A Far Cry from Apartheid

By Laughlin McDonald

Vol. 16, No. 2, 1994, pp. 1-2

The recent round of congressional redistricting in the South was hailed by the minority and civil rights communities as the most successful in the nation’s history. New majority-minority districts were created in Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and Texas. Each of the new districts elected a minority candidate to Congress, increasing the number of African-American members in the South from five to seventeen.

Now these new districts are under siege. Whites in five of the states—North Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, and Texas—have filed lawsuits claiming that majority-minority districts are a form of political apartheid and resegregation. By mid-September, as a result of these suits, federal district courts in Louisiana, Texas and Georgia had struck down congressional plans with majority black districts; a federal district court upheld the state redistricting plan in North Carolina. Because of the conflict among the decisions and the importance of the issues raised, the cases will almost certainly be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has splintered on other recent voting rights decisions.

The claims raised by the plaintiffs in these lawsuits are profoundly ahistorical. Political apartheid, with South Africa long being the preeminent example, is the total exclusion of one race from governance and the domination of that race by another. No existing congressional redistricting plan can be remotely described in such terms. To the contrary, they are designed to include minorities in political life. They are designed to promote the fullest participation of all citizenry in congressional elections.

Segregation involved, among other things, denying

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black persons the right to register and vote, the right to run for office and participate in primary elections, the right to live in neighborhoods of one’s choice, the equal enjoyment of public accommodations, access to jobs, the right to serve on juries, and the right to attend public schools.

By contrast, no person living in a majority-minority congressional district is compelled by law to live there, and to live nowhere else. No person—black or white—is denied the right because of his or her race to run for office, or to vote for a candidate of his or her choice. Any analogy between existing congressional redistricting and segregation or apartheid is completely misplaced.

Legislators always make redistricting decisions based on group characteristics, including race and ethnicity. In Georgia, for example, the state created a district for the mountain counties that was 95 percent white. The state drew the district to recognize and preserve an area of predominantly white Anglo-Saxon heritage that it said had “unified interest and concerns.” No one has suggested that in doing so the state acted unconstitutionally, despite the fact that the mountain counties district is far more “segregated,” i.e. composed of residents of the same race, than is any other congressional district in the state, including the 11th, which is currently being challenged in federal court.

Majority-minority districts do not guarantee that minorities will get elected. All candidates must build coalitions and reach across racial, ethnic, economic, and other lines. But such districts do provide minorities equal opportunities to participate in the political process and to elect candidates of their choice. That right is guaranteed to all Americans, of whatever race, by the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Taking race into account in redistricting, along with other factors, helps ensure that the process will be broadly inclusive and the Congress will be racially diverse. While white elected officials can undoubtedly represent racial minorities, our history shows that frequently they have not and that some have been the architects of our worst forms of official discrimination. Redistricting should ensure that minorities will in fact be represented in the national legislature, that their views will be heard, and that a variety of backgrounds and experience will be brought to national decision-making.

Laughlin McDonald, director of the Southern Regional Office of the American Civil Liberties Union, writes often for Southern Changes. This editorial essay was adapted from an article for Georgia Forum, an educational organization that provides experts’ views on public issues.

The Places of AIDS

By Meredith Raimondo

Vol. 16, No. 2, 1994, pp. 3-12

“Cancer clinic has AIDS scare” was the title of the piece in The Atlanta Constitution‘s local news summary on July 30, 1985. Noting that “As many as 1,000 people may have been exposed to the AIDS virus in blood-derived drugs,” the article mentioned only one patient by name: former Georgia Governor Lester Maddox.

Only a week earlier, newspapers around the country had reported Rock Hudson’s diagnosis with AIDS. In Covering the Plague: AIDS and the American Media (1989), James Kinsella argues that the year of Rock Hudson was the year America “discovered” AIDS. It was certainly the year that The Atlanta Constitution and The Atlanta Journal, Atlanta’s morning and evening daily newspapers (collectively referred to as the AJC) “discovered” it.

Unlike Hudson’s, Maddox’s story is not considered a turning point in the history of AIDS in the United States. In analyses of the arrival of the AIDS crisis in the U.S., Atlanta is not featured except as the location of the national Centers for Disease Control (CD C). Epidemiologists did not consider Atlanta—or the Southȁas one of the sites where AIDS “began” in the United States. Such conclusions were erroneous, however. As a survey of the AJC‘s coverage of AIDS in the first half of the 1980s demonstrates, Atlanta was struggling to come to terms with a crisis very much present and local.

Like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, Atlanta is a major metropolitan center. So why does Atlanta get overlooked? One important reason is that in most of the work on AIDS, the role of place is an invisible factor. For example, in Randy Shilts’ popular And the Band Played On (1988), the cities whose names surface are used to illustrate the ways in which AIDS is a national phenomenon, a story of the failure of the federal government. Other critics reduce regional variation to the difference between “urban” and “rural” areas. Where does that leave a city like Atlanta? Atlanta is a modern urban place, but it is also a metropolitan region within the “South,” an amorphous and sprawling section of the U.S. that is, like the Midwest, often represented as a rural and particularly anti-modern space. Because it fits neither category neatly, Atlanta falls through the cracks in analyses that rely on the urban/rural distinction.

In order to understand how the social experience of AIDS developed in Atlanta, it must be examined as a city

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in the South as well as a major urban area. The variable of place provides an important perspective on why Atlanta’s story is so similar and yet so different from other urban centers. Reconstructing such history is a complex process and cannot be derived from any one source. However, as a beginning point, the story told by the AJC provides indications of what factors shaped the social experience of AIDS in Atlanta. By turning back to the first half of the 1980s, we can see that like other major metropolitan regions in the United States, Atlanta was struggling with AIDS. However, the city’s efforts to understand and respond were influenced by Southern issues that make this history unique.

The Maddox story serves as a turning point in the AJC, a symbol of the transformation of AIDS from a new arrival to an established feature of Atlanta’s social landscape. The incident also illustrates how important it is to account for the cultural meanings AIDS acquires. Maddox was the most well-known American patient at the cancer clinic in the Bahamas. The day after the initial report, he was on the front page of The Constitution, revealing his intent to test for HIV. He was back on the front page on August 1, when a report indicated that serum with which he had been treated tested positive for the virus. On August 28, Maddox was “grinning broadly” because his test was “clean as a whistle.” Rock Hudson made the crisis real for Americans otherwise untouched by the lived experience of AIDS. For the first time, everyone “knew” someone who had AIDS. Likewise, many Georgians could now identify someone they “knew” whose life had been touched by AIDS.

Until 1985, the majority of AJC stories associated AIDS with gay men. The Rock Hudson story fit this pattern: revelations of the popular actor’s sexuality made him one more “homosexual” undone by his “lifestyle.” Maddox, on the other hand, was being treated in a medical clinic. In the rhetoric of AIDS, that made him an “innocent victim”—an especially ironic twist given Maddox’s virulent defense of segregation during his political career. He represented the threat of AIDS to the “general population,” and the end of the safety that readers could find in not belonging to one of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control’s initial “risk groups.”

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Throughout this early period there were few conscious discussions of region, a problem exacerbated by the lack of coverage. The AJC did not write about the local experience of AIDS with any frequency until 19851 (see 1 for comparison by year of total and local coverage of AIDS). Rather, the Atlanta newspapers tended to report on the scientific “mystery.” According to Kinsella in Covering the Plague, many media outlets adopted this approach, taking their cue from the Associated Press Wire Service, the first commercial news service to cover AIDS regularly. AP writers work under great deadline stress with little time for extended research. In covering AIDS, there was one stationary, constant, and reliable source of information: the Centers for Disease Control.

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Kinsella argues that reliance on this source placed the focus almost entirely on rare illnesses and categories of “risk.” Because the experience of living with AIDS was rarely a topic, there was no way to ask how that experience varied around the country. The media’s reliance on the CDC, itself an Atlanta institution, played a key role in establishing an understanding of AIDS that made the city’s own experience of the crisis nearly invisible in its daily papers.

Even when scientific studies did focus on location, they did not develop the tools that would contribute helpfully to regional analysis. A brief sampling of the debates about AIDS within medical geography illustrates how problematically scientists handled the question of place. Geography emerged as a factor as scientists searched for the origins of this new condition. However, as epidemiologists worked to solve the “mystery” of AIDS, they focused on national and continental boundaries rather than regional variation within nations.

For example, researchers Gary Shannon and Gerald Pyle outline the standard epidemiological diffusion approach in their 1989 article, “The Origin and Diffusion of AIDS: a View from Medical Geography,” which they expanded with Rashid Bashshur into their 1991 book, The Geography of AIDS.2 Maps are generated by looking at where and when cases of the AIDS are diagnosed. From there, causal relationships between the clusters are hypothesized. The fact that many cases of AIDS were early identified on the continent of Africa led researchers to assume the disease’s African origins. This approach is clearly evident in Shannon and Pyle; AIDS begins in Africa and spreads globally (see 2). However, there are other possible explanations for these clusters. In Blaming Others: Prejudice, Race, and Worldwide AIDS (1988), Renee Sabatier points out that while “Western” research was quick to look for “Third World” origins, those same researchers appeared unwilling to investigate the possibility that AIDS spread from the United States to the rest of the world in exported blood products. Sabatier concludes that the explanations Western scientists provided for the geographical distributions they recorded were influenced by racist assumptions about developing nations. “Objective science” fell prey to geopolitical bias.

Though Shannon and Pyle focus on the geography of nations and continents, their 1989 diffusion map offers a hypothesis about the arrival of AIDS in the American South, suggesting that it came through Miami via the Caribbean. They confirm this finding in their 1991 study, identifying “incubator neighborhoods” in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, and Houston. In their model, Atlanta is a site of secondary expansion of AIDS in the United States. But there are problems with this conclusion. Their map suggests a causal link in diffusion between the Atlantic seaboard and the West Coast, but it does not identify a similar link between New York City and Atlanta, despite the clear transportation corridor that exists between the two cities. Although they argue that “travel by air and therefore, airline network connections were involved in the early diffusion of the HIV and the subsequent development of AIDS in not only large metropolitan centers, but also major resort areas,” they never discuss Atlanta as one of the “incubator” sites, despite the presence of Hartsfield International, one of the country’s busiest airports. Shannon, Pyle, and Bashur’s model focuses on the travel to and from Haiti to explain what they call “a substantial Gulf Coast pattern,” the key geographic feature of AIDS diffusion in the Southern United States. The focus on the Haitian origins of AIDS in the South to the exclusion of a causal link between places like New York City and Atlanta recapitulates the politics of the search for AIDS’ African origins. Their model fails to explore the movement between the South and other sections of the country and within regions of the South itself.

A national diffusion model utilizing sectional analysis can be found in “Geographical Patterns of AIDS in the United States,” an October 1987 article in The Geographic Review. This research shows that Georgia’s caseload developed quickly and remained comparatively high, demonstrating that AIDS was not simply a West Coast/East Coast phenomenon (see 3). The authors’ analysis of AIDS in the Southern United States is more sophisticated, identifying New York City as well as the Caribbean as being key to the high incidence of AIDS in Florida. However, their use of the CDC’s definition of the South, ranging from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arizona/New Mexico border, encompasses so many diverse areas that their demographic generalizations are of suspect validity for any specific place (see 4).

The tendency to conclude that AIDS came to the U.S. from elsewhere promoted national boundaries as the key geographical feature of AIDS, overshadowing variation within the United States. A model to describe the different patterns of caseloads within a broadly defined “South” has yet to be developed. The geographical work on AIDS defines “modern cities”—where models of modernity are based on the industrial Northeast—as sites of origin for the U.S. crisis. The fact that Atlanta, one of the most “modern” cities of the South, does not appear in these treatments suggests the inadequacies of this work.

These works and their geographical analyses are retrospective, looking back at the first years of the crisis. They suggest that as data was gathered and models

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proposed, Atlanta was not considered a place where AIDS “began” in the United States. Nor does it seem likely that reporters would have found useful tools for regional analysis in such work. However, the dateline Atlanta was not uncommon in the early years of the crisis. When it appeared, it was almost always a reference to the CDC, a federal institution. This replacement of the regional meaning of the city with a national meaning effectively eclipsed the local experience of AIDS in the commercial media. Stories on what the CDC was discovering about AIDS, because they were reported from Atlanta, appeared to be “local news,” but in fact they told nothing about the experiences of people within the city, except for a small group of scientists.

When they began to look beyond the CDC, AJC writers had few cues from this initial primary source as to how to frame questions about the local experience of AIDS. These papers, part of a chain of newspapers held by Cox Enterprises, essentially function as a single unit, publishing joint weekend editions and sharing many staffers and writers. Much of the early reporting on AIDS in both papers was done by the same individuals, Charles Seabrook and Ron Taylor.

The lack of local analysis was not unique to the AIDS story. The 1980s were a particularly bitter period in the AJC‘s efforts to write about Atlanta. The broader struggles around the content and quality of local coverage created the context in which AIDS stories were reported.

One possible way to frame the question of local experience was to look at Atlanta as a Southern city, but there were difficulties in using this approach. According to Gary Moore in a 1992 Columbia Journalism Review article, reporters at the AJC in the early to mid-1980s were writing at a time when the identity of Southern journalism was very contested. The Reagan “Sunbelt” of the 1980s saw the “chaining of Southern newspapers,” as large chains supplanted “family newspapers.” Moore characterizes the situation as a struggle between “those who see the South as basically no place special anymore, with Southern journalism being like any shiny sprocket in chain news” and those who believed that the South’s “essence may be hard to write down as a broad “I” or a narrowed eye, but it’s there, despite the difficulty of digitizing it.”

At the AJC in the early and mid-1980s, proponents of the first position—the South as “no place special”—were clearly in power. Like many newspapers in this period, the AJC withdrew into “safe” reporting. In another Columbia Journalism Review essay (1988), Bill Cutler described Jim Minter, editor of AJC from 1980 to late 1986, as being “far too respectful of local authorities and institutions.” Minter’s deference to local power, both political and economic, led reporters to feel as if they were supposed to “back off from controversy,” thus compromising the spirit of investigative journalism. As a result, morale plummeted and many good writers left for other papers. John Fleming, a former senior editor at the AJC, characterized the papers under Minter as “asleep.” What Moore describes as “a national trend ‘toward comfort journalism'” had the effect at the AJC of discouraging aggressive, challenging investigative reporting into local issues.

In a short-lived moment between 1986 and 1988, the hiring of Bill Kovach as AJC editor lifted the newspaper briefly out of the “haven for mediocrity and soft business coverage it had become,” wrote Eric Guthey in the December 1988 issue of Southern Changes. Yet, wrote Guthey, Kovach’s resistance to New South boosterism proved his undoing and he was fired in the AJC‘s push to look and read more like USA Today.

This history suggests that the AJC might be a prob-

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lematic source for analyzing Atlanta as a Southern city because it is a product of a vision in which the South retains a distinct identity only as a kind of titillating curiosity, exemplified by the “Dixie Living” section. While it is true that the AJC resembles USA Today more than anything else, the absence of a complex self-articulated Southern identity does not mean that it cannot reveal something about the local experiences of AIDS. Especially in the early years of the crisis, the stories told about AIDS served to explain and justify public reaction and responses.

For a large audience of readers, the AJC was a primary source of information and opinions about the crisis. The commercial media did not represent an exclusive source of information—the AJC was not the only storyteller. Harlon Dalton points out that “the mass media are scarcely the only avenues of communication in the black community,” citing the example of the African-American church as an alternative site for education.3 Conversations, storytelling, and oral traditions remain important informal modes of communication among Southerners of all ages and races. Indeed, one of the challenges for Southern newspapers continues to be high rates of illiteracy. However, Moore sees a connection between print and oral forms in Southern culture: “Southerners like a good story, and they like a good story well told, and they like to see it in the newspaper.” Media narrative has a great deal of influence on other kinds of knowledge and communication in a culture saturated with information technology, and may produce values that help frame the debate as information travels from print into oral tradition. As the AJC constructed a drama of AIDS in Atlanta, it created players (both heroes and villains), critical moments, and moral lessons. The framing of local issues by these “mainstream” dailies reveals some of the dynamics of power in Atlanta’s AIDS crisis.

Before the Maddox incident, what story was the AJC telling? Early coverage focused on CDC reports of gay cancer in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Most of those stories came from the wire services, talking of rare disease, drug use, and sexual promiscuity. By 1983, national coverage of the crisis had increased dramatically. The AJC ran a front-page feature on Sunday, February 13 which called AIDS “the killer that no one understands.” It

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made AIDS local by talking about the experiences of Charles, a resident of Atlanta living with AIDS. The article treated Charles with dignity and allowed him to speak in his own voice. It noted that AIDS had brought an increase in homophobia. However, it undermined its own efforts to counteract prejudice by reporting that “most of [AIDS’] victims—about 75 percent—have been homosexual males, like Charles.” By invoking the risk group structure, which erroneously implies that identity leads to AIDS, the article contained and isolated Charles from the presumptively heterosexual—and therefore “safe”—reading “public.”

Perhaps the Sunday article’s most interesting point was the following speculation:

Some authorities on Atlanta’s gay community cite a sexual conservatism bred of Southern culture as one reason the disease has not hit hard here. Many Atlanta gays are from small Southern towns, where promiscuity—whether it be homosexual or heterosexual—is frowned upon. Others say the disease simply has not landed here in full force yet…Atlanta, after all, is a national crossroads.

This story raises important questions about Atlanta’s gay community and AIDS, insomuch as one “gay community” exists. When this term appears in the AJC, it generally seems to refer to white men with enough class privilege to gain access to medical and social service institutions, access which may have allowed the paper to notice them.

The February 13 article suggests that sexuality as the centerpiece of gay liberation may have a very different meaning in the South. It also points out the importance of a highly mobile urban population and the corridors they travel. By thinking about Atlanta as a Southern city, the AJC writers were able to provide important insight as to why the crisis seemed to be developing more slowly. The story noted that there were fifteen reported cases of AIDS in Georgia, and nine deaths.

Scattered reports suggest that AIDS became an increasingly serious issue throughout 1983. A controversy over zoning for a proposed all-male health club in the Virginia Highland area was reported as splitting the gay community, particularly because a gay man with AIDS initiated the protests. In July, the AJC described “paranoia” among the estimated 125,000 gay residents of the metro Atlanta area as the Georgia caseload rose to twenty-seven. As evidence of changes in the “gay community,” the authors cited an organizational meeting for the volunteer group AID Atlanta attended by “a crowd of 80 gay men—most of whom…had never before joined a gay organization of any type.” The report also reflected that “AIDS concerns” in Georgia were not as great as in San Francisco or New York.

At the end of 1983, the first public responses to AIDS became visible in the AJC. AID Atlanta requested financial support from the city and from Fulton County to establish “a 10-hour daily AIDS hotline and a screening clinic” and asked the Fulton County Board of Health “to formally declare AIDS … a public health emergency in Atlanta.” Councilwoman Mary Davis supported the proposed program, which “focused primarily on homosexual males, but … also serve[d] intravenous drug users and Haitians,” but in September their request for $10,000 was tabled. When the possibility of funding for the year-old group was raised again at the end of the month, the Fulton County Board of Health recommended that it be made available.

This incident illustrates some of the the AJC‘s exclusions. Intravenous drug users and Haitians, two of the CDC’s key “risk groups,” were mentioned only in the last sentence of the article describing the funding request. Feature stories about the experience of living with AIDS were located entirely in the gay (read: white, middle-class) community. In September, the AJC ran a major front-page feature on the AIDS crisis in Haiti, the pinnacle of coverage about the island. In this piece, there was no follow-up of the suggestion in AID Atlanta’s funding request that the immigrant Haitian community in Atlanta was affected by AIDS. The repetition of risk groups in many articles creates the assumption that the local community was affected, but the AJC did not investigate and document this presumption. In the AJC, AIDS in the U.S. was presented as almost exclusively a white experience. This problem may reflect either judgments about “newsworthiness,” or racial and class barriers denying access to the services that caused AIDS to be publicly recognized. For whatever reason, there were many Atlantans whose stories were left untold.

Some of the silence may have been self-imposed by the paper. According to Cutler in his Columbia Journalism Review piece, the AJC had a generally “troubled relationship with the city’s black community.” Under Cox Enterprises president David Easterly, who arrived in 1982, the AJC attempted to be more “careful” and less “reckless” in its writing on Atlanta’s African-American community. In the case of AIDS, this caution was taken to a dangerous extreme. The AJC clearly distorted the story of AIDS in Atlanta by omitting the experiences of African-Americans from its reports.

National coverage dropped off in 1984 as fears about casual transmission quieted, and the AJC followed suit. As in 1983, stories about AIDS continued to concentrate

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on gay men and services in the gay community. There was little change in the first part of 1985. Fulton County filed suit to close two bathhouses, both targets of vice squad investigations for violations of the Georgia sodomy law as well as health risks. Delta Airlines, headquartered in Atlanta, considered and rejected a proposal to bar people with AIDS from its planes. AID Atlanta held a service attended by 300 at All Saint’s Episcopal Church in memory of those who had died. Atlanta municipal court judges took it upon themselves to counsel “johns”—men accused of soliciting prostitution—of the dangers they faced and their potential to spread AIDS to their wives and the heterosexual population at large.

Coverage increased dramatically following the reports surrounding Rock Hudson and Lester Maddox in summer of 1985. A Georgia task force on AIDS was formed. By September, the state had recorded 216 cases of AIDS, almost 75 percent concentrated in the metro Atlanta area, and Georgia moved from eleventh to ninth in state-bystate rankings. The AJC noted that the state government led by Governor Joe Frank Harris remained largely unresponsive, with the exception of some metro Atlanta representatives. In the AJC, fear of AIDS was obvious, as exemplified by the coverage of the confusion over how to “decontaminate” a police car in which a person living with AIDS had a nosebleed.

By the end of 1985, AIDS had “arrived” in Atlanta. A brief survey of 1986 demonstrates that the atmosphere had most certainly changed. Public debate was not so much over what AIDS was and whether it was in Atlanta, but what Atlanta was going to do about it. For example, one of the most reported issues was the school attendance of children with AIDS, despite the fact that by August, “only three children in Georgia [were] currently known to have AIDS.” AID Atlanta, the state task force, and the legislature struggled with legislation introduced by Rep. Billy McKinney that in its original form would have permitted quarantine, required testing for all pregnant women, and empowered the state to test and isolate “at-risk” individuals at will. The legislature considered and rejected a mandatory reporting bill. The governor’s office blocked a grant to AID Atlanta because protesters argued that funding of an explicit same-sex education pamphlet would amount to state support for sodomy, illegal under Georgia law. AJC writers discussed a proposal for the mandatory testing of convicted prostitutes. The Georgia Task Force released a report in June, advocating that children and employees with AIDS be allowed to remain in their schools and workplaces. By early September, Georgia had 495 reported cases of AIDS. The chair of the state task force suggested that as many as 49,500 Georgians might be infected. AIDS began to be written about as a “metro” phenomenon, spreading to counties besides Fulton.

Self-conscious discussions of race also reentered the AJC‘s narrative for the first time since interest in the origins of AIDS had faded. The paper reported on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s concern for the rate of AIDS in the African-American community. Sandra McDonald, special assistant to the president of the SCLC, blamed the media for underreporting, noting that while African-Americans comprised around 25 percent of the national caseload, they accounted for 29 percent of Georgia’s caseload. The SCLC’s challenge reveals clearly that there was more than one AIDS epidemic in Atlanta, and this particular one had been unnoticed or ignored by the AJC and the power structures which it covered.

What do these stories suggest about the social experience of AIDS in the Atlanta region? In many ways, they follow national concerns: for example, while Ryan White tried to go to school in Indiana, Georgia schools struggled with AIDS policies. However, there are complex and important regional factors which affected the AIDS crisis in Atlanta.

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The AJC, up to the Maddox reports, focused primarily on the city’s gay community. This selectivity is important, because while it constructs certain “victims,” it erases others. This absence reflects media fiction, not social reality. Dr. Roger Bakerman, a psychologist at Georgia State, pointed out that in 1986, even among gay men whites accounted for 65 cases per million, while African-Americans accounted for 93 cases per million.4 He speculated that “researchers have been ‘afraid to talk racially'” about AIDS because of “a century of scholarship where whites have studied blacks not to their benefit.” If Bakerman is right, racial bias in AIDS research and services seems likely to continue unless this history is finally confronted and the inequities of local health delivery systems addressed. The focus on sexuality was also influenced by two specific regional factors: the strong influence of religion and the state sodomy law.

Religion did fuel homophobia and AlDSphobia. For example, in 1986, Atlanta Reverend Charles Stanley, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, described AIDS as God’s displeasure with the U.S. for its “tolerance of homosexuals,” spawning controversy and protest. However, religion encouraged AIDS activism as well, in the form of memorial services, prayer services, and protests at which ministers spoke. For example, four hundred people attended a healing service at St. Philip Episcopal Church in June 1986, the first gathering of its kind in Atlanta according to the AJC. It was described as having a powerful effect on participants: “My faith in the institutional church has been restored,’ said George Leich.” To challenge Reverend Stanley’s homophobic remarks, 350 people formed “a ‘circle of prayer’ around his downtown Atlanta church.” They then held “a service of their own with some Baptist-style testifying, a collection and songs.”

The visibility of churches and religion in the AJC as a source of strength and resources suggests that the increased religiosity of life in the South informed the politics of volunteerism—in itself a partial response to the Reagan administration’s failure to respond to AIDS—with an added dimension. People with AIDS were not just coming home to their families—they were coming home to their churches as well. When those churches chose to welcome them, people living with AIDS found a much-needed support network. This kind of activism may or may not be “political” in the terms of New York or San Francisco gay politics. In Atlanta’s social context it often proves a courageous response as gay activists and AIDS activists articulate the specific meaning of politics in Atlanta’s (and the Deep South’s) culture. To equate religion only with homophobia and AlDSphobia distorts its role in the construction of local response to the crisis.

As for the sodomy law, it was (and is) clearly a barrier to the efforts of AIDS activists to educate Atlantans about safer sex. It served as an critical subtext to the “homosexual” as high-risk group. In stories that constantly linked sexuality with disease, to be a gay man with AIDS was to “admit” to breaking the sodomy law. As Haitians and hemophiliacs were withdrawn from the list of risk groups, that left homosexuals and IV drug users. In the state of Georgia, both are criminals. “Heterosexual AIDS” was almost always discussed in the context of prostitution, another criminalized activity. The “criminal status” of these groups served as a key justification for the abrogation of their rights to protect the law-abiding “general public.” For example, state Representative Billy McKinney’s quarantine, test-at-will bill was ultimately dropped because the state attorney general ruled that the Georgia already held such powers. This focus on “criminal” activity could also explain the tremendous interest in the issue of children with AIDS despite the very low incidence of actual cases. The establishment of a specter of criminality served to contain the original threat, our children living with AIDS in Georgia are not “criminals”—that is, in obvious violation of the law as a result of their HIV status—and the volume of stories about them in 1986 may represent the discovery of a new epidemic which could not be explained and contained by the original “risk-group” structure.

AIDS was not the only issue to raise the status of the sodomy statute. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s law in Bowers vs. Hardwick, a case which was wending its way through the lower courts in 1985. In a September 1985 article on sodomy law, AJC political editor Frederick Allen pointed out that “The new argument [in support of the sodomy law] ignores morality and asks whether certain homosexual practices, as a medically proven source of AIDS, constitute a public health menace.” The state of Georgia chose not to raise AIDS when it defended the law before the Supreme Court, although it was cited in amicus briefs. The consequences of the criminalization of sexuality (state law prohibits certain sexual acts, regardless of the genders of the partners) has had an enormous effect on Georgia’s response to the AIDS crisis. The Georgia example also demonstrates the importance of understanding the AIDS crisis regionally. To rely on California or New York solutions, where structural barriers like the sodomy law are absent, invites further failure. Strategies must address regional and local situations.

At the same time, this Atlanta AIDS history reveals some of the complications of region in the late twentieth century United States. The distinction between national and local is tenuous at best, and always in danger of disappearing. Local issues about the Atlanta chapter of

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the American Red Cross and its blood supply are inseparable from the policies of the national American Red Cross. The Lester Maddox story was first reported by one of the national wire services with a New York dateline and carried in newspapers around the country. Even defining who is an Atlantan becomes confusing. Like most urban spaces, Atlanta has a mobile population of people from all over the country, and increasingly, the world. This is not to suggest that region is a concept inappropriate to such urban settings. Rather, it is to conclude that region can be illuminated as it illuminates. Clearly, it is critical to understanding the factors that structure the local experience of AIDS in Atlanta in order to create the most socially just response.

In the early and mid-1980s, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution told stories about AIDS which illustrate the struggle of a city to come to terms with a difficult new crisis. Though AIDS was new, it was experienced through historical ideologies of race, class, and gender, as well as sexuality and religion. To understand the process by which the crisis acquired meaning required not just an understanding of the present, but also an understanding of the past, of the social context. Understanding AIDS demanded a sense of history, of the ways in which Atlanta was a Southern city as well as a major metropolitan area. Unfortunately, it was just that sense of history that the leadership of the AJC tried to deny.

By the end of the decade, the AJC attempted to assume greater responsibility. In 1989, it ran a long feature called “When AIDS Comes Home,” recording “The Life and Death of Tom Fox,” an advertising-account representative for the paper. Like the recent film Philadelphia, this well-intentioned piece was designed to raise sympathy and awareness about the devastating effects of AIDS. Such pieces may represent the greatest achievements possible in the commercial media, which are not likely to feature the politics of angry street activists. What is most ironic, however, is that the feature brings AIDS home without a full accounting of what “home” means. What continues to be absent is any kind of analysis of how being in Atlanta affects the experience of AIDS. Over a decade into the AIDS crisis, we look back at the failures of the early responses to find ourselves facing many of the same issues. Though Atlanta shares many features with cities like San Francisco, New York, or Los Angeles, it is also a Southern city, with a history that provides special challenges and special resources. In the face of the ongoing crisis, it is time to account for what that identity means.

Notes:

Additional sources:

Chirimuuta, Richard C., and Rosalind J. Chirimuuta. AIDS, Africa and Racism. London: Free Association Books, 1989.

Dutt, Ashok K., Charles B. Monroe, Hiran M. Dutta, and Barbara Prince. “Geographical Patterns of AIDS in the United States.” The Geographic Review 77, 4 (October 1987): 456-471.

Greene, Harlan. What The Dead Remember. New York: Dutton Books, 1991.

Kayal, Philip M. Bearing Witness: Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the Politics of AIDS. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993.

Kinsella, James. Covering the Plague: AIDS and the American Media. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989.

Moore, Gary. “Southern journalism: gone with the wind? Seems like nobody is left to name names and kick ass.” Columbia Journalism Review 30, 5 (January/February 1992): 30-34.

Patton, Cindy. Inventing AlDS. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Rogers, Theresa F.; Singers, Eleanor and Imperio, Jennifer. “The Polls: Poll Trends, AIDS—An Update.” Public Opinion Quarterly 57 (1993): 92-114.

Robinson, Jr., David. “Sodomy and the Supreme Court.” Commentary 82, 4 (October 1986), 57-61.

Shannon, Gary W., Gerald F. Pyle, and Rashid L. Bashshur. The Geography of AIDS: Origins and Course of an Epidemic. New York: The Guilford Press, 1991.

Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. New York: Penguin Books, 1988.

Tannen, Holly and Morris, David. “AIDS Jokes: Punishment, Retribution, and Renegotiation.” Southern Folklore 46, no. 2 (1989): 147-158.

Meredith Raimondo is a graduate student in Women’s Studies at Emory University. Her research seeks to bring cultural and historical perspectives to bear on AIDS in the South.

Cross Purposes

Review Essay by Vivian May

Vol. 16, No. 2, 1994, pp. 13-17

“There came to me, in answer to prayer, a reward for my sufferings, the perfect maid. She is well trained, as good a cook as I, well educated, with almost my own tastes in literature and movies. She loves the country, she loves my dog, she loves company dinners, she dislikes liquor and has no interest in men”—Marjorie Rawlings, Cross Creek.

Idella: Marjorie Rawlings’ “Perfect Maid,” by Idella Parker with Mary Keating (University of Florida Press, 1992, 156 pages).

Cross Creek, by Marjorie K. Rawlings (Collier/Macmillan, 1987, 384 pages).

Cross Creek Cookery, by Marjorie K. Rawlings (Scribner/Macmillan, 1971, 256 pages).

Idella Parker has written her 1992 autobiography, Idella: Marjorie Rawlings’ “Perfect Maid,” in dialogue with Rawlings’ 1942 autobiography, Cross Creek. When the two books are considered together, the results are startling. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953) was the author of many works of fiction and non-fiction, but is most remembered for her Pulitzer Prize winning 1938 novel The Yearling (made by MGM into the 1946 Gregory Peck-Jane Wyman movie) and her Cross Creek Cookery (1942) collection of recipes. From 1940 to 1950, years in which the writer was living in and fictionalizing north central Florida, Parker worked as Rawlings’ domestic. Unlike Rawlings, who lived outside the South until 1938, Parker was a Florida native who later taught in black schools, worked as a beautician, and taught homemaking skills to educable mentally retarded children. She lives today in Ocala.

Both Cross Creek and Idella are unusual because their authors are relatively invisible, portraying themselves indirectly through the people and geography around them. Yet each woman’s invisibility-as-visibility functions differently. Rawlings obscures her privilege and her exploitiveness: her descriptions and actions seem neutral, objective. Parker mimics or parodies her invisibility as a domestic worker. She uses her circumscribed voice against itself. Parker highlights how constructed her situation is, whereas Rawlings is blind to the forces shaping her point of view. Parker emphasizes the lack of power ascribed to marginalized and denigrated people; unwittingly, Rawlings does the same.

Parker’s ostensible aim is to examine Rawlings’ claim in Cross Creek that she was a “perfect” maid. As she does this, Parker reveals how unaware Rawlings was of her own prejudices and problems. Seeming to write in a deferential manner and in congenial dialogue with her “friend,” Parker actually writes in opposition to Rawlings and the white culture she represents. Her narrative voice is passive, removed, and frequently obsequious. Parker gives more space to their “friendship” than to other facets of her life. In fact, because Idella is not about the times in her life when she is happy and/or not exploited (childhood, schooling, college, her second marriage, her other careers), it is an autobiographical account of one part of

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her life: exploitation and her escape from it. By depicting their friendship and the “superiority” of Rawlings in a passive, deferential tone, Parker reveals her own considerable virtues and her capacity for survival. Moreover, Parker shows Rawlings’ self-portrait in Cross Creek as an independent adventurer to be an illusion upheld by Rawlings’ physical and emotional dependence on Parker.

Rawlings is differently invisible in Cross Creek than Parker is in Idella. Her voice is more personal and active, yet she, too, does not discuss many parts of her life (marriages, family, childhood, friendships). As she tells about her neighbors and herself farming, hunting, and arguing, she evokes the local plants and animals, painting a romanticized portrait of her environment. Her narrative emphasizes the ways in which Nature and the seasons of the year affect the inner workings of the community. Rawlings’ “natural” surroundings include, however, African Americans, whom she animalizes and exoticizes.

Cross Creek is modeled on the “man contemplates nature” genre (Thoreau) rather than the more introspective or private “domestic” autobiography and fiction which were still, in the 1940’s, considered more “appropriate” for women to write. Rawlings also writes against the American ideology of industrial progress. Her text is unemotional and un-“feminine.” She presents herself as independent, self-sufficient, and possessing “masculine” characteristics. Through differentiation from black people, Rawlings imagines herself as an active, knowing, subject. More concretely, she is as ‘one of the [white] guys’ who enjoys hunting, farming, and a good, stiff drink, or two.

Both women write about the same place, but their sense of local geography is very different. Rawlings’ opening chapter, “Cross Creek,” maps out the area for the reader:

Cross Creek is a bend in a country road, by land, and the flowing of Lochloosa Lake into Orange Lake, by water. We are four miles west of the small village of Island Grove, nine miles east of a turpentine still, and on the other sides we do not count distance at all, for the two lakes and the broad marshes create an infinite space between us and the horizon. We are five white families…and two colored families…. The Creek folk of color are less suspect [of madness] than the rest of us. Yet there is something a little different about them from blacks who live gregariously in Quarters, so that even if they did not live at the Creek, they would stay, I think, somehow aloof from the layer-cake life of the average Negro. (1-2)

Cross Creek lies at the center, with the surrounding area defined in relation to it. The population, both white and black, is located geographically and psychologically: “[m]adness is only a variety of mental nonconformity and we are all individualists here.” (2) The distinction Rawlings makes between “us” and “them” not only distinguishes Cross Creek “folk” from other “folk”—it distinguishes between black and white, between the “layer-cake life” and the “individualist’s” life of “mental nonconformity.” Rawlings implies that although the “Creek folk of color” are different from the “average Negro,” they are, nonetheless, not part of the “we” of individualists in the same way that white Cross Creekers are.

She portrays Cross Creek as serenely beautiful, contemplative, “unpopulated,” and rather innocent:

I walk at sunset, east along the road. There are no houses in that direction, except the abandoned one where the wild plums grow, white with bloom in springtime. I usually walk halfway to the village and back again…. The Negroes touch

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a finger to their ragged caps or pretend courteously not to see me. Evening after evening I walk as far as the magnolias near Big Hammock, and home, and see no one. (5-6)

The black people she meets are considered no one, invisible.

Rawlings’ perspective is that of a white landowner when she uses “we” to discuss “members” of the community. For example: “We at the Creek need and have found only very simple things. We must need flowering and fruiting trees, for all of us have citrus groves of one size or another. We must need a certain blandness of season, with a longer and more beneficent heat than many require, for there is never too much sun for us, and through the long summers we do not complain.” (3) Certainly not all the inhabitants of Cross Creek own citrus groves. And, was it true that those who worked for the grove owners never complained of the “more beneficent heat” as they threshed the fields, repaired fences, and cooked in woodfired ovens? Self-centering is expected in autobiographies, yet with her “we” Rawlings erases people or makes them mute.

For Parker, Cross Creek is not a place of quirky madness and romanticized agrarian individualism. “Cross Creek,” she writes, “does not fill me with longing for the ‘good old days.’ It stands as a reminder to me of how far we have come from those days of hard work and segregation.” (xi) Parker is from Reddick, a small town a few miles from Cross Creek. Reddick does not exist for Rawlings—even though she finds her “perfect” maid there. At the beginning of her book, Parker provides a literal map that shows the larger geography of northern Florida. One among many small towns, Cross Creek is not a center on Parker’s map. She describes the locale(s) of her narrative quite differently than Rawlings. The places which Rawlings finds beautiful, peaceful and intrinsically “pure” are often places of loneliness, alienation, and danger for Parker. She writes,

There was no social life for me there at the Creek at all, because the other workers and I had very little in common. I didn’t enjoy ‘jukin,’ and there was no church for me to belong to nearby. Including Mrs. Rawlings’ house there were only five houses in Cross Creek, all owned by white people. There were no churches, no stores, no telephones, and no transportation except what was provided by Mrs. Rawlings. The nearest town was five miles away, and you didn’t dare try to walk. Few cars passed, and all manner of snakes were always crawling across the road, so you were afraid. I felt like I was stuck in Cross Creek. (40)

Parker’s fear has more to do with the innocuous town “five miles away”—Island Grove—than with snakes. Parker’s mother says to her, “‘You know you can’t work in no Island Grove, child. They’ll kill you!’ I knew what Mama was talking about. I’d been hearing stories about how sometimes colored folks mysteriously disappeared in Island Grove ever since I was a child, and those scary tales came rushing back into my mind. Island Grove was a white man’s town, a place where colored people were not welcome.” (17)

Rawlings and Parker write about the same area, yet it has different meanings for each. Having come from the invisible, non-existent Reddick, Parker’s perspective challenges the romanticized beauty of Cross Creek. She reveals Rawlings’ natural paradise of evening walks and studies of local flora to be a space of social alienation, spiritual deprivation, physical entrapment, and psychological loneliness.

Rawlings’ Cross Creek is harmonious because black people are one-dimensional, part of the scenery, mute: “Florida is a country of the work-dog, even where that dog is a pointer or setter and so something, always, of a pet. We live a leisurely life, but while our dogs lie, as we, in the sun, they are also expected to serve us, as the Negro serves.” (32) Rawlings claims African-Americans are like a “black ape,” (186) a “seething mass,” (280) and “a cage of birds.” (324) Of one of her servants—Geechee—she writes:

She was the ugliest Negress I had ever seen….I dressed her….In my clothes she looked like a battered black rag doll. As the weeks passed I bought her a cautious cheap uniform or two. Even in their white formality she seemed always about to burst into belligerent dance, tearing her garments from her, prancing naked in savage triumph. The effect came from her lioness stride, from her unkempt hair which shot in black electric spirals from her skull….I could have beaten her raw those first months and it would not have mattered. She cleaned my house…She was as wild-looking as some fresh-caught African slave. (82-90)

While Rawlings implies that she is sexually self-controlled, culturally civilized, and normal, she exposes her desire for power over others—to clothe, hire and fire, and beat them. The African Americans she portrays are visible only through the myopic lens of racist figures of speech.

In Idella, Parker manipulates the stereotypes of domestics as non-subjects. Parker’s reminiscing is friendly and deferential, yet there is a derisive or cutting under-

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tone which is most evident in her endless descriptions of the mundane aspects of Rawlings’ life. One of her first descriptions of Rawlings begins in a complimentary tone that degenerates rapidly into one of disdain, disapproval, and pity:

Mrs. Rawlings usually weighed about 180 pounds, and was about five foot seven inches tall. From the waist up she was small but bosomy, with very small hands and short, slim fingers. From the waist down she was heavy, with nice, well-shaped legs and the smallest feet. She must have worn a size three or four shoe. Her eyes were grayish blue. Her hair was unruly and she seldom gave any attention to it….Mrs. Rawlings didn’t care about how she looked. She was always clean, of course, but the types of dresses, shoes, and socks she sometimes put on would make me laugh. (1)

On the following page, we see Rawlings “with very thin lips” and “covered with dog and cat hair.” By the next, we learn that Rawlings “drank far more than she should have….She would cry readily.”

Parker is contradictory when describing their personal relationship. “I think fear caused us [employees] to be obedient and do as we were told,” Parker writes. “I say ‘told,’ because even Mrs. Rawlings, kind as she was, never asked her workers to do anything, she told them. In our first years together Mrs. Rawlings was just like other white people; she talked at me, not to me. Whatever she said do, I did.” (xii) Yet a few pages later she states, “Although I was black, and knew that I could only do or say just so much, we were more than servant and master. We were close friends and companions. She confided in me and I have always kept her confidences. Even now that she is gone, there are many things about her I do not feel free to say.” (1)

Parker appears to balance her portrayal of Rawlings by referring to her loyalty to their friendship. She performs this balancing act throughout Idella. “Our friendship was an unusually close one for the times we lived in,” she writes on the book’s final page. “Yet no matter what the ties were that bound us together, we were still a black woman and a white woman, and the barrier of race was always there. In private…there was deep friendship and respect, and no thought of the social differences between us. But whenever other people were around, the barrier of color went up automatically.” (128) The idea that there was “no thought of the social differences between us” is hard to believe after having read of her servitude—a servitude Parker parallels to slavery. (115) Her apparent obsequious fondness becomes derisive or mocking as Idella‘s narrative unfolds and Parker reveals the kind of physical and psychological exploitation she suffered in the employ of her “friend” Rawlings.

Judith Rollins, in her book Between Women: Domestics and their Employers (1985), emphasizes that what “makes domestic service as an occupation…profoundly exploitive…[is] the personal relationship between employer and employee. What might appear to be the basis of a more humane, less alienating work arrangement allows for a level of psychological exploitation unknown in other occupations.” (156) Rawlings’ and Parker’s relationship was exploitive because of a variety of forms of deference. Linguistic deference is obvious in that Parker always refers to Marjorie Rawlings as “Mrs. Rawlings” and herself as “Idella.” Any white people she worked for are “Mr.” or “Mrs.”, while all black people are called by their first names.

At one point in Idella, Parker directly addresses the familiar kinds of linguistic, spatial, and political deference required or demanded at the time: “We weren’t allowed to

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register, so we couldn’t vote. We didn’t enter white people’s houses by the front door, and we were taught to address white people with ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, ma’am,’ not just ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ We sat in the back seats on public buses and separate cars on trains, and we sure didn’t sit up front in a white lady’s car.” (19)

Parker lived in a small tenant house separate from the main house at Cross Creek. She did not eat meals with Rawlings, but served them to her in the dining room or in bed. Parker’s deference was essential to pleasing Rawlings: “To her I was perfect because I knew what to do without being told, and because I eased her mind.” (37) Really “[a]ll she was interested in was whether I could cook and keep her house, hold quiet, and let her do her work.” (61-64) At one dinner which Parker helped to cook and serve, she describes the anger she felt at the “way Mrs. Rawlings and her guests made fun of us black folks right to our faces, and supposed that we were too stupid to know it.” (80-81)

Perhaps most emotionally exploitive for Parker was her prescribed role as Rawlings’ confidante or “friend.” Parker emphasizes that Rawlings confided things to her that she told no one else. (1, 74, 85, 110) In Between Women, Rollins argues that using domestics as confidantes reinforces the “existential distance” between employer and employee. “Using a domestic as a confidante,” Rollins writes, “may, in fact, be evidence of the distance in even the closest of these relationships. Employers can feel free to tell domestics secrets they would not share with their friends or family precisely because this domestic is so far from being socially and psychologically significant to the employer.” (167) Parker writes that her and Rawlings’ “relationship was a close one, but it was one that often felt burdensome to me.” (85) She implies that her perception that they were friends she now sees as incorrect in phrases such as “it never occurred to me to question anything I was told to do.” (39)

In the first pages of Idella, Parker tells us that she is an excellent cook who learned all she knew from her mother. (9) Discovering that Parker can cook well, Rawlings asks “for some of [her] recipes (all of which were in [her] head and hands, but not written down).” (Idella, 3637) As Rawlings decides to write Cross Creek Cookery, Parker remembers,

[w]hen she got the idea to write the cookbook…we were months and months together in that tiny kitchen….As I have said before, my recipes were in my hands and head. I never wrote them down until Mrs. Rawlings started on that cookbook….Many of the recipes in the book were mine, but she only gave me credit for three of them, including ‘Idella’s Biscuits.’ There were several others that were mine, too, such as the chocolate pie, and of course it was me who did most of the cooking when we were trying all the recipes out. All I ever got from the cookbook was an autographed copy, but in those days I was grateful for any little crumb that white people let fall, so I kept my thoughts about the cookbook strictly to myself. (69)

Parker’s invisibility to Rawlings is nowhere more evident than in a detailed chapter in Cross Creek about cooking and food, “Our Daily Bread.” The pen and ink drawing on the chapter’s first page shows a black servant bent over peeling potatoes while appearing to be in conversation with a dog. Rawlings gives no credit given to the endless cooking that Parker has done. In Idella Parker describes the six- or seven-course dinner parties that Rawlings enjoyed, and how she and Martha (another domestic) would work for hours. Rawlings implies that she does all the cooking and preparing herself.

Parker writes against invisibility by showing Rawlings’ method of maintaining illusions. In her telling, Parker performs a change in consciousness. In her finally leaving Rawlings, Parker places her exploitation and escape in the larger context and history of race relations in the U.S. By contrasting Cross Creek and Idella, we learn that both women’s spatial, cultural, racial, and gendered perceptions are relative. Parker mirrors Rawlings back upon herself as the final irony against a woman who saw in Parker (and the rest of the black Cross Creek community) a mirror for self-aggrandizement.

Vivian May is a graduate student in Women’s Studies at Emory University in Atlanta.

Unfinished Tasks

By Harry Ashmore

Vol. 16, No. 2, 1994, pp. 20-23, 31

If American society is divided by horizontal class lines, there is also a vertical division based on race that begins at the point where the affluent are set apart from the poor. Analysis of 1990 census data showed that blacks in significant numbers lived in upscale urban and suburban neighborhoods, but intimate contact with their white neighbors was minimal. Generations of Southern demagogues had claimed that such residential race mixing would result in wholesale miscegenation, but the 53 million marriages recorded in the 1990 census included only 240,000 with a black spouse.

In the upper strata of society racial attitudes, reinforced by ethnocentrism on both sides, still inhibited interaction and provided fertile ground for political exploitation. But in the ghettos the issues were still those that had existed throughout the nation’s history. The greatly expanded opportunities available to middleclass blacks remained as far beyond the reach of most underclass youths as they had been for their sharecropping forebears. Segregation was still the dominant fact of life below the poverty line, and the issue was quite literally survival.

In his campaign, Clinton had carefully avoided proposals targeted directly at the festering problems in the inner cities. If they could be persuaded to vote, the poor blacks who lived there could provide effective political support, but the threat of racial violence emanating from these neglected communities also worked against any candidate who embraced their cause in the name of social justice.

The result was spelled out in the conclusions of leading social scientists who contributed to The Urban Underclass, a 1991 Brookings Institution study. “Universalism” was the key term that emerged from the mass of statistical evidence. Despite the surge of antitax sentiment, broadbased programs such as Medicare and Social Security had remained securely imbedded in the unbalanced federal budget. But problems peculiar to poor blacks had long since lost priority. Any approach to meeting their needs would have to be, as J. David Greenstone put it, “politically feasible, that is, be supported outside the inner cities.”

Kevin Phillips, whose focus on the common denominator of self-interest had made him the most reliable Washington appraiser of political attitudes, concurred:

To the extent that you tell the middleclass you are going to tax the rich so that you can give more to the middleclass, they will love you. But if you tell suburbia you are going to tax them more so you can give more to low-income school districts, they are not going to do it.

Head Start was the only Great Society program of consequence to survive the rising tide of right-wing populism. The preschool program was never adequately funded, but it managed to gain popular support to the point where it even received the blessing of Presidents Reagan and

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Bush. President Clinton was pledged to increase its reach to include all eligible children, and increased funding was included in his pared-down budget.

Head Start met the political test the administration applied to most of the recommendations it made to Congress—that they have sufficient popular support to overcome ideological opposition. “Poor children, who cannot readily be blamed for their plight,” Greenstone noted, “are relatively popular beneficiaries.” And Head Start also had the political virtue of being effectively divorced from any prospect of directly advancing racial integration.

Busing was a dead letter, and the Supreme Court had opened the way for district courts to rescind orders requiring the elimination of segregated schools. Eligibility for Head Start required that children must come from families below the poverty line, and if it were opened to all such, the great majority of new black recruits would be found in urban districts from which 96.7 percent of white students had decamped.

As he rounded into the second year in office, it was unclear how well Bill Clinton was succeeding in his declared goal of persuading the American people to take a longer-range view of public policy. Congress had imposed a higher priority on budget-balancing than he had projected, forcing him to cut back on proposed economic stimulus programs to offset the continuing effects of structural job loss. But the outlines of a new industrial policy had been put in place, and he had restored the burden of increased revenue on upper-income taxpayers, while exempting the poor and minimizing the impact on those in mid-income brackets.

He was still plagued by the skepticism of the media, which continued to portray him as a blundering neophyte out of his depth in big league politics. But when Congress closed out the 1993 session, Congressional Quarterly’s scorecard showed that Clinton had prevailed on 90 percent of the votes on which he took a stand—the highest success rate since the first year of the Eisenhower administration forty years before.

In the course of wheeling and dealing with Congress, he had reaffirmed his centrist position—prevailing against the Republicans on basic elements of his social programs, and successfully outmaneuvering the labor unions on the left and Ross Perot on the right, to put through the North American Free Trade Agreement with a vote margin that refuted the dire predictions of the pundits.

As he moved to take his case directly to the electorate, the polls showed that he was rallying majority support for health care reform, the centerpiece of his design for redirecting the nation’s social policies. Government-directed universal medical coverage would provide an essential benefit for the underclass but the emphasis was on meeting the needs of the middleclass. Welfare and educational reform were still on the presidential agenda, but as a Los Angeles Times headline put it, the White House was “Fighting a Quiet War on Poverty.”

Some of the initiatives clearly are focused on relieving poverty—programs aimed at decreasing homelessness and stimulating business in depressed communities for example. Other new programs, including national service, are couched in rhetoric about helping a broad spectrum of the population but are targeted at low-income individuals and poor communities.

Clinton’s critics labeled this a “stealth policy.” Those on the left discounted the programs as palliatives designed to distract attention from his sellout to business interests in the name of job creation, while the Heritage Foundation spoke for the right wing when it charged that the administration was really bent on “throwing money at every welfare program we’ve ever had…old ideas that the administration is trotting out even when they are proven failures.”

But Labor Secretary Robert Reich pointed out that the focus on encouraging private sector job creation was

what we were elected to do. The putting-people-first campaign was all about investing in the work force. There is a difference between this and the older Democratic philosophy of redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. It’s about giving everyone in society the capacity to be a constructive member of society.

Representative Craig Washington of Texas reflected the

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prevailing view of the Congressional Black Caucus: “It’s a smart approach. The people who have the least clout and the least influence…are poor people. If you stick something out there like a sore thumb, it would never get passed. It’s more important to do something to help the poor than to beat your horn about it.”

Appraisals of Clinton’s performance in terms of the conventional political orientation of Democrats and Republicans had become virtually meaningless in the face of pressures emanating from the electorate. Passage of a package of gun control measures he had sponsored, Clinton said, had nothing to do with ideology; the Congressional response demonstrated that “Americans are finally fed up with violence that cuts down another citizen with gunfire every twenty minutes.” Wherever they chose to place the blame, city dwellers were faced with inescapable reminders of the cost to the whole community of failure to deal with the root causes of crime and violence in the inner cities.

The mounting negative force of these unmet needs were demonstrated in the 1993 off-year elections in Los Angeles, which epitomized the dislocations afflicting all major cities. The coalition of liberals, Jews, blacks, labor and downtown business interests that had kept a moderate Democrat, Tom Bradley, in the mayor’s office for twenty years went down to crushing defeat. His successor was Richard Riordan, an obscure Republican multimillionaire who had moved ahead of twenty-eight candidates with a Perot-style television blitz paid for by six million dollars of his own money.

An exit poll on the day of Riordan’s runoff victory over the Democratic organization’s candidate, City Councilman Michael Woo, provided what the Los Angeles Times termed “a downcast portrait of the city’s political landscape”:

It is a portrait of an electorate deeply divided by race and by what it expects of the next mayor, but unified in its doubts about the honesty of both candidates, its distaste for the campaign’s negative tone and its deep skepticism that improvement will occur….

With a different cast of characters, that portrait would be replicated in mayoral elections in Detroit and New York later in the year.

Maxine Waters, who represented riot-torn South Central Los Angeles in Congress, put a human face on the source of municipal angst:

Look on any street corner—any street corner in my congressional district or in any other urban center—and you will see him. He is a member of our lost generation.

He is between 17 and 30 years old, the product of a dysfunctional family. Unskilled and without a job, he is living from girlfriend to mother to grandmother. He’s not reflected in the unemployment statistics and surely isn’t on the tax rolls. If he’s driving, it’s without a license. If he’s bunking in public housing, you won’t find his name on the lease. He has a record—misdemeanors if he is lucky, felonies more likely. He was the most visible participant in the Los Angeles uprising, but otherwise he seems almost invisible to society.

For too many young men in my district, and in other cities around this country, there is precious little hope. They have given up on themselves and they have given up on us. If we know what’s good for us—and him—we had better start paying him some attention.

Bill Clinton came before the American people as a healer, committed to bringing together a divided nation. Martin Luther King, he said, had been the teacher of his generation: “He taught us about the pain and promise of America, about the redemptive healing of faith and discipline, about love and courage….” As a politician in a poor Southern state, Clinton had also recognized the end of racial discrimination as a pragmatic necessity—not only to meet the pressure exerted by newly enfranchised blacks, but also to free whites of the crippling legacy from the racist past. Blacks now posed a similar challenge for the nation.

When they were isolated and powerless, their existence as a mass of exploited workers had refuted the majority’s professed moral precepts; the civil rights movement that made them a positive factor in national life had tested the basic tenets of governance. Now the movement had run its course and black leaders no longer held the moral high ground. But the effects of the social Darwinism reinstated as public policy could not be ignored if there was to be a restoration of the level of civility upon which democratic government ultimately depends.

The death of Thurgood Marshall during the week of the Clinton inaugural had provided a poignant reminder of the practical consequences of the nation’s failure to live up to the moral standards prescribed in its founding documents. He was laid out on Capitol Hill in the great hail of the marble temple emblazoned with the slogan “Equal Justice Under Law.” Congress had ordered Abraham Lincoln’s catafalque brought to the Court to serve as his bier, and scores of thousands filed by to pay their respects to one of the last survivors of those who

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carried the civil rights banner in the days when there was no mass movement to support them.

For me, Justice Marshall symbolized the gallantry that went into the effort to change the legal contours of the nation’s race relations. When I first encountered him he was a lonely figure standing tall in Southern courtroom before hostile white judges and juries, arguing the case for his people he would ultimately make undeniable. He was sustained in that hazardous practice by a sense of irony and an ingrained civility that never deserted him.

The Newsday columnist Murray Kempton thought the origin of those qualities could be seen in an anecdote from the days when young Thurgood worked during college vacations as a waiter at the Gibson Island Club on Chesapeake Bay, where his father was chief steward:

One night, when the younger Marshall was at his station, a visiting congressman from Iowa, high flown with insolence, wine and ignorance of the customs of the region, called out, “Come here, nigger.”

And then Ellison Durant Smith, the senator from South Carolina, rose up to demand in thunder, “What did he call you, Thurgood? I will not hear that word spoken in this club.”

The offender was driven into the night, exiled for a private racial slur by the wrath of Cotton Ed Smith, the most tireless race-baiter on the Senate floor. The “n” word was Smith’s common currency for the campaigns he debased; but he would not tolerate its utterance in the company of gentlemen.

Marshall could tell that tale without rancor. It came from the vast stock of anecdotes he drew upon to instruct his learned brethren on the Supreme Court. “They are his way of preserving the past while purging it of its bleakest moment,” Justice William Brennan said. “They are also a form of education for the rest of us. Surely Justice Marshall recognizes that the stories made us—his colleagues—confront walks of life we had never known.”

Entertaining no doubt as to his own identity, Marshall ignored the circumlocutions that reflected the effort to end usage blacks believed, with good reason, to be redolent of white contempt. He never accepted “black” and continued to use “Negro” in his opinions until his final years on the bench, when he adopted “African-American” but pointedly rejected “Afro-American.”

It was said even by admirers that Marshall’s opinions could not be considered the work of a great legal scholar. That was the note James Jackson Kilpatrick, the father of interposition, struck in reviewing a hagiography written by the black columnist Carl Rowan. Yet, however he may have intended it, Kilpatrick paid proper tribute when he wrote, “His passion was not for law. His passion was for justice.” Those who had come to the Court lately made a distinction between the two that cast Marshall in the role of dissenter.

He held on as long as he could, telling those anxious for a vacancy, “I have a lifetime appointment and I expect to serve it. I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband.” But in 1991 declining health forced him to step down, making way for Clarence Thomas, a black lawyer of another generation who had won appointment by repudiating everything Marshall stood for.

It was a measure of the changing political climate that the justice who moved from majority to minority came to the bench after winning twenty-seven of thirty-three cases he argued before the Court, many of them brought in the days when most of the justices were rated as conservative. When he put aside the advocate’s role he demonstrated that the usual political labels had little application in the areas of the law where he consistently took his stand.

“Marshall’s focus had always been more inclusive than African-Americans,” said Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, who served as attorney general in the stormy days of the civil rights movement:

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His concern is with all people who do not enjoy the full benefits of a free society…. Fundamentally, he is in his passion for the individual a conservative, a democrat who cannot tolerate the arbitrary acts of governmental bureaucracy in its unconcern for individual rights.

Kenneth Clark rode with Marshall when he headed South to Charleston to try Briggs, the Clarendon County case he would pursue to his final victory in Brown. Late that night, as the train pounded down through Virginia, Marshall looked up from his briefs and said, “You know, Kenneth, sometimes I get awfully tired of trying to save the white man’s soul.”

The task of redemption remained unfinished, and as a new president came up from the South to address it he was faced with the question I had left open a generation ago when the rise of the civil rights movement marked the end of the era I memorialized in An Epitaph for Dixie: “There is reason to wonder, certainly, whether the American political system as it has evolved under the impact of the expanding cities is anywhere giving us the kind of public and private leadership our age demands.”

Former editor of the Arkansas Gazette and an SRC Life Fellow, Harry Ashmore now lives in Santa Barbara, Calif. This essay is excerpted from his new book, Civil Rights and Wrongs (Knopf, 1994), which explores his personal remembrances of U.S. race relations in the fifty years since the publication of Gunnar Myrdal’s landmark study, The American Dilemma, and the founding of the Southern Regional Council.

Unreconciled Southerners

Reviewed by Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 16, No. 2, 1994, pp. 24-26

A Southern Life, Letters of Paul Green, 1916-1981, edited by Laurence G. Avery (University of North Carolina Press, 1994, 735 pages).

I confess that I often feel that the best have gone on, have left the rest of us mired in stagnating and smelly marshes of mediocrity and venality which these days run from art to politics. Is that bit of gloom but the crankiness of a load of years? Perhaps.

But I do remember women and men, Southerners strong among them, whose like I see few of now. They were persons of great and fulfilled talents. They were more than that too. They looked for the enlargement, not the denial, of liberal democracy. They worked for and taught generosity of personal spirit. They did not cheapen public affairs, did not offer us excuses for being violent or for holding down our brothers and sisters. They called on us, here in the South and in the nation, to act like a civilized people. Here in our marsh, pulled down as we are by the mean likes of Helms, Gingrich, Farrakhan, Edwin Edwards, North, and Falwell and Robertson, we have almost forgotten there can be such.

The publication of Paul Green’s letters testifies that there can be.

Paul Green was, first of all, a writer. Asked once if he would be a candidate to succeed Frederick Koch as head of the Department of Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina (where Green had an identification, as student, faculty member, and neighbor, from when he enrolled in 1916 until his death in 1981), he declined: “It happens that I am irrevocably bitten by the writing bug.” A list of his writings is appended to the book, and it is truly impressive: Broadway plays, outdoor dramas (he liked to call them—The Lost Colony, The Common Glory, Wilderness Road, and yet more—”symphonic dramas”), film scripts, novels, essays. For his In Abraham’s Bosom, he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1927.

These letters which Laurence Avery has collected and selected—and to which he has given a fine and exemplary introduction and annotations—give much insight into the process, vicissitudes, and triumphs of Green’s writing. They include some fascinating correspondence with Jesse Helms—six months before Green’s death at age 87 he was urging the Senator to speak out for American-Russian “cooperative” disarmament—and patches of comedy, such as a really funny spoof of Samuel Beckett and his Waiting for Godot. The letters are full too of family and friends; some are old love letters to his Elizabeth. I’ll have to leave all that for another.

Green was also and at all times engaged with public affairs.

Green’s life was of a piece, and the concern of his plays were his social concerns as well. In the 1920s his racial views were, to say the least, uncommon. Having accepted the humanity of blacks as a child, a perception not prevalent in his locale [Harnett County, N.C.] or even his family, he was one of the few white southerners in the 1920s who could envision integration. When he voiced his outlook, of course, he precipitated a storm. In 1927 he wrote an introduction for Congaree Sketches: Scenes from Negro Life in the Swamps of the Congaree, a collection of black folk tales by E.C.L. Adams, and in it he called for an American social order in which race doesn’t count. He supported W.E.B Dubois’s crusade for full equality for blacks and concluded by saying he could “see no sense in the talk of segregation, back to Africa, and the like…. It all seems beside the point.”

The letters have been given the title A Southern Life, and that is apt. Green was time and again running off to New York or Hollywood for work and to other places around the country and world, but always returned to Chapel Hill, and was always a bleeding-heart, liberal North Carolinian and Southerner. He seems, on the evidence of these letters, to have been consistently alert to where he was and what he could do to move the region forward. In 1925, for example, he took over as editor of a literary magazine, The Reviewer (which collapsed for

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want of funds after four issues). He immediately asked the Negro writer and scholar Benjamin Brawley for an article, suggesting one on growing up in the South, which Brawley—with dignity—declined to do in favor of a piece of literary criticism of Robert Browning. (Brawley did later write the autobiographical piece, and his writing appeared in three of the magazine’s four issues.)

A third of a century later, in 1962, his fellow Southern Regional Council member, Winston-Salem attorney Irving E. Carlyle, wrote to Green worriedly about the segregationist statements of the University’s recently retired professor of anatomy, W.C. George. Green wrote back that he was less concerned with what “weak fellows like George” can do to the University, than what a possibly liberal-minded but timid and mindless faculty and administration could do to it.

A first large racial scrap for him had been the “Scottsboro Boys” case, that of the nine black men accused in Alabama of raping two white women. Green angrily rejected an appeal for a financial contribution that came from Theodore Dreiser—”Mr. Dreiser, I also have written, agonized, talked and prayed over the Scottsboro case just as you have.” Green blamed the tactics of the leftist group handling the defense for each day bringing “these boys twenty-four hours nearer death.” Resignedly, four months later, he yielded up some money in response to Sherwood Anderson of the same committee, and gave more two months later, to an appeal signed by John Dos Passos. Neither then nor throughout his career did Green like those he perceived as enthralled by Stalinist dogma. So there was a decidedly more friendly, more comfortable tone to his reply, with check, to Langston Hughes’ solicitation a year later: “If these Scottsboro boys are allowed to be offered up as a sacrifice to bigotry and perverted racial feeling, then we as Southern people have no right to boast of either democracy or liberty. We shall have participated in a shameful deed.”

The accused men escaped execution, but not much else that was bad. No social cause held Green’s commitment more steadily and closely than did the abolition of capital punishment. The first letter about that concern in this volume, May 1934, says that he is not “entirely against” execution but is “absolutely opposed” to it as carried out in North Carolina. No subsequent letter has any such qualifier, and there are at least ten that refer to capitol punishment. They and the editor’s footnotes reveal unstinted activity—interventions with governors, speeches, letters-to-the-editor, prison visits, consultations with lawyers, legislative lobbying; his wife was an ally. By 1945, he would write to Governor Cherry, “To kill a man in judicial cold blood is but to deny any possible development and amelioration in that man’s character. —I am opposed to capital punishment on any ground, for it is part and parcel of the old Mosaic law and of a perverse and pessimistic philosophy of mankind.” He did not for the rest of his life waver from that conviction (although the latest item here is 1967, his opposition never lessened).

Green didn’t like killing, or violence generally. In 1959, at Harold Fleming’s request, he evaluated a motion picture script about strife over school desegregation in Clinton, Tennessee for possible Southern Regional Council distribution: “too much peckerwood violence and rush and wash and go of mobbery throughout. And…there is no purgation out of this bleeding and sound and fury.” Nor, after serving dutifully in World War I, did he like war. A highlight of this book is an extraordinary letter he wrote in 1967 to Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

I have just been looking at a picture of President Johnson holding up his little grandson, his face alight with love and pride. But this love and pride become a mockery to me as I recollect that at the same moment he holds his little grandson aloft he is through our obedient young war pilots blowing other little sons to quivering morsel bits there in Vietnam. Of course the little Asiatic babies are of a different color, and according to

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you, their fathers and brothers are a threat to the security of this mighty nation. No sir!

This country was meant for better things than this!

I Know the sharp reply could be a pleading of the cause, the cause, the cause! Namely, the threat to our security. This is the way it always goes, always a cause for killing people whether armed or helpless.

But the true cause is the cause of man himself. Is it not that? Take any young man we are helping to murder in Vietnam. Is there any cause greater than the sanctity of his own life?

About three years later, after the Raleigh News Observer had published the Greens’ and the Jonathan Daniels’ exchange of Christmas cards, Green having penned on theirs a comment about the Pentagon “hogs” and Daniels having told him to “pack up your pessimism,” Green wrote to Daniels, that his cause

. . . is the cause which the rubber-lipped trumpet-mouth politicians of today betray when above the cross-studded graves of the rotting young men they howl forth the old cliche-refrain that they did not die in vain for they died to keep America Free.

Nuts to the nutty! And oh the dark blood on the ground!

…

Yes, it is the Cause of Life, of Life creative, more abundant, the Good life—and the good life means the true, the beautiful and the useful life—the heart beating life.

…

My main quarrel is and ever will be with such men as those now occupying the Pentagon and the Kremlin—bad men, evil men, blind men—along with their tribal head-hunters in the CIA. They spell damnation to you and me and our children’s children, and Dick Nixon—spells the same.

…

Yes suh, my bosom friend of these many years and many more I trust, I keep singing my song of hope and dedicated effort—singing even louder when the head conductor exchanges his baton for a rifle and calls the death march toward oblivion—my loudness being then no longer singing but a cry and an about face in the march and hollering for others to turn likewise.

Executive director of the Southern Regional Council from 1961-1965, Leslie Dunbar now lives and writes in Durham, North Carolina.

Sisters of Another Era

Reviewed by Joanne Grant

Vol. 16, No. 2, 1994, pp. 26-27

Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years, by Sarah and A. Elizabeth Delany; with Amy Hill Hearth (Kodansha, 1994, 210 pages).

Having Our Say is a folksy, feisty tale of growing up black over a hundred years of our tumultuous history of race relations. Told in the voice of two remarkable women, the Delany sisters, now 100 and 102 years old, the book provides easy access to that history and charmingly details their struggle for independence. Because of that facileness it is particularly valuable for giving the young, who, sad to say, know little about the scourge of racism, some insights into the struggle against it.

Though the Delany sisters were sheltered, growing up in a financially secure family and living for many years in the rarefied atmosphere of St. Augustine’s School in Raleigh, North Carolina, where both their parents were employed, they did not completely escape the barbs of racism. Sometimes they succeeded in deflecting them and sometimes they simply went home and cried.

The two women moved to New York to continue their education; both attended Columbia University. Sarah, or Sadie, the elder, earned a master’s degree in 1925 and taught in New York City public schools for over thirty years. Through hard work and grit Sadie became “the first colored teacher in the New York City system to teach

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domestic science on the high school level.” A. Elizabeth Delany, or Bessie, became the first black female dentist.

Their achievements did not come without struggle. As Bessie put it: “This race business does get under my skin. I have suffered a lot in my life because of it. If you asked me how I endured it, I would have to say it was because I had a good upbringing. My parents did not encourage me to be bitter.”

The sisters met many leading black figures during their long lives, including Booker T. Washington, Paul Robeson, and the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. One longs for more details about these relationships, yet the book should entice young readers into further exploration of the contributions made by blacks.

Amy Hill Hearth, who interviewed the sisters and compiled Having Our Say, writes in her introduction: “Their story, as the Delany sisters like to say, is not meant as ‘black’ or ‘women’s’ history, but American history. It belongs to all of us.”

Joanne Grant is the author of Black Protest and director of the documentary film Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker. Her written biography of Ella Baker will be published by John Wiley and Sons.

What Mama Had to Say

Reviewed by Alice Lovelace

Vol. 16, No. 2, 1994, pp. 27-28

Pushed Back to Strength: A Black Woman’s Journey Home, by Gloria Wade-Gayles (Beacon Press, 1993, 256 pages).

In these days of “Def Comedy Jam” and Snoop Doggy Dog, when the media portrays our families as dysfunctional and the single female household is blamed for every social ill from high school dropouts to the swelling welfare rolls, it is important that as a people, we African-Americans remember there was and is another way to be. Gloria Wade-Gayles reminds us of this “other way.”

In Pushed Back To Strength, she recalls for us a time when we nourished within us-the family, the community, the church- the strength and the ability to raise our children and to raise the consciousness of a nation:

Surviving meant being black, and being black meant believing in our humanity, and retaining it, in a world that denied we had it in the first place. It meant…surviving and achieving in spite of the odds and in the process, changing the world in which we lived.

In a voice honest and sincere she allows us a glimpse of her “re-remembered” life growing up in a Memphis housing project under the watchful eyes of an extended family (beyond kinship); of a time before the word “project” became something shameful, to be feared.

I have seldom heard individuals in the movement speak about the struggle to desegregate Atlanta. Wade-Gayles offers us a brief and unique glimpse of those times. “We were determined to change the city which promoted itself as ‘A City Too Busy to Hate.’ …Not until we picketed Leb’s, a Jewish delicatessen located…in front of the Rialto Theater, did the mass arrests begin.”

At times I wished for more details. For Wade-Gayles to linger for a while. How does an activist in the face of hatred and mistreatment, fear and threats, remain a humanist? How does one learn to separate the individual from the act? She describes a kind of strength this “X” generation would do well to try to learn and emulate.

Wade-Gayles is not apologetic for her times. Looking back on the events of her life she admits things could have been different (and in some ways should have been done differently).

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This is a story of my generation. Her family is our family. She reminds us of our mothers, our grandmothers, who didn’t have much for themselves yet wanted (and expected) us to possess the world.

She reminds us of the role the black church has played and continues to play in teaching self-affirmation. She reminds us we were fortunate to be born before cable, before what was said on television was more important than what Mama had to say.

When speaking to a class of high school or college students, I try to explain to them why the events of the 1950s and 60s were so important in the history of our country. It is often hard for them to comprehend what life for African-Americans must have been like before the Civil Rights Movement.

They are seldom able to appreciate the strength it took for young people of high school and college age (like them) to take on an entire nation. The notion of “redemptive love” in the face of white hatred is a particularly difficult lesson for this generation to value.

In Pushed Back To Strength I found a primer I will heartily recommend to today’s youth. A book inclusive in its recalling of a time in our national history and inspiring in its simple telling of a life.

Pushed Back to Strength is a valuable lesson for all Americans, a reminder that a common history brought us to this point, a history which gave rise to a generation unique in its vision and ideals.

Atlanta writer Alice Lovelace teaches as an artist-in-residence in public schools throughout the region. Her newest book is Remembering My Birth: New and Collected Poems.

Spirit and Velocity

Reviewed by Barry E. Lee

Vol. 16, No. 2, 1994, pp. 28-31

Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, by John Dittmer (University of Illinois Press, 1994, 530 pages).

John Dittmer’s Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi traces the struggles of black Mississippians, aided by national civil rights organizations, to break the death grip of white supremacy. The author unearths the origins of the Mississippi movement in the post-World War II period and the preceding decades. While admitting that to affix dates is arbitrary, the book closes “the movement” in 1968 with the demise of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party after its failure to impact the platform of the Democratic Party at its national convention in Chicago.

Dittmer’s thesis is that the Mississippi movement was made possible by three elements: the courage and commitment of local activists like Medgar Evers, Amzie Moore, Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray, and Annie Devine; the energy and enthusiasm of young SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) organizers; and the reputation of the state as a fortress of racial oppression which made service there a badge of courage. The key ingredient in the movement was the willingness of local people to act on their own behalf while also welcoming outside help. These factors combined to generate the strongest and most far-reaching civil rights activity of the period, easily surpassing the sister movements in southwest Georgia and all of Alabama—Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham included. While citing the volume of change that occurred as a result of the movement, Dittmer reminds the reader of the limits of those changes; black Mississippians still remained largely in abject poverty, attended segregated schools, and lacked any real political power statewide even with 250,000 registered voters.

Dittmer is uniquely qualified to synthesize the Mississippi struggle. The DePauw University history professor has published other works on the Black South, including Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920. In addition, he taught history at Tougaloo College from 1967-1979, giving him a close and personal view of many of the events detailed in his book.

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Local People has special, personal significance for this reviewer, a Delta native who was born in Indianola. In chapter three, Dittmer mentions the name of Dr. Clinton C. Battle, head of the Indianola NAACP. My parents purchased our home from Dr. Battle and my mother stills lives there. Reading about Medgar Evers brings back memories of his visits to our home to chat with my father. My maternal grandmother has been associated for decades with the Gulfside Methodist Assembly, a black-run retreat center in Waveland used by SNCC in late 1964 to hammer out its future goals, programs, and structure. I have spent part of nearly every summer since my birth in 1957 visiting my grandmother, who continues to live in Waveland.

Several features combine to make Dittmer’s book valuable. First, Local People is well researched and easy to read. The author used the papers of key organizations (SCLC, NAACP, CORE, VEP) and individuals (Ed King, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Burke Marshall). An example of how Dittmer’s extensive research enriched his work comes in chapter two, through a story about the lunacy of segregation. Jim Crow, Dittmer writes, was designed to “keep the Negro in his place” and “the place” varied according to the circumstances. When letter carrier Carsie Hall delivered the mall at the Heidelberg, the class of hotels in Jackson, he entered the building through the front door and rode the main elevator. But when attorney Carsie Hall came to the Heidelberg to take the bar exam he had to enter through the rear door and ride the freight elevator.

Also buoying the book’s content are scores of interviews with the people who made the movement. The oral history component provides a depth and scope unrivaled by written sources. Dittmer blends this wealth of sources into a portrait that is both easy to read and fascinating, making his Local People accessible to a broader audience.

Second, the author keeps the influence of national civil rights organizations and other outside influences in proper perspective. Too often, writers and producers portray the Mississippi movement as the sole property and/or brainchild of organizations like SNCC or CORE, failing to credit locals for laying the foundation for outside help. A number of historical works pretend that SNCC and CORE came to the state and “saved the day” for the locals who had no clue of how to champion their own causes. Dittmer avoids this mistake.

A third feature of Local People is its effort to acknowledge that women carried out something more than secondary roles in the movement. Many male historians tend to trivialize the contributions of women in the civil rights era. Early in his book, Dittmer points out that although their numbers were few prior to the 1960s, women’s roles were significant. Most notable were Ruby Stutts Lyells, president of the Negro State Federation of Women’s Clubs, and Mary E. Holmes, the only female officer of the 1953 Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP. Dittmer also highlights women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray, and Annie Devine, crediting Hamer with much of the spirit and velocity of the movement, both locally and nationally. In addition, the author made clear that the motivation for the sexual relations between black men and white women during the summer of 1964, exaggerated by some female writers, belongs to both parties.

Dittmer also highlights the weaknesses of the significant parties. He concludes that in the 1950s, the timidity of white Mississippi moderates in challenging white supremacy resulted in a “bankruptcy of both moral and

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political leadership at the most critical point in Mississippi’s history since Reconstruction” (p.69). Dittmer takes the luster off of the motives of white liberals with two stories. In the first case, Barnaby Keeney, president of Brown University, forced Tougaloo College’s board of trustees to fire its president, Daniel Beittel, before Keeney would lobby the Ford Foundation for grant money that Tougaloo needed. Beittel had adamantly refused to curb the civil rights activism of his students. The board fired Beittel, and shortly thereafter, Tougaloo received Ford funding for its educational program. But the school lost its prominence in the movement when Keeney helped terminate Tougaloo’s association with Bob Moses’ literacy project in the Delta and the college’s relationship to the Head Start program.

A second example involves the Voter Education Project, a project ofthe Southern Regional Council, funded by the Ford Foundation and other national foundations, in conjunction with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). Dittmer implies that the project was canceled because of displeasure that foundation funds were used for the Freedom Vote campaign instead of shepherding potential voters through the political mainstream. The author suggests that the white liberal establishment again put its own agenda ahead of the needs of the masses in Mississippi.

Nor does Dittmer hesitate in pointing out glaring weaknesses of the national civil rights organizations and its key leaders. He reveals that the NAACP often predicated its activities in the 1960s on the need to compete with rival organizations. Charles Evers, self-appointed field secretary after Medgar’s death, is shown as a self-serving egotist bent on establishing himself as “the leader” of the Mississippi movement. Evers attempted to personally profit from the movement by urging Natchez Blacks to boycott white businesses while at the same time purchasing a grocery store to pull in the business no longer going to white store owners.

Perhaps the most significant feature of Dittmer’s work is his approach. He avoids the pitfall of placing the activities of the 1950s and 1960s in a historical vacuum as if the preceding decades have no connection. Instead he

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establishes historical continuity all the way back to slavery. He invests three chapters of the book in establishing those links.

Although Local People has numerous strong points, it is not without its faults. First of all, Dittmer has missed part of the significance of the Emmett Till murder. Not only did the public display of Till’s mutilated body at the Chicago funeral enrage blacks, but Moses Wright’s defiant “Thar he” response at the murder trial when asked to identify Till’s abductor was a watershed in movement history. “It was the first time in the history of Mississippi that a Negro had stood in court and pointed his finger at a white man as a killer of a Negro,” remarked Michigan Congressman Charles Diggs, who attended the trial (Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years 1954-1965, p. 48). Actually it was not the first time, but the act was rare and courageous enough to embolden an entire generation.

Dittmer also fails to give full treatment to the Freedom Rides. In addition to testing the Supreme Court’s ruling banning segregation aboard buses in interstate travel, the Freedom Rides were also designed to force the Kennedy Administration out of its “hands-off” posture. Dittmer explains the significance of testing the Supreme Court in its ruling, but fails to explore another of CORE’s key motives. James Farmer of CORE, which sponsored the Freedom Rides, reasoned that pro-segregationists would respond with such brutality that federal protection would have to be provided.

Dittmer must also be chided for minimizing the impact of many events outside of Mississippi. For example, he gives the reader little feel for the significance of the March on Washington. Not only did it help push through Congress the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but it also revealed the manipulations of the liberal establishment. Dittmer fails to mention how the Kennedy Administration helped turn the march from an angry demand for economic justice to a passive symbolic gesture. In addition, Dittmer sidesteps the impact of the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy. Although he does note the tragedies, the reader is left wondering how Mississippi dealt with them. Almost nothing is said about the influence of Malcolm X. Even though Malcolm never visited the state, his influence among youth was undeniable.

Although Dittmer dwells at length on the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and its challenge to the regular Democratic delegates in Atlantic City in 1964, he understates the real significance of the event. The MFDP did not win its political challenge, but it gave poor black people who had never voted a new sense of power and dignity. They had taken on the most powerful politicians in the country on national television. Fannie Lou Hamer almost single-handedly wooed an entire nation into her corner. Had it not been for the trickery of President Johnson and his cronies, who knows what the outcome may have been.

In sum, Local People charts new territory in the chronicles of the Mississippi movement. Dittmer provides insightful analysis and pleasurable reading with an even-handed and sufficiently broad approach to his topic. The result is scholarship that does justice to the struggles and sacrifices of the people who made the Mississippi movement.

Barry E. Lee is a masters candidate in American History at Georgia State University and an Education Program Assistant at the Southern Regional Council.