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.

The Unquiet Stereotype

By Denise Giardina

Vol. 15, No. 2, 1993, pp. 6-10

These remarks were given by Denise Giardina in accepting the 1992 Lillian Smith Book Award for Fiction for her novel, The Unquiet Earth.

I am going to talk not so much about my book but about my place because you cannot separate them. One of the things that got me thinking about my subject was a book review that appeared in The New York Times Book Review not long ago. The book being reviewed is called Who Prospers? by Lawrence Harrison. The book apparently makes the point that, in the author’s view poverty is caused in large part not by structures but by the culture of people who are poor themselves. The reviewer took the author to task over this view and made the point that you would not want to blame Appalachian coalminers for the problems of Appalachia when you might more probably look at the coal industry and the economic structures that rule Appalachia. The author, Mr. Harrison, was angry at the review and wrote to the Book Review to defend himself and this is what he said:

The roots of Appalachian poverty trace back to pre-colonial north Britain whence came most of the backcountry settlers. They brought with them traditions of highly inequitable income distribution, little concern with education, and suppression of entrepreneurial activity which, coupled with the isolation that so often accompanies poverty, lie behind Appalachia’s distress.

Bigotry I would say to you comes in many flavors and this is one of them. It is a form of bigotry and victim blaming. It is also an attitude which applied to Appalachia is not a new one. The essence of the Appalachian stereotype in popular American culture has basically been twofold: one that we are simple-minded buffoons or the other that we are very violent people.

A few years ago I wrote a novel called Storming Heaven describing the early coalfields of Appalachia, of West Virginia and Kentucky. It was based on actual events that happened when coal miners were living in camps that were basically run like totalitarian societies. They had no First Amendment rights as we know them. They were totally under the control of the coal companies they worked for. If they decided to join a union they would be kicked out of their house that very day. Many people lived in tents during strikes. They would go on strike and they would be evicted from the coal company houses in the middle of the wintertime, sometimes for two years in a row trying to unionize the coal mines. I wrote about those events. They actually were also described in a report by the federal government which sent a commission in 1922 to investigate the situation in the coalfields at that time because there was quite a bit of violence. There was shooting back and forth. The commission concluded that “local traditions still exert a dominating influence and account very largely for the outbreaks of violence. Much of the violence had nothing to do with the coal industry but had to do with the nature and racial characteristics of the people.” The people they

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were talking about were immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, were African Americans and were Appalachian mountain people.

The American public had already been well prepared for this conclusion which has continued to shape the American government’s and public response to problems in Appalachia. One early writer who helped contribute a great deal to stereotypes about Appalachia was Horace Kephart who is still considered a classic writer about Appalachia. In his book Our Southern Highlanders (1913), he wrote about mountain women:

…the mountain farmer’s wife is not only a household drudge but a field hand as well. She helps to plant, hoes corn, gathers fodder, sometimes even plows or splits rails. It is the commonest of sights for a woman to be awkwardly hacking up firewood. [Such treatment shows] an indifference for women’s weakness. A disregard for her finer nature, a denial of her proper rank.

I might add that this attitude of Mr. Kephart’s led him to the logical (for him) conclusion that the reason that the women were doing this hard work was because mountain men were shiftless and “afflicted with that malady which Wendell Berry calls ‘acute disinclination to work.'”

Another Kephart observation:

Every stranger in Appalachia is quick to note the high percentage of defectives among the people. However we should bear in mind that in the mountains proper there are few if any public refuges for this class and that home ties are so powerful the mountaineers never send their ‘fitified folks’ or ‘halfwits’ or other unfortunates to any institution in the lowlands so long as it is bearable to have them around. Such poor creatures as would be segregated in more advanced societies far from the public eye here go at large and reproduce their kind.

So much for the differently abled. I think most of us today would say that mountain people were well ahead of their time in including everyone in the life of the community.

By the end of the period in which Kephart was writing, however, American industry had used his writings and other writings similar to his to convince the American people that it was time for the coal industry to move in and save these poor people and bring them into the late

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nineteenth and twentieth century. So in a period of five years from roughly 1885 to 1890, the land of southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky passed almost totally from the hands of people who lived on it to coal companies. Even today over 80 percent of this area is owned by outside corporations.

On September 2, 1890 The New York Times, taking note of this quick transformation, editorialized as follows:

…the buying up of the mountain lands has unsettled a large part of these strange people. But they may move at the approach of civilization to remoter regions where they may live without criticism or observation their hereditary, squalid, unambitious, stationary life.

In 1934 the historian Arnold Toynbee wrote in A Study of History:

…the Scotch-Irish immigrants who forced their way into these natural fastnesses have come to be isolated from the rest of the world. They have relapsed into illiteracy and witchcraft.

It sort of sounds like Pat Robertson talking about feminists.

The Appalachian ‘Mountain People’ at this day are no better than barbarians. They are the American counterparts of the latter day white barbarians of the old world: … Kurds, and the Pathans and the hairy Ainu… Through one of several alternative processes, extermination, subjection or assimilation these last lingering survivors will surely disappear within the next few generations. It is possible that barbarism will disappear in Appalachia likewise. Indeed the process of assimilation is already at work among a considerable number of Appalachians who have descended from their mountains and changed their way of life in order to earn wages in the North Carolinian cotton mills. In this case however there is no corresponding assurance for the white barbarism of the New World differs from that of the Old World in being not a survival but a reversion.

That is Appalachia in the view of scholars of the past. Such views tend to linger and have serious consequences for the people of Appalachia today. One problem that Appalachian fiction writers have is with the image of Appalachian people as being simple-minded buffoons. It is similar to a comic actor who decides to take a serious

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role. If we portray intelligent mountain characters there are some people who are going to find them unreal or unbelievable. I have sometimes had the unsettling experience of reading from my work outside the region and reading very serious things and having people laugh.

Even more I am concerned with the image of mountain people being backward and violent. I was very privileged to spend quite a bit of time in southwestern Virginia and southern West Virginia during the coal strike against the Pittston Coal Company two years ago. Some of you may have seen some things about it on the news. It was not very widely covered.

I had an NBC reporter call me after reading an article I had written and ask me if it would be safe for him to come to the coalfields and talk to people on the picket line or if he would be in danger. I watched a “60 Minutes” account of the strike which painted it as a totally violent situation when I knew it not to be. I read news accounts of dynamite explosions which the state police later backhandedly admitted had been set by the company itself. That part of the story was never brought out. I also watched another “60 Minutes” program just a few months later in which Dan Rather described Appalachia this way: “There is another America hidden in Appalachia’s hills.” He called the show he was about to introduce “a disturbing journey to a separate world.”

“Back in the hills of Floyd County, Kentucky,” he said, “you’ll find some of the poorest places in America. This is where Washington waged a war on poverty and lost. But that is not tonight’s story. The people here know they are poor. They know there is almost no work. But,”—and his tone of voice implied incredulity—”most of them say they want to stay here, get married here, grow old here. What is it that keeps them tied to a place that seems like something out of another century?”

All this leads also to a damaging counterreaction I think among those of us who live in the mountains. We tend to get chips on our shoulders. Many people also want to avoid looking at the problems that we do have, the problems of poverty, the problems of environmental destruction caused by the coal industry. I had a woman last week in Huntington, West Virginia, after a reading ask me when I was going to write about the pretty part of West Virginia. I run into that a lot.

Having said all this about stereotypes I do want to say, however, that I admit to my region’s eccentricity. I want to close by talking about some of that and what it means as far as being Appalachian and being Southern. One reason I am thrilled to have this award is that you have recognized West Virginia as a part of the South. There are those who would say that West Virginia is not a part of the South because they seem to think that being Southern means that you are white and that you supported secession and slavery. That was not West Virginia’s position. That is why West Virginia became a state. It was a position shared by fellow mountaineers in North Carolina and Kentucky and

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Tennessee who provided stopping places for the Underground Railroad, established abolitionist newspapers, and upheld a truly rebellious stance in the heart of the Confederacy.

My great-great-Uncle James Thornbury, who was from eastern Kentucky and served in the Union army, was captured and sent to South Carolina. He finally managed to escape and after his experiences wrote this very bad poem which I would like to share with you. He wrote:

My troubles there were great and not very much to eat In the sun we were kept and nearly died with heat… The Southern Confederacy, O I left it behind. And started up the river a better land to find. And when I arrived at Knoxville, Tennessee I was treated like a brother and set at liberty. And now I have met my friends in communion Where the stars and the stripes are waving for the Union.

I would like to stand here before you today and say I am proud to come from West Virginia, a state in the South that passed the ERA, a state in the South where in the capital city you can find several pages in the Yellow Pages listing unions, a state in the South with no right to work law, a state in the South that consistently votes against right-wing demagogic politicians, a state in the South which year after year has the lowest crime rate in the country and a state in the South with no death penalty. I am pleased and honored to accept this award on behalf of the people of West Virginia.

Denise Giardina is currently dividing her time between teaching literature and creative writing at West Virginia State College and work on a new novel.

Save Our Cumberland Mountains—
The Courage to Work for Justice
By Connie White

Vol. 15, No. 2, 1993, pp. 11-15

The following essay on the work and vision of SOCM (Save Our Cumberland Mountains) was presented as a talk to the Appalachian Studies Conference held in Berea, Kentucky, in March.

Thanks for the opportunity to talk about the organization that has meant so much to me and many others in this state. I’d like to tell you a little bit about the history of SOCM, some of the issues we’ve worked on and lessons we’ve learned; some of the things we’ve done well and some of the things we haven’t figured out yet.

Save Our Cumberland Mountains is a grassroots, democratic citizens group. Our members are fifteen hundred families living in the Cumberland Mountains and Plateau area of Tennessee. Many of our members belong to local SOCM chapters. The organization is governed by a board elected from and by SOCM members.

SOCM started in 1971 when people in the rural parts of a five-county area had no doctors and wanted to do something about it. They got together and formed community health councils. They worked on the health care issue and also got interested in making other changes.

They and a group of students did research and found out that in their five counties, 80 percent of the minerals and 35 percent of the land was owned by ten companies, most of them out-of-state, absentee landlords. Although these companies held all that wealth, they paid only 3 percent of the property taxes in those communities. The community people stayed together and worked on other problems too. At that time stripmining was totally unregulated. There were no laws. Blasting was damaging peoples’ homes and ruining their wells. Streams and mountains were destroyed. SOCM members and others throughout the mountains fought for laws to protect their homes and families and communities.

I know that several of you in this room were some of the first fighters against stripmining. Probably many of you remember the days in the 1970s when a call would go out to come to a public hearing on a stripmine permit. Tennessee was so lawless and corrupt in those days that some of us would be asked to speak and some would be asked to go and watch because we looked so big and mean and ugly and we ourselves were our only protection from thugs who would try to silence us by any means they could. You may remember that 1979 was the year of the Wartburg Massacre, when four SOCM members were beaten by the Cook boys and their thugs as they sat in the Morgan County, Tennessee courthouse at a stripmining permit hearing. In 1979 and 1980 Sam and Roberta Baker and John Johnson and Millard Ridenour all had their homes burned after they spoke out against wildcat mining. SOCM members gathered to help build their homes back. I remember that day—it seemed like every blow of the hammer was a victory song that rang out all across Elk Valley.

From those early days till right now we’ve been struggling to figure out how to bring about change, how to get a voice in decision making, and how to create an organization for the long haul. We’ve learned a lot of hard lessons in these past twenty years, and I’d like to tell you about three of them.

The first thing we’ve learned is that we can change the world, but only if we work together. We aren’t just victims, we don’t have to stand passively by. We can do something about it, but we have to organize, we have to work together. Those first SOCM members, back twenty years ago—none of them could have gotten laws to regulate stripmining on their own. No one person could have said to a stripmine operator “You can’t destroy the creeks. The stream belongs to everybody, you can’t just bulldoze it away.” No one person could have said “You can’t blast so hard it cracks the walls in my house.” No one person has that much power, because there was too much money to be made by the coal operators to be so easily stopped. But when people came together, when they figured out together how to act in their own best interest, when they supported each other and cared about each other and took risks for and with each other, then their homes and communities could be saved. They had to do it together—that’s where the power is.

A second important lesson we’ve learned is about the way change happens. We’ve learned that we can’t wait for somebody somewhere to do the right thing, to make the ethical or logical or scientifically sound decision. All of us in this room want to believe that when a law needs to be passed, when a wrong needs to be made

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right, that our government, that somebody in some agency, will just do it. We want to believe that environmental policy and human justice issues are decided on the basis of rational thought and a sense of ethics. For example, we want to think that the decision-makers decide on some rational basis about where to put garbage and toxic waste and hazardous facilities. But in our experience, that is almost never true.

Castle Bunch learned that the hard way. He lives near Oliver Springs, in Anderson County, Tennessee, where an attempt is going on by Chambers Corporation, a large out-of-state company. They want to situate a mega-landfill and most likely bring in out-of-state waste to the community where Castle lives—the small rural mountain community of Shoat Lick. That area was previously stripmined, the rocks were fractured by blasting. There is no soil left. It’s a horrible spot geologically and hydrologically for a landfill. Forty families live very near and most of them depend on well water which almost certainly would be contaminated from landfill runoff, because of the fractured rock strata. And, Chambers is a corporation with lots of environmental violations in other states and a history of intimidation and violence against people who speak out against them. Castle Bunch lives near the proposed site and his family depends on their well for water. One night in September at a City Council meeting, after he had spoken against the proposed landfill, Castle was attacked by several men wearing Chambers T-shirts and hats. He was assaulted and knocked to the ground and kicked before others in the room could stop it.

Clarence Cofer has also learned how decisions are made, how change comes about, the hard way. In the Clymersville community in Rockwood, in Roane County, Tennessee, Horsehead Industries is operating a hazardous waste recovery plant. They are operating this plant essentially without environmental regulation. Clarence and many others in the community, worried about high levels of lead and other toxic substances in the air and water, have asked the state to require Horsehead to obtain water quality permits. You would think that this hazardous waste plant would have to subject itself to the laws and regulations of this state. Shouldn’t the Division of Water Quality want to objectively and impartially enforce the law? So far it has not. The people of Clymersville cannot sit passively by, putting their children’s health in jeopardy while the state ignores their requests to enforce the law.

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In Oliver Springs and Clymersville, in stripmining and land ownership and hazardous waste facilities and toxic dumps issues, we’ve learned over and over, that we can’t separate out human justice issues from environmental issues. Often the communities that are most at risk for being environmental victims are perceived as being powerless, without wealth and influence, and with no ability to act in their own best interest. But inside themselves and with each other, community people have to find the strength and the courage to challenge the power and wealth of big corporations, have to challenge the bureaucracy of agencies. I think it is especially hard for us to challenge the social structure and the status quo that is so powerful in our communities. It is hard to speak out, it is very hard to take an unpopular position. For most of us, it is painful to act in ways that call attention to ourselves, but we have to break the silence. We have to find the courage to work for justice, and we can find that strength in each other and in working together.

We’ve learned something about patience in SOCM, and we learned that the hard way too. We learned that change doesn’t come about by one good action, or one set of powerful testimonies at a hearing. Those big blows help, but the real key is a consistent pounding away at a problem, being there day in and day out, getting a hold of it and not letting go. That means we have to learn how to build organizations for the long haul, groups that will be around to keep working. The more entrenched the problem, the harder it will be to change. We also learned to be patient with each other, to listen and help each other. None of us was born knowing how to create an organization like SOCM. We have to figure it out as we go along and we haven’t always gotten it right. Learning patience also helped us understand what it means to be beaten but not defeated. It took us seven years to win our surface rights law—a law that’s the strongest of its kind in the nation; it gives surface owners, often small family farmers and rural people, a way to get their minerals back so that the land they own is really their own. We were crushed in Nashville in the state legislature time after time; we retreated and regrouped. We came back and we came back, and finally we won. We learned that we are only defeated when we quit.

The third thing we’ve learned is that in changing

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the world, we change ourselves.

For most of us, when we start working with an organization like SOCM, we doubt that we have very much to offer. I remember the first SOCM meeting I attended in 1977. I thought, I love the way these people speak out, I admire the courage they have and the knowledge they’ve gained through their work, I love how they connect the best values and sense of right they have in their hearts with the work they do out in the world. But what could I do? I’m a farm girl from Cave Creek. I’ve hardly expressed an opinion anywhere beyond the supper table. That day, back so many years ago, was when I began to learn that you don’t have to know the most or talk the best to be a leader and you really can do a lot of things you never believed you could have done. What happens over the years is that you work together on things that you care about, you help and support each other, you take little steps and little risks and you grow stronger and more confident. One of SOCM’s greatest gifts is the ability to really believe and act on a different idea of leadership. We’ve learned that leadership isn’t finding one or two or three charismatic people. But it’s developing the idea in all of us that leadership means taking your turn, and that the best leaders are the ones who pay the most attention to giving leadership development opportunities to lots of people. Leaders are the ones who think, “Now what’s the next most challenging step that this SOCM member or that SOCM member can take?” And then support them when they take that step. So many of us in SOCM started out thinking our contribution is to fill a seat in a meeting. And before we knew it, we were bringing refreshments or making calls to ask other people to come to the meeting or chairing a small group or speaking at a public hearing. And before you know it, you wake up and you’re talking to the Appalachian Studies Conference!

Part of the change for a lot of us was realizing the importance and value of family and place. We’ve learned to be proud of being from these mountains and valleys of Tennessee. We’ve learned that we can be proud of how we were raised, how we talk. We don’t have to be polished and shined up. Being a SOCM member helps me be proud of that and be proud of my family. It helps me know what an incredible privilege it is to live each day on the same piece of dirt where my father and my grandmother and my great-grandmother and my great-great-grandfather were raised.

But for many of us it’s also helped us think critically about our home, about the way people are divided by class and by race, the way women are treated, about who has power and why—and how to take that power and use it more responsibly.

I’m still a farmer’s daughter from Roane County, and very proud to be that, but because of SOCM I’m also a citizen of the world, someone who cares about and works hard to affect things that happen in public life too. I have a right and a responsibility to do that. I just want to testify that in trying to bring justice to environmental issues and human issues, each of us is rewarded with an incredible sense of richness, not in material things, but in the knowledge that we contributed something, that it mattered that we’ve lived and walked on this Earth for a few short years.

Although we’ve learned these things and more, there are still many, many things we don’t know. We were also asked to talk about the hard parts, the challenges, the things we haven’t gotten right.

I’ll always remember my father saying that back in the 1940s, the U.S. government told the world that they had done us Roane Countians a big favor, that the Oak Ridge area was so poor that a jackrabbit had to carry his lunch across it. This was the same area that my people had farmed for generations, the area that seemed like milk and honey to them. I saw my mother go out to the plants each day to help put food on our table and thought, is this the day, is this the month, is this the year when making our living will make her sick?

And living downstream, where even the municipal water system at Kingston has had to be turned off at times because of mercury spills. I saw my father and four out of his five sisters who stayed in Roane County get cancer. I saw the Oak Ridge plants fight to try to continue to exempt themselves from the water and air quality regulations that help protect us, to literally say they are above the law. But we also know from our own experience that these Oak Ridge jobs sometimes are the only chance that we as ordinary people have to make a decent living, to have good health insurance which can literally make the difference between life and death, and have a retirement where we can live with the dignity that is so well deserved.

So even though there are hundreds of SOCM members in the surrounding counties, even though we have twenty years organizing experience, even though we have won important victories in incredibly difficult circumstances, in the past decade we still have not been very effective on the environmental and economic issues related to the Oak Ridge weapons plants.

And there are plenty of other problems we haven’t figured out that we are still working on. How can we apply our knowledge and experience in land-based issues to problems such as the fight for a fair tax structure in the state? How can we make industries responsible to the SOCM communities that have given them a home? How can we create public policy that helps us grow our own jobs, or get permanent jobs with a living wage and health insurance for our families? How can we work toward a

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government that is by and for ordinary people like SOCM members and people all over this region?

Not only are there hard problems in the world outside to be figured out, there are also ways of working together within an organization that we still aren’t very good at. There are barriers to be broken down between people—economic and social and particularly racial. We are doing better with this, trying things, making mistakes and learning from them. I think our real failure here has been that we didn’t start trying to work specifically on issues of race until the past three or four years.

As you know, many of us join an organization like SOCM out of immediate self-interest—there’s a stripmine or a toxic waste dump to be fought. But the mark of a good citizen’s group is that members can find their concept of self-interest widening. So at first you’ve just got to get that stripmine permit denied, but as you grow and develop you come to feel that you have to get a tougher law on stripmining and you need to help the next community with their dump problem and begin to pay attention to the political process more and you find yourself caring about a lot of things that you didn’t used to notice. And even though you weren’t brought up to think so, it begins to seem right and fair that all people be treated fairly and allowed their dignity and it seems in your self-interest to work on common problems and take down those barriers of race. But it has taken us too long to get to the point of actively trying to remove those barriers.

We were also asked that as voices from the community, we think a little about what challenges we might offer you as individuals and as an organization as you support efforts for change in Appalachia.

The first thing I’d ask you to do is to look around in your own community for organizations working for change and join one. Work with your neighbors and learn together. Contribute your considerable skills, but don’t expect your voice to be any more important than those of your neighbors. Take your turn with the hard stuff and the boring stuff and the exciting stuff and come back to the Appalachian Studies Conference and tell us about it.

Many of you are teachers, and in your classes, it’s important to understand and acknowledge the economic and political forces at work in the region. But it’s also important to raise up examples of people joining together to change the way things are. It’s important to study the dynamic of people’s action—real stories of ordinary people who developed their leadership and their skills and confidence and made changes. It’s important that students see what can be done when people join together. And in an even broader sense, it’s important that students have the opportunity to feel some pride in their culture and heritage, and not have to be ashamed of the way they were raised. Then they can also look critically at problems and understand the forces at work when we as Appalachian people have been unable to act in our own best interest. In your classes and as you send your students out to work for and with organizations and communities, you can do that. I hope you can continue to find ways to help all of us to connect the best parts of ourselves, our values, what we care about with the work we do everyday, whether the work is in colleges or communities or both.

Longtime SOCM member Connie White lives in Loudon, Tennessee. The author wishes to thank Maureen O’Connell, Susan Williams, Beth Bingman and Steve Fisher for their encouragement and support.

Chanting and Other Matters Queer

By Aaron Taub

Vol. 15, No. 2, 1993, pp. 16-19

This critical essay was prompted by the specific chants and events of an October 31, 1992 demonstration organized by Queer Nation/Atlanta, participated in by other organizations such as ACLU, ACT UP/Atlanta, NOW, and Straight But Not Narrow and targeted against the Cracker Barrel corporation. It was one in a fairly regular series of demonstrations, which as readers may already know, began some two years ago, when the corporation first fired several gay and lesbian employees. Despite such tepid overtures as offering one of the most vocal employees her job, the company has refused to rehire the fired employees, to give back pay, or to institute a company non-discriminatory employment policy. In addition, it has actively sought and received federal intervention that would allow it to avoid presenting the issue to stockholder meetings. Although I had been mulling over a number of the ideas contained in this essay long before the demonstration, it was the demonstration itself that inspired me to write. Because of this, my discussion will be both specific and general, rooted in the particular events of October 31, yet extending beyond to a much broader range of issues of radical resistance.

While I am not an active member of Queer Nation/Atlanta, I have participated in a number of their Cracker Barrel demonstrations and have an enormous amount of respect for their accomplishments. For two grueling years, they have relentlessly publicized Cracker Barrel’s bigotry in the gay and straight media both in Atlanta and nationwide. In addition to demonstrating, they have purchased shares in the corporation, maintaining a dissonant presence at stockholder meetings. They have also made critical connections to Cracker Barrel’s racism by pointing out the insult to people of color posed by the mammy dolls that Cracker Barrel sells. Therefore, I find Queer Nation’s persistence on these and other fronts in the face of fierce indifference and hostility to be an extraordinary inspiration.

Yet while I applaud the actual work of Queer Nation, I find myself increasingly critical of some of the tactics and chants that are employed at their demonstrations. One of the most infuriating chants was “We’re your family, not your enemy; someone you love is queer.” The central problem with this chant is that it blurs conflict and a crucial dialectic between queer and homohating* identities. Simply put, I do not include myself in the family of bigots and I am an intractable enemy of people who fire queers. While perhaps seeking to point out to bigots that queers exist in their midst, the chant implicitly posits a larger community of shared relationship and interest. This “closeness” implied by its first two clauses—”we’re your family; not your enemy”—is problematic for a number of reasons. First, queers are genuinely threatening to the entire world view of bigots. To see us as defiant empowered beings rooted in our queer lust questions the entire cultural foundations that bigots have worked so hard to establish. It forces them to confront others who will fight

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their fundamentalist Judeo/Christian obliterations of our bodies and our transgressive desires. Another cause of my reluctance to accept the chant’s usage of the term “family” is because of its accepted definition within contemporary queer parlance. When we ask “Is s/he family?,” we want to know if a given individual is queer. Faced all too often with the possibility of expulsion from the nuclear family, we seek to create alternate networks of relationality. In this framework, every queer becomes a potential family member, almost a blood ally in an alien, often hostile universe.

Equally important in our deconstruction of this chant is the need to combat the implications of “not your enemy.” I would argue there is simply no ground for compromise with people who hate and kill queers. An experience at an earlier QN demonstration made this quite clear. Last summer, when we crowded the Cracker Barrel restaurant at a peak hour and a waitress announced a wait of over an hour, a woman behind me said, “I’m not going to let sinners keep me out.” This woman is one component of a large, well-funded organized movement that is killing, bashing, and discriminating against queers on the streets, in Hollywood films, in the chambers of legislatures that refuse to include us in hate crimes legislation, in governments like Colorado that enact new and hateful amendments to their state constitution, and ones like Georgia that refuse to repeal their already existing sodomy legislation. I therefore believe that to deny Cracker Barrel and other homohaters an “enemy” status is to deny them responsibility for the innumerable acts of evil they have perpetuated against us.

In addition to the chant’s gruesome inaccuracy in invoking family and lack of enmity, I believe it fails even if one went along with its implicit purpose of educating bigots. I argue this because I do not believe revelations of nearby queerness would really change the opinions of homohaters. First of all, I would think that by now, most people are at least vaguely familiar with Kinsey’s research on the widespread existence of homosexuality in the culture. Having dialogued with far too many bigots, I can attest that they usually counter Kinsey’s not-very-startling revelations with the notion that homosexuality is a choice; they also argue that merely because sinning is widespread does not mean that it ought to be condoned. While this is certainly not the place to enter the exhausting nature/nurture quagmire, suffice it to say that since most bigots do not really believe in queer identity, they would hardly believe that someone they love is queer, as the third and equally disturbing clause of the chants says. More importantly, many queers get ostracized and completely cut off from bigoted families and societies just like those eating (and waiting over an hour to eat) at Cracker Barrel. So that faced with the grand ferocity of our desire, bigots completely separate themselves from their “loved” ones. Again, while it seems plausible to conjecture that even these rejected queers are still loved by their families, that possibility seems completely secondary, if not totally irrelevant. What does matter is that abusive power is wielded against queers; that they are losing out in an oppressive, homohating matrix.

A similar but far more useful chant (and one that indeed has been chanted at previous QN demonstrations

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that I have attended) would be “2, 4, 6, 8: How do you know your preacher/doctor/sister, etc. is straight?” This chant successfully troubles the bigot’s idea of a queer-free zone, yet does not fall into the falsely-intimate touchy-feely realm of “We’re your family, not your enemy.” It forces bigots to question the supposed security of their most sacred spaces and destabilizes the very foundations of their bigotry.

Another problematic chant was “Gay, straight, black, white; same struggle, same fight.” While the effort of creating solidarity between liberation struggles is laudable, the chant posits a disturbing sameness that conflates different forms of oppression.

While my point is not to argue for a vertical hierarchy of oppressions, the fact remains that queer and straight people of color necessarily are subjected on a visible skin color, while for queers, this subjugation is based on sexuality. Some argue that this means people of color are more oppressed because they cannot hide or be closeted. Others maintain that queers lack the natural family and community spaces that people of color have and that being closeted is not a privilege but a denial of self. Again, regardless of which position one takes (and there are certainly a range of complicated positions in-between), what is indisputable is that these anti-racist and anti-queer-hating movements are different (though admittedly related) work. They require different strategies of combatance, often involve different communities of resistance, and at times, focus on different targets.

While my central involvement with this chant has been with QN/Atlanta (Atlanta being the primary site of my activism in the last two years), I have also experienced it in other contexts. Last summer in New York, I participated in Queer Nation/NY’s “Take Back the Streets” march, at which this chant was also recited. Following the march and the glorious burning in effigy of Cardinal O’Connor outside St. Veronica’s church on Christopher Street, I became engaged in an intense exchange with a woman who was furious that the chant had fizzled out.

She argued that this lack of enthusiasm was the result

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of racism of the predominantly white marchers. While she conceded the validity of my critique, she felt that it was a subtlety, even a luxury, and that what really mattered was forcing primarily white marchers to face (their) racism. I agreed that racism may well have been the cause of the chant’s unpopularity and that all white people have to constantly fight racism that is manifested both within them/ourselves and in the surrounding culture, but that one does not combat racism by invoking politically problematic chants.

What I did not express to the woman in New York and what I do want to express now is that by thinking critically about our necessarily reductive but nonetheless powerful chants, we empower ourselves and make our movement(s) that much stronger.

A related happening was the conclusion of the October 31st demonstration with a singing of “We Shall Overcome.” As a song made famous in the civil rights movement, this is a song that has a particular historical rootedness. Surrounded by barking dogs, hoses, frothing-at-the-mouth crowds, and brutal police, this song’s very dignity and power also possessed a ferocious radicalism that because of contemporary circumstances, it currently lacks. Moreover, it is a song that was sung primarily by African-American people for their own political freedom. QN’s rendition of the song loses that necessary historical specificity, a loss which a group of primarily (though by no means exclusively) white people should certainly not be the ones to bring about.

The question of specificity of participant and struggle are not simply critical to me as a white person fighting societal and internalized racism, but also as a Jew seeking to free myself from a homophobic and misogynistic ultra-Orthodox upbringing. While Judaism has obviously lacked the cultural and political power of Christianity and while it has all too often been the brunt of Christian hate, I believe that it is critical for me as a former frum (Orthodox) Jew and for other Jews to fight the powerful lobbying drives of Orthodox Jews against gay rights ordinances. One of my most haunting memories is as a queer teenager browsing my father’s collection of hate rags published by Agudas Yisroel, an ultra-Orthodox cultural and political organization and seeing an article proudly proclaim the group’s anti-queer work. I remember my anger, the visceral reaction of my body in the form of shivers and sweat and most of all, my terror. These formative memories continue to shape my resistance to orthodox hatred.

While I would argue that we should all level criticism at the anti-queer initiatives of the ultra-Orthodox (just as we have at those of the Catholic Church and Protestant fundamentalists), I nevertheless believe that it is particularly critical for queer Jews to do this work. Mounting a critique from an inside position is important for several reasons. First it lends an essential urgency to a given struggle, making clear that resistance is not an exercise in abstraction or universal good, but rather one shaped by configurations of power. Even if all could agree on eventual goals, what often happens in the day-to-day process of a liberation movement is that those who possess the most power at the time (straight white, male) tend to dominate decision-making and action. Stemming from an awareness of power imbalance is the need to recognize the importance of self-empowerment, that is, the oppressed liberating themselves. Because self-liberation can only happen through active participation in struggle, it seems crucial for those who are most oppressed within a particular matrix (whether class, gender, ethnicity, race, or sexual orientation) to actively participate in and lead the struggle against those oppressive forces. In other words, while this essay is not specifically about gay Jewish identity, the analytical tools of specificity and difference that I use to understand the benefits that result from my whiteness necessarily affect/intertwine with other, less privileged aspects of my identity.

In this essay, then, I have tried to use my experience of discomfort at a demonstration as a means of thinking carefully about particular chants and actions and their implications for queer liberation. I have argued that queer liberation must make connections to other struggles, but cannot conflate those struggles themselves or appropriate their songs and rituals. And I have done this by positioning myself within my various communities (Jewish, queer, and radical), by saying that we grow stronger not only through our needed struggle against enemies, but also through self-critique and reflection.

And if at certain moments, my tone has appeared defensive, that defensiveness is real. While I can politically justify self-examination, it still remains somewhat awkward and even painful. Our triumphs seem so few; our enemies so formidable. Why spend limited and precious energy on internal critique? Why expose oneself to making enemies from friends and colleagues? Why risk fracturing an already small and overworked community of resistance? Despite these reservations, I remain committed not just to the points raised in this essay, but more importantly, to the larger practice of internal debate and critique not only radical praxis but also ideology and theory.

Aaron Taub is a graduate student in the department of history at Emory University.

The Most Hated Man in Alabama

Reviewed by John Egerton

Vol. 15, No. 2, 1993, pp. 20-22

Taming the Storm: The Life and Times of Frank M. Johnson, Jr., and the South’s Fight over Civil Rights, by Jack Bass (Doubleday, New York, 1993, 512 pages).

The Judge: The Life & Opinions of Alabama’s Frank M. Johnson Jr., by Frank Sikora (Black Belt Press, Montgomery, 1992, 340 pages).

The scene was electrifying: More than 25,000 citizens, most of them black, were massed on Dexter Avenue in front of the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery on a raw and rainy March morning in 1965. They had marched from Selma, fifty miles away, in a peaceful demonstration for the unhindered right vote, a right soon to be guaranteed them by a new federal law.

Their leader, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., once the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church nearby, stood at the very spot where Jefferson Davis had taken the oath of office as president of the Confederate States of America one hundred and four years before. “Glory, glory, hallelujah!” King shouted.

Inside the Capitol, Governor George C. Wallace parted the curtains at his office window and gazed on this amazing drama with scowling, sneering bitterness. He had used every legal weapon at his disposal to prevent it, and he had failed.

A few blocks down the street, at a window in the federal building, Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr., the man whose decision had assured King of victory and Wallace of defeat also watched as the marchers passed on the street below, singing and shouting joyfully. He felt a sense of assurance and satisfaction, even pride—not because he was pro-King or anti-Wallace, but because the rule of law had prevailed.

“From the moment I issued the order permitting that march,” he said later, “I had been certain that I had done what was right according to the laws of this nation.” And to that he added, on another occasion, this further concluding thought: “You can’t have a government like we have, a republic with a constitution like we have, and permit discrimination against people on the basis of race or color. You can’t have that. It runs contrary to the form of government we have.”

It is Frank Johnson’s understanding of “the form of government we have,” and his performance as an interpreter of its ambiguities, that provide the sum and substance of these two biographies. Jack Bass and Frank Sikora, veteran Southern journalists and court-watchers, have drawn on their long acquaintance with the judge, his opinions, and his times to craft portraits of impressive depth and clarity.

That they are essentially admiring portraits is hardly surprising, and altogether understandable. Johnson’s quiet courage in calling shots as he saw them brought down the wrath of the white multitude upon him—all manner of threats and even some attempts on his life—but he suffered the hostility without complaint, and stayed the course, and now he hears some of his harshest critics acknowledge that he was right.

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Even George Wallace, who in the 1960s had demanded Johnson’s impeachment, smeared him as a traitor and a mentally unbalanced tyrant and said he needed “a barbed-wire enema,” sent word through the judge’s wife, Ruth Johnson, that he was “sorry for all the heartache I’ve caused you and all the trouble I’ve given you for the things I’ve said. I was wrong.”

There is so much drama here: the Montgomery bus boycott school desegregation, the “Freedom Riders,” voter registration, reapportionment, the efficient court that brooked no disrespect for the law of for his authority as its interpreter. From the bench he was as intimidating as a Marine colonel. Only from a distance or in cowardly anonymity did his most venomous critics dare to threaten him, bombing his mother’s home in l968.

If Judge Johnson’s Lincolnesque qualities invite hero worship (he does come across as something of a twentieth-century emancipator, tall, quiet, brave, brooding), his down-to-earth qualities tend to balance the picture. The Bass book is especially useful in detailing Johnson’s family background and the elements of his character and personality.

The personal side of the man makes his performance as a judge seem all the more intriguing. He came up in a pocket of independent Republicans—Unionists who had spurned the Confederacy—north Alabama’s Winston County, where his father was a probate judge. Frank, Jr., oldest of seven children, married Ruth Jenkins in 1938, when he was twenty and she was eighteen.

They have been together ever since—through college and law school, World War II (he in the Army, she in the Navy), law practice in the little town of Jasper, a stint as U.S. attorney in Birmingham, and almost forty years on the federal bench. Personal tragedy has shadowed their lives; their only child, an adopted son, committed suicide in 1975, when he was twenty-six.

One of Johnson’s classmates and casual friends at the University of Alabama law school was George Wallace, who came across then as “a genuine Franklin Roosevelt socialist.” The more conservative Johnson was less drawn to politics than he was to the law, and he immersed himself in it so deeply that he graduated at the top of his class in 1943.

His support of Dwight Eisenhower for President in 1952 soon brought him an assignment as U.S. attorney, and in 1955, when Eisenhower named him to the bench serving the middle district of Alabama, Frank Johnson became the youngest federal judge in the country.

His first ten years in the Montgomery courtroom coincided with the most tumultuous period of Southern history since the Civil War. This tense and emotional time—the civil rights decade, 1955-65—is the primary focus of Frank Sikora’s book. Drawing extensively from interviews with the judge and from court transcripts, he recounts and dramatizes the cases that challenged and finally overturned the segregation laws. Sikora, an Alabama journalist since the mid-1960s, interviewed Judge Johnson on numerous occasions over a thirteen-year period. Roughly one-third of The Judge is in Johnson’s own words.

Jack Bass’s book is richer in the historical context surrounding his subject, and in legal analysis; like Sikora, he also makes extensive use of interviews and transcripts. Bass was a reporter in the Carolinas in the 1960s. Previous books on Southern politics and contemporary history include Unlikely Heroes, another story of Southern judges and the civil rights issue.

All in all, these two books complement each other nicely. Frank Johnson comes out of them as another of the South’s unlikely heroes, perhaps one of its greatest—a man of courage and integrity making tough, fair, wise decisions and delivering them in a calm, clear, firm voice while all about him the storms of controversy raged.

Martin Luther King once described Judge Johnson as “a man who gave true meaning to the word ‘justice.'” The two men met only once outside the courtroom. Bass recounts the occasion:

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After the hearings adjourned one day, Johnson stepped onto a crowded elevator in the court house and saw King. The judge nodded in recognition and said, “How are you, Dr. King?”

King nodded back and said, “Fine. How are you, Judge?”

That was all.

Johnson’s halo, like King’s—like every all-too-human saint’s—has sometimes slipped a little, and both Bass and Sikora wisely let some tiny warts show through. Thus we see Johnson the tobacco-chewer, the whiskey-sipper, the mild cusser, the religious skeptic. In other words, Johnson the ordinary fellow, the guy who grows roses and makes furniture and fishes, who is, when he is with his wife and his closest friends, a warm and caring and sometimes funny man.

The only inconsistency that I could find in these two accounts concerns the judge’s eyes—eyes that “can cut someone in two,” remembered one fearful litigant, or that “look at you like he’s aiming down a rifle barrel,” recalled another. So are they blue, as Jack Bass declares, or brown, as Frank Sikora maintains?

Judge Johnson may have to render his own opinion to settle the matter once and for all.

John Egerton is currently working on a book about the South during the period from Roosevelt to Brown with “lots of SRC history woven in.”

Blood On Our Hands

Reviewed by Stetson Kennedy

Vol. 15, No. 2, 1993, pp. 22-24

Terror in the Night, by Jack Nelson (Simon & Schuster, 1993, 287 pages).

What Stalingrad was to World War II, Mississippi was to the Overcoming; and what Jack Nelson has given us here, while not purporting to be the whole story of all that took place on that crucial battlefield in the 1960s struggle to purge America of apartheid and white supremacy, is one of the most revelatory accounts yet.

Everyone who found the film “Mississippi Burning” to be an eye-opener would do well to focus now on Terror in the Night, which belongs on every shelf having to do with America’s on-going struggle to fulfil her ideals. The general reader too (who most needs to get the message) will find this true cloak-and-dagger story as engrossing as anything in fiction.

Jack Nelson is familiar to millions as a panelist on the PBS show “Washington Week in Review.” He grew up in Mississippi, and was Atlanta bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, supplying it with on-the-scene coverage of many of the events detailed in his book. A Pulitzer Prize winner, his exposes of some of the excesses of Hoover’s FBI almost got him (Nelson) fired.

Although Terror in the Night comes a quarter-century after Nelson first reported on these happenings, the book is by no means a rehash of his original frontline dispatches. He recently went back into Mississippi and interviewed many of the surviving principals (colleagues accused him of ingratiating himself with these scoundrels by “walking the walk and talking the talk”).

Be that as it may, he did persuade the once-comely Marie Knowles, secretary to Meridian’s detectives, to let him see a lot of confidential memos she had hidden away all these years. To get the FBI to do the same, it took a demand under the FOIA.

The net result of Nelson’s backtracking is a lot of old evidence that is brand new, in that it has never before been exposed to public view. As it turns out, those who kept it out of sight had good reasons for doing so….

As we have known all along, the arch villain in the Mississippi scenario was Wizard Sam Bowers of the White Knights of the KKK, which by the mid-60s had an estimated five thousand members in the state. An FBI tab turned up by Nelson points to Bowers as the authorizer of nine murders and three hundred bombings, burnings, and beatings during the reign of terror. No one got blown away unless Bowers first issued a “No. 4” death warrant which stipulated that all assassinations be carried out in a “quiet Christian-like manner.”

Mississippi blacks bore the brunt of the terror. In May of ’64 Charles Eddie Moore, twenty, and Henry Dee, nineteen, disappeared, their dismembered bodies surfacing downstream in Louisiana two months later…. In January of ’66 Hattiesburg NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer perished when his home was firebombed…. In July, Ben White, a Korean war vet, was picked up at random and executed by the Klan’s “Cottonmouth Gang”…. Seven months later, Wharlest Jackson, treasurer of the Natchez NAACP, was blown up by a bomb placed in his truck…. As early as 1964 forty-four black churches had been bombed or burned.

But the main focus of Terror of the Night lies elsewhere: it was when the Klan started planting its dynamite beneath synagogues and the homes of rabbis that the terror took on a new dimension. First to be bombed was Temple Beth Israel in Jackson. Founded in 1861, the new structure was but seven months old when the blast oc-

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curred in September of ’67. Its rabbi, Canadian-born Perry Nussbaum, had been letting interracial ministerial groups meet in it, and furthermore had been helping raise a $750,000 fund to rebuild bombed black churches. He happened not to be in the Temple when the bomb went off, but he and his wife were in their home when the Klan dynamited it soon afterward. They escaped, but narrowly.

The synagogue in Meridian was next to go, in May, 1968. From inside the Klan the FBI had gotten firm word that the next time a synagogue would be bombed it would be while it was conducting services. Then FBI agent Frank Watts got his hands on the local Klan’s hit list. The “Big Four” names at the top were Police Chief Roy Gunn, followed by Jewish businessmen Meyer Davidson, I.A. Rosenbaum, and Al Rose. Also high on the list was Watts’s own name. Needless to say, all concerned were agreed that something had to be done, fast.

Jackson FBI agent-in-charge Roy Moore told some Jewish business leaders that it would take big money to buy informers high enough in the Klan to give advance warning of when and where the next bombing would take place. The sum of $100,000 was raised for the purpose. Two such Klansmen were found, but in addition to the money they wanted an absolute guarantee that they would not have to appear in court and thus risk the virtual certainly of being liquidated themselves. The FBI and Chief Gunn concluded that this meant there was but one way to go: ambush with intent to kill.

They got just two days notice that Bowers had issued a No. 4 to bomb the home of Meyer Davidson on the night of June 29, 1968. Active on interracial councils, Davidson had incurred the wrath of the Klan by proclaiming that the bombing of Beth Israel “was an attack on all Jews.”

The stakeout was a formidable one, and included three carloads of FBI agents. Almost everyone wore black T-shirts. Detective Luke Scarborough was designated pointman, and FBI agents Frank Watts and Jack Rucker took up vantage points atop an adjoining home which they commandeered for the occasion.

Much to everyone’s surprise, the Klan hit car turned out to be an old green Buick with two people in it. Just such a Buick, with a woman driver, had been previously reported as possibly casing targets, but it seemed so un-Klannish no one had checked it out.

According to Nelson, a man got out carrying a Clorox carton in his left hand and a 9mm automatic in the other. Still according to Nelson, Det. Scarborough went through the formality of shouting “Halt! Police!” and “thought be saw” two flashes from the 9mm before opening fire with his shotgun. A fusillade followed, and turned into a gunfight.

Hits were scored on both the dynamiter and his dynamite, but it failed to explode, and he managed to get back into the Buick. A chase ensued, ending in a crash and ramming. The driver came out running and spraying the officers with a machine gun. An electrified fence finally knocked him out, and officers crawled to within fifteen feet and emptied their shotguns into his body.

The dynamiter turned out to be twenty-one-year-old Thomas Albert Tarrants III. Although shot to pieces, he lived, pled insanity, went to jail, and got “born again.” His accomplice, Kathy Ainsworth, a twenty-six-year-old school teacher, died in the fusillade.

In and around the bloody Buick police recovered a 9mm submachine gun, a Walther 9mm automatic pistol, a 6mm Browning automatic, two hundred rounds of ammo, a hand grenade, fourteen blasting caps, a seven-foot fuse, mace, and handcuffs.

FBI director Hoover insisted that his men were only there as “observers,” but the fact was that they played the lead role in everything—the fundraising, negotiating (they chiseled on the $100,000 promised), and the fusillade.

A reviewer for The New York Times complained that Nelson was remiss in not at least ending his reportage with some analysis of its portent. I will undertake to fill that gap.

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Champions of democracy will be sorely tempted (as I confess to being) to condone, in the circumstance, this ambush of racist terrorists by officers of the law. But we are obliged to remind ourselves—without waiting for the ACLU to do it for us—that, given any such green light, lawmen would no doubt ambush far more rights activists than racist terrorists. That is what happened in the assassination of Florida NAACP leader Harry Moore in 1951, in Mississippi Burning in 1964, and countless other times before and since.

In taking his scalpel to the scar tissue which had overgrown the terror in Mississippi, Nelson has laid bare the festering question—fundamental in every society—of whether the policeman’s function is to apprehend suspects, or to also act whenever he feels like it as judge, jury, punisher, and even executioner. That the question is not at all moot even in our fair land is known to all the world, thanks to the televising of the beating of Rodney King. We can’t indulge in such as that and this, and still hope to find acceptance as “leader of the free world.”

Law enforcement has enough problems with trigger-happy cops (who see “probable cause” in every dark skin) and beating orgies, without turning to assassination as an alternative to crowded dockets and prisons, as in Haiti.

It is bad enough that resort to force is so often the option of choice in law enforcement; it is far worse, in this reviewer’s opinion, that it is also so often the option of choice in foreign policy. What the rationale of “self-defense” does for the former, “national interest” does for the latter.

Everybody else knows, if we do not, that it was the CIA on a do-it-yourself or contract basis that blew away Mossadegh in Iran, Diem in Nam, Allende in Chile, and did its best to do the same for Castro, Noriega, Khadafi, and Hussein. What’s more, those Meridian hit men were kissin’ cousins to the Death Squads—often funded, armed, and trained by the CIA—whose job it is to liquidate heads of state, rebel chieftains, labor leaders, and dissident poets in many a Third World nation. And I for one American can’t help but feel that many of the shooting wars we humped into in this bloodiest of centuries were also manifestations of this same predilection for force as problem solver.

It is too much to ask cops, who are underpaid even for risking their lives to protect us, to take on the added burden of deciding who is guilty and who is to be executed.

By the same token, it is too much to ask those Supercops at the CIA or Big Brass at the Pentagon or Tycoons in the Foreign Service, to decide who our overseas enemies are, and order them to be bumped off in our name and with our money. All such actions are unconstitutional, criminal, and immoral. And so long as we smirk and go along, the blood is on our hands.

“Which-n-all-is-why” Terror in the Night, though it comes late, is as timely as can be.

Stetson Kennedy is a lifelong full-time rights advocate who, at 76, is still at it in his hometown, Jacksonville, Florida. A contributing editor of Southern Changes, he first wrote for the SRC in 1946.

“Like a Biblical chapter of begats crossed with land descriptions”

Reviewed by Deborah Boykin

Vol. 15, No. 2, 1993, pp. 24-25

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Land: The Plunder of Early America, by Daniel M. Friedenberg (Promethus Books, 1992, 423 pages).

History conventionally ascribes a standard set of motives to those who settled North America. Colonists left England seeking religious freedom, treasure, or escape from newly-overpopulated cities. Friedenberg provides another dimension to this history, suggesting that the founding fathers were motivated less by the desire for freedom and devotion to democratic principles than by a passion for acquiring land.

In seventeenth century Europe, land was power. Ownership of land was essential for anyone who sought political, social, or economic influence. Focusing primarily on England, Friedenberg examines the reasons both nobles and common people came to America. Christian evangelization, the search for new trade routes, and the hope of finding gold or silver all brought colonists to the new land. Freidenberg examines intentions in light of what actually occurred and reaches a conclusion that appears to be inescapable: all of these motives were secondary to the desire to acquire land.

The high value placed on the land meant that no value could be placed on the rights of the tribes who lived there. The English had to establish some legal basis for laying claim to Indian lands. They made a show of negotiation, but their claims in North America were based on the right of discovery, rights that ultimately could be upheld only by force. As Native American tribes were diminished by European diseases, deceived by English negotiators, and driven off their lands, the way was cleared for the land speculators.

Native Americans were neither the first nor last group

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of people to be displaced to accommodate landowners. Decades of political and social upheaval in England, beginning with the consolidation of power in the monarchy after the Wars of the Roses and including the dissolution of private armies by Henry VII and Henry VIII and Henry VII’s seizure of Catholic lands, displaced thousands of people. Friedenberg observes that this division of feudal society into two classes, and aristocracy and a toiling peasantry, “left its psychological mind print.” Region by region, he proves the point. Throughout the new continent, native tribes were seen less as human beings than as impediments to acquisition of land. The plantation aristocracy that developed in the Southern colonies depended on African slaves for its very existence. The picture emerges of a society in which the cost of power and privilege is borne by those most removed from it.

Since most of North America was an English protectorate, rights to any part of it could be obtained by royal grant. Region by region, Friedenberg details the labyrinthine politics involved in obtaining these grants, the system of quitrents which had to be enforced to keep them, and the tension between the grantee landlords who controlled the colonial government and those who settled the land.

As the colonies grew, so did the need to acquire land. Competing American land companies jockeyed for acreage with the royal governors, their councils and the Crown. This process and its eventual effect on the decision to seek American independence is presented here, and the cast of characters is often surprising. Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin appear in their roles as land speculators, as do Patrick Henry, John Sevier, and George Rogers Clark.

Making sense of this period requires an understanding of complex political and social relationships. Friedenberg’s accounts of political maneuvering, exploitation of family connections, and calculated marriages read like a Biblical chapter of begats crossed with land descriptions. However, these events exemplify the obsession with land that brought the English to America and influenced what they built here. The author makes a compelling case that the history of early America is rooted in the use of land to obtain wealth and power. This book examines how cultural attitudes toward the possession of land led to the dispossession of a people and shaped the nature of the nation established by those who took their place.

Deborah Boykin is Folk Arts Director for the Mississippi Arts Commission. She served as editor of the Choctaw Drummer, a monthly newspaper published by the Choctaw Tribal Schools in Mississippi.

Where the nation is heading?

Reviewed by Deborah Boykin

Vol. 15, No. 2, 1993, pp. 25-27

The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Southern Identity, by James C. Cobb (Oxford University Press, 1993, 333 pages, index).

James Cobb’s title, The Most Southern Place on Earth, is a depressing one for Southerners. This is not because he failed to see or document many of the Delta’s special charms, such as its gift of “The Blues,” its substantial contributions to literature, and its irrepressible devotion to excess. It is because Cobb’s thesis is (without much overstatement) that the Delta is cutthroat capitalism at work and probably a good indicator of where the rest of the nation is heading.

This is probably not the picture that first pops to mind when the adjectives “most Southern” are heard. Hot or battle scarred, racially torn or mended, demagoguery, or complicated families, perhaps: these are customary images, and the Mississippi Delta has all that in abundance. Cobb sorts out the history of this rich section between

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Memphis and Vicksburg (which is really the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta) with balance and precision, and it is not necessary to share his conclusion to appreciate his work.

Drawing primarily upon the papers left behind by boom-and-bust planters, old tax and census records, and the observation of a score of writers (including this one) who have explored the Delta, Cobb takes us from the days of the “pioneers” who first ventured into the swamps to the triumph of agribusiness and black voting strength in the 1980s. Black accounts of the days before the Civil Rights movement are skimpy, which is undoubtedly due to the scarcity of any writings left by sharecroppers and possibly also to Cobb’s decision to avoid oral history. Even with that limitation it is a dramatic and brutal story, involving the conquest and eradication of wetlands and hardwood forests full of bear and panthers, fortunes risked on weather and fluctuations in the world cotton market horrifying tales of labor amounting to torture, and personal disasters and triumphs in the contests against racial oppression and the relentless Mississippi, with its power to flood the whole damn place up to the chimney tops.

The Delta produced an extra measure of unreconstructed politicians, like Senator James O. Eastland, and a few leaders who acquired a more moderate reputation, such as LeRoy Percy. These men had money and the incredible conceit that the prosperity of the nation was somehow inextricably tied to the fate of their fertile thirteen counties. So successful were they in selling this idea that the more accurate title for Cobb’s book might be, “The Most Federalized Place on Earth.”

Beginning in 1879, when Congress adopted the idea that controlling Mississippi River floods was a national responsibility, federal dollars and programs have steadily inundated the area. Now private land holdings are deemed arable from the towering levees of the Mississippi to the granite-reinforced, channelized banks of the Yazoo. The New Deals cotton plow-up program, which Cobb treats thoroughly and well, devastated the sharecropper system and led to crop subsidies, land stabilization, and environmental regulation. And then came, unwelcomed by the old planters, civil rights enforcement, redistricting, the poverty programs, and expanded public welfare.

It would be hard to find another place in America where so much daily activity is directly regulated by, and so much of the population receives direct benefits from, the federal government.

And it still may be the poorest place in the country.

Cobb also provides a detailed account of the early Civil Rights movement, from the lynching of Emmett Till through the birth of the White Citizens’ Council in Indianola and the heroic career of Fannie Lou Hamer. His lack of attention to that remarkable 1960s experiment in Head Start, Friends of the Children of Mississippi, is curious, as is the limited coverage of Parchman Prison, which by its ominous presence in Sunflower County has served as a constant reminder of the consequence of offending white justice.

After eleven chapters of linear history, Cobb adds a twelfth on the “blues” and a final one entitled “More Writers per Square Foot…” Almost every recorded blues musician of renown came from the Delta or nearby, demonstrating that the area has been, and continues to be, an organic part of the black experience. And writers galore. Why have so many, William Alexander Percy, David Cohn, Hodding Carter, Shelby Foote, Walker Percy, Ellen Douglas, Willie Morris, Ellen Gilchrist, and more,

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emerged from a class-bound, racist, farming region? One answer is that the planter culture admired the arts and served as patrons to the artists. Another is that the vivid contrasts everywhere apparent in the Delta provoke literary expression.

To my mind the society of this fertile spot is enduringly odd. Cobb, however, after tracing its history with above-average objectivity for three hundred pages, reveals at the end that he sees it in a different light. He suggests that the economic and social polarization “that is synonymous with the Mississippi Delta” may be in the process of reducing the American dream, throughout the United States, “to a self-indulgent fantasy.” And he wonders whether, as “socioeconomic disparity and indifference to human suffering become increasingly prominent features of American life,” the “same economic, political, and emotional forces that helped to forge and sustain the Delta’s image as the South writ small may one day transform an entire nation into the Delta writ large.” For those who would elect to be neither master nor slave, that is a frightening thought.

Tony Dunbar practices law in New Orleans. He is the author of Delta Time, and Our Land, Too, the 197l Lillian Smith Book Award winner. With the permission of the writer and Southern Changes, an abridged version of this review appeared first in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.