even for them.” A liberal may love Christianity’s aspects of beauty and kindness. “What he cannot do, as he is a liberal, is attach himself to the certainties of that or any faith, whether religious, political, or even philosophical.”

Unable to embrace Marxist dogma, and aware that the roots of liberalism and private property rights are inextri-

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cably entangled, liberals have generally a voiced challenging the country’s basic economic system. On current hot-button issues–abortion, affirmative action, anything having to do with the schools–Dunbar finds it inevitable that they should mirror the disagreements of the larger society: ‘They may give service in their communities and hold hopes for its cohesion; but their primary loyalty is to the individual, not the community.”

Experience, he contends, has demonstrated that a constitution, even in a democracy, cannot be relied upon to protect the individual: “Constitutionalism is a set of principles built on reason, liberalism, with its roots in the social contract, has within itself a romantic seeking for loftier qualities than mere reason can grasp.”

Thus, while he sees constitutionally limited politics as one of the noblest achievements of mankind, it is not enough, The American constitution has been friend, companion and guardian of the individualism liberals cherish, but it is chiefly valuable as the “the passageway for moral judgment into politics.”

When justice requires institutional change the moral force must come from the outside, for any system of laws is the guardian of status, the protector and reinforcer of the society as it is, and of its strongest members and interests. Dunbar cites the civil rights movement of the ‘sixties and ‘seventies as an example of how the governmental structure can be altered under the kind of moral pressure generated by Martin Luther King and his disfranchised followers.

Since liberalism is shot through with compromise at the level of political action it is constantly in need of moral grounding. Reclaiming Liberalism‘s examination of the principles set forth in the classic texts, as illuminated by the author’s own experience, is a closely reasoned effort to provide just that. He offers an interpretation of the social contract which contends that people cannot be supposed to have willed their own injury, and asserts that the premise is violated by public acceptance of killing by political decision:

“Social contract theory extends legitimacy to political power by its sources in the people’s consent and by the end it serves. The right to live seems to me the only fully sufficient end for a political order to serve; the only end that is the political expression of goodness, and is the nearest political institutions and processes can come to serving moral good…The right to live is the most radical of all political values. If it now lies beyond our practical reach, and I think it does, it is not beyond our sense of what ought to be; nor is it beyond us to understand how adherence to other national purposes may violate it.

The italics are the author’s, and underscore his contention that this simply-stated doctrine is broad enough to cover the most blatant injustices of contemporary society, and can do so without invalidating the liberal’s concern with individual freedom. It does not, for example, require support of the right to life as the anti-abortionists define it, for their demand is based on state action, not its denial. Abortion is one of a category of moral issues Dunbar concedes are open to debate by all those who are not bound by absolute convictions.

The only absolutism he allows himself involves capital punishment: “I simply regard any and all state administered killing as wrong.” His convictions about war, on the other hand, are equivocal enough “to press me into qualifications a pacifist would not need to think about.”

He does, however, believe that his formulation could support the elimination of war as a guarantee of security–and, indeed, might demonstrate that the nation state is obsolete; “National security is not the stuff of the social contract. Personal security is.” And it would require concentration on the economic issues liberals tend to avoid. He regards poverty as militarism’s twin: ‘The present tasks of liberals and the present meaning of liberalism are to oppose militarism and to measure every public policy against the question: What does this mean for the poor?”

Dunbar completed his work before a new wave of uninhibited chauvinism swept the country as the Bush administration orchestrated the war in the Persian Gulf, and this may have reduced the number of dispirited liberals who would be willing to accept the cogent arguments that lead to his conclusion: “… liberalism must learn that though it may be possible to improve government endlessly, making it ever more competent, fair, just, and compassionate, even this is a losing endeavor and false progress as long as government can kill at its discretion. The right to live must be the liberal’s commanding cause.”

But surely Reclaiming Liberalism deserves the atten-

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tion, not only of those who share the author’s vocation, but of anyone who seriously considers the human condition as it is being shaped in an age of unprecedented materialism.

Author and journalist Harry Ashmore is a longtime commentator on the South.

Mississippi’s Defiant Years

Reviewed by Gordon C. Henderson

Vol. 13, No. 2, 1991, pp. 18-19

Mississjppi’s Defiant Years, 1953-1973: An Interpretive Documentary With Personal Experiences, by Erle Johnston, with a Foreword by William F. Winter (Lake Harbor Publishers, Forest, Miss., 1990. $24.95; xxxii, 430 pp.)

Erle Johnston is a newspaper editor from Forest, Miss., who served first as director of public relations and then as head of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission from June 1960, until July 1968.

The book has 415 pages of text divided into eighty-six brief chapters. The topics, about what one would expect to see in a book about this period, include initial resistance to the Supreme Court’s Brown decisions of 1954 and 1955; the unpledged elector campaign of 1960: the Ole Miss crisis of 1962; the civil rights summer, the Goldwater movement, and the murder of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, all from 1964; the work and influence of the Sovereignty Commission and the Citizen Councils; desegregation of the public schools; the challenge to the renewal of the license of WLBT; and, of course, politics, politics, and more politics.

Johnston’s newspaper experience, his participation at the highest levels in several political campaigns, and his eight years with the Sovereignty Commission give him the best of insiders credentials. We might expect, therefore, that this book would offer insight into the thinking of those white Mississippi leaders who in this period waged a concerted campaign to maintain segregation at home and fight civil rights efforts both at home and throughout the country. But if you pick up this book expecting to find analyses of decisions and events in this period that only a quintessential insider could provide, you are bound to be disappointed.

And that constitutes the first serious failure of the book: the failure of the author to use his insider status to bring us smack into the center of decisions that were being made by Mississippi’s white leaders in this period. Its second failure lies in its too superficial treatment of the events it chooses to report on. Two cases in point. Johnston’s coverage of the Ole Miss crisis of 1962 tells much less about that happening than will be found in chapter seventeen, ‘The Fall of Ole Miss,” in Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters; his coverage of the Jackson movement is nothing like what John Salter offers in his book, Jackson, Mississippi.

Further, this is a book that largely views historical analysis as the recital of events. If one wanted to exemplify value-free social science, this book would serve nicely. Its too-glaring tendency merely to recite that first this happened, and then that happened. and here’s what happened after that; without any effort to measure the significance of events, or relate them to others, or to assess short- or long-tern consequences, can make for a very frustrating evening of reading. particularly when one realizes that explaining what choices leaders faced, what information they had before them, what they reckoned to be goals and the relative worth of means is exactly what an insider like Johnston could surely have told us of if he chose to. His background as a newspaperman may be showing here: newspaper style does emphasize the reporting of events and newspapers generally avoid analysis except occasionally on the editorial page.

Mississippi politics–like the politics of the other southern states–has always had an appreciable number of persons who–to say the least–are properly described as colorful characters. And many of these Mississippi characters appear in the pages of Johnston’s book. But in Johnston’s book they are almost colorless. Jim Neal, a legislator and radio personality is one such, but Johnston does not even identify him as he himself wanted to be know, namely as “Farmer Jim” Neal. Mary Cain, a major player of conservative politics and as colorful as any personality of this period, is similarly portrayed as quite ordinary. Bob Patterson, Semmes Luckett Ellis Hadron, W.M. Caskey, Tom Ethridge, William Simmons, Walter Sillers–every one of them a distinctive personality–are all mentioned more than once, but like Cain and Neal, they are painted in shades of pale grey.

Nor does Johnston recall for us the colorful language of politics. Johnston reminds us that an important slogan of the Paul Johnson campaign for governor was “Stand Tall with Paul” but he neglects to tell us how often Johnson succeeded in whipping up a crowd by declaring that “All the NAACP stands for is Huggers, alligators, apes, coons and possums.”

There are so many things hinted at but never probed that we leave the book frustrated. What programs were developed for the Citizens’ Council Forum and why was Johnston pleased when funding for the forum from the Sovereignty Commission was cut off? What exactly did the Sovereignty Commission feed to the FBI and did Johnston regard FBI personnel in Mississippi as antago-

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nists or sympathizers? What measures did the Sovereignty Commission take with the media to encourage them to toe the “party” line?

And what were the arguments Sovereignty Commission speakers used to defend segregation when speaking before northern audiences, appearances that Johnston believes were persuasive and well-received? I have particular trouble with Johnston’s recounting of this activity. I came to remember that on several occasions speakers used by the Sovereignty Commission–including Governor Barnett and University of Southern Mississippi President W.D. McCain, to name just two–used what they believed were “facts” to boost the picture they offered of the Mississippi they defended that were not facts at all but, indeed, outrageous distortions of social data.

For example. The Clarion-Ledger for Sunday, Jan. 20, 1963, carried a news item headlined “Jackson Among Four ‘Best Educated’ Cities in U.S” In the article which followed data on education, home ownership, unemployment rate, median school years completed, the number of two-car families, and other data all taken, the article said, from the 1962 City and County Data Book were used to show that on everyone of the measures cited Jackson was close to being at the top among the nation’s cities, almost in a class by itself Soon after, these data appeared in speeches made by persons who, like Governor Barnett and President McCain, were among the speakers hired by the Sovereignty Commission to defend Mississippi and its ways before northern audiences.

The Clarion-Ledger article was, from beginning to end, a massive instance of disinformation. Were these gross errors brought to the attention of the Clarion-Ledger? Of course, more than once. Did it make any difference? Of course not And that was far from the end of the matter. As late as 1969, the City of Jackson published a slick public relations brochure which drew upon the same error-ridden data and called them “remarkable figures.” Were these among the data Johnston saw as well-received by northern audiences?

For the reader who knows little about the course of civil rights in Mississippi in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties and who is unlikely to set out to read a Mississippi newspaper from this period, the book may be of value.

For anyone for whom a new volume of memoirs from this turbulent era in our history is an occasion for great excitement at the prospect of still more insider information about these events, this book is bound to be a great disappointment.

Political Scientist Gordon C. Henderson taught at Millsaps College from 1952 to 1965, and even in other of those “defiant years” was a frequent resident of Mississippi.

Black Votes Count

Reviewed by Laughlin McDonald

Vol. 13, No. 2, 1991, pp. 19-21

Black Votes Count: Political Empowerment in Mississippi after 1965. by Frank H. Parker. (Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press, 1990.)

Black Votes Count, by Frank Parker. is a sinuous but supple account of the efforts to implement the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in Mississippi in the face of a campaign of massive resistance by state and local officials. While the book acknowledges the roots of those efforts in the popular movement of the early 1960s, particularly the historic Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, this is mainly the story, told by one of the lawyer participants, of the court room battles and how they helped change the complexion of politics in a state that has long been conspicuous for white intransigence and resistance to civil rights.

Mississippi led the way in disfranchising blacks after Reconstruction. Prohibited by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments from denying the right to vote outright, it held a constitutional convention in 1890 and adopted new stringent, technically legal,” registration requirements (including the literacy test and poll tax) which virtually eliminated blacks from the voter rolls. Other southern states followed suit and adopted the central features of the “Mississippi Plan?

The restrictions on voter registration, administered as they were by hostile whites, worked to perfection. Although blacks were approximately 40 percent of the population in Mississippi, as late as the eve of passage of the Voting Rights Act only 6.7 percent were registered to vote, and there were no more than six black elected officials in the entire state.

The Voting Rights Act abolished the literacy test in the southern states, and blacks predictably began to register in substantial numbers. Mississippi, responding as it had done in 1890 to black political mobilization, enacted thirteen major pieces of legislation in l966 at its regular and special legislative sessions designed to dilute minority voting strength and make it more difficult, if not impossible, for the newly registered black voters to elect candidates of their choice. The Massive Resistance Legislation, as Parker denominates it, included measures that gerrymandered the slate’s five congressional districts to fragment the heavy black population in the Delta area; authorized counties to elect their governing bodies and school boards at-large rather than from districts; authorized the abolition of elected county school superintendents increased the qualifying requirements for independent candidates; and,

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increased the number of discriminatory multi-member districts in the state house and senate.

Mississippi in 1966. for all the similarities and parallels, was not entirely the same as the state in 1890. The nation had renewed its commitment to civil rights in 1965 with passage of the Voting Rights Act, had not abandoned it as it had done after Reconstruction.

The Voting Rights Act was also the most radical, and potentially the most effective, piece of civil rights legislation ever enacted by Congress. One of its major provisions, Section 5, was expressly designed to block attempts by states such as Mississippi to circumvent the ban on literacy tests through enacting new measures to discriminate against black voters. Covered jurisdictions, defined as those which had used onerous registration procedures and in which voter participation was low, were required to preclear with federal officials any changes in their voting laws by proving that they were not discriminatory before they could be implemented.

In addition, while there were relatively few black lawyers in Mississippi due to discrimination in education and access to the bar, three national civil rights organizations maintained law offices in Jackson on Parish Street in the black business district: the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (for which Parker, one of the premier voting rights lawyers in the country, worked in Mississippi for twelve years); The Lawyers’ Constitutional Defense Committee (LCDC, which became part of the American Civil Liberties Union): and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Inc. The “Farish Street crowd,” as they were dubbed by their nemesis District Judge Harold Cox, accepted the formidable challenge of turning back the state’s massive resistance program.

Mississippi thus quickly became a proving ground for the 1965 Act, and for Congress’s substantially new approach to voting rights enforcement. Would the courts require strict compliance with preclearance and the other provisions of the Act, or would the new law prove to be as ineffectual as the voting rights guarantees in the earlier Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964? The political fate of African-Americans, not only in Mississippi but in the South and the nation as a whole, hung upon the answers to these questions.

The Supreme Court was not long in handing the Farish Street crowd a critical victory, one that gave an expansive interpretation to the Act and dealt a severe blow to Mississippi’s massive resistance campaign. In Allen v. State Board of Elections (1969), a majority of the Court held that Section 5 was to be given ‘the broadest possible scope’ to reach even minor changes in election practices, and enjoined the enforcement absent preclearance of the state’s new restrictions on independent candidates, as well as its laws authorizing counties to switch from district to at-large elections and from elected to appointed offices. Allen made clear that voting practices which diluted minority voting strength, and not simply those which denied or restricted the right to register or cast a ballot, were covered by Section 5.

The Farish Street lawyers and the minority plaintiffs they represented won other important decisions as well, which Parker describes in careful detail. To recite only a few is to call an impressive roll of leading cases and principles in voting rights jurisprudence. In Connor v. Johnson (1971), the Supreme Court required single-member districts in court-ordered reapportionment plans and forced the state to abandon at-large voting in multi-member legislative districts statewide. In Stewart v. Waller (1975), the court blocked a change from ward to at-large elections in over forty of the state’s municipalities, a change which would have had a devastating impact on minority voters. In Kirksey v. Board of Supervisors of Hinds County (1977), the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals en banc articulated the

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requirement that remedial election plans, aside from being free of discrimination, must also afford minorities a realistic opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. This “effective opportunity” standard was later written into the Voting Rights Act and applied nationwide by Congress when it amended and extended the Act in 1982.

Black Votes Count reminds us that some of the most important victories of the civil rights movement have been litigation victories. It also acknowledges the costs and limitations of reliance on the judicial process to enforce political rights. The defeat of Mississippi’s massive resistance was gradual and delayed by appeals, while the remedies ordered by the courts were always prospective and did not set aside elections held under the preexisting discriminatory schemes. Still, the gains in African-American political participation, though far from complete, have been impressive. As of 1989, Mississippi had a black member of Congress, a black supreme court justice, twenty-two black state legislators, almost seventy black county supervisors, twenty-five black mayors, and 282 black city council members. The litigation described in Black Votes Count did not itself elect any of these candidates to office, but without it, and without the changes in the state’s discriminatory practices which it brought about, their election would have been impossible.

In one of the most valuable chapters of this excellent book, Parker responds convincingly to the arguments of voting rights opponents that the Act has been transformed into an unwanted instrument for affirmative action. Massive resistance in Mississippi amply demonstrates that the Voting Rights Act and the remedies that have been ordered to implement it were a response to–not the cause of–racial consciousness and division in the electorate.

One would have to be naive or disingenuous to suppose that the protection of minority voting rights in racially polarized jurisdictions could safely be left to the normal give and take of majoritarian politics. As Parker concludes, to characterize judicial intervention in such circumstances as granting minority voters a racial preference “grossly mischaracterizes the history of white efforts to impede minority electoral participation and the functions of remedies for voting discrimination.

In addition to Mississippi, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 targeted six other states of the Old Confederacy for abolition of literacy and other tests for voting and for Section 5 preclearance. The resistance to minority political empowerment in these states, although not always on the grand scale as in Mississippi, was also intense and widespread, illustrating in a direct and powerful way the continuing importance of race in the southern region. I hope that Parker’s book will stimulate an interest in writing accounts of Voting Rights Act enforcement in these states, and that the future chroniclers will bring to their task a comparable level of experience.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Black Voters Count is in fact a pun on the title of a related book, Whose Votes Count? written by one of those opponents, Abigail M. Thernstorm.
Laughlin McDonald is Director of the Southern Regional Office of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Arrogance of Race

Reviewed by Jacob Howland

Vol. 13, No. 2, 1991, pp. 22-23

The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspective on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality. George M. Fredrickson (Wesleyan University Press, 1988. viii, p 310 pp.).

It is a nice touch that the tribute to C. Vann Woodward, as the ninth of seventeen essays in The Arrogance of Race, occupies the position of honor at the exact center of the book, for “The historian,” according to Fredrickson. “must contrive somehow to be in the stream and on the bank at the same time.” In that, Woodward succeeds because of his exemplary ability to fuse narrative, which focuses on “the particular, the concrete, the individual,” with interpretation and analysis. This attempt simultaneously to negotiate stream and bank requires of the historian “a lack of dogmatism, a refusal to allow his historical imagination to be fettered by an unchanging set of interpretive assumptions, and an openness to correction or revision.” These words of praise for Woodward describe Fredrickson’s own historical vocation and sensibilities as well.

Fredrickson weaves history by shuttling in illuminating ways between the particular and the general. The warp and woof of these essays (most of which have been published previously) are two distinct factors, “class” and “status” Fredrickson’s “dualist” or “interactionist” approach, unlike that of Marxist historians, make no a priori assumptions about me relation of stratifications rooted in economic power on the one hand, and in ethnic status and “honor” on the other By focusing on the dynamic interplay of class and status, the historian may “do justice to the complexities, ambiguities, and uncertainties of human experience.” This approach involves a commitment of fine-strained analysis, for conceptions of status and “honor” are especially complex and ambiguous, since they are socially determined and constantly changing. Abstract or theoretical models are useful to the historian as they draw attention to “peculiarities or deviations” that thus bring to light specifics of historical experience.

Fredrickson’s own “reverence for particularity,” a phrase he applies to Woodward, is amply evident in the contents of the present volume. The book’s first part includes a handful of essays that explore influential attitudes toward slavery and raceatthe time of the Civil War. In one, for example, “Masters and Mudsills.” Fredrickson carefully dismantles the view that repression and Negrophobia in the Old South were limited or softened by white paternalism. The remainder of the essays in this section employ a biographical approach and underscore Fredrickson’s conviction of the essential importance of narrative in historical writing. These chapters, which include studies of Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, and Albion W. Tourgee are especially exciting, because in reading them one senses how the stream, the particularities, can shape the bank The complex character of Hinton Rowan Helper, whose book The Impending Crisis of the South, fed the fires of sectional controversy leading up to the Civil War, emerges with special force. Fredrickson explores the mixture of twisted envy, opportunism, and economic insight expressed in Helper’s “antislavery racism,” an attitude summed up in his credo “Death to Slavery! Down with the Slaveholders! Away with the Negroes!” Helper’s story is important because of the political impact of his widely distributed book which was endorsed by Horace Greeley and a number of Republican leaders, and because his attitudes illuminate his time.

The second part of The Arrogance of Race includes seven essays on “Historians of the Nineteenth Century South.” It includes a fine essay on “The Historiography of Slavery.” which emphasizes the significance of ties of marriage and obligations of extended kinship for slaves within the “totalitarian” institution of the plantation. Fredrickson suggests that “the threat of sales that could break up families may have been the most powerful device that the masters possessed to ensure discipline and economic performance.” While he stresses the limits of applying the concentration-camp model to the world of the plantation, this passage brings to mind the story Elie Wiesel tells in Night, about the Nazis’ exploitation of the Jews’ communal and familial bonds and traditional religious faith. Another essay on ‘The Triumph of Radical Racism’ considers Joel Williamson’s The Crucible of Race within the intellectual and literary tradition of “agonized southernism,” and points toward the limitations of the Hegelian concept of a “Volksgeist” as applied to both whites and blacks.

The third and final part counter-balances the first, and

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the Woodward essay seems to serve as the book’s fulcrum. If the biographical essays of the first part view the bank from deep within the stream of particularities the comparative explorations of slavery and white supremacy in the third part observe the stream from the bank of general theory. This section includes an extremely interesting study of the social origins of American racism, in which Fredrickson asks: “To what extent was America really born racist.. and to what extent did it become so?” He argues that to a significant degree prejudice followed m the wake of slavery, and that white “societal racism–the treatment of blacks as if they were inherently inferior for reasons of race–dates from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a rationalized racist ideology did not develop until the nineteenth century.” The book concludes with an excellent study of the political foundations of segregation in the South and South Africa.

My only criticism of The Arrogance of Race concerns Fredrickson’s rather undiscriminating view of what constitutes racism. Fredrickson acknowledges that Reconstruction, “the most radical departure from white supremacy attempted anywhere in the nineteenth century,” was too radical; to enforce the new rights of the freedmen “would have required a concentration of national authority and efficient bureaucratic administration that was beyond the capacity of the American state in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century.” Lincoln appreciated the problem later underscored by the failure of Reconstruction:” blacks as men were entitled to equality, but whites were unalterably prejudiced against them and would never permit the actual attainment of equal rights.” Does this understanding of the vexed racial situation in America justify the conclusion Fredrickson offers in the next sentence, that for Lincoln “the Negro was,. a man but not a brother?”

Similarly, Fredrickson speaks of the “quasi-racism” expressed in Lincoln’s opinion that the systematic oppression of slavery had “clouded the intellects of blacks, and regards Lydia Child’s remark that “it would take generations for freed blacks to shake off the degradation and bad habits engendered by slavery” as “insufferably condescending and paternalistic.” In another context, Fredrickson warns against “a new ‘racism,’ based on the concept of ‘cultural deprivation.'” Yet the essential point of Lincoln’s and Child’s opinions, however distasteful they may seem to our current sensibilities, is that democratic citizenship requires a certain kind of education and training, and that the political culture of slavery (like that of communism, or fascism) provides a very different sort of training.

Richard Wright observed in Black Boy that “clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty and the capacity to remember” are not native with man, but must be “fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another.” Is it racism, or realism, to recognize that the same is true of the habits of independence and responsibility that alone can sustain a democratic political community?

Jacob Howland teaches philosophy at the University of Tulsa.

Racial Violence

Reviewed by Suzanne Hall

Vol. 13, No. 2, 1991, pp. 23-24

Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865-1940: Lynching, Mob Rule, and “Legal Lynchings,” by George C. Wright (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.)

“Some folks just need killing,” a Kentuckian explained not long ago during a conversation about violence in the state. Just who needs killing is the interesting question. In Kentucky, as in the rest of the South and nation, the people in power are often able to decide such matters. Powerful white Kentuckians, George Wright convincingly argues, determined which blacks lived or died in the

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post-Civil War period. Individuals, mobs, and juries subjected African-American Kentuckians to violent acts ranging from harassment and beatings to lynchings. Old arguments that the border state had a less violent racial history than the deep South no longer stands. In fact, Wright asserts that Kentucky’s violent legacy is not confined to the Appalachian region; western Kentucky and the Jackson Purchase area rival the east “as the most violent part of the Bluegrass.”

Whites used violence to keep blacks in their place after the disruption of the society and culture following the Civil War. Mob attacks and illegal lynchings occurred with greater frequency than earlier studies have found. Wright discovered at least 353 lynchings in the state as opposed to the earlier figure of 205. These mob actions resulted from the economic activities of African-Americans, not from rapes of white women. Wright argues that “blacks who were prosperous or independent threatened the entire system of white supremacy.

Lynching one black sent a brutal message to an entire neighborhood of black citizens. And even a killing was not enough in some cases. White tobacco farmers, who had joined to fight the Duke Tobacco Trust in 1904-1908, drove out blacks in Marshall County. some of whom owned prime tobacco land. Three hundred and forty-eight blacks lived in that western Kentucky county in 1900. After the killings and raid 135 remained. By 1960, no blacks resided. Apparently, the Marshall County blacks lost all or most of their property. Whites in the area now claim the blacks were criminals and troublemakers, a common rationalization for racial violence.

After the turn of the century, mob lynchings became less “respectable” among progressive Kentuckians, who sought a better image to attract business to the state. Governors such as Augustus E. Wilson, Augustus 0. Stanley, and Edwin P. Morrow, openly and vigorously opposed lynching. But with the decline in illegal killings came a rise in what Wright aptly terms “legal lynchings,” executions following hasty, procedurally inadequate jury trials. Law-and-order advocates praised the swift enforcement of justice and did not analyze the inequitable distribution of punishments among white and black criminals. Kentucky remained a dangerous place for blacks despite the decline in some forms of extralegal violence.

Wright’s story could become a gruesome recitation of victimization; however, he demonstrates black Kentuckians’ ability to fight back and create lives for themselves and their families. Some shot back at white mobs, others organized and petitioned officials. Many showed their distaste for the state and left. Between 1900 and 1950, the black population of Kentucky steadily declined, especially in rural areas. The myth of benign “polite” racism in the Bluegrass joins the other legends of the Old South. Wright’s finely written story, though painful and depressing. is one that must be told. To overcome completely the failures of the past, we need to understand their complex origins and history. George Wright provides readers with the hard evidence and skilled analysis to achieve a fuller understanding of Kentucky’s. and the South’s, violent heritage.

Suzanne Hall is an Assistant Professor of History at Reinhardt College.

Land of the Free

By Leslie W. Dunbar

Vol. 13, No. 3, 1991, pp. 1-5

In the New York Times on July 14, Vaclav Havel called for a continued American “presence” in Europe, as a “guarantee of peace and stability.” He of course meant a military presence, as in NATO. Havel is an authentic hero. He is, however, no longer one of us. He is one of them. My dichotomy is a simple one: those outside the circles of power (us) and those including President Havel who are within. The people with power want stability–and so do I–and they have not the courage to break the age-old habit of thinking of that as impossible without military forces.

All too likely, by the time these lines appear in print George Bush may have made another violent strike against Iraq. Or some place else, inhabited by people poorer than we, felt by Washington to require disciplining. If so, he will have used for that men and women who have chosen warfare as their occupation, many or most because they could find no other decent paying jobs. The rewards are better and, in actions such as Panama and Iraq, the risks to body less than, say, in coal mining or farm labor. The old ways of power will have been served. The poor of the United States will languish still and the poor of the rest of the world–as one of the managers of

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the whole world’s economy are we not responsible for them too, at least somewhat?–will sink deeper.

One night last winter I found myself wanting a novel Like others must, I own books I’ve never read, and this night I pulled from the shelf one that had been there unread for years, an old C. P. Snow, Corridors of Power. My reading of it occurred while the United States was in the midst of its war against Iraq, and the book and the daily news pressed and scratched against each other in my thoughts about that episode of American “manifest destiny,” our national creed which endows our expansionist desires with claims of moral right.

Do people still read C. P. Snow? They did in the 1950s, and into the 1960s. He wrote a number of books, and I had years back read a couple. Their protagonist is Lewis Eliot, who Snow has moving at the center of university, economic, and political establishments of post-World War II Britain. The stories (at least those I’ve read) are about the making of decisions. Snow specialized in detailing the complexity of the process, and because his own career gave some authenticity o the fictional Eliot, the reader may feel that really it does work this way. The decision-making will be a mingling of sincere convictions, ambitions, animosities, friendships, personal problems–financial, sexual, etc.–and, of course, economic forces that vie with each other. Corridors of Power, published in 1964, is liked that. Its stage is set in the late 1950s, and the plot is woven around the effort of a Cabinet minister to steer British policy away from strategic nuclear weapons. The way to the novel’s outcome will be through intersecting paths of disputes among scientists, marital break-ups, loyalty checks, personal and also personal vindictiveness, personal weariness and distractions, political advantage-seeking, defense contractors’ policies, the

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intimations from across the ocean of the Eisenhower administration’s displeasure, and more rye likely now forgotten. And by an uncanny coincidence, just as George Bush was leading the world into the dark of his new world order, I was reading in Snow’s novel about the British mid-Eastern fiasco of 1956, when with the French and the Israelis they had sought to take back control of the Suez “Countries, when their power is slipping away, are always liable to do idiotic things. So are social classes. You [Eliot was addressing two Americans, one rich] may find yourselves in the same position some day.”

I don’t propose to join the debate over whether American power is declining. We seem to be militarily unchallengeable now, though whether that will endure! don’t know nor care to speculate. I hope it won’t.

In economics–this world’s other primary form of power–were strong enough, I suppose, though to my inexpert eyes there seems a lot of flab and weak legs. Certainly we are no longer the world leader and even controller we grew used to being during the 1950s and 1960s.

Accepting the call to exultation

As I’ve said, I don’t know about our power, its present or future. What the Iraqi War made clear is that we have no right to the power we do have. We were called by our chosen and approved leaders to hate and to exult in ruthlessness, and we accepted the call. Congressmen and Congresswomen greeted Mr. Bush and his lieutenants when they in victory later walked among them like pimply adolescents at a pep rally, cheering their football champions. And in the streets, people have done the same, with a seemingly unsatisfiable appetite. These have been depraved days.

They have nowhere been more so than in the South. It is perhaps not fair to employ Mr. Lewis Grizzard as a representative type, although the massive number of his readers argues that it is fair.

* From Grizzard’s column as it appeared in the Raleigh News and Observer, March 27, 1991 (midway through what Christians call Passion Week).

This is patriotism become barbarism, the despisal of those unlike and weaker than we. The Cold War, which we have congratulated ourselves on “winning,” was against an opponent of strength. No longer have we that test Now we can dominate, unchallengeable: “The thrill is back.” We have committed ourselves, when and as we determine there is need, to warring without cease. What sort of C. P. Snow-like decision process, what mixture of personal and other motives, led George Bush and his few associates to send, by their mainly unchecked order, a half-million youth off to the Arabian desert to slaughter and destroy?

Do we have to concede that this is now the American way? That devotion to violence is the example we intend to set for the peoples of the world, replacing the example of democracy we used to boast of setting?

John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address January 20, 1961

George Bush, National Security Strategy of the United States, March 1990

There is no essential difference of policy between

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these two presidential statements, thirty years separated; nor has there been much between the two parties in their practice of foreign policy. Steadily, progressively, our foreign policy becomes an extension of military policy, a world-wide assertion that we can and will put down any power that dares challenge us. What strategists like to call our “vital national interests” are today simply that. With the close of the Cold War, we have gone “beyond ideology” in a new sense: power is the only end, power to do what we want.

The military is now our basic business

This is wrong, in and of itself. Our government in its folly and its distorted values neglects our poor, our schools, our public infrastructure, our God-given natural environment. But even if it did not, even were this society perfect at home, our obsessive absorption in militarism would be morally and civilly unbearable. John Kennedy’s memorable Inaugural Address had in it hardly a word about domestic issues or needs (not even civil rights). All its visioning was beyond our borders. The difference, such as it is, between him in 1961 and George Bush thirty years later is the removal of the cloak of old ideology around the thrust of power.

What the years since the Kennedy administration have led to is that the basic business of America has become military power. The life of society may go on as freely as people want, so long as military power has its supreme right. The American achievement is a militarism that is compatible with an open society” within the polity, but an open society first limited to the “mainstream” of non-poor and non-dissenters from our “manifest destiny.”

Americans seem to love the military. Militarism is not something imposed on us. At least in these days–maybe it wasn’t so in the 1930s, maybe it won’t be so later on–Americans are infatuated with it. Not long ago I drew up at a stop light behind a car with an official North Carolina license tag that said simply, “Pearl Harbor Survivor.” Perhaps other states too do something like that, treasuring these marks of baffle. What had the man done at Pearl Harbor? Never mind; he was there. This past winter we glorified the youth going off to Iraq, calling these semi-mercenary troops sent at least half on hire to protect dictatorships and the price of oil, carriers in their generation of freedom’s torch. The symbolism is overpowering. On Memorial Day 1990 I was at the coast. The Norfolk Virginian Pilot I read then unintentionally summed up the essence of contemporary America perfectly by the three top placements on its front page: a report on the holiday’s parade, headlined “For young, a lesson in price of freedom”; a picture of a stunningly, ethereally pretty Navy wife and her two all-American boys–“We came this morning to let the boys have an understanding of what it takes to have a free country”; and-thirdly–a report under the headline “Many states cut food aid for the poor.” This was months before the Iraqi crisis. We were ready for it, even yearning for it. We can’t get away from all this. Not from the love of the military. Not from the presence of the poor, either.

It has not been the Lewis Grizzards who have taught us to be militarists. We modern Americans have been taught this by an imposing intellectual and academic elite, one that established a “politically correct” standard that has through the press and television and other instruments of popular culture–such as “fundamentalist” churches and popular singers–been truly and pervasively formidable. Leading us all have been the intellectuals. Not before in American history have they so united to lead and approve governmental policies. The Council on Foreign Relations, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the Rand Corporation, a dozen more such have drummed into our consciousness for half a century the necessity of war readiness and of the arms and men and commanders and executive powers to insure that. War readiness has been the elites’ message to common folk, and they got the teaching through well. They have inhabited America’s “corridors of power.” and have radiated influence throughout the society.

Use for the guns will always be found.

War is not a rational option. If ever it was, it is no longer. When consequences of action are predictably unpredictable and uncontrollable (as they were and are in Iraq), choice of those actions is irrational. The consequences of war are unpredictable, uncontrollable. We shall, no doubt however, continue to make war. Those of us who oppose war will–we must realize this well–never be proved right. Never. And time after time, when force is used, we shall be disparaged. Our “fate” is to carry on a losing struggle. One which also steadily moves from the center to the margins of public debate. Before we entered NATO in the early 1950s, there was remarkable public and congressional debate: creating now a new “NATO” with the Gulf states is seen merely as an option of military planning. Of real authority, Congress has about as much today as had the Roman Senate under the Empire.

The men and women of power–even the occasional good men among them like Havel–will ceaselessly talk about the need for force to preserve “stability.” about the “price of freedom.” about the “peace process.” and all those things which translate into guns in their hands. Use for the guns will always be found.

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It may, however, be worth remembering, worth it even for our statesmen, that 1991 is the fiftieth anniversary of one of our modem testamentary statements, Roosevelt’s Four Freedom Address: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. Wars beyond count or compare have been fought since that great declaration of hopes for the world’s people. Whatever these fifty years may have proved, they have beyond a reasonable person’s doubt proven that war is not useful for the attainment worldwide of those freedoms.

So though we who oppose warring will not be proved right, we shall go on witnessing, in sadness and anger, the ruthless despoiling of freedoms, the environment, and the poor’s chances for decent lives that wars, too many in our own name and more yet from our policies, will surely bring to humanity.

Leslie Dunbar, a former executive director of the Southern Regional Council and of the Field Foundation, is the author of Reclaiming Liberalism.

The Southern Regional Council and the Roots of Rural Change

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 13, No. 3, 1991, pp. 5-12

Since the creation of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation–the Southern Regional Council’s parent organization–in 1919, the SRC has been guided by our sense of belonging to the rural areas of the South even as the skyscrapers around our offices in Atlanta have announced the arrival of urbanity.

Over the decades the Council has attempted to improve conditions in the rural South in differing ways and through various strategies. We have devoted our energies to reducing rural poverty because we know that the South will never free itself from past burdens, never achieve its highest ambitions until we come to terms with the patterns of poverty, racism, sexism, and disfranchisement that have grown out of our rural past and continue stubbornly to persist there and elsewhere.

This knowledge allows us to appreciate both the strengths and the failures of human enterprise in the rural South and to use our collective, institutional experience to shape our fixture strategies and reinforce our continuing commitment.

One of the South’s worst race riots–at least since the days of slavery–was still reverberating across both black and white communities in 1919 when Dr. Will Alexander set up the offices of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta. Perhaps more accurately called an armed rebellion, rural poor black farmers in the Delta of Arkansas had responded to blind racial violence of white landlords by arming themselves. For that act of militant self defense, the black farmers and their community suffered more than a dozen lynchings and scores of permanent injuries as white law enforcement officers and vigilantes undertook to teach these rural poor blacks a lesson in Southern race relations in the name of law and order.

Recognizing the unbridled forces of racism throughout the South, the Commission launched programs to help black veterans of World War I return to a productive life in rural areas and, later, to sponsor the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching where

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Jesse Daniel Ames led a group of white women to fight the violence of racism, sexism, and poverty, especially the rural South. “Not in our name,” they protested as they challenged openly some of the region’s past assumptions and practices.

By modern standards, these efforts–primarily by, white Southerners–were in fact paternalistic. They were efforts to help black citizens by appealing to whites to act rationally without challenging the South’s assumptions of black inferiority. Moreover, it was war that left the rural poor–black and white–disfranchised, powerless to improve their own economic conditions.

After the Great Depression engulfed the South and the nation, the Roosevelt Administration introduced a new era and a new role for the federal government in the twentieth century. In the New Deal, the leaders of the Council’s parent organization took their places in the alphabet of new federal agencies. Dr. Will Alexander–remaining as the head of the ICC–became the director of the Farm Security Administration, the agency of the federal government with the responsibility to assist the poorest of the rural poor.

Under Dr. Will, the agency spearheaded six major programs in rural areas of the South:

* Farm ownership programs that attempted to help tenant farmers and sharecroppers to purchase their own farm land with loans and grants:

* Rural rehabilitation programs to provide for substance care, sanitary facilities–social services provided by the community for the community;

* Cooperative associations programs to encourage and support the creation of poor people’s cooperatives that provided local purchasing. marketing, and production of farm goods and supplies;

* Medical care programs to provide medical care. dental care, and hospital care for the rural poor through group associations;

* Debt adjustment programs to prevent additional foreclosures of farm land;

* Special populations programs to create a variety of programs of special geographic areas, such as a program of leadership development among African-Americans in the rural South.

These programs of Dr. Will Alexander’s agency were far reaching during the 1930s and early 1940s. Perhaps as many as 30,000 black tenants were able to purchase land in the rural South and probably three times that number of white tenant farmers in the South. Almost 700,000 family farms across the country received loans of small size to help improve their housing, livestock, or farm implements. More than half a million farm families received small grants for emergency needs or sanitary facilities, such as clear water wells. The FSA under Dr. Alexander established more than 25,000 poor peoples cooperatives, half in the South. And, by 1942, the agency had created almost a thousand medical and dental associations where 150,000 poor families received health care at reduced or no cost.

Improving many rural lives

While each of these programs in the rural South yielded to the segregationist and discriminating practices of the South, Dr. Will’s programs improved the lives of more poor blacks in the rural South than any other New Deal program. (In fact, this program–it can be argued

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–was the second most important federal program for the welfare of blacks, since Social Security and the minimum wage exempted most of the occupations in which non-farm blacks worked.)

The co-ops funded by the Farm Security Administration in the South were under the direction of George Mitchell, a Virginia economist who would become the second director of the Southern Regional Council. These co-ops included some that were all black, such as a settlement established for one hundred destitute African-Americans in Wilcox County, Alabama, where the federal agency purchased a large white plantation and provided funds for housing, equipment, and community improvements. In others, blacks and whites worked together on equal terms despite the opposition of racist politicians and other white community leaders. According to one commentary, “hundreds of thousands of poor people in the rural South received valuable assistance” from the FSA cooperatives.

Some FSA administrators envisioned the agency’s co-ops as more than experiments in self-help. They wanted them to prompt local mass action and solidarity among the black and white poor. Moreover, as political scientist V. 0. Key observed, in general, “The New Deal affected the masses of the South as had no political movement since the Populist uprising.” It showed poor whites that politics could be more than just oratory on preserving the Southern way of life and demonstrated to poor blacks that the federal government cared about their improvement. Yet, the power of segregated politics (and a poll tax that also kept poor whites out of the political system) doomed the cooperative movement. By 1946 small black and white farmers lacked the political and economic clout to preserve the Farm Security Administration. It was replaced by a conservative Farmers Home Administration which quickly began to serve the interests of big white farmers.

When Dr. Will left the Roosevelt Administration, he joined with other whites in responding to the call of a group of black leaders to create a new regional organization to address, in an affirmative way, the problems of the region, including the problems of poverty. In 1943-1944 the Commission was disbanded and the Southern Regional Council was established in its place.

Limited by increasingly hostile white leadership and, captured by the firestorm after Brown v. Board of Education, the Council spent much of the 1940s and 1950s attempting to enlarge the political clout of poor blacks and to preserve the South’s public school system. In the 1960s the Council’s Voter Education Project inaugurated the first non-partisan voter registration drives in the country and enabled the registration of more than two million additional black voters–almost one million in the rural South.

Another era of activism

The Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s marked another era of activism among poor blacks in the rural South. Challenging segregation, disfranchisement, and poverty, the South’s civil rights organizations attempted to assist the poor in meeting their immediate needs and to push the federal government to establish policies addressing their fundamental needs. Through self-help groups and cooperatives, poor blacks began to free themselves from the control of the local white economy–a freedom allowing them to register and vote and to boycott hostile white merchants. In the late 1960s the Southern Regional Council joined a few other regional organizations to create the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, which became and remains a supportive agency for starting and sustaining local economic cooperatives throughout the South. In addition, community develop-

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ment corporations and economic development arms of the local community action programs were established in some of the poorest areas of the Deep South in order to remove blacks front the local systems of economic intimidation and to address elements of poverty.

During this time, President Lyndon Johnson created a national commission on rural poverty and one of its officers-a vice-president of the Southern Regional Council-helped increase public attention on needed policies addressing the rural poor.

During this time the Council also supported the work of several new cooperative ventures. It gave a small seed grant to a group of black women–led by Estelle Witherspoon–who were creating a quilting bee in Wilcox County, Alabama It purchased and deeded three hundred acres of prime farm land for use by farmer sharecroppers in Mound Bayou, Mississippi.

Yet, in 1969, urban riots and political reactionaries turned the nation away from the War on Poverty to an era of Nixon, “benign neglect” and Watergate. Despite these difficult times, the Council led a citizens’ inquiry into hunger that prompted national attention on the problems of hunger and malnutrition in the rural South. With the assistance of Robert Coles and others, the Council’s efforts spurred the work of Robert Kennedy and George McGovern to introduce legislation for the nation’s first food stamp program. In league with other Southern groups, the Council’s citizen’s inquiry was also responsible for convincing Southern senators, including especially Fritz Hollings South Carolina that real hunger existed in own state–among both black and white poor. Those Southern votes assured that the nation’s food stamp program became law and, in subsequent years, was expanded.

By the middle of the 1970s–sensing a need to articulate a larger vision of both the problems and possibilities in the rural South–the Southern Regional Council sponsored the independent Task Force on Southern Rural Development to enlarge, once again, the concern for rural poverty and to develop new strategies for improving both local practice and government policies. During three years of study, members of the task Force represented a wide range of Southern leadership, including Jimmy Carter (who suspended his membership in order to campaign for president); Ray Marshall, who was the Task Force director Juanita Kreps; Alexander Heard, who was at the time chairman of the Ford Foundation; and several others. When the Task Force’s summary report, Increasing the Options, was issued in early 1977, three members were already in Washington in the White House or the President’s cabinet.

While its members went to high places, the findings of the task force were not self-executing. Left to assistants and deputies in the federal government who had no understanding of the task force’s mission, recommendations for federal action were often compromised and, ultimately, became secondary to the Carter Administration’s own national goals. Without a constituency of rural leaders and organizations pushing the Task Force’s findings, Increasing the Options languished at a time when its best advocates were in the federal government.

Shaping policy and increasing resources

Responding to this problem and the unmet opportunities for reshaping federal policies, around 1978 several local and regional groups in the South (including the Southern Regional Council) started the Southern Rural Policy Congress. Composed primarily of black organizations working on economic development in the South’s

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Black Belt, the Policy Congress had two major goals: to help the federal government shape policies that addressed the needs of the rural poor and to increase the federal resources for local economic development.

Regrettably, the Policy Congress quickly turned into a forum for fundraising with federal agencies on behalf of its members. With available funding for housing and economic development programs from Washington, these local organizations joined many non-profit groups around the country in becoming grantees of the federal government. As a result, issues of policy became secondary and were generally confined to matters of allocating funds.

After the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the Southern Rural Policy Congress ceased to operate primarily because many members faced deep financial crises due to the termination of large federal grants. In this environment the Southern Regional Council and three other regional organizations–the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, the Emergency Land Fund, and the Voter Education Project–created the Southern Rural Alliance in order to improve cooperation and to develop strategies for addressing rural poverty under anew federal administration. Eventually this Alliance led to the merger of the Emergency Land Fund as a special division of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and to a couple of limited, joint ventures attempting to increase political participation in rural areas. The Alliance also petered out when both the Emergency Land Fund and the Voter Education Project no longer could participate due to their own financial problems.

For most of the 1980s, community organizations in the rural, poor South have been on their own in shaping programs, resources, and approaches to practices and policies. Rarely have community-based-economic development corporations, cooperatives, community development corporations, and other community organizations in the rural South come together in common concern during the last ten years. Both organizational demands and a climate of retrenchment have been substantial barriers. Yet, over the decades, many organizations have more than endured, overcoming substantial problems within their own ranks and their own communities. Some groups have diversified their work. Others have encircled their activities with a role in political participation. And others have established new partnerships with local or state leaders of businesses and government.

Promoting democracy in the rural South

During this time the Council returned to its agenda of promoting democracy in the rural South. Over the last ten years the Council used its expertise and reach to redraw the single-member election districts of more than a thousand jurisdictions across the South, probably half in the rural South. These redistricting changes have accelerated the increase in public officials who are elected by the votes of poor people [copy obscurred; possibly “of color”] [sic] [unknown].

In addition, the Southern Regional Council returned to the promise of economic opportunity, first established

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during the New Deal. During the mid 1980s, we began to search for ways to increase the democratic control of utility cooperatives, first created in the time of Dr. Will Alexander’s government service and which now have more than seven billion dollars of assets throughout the rural South. Exploring the means to bring these economic institutions under the control of poor rural blacks, whites, Indians, and Hispanics, the Council discussed many of the same problems of anti-democratic practices that it first met in Southern politics in the 1940s and 1950s.

Collective experience is significant

In searching for the roots of change in the rural, poor South today, the collective experience of the Southern Regional Council and its Southern neighbors over the last seven decades has a direct bearing upon effective practice and policy in the rural South in the future. Nowhere in the United States has the experience in working with the rural poor been more substantial and more representative than in the South’s Black Belt, Appalachia, and the Rio Grande Valley. Through a little thick and a great deal of thin, community organizations in these areas have found ways to build low-cost housing, create some jobs, improve self-help and self-sufficiency, and muster a local constituency of supporters and members. In the 1960s many groups and their leaders helped to motivate public policy on poverty and race. In the 1970s they were often the extension of policy. In the 1980s they became the victims of policy.

So rich in experience and too long isolated from one another, the local leaders of community organizations in the rural South are emerging in the 1990s in search for new possibilities and new capacities. Extending out of both the limits and the achievements of the past, the time has come to bring together the leadership of the rural, poor South so that they might explore collectively how to extend effective local practices and to help shape public policy on issues of rural poverty.

None of these organizations’ strategies for empower-

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ing the rural poor over the last seventy years achieved their primary goals, but the cumulative effects of their activities over time probably are not fully appreciated. For example, Dr. Will’s agency enabled a black cooperative settlement in the 1930s in Gee’s Bend (Wilcox County), Alabama From that origin grew in the l960s the Freedom Quilting Bee, one of the earliest black women’s cooperatives. The Quilting Bee originated a wide range of antipoverty efforts in the county, and the community was home to the first black elected officials in the county. Gee’s Bend also provided leadership In challenging local segregated and racist practices throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The quilting bee operates today.

Empowerment substantial, but incomplete

In Holmes County, Mississippi, part of the local leadership of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s came out of the same community where Dr. Will’s Farm Security Administration assisted several hundred black farmers in acquiring land and starting cooperatives in the 1930s. These independent farmers led local blacks to challenge segregated schools and barriers to black voter registration in the county in the 1960s and have been the core of much of the leadership of Holmes County.

In the same vein, the cumulative effects of political empowerment in the rural South have been substantial, even if they are not yet complete. The clearest evidence–and probably the most unknown evidence–is found in the transformation over the last twenty-five years of support for anti-poverty efforts by Congressional representatives from the Black Belt. This broad area of the South has the nation’s largest concentration and population of rural black poor. It stretches across the deep South where large plantations existed during slavery, up the southern Atlantic coast. It is in this part of the South where the political empowerment of poor blacks has met with the most violent and hostile response.

From 1965 through 1989, the U.S. House of Representatives recorded thirty-eight significant votes relating to expanding or establishing federal anti-poverty programs. Examining the votes of members of Congress representing most of the Black Belt counties within two periods–from 1965 through 1977 and from 1978 through 1989–reveals a radical change in voting behavior among these House members. From 1965 through 1977, only 11 percent of the Black Belt Congressional delegation supported anti-poverty programs on twenty-six important roll calls. During the latter period, however, Black Belt support enlarged to 41 percent on twelve significant roll calls.

This shift represents more than a change in political behavior. It strongly suggests a significant, enlarging change in the outcome of proposed anti-poverty legislation. For example, the key House vote on the Family Support Act passed by only seven votes. Legislation in 1983 providing emergency loans to long-term unemployed homeowners passed the House by only twenty votes. Increases in Medicare funding in 1982 passed by only thirty-two votes. In each of these decisions fewer than seventeen votes changed the outcome, and in each case the shift in Black Belt voting behavior had a decisive role.

(By the same measure, if political changes in the Black Belt had occurred earlier, some different outcomes might also have been possible. For example, the 1967 decision of the U.S. House of Representatives to slash the budget of the Office of Economic Opportunity could have been prevented by a swing of sixteen votes. In 1972, a substantially higher minimum wage could have passed the House had five votes from the Black Belt supported the more generous legislation.)

These political changes over the last three decades have ushered in a new era of Southern politics, one that has deepened the region’s political commitment favoring civil rights and concern for poor through government action. They represented an enlarging concern for policies and resources for the poor among government officials at a time when, in general, government was diminishing its commitment and initiative to address poverty in the 1980s.

By most indicators, however, the political changes in the rural South remain “in progress,” part of an unfinished revolution. Here a reservoir of change remains embanked, awaiting further, effective activities.

Perhaps most absent from the 1980s and its phenomenal political change in the rural South was the collected presence of vigorous, rural community-based organizations that could be the enlivening agents of change and the mechanisms for assuring that political change translated into real changes in the lives of the poor.

Political and economic change needed

Our history suggests that these two elements of rural communities–political change and community-based economic change–may be co-equally necessary. It may be that we must have both economic and political empowerment in concert and interaction, if we are to make real changes. In the 1930s, Dr. Will had the means to make remarkable economic change, often through means of economic empowerment–giving poor farmers their own land from which to work, bringing them into cooperatives to provide for themselves, having the poor work together to provide for basic health needs. Yet, Dr. Will and the FSA did not have the means nor the will to enable political empowerment of the poor at the same time. As a result, poor whites and poor blacks lost the Farm

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Security Administration in the 1940s since they had no political power to maintain its mission over the objections of large landowners.

In the 1960s, we did have a very brief period where the two elements were in concert in some counties. Yet, once again, economic empowerment was usually followed by political power and the interaction was quite limited. Moreover, the War on Poverty was not a governmental program of self-help and independence in the spirit of Dr. Will’s work. Shaped too much by the legislative compromises of the segregationist Southern Congressional delegation, the War on Poverty assumed that the poor could remove themselves from poverty with job training, a little cash, and some social services.

In most respects we have not had the full force of both political and economic empowerment at work in the rural South at the same time.

Community economic control is vital

In order to establish in the 1990s a genuine movement for fundamental change in rural poverty, the community control of rural economic institutions is vital–not simply the existence of community-based organizations, but the community-based control of many economic institutions. In a world economy where local rural communities’ needs may often be secondary to international corporate interests, community and economic institutions can create a counter-balancing force that protects community interests. In rural places like the Black Belt, the existing utility cooperatives can be one of those important community economic institutions which the poor should help control. The utility cooperatives have resources and influence in local areas but, on the basis of available evidence, they are far from democratic in many rural, poor communities.

Utility co-ops also encompass the nature of cooperation and decision-making that is vital to both the welfare of rural areas and the process of movement-building. They are economic institutions that locally provide for the needs of the whole community and, therefore, require community-wide cooperation and decision-making. In addition, both electric and telephone cooperatives are a vital part of the infrastructure of rural areas, and their local policies have a great impact on the nature of local economic development They provide a basic necessity to the poor and have a system of organization and some available capacity to provide other essential services to the poor. Utility co-ops are also a growth industry, providing services that are at the core of the information age. Equally useful, the utility co-ops have opportunities and methods for effective local community participation and education on matters of local and national policy. Their magazines, mail billings, meetings, service routes, and local offices offer remarkable networks of communications in communities so that democratic participation goes beyond merely casting ballots.

Admittedly, the impact of the utility cooperatives on matters of poverty has not been far-reaching in recent years, but the potential should not be prejudged before democratic control becomes genuine.

Of course, other forms of cooperatives, especially new forms outside of agriculture, should provide additional vehicles for addressing the practical, immediate needs of the poor and a forum for improving the nature of discourse and public policy. Nevertheless, the democratic promise of the utility cooperatives–when associated with the potential for political empowerment in the same communities may hold a strategic, beginning place in the future of the rural poor South.

Alone, the prospects for political and economic empowerment in the rural South will not be enough to transform the development of public policy on poverty throughout the United States. Moreover, the South’s tradition of empowerment has failed over the decades to join forces with other segments of the population or to overcome the scarcity of resources and limits of vision. Yet, these failures should inform our future efforts to enlarge democratic control, not check them. In the years ahead, our whole nation will develop the vision, capacity, and will to recover from the deadlock and fatigue of the 1980s only if we keep faith with democratic traditions and principles that, among other things, allow the poor to empower themselves, their own institutions and their own communities. In so doing, society must find ways to do more than adjust to poverty.

In that tradition, I submit, lies the roots of change for the rural South and one of the compelling mandates of the 1990s for the Southern Regional Council and its good friends and neighbors.

Since 1978, Steve Suitts has been executive director of the Southern Regional Council. This article is adapted from a talk at the 1990 annual meeting of the SRC in Atlanta.