Ominous Crime Bill

By Gene Guerrero

Vol. 16, No. 1, 1994, pp. 1-6

Congress is about to pass yet another massive, omnibus crime bill—the most expensive and possibly the most destructive ever. Like its predecessors, this crime bill was primarily fashioned with an eye towards the coming elections. What few genuine reforms it does contain are due largely to three Southern members.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, U.S. crime rates increased to the point where our rates of crimes of violence are three to ten times those in other industrialized countries. In 1943, for example, New York City had forty-four gunshot homicides. In 1992, with a slightly smaller population, 1,499 persons were killed by guns in the Big Apple. Today’s seventh grader has an 80 percent chance of being a victim of a violent crime at least once during his or her lifetime. The impact of crime falls heaviest on the poor. Nearly half of all crimes are committed against households with incomes below $15,000.

Over the past twenty-five years politicians gave us first a “law and order” war on crime and then a “just say no” war on drugs as answers to crime. During the 1980s, while the nation’s adult population increased by 13 percent, the number of prisoners grew by 139 percent. Today the odds of a black man being in prison in this country are almost five times greater than they would be if he were living in South Africa. Yet this massive lock-’em-up campaign did nothing to reduce violent crime. In fact, between 1986 and 1991, violent crime increased 23 percent, according to the FBI.

With ever-growing evidence of the failure of the wars on crime and drugs, there has been growing support for a more productive crime-fighting approach. Some 850 prominent Americans (142 Southerners) in-

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cluding governors, prosecutors, judges, state legislators, and corrections officials signed a Campaign for an Effective Crime Policy manifesto last year urging a greater emphasis on crime prevention, sentencing reform, use of alternatives to incarceration, and drug treatment.

Many people hardly known for their liberal views urged changes in the conduct of the war on drugs. In a June 1993 speech, Chief Justice William Rehnquist complained about Congress making a wide variety of drug offenses into federal crimes, leading to the “near transformation of some federal courts into what might be called national narcotics courts.” Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Representative Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) both called for reform of mandatory minimum sentences which force judges to sentence drug offenders to lengthy prison terms without any consideration of the mitigating or aggravating circumstances. In the federal Bureau of Prisons, where the inmate population has tripled since 1980, nonviolent drug offenders with little or no record of previous offenses constitute over one-fifth of the prison population and serve on average nearly six years before release. Sentencing practices in many states follow the federal example. A 1985 Georgia law requires a life sentence for a second drug-distribution offense. A state parole board study found that seventy-five percent of those sentenced under this draconian law sold drugs valued at $100 or less.

Racial Disparities in Sentencing

Last spring a series by writer Dennis Cauchon in USA Today focused on the discriminatory impact of sharply contrasting penalties for crimes involving different forms of the same drug—crack and powder cocaine. Sentences for crack-related offenses are 100 times more severe than penalties for powder cocaine. Under federal law simple possession of over two grams of crack (the weight of two pennies) is a felony which guarantees an automatic five years imprisonment for a first offender. A 1992 study found that 91.3 percent of those sentenced for federal crack offenses were African American.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission has documented racial disparity in the imposition of federal mandatory minimum sentences. Confirming several earlier in-depth studies, a General Accounting Office (GAO) review has found a “pattern of evidence indicating racial disparities in the charging, sentencing, and imposition of the death penalty.” Nearly half of the federal prison population is

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black although African Americans comprise only 12 percent of the nation’s population.

With the Clinton Administration came hope that the public debate about crime might change. Most encouraging for those favoring a new crime-fighting approach were the appointments of former Atlanta, Houston, and New York Police Chief Lee Brown as Drug Czar, and Miami prosecutor Janet Reno as Attorney General. While, unlike Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders, Brown wrongly rejects any consideration of a fundamental shift in drug policy, he clearly cares about what happens in our devastated cities. In addition to working for more effective and more available drug treatment, Brown says “we also need to look at what fuels drug use among hard core drug users. It is that truly insidious cohort of poverty, hopelessness, and a lack of opportunity for too many of our citizens.” Attorney General Reno quickly attracted national attention for her view that, “if we start talking about [crime] in common sense terms, if we start putting our dollars where our mouths are and start using common sense approaches that balance punishment and prevention, we can make a difference.”

As last fall rolled around and Congress began to think about crime legislation, things looked promising. Perhaps it was possible to have crime legislation that did more good than harm; perhaps it might be possible to undo some of the vast damage caused by the law and order wars.

Then during the November elections, the national media again discovered the crime issue, reporting that in several local races get-tough candidates won because of their crime-fighting positions. The polls showed that crime was a priority issue to many Americans.

In fact, polls do consistently show that if Americans are asked if we should be tough on crime, most of us say yes. However, they also consistently show that if asked which will do more to reduce crime: more police, more prisons, more jobs, or better education—most Americans vote for crime prevention over police and prisons.

Unfortunately, the Senate took up crime legislation right after the November elections and passed an omnibus crime bill worse than those enacted during the law and order days of the 1980s.

The same Senate that earlier in the year killed President Clinton’s stimulus package which would have provided $16 billion to address the urgent needs of the cities, turned around and passed a crime bill with a price tag of more than $22 billion, $15 billion of which will go for prisons and more police.

The Senate bill promised to help states by building ten regional prisons which could be used to house state prisoners. But to be eligible for the program, a state would have to change its sentencing laws, greatly increasing the amount of time served by all state prisoners, and it would have to jail before trial persons charged with violent crimes. One estimate predicts that these new state penalty and sentencing mandates will lead to another doubling of the nation’s prison population over the next ten years.

A centerpiece of the Senate bill is the largest-ever expansion of the federal death penalty to include more than fifty offenses. There is a broad anti-gang provision making it a federal crime to belong to a group of five or more persons who, either individually or as a group, commit two defined crimes within ten years. This provision feeds the out-of-control gang hysteria which brands all African American and Latino young men in poor communities as gang members. A Los Angeles computerized gang file lists 47 percent of the county’s young black men although nearly half of those listed have no arrest record.

The bill provides a breathtaking expansion of the federalization of crime by adopting an amendment by Senator Alfonse D’Amato (D-N.Y.) making a federal offense of almost any state crime committed with a gun—some 200,000 cases a year. The bill includes not one, but two broad “three-time-loser” provisions requiring a sentence of life without parole for offenders who have committed serious drug offenses or violent offenses against persons or property. This provision was incorporated following the passage of a “three-time-loser” law in Washington State a few days before in a referendum campaign funded by the National Rifle Association. An amendment Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) added to the bill would make it virtually impossible to attack unconstitutional conditions in prisons.

Not all the worst provisions come from the likes of Senators Helms and D’Amato. Senator Carol Moseley Braun (D-Ill.) put in a provision requiring that juveniles aged thirteen or older be tried as adults when charged with several federal violent offenses.

Not everything was bad. The bill mandates drug treatment for prisoners and probationers, and provides $900 million for “Drug Court” programs to handle nonviolent offenders who can be placed on probation. It bans the manufacture, sale, and possession of nineteen assault weapons. It also pays needed attention to the problem of violence against women, although some of the enhanced penalties and pretrial detention requirements are both wrong and counterproductive. And it provides limited funding for things like after-school academic, athletic, and counselling programs. But the prevention-minded programs are drops in the bucket compared to both the $15 billion for police and prisons, and to the enormous needs. And all of the bad clearly outweighed the little

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good. Yet only four Senators—Democrats Simon (Ill.) and Feingold (Wis.), joined by Republicans Hatfield (Ore.) and Durenberger (Minn.), who oppose the death penalty—voted against the Senate bill. Not only had reform efforts largely failed, but the Senate crime bill was a stunning setback.

Congressional leaders of both parties celebrated passage of the legislation. President Clinton left the crafting of a crime bill up to Senate leaders, choosing to work on other issues. He seemed to just want passage of a crime bill, it didn’t much matter what it contained. He urged the House to act quickly.

As word of what was actually in the Senate bill spread, opposition grew—not just from the ACLU and defense lawyers. During a meeting of the chief justices of the nation’s state supreme courts, Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice A.M. “Sandy” Keith said, “This is the worst crime bill we’ve ever seen.” A resolution adopted by the group said the bill would waste resources and hinder effective state and local law enforcement.

Southern Black Caucus Members Shift Debate

Things were moving differently in the House. Early last fall members of the Legislative Black Caucus and the Hispanic Caucus, led by congressmen Craig Washington of Houston, Robert Scott of Newport News, Mel Watt of Charlotte, and Xavier Becerra of Los Angeles demanded a different approach and took two important steps. First, Congressman Washington introduced an “alternative” crime bill, HR 3315, filled with sensible crime control measures, needed reforms, and a real emphasis on crime prevention. Then caucus members met with Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks of Beaumont, Texas, urging him not to act on a major omnibus crime bill, but instead to proceed more deliberatively. Because of the growing clout of the two caucuses in the House and perhaps because he is tired of all the political pandering about crime, as so many other members privately are, Brooks agreed. Instead of an omnibus bill, the House in the fall reauthorized Lee Brown’s office, passed the Violence Against Women Act, and approved a bill to place more police on the streets.

After passage of the Senate’s omnibus bill President Clinton began to get more involved, using his January “State of the Union” speech to push for swift passage of a crime bill and, to the apparent surprise of his Justice Department, announce support for “three strikes and you’re out.” But black and Hispanic caucus members insisted that the House not act quickly and not simply take up the Senate bill as the President seemed to be urging.

Also in January, Jesse Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition held a well-publicized seminar on crime and the Black Caucus conducted a hearing on their alternative crime bill. Groups like the NAACP and the Children’s Defense Fund joined the ACLU and the ABA in calling for new directions at the hearing. Louisiana State Senator Charles Jones testified for the National Black Caucus of State Legislators describing the Senate bill as “an unsound investment of taxpayer dollars.” Attacking the provisions to force states to greatly increase the amount of time served by state prisoners in return for placing a few state prisoners in federal regional prisons, Johnson pointed out that states will have to spend an estimated $20 for every $1 of federal assistance they receive through the program. “Understand what this means,” Johnson said, “$20 less for education, healthcare, and job training.” Also in January, ABA President William Ide, an Atlanta attorney, chaired an ABA national “Summit on Crime and Violence” bringing together criminal justice leaders to discuss more productive crime fighting approaches.

As a result of all this, House Democratic leaders rejected calls to quickly pass the Senate bill and instead scheduled a series of hearings including an unusual two-day discussion of Congressman Washington’s alternative bill. At that hearing, Galveston, Texas, County Commissioner Wayne Johnson, a former state and county prosecutor who serves on the state NAACP board, opposed the Senate bill’s provisions forcing states to increase time served by state prisoners, pointing out that Texas is already building so many new prisons it soon will have the largest single prison system in the world. In addition, Commissioner Johnson said, “as a person who was known as ‘maximum Wayne’ in my felony prosecuting days, I am here to tell you that ‘Three Strikes, and You’re Out’ is good politics—but dumb law. Cookie-cutter justice just does not work.”

Urging support for the Washington alternative bill, Jesse Jackson denounced the Senate crime bill saying, “We have a mock-tough Senate crime bill, filled with bumper-sticker gimmicks that will waste money and have no effect on crime.” By this point House crime subcommittee chair Charles Schumer of New York, who had previously been a major obstacle to any reform, was saying “We must attack crime both at its roots and in its fruits.”

Finally, after almost three months of deliberation the House passed its own crime bill on April 21. Included are some of the same terrible provisions as in the Senate bill, such as the huge expansion of the federal death penalty including offenses in which no one is killed. The Justice Department urged a narrowly drawn “three strikes” provision with only serious violent offenses counting as a

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strike. But the House, like the Senate, included serious drug offenses as a strike. The House did include a provision to allow federal prison officials to seek the release of a three-strikes inmate who has served at least thirty years and reached the age of seventy. Carol Moseley-Braun’s requirement that violent thirteen-year-olds be tried as adults was changed into a provision permitting such adult trials in some circumstances. The House authorized $13.5 billion for prisons, more than doubling the Senate amount. But the House approach only encourages rather than requires states to increase time served by state prisoners—permitting states to create more prison space for violent offenders by establishing alternatives to incarceration to get minor non-violent offenders out of prison cells.

Also adopted was a “safety valve” broader than the

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Senate provision to exclude minor, first offender, nonviolent drug offenders from mandatory minimum sentences—a provision which may affect the sentences of several thousand current federal inmates. The House unanimously voted to ask the U.S. Sentencing Commission to recommend new similar penalties for the crack and powder forms of cocaine.

At the same time, like the Senate, the House voted to prohibit prisoners from receiving federal Pell Grant assistance to get a college education while in prison. Outdoing the Senate in such mean-spiritedness, the House banned weight-lifting in federal prisons. Only 22 House Members voted no on that one.

The House voted only $3.45 billion for new police instead of the $9 billion authorized by the Senate for some 100,000 new police over the next five years.

The big battles in the House were over the death penalty. A motion to replace death penalties with life in prison failed 111 to 314. A reform proposed by the Judiciary Committee would require death-sentenced inmates to raise claims of Constitutional rights violations within a year of a final state appeal ruling, but also would require states to provide competent lawyers for indigent defendants and permit additional habeas petitions based on new evidence or new rules of law. Opponents claimed the judiciary proposal was a trick to kill the death penalty. After strident opposition from Republicans using a letter of opposition signed by thirty-three state attorney generals, sensible habeas corpus reform failed in spite of courageous support from Congressmen Butler Derrick of South Carolina, Greg Laughlin of Texas, and Mike Synar of Oklahoma.

The Black Caucus then put its collective foot down, insisting that the House Democratic leadership support the Racial Justice Act, to permit death-sentenced prisoners to use statistical evidence of racial bias to challenge their death sentences. Majority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) made an impassioned plea for the bill even though it was opposed by the White House, which also had opposed habeas reform. After a bitter fight the Racial Justice Act passed with House Speaker Tom Foley casting the deciding vote. And along with that victory, the House voted for $2.45 billion for rehabilitation programs and $6.7 billion for a crime prevention package including community crime prevention, midnight sports programs, drug courts, and a jobs program targeted at high-crime neighborhoods. “ [sic] On May 5, after intense lobbying by the administration, the House passed a separate ban on assault weapons similar to that in the Senate crime bill by a vote of 216 to 214.

A joint Senate/House conference committee is fashioning the two versions into a final crime bill which is expected to be on the President’s desk by early summer. In conference, a major fight is expected over the House-passed Racial Justice Act. The other big fight will be over how much funding will remain for prevention programs.

Democratic congressional leaders claim the crime bill is a “balanced one” that is both “smart and tough.” But the modest reforms in the bill come with the terrible price of several very destructive provisions. Weighing that, Congressmen Washington, Scott, Watt, and eleven other Black Caucus members voted against final passage of the House bill.

Several members of Congress who played key roles pushing for this year’s reforms are leaving Capitol Hill. California’s Don Edwards (D), the Civil and Constitutional Rights Subcommittee chair who has led civil rights and civil liberties fights for many years, is retiring, as is more moderate Congressman William Hughes (D-N.J.), who in recent years became a significant voice of reason. And Congressman Craig Washington, who played such a critical and effective leadership role, lost his re-election primary battle, apparently because he cast “anti-Texas” votes against NASA, NAFTA, and the super-collider project.

Congressman Washington’s impact may be best reflected in a speech House Majority Leader Gephardt gave a few days before the House vote. He said, “Sometimes, when we haul out the tough-sounding slogans, it makes it easier to duck the tough choices …. If we were really tough on crime, we’d do more to stop it from happening in the first place …. If we attack the root causes of crime, and make sure we have tough, no-nonsense law enforcement at the same time—we’ll make our streets safer, and our families more secure.”

At this point it is difficult to predict what the final crime bill will look like. With the extremely controversial Racial Justice Act in the House version and the ban on assault weapons passed by both houses, it is possible that no bill will be finally passed as happened during the last Congress. Or, before final passage the conference committee might delete the Racial Justice Act and cut back the larger prevention package in favor of more prisons.

But even if that worst case happens, the few reforms and the beginnings of an emphasis on prevention in the crime bill illustrate that it may be possible to move towards a new more productive attack on crime. It will take courageous political leadership from the administration and from other members of Congress to aid those in the black and Hispanic caucuses who are trying to lead the way.

For information on the Campaign for an Effective Crime Policy write to them at: 918 F St., NW #501, Washington, DC 20004

Gene Guerrero is the field director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s legislative office in Washington, D. C.

Guilty as Charged

By Elaine Davenport

Vol. 16, No. 1, 1994, pp. 8-11

In closing arguments at the January 27-February 5 trial of Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers, Hinds County, Mississippi Assistant District Attorney Bobby DeLaughter asked the jury, “Is it ever too late to do the right thing?” The jury’s answer was “Guilty as Charged.”

Like many events in this case, the unanimous verdict did not come quickly. It was read after five hours of 8-4 deadlock the first afternoon, an evening of sequestration at Jackson’s Edison Walthall Hotel, and more than an hour of deliberation the next morning—during which the jury foreman, the Rev. Elvage Fondren, 70, led a prayer session to help resolve the jury’s disagreement.

The pace of the Evers case has been both as slow and as sure as the pace of change in the South. More than thirty years have passed since Beckwith hid in a thicket of honeysuckle near the Evers home in Jackson on June 12, 1963, and shot the Mississippi State NAACP leader in the back as he got out of his car in his driveway. Evers led the struggle for better employment and housing for black residents, equal voting rights, and desegregation of schools, libraries, and other public facilities. Beckwith was tried twice in 1964 for the murder, and twice all-white, all-male juries deadlocked. Charges against him were dropped in 1969.

The next phase of the case came in the 1990s, when Mississippi had more elected black officials than any state. Beckwith and others had not changed their white supremacist views, but there had been a vast change in the law and the attitude of most of society since the 1960s. New evidence came to the attention of DeLaughter, assistant Hinds County prosecutor, who, at 35, was young enough to wonder why the case had never been solved.

A grand jury reindicted Beckwith for the Evers murder in December 1990. But Beckwith fought extradition from his home in Tennessee for ten months, then delayed the trial for more than two years with motions alleging violation of his constitutional rights of due process and a speedy trial. The old status quo seemed to be digging in its heels. Evers’ widow Myrlie said she began to despair that the trial would ever take place.

But it did, and the change in social attitudes that thirty years had brought was the biggest factor in the 1994 verdict. The jury this time was not all-male and all-white, but made up of seven women (five black) and five men (three black). Little new evidence was presented; in fact, crucial evidence including the bullet that killed Evers was missing this time. The prosecution had managed to round up the Enfield rifle, the telescopic sight with Beckwith’s fingerprint on it, and a transcript, all from the 1964 trials. Many of the same witnesses testified. And stand-ins read the words of witnesses who could not be found or who had died.

The scant new evidence there was added only circumstantial proof of the murder. Six witnesses testified that Beckwith had bragged to them about killing Evers (see New Witnesses, page 10). An enlargement of a picture that had been evidence in 1964 also was presented. The picture was of Beckwith’s white Plymouth Valiant. The area near the rearview mirror had been enhanced, using modern methods, to reveal a Masonic emblem hanging there, thus matching Beckwith’s car with one a witness had seen in a parking lot near the murder scene.

Mrs. Evers said she had been told “every reason why we could not pursue a third trial,” but kept pushing, nonetheless. She said at a press conference after the trial that whatever the verdict, the trial was a victory in itself. “Perhaps Medgar did more in death than he could have in life…. He lives through all of us.”

As the Evers case began to move through the courts, the idea became more firmly planted that other murder cases from the Civil Rights era might be brought to justice. A precedent had been set in 1977 with the successful reopening of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing case, in which four girls attending Sunday school had been killed. Klansman Robert Chambliss was convicted of first-degree murder in that case. But, despite an eyewitness account of four white men planting the bomb, no one else has ever been charged.

National NAACP leader William Gibson, who attended the Evers trial February 2 in Jackson, called on the Department of Justice to investigate unsolved civil rights atrocities in the same way its Office of Special Investigation looks for Nazi war criminals. The call to reopen or investigate cases has come from every quarter, even

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given that evidence may have disappeared and memories may have faded. “If you can ever solve a murder case, you should be able to prosecute it,” said Bill Baxley, the former Alabama attorney general who was responsible for reopening the Birmingham church bombing case.

There are many unresolved cases. Some of them cry out for justice because either the killer, like Beckwith, has bragged about the crime, or because the murder was witnessed but a case never brought. Carved into the black granite of the Civil Rights Memorial in front of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery are the names of forty persons who died in the civil rights struggle. Most of those deaths remain unsolved. The Civil Rights Research and Documentation Project, formerly at Ole Miss but now directed from Boston by Dr. Ronald Bailey, has found that between 1889 and 1940, “almost 3,100 Black people were lynched in the U.S., mostly in poor rural areas of the South.”

A highly visible stride has been made with the Evers case. And at least two other cases from the same decade now have been reopened. They are:

VERNON DAHMER A well-off businessman and local NAACP president, Dahmer died in January 1966 after Klansmen shot at and firebombed his home near Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He had offered to pay poll taxes for those who could not afford the fee to vote. President Lyndon Johnson ordered an FBI investigation and fourteen Klansmen were charged with arson and murder. Only three were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Sam Bowers, then the Imperial Wizard of the local White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, known as the most violent Klan group in the South, was tried twice and twice the jury deadlocked 11-1 in favor of conviction. Glenn White, Forrest County District Attorney, has searched for transcripts of the Bowers trials, hired an investigator, and is considering reopening the case. “It’s never too late,” says Dahmer’s son Dennis, echoing the words of Assistant District Attorney DeLaughter in the Evers case.

ONEAL MOORE was shot in the head June 2, 1965, by nightriders in Varnado, Louisiana, and died instantly. He and his partner were the first black deputies in the sheriff’s department of Washington Parish, known to have one of the largest Klan memberships per capita in

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the country. Police arrested Ernest Ray McElveen, who belonged to several segregationist groups, but charges were dismissed and the murder never solved. The FBI has reopened the case, which was the subject of an episode of the television program “Unsolved Mysteries” several years ago.

Other cases, both well-known and obscure, beg for justice:

MICHAEL SCHWERNER, JAMES CHANEY, and ANDREW GOODMAN. These young civil rights workers were investigating a fire at the Mount Zion Methodist Church in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where they were soon to conduct a Freedom School. On June 21, 1964, they were arrested and held in jail in Philadelphia, Mississippi, then released at 10 p.m. and intercepted by Klansmen. They were shot and their bodies buried in an earthen dam. Imperial Wizard Bowers (who figured in the Dahmer case), Neshoba County Chief Deputy Cecil Price, and six other Klansmen were convicted of a federal charge of conspiracy to deprive the three young volunteers of their civil rights. But the state has never brought murder charges.

EMMETT TILL. The murder of this black 14-year-old on August 28, 1955, was the subject of an article in Look magazine, in which J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant said they beat the youth, shot him in the head, wired a 75-pound cotton gin fan to his neck and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. A Chicago resident, Till was in Money, Mississippi for the summer and had dared to whistle at Bryant’s wife. Milam and Bryant were tried and found not guilty by an allmale, all-white jury who deliberated just

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over one hour. The case is considered pivotal because such an outrageous act against a young person made Till a symbol of the struggle for equality and galvanized the early civil rights movement. Evers, who had become the first NAACP Field Secretary in Mississippi in 1954, investigated the murder and attended the trial. Milam is now dead. Bryant is still alive, but having been acquitted once of the murder, cannot be tried again for the same offense.

LAMAR SMITH. On August 13, 1955, Smith went to the Lincoln County courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi, as part of his energetic campaign to organize black voters. He was shot as he stood on the courthouse lawn arguing with several white men. No one would testify as to what many had witnessed, and the three men arrested for murder went free. The grand jury’s report said that “although it was generally known or alleged to be known who the parties were in the shooting, yet people standing within twenty or thirty feet at the time claim to know nothing about it.”

Just as the end of the Nazi atrocities against Jews did not mean the end of anti-Semitism, one guilty verdict in an old civil rights murder case does not mean the end of bigotry.

But reopening the Evers case did bring some gains. District Attorney Ed Peters summed up the case: “A bragging murderer has been convicted.” Mrs. Evers saw the verdict as a way to “cleanse the state as it has our family.” And she reminded those who are still alive with a murder on their conscience to “always look over their shoulder because there may be someone like me and my family who will push to see that justice is done and never give up.”

Free-lance journalist and Southern Changes contributing editor Elaine Davenport is the associate producer of an upcoming HBO documentary on Medgar Evers.

The Six New Witnesses

By Elaine Davenport

Vol. 16, No. 1, 1994, pp. 10-11

Highlights from the testimony of the six new witnesses in the Byron de la Beckwith trial, in the order in which they appeared before the court:

In September 1966, Mary Ann Adams, 51, of Mississippi, went with a co-worker to a restaurant between Tchula and Greenwood in the Delta, where she met Beckwith: “He came to our table and was introduced as Byron de la Beckwith, the man who killed Medgar Evers. I refused to shake his hand and he got angry. He said he had not killed a man, but a ‘damn chicken-stealing dog and you know what you have to do once they’ve tasted blood.’ She told her mother, but not “the law” because she thought Beckwith couldn’t be tried again. When she saw publicity about the case being reopened, she got in touch with Deputy District Attorney DeLaughter.

Dan Prince, 49, of Chattanooga, Tennessee, rented an apartment in Beckwith’s home from November 1986 until he was evicted in August 1987. On one occasion when they were both standing in Beckwith’s front yard, Beckwith told Prince that Beckwith had been tried twice in Mississippi “for killing that nigger. I had a job to do and I did it and I didn’t suffer any more for it than my wife would when she was going to have a baby.” The defense portrayed Prince as a drunk, and as someone who was trying to get back at Beckwith for evicting him.

Elluard Jenoal ‘Dick’ Davis, 60, of Orlando, Florida, a Klan member turned FBI informant. Davis met Beckwith October 21, 1969, in a restaurant in Winterhaven, Florida. Beckwith was selling boats. Beckwith discussed his arrest and trials and “‘selective killings’ and said he would never ask anyone to do anything he hadn’t already done himself.” Immediately, Davis typed up notes for an FBI report.

Peggy Morgan, 46, of Mobile, Alabama and her husband lived in Greenwood, Mississippi, and one Sunday, sometime between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s (she was unable to be more precise), the couple gave Beckwith a ride to the state penitentiary, some eighty miles from Greenwood. The Morgans visited her husband’s brother and Beckwith visited Cecil Sessums, one of four KKK members convicted of murder in the January 1966 firebombing death of Vernon Dahmer, former president of the Forrest County NAACP. All three rode in the front seat, with Peggy sitting between her husband and Beckwith, who was in the passenger seat. Beckwith was concerned that no one know of his visit. “He said he had killed Medgar

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Evers, a nigger, and if this ever got out [about the trip to the penitentiary], he wasn’t scared to kill again,” she testified. Morgan said Beckwith later told her again the trip “better not get out” which “put a fear in me.” The defense tried to discredit her by suggesting she had psychiatric problems and was on medication, that she had been subjected to abuse, and that her mother’s death from freezing had traumatized her.

Delmar Dennis, 53, of Sevierville, Tennessee, a Klansman turned FBI informant, recounted the Aug. 8, 1965, meeting of Klan leaders in Byram, Mississippi, at which Beckwith said “killing that nigger didn’t cause me any more physical harm than your wives did to have a baby for you.”

In late 1979 Mark Reiley, 36, of Chicago, Illnois, had been a guard at the Earl K. Long Hospital in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Angola inmate Beckwith was staying. Beckwith called him “Young Blood” because of Reiley’s Scots-Irish coloring: “Beckwith knew I was lacking a father-type figure and he was willing to fill that role.” Reiley spent eight to ten hours a day over a period of weeks with Beckwith and they studied the Bible: “He explained to me from the Bible that black people were ‘beasts of the field’ and if they got out of line you should kill them and not feel guilty about it.”

At one point, Reiley said, Beckwith rang for a nurse and a black woman appeared. Beckwith asked for a white person, and the nurse and Beckwith began a screaming match. Reiley remembers Beckwith saying “If I could get rid of an uppity nigger like Medgar Evers, I would have no problem with a no-count nigger like you.” Reiley also said Beckwith tried to impress him with having run for Lt. Governor of Mississippi, saying if Beckwith didn’t have power and connections, “he’d be serving time in jail in Mississippi for getting rid of that nigger Medgar Evers.”

Reiley did not know who Medgar Evers was until the Friday of the trial when the weather in Chicago was so cold he did not have to go to work and he sat at home watching CNN on television. He saw a story about the Evers case and finally realized who Beckwith had been talking about. Over the years Reiley had told his wife and friends of his conversations with Beckwith. When he realized it was important, he called the prosecutor in Jackson. At the end of the trial, District Attorney Ed Peters called Reiley—a surprise witness with a detailed, coherent story—his “cleanup hitter.”

Rosewood Massacre Survivors Win

By Ellen Spears

Vol. 16, No. 1, 1994, p. 12

Descendants of the black residents of Rosewood, Florida and survivors of the massacre that left at least eight dead and destroyed the town more than seventy years ago took their case to the state legislature in an effort to finally win compensation. At the close of the 1994 legislative session, they were victorious.

“It’s a matter of justice,” said Florida Senate sponsor Daryl Jones (D-Miami), “a symbol of the countless secret deaths that took place in an era that has slipped from view.” The state Senate’s 26-14 vote on April 8 supported a $2.1 million claim which will pay eleven survivors $150,000 each and provide other benefits, including scholarships, to descendants.

In January 1923, a white mob systematically burned down the town, claiming to be searching for a black man accused of assaulting a white woman. Terrorized survivors hid in the freezing piney woods outside the small Gulf Coast town, scattered to Tampa and Tallahassee, and left behind everything they owned. “The failure of elected white officials to take forceful actions to protect the safety and property of local black residents was part of a pattern in the state and throughout the region,” a state investigative team reported to legislators. Levy County Sheriff Robert Elias Walker did not control the mob, the investigators concluded, and Governor Cary Hardee went hunting while Rosewood burned.

The approval of the measure represents the first time a state legislature has voted to compensate victims of racial violence in the U.S. Though it was difficult to secure, the settlement indicates a possible route to redress when individual perpetrators of racist violence may not be charged or successfully prosecuted.

At the capitol in Tallahassee, the ten-year-old great-granddaughter of a Rosewood victim expressed the descendants’ response to the vote, saying, “We stand strong, proud and free, for we are the Rosewood family.”

What Will We Do With the Homeless?

By Ed Snodderly

Vol. 16, No. 1, 1994, pp. 14-15

ED SNODDERLY: Joyce Brookshire is a songwriter and singer whose family comes from north Georgia. Joyce started writing songs when she was ten years old; as a child she sang with her family, mostly in church. She told me she was a shy child, and making up songs gave her an outlet to express herself. Joyce’s family moved to the Atlanta area and settled in a neighborhood called Cabbagetown, made up of mountain people who migrated to Atlanta looking for work, which they found in the mills. For the past twenty years Joyce has worked in the Cabbagetown community. Through her music and community-based work she became involved with the Tennessee-based Highlander Center in the mid-1970s. In 1978 she was on the road with Guy Carawan, touring the country raising money for the Center. Joyce wrote the song “The Man On The Mountain” for Myles Horton and she sang it at the gathering honoring the legendary Highlander founder in May 1990.

When the announcement came that Atlanta would be the host of the 1996 Olympics, many thoughts raced through Joyce Brookshire’s mind. Earlier, when Atlanta hosted the Democratic Convention, she observed what the city had done with its homeless population: “They blocked off the downtown area labeling it a Hospitality Zone. The homeless were not allowed in this area. As a matter of fact, they bused the homeless away from the area.” Joyce’s song, “What Will We Do With the Homeless,” voices her fear that Atlanta will establish a statewide hospitality zone when the Olympics come to town.

A collection of Joyce’s songs can be found on her 1977 Foxfire Records release North Georgia Mountains. This album can be ordered from 230 Carroll Street, Atlanta, GA 30312. Joyce continues her work with The Cabbagetown Revitalization and Future Trust, a land trust established to build low- and moderate-income housing, and she keeps on writing beautiful, melodic mountain songs.

JOYCE BROOKSHIRE: “I wrote this song in 1990 when I heard the announcement that Atlanta would host the ’96 Olympics. Four years later there is still no clearcut answer to my question. However, new ordinances have been written by the Atlanta City Council, establishing a Hospitality Zone where the homeless are strongly urged not to be, and an ordinance that allows anyone walking through a parking lot to be arrested if they have no car parked there. Very little has been done by the city to create low-income housing for the homeless. This past summer I had an opportunity to sing my song for then-Mayor Maynard Jackson. He was not amused.”

“What Will We Do With the Homeless” is available on MEZZANINE, a new recording by Elise Witt. To order, send $15 for CD or $10 for cassette to EMWorld Records, P.O. Box 116, Decatur, GA 30031.

Snodderly is a musician with The Brother Boys Band and an actor with The Road Company Theater of Johnson City, Tennessee. His notes are reprinted from Now and Then, a journal from and about Appalachia.

Whitewash

Reviewed by Robert J. Norrell

Vol. 16, No. 1, 1994, pp. 18-20

George Wallace: American Populist, by Stephan Lesher (Addison Wesley, 1994, 587 pages).

“Watch out for George Wallace,” warned Wayne Greenhaw, an Alabama journalist, in his 1976 expose of the four-time Alabama governor’s continuing political ambitions. The warning ought still to be in effect for those who care about how we understand recent Southern history, because Wallace is attempting to manipulate the politics of memory to the same selfish end that he manipulated the politics of race in the 1960s and 1970s.

His newest instrument of manipulation is this biography by Stephan Lesher, a former Newsweek reporter. Once again George Wallace has fooled the public—this time, the bookpublishing and book-reviewing public—into believing his patently misleading view of the truth. Just as he promised frightened, bigoted white folks in Alabama that he could prevent desegregation—when he knew full well he could not—Wallace is now advancing an interpretation of his life that is sanitized to make him appear a clarion of the poor masses, a “populist.”

According to Lesher, Wallace was a racist, but no more so than the average white American of the time, and Wallace has been redeemed from his sin because he admitted it and asked forgiveness. Wallace’s profound cynicism now has been matched by Lesher’s, because anyone truly interested in historical facts knows that there was nothing commonplace about Wallace’s racism, nothing average about the way that he projected that racism onto Alabama and national politics.

Wallace hardly has admitted the extent of his sins, and Stephan Lesher and his publisher have helped to cover for Wallace by presenting us with a so-called “critical biography” when in reality this is not much more than an as-told-to autobiography with a thin and transparent wrapping of the third-person to fool the uninformed reader.

And fool it has:The New York Times Book Review declared it a definitive biography, long overdue. Lesher appeared on C-Span’s influential program, “Book Notes,” a sure path to the bestseller list. Lord, save us from naive Yankees. But even some hard-bitten political reporters in Alabama who should have known better came through with amnesiac reviews, in which they forgot many realities that should have been called to the attention of the apologist-biographer.

It’s a whitewash from the prologue on. Explaining why Wallace cooperated with him when the governor had refused to help other historians and journalists, Lesher wrote that Wallace believed that “I would treat him fairly and respectfully” and that “a biography by someone whom he had considered something of an adversary would carry greater credibility.”

Lesher conveniently neglected to mention that he paid Wallace a large sum of money to “cooperate,” a fact

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that he admitted to in The New York Times when the great gray omniscience, perhaps embarrassed by its creampuff review, backtracked a little. By that time, George Wallace was sitting beside Lesher in Alabama malls autographing “their” book for shoppers.

Paying Wallace also earned Lesher access to Wallace’s papers, which the governor still controls in violation of IRS rules. Wallace took a big tax write-off for donating his papers to a library, and tax regulations about donated papers deny any further control to the donor. At least that’s how it worked for Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey when they donated their papers.

But nobody challenged Wallace when he continued to control the papers after the IRS donations. So, the governor was in the position to allow Lesher, and Lesher only, the use of those papers. That preserved access for the apologist and kept away other, more critical historians and journalists. Nobody was watching out for George Wallace, and thus nobody was watching out for the historical record.

Not that Lesher’s book reveals much interest in serious historical research. He cites almost none of the relevant scholarly books and articles, even the ones that directly pertain to Wallace in Alabama politics. He apparently did not even consider the critical journalism of Michael Dorman. Nor did he cite the Presidential papers of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or Richard Nixon, which likely contain much relevant material.

There are scores of minor factual errors and distortions of the significance of Wallace’s presidential bids, but the main sins of this author are two interpretive whitewashes, one about race and the other about corruption. Although Lesher acknowledges Wallace’s exploitation of racism in politics, he couches it as an unfortunate reality for all politicians of the time. He ignores the evidence pointing to the singular ugliness of Wallace’s racist connections. He admits there was a “faint whiff” of Klan activity in Wallace’s 1962 campaign; in fact, a “putrid stench” would have been a more appropriate metaphor for the degree of Klan involvement. He distances Wallace from Asa Carter, the notorious Klan terrorist and publicist, by making Carter the tool of a Wallace adviser. He simply leaves out Wallace’s ties to the American Nazis and the John Birchers, thus disconnecting Wallace’s racist political rhetoric from the terrorism and extremism it fostered.

Lesher has little to say about the rampant corruption of the Wallace administrations, choosing to ignore countless journalistic exposés of kickbacks—to Wallace’s kin, cronies, and campaigns—from liquor agents, bond lawyers, asphalt companies, architects, and construction companies, just to mention a few. Lesher lays what corruption he admits at the feet of Seymore Trammell, Wallace’s close adviser, who was in fact convicted of taking bribes. By his own description the “fall guy” for a federal investigation that stopped short of Wallace and his brother when the governor agreed not to run as an independent against Richard Nixon in 1972, Trammell has subsequently confirmed an all-encompassing pattern of official abuse under Wallace. Lesher simply took the governor’s word that Trammell was a bad person.

For all practical purposes, this is an authorized celebrity biography for which the only true source of information is George Wallace himself. Lesher quotes important

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people—many of them still alive—passing judgment on Wallace, and the footnotes reveal that Wallace’s memory is the source of the quotes. As an as-told-to memoir, Wallace’s views on his life would have been accepted as self-serving because all such books are that, but this masqueraded “biography” is contemptuous.

Why get so exercised about a bad book when lots of bad books get published? Because the politics of memory about George Wallace is important today. His son of the same name is running for lieutenant governor of Alabama this year, capitalizing on his virtually 100-percent name recognition among voters. State politics remains full of people who learned the trade in the Wallace machine and now ply it for other candidates.

For people so apprenticed, politics by definition is simply getting elected by whatever means the times allow and then using the office exclusively for self-aggrandizement. Politics so purely cynical teaches the public that there is no place for idealism or ethics in government. Thus politics and government are immoral—and unworthy of our time, attention, or taxes. It seems to defy logic that citizens might act collectively through government to address serious problems. The cost of political cynicism is a huge penalty we pay every day, and that’s why we must still watch out for George Wallace.

Robert J. Norrell is professor of history at the University of Alabama and a member of the Southern Regional Council.

A Lottery for the Poor

Reviewed by John Cole Vodicka

Vol. 16, No. 1, 1994, pp. 20-21

Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, by Sister Helen Prejean (Random House, 1993, 278 pages).

Not long ago I heard Danny Lyon, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee photographer who chronicled much of the Southern civil rights movement in the early 1960s, describe his photographs of that era as “pictures that force us to remember, force us to confront and grapple with” an issue or event that we might otherwise choose to ignore or forget.

Lyon’s pictures—of police dogs and white men assaulting African Americans on the streets of Birmingham, of dozens of teenage African American girls peering through the bars of their crammed Lee County, Georgia jail cell, of the “white” and “colored” drinking fountains on either side of the Coke machine—are pictures that starkly reveal the inhumanity and brutality of segregation, photographs seen by millions of people to whom the civil rights movement was otherwise little more than an abstraction.

Now, a Catholic nun from south Louisiana has written a riveting book that offers a close-up, often wrenching view of another real-life subject that is too often debated in the abstract: the death penalty. The book is Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, and its author, Sister Helen Prejean, constructs a persuasive, first-person, moral and practical argument against the death penalty. It is a powerful testimony to the destructiveness of our system of punishment. And more importantly, it is a narrative that describes the death penalty in very human terms, a book that helps us all get to know the names and faces of those caught up in the macabre process we call capital punishment.

Her journey begins ten years ago in a New Orleans housing project where Prejean worked, taught, and walked with the poor. It carries us through the executions of two Louisiana death row prisoners whom she befriends and whose lives she fights to save. Along the way, we are introduced not only to these prisoners but also to the condemned inmates’ families, the families of the murder victims, prison officials and guards, chaplains and church leaders, lawyers, elected officials (“Politicians feel like they’ve got to get a little blood on their hands in order to be re-elected,” Prejean says), pardon board members, and witnesses to the executions.

As we get to know these people, as we hear them agonize or make excuses about their place or role in the death penalty process, we see clearly that state-sanctioned killing is a brutalization that mars each of their lives, and indeed, mars our lives as well.

Woven into Prejean’s account are the sobering facts about the death penalty: that it is a lottery which affects primarily the poor, the luckless, and people of color; that nearly three-fourths of those sentenced to die are there because their victim was a white person; that most defendants were improperly represented by trial lawyers and some awaiting execution have no attorney at all; that it costs more money to execute someone than it does to keep that same person in prison for life; that there are innocent men and women executed; that the system usually ignores or exacerbates the many needs of a murder victim’s family.

Over and over Prejean tells us that until we face these harsh facts and come to know the issue in human terms, we are not entitled to have an opinion on capital punishment and call it just.

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“By choosing to kill,” Prejean writes, “Americans diminish themselves financially, socially and spiritually.” We legitimize retaliation as the way to deal with conflict, and we all pay a price when we allow state killing to be carried out in our names. In this sense the death penalty means cruel and unusual punishment not only for the condemned prisoner but for the innocent as well, for all of us. The picture Prejean lays before us shows that the death penalty only allows us to extend the pain, to continue to blame one another, to turn against one another, to hate better.

“To understand the death penalty,” Prejean explains, “is to come to understand three of the most important, deepest wounds in this society. And that’s racism—white life is much more prized than black life in this country; the assault on the poor, the separation from them; and that it’s okay to use violence to try to solve problems.”

Dead Man Walking, which at its most basic is the account of a middle class white nun’s relationship with two condemned Louisiana prisoners, is a remarkable story of a courageous, committed, and compassionate woman of great faith who allows not only murderers into her life, but also most of the other actors who must participate in the grisly business that is the death penalty. As Prejean walks with Pat Sonnier and Robert Willie to the electric chair at the Angola Penitentiary, she reaches out to their victims’ families, prison officials, and others—many of whom despise her views on capital punishment. She has an amazing capacity to listen to her adversaries, to engage them in dialogue and debate, and to embrace them as fellow human beings struggling for recognition, an explanation, and justice.

Twenty-two years ago, writing in Furman v. Georgia, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued that “informed public opinion” about the death penalty was anything but informed “ [sic] …the American people are largely unaware of the information critical to a judgment on the morality of the death penalty… if they were better informed they would consider it shocking, unjust and unacceptable.”

“Perilously close to simple murder,” is how recent convert, justice Harry Blackmun, the lone—and departing—death penalty opponent on the Supreme Court, characterized the 1993 execution of Leonel Herrera.

Sister Helen Prejean believes deeply that capital punishment shocking, unjust, and unacceptable and says it is her ambition to turn public opinion against the death penalty.

Dead Man Walking is a testimony to what one person can do affect change, to reshape the debate on an issue that tests the moral fiber of our society. Her book, though painful and difficult to read, ultimately reinforces the value and sanctity of human life.

Dead Man Walking challenges the reader, forcing she or he to confront and grapple with an issue that, after reading Sister Helen Prejean’s story, remains in the abstract no longer.

John Cole Vodicka directs the Prison and Jail Project for Koinonia Partners in Americus, Georgia. He has actively been involved against the death penalty for more than twenty years.

New York Lite

Reviewed by Michael Cooper

Vol. 16, No. 1, 1994, pp. 22-23

New York Daysby Willie Morris (Little, Brown and Company, 1993, 396 pages).

Willie Morris’s New York Days, his thirteenth book, is fun to read because the writing is evocative, literate, and lyrical. This autobiography, which is intended as a sequel to his first one, North Toward Home, is mostly about Morris’s stint as a celebrated editor at Harper’s magazine. That famous old magazine summoned Morris to New York in 1963, when he was only in his late twenties, from his job as editor of the Texas Observer. He was a junior editor at Harper’s until 1967, when he was named editorin-chief, the job he held until a messy mass resignation in 1971.

New York Days describes Morris’s brief orbit in the galaxy of New York’s literati and glitterati. Apparently, every rich, famous, or influential person he ever met, or in some cases merely glimpsed, is mentioned in New York Days. There’s a telephone call from Norman Podhoretz, a note from Philip Roth, a brief exchange at a party with Tennessee Williams. At least one other reviewer has complained of Morris’s name dropping, and it is tedious at times.

On the other hand, Morris was friends with many cultural stars: Truman Capote, William Styron, Larry L. King, David Halberstam, and Arthur Schlesinger, to name just a few. The young editor is forever meeting, eating, or drinking with famous folk, and he has an eye for a good story. Like the time he and Capote were approached at dinner by a woman who asked, “‘Mr. Capote, I read that book In Cold Blood. I just have one question. Did you personally know those two murderers?’

‘Mama,’ he said, ‘did I know them? I lived with them for seven years.'”

But name dropping is just one of several problems with this autobiography. Another is its relentless self-congratulatory tone: how great the magazine was, how great its writers were, and, by not so subtle implication, how great its boy-wonder editor was. Plus, the rich, boorish, and short-sighted owners of Harper’s (who didn’t like Morris’s sledge-hammer journalism) are described so unflatteringly so consistently that it makes the reader suspect this is a get-even book. The conservative publishers reigned the editor in, he resigned, and, coupled with the pain of a recent divorce, the golden boy and his golden era crashed. While pay-back books can be delicious, there is always a nagging doubt about their objectivity.

Overall, New York Days offers little insight into either the times or the journalists who were stirring the social cauldron of the late 1960s. Under Morris’s editorship, the magazine published a surprising number of articles that helped define those years: Norman Mailer’s, “Prisoner of Sex,” and “On the Steps of the Pentagon,” and, (Morris’s favorite) Seymour M. Hersh’s “My Lai: The First Detailed Account of the Viet Nam Massacre.” There are a few insider’s tidbits strewn through the book. For example, Morris writes that he suggested the idea which resulted in Mailer’s Fire on the Moon. But there is not enough of this kind of information.

Because of the stature of these writers and the significance of their work, the reader approaches this book with high expectations that its author, their editor, will have revealing stories about how these journalists conceived and developed their articles and their impact on the nation’s political and cultural life. The reader’s expectations are unfulfilled. Essentially, New Yorks Days is not unlike a long article in a popular magazine, more entertaining than probing; it’s “lite” cultural history.

While much of New York Days is about Morris’s whirl in that culture capital, there are many passages to interest Dixiephiles. His first autobiography and his elevation to editor of Harper’s made Morris a celebrity at a time when the civil rights movement had saturated the media with images of vicious and seemingly ignorant white Southerners. Morris was another sort of curiosity, a Rhodes scholar and a white liberal from a town with the funny name of Yazoo in that awful place called Mississippi.

When North Toward Home was published, Barbara Walters interviewed Morris on the “Today Show.” She asked the author why he, at age twelve, had beaten up a three-year-old black child. Not because he was black, Morris tried to tell her with humor (dark as it might be, which is so characteristic of Southern writers), but because he was small. Morris and his hometown were also the subjects of a photographic essay in The Saturday Evening Post. And after resigning from Harper’s, with plenty of time on his hands, he wrote Good Old Boy, an autobiographical children’s book which Walt Disney Studios made into a movie.

Like fellow Mississippian Quentin Compson in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Morris often muses about what the South is and what it means to be a Southerner. He does this mostly with other Southerners

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and once, Hamlet-like, on a late night stroll over the battlefields at Gettysburg National Park. Morris approvingly quotes Styron on the subject: “If you were born and reared in the South it is certain you will remain a Southerner as long as you live, no matter how far you’ve traveled or wherever you’ve made your home.”

New York Days ends with a chapter entitled “South Toward Home” where, back in Mississippi, the author concludes, “Sometimes I cannot live with its awful emotional burdens, its terrible racist hazards and human neglects, sometimes I can, but these forever drive me to words.”

And Willie Morris is very, very good with words.

Michael L. Cooper is a native of southeastern Kentucky who lives in New York City. His last book was Playing America’s Game: The Story of Negro League Baseball (Lodestar/Dutton, 1993).

Looking for the Morning

Reviewed by Marcia Klenbort

Vol. 16, No. 1, 1994, pp. 23-25

Man and Mission, E.B. Gaston and the origins of the Fairhope Single Tax Colony, by Paul Mershon Gaston (Black Belt Press, 1993, 161 pages).

The occasion for this splendid little book is the centennial anniversary of the Fairhope Single Tax Colony, which was founded as a utopian experiment on the shores of Mobile Bay in Baldwin County, Alabama, in November 1894, and which has continued there in one form or another until now. Paul Gaston, the author and a scholar in the field of American social history, is the grandson of E.B. Gaston, founder and secretary of the colony every year except two until 1936; and the son of C.A. Gaston, who served as the Colony’s secretary for the next thirty-six years. Gaston has written about the Fairhope Colony before, and is working on what he calls “the big book” which will be the chronicle of the life and times of the Fairhope colony. So why this little volume now?

Gaston, mindful that he rejected a legacy by not leading the colony, fulfills his family obligation by writing about it. “I wanted to get something out before the centennial started,” Gaston reports. Man and Mission comes to remind people of the ideals on which the colony was founded, which are no longer embodied by the present wealthy community. For in 1994 the colony, far from being an alternative to a society driven by capitalism and greed, is a retirement haven for captains of industry. Indeed, Money magazine ranked it “second in the nation” among retirement communities in March 1994, for its low crime rate, good climate, and other factors popular with retirees. Fairhope Realtors © report that the prices of homes have doubled in the last two or three years, and young families cannot afford to buy homes there. So, since the Colony itself will hardly celebrate the hundredth anniversary as a place where “scarce community resources should never be privately owned or developed for private gain,” Paul Gaston celebrates the founding as the founders might have.

For those interested in American utopian communities, this little volume is a chance to explore one man’s intellectual journey as he rejected an inegalitarian society; surveyed the existing social experiments; corresponded fiercely with practitioners in other colonies as well as fellow idealists; decided on a plan of action; failed to find subscribers; and then, after reflection, conversations, and a number of compromises, mounted his effort again. Inclusion of original source material makes this book a natural for college courses.

The 1880s in America were a time of growing industrialization, when capital became concentrated in the hands of a few and laborers in industries had no chance of achieving lives beyond subsistence levels. Industrialization, ugly cities, and unbridled capitalism evoked a national reaction. Utopian communities sprang up, back-to-the-land movements which spurned new technologies and yearned for foundations which would result in more equal living conditions far from factories. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, published in 1888, was a part of the same broad movement of E.B. Gaston and his followers. Like Bellamy, E.B. Gaston—a successful real estate developer in Des Moines, Iowa at age 28—proclaimed of the capitalist system, “I want no more of it.” In 1889, he founded the “Des Moines Investigating Club” to investigate the social and economic conditions of the United States.

Gaston’s club was not a part of the network of the six thousand Looking Backward Clubs, but in 1890 Gaston invited Bellamy to speak to the Des Moines Investigating Club members. Bellamy wrote to decline, noting he was “sorry to disappoint any who are, with me, looking for the morning.”

Gaston’s club members read Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, and were impressed by his conclusion: to apply a single tax on land, with no tax on the improvements to the land. The idea was that this method of one annual tax would do away with land speculation and inequality of citizens owning land.

At a time when some experimental communities were foundering because of excessive demands on indi-

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vidual privacy, work choices, and individuality of their members, E.B. Gaston developed “cooperative individualism.” Land would be owned in common, as would the best parts of land, like the beautiful bayfront park in Fairhope. Public utilities, insurance, schools, and libraries would also be held in common. Competition would be encouraged in production, but not in distribution, where Gaston envisioned cooperative merchandising.

Although the colony adopted Henry George’s principle of the single tax, George did not approve of the founding of the Fairhope Single Tax Colony; he thought the model too small to work.

Hamlin Garland did support the colony’s founding, and in 1894 provided words for Gaston to use in promotion: “I hope single-tax men will support Brother Gaston to the full extent of their means, and build a practicable working model of the social group we hope to see the whole nation become.”

Before plans to found a colony took shape, Gaston had explored political change. He supported the Populist Party in 1892, and was disappointed that the Populists drew only five percent of the vote for president in Iowa. After the Populist effort failed, Gaston and his colleagues turned to create a world where his ideals could rule, “A community, in short, where intelligent men and women [are] drawn together by a common purpose.” And they wanted to work the land.

Southerners will not be surprised that they selected a warm climate for their experiment, but why Baldwin County, Alabama? The selection committee traveled to many places. They rejected the “stumps and stones” of the Arkansas mountains, were warned against too-swampy Louisiana, and found that Texas (where they were attracted to rice-growing), lacked hospitable property laws. When they reached the eastern shore of Mobile Bay in Baldwin County, they were captivated.

“The view from the shore is magnificent…. high banks and a sandy beach with every here and there a spring gushing”. In actuality, the land they chose was a wild thicket on poor soil, which had failed to become a habitable place for the two towns which had died there earlier: Clifton and Alabama City. Their plans to establish an agricultural colony were built more on faith than on sound soil.

E.B. Gaston was “distant” from the author, who knew his grandfather only from a child’s view. He is a good subject for a biography, a man of tremendous energy, rebelliousness and ambition, and highly skilled in the capitalist accomplishments he rejected. By the time he led the little band of nineteen adults and nine children to Fairhope in November 1894, he had been an accomplished real estate developer (we see his persuasive salesmanship in the endless “Come to Fairhope” recruiting flyers); managing editor of a newspaper (his launching and editing of the Fairhope Courier alone might merit a biography); and a leader of Iowa populists who actively supported the 1892 presidential bid of Populist Party candidate James B. Weaver, editor of the Farmer’s Tribune which Gaston worked for in Des Moines. (Gaston would need all the management expertise he could muster to lead the early years of the colony).

What relevance does the book hold for present-day thinkers who would bring democracy and opportunity to all communities of the South and beyond? It is very American, Paul Gaston tells us, “for a single American to make a difference in the historical process.” The colony E.B. Gaston envisioned and mobilized was ahead of its time in accepting the intelligence of women as a rock in its foundation. Racial justice, however, was not part of the Fairhope mission. “Racial justice was almost never among the causes championed by communitarian reformers,” the author tells us. One of the colony’s thinkers, James Belangee, reasoned that “the institution of the single tax would necessarily reduce racism through improved circumstances,” an argument which reminds this reviewer of multiple arguments for tiptoeing around race issues sometimes heard in 1990s discussions.

When Fairhopers arrived in 1894, Paul Gaston tell us, about 2,400 people lived on the 112 square miles from

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Mobile Bay to the Fish River. About fifty-five percent were white. Blacks were immigrants from other parts of the South, including “a prominent group of mulattoes, descended from free people of color.” Readers will be left wanting to hear more about life in the Fairhope colony, and will look forward to the “big book” Paul Gaston promises us. Until then, we can be pleased that Gaston has postponed telling the colony’s story until another volume. (Man and Mission ends in 1895.) The present volume has an unhurried feeling. We can linger in the preamble, and give the founding of the Fairhope Colony its due.

Marcia Klenbort sought out her own Fairhope roots in 1972. Her grandfather, a “raving idealist” who grew up on Chicago’s north side, settled in Fairhope in 1904, but did not find his dreams there. Klenbort is director of education programs at the Southern Regional Council.

Bottom Rails

Reviewed by Rebecca Sharpless

Vol. 16, No. 1, 1994, pp. 25-27

The Origins of Southern Sharecropping, by Edward Royce (Temple University Press, 1993, 279 pages).

Statistics on the South today are as bleak as ever: the highest poverty rate in the U.S., the highest infant mortality rate, the highest school drop-out rate. And we ask: How did things ever get this bad? How did the South become the nation’s poorest region?

Historians of the South point to the aftermath of the Civil War in explaining the roots of some Southern poverty. In 1865, four million slaves were freed with no means of supporting themselves, and the region has been paying the price ever since. Out of the crumbling plantation system arose a form of agricultural labor known as the crop-lien system. Under the crop-lien system, a landless farmer and his family worked a designated plot of someone else’s land in return for a portion of the crop. This organization of agriculture remained dominant throughout the South until the New Deal. (The term crop lien encompasses two forms of agricultural labor: tenant farming, in which the farmer owns his own tools and receives three-quarters of the cash crop and two-thirds of the corn that he raises; and sharecropping, in which the farmer provides only his labor and that of his family, and receives half of the cash crop and corn in return. I will use the two interchangeably, as does Royce.)

Historical discussions of how the crop-lien system arose often resemble the arguments regarding the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.1 In fact, two of the players in the struggle to find the origins of the system finally declared in frustration:

Despite the enormous amount of scholarship devoted directly or indirectly to this theme, historians cannot even agree on how to conceptualize either antebellum or postbellum southern society, much less on how to explain the transition from one to the other.2

But the problem of the origins of the crop-lien system continues to tantalyze scholars. The newest addition into the mix is The Origins of Southern Sharecropping by Edward Royce, an associate professor of sociology at Rollins College. To examine the origins of the crop-lien system (which he inelegantly and inaccurately lumps under the rubric of sharecropping), Royce employs a perspective which he calls “constriction of possibilities,” a term gleaned from E. L. Doctorow’s novel, The Book of Daniel. He begins with the premise that the crop-lien system was a compromise that gave neither plantation owners nor freed slaves exactly what they wanted in a labor system. He then seeks to examine what they did want and what happened to keep them from attaining their desires. For planters, a return to slavery would have been their first choice. Barring that, they wanted a work force that would be just as controllable as slaves. Freed slaves, with very few options for nonagricultural employment, primarily wished for their own family farms on which to raise subsistence crops. The bulk of The Origins of Southern Sharecropping looks at what could have happened to give one or both of these groups a satisfactory outcome—and didn’t.

Disagreeing with historians who see sharecropping only as a response to market pressures, Royce portrays both the freedpeople and the planters as active agents in determining their fates. He quotes philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: “Men make their history on the basis of real, prior conditions. It is the men who make it and not the prior conditions” The first result of the active freedpeople was the end of the gang-labor system which had prevailed on antebellum plantations. Despite the best efforts of planters, the U.S. Army, and the Freedmen’s Bureau, former slaves absolutely refused to work in gangs. Coercion and even terror from the Ku Klux Klan could not force freedpeople into the cotton fields as gang labor. This failed coercion thus became one possibility which freedpeople effectively blocked. Planters did not get the ultimate labor control that they believed to be necessary.

Royce next examines why freedpeople did not get their desired autonomy. Loss of nerve on the part of the U.S. government bears significant responsibility for denying freed slaves the “forty acres and a mule” which they so much wanted. Despite some attempts at land redistribution during and immediately after the Civil War, the

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federal government restored almost all confiscated lands to their previous owners by the end of 1865. With virtually all farmland in the hands of its antebellum owners and no money of their own, freedpeople had little opportunity to acquire land. The “best estimate” is that fewer than 5 percent of the former slaves had purchased land by the “first few years after the war.” Their wishes to become independent land owners were thus a second constricted possibility.

Faced with what they perceived as a recalcitrant black labor pool, planters sought other groups of workers as farm laborers. The South had never attracted many foreign immigrants, but postbellum planters believed that they could lure workers from China and Europe, especially Germany, to tend the crops. Neither group was willing to come to the South, and the efforts failed miserably. Poor labor conditions restricted immigration as a possibility.

Another tack discussed by some southern planters was the colonization of former slaves. Some planters believed that if freedpeople would not work under the conditions that the planters dicated, they should be deported, perhaps to Central America. Blacks opposed colonization during Reconstruction, declaring that they had a right to stay on the lands which they had cultivated for generations. A few whites removed themselves to Central or South America, unable to bear living in a land with freed slaves. But for both groups, black and white, emigration remained an impractical solution to the problems of Reconstruction.

Having exhausted other possibilities, according to Royce, Southern planters and freedpeople eventually settled into the crop-lien system. It is here that Origins is weakest, as Royce conflates the end of gang labor and the credit system which was based on the expected harvest. Blacks vehemently opposed gang labor, remembering the days under the overseer’s lash. The decentralization of plantations into individual farm plots was indeed a victory for freedpeople, giving them a measure of autonomy and privacy. It did not, however, result in the crop-lien system per se. Royce argues that freedpeople also wanted the crop-lien system, wherein a family would work the crop and receive a portion of the harvest in lieu of cash wages. The family would feel that the crop was their own and that they were not “mere hirelings.” Royce’s argument and documentation are unconvincing at this point. Why would a family defer payment for an entire year to receive income at harvest? Although planters denied it, the crop-lien system gave them considerable control over their tenants: no harvest, no payment. Royce also does not give adequate attention to the collapse of the southern financial system, which left few planters with enough cash to pay their tenants.

On its face, the crop-lien system does not look all that bad. A family worked the land; if the crop made well, the family theoretically took home a corresponding payment. Royce is concerned with origins, not effects, but his lack of focus on the credit system gives short shrift to the most pernicious aspect of the crop-lien system as it took hold on the South for the next seventy years. Under the crop-lien system, a sharecropper planted what the landlord told him to. That was always the cash crop: cotton or tobacco. Neither was edible for humans. Concentrating on the cash crop, sharecropper families rarely grew enough food to feed themselves. Instead, they purchased food on credit arranged by the landlord, with the debt to be paid out of the crop. With no cash, they also charged cloth for clothing, doctors’ fees, kerosene for their lamps—any and everything went on the credit bill. As a result, families ended up in debt year after relentless year, never able to earn a profit or create a decent way of life. Steady diets of fat pork and corn resulted in widespread cases of pellagra. Inferior water supplies created endless cases of typhoid fever. And shacks with no screens on the windows let in clouds of malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

Royce discusses only freed slaves as sharecroppers, and it is beyond the scope of his study to investigate the spread of the crop-lien system throughout the South. Studies by Steven Hahn, Kyle Wilkison, and others explain how white farmers, too, eventually became sucked into the crop-lien system, so that by 1920, 75 percent of the farmers, black and white, on the Texas prairies were sharecroppers or tenants. This gradual slide into tenancy led to wretched conditions for millions of southern rural families.

The New Deal brought an abrupt end to the crop-lien system as it had existed since the 1860s, but it did not end Southern poverty. Acreage allotments induced landowners to turn their tenants off of the farms, despite the fact that the tenants had nowhere to go in the middle of the Great Depression. Former tenants left for the cities, lacking educations or marketable skills that would help them in the urban world, bringing the misery of deprivation to the cities without the familiarity of the countryside. Because of the urbanization of Southern rural poverty, as well as for other reasons, the South today continues to lag economically.

In The Origins of Southern Sharecropping, Edward Royce has made a valiant attempt to shed new light on the puzzle of the crop-lien system through the theory of “constriction of possibilities.” He is to be commended especially for the agency which he attributes to freed slaves, but one of his central arguments remains unconvincing. In examining the roads not taken, he has cer-

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tainly gazed down some paths that others have overlooked. His perspective is different, but not superior to, many of the predecessors whom he attempts to revise.

Notes

Rebecca Sharpless is the director of the Institute for Oral History at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.