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.

The 1990 Life Fellow Honoree

By Staff

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

“Both the black and the white people of Alabama’s Black Belt and the nation are indebted greatly to Estelle Witherspoon. Long before historians marked the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, Estelle was helping her poor neighbors-solving their problems, nurturing their children, and protecting their community.

“At the same time she was helping them develop an independence of mind and body so that they could free themselves from one of the worst curses of the Black Belt–the plantation mentality. She helped them survive the cruelties of racism and the despair of poverty. In creating the Freedom Quilting Bee–the nation’s oldest rural black women’s cooperative-she gave them an opportunity to realize their own self-worth and to improve their own economic conditions.

“With her late husband, Eugene, Estelle organized the whole community to stand up for their own dignity and worth: to register to vote in the face of angry whites…to demand decent public schools in the face of neglectful whites…to elect local black officials to the disappointment of whites…and to stop racial violence which did great harm to both blacks and whites. In Wilcox County, one of the most remote parts of Alabama, Estelle taught her neighbors the nature of courage and the virtue of leadership. She has challenged some of her white neighbors in Wilcox to free themselves from the racism of the past by gentle persuasion and, at times. by stubborn determination.

“Through her work and leadership, an important cultural legacy of rural black life survives and is celebrated every time one of the women of the Quilting Bee stitches another marvelous quilt pattern and every time someone in Atlanta, Dallas, New York, or London looks on their wall or bed post to view the quilting creations of Alabama’s Black Belt women.

“Her whole life captures the authentic definition of a Southerner of good will.”

Steve Suitts, in presenting the award on November 17, 1990.

Rural Poverty and Rural Development

By Barbara Ellen Smith

Vol. 13, No. 2, 1991, pp. 14-17

I belong to a generation that never experienced the frightening, pervasive poverty of the Great Depression. I grew up in an urban area believing that poverty was a problem of urban areas, primarily central cities, and that rural poverty was a problem of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

I learned a long time ago that my perceptions were naive and ill-informed. but I also learned that many of the dominant ideas about poverty–ideas that have framed the debate over poverty and guided public policy toward it–are also ill-conceived.

One popular idea holds that poverty in rural areas is a consequence of those areas’ isolation from the mainstream economy and culture. The persistence of poverty in rural areas confirms their backwardness, their resistance to integration with the mainstream, If you hold this point of view and are in a position to influence public policy, then you attempt to increase access to rural areas; you develop the rural infrastructure, promote the ties between rural and urban areas, and above all build roads. You may also create “growth centers” that you hope will function as magnets for investment and stimuli for rural development Those of you who are familiar with the policies of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) will recognize these activities as the cornerstone of ARC’s “bricks and mortar” approach to development.

A second view holds that rural people are poor primarily because they have too little money and lack access to necessary services such as health care, education, vocational training, and so forth. If you adopt this view, then you try to increase the availability, affordability and accessibility of services in rural areas. You subsidize rural clinics and public schools. To the extent that there was grassroots opposition to ARC development policy, it centered on the need to promote such services rather than build more roads.

A third approach to rural poverty that literally arrived with the Mayflower and the Protestant ethic of the early pilgrims, but has enjoyed renewed appeal lately, holds that poverty is ultimately the fault of the individual who is poor. Poor people, urban and rural, live in a culture of poverty, a cycle of poverty, that involves a suspiciously irregular attachment to the labor force, a weak work ethic, too many children, and so forth. This view undergirds the punitive and coercive initiatives in welfare policy that we have seen of late.

These first two approaches–“bricks and mortar” development and increasing access to services–have both bad beneficial consequences in rural areas. Where implemented, they have relieved some of the burdens of

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living in rural poverty and in some cases have allowed individuals to leave the ranks of the poor.

However, I am convinced that if we limit our analysis and our public policy to these choices, we will never eliminate or consistently reduce poverty in rural areas. The fundamental problem with all of these approaches is that they view poverty as the problem of areas and individuals who are outside of the mainstream of middleclass America, and who require a special set of anti- poverty policies tailored to their needs.

Poverty is not a problem of areas isolated or left behind by the mainstream economy; poverty is inherent in an economy where there is constant, downward pressure on the wages and standard of living of poor and working class people. Poverty is not just something happening to “those people” over there–rural areas or central cities. In an era of such great economic uncertainty, when there is increasingly extreme inequality in the distribution of wealth, a declining standard of living, a disintegration in public services of all sorts, poverty hangs as a dreadful potential over us all. Except for those with substantial personal or family wealth (which is a small proportion even of the white population), we are all one disabling illness away from poverty. Endemic poverty cannot be solved by a set of programs (food stamps, AFDC, and other “welfare” programs) isolated from the meat and potatoes of economic policy, tax policy, and development policy. As long as we isolate the problem of poverty and anti-poverty policies from the mainstream economy and economic policy, we will never get at the fundamental relations of power that are at the root of poverty.

Poverty systematically created

In the United States, we sometimes talk about poverty as if it just “happens” to individuals. Some “escape” it, others “fall into” it who knows why? Poverty does not just “happen”; poverty has been systematically created.

Nowhere is this more clear or more true than in the rural South where poverty has been systematically created by individuals who have enriched themselves by the labor and impoverishment of others. Poverty has been sustained and nourished by those who have an interest in its perpetuation.

Let us not forget, as we analyze and search for solutions to the problem of rural poverty, that the economy of the rural South was built on the backs of those who were impoverished in the most extreme, ultimate sense, legally and economically. Slavery was the chief labor system in the rural South for three centuries, and it has only been in the last twenty-five years that some of the most offensive aspects of its legacy have been formally and legally if not actually abolished. Slavery set the floor, the standard for the remuneration of workers and small farmers in the South. It is small wonder that a race-based system of no wages should be replaced by a race-based system of low wages, in which black workers and white workers, male workers and female workers, have been assigned different jobs, sometimes to different workplaces, to the division, the detriment, and the impoverishment of all.

For the last hundred years, economic boosters and industrial recruiters have advertised the South’s attractions to business: its natural resources, cheap electricity, and above all, its cheap labor. Textile manufacturers were among the first to heed this call. They built factories that made the rural South the most industrialized rural region of the U.S. but they also paid their workers–predominantly white women and children–such low wages that they ensured the continued impoverishment of rural Southerners. Heeding the racial code of the time, these early industrialists hired almost no blacks in their mills. ‘This helped to ensure that rural blacks would have no alternative to tenancy and sharecropping, and thus continue to provide cheap labor for white planters. The details of these historical arrangements are not the important point. The point is that for these early architects of the “New South,” poverty and racism were not the chief problems of the region–poverty and racism were the chief assets.

Up until the mid-1980s, a succession of business leaders and economic developers have continued to feature the poverty, powerlessness and racial division of its workers as the rural South’s chief attractions. “Cheap labor, docile labor, no unions, no strikes”–these are the watchwords. And, within the limits of their view of the world, this strategy worked. Manufacturers in search of low wages streamed into the region, making the rural South the branch plant capital of the United States.

In the last five to ten years, however, all has begun to change. Unfortunately, this is not because the South’s business and political leaders have undergone a sudden moral awakening. Rater, economic development policies have begun to move away from industrial recruitment because the strategy no longer works. In an era of global mobility, the labor-intensive manufacturing industries that once sought the rural South’s cheap labor are precisely those industries most likely to relocate overseas, where they can pay workers one-tenth of what they pay rural Southerners.

Thus, community after community in the rural South has been abandoned by corporate employers that were once the life-blood of the local economy. This disinvestment has left in its wake abandoned factories, unem-

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ployed workers, intensified poverty, and increased out-migration of the population, especially the young. I do not need to chronicle the hardship; you see it every day. What I would like to emphasize, though, is the opportunity that this hardship presents.

A ‘free space’ for economic debate

The breakdown in the economic order of the rural South has created a “free space,” an open space in which fundamental questions about the economy are now open for debate. Probably not since the Great Depression has this happened on such a scale. Those who want to stay in the rural areas they consider home are asking: What kinds of jobs do we want to try to create in our community? How can we do that? Who should make decisions about the future of our community? How–beyond jobs–do we want to develop our community?

These questions are open for debate because the individuals and institutions that once defined and ran the local economy are disappearing. As the old order breaks down, the paternalism and powerlessness that once held poor and working-class people in a dependent relationship with local economic elites are also breaking down. Most political officials, including state and local development authorities, have been completely unable to offer new, meaningful development strategies for rural communities. Some continue to pursue industrial recruitment; other pursue tourism, if the area is scenic; if not, they advise development of hazardous waste dumps. There is a void in vision, a void in leadership about how to transform the rural South into a better place where all can make a decent living.

The most hopeful and creative initiatives in rural development today are coming from the grassroots, often from people who were victims of development in the past People in communities across the rural South, from southwest Virginia to coastal Louisiana, have begun to come together locally in new ways to exert greater control over their economic future. In Ivanhoe, Virginia, for example, a series of plant closings left people without jobs, without income, without their young people. Poor and working-class citizens realized that if anything was going to be done to reverse the situation, they would have to do it themselves. They went to the county industrial commission and were rebuffed. They tried the traditional strategy of recruiting a factory and failed. Finally, they decided to develop their own vision of development They decided that a small-scale tourist industry under community control would be most desirable and feasible. They are now fighting with the county commission over access to land on which to develop this industry, so they have not yet accomplished what they set out to do. However, in the process of developing their own vision of development they have developed leadership, deepened their political savvy and understanding, built a community organization, and above all begun to view the economy and economic development not as things that someone else does to them, but as processes that they can initiate and control.

There are many examples of community-based development. MACE in Mississippi and the Southern Mutual Help Association in Louisiana have targeted low-income housing as a priority and put together creative initiatives combining private capital, community-based done, volunteers, and federal dollars to build or upgrade housing for poor people. Other groups have focused on access to capital for those traditionally shut out of the credit system–be they black, female, or poor.

All of these approaches to development can be grouped together as “self help” models. They emphasize development from within, reliance on local talent, energy, organizations, and capital.

Others have targeted policies and practices in the mainstream economy and used the political process to exert control over those they consider most objectionable. For example, groups have sought legislation to soften the impact of plant closings, improve retraining for displaced workers, and extend pro-rated benefits to part-time and temporary workers. Although such efforts are often reactive, rather than proactive, they address economic trends that affect millions of poor and working class people.

Community-based approaches are best

The best–meaning durable, visionary, and potentially far-reaching–of these diverse approaches to development have common elements. First, they seek to build broad coalitions that reach across the divides of race, class and gender. They include church groups, civil rights groups, women’s organizations, labor unions, and whoever else is interested in and supportive of the agenda of community-oriented development.

Second, they seek to build or re-build community in all its aspects. Thus the group in Ivanhoe conducted an extensive oral history project that documented the history of their community and resulted in the publication of two books that are a source of great pride. Most recently, they have started a community radio station. The priority is community development, not individual advancement.

Third, these groups support and recognize the leadership of those who have no traditionally been in positions of power, be they black, female, poor, or all three. Associated with this promotion of non-traditional leadership is a reliance on local talent and resources, be it the skills

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of local carpenters, the capital of local banks, or the natural resources of local timber, water, or scenic beauty.

Finally, these efforts reach beyond traditional definitions of economic development. Development is not just jobs; development is childcare, recreation facilities, housing, and quality education. This redefinition involves not only the substance of development but also the process and, above all, the question of who controls the process. All of these efforts reject the notion that development should be done to or for the rural South, and argue instead that development should be done by rural Southerners for their communities. In other words, development should be democratic.

This central idea that development must be democratic is the most significant aspect of these new community-based initiatives. It makes them visionary and potentially transformative, yet at the same time keeps them culturally rooted and appropriate, given the traditions and values of our county.

Fundamental and strategic questions

As hopeful and inspiring as many of these efforts are, they will remain isolated and marginal unless we begin to tackle at least two fundamental strategic questions. First is a group of questions concerning the relationship between economic development and the political process. We face a situation in this county where “our” government, especially at the federal level, exercises considerable control over certain aspects of the economy through. for example, taxation, the Federal Reserve system, and the federal budget Yet the decisions most directly affecting our rural economies at the local level–for example, the decision to invest or disinvest in a certain plant in rural Mississippi–are all in private hands. How can we utilize the political process to enforce greater accountability by private capital to our local communities? How can local political institutions–county commissions, local development authorities, and municipal governments–be used to the fullest extent to influence investment and disinvestment decisions, and the larger community development process? What are the limits and potential for realizing a new vision of community development through the political process?

Looking critically at these questions will lead us to create new political tools, such as the Community Reinvestment Act, that increase the accountability of capital to local communities and that expand the potential for genuinely democratic development I think we will also begin to look more broadly and inclusively and build new coalitions that join people across the boundaries of towns and counties and thereby overcome the fragmented and competitive characteristics of traditional economic development In such a direction lies the political power necessary to make development happen and make it happen democratically. Ultimately, I think we will grapple with the need to align federal economic policy with our local development visions. Over the long run, we cannot successfully promote investment and a decent standard of living in the Delta or the coalfields or anywhere else in the rural South when the federal government promotes capital mobility out of the region (through, for example, the recent “fast track” negotiations with Mexico) and purposefully undermines the wages and economic power of workers.

This leads to the ultimate practical question that all development efforts face: access to capital. Rural poor people obviously do not control, nor do they have access to, capital. Our efforts are doomed to marginality until we figure out how to leverage significant private-sector funds or develop the political power to leverage significant public-sector funds for rural development. As awesome as this task may seem, the more difficult and enduring question involves who will control the allocation of such funds. We do not need to create another Appalachian Regional Commission with a fat budget for the rural South. We do not need to leverage federal monies for porkbarrel projects controlled by unaccountable political machines. As we expand our vision and strategy, we need to hold fast to the empowering process that necessity currently dictates we are doing development for our communities. This means, I think, that we need to build broadly participatory community organizations that, precisely because of their solid and broad social base (and not because of shrewd grant-seekers), are capable of leveraging funds for development and ensuring that those funds are spent where they are most needed. Only as development becomes genuinely democratic and participatory can it improve the lives of those who have been so exploited and impoverished by development in the past.

Barbara Ellen Smith’s comment were made in Atlanta during the Southern Regional Council’s annual meeting last November

A Hero, Moth Holes and All

Reviewed by Tony Dunbar

Vol. 13, No. 3, 1991, pp. 24-26

W. J. Cash, A Life, by Bruce Clayton. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991, $24.95.)

To those who have “a profound conviction that the South is another land, sharply differentiated from the rest of the American nation,” W. J. Cash, who wrote those words and went on to explain them in his bestselling classic The Mind of the South, first published in 1941, is one of the region’s special heroes. Cash, who captured Southern history, moth holes and all, was himself a peculiarity. Neither a rigorous historian nor a participant in major events, but instead a sporadic journalist little-known outside North Carolina, he nevertheless penned one monumental book which has remained in print for fifty years. Having achieved this success, he then committed suicide.

In Bruce Clayton’s biography we have as authentic an account of the man as we are ever likely to find. Cash is a hard man to write about So much of his time was spent in a very private world. He was not for example, a man of many accomplishments. Born in 1900 in Gaffney, then the industrial frontier of South Carolina, Joseph Wilbur Cash was the son of a man trying to rise in that world by operating a small textile mill for his father-in-law. “The Cashes were of the middling sort.” is Clayton’s description. “They worked hard, occasionally succeeded, yet seemed perpetually to be starting over again in life.”

Young Cash was bookish, and was nicknamed “Sleepy” by his schoolmates for his customary squint and his eyeglasses. He transposed his first names to distinguish himself from his father. He grew up in the days when the great clash in the Baptist Church was over evolution, when the famous orators were William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, when evangelists like Billy Sunday roamed the countryside, and when his most famous neighbor was Thomas Dixon, Jr., author of The Clansman (made into the early film, “Birth of a Nation” and a series of other tremendously popular books (which were racist in the extreme) about the same subject. After false starts at Wofford College and Valparaiso, Cash attended Wake Forest College. His writing career began there as an editorialist for the student paper in defense of the Baptist school’s liberal president William Louis Poteat For intellectual nourishment he looked, for want of other sources, northward and found the caustic critic of the South, H. L Mencken and his American Mercury. The Mencken style left an indelible impression on Cash, as in this senior year epistle on the South: “It is a desert–a barren waste, so far as the development of culture and the nature of the beaux arts are concerned, and North Carolina comes very near being the dreariest spot in the whole blank stretch.”

Dismay intact, Cash graduated and entered a long period of what might best be described as “drifting.” He taught high school in Henderson, tried college teaching at the Baptist Georgetown in Kentucky, and wrote some pieces for the Charlotte Observer, but generally he stayed close to his parents in Boiling Springs, North Carolina “Nervous disorders” and depression frequently laid him low, and he was never able to support himself. Clayton writes that the “imposing religious fundamentalism” of the era, the “culture of racism,” and the way the world turned slowly” in places like Boiling Springs. and even Charlotte, were “enough to make someone like W. J. Cash sick. In any event, something did.”

He displayed some vigor in 1928 when he accepted the job of managing editor of a new county newspaper, and he wrote some ringing editorials for the Catholic “wet” New Yorker Al Smith against the Quaker “dry” Midwesterner, Herbert Hoover. But Clayton gives us no evidence that this fiery propaganda was widely read. Once again, frail health and “neurasthenia” caused Cash to retire.

Then in 1929, while the rest of the country crashed, a dream of sorts came true. Cash had an article accepted for publication in the American Mercury. It was an attack on North Carolina’s Senator Furnifold M. Simmons (a pompous Old Democrat who had supported Hoover), and it was soon followed by two other articles in the Mercury. One was called “The Mind of the South,” and it parroted the Mencken style with references to white trash, coons, the yokel mind, and sweeping derogatory

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premises like, “The growing of cotton involves only two or three months of labor a year, so even the slaves spent most of their lives on their backsides, as their progeny do to this day.” To modem ears,” notes Clayton, “unaware of the journalistic context or the fact that Mencken (and Cash) used slangy epithets for even’ group–even their own–Cash’s words sound like malicious slurs.”

But here too was much that would flesh out the themes of the book it would take him twelve more years to write. Despite the birth of the New South, the Southern mind was basically the same as in the Old, Cash wrote, with “a passion for the lush and baroque,” charged with irrationality and fantasy, and unadjusted to the modem world. Cash described his neighbors as “lint-heads” and “romantic loons,” but Clayton writes, he had an important statement to make, that “the hill-billy was mired in history and, as a result, lacked any class consciousness or ability to understand his own deprivation–a controversial point that Cash would place at the center of his great book.”

All of this was big stuff, and its publication by a national magazine made Cash a local celebrity. He began a correspondence with Blanche and Alfred A Knopf, owners of the Knopf publishing house and also publishers of the American Mercury, about expanding “The Mind of the South” into a book. But as recognition threatened, Cash fell ill. He was hospitalized in Charlotte and, Clayton speculates, treated to electric shock therapy. He returned to his parent’s home, now in Shelby, and for six years basically loafed. He hiked the dirt roads, rode his bicycle, talked politics at the courthouse, provided an entertaining target of jests for little boys, yet still got off an occasional piece for the Mercury or the Baltimore Sun. Frustrating stuff for the historian. Cash began novels then burned the pages. Worse, he revealed this to his waiting publishers. For years he continued his correspondence with the Knopfs, enticing them with the prospect that they would soon receive the manuscript they were encouraging him to write. Clayton is letting his own irritation show when he writes that “It is tempting, given Cash’s tendency to procrastinate, to second-guess him and feel anger or impatience with the man for throwing away pages and then avoiding working on a book that would become a classic.”

Finally, in early 1936, Cash mailed three hundred manuscript pages (which became the first half of The Mind of the South), and the Knopfs responded with a contract, which Cash quickly signed. He collected a $250 advance and promised a first draft by summertime. It was not to be. Cash instead moved to Charlotte to write editorials and book reviews for the News. He became known as, “that man writing a book.” The public read and liked his repeated slashing denunciations of Naziism. At Knopf, pages continued to arrive in the mail, but at intervals of months, and often Cash was trying to retrieve old segments to rewrite them. The process consumed five years.

At age thirty-eight Cash met and, on a high-alcohol Christmas Eve, eloped to South Carolina with and married divorcee Mary Bagley Ross. The event ended one thread of the Cash story, his fears of impotence, to which Clayton gives importance. All of a sudden, The Mind of the South was finished and in the mail. The Knopfs rushed it into print before Cash could think twice, and, as they had predicted, it was critically acclaimed almost everywhere. The book arrived at a time when there was great interest in the South, when Wolfe, Faulkner, W. A Percy, the ‘Twelve Southerners” who wrote I’ll Take My Stand, and even F. D. R., it, who called the South the Nation’s Number One Economic Problem, were all bombarding the public with their views about the region. Though Cash basically advanced the idea that the South is a land of violent Irishmen, romantics, unrealistic and prideful, resistant to any modern secular or religious ideas, and though he talked freely of rednecks and the exploitation of blacks, his book was reviewed well in the South, and even more widely praised in the North. Time magazine wrote that “Anything written about the South henceforth must start where he leaves off.”

All those things pleasing to an author followed. The Cashes were invited to lunch with Margaret Mitchell and to the mountain home of Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling. He was invited to lecture at the University of North Carolina and to give the commencement address at the University of Texas. Best, Cash was awarded a Guggenheim (and $2,000), and he and Mary decided to spend the next year living and writing in Mexico City.

The journey began with an arduous train ride south, followed by two weeks of digestive disorders that made it difficult even to drink beer. Then, in his hotel roam, Cash began to hear Nazis in the corridors plotting to kill him. Mary dragged him to a psychiatrist who gave Cash an injection of Vitamin B, then back to their room to rest He escaped, and was found hours later in a rented room, hanging on the bathroom door from his necktie. His family back home would always believe that Nazis had done him in. Clayton thinks it was a suicide.

It was a disappointing and inglorious end, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. and Clayton does not try to glamorize it He does attempt to explain it by digressions on Freud and on physiology. Clayton’s book compares favorably with another biography. W. J. Cash, Southern Prophet, by Joseph L Morrison (published by Knopf in 1907). As the title of Morrison’s book suggests. it was an affectionate account, less scholarly than

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Clayton’s. Clayton’s book, barely 225 pages long, moves crisply and swiftly and leaves the reader feeling that there is not much more we are going to find out for sure about this troubled soul.

Cash was not a common man. He was a small-town eccentric, the butt of jokes, and a gifted writer blessed with enormous powers of observation, planted deep in Southern soil, who escaped greatness each time it was offered to him. He gave us one great book which, probably more than any other, has shaped how Southerners (even those who have neither read it nor heard of it) think of themselves.

Tony Dunbar is a New Orleans lawyer. His latest book is Delta Time. An earlier version of this review appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Moving On, But Not to Utopia

Reviewed by John R. Salter Jr.

Vol. 13, No. 2, 1991, pp. 26-27

Farewell–We’re Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration by Carole Marks. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1989. 209 pp., photographs, charts and graphs, notes, bibliography. $37.50 cloth/$12.95 paper).

Well over a century ago, sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies gloomily predicted the demise of essentially rural folk societies in the context of burgeoning urban industrialism. He was certainly partly right though not completely: many tribes and rural communities survive globally. In this important work, sociologist Carole Marks examines in considerable detail the background, flow, and all-around impact of Southern black rural and small town migration into the urban North, primarily during the 1910-1930 era. Sketching the historical and theoretical framework of migration in the broad sense and skillfully analyzing the makeup of the South and the North–with an intricate discussion of feudalism, racism, and capitalism–Marks carries hundreds of thousands of blacks northward from blood-dimmed poverty into something considerably less than utopian. Mostly uneducated and unskilled (not completely), they survived in various ways: grubbing an economic handhold and sometimes a footing; building, inch by inch, a political base. Unable, because of racism, really to assimilate. Culturally American, they were forced into interaction with an oft-cruel and hostile “mainstream”; and, as they became even peripherally urbanized, unable to return South comfortably, their survival takes on the miraculous qualities exhibited by other groups in the Great Shift: e.g., American Indians, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and in some ways Appalachian whites.

Most of the blacks survived in the North (and most did in the South)–as have the “others”–and heavy has been the black impact in the Yankee cities: now frequently a predominant force and a beneficial one in American social consciousness.

Farewell is a welcome blend of a well-organized academic approach with clean, clear, and lucid writing. Although tagged a “neo-Marxist” work in its accompanying brochure, Marks has delineated a variety of forces which produced (and produces) substantial human shifts from “home” to somewhere else. “Labor migrations are not simply movements of individuals selling their labor,” she writes. “Migrants do not move, even for only part of a season, merely for higher wages. Conditions in sending areas must be in a sufficient state of flux to create uncertainty, intense competition, and eventual displacement.”

With academic expertise and sensitivity to the people

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involved (with many illustrative vignettes sprinkled judiciously throughout), Marks gives us a first-rate study.

John Salter, Jr., chairman of the department of Indian studies at the University of North Dakota, is the author of Jackson, Mississippi: An American Chronicle of Struggle and Schism.

Bull and ‘Bombingham’

Reviewed by George Littleton

Vol. 13, No. 3, 1991, pp. 27-28

Until Justice Rolls Down: The Birmingham Church Bombing Case by Frank Sikora. (Tuscaloosa University of Alabama Press, 1991. 175 pp. $22.75).
Bull Connor by William A. Nunnelley. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991. 225 pp. $19.95).

On September 15. 1963, in Birmingham. Alabama, there occurred “the most sickening act of terrorism” of the civil rights movement in the American South. On an otherwise-quiet Sunday morning a bomb exploded in the basement of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls.

The church bombing was the deadly culmination of a summer-long turmoil over the court-ordered desegregation of Birmingham’s all-white public schools. Although just five black children were scheduled to enroll in those schools, Birmingham’s pro-segregation power structure, led by Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor, reacted violently.

In April 1963, following a failed attempt to desegregate the public life of Albany, Georgia, Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference turned its attention toward Birmingham as a symbol of hard-line Southern racism. Under the leadership of King and Birmingham minister Fred Shuttlesworth, thousands of blacks raffled throughout the spring, and gathered daily to march from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

Connor’s all-white fire and police departments grew increasingly anxious over this black presence in Birmingham’s streets and arrested King and other black leaders. It was at this time that King wrote his “Letter From the Birmingham Jail.”

During the first week of May, Connor ordered the use of high-pressure firehoses and police dogs against the demonstrators, and even deployed a police department anti-dot tank. The familiar images of these encounters erased once and for all Birmingham’s image as the “Pittsburgh of the South.” A few weeks later, just as school was starting, the city cemented its image as “Bombingham,” the most violent and segregated city in the South.

From these days of violence, courage, and cataclysmic social change, the bombed church and Bull Connor became symbols of all that was wrong with antiquated segregation codes and racial hatred. Two recent books from the University of Alabama Press examine the events leading up to these days and their aftermath.

In Bull Connor, William A. Nunnelley shows us Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor as a man who had much in common with other Deep South politicians of his day. From humble origins, Connor first gained attention as a colorful radio announcer for the Birmingham Barons, a minor league baseball team. Propelled by this notoriety into the public eye, he ran for a seat in the 1934 Alabama House of Representatives. He won the seat, although he said at the time he had “no more idea of being elected than I did of beating Lou Gehrig out for first base with the Yankees.”

Connor ran as a reformer, opposing higher taxes of any sort and strict civil service laws, emphasizing merit over political favoritism.

Nunnelley’s book details Connor’s eventual alliance with the “Big Mules” and his rise in the political ranks over a thirty-year career, how he survived an early sexual scandal, and how his prejudices gave way to violent efforts to uphold local white customs in the face of a changing legal landscape.

The book’s most absorbing description is how Connor, unlike wily Albany, Georgia, police chief Laurie Pritchett, chose to respond violently to demonstrators in his city.

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The effect of these tactics was perhaps best summarized by President John Kennedy who, upon viewing television reports of the fire hose-police dog incidents, said, “The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.”

Connor, then, was largely responsible for setting the volatile racial mood which choked Birmingham in that summer of 1963. Until Justice Rolls Down: The Birmingham Church Bombing Case details the aftermath of those demonstrations and white resistance to them, which ended in the gruesome death of four innocent children.

Sikora, whose book credits include Selma Lord, Selma, only sketches the turbulent historical background which is fully drawn in Nunnelley’s book. What Sikora gives instead is a complete examination of the bombing itself–including portraits of the slain girls and their families–and an introduction to a young Alabama law student, Bill Baxley, who on the day of the bombing vowed to become a prosecutor and convict the guilty party.

Using court records, FBI reports, oral interviews, and newspaper accounts, Sikora shows how Baxley followed a decade-old trail to fulfill that promise. Hundreds of FBI and Justice Department officials descended on Birmingham in 1963, and traced hundreds of leads, but failed to get a conviction.

It took Baxley, who in 1970, at the age of twenty-eight, bad been elected Alabama’s attorney general, to reopen the case and move it forward. With the help of ace investigator Bob Eddy and women associated with the 1960s Ku Klux Klan and their families–especially Elizabeth Hood Cobbs–Baxley succeeded in having indicted and convicted Robert Chambliss, then seventy-three years old, of the heinous deed. Chambliss went to prison in 1977, fourteen years after the bombing, and died there, still maintaining his innocence.

Sikora’s book reads like a detective story, which in a way it is, and is hard to put down. Nunnelley’s book, meanwhile, is a more sober, less passionate analysis of a man whom he presents as neither saint nor sinner, but simply a power-hungry product of his time who feared and opposed racial equality. Together, the books paint a picture of a city which was torn apart one summer by events that Sikora suggests led directly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The University of Alabama Press has done readers and scholars a great service by bringing these books out at the same time.

George Littleton is publisher of the Eclectic Observer, a weekly newspaper in Elmore county, Alabama.

An Oral History Forerunner

Reviewed by Jane Maguire Abrams

Vol. 13, No. 3, 1991, pp. 28-30

Willie Mae, by Elizabeth Kytle. Foreword by Joyce A. Ladner. (McLean, Virginia: EPM Publications, 1991. 244 pages, $19.95).

Times have changed and with that the reception of Elizabeth Kytle’s book Willie Mae. Published originally in 1958 and named one of the best books of that year by the New York Times, publicity was aimed at the general white reader.

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Some must have found it painful that most black women could only reach their jobs by riding at the back of the bus, that the lady of the house might say “use the toilet but lift up the seat first”; and if work necessitated sleeping on the premises, “make up a pallet.” Otherwise a mattress would have to be cleaned or re-covered.

This is a story of a black domestic’s progress from one white household to another. There were employers who threw pots and pans at each other, and one who preferred throwing beef hash and rice all over the kitchen.

When a seven-year-old tried to avoid a beating from his step-mother for blowing his nose on a sheet, “I got beat my own self because he’d run to me. Him and her be wrassling around me, him trying to get away and her striking out. I cried harder than he did.”

One joyous summer day in Washington, D.C, where he went to take a month-long job as a cook, Willie Mae Wright met President and Mrs. Roosevelt “Before I found a place in the housing project,” she told him, “the house we was living in I could layin the bed … and in bad weather just as much rain came in on my face as would be outdoors. Now we got a nice place to live. I’m living better now than I ever lived in my life.” Wright told Miss. Roosevelt she was making “twenty-five dollars a week and a round-trip ticket on the Streamliner.”

When the book was first published one white reader asked the author, “Do you know what Willie Mae did for me?”

“No, what?”

“Well, until I read about her I never thought about Peggy [her maid] as part of the family group.”

C’mon. Not even as having a mother and father? Such total lack of imagination, common sense and humanity probably would not happen now.

Today such organizations as the American Library Association and the National Education Association are

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advised by black caucuses. These have recommended Willa Mae to teachers of sociology and history, particularly black history. So Willa Mae, with a telling foreword by Joyce Ladner, is born again to a new life, perhaps even classic status, with new readers.

Elizabeth Kytle welcomes them. For in the new introduction to the revised 1990 edition she regrets that “some modem blacks during a certain period, distanced and even seemed to want to ignore the contributions of unlettered … blacks of the generations immediately preceding them . . . This was to deny their debt to the very blacks on whose shoulders they were standing, who by doggedly surviving in devastating circumstances, had scratched out a toehold for descendants.”

You do not have to be either black or young to learn a lot from this book about race relations in our country before 1960. Willie Mae’s cousin went to the voting place and was told “yes,” he could vote, but if he was smart he would not. He did. That night two young white men went to his home and shot him in the presence of his wife and children. Her brother lost his life because he persisted in courting a black lady desired by a white man.

I confess to a small disagreement. Kytle says, “Willie Mae’s language is idiom, common to blacks and whites in the rural South. Dialect,” Kytle contends, is a “gross impropriety,” which she feels “pollutes material with condescension and ridicule.” But is not dialect (like any speech) a vehicle? It is what it transports to the human eye and ear and mind that counts. Joel Chandler Harris, most famous user of dialect, saw Uncle Remus as having “nothing but pleasant memories for the discipline of slavery.” So Harris had a kindly regard for slavery and portrays Uncle Remus as a man with a slave mentality. That is what pollutes, not the dialect.

Zora Neale Hurston conveyed with dialect her respect and affection for the characters in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Margaret Walker uses dialect convincingly in Jubilee. And Kytle’s use of idiom works well. But there is no one way to convey speech. Authors, black and white, have met the challenge in different ways.

Elizabeth Kytle listened and produced an early and brilliant example of what is now called “oral history.”

Jane Maguire Abrams reviews Elizabeth Kytle’s Willie Mae, reissued after more than thirty years. It was a forerunner of what has become a good and valuable stream of such books, re-capturing the life experiences of black Southerners who survived and in their own ways bested the years of enforced segregation. Theodore Rosengarten’s All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw may be the best known. Another of great distinction is He Included Me, The Autobiography of Sarah Rice, transcribed and edited by Louise Westling (University of Georgia Press, 1989). And one of the best has been Jane Maguire’s own On Shares, Ed Brown’s Story (W. W. Norton, 1975).–LD.

Good Writing on Good Food

Reviewed by Randall Williams

Vol. 13, No. 3, 1991, p. 30

Side Orders: Small Helpings of Southern Cookery and Culture, by John Egerton. (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1990. 224 pp. $14.95.).

A highly readable, entertaining and informative tour along the region’s stovetops and sideboards by the author of the definitive Southern Food. The present book consists of previously published essays which presumably makes it a collection of leftovers, and in this case the flavors survive. There are sixty or more recipes, and a lot of what the author describes as “just talk–kitchen talk, table talk.” Even the recipes, for everything from turnip greens to Duke of Norfolk Punch, are anecdotal in style. “The social and cultural dimensions of Southern food are as important as its appearance and taste and quality…It is not just the food itself that matters; it’s also the people, the setting, the precedents,” Egerton writes. In nine chapters on Cookery and Culture, he shows why.

The Cold Hard Truth

By J.L. Chestnut, Jr.

Vol. 13, No. 3, 1991, pp. 32, 31

I have been looking quietly at the Selma school system and the Selma school board. Selma is where I live, but I expect it’s the same elsewhere in the South. I don’t like what I see, though I expected what I found.

The whole focus of public education in Selma misplaced. I sued in 1969 to bring integration to Selma schools. At the time I didn’t realize another type of widespread segregation existed in the schools and was predicated on the foolish criteria of elitism.

How many geniuses are there anywhere? Where does one find a first-class imagination? Who really knows? Imagination is where you find it thus we must search among all the children. There are no throwaway children, only misguided adults.

Selma schools have turned out an army of pretentious graduates through so-called progressive education. A few have been articulate, and some were even highly imaginative and creative. We can be thankful for that small achievement.

But, many Selma graduates were utterly unprepared by their education to live in this world without extensive aid. I am not making the point, at least today, they were estranged from their backgrounds and given skills of limited utility in the real world.

Rather, I am saying something is more basically and fundamentally wrong with public education in Selma. We are missing the target and all our children are suffering as a result. To be ill-clothed, ill-housed and ill-fed is not the only way to suffer deprivation.

I hear white educators, social workers, teachers and others speak of the “culturally deprived child.” Apparently, they think all culturally deprived children live in housing projects and are mostly black. Public education in Selma and in America proceeds on that false premise.

When children have no sense of how they should fit into the society around them, they are culturally deprived–no matter how high their parents’ income. One would think that obvious, but it isn’t in Selma.

When children have no fruitful way of relating the cultural traditions and values of their parents to the diversity of cultural forces with which they must live in this pluralistic

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society, they are culturally deprived.

When children spend a great part of their time in the care of psychoanalysts, they are culturally deprived. It is about time Selma educators recognized obvious facts and acted accordingly.

What is the source of this trouble, these blind spots among educators and board members?

First, local educators and board members, like the rest of this society, are color-oriented in the wrong way. This guarantees misplaced values. They would rather whistle “Dixie” than sing “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Second, there is a dislocation between that which an education is supposed to guarantee a child and the nature of the world in which he or she lives. Our children are not trained to reject enough of the negative values which this society presses upon them.

The children are not trained sufficiently to preserve those values which sustained their forefathers and which constitute an important part of their heritage. They are unable to identify those aspects of American life where it is in their best interest to say “No.”

Too often they are not taught why there are American situations, processes and experiences that are not merely to be avoided, but actually feared. Take a look at what drugs have done to the young from the best middle-income families.

Finally, there is a raging conflict between a child’s own knowledge, his or her own intuitive feeling, and a sense of security to be derived through a gang or something similar that leads to rejection of many of the values offered by the school board and the schools.

What passes for education in Selma and many other communities does a poor, poor job of addressing the situations mentioned here. There are others.

While we fight over the skin color of school board members, and leave the appointment of board members to race-conscious, self-serving municipal politicians, this society is coming loose at the seams.

The school board’s notion of “quality education” is rapidly becoming irrelevant to the young souls entrusted to its care.

I am convinced the school board in my town couldn’t correctly identify the real problems and fashion effective solutions if the fate of Selma hung in the balance.

And, it may.

Is it any better where you live?

Peace.

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