‘Freedom Buses’ Roll Along Cancer Alley

By Ellen Spears

Vol. 15, No. 1, 1993, pp. 1-11

On the weekend of December 4-6, 1992, more than 2,000 activists from around the South and the nation joined in an unprecedented gathering in New Orleans, drawn together in a common movement for environmental justice. With these unanticipated numbers and the diversity of participants, the meeting at the mouth of the Mississippi may come to be regarded—like the October 1991 People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., that inspired it—as a watershed in the U S. environmental movement.

The New Orleans conference was called together by the Southern Organizing Committee for Social and Economic Justice (SOC), whose legacy of anti-racist and pro-union work stretches from the 1930s, and was hosted by the Gulf Coast Tenants Organization.

It was significant that the meeting was held in the South, where the disparate impact of environmental degradation on communities of color—environmental racism—is strongly felt.

An understanding of what we as a movement are up against came from a special part of the conference: a bus tour of Cancer Alley, the seventy-seven-mile stretch of the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans poisoned by more than 120 petrochemical plants.

OUR TOUR of Cancer Alley takes off from the Bayou Plaza Hotel, where many attendees are staying, near Xavier University. Our tour guides, all environmental leaders in Louisiana, are dealing with a problem faced by the whole conference—the kind of problem organizers like—the unexpectedly huge turnout “It just snowballed under our feet,”

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said Anne Braden, co-chair of SOC. “What it indicates is the tremendous breadth and depth of grassroots concern about this issue.”

Increasing interest in the tour had already forced planners to add another bus, and now we are waiting for a third. Folks pass the time pleasantly in the overcast but warming New Orleans weather, checking in with old friends and striking up conversations, making new ones. Already the diversity of cultures the conference has brought together is evident: African American residents of Homer, Louisiana, who are fighting a uranium enrichment plant; Native American activists from Oklahoma opposing General Atomic’s Sequoia Fuels nuclear facility; United Farmworkers from the Rio Grande area working to end overuse of pesticides; an Asian American staffer from one of the national environmental groups; whites from Appalachian mining towns; veteran organizers, young people, whole families.

While we are waiting, other buses, “Freedom Buses,” are carrying youth from Selina, Atlanta, Savannah and North Carolina, first stopping in Columbia, Mississippi. A youth speak-out has been organized to support demands by the African American community in Columbia, where the Reichold Chemical Company plant exploded and burned in March 1977.

The 775 residents of this Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region IV hot spot want compensation and relocation for illnesses they believe resulted from the toxic explosion. Busloads of students stop to march in solidarity on their way to New Orleans.

BACK ON TULANE Avenue in New Orleans, the humid clouds are lifting slightly and our tour begins. As the busloads wind through the Crescent City toward our first stop, Willie Fontenot shares, from his vantage point as coordinator of the Public Protection Division in the Louisiana Attorney General’s office, a perspective on the New Orleans environment.

New Orleans’s infrastructure is shaped by its unique ecosystem, with a water table above the streets in many places; some streets are below sea level. The city has the most extensive canal system in the country. And, explains Fontenot, the ground is still settling. Especially where development happened rapidly, with lots of fill, the materials used dry and shrink, and the sewer, water, and gas lines break away.

The city has one of the largest tonnage ports in the country, averaging 120 to 150 ocean-going ships every day, carrying mostly grain and oil and refined oil products.

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Though shallow, with an average depth of twelve feet, Pontchartrain, covering 610 square miles, is one of the most productive fishing estuaries in the country. Yet it contains such high fecal coliform levels that signs are posted by the Orleans Levee Board and the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals to prevent swimming.

A high percentage Of New Orleans residents drink bottled water, report our guides. “Even Louisiana-brewed Dixie Beer tasted funny,” Fontenot says, after Georgia-Pacific Chemical Company dumped forty-two tons of phenol in the river in 1981. The dumping raised the phenol threshold in the water to seven parts per billion (ppb). Phenol is not known to be hazardous to human health at that level, but it exceeded the standard of one to three ppbs. When it bonded with chlorine used to disinfect the water supply at a treatment plant, the resulting chemical could be tasted in the water. It made the water—and the beer brewed with it—taste like oil, he says.

Another result of frequent spills: major kills of fish, birds, and turtles. Runoff of the pesticide azinphosmethyl from the sugar cane fields is suspected in summer 1991 kills of more than 750,000 fish, including striped mullet largemouth bass, freshwater drum, and blue catfish in the bayous of south Louisiana.

By 1965, the state bird, the native brown pelican, once numbering 50,000, was wiped out after endrin spills in late 1950s and 1960s traced to the Velsicol plant in Memphis, Tennessee, killed fish and other wildlife. Now the brown pelicans in Louisiana have been re-established from Florida. Eighty percent of the re-established birds were killed in 1974, again by endrin, the year that EPA finally banned the substance.

Louisiana is number one among the fifty states in the discharge of toxic pollution into the waterways and number four in air pollution (based on 1988 EPA statistics). Capitol Lake, adjacent to the state capitol in Baton Rouge, is closed to fishing because of PCB pollution.

Cancer Alley takes its name from the high rates of cancer among the people in the parishes along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, among the highest in the nation. And the lung cancer rate for black men is among the highest in the world, explain our guides.

Although studies are scarce and much work remains to be done, few doubt the connection between cancer and pollution. Almost everyone we meet with Louisiana friends and kinfolk has a story to tell about a death from cancer.

Nick Spitzer, a public folklorist who used to work in Louisiana, shares one tale. “I had cancer myself. I can’t say that it was from Louisiana, but I was brought in for some chemotherapy. There was a guy there who had lung cancer, he had been an oil field worker. He was a classic, a lot of loyalty to the job and the work, and he was physically being destroyed. And the Ethyl Corporation had a plaque on the door. They donated the room, and he would say, ‘They may have contributed this room, but they also contributed a lot of patients.'”

CONCERNS OF CHEMICAL workers and others working in toxic environments are central to conference planners, who aim to unite labor and community in a common environmental movement. Conference speaker Tony Mazzocchi, of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union, argues the importance of confronting competing needs directly. Sometimes the demand for jobs does conflict with the health needs of the

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community, he says. His proposal, a Superfund for Workers, would reduce the impact on workers displaced by shutdowns of toxic industries. The Superfund would function like the GI bill, which offered tuition support and family stipends for workers after World War II as they sought college educations or technical training.

To But Cut’s and Back

Crossing the Mississippi on the Huey P. Long Bridge, we are reminded that Louisiana’s shifting politics, as unique as the landscape, will shape the response to the environmental crisis in the state. The damage to the environment allowed during Gov. Edwin Edwards’s previous terms is well documented in Southern Exposure’s March/April 1984 article “The Poisoning of Louisiana.” But given the choice of David Duke, environmentalists “held their noses and voted for Edwards,” says tour guide Nathalie Walker. Under Edwards’s current tenure, the staff of the state Attorney General’s office environmental division has been reduced by about one-half.

Kai Midboe, Edwards’s appointee for Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) chief, is regarded by environmental leaders as more sympathetic to industry than his popular predecessor, Paul Templet. Though Midboe helped establish the state’s coastal zone program, protecting wildlife habitats, he more recently represented oil and gas industry clients in an effort to limit DEQ regulations on discharges from their facilities. Midboe’s strategy is to take a cooperative approach with industry rather than engage in litigation for enforcement.

“You can work out some things,” says Fontenot. “But you don’t stop bank robbing by saying ‘let’s sit down and talk about it,’ you need a strong enforcement program, you need incentives which include strong provisions for fines. And, says Fontenot, “We have not had a tradition of that under anybody.”

Activists like Audrey Evans of the Tulane University Environmental Law Clinic expect “more frequent use of the device of the minor modification, circumventing the permitting process altogether by calling a big expansion only a minor modification.”

“We are ranked fiftieth in the state government’s commitment to protecting the environment,” explains Walker, who is the attorney for the Sierra Club Defense Fund in New Orleans. “For example, in New Jersey, they have a similar industrial base but much lower emission rates

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than Louisiana. And, they have a much larger enforcement staff for air, land, and water pollution.”

Some new laws will help. The Louisiana Air Toxics Reduction Law, passed in 1990, aims to reduce air emissions of one hundred chemicals by 50 percent by 1994. The 1989 Solid Waste Reduction Act requires reducing landfills by 25 percent. And the Wetlands Conservation and Restoration Fund will receive forty million dollars annually to deal with wetlands problems.

Louisiana’s economy has been affected by the boom and bust in oil and now the decline in natural gas production. The state ranks third in production of gas and oil, behind Texas and California. The failing economy is cited for underfunding of enforcement efforts, but it simply underscores a clear theme of the weekend conference: polluting industries must pay. It has been clear for some time, says Spitzer, that “the laissez le bon temps rouler attitude must go.”

Our first stop-off is a sewage treatment plant, which serves Marrero on the west bank of Jefferson Parish, at the LaPalco Boulevard Waste Drop-Off, built right next to the Marrero Housing Project, the first tenant-owned housing project in the country.

Tenant leader and president of our host group, the Gulf Coast Tenant Organization (GCTO), Rose Mary Smith explains, “we keep getting a foul smell just day after day. We have met with folks all up around Baton Rouge, and they tone the odor down, but that lasts for a few days and it flares back up.”

Tenants took over the management of the Marrero Project in November, 1984. The housing project had been built long before the sewage plant.

The GCTO embodies a strategy which SOC has pursued for many years: The principal victims of environmental racism are people of color, the poor, and working people. When these groups provide leadership, winning coalitions can be built.

GCTO has led a number of marches, from Huntsville, Alabama, to Cancer Alley and between New Orleans and Baton Rouge to dramatize the need for action. “We had been talking about this a long, long time and all of a sudden it exploded,” says Smith about the attention to toxic waste and race along Cancer Alley and elsewhere in the South evident at the conference.

WE WIND THROUGH Jefferson Parish. Two men on a bicycle careen in front of the bus. Peering out, we notice all-new windows on the small frame homes, windows which had to be replaced after the Shell Oil explosion at Norco in 1988. At Norco, the town which takes its name from the New Orleans Oil Refining Company, seven workers were killed when the cat cracker blew. The cat cracker, short for catalytic cracker, is a key part of the refining process, which separates raw oil into gas, oil, and kerosene. The blast blew out windows in downtown New Orleans twenty miles away.

Toxic spills, releases, and blasts keep residents of the towns along the river on edge. Fontenot explains that a decade ago people in the towns of Good Hope and New Sarpy frequently had to evacuate. At the time of the first buyout in 1981-82, people kept a suitcase packed. “Parents finally forced the school to keep busdrivers and buses on school grounds all the time to evacuate the kids,” he says.

We travel on to the Bonnet Carre spillway, where the levee opens to reroute Mississippi floodwaters to Lake Pontchartrain if the river rises more than seventeen feet. The wind has picked up and our eyes are stinging. We are smelling an acrid shoe polish odor. It’s nitrobenzene from a chemical plant across the river, explains guide Darryl Malek-Wiley, a New Orleans activist. Water pours past us from thirty-three states and two Canadian provinces. Way north along the Mississippi River, Native Americans are organizing to stop a proposal for storage of nuclear casks at the Prairie Island Nuclear Facility on the Lakota reservation in Minnesota. Farm pesticide runoff and untreated sewage has muddied the river on its way to the Gulf, even before it filters past the toxic gauntlet between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

Even if the dumping is in compliance at each of the 120-200 toxic sites along this section of the river—which many doubt (state funding for monitoring is inadequate, private monitoring cost-prohibitive; present practice relies mostly on the companies themselves to regulate)—no one knows the damage done by the combined dumping. “Nobody looks at the cumulative impact on the Mississippi River,” says Malek-Wiley.

The Clean Water Act, up for renewal in Congress in 1993, provides for monitoring at each plant in isolation, controlling pollution from point sources. Little attention has been paid either to combined effects or to nonpoint sources—runoff from agricultural lands, urban areas, construction, mining and forestry—which Claudia Copeland, writing in Congressional Research Services (CRS) Review in December 1991, calls “the most pervasive remaining unsolved water quality problems in this country.”

Companies still argue that dilution is the solution to pollution. The activists gathered here are familiar with this and other tired industry lines: “We just need to keep this landfill open long enough to bring in enough revenue to pay for shutting it down.” While it may be difficult to measure diluted toxins, a three-year study conducted by the state of Louisiana shows that more than 80 percent of fish and shellfish from the Mississippi River contain mer-

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cury and toxic chemicals. While the study stresses that the levels of toxins found were within the safety standards set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, residents are alarmed.

Malek-Wiley and others are participating in a new initiative, the Mississippi River Basin Alliance, which is forming to build the kind of pressure necessary to look at the river as a whole and change environmental policy. The Great Lakes region is the only area of the country where the pollution is monitored not just chemical-by-chemical or industry-by-industry but in the region as a whole.

In the year since its first meeting, February 20,1992, in St. Louis, the Mississippi River Basin Alliance has grown to include the Garden Clubs of America, Louisiana Environmental Action Network, the Indigenous Environmental Network, MACE (Mississippi Action for Community Education), Coalition for the Environment in St. Louis, the Minnesota Project the Tennessee Environmental Council, the Kentucky Resource Council, the American Indian Center in Milsteadt, Illinois, as well as American River, Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, Isaac Walton League and Audubon Society. With an emphasis on community-based organizations, the Alliance will look at water and air quality among other health and safety issues, economic development, and cultural and historical issues, all from the point of view of how the people who live in the basin are affected.

The Alliance aims to wield considerable influence, notes convener Bill Reading of the Sierra Club, as the river flows through states represented by “two-thirds of the Senate and three-fourths of the House of Representatives.”

OUR ROUTE TAKES us along River Road. Not all tourism is beignets and bands and Mardi Gras in the French Quarter. Touring the River Road antebellum plantations is the second biggest attraction around New Orleans.

Petrochemical plants have destroyed whole communities along River Road. Companies buy up land for the site, forcing out residents. A few families hang on, but surrounded by toxic plants, the holdouts are forced away. “It’s a calculated process that disintegrates the culture,” explains Nathalie Walker.

“It’s really bizarre,” Nick Spitzer recalls, “an old plantation house that is now the company headquarters, once devoted to sugar, now is devoted to the petrochemical industry. The people affected most are not the big house, but the people in the surrounding slave and sharecropper quarters.”

Steve Duplantier, an assistant professor of communications at Xavier University, calls up the image of Ghosts Along the Mississippi (1948, 1961), a book of photographs by Clarence John Laughlin. The people who survived … are being haunted by these new toxics along the river. It has a nasty and weird continuity, plantation big houses, gorgeous but symbols of oppression and misery, the very sites of the manor houses are now the locations of the offices of these chemical and fertilizer companies spewing out a different kind of oppression and poison.”

Guides and news reports described towns we did not see, with uncanny names like Reveilletown, Cut Off, and Good Hope, a community where all the homes but one are boarded up. In Sunrise, everybody was bought out except two people.

“I wasn’t prepared for entire towns that had been bought out to quiet complaints, wasn’t pre-

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pared for the poverty, for the concentration of the petrochemical industry that we found there. I live in New Jersey and I saw a lot of the petrochemical industry, and had never seen anything like this,” said Cathy Verhoff, director of operations for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“This is sacred land,” said one guide. It was a theme that would come up often throughout the weekend, in a powerful ceremony led by Native American leaders during the Friday night opening session as well as from Louisiana coastal residents.

The pollution of land and waterways has made impossible a way of life that depended heavily on fishing and agriculture to support a close-to-the-land existence.

We ate lunch along the River Road, at But Cut’s, named for the owner, who, following a tradition in these parts, carries his father’s nickname, earned for an injury he got sliding into home plate, explains GCTO leader Pat Bryant.

The meal of red beans and rice and fried catfish and shrimp stretches to feed us all. “I was impressed by them stopping for lunch and giving business to a people’s restaurant, rather than to one of the commercial chains.” said Jessie Deer in Water of Oklahoma. Only later does Bryant confess, “We didn’t know what the folks were going to eat.”

Crossing back across the Mississippi on the Luling-Destrehan Bridge, huge grain elevators line the banks of the river near the bridge. People living near the grain elevators have problems with particulate matter in the air, with increased incidence of respiratory problems and reports of asthma in children.

Continuing along the causeway through the LaBranche wetlands, we get a glimpse of the swamp, maintained only after great struggle by environmentalists. Much of the tupelo gum, willow, and cypress that house the herons, egrets, cranes, muskrats, and alligators has already been destroyed to make way for the petro giants.

A Ten-Mile Question Mark

“It must have been depressing,” said one conference goer, who had yet to make the tour. For some, it was. One man reportedly took to his room in disgust and despair, declining to attend the conference, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the mess. But, I didn’t find it so. We were in such great company, of so many strong people, several generations of activists, for once representative of our nation’s people, who are all doing something to stop environmental disaster. And, in some cases, we are win-

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ning.

Further upriver, in Wallace, Louisiana, residents have just succeeded in blocking Formosa Plastics from installing a $700 million rayon plant that would have devastated the town and dumped more toxic waste in the river. Formosa Plastics, a multinational corporation based in Taiwan, bought the Whitney plantation, and expected to get $425 million in tax concessions from the state. But after community pressure and a lawsuit forced an environmental impact statement, the company cancelled plans to build the rayon plant

Coalitions are essential to winning victories against major corporate projects, which wield huge budgets and political influence. And, says conference organizer Anne Braden, “Fighting environmental racism is potentially a very unifying issue; not automatically but potentially.”

Wallace residents sought out environmentalists to help win against Formosa Plastics. Preservationists from Evergreen Plantation, one of the best-preserved antebellum homes on River Road, joined in. Wilfred Greene, a seventy-year-old African American school principal in Wallace, describes one controversy over the name of the group, already chosen by residents, River Area Planning Group, RAP.

“We can’t get involved with you, you are a rap group,” said a few. But the name stayed, and together, “unified with difficulties,” they succeeded.

Greene articulates one principle for united efforts, a view shared by conference organizers. “Join hands, [but] don’t let anybody decide for you what’s got to be done in that community,” he says. “You do it, ask for help, but always hold the reins.”

Mutual work on common concerns has brought mutual respect. “He’s the wisest person that I know,” said Gad Martin, a chlorine campaign activist working for Greenpeace in New Orleans, of Mr. Greene.

The win in Wallace buoyed residents, as it did those of us gathered at the conference. Formosa Plastics still owns the land it purchased for the plant so residents continue to be on guard. And, says Martin, “We have not won for two reasons, we cannot pass on our problems [to a likely site in a Third World country], and people in Wallace still won’t have jobs.” Martin suggests a new initiative, trying to make connections with the historically black colleges to discuss economic development solutions.

Residents of Homer, Louisiana, who have formed Citizens Against Nuclear Trash (CANT), inspired other attendees, too. While their battle is far from over, residents of Center Springs and Forest Grove in Claiborne Parish, on the Arkansas border, have taken the lead in a coalition to stop a consortium from placing a uranium enrichment plant in Homer.

“One of the major contentions there [in Homer] is environmental racism,” says Michael Mariotte, of Nuclear Information Research Services, a Washington, D.C.-based research group. Louisiana Energy Services (LES), a five-member consortium whose central partner is URENCO, itself a partnership of British Nuclear Fuels, the government of Holland, and a number of German companies, is seeking permits from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to enrich uranium from commercial nuclear power plants.

In the process of fighting the permits, residents have won a commitment for the first-ever environmental racism hearing before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) panel. An NRC panel will hold an adjudicatory hearing, which differs from a traditional courtroom in that participants submit affidavits and briefs but testify only if called upon, explains Mariotte.

Residents are glad for the hearing and the delay it provides, if skeptical about the outcome. “The judges are NRC employees,” explains Homer real estate agent Toney Johnson, who is white and a member of CANT. “And they have never ruled against a single application.”

CANT activists have also sought other avenues to win their battle, electing a black representative, Roy Martis, to the police jury, the Louisiana equivalent of a county

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commission. “Most [residents] hadn’t been paying elections too much attention,” says Essie Youngblood, who lives near the proposed site. Redistricting helped, and residents organized to elect their own candidate.

And, notes Youngblood, the effort to stop the proposed plant “has improved the relationships. It may have divided some who want the plant, but the rest of us, black and white, we are much closer.”

What will the Clinton administration do about environmental racism in Homer? “We hope they will be a big help, we just don’t know. We put a ten-mile question mark behind that,” says Youngblood. “The coalition in New Orleans will be our greatest help.”

One reason Homer residents are waiting to see what the Clinton administration will do is Department of Energy appointee Hazel O’Leary. O’Leary is a top corporate affairs officer for Northern States Power Company, one U.S. member of the consortium seeking permits to open the uranium enrichment plant in Homer.

Northern States is also involved in the effort to site nuclear storage casks on Prairie Island where the Lakota Reservation is located in the upper reaches of the Mississippi. But Northern States’ involvement in these controversial projects had little impact during confirmation hearings.

Waste and Gore

Still, there’s a wary optimism that a new administration in Washington not openly hostile to the environmental movement will pave the way for confronting disparate treatment of people-of-color communities. The appointment of former Gore staffer Carol Browner of Florida to head EPA is considered a good sign.

Concerns about environmental racism “have even trickled up to the federal government,” says sociologist Robert Bullard, author of Dumping in Dixie, citing his selection to serve on the Clinton transition team’s Natural Resource and Environment cluster.

Conferees attending from East Liverpool, Ohio, went home December 6 to the news from Vice President-elect Al Gore that the Clinton administration would seek to halt a proposed East Liverpool waste incinerator until Congress investigates the plant’s safety. Though the company countered with a full-page New York Times ad, and in late December, protestors were getting arrested at the site, there is the feeling that environmental concerns are more likely to be heard than at any time during the past twelve years.

A major legislative initiative will be the re-introduction of the Environmental Justice Act. Gore was the Senate sponsor of the Environmental Justice Act of 1992, a measure which would have established a mechanism for dealing with high-impact areas of environmental pollutants. “You can have an area that is meeting the major laws and still be very hazardous, more often than not low-income or minority,” says Commission on Racial Justice staff member Charles Lee.

The bill, crafted with the aid of United Church of Christ Commission on Racial Justice Executive Director Rev. Ben Chavis, a conference co-chair, and other advo-

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cates, would require the Health and Human Services department to make a number of health assessments. Congressman John Lewis is planning to reintroduce the bill in 1993, once a new sponsor comes forward in the Senate.

Chavis was also appointed to the Clinton transition cluster on the environment. He and a few others from the conference touched base with the National Conference of Black State Legislators meeting at the Sheraton in downtown New Orleans. A natural for alliances, the NCBSL passed a resolution in support of SOC’s efforts. Legislator Bob Holmes of Georgia and former Alabama legislator Tony Harrison made their way over to the environmental justice gathering.

A National Guard for the Environment

It was just a decade ago that black residents of Warren County, North Carolina, became the first African-American citizens jailed for protesting environmental racism, describes Robert Bullard in his forthcoming book, Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots. A young woman, Kim Burwell, now twenty, who was eleven at the time she lay down in front of the truck carrying PCB-contaminated soil into Warren County, was honored in a special youth awards ceremony at the conference.

Bullard, whose Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality has become the textbook on environmental racism, has led the way in research since 1979. “The whole grassroots movement in the environmental movement” says Bullard, is “influencing the way that the national environmental organizations are talking about the environment. Even the EPA is now talking about it.”

“The movement has been very effective,” he says, but “there’s a lot of work that still needs to be done. The alliance between grassroots groups of color, and national organizations … is breaking down mistrust and stereotypes on both sides.

The convergence of the whole social justice and the environmental movement [has meant] more staff of color. Even though we are not totally satisfied with the numbers, there has been some movement diversifying the staffs and the boards.”

So while this conference feels like a beginning in many ways, it is also the fruition of at least a decade of focused work to shift the agenda of the environmental movement. The stereotypes of “elite crunchy granola types” and the “Audubon Society in khaki shorts” (Spitzer’s terms, which he admits may never have been fair) have shifted, and the movement has become more populist.

The convergence of the civil rights movement and the environmental movement is a necessity, welcomed by many. Says Domingo Gonzalez, of The Border Campaign, a grassroots group in Brownsville, Texas, who told conveners, “The time is long overdue for Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans and Asian Americans and progressive whites to unite throughout the Southern region. The environmental movement has reached the limits of its effectiveness; it will take the environmental justice movement to move things further.”

This gathering is informed by decades of experience, some of which was in support of the California farmworkers, echoed in familiar picketing at a Winn-Dixie grocery near the conference site during the event. Pesticide use which results in birth defects still plagues farmworkers’ families, and the grape boycott is still on.

We are rich in lessons learned from earlier struggles. When government officials say solving toxics problems is going to take time, conference organizer Pat Bryant recalls, “It’s the same thing they told us back in the sixties: we can get public accommodations and desegregate housing and schools, but we gotta go slow. We’ve been going slow, and that’s the problem. We’ve got to go fast.”

It was this sense of urgency that brought such large numbers to New Orleans. And while the meeting involved

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many veterans, its clearest hopeful sign was the overwhelming turnout of youth: five hundred high school students. College students formed their own caucus. Tensions were felt around the role of youth in the weekend’s program. A special Saturday morning agenda change was made to allow greater youth participation. The gathering brought several generations together and spawned youth activities back home. Shortly after the conference, Jessie Deer in Water reports the formation of YEA (Youth Environmental Awareness) among Indian youth who attended from Oklahoma. YEA has already organized its first activity, recycling Christmas trees to farmers for fish cover in ponds.

And, in addition to the Louisiana Attorney General’s office, the conference attracted other official involvement as well: from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Air Control Board.

Caucuses provided opportunities for white activists to reflect on the need for struggle against racism within white communities to build successful coalitions. The Indigenous Environmental Network was strengthened by coming together again within the New Orleans gathering, says Deer in Water, who works at Cherokee Community Initiative in Oklahoma.

The fourteen-member Asian American caucus stood together with spokesperson Cathy Verhoff, as she delivered their moving statement Sunday morning, teaching many present about Asian American culture. “We are exploding the model minority myth that keeps us in our place and explaining the history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the U.S., pointing out the diversity of our group—Indians, Filipinos, Laotians, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans from different parts of China, all of the nations of Southeast Asia, various communities in the Pacific Islands. We are standing together united and also with the people in the audience. We are [sic] still people the sweatshops, we are the textile workers, the food processors, we work in Silicon Valley. In 1945 our people were the victims of the worst environmental disaster in world history, and we are still reeling from the testing of atomic bombs in the Marshall Islands.”

The conference is only part of a major recent push in the South to keep justice issues central in the environmental movement. A coalition of grassroots environmental groups in EPA Region IV (Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee) was formed after activists took over the EPA Environmental Equity gathering in Atlanta September 14-15, 1992. One project the coalition hopes to undertake is the Neighbors Keepers Strike Force. It will provide mutual aid, with individuals and organizations serving once a month to help others and in turn calling upon the Strike Force to aid in their environmental fight, kind of “a national guard for the environment,” says Connie Tucker, who staffs the SOC Environmental Justice Project office in Atlanta. “The conference was just one highlight of a massive organizing effort to build a Southwide coalition for environmental justice.”

Overwhelmed by the huge attendance, organizers found it was impossible to distill an action plan and strategies on the spot. The Southern Manifesto, proposed by GCTO leader Pat Bryant, is a broad program in keeping with the understanding of the environment as all the life conditions of a community—clean air and water, safe jobs for all at decent wages, health care, education, equity, and justice. The Manifesto, which should be available soon with caucus recommendations and other conference materials, synthesizes some of these demands.

A follow-up meeting will be held March 27-28 in Birmingham to outline strategies and come up with an action plan. Likely priorities include: action toward a moratorium on siting new waste and other toxic facilities and demanding stricter limits on existing facilities. A campaign might focus on limiting pollution by the federal government, focusing on unbleached paper, for example. Other tough organizational questions to be wrestled with: How will the coalition continue? Should there be a parallel youth arm, or should young people be a part of a larger group?

“No conference is truly successful unless the ideas get put into life,” says Damu Smith, an African-American organizer on the Greenpeace staff who visited dozens of Southern communities working with SOC to bring people together. Smith found a community in Texas fighting the same company, sometimes dealing with the same person, as a community in North Carolina. He helped them share notes and strategy. “People are really doing their best under very difficult circumstances. The most important thing, in addition to multiracial unity, is to develop a strategy for preventing pollution, and an alternative strategy for economic development.”

A SECOND TOUR is organized, at night, for those who missed the first. Flares from the smoke stacks leap and glow, forming an even larger image in the dark.

“Prior to European contact not many native groups lived directly on the river,” says Duplantier. “It was fertile, but treacherous … No one knew better than the Indians the hydraulic power of the river. Today the power of those toxics is multiplied by the river.”

At night the Mississippi River’s reflection further obscures the dangerous poisons within. But, back across the water, with state meetings underway and more caucuses being formed, a multiracial movement that will change the river’s course is in full swing.

Ellen Spears is managing editor of Southern Changes.

Anne Braden: Southern Activist

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 15, No. 1, 1993, pp. 13-14

FOR OVER FORTY-FIVE YEARS, almost as long as the Southern Regional Council has existed, Anne Braden has stood for a South that embodies the very best democratic ideals and traditions. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, and reared in the Deep South, Anne had every opportunity as she was growing up in the 1930s to acclimate herself to the worst traditions of the South—the worst habits of a white segregated society. But by the gifts of family and circumstances, and perhaps just that magic that some call fate and others call God’s will, she came to understand in time and experience that the South of segregation was wrong in the 1940s, and, by God, the South of segregation need not be forever. While in 1992 that conclusion seems commonplace, for those who were coming of age in the 1930s and ’40s, it was a leap of imagination which even the founders of the Southern Regional Council could not grasp in its beginning.

Anne began in newspaper work in Birmingham, Alabama, and in Kentucky. She soon realized, however, that what she was covering, what she was seeing, needed to be changed more than reported. And so, she began to use her talents as a journalist and her self-made talents as an organizer to work with labor unions and burgeoning groups that later would call themselves civil rights groups. With her husband Carl, she began to change and challenge and did not stop.

In 1957, the Bradens began to work with the Southern Conference Education Fund, (SCEF). And if I fumble a bit on the name, it’s only because, if there’s been one time, there’s been a thousand times that people have introduced me from the Southern Regional Conference. I have often thought of it as something of a nice compliment, that somehow the Southern Regional Council, the Southern Conference on Human Welfare and the Southern Conference Education Fund could be seen as one in the full history of our world.

Anne worked through the ’50s and the ’60s with SCEF. Into the ’70s she helped to organize the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice (SOC) as a multi-racial, multi-issue network. She continued in the ’80s and she continues in the ’90s. If we had time and opportunity, we could meet people from the bayous of Louisiana to the mountain country of Kentucky who would give their own personal stories of what Anne has meant and done in their lives.

Tonight we honor Anne not merely for the consequences of these good deeds but also for the example that she sets as a lifelong Southerner of goodwill. In the 1950s, Anne and her husband Carl stood up against the tyranny of the witch hunt which Joe McCarthy and the U.S. Committee on Un-American Activities led and which Southern segregationist governors and members of Congress used to terrorize people who simply believed in integration. More than virtually all other Southerners—at times more than the leaders of the Southern Regional Council—Anne understood the devastation that would befall the South, and did, when people replied to the accusation, “Communist” with the reply, “Not me!” She knew that that reply only gave strength to the corrupted accusations and only divided Southerners of goodwill into ineffectiveness. It is a testament to her mettle not only that she gave us that example, but that she forgave us for having not understood it early enough.

Another of Anne’s exquisite examples comes from her insight and her faith in what I would call the beloved community. Before many others, Anne saw the connections between various social movements that came in time and different eras, various movements of different people with different urges. She saw the labor movement and the civil rights movement had very important connections—that they were in many ways one. She was one of the first white Southerners to understand the important connections between the civil rights movement the anti-war movement (Vietnam) and the poor peoples movement. She understood this lineage and these connections. I remember in 1969, after perhaps the most deadly year of our recent political history, Anne Braden went to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to speak to a group of black and white students and community folks about how their work

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in civil rights and their work on anti-war activities were in fact one and the same. She made those connections far better than any of us ever did, and she was able to forge them in many other places with a sense of common purpose which enlivened, deepened and enabled the local work for social and political change.

In recent years, she’s continued to bind together what is a rainbow of interests even before the Rainbow Coalition, on whose board she sits, was ever imagined. Civil rights, peace, labor, environment—these are but one cause, not many, for Anne Braden and for this insight we all are indebted.

The third significant lesson that Anne has given in her lifetime is tenacity, her endurance in the cause of a multiracial, just society. In an era when two years seem to be an awfully long time and four is just more than one can imagine ahead, Anne has given decades. She is devoted, daily, weekly, monthly in a fight she believes is as dear as her soul. I doubt there are many people who have ridden more miles, who have gone to as many small community group meetings and who continue to believe that each and every time it was important than Anne Braden. She has endured.

Finally, Anne Braden has had an important part, now and in the past in shaping the conscience of the South. This is not a fuzzy, feel-good notion with Anne. While she is warm and friendly, no one is more free of useless sentimentality than Anne Braden.

Bless her heart, she suffers fools poorly. She speaks her mind and she’s always done so on behalf of what she sees as a just and right society. She always has been impatient with those who find practical problems with moving forward. Always impatient, yet always enduring, she has continued to help define the struggle to empower all citizens to have a voice and a stake in our peculiar institution of democracy.

These are the examples of a lifetime that Anne Braden has brought to the South and this nation. History, I fear, will not do her justice since Anne’s contributions represent characteristics that are not only too rare but too rarely appreciated.

Tonight we are trying to do what I fear historians will not, to recognize the importance of these characteristics and the contributions they’ve enabled. Because she has given us a noble model of the qualities that are essential for anyone who works for a just and peaceful world, we have decided to give Anne Braden our highest honor and our deepest appreciation.

Steve Suitts, executive director of the SRC, made these remarks in presenting a Life Fellows Award to Anne Braden.

Remembering Harold and Marge

By Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 15, No. 1, 1993, pp. 17-18

At the Atlanta/Fulton County Public Library November 19, 1992, Harold Fleming, former director of the Southern Regional Council, and Marge Manderson, long-time program officer, researcher, and writer, were memorialized by family and friends. Leslie Dunbar offered the following words.

MY GOOD FORTUNE and privilege have been to know well both Harold and Marge. They were good and noble people, whom I cherished as friends.

I worked under Harold at the Council, and later tried to live up to his example, his many examples, as his successor. When I first came to the Council’s staff it was Marge, who had already been there for four years, who broke me in—she was to be my assistant—and who with her unflagging commitment to the Council worked with me during the next several full and challenging and always exciting years.

Harold was a superb leader. He was marvelous in his discernment of opportunities, in his ability to seize the moment. Today as the nation in its present troubled state is about to bring new government to Washington after the long years of Republican misrule I’ve been reflecting on that similar time in 1960 and 1961. The election results were hardly in when Harold set me and others to work on a study of what the new President and his administration could do for civil rights through executive authority and acts without recourse to a Congress, still then dominated by opponents, led by Southern Senators and Representatives.

The result was our book-length publication, The Federal Executive and Civil Rights, which was on the desks of the new administration almost as soon as it arrived, and which became its road-map, setting directions which it mostly followed. This capacity of awareness of what could be done was carried by Harold when he moved on to Washington. During my own tenure as Executive Director, the Council’s most valuable contribution was the Voter Education Project. That began with a phone call from Harold to me, saying in effect, “Why didn’t you undertake to organize a coordinated voter registration drive?”

Harold was all that, and more besides. In my remarks at the lovely memorial service last month in Washington I mentioned that what had struck me first of all when on that morning in 1958 I reported for my first day of work was that all the male staff were wearing coats and ties, that our usual daily routine was to go for lunch to Herrens, at that time the lunch place of Atlanta’s professional and business elite. This was more than a matter of style, for it grew from his conviction, his insistence, that the South

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and its graciousness and civility belonged as much to us radicals as to any Southerners. We always, through his leadership and example, saw ourselves as, whatever popular opinion of the time might hold, the “enduring South.”

Marge Manderson was the best proofreader and copy editor I’ve ever known and been blessed with having the assistance of. My rule while at the Council was that nothing went out to the public without her check. But Marge was far more than that. Marge was always ready for what had to be done.

Her steady belief in the importance of the Council and of what it was doing was inspiring to all of us who worked alongside her.

Harold came to the Council in 1946. Marge in 1954. What stamina! I think we do best in knowing them this afternoon by pausing a moment to think on this institution, this Southern Regional Council, and what it has meant that it could hold the loyalties of such people for so long.

The Council was born in a series of meetings—Durham, Atlanta, Richmond—during World War II. They were all essential, but the first, the one in Durham, has the most meaning, and should be, I believe, in the Council’s constant memory. We should never forget or overlook that the Council had its origin in a gathering of black Southerners, speaking out of their felt disadvantage and pain and appealing as they did so to their vision of what a free and fair South and nation could be. Some of those people who assembled there in Durham I had the privilege later of working with—working for—during my service here.

Dr. Gordon Hancock, the principal organizer of that meeting, became my friend. Others who were there and who were still active in my time included Dr. Rufus Clement and Dr. Benjamin Mays. From the Atlanta and Richmond meeting I knew through later association Guy Johnson, Paul Johnson, Ralph McGill, and our beloved Josephine Wilkins. These were great Southerners, great Americans, best of all great persons. They made the Council, put on it that imprint which could for years hold a Harold and Marge captive. Like them were others under whom they, and I, worked. Ones such as Paul Christopher, James McBride Dabbs, Albert Dent, Joseph Haas, Al Kehrer, Dorothy Tilly (according to the organizational chart she was staff, under me, but I did not make the mistake of taking that seriously), John Hervey Wheeler, Raymond Wheeler, Marion Wright Stephen Wright, and many more who so excellently guided me through demanding years.

They also shared with me, as with Harold and Marge, the consciousness that the Council had not, and probably could never have, fulfilled all the grand hopes of that process begun in Durham. Yet, we were not thereby excused from being all that we could be. And what was that? What did Harold and Marge discover that led them to give devoted service to the Council? Let me suggest five characteristics which have always defined this unique institution.

First has been a conviction that democracy must be inclusive of all the people who make up our society. President Clinton has stated it well: we have not a person to waste. The old supposed tension between freedom and equality is false. Only where persons count as equal can any be free, only where freedom exists can equality be established.

Secondly, the Council has known that in the South and in the nation as a whole, freedom and equality can be realized only through the combined efforts of blacks and whites—indeed, of all ethnic groups.

Thirdly, from its beginning days the Southern Regional Council has committed itself first of all to building democracy in the South, knowing, however, that an ascending South has to be linked to the best of the rest of the nation. A self-respecting South has been the goal. The road to it is through linkage with free women and men everywhere.

Fourthly, the Council has always been driven to do well whatever it does, whether it be writing well, researching well, organizing well, or thinking clearly. Only the best, only the trustworthy. The Council lives by the trust others have in its work.

And finally, it has been characterized, as Harold so well exemplified, by its having a clear-sighted view of what ought to be done next, and next after that, and a workable way of attaining it.

These characteristics defined the Southern Regional Council which Harold and Marge served so well. If we truly honor them, the Council will hold to them as they did.

State of Change?

Reviewed by Cecily McMillan

Vol. 15, No. 1, 1993, pp. 22-23

South Carolina in the Modern Age, by Walter Edgar (University of South Carolina Press, 1991, 171 pages).

The shaggy outlines of political coalitions and the ways in which they are created—around personality or favors, “friends and neighbors,” or to an increasingly hopeful degree in the South, around real issues—have long provided incumbents and those who aspire to public office with away to read the electorate. They also provide a way to read the changes that are occurring in a whole state.

At a time when at least one Southern state, South Carolina, is self-consciously attempting to loose itself from the grip of its past, from a legacy of defiant insularity, poverty, poor health, poor schools, racial inequality, and mistrust of its public officials, the transformation of a particular constituency this fall offered some clear indicators as to the voters’ identity and concerns and to the future of the state their activism will help define.

By itself, the birth of the new coalition that sent Billy Keyserling to the South Carolina House to represent a portion of Beaufort County is a small story involving about 10,000 voters. But it had the curious “before and after” quality which marks fundamental, if not seismic, shifts in a community.

When it is understood in the context of Walter Edgar’s fine new book, South Carolina in the Modern Age, a history of the state’s last one hundred years, it gains political symbolism, as if it were the very expression of—the culmination of—changes that have been occurring since 1891. As Professor Edgar tracks the steps the state has slowly taken to enter the mainstream of national life, so the Keyserling election shows how a group of voters came to feel they were a part of the mainstream, too.

The story began in Beaufort nearly twenty years ago when Billy Keyserling’s mother Harriet ran for and won a seat in the South Carolina House of Representatives. She was re-elected time after time, in large part as a result of her maturity, intelligence, and reputation as a good legislator, but also for her skills in securing for herself, a Democrat, the support of Republicans—many of them women, many of them her contemporaries, many new to the county. Combined with the traditional support of the county’s black voters for the Democratic candidate, and their unique loyalty to her husband Herbert, a well-known doctor who had cared for them, she was assured a margin of victory.

This spring, when she announced she would not seek another term, the question asked by many people—including her son Billy—was, “Could Harriet’s constituency be transferred intact?” The short, and not-surprising answer was no; constituencies are products of a unique alchemy between leaders and supporters.

However, the fact that Billy Keyserling did indeed win meant he had found a new, rich vein of loyalists. They were teachers, cooks, barmaids, landscapers, shopkeepers, young professionals with children in the public schools, college graduates who feared having to leave a place they loved because there were no good jobs. Many had felt themselves “not political,” on the fringes. Once given the sense that the issues they cared about had a political configuration—whether it was stopping a highway widening, improving the schools, or keeping their drinking water pure—and convinced that outcomes could be influenced by their efforts, they participated in droves.

The fact that this rather simple exercise in American politics should take on such meaning has everything to do with the modern history of South Carolina which Edgar, who teachers history at its University and directs its Institute for Southern Studies, so carefully and concisely summarizes in four chronologically-organized essays.

From the period starting twenty-five years before World War I through the legislative scandals that rocked the state in 1990, Edgar portrays a place which seemed to be in constant struggle with itself, pulled on the one hand, by a deep desire to glorify—and inhabit if possible—a mythic past and to preserve a rigid social and political order at the expense of progress; and, on the other by the desperate need to solve a host of seemingly intractable problems which, left unattended, had consigned South Carolina to nearly last place on every national “quality of

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life” indicator.

The basic conflict, left unresolved for most of the state’s modern period, provided the context in which every important decision was made. It gave rise to a political system in which power was closely held, issues rarely defined, local government barely alive, and scores of voters, black and white, disenfranchised and divided along race and class antagonisms. It is hardly surprising that demagogues flourished and that reformers were rather moderate. Or that when South Carolina was pressed to change, it found itself lacking the political and social infrastructure, and the means of consensus, by which to achieve it.

As Professor Edgar sees it the modern age has been a long haul. He brings the point home in each of his essays by describing, in a dozen or so sub-sections, activities that were taking place on all the state’s fronts: education, farming, the economy, and so on.

The fact that the news was never very good brings into sharp focus the difficulties faced by the state: some of which, it should be said, it brought on itself, and some, like the Depression, droughts, or changing price and demand for its goods, that were thrust upon it. Given the persistently bad odds, Edgar judiciously credits the bursts of progressivism designed to bring South Carolina out of the backwater.

The book opens with a chapter on the years 1891-1916, an account of the unsavory ways politicians like Coleman Blease and “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman consolidated their power. It wasn’t hard to do in a state that was poor and debt-ridden, its residents ill-educated (45 percent of the state was totally illiterate), unhealthy, and given to violent expressions of their discontent. The second chapter, 1916-1941, describes an already-hapless population faced with more difficulties: the Depression, the scourge of the boll-weevil, losses in the textile industry.

Taken together, these essays provide ample evidence as to why South Carolina was in no position to move forward. Political domination was complete. By 1916, Edgar writes: “Blacks had been disenfranchised and working-class whites effectively neutralized at the local level. The resulting political power structure would remain in firm control of South Carolina for another fifty years.” Economic paralysis was only marginally relieved by the New Deal’s “prime-the-pump” aid. In what might be called its “psychological” realm, the state was avidly romanticizing its antebellum past for tourists, and, no doubt, hoping to escape there itself.

World War II came and with it sweeping social changes that would influence not only South Carolina but the nation. This period, 1941-1966, witnessed the greatest shift in attitude and direction the state was ever to know.

The transformation was not without conflict-most especially on matters of racial integration which Edgar covers in excellent detail-but there developed for the first time a consensus among business and political leaders that what the rest of the country thought of South Carolina was important. Indeed, if it were successfully to attract the industries it coveted, major changes in image, and in reality, were crucial.

Thus began a campaign of self-improvement which has lasted to this day. It was, and is, fueled by considerations of economic development, but it has spun off commitments in every area including reform of state government, improved health-care, tax increases to fund education. The very fact that there are tangible issues to consider has created a place in the political system for citizen participation, as evidenced by the emerging coalition in Beaufort County. As Edgar wryly points out: “The worst fears of white Carolinians a century ago have come to pass: two-party politics, a strong Republican party, and black voters.”

Continuing his theme of “making headway” in the final essay, the years from 1966-1991, Edgar thoughtfully balances the consequences of change with the ability of South Carolinians to reconcile themselves to it. The amazing thing, he points out, is that the state came so far in such a short period of time.

Speed has its price, though, and he reports several significant instances of backsliding: one was the tremendous resistance encountered in 1970 by then-Governor Robert E. McNair as he complied with a Federal order to desegregate two school districts and maintain order, by force if necessary, while doing so.

More recently, the population had had to adjust itself to reports of widespread malfeasance on the part of more than two dozen public officials. Whether the process of governance can be reformed to the degree that seems necessary to prevent further abuses of power is the task that a newly-strengthened state, and a more aware citizenry, will have to face.

Whatever the outcome, and whatever challenges the future brings, Edgar’s book points up that, finally, South Carolina has entered the mainstream and intends to stay there. The portrait he draws of a state at long last being able to look itself in the eye, as it were, instead of having its gaze permanently fixed on its past, is a hopeful one. That change is coming to the state at all and the sort of change that residents will welcome and support, that they will view as an historic opportunity instead of a trade-off for what they value, represents a basic shift in the perception that South Carolinians and their leaders have of themselves. Overcoming many obstacles to achieve it has indeed been the history of the state in the modern age.

Cecily McMillan, writer and political activist, divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Frogmore, South Carolina.

Extraordinary Actions

Reviewed by Suzanne Marshall

Vol. 15, No. 1, 1993, pp. 24-25

Refuse to Stand Silently By: An Oral History of Grass Roots Social Activism in America, 1921-1964 , Eliot Wigginton, ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1991, 430 pages, index).

“But see, I went through a whole lot of things a whole lot of people never knew about. And I kept on doing it, not because I wanted to be a big man,” recalled civil rights activist Edgar Daniel Nixon. “I done it because I thought it needed doing.” Ordinary people have always done things to bring about change in society, as E. D. Nixon did, without desiring recognition. After finishing their work, they resumed their lives. But through the research of oral historians, the lives and actions of ordinary people are illuminated. Eliot Wigginton, a pioneer in oral history, has provided an inspiring, moving account of grassroots activists who were affiliated with the Highlander School in Tennessee.

Highlander was founded in the early 1930s as a training center for labor activists. Over the past sixty years it has concentrated its efforts on labor issues, civil rights and Appalachian concerns. Currently, the center concentrates on economic and environmental issues. During all the years of its existence Highlander’s founders and directors sought to work from the grassroots. As Dorothy Cotton explains, “if you want to have change, of course, the bottom line is that the folks for whom the change is meant must be involved in it.”

Wigginton allows the people involved in Highlander to tell its story, its philosophy, its transformations, and its effects on the activists who worked with it. Through their stories a narrative history of Highlander School and its influence evolves. “Highlander, in a sense,” interviewee Studs Terkel points out, “is symbolic, but more than that it is representing, as a school, all those disparate forces of positive change.” And these people did force change—sometimes minimal, sometimes dramatic—that inspires awe and spurs new forms of activism today.

The stories reveal the hardships and pleasures, the dangers and excitement of social justice work. They exemplify how people became involved in trying to achieve social change and how they persisted in the work when all signs pointed to failure. For instance, Ralph Helstein, a leader in the 1940s of the CIO, later of the AFL-CIO explained his commitment to social action as “this strong moral urge that unquestionably reflected my family’s strong drives toward responsibility toward the community.” When the road ahead looked dark and forbidding, Septima Clark carried on because, “you have to be strong. You have to tell the truth and take the consequences. And it’s not going to be easy. It’s not going to be pleasant” Nevertheless, Ms. Clark continues, “you live through the bad times. You have to have faith.”

Faith, courage, moral strength, and hard work characterize the efforts of all the people interviewed. Although each person in this book tells a unique and compelling story, I have chosen just two, E. D. Nixon and Bernice Robinson, as examples. Together their lives and work span great years at Highlander.

E. D. Nixon, of Montgomery, entered social justice work in the 1920s when he joined A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a courageous act for a Southern black man. When his boss warned against union activity, Nixon threatened a lawsuit if anything happened to his job. He encountered no problems after this confrontation. As a union man he learned valuable skills in public speaking and organizing. When the civil rights movement began in the 1950s, Nixon was experienced and ready to act. “I was the first man anywhere in the United States to lead a group of black children into an all-white school.” He also served as the head of the local NAACP, worked with Martin Luther King, Jr., during the bus boycott and continued activism throughout his life. Nixon, in his concluding interview, looks to the future and advises social activists to learn from their elders, to learn from experience and to work for economic equity because, “you can’t be independent and broke. As long as you’re broke, you got to stay on your knees.”

Bernice Robinson, a South Carolinian, moved to New York in the 1940s and experienced a freedom unknown in her home state. Eventually, due to family demands, she returned to the South and its Jim Crow society. She had trained as a beautician, an occupation where she could be self-supporting and independent of white control because her customers came from the black community. This economic freedom and her own courage allowed her to become politically active, join the NAACP, and work for civil rights. She had become acutely aware of discrimination in the South after tasting the comparative freedom of the North. This consciousness drove her to action. She worked with voter registration projects in the late 1940s, attended a Highlander program with her aunt, Septima Clark, and together they set up the first Citizenship Schools in South Carolina which became models for other states. She concludes that her work was productive and

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rewarding. “Although we haven’t scratched the surface as far as literacy is concerned, we have had an influence. So some progress has been made, even though it may be minute when you look at the overall picture.” For the future, “we have to protect that progress and hold it or else we’ll be right back in the same boat we were in right after Reconstruction when everything was going fine until the troops were pulled out of the South and we lost almost everything again.”

A number of interviews were conducted with people who began their association with Highlander as ordinary citizens, but because of their work became famous. Rosa Parks, Pete Seeger, Andrew Young, and Julian Bond all participated at one time or another. Highlander co-founder Don West defined a revolutionary as “one who wants to change ugly conditions to more positive humane conditions and to have a turnover from the kind of regime that may be rotten and corrupt to one that is more humane.”

According to West’s definition, all the people interviewed in this book are revolutionaries. Transforming society required dedication, vision, and persistence. Pete Seeger declares that, “if you’ve got any energy, use it wherever you are, wherever you think you can be effective. City or country, family or community, do whatever you can do. Everything has an effect.” These people had the energy, and they used it in many ways and in many projects.

This book will remind readers of the importance of ordinary people who rise up and decide to take action. It shows that change can be made by committed individuals and by grass roots organizations. Much of history has been made by people who remain anonymous. Fortunately Wigginton and his primary collaborator, Sue Thrasher, have provided an oral history that is a testimony to the power of the people.

Suzanne Marshall is on the history faculty of Jacksonville State University in Alabama.

Irreconcilable Priorities

Reviewed by Thomas V. O’Brien

Vol. 15, No. 1, 1993, pp. 25-27

Black Scholar: Horace Mann Bond, 1904-1972, by Wayne J. Urban (University of Georgia Press, 1992, xii, 266 pages, photographs).

Wayne J. Urban’s Black Scholar is a biography of Horace Mann Bond, who lived, worked, and wrote in both the South and the North during the reign of Jim Crow, and through the early years of its aftermath. Bond is portrayed by Urban as having two irreconcilable priorities: the desire to pursue a life of scholarship and a competing desire to be a university administrator. Although he achieved both of these goals in his lifetime, Urban argues that Bond’s greater strength was as a scholar. He asserts that Bond’s best work was his early research and writing, exemplified by his dissertation at the University of Chicago. In this early work, Bond showed deep insight into the problems of educational, political, and social injustices to blacks in the South.

Tragically, feels Urban, Bond never was able to devote his energies to serious scholarship after his first decade in academe. He “was never free to follow his inclinations and talent for historical scholarship.” Pointing to two of Bond’s later works while he was President of Lincoln University, his research for the NAACP in the Brown v. Board of Education case and his history of Lincoln University, Urban, himself an historian at Georgia State University, asserts that the quality was undermined by “the contemporary circumstances he found himself in.”

Urban, who writes well and has researched thoroughly, is judicious and fair in his treatment of Bond’s professional life as both scholar and college administrator. He has done a marvelous job making sense of the Horace Mann Bond papers, housed at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He has also carefully read and analyzed virtually every publication of Bond’s. Moreover, he interviewed many of the people who worked and lived with him over the years, including his widow, Mrs. Julia Washington Bond. A shortcoming of the book (and one that Urban admits up front) is its failure to reveal much detail about personal life or personality. Although the reader learns much about what made Bond angry (especially in the last five chapters), one never gets a genuine understanding of what was going on in this man’s mind, what motivated him, and what he relied on when making decisions.

In chapter one, Urban points out that Bond was named after Horace Mann, the great nineteenth century common school crusader, not because of his reputation as an educator but because of his anti-slavery activities. Urban then sketches a brief, lucid picture of the young Bond, a small, bookish boy who was more content reading at home than cavorting in the streets with his older brothers. His mother’s sister, Aunt Mamie, had a profound influence on the youngster early in his life. She, a physician who had moved to Kentucky to practice medicine and live with the Bonds, devoted her free time to schooling young Bond in medicine, history, and contemporary novels. He also read extensively from the family library, which included several anti-slavery and abolitionist works, and W.E.B. DuBois’s magazine, Crisis.

But it was his father, James Bond, a Congregationalist minister who had fought against his illiteracy as a young

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man and eventually graduated from two institutes of higher education, who had the greatest influence. James placed a premium on education and a liberal brand of moral Puritanism. This combination, which allowed Horace to be comfortable with the piety of many blacks “without being overcome with anti-intellectualism and fervid fundamentalism,” would serve him well in his career.

Urban then skillfully chronicles Bond’s scholarly ascent, first to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania (where he was accepted at age fourteen) and then to the University of Chicago, where he studied education. Financing his schooling was a problem, but with advice and help from his father, Bond found innovative ways to make ends meets and earn his degrees. After his baccalaureate from Lincoln in 1923, he jumped between graduate school in Chicago and faculties at colleges in Oklahoma, Alabama, Tennessee, and a deanship at Dillard University. He did not receive his doctorate until 1936. It was during these twelve years that Bond matured as an astute observer and critic of an unjust society and as a scholar of black education.

Whether he was researching and writing at Chicago, publishing in DuBois’s Crisis or in Charles Johnson’s Opportunity, or conducting research for the Rosenwald Fund (which he joined in 1929), Bond was in his element. His work with the Rosenwald Fund led to several other publications, including what Urban considers to be his “greatest contribution to scholarship,” his dissertation, published in 1939 under the title Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel. Urban portrays Bond as a bright, gifted, young scholar, on track to become a serious academic.

The same year Cotton and Steel was published, and at the young age of thirty-five, Bond accepted the presidency of Fort Valley State College in rural middle Georgia. At forty, he left Fort Valley to become the first black president of Lincoln University, his alma mater. It was during this time that be drifted away from “academic accomplishments” and toward becoming a “committed professional administrator who was also gaining a powerful voice in the segregated world of black education.” He began making “peace with the diverse nonscholarly tasks a president is expected to perform… the art of political manipulation, public relations, and bureaucratic maneuvering.” Urban argues, and laments, that Bond’s decision to commit himself to administration sapped his scholarly energy and compromised his ultimate achievements.

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Urban laments that Bond’s serious research was victimized by his time and place in history.

His initial foray into administration, however, appeared auspicious. For six years at Fort Valley he functioned successfully as an administrator, transforming that institution from little more than a junior college to a full-fledged four-year college. While there, be secured notable increases in state funding and, with additional help from the Rosenwald Fund and the General Education Board, also strengthened the faculty, built up the library, and improved the teacher training program.

While Lincoln was a greater professional opportunity for Bond, and provided possibilities of a better life for his family, it turned out to be an administrative nightmare. His tenure was marred by interpersonal struggles and political battles with faculty members and alumni. Urban believes that Bond reduced and misattributed many of his conflicts with white trustees and faculty to issues of race, when in fact they were largely economic issues. “Bond allowed his very real concern about racial dynamics among faculty and between town and gown to obscure larger economic realities.” There were also conflicts with black faculty and alumni.

During his years at Lincoln, Bond made ten or more trips to Africa. There he devoted himself to improving education and strengthening ties between African schools and Lincoln. While his trips had few “tangible results,” argues Urban, they met his “own need for discovering the antecedents of his people” and took “him away from the turmoil at Lincoln.”

The issue that would lead to Bond’s resignation from his position at Lincoln involved a plan to alter the historical mission of Lincoln University to make it a more interracial institution. While Bond had always supported keeping the doors open to all types of students, he would not enthusiastically support the trustees’ 1953 plan to recruit white students. Bond, disagreeing with Thurgood Marshall, a Lincoln alumnus and at the time chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, opined that Lincoln’s interracial character was evident in its board and in its faculty, and that it should not abandon its raison d’etre: educating black men. He criticized student tokenism elsewhere and argued that those white schools then opening their doors to blacks were far behind what was happening interracially at Lincoln. Given that the decision was imminent, Bond’s stance was perceived as “politically incorrect” and served as a final straw. Bond was forced to resign in 1957.

After leaving, be accepted a one-year lectureship at Harvard University and then appointment as dean of the School of Education at Atlanta University. There he was able also to return to scholarly pursuits, though he had lost many valuable years of serious scholarship. In Atlanta, he settled into realizing the fruits of his personal life. Urban describes this period as a fulfilling one for Bond. His children℄Jane, James, and Julian—, one can suppose, took his efforts, principles, and ideals into the climate of social activism of the 1960s and 1970s, to which they contributed significantly. Professor Urban’s scholarship is impeccable, and his biography of a man who sacrificed scholarship for administration creates a vivid portrait of a brilliant black man, and his pursuit of his principles in twentieth century America.

Thomas V. O’Brien is an Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations at Millersville State University, Millersville, Pennsylvania.

The FBI’s Judicial Agenda

Reviewed by Cindy Adcock-Steffey

Vol. 15, No. 1, 1993, pp. 27-28

Cloak and Gavel: FBI Wiretaps, Bugs, Informers and the Supreme Court, by Alexander Charns (University of Illinois Press, 1992, xviii, 206 pages).

In Cloak and Gavel, Alexander Charns, a Southern civil rights attorney, weaves a tale of deception and intrigue. His proposition is that J. Edgar Hoover, during his forty-eight year reign as director of the FBI, greatly influenced both the make-up and the decisions of the Supreme Court. His tale involves plots that most would find unbelievable:

• During the Johnson administration, a Supreme Court Justice violated his judicial oath when he acted as an informer for the White House and the FBI by providing inside information on key cases before the Court.
• During the 1950s and 1960s, the FBI not only used wiretaps, bugging, informants, and disinformation to gather “evidence” on supposed Communists, but also used such methods to try to force “liberals” off the bench and to cultivate favoritism from others on the bench.
• If information obtained through warrantless wiretaps had not been given to President Truman by the FBI, William Douglas probably would have been appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court instead of Fred Vinson, changing drastically the make-up of the Supreme Court even today.

Charns supports his proposition with pages and pages of documentation. Consequently, the reader is drawn into the tale, finding it hard to put the book down, hanging at the end of each chapter, eager to discover the exact nature of the FBI’s impact on the Supreme Court.

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Charn’s book is actually a tale made of two stories. There is the story in most any legal history, of certain resignations and confirmations of Supreme Court Justices and of the Court’s key decisions from the 1920s to the 1970s dealing with the constitutionality of warrantless wiretapping. This information provides the context for the second story and makes the book easily accessible for even those unfamiliar with legal history.

The second story is the one previously untold. It is the story of J. Edgar Hoover’s anti-Warren court program which consisted of supporting conservative nominations to the Supreme Court by influencing the nomination and confirmation process; whipping up public furor against Warren Court rulings; lobbying for legislation to counteract Supreme Court decisions; penetrating the Court itself to gain advance knowledge of Court business and influence rulings; and attempting to remove enemies of the Court.

Importantly, it is a story about a program which could have never existed without the assistance of various presidents, attorneys general, congressmen, and Supreme Court Justices.

Hoover was director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1924 until his death in 1972. From 1941 to the mid-1960s, the FBI eavesdropped without a warrant on at least 13,500 individuals and organizations, catching information on thousands of non-targeted persons, including at least twelve Supreme Court Justices. Hoover was strongly anti-Communist and believed that the manner in which incriminating information was obtained was largely irrelevant. He also believed that the Supreme Court under Earl Warren, who became Chief Justice in 1953, was coddling subversives in its opinions on criminal law and civil liberties. Consequently, as revealed by Charns, from 1957-1971 Hoover “battled for the soul of the Supreme Court.”

Charn’s expose consists of shocking incidents, uncovered in government documents, of ex parte communications between the FBI and the Court and of vendettas against particular justices. One such incident was Hoover’s interference with the judicial process in Black v. U.S. The government believed Fred B. Black, Jr., had ties to racketeers. During its investigation, the FBI intercepted conversations between Black and his attorney. Black was subsequently tried for and convicted of income tax evasion.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy learned of the bugging several years later, but Hoover did not want him to inform the Court, as he feared the man would be freed. Nevertheless, in that year, Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall did inform the Court of the illegal bugging. From that point, Hoover was determined to lay the blame for the bugging on Kennedy, who had not directly approved the practice but had quietly acquiesced in it. Justice Abe Fortas was a close friend of President Johnson who hated Kennedy; Hoover enlisted Fortas to be an advocate for the FBI on the Court.

Charns goes beyond an historical examination of Hoover. He posits that the FBI has maintained what should be viewed as an inappropriately cozy relationship with the federal judiciary, pointing to the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings as a recent example of the ill results of such a relationship. During the confirmation process, the FBI did not view Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment sufficiently relevant to put into its investigative report, a report heavily relied upon by the Senate Judiciary Committee. As a result of the omission, the Committee had to learn of the allegations from the news media.

Charn’s contribution is to remind us that the FBI is an agency of the Executive Branch and should not be allowed special access to the judiciary. He shows a passionate devotion to the ideal of separation of powers and prompts his readers to ponder whether they believe the ideal is worth protecting.

As Charns points out, “An informal arrangement in which FBI agents and U.S. attorneys are more welcome in the chambers of justices and judges than defense lawyers or citizens does not inspire confidence and leads to the appearance that cases have been discussed and resolved beforehand, no matter how untrue this may be. This appearance itself is contrary to both the high ethical standards required of judges and to basic notions of fair play and good citizenship.”

He ends the book by making seven logical and seemingly reasonable recommendations, which if taken by Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court, would prevent abuses of the past from occurring in the future. If the reader believes that such remedies are not necessary because such abuses no longer occur, he or she need only be reminded of what was disclosed in the book’s preface: much of the information found in Cloak and Gavel was discovered only because of Charn’s ten-year struggle to obtain government documents about the FBI’s influence on the Supreme Court through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Only after litigation were the tens of thousands of records eventually released to him.

And the litigation has not ended. The information Charns has disclosed is most likely the tip of the iceberg, and without the implementation of at least some of the reforms Charns recommends, there can be no assurance that the FBI does not continue to influence the federal judiciary.

Cindy Adcock-Steffey is a staff attorney with North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services.

A Journalist’s Education

Reviewed by Linda Blackford

Vol. 15, No. 1, 1993, pp. 29-30

In Our Place, by Charlayne Hunter-Gault (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1992, 257 pages).

“We were simply doing what we were born to do.”

With this statement, journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault recalls her role in an era of great change for the United States. That role is less famous than her present persona as a television journalist with the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour. But in 1961, Charlayne Hunter attained instant fame as the young student from Atlanta who integrated all-white University of Georgia. She has set down her memories leading to that tumultuous time in In Our Place.

As Hunter-Gault writes, it becomes apparent that she was indeed a model to bring the South into the twentieth century. She was bright, beautiful, and well off by the standards of many Southern blacks, a polished product of black, middle-class Atlanta. Her father was an army chaplain frequently stationed away from home. She was raised by her mother and grandmother, the two women who most influenced her, and instilled in her the sense of pride and courage that convinced her that the University of Georgia was as much “our place” as anyone else’s.

Hunter-Gault records both happy and painful memories of her upbringing; her birth in Due West, South Carolina, her moves to Covington, Georgia, then Atlanta, growing up in schools that were neither equal to white ones nor up to the task of educating precociously intelligent children. Her childhood could have been that of many pretty, smart girls who are editors of their school paper and homecoming queens at their high school and who want to go to journalism school. But as she was black, and living in the South during the 1950s, it became the extraordinary precursor to extraordinary event.

Because the lengthy court battle had just begun on the case to enter the university, she went to Wayne State University, in Detroit, to begin her studies at another journalism school. At Wayne, she took part in the social life as a normal college student, joining a sorority, and getting involved with various student groups.

All that ended on December 13, 1961, when she and Hamilton Holmes entered the University of Georgia. Calvin Trillin has extensively documented the chronology of the two years that took Hunter, along with her Turner classmate Holmes, from the courts to the classrooms, in his An Education in Georgia. But where Trillin provided the facts, Hunter-Gault fills in the personal, compelling details of that time, such as how girls a flight above her in the dormitory took turns pounding on the floor so she wouldn’t be able to sleep, and the reactions of other students when she finally received permission to use the cafeteria. She and Holmes were suspended a week after their arrival, ostensibly for their own safety because of a student riot. She notes that the famous photo of her leaving the dorm after the riot, clutching her Madonna, showed tears of rage, not fear. Her last years at Georgia never became more warm or welcoming, despite the few people on campus who would talk to her, people she describes as “well meaning but who also had nothing else to do.”

One of the most interesting offshoots of her experiences is her ambivalent relationship with the civil rights movement. She, along with her peers at Turner in Atlanta, became involved in the Inquirer, a newspaper largely run by Atlanta’s student movement members, and would speak for various organizations about her experiences. But as she became less of a member and more of a symbol, the novelty and allure of the movement and her role within it lost its appeal. When Walter Stovall (whom she later married), a white student from the University, came to visit in Atlanta, the disapproval of some of her black friends became a lightning rod for many of her frustrations with the civil rights movement in general.

“I found the things they said to be racially insensitive and totally at odds with the movement position articulated by Dr. King: that people should be judged ‘not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’ Besides wasn’t anybody concerned with my personal happiness? How much of a sacrifice was I supposed to make? And who was in a position to judge?” She never underestimates the historical importance of her experience. But she never rests on her laurels as a hero of the movement, a role she neither desires nor sees as particularly heroic.

“If I were going to be known to the world, I wanted it to be through the efforts of my ability, rather than through something that but for the time and the place should have been ordinary, routine occurrence. I wanted to be famous someday, but not simply for going to college.”

Autobiographical writing remains one of the most difficult literary genres to convey to the reader without either being self-effacing, boastful, or awkward. Hunter-Gault writes without sentiment, bravado, or bitterness, a pleasing combination of journalistic detail, humor, and insight. Her life comes through as clear as her prose, with the same sense of purpose and persistence that got her through the

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most arduous travails at Georgia, and to her status as a national journalist. It is the work for which she seems to want to be remembered and recognized—the rest was something she was born to do.

Linda Blackford, who reviewed Calvin Trillin’s book about Hunter-Gault’s and Hamilton Holmes’s desegregation of the University of Georgia in our August/September 1992 issue, is a reporter for The Observer, Charlottesville.

Cross-Examining America

Reviewed by Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 15, No. 1, 1993, pp. 30-31

Declarations of Independence, by Howard Zinn (Harper-Collins, 1990, 341 pages).

The Disunity of America. Reflections on a Multicultural Society, by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (W. W. Norton, 1992, [first published by Whittle Books, 1991.], 160 pages).

Within the ranks of contemporary American historians it would be hard to pick two more unlike than are Schlesinger and Zinn. Schlesinger is a principal chief of the current intellectual aristocracy. Zinn is, on the other hand, a much admired voice for a sizeable number who distrust that leadership, and its outlook on our national history and priorities. Both, I would guess, vote Democratic; or, in any case, do not vote Republican.

They also both belong to the long national tradition of self-criticism. Each of these books treats today’s America very harshly. But the books are not parallel; the subject of one is hardly touched in the other. These men have different worries on their minds. In that, they are like their followers, Schlesinger’s from the center, Zinn’s from the left of American liberalism. “Ethnic and racial conflict it seems evident, will now replace the conflict of ideologies as the explosive issue of our times.” Schlesinger. “All of us, therefore, as we approach the next century, face an enormous responsibility: How to achieve justice without massive violence. Whatever in the past has been moral justification for violence—whether defense against attack, or the overthrow of tyranny—must now be accomplished by other means.” Zinn.

Declarations of Independence treads, nearly always angrily, over the record of American political and economic behavior. It likes hardly anything it sees. Even a reader who comes to the book with a large measure of built-in agreement may find it guilty of overkill. It too often lapses into sarcasm, surely the most difficult form of rhetoric to manage successfully. Zinn’s subtitle is, “Cross-Examining American Ideology.” He would have benefitted by having had an editor who cross-examined him at many points; for some of the interpretations in this book simply could not be well defended. The pages on “free speech” and “representative government” for example, are riddled with such, and that is the more regrettable because the themes of those pages are impressive and should not be lost because of faulty elaboration.

But where Zinn is at his best he is very good, and that is when he is not laying about with every stick he can put his hand on but is speaking in his own voice and through his own vision. He does this especially well in the last thirty-five or so pages; to the fine and even lovely words of those I’ll return.

Schlesinger’s book is, after all, a polemic, but if we are to take his words seriously—and one always does—it reveals the heart of his concern. “The explosive issue of our times” is not necessarily “the basic issue” but it is certainly close. A summary of his book would go like this.

America has to be a nation of individuals, not of groups. The growing racial and ethnic heterogeneity of our population “makes the quest for unifying ideals and a common culture all the more urgent.” We have, therefore, to resist the present tendencies toward becoming “a nation of minorities.” We have come “full circle” on integration. “Little is harder to talk honestly about in America these days than race.” “For blacks the American dream has been pretty much of a nightmare.” Tocqueville almost alone among our critics perceived “racist exclusion as deeply ingrained in the national character.” But “white guilt can be pushed too far,” and “ethnic ideologues” have encouraged not only blacks but other ethnic groups (and perhaps we might add, women and homosexuals) to see themselves as “victims” and to live by “alibis” rather than to claim opportunities. We have in our national existence been held together by “a common adherence to ideals of democracy and human rights.” Desertion of that commonality will lead, as already appears, to the “disunity” of America.

The argument has become familiar, probably in part because of Schlesinger’s authoritative advancement of it. Anecdotal evidence piles up to support it. Silly things are indeed being done in the name of multiculturalism. Hucksters of one or another profession—take that word in two meanings—pocket their profits from it. Our schools, from kindergarten to Ph.D. levels, are pressed hard, and clamorously, to teach all manner of novel things, at the expense of what makes a person cultured, in the old and right meaning of being brought into the structure the ages have built and which we know as civilization.

And yet, how lastingly threatening is all this? And has it no good side? And is even its bad side, such as Schlesinger attacks, worse than the monoculturalism it supplants?

It may be true that every generation has at least one historic task, and if it may be that some generations (unlike others) do in fact accomplish their tasks, then it

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can be said that the single greatest task-and accomplishment-of Schlesinger’s and Zinn’s (and my) generation was the overthrow of Jim Crow. That generation has had also the task—which it did not accomplish well—of moving the country on from the victory, that “overthrowing,” to a “more perfect union.” Wills grew slack, intelligences were blurry, selfishness took over from all sides, and overpowering events intruded (like the continuation in Vietnam of our anti-Communist obsession—and here Zinn is truer to history than Schlesinger has been). There was some directive intelligence behind the victory over Jim Crow, from great leaders, grassroots organizations, lawyers, governmental figures, journalists, organizers of public opinion and behavior such as the Southern Regional Council. Zinn himself was a valiant, constant, and outstanding worker in the movement, and some of this book’s strongest pages are devoted to it. No comparable array of focused leadership has been with us to guide the building of the” new union” which the civil rights movement created.

Instead, “discrete minorities”—to use an old constitutional law term—have each in its own way moved to establish itself and to work out the terms of its co-existence with others. Schlesinger wrote that for blacks “the American dream has been pretty much of a nightmare.” But so too has it been for Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, American Indians (who, amazingly, were hardly mentioned in Schlesinger’s famous Age of Jackson despite their virtually genocidal persecution then). And I am sure a nightmare too for many women, and a bitter hurt for nearly all women. Never before in our history have we really thought of the polity as being inclusive of all who live here. Never before has “consent of the governed” actually meant anything more than, at best, consent of white males. What the nation is in the midst of now is not its “disunity” but its first real attempt to find and secure a true union.

Some sentences of Zinn’s summarize his book perhaps as well as another could.

… We should make the most of the fact that we live in a country that although controlled by wealth and power, has openings and possibilities missing in many other places. The controllers are gambling that these openings will pacify us, that we will not really use them to make the bold changes that are needed if we are to create a decent society. We should take that gamble. We are not starting from scratch. There is a long history in this country of rebellion against the establishment, or resistance to orthodoxy.

In successive chapters he elaborates these themes. Wealth dominates this society, and has always. Resistance is possible, though the “establishment” in diverse and devilish ways tries to stifle it. There is a real though insufficiently known and celebrated tradition of American radicals and dissenters, persons who did not accept the ideological orthodoxy which surrounds us from birth. Basic changes in our economy and political values are needed.

As I have earlier implied, I doubt that Zinn’s presentation of these vastly important themes will persuade many. He preaches to the choir; which sometimes is a necessary thing to do, when the choir has become listless and off-key: as may be the present case.

The concluding pages, beginning with a section titled “Communism: A Rational Critique,” go well beyond that. Here he has given over slashing and burning in preference for talking to us of his own deeply thoughtful principles and hopes.

He wants us to know, as we all should know, that the appalling, essentially horrifying, history of the Soviet Union was a betrayal of Karl Marx’s vision (comparable, one might say, to the savagery long practiced by the Christian churches in betrayal of the gospels), and that the deserved collapse of so-called Communist states in the 1980s does not mean that the age-old socialist ideals will not again put down, as they always have, new roots in human aspirations. “A recognition of the terrible things that have happened in the Soviet Union should not lead us … to embrace the anti-communism of the U.S. government to justify its wars, its control over other countries, …at the cost of poverty, sickness, and homelessness for tens of millions of Americans.”

This leads Zinn to invite us all to consider the possibility of a “worldwide movement of nonviolent action for peace and justice, …the entrance of democracy for the first time into world affairs.” He tells us that such, in fact, is “the new realism,” realistic to a degree that the conventional method of war after war after war has not been; and cannot be.

It is usually the long-term irrationalists who call thoughts like these “unrealistic.” Is there any necessity more heavy upon us, than that of learning to think and act not merely for today’s or even tomorrow’s advantage but for the time beyond. For the long-term. Zinn’s anger, perhaps too rashly expressed in his critical chapters, grows from a realism, a wise perception that too much of our contemporary America will not endure, not if justice is to live. I think the unity of this nation can better stand the “multiculturalism” Schlesinger deplores, than the continuation of the warring and exploiting which Zinn abhors.

After this issue of Southern Changes, Leslie Dunbar is stepping back as Book Review Editor. His efforts, garnering reviews from noted and able writers in and around the South, will be missed a great deal. He promises still to write reviews regularly, so you’ll not be missing his rich insights.

Raveled Care

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 15, No. 2, 1993, pp. 1-4

If modern American presidents are known by the companies that keep them, this summer we are witnessing a shift from the era of military-industrial presidencies to those in thrall to the health insurance-medical industry. It’s not that the Pentagon is on the verge of withering away into plowshares and stethoscopes. Hardly. More that there is a newly ascendant hog whose presence at the trough demands notice.

Postponed for decades, but forced now because of costs that are rising more than ten percent a year in a sector that takes 14 percent of our annual gross domestic product while leaving thirty-seven million people uninsured, the debate over the national crisis in health care is sure to continue for months and years to come. Yet, at some point late in the ’92 campaign, Bill and Hillary Clinton firmly fastened on to the conservative Democratic “managed competition” strategy, a proposal that if put into practice will accelerate the pace at which this country’s health care is being turned over to insurance industry giants. When Clintonians say “Be realistic, this is the best we can hope for,” what they are really saying is “Be Prudential.”

Believers in the irony theory of history might look back to October 3, 1991 when Governor Clinton, in announcing his candidacy for President, vowed—as he would vow and vow again during the campaign—to “take on the big insurance companies” as he sought to control health care costs. The result so far, as the preacher might say, has been much like Jonah swallowing the whale. Recently, five of the largest commercial insurance companies (Prudential, Cigna, Metropolitan Life, Aetna, and Travelers), all with enormous invest-

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ments in managed-care programs, formed their own lobbying group—the Coalition for Managed Competition—to help shape and promote the Clinton program.

All spring, as trial balloons floated out of the closed deliberations of Hillary Clinton’s Task Force on National Health Care Reform, you didn’t have to jog in Beltway circles to realize that the Task Force leaders remained fixed upon the managed competition framework. Although many particulars remain to be worked out, the Clinton plan would organize the nation’s population into geographic health alliances, composed of hundreds of thousands of people, each of whom will have a health security card. The health alliances would represent constituencies of households and small businesses by bargaining among competing private insurance providers for the best care available for a fixed amount of money. Financing for the system of phased-in, universal coverage would come from mandated employer and employee contributions plus new sources of tax revenue still under negotiation.

By whatever euphemism the Administration finally decides to call it, managed competition would be good news for franchised hospitals, pharmaceutical manufacturers, some medical entrepreneurs, and large health insurance companies. While it will offer a yet-undetermined range of coverage for the currently uncovered, the Clinton plan is not the cure for our failed medical care, system, but, at best, a kind of symptomatic treatment.

In recent weeks several journalists have looked into how the Clintonians came to embrace and elaborate the framework of managed competition. It is a tale of health-policy advisors with backgrounds in—and financial support from—the health care industry cozying-up long before the ’92 election in a Wyoming retreat named Jackson Hole, of Rhodes Scholar old boy connections that lead in and out of the trail to Jackson Hole, and of an appointed Task Force on National Health Care Reform that insisted upon secret sessions rather than open and representative forums to argue-out this pent-up issue.

In the meantime, what has become of serious discussion of the merits of the single-payer, Canadian-style health system? This alternative would replace the private medical insurance industry with a program financed largely by progressive forms of taxation. The government would function as the sole insurer and payer of bills. Patients could choose their physicians. Coverage for long-term

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care, including mental health treatment would keep families from being driven into desperation and financial ruin. Such a plan with national standards could be administered regionally.

Under the name of the American Health Security Act (the McDermott-Conyers-Wellstone Bill), introduced in Congress in March by fifty-three sponsors, a version of the single-payer plan is still alive. Yet those who have raised this alternative with members of the President’s Task Force have risked being told in patronizing tones that an equitable, comprehensive, national program that eliminates private health insurance is, pragmatically speaking, not in the cards. It’s something the Clintonians would rather not hear or talk about. Outside of Congress, the push for a Canadian-style plan is being made by grassroots organizers such as those of Citizen Action, advocacy groups like Consumers Union and Physicians for a National Health Program, and a number of labor unions.

When evasion and defensiveness speak in the voice of American political reality, you know there are fortunes being made and empires under construction. In the $300 billion-a-year health industry a small number of very big interests stand in the way of a national program of humane care. We’re more likely to see a national network of Humana outlets. “Managed competition,” observes Ohio Senator Howard Metzenbaum, a co-sponsor of the American Health Security Act, “is the creation of the Jackson Hole Group. And what is the Jackson Hole Group? It consists of the people who are profiting most from the system as it is: insurance companies, hospital associations, drug companies.”

That big interests stand in the way of much that might be just and fair in America comes as a surprise to few Americans. Probably not even to those who voted for Bill and Hillary and Al and Tipper last November. The surprise comes if you were hoping the Clintonians might seize the moment for the challenge it offers.

Instead, the scene is now set for a major and tragic squandering that could take years to play out and might well leave the public soured on any sort of national health plan. What the Clintonians seem intent upon throwing away is the broad popular desire—measured in poll after poll, year after year—for fundamental change in the way that American health care is provided. As recently as 1990, three out of four Americans favored a government-financed national health care program. Even if it required more taxes. Belief in a Clinton-Gore commitment to comprehensive, affordable, efficiently administered medical care for all Americans was one of the major reasons for the change in White House residents.

Beyond the fundamental issue of private enterprise versus a genuine national health program, the recommendations of the Clinton Task Force provide exemptions and dodges that, if left unchanged, will result in administrative chaos and in unequal levels of care arising from the different social and class situations of Americans. The chaos is certain if each of the fifty states is allowed to pursue its own approach for covering residents. The inequalities are certain, if, in exchange for not lobbying against the Clinton plan, large employers with currently existing medical plans for their employees (often a selected population with lower risks) get to opt out of the health alliances altogether. Inner-city and rural populations will be assured some basic package of benefits as health security cardholders, but who will rush in to compete and bring quality care to these places? Why would a corner-cutting, profit-first insurer incur the extra expense required in making sure every registered member of a health alliance in, say, rural Louisiana, take full advantage of its services? What’s to keep already discriminated-against populations in relatively powerless places from becoming health care dumping sites for the currently uninsured and uninsurable?

If the government is left to pay the costs of care in only the more risky, expensive situations in which no private company can figure on profiting, these health alliances

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will take on the happy features of these same locations’ distressed and underfunded public schools. Managed competition will promote a differential system of care, perpetuating many existing inequities and, from the beginning, undermining hope for a universal system that would be fair regardless of class, race, gender, or geography.

For Southerners, geography is an especially important concern. As a special report (“The Marketplace in Health Care Reform”) in the January 1993 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine has made clear, the South is one of several sections of the country which contains large areas that are too sparsely populated to support competing groups of health providers. In fact as the principal author of this report (a former proponent of managed competition) insists, over a third of the U.S. population lives in places where managed competition would not be effective.

As a bad idea, several observers with living memories have pointed out that managed competition had its beginnings in the early 1970s with Nixon Administration schemes that sought to divert attention away from proposals for comprehensive national health insurance. Out of this context came managed care reforms such as the prepaid health plans known as health maintenance organizations. When HMOs began they were non-profit group practices organized around physicians, hospitals or clinics, and patients. Nowadays, new HMOs are virtually all owned by for-profit insurance companies and the HMO concept itself has been transformed into just another insurance product line. During the last fifteen years, as U.S. per capita health care costs have become, by far, the highest in the world, managed care organizations offering pre-paid private group plans of one sort or another have expanded to cover more than 50 percent of Americans.

It’s clear by now that HMOs have not succeeded in holding down costs. A national system of managed competition will only feed the growing chains of private hospitals while promoting further mergers of ever-more impersonal and remote insurance companies. Costs of administering HMOs, like other private plans, are far higher than those for a single-payer system. In addition, managed competition could result in profit-first insurance companies telling people what physicians they may see and telling physicians what sort of care patients may receive.

That, in the 1990s, the Clinton White House would make itself home to managed competition is a reminder of just how mean-spirited and profit-crazed the Reagan-Bush era was, and how tentative, embarrassed, and equivocal Democratic policymakers have become.

It was the view of that great curmudgeon H. L Mencken, reiterated until it has become a clichi, that no one in American politics ever lost office “by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” The blindness of the present moment, however, does not come from any lack of insight by the great masses, but in Bill Clinton’s reluctance to rise to one of the principal purposes of his election before we are all snowed by the intensifying blizzard of medical insurance company propaganda and advertisement. If ever there was a pent-up parade in search of a drum major to push to the front.

Hopes of pushing the Clintonians to do the right thing depend upon marshaling popular opinion and bringing to bear voter pressure, district-by-congressional district, with a pledge that constituents will vote accordingly in the ’94 elections. A bloc of as many as a hundred members of Congress committed to the American Health Security Act (the McDennott-Conyers-Wellstone Bill) could make a significant difference in the bargaining over final legislation.

In their speechifying, town meetings, and one-on-one encounters with people around the country, and in their highly-visible symbolic acts ranging from the People’s Inaugural to the White House Easter Egg Hunt, Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton project compassion, accessibility, and a warm glow for everyday Americans. This is the genuine hospitality of the Southern welcome table that accompanies the made-for-television fairy tale of Hope, Arkansas. Who doubts for a minute that the Clinton Administration is more committed to government’s active role in bettering the health of Americans than any number of Reagans and Bushes, or for that matter, any sackful of social policy dinosaurs and Senate whiners like Bob Dole, Sam Nunn, and Phil Gramm? Still, unless the enormous popular pressure of Americans who want fundamental change in our health system can be brought to bear upon members of Congress and upon the residents of the White House, what Bill and Hillary Clinton seem willing to settle for hardly tests the limits of hope. Instead, the medical policy now in formation comes to represent the limits, evasions, and rationalizations of politicians and lobbyists unable or unwilling to distinguish what can be bought and sold in the marketplace from what ought to be the necessary public commitments of a just society.

Allen Tullos is editor of Southern Changes and, most recently, is the producer of the video documentary “Tommie Bass: A Life in the Ridge and Valley Country,” about the legendary Appalachian herbalist.