Southern Changes. Volume 20, Number 4, 1998 – Southern Changes

Back to Birmingham

John Egerton — Tue, 01 Dec 1998 05:00:01 +0000

Back to Birmingham

By John Egerton

Vol. 20, No. 4, 1998 pp. 3-7

On November 14-16, 1998, more than four-hundred Southerners convened in Birmingham, Alabama, on the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare to recommit to the challenging work for social justice ahead. The conference, “Unfinished Business: Overcoming Racism, Poverty, and Inequality in the South,” capped a two-year process of local gatherings initiated by the Jessie Ball duPont Fund in conjunction with the Center for the Study of the American South, the Southern Regional Council, the Southern Education Foundation, the Southeastern Council of Foundations, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

This initiative on the part of Southern philanthropic, academic, and non-profit institutions, was inspired in part by Nashville writer John Egerton’s book, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South. An excerpt from Egerton’s essay, “Back to Birmingham,” follows.

We have passed this way before–some of us painfully, in the searing heat of social upheaval, and all of us, at least figuratively, in our struggle to make sense of the South and its place in the American democratic experiment. There is no way around Birmingham. We have to go into it, become a part of it, make our peace with it, in order to find the way to the Good South of our dreams.

In the long and anguished history of racial and economic conflict in the South, Birmingham looms as a powerful symbol of the worst and best in us–a symbol of exploitation and resistance, of violence and valor, of pervasive despair and abiding hope. These sharply contrasting images arise not only from the dramatic civil rights clashes of the 1960s, but from almost a century earlier, when Birmingham was forged on the anvil of post-Civil War recovery.

Its founding in 1871 near rich deposits of north Alabama iron ore and coal soon gave it identity and notoriety as the Pittsburgh of the South–a noisy, smoke-wreathed hub of iron and steel production and railroad activity built with Northern capital and Southern sweat. A racially segregated, non-union labor force kept the mines open, the trains running, the furnaces roaring. Power gravitated to the ruling industrial barons who, in a self-conscious act of majestic symbolism, erected an iron statue of Vulcan, the Roman fire god, to protect and bless their empire from a mountainside pedestal.

Those whom the gods were beseeched to favor–white men all, and rich, and conservative, at least in the sense that they sought to conserve at all costs the wealth and power they had amassed–had put their stamp on Birmingham from the start, and it was still very much their company town, an oligarchy, when the Great Depression of the 1930s plunged the Old Confederacy into its deepest and most desperate crisis since the Civil War.

No region of the country was more devastated by the depression than the South, and no class or race of Southerners was spared the devastation. In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared the South to be “the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem,” and the National Emergency Council, a White House agency, delivered in its “Report on Economic Conditions of the South” a grim catalog of human and environmental losses that reads today like a profile of a third-world country on its last legs.

In anticipation of that report, a small group of reform minded, New Deal Southerners, including several Alabamians, came up with the idea of organizing a region wide assembly–the Southern Conference for Human Welfare–to take a hard look at the economic and social problems of the region and begin a search for some solutions. When the four-day meeting was convened in Birmingham’s Municipal Auditorium in mid-November of 1938, some 1,500 citizens from all over the South came to take an active part. Even now, sixty years later, that conference still stands out as the largest and most diverse public gathering ever held to address the basic human needs of Southerners.

Governors, senators, and congressmen attended. The speakers included Eleanor Roosevelt, the President’s wife, U. S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black of Alabama, and

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University of North Carolina President Frank Porter Graham. The Judeo-Christian establishment was well represented, as were business and labor, academia and the press, political parties of the left and right, and non-government organizations concerned with a variety of social issues. From across the spectrum of Southern humanity they came: men and women, white and black, rich and poor, young and old–most, if not all, looking for ways and means to make their region a healthier, better educated, better paying, less violent, more charitable, more equitable, more democratic place.

Virginia Foster Durr, an Alabama citizen then and now, would recall years later the excitement she and many others felt on the night the assembly opened. “It was exhilarating,” she said. “We felt like we had crossed the river together and entered the Promised Land. It was one of the happiest experiences of my life.”

But the joy gradually gave way to frustration and dismay as a multitude of competing interests and shades of opinion clamored for attention. At first, the divisions appeared to follow the familiar lines of liberal or conservative ideology, with no mention of race or class. Then, however, as a committee of the conferees was meeting in the auditorium on the second day, the Birmingham police commissioner suddenly appeared and ordered the racially mixed group to segregate itself or face arrest for violating a city ordinance. Segregation was enforced for the remainder of the conference, and the incident shattered whatever semblance of unity the delegates had managed to achieve. (Twenty-five years later, in 1963, the same police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, would bring shame on Birmingham by ordering police assaults with (logs and fire hoses on nonviolent civil rights demonstrators.)

Nonetheless, the 1938 assembly in Birmingham, when viewed through the long lens of history, casts a far more positive than negative light. In advancing visionary ideas about health care (“birth spacing” clinics), racial equality (“full rights and privileges of citizenship for all people under the law”), education (public appropriations based on school-district censuses), justice (public defenders for the poor), employment (equal pay for equal work across race and gender lines), and numerous other issues, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare was far ahead of its time. We still grapple now, three generations later, with many of the same issues that were on the table then–race relations being the most obvious.

In the 1940s, economic improvement stimulated by World War II brought some relief to the South, but pushed local and regional social issues aside for the duration as most Americans focused on the military campaigns abroad, not on problems at home. But then, in the twenty-year period after 1945, as the white South tried frantically to maintain the stranglehold of segregation that the war itself had finally loosened ever so slightly, age-old inequities and grievances were revived. The South slowly spiraled downward in a whirlpool of destructive state, municipal, and private conflicts fed by the crosscurrents of race. This painful tightening of social pressures and the pervasive atmosphere of impending crisis touched almost every community–and none more profoundly than Birmingham.

The celebration of victory over “super race” enemies across two oceans had hardly begun to fade when racial hostility boiled over in the Iron City and elsewhere around the South. Wherever working-class whites and blacks were pushed into proximity, there was separate-but-unequal competition for meager resources, and these flashpoints–neighborhoods, worksites, schools, parks–were the front lines in an ominous new struggle orchestrated from the top by elected officials and influential private individuals who considered it essential to maintain segregation by whatever means necessary.

Between 1947 and 1965, more than fifty sneak bombing attacks rattled windows and nerves in the urban core of Birmingham. Black citizens who had dared to seek their constitutional rights in opposition to the laws and customs of Jim Crow segregation were singled out as the principal targets; virtually all of the perpetrators were white vigilante terrorists bent on intimidating and punishing anyone who threatened the racial status quo. The most devastating of these bombings, on September 15, 1963, killed four young girls in Sunday School at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

Against this wall of violent resistance to social change, Birmingham’s black population of more than 130,000–40 percent of the total–had only the most limited defenses. In the mid-1950s, as the U. S. Supreme Court was declaring school segregation (and by implication, all forms of legally enforced racial separation) unconstitutional, and as a boycott against segregated seating on city buses in Montgomery, the Alabama capital, was lifting Martin Luther King, Jr., to prominence as a civil rights leader, Birmingham had only about 3,000 registered black voters, a small local chapter of the NAACP (but no other civil rights organizations), and only one practicing black attorney.

It did, however, have the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth, a charismatic and fearless black Baptist minister, and in 1956 he became the catalyst for a local movement that in less than ten years would bring the wall of segregation tumbling down. His house was bombed in 1956, and his church in 1962; in 1957, he led four black teenagers into a segregated white high school, and for that was severely beaten on a public sidewalk; he was threatened, jailed, and firehosed; and still, in the spring of 1963, the Reverends Shuttlesworth and King and the thou-

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sands of adults and children they had inspired broke the back of massive resistance to equal rights, not only in Birmingham but all across the South.

A third of a century has passed since then. Birmingham and the South have changed tremendously in that time, in ways both measurable and abstract. This city that only a generation ago appeared to raise a virtually united front of white opposition to any change in the status of its black minority is now majority-black; its mayor and congressman are African Americans, and so are many of its judges and local officials, elected and appointed. In the churches, the colleges and universities, the media, the professional ranks, the corporate management and labor forces, there is evidence of cooperation and collaboration between the races now, where once there was only segregation, discrimination, and hostility. Such signs of change can be found all over the South.

In 1938, more than 400 Southern counties had no high school for black students; today, blacks in the region complete high school at about the same rate as whites. In 1958, there were fewer than a dozen black elected officials in the South; now, there are well over 5,000. In 1978, the South had only half as many jobs for its citizens as it does now, and Southern per capita income in the past twenty years has risen to 92 percent of the national average. And now, in 1998, the rate of population growth in the region outpaces that of the rest of the country–completely reversing the pattern of half a century ago, when millions of poor Southerners, black and white, migrated north and west in a desperate quest for survival.

And yet, in spite of these advances, much inequality remains, and its harmful effects are clearly visible in every state, every city, every rural county. Black family income in today’s South, though dramatically higher than it was three decades ago, is still only about 80 percent that of white families. Nearly four in ten black families in the region, compared to only one in seven white families, live on less than $15,000 a year (a benchmark approximation of the poverty line for a family of four). In the late 1990s, one-fourth of the South’s children are poor (a higher ratio than in the late 1960s), and a disproportionate number of them are nonwhite. The average black Southerner is about three times more likely to be poor than his white neighbor (four times more likely in Mobile or Savannah, six times more likely in rural East Carroll Parish, Louisiana, the South’s poorest jurisdiction).

Other nonwhite groups in the region–particularly Native Americans and Latinos–also tend to be poorer than whites, and their numbers are growing rapidly (indeed, citizens of Hispanic origin are projected to become the nation’s largest minority group early in the new century). And, poverty makes more volatile the interaction among different cultures; racial conflict was once taken to mean black-versus-white, but now the wounding knife cuts in many directions.

More than facts and figures can be seen through the lens of racism, poverty, and inequality in the South. Consider these images: the dwindling number of farm families and their endangered livelihood; the escalation of poverty in small villages and rural areas; the loss of manuf acturing jobs to third-world countries; the pressures of immigration, viewed as a challenge or a threat by many; the sprawl of suburban affluence, encircling densely concentrated populations of the poor; the pervasiveness of crime, much of it driven by an underground drug economy; white flight from public schools; the cost of housing and health care soaring beyond the means of working people; the speed of technological change and its tendency to segregate and isolate the uneducated, the poor, the elderly; the homogenizing impact of mass American culture; the growing threat of environmental dam- age, especially to poor and vulnerable communities; and, in certain consequence of all these, the widening canyon be- tween the haves and the have-nots, those who race ahead and those who fall behind.

The disturbing signs of resegregation and growing distance between the rich and the poor are especially ironic now, with the United States riding the longest and mightiest train of economic growth in fifty years–and with the South as the locomotive this time, not the caboose. It would be far

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easier and more effective for the region and the nation to attack these social problems here and now, from a position of strength, for the problems themselves will be much tougher and more daunting when the economy weakens, as it eventually and inevitably must.

There are other compelling reasons why this is a good time for a people’s initiative on economic and social issues. The eve of a new century and a new millennium is certainly an appropriate occasion for stock-taking, pledge-making, and serious planning. A strong show of public readiness to end racism, poverty, and inequality might embolden elected officials and political party leaders to put aside their partisan agendas and address these matters cooperatively. And, perhaps most compellingly, all Americans–and future generations-will pay a heavy price for delay and denial and inaction. Moralists, idealists, and pragmatists can all agree on the consequences of ignoring these problems. Just as the nation in the Civil War could not survive half slave and half free, the nation in the 21st century cannot survive with its lightest half rich and its darkest half poor. In the words of Georgia Congressman John Lewis, a hero of the civil rights movement, ‘We may have come over here on separate ships, but we’re all in the same boat now.”

Unfinished business. The transcendent question in our history as a region, as a nation–our supreme crucible, past, present, future–is the question of race, amplified by class and culture. What the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal half a century ago called “the American dilemma” still haunts us to this day: How can we be e pluribus unum, with liberty and justice for all, without reaching the inescapable conclusion that equality and diversity are the twin pillars of our national superstructure, the bedrock of our identity? We will either find reconciliation and unity within this framework, or else our great and venerable experiment in egalitarian democracy will end in failure.

History has always been important to Southerners. But the past is prologue, and the most compelling reason to heed it is to avoid repeating the mistakes of our forebears. We have to live in the present, and look to the future. That is the primary reason this ad hoc assembly of contemporary Southerners is back in Birmingham.

Change is never easy. The pursuit of equality and other idealistic goals often runs up against some sobering everyday realities: plant closings, school failures, health woes, homelessness, crime and violence, the scourge of drugs, the clash of core beliefs. Not only is the role of government hotly debated these days; its very existence is being called into question by neo-secessionists and other disaffected citizens. We lament the decline of values, but can’t agree on which values are most significant–and all too often, the list leaves out such virtues as civility, fair play, respect for others, forgiveness, empathy, generosity, nonviolence.

We start and end with one another as individuals, as Southern men and women drawn by the challenge of trying to overcome racism, poverty, and inequality in our corner of the United States, and hoping in the process to inspire the same reforms elsewhere. There have been times in our checkered past when such an effort would have offered no promise of success at all. The white population in those times was racist to the bone. It is incumbent upon us now to prove that those times are past and gone, and the people of the contemporary South–white, black, and other hues–must define anew, in egalitarian terms, what it means to be a Southerner, and an American.

As black and white Southerners, we have much in our experience that is recognizably similar, if not altogether common to us both-from food to faith, from music and language and social customs to family ties and folklore and spellbinding parables out of the past. We are, said James McBride Dabbs of South Carolina thirty years ago, “cultural first cousins,” more alike than different, because we were “all brought up down here” where (let another South Carolinian, Jesse Jackson, finish the sentence), “we were separated by race but bound by grits, bound by biscuits, bound by circumstance and history.”

Out of our kinship as Southerners, as citizens, as figura- tive and literal brothers and sisters, can come a mutual understanding and respect and an affirmation of equality that fundamentally redefines the model of race relations in America. To get there, though, will require new ways of thinking and behaving, new public and private initiatives. Birmingham can only be a start, a small first step along that road–but this is the place to begin thinking about the region and nation we will leave to our children and grand- children.

Sidebar: A “New Southern Agenda”

Education: In order for this country to flourish as a free and open democratic society in the 21st century, we must make the transformation of our public learning institutions the highest priority of our local, state, and national governments.

Health: We need a universal plan to put an adequate floor of medical security under every person, helping healthy people to stay healthy and sick people to get well, and offering basic care to the most vulnerable among us–the youngest and oldest, persons with disabilities, the poor. The bottom line must be access and affordability for all, as a fundamental right.

Employment: Every member of our community should have the opportunity to earn a living wage that yields adequate income and benefits. We support it so strongly, in fact, that we want the public and private sectors to join together in guaranteeing full employment and economic opportunity to all members of our community.

Housing: Every person in our community must have access to a safe, comfortable, and affordable place to live and grow, free from environmental hazards.

Justice: The equal administration of justice is paramount to civil society. Citizens must have equal protection under the law, and the expectation that our system ofjustice will be applied firmly without regard for race, color, national origin, sexual orientation or economic status.

The Birmingham “Unfinished Business” conference closed with a call to action, which was debated in small groups and drafted by a team of more than twenty people from several states, including (left to right) Ellen Spears, Afesa Adams, unidentified, Ahmed Obafemi, Eric Rubin, Christopher Myers, Jackie Jones, (seated) Jeffy Will, and Merceria Ludgood. The agenda emphasized five areas for action.

Photos courtesy of Alabama Power.

Seeking an America as Good as its Promise: Remedies for Racial Inequality: The Public’s Views

Staff — Tue, 01 Dec 1998 05:00:02 +0000

Seeking an America as Good as its Promise: Remedies for Racial Inequality: The Public’s Views

John Doble Research Associates

Vol. 20, No. 4, 1998 pp. 8-10

In September of 1996, the John Doble Research Associates conducted a national survey of racial attitudes for the Southern Regional Council (see Southern Changes, Spring 1997 and Spring 1998). Below is an excerpt from the Council’s detailed analysis of this national survey. The research includedfourfocus groups of white Southerners and a national telephone survey of 1,216 randomly selected adults. Tom W. Smith, Director ofthe General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago further analyzed the data. In addition to Doble and Smith, the writing team included Ellen Spears and Preston Quesenberry. The research wassupported bya grant from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

Combating Discrimination and Racism

Most Americans believe discrimination ought to be punished. First, people favor legal sanctions against discriminators. A plurality say that top priority should be given to legally punishing companies that discriminate in hiring and promotion and real estate agents who steer blacks away from white neighborhoods. A majority also places investigating and prosecuting those responsible for fires in black churches in the South as a top priority. These measures, to directly punish wrongdoers, are especially supported by blacks, younger adults, and those with low incomes.

Second, people want to ban discrimination in employment. In a July-September, 1995 Washington Post poll, 58 percent agreed that, “The federal government should enact tougher anti-discrimination laws to reduce racial discrimination in the workplace.” Also, in an October, 1996 CBS poll, 61 percent believed “it is necessary to have laws to protect racial minorities from discrimination in hiring and employment ….”

People are highly supportive of educational measures to improve inter-group relations. In the SRC study 87 percent said that the country should “actively promote and teach racial tolerance and cooperation in the schools.” Likewise, an August 1993 research poll found that 65 percent thought it was very desirable for schools to “teach all students about the racial, cultural, and ethnic groups that together make up American society today.” In addition, there is support for instructing people about the history of racial groups and discrimination. For example, an April 1994 Los Angeles Times poll found that 63 percent felt it was very important to teach students “about the history of the slavery of black people in the United States.” However, feelings are very mixed about whether more instruction is needed. In the 1994 General Social Survey, 23 percent said that too much attention is given to the experiences of racial and ethnic minority groups in history classes, 43 percent said that the right amount of attention was given, 21 percent said that too little was given, and 13 percent did not know.

Americans realize that black-white relations are strained and many see them worsening. In addition, most think that discrimination is still widespread and is a significant cause of the racial disparities in education, occupation, and income that exist. But neither improving race relations, nor decreasing racial inequality are high priorities to mostwhite Americans. Many whites think conditions for blacks and other minorities are improving and that factors other than racism are the major causes for the social imbalances that persist.

People support governmental policies to increase opportunity and reduce inequities. Support is strongest when such policies are directed at the poor, unemployed, and other disadvantaged groups. But even race-based policies receive considerable support. Approval is greatest when policies:

promote opportunity;
assist the qualified;
offer specific remedies to concrete, continuing problems such as under-representation and discrimination;
emphasize anti-discrimination measures; and
include women along with minorities.

When questions evoke these policies, as they did in the SRC Racial Attitudes Survey, majorities consistently support affirmative action programs.

Approval is least when policies involve quotas and special preferences; present no rationale for assistance, or focus only on the past; and raise the specter of reverse discrimination. When policies are described in this way, majorities oppose them.

The same mixture of support and opposition also emerges regarding minority political representation and residential integration. People want racial minorities to be fairly represented and are even willing, under some circumstances, to endorse special measures to increase their electoral representation. But people are leery of explicitly acknowledging race as a criterion for selecting candidates and dividing up elective offices. Regarding residential integration, people, in principle, oppose segregation and back laws to encourage open housing and punish race steering. Moreover, support for laws promoting residential integration has grown over the last twenty years. But in practice, most people live in and prefer segregated neighborhoods. As a result, residential integration remains slow.

Liberal, proactive positions acknowledging racial problems and supporting policies to reduce racial inequality are most consistently favored by groups that have suffered from discrimination. Blacks typically are most likely to see that there are problems and to back strong measures to deal with the inequities. Women tend to adopt similar points of view, but not as strongly or consistently as blacks. Younger adults (ages 18 to 24) take more liberal positions than adults in older cohorts, which should tend, in time, to push things in a proequality direction. Education and income push in opposite directions. Those with lower in

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comes tend to support measures to redress racial inequalities, but those with more education also lean somewhat in this direction. Finally, community type (farm and non-farm) is not related to these issues and the non-South is more likely to have a liberal viewpoint.

The case for the assertion of a backlash against racial tolerance in general and against affirmative action in particular cites the supposed effectiveness of the Jesse Helms’ White Hands ad against Harvey Gantt in their 1990 Senate race, the political clout of the angry white men in the 1994 Congressional election, President Clinton’s “Mend it, don’t end it,” review of federal policies, and the passage of anti-affirmative action Proposition 209 in California.

But in fact survey data shows no general retreat on attitude measures toward race relations. Support for the principles of integration and racial equality have not declined and most measures show more approval than ever before. Moreover, opposition to affirmative action centers more on a caricature of it rather than on a balanced description of this policy. It is only for negatively presented versions of affirmative action that some moderate decline in support has occurred. In contrast, there remains substantial public support for various race-, genderand class-based policies to reduce racial and social disparities.

“But,” says General Social Survey Director Tom W. Smith, “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.”

The losses that civil rights in general and affirmative action in particular have suffered, says Smith, are the result primarily, from their defenders being outspent, outmaneuvered and outgunned. But a convincing public argument can be made that racial inequalities should be reduced and that affirmative action programs can contribute to that goal without creating reverse discrimination. The opponents of fairness and equal opportunity appear to have been winning the debate, but that largely reflects the effectiveness of their appeals and not that the public is against policies to reduce racial disparities. A series of victories for affirmative action proponents, in each of thirteen state legislatures where anti-affirmative action legislation was brought forth during 1996 and 1997, gives evidence of this analysis. The outcome of that debate can be changed; the battle for public opinion can be won and the goals of racial equality and intergroup tolerance advanced.

The Newtown Story: One Community’s Fight for Environmental Justice

Ellen Griffith Spears — Tue, 01 Dec 1998 05:00:03 +0000

The Newtown Story: One Community’s Fight for Environmental Justice

By Ellen Griffith Spears; Photos by Michael A. Schwarz

Vol. 20, No. 4, 1998 pp. 12-15

The following excerpt is from The Newtown Story: One Community’s Fight for Environmental Justice, written by Southern Changes managing editor Ellen Spears and photographed by Atlanta independent photojournalist Michael A. Schwarz. This oral history chronicles the story of Newtown, an African-American neighborhood in Gainesville, Georgia. Following a deadly tornado that ripped through Gainesville in 1936, segregated housing for black residents was built on a landfill beside the railroad tracks. Industrial development burgeoned in close proximity. Formed by women of Newtown in the 1950s, the Florist Club started with members caring for the sick and buying flowers for community funerals. Through the turbulent 1960s and 70s, the Florist Club members became vocal leaders for civil rights and community improvement. By early 1990, members of the Club realized that many in the community had been dying from the same kinds of cancer and from lupus. Suspicious, they began canvassing the neighborhood, taking family histories and piecing together a puzzle that remains unsolved. As part of the movement for environmental justice all over the South and the nation, local organizations like the Newtown Florist Club are tackling the disproportionate degradation of the environment pervasive in communities of color. Women are playing key leadership roles, defining and transforming culture in place-based, identity-affirming organizations to fight the politics of growth, corporate abuse, and the exclusion of people of color from business and government decision-making.

In the rising heat of a Georgia spring morning, community leader Rose Johnson guides several dozen visitors on a somber mission. The date is May 7, 1993. This African-American community on the south side of Gainesville, about fifty-five miles north of Atlanta, reports unexplained high rates of throat and mouth cancers, excessive cases of the immune-system disease lupus, and a variety of respiratory ailments. Too many people have died.

The visitors from the Racial Justice Working Group of the National Council of Churches, along with city and state officials, follow Johnson “door-to-door, neighbor-to-neighbor” as she places black ribbons at homes where residents are sick with cancer or lupus or a family member had died.

The observers sense firsthand the sharp contrast between the Newtown community–where the acrid odor of toxic industry and scrap yard presses in on the little park and well-tended homes–and the flourishing green lawns and flowering trees of Longwood Park and the generous homes on the north side of town where most whites live.

On this already overheating day, an intolerable picture emerges. The seventy-five homes in Newtown, built atop an old dump, are surrounded by thirteen toxic industries, two identified potentially hazardous sites, numerous hazardous waste generators, and a rat-infested junkyard.

This neighborhood next to the railroad tracks is encircled by so many toxic sites that the local paper called it “an industrial fallout zone.”

As guide, Johnson represents the younger generation of leaders of the “one group that didn’t mind tackling anything”–the Newtown Florist Club. Founded nearly fifty

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years ago to pool funds for funeral wreaths, today the Club is working aggressively to uncover the environmental links to the diseases affecting residents-and to halt the toxic assault on the community.

Johnson, who played along Desota Street as a child in the 1960’s, introduces the Club members and other residents one by one. Faye Bush survived her own battle with heart disease and lupus to steer the Club in key phases of the fight; her daughter Jackie Mize fondly remembers the close-knit community. Bush’s sister Mozetta Whelchel lost her teen-aged daughter, Mozzie Lee, and son, Deotris, to lupus. Her husband, Lee, died of cancer after a lifetime of

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work in the starter motor plant he could see across the railroad tracks from his back door. Geraldine Coffins raises her voice to protest despite throat cancer. Mae Catherine Wilmont, who lost her nursing job after she contracted lupus, is coming forward as a leader in the Club. Jerry Castleberry watched his mother die of lupus and now faces the daily pain of the disease himself.

Others have passed on-people like Ruby Wilkins, who hosted vote-seeking white politicians at her dinner table and counseled a generation of neighborhood youth who played basketball in her side yard. Ruth Cantrell, who survived the deadliest disaster in Gainesville history, the 1936 tornado, was too ill from battling cancer to leave her oxygen tank to greet those gathered for the Toxic Tour on that day in 1993. She has since died. Neighbor Roland Wailer, who worked with Lee Whelchel over vats of toxic chemicals at the starter motor plant, had to give up his vegetable plot because the ground was so contaminated, not long before he died, too, of congestive heart failure.

“I thought I was immune to the pain of it,” says Johnson, “but I don’t guess I am.”

She explains that the Florist Club began its work in 1950 with a simple traditional mission: to care for the sick and comfort families as they buried their dead. The Club’s concern for the health of individuals led inevitably to action to protect the health of the entire community.

Tested during segregation, shaped by the civil rights movement, the women and men of Newtown came forward to resist every indignity faced by Gainesville’s black residents. Braving personal illness and tragedy, members have organized an endless variety of community-building, youth-developing, race-uplifting strategies. When the Klan tried to march near Newtown, the Club backed them down. When the city’s election system undermined black voting strength, the Club took them to court. When awareness of the environmental threat emerged, the Club tackled toxic polluters, demanding changes from industry and pressing city, state, and federal officials for results.

The environmental fight has stretched the Club in new directions, into the underdeveloped science of ecological cause and effect, seeking toxic sources and health treatments for the ailments that plague the neighbors. When a state health survey blamed high cancer rates on residents’ “lifestyle,” volunteer eco-experts and health and science professionals helped members research the local toxic profile and seek environmental links. Proving a con-

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nection is difficult, but experts agree it’s still fair to limit exposure. None of the work has been easy: corralling the efforts of volunteers, battling the insensitivity of a maze of bureaucrats, bringing pioneering legal claims, and garnering the attention of those who could effect a change.

An old yellow school bus transports the invited guests through the noisy heat, past the industrial sites that surround Newtown. The tour winds through the rapidly growing city of Gainesville, the largest industrial hub north of Atlanta in the state, the last urban center before the rural farmland and mountains heading north, a gateway between the future and the past. Combined with suburbanized Hall County, the area is home to more than 111,000, making it the fifth largest metropolitan area in the state. The city’s business leaders have been remarkably successful in recruiting industry. Many factories depend on the area’s agricultural roots, chicken processing plants and animal feed manufacturers. Gainesville boasts the slogan, “chicken capital of the world;” three poultry processors are located near Newtown.Animal food giants Ralston-Purina and Cargill operate major feed mills within earshot.

Grain dust, runoff, sewage, air pollution, and groundwater contamination create problems that extend beyond Newtown. Toxins endanger other African-American neighborhoods on the south side, where two emergency evacuations in 1995 sent dozens to the hospital and brought residents to challenge Cargill with releasing dangerous hexane emissions.

The tour participants disembark at Bethel AME Church, feeling the weight of the evidence of life in a toxic zone. Newtown’s perseverance against these environmental odds has become a symbol for other communities across the South. Partial victories along the way–and deep faith–have sustained the fight, though much work remains.

Sidebar: “Wheel of Fortune”

“Wheel of Fortune” spun on the television at the Hailey home on Friday, May 19, 1995, when Hall County emergency officials forced the family to evacuate down the street-away from noxious odors that would send Paul Halley to the hospital for five days. Halley was one of more than thirty people hospitalized. Most were treated and released, for severe nausea, skin irritation, headaches, burning eyes and throats, dizziness, shortness of breath and sleepiness.

As emergency vehicles and personnel swarmed on Black Drive, where the Haileys live, and Cooley Drive, near Newtown, local hospital personnel were told to prepare for hexane poisoning. Environmental reports on the spill do not specify which form of hexane was suspected, but the chemical n-hexane may be the most highly toxic member of one family of neurological toxins, according to the recognized industrial toxicology guide. The odorous chemical rates as a severe fire and explosion hazard, and is associated with nausea, eye and skin irritation, dizziness, drowsiness, numbness of limbs, and bronchial and intestinal irritation.

Initial news reports pointed to the Cargill Feed Mill’s periodic cleaning process as the source of the release. Across Athens Highway on West Ridge Road, within earshot of Newtown, Cargill Feed Mill refines soybeans and extracts edible vegetable oil, soybean meal, soybean hulls and crude soybean oil. Cargill, which boasts of being the “planet’s biggest grain trader” and is one of the nation’s largest food companies, built its Gainesville plant in 1966.

Cargill denied any responsibility for the May 1995 spill, but sent letters to some residents offering to pay medical bills. The May 24, 1995 letters from plant manager Catherine Hay read that though it is “not determined what caused” the odor, “Cargill has made arrangements to pay your medical expenses associated with this odor.”

The Environmental Protection Division’s report on the May 19, 1995 event is inconclusive, “The identity origin of the material remains unknown.” But, on the night of the evacuation the EPD investigator advised against sampling, “since the material was no longer detectable.” EPD’s report says, “Ms. Hay clearly stated Cargill’s position that they did not feel they released hazardous materials, but that they had likely released an odor that passed through the community.” While not finding Cargill guilty, the EPD did issue two recommendations: 1) EPD and Cargill identify better procedures for performing annual cleaning to minimize community odors, and 2) Hall County consider forming a Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC) to involve the entire community in emergency planning.

Later, in early December 1995, a smaller number of residents from the Black Drive and Cooley drive area had to evacuate.

“Two times last year, we were taken out of our homes. We have never been told what it was,” Paul Halley told residents and supporters gathered at St. Paul United Methodist Church to hear about a health study in 1996. The spills galvanized a new group, Concerned Citizens Against Pollution, formed by black Southside residents from the Black Drive, Cooley Drive, and Jordan Drive area.

The Newtown Florist Club, Concerned Citizens Against Pollution, and other residents filed suit on December 10, 1997, with the aid of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, charging Cargill with a violation of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA) in releasing the hazardous air pollutant hexane. The suit also charges Cargill, Inc. with falling to report the release to the appropriate authorities and with violating the air quality permit issued by the State of Georgia.

The CERCLA lawsuit charging Cargill with a violation of the toxic reporting requirements was dismissed on narrow technical legal grounds on June 19, 1998. A second, personal injury lawsuit on behalf of residents was dismissed in April 1998 by Judge William O’Kelley on the grounds that insufficient evidence of injury was provided during the pre-trial period. Residents are appealing both decisions to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta.

From New Orleans to Your Radio–It’s American Routes

Allen Tullos — Tue, 01 Dec 1998 05:00:04 +0000

From New Orleans to Your Radio–It’s American Routes

Allen Tullos

Vol. 20, No. 4, 1998 pp. 16-22

In April of 1998 American Routes, a weekly, two-hour radio show featuring genre-busting sets of recorded music and original interviews went on the air across the United States. Based in New Orleans and syndicated by Public Radio International, with a list of stations that grows weekly (for the station nearest you, see page 22), American Routes explores the roots and routes of American traditional and popular musics. Nick Spitzer, the creator and host of the program, is a familiar voice to public radio listeners for his features on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and as host of the popular Folk Masters series of concerts from Carnegie Hall and Wolf Trap, heard on Public Radio International. In the following edited interview with Southern Changes editor Allen Tullos, Nick Spitzer, native of New England, University of Pennsylvania- and University of Texas-trained ethnographer, and Louisiana and Smithsonian folklorist discusses the launch and first months of American Routes.

Allen Tullos: Nick, what is American Routes?

Nick Spitzer: American Routes is a radio program that I’ve been thinking about for around twenty-five years. I’ve always felt strongly about music based on oral traditions that work their way into popular culture, whether blues, country, rhythm and blues, jazz, gospel, rock and roll, klezmer, zydeco. Instead of a radio show presenting only one sort of music, I feel that all these musics deserve to be heard together as part of an understanding of the broader American cultural experience. American Routes presents musical forms that have historic cultural, or at least parallel, relationships but that are often artificially separated by the marketplace for purposes of selling off bits and pieces to core audiences of differing classes and ethnicities in a manner that may seem efficient, but denies some of our cultural sharing. In an opposite sense, the program also tries to air the styles and music that do in fact distinguish groups or are tied to different identities in our country but we do this in a positive way-using a capital D for distinguish.

Tullos: How did you come up with the Routes name instead of, say, American Roots?

Spitzer: The show is named American Routes to take into account how in a large nation state, all the smaller, traditional or grassroots musics–gospel, country, bluegrass, soul have mingled and mixed and traveled just like people travel from rural Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma out to the west, north to Chicago, Detroit, from the Carolinas up to Washington and Philadelphia. From the rural South into cities like New Orleans, Nashville, Memphis, and in these settings of new lives and the search for employment, and seeking a better life, people have merged their musics as they have mixed socially and culturally.

Rural Anglo-Texans, Cajuns, and African Americans might find themselves working in the same oil field and create new kinds of honky-tonk blues. Performers that range from Gatemouth Brown to Janis Joplin emerge. Routes is about migration and immigration; we try to offer a sense of traveling, planned and unplanned, as cosmic, as diasporic, as creative, as painful. How people got to where they are. How they change their identities. This allows us to play western swing with its very developed horn figures based in fiddling–the string music of the Anglo South–next to certain forms of jazz and klezmer. Then klezmer allows us to get to Gershwin who brings us back to jazz or to American forms of classical music. American Routes travels through time and space with musicians and their cultures. Now you note in all this that we do play “roots” music from the small community be it Cajun, country blues, or brass band jazz from the New Orleans neighborhood. But with Routes we embrace the organic idea of “roots music” while reaching to the wider shared experience of how all kinds of folks have taken the roots to new places, e.g. American Routes.

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Tullos: What sort music and radio projects were you doing prior to the current program?

Spitzer: Before American Routes, for six years since 1990, I had been doing a show called Folk Masters on Public Radio International. I did it at Carnegie Hall in New York and later at Wolf Trap, in northern Virginia about twenty miles from Washington, D. C. Folk Masters was an end-of-the century attempt to show how folk artists and cultures move and change and transform. We presented many great traditional performers to live audiences. Folk Masters also came about as I became dissatisfied with the way musicians were often presented at folk festivals where the audiences were extremely mobile or inattentive. Those of us who worked on festivals–I’m specifically thinking of the Festival of American Folklife on the National Mall–back then sometimes fooled ourselves into thinking we were presenting to community audiences, or we forgot we were in a very different public space than our “county fair” production values could address. I thought that the proscenium stage and public radio might be combined to bring more focused attention on the musicians-their lives and their art. Folk Masters was a way to do that. It became a bit of the Grand Ole Opry meets Chautauqua meets a variety show meets the King Biscuit Hour. We would present different groups that had varied approaches to one instrument: three different cultural styles on the guitar like Hawaiian slack-key, African-American blues, and Anglo-American country. Or we would do things that had cultural affinity: music from the French Caribbean and music from French Louisiana. Or we would take a cultural style and see how its different manifestations had emerged: Native American rock music alongside several forms of far more traditional American Indian music like Navajo songs or Iroquois chants with drumming

Tullos: How did Folk Masters differ from American Routes in terms of intention and reach? And how did Routes evolve?

Spitzer: With Folk Masters, we were working with live performers, bringing them to concert audiences, and combining that with a radio audience. The disadvantage of that format is that you’re generally already preaching to the converted. That is, many of the people who are attending a concert or tuning into something called Folk Masters are often already interested in this sort of music. That’s great for the artists. It helps develop their careers. And it’s a lot of fun to do for supportive audiences. But the limiting factor, from a more activist point of view, is that you’re not then able to weave together broader audiences whose shared interests are not generally acknowledged. Native Americans’ relationships with European fiddling tradition, African Americans who play or appreciate country music, Anglo Americans who have been profoundly influenced by and play blues. When you try to get that on the radio, some programmers start raising questions about eclecticism and working across perceived categories.

As I began thinking more seriously about American Routes, I felt that it would have to come from the Gulf South or the Deep South because that’s the source point of a lot of our mingled or creolized music forms–the old-time jazz, the rhythm & blues, roots rock and roll, honky-tonk country, Cajun, and zydeco–that I think people can accept as such because these styles have been or are becoming part of our popular culture (albeit sometimes in awfully mainstream and watered-down forms).

Back in the early 1990s, I initially approached National Public Radio (NPR) with the idea for an American Routes-type program. I think it scared them. It didn’t fit classical music format ideas. It didn’t fit jazz. It wasn’t exactly a news/variety program. So I kept plugging. I worked with an old friend, the executive producer of Folk Masters, Mary Beth Kirchner, a widely respected cultural producer in public radio and television documentary. Folk Masters became our project built on a core audience of people who were interested in some of the perspectives I’ve mentioned, but who especially wanted to hear live music. We had a pretty good success with Folk Masters. I think we expected maybe forty or fifty stations, and in the end we reached three-hundred stations and had some overseas airings as well.

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During that time, I had also been doing features for All Things Considered about everything from a segment on Croatian computer repairmen in Chicago who continued to play their tamburitza music for Serbian- and Croatian-American “mixed” audiences despite the war in Central Europe, to the Christmas/New Year’s ring shouts from the coast of rural Georgia. We began making the point that this was news, this was information. Whether it was a griot or a bard or a country and western singer or a blues singer, it was news about the human condition–in the Croatian example or a commentary I did on David Duke-versus-Edwin Edwards, it approached “hard news” as well. So after putting together our own demo in 1997, we went to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. We were well received. We asked for a little money to study the prospects of and piloting American Routes. They liked the demo enough that the CPB tripled our funding and said, “Do it.” That had never happened to me before. We assembled a team and got started. After a period of negotiations, first with NPR and then with PRI, we ended up with Public Radio International on the air in April of 1998.

Tullos: How do PM and NPR differ as networks supporting the kinds of programs and issues that concern you as a folklorist and independent producer?

Spitzer: PM and NPR are both very important, for different reasons. NPR’s greatest strength is its news operations. As I’ve said, I’ve done many seven-to-twelve minute cultural features for All Things Considered and those pieces have terrific impact despite being short in terms of usual documentary lengths of thirty minutes or an hour. NPR also produces and distributes cultural programming–some of it very good–but I see it as less of a distributor of programming from outside its shop. Also, some of its cultural programming often has a very news-based style or continues the more received notions of public radio cultural programming like Performance Today or the opera. PRI is exclusively a distributor of programs. Everything you hear on PRI, whether it’s The World (BBC-WGBH), Marketplace, Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, or Afropop, those are programs produced by independent producers or producing entities that PRI distributes. I make the analogy in Hollywood terms between the old big line studios that make the blockbusters, that have their ups and downs–from Titanicto Waterworld, metaphorically one floated and one sank with the public. That’s more like NPR–trying to create a network blockbuster in-house with their many personnel and information resources, but with the problems of being Beltway-centric and often programmed by committee. PRI is more like independent cinema around the world where a lot of stuff is made, a lot of things happen, and what grabs people’s attention most ends up with PRI’s support and a wider audience. PRI is playing to a new-found freedom across the U.S. among independent public radio producers like Ira Glass’ This American Life or your own Southern Regional Council’s powerful Will The Circle Be Unbroken? and getting it well-distributed by a credible network. PRI has been great for us. But, that’s not to say that NPR doesn’t do a lot of fine news and cultural productions. I still do pieces for NPR and All Things Considered when time permits or they call me, and they also broadcast the annual Fourth of July Concert that I host live from the National Mall in D. C.

Tullos: What sort of economic and political implications exist in working on American Routes from the Gulf South?

Spitzer: I have spent many years working on the Gulf Coast, for the state of Louisiana and the Smithsonian, in urban and rural situations, in small communities with Cajuns and Creoles. I have a devotion to people from this region and I’ve tried to express that in public policy and programs. I remember standing one day with a National Park Service official in New Orleans, in front of a map. He pointed to St. Louis and Memphis, and he pointed down to the Florida Gulf Coast, then drew his hand over the map across Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana and he said, ‘This is the dead zone of the United States.”

I said, “What do you mean?”

“Economically,” he said, “it’s not thriving. Its politics are regressive. Environmentally it’s a disaster. And it doesn’t have the leading intellectual activity of the East and West coasts.”

As someone who grew up in New England, I was flabbergasted. I said, “But it has produced and continues to produce music, movements for social justice, literature, foodways, and other forms of culture that affect the whole country, indeed the world. It’s a bellwether for the painful mingling of peoples, as well as for their most creative output.” I said, “How can you call it a ‘dead zone’ and rank it purely in economic and political terms when in cultural terms, it arguably has the most influential regional culture in America?”

I think it’s sadly typical for people to think quickly of the East Coast and the West Coast, but tend not to think of the South Coast, the Gulf Coast. What I call the Third Coast is considered by some the defeated coast, the coast of cheap labor and poor environment. Now, I’m no defender of regressive politics and ecological irresponsibility, and I know that broken economies lead to broken lives. But I’m a real believer that cultural power can, and is, providing a way to help transform the Deep South

There is tremendous creativity at points where the cultures here have crossed-over with one another. New Orleans is one of those points. This city is the second most popular urban tourist destination in the country, after San

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Francisco. It takes specialty regional and ethnic musics such as rhythm and blues, jazz, Cajun, zydeco, and creolizes them, becomes a serving bowl for them. That cultural mix of music was what led me here and it is what keeps me here. What New Orleans is facing now is how do we notch-up the regional quality and economic impact of cultural programming, cultural tourism, and music “industry”related activities without compromising values of community life and cultural expression for our own sake here with excessive commercialism and all the attendant problems for community-based music and other art forms of say a Motown- or Nashville-type situation.

With the possible exception of TV cooking shows, I think American Routes is the only nationally syndicated public media program out of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. As we aim for a broader audience on American Routes, we work outward from the creolized musics of the South, trying to convey qualities of New Orleans as our point of reference, our urban village, using ambient sounds and local voices. We’re lucky enough to produce the show in the French Quarter in an old water bottling plant next to the historic Gallier House. The tourists pass down Royal Street, the hustlers lurk in the shadows, and the horses clip-clop by. It’s all out there for the listening.

Tullos: Does being in such a musically distinctive city and region limit your programming?

Spitzer: No, I think it’s the opposite. With New Orleans as our base, we can still move widely around the country, seeking the subtleties of social relations that are in the music in a parallel way to our situation here. Recently we presented Jack Kerouac’s Lowell, Massachussetts. We have chased moose through the Maine woods. We have talked to Navajos about the history of the highway that came through their land called Route 66 and brought problems (cultural loss and stereotypical teepee motels) and progress (more jobs, a restored sense of Navajo nomadic freedom to work on railroads or go West). On that show, we played versions of “Get Your Kicks on Route 66,” along with Native American music, western swing, Texas oilfield rhythm blues–forms of music that both arrived with and comment on the nature of the travel west.

Now, there are certain core genres in American Routes: blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, gospel as well as Cajun and zydeco, that have very strong associations with New Orleans and the region. We add in Memphis, Nashville and the rest of the Southern music by sub-region and that’s a powerful palette. Then there are the artists or styles in “rootsy” popular music that draw on those forms whether it’s Ray Charles or The Band, the Grateful Dead, Merle Haggard, Etta James–there are certain artists that embody those transformations or “routes” versions of “roots” music.

Around that maybe 60 percent music core of the show, we start adding other things, keeping in mind that one person’s familiar song is not another person’s familiar song if you went in a three song set. So, to give the example in Latin music, for people that are interested in Tejano and already like Latino music, they hear Santiago Jimenez doing a regionally well-known ranchera like “Ay te dejó en San Antonio” (“I’m Going to Leave You in San Antonio”). After that you play something familiar to most people who have ever heard oldies, a song that was a novelty hit when it was made and most people don’t know where it came from: Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs’ ‘Wooly Bully.” In “Wooly Bully” you have a song that probably relates to humor about supernatural beliefs and certain types of malevolent animal spirits chasing around in everyday life, some people call it the “chupa cabra.” Maybe you don’t and maybe you do, but nonetheless that aesthetic, that humor is there to an original audience. ‘Wooly Bully” was produced by Stan Kessler, who had worked with and written songs for Elvis at Memphis’ Sun Records. It became a huge pop hit. But people still don’t know what the Wooly Bully might be, they just kind of relate to the pulsing rockabilly/ rhythm blues feel and its exoticism.

We put ‘Wooly Bully” back in another context by

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playing it next to the traditional ranchera I mentioned in the Tejano conjunto tradition. Santiago Jimenez and Sam Samudio of Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs are both from Texas. The completion of the three song set comes when you put Los Lobos on the other side of “Wooly Bully.” The guys in Los Lobos appreciate “Wooly Bully” and the traditional Tejano music but are themselves progressive, next generation, intellectual Mexicano Californians. They get how those songs are put together which are also well received by FM rock listeners of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.

Once you’ve done that sort of three song segué you help audiences hear the relationships between all of these things: the traditional ranchera, the pop standard that has been beaten to death in oldies formats, and Los Lobos singing about alienation in American life in a song called “One Time, One Night in America.” So our art in the show is partly the art of the segué, that continuity, that set of juxtapositions that allow these things to be heard in a fresh way. If was going to continue out of this set, knowing that guitarist David Hidalgo of Los Lobos grew up hearing and being influenced by the California rockabilly of the Bakersfield Arkies and Okies like Buck Owens, I’m now freed by having heard those guitar lines in Los Lobos to play some Buck Owens. (And I hope Buck or someone appreciates that!)

Seriously, we try never to dwell too long on any genre of music. All of these people and musics are in migration in history, in real life and in our show. Things that pop culture has turned into static icons are freed and allowed to flow again.That’s the kind of conscious effort we’re trying for in our mix. To make those things possible, but to do it in a way that’s not static. As much as I’ve talked about it just now, if 1 talked this much on the radio I’d be dead. It has to be done quickly. The music selections speak to each other and to listeners.

This flow of the music is the everyday, living, breathing aspect of American Routes. The way the show is put together always has a basis of juxtaposition, transformation, and texture. Making forms of American classical music (Ives, Still, Copeland) work with classic jazz (Ellington, Basie) next to blues, next to country, on and on. But we are also interested in themes. Sometimes themes are based around interviews. We’re currently doing a series of programs featuring the living New Orleans piano professors like Allen Toussaint and Henry Butler. The theme is how these piano professors mingle European and popular music aesthetics with jazz and blues and new forms of African-American popular music. Artist interviews give a sense of an anchor to these programs that also include cuts from Louis Gottschalk, rural black banjo players, piano boogie music, and so on.

Shows may be completely thematic but still listenable even if you’re not particularly interested in the theme. For instance, in the Jack Kerouac show, we put him back into

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the context of where he was born and grew up. Many people think of Kerouac as the alienated existential traveller who wrote of his search for an America sans any home place. Your readers probably know that Kerouac was from a French-speaking family and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts’ industrial setting. In our show, we infer that his alienation stems in part from his sense of rejection in New England as a French-speaking person. We talk to French people from Lowell; talk to people who worked in the same factories as some of his family or friends. It offers an opportunity to play a lot of music and do something that’s of interest in an evocative way. We don’t demand that everyone listen closely, but if they do, it’s all there to imagine and take further in their own minds.

This same show does a lot with the music of the Beats. It allowed us to play a lot of be-bop jazz and a lot of the more existential blues. It also let us run a little Beat poetry in there, hear manifestions in popular culture and consider music that somewhat parodies the Beats-like Huey ‘Piano’ Smith’s “Beatnick Blues.” Slim Gaillard’s “Yip Roc Heresy” allows us to talk about scat singing, where people use nonsense syllables as a melodic line or work them as instruments that jam over melody, and also identify the notion of “vocalese” which is where people take actual song words and make them conform literally to the melodic line or the instrumental line. You get to bring out a lot about where that music came from, how it’s put together, how it’s entertaining, without asking people to be listening to a documentary close-up about the Beats.

We also did a Labor Day show knowing that weekend is a kind of a playtime, end of summer, and in many people’s minds has moved away from a celebration of one big union and solidarity and the American labor movement. We wanted to give some history of the American labor movement. For that we used a grand figure, folklorist Archie Green, and recordings he had compiled of workers singing songs. Archie helped us set the scene. He noted that very few labor song are currently listened to by workers. What are they listening to? The popular music of the time. For example in country music: Merle Haggard’s ‘Workin’ Man’s Blues,” Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It,” as well as lighter entertainment.

In that show we also played the legendary Paul Robeson singing about the labor leader Joe Hill, next to Randy Newman singing “Mr. President, Have Pity on the Working Man” which was a mid1970s retro, almost Brechtian representation of 1930s Depression labor strife but still the parlor piano and art song style made it work next to “Joe Hill.” Then Ray Charles in the 1960s singing Harlan Howard’s “Busted” which is itself a kind of a theatrical presentation of the working man or woman’s plight, sung by a soul/rhythm and blues singer. So, in three songs you get a Black activist singing in European art style about labor radicalism and social justice, a tongue-in-cheek representation of the thirties in Randy Newman, and then finally a wildly popular artist from the 1960s singing what was originally a country song. They all are addressing the place of economic well being and work in people’s lives.The Labor Day show went between serious historical discussion of the history of labor in the U.S. and its significant but entertaining manifestations in music. At one point, at Archie Green’s request, we juxtaposed Pete Seeger with Merle Haggard. To me that’s both illustrative and entertaining.

I’m not saying I don’t have a point of view in all this, but I really believe strongly in letting different kinds of voices be heard. If somebody thinks I’m being a little too arch or ironic from my eclectic populist perspective, they can tell me that on our web site (www.americanroutes.org) and IT respond as best I can.

Tullos: Interviews with performers are a regular feature of American Routes. How do you approach these?

Spitzer: If somebody is really well known we try to find out more about their attachment to roots music and culture. And if somebody is a relatively unknown folk artist, we are giving them the spotlight, trying to show a broader audience how valuable their traditions are. You take an artist like the late Jerry Garcia who spoke quite frankly about the fact that the old Folkways collection, Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) by Harry Smith was as fundamental to his musical development as playing banjo in a jug band on the West Coast Berkeley folk scene. Having a father that played pop music was important, but so was a grandmother who listened to the Grand Ole Opry. Then, Oakland rhythm and blues radio stations in the 1950s gave a sense of the beginnings of rock and roll to him. All became the sources that Jerry Garcia drew upon to create the Grateful Dead, a band that consumed jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, country, rock and soul that came before it and produced a new form. Jerry was very conscious of all that, incredibly articulate, and, I think, happy to talk about it. It gave him a sense of payback when we did an oral history with him while I was still working at the Smithsonian.

Other interviews have ranged from B.B. King, Irma Thomas, Nicholas Payton and Dr. John to shoeshine men, children doing handclap games, community historians, and taxicab drivers.

Tullos: How much new music is helpful to you, and who are some of the artists involved?

Spitzer: By one medium or another, good, new roots music is finding its routes to new audiences. Among the emerging artists we have featured, let me start in Louisiana with a fabulous young jazz banjo player named Don Vappie, a younger musician from a Creole family who is digging into traditional material and recreating it in very skilled

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ways. I also feel that way about Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, Cajun musicians from rural French Louisiana. They are getting somewhat like a Los Lobos of Cajun music. Beyond Louisiana, I find Gillian Welch not some sort of retro folky re-creating old songs, nor is she a fully contemporary pop country artist, but a singer-songwriter who has taken the essence of Hank Williams, the Carter Family, the old ballads, things like that and woven them into new material that feels extremely fresh. Her album covers suggest she might be a member of the Gudger family. Ironically I hear she grew up in Los Angeles or went to Beverly Hills High. That provokes some mystery to me on how much utility is left in the notion of authencity as we have known and used it. As a folklorist all I can say is that she is “authentically” a very capable artist despite not desecending from some of the community traditions we have always designated as “folk.”

A great cadre of African-American performers are new intellectual exhibitors of the blues. Younger performers such as Alvin Youngblood Hart or a seasoned jazzman like Olu Dara are both bringing a new touch to the country blues. I am also intrigued when more traditional artists like R L. Burnside are being being produced by Beck’s producer–Tom Rothrock–and sounding good in mingling the blues that are clearly in the roots of rock with some of hip-hop rhythms that R.L.’s grandson Cedric plays on drums with 90’s production values.

Records and artists like these are addressing the question of how roots performers can reach old and new audiences in a time when most commercial music radio is hopelessly detached from the local and regional and is programmed entirely by numbers. I hope American Routes is also one of the answers to that problem.

Tullos: What is the reception to American Routes in the program’s inaugural year?

Spitzer: American Routes started in April of 98 with an initial group of twelve stations. Public Radio International set a one-year goal of signing-up one-hundred stations to carry the show. We’re already at around sixty-five stations (see the carriage list accompanying this interview). They are an interesting cross-section, ranging from news and information to community-based stations to classical stations,jazz stations, small towns, big cities, rural areas, Alaska and Alabama. It’s very pleasing. We get letters and email from all over. From mayors and prisoners, musicians, storytellers, gas pump operators. The stations come in different types: sometimes the confidence of a state network joining us urges other state networks to join. When a classical station that has a weekend information format joins us, it encourages other classical stations to join. It’s an additive process. We’re trying to have broad appeal without sacrificing a sense of core continuity from the Gulf Southern cultures and from what I call “consistent eclecticism” that really speaks to the American experience from a perspective seasoned in New Orleans.

Sidebar: American Routes Staff

American Routes is not just a host, with music. There is a staff that produces the program and makes it happen every week. A research team helps make the segments fit together. We have a University of New Orleans staffer, Lauren Callihan who keeps us in touch with the university and the cityscape. Associate producer Lisa Richardson is an ethnomusicologist who has worked in Cajun country and has been a public radio host there. Lisa does background research and maintains archival materials. We also have a technical director, Matt Sakakeeny, who has come out of the mingling of musical performance practice, recording, and engineering. He’s a graduate of the Peabody School and Johns Hopkins. Matt does all our editing digitally, so whether from an old 78, compact disc, LP, field recorded cassette or DAT, it all goes into the digital editing system so that it can be moved around, seguéd, raised and lowered in volume, and have noise levels reduced. Matt is the craftsman behind the very seamless sound that we get.

Mary Beth Kirchner is our executive producer, a wise woman in the world of programming for public radio and television. Mary Beth is responsible for a number of important documentaries on public radio over the years, from research into the frontiers of the brain to elderly nuns and the “graying of the convent.” She helps us understand how we’re communicating and whether we’re being effective or not to the network and the non-initiated who are a big segment of our audience. -N. S.

Here Comes the Farm Labor Organizing Committee

Staff — Tue, 01 Dec 1998 05:00:05 +0000

Here Comes the Farm Labor Organizing Committee

Vol. 20, No. 4, 1998 pp. 24-26

Baldemar Velasquez founded and currently serves as president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee. In August 1998, Velasquez was interviewed at the Southern Regional Council. The Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), a union of migrant and seasonal farmworkers, was founded in l967 by Baldemar Velasquez. Concentrating most of its work in the Midwestern states of Ohio and Michigan, FLOC negotiated contracts in the tomato and cucumber industries with Campbell’s Soup, Vlasic, Heinz, Green Bay, and Aunt Jane companies. The more than 7,000 workers represented by FLOC now receive minimum wage earnings, workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, and social security benefits. FLOC is extending its efforts to North Carolina cucumber workers.

In the breakthroughs that we have had in the North, we have come to realize some fundamental things about the structure of the agricultural industry and, particularly, the contracting and subcontracting arrangements that these international food companies employ-basically it’s the old system of sharecropping. It is used as a technical way to get around the Fair Labor Standards Act and the minimum protections that workers are supposed to enjoy.

One example is the Vlasic Pickle Company, a multinational buyer of cucumbers. They contract with local companies, which are essentially grading stations. The grading stations grade the cucumbers by their sizes and contract with the growers-family farmers-contracting anywhere from twenty to one hundred acres of cucumbers. Each one of those growers employs about one worker per acre. So you have the food company, you have a local grading operation, you have the small family farmer, and then you have the worker. You have two parties between the top decision maker that sets the parameters, and the workers on the bottom who harvest the cucumbers.

Since the sharecroppers are categorized as independent contractors, this arrangement saves the industry 15 to 20 percent of the production costs-the employers’ share of social security, workers’ compensation, and unemployment compensation. Of course, this hurts workers by burdening them with both the employer’s and the employee’s share of social security. Workers pay this out of their meager earnings-a fifty-fifty split of the value of anything they harvest.

The workers harvest three sizes of cucumbers: ones, twos, and threes. The ones are the smallest and the most valuable-because they will fit into glass jars. Before we signed our first agreement in Ohio, the ones were running about fourteen to fifteen dollars per hundred pounds. The worker got half and the farmer got half. Seven or $7.50 for every hundred pounds of those little pickles represents a considerable amount of work for a small amount of money with which workers have to pay a self-employed share of social security.

Starting at the Top

In our northern campaign, we organized the workers on farms according to the particular grading stations they were contracted to, keeping in mind which stations sold to which company. We then demanded negotiations, not with the farmer and not with the local company that bought the cucumbers, but with the multinational food processor that eventually purchased and sold the cucumbers.

One of our first demands was that these multinational companies order their farmers and their local companies to the negotiating table. They did that, allowing us to conduct multi-party, collective bargaining sessions which culminated in an agreement signed by all of the parties.

That breakthrough was significant because we understood that in order for us to truly change the conditions on the farms, there had to be changes in the structure of the operations.

Through this process, we have eliminated the whole sharecropping arrangement in Ohio and Michigan, converted all the workers to employees on an industry-wide scale, not just at one company-not just Vlasic Pickle, not just Aunt Jane, not just Green Bay Foods-but all of them, simultaneously. When we got them all in a basic labor

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agreement, we told them that, by 1993, all workers, on all farms, with all companies, and all farms contracted to all companies will convert their workers to employee status, winning social security, workers’ compensation, and unemployment compensation for the first time. Requiring all companies to agree to this was a very strategic thing to do. If we had only asked Vlasic Pickles to do this and not asked their competitors to do it, then in a few short years Vlasic would have bought its pickles outside of Ohio.

Holding Companies Responsible

We got Vlasic, Heinz, and Dean Foods to pay for the transition so that it would not come out of the farmers’ pockets. The farmers in Ohio, the ones who actually grow the cucumbers, the tomatoes, and other crops, are small family farmers. To us they are big, but to the rest of the country they are small. A farm with five hundred to fifteen hundred acres of corn, wheat, soybeans, and fresh vegetable crops, in our eyes, has a pretty good-sized operation. They are also very important to us because they are the farms that we come to work on. In order for us to preserve our jobs, we have to preserve the operations on the farm. It was important, therefore, for us to get the companies to pay for these transitions.

That is why it is so important for us to have culminated in these historic multi-party, collective bargaining agreements, compelling the multi-national food companies to pay some of the costs of the structural changes. That was the first step. The second step, since we had a financial body to negotiate with, was to start adding some traditional wage demands for the workers from the industry.

If we had attempted that with the farmers, we would have achieved nothing. We would have been negotiating with a low ceiling, determining how much we could win. For instance, we’ve gotten the companies to renovate the labor camps. Instead of the one room shanties for entire families, we’ve got multi-bedroom units, almost like apartments, with self-contained showers and cooking facilities as opposed to the common-use facilities.

This has been a blessing in disguise for a lot of the food companies and the growers because productivity has gone through the roof. In one study done over a three-year period, on the twenty-three farms that were contracted to the Heinz Company in the cucumber operation, productivity went up, on average, 45 percent. That was more than enough to offset some of these increased costs for the labor agreement and wages. We have also managed to increase the wages over 100 percent in these last ten years in Ohio. That price of number one cucumbers has gone up from fourteen or fifteen dollars per hundred pounds to twenty-five and twenty-six dollars in Ohio and Michigan.

Moving to the South and Beyond…

But this creates a problem for us because-and this is where the South ties in–these food companies not only buy cucumbers in Ohio, they buy cucumbers in North Carolina as well. The same companies–Dean Foods, Vlasic–and you have a new player in the South, the Mt. Olive Pickle Company. Mt. Olive is the second largest pickle company in the United States. Since we have negotiating relationships with Dean Foods and Vlasic, we are going to pick on their competitor in the South as our first target. In order for us to create these same changes in the South, Mt. Olive needs to be a player. We can’t ask Dean Foods and Vlasic to do something that their main competitor won’t do.

This is the second step in a broader campaign that we see stretching down into Guanajuato and Michoacon, Mexico. The same companies buy cucumbers there. They use the same structure this contracting, subcontracting style-but this multi-party collective bargaining arrangement is a vehicle to offset the way they would play us off against each other and the way they would keep us from truly creating some change for workers.

The agricultural industry is wealthy enough to provide subsistence and a standard of living so that a family can feed, educate, and clothe its own. All we want is a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work and we’re not getting it.

The reason for us to move into the South is that, in Ohio, to preserve what we have gained we have to lift up the conditions of our counterparts in the pickle industry in the Carolinas.

Redefining Worker Communities

As we bring our campaign to the South, we have to determine a way to organize workers in a systematic way so that we can hold the appropriate people accountable for the conditions and have them pay for the changes. The workers aren’t considered sharecroppers in North Carolina, but they are still paid piece rates. The farmers pay a labor contractor who pays the workers in cash. That takes the responsibility of worrying about deductions off the farmers who can claim that the labor contractor is the employer.

Who are these workers? They are Mexicans, Guatemalans. They scout around to see what jobs are here–

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poultry, hog processing, and construction. About 50 percent of the workers that we represent under union agreements in Ohio and Michigan are undocumented workers. Since the same workers are working in tobacco harvesting and sweet potatoes we know that if you organize cucumber workers you can extend your organization into other crops.

This is the way we organized the fresh market tomato crop in Ohio. We first organized a labor-intensive crop like cucumbers. But since those same workers stay over to harvest the fresh market tomatoes and work in the packing sheds after the harvest, they began to say, ‘Well, why don’t we get this under contract also?” Last year, we were able, in just one month, to organize the entire fresh market tomato crop in Ohio. It was eight hundred or nine hundred workers, two packing sheds, and seven or eight big tomato farms.

If we organize the cucumber workers in North Carolina, we will have the labor force in a basic, organized unit to begin to demand recognition in tobacco and sweet potatoes, the crops that sandwich the pickle crop. If we don’t organize North Carolina, the companies will begin to contract more acreage in the South instead of Ohio and Michigan. If they have to pay four or five times higher prices to harvest the cucumbers, they will buy more and more of their crops from North Carolina. If we organize North Carolina and bring those standards up, we’ll have an equal and competitive field. Some of the biggest supporters we have in Ohio are now the family farmers who used to arrest us and throw us in jail. Now they are saying, “Yeah, go down there and organize North Carolina.”

Unions have to get smart and start redefining who their communities are.Our communities aren’t just a few counties in northwest Ohio. Our communities are any workers who harvest cucumbers for the Mt. Olive Pickle Company, for the Vlasic Pickle Company; wherever they buy them, that’s our community. We are all workers in the same industry. We are, more and more, citizens of these multinational corporations than we are the nations in which we are born.

Immediate Steps in North Carolina

Our North Carolina office is in Faison, the Mt. Olive region. Most of their market is in the Deep South so we are planning simultaneous boycott actions in twenty Southern cities to begin on March 17, 1999. We are looking to connect with groups all over the South to make the Mt. Olive boycott a main focus of activism. We need to popularize it to keep it in the forefront.

We will do actions with workers. We can do strikes. But in Ohio, we learned that workers’ actions must be done in a way that doesn’t hurt workers. Our efforts require a lot of networking, a lot of collaboration with people, a lot of work outside of the fields to make these companies responsible.

Perhaps this is going to open up another aspect to the voting rights, civil rights, and justice struggle in the South. Thousands upon thousands of workers are here illegally, but employers want them to be here. If they were deported, it would shutdown much of the agricultural economy in the South.

As these workers organize, as they vote and participate in decision-making, they will change the way things are done and broaden the base of democracy.

For more information about FLOC’s work in North Carolina and the Mt. Olive boycott, contact Baldemar Velasquez or Mike Ferner at FLOC, 1221 Broadway, Toledo, Ohio 43609; telephone: (419) 243-3456, or Ramiro Sarabia at FLOC’s North Carolina office at: (910) 267-1637.

Lewis, D’Orso, and Cox: 1998 Lillian Smith Book Award Winners

Staff — Tue, 01 Dec 1998 05:00:06 +0000

Lewis, D’Orso, and Cox: 1998 Lillian Smith Book Award Winners

Vol. 20, No. 4, 1998 pp. 24-26

On November 6, 1998, the 1998 Lillian Smith Book Award for nonfiction was awarded to John Lewis and Michael D’Orso forWalking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998. In the category of fiction, the award went to Elizabeth Cox for her book Night Talk, Graywolf Press, 1998. Below are the remarks of Lillian Smith jury members Cleophus Thomas and Suzanne Jones who introduced Lewis and Cox respectively, and the remarks of the award winners. The awards are given annually by the Southern Regional Council.

Cleophus Thomas:

Mr. Lewis’s affecting narrative is at once a coming of age tale as well as an account of a participant observer of recent American history.

Growing up in Alabama, John Lewis was one of ten children born to Eddie and Willie Mae Lewis, loving parents who referred to each other as Shorty and Sugarfoot. He grew up in a community filled with relatives: Uncle Rabbit, Uncle Goat and cousins by the dozens.

He was an unusual child with a philosophical bent. During the years his parents worked as sharecroppers he saw things this way: “Even a six-year-old could tell that this sharecropper’s life was nothing but a bottomless pit. I watched my father sink deeper and deeper in debt, and it broke my heart. ‘Gambling,’ I would proclaim. ‘This is nothing but gambling. We’re betting on getting ahead, but there ain’t no way. We’re gonna lose. We’re always gonna lose. The Bible says gambling is a sin, and that’s what we’re doing.”

His parents put up with his idiosyncracies. The notion of a truant is a common one. What do you call a child who runs away to school-an attendant, perhaps? As a boy, Lewis would be asked to stay home from school and help his family work the fields. He would hide and catch the bus and go on to school. This act of disobedience received verbal reprimands but never corporal punishment from his parents.

This ambitious boy wanted to attend Troy State University. He met with civil rights attorney Fred Gray and civil rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy. They agreed to take up his cause. His parents’ concern about the community’s likely violent reaction to such a challenge to local custom caused Lewis to end this effort.

His mother found a college for him to attend. She brought home a brochure from her job doing laundry at a Baptist orphanage. The college was the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee. It was from Nashville that Lewis got his start in what we now call the civil rights movement. He was a leader of the first wave of activists integrating lunch counters there. Indeed, the effort in Nashville predated the ultimately more famous lunch counter demonstration in Greensboro, North Carolina.

From Nashville, Lewis would go on to help found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and work hand in hand with Martin Luther King in the Selma to Montgomery march, the March on Washington and most every significant movement battle. In many of these encounters he was brutally beaten. Then and now he practiced the philosophy of nonviolence.

Unlike King, however, he would survive the movement to and enjoy success in electoral politics. Since 1987,

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he has represented Georgia in Congress.

Lewis is in many ways your typical, striving, upwardly mobile American. As he goes back to his alma mater he compliments his classmate, Bernard Lafayette, who now serves as its president. Lewis says: “I don’t know if I’d have it in me to be the president of a small, struggling black college in the 1990s.” Clearly, his tolerance for sacrifice has waned over the years.

As well it should. For Walking with the Wind is about keeping the house on the ground. Being of this world and not morosely fixed on the next. Pursuing citizenship not martyrdom.

John Lewis:

This book, Walking with the Wind, is not just my story. It is the story of countless individuals–black and white, young and old–who put their bodies on the line during a very difficult period in the history of our country. It is the story of faith and hope, of people believing and not giving up.

The story about the storm in rural Alabama during the ’40s is a true story. I will never forget it. Now most of you here wouldn’t know what a shotgun house is. You wouldn’t know. A shotgun house is a house with a tin top. You could fire a gun through the front door and the bullet would come out the back door, or you could throw a brick through the front door and the brick would come out the back door.

My Aunt Soneba lived in a shotgun house and you heard that we were outside playing, a few of my brothers and sisters and a few of my first cousins, about 15 of us. And this storm occurred and she suggested that we all come in. Rain, strong wind, thunder, lightning. She was terrified; we were terrified. She started crying; we started crying. We thought this house was going to blow away. She suggested that we hold hands and we held hands. And when one corner of the house appeared to be lifting from its foundation, we would walk to that corner trying to hold down that shotgun house with our tiny bodies. And when the other side of the house appeared to be lifting, we would walk to that side, trying to hold down this house, with our tiny bodies. So in a real sense, we were walking with the wind. We never left the house.

The Southern Regional Council never left the American house. We must never ever leave the house. The wind may blow, the lightning may flash, the thunder may roll, but we must never ever leave the house. We must stay together and hold the American house together and create one house, one family, the American family, the American house.

During the past few years, many members of this organization and others have been walking with the wind from Selma to Montgomery, to Atlanta, to Nashville, to Raleigh, to Durham, to Charlotte, to Richmond, to Washington. We’ve been walking with the wind and we must continue to walk with the wind and never leave the American house.

So I say that just maybe we all came to this great country in different ships, but we are all in the same boat now and we must hold this house together. This is our house. This is the only house we know as Americans. Here in the American South, we have come to that point where, I truly believe, we are in the process of laying down the burden of race. We will make this house the good house, the beloved house. We will make this house a house that we will be proud of for generations yet to come.

Thank you so much for this honor, this award named for Lillian Smith who was a brave and courageous woman. During the early ’60s I had an opportunity to meet Lillian Smith. Her writings, her words inspired us all to do better. Whatever we do in the days, the weeks, the months, the years to come, we must walk with the wind and let the spirit of history be our guide.

So keep the faith, don’t give up, don’t give in, don’t give out and we must never ever get lost in a sea of despair. We must never ever leave the house. Stay in the house.

Suzanne Jones:

Like the works of Lillian Smith, Elizabeth Cox’s Night Talk provides a strong moral vision and an honest representation of the South–its people, its problems, and its promise. Growing up in Tennessee, Elizabeth Cox witnessed intolerance at close range when she entered the University of Mississippi in the same semester that James Meredith integrated that university. This experience provoked her to speak out as a young woman. The same concerns inform her teaching and her writing. Night Talk is a novel about a black girl, Janey Louise, and a white girl, Evie, who grew up together in the 1950s in a small Georgia town.

When Evie’s father, a biologist, leaves his family to seek adventure in Mexico, her mother, Agnes, suggests that their black housekeeper Volusia and her daughter Janey Louise move into the spare room. The young girls plot to share Evie’s bedroom, and although at first their mothers object, Evie and Janey Louise eventually share not only a room, but night talk–their most intimate secrets and dearest dreams. As Newsday reviewer Allison Xantha Miller has noted, “Within the confines of the home, at least, segregation can be defied; in the dark, race and class differences can dissolve. But in public, racism strains their relationship…. Their relationship mirrors that of their mothers, who, despite mutual dependence and emotional

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support, outwardly conform to expectations. “When Agnes’s white friends visit, Volusia becomes only her maid.

Evie’s narrative is retrospective, and her years growing up with Janey Louise in the 1950s are juxtaposed with their adult relationship in the 1970s, a relationship they have maintained through yearly holiday visits back to Georgia. A scene in which the two old friends go shopping for sexy nightgowns parallels an earlier event in their childhood when a clerk humiliated Janey Louise and made her leave a fancy department store. Cox shows that although much has changed the two women can now be friends in public–the legacy of racism lingers and still tests their friendship. The saleslady keeps checking on the two women, counting the nightgowns they take into the dressing room. Jane believes the saleslady is racist and decides to walk out without buying anything; Evie who has always left with Jane since that first episode twenty years before is tired of having to leave on principle and insists to Jane that the saleslady is not racist but simply rude, and rude to both of them. Elizabeth Cox leaves the truth of the saleslady’s motives ambiguous so that her readers will have to focus on the equally troubling truth of the causes and consequences of Jane’s and Evie’s different interpretations of the incident. Their friendship becomes strained; as Evie says, ‘We didn’t know how to be together anymore. I was afraid of saying something offensive, and no doubt she expected to be offended. We couldn’t laugh at anything. I wished we could just be us again. I wished we could just be us.”

Elizabeth Cox’s novel juxtaposes their early friendship with their adult struggles, both to fully understand the complexity of their childhood relationship and to forge a new intimacy. Night Talk demonstrates that for such understanding to occur, the two women must be honest with each other and they must see each other’s perspective. Elizabeth Cox helps readers, both black and white, do just this. As reviewer Colleen Kelly Warren writes in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Elizabeth Cox, who is white, “seems to have crawled inside the skin” of her black characters, “to have captured not only the cadences of speech but the essence of soul.”

And yet the epilogue, set in 1991, is a chilly and powerful reminder of what it takes to maintain the “beloved community” that John Lewis fought for and describes so passionately and poignantly in Walking With the Wind. Evie contrasts her deep friendship with Jane to the shallow relationship of their 12 year-old daughters, who see each other once a year at Thanksgiving: “they know how to tolerate each other with politeness learned from schools and politicians. They speak guardedly about their feelings, because they have been told that words can start a riot. They do not yet believe that love can stop one.” Jane’s and Evie’s daughters do not know how to argue or laugh at each other because they have never really experienced life together. But Elizabeth Cox does not conclude this novel until Jane and Evie put their daughters in a position to do just that.

Elizabeth Cox:

When I began writing Night Talk, I did not know the story was going to be about issues of race. The book in its early stages was about a girl whose father had left home. When the black characters–Volusia, Janey Louise, Joe Sugar, Albert–entered the story, they became alive in my mind and took over the book. I struggled with the obvious problem that I knew too little about the perspective of these characters, but each time the fear stopped me, I thought: I’m writing about human intolerance–frailty and need–the ways we love and betray each other. In Night Talk, Evie, the white girl, and Janey Louise, the black girl, live in the same house and even share the same room for a period of eight years. Their talk at night is more honest, more intimate, than anything that happens to them in the daytime. Over the years they build a floor of love that is stronger than the ways they eventually fail each other.

When Lillian Smith speaks of the rivers, the red clay of Clayton, Georgia, the smells of pies baking, of body sweat, of “dried petals in the blue bowl in the parlor,” I am reminded of my own childhood. I can remember the cruel perplexities that made my grandmother pay a black child to play with my brother. At five years of age my brother thought he had a friend–I’m sure both children felt that way–until the payments stopped and they couldn’t play again. I remember the whispers of moral rectitude from nice people that could mold a child’s mind into conformity.

Lillian Smith claims that she became different because she wrote about social and political inequities. She explored layers of her psyche that she had never touched before. I know that while writing my novel, I thought–with great arrogance–that I could move into a better understanding of the black experience. I had a hard time finishing the book, until I realized that Evie would never understand what Jane had gone through, and she would never understand how much had to be forgiven–something I hoped my reader would come to see.

This book has spawned several “conversations between the races”–in North Carolina, Minnesota, and Massachusetts. One wonderful thing about the Lillian Smith Award is that it may allow me to create more opportunities for these conversations.

I heard a speaker in Cambridge, Massachusetts–a man named Richard Wright–say that very often such dialogues end up with whites going home “feeling good about themselves” and blacks feeling “on display.” In

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order to prevent that dynamic an action needs to follow the night of conversation. In that spirit, I urged my audience to consider what action could be taken. At the very least (and maybe the best step) would be further conversations, and visits into each other’s homes.

At the first conversation in North Carolina, an African-American woman began by saying to me: “I saw this book in the library and read the flap copy and thought This sounds interesting,’ then I turned to the back cover and saw your face, and said to myself, ‘Right. What does she know?’ I took the book home,” she went on to say, “and thought I might glance through it, but didn’t expect to like it.” Then, she said, to her surprise, she began to identify with many of the experiences described. She used the experiences in the book to talk about her own life. The conversation began in earnest. Blacks spoke of their anger, whites listened, grew defensive, admitted their frustration–one white woman said, “It seems like I’m always doing the wrong thing.” We did some honest talking.

In Minnesota, the first speaker was an African-American woman, a professor of psychology at the university there. After I had read a portion of the novel, she said, “I never come to these things, and I thought the reason I didn’t come was because I was past all that. Now, I realize the reason I don’t come is because this talk dredges up too much pain.

“Man is a broken creature,” Lillian Smith says in Killers of the Dream. “Yes it is his nature as a human being to be so; but it is also his nature to create relationships that can span the brokenness–to put behind us that persistent blindness that has hurt us all.”

An African-American minister in Cambridge, Jeffrey Brown, told me–“Politics will follow the will of the people.” After each of these conversations–people planned to meet again–they left disturbed and excited. The conversations had been honest, angry, awkward, curious, and finally intimate. I hope this award will give me a chance to hold conversations in other places.

Maybe that’s why I wrote this book.