Empowerment and Democratic Education

By Irma Gonzalez

Vol. 13, No. 4, 1991, pp. 3-6

IN THE LAST DECADE, empowerment has surfaced as an important theme in the women’s movement, community organizing and the progressive movement for peace and social justice. It has also emerged as a concept in the push for democratic education.

Virtually all serious discussions of empowerment emphasize the importance of community–of support and shared struggle in the process of empowerment. In fact, most empowerment theorists see individual and community destinies as interdependent and mutually reinforcing. Thus, empowerment is often described as a process of individual and group transformation in which individuals develop “mastery of their lives” and “participatory competence” through group problem-solving and collective action. Empowerment comes through dialogue and shred work to improve the lives of all members of a community. In the classroom, the empowerment of any one student is thus tied to the empowerment of her or his classmates. Or, as one teacher describes it, it is the climate of mutual respect in her class, where the group accepts that

There are compelling links between empowerment and democracy. A democratic culture fosters the progressive evolution of peoples’ capacities to control their lives and act with others to fulfill individual and community goals. That is, democratic cultures are empowering cultures. Likewise, empowering teaching is democratic teaching. Yet the kinds of teaching and learning to which most students in this country are subjected are neither democratic nor empowering, and they do much more to perpetuate undemocratic forms of social relationship than to create and sustain a democratic society.

Over seventy years ago, John Dewey argued that education needs to have an anchoring idea and ideal, and that in the United States we had such a concept available–democracy. In placing democracy at the helm of the educational enterprise, Dewey situated education squarely

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at the center of his theory of democratic society, exploring the role education could and should play in the continued creating and maintenance of democratic cultures and institutions. A commitment to democracy is not a commitment to process alone. It is rooted in and informed by a moral agenda guided by a commitment to human dignity, social justice and liberation. It is through democratic empowerment that we can break free from the constraints of domination in our institutions, in our cultures and in our everyday experiences.

Indeed, empowerment and democracy are complementary ideas. On the one hand, genuine democracy depends for its survival on having empowered citizens. It can only be created and maintained by individuals with the skills, values and dispositions necessary to frilly participate in their communities. On the other band, democratic institutions and social processes are uniquely able to provide the conditions for individual and community empowerment.

Empowerment embodies the idea of self-determination, a process through which individuals and communities increasingly control their own destinies without imposing on others. The link between controlling one’s own life and valued resources while simultaneously respecting others’ rights to do the same is crucial to empowerment theory. It is this dual dimension of empowerment that makes the nature of power such a vital and problematic question.

Democracy and empowerment need a conception of power that is not based on relationships of domination. A democratic theory of power must encompass the power that restricts freedom and denies popular sovereignty, the power that is manifest in resistance to domination, and the power that is the expression of liberty and self-determination. Such a theory must be able to describe a power that empowers people to democratic participation.

Educators seeking to understand the process of empowerment and to develop pedagogies of empowerment are confronted with fundamental questions relating to the nature of power relationships in their classrooms. These questions include: What are the dynamics of power relationships in classrooms? How do teachers and students relate to one another in empowering classrooms? How do students relate to their peers? Put differently, what is the nature of power that empowers and is empowering?

Most discussions of power share a common conception of power as a relationship of domination, as power over. Dominating relationships are characterized by inequality: situations in which an individual or group in order to fulfill its desires, has the ability to control the behavior, thoughts, and/or values of others. Power over is characterized by competition, hierarchy and win/lost situations.

Power with is an alternative conception of power appearing in an obscure but growing literature. Power with is manifest in relationships of co-agency. These relationships are characterized by people finding ways to satisfy their desires and to fulfill their interests without imposing on one another. The relationship of co-agency is one in which individuals and groups fulfill their desires by acting together. It is jointly developing capacity. Power with is characterized by cooperation, synergistic interactions and the possibility of win/win relationships.

Power over is inadequate to describe a power that empowers people to democratic participation. Power with, on the other hand, offers an aspect of power which resonates with the possibilities of community, participatory decision making and democratic empowerment.

Seth Kreisberg conducted an in-depth dialogical interview study with six educators who were active in Boston Area Educators for Social Responsibility. The interviews examined the nature of power that the teachers experienced within ESR and that they sought to foster in their classrooms. The six teachers saw themselves as the locus of power over in their classrooms and identified entering into power relationships with their students as their greatest challenge. The central themes that emerged from this study were the importance of supportive community, dialogue and shared decision making in empowering pedagogy.

Building an Empowering Community

The six teachers’ experiences of power in empowerment suggest key themes for developing models for the empowerment of teachers. First, teachers must share control over their schools and their teaching–they must be equal participants in decision making in their schools. Teacher empowerment will only be supported when teachers can come together to solve practical problems

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and when they have opportunities for dialogue. Teachers must be able to develop and express their voices through the ongoing practice of pedagogical reflection and action. Empowering schools will provide teachers with ongoing opportunities to develop a critical awareness of their lives and experiences, of the meaning and impact of their teaching, of their students’ lives and learning experiences, and of the nature of our society.

To begin a process of empowerment, teachers must initiate a process of personal and institutional change that will lead to the transformation of both the structure of the schools in which they work and their relationships with their colleagues and students. One teacher describes the structure of his classroom:

The implications for the practice of education are dramatic: to transform our schools from places characterized by human isolation, competition for scarce resources and relationships of domination, and submission into democratic communities in which people enter into critical inquiry characterized by mutual support, cooperative decision making and synergistic learning. In such learning communities people can meet express and act on their concerns for themselves, their communities and the greater global community. They can discover and begin to live the meaning of democracy. After one year in a democratic classroom, a student noted:

The challenge for teachers committed to transforming their power relationships with their students and creating empowering and democratic classrooms is complex and difficult Teachers are situated within institutions that are saturated by cultures of control and domination which are deeply resistant to change. Indeed, these educators encounter resistance on all levels, including resistance within themselves. They question the value of their efforts and find their past experiences difficult to transcend, their old patterns difficult to break. Outside the classroom they face resistance from administrators, colleagues and parents who question whether “real” teaching and learning is occurring and whether students are learning what they need to learn to “survive” and “succeed” in the “real world.” After the first year of co-creating a democratic classroom, one teacher comments:

Inside the classroom, these teachers often face resistance from students who may ask why the teacher isn’t “teaching.” Students may feel uncomfortable being asked to think and choose for themselves, and may be unwilling or unable to take increased responsibility for their learning. In fact, students arrive in their classrooms having been shaped by and conditioned to respond to teacher-dominated teaching and learning. They often come to class feeling so powerless, mistrusting and cynical that creating a supportive context with transformed power relationships is a struggle for both teachers and students.

The fact is, students do not come to these classrooms with the predispositions nor the skills to take control of their learning. Working with students to create a more democratic and empowering learning environment takes time, skill and patience. In the process teachers mediate between conventional rules and structures and their students’ emerging abilities to participate in and create an empowering community. As one teacher in the study noted:

How can we create classrooms that more fully acknow-

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ledge the humanity and aspiration of young people?

At the center of the challenge is the struggle to break down structures and patterns which dehumanize and disempower and to cultivate forms of relationship that provide affirmation, hope and a sense of possibility. Maxine Green addresses this when she writes:

We can create such spaces. But it is not easy. If we are to make democratic education in our culture a reality we must come to understand how teachers and students can and do create spaces where they encounter on another as persons, spaces in which lived worlds are being examined, and in which imagined worlds begin to be lived.

Irma Gonzalez is associated with the Peace Development Fund in Amherst, Mass. This article is based on the work of her husband Seth Kreisberg, who died in December 1989. Transforming Power: Domination, Empowerment and Education by Seth Kreisberg is being published in January1992 by the State University of New York (SUNY) Press, Albany, NY.

Bloodlines: A Case Study of Educational Empowerment

By Jay MacLeod

Vol. 13, No. 4, 1991, pp. 7-9

THE RURAL ORGANIZING AND CULTURAL CENTER (ROCC) is a county-wide membership organization serving Holmes County, Miss., one of the nation’s poorest counties. Through community organizing, ROCC strives to bring about changes in the social-economic-political fabric of the county that address the causes of poverty.

As its name implies, the Rural Organizing and Cultural Center is founded on the premise that community organizing and local culture should reinforce each other. Personal and collective empowerment require an awareness of our culture and history but this awareness doesn’t happen automatically. Appreciation of culture needs to be nurtured and this ROCC has endeavored to do.

The year 1988 marked the birth of a new ROCC project designed to recover and explore local history. As part of a summer educational program serving sixty youngsters, a class of eighth and ninth graders produced Bloodlines, a seventy-page magazine based on interviews with elderly residents of the county.

We were aided that first summer by a $975 mini-grant from Foxfire Teacher Outreach. In return, we agreed to critique a draft of Eliot Wigginton’s magazine course guide. The course guide proved indispensable.

Consisting of classroom exercises Wigginton has refined over twenty-five years of teaching, it became our map to the magazine production process. We altered many of the specific techniques and exercises to fit our circumstances but stuck to the underlying Foxfire philosophy of democratic, experiential education.

How disorienting it can be for students when they realize that they are in charge. In a school where the switch is still the sanction, the kids were flabbergasted and excited at the prospect of making up their own rules. I always get a kick out of how students chafe against teacher discipline but, given the opportunity, set a strict disciplinary code for themselves. Initially bewildered and even resistant to taking responsibility for their own learning, the students soon embraced the idea.

By the end of the first week the class enrollment had doubled and the students had planned the steps ahead of them: selecting people to interview, drawing up the interview guide, conducting the interview, transcribing, editing, acing a follow-up interview, writing the introduction, drawing the illustrations, typing the interview into columns, and laying out the final copy for the printer.

Interviewing is the crux of the whole project and the students spent countless hours honing their questioning techniques. Instead of writing out the questions, the students learned to construct an interview guide–a series of prompts to guide the interview. This ensures that the students listen to their sources as they speak and can follow up on what’s being said, taking the interview into new territory.

Next, the students began to practice their interviewing. They learned to avoid asking yes/no questions and to exhaust a subject by asking follow-up questions before moving on to another topic. They practiced on their parents, on other teachers, on me, and on each other. After several days of drills and mock interviews, most students were beginning to get a feel of how to test out experiences, stories, and information from their sources. They were developing listening skills, concentration, and poise required for a good interview.

The first interview was a collective effort. Three students conducted the interview in class so that we could all critique it afterwards. By the end of the hour-and-a-half session, the entire class was standing around Mrs. Alice Rule and her interrogators pitching in asking questions. The next day, we transcribed in class the first bits of the Alice Rule interview. It was slow going, but the lessons learned were strong ones. We worked through plenty of snags as we considered how to handle spellings and apostrophes to reflect pronunciation.

It is absolutely crucial that the students be firmly ensconced in the driver’s seat throughout this whole process. Having the students work through and democratically resolve questions and problems as they come

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up can be tedious and time consuming, but there is no substitute. As Eliot Wigginton paints out in his course guide, the creation of a final product is a means to motivate and educate students. The extent to which I lay my hands on tat product and supply those skills necessary for its creation is the extent to which I diminish not only the project’s power to motivate, but also its ability to educate and excite anyone but me.

Bloodlines demonstrates the extent to which oral history can serve as a bridge between oral and written language. Otherwise defeated by a blank piece of paper, many students positively enjoyed transcribing their tapes. Some of their efforts were superhuman. Joseph went home to his three-bedroom house that accommodated twenty-one people last summer and returned the next day with fifty-one pages of transcription. Another student who had failed seventh grade two years running went home with his taped interview and came to class the next day with a twenty-five page transcription, written by flashlight in the bed he shares with two nephews. Because those hours of labor were perceived as personally relevant and as a step in the creation of a tangible product of value to the community, motivation was not an issue.

Almost all of my students had real difficulty understanding, let alone developing, a rationale or criteria for what should be moved where. My questioning met with a lot of blank faces. “Which way would make it flow better?” “What would be the logical order here?” “What sequence will the reader most easily follow?” At the beginning of the session, much to my chagrin, I’d end up answering most of my own questions. But a few pages into it, most would begin to catch on…. As students edit their interviews, they engage in a process very similar to that which will be used in their own writing. Rearranging the interview so that it runs smoothly and logically from beginning to end, they

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learn to organize, group, sequence, and paragraph–to make sense of the written word.

This task, like those of interviewing, taking photos, and drawing pictures, tends to break down the hierarchy of competence among the students. “High academic achievers” often become impatient and frustrated trying to cut and paste their interviews so that the margins are uniform and straight while those who struggled with editing and writing their introductions often turn out to be natural paste-up artists. This reshuffling of the hierarchy works wonders for student’s confidence, often inflating and deflating in just the right proportion.

By this time the summer program had long since ended, and the students were feverishly working at my house in small groups after school and on weekends.,.. [D]ebate raged on two issues: what to call the magazine and what price to charge for it. In order to make the book affordable locally, they decided on $2.50, and “Bloodlines” emerged a narrow victor over “Hard Times” and “Struggling to Survive.”

We all traveled in a van down to Jackson to pick Bloodlines up at the print shop. Here were seventh, eighth, and ninth grade students, some of whom had almost a fear of the written word, picking up their book. Excitement and emotion ran so high that almost no one paid the least bit of attention to the owner’s explanation of the printing process. The students emerged from visits to newspaper and television stations jumping in the air, shouting that the media had agreed to do a story on them. In the end, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger did a feature article on Bloodlines and a television news program awarded their weekly “Spirit of Mississippi” award to the Bloodlines staff.

Students involved in the Bloodlines project went on to compile a history of the civil rights movement in Holmes County, Minds Stayed on Freedom, published by Westview Press. With S.V. Marshall High School, they also produced a videotape. “Struggle for Equality in Holmes County: 1860-1960.” All are available from the Rural Organizing and Cultural Center, 103 Swinney Lane, Lexington, MS 39095.

This account of the Bloodlines project was condensed from a report prepared by Jay MacLeod, who after three years with the Rural Organizing and Cultural Center, is studying theology in England. Bloodlines is among several efforts for democratic education described in the forth coming Crossing the Tracks: Alternatives to Tracking and Ability Grouping in the Middle Grades, by Anne Wheelock, senior policy analyst of the Massachusetts Advocacy Center, with support from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, to be published in January 1992.

Communities and Education

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 13, No. 4, 1991, pp. 9-11

Virtually every report on public education in the last half-decade has worried about one central, demographic projection: in the face of growing poverty, racial minorities–the least educated, the least skilled, and the mast frequent victims of discrimination–will be the fastest growing segment of our workforce over the next fifty years. Unless public education improves for these groups, all Americans will suffer losses in productivity, social security, and, perhaps, domestic tranquility.

While these statistics have a compelling message, other trends–largely overlooked–will also have profound consequences for education in America Because of the decline in the birthrate of most American families, the nation has experienced over the last twenty years a decline in the number of school-age children. This trend has reduced to a very small minority in the population the number of American households which now have children in elementary or secondary public schools.

In 1960 virtually half of all households had children under the age of 18. By 1988 hardly more than one in three households had such children. When adjusted to reflect only households with children of school age, these figures shrink to only one in five. Therefore, today only twenty percent of the households in the nation have children of school age. In several urban and rural communities, this decline in the real connection between public schools and the community has become even more pronounced, due to white flight to suburbs or private schools over the last twenty years. In Atlanta, for example, the enrollment in public education declined from a level of 115,582 in 1969 to only 61,378 in 1990.

This transformation has distanced most American households from any direct personal interest, understanding, or involvement in the public schools. It has reduced to a small minority those members of the community who see the fate of public education in personal terms, at home, on a daily basis.

With distances also have come changes in how most adults see the nature of problems in public education. According to an annual Gallup poll on education, forty

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percent of Americans in 1970 mentioned structural problems–matters such as lack of financial support, getting good teachers, and a lack of proper facilities–as the chief obstacles of the local public schools. Only twenty-eight percent of those polled stated that local public education suffered chiefly from various shortcomings of students themselves. In sharp contrast, last year, 66 percent of the respondents in the Gallup poll mentioned aspects of students’ behavior as the chief problems in public education, and few mentioned structural problems.

In essence, the Gallup polls suggest a major shift in public understanding over the last twenty years–away from perceiving educational problems as systemic in nature and towards believing that student behavior (and, to a lesser extent, parental and teacher behavior) constitutes the chief problems. This transformation has taken place at a time when the number of American households with a direct connection to the public schools has shrunk to a very small part of the whole community.

These shifts in our local communities and their attitudes towards public schools present an urgency for communities to become more meaningfully involved in educating all of their children. It was, perhaps, part of the reason that in 1989 a panel of noted black leaders concluded that few changes in public education for African-American children would occur unless the black community demanded schools make basic changes. John Hope Franklin, its chair, states that the accession to office of more than 1500 black school board members and 125 black superintendents is no guarantee of significant changes in the public schools. ‘The black community must insist on educational excellence for its children, regardless of who is in charge of the system.” Another commission, the National Action Council for Minority Achievement–chaired by Ray Marshall–made several broad recommendations in its 1990 report Among others, the Commission found that “minority communities must mobilize to participate in the education process, both in planning for change and for making those changes happen.

While minorities are surely underrepresented in the process of changing schools, the vacuum in community leadership encompasses all segments. Although no study has been done of community leaders in education partnerships across the country, data for more than 30 collaborative efforts in 18 states from California to New York in 1988 revealed that community leaders, especially minority leaders, constitute the least-represented groups among the education partnerships–even those partnerships aimed at addressing primarily the needs of minority disadvantaged students. In Albuquerque, N.M., a local dropout prevention partnership, in fact, called itself the “school/business collaborative” with relatively little involvement from community leaders. And in Savannah, Ga., two citywide youth partnerships have existed for several years: one has been an all-white board of businessmen and city administrators, and the other often had to struggle to maintain more than symbolic participation from indigenous community leaders.

Such a dearth of community leadership involved in changing public education certainly does not appear surprising in light of the changed demographic trends of the last twenty years; however, even community leaders who see the connections between public schools and the public good face real, practical barriers in becoming and remaining effectively involved in the process of restructuring the schools. First, they may face the high cost of

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involvement. Too often, school administrators, social service agencies, and business representatives find that the most convenient times and places to meet in partnership on issues are those when volunteer community leaders–and most working people–are unavailable to meet unless they take off from their own jobs. Sometimes community leaders in poor urban neighborhoods–such as tenant association presidents–have trouble incurring the regular, incremental costs of transportation to and from distant places, such as the school district’s central office or a businessman’s board room. In time, these inconveniences and costs can become real barriers for indigenous community leaders in poor areas.

A far more substantial barrier, however, is the process by which schools are fundamentally changed today; it is a process involving issues, forums, and concepts which, for most community leaders, especially in the South, are new and not fully understood. During much of the past thirty years, the most pressing issues of public education have been defined for most community leaders by the U. S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Lest we forget the very existence of public education remained an open question in some Southern states as late as the 1960s, and many Southern communities did not experience any real efforts of racial integration of the public schools until the early 1970s. Throughout the nation in almost every major urban area over the last two decades, school desegregation was the primary issue and litigation was the principle method for resolving it.

Today, both the primary issues and the means for change are quite different. In many urban and rural communities, minorities are the majority race in the schools: for those and other communities, counting students by race in schools is no longer as important as how well students by race can count. An enlarged sense of community self-interest, (especially in the business sector) and more than a decade of local, political change opening up previously all-white local governments have made collaboration, as much as confrontation, a primary vehicle for improving schools.

Both the new issues and the new approach leave many community leaders truly without any solid base of recent experience from which to understand how to develop their own positions, strategies, and remedies for systemic changes. As a result, community leaders are far more familiar today with trying to change an individual student failing in school than with changing an individual school failing its students.

No formal or informal network of support and assistance exists for community leaders to understand the issues in improving schools or to sharpen skills and strategies for assuring that their constituents’ children–at-risk youth–have the best schools. If national leaders, teachers, and school administrators have been unable to develop fully their own understanding of why and how to change schools today, how can community leaders be expected to acquire such an understanding? If educators have difficulty avoiding isolation, can community leaders, who have no access to regular professional development be alert and effective on issues related to educating at-risk children?

The consequences of uninformed, ineffective, or inactive community leadership can be devastating to public education. Often, community leaders are essential in developing broad-based participation within rural communities or urban neighborhoods. They can help spur or hinder parental involvement, and they establish the legitimacy of proposed reforms within local communities. Community leaders are often the most visible, genuine representatives of neighborhoods in the areas of at-risk children and can shape the level of community acceptance of and involvement in change. They are also quite important in maintaining a level of accountability for elective local school board members and superintendents.

The importance of community leadership comes home to several communities in need of new finances for vital school improvements. In the last three years alone, small communities and major cities across the Deep South often failed to pass major bond issues for the public schools. In each case, the support for the bond vote was lukewarm or nonexistent, even in poor areas where the bond funding would have brought additional resources and needed changes.

Without able leadership from all segments of the community–without community leaders who can join as able, equal education partners–the capacity to restructure and improve schools across the Southern states and the courts will be limited and the momentum for creating a school environment in which all students can be–and want to be–knowledgeable and capable, will falter, if not collapse.

Alabama native Steve Suitts is executive director of the Southern Regional Council.

Selma: What Has Changed?

By Christina Matthews

Vol. 13, No. 4, 1991, pp. 12-15

More than two decades after the civil rights movement came to Selma. Ala, the public school system there remains segregated. Schools in Selma, like many schools throughout the U.S.. have been resegregated within the city, within buildings, and within classrooms. 1990 saw angry parents begin to protest when the first superintendent to challenge the Selma system–not coincidentally also the first African American superintendent–was fired, in a Board of Education (BOE) vote divided strictly along racial lines.

Blatant as the problem is in Selma, it is dangerous to see it as an exception. Selma is not just a place somehow stuck in time, failing to be enlightened while the rest of the country has progressed. Tracking in the schools plagues New Haven, Conn.’s children as it does Selma’s. Harassment for organizing opposition to such institutions occurs elsewhere as well. Certainly George Bush, in calling for the “power of the individual” suggests this country’s intolerance for collective action, and its impatience with calls for a reshaping of institutions. In a sense, Selma once again stands as an example. a place where the injustices of a racist and classist society are blatant enough as to make them easily recognizable.

Though the Voting Rights Act followed closely on the heels of the violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, many things haven’t changed in Selma. In this small Southern city of 27,000, 53 percent of whom are black. Joe T. Smitherman, the mayor who in 1965 lauded Sheriff Jim Clark’s infamous attack on demonstrators at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. still holds that office. Clark himself is no longer the sherift but F. D. “Cotton” Nichols, a deputy in 1965, now holds the position. Then-city attorney Mclean Pitts is gone, but his son, Henry Pitts, now defends the city’s interests on legal matters. Only in 1972 did Selma begin to elect city council members by district rather than in at-large elections.

Predictably, the African American citizens of Selma–as elsewhere–continue to suffer unequal treatment. One particularly devastating area of discrimination has been the city’s public schools. Through a tracking system, the now-integrated public school system continues to provide white students with a better education than it does black students.

The city council, which has never had a black majority, appoints the school board, and only five of the eleven members of the school board are African American, though the school system has had a majority black student body since 1975. Prior to 1991, the schools had never been governed by a school board with a black majority. The first African American superintendent, Dr. Norward Roussell, was hired in 1987.

The system Dr. Roussell inherited was known for its practice of leveling,” a plan of organized “levels of instruction” that assured white parents their children would get preferential treatment.” “Levels of instruction” has translated, in Selma, into a rigid tracking system. For many black students and poor, white students, it has meant being trapped in the lower levels of a hierarchical system of instruction, where they received a second rate education and the message that they are inherently stupider than students in the upper levels. The different levels–there were four until the mid1980s, and there are still three–were originally kept physically separate as well, with lunch hours scheduled at different times. Students rarely had a chance to form friendships with students in other levels, and, because of the racial segregation in the levels, this also meant that friendships between white and black students were even rarer than they might otherwise have been. The schools were effectively resegregated within the walls of a single school building.

Until recently, when Dr. Roussell made some changes, assignment of students to their “lever remained completely at the discretion of teachers, who did not have to justify their placement of a child based on test scores or even past performance. Though students placement was ostensibly based on ability, students–especially black students–with high test scores often found themselves in the lower levels. White students, particularly those from influential families, enjoyed the courses available only to students in the top levels, and reaped the benefits of some equipment, like computers, that was specifically intended for the top level. No black teachers taught Advanced Placement level classes of history or math. Only fifteen percent of black students took algebra, though eighty-five percent of American public high school students take the class. Neither the students themselves nor their parents could do anything to move their child out of classes that were too easy, the decision rested with teachers alone.

Many parents were unaware of the policy, and others believed that the system would recognize and account for the

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abilities of their children. Because there was no written policy, parents could only rely on teachers. “They told the public it was a means of grading, and we believed that … we thought they’d move [the students] up. We were very trusting of the system … but it took a lot of motivation out of the kids,” said Nancy Sewell, a librarian at Selma High. Her daughter, who became the first (and, so far, the only) black valedictorian was placed in level II math in the sixth grade. She wasn’t challenged by the work in that class, and Mrs. Sewell asked that her daughter be moved up to the more difficult class, and the teacher told her she should be worrying about her other children, not her daughter, and refused to move the girl up. Only in the next year was the girl moved up, and only because, Mrs. Sewell felt, the guidance counselor was both black and a personal friend of hers. She believed that the “officials” didn’t know of the switch.

Failures of the Selma City School System to respond to the needs of children–particularly bight African American children–abound. Children who tested extremely well on reading tests have been told that they are not “mature enough” to move up to a more challenging class; black children with higher test scores have remained in lower levels than white children with lower test scores.

It has been nineteen years since the Selma school system became integrated. The student body has been majority African American since 1975. four years after integration. Currently, more than eighty percent of the students are black. Until very recently, the school had never been governed by a school board with a black majority. In all of the years since integration, there has been one black valedictorian and one black salutatorian.

Dr. Norward Roussell came to Selma from New Orleans In February of 1987. Especially because of Selma’s history as a town with troubled race relations, he had high hopes of demonstrating to the country that integrated public education could work and work well. When he arrived, he found celous discrepancies between the facilities at historically black mid historically white elementary schools: some black schools had received their books as hand-me-downs from white schools; some had outdated maps with only forty-eight states on them: sonic of the white schools had computerlabs, while the black schools had maybe two or three computers for the whole school.

Roussell also found that there was a system of leveling” in place, a system that everyone knew about and talked about, but for which there was no written policy. He had never heard the term before–but had heard of “grouping.” lie had heard of “tracking.” but he had never heard of “leveling.” ‘I’m not against grouping students,” he said, “hut I am against tracking, and this leveling thing tracks students in a way that–given there was no criteria -black and poor students were sort of left to chance as to where they would fall out in the grouping.” According to Roussell, some of the students in the higher levels had low scores, and some of the students in the lower levels had high scores–meaning that depending on who you were, you got into the class.” Many parents did not realize that their children were in lower levels or what that meant, as the children brought home As and Bs. Only later, when told that their children were not qualified for advanced classes in high school since they had been in lower level classes in junior high and elementary school, did they recognize the reality of levels, and what that meant for their children’s educations and their futures. According to Malika Sanders, at the time a senior at Selma High, “it levels a students’s spirit. The teacher picks who they want to be in level I. The few black students who are in level I are usually middle class.”

It was Dr. Roussell’s discovery that the “leveling” system was a tracking system that ultimately got him fired by the school board. “Leveling” had been an issue of concern before 1990, when protests erupted over the topic. Parents had spoken with Roussell about the problem. and BEST had been raising the issue for some time. BEST (Best Education Support Team) was a coalition of concerned African American parents, who, in addition to lobbying for changes in the schools, sponsored educational programs outside the schools. BEST’ met with Roussell to discuss the leveling issue in September of 1988, soon after Roussell arrived, and spoke at school board meetings, voicing their concern over the leveling system.” Teachers like Loretta Winberly, a guidance counselor in the Selma City Schools who knew that tracking was a reality, joined BEST. BEST also included many leaders from the African American community. Among others, it included County Commissioner Perry Varner, State Senator Hank Sanders, Danny Crenshaw, director of Dallas County Youth Services and Ronald Peoples, dean of students at a local college.

A few of BESTs prominent members worked at a local law firm, the largest all-black firm in Alabama, and later, much of the responsibility for the protests was placed on those members, particularly attorney Rose Sanders, Senator Sander’s wife. In addition to being a lawyer, Rose Sanders works extensively with children, writing, and putting together musicals, and organizing leadership camps. She is also very outspoken, and much of the rancor toward the protest movements was directed at her, as well as toward her colleagues at the law firm. Many of the white opponents of the movement saw BEST as her pawn, ignoring the other people involved.

Dr. Roussell feels that the changes he made in grouping students was one of the primary reasons for the level of control the school board exercised over him while he was superintendent and ultimately for his firing in December of 1989. Roussell claims that he was not given autonomy usually given a superintendent; black members of the BOE and others also claimed that Roussell’s hands were tied by the Board.

Roussell asserts that the changes he made in the school in general, and in the leveling system in particular, were to

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benefit all students, not just African American children. The board, though, considered his challenges to the leveling system threatening, as tampering with a “sacred cow.” Roussell believes he paid for his challenge in decreased autonomy and, ultimately, with the loss of his job.

On Dec, 21 1989, the school board met to discuss the renewal of Dr. Roussell’s contact. Without stating their reasons, the white members of the board voted not to renew his contract. The five black members of the board walked out in protest.

On the 28th, black board members gave their reasons for walking out in a statement signed by all five. Among them was the fact that “Dr. Roussell was not allowed the same authority and freedom as previous superintendents.” They said that “[t]he unjust firing of Norward Roussell was not the only reason for our resignations. It was the final action in a series of events that occurred over the past years. “They claimed that some white members had been trying for some time to terminate Roussell’s contract. Shiela Okoye. one of the members who walked out, said that in leaving they were demonstrating just how much power they actually had: none.

The day after the white members of the HOE voted to fire Roussell, BEST members and began picketing.

Although the temperature was well below freezing, they picketed City Hall, as well as two downtown banks where two school board members had ties.

Picketing continued after Christmas. and BEST members talked of organizing a school boycott. Roussell went on record opposing the boycott, to which BEST responded in a leaflet: “Dr. Roussell went on record opposing the boycott. We are morally required to speak out for him and our children. BOYCOTT SELMA CITY SCHOOLS.” On the first day back from vacation, almost 1500 students stayed away from the city schools, one-third of Selma High students boycotting. Roussell called for the schools to close, but his decision was overridden by school board chairman Carl Barker and Mayor Smitherman. and schools remained open.

On Feb. 2. the school board notified Roussell that he was suspended for the remainder of his contact period because his continuing presence was “disruptive.

On Feb. 4. the five white members of the school board appointed Selma High School principal F.D. Reese as acting superintendent. The black school board members were not notified of the meeting.

BEST protests continued, focusing largely around City Hall. where demonstrators sat in alter-hours. A confrontation in the mayor’s office on Monday, Feb. 5, resulted in the protests’ first arrests. Rose Sanders, County Commissioner Perry Varner, and attorney Carlos Williams were all arrested when they tried to force their way into the mayor’s office after he had kept them waiting for an hour-and-a-half–they did not have an appointment but had been told that the mayor would see them.

BEST called another boycott and in light of that and because the protests downtown had escalated tensions, school was canceled on Wednesday, Feb. 7. At around noon on Feb. 8, about two-hundred Selma High School students took over the cafeteria, and refused to come out until Roussell was reinstated. They remained in the school until the evening of the following Monday, when Roussell visited them and said that he would resign unless they came out During their stay Mayor Smitherman asked Governor Guy Hunt for National Guardsman and state troopers, which the governor sent Governor Hunt said “I’ve never been known to be fond of lawyers. I think they cause more trouble than they settle. I think that’s what’s happening in Selma.” School remained canceled “for safety reasons” until Feb. 13th, and when it resumed the schools were still guarded by Alabama State Troopers and military police as well as by most of Selma’s own police force; a helicopter hovered overhead as school reopened. The extra security at the schools–the troopers and the MPs–stayed in place until the 20th.

White students began to leave the Selma school system soon after the protests began, most of them for Selma’s segregated private schools. The exodus of white students left the city schools eighty-five percent black–they had been about seventy-five percent black before the protests began. Smitherman later asserted that it appeared to be reaching a point where only those whose parents cannot afford private schools would remain in the public system.

Protests continued downtown through February. with protesters continuing to sit in at City Hall both day and night and sleeping in tents set up outside the building.

On Feb. 18, Roussell filed a $10 million suit against the BOE under Title VII of the 1977 Civil Rights Act; he asserted that his firing was a response to his “dismantling” of a leveling system which offered a better education to white

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students than to black ones.

Attempts to quiet the protest movement did not stop at restraining orders and compelling students to pledge not to boycott. In the course of that spring, numerous leaders of the protests were threatened with loss of their jobs.

The city filed a complaint against employees of Central Alabama Youth Services, a local juvenile detention facility. They had, the city alleged, been involved in unlawful conduct which disrupted government operations. CAYS director Danny Crenshaw was among those cited for contempt because of his involvement in the protests.

Dr. H. Mallory Reeves, husband of white BOE member Martha Reeves, wrote to Selma University’s trustee chairman in Mobile, calling for the removal of Ron Peoples, dean of students at Selma University; “his unstable behavior and unreasonable political views can only harm your school and the community of Selma,” he wrote. Peoples had bee arrested on March 26 along with other protesters.

The city targeted Yusef Salaam, a staff attorney at Legal Services Corp., which provides legal help for people who cannot afford to hire a lawyer. The city urged Legal Services headquarters in Washington. D.C. to investigate his involvement in “illegal” protests, providing videotapes and photos of his demonstration involvement. The city asked that the Selma office of Legal Services be closed, or at least that Salaam be fired or transferred.

Attorneys J.L Chestnut, Rose Sanders, Hank Sanders, and Carlos Williams, all partners at Alabama’s largest black law firm, and all of whom had been involved in the protests, were investigated by the Alabama Bar Association for “illegal” activities.

Roussell accepted a $l50,000 buy out offer from the BOE, and resigned on May 7, agreeing also to drop his lawsuit against the BOE. He also agreed not to reapply for the job.

BEST’s tactics have not pleased everyone in Selma’s African American community. However, like Shiela Okoye, one of the school board members who walked out when Roussell was fired, many approve of the fact that BEST is challenging the status quo in Selma. “Someone needs to do it.” she said. Nancy Sewell, too, who was never a member of BEST and was involved in only a few of the protests, said “Hats off to them for hanging in there. I may disagree with some of the tactics, but I support their ideas, and they are being persistent about bringing about meaningful change.” She said that the whole affair has been a “rude awakening” for her “I am a moderate, I tried to be ‘fair,’ and I really felt that that man [Roussell] would make a difference.” Both Sewell and Okoye believe that Roussell was fired for trying to change the leveling system, and that his supposed alignment with BEST hurt him, too.

White leaders of Selma have a less charitable attitude toward BEST and its motives. Chamber of Commerce employee Edie Jones, one of the BOE leaders seeking to fire Roussell, sees BEST as an almost demonic force trying to rip Selma apart. “They want complete control of this community and everything in it,” she said. She sees their tactics as suspect as well as their motives, and says of their complaints, “these people are very, very convincing, they’re very skilled,” and that, “if anything, poor Norward Roussell was used by those people.”

Mayor Smitherman declined to meet with me despite many calls and a lot of waiting, but his attitude seems evident. A Newsweek photographer said that Smitherman characterized Roussell as “an overpaid nigger from New Orleans,” though the mayor denies having said that He said the protesters “believe in the law of the jungle, in whoever growls the loudest.” City Council president Carl Morgan apparently told another out-of-town reporter that the school protests were led by “two little nigger girls.,, White parents sponsored an all-white prom this year, and one white Selma High student said that it was “a way for us to get back at them for what they did to us in February.”

Prominent members of the African American community have been involved in BEST and the protests. Many of them are well-educated (both of the Sanders graduated from Harvard Law School) people; many have jobs that serve the community, such as jobs at Legal Services and jobs in education. Hank Sanders is a state senator; Perry Varner an elected county commissioner. The black members of the school board, none of them in BEST, walked out of their own accord. The black city council members, also unrelated to BEST, also walked out over related issues.

In the fall of 1990, an agreement was reached in Selma which will probably not solve the problems; it may, however, protect the power structure from protests and accusations of blatant racism. The school board will now rotate racial majorities each year–a move following almost exactly the proposal that was put before the city council by black members in February. The city and BEST agreed to drop all suits against one another.

Update: As school began in the fall of 1991, 24 African American student were suspended and threatened with expulsion for allegedly attacking a white student. When BEST protested again, the expulsions were voided, but several student were facing charges in juvenile court.

Before this incident, a lawsuit was filed protesting the violation of policies in the hiring of a new superintendent, selected at a school board meeting where four black em members, including the chair, were absent.

Young people who organized the 1990 sit-in at Selma High School have produced a play about their experiences with tracking, “Track Meet of Freedom,” which they are performing around the region. For information about the play call Gloria Lassiter, 205-788-4042.

Christina Matthews wrote this article while a student at Yale University. She is currently living in Mexico.

Focus on School Desegregation: Is the Past Repeating?

By Staff

Vol. 13, No. 4, 1991, pp. 17-19

Introduction

Perhaps the most important school desegregation case since Brown v. Board of Education was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court Oct 7, 1991. Freeman v. Pitts examines whether a school system in metropolitan Atlanta, which was officially segregated by law until 1969, can be excused from failing to implement an effective school desegregation plan due to increasing residential segregation. The case will also determine if the school system can be released from court supervision of desegregation in one area of school operations when racially discriminatory practices persist in other areas.

Looking back to Brown, John A. Griffin recalls that social scientists in Atlanta worked quickly to prepare demographic studies which became known as the Ashmore report. The best-known study in the Brown case by psychologists Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie Clark showed the harmful impact of segregation on black schoolchildren. The Ashmore report documented the extent of segregation, wide funding gaps and other harmful effects of the dual system.

In August 1991, a group of more than fifty social scientists published School Desegregation: A Social Science Statement, which was filed with the NAACP briefs in the Freeman case and is excerpted on page 19 of this special issue of Southern Changes. School Desegregation, which was led by Harvard professor of education and social policy Gary Orfield and includes Kenneth Clark among its signers, reviews results of years of study of desegregated schools.

John A Griffin was a sociologist on the faculty at Emory University at the time of the study and an active participant in the central committee of the Ashmore project. He is a Life Fellow of the Southern Regional Council.

The Poor You Have With You

Reviewed by Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 13, No. 4, 1991

The Truly Disadvantaged, by William Julius Wilson. (University of Chicago Press, 1987. xi. 254 pp.).
The Closing Door, by Gary Orfield and Carole Ashkinaze, with a Foreword by Andrew Young. (University of Chicago Press, 1991. xx, 254 pp.).
The Undeserving Poor, Michael B. Katz. (Pantheon Books, 1989. ix, 293 pp.).
A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society. Gerald David Jaynes and Robin M. Williams, Jr., editors. (National Academy Press. 1989. xiv. 608 pp.).
Unemployed and Uninsured, and other occasional papers of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington, D.C. 1991.
The State of America’s Children 1991, by the Children’s Defense Fund, Washington, D.C.

Not long ago I wrote in these pages that there seems to be no end to books about Atlanta. I had not known then of The Closing Door. After reading it one can only wish that there will be at least more book, one able to report that the blockage of most of black Atlantans from decent life chances which Mr. Orfield and Ms. Ashkinaze convincingly document, has been opened. Getting through The Closing Door is a struggle. It is an even more saddening and depressing study than is The State of America’s Children 1991 for though one comes from that full of sorrow and anger over our mistreatment of our children it is possible to feel at least a hope that changed political policies could make a great difference. The Closing Door, on the other hand, depicts the miring of people behind connected walls of social structure that are deeply grounded in social and economic realities, ones not likely to respond to such political decisions as we seem capable of. So it is hardly a criticism of the book to say that its least persuasive pages are those few at its end which discuss “what must done.”

Prior to those, the situations of black Atlantans in education, employment, and housing are relentlessly analyzed. In every area, the finding is that while many black Atlantans have done very well most have not, and that for them the conditions are worsening, a decline coincident with the Republican administrations since the early 1980s The door is closing for them.

The plight of the majority of blacks is set against Atlanta’s glittering reputation, its rapid growth and general prosperity, and its black political leadership. (A foreword by Andrew Young goes somewhat sideways of the book’s argument, and was, curiously, signed more than a year before publication.) For these trends, Orfield and Ashkinaze impartially distribute blame among fed. eral, state, and local governing bodies.

Not readily, however, to the citizenry. “Residential segregation remains a fundamental underlying feature of urban racial inequality … the level of residential segregation in metropolitan Atlanta is very high….” Here as elsewhere, the authors look to government for both cause (developmental decisions and non-enforcement of anti-discrimination laws) and remedy (reversal of the causes). They are right to decry this misfeasance, but it must be time for us to do what they call for–“it is essential to confront the issue of racial discrimination directly”–but even more basically than they do. Is it not time to question whether the liberal premise we adopted in the post-World War II years may have served its usefulness, that if laws will but change allowable conduct peoples’ prejudiced attitudes can be safely tolerated?

We little talk anymore of mainstream prejudice, and do little to combat it. What we do is pretty much to load the problem of re-shaping attitudes onto the schools (i.e. governmental agencies). I hazard the guess that less black-white conversation about what we used to call “racial relations” goes on in the South today than in even the 1950s. The Southern Regional Council, to its fault, long ago abandoned the state and local Councils on Human Relations in which it had once invested large–and not unrequited–hopes. I suspect that the door, in the rest of the country as well as in Atlanta, will continue to “close” until a strong sense of the common interest spreads within the public, not only determining governmental and corporate actions but also manifesting itself in a willingness, which obviously today does not exist, to believe once again, blacks as well as whites, in the value of knowing and getting along with each other.

The lack of appreciation of that among social scientists

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produces the irrelevancy of many of their prescriptions. One is left high and dry by the kind of reasoning which first tellingly describes (and eat, this book’s analyses of facts are outstanding) the ineffectiveness of minority contractors’ “set-asides,” then notes the Supreme Court’s probable invalidation of them, and follows by decrying the court’s action as damaging a “central accomplishment of black victories”; or which after detailing the frustrations of fifteen or so years of reliance on litigation to integrate the public schools of Atlanta while they were being deserted massively by white parents chastises black leadership for not continuing to rely on the lawyers and judges.

Orfield and Ashkinaze are wholly right in insisting that governmental action, even leadership, is now as before required for the resolution of our racial inequities. But law and law enforcement have their limits; the authors must know that and ought to have said so strongly. When I read their Chapter Five on “High Schools” I truly felt like weeping, for the youth in those schools and-confessedly–for the collapse of old hopes and dreams we once had and thought we had moved toward realization. On the evidence of this book those schools are terrible (and in my home town of Durham, in some ways a mini-Atlanta, one would find equally bad schools). But when the polemic of the authors against Atlanta’s black leaders who in the early 1970s sought a road to better schools other than more and yet more litigation (largely controlled from New York) is finished, all they can say in alternative is that “the data” do not “support” a conclusion that academically another way, with heavier busing, would have been better.

I don’t know how to make our schools better teach and rear our children and youth- Mr. Orfield and Ms. Ashkinaze do not either. Like other social scientists, they tell well what does not work. What I have experienced or observed working are only two things: good teachers, and that requires pay high enough to attract them into the profession–and it must be that a respected profession of responsible practitioners–and keep them there; and community values that surround children with expectations that they ought to learn, values strong in home, church and synagogue, and in the public including the press and television.

Orfield and Ashkinaze have a theoretical point to argue, and wrongly choose to do so by placing it in opposition to William Julius Wilson’s central conclusion regarding public policy in his The Truly Disadvantaged. His was that reform of poverty requires a political resolve to create full employment, that such cannot be attained without deep economic change, and that that is not about to happen unless the reforms are perceived as directly benefitting a wider slice of society than just minorities. Orfield and Ashkinaze decide that this rules out race specific programs (though Wilson says it only means they should not be “central”), and moreover that Atlanta’s experience shows the futility of Wilson’s condusion as ameliorating black poverty. Their criticism is important.

Its basis is that Atlanta during the 1980s was, they contend, the sort of tight labor market which Wilson sees as necessary for the poor’s advance–and yet in Atlanta they did not (at least the black poor did not: The Closing Door gives little attention to the non-black poor). The authors would have done better to see the Atlanta experience as confirming Wilson’s analysis. There was, of course, no “tight labor market” for black Atlantans and their argument that there would have been if racial deprivation in Atlanta’s schools and housing were not so intense that employers had to import workers from elsewhere does not get us very far. Not, at least, as a refutation of Wilson’s carefully constructed thesis that the poor will remain not only “truly disadvantaged” but economically superfluous (as Orfield and Ashkinaze unintentionally show them to be in Atlanta) absent a national commitment to full employment, and the structural changes in our economy that could make that possible.

Many persons (and I am one) regard The Truly Disadvantaged as the most valuable writing on American poverty of recent years. Perhaps the only one of lasting importance. Some years ago, Wilson would have been the winner of any contest, had there been one, for worst book title, with his The Declining Significance of Race. The book appeared at the same time as the early sproutings of what was to be the 1980s lush crop of reactionary and revisionist treatments of race and poverty. Conservatives loved and liberals hated the book, unread, just for its title. It has taken a while for Wilson to set his critics straight, as he first attempted to do in an epilogue to the second edition of Declining Significance and does again in the preface to The Truly Disadvantaged. If classifications matter, Wilson might be said to be in the tradition of Bayard Rustin. From his own impressive and widely respected scholarship he

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concludes as had Rustin that the welfare of America’s poor, black and non-black, is inextricably connected to an economy that is by public demand required to make decent room for them. The Truly Disadvantaged is a book more radical than liberal, because it knows that “any significant reduction of the problems of black joblessness and the related problems of crime, out-of-wedlock births, single-parent homes, and welfare dependency will call for a far more comprehensive program of economic and social reform than what Americans have usually regarded as appropriate or desirable. In short, it will require a radicalism that neither Democratic nor Republican parties have yet been realistic enough to propose.”

Joblessness comes first. Other problems are “related” to it. Wilson’s theoretical distinction is to insist that it–not poor people’s behavior, or the “culture of poverty,” or female-headed households and early pregnancies, or the welfare system–is basic: and the most important segment of it is black male joblessness. Wilson has argued persuasively that the root cause of the female-headed households is the small “male marriageable pool,” young unincarcerated black men working at decent paying jobs.

An interesting part of The Truly Disadvantaged comes in its first chapter where a variety of liberal perspectives on poverty are challenged. Wilson does not do this. however, in a liberal-bashing way but with the intent of pressing liberals to go beyond their usual analyses and programs, and to do so with realism. But he no more than Orfield and Ashkinaze nor Michael Katz follows realism to where in the present times it inevitably will lead, and that is to American militarism. In the years from the Second World War to the early 1970s this country did a mighty thing. Led by the great Southern civil rights movement, the rule of terror against blacks was halted, legal segregation and discrimination were ended, minority political rights were established, and doors were opened for the black elite to grow. All of those achievements can and undoubtedly will enlarge themselves; and good remnants of the Johnsonian “war on poverty”–Head Start, legal services, Jobs Corps–will continue to feed a trickle of the “truly disadvantaged” into what invidiously these days is called the “mainstream.”

But for the most part, realistic hopes for most of the poor had ended by the time President Carter took office. What the economy has told them ever since is the cruel, the damning, message that they are not needed. They are redundant. Nothing new about that. I and a horde of other North Americans of Scottish ancestry would likely not be here had our generally destitute forefathers not become redundant in Scotland. But the historic options no longer exist. People, all of us, have to do well here, together. We’ll not, not as long as Congress and Presidents don’t give a damn. Because if they ever started caring (instead of mouthing the claim), they would have to give up the commitment of our largest energies and resources to the military; and that they have not the courage or the wit or the will to do. Orfield and Ashkinaze will not get their renewal of commitment to civil rights nor will Wilson get his radical reforms as long as they have not, and as long as the public prefers yellow ribbons and parades. Orfield and Ashkinaze rightly say that we must confront directly the facts of racial discrimination. But if and as long as friends of the American poor do not confront directly American militarism they are but marking time, pawing the ground.

Michael Katz’s The Undeserving Poor is largely a review of what social scientists of the past quarter century have said about poverty and their recommended policies to eradicate it (Wilson has a few pages of such review also.) Students of these matters should find this book useful. At the same time, good students will be asking themselves what economics and the other social sciences can contribute to the amelioration. I think the answer is factual description and analysis.

It is hard to think of any benefit the poor owe to economists and other social scientists, who of late have studied them so everlastingly much. The poor of the 1930s owed the social scientists of the time a lot, for programs such as Old Age and Survivor Insurance (“Social Security”) and unemployment insurance originated in the universities. But assistance has dried up, to the present situation where a Wilson has to go against the grain of contemporary social science in order to say (what most people have known all along) that first of all, the poor need jobs.

What social scientists can do, and no one else has the tools to do so well, is, first, to provide clear, accurate descriptions; and, second, never to allow politicians to believe that gimmicky solutions are to be treated seriously or the public misled by them.

The Undeserving Poor has little of the anger and passion that made Katz’s earlier In the Shadow of the Poorhouse so attractive. There are even less of those qualities in A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society. This is a volume that undoubtedly should be on the shelf of every library. A score or so of eminently qualified authorities, many consultants also of reputation, many commissioned papers, a considerable staff, and what must have been many, many thousands of dollars combined to study and report. There are chapters (which include much repetition and overlapping) on political participation, the economy, schools, health, crime, families, attitudes, and yet more. It was all produced under the auspices of the National Research Council.

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As a portrait–“snapshot” seems to be the current word–of where black Americans were in the late 1980s (and are still) the report should be of high value. Sometimes, however, the book forsakes all claim to be other than a review of the relevant literature, giving readers another depressing opportunity to witness how much social science has been written in recent years about the poor, how assiduously social scientists have mined the same data and shaded the same “findings.” All three of the books discussed above are full of the compulsion to show that everything written by co-professionals has been read.

A Common Destiny compares itself with Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and with the Kerner Commission’s 1968 Report on Civil Disorders. It has neither the ardor of the latter or the commanding intelligence of the former. One came–one still comes–from a reading of Myrdal with messages to chew over, to agree or disagree with. One comes from this book with only as much information as one can load and carry. Its message, if there is one, is in its title: we are destined to be together.

Scan the lengthy bibliographies and references of Wilson, Orfield and Ashkinaze, and Katz, and there will not be found citations of the Children’s Defense Fund or the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. A shame–academic snobbery. We could do more satisfactorily without the products of academic social science than the loss of the reports of staffs (which include their own good economists and other social scientists) at the Fund and the Center. Regularly they report today what the academicians will be “finding” tomorrow.

I don’t intend this as more crude sniping at the universities; there is too much of that already. They bring skills that the advocacy centers hardly can; Orfield and Ashkinaze, for example, wrote a treatment of educational opportunities more powerful than anything I have heretofore read. It is, however, to organizations like the Fund and the Center that we have to depend on for the sharpening of facts to the service of political processes and to, first of all, an understanding that American poverty firmly connects to a) American partisan politics but b) even more, to the deep desire of both Democrats and Republicans to leave it alone, as well as they can. Orfield and Ashkinaze won’t enter that arena, Wilson strides above it, Katz seems in the present book to think solutions are all a matter of debate among “experts,” and A Common Destiny concludes on the orthodox note that there must be “public and private programs to increase opportunities and to reduce raceconnected constraints and disadvantages.”

People at Robert Greenstein’s Center and at Marian Wright Edelman’s Fund don’t take time to talk that way. ‘The Children’s Defense Fund’s annual “State of America’s Children” begins with an essay by Ms. Edelman which is as wise as it is moving, and then gets right down to business: first chapter, “family income and employment” The beginning of caring for children is to put adequate money into their homes.

“Eradicating childhood poverty” is essential to “improving the health, education, housing, welfare, and development of children and youth. Eliminating childhood poverty requires–ensuring that full-time work yields incomes high enough to support a family and that parents have the education and skills to obtain stable employment”

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities speaks with similar realism. A steady stream of reports comes from it some recent titles include Real Life Poverty in America; Unchanged Priorities; A Painless Recession?; Drifting Apart: Income Disparities Between the Rich, the Poor, and the Middle Class.

I am not sure that any problem of American life today is more serious than the one suggested by the last title or not connected to it Robert Greenstein and his staff, like Marian Wright Edeiman and hers, are frequent witnesses before Congressional committees. In March of this year, Greenstein tried to get the attention of one of them, by telling it:

“In fact, the growth in the incomes of the wealthiest Americans has been so large that just the increase between 1980 and 1990 in the after-tax income of the richest one percent of the population equaled the total income of the poorest twenty percent of the population in 1990. In other words, the increases in the after-tax income of the richest 2.5 million Americans between 1980 and 1990 equaled the total income the 50 million Americans with the lowest incomes received in 1990.”

So, off to our next jolly good Desert Storm. Build the space platform and the supercollider. Plunge ahead with Star Wars and still more B2s. Give more military aid to our clients abroad.

The poor you will have with you always.

Leslie Dunbar is book review editor of Southern Changes

The Ignorance of the Learned.

Reviewed by Charles J. Bussey

Vol. 13, No. 4, 1991, pp. 25-26

Making Haste Slowly: The Troubled History of Higher Education in Mississippi by David G. Sansing. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990, xii, 309 pp.).

Publish or Perish! This argument continues to rage among academics, and it ignites passionate debates at my university today.

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It is within that context that I read David G. Sansing’s Making Haste Slowly. That and the fact of my birth in Oxford, Miss., with a long-time family connection to Ole Miss, may color this review and the reader should know those facts.

In a 1990 book called Killing the Spirit, distinguished historian and former college provost Page Smith launched an attack of the “publish or perish” mentality. He urged American universities to recognize their failure to emphasize quality teaching from a moral base instead of a value-neutral base, as some call it, and argued that “teaching is shunned in the name of research.” He is right. The vast majority of published research is at worst, worthless; and at best, mediocre and time-consuming of interested readers, time that could be used to improve teaching.

From these premises, I tackle Professor Sansing’s book.

First, Sansing consulted all the proper sources for this study. His bibliography is comprehensive and covers both written sources and the available oral ones.

We travel with him from the early nineteenth through the last years of the twentieth centuries as he documents the history of higher education in Mississippi. He shows us the early visions, and likewise the scheming, the pettiness, the political morass which identifies “college/university making.” (Most states have similar stories; my own state of Kentucky certainly does.)

Two-thirds of the book deals with the post-1928 period, and familiar names pass before us: Theodore Bilbo, Alfred Hume, Alfred Butts, Paul Johnson, John D. Williams, Fieiding Wright, James Meredith, Ross Barnett, Porter Fortune, Gerald Turner, Donald Zacharias.

Reciting those names calls images to mind, different images for each of us. Demagogic politicians; manipulative college leaders; the anti-democratic practices of Mississippi colleges as they sought to save “our Southern way of life”; blacks who wanted to share in the American Dream; riots; and modern university administrators who reflect a corporate image.

The story Sansing tells will be familiar to many Mississippians. And maybe they need to hear it again. He tells it well enough in a style which is passable though it doesn’t sparkle.

Some of the stories (the tangled Meredith, Barnett, Kennedy story from the early 1960s, for example) offer insight into what moved from a state to a national tragedy. Most of this work, however, may not appeal to readers beyond the boundaries of the Magnolia State.

What troubles me about this book, and this perhaps says more about educational leaders than Sansing, is the absence of proper vision. Like their counterparts across the nation, Mississippi college and university administrators seem unaware of what the university’s role should be.

We face a crisis in higher education in America today. State colleges that have become universities, as well as long established state universities themselves, have followed a flawed model I call it a kind of ‘academic fundamentalism.” It is what I believe Page Smith had in mind when he referred to a “disease of the spirit”

Characteristics of that disease include too much emphasis on specialization; the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake; and an almost absolute relativism, and, yes, such a condition is possible.

Universities seem to have forgotten their primary mission: TO TEACH. Students are the reason universities exist. Professors should focus on education first and publishable research last. Do administrators at colleges and universities in Mississippi (or anywhere else?) really care about teaching? Do any of them want to admit that they (we) follow a failed model?

Nowhere in Sansing’s book did I sense that higher educators in Mississippi realize the crisis that faces their institutions, a crisis of the spirit far more than a crisis of budget. Do Mississippi’s college and university leaders know the nature of the crisis? They (like most American university leaders) ignore it.

That might be expected, however, for as writer Gary Wills said recently “No ignorance is more securely lodged than the ignorance of the learned.”

Charles J. Bussey teaches American history at Western Kentucky University

Portrait of Its People

Reviewed by John Griffin

Vol. 13, No. 4, 1991, pp. 26-27

Living Atlanta: An Oral History of the City, 1914-1948, by Clifford M. Kuhn, Harlon E. Joye, and E. Bernard West (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. 406 pp., photographs, notes.).

The “official” history of Atlanta, a three-volume work produced some years ago by the Atlanta Historical Society, was a painstakingly assembled work compiled from many sources and written by a historian and a journalist with extensive help from the Society’s staff.

Living Atlanta is a different but no less important book, a history edited and organized by two historians and a sociologist and published jointly with the Historical Society. Most of its raw material came not from traditional historical sources but from the memories of 173 men and women who lived in Atlanta at some time during the years

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between 1914 and 1948.

There is the credibility question, of course, when the historian presents information gleaned from the memory of individuals who were “there” forty or more years ago. Nonetheless, social history based on the memories of participants and first-hand observers in yesterday’s events often makes for easier and even more enjoyable reading than do conventional histories.

Georgia State University historian Clifford Kuhn and associates Harlan Joye and Bernard West interviewed about 200 people who lived in Atlanta during the years from just before World War Ito just after World War II. Their taped interviews were first used as the basis for a series of fifty programs broadcast on an Atlanta radio station. The series was widely acclaimed; Studs Terkel described the programs as an important, exciting project–a truly human portrait of a city of people.” It is from this abundant material–6,000 pages when transcribed–that Kuhn and his associates have fashioned their social history of Atlanta during a pivotal 34-year period of its life.

So much is here in these pages: men and women in a variety of low-paying jobs; cotton mill workers in debt to the company store; the problems of policing the city during Prohibition; remembrances of working and riding on the railroads and the streetcars; life in the public housing projects. There is testimony, too, about the Depression and how it touched people in all walks of life, about the struggle for adequate medical care; about domestic work with its long hours and low pay. There are also quotes from people in professional fields, and some from the movers and shakers.

This history is not organized chronologically; the material is presented under eleven topics, such as World War I, Depression and New Deal, Leisure. Politics, and so on. The authors acknowledge that these are but a few of the topics that might have been explored. Nonetheless, their special purpose was, to reflect as much as possible all the city’s people, not just the “white elite.”

The central sub-theme that runs through the book is race relations in a segregated urban place. In pursuing this concern, the writers quote extensively blacks who endured second-class citizenship in most aspects of their lives. Only in the community of professional people and others around the Atlanta University Center and among the successful businessmen and women like those on Sweet Auburn Avenue could blacks escape from some degree of discrimination and harassment.

This very readable book written from the perspective of the people enlightens and enlivens the history of Atlanta. It deserves wide attention.

John A. Griffin, scholar, public servant, foundation executive, is and has been above all a leader over decades of “southern change.”

Tell About the South

Reviewed by Idris Knox

Vol. 13, No. 4, 1991, pp. 27-28

The Southern Writer in the Post-Modern World, by Fred Hobson. (University of Georgia Press, 1991, $17.95.).

Fred Hobson’s book is full of ideas and examples without being pedantic–light and serious all you haven’t read any of the authors he talks about, then attend to that before settling back to enjoy how he places them, where they fit in. How do we consider these writers who have gained national prominence since the 1960s? How do they differ from their predecessors? How are they inspiring and how do they disappoint? As Professor of English at UNC Chapel Hill, Hobson is qualified to explore, follow hunches and state a few

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verities. These ideas grew from the Lamar Memorial Lectures he gave at Mercer University.

The title comes from the first lecture of the series. It had been used by unwavering agrarian Donald Davidson of Vanderbilt. He titled his lectures “Southern Writers in the Modem World,” meaning then the world of the 1920s. Since Hobson’s is a sketch of authors publishing now, the title satisfies by placing them in relation to their immediate predecessors. Who knows how the critic and scholar will define and locate these current writers in another thirty years?

First of all, there will then as now be the mass culture that none of us escapes, whose influence has to be reckoned. Hobson values a southern penchant for being concrete, not abstract. So he states the importance of mass culture in America and moves to consider three authors: Bobbie Ann Mason, Lee Smith, and Barry Hannah. I am familiar with the first two, and I will soon know the writing of Hannah–as a result of Hobson’s comments. All three deal with the vapid content and style of mass culture: TV, radio, Rock, and best-sellers that have little connection to excellence, however defined.

In speaking of Mason’s work, Hobson warns us that the reader must supply the background or context for her tales of common people who struggle with integrity to understand their world. This is the big demand of all minimalist fiction: you’ve got to know our world and the implications of events, to fill in the story’s gaps and silences.

Smith combines fine craft with a sense of values. She calls to my mind Vera Brittain, in showing the difference of perception that results in gender interpretations of history.

Hobson tells us that Hannah values history because it teaches us to feel. Violence and madness and a love of rhetoric in his work stem from an outrageous comic vision that is in a direct line from earlier southern writers. Read Geronimo Rex, he says.

Then, Hobson moves on to sketches of Richard Ford and Josephine Humphreys, showing how their work fits into our southern world. Ford is the uncommon one, with but a single work located in the South. Raised here, he left to live elsewhere and has only recently returned to New Orleans, twenty-five years later. He shows no devotion to place, a southern tenet, but does feel the magnet’s pull. Hobson refers to John Crowe Ransom, saying Ford is modern with a southern accent. Hobson also shows us the connections between Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and Ford’s The Sportswriter, an echo in the ways of perceiving and truth-telling.

Humphreys represents the Agrarian tradition. She comes from Charleston, and attended Duke. Along with Styron, Chappell, Tyler, and Price, Humphreys studied at Duke in the school of Blackburn and, later, Reynolds Price himself. She writes social commentary, but also about dreams. Hobson shows how she replies to the gender pressures of these times, and to alienation from family and past.

Now Hobson makes a “preliminary estimate”: what about the heirs of Welty and Faulkner? Hobson feels there is a merging and overlapping, although it is not easy to distinguish the patterns. Certainly there is a direct line in family and community concerns of all kinds. In humor, Hannah, Edgerton, and Wilcox carry on.

What about all the authors who are mentioned only in passing? Initially. I kept saying to myself, “Yes, but what about . . .” and then remembered that a few strokes are best for sketching. Still, listing those authors named in passing will caution the reader: this is an impressive group. The footnotes give valuable referrals to works and commentary. Listen to this list and then read: Padgett Powell, Kay Gibbons (a new book just out), Clyde Edgerton. Anne Tyler. Jayne Ann Phillips, Ellen Gilchrist, Gail Godwin.

Reynolds Price. Cormac McCarthy, and Walker Percy are accepted as established writers, models for the younger ones, and as teachers.

Community, a sense of place, love of nature and reverence for the past: these values Hobson discusses in the work of Fred Chappell and Ernest Gaines. The former comes from southern Appalachia, the latter from a Cajun and African-American world around Baton Rouge. Thus, at the end of his sketch Professor Hobson provides the reader with even more variety, and depth. Who is the quintessential southern writer? You’ll have a much better idea after reading these comments. Hobson’s reasoning and examples will provoke thought, and then satisfaction in your own conclusions.

Idris Knox lives and writes in Durham.

An Abrupt Reversal

Reviewed by Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 13, No. 4, 1991, pp. 30-31

Frank Porter Graham and the 1950 Senate Race in North Carolina, by Julian M. Pleasants and Augustus M. Burns. (University of North Carolina Press, 1990, xv, 356 pp.).

The Republican Party, and especially its southern wing, must be the most ideological major party in American history, and has been becoming so since the Goldwater candidacy in 1964, an overwhelming defeat which transformed a party of inertia into one of generative force.

When Jesse Helms defeated Harvey Gantt in North Carolina’s 1990 Senatorial election the usual explanation was race. That was too simple. The much more formidable fact is that racism is one, but only one, binding strand of modern Republican ideology. If that ideology is strongest in the South it is only that political emotions typically get their exaggerated shape and content here. The Republican Party, nationwide, is committed to military supremacy, the erosion of the strength of labor unions, a deep suspicion of the benefits blacks have obtained through law and a determined resistance to further gain, the same for women and other ethnic minorities, an abiding distrust of and disapproval of the poor, an intolerance of dissenters and an ever-latent intolerance of dissent, a reflexive preference for economic development” over nature, and an embrace of a host of so-called “social issues”–abortion. school prayer, capital punishment, etc.–on which unanimity is exacted. Harvey Gantt lost because Jesse Helms stands foursquare for this ideology and he, Gantt, did not.

Jesse Helms embarrasses many of his Republican brethren by his methods, but in fact he typifies the Party as well as does anyone. If anything, he is better than the generality, as represented by Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush. He is not quite as devoted as they to laissez-faire economics–he is protective of his state’s textile industry, for example–and neither he nor his family seem to get rich.

Jesse Helms was already of importance–how much is a matter of small dispute–in the 1950 election when Willis Smith upset Frank Porter Graham. Two decades later Helms switched parties; I suspect Smith would have done the same. Pleasants and Burns in their solid and highly valuable study subject the election and its results

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to close analysis, and conclude that the decisive factor was Smith’s use of race. (Smith let campaign workers do most of his dirty campaigning for him, but that need not to be taken seriously in ascribing responsibility.) Pleasants and Burns thus put less weight than has been customary on the Red tag and other smears that Smith’s campaign sought to hang on Graham. Their evidence is persuasive. In the first three-man primary, when such had been abundant, Graham came within an eye-lash of winning a clear majority 48.9 percent. The authors do not speculate on whether the smears of the first campaign may not have deprived Graham of a clear majority. Only one month later, Smith beat him 51.1 percent to 48.9 percent. What took place in that month was utter concentration on racial issues and on Graham’s strong convictions for racial justice.

1950 was at the beginning of the formation of the modern southern–later, modern Republican–ideology. The post-war South had shown signs of a newly liberal politics. Men such as Kerr Scott of North Carolina, Arnall of Georgia, Folsom, Hill, and Sparkman of Alabama, Fulbright and McMath of Arkansas, Kefauver of Tennessee, and Pepper of Florida were winning gubernatorial or U. S. Senate seats. The end of the decade brought an abrupt reversal. The thin margin by which Francis Pickens Miller’s effort failed in Virginia in 1949 to set back the Byrd machine, Claude Pepper’s loss in Florida to the smears of George Smathers, and Frank Porter Graham’s defeat in North Carolina all showed that even reputedly progressive southern states were ready to follow into the “closed society” of the next fifteen or so years where the Talmadge resurgence in Georgia had already led.

Pleasants and Burns have brought back for our study and reflection one of the first stages in that snarling retreat of the South into “massive resistance.” For its recovery, the South would require the heroics of the civil rights movement and (let those of us who damned him for Vietnam acknowledge) the leadership of Lyndon Johnson. The election was a first also in its tragic importance, for the one who lost it, Dr. Graham, was among the South’s and the country’s best, ever.