A Collective Effort

Staff

Vol. 19, No. 1, 1997 pp. 2, 26

With this issue, Southern Changes celebrates the SRC’s civil rights radio documentary series, Will The Circle Be Unbroken? Perhaps even more than most documentary productions, the radio series represents a collective enterprise. The person who was primarily in charge of the planning was not the person who was primarily in charge of the scripting, and the person who was in charge of the actual pilot programs and now the final programs was not the person who was involved in the original ideas.

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Part of the series’s continuity was the steady involvement of people from beginning to end who had the notion of what the basic contribution of the radio series should be. Among these people are Randall Williams, publisher of Black Belt Press in Montgomery, Alabama, who helped conceive the project, served as an early project director, and conducted interviews. Worth Long, a folklorist and former SNCC activist, also served as an early project director and continued to conduct interviews and serve as a project consultant for the series up until the time of broadcast. Greg Bass, of Boutwell Studios in Birmingham, Alabama, was an early technical advisor.

Former SRC executive director, Steve Suitts, originated the concept of Will The Circle Be Unbroken? and has guided program development, oral histories, and fundraising for the series since its inception in 1979.

Producer George King came on board to write scripts for the radio series in 1991, produce six pilot programs in 1993, and was appointed project director to produce and supervise the distribution of the series in 1995.

Among the scholars who were a part of the project over the long haul are Paul Gaston, a professor of Southern history at the University of Virginia; Barbara Woods, a professor of history at South Carolina State University; Grace Jordan McFadden, a current affiliate and former associate professor of history and Director of African American Studies at the University of South Carolina; Raymond Gavins, a professor of history at Duke University; Cliff Kuhn, a professor of history at Georgia State University; John Dittmer, a professor of history at Depauw University; Mills Thornton, a professor of history at the University of Michigan; Allen Tullos, a professor with the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University; and Julian Bond, a long-time activist and statesman and now a professor of history at the University of Virginia and a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American University in Washington, DC. Bond wrote the Prologue and Epilogue to the series.

An ever-changing group of people have done loyal and hard work on the series–Kim Springer, Laura Hudgens, Genie Barringer, Arma Benoit, Connie Curry, Hilda Dent, Mimi Eisenberg, Winston Grady-Willis, Patricia Newman, Dihane Hayes, Pat Williams, Lisa Pertiller Brevard, Ellen Barnard, Sylvia Jackson, Katie Shellman, Narcel Reedus, Marge Manderson, Dot Hughley, David Dreger, and Ellen Spears, to name a few. Thanks to the outreach, publicity, and marketing team of Dan Gediman, Marge Ostroushko and Deborah Blakeley. SRC’s executive director, Wendy Johnson, has been instrumental in helping to raise funds.

Democracy Demands Memory

By Julian Bond

Vol. 19, No. 1, 1997 pp. 3-4

“I tell my children today they don’t know anything. You know, when I hear young folk talking about what they ain’t gonna take, and I like to sit down and tell ’em, ‘You haven’t seen anything. You just don’t know what it’s all about. I don’t know what it is you can’t take.’ And when I go back telling them some of my history, you know, they perk up their ears.”

Mary Sanford, a tenants rights and housing activist in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1992

Mary Sanford’s words and the reminiscences of other Southerners, black and white, about the civil rights movement ought to be required listening, because few Americans have heard them.

You can hear them in Will The Circle Be Unbroken?–a landmark radio documentary on the civil rights movement. The radio programs tell the story of how Sanford and hundreds of other people in five southern communities watched, made–and sometimes tried to stop–one of America’s most powerful social movements.

Ordinary Americans who witnessed and participated in the movement explain what we Americans have done so far in closing the racial divide; they explain what else needs to be accomplished.

They help explain why we still argue over whether racial minorities ought to be elected to public office; whether merit was ever really the test for getting a job or a seat in a university freshman class; whether children should be bused to schools.

For much of the twentieth century, an interracial

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black-led movement fought against white supremacy. That after nearly one-hundred years the job remains undone is not a testimony to the movement’s failure; it is a measure of how great the odds were, and how difficult the task is that remains.

Mis-memory of this movement threatens to erase the reality of the often brutal past, the class divisions evident in every institution from church to school, the failure of civic institutions to service black communities, and most of all the cruelty and harshness of American apartheid.

A survey of racial attitudes by the seventy-eight-year-old Southern Regional Council demonstrates that while Americans do not place reducing racial inequality high on their list of priorities. few Americans really believe they live in a color-blind society.

One-third of the public has no idea what “affirmative action” is, and makes no connection at all between those two words and race and gender. But, a majority think qualified minority and female applicants deserve it. Three out of four believe our elected officials ought to reflect the diversity of the electorate, and if eliminating majority black districts causes a decrease in black representation, a majority favors drawing such districts 58 to 29 percent.

The more poll respondents knew about our history, and the more the likely results of ending race-specific remedies to discrimination were explained to them, the more likely they were to respond thoughtfully, rather than with bumper-sticker answers.

In more and more schools, students learn about the democratic civil rights movement of the recent past. They learn that ordinary women and men were moved to extraordinary acts of courage. They learn that Ozell Sutton (now with the Justice Department) risked his job as a journalist when he challenged a newspaper’s policy that discriminated against black women. They learn that when Rosa Parks refused to stand up on a bus in Montgomery and when Martin Luther King, Jr., stood up to preach, mass participation came to the movement for civil rights. They learn that most presidents had to be forced, by public pressure built by the movement, to make the weakest gesture toward insuring freedom for all citizens.

And they learn that what was done once may well be done again.

At the end of Will The Circle Be Unbroken?, former Arkansas governor Sid McMath says:

“I think you’ve got a need for continuing a civil rights movement, that’s not just the blacks. Of course the civil rights movement wasn’t restricted to blacks. There were a lot of good white people in there. And you need a civil rights movement for everybody. Women need a continuing civil rights movement and the blacks and the Mexicans. They should all join together in the civil rights movement to see that the rights we have are protected and that the laws we have on the books are implemented and that the Bill of Rights is recognized in spirit as well as in the letter of the law. So there’s a continued need for the civil rights movement. Civil rights education. Human rights.”

Julian Bond is a professor at American University in Washington, DC and the University of Virginia. Since he was a college student leading sit-in demonstrations in Atlanta in 1960, he has been an active participant in the movements for civil rights, economic justice and peace, and an aggressive spokesman for the disinherited.

People Who Made the Movement

Staff

Vol. 19, No. 1, 1997 pp. 5-20

The voices you hear in the radio series, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? are edited and assembled from of a treasure trove of more than 250 interviews conducted by the Southern Regional Council and others with women and men who made one of America’s most powerful social movements. In lengthier form seven of those interviews are excerpted here, stories largely untold about a few of the acts of conscience and courage that were undertaken by many people from many walks of life. Uncharted Trail: Ozell Sutton

Interviewed by Worth Long, September, 1991.

A lifelong activist, Ozell Sutton was director of the Arkansas Council on Human Relations from 1961-1966 and since 1972 has been the regional director of the Community Relations Services of the United States Department of Justice.

I was born about three miles outside of a little town in southeast Arkansas called Gould. That’s in Lincoln County, south of Pine Bluff, about thirty-five miles. That is truly “cotton country,” and I was born on a plantation. We were sharecroppers. My mother was a widow and she had six boys and two girls. Those six boys did most of the field work and the girls pretty well did the cooking and washing and ironing.

From about April until June, if you were a sharecropper, you did what you called “draw.” After I got to Philander Smith College I learned it was a “line of credit.” So, in the spring, you went to the company store to get food and grain and seed for planting.

You had a certain amount that you could obtain based on an agreement with the boss. Then, when you were gathering your cotton in September, October and November, half you made already belonged to The Man. That was number one. And the indebtedness had to be paid out of your half. Which meant that years would pass and you never really got out of debt. And The Man was the only person who knew how much you owed in the first place. Whether he was juggling the figures I’m not prepared to say, but he was doing everything else, so that wouldn’t be beyond him–I can say that. My mama knew how much she owed, and she kept up with what she owed.

One year, according to her figures, mama had paid out of debt, and the last bale of cotton we had ginned was still in the possession of the plantation owner. So she sent my older brother in the town to sell the bale of cotton and the cotton seed.

And when he got there, the plantation owner, Mr. Holthoff, would not let him sell the bale of cotton because he contended that my mama was not out of debt. He came back home and told Mother what Mr. Holthoff said, and Mother struck out to town.

She walked into the store and asked Mr. Holthoff, “What’s this business about my owing you some more money?”

And he said, “You know, Lula Belle, you’re not out of debt.”

She said, “Yes, I am.”

And he said, “No, you’re not.”

Now during that day, and in some situations now, whites would just shut you up if you challenged them by asking whether you were calling them a liar. So he did that. He said, “Lola Belle, are you calling me a liar?”

And my mama, who was a very good sister in the Baptist church, (I had never heard her use a curse word) she said, “Damn right, you’re lying and I want my cotton.”

Wherever my mama went, her eight children were strung out for half a block behind her. From the oldest to the youngest. And we all were it the store when Mama said that And the store was full of black doing their business. Her neighbors started trying to get her out of there before she got in what they called, “trouble.” And after Mother wouldn’t leave, they left.

My mother and the plantation owner stood there, and my mother used some terms I really never knew she knew. Some real ghetto terms, like “Your momma ….” And then she told my two older brothers to go up the street and get her brother Gus Dowthard’s wagon.

And she told my brothers, “Don’t tell Gus about the problem, because I don’t want him to get into this.”

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I’ll leave it to you to understand what that meant in terms of a black man. Uncle Gus would have tried to defend his sister, and if he had done that … .

Anyway, my brothers went and obtained Uncle Gus’s wagon, and Mother told them, “Throw that bale of cotton”–which had been ginned–“on the wagon.”

And Holthoff said, “Don’t bother the cotton.”

But if Mother told her boys to throw that cotton on the wagon, on the wagon it was going. And so then we had to move off of the plantation and move into the little town and become clay laborers.

There’s a sequel to that experience.

Years later, when I was Special Assistant to Winthrop Rockefeller, Governor of Arkansas, Mr. Holthoff came to see the governor. By this time he was old and walking on a stick. There had been a tornado–high wind and a lot of water in Lincoln County that destroyed crops, land, houses, and what have you. He came to get Mr. Rockefeller to declare Lincoln County a disaster area so it would qualify for federal assistance. I came out through the reception area and I heard this secretary say, “I’m sorry Mr. Holthoff_” Well. that caught my interest. There are not many names like Holthoff. I looked around and then stood the old man, kind of stooped now, and she said, “I’m sorry, Mr Rockefeller is not in. Would you ilk( to speak to one of his assistants?’ And he said he would.

So I postured myself so she’d have to assign Mr. Holthoff to me And she said, “Oh, there’s Mr. Sutton Mr. Sutton, would you see Mr Holthoff?”

I said, “I will gladly see Holthoff.”

I took Mr. Holthoff in the governor’s office, not in my office. Sal down in the governor’s chair behind the governor’s desk. And I looked around and I said, “Mr. Holthoff, now what may I do for you?”

And he said, “Mr. Sutton, I am from…”

And before he could say it, I said, “You’re from Gould, Arkansas.”

He said, “That’s right. You know me?”

I said, “Yes, Sir–I know you very well.”

He said, “How do you know me?”

I said, “I was born on your place.”

He hesitated for a moment, he said, “You were born on my place?”

I said, “Yes, Sir, Mr. Holthoff. Think back many years when cotton was sure enough king. There was a black widow woman on your place who had a house full of children–mostly boys.”

And he said it immediately: “Lula Belle.”

I said, “Yes, sir. I am Lula Belle’s youngest boy.”

Mr. Holthoff said, “I’ll be damned. I’ll be damned.”

I said, “Mr. Holthoff I know what your problem is: there’s been a great destructive tornado in my home county. I’ve been reading about it. I still have an uncle down there.”

He said, “Yes you do–that’s Winston, isn’t it? I know Winston.”

“Of course you know Winston,” I said. “He used to sharecrop with you, too. But tell me, you want the governor to declare a disaster area?”

He said, “That’s right.”

I said, “Well, Governor Rockefeller is not here. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Tomorrow Ill come down and survey the area for the governor. And then I will return and make a recommendation as to what he should do.”

Now ordinarily you would do that in a National Guard plane, but I called Winthrop’s personal pilot and said, “Claude, I want you to fly me down to Gould.”

So Claude flew me down in the Governor’s plane. I came back and wrote a report for the governor, asking him to declare the disaster area, which he did. I took great deal of pride in that experience.

A War at the Democrat

I started at the Democrat during my senior year at Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Arkansas. The more reactionary Democrat came up with this idea of hiring a black staff person to counter the Arkansas Gazette, which had a lock on black circulation.

The Democrat and I had our own war; the did not use courtesy titles for blacks–for black women. Called them “Lula Belle”; “Joanne”–that kind of thing. And I would never write a story using a black woman without calling her “Mrs.” They would go through my copy and cross it out. And then the editor called me one day, and said, “Ozell, you know, we don’t use `Mrs.’ for black women.”

I said, “I know.”

“Well, so that we don’t have to go through your paper and cross it out all the time, uh, couldn’t you just write it according to the policy of the paper?”

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I said, “No. According to my own policy, I could not do that. Allen, in all good conscience, it’s bad enough for you to go through there and cut it out, but I could not in all good conscience write it any differently.”

He said, “Well, we’ll just have to keep going through there and cutting it out.”

I said, “I can’t do anything about that, but I can’t write it any other way.”

As you do in a war, you come up with strategies, right? I learned, instead of saying, “Mrs. Joanna Sutton,” to call her “Mrs. Ozell Sutton.” Now, if you’ve cut it out, you’ve identified the wrong person. They did that a couple of times, and then they had some calls and got tired of that. So, the executive editor called me in one day. I thought I was going to get fired. Everyday I came to work at the Democrat expecting to get fired.

So he said, “There seems to have been a little tug-of-war between you and the city editor.”

I said, “Tug-of-war? No war between me and Mr. Tilden. I like Mr. Tilden.”

He said, “That’s not what I’m talking about.” He said, “On this business of courtesy titles for black women.”

I said, “Oh, that’s what you mean. Yes, he did call me in, and asked me to stop writing it as `Mrs.,’ and I told him that in all good conscience I could not do that. If that’s what you’ve called me in for, I want you to know that under the threat of being fired, I cannot do that.”

He looked at me, he says, “No–we’ve changed our policy. We’re going to use `Mrs.’ for black women.”

I said, “That lifts a heavy burden off of my mind. There’s one thing to just insist upon writing it that way, it’s another thing to look at your work appear, and the public sees your work as `Sally Jane.”

He said, “Ozell, I have never met a black person like you.”

I said, “You never met but one black person, really. Now, I’m not talking `bout the ones that work for you–clean your yard, cook your food–that’s a different category. This is the only time that you have been exposed to a professional black, and I hope I represent them well.”

A Panel of Women: Brownie Ledbetter

Interviewed by George King, January 1992

In the later 1950s and 60s, Brownie Williams Ledbetter was a member of the Council on Community Affairs, a group which got blacks and whites registered and out to vote for school board elections; and the Panel of American Women, a interracial and interreligious group which worked toward changing racial attitudes. Since 1981, Ledbetter has been the president of and lobbyist for the Arkansas Fairness Council, twenty organizations representing unions, African Americans, teachers, women, social workers, and environmental groups who coalesce on civil rights tax equity issues and environmental and consumer protection.

I grew up in Little Rock. Until I was nine, we lived in a part of town that was sort of country club-oriented, but my folks had enough sense to move out of that culture, which I’m very grateful for. We moved from what is now “in-town”–but at that time was out of town–to a dairy farm. It was a rural setting then, although it’s not now. Now it’s a suburb, the whole farm. Moving to that setting had a lot to do with my attitude.

I can remember shortly after we moved to the farm, my father came home and slapped his briefcase down on the kitchen table. He had been working with an interracial group, and he was angry because he said that for every five dollars that was spent on a white child in the public schools, only five cents was spent on a colored–he would use the word “colored”–child. That would have been about 1942 or ’43, somewhere in there. My father died in 1950, so all I remember is scattered things as a child. I must have been ten at that time.

Now, my dad worked in insurance–he was a business person–but he was always involved in political stuff. Clear back to when I was ten or eleven, my daddy was in that interracial group, working for equal but separate schools, which was seen as very radical at that time. Nobody else was really trying to get equal schools until about ’54. My father would keep saying, “Isn’t this absurd. People think we want to socialize, and all we’re saying is that colored kids have the right to an equal education.”

My father had very strong values about equality. He

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was very contentious, quite a catalyst where ever he went. He was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, the third of eleven children, and they moved to Little Rock when he was three. His mother had some sort of East Tennessee mountain values. My mother’s family was from Arkansas, but they had those same values. Both families were in Presbyterian Churches that stressed the equity and integrity of human beings. Sometimes we would take the bus out to my Aunt and Uncle’s, who lived in town. One such time I was a teenager and it was close to Christmas. The last bus to go west stopped and I had packages. It was real crowded and it was a rainy, rainy, day. We got to the bus stop on Fifth Street. There was a black man standing there, and the bus driver opened the door and shut it.

And the man said “Can’t I get on, boss.”

And he said, “No we’re too full.”

So then he went down to Fourth Street and picked up two white women and it just blew my mind. I was standing right behind him because it was crowded, and I guess he must of felt somewhat guilty because he said, “I wonder what he thought this was.”

Well I just took my little smart ass, and I said, “Perhaps he thought this was public transportation.”

He said, “Maybe you’d like to get off this bus.”

I said, “Stop the bus!” And then they were all yelling stuff, “nigger lover,” and I got off and called my uncle and he just died laughing.

When I grew older and became a housewife and mother, a lot of the activity I got involved with centered around school board issues. That’s what was different about Arkansas. From day one after the Brown v. Board of Education lawsuit, the schools were the focus of civil rights activities in this town. Those of us who worked locally in the movement were thrown immediately into politics, and it was focused on school board elections in Little Rock. A lot of us from Little Rock belonged to the Council on Community Affairs, which would get ready for school board races. We would go get cars from the west end from white folks and then start bringing the cars over. We’d have anywhere between thirty to forty cars to go door to door in the precincts and get blacks out to vote.

Another group I participated in at the time was the Panel of American Women. Basically, the panel consisted of twenty-five to thirty women organized in groups of four, five, or six. Each group had a black, a Catholic, a White Protestant, a Jew, and sometimes an Asian-American. Our organization had one Japanese-American and one Chinese-American. Eventually it grew to about forty-two states.

We would go where we could get invited and sit down as nice upper-middle-class or middle-class ladies. We were credible and acceptable, and all mothers of children in school. We would talk about why diversity was important to us and why we wanted all kids to be in the same schools. We started that in ’63 and so we got real honest dialogue. People were very open about being segregationist. Nobody bothered us physically in any way because we were all dressed up and looked different from what they expected civil rights workers to look like. And we were all absolutely local.

We just didn’t fit their stereotype, and they didn’t know what to do with us. We were all great friends, and that was communicated to the audience, I think. I often said that we were more visual than anything else. We could go and sit in the local Baptist church and the roof didn’t fall in–that was just something people had never seen.

We got invited to speak regularly, doing about a hundred panels a year. We went to churches and schools. They wouldn’t let us in the white school district because we were too controversial, but other people didn’t really consider us that controversial. We would each talk three to four or five minutes. We didn’t talk about justice and preach about brotherhood. We sure as hell didn’t talk about sisterhood. We just told our stories. I talked about what it was like to explain to my kids as they grew up and asked questions about why black kids were going over there and they were going here. Each of us, particularly the minority panelists, also had to demonstrate why they were proud of being who they were and talk about the kind of discrimination they had faced.

Then we would open up for discussion. We always had very good discussions. We were committed to the principle that people are entitled to their opinions, and if somebody would get up and say something incredibly racist or anti-Semitic, which always happened, and somebody else in the audience would start to object, we’d say, “Now wait a minute, he has a right to his opinion. I don’t agree with him, but…” We required a table cloth that went all the way to the floor because we always had to grab each other and hold on to each other underneath when someone would say something really hostile.

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We learned so much about attitudes doing this, and we were forced to deal with our own attitudes and get more realistic than we had been. You had to grow when you were in dialogue, and you begin to see your own attitudes reflected back to you.

It must have been in the ’60s before I even dealt with the fact that I actually had any racism. And I think one of the big problems with racial attitudes today is that we just can’t admit that we are racist, so we can’t cure it. You know, all of us have some of that; you can’t grow tip without it inside you. You have to be conscious of it and recognize it when it comes–that it is wrong. But people are so busy denying it.

I was very naive. Once the nine kids were in the school and it was open, we thought it was over. Well, my God, you never really realize how long these things take.

Out of the Slave Environment: Carrie Young

Interviewed by George King, December, 1991

When Carrie Young was only fourteen years old, the movement came to her small town in eastern Arkansas and she became an active participant. For the last thirty years, Young has lived in Little Rock, working at the state capitol, at Southwestern Bell, and most recently at the Word of Outreach Christian Center.

I was born Carrie Lamar on December 10, 1948 in Barden, Arkansas. Barden is in eastern Arkansas, Phillips County, near the Mississippi River, about two hours from Little Rock.

My folks, Lottie and Lazarus Lamar, chopped cotton, picked cotton. And we sharecropped a little. Basically, we survived off the land–off of all God’s fresh fruits and vegetables, those that grew wild and those we grew ourselves.

My role in the cotton field was to keep count of all the cotton that was weighed and make sure that we received the three dollars we got for every hundred pounds of cotton we picked. I got whippings every day under the scales because I didn’t pick up a hundred pounds.

That was your life, to be able to pick a hundred pounds of cotton to bring in three dollars. And that’s what we lived off of all winter long, other than the peaches and pears and apples and stuff like that that we canned every year. We were “day laborers”, as they called it in the society of the clay. And my little hands wasn’t made for it.

Growing up this way, was just basically waiting to get out of high school so could leave the whole scene–to get out of the slave environment. That’s the only word I have for it because looking at movie on TV and reading history books, the life that I cam( up under was a slave’s life You know, when you get whipped under a weigh scale because you haven’t picked a hundred pounds of cotton, that’s slavery.

People would ask me, “Well, what do you want to be when you graduate from high school?” and I would say, “I don’t care. I just want to leave here.” And if anybody would have told me that I could be content living in Arkansas, I would have told them they was crazy.

So, I was glad to see SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] or anything else that looked like `em when they rolled into town in the early ’60s because that was my ticket out of the cotton field. At that time, people were coming from universities across America just to be in Arkansas. The focus on Arkansas actually came as a result of the Central High School Little Rock Nine, but Little Rock was not to be the focal point because it was not the root of the problem. The activists coming to Arkansas wanted to go to the rural areas where they knew the problems were more grass-roots where lives were threatened and people were killed.

SNCC started in Phillips County by passing out flyers door-to-door and inviting people to a church meeting that they had got together. They started talking to us about the Civil Rights Bill and had what they used to call the Harambee Singers; you may know them as Sweet Honey in the Rock, but they were called the Civil Rights Singers. They told us that our rights were being infringed upon, and that if we knew how to break the Bill of Rights down and take it to court, we didn’t have to live the way we were living. And, you know, people are pretty much content with their lifestyles until someone gives them a revelation on some other choices and opportunities they have.

I guess the calling card at that time was school desegregation with the Freedom of Choice Plan. Also, somebody in the civil rights movement–probably between Stokeley Carmichael and Marion Barry–found a law that said that if you got a petition with so many people, you could put a proposition on the ballot to get the poll tax abolished. So that was my part in the beginning of the civil rights movement. When I was only fourteen, I’d sit on this

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storefront in 90-and-100-degree weather, everyday, until I got everybody in Phillips County registered to vote on this petition. That’s how we got the poll tax abolished. And starting that year, we started getting black people voted to public office.

My parents didn’t try to stop me from getting involved with SNCC, but when they found out I was courting–that I had feelings for–his white man, Howard, they got very scared. My Daddy was just up in air about it. He’d say, “He’s all right with me, but I’m not gon’ have these white folks comin’ up in here killin’ up my family just because one white boy wants to see my daughter.”

Howard came to West Helena to work as part of SNCC. He was a Jewish guy out of Queens, New York, graduated from Hunter College. I guess you could say he was my first real friend. When he met me I was on my knees shooting marbles at age sixteen. Of course, he didn’t realize I was sixteen at the time. He thought I was about twelve, thirteen years old, or something like that, and then he found out I was sixteen.

And after about a year-and-a-half, we had a secret engagement going on as I graduated from high school, and my main focus was to get out of the environment. I graduated on a Friday night, and Saturday morning at 7:15 I was on my way to Washington, DC. Free from the South, I thought.

We left Arkansas for Washington, DC, in May of ’66. We knew we couldn’t get married anywhere until I turned eighteen in December. We got married in New York City in March of ’67. Then, on April 1st,1967, my husband brought me right back to Little Rock, Arkansas! On April Fool’s Day. I never will forget that. I said, “I know I’m crazy for coming back to Arkansas!” But I wound up being here in Little Rock from ’67 until now.

At the time, I think Howard was working for the Arkansas Council on Human Relations with Elijah Coleman. I was a student and housewife, but I never really enjoyed sitting at home and was active working alongside my husband. In April after we moved back here as a couple, I started going to school at the Opportunities Industrialization Center [OIC], because all I had was a high school diploma, and I wanted to work. The OIC had just been organized in March, I believe, of ’67.

I went to the OIC and studied to be a keypunch operator–hey call them data entry operators nowadays. I spent 750 hours in training. I went through all of the testings and all of the qualifications, but nobody wanted to hire me. Finally, I went to the state capitol, and, after giving me the runaround, they let me take a test. They gave me about thirty minutes to finish the test and I finished it in five.

At that time, there were no blacks working at the state capitol except those taking care of the lawn. They didn’t have a cafeteria any longer for blacks to work in because they had closed that down in 1965, after we had marched to the capitol demanding that they let blacks eat there.

I got hired and had been there a week when they realized it was a white man picking me up from work every night. They ran a check on our tags and found out

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that we both had the same last name. But what they didn’t know was that the man who was over the computer room was the son of a friend of ours, who couldn’t wait to get off of work so he could come tell us everything that was happening.

The director of the Motor Vehicles Department, Mr. Lazano, got so frustrated that he took a vacation and left word with his supervisor that he wanted me out of that place when he got back. And she came up to announce to me that she was going to have to let me go, because I wasn’t meeting their standards. But I was meeting their error standard. We were only allowed three errors per batch of work, and I never made more than three errors per batch, if that many.

The very next day I proceeded to file a lawsuit against the State of Arkansas. We knew I was let go because I was black and married to a white man. And all of the people around us knew it, too, and said they would testify to it. But it didn’t even get to that, because when the man came back from his vacation, the governor had already received the complaint that I had filed and had a meeting scheduled.

When Mr. Lazano came into the governor’s office for the meeting, the room was set up for ten people–all of my instructors from school, the supervisor, Mr. Lazano, myself, my husband, my attorney, and the governor. On each chair was a folder with my name on it.

And Mr. Lazano came in and saw my name on the folder and said, “When I fire somebody, don’t nobody hire them back, especially when it’s a nigger.”

By that time, Governor Winthrop Rockefeller was coming out of his office, and he said to Lazano, “You can go back to your office and take your stuff, and I don’t want to see you back in there after today.”

I just happened to he coming in the other main door, and I was standing there listening, and so Governor Rockefeller proceeded to apologize. He said, “Young lady, take the rest of the week off and report to the State Financing Administration on Monday.” He said, “We’ll have this meeting without you, and you just go on and do whatever you want to do, but you have a job working for the state capitol from now on.”

So that was the first incident where I just personally knew that I had been discriminated against for racial reasons. At the time I was eighteen years old and it still hadn’t really hit me the degree to which people could really hate somebody because of their color.

A Groundswell of Unrest: Rev. Solomon Seay, Sr.

Interviewed by Worth Long, with Randall Williams August 19, 1983

Rev. Solomon Seay, Sr. served as an active pastoral minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church for sixty-three years. In 1948, Seay came to pastor in Montgomery, where he served on the Negotiating Committee of the Montgomery Improvement Association and, later, as the third President of the MIA and as a member of the Executive Board of SCLC. Seay died in Montgomery in 1988 at the age of 89.

One problem we were facing and one problem we still face here in Montgomery was the conduct of the police force. When I came and took Mount Zion Church on Hope Street as a pastor in 1948, a young woman camp to my door about two o’clock in the morning. Gertrude Perkins was her name. She told me that two policemen

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had taken her down on the railroad and had all types of sex relations with her. And when I say all type, then you can imagine what I’m saying.

She told me what had happened to her, and I sat down and wrote what she said word by word. When she had finished I said, “Now, I’m going to have this notarized and send this away under your name, and if you are not telling the truth they are going to get you for perjury. If you are not telling the truth, they’ll put you in jail.”

I had it notarized and sent it to Drew Pearson in Washington at that time. And Drew Pearson went to the air with it. By the time the power structure here in Montgomery knew anything, what happened to Gertrude Perkins was all over the nation. From that there was a committee appointed to investigate, and I was made chairman of the committee.

During the time of the investigation, we had a meeting with the Civic League down on Monroe. When we got through with the meeting we walked out and were standing on the corner with one or two men when all at once two policemen came up and shined their lights in my face.

And of course I threw up my hands and says, “Why in the world you shining lights in my face?”

And they jumped off their motorcycles swearing and cursing and came up to me.

I threw up my hands and said, “Whatever you want to do with me just go on.”

When one of them came close enough to me, I let my hands down. He jumped back and struck me on the arm. I think he thought perhaps I was going to reach for him.

They took me to jail. Some young white men that I had been working with in the Alabama Council on Human Relations heard about it and they came running over. The police let them speak to me. I said to them, “I been waiting for this for twenty years.”

They said, “Now Dr., don’t do anything radical.”

Of course they didn’t know what I was talking about. After they left I could hear the jailer talking to the people downtown. Whoever they were, they were saying, “You all let this man alone. He’s not doing anything but trying to protect this woman.” But they didn’t let me alone.

Pretty soon, somebody came and said, “There is a

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bondsman here to get you out.”

And I said, “No. I haven’t done one thing to be in jail and I’m not going to pay one single penny to get out of jail.”

They closed the door and not long after that they came back and ordered me out. I came out, and they put me in the black wagon and went on down the street.

I didn’t know where they were going and what they were going to do. So fear shook me. When I was shaking with fear I said, “Lord, I don’t know what’s going to happen to me but just let it happen, if it’s going to help my people.” And the fear fell off of me. I’ve never been afraid before or since.

They took me down to the police station. I had my hat on, and the first thing they did was ordered my hat off. I took it off, and then the captain said to me, “We run this town.” And with a lot of curse words, he told me what they weren’t going to let me do.

After awhile a black man who was one of the leaders around here came in and they had him sign my bond without my asking him. They took me out and took me on home.

They had a grand jury investigation, and in that investigation they had Gertrude Perkins come down. The county solicitor, who had been here for thirty-odd years I reckon, had a roaring, shaking, loud-toned voice, very heavy. I could here him swearing (I was on the outside) and cursing Gertrude Perkins, telling her what she was, what she was telling her lies, and all that. Every time, he’d ask her, wasn’t she lying?

She’d say, “No, I’m not lying.”

So finally they brought her out, and because I was sitting right by the door, I had heard everything they said in there. Gertrude looked as calm as a person that had never been disturbed. She was an ignorant, almost illiterate black woman, but they didn’t shake her.

On the grand jury there were a number of men from different churches. They published their names. All of them on the jury were stewards and deacons in the different churches. You could see what the point was. So the Grand jury reported that it didn’t find anything.

Black people in Montgomery at that time had no organized force to speak up for them. There was fear among blacks in Montgomery, fear still holding the lid down on a better life. We didn’t have any help. One thing that happened when they put me in jail was that it shook all the ministers. That’s the first time all the ministers in the city were shaken up. When they had my trial, the oldest man I know, Dr. Cleveland, who was the most conservative of Blacks, led the crowd of ministers there to my trial. They couldn’t get in, but they walked the streets with people, trying to see what happened to me.

They dismissed me. They didn’t have any charge against me. Because what they tried then, they still try. They arrest you for one thing and charge you with something else. They knew what they were arresting me for–to break my spirit. And to calm me as a leader among the people. But they charged me with disorderly conduct. That there was their famous means of breaking the spirit of black folks. Disorderly conduct.

I can’t talk now like I used to because my vocabulary is somewhat limited now. But you see what I’m talking about–a groundswell of unrest. They grew more restless every year because of these incidents that increased the resentment of ordinary black people about how they were being treated. Treatment on the buses, treatment by the police. And when Martin Luther King came here those issues were still hanging unsettled.

Taking Jim Crow to Court:

John McCray

Interviewed by Worth Long with Randall Williams

John Henry McCray was the editor and publisher of the Lighthouse and Informer, South Carolina’s leading black weekly newspaper in the 1940s and early 50s. McCray went on to become director of admissions and recruiter for Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama. He died in September 1987 at the age of 77.

I was born near Youngstown, Florida, on August 25, 1910. My family moved from Youngstown to Charleston, South Carolina, which was the birthplace of my mother. I went through the elementary schools in a little town called Lincolnville, about twenty miles north of Charleston. I then went to Avery Institute in Charleston and Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama.

Upon leaving college, I worked as the city editor of the Charleston Messenger, which was owned by Jenkin’s Orphanage. I was able to run some good stories with the Messenger, but still the management didn’t want certain stories published. So when I went into producing a newspaper of my own, a weekly, which we called the Charleston Lighthouse. Later, in 1940, we combined that newspaper with the People’s Informer out of Sumter, South Carolina, and we started publishing the Lighthouse and Informer out of Columbia, South Carolina in 1941. And we continued to publish until we closed it in 1954.

Why did I go into the newspaper business? I suppose it was to try to take up the cause of a people we felt had

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little coverage in the daily newspapers at that time other than crime. There were no Negro newspapers in that community at that time.

I think the most important thing I hoped our newspaper could accomplish was recognition of blacks as a human beings. For example, no newspapers in South Carolina capitalized the word “Negro.” You never saw a picture of a Negro in the daily newspaper unless it was somebody who had been arrested for a crime or something. Every year, the News and Courier published the statistics from the Charleston police department and every year followed this with an editorial calling attention to the fact that the largest number of arrests in Charleston were of blacks (even though the statistics didn’t always bear this out). We undertook in our own way to correct that, and it worked very well.

Waldo Eugene Simmons did a column for us which would emphasize the need for the Negro himself to change. We would say, “Don’t go around making a lot of bad noise, using a lot of bad language, and setting poor examples for your kids. Stop grinning every time you see a white face. Stand up and be a man.” Basically the message people got was “Uncle Toms, Mr. Crook–you gotta go.”

In 1940, I started writing a column called, “The Need For Changing.” We pointed out certain situations, such as the poor academic facilities in the schools and so forth. Back then, lynching and violence were still big issues as well.

We also supported the campaign across the state for equalization of teachers’ salaries. I would say the movement for civil rights–back then we called it the movement for Negro rights–started in South Carolina in 1940, when the man who was to be my associate editor, Osceola McKaine, started trying to organize school teachers so that they might get equal salaries. McKaine was working out of the Sumter branch of the NAACP and some business men there had put up about 8100 a piece for a travelling fund for him. McKaine would travel during the weekends, speaking to small groups of teachers, telling them what it was all about.

Around the same time, a statewide NAACP organization–a Federation of NAACP Chapters–was organized. Before then, you had a small NAACP branch in Columbia, a branch in Charleston. You had one in Sumter. I think there were six branches altogether. So these chapters organized and, to me, that was a most significant thing. From 1941 on the NAACP in the statewide organization began to develop. By the late ’40s we had over 110 active branches.

McKaine had raised a little bit of money and put it into the Teachers’ Defense Fund over in Sumter, and that was turned over to the state NAACP. The NAACP got busy and got the State Teachers Association, (then called the Palmetto State Teacher’s Association) involved.

It turned out to be a long fight. The teachers were afraid and the Executive Committee of the Teacher’s Association wasn’t supportive. In 1942, the president of the Teacher’s Association, John P. Burgess of Orangeburg, was telling the teachers “You know these white folks are not going to pay you the same money they make. You’re a fool if you try to get them to. You’re gonna be out of a job,” and so on and so on. The Lighthouse and Informer called the Executive Committee of the Teacher’s Association the fourteen devils. And everybody who was on it was a devil. They were blocking progress.

We got a plaintiff in Charleston in 1944–a young lady named Viola Louise Duvall from Charleston who worked at Birke School. It was her third year as a science

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teacher. She was a graduate of Howard University and her salary was $600 a year! There were a lot of ladies who hadn’t even gone to high school who were riveters and so forth working at the Navy Yard there in Charleston making $35 and $40 a week. Hers, when you break it down to a weekly basis, was $12 a week.

The teachers were afraid. I was asked by the president of the state NAACP and the principal of Booker Washington High School in Columbia who had recruited her as the plaintiff, to sort of keep Miss Duvall together. I made several trips–drove 115 miles from Columbia down to Charleston and many a Saturday evening sat down there with her and her mother. Viola told me that her friend at Birke High School who was usually assigned to work with her on yard duty at recess time had stopped having anything to do with her. Most of the teachers were like that publicly. There were some who favored her. I think all of them wanted the money.

Back then, Thurgood Marshall was the chief counsel for the NAACP nationally. When he came into South Carolina to assist in the prosecution of the equal pay case, it was the first case he had had in the state. He was scared to death–first time in South Carolina. He didn’t know what was going to happen.

So he goes into court that morning, a little courthouse in Charleston. The Board had two lawyers: Erlich was one, and I forget the name of the other man. And Thurgood and his associates and the state attorney were sitting at the other table along with Miss Duvall and her mother sitting behind–holding each others’ hands.The place was packed. The Charleston system at that time was running three sessions a day–you had three school days in one, everything abbreviated. So those teachers who were not in class were able to come in when they were free. You could overhear things like, “God, I sho’ feel sorry for her” and “I sho’ don’t wan’ to see that chile hurt, but she shudda known that” and that type of thing.

The judge came in and sat down in his swivel chair. He liked to put his hands together and rest his chin right on the tip of them. He smiled, and then he turned his back to Marshall’s table.

“Mr. Erlich,” he said, “when was that case decided in Maryland, the Donald Murray case?”

And Marshall jumped up behind the judge. He says, “Your honor?”

And without looking around, the judge said, “I didn’t ask you Mr. Marshall.”

And boy, there was this buzz. I heard this woman say distinctly: “See that chile, he won’t even let her lawyer talk. Poor thing. Poor thing. Poor thing.”

Well, Mr. Erlich found whatever it was. He had it in some records there, and he gave it to the judge. Still smiling, the judge asked Mr. Erlich when another case was decided, and Mr. Marshall jumped up again. The judge, without looking, said: “Mr. Marshall, I didn’t ask you.”

Boy, you didn’t know what was going on. I looked at Thurgood. I was sitting at the press table. They were bewildered. But the judge asked about four questions of that type, and then he swung his chair around to face the plaintiffs, his hands still up and his chin resting on them.

He said, “Now Mr. Marshall I don’t want you to think I was being rude by not letting you give me the answers. I know you know the answers to those cases because you were the chief counsel for them. This is a very simple case, but I wanted to find out from the School Board was how long it knew it was supposed to pay Negro teachers equal salaries and hadn’t paid it. There’s no need to take the court’s time on this. Now, what I want to know from you is how do you want me to prepare this order? Do you want immediate equalization of salaries? Do you want to give the School Board some time in which to get ready for equalization? Or do you want a retroactive order which would make the School Board go back and pay these poor teachers what it has denied them for so many years?”

And that was Mr. Thurgood Marshall’s argument. He just stood there and looked at the other side, and asked that they be permitted to get together. The judge fixed the time for that, stood, said “Court’s adjourned,” and walked on out. The whole thing didn’t take ten minutes.

In South Carolina, the legal approach was the way to go. It worked. As long as Reverend James Hinton was president of the state NAACP and as long as we ran The Lighthouse, we didn’t have street demonstrations, although they had been done by the NAACP for years. Not that we were against them, but that wasn’t the way it was done then. And as we look back on those years, we have to concede that when you get through marching in the street, and you’re bailed out of jail, you still have got to settle these things in court.

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Bearing Fruit:

Constance Slaughter-Harvey

Interviewed by George King, May 1992

A student activist at Tougaloo and Ole Miss Law School in the 1960s, a civil rights attorney in the 1970s, and the Assistant Secretary of State for Elections and General Counsel for the State of Mississippi from 1984-1996, Constance Iona Slaughter-Harvey is presently engaged in the private practice of law in her hometown of Forest, Mississippi.

I was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1946. There were six girls and no boys in our family. My parents were students at Tougaloo College. My father’s mother graduated from high school at Tougaloo and her mother graduated from Daniel Hand School at Tougaloo. So Tougaloo was a part of our family. We moved to Meridian, where my father was a football, basketball, and track coach as well as a math instructor.

Our parents sheltered us quite a bit. They were very concerned about us not having to pick cotton or work for whites. We were taught to work for ourselves, and when we left Meridian and moved to Forest in ’54, we had a garden or farm and we raised sugar cane and vegetables. We were taught to be independent at a very early age. We were also taught not to ask for trouble, but not to run from trouble.

My father was extremely outspoken but he never asked for a fight. When we moved to Forest, it was unusual for a black man to vote. But Daddy voted and it was no big deal. It was just something he took for granted. We had that kind of pride.

I remember when Gladys Noel Bates filed a lawsuit for equalization of teachers’ salaries around 1960, Daddy was the happiest person in the world. He sent money to her, made contributions. Quite a few black folks had that kind of pride. We just didn’t go around and say, “Okay, to hell with the system.” There are ways of fighting a system without anybody knowing how you’re fighting it.

We were always taught that we were as good as anyone. Race, we were taught, was no barrier. Your worth was determined by the contributions you made to others. That has stuck with me.

We did not go to movies where we had to sit in the balcony. We didn’t ride the bus. Our parents took us where we needed to go. They didn’t want us to sit in the back of the bus. We were aware of the political realities and the realities of racism and injustice, but our parents tried to keep us from actually having confrontations.

Of course, I do remember some confrontations.

I do recall my father stopping at a vegetable stand and the guy calling him “boy” and telling him not to touch the tomatoes. I remember my father squeezing the tomatoes until one broke in his hand and telling us to get back in the car. We never stopped there anymore.

I recall going to California in our car. My father was going to UCLA to work on his masters degree. we got to Flagstaff, Arizona, and my father stopped so we could get a room. The guy told my father there were no vacancies and Daddy said, “Why is there a sign that says vacancies?”

He said, “Well, there are vacancies, but they’re not for y’all.”

And I remember my father using profanity and getting very angry. I remember us having to sleep in the car that night.

It was incidents like that, before I went to Tougaloo, that produced the need to hold somebody accountable and responsible for making certain that we all were treated fairly.

I was in high school when the first student sit-ins began. I recall the pride I had in their the courage to stand up to the system. And I recall a cousin of mine, Memphis Norman, and another Tougaloo student, Ethel Sawyer, on television with people pouring ketchup on them and pouring sugar on top of the ketchup when they were sitting-in I always had a problem with permitting anybody to misuse my body, but for those who were able to do it, I had the utmost respect.

I came to Tougaloo in the summer of ’63 for a premed program. It was at that time that I met Medgar Evers. I met him, got to know him in the first week of June, and he was killed June 12. Because of his death, I became involved then in marches and protests. I was away from home, and I didn’t have to worry about my parents being protective.

Next to my father, I thought Medgar Evers was the greatest man in the world. He was the packaged deal. He was good looking. His eyes were so bright. He was

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extremely articulate. He was committed. He believed in doing what was right. When I first met him, he was organizing students for voter registration drives on campus. I could see marching with him and working with him the rest of my life.

Now I had really looked forward to the pre-science program at Tougaloo because I wanted to be a doctor, but then I met Medgar. I think I came of age after he was killed. Because of Medgar’s death, I made a promise to myself to bring about changes in Mississippi.

From the NAACP, my involvement led, in 1963, to working with a sorority, Delta Sigma Theta, on voter registration–something I’m still committed today. We came into Jackson and registered people instead of doing foolish things. We went into housing projects where nobody dared tread. I think I came up with 700-800 new voters.

At Tougaloo at that time there were quite a few students involved in SNCC. Stokely Carmichael. Rap Brown, Hollis Watkins, and Bob Moses, all of them came down. Tougaloo became important to the movement. At Tougaloo, academia and the world of social change came together. We had an integrated faculty with whites who were sympathetic to our cause. You dealt with the realities and you also dealt with what should be. You learned about the Constitution and then you saw the application of the First and Fifth Amendments. The movement folks were there but you also had to be accountable for your academic performance. That’s why I was able to go to Ole Miss and challenge the system from a social perspective in an academic setting.

In 1970, when I graduated from law school. I represented the families of two students–James Earl Green and Philip Gibbs–who were killed at Jackson State. In June of 1970, I filed a lawsuit against the highway patrol, which had never had a black patrolman. In August of 1970, I filed a lawsuit against the state prison system, bringing about a change in the living conditions there.

I represented Tougaloo students who were stopped by highway patrolmen and beaten and had their Afros cut. I represented people who were stopped by highway patrolmen at roadblocks and beaten. I represented prisoners who were beaten in jail. Seeing Rodney King beaten on television was nothing compared to some of those who walked into my office when I was practicing law. One man walked in with an eye hanging out of the socket. Another walked in bleeding so bad I couldn’t tell his face. Both had just been released from jail. I think if you put yourself in a position to be contacted when such things happen, you’ll be surprised at the prevalence of brutality.

I have prepared pre-law students at Tougaloo who are now doing important work as lawyers and judges. So I feel that the seed that Medgar planted has grown and is

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now fielding and bearing its fruits. I’m now ready to pass the baton on. I encourage young people to challenge the system. The judicial system needs to be challenged annually, yearly, daily. If the system doesn’t work, challenge it and change it. Hold it accountable. Because we have not overcome. We’ve made a significant difference. We’ve encouraged and caused significant changes, but we have a long, long way to go. The system that we fought in the 60’s and 70’s took a rest. It hid and got a reprieve, got a continuance. Now that very system, because it was never destroyed, is raising its head again, and we need to be prepared to deal with it accordingly.

Generation Gap:

CHARLES BLACK

Interviewed by George King, January 1992

An active participant in Atlanta’s student movement while at Morehouse College in the early 1960s, Charles Black now works as an equal employment opportunity investigator for the federal government and as a stage, television, and movie actor.

I was born in Miami, Florida. I came to Morehouse College in Atlanta in September of ’58. I was not aware of a lot of civil rights activism when I first got there. Campus life was pretty isolated and insular. You were there to study and you dated girls and you participated in various social and extracurricular activities. And that was pretty much it, from my perspective anyhow.

It was the lunch counter sit-ins that took place in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February of 1960, that united the minds of a few people like Lonnie King, Sam Pierce, and Julian Bond. These people had a conversation about our needing to do some such thing here, and that little group expanded quite rapidly.

There may have been as many as two dozen of us at the most discussing the actions that came to be a rather massive demonstration carried out with military precision.

The presidents of the black colleges–the Atlanta University Center–had been advised of our intention. Some of the presidents were quite reluctant and opposed us taking these steps. But in the end, they were all supportive and advised us.

Their advice to us was to give the white community an opportunity to correct these ills before taking this step. We should at least make it clear to the public why we were doing what we were doing, they argued, to increase the prospect of support in the general community.

A group of us sat down to put a document together. We reviewed it with the presidents of the University schools, and they made some suggestions for changes and improvements in various ways, but the original draft remained pretty much intact. The statement was then published in local newspapers, as well as The New York Times and, I believe, maybe L. A.

The first sit-ins that we had in Atlanta involved about two-hundred students and, as I recall, eleven locations, all of which were visited at exactly eleven o’clock in the morning. We had sat down and spent a lot of time planning every step. We had people who were assigned to drive cars to take people to these locations. We had other people assigned to stand at telephones, who could see the action and report any problems. We had adults who had committed to get people out of jail with bonding if we were arrested. It took a goodly bit of planning, but it all came off at exactly the same time and to the surprise of everybody.

The city leadership was taken quite by surprise. They didn’t know what to do. There were lots of reports of policemen turning around in the middle of the street in their cars just spinning around, not knowing what to do. We got a big kick out of that, of course.

When they arrived on the scene, they didn’t know what to do either. They had to wait for instructions from back at headquarters. Essentially what was decided

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was that they would give us fair opportunity to leave without being arrested, and those who did not leave, of course, would be arrested.

The group that I led went to the Terminal Train Station, which no longer exists now. In that group was Martin Luther King’s brother, A.D. King. There were two different entrances to the white lunch counter there, so King took half the group into one entrance and I took the other half into the other.

We simply went to seats that were available and sat down, or stood when there weren’t enough seats. Nobody asked us, “May I help you?” So we didn’t have a chance to order a hamburger or anything. There were people telling us, “You can’t eat in here. The colored room is ’round that way,” and that sort of thing.

The clerks, customers, everybody was totally surprised. Nobody really knew what to do, so everybody was looking to somebody else for an answer. But, of course, phone calls were made immediately to the police by the operators of all these establishments. And eventually the police did show up. But I don’t recall that anybody was assaulted in any way during the sit-ins mostly because it was a total surprise and there was nobody there with intent in their minds to do harm to anybody. They were just having their lunch.

We were quite anxious because it was entirely new. But nobody anticipated anything more negative than an arrest occurring, even though we knew there was the possibility of violence. We had discussed non-violent tactics in the event anyone struck or mistreated us. We were anxious, but we felt that what we were doing was very important. It felt good to be involved.

After the sit-ins, the city officials and the business owners still thought there was no real reason for them to have to change their ways. That led to boycotts of the downtown facilities like Woolworth’s and Rich’s and Davison’s (now Mary’s) and Sears, which had lunch counters in their department stores. Rich’s was the main target because that was where everybody shopped and it was the store most beloved of everybody in the Atlanta community, blacks and whites. But they were all targeted, and after along and arduous boycott, they did have to give in. We had been told, of course, by the white business community that our boycott was having no impact on them. And it just happens that somebody saw reports in The New York Times that said sales were down substantially and so that gave us the will to continue.

There was some divisiveness, too, about continuing the boycott as Easter approached. Folks wanted to buy their Easter outfits and everything. The boycott had been dragging on for a long time and it seemed like there was gonna be no end to it; it seemed we were not going to get any results from doing it. People were talking about breaking ranks and the older black leadership was, in some instances, opposed to these actions in the first place because they had had more or less a privileged position with the white establishment. They could sit down and kind of negotiate out things with the mayor, and the Chamber of Commerce, and Robert Woodruff of Coca Cola and Richard Rich of Rich’s, and they got personal regard and got things done for the community.

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We were threatening all that, because when they were asked to do so, they couldn’t keep “those kids” in line. Their influence lessened immediately when it was apparent to the white establishment that they could not control the events of the times–that they were, in fact, at our mercy, because the masses of people were responding to what we were doing.

In many instances they sought to dissuade us. We formed an organization that was called the Adult-Student Liaison Committee early on in all of these undertakings, and we would meet on a regular basis with the adult leadership, which included Daddy King, Rev. William Holmes Borders, C.A. Scott, A.T. Walden, and Warren Cochran. We were challenging them constantly in these meetings. And we won more often than not.

They couldn’t tell us not to do things. We would discuss things with them, but we didn’t ask them whether we could do them. I think in many instances, they simply went back and told the white establishment that we were going to do these things.

But traditionally, we would call the mayor, anyhow, and let him know if we had a protest planned–partly because we wanted police protection and partly because it was just kind of an accommodation we had reached.

But, at a point, when the boycotts had continued for quite a while, we found ourselves really fighting with these guys quite a bit about continuing to support our efforts. And it all came to a head on one evening when we had a mass meeting around the question of continuing the boycotts, which was held, I believe, in the Warren Memorial Church over on Ashby Street. The church was filled to the rafters, and the issue was put to these masses of people as to whether we’d continue the boycott or not.

And I distinctly recall one lady in a white nurses uniform coming down the middle aisle, and shaking her fingers up at Reverend Borders–or maybe it was Daddy King–saying, “I’m a member of your church, and I want you to tell me to go back to shop at Rich’s.” Which he, of course, could not find it in himself to do, before this mass crowd, although he was trying to persuade everybody that it was time to call off the boycott.

The situation was so tense that we decided that we needed somebody to help us out on this. Lonnie placed a call to Martin, Jr., at home and asked him to come over and speak to the crowd, which he did. He made one of his most moving and compelling speeches I suppose I’d ever heard him make. He didn’t really take any side in the matter, but his fervor kind of continued the spirit in the people, and the boycott continued until they were willing to sit down and negotiate a settlement.

The Making of Will The Circle Be Unbroken?: Beyond the Printed Word

Staff

Vol. 19, No. 1, 1997 pp. 22-26

When Black Belt Press publisher Randall Williams suggested in 1978 that the Southern Regional Council publish a guidebook to civil rights historic sites in Montgomery, Alabama, former SRC Executive Director Steve Suitts married that proposal to his longtime interest in regional radio and cane up with the concept of a civil rights radio documentary project focusing on the five state capitals of the Deep South. From this initial conception of what would later be named Will The Circle Be Unbroken?,Suitts guided program development, oral histories, and fund raising for the series until his resignation as SRC’s executive director in 1995. Suitts is still a consultant for the project. In addition, he now works as a writer, and is an adjunct faculty member with the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University.

In a January, 1997 interview with Allen Tullos, Suitts reflected on his long involvement with the civil rights radio project.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken? has taken even longer to produce than most of the media efforts the Southern Regional Council has undertaken fifteen years. It will actually be sixteen years from the point of planning to the point of broadcast. The project changed over this time. If we had finished the enterprise in the middle of the 1980s, it would not be what we are going to be broadcasting in the late 1990s. But the essence of it is there, and I think it is true to what the overall mission was from beginning to end.

This mission had two parts that allowed us to keep the faith through the thick and many patches of thin. First, we felt it was important to give voice and attention to a part of a social movement that defines the best part of the South, before many of the people who participated in it were no longer alive to tell their stories. The radio project was also an institutional effort to try to have the Southern Regional Council move beyond the printed word as the sole medium by which it tries to reach people around the country.

Reaching the hearts and minds of people is something we were thinking a lot about in 1980, when Jimmy Carter had been defeated for a second term and Ronald Reagan had declared that poverty no longer existed and that civil rights was no longer a major issue in America. It was a time to rethink. And it’s appropriate that the series finally emerges into the public domain at a time when people are beginning to realize that in a democracy you cannot simply fiddle with the enforcement of good laws and expect the people to remember why those laws ought to be there.

Hearts of Dixie

We chose the five capitals of the Deep South simply for the symmetry of it and because we felt there was, at that time, no recognition of the history of the local movements in these cities. In virtually every part of the public domain of those state capitals there are monuments to all sorts of histories of the South, primarily the Confederate’s history, but hardly any monuments to the history that changed the South from being a place of oppression by law to a place where equality of law was the abiding spirit and ambition.

Once we, the scholars and activists who were involved in this series, had good discussions and lots of debate among ourselves, we did develop an important perspective of how each of these state capitals, while very individual in their own stories, captures some important theme that ran through much of the Southern civil rights movement.

Jackson, Mississippi, showed vividly the problems of violent resistance, of how tenaciously, how violently whites were unwilling to give even an inch, much less a bit of human dignity. Little Rock represented the concept of federal intervention, the way that federal support in the end backed the movement. The Atlanta programs look at the idea of negotiated settlement, the deals that were cut and the compromises that were made in this process.

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Montgomery features the importance of mass organization and Columbia shows how the courts were used as a route to social change. It’s not that any of these things didn’t happen in other communities; it’s just that they happened in a particularly emphasized way in those particular state capitals.

Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Deeds

The important story in each of the cities’ programs in the radio series is not that there was an individual person but that there were many individual people, some of whose voices get played out in the series more often than others simply because they didn’t die; because they were available; because their words may have been remembered; or because their recollections are more vivid or their ability to tell a story is more emphatic.

But none of that discouraged us from holding onto the notion, which most of the people we interviewed reiterated, that this was a movement in everyday life. Ordinary people in the South at that time had to make some difficult decisions about courage and conviction and right and wrong, be they black or white, male or female. What rose out of this were extraordinary deeds done by people who lived ordinary lives.

Now, I think there’s an incredibly important message there, since Americans and especially Americans in the latter part of the twentieth century, have a real notion that activism is something which a handful of people who belong to a public interest group somewhere engages in and that social change or political change or economic change is something which you either watch on the evening news or read about someone else doing. Activism is not seen at this point in our history as being something that’s clone in the first person. Hopefully, our story will remind people that in a democracy, change occurs only when people think that it’s done in the first person and they think they can do something about it.

Changes in the Airwaves

George King has produced a program which is really quite different from what would have been produced had we succeeded in our grant applications by the mid-’80s. Part of this difference has come about because George brought in some ideas of his own. But the program willalso be different because it’s ten to twelve years later, and things have changed.

Originally, we had hoped that this series could be on commercial radio as well as public radio. At that time, there was a real search for programming going on in AM commercial radio. This was before AM radio fell into its monolithic mania with talk radio, but when FM radio had emerged as the source for music. So AM commercial radio was looking for something.

By the 1990s, when George came along, the radio market had changed. AM radio had found talk radio, most of it foul and disingenuous–people coming up with clever phrases to demean other people. Unfortunately, a lot of people enjoy that–particularly men, according to the demographics of American radio. So, there was no real opportunity to move in.

In addition, with the permission of the Federal Communications Commission, the limits on cross-ownership of stations–on one company or person owning several different stations–had been removed almost to the point of elimination. One can virtually own as many radio stations as you can buy today in America. Those limits used to be very strict–less than ten nationally and no more than two within the same market.

Having more and more radio stations in fewer and fewer hands has meant that national canned programming has filled up the AM commercial radio time, that the national talk shows do not. So there really has not been a chance to get into the commercial radio market for the last six or seven years.

This development meant that non-commercial radio was really the only avenue for us. However, during the same time period, non-commercial radio has become more widespread. There are many more stations. The listenership is much larger, although still not very diverse. And so I think the impact of the programming can still be as substantial as we had envisioned in our more ambitious strategies.

The other major difference between the programs as we originally envisioned them in the early ’80s and what has been produced is that we had foreseen having a more narrative style. We had foreseen programming where some important voices of people in these local places told their stories and then their own stories captured the

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stories of many other people in their own communities. We saw them in some ways as much more personal stories than what the present programs show.

What George has led in producing is a very lively, rich set of voices which has a narrator who is fairly active in trying to emphasize and tie together the voices. It’s much more of a standard format for radio documentaries. It is probably a necessity. I think to try to introduce the more personal narrative form today in the market of telecommunications would probably be a very difficult sale.

In addition, George chose to add music to the formats, to enliven it so that there’s a combination of music and story. The music emphasizes the story and might even bring in new listeners, especially young folks. Even as recently as five or six years ago, when the Council was attempting to distribute other radio programming under the banner of Southways, which mixed together music and analysis and stories, we got enormous resistance. Radio stations wanted either a story, a documentary program, or a music program. It is a tribute to George and to the story that is being told that we have been able to get the public radio community excited about telling it with music.

The essentials of what we’re trying to do in 1997 are the same as they were in 1981: to give people who listen to radio a sense that there was a great movement in communities throughout the South and that something remarkable happened, a moment of grace in Southern history, when people recognized that they could pull together and that they could, with good will and hard work, do extraordinary good with each other.

Completing the Circle After a five-year hiatus due to funding shortages, the Southern Regional Council was able to resume work on its Civil Rights Radio Documentary in 1990, when SRC finally received a grant from the National Endowment of Humanities. SRC hired award-winning documentary producer George King to script and produce the series. Originally trained as a documentary filmmaker in the United Kingdom, King produced “trigger films” in the early 1970s which were intended to trigger discussion and problem-solving within communities and were screened extensively on European television networks and at the Berlin and Edinburgh film festivals. Since moving to the United States, King has worked in New York, San Francisco, and Atlanta writing and producing documentaries for film, television, the theater, and radio. In a December 1996 interview, King reflected on his six years of working on Will The Circle Be Unbroken?.

I started working on the radio project in 1991, and I spent about a year writing twenty-five scripts. I remember that every time I would run into [then-SRC Executive Director] Steve Suitts in the corridor, I would repeat the mantra, “It can’t be done, Steve.” I wanted him to recognize the sheer volume of work that he was asking to be done–that I did not believe one person could do this in a year. By the end of the year, I had nine people working with me, as we scrambled in the last few months to get all the scripts finished.

Mining the Archives

Fairly early on, we conducted a national search to find any kind of recorded materials on civil rights in the South. After we read through hundreds of transcriptions of interviews, we started creating patterns according to themes and events.

So these scripts really evolved, then, out of the material that we gathered. We didn’t look at the history of a community and say, “Within this community, these are the stories we should try to tell, and let’s try to find people who can tell them.”

The way these scripts evolved was much more, ‘These are the stories people are telling us. Let’s try and see if they can tell the story of what happened in this community.” A rag-tag army ended up completing the scripts by the summer of 1992. We sent them to NEH and received for a grant to make a pilot in ’93.

For the pilot, I decided to do a prologue and five programs on Little Rock, Arkansas. I’d spent a lot of time in Little Rock, myself and done a lot of original interviews there, so I felt more confident about this city than I did about any of the others. I knew we had we had good material, and there was also a tremendous amount of archival material to back it up.

Frequently you’d rifle through people’s papers and you’d see “Tape. Box 52.” In box 52, you’d find some old reel-to-reel tape, and you’d put it on, and it would be amazing. It would be a speech by Governor Faubus that had vanished from sight otherwise. Or it would be some campaign slogans from a race in 1948 in Little Rock.

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During our research we uncovered a lot of archival oral history interviews that were (lone for academic purposes and were never intended for broadcast. So we had all of these wonderful interviews that were going to sound like junk compared to what you hear on the radio. But fortunately, with new digital technology, we were able to enhance the sound and filter out a lot of the extraneous noise. We also had to resort to baking some of the tapes in ovens because the oxide had started flaking off.

Around the same time, we decided we wanted to put music in the programs, and not just music that had been part of the movement. In an attempt to engage listeners, I thought it would be interesting to try and put popular music into the soundtrack as a way of connecting people to a moment in time. Songs serve as locating points. If you play somebody a tune by Martha and the Vandella and if they were old enough to have heard it at the time it was recorded, they re member what was going on in their lives and what they were doing.

My decision to use popular music from that time was also based on the fact that there was some amazing music that came out of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s in this country–blues, RB, country, gospel, rock and roll. So we brought on a music researcher named Thom Watson, who’s clone an enormous amount of laboring in the vineyard, looking for appropriate music.

Bringing it Home

As we put together the pilot programs on Little Rock, we had the idea to play them for focus groups made up of community leaders and movement participants. They could tell us whether we got everything right in both fact and emphasis and if we hadn’t, where we’d run off the rails.

Reconnecting the programs back to the local communities was so valuable; so many things came from that. They knew a lot of the people in the communities so they could say, “You folks never talked to Betty? You’ve really got to go talk to Betty, and here’s her phone number.”

Sometimes, I would arrogantly claim that we had been to every archive in this country and that I knew where every sound bite was. And then, the person I was talking to would say, “Well, I’ve got twenty interviews under my bed, actually.” So you were humbled by such things periodically, and the collection grew and grew.

When we took the first roughly-edited shows into Little Rock to the focus groups, one of the first comments was, “You don’t get a sense of what we opposed, of the people we faced. They’re not in these programs. People won’t understand or believe what we were up against.” That made a lot of sense, and we then went out and tried to interview segregationists, or find interview material from them. But it turned out to be no easy task to have those folks come forward and talk about their attitudes in an honest way. We found a few, but, boy, it’s been rare. What we’ve had to do is use the more sensational material we found in archives. which gives you a flavor of the conviction or sense of righteousness that segregationists had, but it doesn’t really explain much about the roots of prejudice.

However, just in the way that oral history can skew, there is a danger that in a small focus group of five people, one person can dominate it and say, “This is all wrong. My grandfather is obviously the most important person, and you’ve ignored him.” I think we were very fortunate that this never happened. I don’t believe anybody in these groups put their ego in the way or were overly protective or defensive about individuals or their communities.

Still, I never know for sure if someone is remembering something accurately. In some of the many original interviews that I did, I couldn’t be sure if people were trying to reposition themselves in history so they would look better than they were. To offset these pitfalls of oral history, I introduced another layer into the feedback process: a scholar with local knowledge. We identified scholars in each city with specific local knowledge, people like Mills Thornton in Montgomery, Cliff Kuhn in Atlanta, and John Dittmer in Jackson. Involving the scholars was very useful indeed for fact-checking and for balancing what the community was giving us.

So out of these three methods–one of which is the scholar, one of which is the community, and the third of which is the material that we actually had–the scripts and then the programs evolved.

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Of course, this process of reworking the shows based on feedback from local focus groups and local scholars is very time-consuming. It becomes an expensive prospect–you might even be doubling the cost–but I think it was critical for the integrity of the project.

Chutes and Ladders

By 1995 we had received a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that gave us almost enough to finish the production side. Six months later we got another grant from the Ford Foundation for distribution–a facet which most independent producers very frequently ignore until it’s too late.

Because every public radio station in this country is essentially an independent entity, you have to “sell” your program to all of these individual stations throughout the nation while hundreds of other people are trying to get their programs onto the same limited air time. And then there’s the challenge of getting your program placed in a time slot where there’s actually going to be an audience. And then the challenge of getting an audience. To meet these challenges, we are fortunate not only to have Public Radio International distributing our program, but also to have been able to hire our own people to enhance the publicity, marketing, and outreach PM is providing.

Getting an independent production on the air is an incremental process, however you do it. You seldom get totally funded up-front for any of these kinds of projects; it’s a question of getting the resources that you can at any given moment and then doing enough to be able to demonstrate to somebody else that you’ve moved up the ladder four rungs–that you’ve brought in these other people and that you now have these additional resources. So it’s a real game of chutes and ladders, where sometimes you move up and sometimes you slide down.

As I’ve moved up and down over the last six years, I’ve learned a tremendous amount about the South and particularly about black life in the South. It’s been an extraordinary privilege. Now, when I hear the convoluted arguments people make on AM talk radio about “We’ve kind of equalized things out now” and “Affirmative action is wrong because it’s now giving unequal rights to people,” I know that the speakers know nothing of this history.

You can tell that they have no experience with what black folks went through, or experience today. Unless you understand the history of violence, of segregation, of discrimination–second class citizenship, economic sanctions, redlining, inferior education, lack of political power, lack of respect–you are basing your opinion on only half of the story. It’s been an education which I really value, and it’s something that I will never forget.

Prejudices and Hopes

By Ellen Spears

Vol. 19, No. 1, 1997 pp. 28-29, 31

The personal stories in Will The Circle be Unbroken? remind us how recently American apartheid shed the force of law, and at what costs the changes were extracted. These recollections inevitably lead us to consider how things have changed and to identify the work that remains to be done if we are to create an equal society. What do Americans today have to say about current racial attitudes?

“It is harder to put away the past than what we are trying to make it. If it was my people that got burned and beaten, their houses burned, it would be hard for me to forget, in just a few years.” White man, Raleigh, North Carolina, January, 1996.

“I grew up in Atlanta, and each group knew their place and the limits of social interaction were understood.” White man, Gainesville, Georgia, early 1996.

“I am more prejudiced than my parents.” Twenty-two-year old white hotel clerk, Atlanta, April, 1996.

“We’re not as prejudiced as we used to be and, hopefully, that trend will continue.” White woman, Gainesville, Georgia, January, 1996.

In Atlanta recently to plan a conference on race and region, veteran South-observer John Egerton commented on the persistent problems of race. “What people are looking for is hope and a few tools to build on previous decades of racial progress,” he said.

Seeking fresh hope and new tools, SRC conducted in 1996 a national public opinion survey and focus groups to better understand racial attitudes. The quotations at the start of this essay come from four focus groups with white Southerners conducted by John Doble Research Associates. The national telephone poll surveyed 1216 randomly selected adults in September, 1996. A further analysis of the survey data was carried out by Tom Smith, Director of the General Social Survey at the National Opinion Research Center. The project is supported by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

We focused on documenting attitudes of white Americans toward the race-based remedies which, when applied, have brought a modicum of progress toward equity for people of color and women. Now these remedies are being withdrawn.

We sought not to shape the outcome, but to step back and listen. What we have heard offers more hope than anticipated. Despite the contemporary assault on racial pluralism, there exists broad public support for measures redressing racial discrimination.

Like current racial attitudes in the United States, the survey results are exceedingly complex and often contradictory. Most people say that much progress has been made in race relations, and most want to reduce racial inequalities.

“But while public support for reducing racial inequality is broadly based, it is not especially deep,” says John Doble. “While Americans see racial tensions and racial inequalities as serious social problems,” adds Torn Smith, “they do not give these high priority along the spectrum of public concerns.”

But the research shows that the American public also does not give high priority to abolishing affirmative action programs. Moreover, in the face of difficult trade-offs, large majorities said they favor a host of remedies–some race-based, such as financial aid for black college students (75 percent) and job training for blacks who lack skills (78 percent); some class-based, such as tax breaks to low-income families for college tuition (84 percent); and some anti-discrimination measures, such as tough legal action against companies practicing discrimination in hiring and promotions (71 percent).

“Despite the low priority they give racial matters, Americans are troubled by the state of race relations,” says Smith. “Few people think that America is a color-blind society in which prejudice and discrimination no longer prevail.”

The chasm dividing the views of contemporary black and Hispanic Americans from those of white people is evident on various measures. “Most white Americans said black people do not face a great deal of racial discrimination in employment, education, housing or political representation,” notes Doble. “For example, 61 percent of African Americans say blacks face a great deal of discrimination compared to 27 percent of whites.”

Among minority groups, black people are seen as facing the most discrimination, with 32 percent of all respondents saying there is a great deal of discrimination and 51 percent more saying there is some discrimination. Twenty-seven percent say that there is a great deal of discrimination against American Indians, 24 percent against Hispanics, 19 percent against women, 14.5 percent against Asians, and 14 percent against whites.

Defining affirmative action

Public opinion towards race-based governmental policies to address racial inequality defies simple portrayal. “People do not have a position on affirmative action in general, but varying points of view on the many distinct policies that fall under this term,” says Smith.

“There is confusion about exactly what the term `affirmative action’ means, with upwards of one-third of the public not knowing what the term means and another 22 percent saying it means a quota or forced hiring. Nevertheless,” says Doble, “affirmative action should be continued, people said, by a margin of 56 percent to 32 percent.

The data does suggest frames for discussing affirmative action that garner the broadest support. “[S]upport for affirmative action is highly conditional on how the policy is presented and what steps are actually called for,” says Smith. “Support is greatest when measures emphasize equal opportunity, reject the use of quotas, highlight women, and stress the qualifications of members of the targeted group.” Support is weakest when measures are described as quotas or preferential treatment, mention only racial minorities, and refer to possible discrimination against whites or white men.

While differences between attitudes in the South and the rest of the country persist, explains Doble, “they are far less prominent than in the past.” For example, residents of the South and Northeast are just as likely to favor affirmative action (57 percent), though Midwesterners are more likely to show favor (61 percent). Those in the West are least likely (34 percent).

In the political arena, three out of four Americans believe it is in the best interests of the country if our elected officials reflect the racial and ethnic background of the entire population. And, if the failure to create minority majority districts were to lead to a sharp decline in the number of black members of Congress, people favor drawing districts that provide opportunities to minority voters by a margin of 58 to 29 percent.

Racial attitudes are more subject to change than one might expect, a fact that other researchers have noted. Given additional information about the impact of eliminating remedies to discrimination, opinions do change, researchers noted. For example, while only 44 percent of Americans favored the idea of reserving college openings for black students, people changed their minds and gave the proposal majority support (65 percent), if not doing so would mean black students will be badly underrepresented.

Opinion research should never be viewed as defining the boundaries of the possible; it was precisely by challenging the confines of public opinion and policy that the civil rights movement brought progress. More recently, Duke opponents in the 1991 Louisiana governor’s race, chose to ignore pollsters recommendations that he be challenged based on his failure to pay taxes, rather than tackle his white supremacist message head-on.

Nor is public opinion polling unerring as a measure of what people will do in practice. Witness the well-documented (Virginia Gov. Douglas) Wilder Effect in election year polling: voters will tell a pollster they will vote for a black candidate and walk into the voting both and vote for the white one. Nonetheless, analyzing this data in light of other findings, a portrait emerges, useful to those who would work for change.

What the data seem to suggest is a vast middle group willing to be led to oppose or support affirmative action; not a public clamoring for abolition. “Leadership is critical,” says John Doble.

“The losses that civil rights in general and affirmative action in particular have suffered result mostly from their defenders being outmaneuvered and outgunned,” concludes Tom Smith. “But uprooting bigotry and equalizing opportunities are not easy tasks. Racism is deeply entrenched, group disparities are large, and efforts to alleviate racial inequality are seen by some as antithetical to core American values such as individualism and even equal treatment itself,” says Smith.

Whites interviewed in focus groups remember little about segregation from experience or history. “White Americans tend to see the issue of race relations, not in historic terms, but rather through a case-by-case, pragmatic, a historical lens.”

Perhaps listening to the local people who made civil rights history recorded in Will The Circle Be Unbroken? can help. Not only do their words provide definition to the recent past, the hope that fueled their efforts–against even greater odds–is needed as we tackle the next great challenges in winning full equality.

Will The Circle Be Unbroken? Program Listings

Staff

Vol. 19, No. 1, 1997 p. 30

PROLOGUE

Race relations and social conditions across the American South prior to World War IL Written by Julian Bond. >COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA The use of litigation through the courts as a route to social change.

THE ROAD TO LITIGATION

Formation of the statewide NAACP in South Carolina. Thurgood Marshall and the 1941 equal pay for black teachers lawsuit, and challenging the all-white democratic primary.

UNDER COLOR OF LAW

Briggs vs. Elliot, the lawsuit in rural Clarendon County to challenge segregated schools. On appeal it became part of Brown vs. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ended segregation in the South.

HEY HEY, HO HO SEGREGATION’S GOT TO GO

Repercussions from Brown vs. Board of Education. Desegregation of public schools in Columbia. 1960’s boycotts and marches.

ORANGEBURG

The Orangeburg massacre–three students are killed by state troopers while protesting on their campus at South Carolina State University.

MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA The birth and evolution of the strategy of a mass movement.

THE CRADLE OF THE CONFEDERACY Social conditions in Montgomery after WWII. The antecedents to the bus boycott: Rev. Vernon Johns, the NAACP and the Women’s Political Council.

WALK AND PRAY

The bus boycott, Part I: Rosa Parks’ arrest and the establishment of the Montgomery Improvement Association under the leadership of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

THE BUS BOYCOTT

The bus boycott, Part II: Tactics, strategies and events during the year long boycott.

MY FEET IS TIRED, BUT MY SOUL IS RESTED

The bus boycott, Part III: The settlement of the boycott, Dr. King leaves Montgomery for Atlanta.

ROCKING THE CRADLE

Montgomery after the boycott: apathy and internal conflict, the freedom rides and the Selma marches.

LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS The practice and implications of federal intervention to protect individual civil rights.

THE JIM CROW YEARS

Social conditions and social change in Little Rock and East Arkansas, 1940-1956.

NINE FOR JUSTICE

The desegregation of Little Rock public schools 1954-1957. The history and context behind the effort to integrate Little Rock’s prestigious Central High School.

SOLDIERS IN THE SCHOOLHOUSE

The desegregation of Little Rock public schools, Part II: 1957-1958. President Eisenhower sends in federal troops to protect the rights of nine black school children.

THE LOST YEAR

The desegregation of Little Rock public schools, Part III: 1959-1960. The Women’s Emergency Committee forms to pressure re-opening of the public schools as integrated institutions.

THE 1960s

A review of civil rights activism in Little Rock and East Arkansas during the 1960s. Describes the process of a growing militancy and rifts within the movement.

JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI The violent resistance encountered by civil rights workers and the strategies that evolved to challenge that resistance.

AMERICAN APARTHEID

Social conditions in Jackson and rural Mississippi between 1940 and 1960, including the formation of white Citizen’s Councils and the state Sovereignty Commission, and the opposition organized by the NAACP, led by Mississippi field secretary, Medgar Evers.

THE BIRTH OF THE JACKSON MOVEMENT

Chronicles Medgar Evers’ early leadership, the library sit-in, the Freedom Rides and the beginning of 1960’s movement in Jackson.

THE DEMONSTRATIONS

Medgar Evers’ murder and funeral, and the subsequent elementary and high school students’ mass protests.

FREEDOM SUMMER

1964 and the Freedom Summer campaign that brought northern students into Mississippi to register and educate voters.

POWER AND RESISTANCE

The late sixties and the formation of the anti-war movement, black power and the killing of the Jackson State University students by state troopers.

ATLANTA, GEORGIA The process of negotiated settlements and the manipulation of public information to both protect and challenge the status quo.

PRELUDE OF A MOVEMENT

Social conditions in Atlanta between 1940 and 1960 and early voting rights protests.

THE ATLANTA STUDENT MOVEMENT

The Atlanta Student Movement, 1960-61–one of the largest and best organized student protests in the nation. Conflict between the older and younger black leadership.

CROW AND MOLASSES

The extended and tumultuous process of desegregating the Atlanta public schools, 1954-1970.

THE CITY TOO BUSY TO HATE

Describes how Atlanta’s business and civic leadership in order to provide an acceptable climate for business, carefully created and maintained the myth that the city had no racial conflicts, and desegregated peacefully and willingly.

THE RISE OF BLACK POLITICAL POWER

Over a twelve-year period, describes the changes, and provides perspective on the transformation of Atlanta from a city led by white politicians to one with black leadership.

EPILOGUE

Bringing the listener up to date. From the people who made the Movement, responses to the following questions: What did the Movement achieve? Is the Movement over? Is there still a need for a Movement today? Written by Julian Bond.

Another Dry, White Season

Wendy Johnson

Vol. 19, No. 2, 1997 pp. 1, 3-4

President Clinton’s call for a national conversation on race comes at a pivotal time, a time when the neoconservative misuse of “color-blind” rhetoric has encouraged a willful obliviousness to enduring racial problems and a retreat from any meaningful engagement. Whether or not Clinton’s race initiative can stem this disturbing tide and make progress toward racial justice will depend on the access that minority voices can have to the public ear, the effective content of the conversation, and the willingness of white Americans to listen and act affirmatively. What should the discussion include?

One place to start would be to publicly acknowledge the dramatic racial inequalities that persist. Advocates of racial justice must find ways to publicize and reiterate the facts: that the percentage of blacks and Latinos living in poverty is about three times more than the percentage of whites; that per capita income of blacks and Latinos is

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less than 60 percent that of whites; and that blacks and Latinos are about twice as likely to be unemployed.

Other disparities are lesser known but equally alarming, such as the fact that even middle-class African Americans and Latinos with identical incomes to whites are significantly poorer and less financially secure because their net wealth is about eight times less. Why do minorities have so much less in total assets than whites? To begin with, there is the historical legacy if racial and class oppression in the very direct form of less inherited wealth. Next, continuing institutional discrimination plays a large part. For years, white firms denied life assurance to African Americans, and African Americans ire still denied home mortgages at twice the rate of similarly qualified white applicants.

As such examples attest, the ludicrous notion that we now live in a discrimination-free society must be thoroughly dismissed. Such a repudiation has proven difficult largely due to tactics of white denial. Study after study using matched white and minority applicants (with identical education, work experience, age, and size and similar personal traits) have documented the persistence of discrimination not only in the housing but also the job market. These facts of discrimination, like those of inequality, must become part of the national common sense.

As those members of Congress who amended the Voting Rights Act in 1982 realized, the issue of discrimination must by taken out of the realm of personal intention and understood as a systematic process. In hiring practices, for example, minorities are systematically discriminated against because they have fewer contacts with those whites who can alert them to job openings and who make the majority of hiring decisions.

Another way discrimination can persist without conscious or malicious prejudicial intent lies in the normative considerations involved in any selection process. The notion that gatekeepers into schools, jobs, promotions, etc. can somehow impartially select the “most qualified” candidate out of hundreds, or thousands, of applicants by a pure assessment of technical ability is a myth, and must be repeatedly exposed as such. As historian Dan Carter puts it in this issue of Southern Changes, we must “challenge the worship of a handful of standardized tests as though they alone could judge what makes a person qualified for a job or for admission to college or professional school. We have to talk about the ways in which people actually succeed in college, in the workplace, and in life in general.”

In the absence of perfect information, pure impartiality, or even a clear understanding of what being technically qualified for a position really means, normative qualities (including style, mannerisms, deportment, and other personality traits) play a major role in the hiring or promoting process. For many relatively privileged positions in business firms–sales, managerial work, etc.–these personal qualities may play the predominant role.

Unfortunately these qualities are highly subject to class, race, and gender bias. Because white men have monopolized the positions of privilege and authority for centuries, these jobs have been racially and sexually stereotyped to entail the very normative characteristics they possess, while subordinate positions are often stereotyped as appropriate for minorities and women. Asian Americans, for example, are the most educated population in the nation, but they are not promoted in proportionate numbers because they are frequently stereotyped as “technicians” poorly suited for people-oriented managerial work. Introducing people of divergent racial backgrounds, languages, and cultural identities into traditionally white male occupations will help break down such occupational stereotypes and may help change the very structures of power in the process.

Because of occupational stereotyping, entrenched networks, and other forms of systematic discrimination,

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white men continue to dominate the professions and the most influential positions in our society. As noted in The Affirmative Action Debate, edited by George E. Curry, while white men are 33 percent of the population, they constitute 86 percent of the partners in major law firms, 88 percent of the holders of management-level jobs in advertising, 90 percent of those occupying the top positions in the media, 90 percent of the members of the U.S. Senate, and 95 percent of all senior managerial positions at the rank of vice president or above. In Fortune 1000 industrial and Fortune 500 service industries, white men hold 97 percent of senior management positions, while African Americans hold 0.6 percent, Asian Americans 0.3 percent, and Latinos 0.4 percent. As of 1996, there were only two female CEOs in Fortune 1000 companies.

Numbers like these should convince the public that minorities continue to face systematic discrimination in the workplace. Even before entering the job market, however, minorities have already faced substantial structural discrimination in attaining the necessary educational qualifications. As Gary Orfield documents in this issue, the racial and ethnic segregation of African-American and Latino students is spreading across the nation and producing a deepening isolation from middle class students and from successful schools. This segregation, Orfield says, is “not simply racial segregation; it is segregation by class and family and community education background as well.” While only about 5 percent of the nation’s segregated white schools face conditions of concentrated poverty among their children, more than 80 percent of segregated black and Latino schools do. High poverty schools usually have much lower levels of educational performance on virtually all outcomes, for a variety of reasons that Orfield discusses.

Increasing segregation in schools is enabled by persisting residential segregation. This American Apartheid, as one study has deemed it, is perpetuated both by the preference of whites for predominantly white communities and by realtors who respond to this demand by steering black customers away from white neighborhoods. Housing audits conducted over the past two decades have documented the persistence of widespread discrimination against black renters and homebuyers. As with schools, these systematic patterns not only segregate by race but also concentrate poverty.

According to Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., however, it is neither the school-day nor the hours spent in one’s neighborhood which are the most segregated times. “Four o’clock every day,” says Jackson, “when editors meet with their staffs to discuss the next day’s news consumption, is perhaps the most segregated hour in this nation.”

The persistence of segregation in the newsrooms is particularly dangerous because the media plays a big role in deciding how and if issues of race are addressed and whether racial prejudices and stereotypes are challenged or exacerbated. In his article, “News and Blues: Minority Journalists in the South, Twenty-Five Years Later” in this issue, Reginald Stuart points out that while minorities have made impressive gains over the last twenty-five years, they remain under-represented in the media. To make matters worse, federal policies deregulating the media “threaten to wipe out what little minority ownership of mass media properties there is.”

The final ingredient for a successful conversation on race will perhaps be the most challenging. Due to what Dan Carter identifies as the “dogma of the marketplace” dominating the current political climate, the effort to link the issues of racial injustice with those of class exploitation has become more difficult just as it has become more crucial. Both domestically and internationally, a disproportionate number of people of color continue to engage in the world’s most exploitative work at the bottom of the wage and benefits ladder. Racial prejudice helps make the most egregious forms of economic exploitation more tolerable to the white, middle classes of America and other Western industrialized nations, just as it once helped justify the economic exploitations of slavery and colonialism. The conventional notion that it is somehow appropriate or acceptable that blacks, Latinos, or Asians occupy positions of subordination and poverty because of their supposed inferiority (whether defined biologically or, more common today, culturally) acts as a formidable barrier to the formation of broad-based political coalitions capable of demanding international labor market policies geared to minimize exploitation and social welfare policies geared to guarantee decent standards of living.

Is Bill Clinton up to asking the sort of questions raised by this issue of Southern Changes? Rather than waiting in dread through another dry, white season, we must use the space created by Clinton’s initiative to encourage innovative work on remobilizing a consensus for achieving social justice.

News and Blues: Minority Journalists in the South, Twenty-Five Years Later

Reginald Stuart

Vol. 19, No. 2, 1997 pp. 5-9

Editors Note: Twenty-five years ago in July-August, 1972, Reginald Stuart wrote the “Survey of Southern Black Journalists,” for SRC’s South Today. It was our first look at the emergence in large numbers of blacks as full fledged partners in the newsrooms of historically white newspapers, television, and radio stations in the South.

He also wrote about the changing face of reporting on race issues in the region, with stories about the historic WLBT-TV licensing challenge case in Jackson, Mississippi, and how the media covered school desegregation in the South.

In this story, Stuart, who started as a reporter for The Nashville Tennessean and later worked for The New York Times and Knight-Ridder Newspapers, revisits these topics. Now based in Silver Spring, Maryland, he is a contributing editor to Emerge Magazine and a newspaper consultant.

When golfing sensation Tiger Woods donned his champion’s Green jacket this spring, symbolizing his victory at the prestigious Masters Golf tournament, thousands of writers like Joe Oglesby at The Miami Herald were hailing the trailblazer in newspaper columns and commentaries across the country. As an amateur golfer Oglesby had a real appreciation for the feat of a Masters victory and, in this instance, the added historical significance of a man of color winning the contest.

Like Woods, only with far less fanfare and considerably less compensation, Oglesby was quietly making history twenty-five years ago as one of a new crop of young black reporters being turned loose in historically white newsrooms across the South. Like Woods, he is making history today as one of a growing number of black editorial writers in Southern newsrooms.

“When I started, there were very few black folks doing what I was doing,” said Oglesby, who was a general assignment reporter for the St.Petersburg Times in the early 1970s. “I was very idealistic. I was literally answering the call of the Kerner Commission.”

The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, was a federal panel appointed by then President Lyndon Johnson to explore the root causes of civil disorders that swept the nation’s cities in the 1960s. In its final report, which will be thirty years old next year, the commission assigned much of the blame for the riots to the white-run news media’s insensitivity and failure to reflect the totality of black life in America.

The South’s news media began to change slowly, but in profound ways, spurred by the civil disorders, the Kerner report, the end of legal apartheid, and action by local citizens’ activists groups like the United Church of Christ and NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. It has never been the same.

Oglesby and scores more young blacks like him were hired by white editors and news directors seeking to step out of the past. Today, hundreds of black reporters are real players across the spectrum of the South’s news media.

“Colored” pages began to disappear as news about blacks was integrated into the mainstream of daily journalism. Today, the old reliable black crime story is put in context with news that gives a more total picture of black life and culture.

Black television news reporters and anchors began to appear, even in places like Jackson, Mississippi,

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and Montgomery, Alabama, centers of resistance to the social changes of the 1950’s and 1960’s. While those changes were largely cosmetic (there were few, if any, black assignment editors and news directors deciding what would and would not be covered), they sent a powerful signal just the same about the changing face of the South’s news media. Today, black anchors are commonplace and there are more blacks behind the camera influencing decisions about what is aired.

Quite a change for a region where much of the white-run media thrived for decades on race baiting, taunting its citizens–black and white–with lightning bolt phrases like “race mixing” and “forced busing.” A lot of white people didn’t like this new black presence that began emerging twenty-five years ago and are still uncomfortable with it now. A lot of black people were amused and confused by it then and remain so today, say Oglesby and others.

“I was dealing with people who carried a lifetime perception of black folks,” recalled Oglesby. “Back in those days, I was as much a curiosity among black folks as anything. People thought I was a police officer. I traveled around in a plain green car equipped with police radio monitors. And people were suspicious of what I was doing.”

Even today, black journalists working in mainstream newsrooms find themselves between a rock and a hard place. They are suspected by whites of being harsh on whites and easy on blacks. At the same time, many blacks see black journalists as “traitors to the cause.”

Pioneers and Pay-Off

Our generation of blacks was far from the first hired by so-called general interest daily media. Such honors go to people like Robert Churchwell, hired in 1950 by the ultra-conservative Nashville Banner and forced to work from his home during his first four years so his presence would not be disruptive to the newsroom. Churchwell, believed to be the first black hired as a general assignment reporter on a white-owned daily newspaper in the South, and the few blacks like him, were restricted in what they could do and how they had to act.

“When I started, I didn’t have a desk,” said Churchwell, who spent thirty-one years as a general assignment and education reporter for the Banner. “I had to work at home until 1954,” he said, describing the Banner as simply a “racist” paper in those clays. Today, Churchwell says, “it’s completely different. The newsroom here is filled with blacks.”

Oglesby and others of his generation were the first blacks hired in large numbers and given the same chances, freedoms, and responsibility as their white counterparts. For sure there were exceptions where editors only wanted blacks to cover more black news. For the most part, we were allowed to cover and question everything–city council meetings, sports, Ku Klux Klan rallies, courts, cops, NAACP meetings, schools, housing, welfare, health, prisons, travel, entertainment, business and finance–and have some assurance that we would hit page one and could actually run one of these newspapers someday. Then, our bosses and we were taking big risks. Today, hardly anyone notices.

In later years, more sweeping changes would occur as Gannett, a Rochester, New York-based chain of small and mid-size newspapers, began expanding its reach by buying key properties across the South. Gannett leaned toward the simplistic in its philosophy about news content and presentation, but also leaned moderate in its political bent. Thus newspapers that had been mouthpieces for the Old South, like the powerful Jackson, Mississippi, papers owned by the Hederman family and the Nashville Banner owned by the late Jimmy Stahlman, dramatically moderated their tone under the new, more progressive owners.

On the passionately written editorial pages, the hot button terms of “race mixing,” “outside agitators” and “forced busing,” and the relentless defense of “states’ rights” faded from the pages of these Gannett papers. As significant, Gannett would be quick to install a black

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person or two in high level decision-making positions, making its own statement about the ability of black people to read, write and fairly inform the Southern masses. In the 1980s, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, then owned by Gannett, appointed a black managing editor, one of the first for a major daily in the South. Such a move became a Gannett trademark.

“The basic motivating philosophy was the message Al Neuharth [the head of Gannett] established in Rochester–the leadership must reflect the readership,” said John Quinn, Neuharth’s long-time colleague who retired from Gannett as senior vice president and chief news executive. “It was a culture rather than any pontification of policy,” said Quinn.

Gannett’s move would significantly expand the isolated efforts made by a handful of progressive papers that had begun to hire minorities on their staffs in the late 1960s (Atlanta Constitution, Nashville Tennessean, St. Petersburg Times, Charlotte Observer, and the Anniston Star.)

The same changes would happen later at such staunchly conservative papers as the Tallahassee Democrat (for years referred to by blacks there as the Tallahassee Dixiecrat) and the Columbia State, which were acquired by Knight Newspapers (later Knight-Ridder, Inc.). Newhouse, which purchased the Mobile Press Register and New Orleans Times Picayune from entrenched local owners in the 1960s, would also start to defuse the Old South in those papers by the late 1980s.

Today, there are literally hundreds of black journalists across the South working for the so-called general interest news media (daily papers, radio, and television news operations). Most are still in the trenches, but some hold high ranking positions. Oglesby, who shared a Pulitzer Prize in the early 1980s as a member of The Miami Herald editorial board, is now associate editor of the paper. In Tallahassee, the newsroom of the Democrat is now run by a black woman, Lorraine Branham. At the Nashville Banner, once one of the most openly racist papers in the South, a black woman, Tonnya Kennedy, was recently appointed managing editor. The editorial job once held by liberal Ralph McGill at the Atlanta Constitution and Journal is now held by a black woman, Cynthia Tucker.

There are black general managers and owners of major market television stations in the region. At the national television network level, Turner Broadcasting of Atlanta, broke the glass ceiling with the appointment of a black man, Bernard Shaw, as principal anchor for the Cable News Network, the widely acclaimed worldwide cable news program. In a phrase, says veteran Atlanta journalist Alexis Scott Reeves, the media in the South”has become less recognizably Southern.”

Adds Little Rock native Cecil Hale, now a professor of communications at the City College of San Francisco:

“Have these changes made things more equitable, without a doubt. Have they made minorities feel better? Without a doubt. Have they made black papers feel unnecessary? Absolutely not. Have they made a change in the hearts and minds of the South? I’m not sure.”

Despite all the changes, the South’s media remains essentially conservative to moderate.

Hale, Oglesby, and others say the gains of the past quarter century are fragile and at risk of being lost.

Losing Ground Again

Just as the civil rights movement appears to have lost much of its momentum and muscle, the same is being said about efforts to continue changing the media in the

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South and elsewhere. The people and tools for change are disappearing.

The campaign to bring more minorities into daily paper newsrooms was never fully embraced by all editors and publishers. Tokenism is still a widespread problem, particularly at small and mid-sized papers. Indeed, the plateauing of affirmative action in newsrooms across the country has guaranteed that the ASNE (the American Society of Newspaper Editors), the leading trade group of editors of major daily papers, will not meet its year 2000 goal of having all member newsrooms reflect the nation’s racial mix.

They’ll get nowhere close to that ambitious goal, in part because of resistance among some member papers to aggressively recruiting and retaining racial minorities. Indeed, more than 40 percent of the nation’s daily newspapers have no people of color on their news staffs. Many of these papers are in the South. Meanwhile, that collective of progressive white editors who knew first hand the downsides of the Old South media has not seen its ranks replenished as it fades into the sunset.

The situation is more frightening in the television and radio fields. In the 1970s, citizens had some leverage with local stations by calling upon the Federal Communications Commission at license renewal time. Now, in the name of promoting competition and freeing business from overregulation by the government, the Commission, pushed by Congress and Republican and Democratic presidents, has all but abandoned most of the regulations used to expand and improve programming, job, and ownership opportunities for minorities.

Community ascertainment requirements that required stations to solicit public views about community needs and to offer programming to reflect those needs, has been abandoned. Nearly all requirements for news and public service programming about content rules have been abandoned. Station license renewal times have been stretched to as rarely as eight years from the historical three years, making it tougher to build a case for challenging a license at renewal time. Employment reporting requirements have been all but abandoned. The lid on station ownership has been lifted, making it harder for blacks and other minorities to purchase stations. Meanwhile, the federal government has dropped nearly all the programs it had–special tax treatments, spectrum set asides, etc.–to help blacks and other minorities purchase stations as prices are bid beyond their reach.

“There are very few local shows that address blacks at all,” said David Honig, executive director of the Washington-based Minority Media Telecommunications Council, a non-profit, non-partisan group that focuses on issues of minorities in the media. Even cable, which held out the promise of expanding ownership and programming opportunities for minorities has been very disappointing, Honig and others say. Honig’s group has taken the baton once carried by local activists in trying to preserve and enhance the gains of the past quarter century. But he and others say the landscape is discouraging.

Robert Johnson, chairman and chief executive officer of Black Entertainment Television, one of the few minority owned ventures to truly benefit from the introduction of cable television, and civil rights advocate, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., have been warning in a series of recent speeches across the country that federal policies aimed at fostering competition threaten to wipe out what little minority ownership of mass media properties there is.

“While there have been steps forward, there have been steps back,” said Dwight Ellis, director of minority affairs for the powerful National Association of Broadcasters, the trade association of local television stations. “We still have only two or three black publishers. The ownership picture in print hasn’t changed much and in broadcast it’s declining. Black and minority broadcasting is going through the same changes as the industry as a whole–consolidation. We’ve lost a lot of owners and I’m not optimistic that the traditional minority broadcast ownership is going to get any better.

Going Full Circle

If changes in the South’s “white” media have been profound, they have been earth-shaking for the ‘black’ media. After all, it was the void of fairness and voice in historically white-controlled papers that gave birth to the black press across the nation and particularly the South. For decades, black papers and their publishers and editors were the lone voice in communities for an end to Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and all forms of race discrimination.

The decision by the white press in the South to change robbed many black papers of some of their best reporters and editors (for example, former New York Times reporter and editor Paul Delaney got his start at the Atlanta Daily World, and Jack White, a top editor at Time magazine, got his start at the now defunct Richmond Afro-American) and gave blacks readers less of a reason to buy a black paper. Circulation of black newspapers nosedived.

“The changing face of the media in the South probably has been most detrimental to the black press,” said Alexis Scott Reeves, granddaughter of the founder of the Atlanta Daily World. “Readership demanded integrated coverage, so readership left the black press.”

Reeves, one of that new generation of young black journalists,launched her career in 1974, not with the Scott

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family papers, but with the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. She worked her way through the ranks to become director of diversity at Cox Enterprises, which owns the Constitution, Palm Beach Post, Austin American-Statesman, and a host of television and radio stations.

Many black papers folded as the white media changed, Reeves said. Others were able to hang on for a while by having a more direct message and staying local, she said. In the 1970s and early 1980s they benefitted from the minority vendor purchasing programs of major companies that set aside funds for advertising in the black media. In the past decade, “the smart ones in the black press, all of them, are reinventing themselves as affirmative action has waned. Now, they’re cashing in on the second Reconstruction.”

Reeves is part of the rebuilding of the black press. This spring she quit Cox to help her family revive the Daily World, a twice-a-week publication with a circulation of about 16,000.

“To many of us, we can’t all be editors and publishers for the white folks,” said Reeves. “But we can go home with what we have learned and run the black press.”

Indeed, there is plenty the whole Southern press can do to better itself, despite the phenomenal changes of the past quarter century.

Historically white papers still fall far short of covering black and other minority communities in all their dimensions, Reeves, Hale and others say. Seasoned public thinkers who are black, like Andrew Young and Johnetta Coles, “have all this perspective but no where to share it because white folks still don’t get it, except for a quote here and there,” said Reeves.

Meanwhile, there is still a widespread perception, that covering news of blacks and other minorities is a necessary evil, rather than a necessary part of doing business. As a result, the agenda setting that news organizations provide for a community does not often enough reflect the best interest of the total community.

“This business has changed immensely and in profound ways,” said Oglesby. “At the same time it hasn’t changed at all. There are a hell of a lot more black folks doing a lot more things from top to bottom. Still, they are not in control of much and the black perspective we thought we were going to be able to bring has not been brought forth in a way we thought would make a difference.

“It’s like being in a ship traveling at twenty miles per hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week,” said Oglesby. “You know after several weeks you’ve traveled quite a distance, but it still looks and feels the same.”

Get Back! The Resegregation of America’s Schools

By Linda Blackford

Vol. 19, No. 2, 1997 pp. 9-11

The city of Charleston, West Virginia, took an unusual approach to school integration in the fall of 1956: It moved black children into white schools long before the rest of the South, and did it without a peep.

No one showed up to protest. No state official swore to block the schoolhouse door. It seemed that the daring experiment of integrated schools could succeed.

But over the years, and again, without a peep, Charleston’s schools have moved back to the separate and unequal facilities the Brown decision tried to correct.

Most of Charleston’s black residents–about 12 percent of the population–live in the Flats, the river bottom land north of the Kanawha River. Their children go to crumbling, un-airconditioned schools. Children and teachers move in and out at an alarming rate. The shiny, new schools up in Charleston’s hills have PTAs that raise up to $40,000 a year to hire art teachers and install new computer labs. The Flats schools still hold fundraisers for field trips. In the seven Flats elementary schools, there are less than five black children in the gifted programs.

“People are having a lot of problems.” said Anne Gilmer, a parent and teacher. “We’ve noticed a lot of our kids have been passed over and we feel the school system for our kids is a lot worse now than it ever was then.”

When the school board created a re-districting program, they refused to consider creating more racially and economically diverse schools, opting

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instead for “neighborhood schools.”

But Charleston is far from being alone. In fact, according to Harvard researcher Gary Orfield, it’s just one more fallen domino in what is becoming a pre-Brown pattern of segregation in America’s schools.

As places like Charleston show, the historic promise of integrated schools has somehow gone awry. Small gains that were made since the 1970s have reversed and widened the gap between black and white schools, and rich and poor ones.

Meanwhile, the entire principle of desegregation has become so controversial that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has discussed abandoning its historic and vigorous support of integrated schools. Even the U.S. government has changed its course.

“It is wrong to conclude that schools that teach poor, black children cannot teach,” said Raymond Pierce, Deputy Assistant Secretary for the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights. “We need to look at the deliverables like test scores and graduation rates.”

Reversals

Orfield, who started the Harvard Project on School Desegregation and frequently testifies in desegregation court cases, has sounded this particular alarm since the late 1980s. His latest report, which came out in April, 1997, and is excerpted in this issue of Southern Changes, shows that re-segregation is occurring at the fastest rate in schools in the South. The other increase is for Latino students, who find themselves more and more isolated in schools in the West and Southwest.

The Southern states have the most to lose ‘they moved from total segregation in 1960 to placing 14 percent of blacks into majority white schools in 1967. By 1988 the percentage jumped to 41 percent. By 1994, however, that number has dropped to 36.6 percent. Maryland, Mississippi, and Louisiana are now among the ten most segregated states in the country.

Latino segregation has become even more severe, according to Orfield’s data. In the North, South, and West, three-fourths of all Latino students attend predominantly non-white schools.

Orfield’s report blames most of the reversals on lower court and Supreme Court rulings that reversed desegregation orders, many of which are Reagan and Bush administration legacies just being felt today.

The trend started in Detroit in 1974 when Milliken v. Bradley drastically limited the flow of students between suburbia and the inner cities. Michigan now ranks second in the country for segregated black students. Cities like Richmond, Virginia, or Atlanta, Georgia, are similar: inside city limits, the schools approach 95 percent black, the result of nearly irreversible white flight.

Since then, major desegregation and busing orders were overturned or dismantled in Oklahoma City, Denver, and Kansas City; a landmark case in Norfolk, Virginia, supported by the Reagan Justice Department allowed the school board to return to segregated community or neighborhood schools.

Orfield’s numbers also illustrate the consequence of this segregation by showing the close link between racial isolation and economic deprival. The way most school systems are funded today, local economic deprivation too often means educational deprivation as well.

For example, he points out that only 5 percent of the nation’s segregated white schools face conditions of concentrated poverty among their children but more than 80 percent of segregated black and Latino schools do.

“Desegregation is not only sitting next to someone of the other race,” he writes. “A child moving from a segregated African-American or Latino school to a white school will very likely exchange conditions of concentrated poverty for a middle class school. Exactly the opposite is true when a child is sent back from an interracial school to a segregated neighborhood school as is happening under a number of recent court orders which end busing or desegregation choice plans.”

The Brown decision said that segregated schools were “inherently unequal,” and evidence proves this is true today, Orfield says.

Economically deprived schools must often cope with a host of problems before class even starts. Poor children are more likely to have health and developmental problems, they may not be ready to learn, and they may not speak English. Many poor schools find it hard to attract good teachers while parents cannot afford the many extra resources, like art and computers, that wealthy schools buy.

Like a Mirage

Orfield is a tireless campaigner for integration. But many others feel the long struggle has had too few results.

“I’m not saying it was the wrong thing to do,” said Gilmer, who went on to teach in the Charleston schools. “What was bad was we expected too much of it.”

Mary Sanford, president of the Perry Homes Tenant Association in Atlanta, Georgia, thinks integration failed because it wasn’t done fairly.

“They took all the best black teachers into the white schools and bused all the black children,” she said. “Black schools stayed black, they never bussed any whites.”

Gilmer and Sanford agree that too much time and

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money have been spent trying to persuade white families to integrate. They think that the country needs to strive for integration, but not at the expense of children’s education.

“I think we lost a whole generation of children,” Gilmer said.

Integration was also resented because it held that a black child got a better education because he or she sat next to a white child. In fact, many black children in white schools were ignored or tracked into low level classes, regardless of their intellect.

Pierce of the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, thinks too many people assume a majority black school must be a bad one.

Black residents of Greensboro, North Carolina, including a group of black ministers called the Pulpit Forum, supported the end of large-scale busing in Guilford County. “Separate but truly equal would not be so bad,” Greensboro resident Amos Quick told the Greensboro News and Record in May.

But the idea of “truly equal” still shimmers like a mirage in school districts around the country. Educational equity may prove to be just as elusive a concept as racial integration.

Numerous states have used lawsuits to fix funding disparities between rich and poor school districts. Those lawsuits may equalize property taxes between areas but they have not addressed the crucial difference between a PTA that raises $40,000 and one just a few streets away that raises $400. That difference often occurs between white neighborhoods and minority ones.

But Orfield is not the only one who thinks it’s too early to give up on integrated schools and the educational equity they bring. After much speculation and debate at the NAACP convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in July, the NAACP confirmed its support for school integration and pledged to continue to fight in desegregation court cases.

“Separate, segregated schools are inherently unequal,” Chairman Myrlie Evers-Williams said at the conference, “and will not provide the quality of education needed for the twenty-first century.”

Deepening Segregation in American Public Schools

By Gary Orfield, Harvard University; Mark D. Bachmeier, David R. James and Tamela Eide, Indiana University Harvard Project on School Desegregation

Vol. 19, No. 2, 1997 pp. 11-18

Introduction

After the Supreme Court outlawed segregated education in the South, it took fifteen years and a series of actions by the courts, Congress, the executive branch, and civil rights groups before the seventeen states with legal segregation were changed from an area of total educational segregation to the nation’s most integrated. It remained that way for a generation. Now, there are clear signs that progress is coming undone and that the nation is headed backwards toward greater segregation of black students, particularly in the states with a history of de jure segregation.

The trends reported here are the first since the Supreme Court approved a return to segregated neighborhood schools under some conditions. A number of major cities have recently received court approval for such changes and others are in court. The segregation changes are most striking in the Southern and Border states but segregation is spreading across the nation, particularly affecting our rapidly growing Latino communities in the West. The racial and ethnic segregation of African-American and Latino students has produced a deepening isolation from middle class students and from successful schools. Our report also highlights a little noticed but extremely important expansion of segregation to the suburbs, particularly in larger metropolitan areas. Expanding segregation is a mark of a polarizing society without effective policies for building multiracial institutions.

Latino students, who will soon be the largest minority group in American public schools, were granted the right to desegregated education by the Supreme Court in 1973, but new data show they now are significantly more segregated than black students, with clear evidence of increasing isolation across the nation. In contrast to the varied regional trends and changes in direction over time for African Americans, Latino students are becoming

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more isolated almost everywhere. Part of this trend is caused by the very rapid growth in the number of Latino students in several major states. Regardless of the reasons, Latino students now experience more isolation form whites and more concentration in high poverty schools than any other group of students. This was long true in the centers of Puerto Rican settlement in the Northeast but it is rapidly increasing now for students in areas where the Latino communities are overwhelmingly of Mexican background.

The segregation is not simply racial separation, it is segregation by class and family and community educational background as well. Segregated black and Latino schools are fundamentally different from segregated white schools in terms of the background of the children and many things that relate to educational quality. Only a twentieth of the nation’s segregated white schools face conditions of concentrated poverty among their children, but more than 80%, of segregated black and Latino school do. Desegregation is not only sitting next to someone of the other race. A child moving from a segregated African-American or Latino school to a white school will very likely exchange conditions of concentrated poverty for a middle class school. Exactly the opposite is true when a child is sent back from an interracial school to a segregated neighborhood school as is happening under a number of recent court orders which end busing or desegregation choice plans.

This is of fundamental importance to educational opportunity. The United States is a nation with a shrinking proportion of white students and a rising share of black and Latino students, groups which experience far less success in American public education and are concentrated in schools with lower achievement levels and less demanding competition. Recent court decisions approving a return to segregated neighborhood schools in various parts of the country will intensify the isolation.

The Supreme Court’s 1954 conclusion that intentionally segregated schools are “inherently unequal,” and contemporary evidence indicating that this remains true today means that it is very important to continuously monitor the extent to which the nation is realizing the promise of equal educational opportunity in schools that are now racially segregated. Education was vital to the success of black tenth of the U.S. population when de jure segregation was declared unconstitutional in 1954. It is far more important today, in an era in which millions of the good, low-education jobs have vanished. We are now talking about a society which has one-third non-white public schools and where whites will make up only half of

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the school age population in a third of a century if well-established trends continue. The stakes are much higher. We are moving backward toward greater separation rather than pressing gradually forward as we were between the 1950s and the mid-1980s for black students.

Our report presents the latest available evidence on segregation trends from federal enrollment statistics. It shows a delayed impact of the Reagan Administration campaign to reverse desegregation orders, which made no progress while Reagan was President but now has had a substantial impact through appointments which trans-formed the federal courts. The 1991-94 period following the Supreme Court’s first decision authorizing resegregation witnessed the continuation of the largest backward movement toward segregation for blacks in the forty-three years since Brown v. Board of Education.

During the 1980s, the courts rejected efforts to terminate school desegregation and the level of desegregation increased, although the Reagan and Bush Administrations advocated reversals. Congress rejected proposals for major steps to reverse desegregation and there has been no trend toward increasing hostility to desegregation in public opinion. In fact, opinion is becoming more favorable. The policy changes have come from the courts. The Supreme Court, in decisions from 1991 to 1995, has given lower courts discretion to approve resegregation on a large scale and it is beginning to occur.

The statistics we report show only the first phase of what is likely to be an accelerating trend. These statistics for the 1994-95 school year do not reflect post-1994 decisions to end desegregation plans in a number of areas including metropolitan Wilmington, Broward County Florida, Denver, Buffalo, Mobile, Cleveland, and others. Important cases in a number of other cities are pending in court now.

Background Of Desegregation

Forty-three years ago, in 1954, the Supreme Court began the process of desegregating American public education in its landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education. Thirty-three years ago, Congress took its most powerful action for school desegregation with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Twenty-six years ago, in 1971, the great national battle over urban desegregation began with the Supreme Court’s decision in the Charlotte, North Carolina busing case, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. With Swann, there was a comprehensive set of policies in place for massive desegregation in the South.

No similar body of law ever developed in the North and West. The Supreme Court first extended some desegregation requirements to the cities of the North and recognized the rights of Latino as well as black students from illegal segregation in 1973. In the early 1970s, Congress enacted legislation to help pay for the training and educational changes (but not the busing) needed to make desegregation more effective. The last major initiatives intended to foster desegregation took place more than two decades ago.

Since 1974, almost all of the policy changes have been negative and there has been a major increase in the nation’s non-white population, particularly among school age children.

The key decision limiting metropolitan desegregation, Milliken v. Bradley, concerned metropolitan Detroit and was a drastic limitation on the possibility of substantial and lasting city-suburban school desegregation in what was rapidly becoming a society dominated by suburbia, a society in which only a small fraction of white middle class children were growing up in central cities. That decision ended significant movement toward less segregated schools and made desegregation virtually impossible in many metropolitan areas where the non-white population was concentrated in central cities.

The Supreme Court ruled that the courts could try to make segregated schools more equal in its second Detroit decision in 1977, Milliken v. Bradley II. The Court authorized an order that the State of Michigan pay for some needed programs in Detroit which were aimed at repairing the harms inflicted by segregation in schools that would remain segregated because of the 1974 decision blocking city-suburban desegregation. Unfortunately, there was little serious follow-up on the educational remedies by the courts and the Supreme Court would radically limit their reach in the 1995 Missouri v. Jenkins decision.

By far the most important changes in policy in the 1990s came from the Supreme Court. The appointment of justice Clarence Thomas in 1991 consolidated a majority favoring cutting back civil rights remedies requiring court-ordered changes in racial patterns. In the 1991 Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell decision, the Supreme Court ruled that a school district that had complied with its court order for several years could be allowed to return to segregated neighborhood schools. In the 1992 Freeman v. Pads decision, the Court made it easier to end student desegregation even when the other elements of a full desegregation order had never been accomplished. Finally, in its 1995 Jenkins decision, the Court’s majority ruled that the court-ordered programs designed to make segregated schools more equal educationally and to increase the attractiveness of the schools to accomplish desegregation through voluntary choices were temporary and did not have to work before they

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could be discontinued.

In other words, desegregation was redefined from the goal of ending schools defined by race to a temporary and limited process that created no lasting rights and need not overcome the inequalities growing out of a segregated history. These decisions stimulated efforts in a number of cities to end the court orders, sometimes even over the objection of the school districts involved.

As the courts were cutting back on desegregation requirements the proportion of minority students in public schools was growing rapidly and becoming far more diverse. American public schools enrolled more than 43 million students in the fall of 1994 of whom 66% were white, 17% African American, 13% Latino, 4% Asian, and 1% Indian and Alaskan. By 1994, the proportion of Latinos in the U.S. was higher than that of blacks at the time desegregation began in 1954 and the proportion of whites far lower. The two regions with the largest enrollments, the South and the West, were 58% and 57% white, foreshadowing a near future in which large regions of the U.S. will have white minorities.

Rising African-American Segregation in the Heartland of the Old Segregation

The South and the Border State region are leading the nation in the turn back toward segregation for black students, because they have been the most desegregated region and have the most progress to lose. Ever since the civil rights revolution in the 1960s, the seventeen states of these two regions (the eleven states of the Old Confederacy and the adjoining six states from Oklahoma to Delaware which also maintained state-mandated segregation) have been the center of the least segregated region for black students. The transformation of this huge region, with more than one-third of the states, from an area of complete educational apartheid to the least segregated area in the U.S. was a historic accomplishment that is being lost.

Two of the three measures used in this study, show that the South has fallen behind another region of the country. The Border State region is now reporting an extremely high level of intense segregation, exceeded only by the Northeast. These regions are clearly slipping back toward their far more segregated pasts.

In terms of the proportion of black students in desegregated majority white schools, the South increased dramatically from virtually total segregation in 1960 to 14% of blacks in majority-white schools in 1967, 36% in 1972 and a high of 44% in 1983. Since then the number dropped to 39.2% in 1991 and 36.6% in 1994, losing all the slow progress of the last two decades and heading back toward the levels of segregation before the cities were desegregated. On the other measures of segregation the pattern for the region was similar. Its level of intense segregation increased slightly and the exposure of its black students to white students fell.

The Border State region, encompassing the six states from Oklahoma to Delaware which were not part of the old Confederacy but had a system of mandated segregation at the time of the Brown decision, experienced a more rapid rise in segregation from 1991-1995. The Border State region went from having 41% of its black students in majority white schools to 36% in just three years, a very rapid rate of change. The percent in intensely segregated schools climbed from 33% to 37% and exposure of black students to whites also declined significantly.

The most segregated regions for the past generation, the Northeast and the Midwest, continued to lead the list this year, except the Border States surpassed the Midwest in terms of intense segregation. Segregation in the most segregated region, the Northeast, remained about the same. The Northeast now has about half of its African-American students in schools that are 90-100% nonwhite, far surpassing other regions in the level of intense segregation.

Trends for Latino Students

Latino segregation has become substantially more severe than African-American segregation by each of the measures used in this study. In the Northeast, the West, and the South, more than three-fourths of all Latino students are in predominantly non-white schools, a level of isolation found for African-American students only in the Northeast. We have been reporting these trends continuously for two decades. They are clearly related to inferior education for Latino students. Though survey data are limited, the surveys that have been done tend to show considerable interest in desegregated education among the Latino families and substantial support for busing if there is no other way to achieve integration.

The data shows a continuing gradual national increase in segregation for Latino students. The most significant change comes in the proportion of students in intensely segregated schools, which rose to 34.8% in 1994. In 1968, only 23% of Latino students were in these isolated and highly impoverished schools compared to 64% of black students. Now the percentage of Latino students in such schools is up by almost half and is slightly higher than the level of intense segregation for black students.

Race and Poverty

The relationship between segregation by race and segregation by poverty in public schools across the nation is exceptionally strong. The correlation between the percent of black and Latino enrollments and the percent of students receiving free lunches is an extremely high 72. This means that when we talk about racially segregated schools, they are very likely to be segregated by poverty as well.

There is strong and consistent evidence from national and state data from across the U.S. as well as from other nations that high poverty schools usually have much lower levels of educational performance on nearly all outcomes. This is not all caused by the school: family background is a more powerful influence. Schools with concentrations of low income isolated children have less prepared children. Even better prepared children can be harmed academically if they are placed in a school with few other prepared students and, in some cases, in a setting where academic achievement is not supported.

School level educational achievement scores in many states and in the nation show a very strong relation between poverty concentrations and low achievement. This is because high poverty schools are unequal in many ways that effect educational outcomes. The students’ parents are far less educated–a very powerful influence–and the child is much more likely to be living in a single parent home which is struggling with multiple problems. Children are much more likely to have serious developmental and untreated health problems. Children move much more then, often moving involuntarily in the midst of a school year, meaning that schools often do not have the students for sufficient time to make an impact. High poverty schools have to devote tar more time and resources to family and health crises, security, children who came to school not speaking standard English, seriously disturbed children, children with no educational materials in their homes, and many children with very weak educational preparation. These schools tend to draw less qualified teachers and to hold them for shorter periods of time. They tend to have to invest much more heavily in remediation and much less adequately in advanced and gifted classes and demanding materials. The level of competition and peer group support for educational achievement are much lower in high poverty schools. Such schools are viewed much more negatively in the community and by the schools and colleges at the next level of education as well as by potential employers. In states that implemented high stakes testing that denies graduation or flunks students, the high poverty schools tend to have the highest rates of sanctions by far.

None of this means that inc relationship between poverty and educational achievement is inexorable and that there are not exceptions. Many districts have one Or a handful of high poverty schools that performs well above the normal pattern. Students of the same family background may perform at ninny different levels of achievement, and there are some talented students and teachers in virtually every school the overall relationship, however, are very powerful. Students attending high poverty schools face a much lower level of competition regardless of their own interests and abilities.

This problem is intimately related to racial segregation. The data show that 60.7% of the schools in the U.S. have less than one-fifth black and Latino students while 9.2% have 80-100% black and Latino students. At the extreme, only 5.4% of the schools with 0-10% Black and Latino students have more than half low income students; 70% of them have less than one-fourth poor students. Among schools that are 90-100% African American and/or Latino on the other hand, almost nine-tenths (87.8%) are predominantly poor and only 3% have less than one-fourth poor children. A student in a segregated minority school is 16.3 times more likely to be in a concentrated poverty school than a student in a segregated white schools.

Segregation in the Suburbs

Blacks living in rural areas and in small and medium sized towns or the suburbs of small metropolitan areas are far more likely to experience substantial school de-segregation than those living in the nation’s large cities. Students living in towns and rural areas and in suburbs of small metropolitan complexes attend school with an aver-age of about half white students. In contrast, those in the big central cities attend. schools those that have an aver-age of 83% nonwhite students. Suburbs of big and small central cities occupy an intermediate position, with black students in schools with about 40% whites and 60% non-white students. Considering the small proportion of minority students in many suburban rings this level of segregation is a poor omen for the future of suburbs which will become more diverse.

The nation’s nonwhite population is extremely concentrated in metropolitan areas. Outside the South, this concentration tends to be in the largest metropolitan areas with the largest ghettos and barrios. Since the minority communities are constantly expanding along their boundaries, and virtually all-white developments are continuously being constructed on the outer periphery of suburbia, the central cities have a continual increase in their proportion of black and Latino students.

The suburbs are now the dominant element of our society and our politics. As the nation’s population changes dramatically in the coming decades, they are destined to become much more diverse. What kind of access black and Latino children will have to mainstream suburban society will be affected by the racial characteristics of suburban schools. It raises serious concerns to realize that by 1994, blacks were in schools that averaged 59% nonwhite and Latino students were in schools what were 64% nonwhite in the suburbs of the largest cities although the whites in those suburban rings were in schools with little hope of stabilizing lists enrollment once a major racial change begins without drawing on students from a broader geographic area. This means that in areas with many fragmented school districts, not only the central city but also substantial portions of suburban rings may face high levels of segregation.

Since nonwhite suburbanization began in earnest in the 1970s, the cities have also been losing many of their minority middle class families, leaving the central cities with a higher and higher concentration of poverty. These districts contain 18% of the black students, 23% of the nation’s Latino students, 13% of Asians, but only 2% of the whites. About a fifth of black and Latino students depend an average of only 14% combined black and Latino enrollments. Latino students, but not blacks, were almost as segregated in the suburbs of smaller metropolitan areas. If these patterns intensify as the suburban African-American and Latino population grows, we may be facing problems that are as serious as those that led to desegregation conflicts in many central cities.

Table 1: Most Segregated States for Black Students, 1994-1995 on Three Measures of Segregation

%of Blacks in Majority White Schools	%of Blacks in 90-100% Minority Schools	Average % of White in Schools of Typical Black Student
New York	15.1	Illinois	61.9	Illinois	20.0
California	17.5	Michigan	59.6	New York	20.1
Michigan	18.8	New York	57.1	Michigan	20.8
Illinois	20.2	New Jersey	53.7	New Jersey	25.7
Mississippi	23.3	Pennsylvania	47.0	California	26.0
Maryland	25.9	Maryland	46.0	Maryland	27.3
New Jersey	26.6	Alabama	38.2	Mississippi	28.5
Louisiana	28.8	Tennessee	38.0	Louisiana	30.4
Wisconsin	29.2	Louisiana	37.6	Pennsylvania	30.4
Pennsylvania	30.4	Mississippi	36.9	Alabama	32.9

It would be profoundly ironic if the Supreme Court decision that meant to protect suburban boundary lines, Milliken v. Bradley, ended up making it impossible for suburban communities in the path of racial change to avoid rapid resegregation. Individual suburban school districts are often so small that they can go though racial change much more rapidly and irreversibly than a huge central city. A suburb will often have only the enrollment of a single high school attendance area in a city and has little hope of stablizing lists enrollment once a major racial change begins without drawing on students from a broader geographic area. This means that in areas with many fragmented school districts, not only the central city but also substantial proportions of suburban rings may face high levels of segregation.

Since nonwhite suburbanization began in earnest in the 1970’s, the cities have also been losing many of their minority middle class families, leaving the central cities with a higher and higher concentration of poverty. These districts contain 18% of the black students, 23% of the nation’s Latino student, 13% of Asians, but only 2% of the whites. About a fifth of black and Latino students depend on districts that do not matter to 98% of white families. Most of these systems have faced recurrent fiscal and political crises for years and have low levels of educational achievement. Desegregation has become virtually impossible in some of these systems since the 1974 Supreme Court decision in the Detroit case. The trends of metropolitan racial change that have been operating since World War II suggest that segregation will become worse in the future.

Segregation of Whites

In a nation where whites are destined to become one of several minorities in the schools if the existing trends continue, it is important not only to consider isolation of nonwhite students from whites but also the isolation of whites from the growing parts of the population.

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Except in the historic de jure states for blacks and the states taken from Mexico in the war in the 1840s, most white students have not yet experienced substantial desegregation. Although they are growing up in a society where the Census Bureau predicts that more than half of school age children will be non-white in a third of a century, many are being educated in overwhelming white schools with little contract with black or Latino students. As the American workforce changes skills in race relations will become increasingly valuable in many jobs.

Southern and Border states tend to have substantially larger proportions of black students than other states and higher levels of desegregation. Not only did they have to overcome a very rigid segregation but they also had to bring much larger shares of black students into interracial schools. As a result of desegregation orders their white students tend to be in schools with much larger proportions of black students than whites in other parts of the country. In no state in the Northeast, the Midwest, nor the West do whites, on average, go to schools with 10% of more black classmates. Thirteen Southern and border states have higher shares of black students than any state in the North or West. White students attend school with the largest proportions of black students in the states indicated in Table 2.

The most segregated states of the North had little interracial experience for white students. In Illinois, New York, and California the typical white student attended a school with less than 7% blacks; in New Jersey, less than 8%; and in Michigan less than 5%. Some states with developing patterns of serious segregation, such as Wisconsin and Minnesota, have proportions that are even lower.

There were twenty-three states where the number of black students per classroom in the schools attended by white students was less than 1 percent. Northern whites who may be inclined to assume their superiority to Southerners in terms of racial attitudes and policies should reflect on the fact that Southern white students have experienced far more actual desegregation for a quarter century and some northern states with very small black enrollments have been more resistant and made less progress than Southern states with far larger black communities.

The exposure of whites to schools which average more than 10% Latino enrollment is limited to six South-western states–New Mexico (36%), California (23%), Texas (19%), Arizona (19%), Colorado (13%), and Nevada (13%). In eight other states, the typical white is in a school with more than one-twentieth Latinos. The number is lower in the other thirty-six states and that is a major reason that national attention on this extremely important population is limited. In the long run, secondary immigration may distribute Latinos much more broadly across the nation.

Federal and State Policy

The Clinton administration has no stated policy on the movement back toward segregation and has given no priority to supporting successful desegregation. Although it is presiding over the period of the most rapid resegregation of the South since the Brown decision, it has not proposed any initiative, though the hostility of the previous twelve years has ended and positions have been changed on some important cases. There has been no proposal to restore the federal desegregation aid program that reached its peak under President Carter and whose funding was eliminated under President Reagan. Although the administration is asking for large increases in compensatory education, to a total of $7 billion for children in high-poverty, low performance schools, it has no initiative to move children out of such failing schools or even to slow the termination of desegregation plans in communities where equal education for minority students has never been achieved.

The only two desegregation-related items left in the education budget are for the small desegregation assistance centers set up under the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Magnet school program, which is often used to help pay for some of the voluntary elements in desegregation plans. The White House has requested zero increase for each program.

School desegregation has not been chosen as a priority issue by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights or the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and no major new research on the consequences of segregation or the best methods for improving the successful operation of multiracial schools and classrooms have been commissioned. The leader of both the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights recently stated that neither department has issued any statement of its policy on school desegregation during the Clinton Administration and that each is responding on a case-by-case basis.

Very few states have active state government efforts to enforce school desegregation in the middle 1990s. Some that once had rules or state legal requirements have suspended them or have terminated the offices that administered them. In California, for example, where segregation was increasing rapidly for both blacks and Latinos, and for some groups of Asian students, the State Department of Education’s Intergroup Relations Office was abolished, though the state provides funds for court ordered remedies. In Illinois, the state supreme court took away the state board of education’s right to enforce

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desegregation requirements. In New Jersey, the state desegregation office has been abolished under Governor Christie Whitman.

Table 2: States with Lowest Levels of Segregation of Whites

State	Average % black in School of Typical white
Mississippi	30.3%
South Carolina	29.9%
Delaware	27.2%
Louisiana	26.8%
North Carolina	22.9%
Georgia	21.6%
Alabama	18.9%
Virginia	17.7%
Florida	16.9%
Maryland	15.9%

Many states have adopted policies to publicize achievement results by district and school and they repeatedly publish lists that show urban minority schools with very high levels of concentrated poverty at the bottom in academic achievement without ever discussing the very frequent relationship between segregated education and low achievement. If standards are to be raised with high stakes for students, states must be concerned about the structural fairness of their system to minority students.

The Bridge Backward

In American race relations, the bridge from the twentieth century may be leading back into the nineteenth century. We may be deciding to bet the future of the country once more on separate but equal. There is no evidence that separate but equal today works any more than it did a century ago.

The debate that has been stimulated by recent Supreme Court decisions is a debate about how and when to end desegregation plans. The most basic need now is for a serious national examination of the cost of resegregation and the alternative solutions to problems with existing desegregation plans. Very few Americans prefer segregation and most believe that desegregation has had considerable value, but most whites are still opposed to plans which involve mandatory transportation of students. During the last fifteen years plans have been evolving to include more educational reforms and choice mechanisms to try to achieve desegregation and educational gains simultaneously. A stronger fair housing law, a number of settlements of housing segregation cases, and federal initiatives to change the operation of subsidized housing–as well as the very rapid creation of brand new communities in the sunbelt–all offer opportunities to try to change the pattern of segregated housing that underlies school segregation.

Policies that would help move the country back toward a less polarized society include:

1) resumption of serious enforcement of desegregation by the Justice Department and serious investigation of the degree to which districts have complied with all Supreme Court requirement by the Department of Education. Such requirements could be appropriately specified in a federal regulation.

2) creation of a new federal education program to train students, teachers, and administrators in human relations, conflict resolution, and multi-ethnic education techniques and to help districts devise appropriate plans and curricula for successful multi-racial schools.

3) serious federal research on multiracial schools and the comparative success of segregated and desegregated schools.

4) a major campaign to increase nonwhite teachers and administrators through a combination of employment discrimination enforcement and resources for recruitment and education of potential teachers.

5) incorporation of successful desegregation into the national educational goals.

6) federal and state efforts to expand the use of integrated two-way bilingual programs from the demonstration stage to become a major technique for improving both second language acquisition for both English speakers and other language speakers and successful ethnic relationships.

7) additional Title W resources to expand state education department staffs working on desegregation and racial equity in the schools.

8) federal, state, and local plans to coordinate housing policy with school desegregation policy.

9) examination of choice and charter school plans to assure that they are not increasing segregation and to reinforce their potential contribution to desegregation.

10) examination of high stakes state testing programs to assure that they are not punishing the minority students who must attend inferior segregated schools under existing state and local policies.