History, Hope and Heroes

By Julian Bond

Vol. 15, No. 4, 1993, pp. 1-7

In 1993, the grandson of an American slave teaches at the university slave owner Thomas Jefferson founded in Virginia, and teaches young Americans about the modern day struggle for human liberty. That struggle has its roots in Jefferson’s words more than his deeds and its parallels in my grandfather, James Bond’s, membership in a transcendent generation—that body of black women and men born in the nineteenth century in servitude, freed by the Civil War, determined to make their way as free women and men.

My students are modern young men and women, filled with the cynicism and despair of their age. For them, these are the worst of times, and my documentation of a harsher and more oppressive past does not always convince them that these days are better times than those older days they study with me.

Today’s world holds few heroes for my students, and this lack of heroes, coupled with their pessimism, makes them unlikely candidates to create a movement of their own.

My students learn about a more modern generation of Americans than my grandfather’s. The transcendent generation they study, born in segregation in the twentieth century, was freed from racism’s legal restraints by its member’s own efforts, determined to make their way in freedom.

The historian’s task is to remind the students—to remind ourselves—that King was more than the movement and that the movement was more than Martin Luther King. Through demonstrating the democratic nature of the movement, we not only discover and

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expose heroism unknown, we demonstrate the optimism and sense of possibility which was the movement’s engine. By giving voice to the hopefulness of earlier generations who faced resistance and oppression my students have never known, and will never know, we make heroism more available, more attainable.

I want my students to learn history, heroes, and hope.

Preserving and interpreting the civil rights past requires acknowledgement that the movement was made by many, not the few, and the avoidance of the King-deification and dependence which has so permeated the historical discourse.

One hundred and thirty years ago President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Because my grandfather was born in Kentucky, he remained a slave until the 13th Amendment became law in 1865.

Fifty years ago the world was at war, and Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill met in Teheran.

Back in the United States, between May and August of 1943, race riots swept through American cities, resulting in forty deaths.

1993 also marks the thirtieth anniversary of the civil rights movement’s notable March on Washington where Martin Luther King delivered his best-remembered speech, in which he asked Americans to share his dream.

These anniversaries provide a handy platform from which retrospectives can be launched, and a proper distance from which to look back upon an event with suitable detachment.

In our glorification of the past, we often bemoan the present day reality. From the present we look backward and see the modern civil rights movement as heroic, with King in the leading role. I want to discuss King as hero, first in the larger context, and specifically in his role in Birmingham, Alabama thirty years ago. By regarding King and the civil rights movement as heroic, we miss the reality of each. Each becomes more—and less—than they actually were, robbing today’s lesser mortals of any ability to duplicate their heroism today.

Too, our heroes have changed as technology has changed our expectations, and that technology has expanded the lists from which heroes can be chosen—today they come more frequently from weekly combat on

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the playing field than from the battleground.

The oral tradition that once transmitted heroic words from generation to generation has been replaced by the VCR. Today we can fast-forward through a modern hero’s life to get to the good parts. Once we were inspired by the telling; today we are entertained by the viewing.

Buckskin-clad backwoodsmen and powder-wigged Founding Fathers have been replaced by the Italian-suited Wall Streeter and the head-shaved sports star. That athlete transcends racial boundaries; today, so does Martin Luther King.

This marvelous man who was my college teacher speaks in death and memory to whites and blacks as he never did in life.

In grainy film taken at his 1963 March on Washington speech, we hear again the measured, rhythmic cadence, we see the commanding presence, we hear the booming voice, we share the martyr’s dream.

We honor him because of what he means to our imperfect and selective memories—the stoic who faced injury and death, and the major figure of his period, the spokesman for nonviolence, able to articulate for whites what blacks wanted and for blacks what would be required if freedom was to be the prize.

But that King is half the man. The King we see is a blurred picture of who the man was.

The reappraisals of King, his leadership, the movement he helped to make, and most recently his character have taken a familiar path.

Thirty years ago he emerged triumphant from Birmingham. He had skillfully employed youthful demonstrators whose buoyancy and vitality provoked the anticipated and nationally-televised violence from the local police. He had drawn an unwilling President into his drama; the President’s men helped make a settlement possible.

A few months later his dramatic speech at the March on Washington cemented his place as first among equals in America’s civil rights leadership. Like the beatings and hosings in Birmingham, King’s Washington speech was televised; in a nation-wide mass meeting, an American audience was treated for the first time to the unedited oratory of America’s principal preacher, and for the first time, a mass white audience heard the undeniable justice of black demands. By 1965 King was at the apex of black leadership; his success in Selma at soliciting national revulsion at racist violence translated into federal action and marked him as the primary figure in America in the leadership of what was being called the Negro revolution. With King as leader, the organized movement would remain peaceful, and the movement’s goals would remain inclusive into the American mainstream, but other events and personalities would begin to intrude.

In December, 1964, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; within a few months he demonstrated he took the Prize seriously, speaking out against the War in Vietnam.

King’s conscience could not avoid involving him against the war, and his anti-war activities gave him a chance to further define himself.

“I’m much more than a civil rights leader,” he said in mid-1965, while insisting his major focus would continue to be the struggle against black oppression.

He took a campaign against discrimination and black poverty to Chicago in 1965 and 1966, but Chicago’s rigid politics suffocated the movement he tried to build. He still peppered his speeches with darts against the war and spoke more forcefully against what he called America’s “vicious class system(s).”

“If our economic system is to survive,” he told his Atlanta congregation, “there must be a better distribution of wealth… We can’t have a system where some people live in superfluous, inordinate wealth while others live in abject, deadening poverty.”1In the middle of King’s Chicago campaign, James Meredith was shot on his one-man march through Mississippi. King and others took up the March. In a dusty cotton field Stokeley Carmichael shouted “Black Power,” and the rift between King’s moderation and the militancy of other movement figures became public. Black power did more than frighten whites and black moderates; it divided support for the move-

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ment and gave sanction to those who thought American blacks already had won enough.

Acceptable pluralism became unacceptable separatism when the proponents’ skins were black; pride became arrogance when nonviolent petitioner became militant demander.

King’s last years were marked by attitudinal changes—in black America’s demands and white Americans’ response. In Montgomery in 1955 blacks had asked for seats at an abundant table; they could gain and no one—except the believers in white supremacy—had to lose. As the movement grew in strength and extended beyond the borders of the Old Confederacy, many whites began to believe blacks wanted the whole table for themselves.

King interrupted preparations for a Poor People’s March on Washington to help striking garbage workers in Memphis; it was there he was murdered in 1968.

The violence he had fought against in life, and had exploited so brilliantly to win sympathy for civil rights in the South, exploded across America in the aftermath of his murder.

Eighteen years later, President Ronald Reagan reluctantly signed the law that made King’s birthdate a national holiday, and today schoolchildren across America know part of the story of Martin Luther King. His heroic status was assured.

The story schoolchildren do not know is what makes making heroes the peculiar and ironic process that it is. They do not know that in Martin Luther King’s America what had been “a culture with a racist ideology,” became “a chronically racist culture” after Emancipation, unifying all who found themselves “within the Caucasian chalk circle,” offering reward and punishment based on pigmentation in King’s time and today.2

The movement King helped to lead destroyed the moral authority undergirding that culture; that is why we honor him. We do not honor the severe critic of capitalism and its excesses. We do not honor the pacifist who preached that all wars were evil, who said a nation which chose guns over butter would starve its people and kill itself. We do not honor the man who linked apartheid in South African and South Alabama. We honor an antiseptic hero.

He could not have imagined his birthday would be a national holiday or that American schoolchildren of all races would spend the days surrounding January 15 each year declaiming his March on Washington speech, learning about Rosa Parks and the boycott in Montgomery.

And he could not have imagined that he would be considered by many to be a hero, for if he realized he was worshiped in his lifetime, he thought that worship vainglorious and misplaced. He knew his human failings.

Because his opinions remain controversial today, we selectively honor only part of the whole man; even the most vigorous opponents of civil rights can find a King quote to camouflage their racism. They often chose excerpts from the “I Have A Dream” speech given thirty years ago.

1993 marks also the thirtieth anniversary year of “Project C” for ‘confrontation,’ the plan created by the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker to bring creative tension to Alabama’s largest city. I first knew Birmingham as a student from Atlanta; it was a place where you did not linger after football games between Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School and Birmingham’s Parker High School, particularly if Parker lost. I knew the city later, from the perspective of a participant in the modern civil rights movement, as “Bombingham” because of the frequency of its explosive attacks on blacks. It became known throughout the nation and the world in 1963 as the site of a ferocious fight between the movement’s nonviolent forces and the white resistance, and it was here thirty years ago that a bloody bomb ended the lives of four young girls. In Birmingham’s streets a drama unfolded that typifies the entire civil rights movement for many: nonviolent protestors, many of them pre-school children, singing while they marched from the Sixteenth Street

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Baptist Church into blasts of water fired from cannons whose power, it was said, could strip bark from trees and bricks from buildings.

Looking backward from today at the events which happened here, we can see the Birmingham of 1963 through others’ eyes. Historians and movement leaders alike have much to tell us about what was done and what it meant—to them then and to us today.

Taylor Branch and David Garrow, in their Pulitzer Prize winning studies3 of Martin Luther King, have given us moving portraits of the man and the movement he helped to make, in Birmingham and elsewhere. For Garrow, Birmingham was where “SCLC had succeeded in bringing the civil rights struggle into the forefront of the national consciousness.”4

For some in the civil rights movement, Birmingham was observed through the parochial prisms of organizational interests, through the lens of competition with King and SCLC for national sympathy and contributions, for the loyalty of black America, and for the attention of the White House.

Despite the descriptions of prize-winning historians and authors, and despite some criticism and carping from the civil rights movement’s more prominent participants, there is much more to be learned about what happened in the Magic City in the Spring of 1963. The popular view of the Birmingham movement—children facing fire hoses and the leadership of Martin Luther King—obscures a larger level of participation and involvement that explains the democratic nature of the Southern struggle for human rights.

A visitor today may be surprised to learn that Birmingham is eager to exploit its civil rights past. The city is home today to a new Civil Rights Institute, opened in 1992. It is a wonderful structure, built with taxpayers’ money, a remarkable fact in view of the outbreak of protests in Birmingham a mere thirty years ago. A visitor to the Institute can learn much about what took place in the surrounding streets three decades ago, particularly why the movement was called a mass movement. Here visitors have a chance to learn much about heroes and heroism.

In a ledger the Institute has used as a visitors’ book on and since its opening days are written the accounts of movement participants. Those who signed were asked to record what they did—whether they marched, were arrested, or served in some capacity or capacities, many having performed more than one activity.5

On the ledger’s first page are found thirty-six names of those who marched in 1963’s demonstrations, three who served as security guards, seven who said they were arrested and six who said they were jailed, two who served as committee members, two who served meals, and ten who worked to register voters. The pages which follow list many more.

The visitors’ ledger is the basis for the Civil Rights Institute’s planned oral history project. Its sign-up sheets are also the Birmingham movement’s social register, a roster of who was who and who did what, a roll call of the movement’s nameless and forgotten.

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In a few words, testimonies of cramped shorthand, the episodes they chose to record compose their Birmingham movement.

Empress Akweke-king, now of Brooklyn wrote: “dog attacked.”

Rev. BW. Henderson of Avenue O reports “house bombed on Sugar Hill.” Ruth Barefield-Pendleton of 2nd Street West “marched Selma to Montgomery.” Doris Brewster of Riverchase Parkway simply wrote “hosed.”

Rodrick Hilson “brought kids from Bessemer to Birmingham.”

In Arthur Lee Smith’s account he “acted as liaison between jail and headquarters (church).”

Willie James Coleman boasts he was “first to go to jail for park.” Sandra Johnson’s brief narrative says simply “left school.” Glenda Bailey of Adamsville remembers “heard blast at church from the fountain Heights Methodist Church.”

Thirteen-year-old Virgil Ware could not sign in for himself; he was killed on the afternoon of September 15, 1963, in the angry aftermath of the dynamite blast Glenda Bailey heard. Riding on the handlebars of his brother’s bicycle, he was shot by a sixteen-year-old white boy riding on the back of a motor scooter. Someone signing in for Virgil Ware wrote: “Deceased. KKK killed him same day 16th Street Baptist was bombed.”

Charlotte Billups Jernigan modestly described her father, the Rev. Charles Billups as, “Foot soldier, dedicated worker, 1927-1968.” Historians of the Birmingham movement will remember that while Rev. Billups was a dedicated worker, he was far more than a foot soldier; he was at least a Major General.

Flora Smith of Bessemer was “chaplain in jail.”

Not all who made the movement were black. Melva Jimerson, now of Washington, D.C., was “part of Alabama Council on Human Relations.” Randall Jimerson, now of East Hampton, Connecticut, “spoke out on civil rights issues with white students in Homewood.”

Many are modest. From Stafford, Vermont, William Sloane Coffin described himself simply as “Freedom Rider.”

Will Eatman of Birmingham remembered, “I was water down on 5th Avenue 17th Street.”

After twenty-five pages, each page with forty-one lines, each line defining a small space, each space filled with proud self-identifications of contributions made to breaking Alabama’s rigid walls, of days in jail, of dogs and hoses, of marches and mass meetings, and explosions heard, of offices sought and sons killed in war, of ushers and musicians and food servers, of explosions

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heard, Steve Norris is the first to mention the man most Americans associate with Birmingham then and now.

Norris writes: “In jail with Martin Luther King.”

“In jail with Martin Luther King!”

Here Steven Norris lists what must have been for him the significant moment of his involvement in the Birmingham campaign. His fellow authors had summed up their magic moments in other ways; they are the primary actors, only occasionally the acted upon. It is they who “march” or “brought kids” or “were first” to go to jail or were “water down;” they were attacked by dogs or hosed by firemen or simply “spoke out” where speaking out was dangerous.

These pages, filled with the self description and identification of movement makers from Birmingham and Alabama thirty years ago—provides excellent opportunity for historians to examine the Birmingham movement anew, from the heart of the movement’s mass.

Let no one tell us their movement did not succeed.

Ask Hartman Turnbow, a black Mississippian, who said:

“Anybody hadda told me ‘fore it happened that conditions would make this much change between the white and the black in Holmes County here where I live, why I’da just said, ‘You’re lyin’. It won’t happen.’

“I just wouldn’t have believed it. I didn’t dream of it. I didn’t see no way. But it got to workin’ just like the citizenship class teacher told us—that if we would register to vote and just stick with it. He says it’s goin’ be some difficulties. He told us that when we started. We was lookin’ for it. He said we gon’ have difficulties, gon’ have troubles, folks gon’ lose their homes, folks gon’ lose their lives, peoples gon’ lose all their money, and just like he said, all of that happened. He didn’t miss it. He hit it kadap on the head, and it’s workin’ now. It won’t never go back to where it was!”6

It succeeded in spite of Turnbow’s “difficulties,” in spite of what King called the brutality of a dying order shrieking across the land.

In its successes, it has much to teach us now.

Today, from Somalia and Haiti, the United States looks back at Vietnam to discover what went wrong. We can look back at yesterday’s civil rights movement to discover what went right.

Yesterday’s movement succeeded because victims became their own best champions. When Mrs. Rosa Parks refused to stand up, and when King stood up to preach, mass participation came to the movement for civil rights.

Today, too many of my students and too many others—young and old, black and white—believe they are impotent, unable to influence the society in which they live.

Three decades ago, a mass movement marched, picketed, protested and organized and brought state sanctioned segregation to it knees.

One movement message is that people move forward fastest when they move forward together. Another lesson is that heroes need more than a passive audience if their heroism is to flourish. That audience can provide a context for heroism, a supportive cast for heroic deeds and a mirror for its valor.

Black Americans worked their way to civil rights through the difficult business of organizing. Registering voters, one by one. Organizing a community, block by block. Creating a movement in which one hundred parts made up the successful whole.

The civil rights movement provides more than a century’s history of aggressive self-help and voluntarism in church and civic clubs, assisting the needy and financing the cause of social justice, and an equally long and honorable tradition of struggle and resistance.

Our task is to communicate the hopefulness that made the movement possible, the optimism that conferred heroism on a population history does not acknowledge. “Greater efforts and grander victories,” my grandfather would say.

That was his generation’s promise a century ago, an inheritance from the generation born as slaves. That is the modern movement’s promise to us now.

NOTES:

Julian Bond is Distinguished Adjunct Professor in the School of Government at American University in Washington, D. C., and a Lecturer in History at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. He wishes to acknowledge Vincent Harding’s text Hope and History for the (un)conscious inspiration for the title of this article.

A New Ecology of Poverty

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 15, No. 4, 1993, pp. 8-13

While it is true that the poor have always been with us, poverty in America today is profoundly different and more disturbing than ever before. Our nation is now tolerating dimensions of poverty that threaten anew our collective well being, our communities, and our spiritual values. Over the last two decades, we have witnessed the arrival of new aspects of poverty and new faces of the poor without coming to terms individually and collectively with the human and moral costs to us all.

As the latest census report confirms, for the first time in America, children have become in the 1990’s our largest population in poverty. During the last twenty years this transformation has been slowly evident through a sea of official statistics and the carefully measured monotone of governmental reports. At bottom they tell us that one in five of all children in America is poor and almost one in four of all children under the age of six lives in poverty. America’s poverty encompasses more than 13 million children.

The United States may now be the only industrialized nation in the world where children are the largest population in poverty. Our rate of poverty among children in the last decade was probably more than twice as high as the rate in West Germany and almost double the rate in neighboring Canada. These statistics are reinforced by other international comparisons showing that in the United States our youth are more in jeopardy from infant mortality, birth at low weight, violent crime and teenage pregnancy than the youth among most of the world’s other industrialized nations.

Yet, the changes in the nature of American poverty involve more than its increasing visitation upon the youngest and the smallest among us. Poor children in this country today are more often the third or fourth generation of poor within their own families. They live within families and communities that have become terribly de-

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pendent upon private and public charity for survival. These boys, girls, and babies may be the first generation accurately described as America’s underclass.

Not in recent times have we as a nation witnessed so many children, families, and communities in persistent poverty. As many as 2.5 million people (one in three of whom are probably children) may be among the persistent poor today. Since 1970, the number of the persistent poor has likely quadrupled.

In places like the South Side of Chicago this fundamental change in the nature of poverty is ever-present. Like the communities themselves, the proud edifices of homes and buildings which were once constructed in an active, if poor, community now stand abandoned, crumbling around the poor. These structures are the testaments of persistent poverty—dependency and deprivation, two characteristics of this new poverty that have engulfed communities as much as individuals.

The dependency of many poor families is linked indissolubly with the dependency of their communities. The life of one is the predicament of the other. Areas of persisting poverty have no vitality because they lack employment, safety, reliable services for basic necessities, and people of some means. They have no employment, no basic services, little safety, and few people of means because the people are poor. As William Julius Wilson has begun to document, this damaging interaction between the dependency of families and the dependency of their communities continues to dissipate the strength of both and has created a downwardly spiraling deprivation of the body and spirit in which children, more than anyone else, are now caught.

Within the spiraling dynamics of poverty, African and Hispanic Americans are disproportionately concentrated. While these individuals and families constitute only one in five of our population, they may comprise as many as two out of every three Americans in persistent poverty.

In essence, there is today a new ecology of poverty in which children, their families, and their communities are suffering without their own means to vastly improve circumstances. In America today from Los Angeles to Liberty City, from Navajo reservations to Delta plantations, the new ecology of poverty evidences primarily four characteristics which are sustained by the interactions of place, people, and policies. Those characteristics are deprivation, dependency, isolation, and violence. They have rendered both urban and rural communities into dysfunctional, dangerous places for children, their parents, and their neighbors.

In urban areas poor children are growing up without a diversity of adults and without family and friends who have the habits of industry. They live with few opportunities to earn money legally, and they see wealth and prosperity only from television and shady, violent transactions. They live in a world in which their families and most of their neighbors are usually the recipients of charity and seldom the benefactors of good deeds. They live in apartments that are aesthetically poor, too often dangerous, in buildings where entire floors remain as burnt shells, on street blocks where abandoned buildings are the most available play structures, and in neighborhoods where liquor stores are more prevalent than laundromats.

In rural areas the problems of isolation have also become more profound for the poor in recent years, as they have been left behind. Many rural communities were once created to provide cheap labor for agriculture work. Now, they exist with little demand for their labor, at any price. In some places an entire community may embody the same, stultifying dimensions of this new ecology—no jobs, few adult males, no playgrounds, no services—in the words of one community leader in Mississippi, “just no nothing.” In other locations poor chil-

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dren and their families remain separated by the distances of rural life, even more isolated than before from health care and other vital provisions which have become more centralized. Often they are without private or public means of transportation, probably more scarce than at any other in the last twenty years.

As government statistics tell, these distressed communities are also our most violent places. Children often play within the sounds of gunfire and walk across the sites where other children have died from guns or gangs. Mothers and school teachers instruct their children on how to duck gun shots and the elderly retreats behind locked doors for most of the day and all of the night in these profoundly poor places.

With a remarkable, saddening consistency, the invidious aspects of this new ecological poverty build upon themselves, like a cancerous growth, as their inhabitants witness the decline and jeopardy. In Chicago homeless mothers—some with fussy babies in their laps—can talk of their plight, living on the margin outside of any real community or nurturing support; older residents of the Ida B. Wells Center can talk with melancholia about the decline of their own community over the last few decades. And in Chicago’s Little Village on the floor of a local church building Mexican-American moms and their toddlers, valiantly can explain in broken, haunting English their joy for having a few hours together amid a life of isolation and struggle in a strange new land called America.

In the Delta children and adults can tell the incredible stories of how plantation life has and continues to foster dependency deprivation, isolation, and violence. They know the vast distances of flatlands, toiled now primarily by machines, that separate people and services. And they truly can feel a sense of the Delta blues as it rhythmically evokes both the awesome forces of poverty and racism and the endurance of the human spirit.

In these and other poor communities across the South and nation many local leaders can also offer genuine insight about how necessary and how difficult it is to work locally in poor communities. It was surely no accident, for example, that both residents of South Chicago, and Marks, Mississippi, began their efforts to turn around their own communities with issues of security and laundromats. On a bleak October day, at Ida B. Wells Center, an elderly resident representing a tenant organization explained that their first initiative was the “security committee,” to provide solid padlocks for residents’ doors. In Marks, the origins of the local development organization began with a boycott over the mistreatment of local residents by the police. In Chicago another local resident of Ida B. Wells recalled: “Next, we had a dream… that someday… we would have a laundromat….” and now they

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are opening one. In Marks, the Quitman County Development Organization responded to a real community need first by building a laundromat. Amid the nation’s poor, real needs begin at an elemental level.

And so does the work to meet those needs. Many community leaders know the strategic value and the moral imperative of helping to assure the participation of the poor in the life of their own communities and in meeting their own needs. Where effective efforts exist to reduce poverty and its deprivations—to enlarge the real chances of many poor children and their families—are found marvelous leaders and community-based organizations and hopeful moments of the promises of the American democratic process. In Chicago the elections for the management of local schools enlivened a new sense of participation and activity in poor neighborhoods, and in Mississippi a fair election process has helped to create and improve vastly poor communities like Metcalfe and has elevated caring, local leaders like county supervisor Robert Jackson. Anyone who has worked in or studied poor places has stood in witness of the poor as they began to see themselves participating in their own communities, controlling their own lives, and experimenting with new democratic forms.

Yet, most poor children will not escape poverty nor its dependency, deprivation, or other ill features unless the new ecology of poverty is recognized and squarely addressed locally and nationally. Because children are increasingly living in deprivation, dependency, and isolation, and violence—intertwining factors of this new ecology—our nation must act with a sense of urgency. That children, their families, and their communities are interdependent in this new ecology of poverty signals how we must respond. No one knows what will be the real damage that these new dimensions of poverty have upon our nation and all of our individual lives, although the current persistence of violence and death among the young may be a harbinger of the future we have sowed. Common sense, common interest, and common spiritual values tell us simply that we cannot wait to know. Today a new poverty is with us, and we must respond as wisely and as purposefully as we can.

The commitment to a new approach to poverty should not only be deep, reflective, and, in a sense, personal, but it also must become long-standing. The nation’s work on poverty over the last twenty five years permits no delusion about our ability to make a real difference within a couple of years. The problems of poverty have always been formidable, and lately they can appear overwhelming. For these reasons, the nation’s new commitment must stay the course for several years if work and dedication are to have more than symbolic values.

Our nation must begin with a preference to support community organizations, churches, and other associations who already work effectively in and with poor communities. These institutions and their leaders have a pivotal role at all levels. From their collective experience and observations, they are most likely to carry out enabling and even ennobling local practices that can help reduce the deprivation of poverty; they are the empowering instruments for the participation of the poor; they are among the most knowledgeable about how to change government practices and local policies for the better; and they are often the best advocates to make the case and build the constituency for transforming public policies.

The simple fact is that poverty is local in nature and national in scope. The work to reduce poverty requires activities at all levels—local, state, and national. Exemplary, local activities will be very important, but they can be instructive and instrumental in assuring improvements in policies and activities only within a broader venue and in the context of broader activities.

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In response to ecological poverty, we must reach different levels of work, address diverse elements of needs, and venture into enterprises where success may be no more likely than failure. Without a broad, interactive approach, that is nurturing, incisive, and venturesome, the nation will not be able to sustain work that helps to reduce the new ecological problems of poverty today.

Both the government and the private sector should establish work and policies in the following areas:
1) effective and exemplary local practices in the poorest areas to reduce poverty,
2) empowering of poor communities and supporting indigenous talented leadership,
3) public policies that address the worst characteristics and the interlocking nature of ecological poverty
4) public discourse that deepens understanding about the nature of poverty and its claims on all of society.

Effective, Exemplary Local Practices

Twenty years ago political scientist Charles Hamilton examined a Harlem tenement, finding that its poor families dealt with almost two dozen government officials who were in the business of helping the poor. Today private and government assistance to the poor suffers often from similar circumstances, and the poor suffer from the disastrous consequences. The families of poor children have become wards of the state, governed by a multitude of regulations and social workers whose functions are defined by separate volumes of eligibility details and accountability statistics on “transactions” with the poor.

The paramount goal in this area should be to support existing organizations to explore new, more effective and comprehensive ways to provide services to poor children and their families and to enable poor communities. We should seek to assist those local practices that end the bureaucratic, arbitrary division of individual and community services; that promote a comprehensive, respectful response to the needs of poor families and communities; and that experiment carefully with projects bringing together public resources, the private economy, and private associations to reduce poverty and restore community. These programs should be family centered and community based. They should include those local practices that have, within one program, both the flexibility to respond to the real personal needs of poor families, without bureaucratic restraints or indifference, and to help build an infrastructure within poor communities. The government and private services which these projects

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may attempt to deliver better should include housing, social services, cash payments, transportation, sanitation, job readiness, education, economic development, recreation, and security.

Empowering Poor Communities and Supporting Indigenous Leadership

Second only to the notions of community, the concepts of empowerment reverberate throughout the language of poor communities, their leaders, public policy analysts, and some government officials. The work of empowerment is to help people and communities build agency in their own lives—to participate meaningfully in the vital decisions affecting them.

In this area, private philanthropy and the government should support work that empowers the poor, in league with others, to help themselves out of poverty. This work may often include community organizing when it is driven with specific goals and practical strategies for improving services, policies, and practices; activities that enlarge the clout of the poor in dealing with the larger society; undertakings that give voice to the strategies and aspirations of poor communities; and effective programs of mediating institutions that genuinely take up the needs and causes of the poor.

Public Policies

The public policies relating to poverty at all levels of government in the United States have not yet come to terms with the dynamics and needs that are a part of the new ecology of poverty. In both development and implementation, public policies tend to address the various needs of poor children or poor individuals, as if their lives can be disconnected into manageable compartments—as if their chances in life can be divorced from the fate of their families and their communities. These failures in public policy continue at a time when the states are increasingly responsible for shaping policies and distributing available resources to address poverty.

In this field the nation needs the development and implementation of policies that eliminate barriers to effective, comprehensive services for poor children, their families, and their communities. Support should be available for experiments that suspend traditional guidelines and divisions in practice in order to allow for more comprehensive, effective collaboration with and among local organizations in poor areas.

No less important are projects that explore and implement practical ways in improving the structure and opportunity for jobs and earnings for the poor in both urban and rural areas. Finally, we need efforts that establish the means by which public policy is better informed in its development and implementation by the local organizations that have valuable experience with government programs.

Poverty and Public Discourse

The nation must have research and public discussions that explore how well the American people and their governments understand poverty and the poor and that examine the factors influencing the development and implementation of public policy on poverty.

Poverty in the United States constitutes a set of problems that cannot be resolved only by the efforts of the poor, their indigenous leaders, public policy analysts and activists, and government officials. They demand a broader range of responsibility, concern, and understanding. The existence of poverty says more about the values and nature of our nation as a whole as it does about those in poverty.

Steve Suitts is executive director of the Southern Regional Council.

1993 Lillian Smith Awards: The Power of Mercy

Acceptance Remarks by William Baldwin

Vol. 15, No. 4, 1993, pp. 15-17

To say I’m flattered that you have chosen me to be one of this year’s winners of the Lillian Smith Award is an understatement, but to keep myself honest I must make some confessions.

Although, in my own little community, I’m still considered by some to be a wide-eyed, bomb throwing communist, by the standards of this room I am conservative—conservative to the marrow. I can only mitigate that first confession by adding that I tend to vote the Democratic ticket. But for me voting Democrat is a form of prayer. I must tell you I am a conservative in the sense that I believe that human beings are not perfectible—for better or worse, human nature is a constant.

Furthermore and sadly, I can’t claim to know much about civil rights. And I have not paid enough attention to public or even private education. I realize that these are important issues to all of you here, and I apologize.

A couple months back I watched “Eyes on the Prize” on public television and was amazed by how much I had missed out on.

During most of the sixties and half of the seventies I would wake up contemplating suicide and go to bed drunk. I could have placed Alabama on a map but not Selma. I could have picked out Viet Nam but not Cambodia or Thailand. I knew that Beatles existed but I couldn’t have given you their first names.

When I graduated from high school in 1962 I was a strange little person. Dysfunctional is the word today, But back then it was strange. I had to just guess what was real. Like Brother, in my novel, I saw things and heard voices and I was attending Clemson University. At the end of the first semester they tried to kick me out. That was the same week they let the first black man in—and that was Harvey Gantt who I recall was received fairly civilly. I remember him commenting on the fact he could count on South Carolinians being polite. But they weren’t particularly polite to me. My advisor laughed. Said I had absolutely no future in a college, could never graduate, and should join the Navy.

I stayed on at Clemson out of contrariness and five years later I was finishing up a masters degree in English and teaching in an all-black high school. I wasn’t just the only white teacher, I was the first white teacher, as far as I know the first white person to even come through the door of that school. That was culture shock for everybody. Some of the seniors could only sign their names, but I enjoyed teaching those children and I think they enjoyed me being there. Still I wasn’t in that school out of any political convictions or part of any national mandate. I was just there because I’d drifted there. And two years later I was picking oysters with an all-black oyster crew and I was there because my wife and I had no money for food. That was 1968 and these black men were my friends—in a way. A reverse paternalism. They looked out for me in the creek and taught me to scrap up a living. Contrary to the familiar national statistics they had families and certainly worked hard—four in the morning until nine at night, five days a week, and much of the time in freezing mud and water—was the norm. But of the dozen or so on that crew almost all are dead. I believe only three got shot or stabbed. Contrary to the familiar statistics the rest were killed in accidents—wrecks they didn’t cause or drownings. They died because they led hard lives and they were mortal and I suppose pieces of all of them ended up in the novel’s character David Allson.

Now, to return to “Eyes on the Prize.” It was interesting to see Rosa Parks fighting for a seat on the bus—because in the late 1950’s my grandmother’s cook Anna, a tiny black woman had walked into the white Presbyterian church one Sunday morning and sat through an entire service. For that place and time that was an equally heroic or at least for the whites equally outrageous act. I’m sure that in 1958 there were some in the congregation who still doubted the Negroes had souls, but nobody was going to say no to her because—quote unquote—Anna didn’t take any crap off of anybody—and because in one

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way or another she’d helped to raise the entire congregation or at least their children. Anna, on the other hand, must have been bored stiff by the staid Calvinism of that group. Over the last years my wife and I have gotten into the habit of attending black church services—one or two a year for awhile. We don’t go as tourists—we stay two or three hours, stay to the point where we know that Jesus Christ exists—that a tangible Christ is in our midst and life is bearable. Then, I at least, walk out the door and this Christ dissolves. But He would have remained real for my grandmother’s cook Anna, and I suspect this is the same Maum Anna who started waking me up at three in the morning a dozen years ago—a voice in my head telling Gullah stories that demanded attention—insisting that this novel get written.

So that’s Anna Allson and David Allson from the novel—who I believe are the best characters in the novel. Which brings me around to what I do believe in. And that is the spark of divinity inside of every human being. For me this belief isn’t necessarily of Christian origin. I happen to be a Christian of sorts, but that is almost incidental. What I believe in is the perhaps now unfashionable notion of the indomitable and enduring. I believe that all life is sacred and honestly and truly believe that skin color, sex, and sexual preference are simply veneers overlaying and equally old-fashioned concept of all encompassing life force. In the novel Anna Allson is the embodiment of this

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force. In the original draft she was the main character. And David Allson is brought on at the end of the novel to explain it all to the narrator—to show not the humanity of Christ but his outright humanness. David doesn’t want to explain God’s ways to man but man’s ways to God. To say this is me—That I’m willing to meet you more than halfway—but I’ve got a right to exist.

And that’s how I came to write The Hard to Catch Mercy. I sat down a dozen years ago determined to write about a mythical place called The Isle of Negroes—a tiny corner of the South that the free slaves would break off and run as a separate cannibal kingdom—a place where white fears, black anger, and the redemptive powers of Jesus Christ would all come together and I did write it. But each time I rewrote, I considered scrapping the Isle of Negroes sections, thinking this material would keep the book from being published. But I didn’t scrap it.

Still, when the novel was finally out and it came time to do promotion I tried never to mention race relations. Not on instruction from Algonquin Books but because of my own timidness. I said The Hard to Catch Mercy was an adventure yarn—and if pressed I would say it was like Chinese boxes and had a lot of meanings. So it’s a relief for me to be able to stand up here in front of you after six months of side-stepping and say that at least half of the novel is about white fears and black anger and Christ’s redeeming powers.

This was a combination that seemed strangely overlooked by everyone. Growing up after the Civil War you did have at least two generations of whites who felt there was a real possibility that their entire community would be massacred. Before starting the novel, I supplemented the stories I’d been hearing all my life by doing interviews, and a fairly distinct pattern was apparent—an age limit on this view. Below seventy most whites thought the idea silly—but they wouldn’t laugh at it. I did laugh though. Now, partly as a result of this white fear you had incredible cruelties practiced against the blacks. And the backlash to this is, of course, more black anger which I also poke fun at or, at least, let them poke fun at it themselves. Anger and humor run side by side in real life—so it is always there to pick up on. Hardest of all is to poke fun at Christ’s redeeming powers but I do that too. Make fun of and even question the fundamental reality of the entire scenario. Mock the faith that I need and want in my own life.

But I’m going to let Maum Anna Allson have the last word here. Literally the last—though she returns in the angel tales of her husband—she’s last heard on earth locked in mortal combat with her life long nemesis the plantation master, Colonel Allson. The year is 1916. The place is a small coastal village in South Carolina. A flood, with a great fire storm floating on its surfaces, is threatening the Allson homestead and the narrator Willie T. and Maum Anna’s nephew Sammy have come to float the old people away in a small skiff they don’t wish to share. It goes like this:

“The world dying,” Maum Anna whispered when the extent of the destruction was evident.

“Put that woman off. Set her ashore!” the old man bellowed.

“I feels the cool breeze of death fanning over me.” Maum Anna spoke louder. She smiled. A hot wind whipped about us, the outermost edge of the fiery hurricane drifting closer and closer to our home.

“Remove this woman!” Grandpa raised his came and slapped it down hard on the seat between them.

“I know that old gentleman!” Maum Anna cried out.

“Ask Red Willie Allson who he pa is. You ask ’em.” She raised a small finger and pointed it straight at the old man, taunting him, accusing him of a crime of which she herself had declared him innocent.

“That woman is not an Allson!” the old man shouted “She took that name only to cause me discomfort.”

“Chain Anna. Chain ’em..

“That woman is not an Allson,” the old man says.

But she is an Allson. A-L-L—all S-O-N—son black and white, they are all the sons of God and it’s God’s mercy that is so difficult for them to catch—difficult, perhaps, because God’s mercy is concerned not with fear and anger, but with faith and love.

William Baldwin lives in McClellanville, South Carolina, where he has worked as a house designer and builder, historian, magistrate, shrimper and shrimp-boat builder as well as a writer. He gave these remarks in accepting the fiction award for The Hard to Catch Mercy at the November 1993 Lillian Smith Awards luncheon.

Promises, Promises

Reviewed by Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 15, No. 4, 1993, pp. 20-22

The Promise of the New south: Life After Reconstruction, by Edward L. Ayers (Oxford University Press, New York, 1992, xii, 572 pages).

Historians take the past on its own terms (or should), but the commonalitycommunity [sic] of us want to know its “lessons.” There is, in fact, a sense in which all history, as has been said, has “the character of ‘contemporary history,'” because the questions which the historian asks of the past, and which have put her or him to work, are born in present day life and its circumstances. As I read Ayers he has one big lesson to teach—that all is complexity—but leaves to his readers lesser conclusions about the late 19th century’s meaning to us, almost as though he disdains making them himself.

So we read, “the number of female-headed households rose in the villages, towns, and cities of the New South; 25 to 30 percent of all urban black households between 1880 and 1915 had only a mother present”—and we wait expectantly but vainly for his remark on resemblance to the present.

If he doesn’t make it we are not stopped from doing so, and one of the rewards of reading this massive book is the lode of such parallels we can mine, and from them learn how durable have been some of the South’s problems and conditions, and how ours is not, by any means, the first generation to labor over them.

For example, we learn that, “The New South was a notoriously violent place. Homicide rates among both blacks and whites were the highest in the country, among the highest in the world. Lethal weapons seemed everywhere. Guns as well as life were cheap.”

Or again, we can see, even if Ayers doesn’t direct our eyes, that when the report was that “most of the ablest men in the [Virginia Constitutional] Convention are acting in the interests of the big corporations rather than in the interests of State. “that nothing has changed, in this most docile and corporate bossed region of the country.”

Ayers leads us to record such recurrent, virtually continuous, aspects of the South. But like a good reporter—and it is hard not to see this book as an enlarged journal—he favors facts, rather than self-indulging “analysis.” And, mirabile dictu, we the readers learn all the more, perceive history’s “lessons” all the better. One can, for example, hardly come from this book still regarding as Southern heroes Jefferson Davis, or the new Piedmont industrialists, or Henry Grady, and certainly not the congressmen and senators “undistinguished in intellect or vision.” Instead, one sees how badly the molders of popular opinion have treated us by virtually shutting out of public memory John Spencer Bassett, George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, Oliver Cromwell, Dorothy Dix, W.E.B. DuBois (“Here,” in the South, “I found myself.”), Ellen Glasgow, Reuben Kolb, Charles W. Macune, Edgar Gardner Murphy, Leonidas L. Polk, George Henry White—these and other men and women like them who worked for a truly new South. These, not the custodians of power and money, were the deeply interesting and humanly valuable representatives of “life after Reconstruction.” In allowing us to see that, Ayers’s book is, indeed, radical.

Some of these were leaders of the populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s. Chapters 9 and 10 of this book tell of that, and are one of its highlights. Despite all the movement’s sizeable faults and shortcomings, it did boldly confront corporate and banking powers of the United States: its “language rang with disdain for monopoly capitalism and monopoly politics.” Not since its demise has there been such spark, such backbone, in the South. Did the white South wear itself out in the 1890s; masochistically shackle itself on the ideology of white supremacy; learn then its lasting habits of obedience?

Ayers might raise those questions, but hardly does. It is puzzling. He closes Chapter 10 with the statement that populism “would not rest with the defeats it suffered” in 1892. But the remainder of the book discerns no signs of later life; indeed, the title of his very next chapter is “Turning of the Tide”—and it is a reactionary turning he describes. There is a lot of enigma in the book. I, for one, have no idea what the title means; what was, what is, “the promise of the New South?” In the preface, three—only three—”more hopeful” achievements of these years are noted; the birth of blues and jazz, the spread of “vibrant new denominations,” and “an efflorescence of literature.”

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The half-page epilogue—thus the book itself—closes with a short and, to me, virtually impenetrable paragraph. Perhaps, however, other readers will find meaning in these concluding words:

The signs of the First New South are easily visible a century later, reflected in glassy skyscrapers, scattered across raw subdivisions, strewn through housing projects. The longing and promise that beckoned then still hover over forsaken general stores and farmhouses, over discount malls, mobile homes, and electronic churches, over low red-brick houses turned toward the restless procession on the highway.

The chapter following “Tuming of the Tide” is titled “Reunion and Reaction,” and one is certainly right to infer an act of homage in this use of the title of one of C. Vann Woodward’s books. No one can read Ayers’s book, as he himself tells us, without measuring it by Woodward’s Origins of the New South. I had written in my copy of that classic, “would that I could write a book like this!” I can’t write one like Ayers’s either, but the wish to do so is small. His erudition is awesome, his energy in researching is amazing. His book does not replace Origins of the New South. To that, however, it does add a huge amount, and not only of data but of instructive insights, and ones that can enrich our comprehension of our own present times.

His emphasis on the sexual determinants of white supremacy (“the history of segregation shows a clear connection to gender”) and of the South’s addiction to violence (at one point he quotes approvingly, “The South is a pretty good organized mob.”) are by now accepted truths but he deepens the meaning of both. He enlarges Woodward’s interpretation of the effects of the Spanish American War, ones that lingered for decades, and perhaps do still.

The war against the Spanish, which so many black Americans thought might be a turning point in race relations in this country, in fact accelerated the decline, the loss of civility, the increase in blood-shed, the white arrogance. The major effect of the war seems to have been to enlist the North as an even more active partner in the subjugation of black Americans. The war brought Southern and Northern whites into contact with one another. They discovered, much to their delight, that they had grown more alike than they had expected. The war also brought blacks and whites of all regions into contact. They discovered, much to the dismay of the blacks, that they were even farther apart than they had imagined.

This reader especially appreciated the pages—quite a few of them—in which Ayers discusses the roles and contributions of Southern women during these years. Women as social reformers, women as church leaders, women as women—feminists, we might say, women as writers—all of these are here. Victories, however, were only individual.

Many young Southern white women belied the stereotype of passivity. The clubs they formed, the kindergartens and philanthropic groups they founded, the work they performed, the education they won all marked them as new women. Some went farther, demanding political and legal rights, demanding access to careers of the highest prestige. But the New South left little room for their ambitions. Politicians sneered. Husbands balked. Colleges turned their backs. The white women of the New South quickly

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discovered the limits of how new the New South would be for them. Desire, determination, and hard work were forced into narrow channels.

This depiction of what finally happened to white women of the late nineteenth century returns us suggestively to Ayers’s historiography. In his treatment, there are no dominant causes, no determinism. Nor, perhaps, personal blame or responsibility. All is complexity. “No part of life,” he nicely says, “is background for any other part.” “Like everything else in the New South,” he says somewhat less convincingly, “segregation grew out of concrete situations, out of technological demographic, economic, and political changes that had unforeseen and often unintended social consequences.” It is the last clause that is to be doubted. The book nowhere gives reason to question that the white supremacists who led the region from Reconstruction on did not foresee or intend that their every act would maintain their controlling positions.

Ayers’s book ends a hundred years ago. We can still see in it the likeness of our life and times, our problems and concerns, our hordes of sorry politicians and our occasional good ones, our criminals and brutes, our noble spirits too—can, that is, see ourselves. We haven’t changed much. These hundred years did end legal segregation and did breach the walls of white supremacy, if not yet having toppled them. Women have gained new, wider vistas, and we are all the better for that. Not a lot else has improved. Some old diseases have been overcome, some new ones have emerged. So with other things. Edward Ayers’s portrait of the New South is like old family pictures, wherein the likeness of ancestors and descendants are clear and telling. We will for long be in his debt for revealing to us so much of the South’s and Southerners’ enduring character.

Former executive director of the Southern Regional Council, Leslie Dunbar lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Delta Democrat

Reviewed by John Egerton

Vol. 15, No. 4, 1993, pp. 22-23

Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist, by Ann Waldron (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1993, 369 pages).

All through the late 1950s and early ’60s, as Mississippi led the white South into its second stinging lost-cause humiliation in less than a century, you could have collected the Magnolia State’s voices of sanity in the back room of Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville—and they would have rattled around like B-Bs in a boxcar.

There was the historian James Silver at Ole Miss, eventually to be run out of the state. (Will Campbell had already departed.) Silver’s Oxford neighbor William Faulkner sometimes wrote or spoke eloquently about the South’s afflictions. There were a few editors—Oliver Emmerich in McComb, Ira Harkey in Pascagoula, Hazel Brannon Smith in Lexington, George McLean in Tupelo, and the quixotic P.D. East in Pedal, down by Meridian. No doubt a few others were scattered here and there, risking life and limb by expressing the radical belief that federal laws and court rulings applied to the South, yea, even to Mississippi.

And there was Hodding Carter, editor and publisher of Greenville’s Delta Democrat-Times. He had been at it for much longer than the others—since the 1930s—and he was an inspiration to them: an aggressive and pugnacious journalist of the old school, a man more devoted to his craft than to his business, more committed to finding and publishing the truth than to the get along-go along boosterism so common among, small-city publishers.

The combination of his fearless attacks in the DD-T on racial intolerance and his national exposure through books, magazines articles, and a Pulitzer Prize made him the most prominent white Mississippi in the uncrowded field of social criticism. He never ducked a fight. After the Mississippi House of Representatives censured him by a vote of eighty-nine to nineteen in 1955, Carter put his angry response on page one: “I herewith resolve by a vote of one to zero that there are 89 liars in the state legisla-

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ture,” and “those 89 character mobbets can go to hell collectively or singly and wait there until I back down.”

By Mississippi standards, Hodding Carter was a flaming liberal, a prominent and prosperous white man who refused to defend the unequal and unjust patterns of white supremacy that the majority accepted uncritically as the Southern Way of Life. From a wider perspective—and with the aid of hindsight—he looks more like a flaming moderate, a man who insisted throughout his career that he favored segregation (as late as 1963, he threatened to sue his publisher for calling him “one of the South’s leading integrationists”).

In the context of his time and place, it seems a bit simplistic and misleading to call him a racist, as the title of Ann Waldron’s warts-and-all biography of Carter does. The tag certainly applied when he took his Louisiana Confederate sensitivities to college in Maine in the 1920s, but when he got to Greenville in 1936, he was instantly in conflict with the undisputed king of Southern racists, Senator Theodore Bilbo, and for the next eighty years Carter’s editorial dueling pistols were seldom holstered.

As a native Southerner herself (a University of Alabama graduate who has worked for papers in Atlanta, Tampa, St. Petersburg, And Houston), Ann Waldron is not at all uncomfortable with or perplexed by the ambiguities in the Carter chronicle; such seemingly contradictory twists and turns are so much in keeping with regional character that they hardly need explaining. With a good reporter’s unflinching detachment, she builds her fact-rich chronology brick by brick, without much interpretive mortar in the joints.

The emerging portrait captures the editor and author, his wife Betty Werlein Carter of New Orleans, their three sons, and to a lesser degree their friends and family, the river city of Greenville, the state of Mississippi, and the South. Betty Carter’s substantial contribution to her husband’s career (in quiet sacrifice of her own ambitions) is an integral part of the story, and so are the triumphs and tragedies of their sons.

Hodding Carter himself is the primary figure throughout, of course, and several things about him stick in the mind. One is his love of writing, his obsession with its unending challenge, and his prolific outpouring of work—editorials, magazine articles, books (about twenty in all) of contemporary fact and opinion, history, fiction, and even poetry. Another is his complex character: courtly and combative, soft-hearted and hot-tempered, pro-Roosevelt and anti-Truman (and an Eisenhower backer in 1952), puritanical, honor-driven, past-haunted, patriotic, hard-drinking, given to bouts of depression.

He was better at attacking than defending, as witness his blistering campaigns against Huey Long and other Southern demagogues, the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, the Communists, Joe McCarthy, the NAACP, the Dixiecrats, smugly self-righteous Northerners, the White Citizens’ Council, civil rights activists working in Mississippi, protesters against the war in Vietnam. On the other side, he stood up for Greenville, for civil liberties, for underdogs, for fairness and justice, for the Constitution, and for the Supreme Court’s Brown decision in 1954 (the court could not have done otherwise, he said, “in light of democratic and Christian principles”).

There is much to reflect upon in Waldron’s telling of this extraordinary man’s productive but short life (he died at sixty-five in 1972, and his last decade was eclipsed by blindness and a multitude of other infirmities, physical and mental). Waldron has dug deep for the facts, and organized them well.

Too seldom, for my taste, does she venture to explain or interpret or analyze the facts, or to offer her opinion on their meaning. Once in a while, though, she lays it out there—as, for example, near the end of the book, when she concludes that “the persecution he suffered” was a factor in Carter’s deterioration:

“The people of Mississippi literally drove him crazy. It is a miracle that this proud and sensitive man endured for as long as he did the calumny, the slurs, the insults, the abuse, and the ridicule that his neighbors poured upon him. Perhaps the bitter segregationists did not drive him out of town … but their evil, malicious words helped break his spirit and his mind.”

Now there’s an informed judgment with some meat on it.

The thing I always liked about Hodding Carter was his willingness—his aggressive eagerness—to tell you what he thought. You didn’t have to agree with everything he said to admire his forthrightness and courage. He was probably as much of an integrationist as any white Mississippian of his time could be, and stay in the game. Ann Waldron presents him in such a way that his strengths and flaws seem altogether real and human and understandable. I think Carter the journalist, the reporter, the editor, would have admired very much the thorough job she did.

Nashville writer John Egerton’s latest book on Southern history, Speak Now Against The Day, will be published in the fall of 1994.

Whistling At History

Reviewed by Trudier Harris

Vol. 15, No. 4, 1993, pp. 28, 24-25

Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan (Algonquin Books: Chapel Hill, 1993, 308 pages).

“Irreverent,” was my first reaction. And: “These characters aren’t rising above stereotype fast enough to suit me.” Next:”Too self-consciously aware of the novel being based on an historical incident.” Then: “Hmm this guy knows the black and white folk speech of the South, like an ear for things such as ‘I own know’ for ‘I don’t know’ and ‘Co-Cola’ for ‘Coca-Cola.'”

With this mixture of reactions, and several others that alternated with them, I raced my way through Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle. In a matter of hours I had completed a book that was alternately sad, funny, outrageous, informed, violent, tragic, and lingering. It lingers because I expected the novelist to do what the historians, newspaper people, and lawyers did not do—let the dead child raise his voice and reveal to me something that I didn’t know before. I expected Nordan to pull back the veil of history and take me to a place of understanding, not one that would make 1955 any less painful, but that would make it more tolerable. And after all those reactions, I reminded myself. “This is a novel. It was written by a man who was profoundly influenced by an historical event, but it is a novel. Let it take you places. Don’t impose your expectations upon it.” It is from that rather ambivalent—and hard to maintain—perspective that I offer the following comments.

Evoking the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a fourteen year-old boy from Chicago, in a small town in Mississippi, Wolf Whistle moves quickly from the scene of offense, to character studies of the white personalities central to the case, to the murder, the trail, and the aftermath of this “disturbance” (merely that, because the majority of the townspeople go so easily back to their routine existences). Set in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi (arrow catching is a senior varsity sport in this town), the novel follows Alice Conroy, a local school teacher; Uncle Runt and his family; Solon Gregg, the “white-trash” villain; and the Poindexter Montberclair couple, with wife Sally Anne as the unwitting recipient of the wolf whistle. And it is about Bobo, the character based upon Till; listing him last here is commensurate with the perspective of the novel, for it is the whites who hold

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center stage in this fictional creation.

My mixture of reactions to the novel is perhaps tied to a seeming ambivalence on the part of the writer. At times, I felt Nordan was intent upon probing the emotional and spiritual ugliness that led to Till’s death in 1955; there are some striking moments of introspection and analysis in the novel. At other times, I felt Nordan was parodying his own subject and characters with the use of names (Lord Montberclair,” “Jeter Skeeter”; the elderly relatives with whom Bobo is staying, viewed from the white perspective, are simply referred to as “Uncle” and “Auntee”; “Balance Due” and “Belgian Congo” are respectively the names for the white and black dilapidated, poorest of the poor sections of town), the blatant anthropomorphism (sentient birds and rice fields), and jokes about personal hygiene (Runt always smells like “birdshit,” and his son’s feet are so perennially unwashed that one of his classmates claims that she can smell them the minute he walks onto the school grounds).

Yet just when I am about to criticize these seeming irreverencies, Nordan surprises me with an understanding of the rather intricate relationships between blacks and whites in the South. Blues musicians sing on the porch of a white-owned grocery store (references to Robert Johnson and hellhounds are prominent) while black children play their games there; Runt tries to warn Bobo’s relatives that he is in danger; and the hardest-headed member of the arrow catching team sympathizes with Bobo when all his white classmates are making bad jokes about the murder. Even Solon Gregg listens to Muddy Waters on his truck radio.

As a scholar of African American literature, I was particularly struck by the evocations of African American literary texts that Nordan’s novel brought to mind, those of Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jean Toomer, and Toni Cade Bambara. The Till character, for example, carries the heavily destined name of Bobo, and a local lawman is Big Boy Chisholm. Bobo and Big Boy are the names of two rather famous characters in Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home.” Even Nordan’s pattern of narration suggests Wright at times. He begins outside a character’s mind, then goes inside; visual representation parallels that movement by language shift from standard English to dialect. Initially, the transition and the dialect seemed stilted, but I was lulled into its effect as the novel went along.

Bobo’s sentience beyond death evokes Morrison’s Sula, Wright’s Mann in “Down by the Riverside,” and J. California Cooper’s Always in Family. When pigeons have a conversation about Bobo’s offense, the sixth chapter of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God comes to mind (though the buzzards here, tagged by scientists, are named after ex-governors of Mississippi). References to “Lord” and “Lady” Montberclair and “Runnymede” evoke Brooks’ treatment of the murder as a failed Arthurian romance/ballad in “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi: Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Bums Bacon.” And the typographical rendering of conversation reminds me of Toomer’s Cane. Consider this small sampling after Bobo has been taken from the home of his relatives:

Uncle pulled on his brogans. He said, “I’ll walk to the telephone at Sims and Hill, call the High Sheriff.”

Auntee said, “Wont do no good.”

Uncle said, “I know.”

Auntee said, “What’s the High Sheriff gone do?”

Uncle said, “I know.”

Auntee said, “Get you lynched, is all.”

Uncle said, “I know, Auntee.” (146)

And when several flash-forwards occur, along with Alice Conroy turning into a fortune teller, I think of Toni Cade Bambara’s treatment of extranatural characters and futuristic events in The Salt Eaters.

I tried to sort through the effect this inadvertent intertextuality had upon me as an African American reader. I concluded that the shock of recognition finally had a mediating effect. In a world where black readers might be particularly skeptical of any writer, and particularly a white one, daring to attempt to fictionalize the atrocity of the Till murder, the familiarity with other texts blunted my potential negative reaction to the implied trespass on novelly subject matter. These accidents of literary creation also kept me in the world of creativity and out of the realm of factuality for which I had initially gone looking.

Treading on problematic historical events is a daring venture under any circumstances. Underlying any such undertaking, where documents stack up for miles, is the question: How can you humanize villainy? How could Nordan make the murderer of the Till character someone who would consistently engage readers? I think he answered the question by wallowing in the villainy. Just facing it head on—saying, essentially, here is an unChristian (though he believes otherwise), unredeemable human being whose very effrontery is his attraction.

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Of course it can be argued that Nordan attempts to “humanize” Solon Gregg in the scene where he returns from New Orleans to the bedside of his fatally burned nine-year-old son. Wordless, he simply takes his guitar and begins strumming his son’s favorite song; his wife and daughter join in with their homemade instruments (washboard, tub). This nearly touching scene is gainsaid, however, by the reason for the son’s burning.

The question of bringing characters to life affects Lord Montberclair in a strange way. When initially confronted by the prowling Solon, he wields his German Luger in disgust at the “white trash” invading his territory. Class immediately gives way to race when Solon reveals his story. The problem is that the change in Lord Montberclair is too sudden; he dissolves too readily into a wimp. The characterization of Alice seems more a bow to feminism than to 1955 Mississippi. With the imaginative field trips for her fourth grade class, Alice Conroy brings an understanding of power relationships that seems a bit too advanced for the times. Strikingly, Bobo and Sally Anne, the two characters who are presumably central to the historical event, are almost absent from the text. Sally Anne appears to receive the wolf whistle, is seen from a distance in the courtroom, and shows up again to bond with Alice at the end of the novel. Bobo is mostly silent, which is a strange situation for a young man whose voice got him into so much trouble.

When he is taken from his aunt and uncle’s home, Bobo says nary a word during the entire ride with Solon to his place of death. This in spite of the fact that Solon carries on a stream of so-called casual conversation. Nordan succeeds in creating a surprisingly strange effect. We know what’s going to happen; Bobo knows what’s going to happen; and Solon knows what’s going to happen, yet he keeps up this polite “conversation” that gets poured into the seeming vacuum of the truck’s interior and the brooding, anticipatory state of the reader’s mind. Bobo is silent, seemingly not there spiritually or physically. When he becomes present again is the problem. After death, he becomes sentient. While he still does not gain voice, he registers and observes things about him in a lyrically haunting, unsettling presentation.

Bobo’s presence—or absence—is one of the reasons this book will get a lot of attention. The subject matter is precisely why I was hooked—and the fact that a former student of mine who worked for Algonquin books forwarded a copy of the advance corrected proofs to me. My expectation of some sign of transformation did not come in Nordan re-writing a specific historical event, but I think he attempted it in trying to suggest a different future for Alice, Runt, and Mississippi. The experience has such a profound effect upon alcoholic Runt that he almost sobers up (a friend of his shocks everyone by going to Alcoholics Anonymous,) and he insists that friends and relatives begin to call him Cyrus, his given name. His insistence upon that change is at best a limited sign of any different future, but it’s there, and its prominence calls attention to itself. Alice gives up teaching and perhaps her unrequited love for her college professor, yet she has been so on the periphery of the major action that it’s hard to see what her change means. And it’s somewhat disturbing that she is finally so ingratiating to Sally Anne.

I come away from the novel wondering what place it will eventually find in the literary mythmaking of Southern letters. It will be read, which I heartily encourage, for I certainly found it engaging. It will be discussed, with the academic types probably focusing on issues of literary representation and the appropriateness of particular kinds of literary endeavors. It might even find its way into history classes where professors want a literary representation of an historical event; with distance, tragedy inevitably gains a fascination that the immediacy of its horror initially precluded. Nordan’s novel will surely be considered an indispensable addition to a growing number of historical and fictional treatments of the Emmett Till murder.

Trudier Harris is A.B. Longstreet Professor of English at Emory University.