Keeping The Faith On Abortion

Brownie Ledbetter

Vol. 12, No. 1, 1990, pp. 1-4

The argument about abortion must develop into a substantive debate. We must deal with questions of morality, medical ethics, medical technology, health care, environment, economics, separation of church and state, individual rights, and women’s rights, to name a few.

What decisions about life and death should we make now that we have choices we have never had before as a result of increased medical technology? Who should make them? Are the laws regulating such questions adequate protection for individual rights? for doctors? for hospitals? for family planning and abortion clinics? should we put limits on medical research? what about the effects of overpopulation on the environment?

Who pays for welfare, health care, and education of the increasing number of poor women and children in this country? in other countries?

If a fetus has civil rights does that include inheritance? Does extending legal personhood to fetuses mean that women of childbearing age must be prohibited from any job that could endanger a fetus or a woman’s right to become pregnant?

Issues relating to human sexuality in this country have become so complex and frustrating to many of us that we advocate single-issue solutions. We do this, generally, out of abysmal ignorance of the biological and social development of human life. We have allowed only minimal education on human development in our public schools and that little is way out of date now. It must be nonexistent in many sectarian schools. We are

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bemoaning the fact that few high school graduates know where Florida is. How many ever even heard of DNA?

But changes have come about awfully fast. I can remember when virginity was a requirement for marriage (for women only, of course), when movies could only show stars fully clad in separate beds, and even two-piece bathing suits covered most of women’s bodies. And I’m not even sixty yet! Now you take a person like me and jerk me up into the ’80s and ’90s with pornographic TV ads and movies in which stars have intercourse right there on the screen and you are talking major shock treatment.

Young folk have trouble coping with all this sexual activity as well. They need some support if they are going to be able to “just say no” when they believe none of their peers would and certainly very few adults do. Besides, all that stuff on TV looks pretty tempting. Kids do mirror our values, after all.

A lot of folk in my vintage-and younger-just figure we have to put our collective foot down. If we look for a nice simple reason for all of this “moral degradation,” the 1973 Supreme Court decision protecting a woman’s right to choose an abortion is a pretty good target. Throw in the women’s movement-all that freedom for women-and you have yourself a good, clear, scapegoat. Up to date, too: it can be characterized in a broadcast sound bite-“abortion on demand”-now used by the media as if it were an objective description of the pro-choice movement. Well, if every woman would just stay home and teach these children the right moral values everything would be back to normal, right? Wrong.

Arguing over when life begins as a basis for solving this moral controversy is taking the issue out of context, the context being the welfare of the species, the planet, the creation and sustenance of all life forms. The context being the lives and relationships of human families…mother, father, and children already born and living…the unborn child herself…the very child over which this irrational conflict supposedly rages. What effect will an additional sibling have on the family relationships? On the well-being of existing children? On the contributions the mother is making to the welfare of the total family? What will be the new child’s acceptance by the rest of the family if the mother’s health is affected or if she dies in childbirth? What child would trade her or his mother for an unknown baby? What husband would trade his wife for a new child?

What is responsible about requiring a mother to complete a pregnancy regardless of the health risk, or the economic risk, to the family in order to bring another life into being? Is that not potentially destructive to existing

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family relationships? And what if the mother is a single parent? Is there a clear moral answer to these concerns that fits every situation?

AND IF THE PREGNANT woman is single? Even irresponsible in her use of abortion after a carefree sexual encounter? Would she make a good mother to this unwanted child? Why is it more morally responsible for her to give birth to a child she does not want or is in no position to raise responsibly? Is it that she should be punished by having to go through nine months of pregnancy? Is pregnancy a punishment? What respect does that attitude show for life? What does that do for the child?

What ever happened to the belief that one has no right to bring a child onto this earth unless she and he are committed to providing for the welfare and education of the child? Is that an immoral belief? I thought it was Judaic-Christian stewardship.

The furor over abortion has little to do with the welfare of babies, born or unborn. If it did we would spend more than a token amount on the welfare of children in this country so that we could bring them up to be the responsible citizens and leaders we need. If the folks calling themselves “pro-life” who are raising the issue of abortion as a child-centered concern had child welfare in mind they would not oppose public spending for child care, for pre-school education for every child, for school lunches for poor children, for prenatal care for pregnant women and other measures to decrease infant mortality, for an adequate national immunization program. for identifying and treating child abuse, for accessible and medically safe birth control, and above all, for increasing funding for public education and health care.

Unfortunately, they are joined by many other American voters who appear to have little sense of responsibility for the welfare of children other than their own…especially if it means paying more taxes.

There is an area of agreement even among the more vocal and polarized movements. We would all like to see an enormous decrease in the incidence of abortion. But here again there is conflict in how that goal should be reached.

Pro-choice groups believe that could be accomplished by increasing the use of medically safe birth control methods and education about the reproductive process and responsible sexual behavior. Anti-choice groups, believing those methods to be an inducement to increasing sexual activity, advocate abstinence enforced by law and outlawing birth control as well as abortion to accomplish that goal.

I believe the rhetoric about unborn babies is yet another way to exploit children, to tug on our emotional reaction to perfectly formed and adorable little babies (usually white) for other purposes. If we can use babies to sell everything from soap to long distance telephone service, why not?

For some this tearful rhetoric about unborn babies is a way of avoiding the tough new choices we can make about life and death rather than being able to dismiss them as “God’s will.” For others it is a way of punishing those who sin. For still others it is simply a way of resisting change. For many it is a method for re-establishing a more subservient position of women, a way of stopping the increasing independence of women.

And where are the churches on this

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moral question? Protecting their institutions, whatever their doctrine. That appears to be the one common denominator among our diverse religions. The linchpin of the great American experiment, separation of church and state, protection for individual diversity, is in danger yet again. Cries of “this is a Christian nation” are heard once more across the land. And where are the clergy and lay leadership alike who are not ignorant of the historical fact that many of our most-revered founding fathers were not Christian or that they created constitutional protection for the diversity of religious citizens as well as non-religious citizens?…They are silent. Even those religious leaders who represent a faith with long-held positions of support for the separation of church and state are silent, or outvoted by newly organized voices as in the Southern Baptist Convention.

That is not to say that there are not groups of religious clergy, laywomen and men within many faiths who are trying to speak responsibly to these issues. There are many traditional women’s organizations within a variety of religious institutions across religious faith groups struggling as catalysts within their institutions-all of which arc male-dominated. But rarely are they heard by the general public because they are not the established leadership.

I have always believed that religious faith is a very private and personal matter and although it is the basis of my moral value system and I see it as the reason for my work as an activist, I do not feel comfortable articulating my faith in secular settings, or to religiously diverse groups unless it is the stated topic for dialogue. However, since so much of the debate on abortion is characterized as “religious” I may be wrong about that.

Probably my own reluctance is a mirror of the unbelievable reluctance and inaction of religious institutions like my own who claim to be “mainstream” and yet allow absolutist groups to speak for Christianity as if there were no other Christian perspective. There is also a certain “classism” among our so called “mainstream” Protestant denominations. Perhaps guilt over our mild contempt for “lower class” evangelical or fundamentalist denominations has motivated the current efforts of mainstream denominations to work towards some sort of vague coming together. It also may have something to do with the fact that we are losing membership.

THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT has every right to speak for their position, but so does the rest of Christendom-not only the right, hut the responsibility.

The culture in which we exist in this world and the circumstance of our lives have such enormous bearing on our religious preferences that I have always believed separation of the church and state to be the only way we can coexist. It is also the only way of avoiding religious wars. Religious wars, whether they are fought with words or weapons, are clearly blasphemous in that any group who claims to be defending the only religious truth is pretending to be God. That kind of arrogance must feed the very devil that they are so busy personifying.

Human life cycles are longer than those of many of God’s creatures, and we have perhaps more ways to affect life and death, but we are still within the constraints of mortality, just like all other living things. Human life gets renewed just like all other forms of life. We are not unique in that sense. After all, every form of life is unique in its own characteristics. The Christian insistence that we are superior to other forms of life we believe to have been created and sustained by God seems to me to be the height of arrogance. Maybe that is our “original sin.” It is surely a part of our self-centeredness.

Most human religions advocate some level of responsibility for or toward other living things. We humans are finally beginning to be concerned about our environment. But until we realize that we arc only one of the many forms of life created by God with considerably greater options in our reproductive processes than other creatures, and learn to use those options in more morally responsible ways, we are incredibly poor stewards of life.

We Christians should speak out with different perspectives, as citizens who have honest disagreements. Instead we swallow our commitment to our own beliefs. We try to reconcile ourselves in some way with those of our faith who want to enforce their particular religious beliefs in secular law and thereby separating the goats from the sheep as if we had that kind of authority.

After all, the pro-choice movement does not advocate laws forcing women to have abortions. But what is being advocated by the anti-choice movement is forcing women to complete a pregnancy regardless of the circumstances that brought about that pregnancy, her circumstances, or the circumstances of her family. Those among us who believe abortion is immoral no matter what the circumstance are free, as they should be, to practice their belief within current legal requirements. Why should they force those of us who do not share their belief to conform to their absolutism? We advocate personal private choice, not abortion.

Dialogue among religious faiths and denominations is vital and it can solve a lot of conflicts. Heaven must know that we Protestants have a proclivity for starting a new denomination over the silliest disagreements. But at some point judgments must be made, not postponed, in the name of avoiding conflict. Often that strategy only prolongs and exacerbates the conflict. l he public welfare is at stake. Prolonging the debate has become destructive.

Somebody has to call for the question. I so move.

Brownie Ledbetter is a Presbyterian elder in Little Rock, Arkansas’ and a longtime civil rights activist.

Five Decades of Activism

By Patricia Sullivan

Vol. 12, No. 1, 1990, pp. 5-9

“THE SOUTHERN MOVEMENT provided a permanent flame from which the rest of the nation could draw inspiration, light and heat. You were always there burning, percolating, in the dark sometimes, but going ahead, holding aloft even the smallest candle which ultimately became the blazing light leading…to freedom,” Ossie Davis proclaimed to several hundred people gathered at the New Pilgrim Church in Birmingham early in December. They had come to celebrate the 51st anniversary of the founding of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), and the five decades of activism joined with SCHW by the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) and the Southern Organizing Committee (SOC).

Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Anne Braden, Modjeska Simkins, Virginia Durr, Rev. Ben Chavis, Hollis Watkins, Bob Zellner, and Pete Seeger were among the anniversary participants–a collective testimony to the rich legacy of the Southern movement for racial and economic justice. In his welcoming address, Birmingham Mayor Richard Arrington highlighted a theme of the meeting. As we look back fifty years, and we look ahead, he said, we learn that “in the freedom struggle there is no ending which is not a beginning.” The weekend provided a special opportunity to talk about the kinds of changes that have been set in motion over the past half century, and celebrate the victories, “even as we look at the walls that are still in front of us.”

WHEN THE SOUTHERN Conference for Human Welfare was founded in 1938, it was “one of the most exaggerated expressions of change in the South,” remembered one of its early members. The Depression and the New Deal had shaken people from decades of political apathy and complacency. “A lot of folks were standing up…and talking and expecting things they had never expected before.” More than twelve hundred Southerners met in the Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham over Thanksgiving weekend in 1938 to organize mass political support for New Deal economic reforms. Race became the issue when Police Commissioner Bull Connor enforced segregation upon the integrated gathering. In a symbolic act of defiance, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt placed her chair in the center aisle of the racially divided auditorium. SCHW organizers vowed that all future meetings would be integrated. Southern moderates quickly withdrew and labeled the new organization subversive.

The SCHW did challenge the structure of Southern society, a society based on disfranchisement laws and legalized white supremacy. From the beginning, SCHW organizers believed that economic and political democracy were essential to remedying “the nation’s number one economic problem.” In the opening round of the voting rights struggle in Congress, Virginia Durr and Joseph Gelders engineered the introduction of anti-poll tax legislation and organized a broad coalition of national support. Building on the expectations and political interests stirred by the New Deal and the war against fascism, SCHW organizers joined with the NAACP, the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), the CIO and community groups throughout the South in a region wide voter registration effort. After the Supreme Court outlawed the all-white primary in 1944, the number of registered black voters in the South increased dramatically. The Talmadges, Bilbos, Eastlands, and Byrnes led a growing resistance, but a sustained movement for social and political justice had taken hold in the South.

In 1948 Clark Foreman, a founder and Executive Director of the SCHW, referred to the organization’s first ten years as “The Decade of Hope.” The McCarthy era followed; the Southern conservative attack on the Southern Conference movement was reinforced by the redbait-

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ing politics of the Cold War. Born in the promise and activism of the New Deal era, the SCHW would not adapt to the conformist and exclusionary policies legitimized by President Truman’s “loyalty” program. Its activities culminated with Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party campaign in 1948. Under the direction of SNYC’s Louis Burnham and Palmer Weber of the SCHW, the Wallace campaign in the South expanded the campaign for political and economic democracy. Black and white candidates ran for office on the Progressive Party ticket, and Henry Wallace became the first presidential candidate to refuse to address segregated audiences in the region. The Wallace campaign demonstrated, however, that the fragile political coalition organized by the SCHW in the South could not survive an aggressive national Cold War consensus, and the organization quietly disbanded at the end of 1948.

BUT THE SOUTHERN Conference Education Fund (SCEF), established as the educational branch of the SCHW in 1946, continued. Under the leadership of Jim

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Dombrowski, SCEF concentrated on ridding the South of segregation as the essential first step in moving towards the economic and political goals advanced by the SCHW. SCEF aimed to build interracial support for desegregation, and made a special effort to engage whites in the struggle. Its small staff endured constant threats, attacks and investigations as it worked steadily through the 1950s, helping to support indigenous civil rights efforts throughout the South. When Carl and Anne Braden learned that economic pressures were about to force leading black activist Amzie Moore out of Mississippi in the late 1950s, Dombrowski raised the money to secure Moore’s financial independence so that he could remain in Cleveland, Mississippi. In 1960, SNCC Field Secretary Bob Moses met Moore on his first foray into Mississippi; Moore became a crucial link between the student movement of the 1960s and a small but seasoned generation of Mississippi activists.

Jack O’Dell observed that Southern Conference activists had to “work our way around the Cold War and find

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our way back through Montgomery and the civil rights movement.” During the 1960s, SCEF’s history merged with the mass movement that broke through the political lethargy of the 1950s and finally succeeded in ridding the South of legalized segregation and disenfranchisement. In remembering these hard-won victories of the civil rights movement, however, the history has often been distorted, and the “movement” left motionless. The Southern Conference anniversary pointed to the deep roots of movement history and bore witness to the fact that the struggle continues. Nostalgia was noticeably absent from this celebration. While there were several veterans of the early SCHW years in attendance, they seemed impatient to act on with it.

IN A BRIEF TRIBUTE to the enormous changes of the last half century, ninety year-old Modjeska Simkins remembered the concentrated atmosphere of terror and violence that permeated Bull Connor’s Birmingham, a city where the Klan worked openly with the Police Commissioner. Whenever she was in Birmingham, the South Carolina activist recalled, she was always watching “out of the tail of my eye, not knowing whether some of those renegades would attack me.” Bull Connor is long gone, and Birmingham has a black mayor who presides over a progressive city government. But Mrs. Simkins observed that many gains secured in the past fifty years have been rolled back. “We’ve been knocked back down the hill by a do-nothing president,” she said, “and it looks like we’re going to have four or eight more years of ‘almost do nothin’. ‘We got to fight all the way back up the hill.”

Stetson Kennedy explained that many regional problems addressed by SCHW have become national in scope. He cited homelessness and widespread hunger, perhaps more prevalent now than during the 1930s. Absentee ownership used to mean Wall Street; now we think of Tokyo. “Mr. Charlie is gone with the wind, but Mr. Yakamoto is on the way and we don’t know where he stands except that he’s anti- union.”

Legalized segregation has been outlawed; now we have “desegregated racism.” “Back then, it used to be the Attorney General of Alabama or Mississippi or perhaps the Magistrate of Florida up before the Supreme Court arguing in favor of in justice and discrimination; but now it’s the Attorney General of the United States of America.” Much blood was shed and many lives lost on the road to free elections and voting rights. But, Kennedy asked, how “free” are elections today? Politics has become a state-of-the-art industry, run by the media and highly paid consultants, who manipulate symbols in a way that often results in “the American people voting over and over against themselves.” The notorious Southern demagogues of the past have been replaced by a more sophisticated, polished variety saying “read my lips.”

Community activists joined historians and students in workshops during the second day of the meeting. Individual discussion groups on the economy, labor, women, culture, education, and militarism worked to define current issues within a fuller historical context, and build a common agenda for action in the 1990s.

IN THE “ECONOMY of the South” workshop, John Gaventa, of Highlander Center, sketched the cycles of economic development over the past fifty years. Gaventa explained that the ambitious War on Poverty of the 1960s and the well-publicized industrial transformation of the “Sun-Belt” in the 1970s have run their course; yet steady economic growth and development has bypassed most of the region. The shift from an industrial to a service and financial based economy has proved elusive the gains of the sixties and seventies. Twelve million workers lost their jobs to plant closings in the first half of the 1980s; even more in the latter part of the decade. Companies lured South by the promise of cheap labor, resources, and tax concessions have moved on to exploit even better “deals” in other parts of the world. When U.S. Steel left Gary, W. Va., a town the company built, they took the street lights with them. During the 1980s, virtually no new jobs were created in rural communities; 60 percent of urban jobs are poverty level and offer no mobility. Job growth areas are affluent, white, and offer the best education systems.

WHILE THERE HAVE been dramatic changes in the South’s economic landscape during the last half century, they have been guided by the state’s promotion of a “business climate” which allows for the mobility and unaccountability of capital. Barbara Taylor, Bob Hall, and Pat Bryant described the enormous price exacted from the region’s resources, workers, and environment. Job-related injuries, illnesses and deaths have increased in the last twenty years. The South has become a dumping ground for hazardous wastes; the most significant variable in determining the location of chemical dumping grounds is race, noted Louisiana activist Pat Bryant, a factor that has not been addressed by the environmental movement. The vaginal cancer rate for African-American women in St. John the Baptist Parish is thirty times the national average; the lung cancer rate for African- American men in New Orleans is the highest in the world.

There was much discussion and disagreement about the complex array of problems raised by the panelists. But there seemed to be general agreement that politics is the only way out. Now that all Southerners finally have the

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vote, it is possible to work towards the goal of economic democracy which guided the founding of SCHW a half century ago. Economic development, participants agreed, needs to be considered within the broad context of issues addressed in the other workshops.

In discussing the role of women in the South’s progressive movement, panelists outlined a history of interrelationship of race, class, and gender, and suggested a broad context for the women’s movement in the 1990s. Jewell Handy Gresham told how the abolitionist movement gave birth to the modern women’s rights movement. As a national woman’s movement developed, a tension developed and has persisted between those who would focus on white, middle class goals, and those who view the women’s rights movement as an integral part of the larger struggle for human rights. Georgia State Representative Nan Orrock insisted that the issue of reproductive rights must be understood as more than the issue of abortion rights, and, indeed, provides an opportunity for broadening the focus of the women’s movement. The crisis in health care, the issue of child care, and the failure of the public education system should be part and parcel of the reproductive rights movement. Orrock urged the organized women’s movement to make a more conscious effort to incorporate working-class women and women of color into positions of leadership, and at the same time warned progressive activists that to dismiss the women’s movement as an exclusively white middle class phenomenon.

WHILE LOOKING towards the future, participants sought to recover a history that would illuminate the larger contours of the struggle for racial, economic and political justice. The workshop on racism identified historical amnesia as a major contributing factor to the nature and persistence of racism in America. Judge Margaret Burnham told about the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), a pioneering organization of African-American youth whose history paralleled the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. From 1937 until 1948, SNYC activists participated in organizing workers and registering voters throughout the South, helping to build the progressive coalition of voters that showed such promise in the immediate postwar years. SNYC enjoyed the support of prominent African-American leaders, fraternal organizations and churches. By the late forties, however, SNYC was isolated and ultimately destroyed by redbaiting, and since then its history has been largely neglected and forgotten. Yet that history tells about the power of effective organizing before the FAX machine and foundation grants, when chicken dinners were a major source of fund raising. And it tells about the essential role young people have played as organizers and leaders in the freedom struggle. The importance of reaching out to youth, and encouraging them towards their unique and vital potential was a central concern throughout the two day meeting, eloquently addressed by Brenda Davenport, Rev. Chavis, Representative Mabel Thomas, and others.

THE FINAL PROGRAM began with a candle-lighting ceremony honoring the heroes and heroines of the Southern movement. Ossie Davis and the Children of Selma paid tribute to Hosea Hudson, Joe Gelders, Mary Mcleod Bethune, Clark Foreman, Aubrey Williams, Modjeska Simkins, Ella Baker, Myles Horton, Palmer Weber, Lou Burnham, Virginia and Clifford Durr, James Dombrowski, Fred and Ruby Shuttlesworth, Anne and Carl Braden, and, joined by participants, named countless others who have led the South, and the nation, forward. Pete Seeger called the name of Fannie Lou Hamer. Virginia Durr remembered Hugo Black. Other voices named Paul Robeson, E. D. Nixon, Septima Clark, and many more. “With the help of God and struggle and leadership and song and living and burying and marching and singing we have come a long way toward helping this country define what its Constitution outlined way back in 1787,” celebrated Ossie Davis.

And the struggle continues, was the refrain. The unfinished agenda of the freedom movement has been redefined by the challenges and possibilities of the late twentieth century. What does equality mean in a society where adequate education, health care, and housing is beyond the reach of growing numbers? How, asked Ossie Davis, do we effectively challenge the divine right of greed, which reigns in America? The answer, suggested Rev. Ben Chavis, lies in the fundamental changes released by the unravelling of the Cold War and the dramatic gains made by democracy movements in other parts of the world. Shaped by the tradition and promise of democracy, the Southern Organizing Committee for Racial and Economic Justice and countless other groups and activists are building a strong link into an uncertain future. But the times, noted Jack O’Dell, make us mindful of Martin Luther King’s admonition that “the arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice.”

Patricia Sullivan is the assistant director of the Center for the Study of Civil Rights at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies, Charlottesville, Va.

Slapping Together a Coalition. . . To Win Below the Mason-Dixon

By Staff

Vol. 12, No. 1, 1990, pp. 6-7

Virginia Durr: There’s no sense trying to reform capitalism, because it can’t be reformed any more than slavery could be reformed. It’s a very bad system. You’ve got to realize that you have lost the power of your government. You do not own your government. It is owned by the people who have the money. And they pay the money because they have to get on television or else they can’t get elected.

Now, you can complain, and you can talk about waste and you can talk about the Russians and you can talk about the Germans, but you can’t do much unless you have the power of your government. Now, it’s a democratic country, you’ve got the vote, you can control your representatives if you work at it. You have to work at it day and night. You have to form government clubs, voters clubs, you have to watch them, you have to write letters to them, you have to see what kind of devilment they’re up to, you have to see who’s slipping them money. To sit here and complain is just a pure waste of time.

We have a congressman [from Montgomery] who is paid by the military contractors. And we know how much he’s paid. Now he gets on the TV every fifteen minutes; he gets elected every time because he’s got the money. Now here we sit, black and white, and we might as well be talking about the moon as be talking about the President of the United States. And all I can say is I’m too old to do it. I’m eighty-six years old. Now, I did help to get the poll tax removed, and I did really a good job. And I sure did help to get segregation removed, and I think I did a damned good job there because I helped Mrs. Parks. On the other hand, I do not know how to solve the economic situation. That is left up to you. And I’m not gonna say you men anymore; fifty years ago I would have said you men. You people have got to do it. And it’s just a waste of time to talk about the chemical flowing down the Mississippi River. You have to control the government that controls the corporations. Unless you do that you’re just wasting your time, and mine too. What possible solution have we been offered here, not any.

Rev. Andrew Turnipseed: I’ll offer one.

Mrs. Durr: Pray?

Rev. Turnipseed: Well, no, I’ll go beyond prayer.

Mrs. Durr: Thank God.

Rev. Turnipseed: We’re all talking about politics…my name is Turnipseed, just like it sounds, TU-R-N-I-P-S double E-D

Mrs. Durr: He got thrown out of the church in Montgomery because he let a black soldier in [during WWII]. So he gave up his life, his church…

Rev. Turnipseed: You’re sweet to tell that. I’m seventy-eight years old. I never was too quick, and I’m less quick now. I think if you are going to get into politics, and that is the only place you can go…the only power in the world that can deal with the corporations would be a peoples’ government. Now, how you gonna do that. Politics as I understand it is a matter of coalitions. I know that word is overworked; you give me a better one, I’ll use it. It would be better if we had a comprehensive program. What are those? Well, first of all there’s the black vote and, thank God, that has come to us lately. That’s the basis of a coalition. But unfortunately the blacks are not in a majority in the South. I wish they were. The whites are in the majority in the South. We’ve got to have a pool of white people who will collaborate with the black vote and have a composite vote. Now, where we gonna get those white people? We don’t have to have a majority of the white people.

Now, I will digress to say that in the last four years we have elected a senator in Maryland, and a governor in Virginia just the other day, and a senator in North Carolina, a senator in Georgia, a senator in Florida, a senator in

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Alabama, and got one coming up here next year, and in Louisiana. I count five major offices. How did we do it? I say we because I played around with it in Alabama. We had a black vote that was 100 per cent. We had to pick up about 45 percent of the white vote to slap together with that black vote, and you put ’em in. And how did we do it? First of all, there’s the labor movement. I know it’s bow-legged and tired and run so far it needs to rest, but time to reassert itself. We need the labor movement.

Right here in Birmingham. The industries are gone, and you [John Gaventa] very brilliantly showed us why they left. All the heavy industries have gone abroad. We’re left with a service economy, and I’m not an economist, just a country preacher. But I know the steel mills are closed. I graduated from Birmingham-Southern College in 1933, and that was in the depths of the Depression, and this town was dirty black because of the smoke coming from the operating industries then, the furnaces, then. They can come back. People do need steel. And you made that point very brilliantly how at one of those three stages they came here because we had the resources. In spite of all of the rape against the soil and our natural resources, we still have them….Now back to where I was on the coalitions. I said we need the labor movement. Some of you people here have had experience with the labor movement. . .

Mrs. Durr: and the women’s movement

Rev. Turnipseed: All right, I’m gettin’ to that. Just hold on. And second of all…I’ve got to stand up. I preach better when I stand up…we need a block of school teachers, public school teachers. The public school system is absolutely being shot through with a propaganda that we’ve simply got to eliminate. And those school teachers, I don’t care what their husbands might do to make a living, these school teachers, most of them are women, and that’s my next point, but before I get there. You’ve got a school apparatus here. Most of the folks who are against us have gone off to private schools and they call them Christian schools–God forgive me for using that cuss word–all right, they’ve gone to private schools. I live in a little country town, a village, called Remar. A lot of folks in Birmingham have never heard of Remar, and a lot of folks in Remar have never heard of Birmingham. Anyway, that’s where I live. And my people in the church where I am, and I’m retired…but they’re too good to go to public schools. And we have a public school there that goes back to the experimental days when we first had consolidated schools. And they won’t go because we live in the Black Belt and 90 percent of the students in those schools are black. And so my people pull up and go down the road five miles and have a private Christian school. Now then, those people are not gonna go with us ever.

But there are millions of white people below the Mason and Dixon line who are white and have the same interests as your constituency has [Louisiana State Rep. Avery Alexander]. I understand you’re in the legislature. They have the same interests. I know. I’ve lived here for three hundred years, and I’m just gettin’ started. We’ve got to do this. And now, back to the ladies, that’s the third element of this coalition . . .

Voice from the audience: the “women”

Rev. Turnipseed: Well, women. Whatever they are, they’re my people and yours too. By the way everybody here had a mother. All right. There is discrimination. And everybody knows which party loves to discriminate against the ladies, or the women, or the females–I won’t go into that. Scared to. I think everybody here knows what I’m talking about. If a woman does the same work as a man, and a man does the same work as a woman, is it right to pay one one level of pay and the other another? Is exploitation right wherever it’s practiced? Of course not.

Well, I’ve already listed three levels of supply for this white coalition. Then, too, there are a few left, never have been too many–well, I hate to use the word intellectuals. I don’t know what that is exactly. But add those harum-scarum intellectuals, put them with those other three elements, add them to the black base, and we can win any election we want to below the Mason-Dixon line.

Edited comments of Virginia Durr and Rev. Andrew Turnipseed at a workshop on the Economy of the South; Southern Conference 51st anniversary, Birmingham, Dec. 2, 1989; sponsored by the Southern Organizing Committee.

Angela Davis: ‘Rekindle the Flame’

By Elaine Davenport

Vol. 12, No. 1, 1990, pp. 10-11

Angela Davis, one of America’s best known activists of the 1960s and 1970s, encouraged an overflow crowd in Austin, Texas, on Martin Luther King Day to renew a commitment to activism in the 1990s–to “rekindle the flame.”

In 1972 Davis was acquitted of charges of murder and conspiracy stemming from a shootout involving Black Panther prisoners at a courthouse in San Rafael California. She emerged as a symbol of the American left and became a popular speaker at rallies and a lobbyist for change. “I’m asked what it was like then,” said Davis. “I tell them we worked hard, that it didn’t just happen. It’s called organization and continuity from one event to the next.” She said that today’s goals can be achieved only through an activist struggle: “Our activist efforts must unfold on all fronts …We must be aware of how the issues interconnect. You must join and be on call to be seen and heard.”

• “We must fight for free, universally available, quality child care for all,” Davis told her Austin audience. Women can’t afford to work when they earn 510,000 a year and the cost of child care is 53,000 a year per child.
• “Violence against women in the home and against children has to stop.” The portrayal of women in today’s rap music–“this idea that women are to be trampled upon and treated as sexual objects”–has to change, she said, suggesting that people write to their local radio stations.
• Blacks must tackle problems in their own communities, she said, including AIDS. “We have not done whet we ought to have done to help those with AIDS.” Since blacks make up the overwhelming majority of AIDS victims, why is it that black churches in East Oakland can’t find buddies to spend time with black people who have AIDS? “This upsets me more than almost any other issue that we currently face.”
• “The reproductive rights movement is still too white.” The federal government will pay for sterilization, but is rolling back the right to abortions. “It’s this simple: it is a woman’s right to determine what happens to her body.”
• A higher minimum wage is possible by saying “no to the corporate system that gives us no economic hope.” We may have rights, she said, but if we’re too poor to exercise those rights, we might as well not have the rights.
• “We must begin to fight for mandatory courses on African- American history and Latino history on U.S. campuses,” she said. This brought a large number of people to their feet, based perhaps on the longstanding conflict at the University of Texas over upgrading the African and Afro-American Studies and Research Center into a bonafide department.

The crowd of more than 3,000 overflowed the Performing Arts Center at the University of Texas. The PAC is often filled with with [sic] mostly white audiences attending the symphony, ballet or opera. But the atmosphere on this occasion resembled that of a community gathering, as the racially mixed audience heard songs by the Webb Elementary School Choir, a welcome by the president of the University of Texas, who was heckled because of the university’s South African policy, and a dramatic interpretation by Miss Black Austin. The group also participated in singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

Davis, a polished orator, spoke slowly and rhythmically, often repeating her last few words or last phrase as members of the audience began to shorthand clap.

Her list of crises facing blacks and other Americans was long:

• “Drugs, prison and violence are a murderous cycle for our young black people,” she said. “We’re talking about a genocidal situation in this country.” With homicide the leading cause of death for black men and women ages fifteen to thirty-four, blacks making up 44 percent of the murder victims in the country, with the majority of those
  

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  with AIDS black, and with large numbers of black men permanently unemployed, “is it hard to understand why they drift to drugs?”

• “The U.S. government is solidly on the side of apartheid,” she said. If the United States had asked for total economic sanctions against South Africa ten years ago, apartheid would no longer exist.

Davis reminded the audience that by circulating petitions, marching and writing to elected representatives, they had achieved a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King. “This national holiday is a living example of the possibility of our activism. We are living in history. Yesterday informs today.” Martin Luther King was not ‘the’ movement. He emerged from the movement and others will emerge from the movement, too, she said. She reminded the crowd that it was a group of women in Montgomery, including Jo Ann Robinson, who provided the organizational structure to successfully mount the Montgomery bus boycott. “What the sisters did in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, we can do in 1990. The issue then was desegregation, but Martin Luther King soon realized it had economic roots. In 1990, the interconnectedness of all the issues is much more pronounced than before. It is no longer possible to separate all the struggles. We’re all in this together.”

One tactic she suggested was to occupy Washington, D.C. “Prepare to stay there and force the government to negotiate with us.” There is a revolutionary spirit all around the world, she said. “If they can rise up in Eastern Europe, then so can we.”

Elaine Davenport is a Southern Changes contributing editor. She lives in Austin, Texas. Angela Davis currently teaches courses in philosophy, aesthetics and women’s studies at San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Art Institute. Angela Davis: An Autobiography from Random House was a 1974 best-seller. SO has also written Women, Race and Class (Random House, 1982); her latest book is Women, Culture and Politics (Random House, 1989).

An Imperfect Assessment of Movement Flank Actions.

Reviewed by Mary Nell Morgan

Vol. 12, No. 1, 1990, pp. 12-13

Black Radicals and the Civil Rights Mainstream, 1954 1970 By Herbert H. Haines (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 1988. 244 pps. $24.95).

Herbert Haines’s analysis in Black Radicals and the Civil Rights Mainstream challenges the popular notion that so-called radical blacks did more to harm than to help the civil rights movement during the activism of the late I950s and throughout the 1960s. Haines examines external financial support, which he calls “exogenous income,” to test his thesis. The various sources of “exogenous income” are individuals, churches, labor unions, foundations, corporations, miscellaneous organizations (such as social and fraternal groups), and the government.

Using the concept of “radical flank effects,” which he defines as the helpful or harmful consequence for moderates of radicals’ actions, he argues that an increase in external financial support indicates helpful effects, while the converse indicates harmful effects.

“Radicalism” is a relative term. It is important to understand this, Haines insists, if one is to understand social movements by suppressed people. Any suggestion to change is likely to be considered radical. Indeed, the mainstream civil rights organizations of the 1960s–especially the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)–were once considered radical Haines argues, and this is the crux of his thesis, that it is precisely the emergence of radical alternatives which motivated white support of, rather than white backlash against, the so-called black moderates once themselves called radical.

Using seven civil rights organizations to form a continuum, moving from left to right, moderate to radical, beginning with the National Urban League and ending with the most radical, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee–with the National Association of Colored People, the Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Southern Regional Council, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Congress of Racial Equality in between in that order–Haines presents funding information for the years from 1952 to 1970. There are, however, numerous gaps in the income information and several areas of concern which, Haines admits, make his argument imperfect.

Fully 46 percent of the exogenous income is either estimated or missing: three pages of footnotes, in small print, are offered to explain this! Despite this data deficit, Haines proceeds with his argument. Observing that from 1957 there was a general increase in the exogenous income of the moderate groups, a “dramatic increase in the level of exogenous income for the movement as a whole during the 1960s,” and a general decrease after 1965 for the more radical SNCC and CORF, Haines concludes that the radicals benefitted the treasuries of the moderates.

I focus on the financial question because it is, by far, the dominant theme in Haines’s argument. To a lesser extent, he looks at legislation enacted in response to actual and threatened violence by radical groups like the Black Muslims and the Black Panthers as a way the radicals benefitted the moderates. “The most important pieces of legislation. affecting the rights of black Americans–the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Economic Opportunity Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965–were all enacted in the midst of an unprecedented racial crisis which seemed to reflect a widespread rejection by blacks of gradualist, legalistic means.” Since these laws were responses to old NAACP and NUL demands, such as integrated schools and protected black franchise, they are considered positive radical flank effects; an indication that when given the option between radical and moderate demands, government officials chose the later.

Another area of my concern is the question of how the continuum of organizations was selected. It is not clear how Haines decided which organizations to include. Very early in the introduction Haines states that the book’s focus is on “…black protest in both its civil rights and nationalistic forms…” As already noted, Haines refers to the Black Muslims and the Black Panthers as groups whose growing appeal to blacks and whose direct action approaches–which included abandoning nonviolence as a philosophy–led to greater acceptance of the moderate alternative. Yet these organizations are not included among those for which he analyzes income. Given the apparent difficulty encountered in acquiring income information for most of the organizations studied, perhaps the absence of any reliable data of this kind for these groups led

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to their omission.

As a final concern, I register a complaint which I no longer regard as minor. It is particularly pertinent, because it is of an error which crops up over and over again. I refer to the account of the circumstances which led to Mrs. Rosa Parks’s arrest. Haines states what has become usual: Mrs. Parks refused to go to the back of the bus as required by law and upon refusal was arrested. The more accurate account is that Mrs. Parks was occupying a seat in the first row designated for “colored.” When all of the seats in the “white” section were taken, it was customary in Montgomery for the bus driver to force blacks out of their seats, beginning with the first row of seats for “coloreds.” This practice was guided by the principle that no white person should stand while a “colored” was seated. Mrs. Parks was told to give her seat to a white male. She refused, saying she was tired from her day’s toil. Upon refusing she turned her head and looked out the window, ignoring the threats of arrest. She was arrested and the Montgomery Bus Boycott followed.

The version of the incident given by Haines–and even the Rev. Jesse Jackson recently gave a similar account on the television program A Different World–proliferates. Indeed, it seems to be emerging as a modern myth. Several of my students have told me that the only version of the Rosa Parks incident they had heard was that given in Haines’s book and “confirmed” by Jackson. In fact, I have been presented with the argument that the inaccurate version is better because it gives a more dynamic posture to Mrs. Parks and the occasion which is widely accepted as the moment which sparked the activism of the modern civil rights movement. This is similar to saying that if one says that Columbus discovered America in 1492 that is not falsifying history, because indeed he did discover the Americas for Europe.

Despite the problems noted above, this book is worth reading. I especially recommend it to persons interested in the funding sources of the civil rights movement.

Mary Nell Morgan, is associate professor of political science at Xavier University of Louisiana, currently on leave to serve as visiting associate professor of American Studies at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs New Fork. Early in her career, in the mid-1970s, Dr. Morgan was a research assistant at the Southern Regional Council.

Collusion Between Worker and Power Structure.

Reviewed by Linda Kravitz

Vol. 12, No. 1, 1990, pp. 13-15

Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina Piedmont. By Allen Tullos (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1989. 419 pp. $34.95; $12.95 paper.).

In the late 1920s, to attract manufacturers to the Piedmont region of the Carolinas, Duke Power Company advertised:

A population marked by racial purity and unusually high character…. Willing labor, unhampered by any artificial restrictions on outputs native born of old pioneer stock and not imbued by un-American ideas or ideals.

The message of many such ads quoted by Allen Tullos was that Piedmont workers were white and would work long hours for little pay, acquiesce in increasing productivity demands, and resist unionization. In this engaging and provocative book, Tullos explores the remarkable regional culture supporting these corporate “habits of Industry,”

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which he sees as feeding upon the traditional “habits of industry” Piedmont people. He traces their painful “shift from farm to factory, the transition from folk to working class,” through his own encompassing analysis of the times and through the histories of individual families representing industry’s owners and industry’s workers.

The family histories, whether of the powerful or the poor, are imbued with values stemming from Scotch-Irish, English, or German ancestries, and Calvinist, Methodist, or Baptist upbringings.

Faith in authoritarian paternalism and the holiness of work shaped individual social growth; together they produced remarkable collusion among all economic classes in support of the power structure of the textile industry and its demands for productivity.

Acceleration of such demands did bring about labor unrest and strikes, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, but efforts at unionization were consistently crushed by factory owners, often with the cooperation of “the highest officials of state government and the state’s police power.” Says Tullos: “Farmers recently turned mill workers often saw the union as ‘foreign’ to their experience, as un-American and atheistic, and as a threat to customary work arrangements and familial as well as paternalistic ties of employment.”

The familial and paternalistic ties of employment could not have been more direct. At its most elementary, the family supplied workers. Its vital role in doing so did not escape the regional promoters, whose ads proclaimed: “The birth rate of the Carolinas is the highest in the United States. Already a second generation of textile workers has come along, and in many older textile centers a third generation has grown up.”

Secondly, as one interviewee noted, “A man will think a long time before he’ll speak out when he’s got nine little children about his knees.”

Third, and perhaps most essential to the character of Piedmont industry, entire families, including those of all ages and genders, worked for individual employers. As Tullos explains, until the 1930s, a “family wage” commonly meant that children and adults all had to tend the factory machinery to earn a livelihood. Mill bosses understood that much of the job of enforcing discipline and industry among the youngest workers would be managed by the fathers and mothers. “Besides [being] under the company’s jurisdiction,” said Grover Hardin, who entered the mills of Greenville, S.C., as a child, “you was under your parents.” Fathers ruled both roost and workplace. “To the child, religion, stoic discipline, fatherly authority, and the mill hierarchy seemed to be cut from the same cloth.”

Tullos alternates voices of the Piedmont industry’s captains, all white males, with those of its labor force, primarily white women. As he follows their family histories, the captains, including the tobacco mogul James Buchanan “Buck” Duke (founder of Duke Power Co. and Duke University), J. Spencer Love (founder of Burlington Mills), Daniel Augustus Tompkins (promoter of textile schools and child labor), and William Henry Belk (innovator in “single-pricing” and creator of Belk stores) are chiefly heard through their writings and speeches. They bear few surprises, little self-questioning or deviation from promotion of industry. Witness the refrain of John Belk, heir to the Belk fortune, who sums up his view on the habits of industry: “Man is a working animal.”

In this whole book, the only real exception to the untroubled tales of the upwardly mobile is the sad story of D.W. League, a weave-room overseer who in 1928 sacrificed his job at Poe Mill in a “stand of Christian conscience” against increased workloads for his weavers, lost another job in a refusal to work Sundays, took another requiring two shifts, and finally, exhausted, turned back to family farm life. Said his daughter, “He had just got so confused, till he wanted to get quiet. He worried himself to death.” Said another, “It bothered him a great deal, this change that had come about. People were not given the consideration that they had been before. You were pushed as a worker…More looms, more than you could run.”

It is the tales of the workers which are the life of the book. Typically, their families were sharecroppers or yeomanry displaced by the agricultural collapse of the late nineteenth century. Tullos gives their present-day accounts in their own words, which are never sugarcoated, and often spirited and humorous. They are frequently fascinating simply because of their implied acquiescence in end expressed gratitude for the “habits of Industry” which, having allowed them to make a meager living, also brought them much suffering. They impress us with the vulnerability of people with desperately immediate needs to jobs whose benefits are so low as to guarantee that those needs are perpetuated.

Upon the retirement of Icy Norman, for forty-seven years a yarn winder for Burlington Mills, company officials lauded and publicized her as its “oldest hand.” She was royally taken to dinner by “big shots” from the New York office, who told her that “if you ever come to New York…you will have a welcome mat.” She recalled that “I really enjoyed it” and later “Every time I go back up there [to the factory] I feel like I’m going back home.”

But in the same interview, she also related how she was forced to retire before she could benefit from a new profit-sharing plan. “I said, ‘Just let me work one more year. . .Then I could have my debts paid off.’ The man says, ‘I wish we could.’ That kind of hurt me…I could really have used that money [$12,500]. I felt like if anybody was entitled to it, I was, because I put my whole life there. My young life, and I growed up there. I feel like I was part in the making of Burlington Industries, because I come there

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and stayed with them. I went with them through thick and thin.”

Ethel Hilliard, another long-time employee of Burlington, related how the mill hired two of her children before they were sixteen [the legal age] because “they knowed we needed work.” Her son “oiled that machinery and climbed over them looms. I thought about that a lot of times. I don’t reckon they really wanted to work a child like that, but they just done it to help out, I reckon. I know it was dangerous for him to be up there.”

Ultimately, Ethel Hilliard felt, “They was good to me at the Burlington Mill.” Mother of ten children, with an unemployed husband, she was most grateful that “They’d always take me back. I’d stop when a baby was going to be born, and then when they got old enough, I’d go back. Usually I’d stay out a couple of months.”

These workers were naturally wary of unions. Wariness approached fear in Bessie Buchanan, who in the early 1940s had witnessed a strike at Durham’s Erwin Mill. She believed she had barely escaped the union due to “a vision that the Lord gave me.” She had a dream about Nazis, who also resembled Old Testament persecutors, who tried to force her to join the union. In her dream, her faith as she walked a gauntlet convinced the unionizers to free her.

The workers’ stories are not all dreary. Ethel Hilliard’s irrepressible account of her childhood, her mother’s healing talent and herbal remedies, and her marriage is alone worth the purchase of this book. Ethel also enjoyed her work, “scalloping bedspreads,” which she felt was her “talent.”

These stories tell us that in the Piedmont any challenge to the workplace would have been a challenge to an entire culture. The Piedmont’s “habits of Industry” were reinforced by family, church, and workplace and, as Tullos documents, by the education system, from the early textile schools to Duke University and the University of North Carolina. They were benignly interpreted by the Institute for Research in Social Science, established by Howard Odum (SRC’s first president) as a laboratory for regional sociological investigation. “With a bit of hammering out by Odum, the habits of Industry appeared as inevitable, manifest, progressive.”

Finally, “In time, Industry’s assurance of having its way and of having it publicly confirmed became one of the Piedmont’s, and the South’s most secure habits.”

Habits of Industry would be an excellent text for students of labor history. It is challenging reading for any who wonder how it came about that in this country so many people would work so hard, over so many generations, so profitably for others, and for wages so low that their incomes would never rise above the poverty line. And it is graceful, enjoyable reading for those who may simply be intrigued by the rich, albeit perverse, culture of the Carolina Piedmont.

Linda Kravitz has recently resigned as research director of the Housing Assistance Council. She is immediate past chair of the National Council of Agricultural Life and Labor. In her undergraduate days she worked a summer at the Council. She is co-author of the Other Housing Crisis, published by HAC and the Center on Policy and Policy Priorities, 1989.

The Cold Hard Truth

By J.L. Chestnut, Jr.

Vol. 12, No. 1, 1990, pp. 16, 15

Herbert O. Reid, Sr., (Herb) is attorney for the Washington, D.C., municipal government and personal lawyer and advisor to Marion Barry, the embattled and dishonored mayor of the nation’s capitol city. Herb taught me criminal law at Howard University in Washington and subsequently taught Bruce Boynton and Governor Doug Wilder, whose class followed mine.

At Herb’s invitation I often return to Howard to lecture and judge students in moot court competition. I cannot be certain if I first met Barry in Herb’s office or in Walter Fauntroy’s church office, but I have known and liked Barry for a decade.

I did not know Barry when he was with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the 1960s. Jim Forman, Bernard Lafayette, Julian Bond, John Lewis and Worth Long were in my office almost daily. Barry was here, but I don’t remember him. He remembers me.

Julian Bond, who moved to Washington after very serious personal problems in Atlanta, ran into Vivian and me last summer at the New Orleans Jazz Festival and we talked about mutual friends. Julian said, “Marion has lost all sense of reality. I couldn’t believe what he said over his telephone and he knows it has to be tapped by the feds.”

Julian had no need to detail what Barry said on the telephone. I knew it had to do with drugs and women. Similar revelations have been around for years.

Neither Julian nor I made any other comment about Barry. We could only pray.

After the sky fell on Barry I made several telephone calls around Washington. Everyone agreed drug addiction spawns a euphoric, false sense of security and incredible arrogance. Herb commented, “No one, not even a loving wife, can really help an addict who thinks he needs no help.”

A black female official in Washington whom I have known for years was needlessly defensive and abrasive. She insisted Steve Smitherman (son of Mayor Joe) is a former mayor of Selma and wrongly accused me of covering for “the worst kind of Southern racist” and my hometown. She later composed herself and said, “Drugs and whiskey are often exclusive, but our boy had both monkeys at the same time.”

Jesse Jackson was due to address a meeting in Selma about the time of Barry’s arrest on drug charges. His secretary called to say he was in “a trance” over the arrest. Jesse canceled all commitments and was trying to figure what to do. I predict he will not run for office of mayor of Washington, D.C.

It was a depressing time. A sad, but hardly unique episode in today’s America. Some questions, however, must be answered.

Has Barry’s conduct undermined efforts to address the already debilitating drug scene in Washington? Will Washington ghetto youths become even more cynical? Was President George Bush’s drug conference in South America undermined to any appreciable extent by Barry’s arrest?

The answer to all three questions is no. Given the noise

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in the media, that may be difficult to believe.

The drug scene in Washington involves more money than many could count on a computer. Drug traffickers operate in open defiance of the White House, not to mention City Halls. Illegal drugs have entered every White House beginning with the administration of Richard Milhous Nixon. That is an open secret in Washington.

Scores of ghetto youth already have zero faith in the system or politicians who operate government. Ghetto youth can cite verse and chapter of drug traffickers who operate both with impunity and immunity. A misdemeanor bust for possession means nothing on the big city drug scene, even if the defendant is a mayor.

Barry’s arrest had no effect on Bush’s drug conference. The conference will result in little or nothing because the president brought only rhetoric and show.

What a world!

Peace.

J. L. Chestnut is an Alabama trial lawyer and writer.

Democracy in the South

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 12, No. 2, 1990, pp. 1-3

Like an old Chinese proverb coming south for the winter, one side of democracy in the American South today shows troubling, even treacherous signs of crisis, and on the other side are rare moments for important opportunities. This contrast is, of course a part of the ironic history of political participation in the South which has delivered the region from the land of segregation of thirty years ago to being home for most of the nation’s registered black voters today. It is that essential characteristic of a region that can encompass in one year more violations of the voting rights of its minority citizens than any other while electing more minority officials than all others.

The dangers to democracy which haunt the South today are both immediate and far-reaching. The region’s population growth over the last ten years presents real obstacles to maintaining the voting strength of minority citizens beyond the local level. Most of the growth, for example, has been in suburban Congressional and legislative districts where minorities are a small part of the population and where incumbent voting records often show indifference or even hostility to the interest of black and Hispanic citizens. Racial bloc voting continues throughout the region, fencing out minority voters from any substantial influence in presidential elections. And Southern state officials–often elected with the support of minority voters–appear today as adamant in their opposition to the enforcement

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of the Voting Rights Act as they were decades ago. (Witness the never-ending oppositions of state officials to a fair redistricting of the Arkansas legislature and the judicial districts in seven Southern states.)

Other signs of crisis are no less troubling. In three Southern states during the last year, whites claimed “reverse discrimination” in federal courts as they invoked the Voting Rights Act to promote their own political rights, apparently oblivious of the need to show that they had been the victims of a history of racial discrimination in voting and in society. In 1989, a state court judge in Georgia dismissed local criminal indictments because of jury discrimination–not enough whites were on the jury, he claimed. And in South Carolina a public restaurant openly defied the provisions of the federal public accommodations law, apparently on the belief that those laws were not going to be enforced any longer.

These peculiar events took place within the backdrop of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decisions on “race-based remedies.” In its opinion holding that efforts to assist minority contractors by the City of Richmond were unconstitutional, the U.S. Supreme Court stated: “Classifications based on race carry a danger of stigmatic harm. Unless they are strictly reserved . . . they may in fact promote notions of racial inferiority and lead to a politics of racial hostility.”

The Court’s reference to a “politics of racial hostility” reflects the language used by opponents of renewal of the Voting Rights Act in the Congressional debates in 1982: “All too often the task of racial classifications in and of itself has resulted in social turmoil…[and]…the proposed changes in Section 2 [of the Voting Rights Act] will inevitably ‘compel the worst tendencies towards racebased allegiances and divisions.'”

These similarities are more than linguistic: the fundamental rationale undergirding the Supreme Court’s ruling against minority contracting–and affirmative action in employment in its other recent cases–applies to all remedies for racial discrimination, including the creation of majority black districts in voting cases. Increasingly, race-based remedies are suspect in the federal courts no matter what they’re aimed to correct.

These signs of the times are serious indicators of dangers amid both our folkways and stateways. When the city council of Richmond, Va.–the old seat of the Confederacy–is frustrated by the U.S. Supreme Court–the authors of legal equality in the twentieth century–in an attempt to remove the vestiges of race discrimination, we should realize that no longer will traditional institutions defend and expand opportunity for all in the future. We must take seriously the jeopardy that can befall both the letter and the spirit of democracy in the South from both old friends and old foes.

Nonetheless, the South is poised to deliver another set

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of historic advances. With an expected gain of ten Congressional seats in Southern states after the 1990 Census, minority voters have a chance to increase their strength through the creation of additional Congressional districts with a majority of black and Hispanic voters. The legal movement for enforcing the federal Voting Rights Act is continuing to remove old and new barriers to full political participation, and the numbers of black, Hispanic, and white officials elected by the votes of minority citizens continue to enlarge. It was not, for instance, a change of heart, but a change in the voters of Richmond that moved the city council to embrace local legislation promoting minority contracting.

Of course, only one of these contrasting signs will become the signal feature of the South’s future–depending upon what Southerners of goodwill do now and in the future. As in the past, these times call for perseverance with those enterprises that have worked and experimentation with others that promise new results in promoting political participation. It is a time for redoubling and improving upon current, effective work, for reinforcing the public understanding of the necessity for such work, and for boldly searching for new ways to further democracy for all.

In this spirit the Southern Regional Council has a timehonored place as an institution which believes in, and whose work enlarges, the promise of democracy in the American South. More than any other private institution in the region during the twentieth century, the Council has been able to bring both vigilance and innovation to the challenge of expanding democracy. These qualities, hopefully, will also be evident in the strategies and activities which both the Council and other Southerners engage over the next few years for enlarging democracy in this region we stubbornly call home.

Steve Suitts, a native of Alabama, is the executive director of the Southern Regional Council and the publisher of this journal.

The Vote and Change

Julian Bond

Vol. 12, No. 2, 1990, p. 4-9

These edited remarks are from a panel discussion held on political participation during last winter’s annual meeting of the Southern Regional Council. The participants, all with long involvement in the drive to expand political participation, included former SNCC leader and Georgia State Senator Julian Bond, former Little Rock mayor Lottie Shackelford, former Alabama legislator and national Democratic Party operative Tony Harrison and Texas voting rights activist Andrew Hernandez. All are members of the Southern Regional Council, Harrison and Shackelford are former presidents of the organization. Bond narrated the program, which was taped for television broadcast and is available on videocassette from the SRC.

JULIAN BOND: Ms. Shackelford, let’s begin with you. You were a high school student in Little Rock in 1954 when the Supreme Court said that separate but equal was against the law. Many believe that’s the beginning of the modern civil rights movement and the present day emphasis on the right-to-vote. What are your recollections of the political scene in Arkansas at that time?

LOTTIE SHACKELFORD: I think that Daisy Bates would be the first to say that she was merely trying to make certain that all students, particularly black students, had equal access for educational opportunities. And while the Court decision came down in ’54, the Little Rock schools went back and forth for three years as to when and how they were going to integrate. Then in 1957, of course, we had the Little Rock Nine who actually did integrate Central High School.

A lot of folk have asked, “Why nine?” I tell them that the number started off being 250, but as each year would pass, the number would drop. Some students no longer wanted to be a part. Some parents were being threatened about their children participating. So on that day in September 1957, there were only nine students still willing to go. Had the date been put off even one more day, we may have had eight or seven. But that did start an awakening-not just in Little Rock and the South-about what was needed to bring about equality and justice for all.

BOND: A moment ago you remarked that your father sold poll taxes, and a great many people won’t understand what that meant. What did you mean?

SHACKELFORD: You needed a poll tax to be eligible to vote. As opposed to registering to vote, you bought a poll tax.

BOND: How much did it cost?

SHACKELFORD: One dollar, at that time which was quite a bit of money. And I helped him sell poll tax receipts.

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BOND: So he would buy a quantity and then sell them back to potential voters?

SHACKELFORD: Right. He always believed that folks should exercise their right to vote. And, that was his way of making a contribution. He’d go into the rural areas outside Little Rock and sell those poll tax receipts. Go into churches and neighborhoods.

That’s one of the things that black folk in Little Rock were quite complacent about at that time. In their view they didn’t feel they were being denied so much. And, I think that’s another reason the impact of the desegregation crisis in ’57 had such a meaning there. Too many people were satisfied with the way things were going. While in rural areas black folk were saying they could not vote, in Little Rock, if you bought a poll tax receipt, you could vote.

Somehow or another they saw that as equality because white folk couldn’t vote either without a poll tax receipt.

BOND: Do you recall any fear accompanying your father’s efforts when you got outside Little Rock, out in rural Arkansas? Do you remember people being afraid to buy a poll tax?

SHACKELFORD: No, but then he never ventured much farther than the central Arkansas area. He didn’t get down into the Delta area.

BOND: Mr. Harrison, you’re an Alabama native and it is in Alabama, and Selma particularly, in 1965 that a massive demonstration resulted, finally, in the passage of the Voting Rights Act from which stem most of the political protections evident about us all over the United States for a wide variety of groups today. What are your recollections of the period before ’65 leading up to the Selma-Montgomery march?

TONY HARRISON: I was too young to have a personal recollection of that. But my grandfather was a voter. And, he was a teacher and minister. My fondest recollection of him is not about voting, but about his reading. He was always reading. In the summer he would be sitting on the porch after he had done his chores, and he would be trying to read the paper and I would be up trying to disturb him from his reading. He’d just ignore me and keep right on going.

BOND: As an Alabama state Iegislator, you helped reapportion the state legislature, did you not?

HARRISON: I had watched very carefully the reapportionment process in 1970 and ’74. And subsequently I ran for the legislature and won. So I was active in the process following the 1980 Census in which we expanded the base of participation from that in ’74.

BOND: Could you have helped to create additional black representatives in the Alabama state house and senate had it not been for the Selma movement in ’65 and even what had happened in Little Rock in 1957?

HARRISON: I don’t think there was any political participation of any significance in the South. The South was very clear that the poll tax represented a process for the denial of the franchise to all but primarily white males. So without the Selma march which brought the Voting Rights Act, my own participation would not have been possible. Once we got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of ’65, we also had the litigating process that brought one-man one-vote and which then turned out to be the basis for all of the redistricting. If I’m not mistaken, that comes out of Tuskegee, Alabama.

BOND: A natural turn to Mr. Hernandez, whose organization works primarily with Hispanics in the southwestern part of the United States. It was 1972 that the Voting Rights Act was extended to cover Hispanics. What did that extension mean to the kind of work that you do now? Could it have happened without this extension, this widening of the pool, in effect?

ANDREW HERNANDEZ: Absolutely not. In the same way that the passage of the Voting Rights Act opened up the doors of political opportunity for blacks in the South, where they went from 2-3 percent of the electorate to 30 percent of the electorate in some of the states, with extension of the Voting Rights Act to Hispanics in the Southwest beginning in the early ’70s, we saw a dramatic change in Hispanic participation. As the barriers came down, Hispanic participation went up.

In the same way that blacks went from a people who couldn’t participate because they were shut out of the process, Hispanics went from a group who had the lowest registration rate and the lowest turnout rate in the country of any other group in the early ’70s to in the ’80s a group that has the highest registration and turnout rate. Frankly, prior to the extension of the Voting Rights Act to Hispanics, at a time when the population was literally booming, the actual number of Hispanics registered to vote went down. That’s pretty hard, to be tripling your population and actually go down in the number of people registered to vote.

BOND: Why did that happen?

HERNANDEZ: There was an induced apathy in our community. It was induced by an array of election devices

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that shut Hispanics out of the political process; for instance, gerrymandering. When we first started our work in 1974, I was given the assignment to look at why Hispanics couldn’t win where they were in the majority. There were sixty-seven counties we identified in Texas that should have elected [Hispanic] county officials but that had not. That’s pretty distressing and we tended to blame our own people for it.

And when you got the leadership together and asked why we couldn’t win, somehow the finger was always pointed at apathy. That they were too poor to be organized.

What we found in those sixty-seven counties was that every single one of them was gerrymandered. The lines were drawn in such a way that Hispanics couldn’t win, no matter how much they registered, no matter how much they voted. When people were saying their vote didn’t count, they were telling the truth. The system had been set up to insure that their vote didn’t count.

BOND: What about other barriers? We heard Ms. Shackelford talk about the poll tax. What about other exclusionary barriers?

HERNANDEZ: We faced the annual registration for the poll tax. But another barrier unique to Hispanics was learning English. A large number of our older citizens weren’t afforded the opportunity to learn English. When they were growing up and when they were working they knew as much English as they needed to know to pick up people’s clothes, to clean their houses and take care of their children, and to cut their yards.

They didn’t figure they needed any more English than that. So having the ballot printed in English only denied people their citizenship. People who had sent their children to war, had paid their taxes all these years, and been faithful to American ideals but who had never been given a chance to learn English. When-under the Voting Rights Act-bilingual ballots were printed, our participation increased.

We also started attacking by litigating. We had filed lawsuits and were victorious in voting rights cases. When our people started winning at a local level and they started seeing change our participation went up.

In the Southwest the number of Hispanic elected officials increased from 1,500 in 1976 to close to 4,000 today. In Texas, one of the Southern states that we are talking about, we went from about 700 elected officials in 1974 to 1,600 today. We’ve doubled the number of voters, we’ve doubled the number of elected officials. I think that in Texas and in Florida you’re not going to win statewide elections unless you capture a significant part of the Hispanic vote.

BOND: And what has it meant to the general public in the states where you work to enfranchise this large segment of the population that formerly was just shut out; what difference does it make? If I were a devil’s advocate here: who cares? What difference does it make if Hispanics vote, if their lines are drawn properly?

HERNANDEZ: Well, in a democracy, anytime you have a large portion of the population shut off and alienated from the political system, that population, pretty soon, is going to try to bring down that system. They have no part in it, no share in it. Democratic institutions are fed and nurtured by people’s participation.

But there’s another issue that has to do with the fact that Hispanics bring energy, skills, and wisdom to this country. The other side of it, let’s say we don’t do anything. Let’s say we don’t integrate people, we don’t give them an opportunity. In Texas, by the year 2025, blacks and Hispanics will make up a majority of the population.

Are you going to have a majority of the population shut out economically, politically, and culturally from the life of that state?

HARRISON: In Alabama, the relegation of blacks to a second-class citizenship economically has denied growth to that state. If you look at the gaps between white income, black income, and Hispanic income across the region and the nation, you see lost economic opportunity. You can’t buy a house, you can’t feed your children, you can’t buy health care, you can’t clothe your family. That has relegated this society to a slower growth. We have a third-world nation living in the midst of the wealth of America. Racism continues to be the determinant of not only political but economic decisions. Racism is just a hell of a thing.

HERNANDEZ: I think the first stage in a people’s development is always the acquisition of power. The second stage is the exercise of power. I think we’ve gotten pretty

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good at moving into the acquisition of political power. But we’re still learning our way on how we as minorities exercise that power.

BOND: 1990 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Selma march and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. What does tomorrow hold? We see David Dinkins in New York, Douglas Wilder in Virginia–are these aberrations? Are we going to see more dark faces in unfamiliar places? What’s going to happen next?

HERNANDEZ: There’s no question that we will see more blacks being elected and we’ll see Hispanics being governors within this decade, and perhaps some black and Hispanic senators.

I think that the challenge for the ’90s is to exercise the power. For a long time our politics was protest politics, meaning you try to stop that thing from happening to you. It’s a redress of grievance, Well, that’s the politics that you’re involved in when you’re not on the inside. And we still need to do that.

But there’s another politics that’s emerging within the Hispanic community. In Texas we say, “dance with the one that brought you.” And what brought us was voter registration. What brought us were the Voting Rights Act lawsuits, and we have to be vigilant about that. What bought us was the commitment of black and Hispanic leaders and families and parents to do something better for their community and their children. We can’t leave that behind.

At the same time, we need to make sure that we start paying attention to the time when we will be the majority. By 2010, 30 percent of all the children in America will be minority children. In the five largest states in this country, minority children will be the new majority. That’s within our lifetime. When my boy is my age, he could be living in a state in which a majority of the people there are Hispanic. We need to prepare ourselves for being the majority and that means proposing from public policy perspective things that make our society more opportunity-filled, freer and more just.

The whole process is still very much alive and well in the black communities. The realities of our politics in northern cities is often still based upon that kind of participation. In 1991 after the census is taken and the new line-drawing process begins, we will come to the table with knowledge about what reapportionment is. We know how to try to make it work for us. I think we’re going to see an expansion of black, Hispanic and other minority participation during the 1990s and the redrawing process that will follow the 1990 census will lay foundations for that expansion.

BOND: Ms. Shackelford, let me shift gears a little bit and come to you. Your biography says you are the first woman mayor of Little Rock. We hear now about a woman’s vote. We see women’s preferences influencing decisions in the New York City mayoral race and the Virginia governor’s race. What does this mean?

SHACKELFORD: I think that in the beginning days of the women’s movement when we were fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, it still wasn’t clearly defined. It was almost pitting one against the other. Say me as a black woman, whether I’m a woman or a black in the sense of how I related to issues. There is no “if, and, or but” about it. The abortion issue is a woman’s issue. And, for the first time now, I think you can see the impact of the woman’s vote, black or white, rich or poor, in the sense of how they are impacting upon elections. And I think the past elections in Virginia and in new York show that.

BOND: You can argue that black women have been much more successful, proportionately anyway than white women. There were at one time, in proportionate number, more black women in the Congress than there were white women. There are a number of black women who have had electoral successes on the lower level. What’s going to happen in black politics in the United States, what new faces are we going to see? Neither Douglas Wilder nor Dave Dinkins is a babe in arms. These are men who have been around in political office for years and years. What new faces, fresh faces,

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female faces are we going to see in the future?

SHACKELFORD: We have not had a black woman governor. We have not had a black woman mayor of a truly major city. We have not had a black woman senator. We have very, very few black women who have found entry into corporate policymaking. You give me an economic chart and black women are still on the bottom; a political chart, we’re still on the bottom.

But, in the sense of new faces on the horizon, I see many more women now because they have had the opportunity or have been forced to be a part of the economic mainstream. Really working to take care of families themselves. Exposed-which means they are more concerned about politics because they understand the relevance of politics and economic well-being. We’re going to see more educated women who will not just focus on careers, but will focus on politics.

BOND: Mr. Hernandez, earlier we were talking about generations in politics. How is the first generation of Hispanics elected in Texas and the first generation of blacks elected in Alabama and Arkansas different from those elected in the last five to ten years?

HERNANDEZ: I think you’ll find two major differences. The first generation of leadership tends to be elected out of communities where the districts or jurisdictions are predominantly black or Hispanic. And as such, they come out of a struggle of protest. The second generation of Ieadership has less of that struggle of protest because the political process has been more accessible to them. But they’re tending to win now in districts where they make up 20 to 30 percent of the population. For example, the mayor’s race in Denver is won in a city where only 13 percent of the population is Hispanic. We see that happening much more. That means that their politics are not going to be as ethnically driven.

The more that women are integrated, the more that Hispanics and blacks are integrated into the national body politic, the more they’re going to be talking about justice, opportunity, and freedom. I think you’re going to see a renaissance in those values coming from segments that have been left out and now are being brought in. Because they are close enough to their history to remember a time when they were excluded, they will be more faithful to keeping the promise for all the citizens.

Once there were folks who said that you shouldn’t give people who don’t own property the right to vote. There were others who said you shouldn’t have freed the slaves, or given women the right to vote. There were folks who said you shouldn’t pay attention to those rabble-rousers in the South in the 1960s who made the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation come true. I think that future generations will look back at this generation that’s in the vanguard of transforming American life and say that this generation stood for what was best in America. And, those that resisted, stood on the wrong side of history.

BOND: Tony Harrison, we see in the headlines all kinds of racial and ethnic conflict, gay bashing, attacks on Asians, attacks on Hispanics, incidents such as Bensonhurst in New York. What does this say to us, twenty-five years after the Civil Rights Movement began?

HARRISON: It says that we are going through some frustrating times. I think Andy touched it when he said that you are sort of at the castle door. I think that there’s a lot of resentment, frustration, and lack of understanding in the white community that is festering.

The fact is that the economy is not generating enough opportunities for America’s people. White folks feel that blacks, Hispanics, and Asians are getting what’s theirs. The fact is that the economy isn’t generating jobs enough for all of us. And white folks are resenting what they see.

I don’t think it speaks negatively to where we are coming from, I think it speaks more to white frustrations. In this context, just the other day I was watching a television piece on eastern Europe. A Solidarity leader was attending a big rally in Chicago. The highest population of Polish people outside of Poland in one city is Chicago. I hope the Poles in Chicago will understand my struggle. Their struggle and my struggle is basically the same. Racism impedes their ability to see that.

Those kids in Bensonhurst were almost first generation Italian emigrants.

Why did they come to America? Freedom, economic opportunity? The same things I want. Racial tensions remain because the society has so segregated us that we have not learned enough about each other or appreciated our respective histories and those are the tensions that we

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are seeing.

I’m hopeful that with the new participation of blacks, Hispanics and Asians we can make this society as vibrant and vital and energetic as it ought to be and can be. We have to continue to pursue the political acquisition of participation and of power. We have to make the schools responsive to educate our children and help them understand that if they are not ready for participation in that society that’s coming in ten years they’re going to be cast aside.

The drug wars in the inner-cities of today are, I think, a direct by-product of the absence of hope and the absence of a sense of the future that these kids are faced with- overbearing pressure built upon generations of exclusion and denial. As long as our children cannot see past the moment that is in front of them, they can’t plan for tomorrow. When they can’t plan for tomorrow, there is no hope.

I think that racism is going to impede this society’s acceptance of the changing reality that Andy described. We’ve got every nation here in America. You can find somebody from every place in the world right here. And those Americans can in fact provide linkages back to South America, back to Spain, back to Europe, back to Africa. And all of the Asian countries are represented here.

But I don’t think we really understand the wealth of human diversity that we have in this nation, because we have been so historically tied into restricting access and restricting participation.

‘You Have a Right . . .’ Voices from the Movement in Mississippi

Edited by George Littleton

Vol. 12, No. 2, 1990, pp. 10-14

The following narratives are condensed from interviews conducted by young people from Bloodlines, regroup of black Mississippi high school students with a special interest in the seeds of the Civil Rights Movement in their area. The people they interviewed were all active in the Movement in and around Holmes County, Mississippi, which includes the communities of Lexington, Durant, and Goodman. Holmes County is deep in the Delta, along what is now north/south Interstate 55 above Jackson. The excerpts reprinted here focus on voting rights, although other signs of the times are visible which shed light on the struggle for the ballot. It is worth noting that for some of the interviewees the Civil Rights Movement began in the 1930s, and only came to a head in the Delta in the freedom summers of the early 1960s. These interviews also point up the often overlooked truth that dirt farmers and other grassroots soldiers started the Movement which only later attracted its stars. The interviews were edited by George Littleton.

Mr. T.C. Johnson

Interviewed by Jaqueline Collins & Reginald Skinner July 21, 1989. Lexington, Miss.

When I first got into the Movement, they had me like a so-called leader to encourage the others to come to meetings because a lot of people knew me. I had some influence, and I was puttin that to help where we could get on track to help the entire situation. I had seen a lot of abuse, and this made me make the effort to better conditions in Holmes County.

When I first went up to try to register to vote, it was only three of us but we was met by some of the deputies. This kinds put a little fear in your mind. Old Man Sims, who was practically blind, was in front, and the dogs was just charging at his legs, but he couldn’t see. We still had the courage to proceed into the courthouse. When we go in the courthouse we had to go in the circuit clerk’s office–that’s where we went to try to get the forms and try to fill ’em out to register to vote. We proceeded filling out the forms. It was what grade you were, how old, were you a citizen and a whole lotta questions. Some I thought was just pathetic–how many bubbles in a bar of soap? That was under Henry B. McClellan. We stayed in there so long till I was leaning on the counter, and he asked me did I want to go to jail. And I said, ‘No, the only thing we came up here for was to try to register to vote.’ And he asked me if I wanted to see the sheriff. I told him, ‘No, I didn’t come to see the sheriff.’ Then he messed around; we was in there from about nine o’clock till about two. He would go get coffee and it would take him ’bout two hours and a half to return. You gotta sit and wait. You didn’t feel too good sitting there. That’s how slow and unconcerned they were about you trying to get registered to vote to better your condition.

We went up there several times [to try to register to vote]. The next time, a pretty good bunch was going, and me and my wife and two more ladies went up. They were still giving you the runaround, askin’ you all kinds of silly questions, going through the motion again. It was still dragging feet and wasting time, and only one or two could get in that day.

They would treat you very ugly, talking about throwing you in jail and calling the sheriff. This was an experience I had never felt, trying to do something for your rights and they further misusing and intimidating you. It was awful, and you couldn’t even get a lotta peoples to even go up because they was already fearful; they knew how things were in the county, that white folks was running it and if you didn’t do what they wanted, they would make it hard for you. Or catch you on the road and beat you up. And wasn’t nothing did about it because they wasn’t handling whites for doing anything to blacks.

But after I went, it gave me more courage to go back where I’d be a registered voter. And that’s what’d make me proud; I could tell the young black generation that it’s not so hard now. We were the first three from the east side of Lexington ’cause there was a group ahead of us from down by Mileston, the first fourteen. They took a lotta abuse. I think the sheriff went out and cursed ’em out and made ’em get off the grass.

[The sheriff’s] main purpose was to hinder blacks from coming to the courthouse. He could get you upset and afraid. Lotta people just wouldn’t go if they saw the dogs out there. They would be saying things to you, ‘Get the hell offa that grass.’ They had signs out there: ‘Keep off the grass.’ And if you step on the grass, they would carry you to jail. And this would disencourage a lot of blacks from even going up to try.

[We were never threatened] for trying to register at that particular time. It came down later when we started entering children in the white school. It was the county schools, but at that time it was the white schools. And I put my youngest son, Leander Johnson, over there and they

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cut my funds off–what I was borrowing to farm on. They came by and told me a group was comin’ to see me about why was I doin this or was I being paid by the government. And I just told em I wanted my child to get a good education so he’d be able to make it through the world.

Once I was comin’ from a meetin down to Mileston, and I had four or five youngsters with me. The sheriffs and the constables and the game wardens would get across the track and catch us. I knew the routes through the country roads and the hills so I could bring them a different route. Once when we got to Lexington, they had two cars across the blacktop. I just whirled and went the other way. Fear is part of it, but I was trying to shun trouble at that time.

SNCC and CORE was the first to come in [to help blacks register] and was kinda like the freedom riders comin down South. They had a staff and connections with lawyers from the North, and they would come down and help us do sit-ins and go into places where blacks wadn’t allowed. They would help us do these things, getting through the county, gettin’ peoples organized. They could come in and mingle pretty good. They knew partly what they were doing. They could get more of the people together at these meetings than we who were living here.

I guess that’s because people were just really searching for good leadership and somebody to stand up and tell ’em what the whites couldn’t do to ’em. because the blacks here were slow about moving. But they would come in with us and get peoples to promise they would come out and help do things. So they had pretty good connections with the peoples here.

[The white volunteers] would fall in and just fit right on in. They were coming from the North and had a little more hang with ’em than some of the blacks here. Some of ’em came six months, a year, and left. But Sue and Henry Lorenzi stayed on throughout the whole action because when they left most blacks what wanted to register had done been up and registered.

[The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (FDP)] was mostly to help get peoples registered to vote. And it would help you get organized to go in and sit down in a lotta these places where blacks wasn’t allowed in the regular Democratic Party. By 1967 we had enough blacks registered in Holmes County so the FDP ran a group of candidates.

I ran [for supervisor] to help the peoples more, cause I wanted it fairly and squarely with all of ’em. Of course they tried to keep blacks from voting. That was the first priority. They could always get who they wanted to. [On voting day] I went to each polling place, shook hands, and checked out was it being fair and square. We had federal observers, but it didn’t seem like they was much help. They just observed like they was sent to do. We had quite a few disturbances on voting day. Whites and blacks would kinda get uptight to each other or say some violent things.

It was mostly the farmers–the poor farmers, the dirt farmers–that started the Movement. [Their advantage was that] the farmers had a acre or two, or ten or twenty, so he had his own little shack and his farm; he was making his living mostly from the earth. The teachers had to go through the school ‘sociation, and they were always afraid if they got out there, they would hear their name. The Superintendent and the rest of the people would get on ’em, and if they didn’t quit, they would fire ’em. But now we did get one teacher–Mrs. Bernice Montgomery. She was the first teacher that really came out and stuck with the Movement and the peoples. Seem like she had her mind made up. And her husband saw the Movement needed help so he got in it, and that gave her more courage whether she got fired or whatnot. She didn’t care what happened back there at the job. She just came with a full desire to help the people move forward. Later on you had other teachers to come and associate some with it.

There was some tension between the poor farmers who were first involved in the Movement and the teachers and preachers who came later on. They were all tryin’ to work towards one cause, but it would be a little tension because the grassroot people were the first to do anything to get the peoples together, where the preachers was afraid and the teachers was mostly afraid of gettin’ fired from their job; they didn’t wanna be involved at that time. So it was just the grassroot level people. And you get some of these old peoples, they didn’t want you to talk about it or come to see you because they knew what would happen. And we got turned down a lot of times from the black minister. He said he didn’t believe in mixing politics with the Bible, but it was fear is what it was.

William B. Eskridge

Interviewed by Dwayne Buchanan John Darjean August 2,1989. Carrolton, Miss.

I been in the Civil Rights Movement since nineteen hundred and thirty-two. But I had to be in it very slowly at that time. I believe the first time I got in the real Civil Rights Movement was in the sixties, Mrs. Blackmon put me in it. I went to a meeting and this young fellow was there named John Allen. Before I left there that night they had made me president of the whole thing. Consequently, I had to go to work and from then on we had quite a few meetings, quite a few run-ins and so forth. But my main role was to try to guide the thing in order to keep down as much violence as we can. Of course I was older than most of the people here that was in the movements.

Way back yon’, in 1928, we were tryin’ our best to get people registered to vote. We went to a state convention in 1928 and came back and got started. And we got about fourteen or fifteen people in the movement. Eventually we

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got that many registered, too.

The state convention was in Jackson, and the main party leader was Perry Howard, a Republican. The onliest way we could get in politics at that time was through the Republicans because the Democratics called themselves lily-white Democrats–you couldn’t get in there. So we decided we’d get a group and go vote. I believe ’twas 1932, we had about four teams go and vote. The day came for voting, I went to the poll in Carrolton. I think I was teachin’ school in Benton. I planned to leave school at that time. They didn’t want me to have a ballot but I told ’em ‘I got to have a ballot.’ And they gave me one and I voted that time. Now, one man was ‘spose to go to McCauley–he went, but the white people told him ‘Now, Uncle, you’re qualified but we advise you not to go.’ And those who were to follow me in Carrolton didn’t. So you had one man voted and you know what position it threw me in just havin’ one man voting.

When I went back to get another contract to teach school, one of them board members told me ‘If I hear of you teachin’ politics in that school, we gon’ put you out the next day.’ I looked at him and said, ‘Now I’m not down there to teach politics, but I do teach civics, and whatever comes up in civics I’m teachin it.’ And that settled it. You had to have, at that time, a way around them. You couldn’t just come out the way we do today. So I got over that hurdle. And after I voted once or twice more, but this was in Democratic–well, some’s Republican–because this was general election. I went to the polls at that time and they didn’t wanna give me a ballot. And we had a lawyer here–mighty fine man, old man Ewell–and they asked him was I qualified. ‘Yeah, Eskridge’s qualified.’ So that settled that. After that, why, I had to quit politics. My reason for quittin’ was if I couldn’t get enough folks to follow me, I wasn’t doin’ nothin but but hurtin myself. Because I knew I would soon be in a place where I wouldn’t have a job. So I pulled back and didn’t vote any more until way on up.

But during that Civil Rights Movement, I believe we went to Carrollton there one day to register people to vote. I told the sheriff and the Chancery Clerk what we was plannin’. Course I knew they didn’t like it, but still they had to accept it. After I told ’em that, he told me how he l gonna put ’em in jail if they keep on like they goin’. And

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I told him, ‘Now, you’re the sheriff, I can’t tell you what to do, but one thing: it may be better if you don’t.’ We stayed around that courthouse all day long and didn’t a single person register.

‘Twas against their religion to let black folks register. A few had a chance, but nobody could pass the literacy test. Back in the thirties we had to pay a poll tax but didn’t have to take no literacy test. That came later. Early on, they figured black folks didn’t have the money to pay a poll tax, and later they had to use the literacy test.

Mr. Mrs. Cooper Howard

Interviewed by Felisha Dixon Jeffrey Blackmon July 28, 1989. Goodman, Miss.

I was in the first march that they had here in Holmes County to get people registered. We had about 200 people, cause the rest of the people was just afred. They was saying what was gain’ to happen was that we was gain’ to get killed, the white people gain’ to kill us. Well, I figure like this: I went to taken my basic training in Aberdeen, Miss., and I marched on that soil and in Illinois, California, and Hawaii. So if I can march in the army where they fightin’ at, surely if this is a free country I can march here.

But that’s when they had the old dogs. That German Shepherd dog, he was at the door, and he would bite. And see, then people wouldn’t go in there, because they knew the dog would bite. Mr. Henry McClellan know ’bout that. He was the circuit clerk, but he would not help you or didn’t want you to come in there to get registered. And most of our professional people was scared to go into that office. They went down to the Post Office under federal registrars. The grassroot people went up there while it was tough, amongst the dogs and the bad sheriff and those bad people. We went up there and got registered.

We registered by havin’ the Justice Department come in and they told ’em that these people had to register. Then they moved the dog back. But as long as you was in there, they talked to you so bad. Talkin to old people, tellin ’em, ‘I ain’t gon’ help you. You can stay there and look like a coon, old possum!’ He told my daddy that. My daddy were eighty year old. I say not one thang, cause if I hadda open my mouth, he woulda said something to me. Then I would’ve put him across the counter.

The freedom riders came in about this time, but we had already decided we was gonna do it. But we would have went up and got turn away. Never would have got registered. We would have been in the same fix, like back in slavery. But those people had the backin’ of the NAACP, SNCC, COFO. They had a lawyer from the president office.

It helped to own land at that time, and because I did I never did suffer. A lot of people were put out of where they were working. Take the school teacher who could not participate in SNCC or anything concerning civil rights. Bernice Montgomery was the only teacher that stood up. And very few preachers would come out.

Viola Winters

Interviewed by Michael Hooker Tamara Wright August 1,1989, Durant. Miss.

After the trouble we had getting hired at the plant and integrating public facilities, we met at Second Pilgrim Rest Church with the Freedom Democratic Party–the FDP. There wasn’t any black folks here voting. So we went up there in Lexington to the courthouse. We had a hard time; they had a lot of questions to keep you from registerin’. Then when we started to voting, we had a hard time doing that ’cause we had to go round trying to beg them to come out of the house to vote. Black folks wasn’t use to anything like this. We had a hard time. I was sittin’ when the voting happening when we put Representative Clark in what he is now in Jackson [first black in Mississippi legislature since Reconstruction]. We sit down and take names–how many white and colored voting. I was sittin’ there one voting day, and a white man come up and told me ‘Get up and get outta here!’ Then I saw the pistol in his pocket. But, y’see, I didn’t get up. Finally I saw Mrs. Irene Johnson come in and I told her go and get somebody to identify this man, but when she come back he was gone.

The hardest time we had was trying to get registered. They didn’t want color’ folks to vote. They didn’t want equal rights. They had it so long to themselves, they don’t want us with them. They can’t help it now.

It kinda worries me that after all we did to vote, black folks don’t vote today. But black folks ain’t never had nothing. Seem like some don’t even want nothing. They still out there with the white man. A lot of ’em right now will carry messages back to him.

Dr. Martha Ann Davis

Interviewed by Marvin Noel Willa WilliaMiss. November 8, 1989. Brozville Road, Miss.

Along with three young men, I started the Lexington Action Group (LAG) before the civil rights voting vet, as we know, back in Lyndon Johnson’s time. It was also during a time when John F. Kennedy was president, so there were a lot of positive things going on. But before that time there was a lot of die-hard black independent farmers who simply were not pleased with not having a voice in government and not being able to vote. So they challenged the system. And because of our involvement with them, we started going to their little community meetings as they

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planned strategies to try to eliminate some of the barriers to voting.

When we began to get organized and actively involved, we went up and harassed the then-circuit clerk Henry McClellan, to ask him questions such as ‘How do you know what part of the Constitution of Mississippi a person who is trying to register to vote will have to interpret?’ And, of course, he would never give us straight answers to the point that he would try to tell us, ‘Who are your parents? I need to find your parents because you’re out of order.’ This was during a time when most black folks considered white folks as being superior to them. So I guess I, along with the young men, we were sort of militant and sort of crazy, and I think it was because of the way we had been brought up by our parents.

The LAG was like a youth arm to the establishment of the Freedom Democratic Party, and during that particular time in the sixties there was really no formal civil rights organization per se. But there was always somebody–no matter how small or how large the cluster of people–that everybody looked up to. And it was always the independent farmers in the lead, not the folks who worked on plantations.

One of the most scariest moments that I can recall was after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we were getting people that lived on plantations that joined the independent farmers down in the Delta to come to Lexington, to the courthouse, because at that time that was the only place you could register to vote. Everybody had come to the circuit clerk’s office. And I recall very well, we had to do it like in the late evenings or by dark, because usually you couldn’t talk back to black folks in the daytime because they were busy working in the fields or taking care of the big house, as they called it. And most blacks was afraid to talk to you if you mentioned the words ‘civil rights.’ That was just something you didn’t want to identify with because people had no other alternative for survival except to stay on these white peoples’ plantations. So now here we are saying that ‘You need to be men and women. You’re of age. You need to go and register to vote. You have a right to have a say in what happens.’ And then after that the slogan ‘One-man one vote’ evolved.

But on this particular plantation past Tchula we were trying to explain to the people what they had to do when they went to the circuit clerk’s office to register to vote. And here comes this white man up with a double-barreled shotgun and he cocks it at us teenagers. And we just stood there. We were scared to death, don’t get us wrong, but we just stood there to the point where he said ‘I don’t wanna catch ya’ll on my place no more.’

In the Mileston area we were successful at organizing to the point that people from the north that were sympathetic to the causes of voter rights, justice and equality for black folks, sent us large sums. of money, to put together this basically black community in Mileston and Homes County.

As a result of organizing the LAG a lot of opportunities came my way–thanks to people like Reverend J.J. Russell and T.C. Johnson, who would take us the back way through Hebron to the Mileston Community Center. And Reverend Willie James Burns stands out because he gave me an opportunity to go to Macintosh, Ga., (to the Citizens Education Program, headed by Dr. Martin Luther King) and really learn how to train people in voter education. I worked with people like Hartman Turnbow who was one of the first people to take on Henry McClellan, and people like Julian Bond, Joe Lewis, Andy Young, Dorothy Cotton, and C.T. Vivian. As a result of that training we would come back and train the next group of young people. We were on a mission. Before that the older people had to depend on the freedom riders or other outsiders. So for the old people this was a new avenue.

When the first challenge was made to the Democratic Party after the FDP was formed, I had an opportunity to be there for that first convention in Atlantic City, N.J. where we challenged them to say that, ‘Hey, this Democratic Party from Mississippi doesn’t represent the people of Mississippi, cause we got all these black folks in Mississippi and they have no representation.’ And at that time the Democratic Party was basically lily-white in Mississippi, and therefore it’s kind of ironic ’cause seemingly the tides are turning. But my mother reminds me that when she was a child, what black folks that could vote outside of areas that called themselves sort of ‘liberated’ did was vote Republican. They were not Democrats. And I thought that was interesting and asked her the other day did she think as young people we should be training them to be Democrats or Republicans? And she said, ‘Neither one. Instead we should be training ya’ll to be thinking.’