Willful Retreat From Justice

Selwyn Carter, Director of SRC Voting Rights Programs

Vol. 17, No. 2, 1995 pp. 1-3

In this thirtieth anniversary year of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the United States Supreme Court is busily erecting new barriers to the voting rights and political representation of African Americans and other minorities.

This summer, in the name of a color-blind Constitution, the Court ruled that any use of race to prepare redistricting plans should be subject to strict scrutiny from the federal bench.

In striking down a majority-black congressional district in Georgia, in dismissing–on technical grounds–a case involving a majority-black district in Louisiana, and in agreeing to add to its calendar for the October term two redistricting cases from Texas and North Carolina, the Court has opened the door to a new round of legal challenges to minority representation. Further, by restricting the authority of the Department of Justice under section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the Court has weakened the federal protection and intervention which is indispensable for African Americans and other minorities seeking fairness and non-discrimination.

With the Miller v Johnson decision, and in other recent decisions on affirmative action, the Supreme Court majority has displayed either a profound lack of understanding of history or a calculated intent to return America to its most discriminatory past.

The five-to-four decision in Miller reminds us that we will be seeing the Reagan Revolution’s legacy on the Court for years to come. Miller is strongly at odds with the spirit and letter of the congresses which passed and amended the Voting Rights Act to ensure increased

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African American participation and representation in the political system.

The need to draw “majority-minority” districts arose from a particular history. In each of the six Southern states where legal challenges have lately been mounted to majority-black congressional districts, it remains true that large numbers of white voters consistently do not vote for African American or other minority candidates. Such white bloc voting has made it virtually impossible for minority candidates, however strong their qualifications and merit, to win an election in a district in which minority voters are not a majority of the electorate.

The Court’s decision has already prompted more litigation. A new lawsuit, challenging the district of Nydia Valasquez in New York City, was filled on June 28 by the “Campaign for a Color-Blind Society,” a group linked to the challenges in Louisiana, Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina. These court cases are part of a pernicious, organized strategy by those who have never supported the Votings Rights Act. They have used the constitutional amendment passed to enfranchise African Americans as the basis to dismantle black representation.

Despite the election of mayor Ron Kirk in Dallas, Texas, former Governor Douglas Wilder in Virginia, Representative Gary Franks in Connecticut, and a sprinkling of other African Americans across the nation who have won office with white support, the significant increases in black office-holding over the past fifteen years are due primarily to the conscious creation of single-member districts in which black voters are in the majority, and not

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to white support of African American candidates. This is true for African Americans elected to Congress, state legislative bodies, county commissions, city councils, and school boards. Are we now to say that only those African Americans who are the candidates of choice of white voters have a right to hold office?

If minority voters, like their white counterparts, are to have the opportunity to elect their candidates of choice, then we must support the conscious drawing of districts in which minorities are a majority. In the area of voting rights, support for the principle of fairness and non-discrimination means support for the specific remedy which has ended apartheid in political representation and brought increased diversity and democracy to the South.

During the Reconstruction period the counting of African American ex-slaves for the purposes of apportionment added fifteen additional congressional seats to the House of Representatives. Yet, from 1901 to 1971, not a single African American was elected to the House from the South.

In the recently published Quiet Revolution in the South: the Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965-1990 (reviewed in this issue of Southern Changes) editors Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman remind us that “the Voting Rights Act must be seen as a mechanism to ensure that the second Reconstruction of the 1960s did not meet the same fate as that of the first Reconstruction of the 1860s and 1870s.” It took the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to enable African Americans to realize rights which had been granted by the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment nearly a century earlier.

The dilemma facing African Americans and other minorities today is that while many white Americans continue to express support for the broad principle of racial fairness, they continue to resist the specific and practical steps necessary to achieve an equal and non-discriminatory society.

For the Court to rule in 1995 that race-conscious redistricting violates the principle of a color-blind constitution is to ignore what has been a bitter reality for African Americans since the three-fifths clause was written into the Constitution–neither the Constitution nor the society has ever been color-blind. Despite a civil war, a civil rights movement, several civil rights acts, a voting rights act, amendments to the Constitution, and decades of litigation, race is still as central an issue in American life as it was when the nation was founded. Race-based remedies are a necessary means of redressing historical racial oppression and discrimination in the pursuit of justice.

The Engaged Observer

Rob Amberg and Earl Dotter

Vol. 17, No. 2, 1995 pp. 4-13

Editor’s note: In the following pages Southern Changes features the work of two excellent and widely recognized contemporary social photographers–Rob Amberg and Earl Dotter–accompanied by brief autobiographical comments and discussion of photographic strategies. Amberg’s pictures have appeared regularly in Southern Changes, providing complement and counterpoint to a number of writers’ essays. Here we join his words to a selection of photos drawn from projects he has undertaken working from his base in Madison County, North Carolina. For years, Earl Dotter, one of the most well-known of American photographers, has documented the lives and livelihoods of working people. From an early emphasis on occupational health and safety, Dotter has expanded his range of subjects to include environmental hazards to public health.

Rob Amberg:

For much of my twenty-year career in photography I have wrestled with issues of participation and observation: how to play an active role and establish everyday relationships in the rural communities that I photograph. This takes a lot of time. It also makes it difficult to earn a living doing engaged photography.

I was born in 1947 and raised in the Washington, D.C., area, a product of the Catholic school system, the middle class, and the baby boom. My parents worked for the federal government. Montgomery County, Maryland, was the fastest growing county in the United States, with one of the five highest median incomes. I spent much of my childhood looking for a place to get lost–wanting to get away from the suburban sprawl, the congestion, and the noise.

By the time I graduated from the University of Day-

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ton in 1969 with a degree in personnel management and a minor in psychology, I had become very involved in social issues–Vietnam War protests and civil rights. In my senior year I had put together a slide/tape presentation that was my first experience with a 35-millimeter camera. I remember my strong attachment to the camera and the control that it gave me. I thought, then, in terms of capturing an image.

After college, I received conscientious objector status, became a VISTA volunteer, and did my alternative service as a pre-school teacher in Tucson, Arizona. I took beginning courses in photography and was very much influenced by the work of Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, and Eugene Smith. I began to see the possibility of using a camera as a tool for social change.

In 1973, feeling like my life lacked cloudy days and greenery, I was ready to move back East. On my way to the I). C. area, I stopped to visit an uncle who had settled in Madison County, North Carolina, which is northwest of Asheville. I realized almost immediately that this was a place that I had wanted to find since I was a kid. So I settled there.

When I arrived, I intended doing the definitive photo book on mountain culture. I had very preconceived ideas of what that meant. I was taken with the romance of the idea of wizened faces, old women in doorways, men plowing into the sunsets. That’s what I thought the place was all about. Those early photographs, as I look at them now, feel like cliches. The misty morning light of hog butchering. I would get out on mornings and see the light with the smoke and the fog and I would drool.

After I had lived in the area for about a year and a half, I had the good fortune to meet Dellie Norton, age seventy-six, and her adopted son Junior. Dellie had adopted Junior when he was about six years old. He was emotion-ally retarded and in bad physical condition when he came to live with her. Dellie was a community elder, a tobacco farmer, and a very noted ballad singer. She helped me and others who came new into the mountains to bridge cultural and generational gaps. She was a mountain person who was very interested in the outside world and in outsiders.

Soon, she enlisted me as her chauffeur of choice. She opened me to the community of Sodom Laurel. We drove around the county, visiting relatives and neighbors. I

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would carry her to perform at music festivals. Dellie said I could come to her house as often as I wanted, and I took her up on that. We would sit on her front porch, playing cards, talking.

Most of the people living in Dellie’s community at that time had been on the land for generations and continued to farm, often full-time. The people here had an intimate and tangible knowledge of the land that was difficult for me, a suburbanite, to understand. Land provided a life for them.

The people of Madison County will do most anything to stay on their land. When the county closed its community schools and switched to consolidated schools, many children were riding two hours, one way, to school. They would put up with that to stay put.

Dellie Norton told me of her family’s having to leave now and then to work in cotton mills in South Carolina when she was a child. Once, her father left for two years and worked in a bathtub factory in Pennsylvania. She didn’t know him when he returned. When Dellie was sixteen, she cooked in a logging camp. All in efforts to make enough money to stay on the land and farm.

Not only do the people in Sodom Laurel have a strong sense of place, they continue to have a strong sense of ritual. For me, being raised Catholic, ritual was something I understood. In Madison County, a community’s sense of ritual isn’t so much interested in end results. It is much more day-to-day. The events that I was invited to photograph were so personal and involved that I had no choice but to get close.

Photographically at this time, I became less interested in control and more interested in spontaneity–photography as a form of visual notetaking. Rather than seeking the perfect photograph, I started becoming more interested in the process of events.

One feature of everyday life in Madison County for the last seventy years or so has been the farming of burley tobacco. Tobacco is a very labor intensive crop — a thirteen month crop. It was introduced specifically to keep people on their land. Of course, one of the ironies of tobacco is that what most people consider America’s number one cause of death has allowed some small rural communities to stay alive.

Historically, tobacco has been worked by families and neighbors helping neighbors, working together to get the crop planted, to get it in the barn, get it to market on time. But what’s happening now is that the young people are not at all interested in working the crop, and large crews of migrant farmworkers are coming in. You don’t see small patches any more; everybody has got at least ten acres.

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In 1978, I received an National Endowment for the Arts grant that allowed me to expand my Madison County work to include rural towns and the influx of newcomers into the county. I bought land in the county and homesteaded. Had a son and started a house. I even raised a couple of tobacco crops. But I learned quickly that I didn’t have the necessary skills or mindset to be a farmer.

In the mid-1980s, I began freelance work for the Rural Advancement Fund, a fifty-year-old non-profit organization with its roots in the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. They hired me to document the effects of the drought on small family farmers in the Southeast. Then I stayed on staff to help with the RAF’s fiftieth anniversary celebration, which involved publishing a history of the organization and doing a photo exhibition on small family farms.

My boss at Rural Advancement Fund, Cary Fowler, let me work in my own manner. I would spend days on family farms throughout the region, photographing and interviewing, and helping with farm work. I tried to be-come involved in the lives of the families. If it meant getting up at three o’clock in the morning to milk cows, I was out there. The effect was to build intimacy and trust with the people I was photographing.

I learned that more farms went out of business dur-

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ing the 1980s than in the 1930s. Loan policies had forced many small family farmers to get larger when they didn’t necessarily want to be. Planting fencerow to fencerow was the practice: people borrowed money, then land values dropped, cost of production stayed high, and the price they were being paid for their commodities went down. Because of the financial pressures they were facing, farmers were not able to take care of their land. They often, for instance, neglected to plant cover crops.

This was a culture being lost. Farm families ceased to see farming as a viable option for their children. More and more land was owned and operated by retirees or absentee landlords. Daily customs disappeared. People didn’t visit house to house. No one went down in the heat of the day to the country store and talk with their neighbors. The country stores were replaced by Wal-Marts.

I also photographed corporate agriculture for the Rural Advancement Fund. In North Carolina that mainly means poultry. Poultry is a vertically integrated industry, with the large corporations owning everything about the birds, from top to bottom. Even the birds on a farm are not owned by a farmer, but by a company. The company dictates how the birds are to be taken care of, and how much the farmers will be paid. Farm families, again in an effort to say on their land, will borrow hundreds of thou-sands of dollars to put up two or three turkey barns or chicken barns. For this they are awarded the security of one six-week contract. The poultry companies have divided up the territory so farmers have no recourse but to stay with one company. If their contract is cut off, they’re out of luck and faced with huge debt. Sometimes farmers have been forced to foreclose because contracts were cut off, and then the poultry company has come in, bought the farm, and installed the same farmers back on their own places as tenants.

Working with Rural Advancement Fund reminded me of my initial motives for using photography as a tool for social change.

I resigned my staff position with RAF in 1988 so I could move back to the mountains and continue my own documentary projects. I wanted to be closer to my son. I also realized that place had become important to me and the place I wanted to be was Madison County.

In recent years I have supported myself with freelance work for a variety of non-profit and editorial clients, both regionally and nationally. I have begun projects on sustainable agriculture with the Rural Advancement Foundation International and, with the Appalachian Consortium, documentation of the current construction of a corridor of Interstate 26 as it cuts through my county.

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Earl Dotter:

By way of contrast, I now reside in the county where Rob Amberg grew up — Montgomery County, Maryland. From there I head out to my assignments. I think Rob is fortunate to work where he lives. But a different set of challenges meets photographers who must travel to the locations where their subjects are.

My artistic development began during my teenage years. After a boating accident, I was confined to bed for several weeks. My mother gave me a John Nagy art book to pass the time. I started to draw covered bridges with three point perspective, portraits of Abraham Lincoln, and so on. As I discovered my natural ability, I began to study art. My real enthusiasm for it developed when I saw the impact it had on my social life. I had been an extremely shy child and an awkward adolescent. By drawing pictures of the weekly football stars and having them posted on the high school bulletin board, I suddenly got the kind of recognition I had never known before. Sketching a portrait of the homecoming queen led to a treasured friend-ship.

I graduated from the University of California at San Jose with a degree in graphic design in 1967. My design instructor encouraged me to get the full Madison Avenue experience by en-rolling in the School of Visual Arts. So I moved to Manhattan. One of the courses which I took was intended to acquaint future art directors with photography so that they could direct a photographer to execute a visual concept. My instructor was a successful but disenchanted advertising photographer who insisted that we take pictures that expressed a personal point-of-view. He wouldn’t talk about our pictures unless they did.

After several meetings, somebody finally took a photo that really did say something in a heartfelt way and the teacher spent the entire class talking about that one photograph. I learned from that experience and started to take pictures in a very active way. My instructor put me in touch with graphic designer Milton Glaser who was then redesigning New York magazine. Soon, my photos appeared on a couple of New York covers and some double spreads. What better encouragement for an emerging photographer?

A pivotal moment for me came in that same year. In another course at the School of Visual Arts we reversed roles, the students giving assignments to the teachers. One night we were meeting on the top floor of the Young Rubicam agency on Madison Avenue. We had as-signed our instructors to respond visually to the Bob Dylan song “Something is happening but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?” One of the teachers interrupted our session to announce that Martin Luther King

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had been killed in Memphis. Immediately the class broke up. As I headed home on the subway I read a message in big red letters on the wall: “The last of the nonviolent men are gone. Arise and kill whitey, the eternal target.” I can trace this as the moment when I decided to put down my advertising tools and begin to become a photographer engaged in social issues.

About this time I received 1-A status from Selective Service and faced the probability of a tour of duty in Vietnam. Instead I was able to select alternative service and was sent as a VISTA worker to the Cumberland Plateau region of Tennessee. The coal fields were facing particularly tough times as heating oil was replacing coal as home fuel. Mines were shutting down. Those who could leave Appalachia for the auto plants and steel mills of the North did, leaving the young, the old, and the less educated. As VISTA workers, our job was organizing grassroots programs to develop cooperatives to provide basic needs, such as housing, Head Start, and adult education programs. As I photographed these efforts, I met the people of this region in their homes and communities.

I met many coal miners who were dissatisfied with the state of their union. Disabled miners were not getting benefits, miners who had retired were not getting pensions, or if they did, it was fifty dollars a month. The United Mine Workers had become known for murder and mayhem. I was invited to become a full-time staff member for the Miners for Democracy campaign in Charleston, West Virginia. With the election of the reform candidates, I moved to the union’s Washington, D.C., headquarters to work as the UMWA Journal photographer. I traveled the coal fields, documenting occupational health and environmental hazards and the rich traditional culture of mining.

The camera allowed me do work which was meaningful on a daily basis. From the coal fields, my photography has taken me into a wide variety of working lives throughout the United States. My goal behind the camera is to celebrate the accomplishments of workers and community activists, to emphasize their pride and skills, and to document the satisfactions of their jobs as well as the dangerous and dehumanizing aspects. I look for workers and community activists who are taking steps to improve their lives and, with photography, seek to encourage their achievements.

For people to reveal themselves before the camera, I really feel I first must let them know who I am and to explain why I want to take their picture. After you have become acquainted, folks are more apt to live out their lives rather than act them out before the camera. Because so many of the people whom I photograph endure brutal working conditions or impoverished lives which can victimize, I am careful to look for the common ground that workers share with the viewers of the photographs. Often this is simply the desire to be treated with dignity and self-respect. Motivated by my own concern for their situation, I try to photograph in a

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way that will touch not just viewers who are already sympathetic to their plight, but will reach out and get the attention of people who might normally pass them by. I try to achieve this by taking a picture that has visual power, that has a graphic and clear beauty. It is this aspect that often appeals to viewers who are not initially concerned with the subject itself, bringing them back for a second look.

When I walk through a plant or work site, I will sometimes encounter that individual who exudes a sense of personal worth, who illustrates the notion of the human family, and I always jump at the opportunity to record them. When I experience tragedy in the workplace–death, disability, and exploitation–I use the camera to record not just the person or event, but also my own reaction to it. If I am successful, then the viewer will be able to stand before the photograph and feel the intensity of the moment that I felt.

I take care to avoid distorting or altering the scene for the sake of “art” whose result simply panders to viewers. Although I strongly identify with the underlying issues of the photo I am creating, I try to let the subject guide me with suggestions, ideas, and point of view. It is not enough for the photographer to convey his or her own point of view, as you often see in so-called “objective” photojournalism. Such voyeuristic photography is, in fact, not objective but is geared toward expressing only the photographer’s perception. It ignores or underemphasizes information that runs contrary to the photographer’s particular perspective. Although there is some merit in showing viewers the world as the photographer sees it, it can twist or not tell the full story.

To photograph in a way that lets subjects communicate with viewers, you must take time to learn the way subjects present themselves to the world physically, in their body language, their gestures and motions, and their looks. You draw from that information to develop a picture-taking strategy before you start taking the actual photos. You begin working in a candid way, letting the

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subject lead, and gradually work into a more posed mode to intentionally capture nuances you have observed in the process. Sometimes, when a subject freezes up, I will discuss mannerisms and gestures that I have observed him or her make, and suggest that the individual recreate these natural poses for me. For example, I might say “a moment ago, you put your hand under your chin and just rested your elbow on the table there.” It’s something the person has probably done thousands of times, but before the camera a little guidance is needed to recreate it.

I want to capture the moment clearly, in the midst of the action, and in response to the smell, the atmosphere, the three dimensions, and the physical proximity. That’s not to deny the value of other approaches. But, for me, it’s the most effective means for creating images of telling beauty and artistry, of transcending the commonplace.

If the photographer has rapport with the subject, the subject will let the viewer into the personal realm, overcoming barriers — such as the invasion of space — that normally exist. To be an effective photographer in the most delicate of situations, you have to be sure you are welcome.

The camera allows certain features or characteristics of the subject to be emphasized in a way that cannot be captured with the human eye. There are unlimited ways to freeze the moment. While you draw from reality, the way in which you use the camera and the extent of your visual vocabulary make a personal photographic statement. I try to learn from my experience of happy accidents and how to repeat them in another context. A good photograph draws viewers in on levels that range from the obvious to the symbolic to the concern with details of foreground and background.

I try to photograph a subject in several different ways. In the leisure of the darkroom, you can look at the proof sheets and compare the images, finding the ones which resonate more powerfully. If you don’t explore the subject fully behind the camera, you can’t learn what is there.

Photographs have the capacity to bear witness at the most gut level and to uniquely distill information and feelings. This is true as much for the snapshots that make up the family album as it is for professional photojournalism. We return to these still shots year after year, to savor and remember.

The proliferation of magazines makes the still photograph as much in demand as ever. Although magazines have emphasized the color image (I have slowly enlarged my work to include more color), there is a continuing interest in the power of black and white photographs. In fact, many of us “older” black and white photographers are enjoying a renaissance of appreciation.

In looking at my early work and comparing it with my more recent work, one of the greatest differences is that when I was young and free of family and other responsibilities, I was able to allocate long blocks of time, even years, to a given subject. Although I do not have that freedom today, I have built steadily and consistently on that early body of work, by continuing to focus on occupational subjects and environmental-related issues, trade union activity, and workplace health and safety concerns. By retaining my focus over the years, I have been able to build a professional reputation that I do not believe I would have accomplished had my subject matter been more scattered. I have also developed an understanding of my subjects that can only come over time. This has been key in my ability to succeed as a freelance photojournalist, and to make a contribution in which I can take pride.

The Last Innocents: The Civil Rights Movement and the Teaching of High School History

By James W. Loewen

Vol. 17, No. 2, 1995 pp. 14-17

In 1974 Pantheon published the first revisionist textbook of state history in the United States, Mississippi: Conflict and Change, edited by Charles Sallis and myself. The Southern Regional Council awarded the book the 1976 Lillian Smith Award for nonfiction, but the State of Mississippi rejected it for use as a public school text. This led to the lawsuit Loewen et al. v. Turnipseed, et al., which we finally won in 1980. As a result, Mississippi was ordered to adopt our textbook for six years beginning in 1980.

Rewriting Mississippi history helped me see the problems in American history, for I came to realize, especially after moving to Vermont, that in history teaching as well as other areas, Mississippi in the 1960s merely exaggerated tendencies that unfortunately permeated the United States. Gradually I became aware that American history textbooks simply do not tell high school students what historians tell each other in their professional monographs and articles. For my most recent book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, I selected twelve commonly used high school history textbooks and spent much of ten years surveying what they tell students about our past.1

The distortions begin with what textbooks say about the Indians, continue as authors retell the familiar (though largely false) legends about Columbus and the Pilgrims, carry on through astonishing omissions about historical figures like Abraham Lincoln, Helen Keller, and Woodrow Wilson, and even affect what history books predict for the future. Let me illustrate, however, with a topic which most readers of Southern Changes know intimately: the story of the Southern civil rights movement and its complex relationship with the federal government.

Between 1960 and 1968, the civil rights movement repeatedly appealed to the federal government for protection and enforcement of federal law, but governmental response was woefully inadequate, especially during the Kennedy administration. In Mississippi, movement offices displayed this bitter rejoinder:

There’s a street in Itta Bena called Freedom. There’s a town in Mississippi called Liberty. There’s a department in Washington called Justice.

From their start investigating alleged Communists during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, J. Edgar Hoover and the agency that became the Federal Bureau of Investigation had a long history of antagonism toward African Americans. Although the last four years of that administration saw more anti-black race riots than any other time in our history, agents focused on gathering intelligence on African Americans, not on white Americans who were violating blacks’ civil rights. Hoover explained the Washington, D.C., anti-black race riot of 1919 as due to “the numerous assaults committed by Negroes upon white women.”

In the beginning the FBI had a few black agents, but by the early 1960s the Bureau had none, although Hoover tried to claim it did by counting his chauffeurs.2 Many FBI agents in the South were white Southerners who cared what their white Southern neighbors thought of them and were themselves white supremacists.

Even in the 1960s, Hoover still thought the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education was a terrible error. Beginning in 1963, Hoover decided to try to destroy Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement. With the approval of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, he tapped the telephones of King’s associates, bugged King’s hotel rooms, and made tape recordings of his conversations with and about women. The FBI then passed on the lurid details, including photographs, transcripts, and tapes, to Senator Strom Thurmond and other white supremacists, reporters, foundation administrators, and of course the president. In 1964, a high FBI administrator sent a tape recording of King having sex, along with an anonymous note suggesting that King kill himself, to the office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). When King went to Europe to claim the Nobel Peace Prize, the FBI tried to sabotage receptions in his honor. Hoover called the civil rights leader “the most notorious liar in the country” and tried to prove that SCLC was infested with Communists. Hoover

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also passed along disinformation about the Mississippi Summer Project, organizations such as CORE and SNCC, and other civil rights leaders including Jesse Jackson. At the same time, the FBI refused to pass on to King information about death threats made against him and repeatedly claimed that protecting civil rights workers from violence was not its job.

In 1962, SNCC sued Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover to force them to protect civil rights demonstrations. Desperate for ways to force the United States to care about enforcing the law in the Deep South, Mississippi civil rights workers Amzie Moore and Robert Moses then hit upon the 1964 “Freedom Summer” idea. The FBI finally opened an office in Jackson after the national outcry prompted by the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi. But later that summer, at the 1964 Democratic National Convention at Atlantic City, agents tapped the phones of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and Martin Luther King, at the request of President Johnson.

After Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, students from a nearby black college demonstrated against an Orangeburg, South Carolina, bowling alley which refused to obey the law. State troopers fired on the demonstrators, killing three and wounding twenty-eight–many in the soles of their feet as they threw themselves on the ground to avoid the gunfire. The FBI responded not by helping to identify which officers fired in what became known as “the Orangeburg Massacre,” but by falsifying information about the students to help the troopers with their defense.

Federal harassment of black organizations was not limited to Dixie. In California, Chicago, and elsewhere, the Bureau tried to eliminate the breakfast programs of the Black Panther organization, spread false rumors about venereal disease to break up Panther marriages, helped escalate conflict between other black groups and the Panthers, and helped Chicago police raid the apartment of Panther leader Fred Hampton and kill him in bed in 1969. The FBI warned black leader Stokely Carmichael’s mother of a fictitious plot to murder him, prompting Carmichael to flee the United States.

The FBI also investigated pro-black faculty members at colleges across America. The institution at which I taught, Tougaloo College in Mississippi, was a special target: at one point agents in Jackson even proposed to “neutralize” the entire college, because among other things its students had sponsored “out-of-state militant Negro speakers, voter-registration drives, and African cultural seminars and lectures… [and] condemned various publicized injustices to the civil rights of Negroes in Mississippi.” Obviously high crimes and misdemeanors!

The FBI’s conduct and the federal leadership that tolerated and sometimes requested it are part of the legacy of the 1960s, alongside such positive achievements as the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. As historian Kenneth O’Reilly put it, “when the FBI stood against black people, so did the government.”

How do American high school history textbooks treat this legacy?

First, they leave out everything bad the government ever did, as if it never happened. Textbooks do not even want to say anything bad about state governments: ten textbooks include part of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but nine of them censor his negative comments about the governments of Alabama and Mississippi.

Not only do high school text books fail to blame the federal government for its opposition to the civil rights movement, many actually credit the government, almost single-handedly, for the advances made during the period. In so doing, textbooks follow what we might call the Hollywood approach to civil rights. Hollywood’s main feature film on the movement, you may remember, was Alan Parker’s notorious Mississippi Burning. In that movie, the three civil rights workers get killed in the first five minutes; for the rest of its two hours the movie portrays not a single civil rights worker or black Mississippian over the age of twelve with whom the viewer could possibly identify. Instead, Parker concocts two fictional white FBI agents who play out the hoary “good cop/bad cop” formula and in the process, double-handedly solve the murders. In reality, everyone in east Mississippi knew for weeks who did it. Supporters of the civil rights movement, including Michael Schwerner’s widow, Rita, and every white northern friend

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the movement could muster pressured Congress and the federal executive to force the FBI to open a Mississippi office and make bringing the murderers to justice a priority.3 No innovative police work was involved; the FBI finally apprehended the conspirators after giving one of them $30,000 to testify against the others.

American high school history textbooks offer a Parker-like analysis of the entire civil rights movement. Like the arrests of the Klansmen in Mississippi Burning, advances in civil rights simply result from good government. Federal initiative in itself “explains” milestones like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. John F. Kennedy proposed them, Lyndon Baines Johnson passed them through Congress, and thus we have them today. Or, in the immortal passive voice of one textbook,American History, “Another civil rights measure, the Voting Rights Act, was passed.” Several textbooks even reverse the time order, putting the bills first, the civil rights movement later.4

Much of the civil rights movement consisted of various tactics to force the federal government to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments and other civil rights laws. Omitting this dynamic not only makes it impossible for students to see how citizens can get the government to act, but also makes for inaccurate history. Instead, textbooks tell us about the “outstanding leadership” of John F. Kennedy on civil rights. Challenge of Freedom provides a typical treatment:

President Kennedy and his administration respondedreponded [sic] to the call for racial equality. In June1963 the President asked for congressional action on far-reaching equal rights laws. Following the President’s example, thousands of Americans became involved in the equal rights movement as well. In August 1963 more than 200,000 people took part in a march in Washington, D. C. (611-13)

This account reverses leader and led. In reality, JFK first tried to stop the march, then sent his vice-president to Norway to keep him away from it, because Kennedy felt Lyndon Johnson was too pro-civil rights. Even Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a Kennedy partisan, notes dryly in his assessment of the administration that “the best spirit of Kennedy was largely absent from the racial deliberations of his presidency.”

Similarly, when describing the attack on segregation that culminated in the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Triumph of the American Nation makes no mention that African Americans were the plaintiffs and attorneys in Brown v. Board of Education or that prior cases also brought by the NAACP prepared the way. Today many black students think desegregation was something the federal government forced on the black community. They have no idea it was something the black community forced on the federal government.5 No wonder some young African Americans now view Brown as part of a government conspiracy to destroy black institutions! Meanwhile, young white Americans can reasonably infer that the federal government has been nice enough to blacks, so why does it need to do more?

However, it is boring to read about all the good things the government did on its own. Moreover, revelation after revelation of misconduct and deceit in the federal executive branch have shattered the trust of the American people, including high school students. Since they are unwilling to say bad things about the government, high school textbook authors come across as the last innocents left in America. When students encounter so little material in school about the bad things the government has done, especially when parents and the daily newspaper tell a different story, this “makes all education suspect,” according to education researcher Donald Barr.

Nor can the servile approach of textbook authors to the government teach students to be effective citizens. Not one of the history books I surveyed educates students about the dynamics that should characterize the interrelationship between the people and their government in a democracy.6 Consequently none of the books tells how citizens can, and in fact have, forced the government to respond to them. According to Patrick Ferguson, many teachers only reinforce this passive image: his study of twelve randomly selected teachers of twelfth-grade American government courses found that about the only way they suggested that individuals could influence local or national governments was through voting.

By downplaying covert and illegal acts by the government, textbook authors narcotize students from thinking about such issues as the increasing dominance of the executive branch or the growth of the CIA, National Security Council, and other covert agencies into what some analysts call a fourth branch of government. By taking the government’s side, they encourage students to conclude that criticism is incompatible with citizenship. And by presenting government actions in a vacuum, textbooks mystify the complex interrelationship between the people and their leaders. All of this encourages students to throw up their hands in the belief that the government determines everything anyway, so why bother, especially if its actions are usually so benign. In this way, our American history textbooks minimize the potential power of the people and, despite their best patriotic efforts, take a stance that is overtly anti-democratic.

I hope to have persuaded you that the way history textbooks present the relationship between the civil rights movement and the government is incredibly incomplete and inaccurate, and that these errors have consequences for our society today. The same holds for how history textbooks treat Helen Keller, Woodrow Wilson, Christopher Columbus, the War of 1812, the My Lai massacre, and even the Gettysburg Address, as other chapters of Lies My Teacher Told Me demonstrate. Hopefully I have also persuaded you to put Lies My teacher Told Me in the hands of every teacher of American history in the South, so that knowledge of our past can become a tool for self-understanding and social change, rather than another source of the social problems facing our country.

Portions of this essay appear in slightly different form inLies My Teacher Told Me, and are reprinted here by permission of the author.

The twelve American history textbooks surveyed in Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James W. Loewen:

Social Science Staff of the Educational Research Council of America, The American Adventure (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1975).

Ira Peck, Steven Jantzen, and Daniel Rosen, American Adventures (Austin, Texas: Steck-Vaughn, 1987)

John A. Garraty with Aaron signer and Michael Gallagher, American History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).

Thomas A Bailey and David M. Kennedy, The American Pageant (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1991)

Robert Green, Laura L. Becker, and Robert E. Coviello, The American Tradition (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1984).

Nancy Bauer, The American Way (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1979).

Robert Sobel, Roger LaRaus, Linda Ann De Leon, and Harry P. Morris, The Challenge of Freedom (Mission Hills, Calif.: Glencoe, 1990).

Allen Kownslar and Donald B. Frizzle, Discovering American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974).

Carol Berkin and Leonard Wood, Land of Promise (Glenview, Ill: Scott, Foresman, 1983)

Philip Roden, Robynn Greer, Bruce Kraig, and Betty Bivins, Life and Liberty (Glenview, Ill: Scott, Foresman, 1984).

Paul Lewis Todd and Merle Curti, Triumph of the American Nation (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986).

James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle, The United States–A History of the Republic (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981).

James W. Loewen is a professor of sociology at the University of Vermont and an expert in voting rights issues. His previous books include the Smith Award-winning Mississippi: Conflict and Change (with co-author Charles Sallis) and The Truth About Columbus, a “subversively true” poster book which also resulted from his research on American history textbooks.

BOOKS:
Not So Quiet Anymore.
Reviewed by Pamela S. Karlan

Vol. 17, No. 2, 1995 pp. 18-19, 21

Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965-1990, edited by Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman (Princeton University Press, 1994, 512 pages)

There is a deep irony in the title of Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman’s massive study of the Voting Rights Act’s first twenty-five years. The revolution isn’t so quiet anymore. Lani Guinier’s ill-fated nomination, the creation of new majority-nonwhite legislative districts following the 1990 census, the Republican takeover of Congress, and now the Supreme Court’s action overturning the 11th congressional district in Georgia have generated huge controversy over the Act’s goals, assumptions, and techniques. Critics of the Voting Rights Act have seized the rhetorical and anecdotal high ground, throwing around phrases such as “balkanization” and “political apartheid,” and examples such as former Virginia Governor Doug Wilder, U.S. Representative Gary Franks of Connecticut, and Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk. The critics’ underlying assumptions are that the Act is no longer necessary, because black voters now participate fully in the political life of the Nation, and that the Act is pernicious, because it magnifies racial tensions and denies the possibilities of cross-racial coalitions and representation.

Quiet Revolution offers a powerful factual rejoinder to these assumptions. But the book’s greatest strength — its dispassionate attention to detail — leaves open the question of how to respond to the emotional chord that resonates in the conservative critique: the fear that America will be swept up in the rising tide of ethnic and racial separatism that is threatening multi-ethnic nation-states around the world, from the relatively decorous secessionism of the Quebecois in Canada to the bloody disintegration of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

The first part of Quiet Revolution consists of state-by-state studies of voting rights in the eight Southern states which are required by Section 5 of the Act to preclear voting and election changes by judicial or Justice Department review. The format of the chapters, which include parallel charts detailing black enfranchisement, changes in black representation on local governing bodies, and the reasons for alterations in election structure, enables readers to make cross-state comparisons. Each chapter also contains a history of black political participation within the state, from Reconstruction to post-Thornburg v. Gingles litigation in the late 1980s.

Five conclusions emerge. First, the historical over-views show how many “traditional” American electoral practices, such as at-large elections and majority-vote requirements, were deliberately designed to dilute black voting strength. The persistence of these practices well into the 1980s show how resistant the South has been to full enfranchisement of blacks. The chapters’ accounts of post-Act behavior, including numerous Section 5 objections to redistricting after the 1970 and 1980 censuses, show that these problems remain.

Second, the Act has been tremendously successful at enfranchising black voters. Although some problems remain (which the 1993 National Voter Registration Act may address), the Voting Rights Act has eliminated most formal barriers to participation.

Third, the Act has transformed the representational structure of Southern politics. In the 1960s, the vast majority of local governing bodies were elected at-large and substantial numbers of state legislators were chosen from multi-member districts; by 1990, single-member districts were the norm for both local governing bodies and legislative districts.

Fourth, most of the increase in black office-holding is attributable to the switch to single-member districts. Few blacks are elected in at-large elections. Of particular salience is the experience in cities using “mixed plans”ס blend of single-member and at-large seats. In these jurisdictions, the districted seats account for virtually all the black elected officials. The failure of black candidates to win election to at-large seats strongly suggests continued racial bloc voting: if white voters were willing to vote for black candidates, then one would expect success rates for districted and at-large seats within a given jurisdiction to be comparable.

Fifth, the South did not change voluntarily. Litigation

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and the threat of litigation were the major factors in causing the abandonment of at-large elections. Indeed, the cross-state comparisons show that states such as Alabama and Mississippi, in which both local black political organizations and national civil rights groups were active litigators, made far more progress than states such as Virginia in which little litigation occurred. Moreover, the bulk of the litigation was brought by the civil rights bar, rather than the Department of Justice. Thus, while Section 5 is a critical tool in the voting rights enforcement arsenal once single-member districts have been created (because the decennial redistricting required by one-person, one-vote must pass through preclearance), a large number of the single-member district plans now used in the South would never have been created but for the litigation efforts of private groups and individuals.

The second part of Quiet Revolution consists of three substantive chapters and a summary of the research findings. One chapter analyzes the Act’s impact on voter registration; the other two deal with the effect of municipal election structure on black representation and the impact of the Voting Rights Act on black legislative and congressional representation.

Davidson and Grofman’s research design enables them to convincingly refute two of the most prevalent conservative arguments against the Voting Rights Act. First, conservatives often point to increased black representation in majority-white jurisdictions today to suggest that the change to single-member districts was unnecessary; blacks would have attained electoral success anyway. The longitudinal design of the state-by-state data, however, suggests a fallacy in this reasoning: the remaining at-large jurisdictions are simply not typical of the larger pool of jurisdictions that elected at-large in 1970. Thus, the “worst” (i.e., most racially polarized and discriminatory) jurisdictions are not in the contemporary at-large sample. Moreover, the data show that in a substantial number of states, black representation in at-large jurisdictions did not change appreciably, and in state legislatures the percentage of blacks elected from majority-white districts actually declined during the 1980s.

Second, conservatives often deny the persistence of racial bloc voting. Quiet Revolution does not directly examine this question, although several of the state-by-state chapters do provide citations to the hundreds of voting rights cases that have found significant polarization. But in the chapter on legislative and congressional representation, Grofman and his co-author, Lisa Handley, offer a different sort of proof. If the “color-blind” hypothesis were correct, then, as a statistical matter, one would expect that 180 of the 1144 majority-white state house districts in the South would have black representatives; in fact, only 14 did. Thus, the color-blind hypothesis was off by an order of magnitude. Similarly, the color-blind hypothesis would predict that 61 of the 181 majority-black districts would elect white representatives; in fact, only 40 did. Thus, however desirable a color-blind political process might be, Quiet Revolution convincingly shows we have not arrived yet at that promised land.

Quiet Revolution consciously avoids addressing the third- and fourth-generation issues of voting rights: Can black representatives participate fully within elected bodies? What impact has the Voting Rights Act had on substantive policy outcome? The authors’ explanation of this decision is persuasive: one book cannot comprehensively settle every aspect of the wide-ranging debate over political fairness and the allocation of power in a multi-racial society that lies at the heart of the Voting Rights Act. But Quiet Revolution is nonetheless an essential tool in the ongoing debate because it establishes one central point: if

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we want integrated governing bodies in contemporary America then we simply must draw majority-nonwhite districts to achieve them.

Quiet Revolution will not silence all the critics; unfortunately, many of them are not merely ignorant of the facts but are actively indifferent to them. But Davidson and Grofman’s book will empower defenders of the Act to strip the conservative critique of its pretense to empirical truth. And it squarely confronts courts and commentators with the exorbitant price of abandoning the Act’s commitment to equal electoral opportunity.

Pamela S. Karlan is the Roy L. and Rosamond Woodruff Morgan Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, and a 1994-1995 Visiting professor at Harvard Law School.

The Continuum of Struggle

Reviewed by Calvin Kytle

Vol. 17, No. 2, 1995 pp. 21-22

Georgia in Black and White: Explorations in the Race Relations of a Southern State, 1865-1950, edited by John C. Inscoe (University of Georgia Press, 1994, 312 pages).

If, like me, you went to school during the South’s long Age of Denial, and if, like me, your introduction to Southern history came years before it was corrected by C. Vann Woodward, this book will come as a revelation.

Georgia in Black and White is a collection of eleven essays written by graduate students in history at the University of Georgia. Together, the essays constitute a survey of the state’s racial history from the end of the Civil War until the first sparks of the civil rights movement 95 years later.

Foremost, this book is an example of a trend in Southern historical research that, as editor John Inscoe explains in his introduction, “challenges the earlier assumption of W.J. Cash, Lillian Smith, and others as to the rigidity and perpetuity of the racial order of the pre-Civil Rights South.”

What the authors give us, among other things, is confirmation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ observation that “the color line” during this period was far less rigid and absolute than most of us have been led to believe. The Georgia after Emancipation it describes is no less violent, no less spiritually rent, than in previous accounts. Nor is there any effort to make the case that it was anything other than a society in which, to quote the dying words of a black bishop, “no matter what social or political changes might appear, the white man would be on top.” Still, by focusing on specific individuals, many of whom would qualify as heroes, as well as showing them in action and interaction during critical episodes in illustrative settings, the authors move us into a new dimension and give us sometimes startling new insights. They identify a culture in which relations between the races were intricate and ambiguous, in which attitudes shifted imperceptibly with the exigencies of time, place, and human nature. The cumulative effect of their work is to explain, better than any other history to come to my attention, the twists and turns in the continuum of struggle that preceded the civil rights victories of the 1960. It deserves a place on the shelf right next to John Egerton’s Speak Now Against the Day.

There is material here that one writer with a gift for narrative could shape into a popular piece of literary non-fiction. But as is almost inevitable in any anthology by writers of varying talent, the prose is of uneven quality, and there is more redundancy in the collected pieces than a less kind editor would have permitted. This is not a book to be valued for style. Its importance and its utility derive from the richness of its content, almost all of which is

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enlightening and much of which has the fascination of fresh discovery.

I, for instance, had never before heard of Abram Colby, a freedman from Greene County. Colby was elected to the Georgia Legislature in 1868, was beaten by Klansmen and left for dead, and survived to be reelected to a second term in 1870 following another attempt on his life two days before the election. When a group of merchants had earlier offered him $2,500 to resign his seat, he refused; Colby wouldn’t do it, he said, “for all the wealth in Greene County.” I long ago rejected the version of Reconstruction sopped up from repeated viewings of Birth of a Nation in my childhood (it was one of my father’s favorite movies), but even so, I had never quite seen the Reconstruction period so clearly as the tragedy of human betrayal it was until I read the story of this idealistic and steadfast black man.

Similarly, I now see Governor Rufus Bullock as a political figure of considerably more substance than Margaret Mitchell represented him to be in Gone with the Wind. To draw from the evidence in Georgia in Black and White, Bullock was a man of principle who on more than one occasion stood by his black constituents at great personal cost.

I read Georgia in Black and White with admiration and appreciation for everybody who had anything to do with it–especially the eleven students (who are, I hope, continuing to look into other neglected corners of Southern history) and their professors, Numan V. Bartley and William McFeely. I consider it one of the more validating signs of basic social reform, of which we have too few, that students in a publicly-supported Georgia institution are now free to pursue research into matters that less than two generations ago were taboo. It seems only yesterday that the president of Georgia Tech was prohibited by an act of the legislature from using state funds to pay the salary of Glenn Rainey, an outspoken English professor; Rainey’s chief credentials as a radical were that he opposed the county unit system and the poll tax, and thought blacks had a right to vote.

My other reactions were more personal than I find it comfortable to admit. Reflecting on the depth and direction of contemporary scholarship exemplified in these essays, I have been embarrassingly alerted to my ignorance, particularly of what really went on immediately after the Civil War and during the early years of Jim Crow. As one the “white Southern liberals” of the 1940s whose collective experience is now a subject for such scholarship, I can’t quite account for my failure to have learned more about the source and eddies of the current that moved me.

This book also made me feel deprived, for on almost every page was something to remind me how, in the classroom of my youth, Southern history was taught–or rather, how it was sanitized, romanticized, bowdlerized, and significantly suppressed.

The Georgia public schools in my day–say from 1926 to 1937–were tacit agents of a culture in which the Confederacy was celebrated and white supremacy was the governing theology. I can still hear Miss Bolton in our civics class at O’Keefe Junior High: “You will not speak of the Civil War in this room. It was not a civil war, and no true child of the South ever calls it that. It was…” a significant pause here until she’d satisfied herself that we were listening, and then, almost reverentially, “…it was the War Between the States.”

At no time was I taught anything about the origins of the war, by whatever name (my Uncle Ray unfailingly called it “The War of Northern Aggression”). Aside from the dirty pictures in my head implanted by D.W. Griffith, I knew nothing about Reconstruction other than what I inferred from Henry Grady’s “New South” speech, which I’d had to memorize for a declamation contest.

I entered Emory at a time when Hitler was rising and our minds were turned to events abroad. History, as I recall, was an elective, and European history was generally preferred. The sum of my knowledge of the Civil War obtained there was from a course in American biography that dealt chiefly with Robert E. Lee. In sociology, I remember much talk about community and individualism, and nothing about race relations. When members of my class auditioned for the Glee Club, we were asked to sing a few bars of “01′ Black Joe.”

Whatever civilized feelings I had about race during my teens can be credited not to my teachers but to an experience one summer at an Epworth League leader-ship training institute, which in the detached setting of Lake Junaluska, dared raised the possibility that segregation might be un-Christian. What I’ve learned of the hard facts about the biracial society I was born into began a few years later when, sometime in the 1940s, an older friend thrust upon me a copy of Vann Woodward’s mind-opening biography of Tom Watson.

How I wish that in those formative years somebody could have given me a copy of Georgia in Black and White.

Calvin Kytle is a retired publisher living in Chapel Hill, N. C. He was the author of “Race in the News” (1950), the Southern Regional Council’s first study of discrimination in the press, and served briefly as deputy director of the U.S. Community Relations Service in the 1960s.

Muted Voices

Reviewed by Paul Delaney

Vol. 17, No. 2, 1995

The Black Press in Mississippi, 1865-1985, by Julius E. Thompson (University Press of Florida, 1993, 242 pages).

Thompson’s is a fascinating and important, if not well-written, account of the black press in Mississippi, from its feeble beginnings in the aftermath of defeat and ruin at the end of the Civil War up through the mid-1980s. A press is supposed to be the voice of a people, but for decades what Thompson finds is not pretty: black editors “caught in a no-man’s land, where they dared not criticize local whites,” following a policy–as Pittsburgh Courier columnist George S. Schyler put it–of “generally avoiding nine-tenths of the real news and practically all of the possible topics crying for comment.”

Thompson presents an accurate, understated account of the tragic ups and downs of Mississippi black citizens as witnessed through their press: the Post-Reconstruction deal-with-the-devil between North and South, the systematic denial and withholding of rights, the Great Exodus which left the state robbed of the potential both of those who were run out as well as those who remained, and the Civil Rights era. Whatever evil could be concocted against blacks, it was surely practiced at one time or another in Mississippi. The scars and the acts remain to this day in a state still reeking of abject poverty, inept and corrupt political leadership, and extremely deep racial divisions that impede justice as well as progress.

The black Mississippi press was one of muted voices and muddleheaded policies and politics. For example, according to Thompson, in the heyday of the most heinous racist acts, some black editors and publishers believed that the “better elements” of both races could come together and solve the problems presented by the black and white underclass.

The politics of the black press reflected the conservatism of the white press and political establishment. Some black editors took the same positions against black aspirations and interests as their white counterparts. The Jackson Advocate was against the Montgomery bus boycott, against troops enforcing the desegregation of Little Rock schools, and opposed to the civil rights movement in general. The paper’s editor, Percy Greene, was anxious about acts that created “a deepening of the animosities towards the Negro and a widening of the gulf between responsible Negroes and Whites.”

Extreme fear by blacks resulted in such strange logic as that of the Mississippi Enterprise of Jackson, which urged blacks to pay their taxes as a sign of participating in government and “an insurance against slavery.”

Sectioning off chapters by decades, Thompson notes growth and decline in the number of black papers. He also deals with radio (no black owners until the 1980s), magazines that appeared abruptly and disappeared almost as fast, pamphlets and bulletins by religious organizations, colleges, and fraternal groups. Thompson reports on advertising, circulation, number of pages; his book also contains healthy appendixes and identifies every publication he could find, as well as television and radio stations. He deals somewhat with television–white-owned, anti-black, and anti-civil rights from the beginning well into the 1970s.

Among many contenders, Thompson singles out as particularly racist and harmful by its location in the state capital and by its wide circulation throughout Mississippi, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. Black papers harshly and justifiably criticized by Thompson include the Jackson Advocate, The Enterprise of Jackson, the Greenville Delta Leader, the Meridian Digest, and the Natchez News-Leader.

The Advocate maintained an almost anti-black tone, was opposed to the movement, the NACCP, and Martin Luther King, Jr.. It took the money it needed to survive from outspoken racists, including the State Sovereignty Commission, established to “maintain the status quo and destroy the civil rights movement.” During the greatest period of need, the Advocate and other black papers turned their backs on their readers. This sorry experience fostered an abiding distrust of black papers in the communities they were suppose to serve. Thompson names as moderate white publishers Helen Brannon Smith of the Lexington Advertiser; John Oliver Emmerich of the McComb Enterprise; Hodding Carter, Jr., and Hodding III of the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times; Bill Minor of the Capital Reporter, Ira Harkey of the Pascagoula Chronicle, and P. D. East of the Petal Paper. Ultimately, the movement had to produce its own publications, which included Freedom’s Journal and the Mississippi Free Press, as well as the Kudzu, a white underground paper that supported civil rights.

And change did arrive. Percy Greene died in 1977 and his paper eventually did an about-face. Gannett bought the Clarion-Ledger and other Mississippi papers. WLBT’s license was lifted from white owners and given to majority black ownership, giving Jackson its first black-owned radio station in 1984.

Still, by the mid-1980s, when Thompson’s story ends, there were only four black papers in all of Mississippi.

Paul Delaney is chair of the Department of Journalism at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.