Affirmative Action Foes: Chasing the Initiative

By Amy Wood

Vol. 21, No. 2, 1999, pp. 3-9

Ward Connerly and his deceptively-named American Civil Rights Coalition are on a mission to overturn affirmative action one state at a time. After successful initiative campaigns against affirmative action in California (1996) and Washington (1998), Connerly and the American Civil Rights Coalition (ACRC) are gearing up to do the same in at least two states in the year 2000.

Connerly, a California businessmen-cum-conservative activist, established the ACRC, and its educational affiliate, the American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI), in 1997 in order to provide instructional, political, and financial support to legislators and grassroots organizers seeking to overturn affirmative action. But as legislation to end affirmative action continually fails to pass in state after state the ACRC has turned its primary focus to ballot initiative campaigns. By taking the issue directly to the people, it hopes to circumvent the slippery logistics of state politics, including what it calls “fearful and fickle” politicians.

What these campaigns allow the ACRI to do, however, is distort the issue. Connerly’s Coalition pretends to be championing progressive values of diversity and racial equality, while in actuality it favors tearing away programs that make such diversity and equality possible. If affirmative action supporters are to stop these wolves in sheep’s clothing, voters need not only the truth about affirmative action, but the truth about Ward Connerly and the American Civil Rights Coalition.

Last year Southern Changes (see “Going Nowhere Fast,” Spring 1998) reported that despite the popular perception that many states were ready to overturn affirmative action in the wake of California’s successful Proposition 209, only fifteen states showed any action at all. In 1998, only one of those fifteen, Washington state, actually eliminated affirmative action through its “Civil Rights Initiative,” a campaign abetted by Connerly and the ACRC.

As we discovered last year, legislation to abolish affirmative action is going nowhere. Eight states saw new anti-affirmative action bills introduced in 1998, none of which passed. Legislators are clearly giving up: in 1999, the number so far is down to seven new pieces of legislation, all of which are at a standstill. (See chart on page 8.) Nor have congressional challenges succeeded; four federal legislative moves against affirmative action during 1998 and 1999 were defeated.(See summary on page 13.)

The ACRI attributes this failure not to any public disregard for anti-affirmative action, but rather to “cowardly” politicians who cave-in to “powerful minority lobbies,” blatantly ignoring the will of the people, whom it claims are ready to eliminate the “unfair preferences and discrimination” that affirmative action programs supposedly promote. As the initiative campaigns in Washington and California show, Connerly and his people have mobilized votes for their efforts. For the year 2000, ACRI has such a campaign underway in Florida, with Michigan also within their scope. The organization also acknowledges interest in Nebraska, Oregon, Ohio, and Colorado for anti-affirmative action initiatives, but no one in any of these states has grabbed the reins-yet.

Why Florida and Michigan? According to Kevin Nguyen, director of state affairs, the ACRC does not target particular states for initiatives, and it never comes into a state as an uninvited outsider. Rather, grassroots organizers in Washington, Florida, and Michigan came to ACRC asking for help. But Allen Douglas, executive director of the Associated General Contractors (the building contractors’ union which asked Connerly to help them run a campaign in Florida), says that Connerly came to Florida first-making speeches and meeting with Republican party officials-before Douglas contacted him. Connerly clearly makes himself most visible and accessible in states that might be conducive to an initiative campaign (like Florida, where an initiative campaign failed in 1997; like Michigan, where there is currently an anti-affirmative action lawsuit again the University of Michigan; like Oregon, lodged between the anti-affirmative successes in California and Washington.)

Once the ACRC is invited in, however, the kind of

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support it offers differs from state to state. “It is not a cookie-cutter process” explains Nguyen, “we adapt strategies to the unique circumstances of each state.” In Washington, ACRC largely acted as a clearinghouse for various organizers who were working on the campaign, and, of course, as a fundraiser. In Michigan, its involvement so far has been minimal. Connerly visited the state in 1998 and is talking to Republican State Senator Bill Bullard on beginning a campaign. Bullard says the initiative has already passed an informal review by the Secretary of State and is now under a formal review by the state board of canvassers (appointed by the governor and consisting of two Democrats and two Republicans). This board will approve the language of the bill and write the one-hundred-word summary that will go on the petition. When, or if, the initiative passes this process, Bullard will begin gathering the 304,000 signatures needed for it to be on the election ballot in 2000. Although Bullard is confident of passage, he is working largely alone; there is no organizational structure in place to run a campaign, he has not raised any money, nor has the ACRC provided more than advisory help.

Florida is clearly the state to watch in the year ahead. Connerly and the ACRC are taking on a more direct and involved role than in Washington. The Associated General Contractors (AGC), the nation’s oldest and largest contractor’s union, was supportive of Connerly’s California and Washington campaigns, and, according to Douglas, has been behind many court cases to “outlaw minority preferences.” Florida’s branch of the AGC, with between 1,700 – 2,000 members, mostly building contractors, has pledged financial and political support for the initiative, but they have asked the ACRC to manage the initiative campaign.

The ACRC has hired a savvy, experienced political consultant, Herb Harmon, to do just that. While the 1997 campaign, Harmon says, “never really got off the ground at all, this campaign is more serious; it is being handled by professionals.” The ACRC clearly hopes that Harmon, who is the ex-director of the Republican party in Florida and handled the Bush and Reagan campaigns in the South, will not only bring the campaign to fruition, but that he can help smooth relations with the reluctant Republican party.

Indeed, Republican Governor Jeb Bush has said that although he opposes “rigid quotas and set-asides,” he believes ACRC’s campaign would be divisive and untimely. For that reason, he has ostensibly asked Connerly to leave Florida alone. In a letter to Connerly, written in February, 1999, Bush writes, “Ward, we live in a state where our education system denies our children the basic right to learn; where child abuse and neglect are an expectation, not the exception; where taxes and mandates stifle economic competitiveness; where our urban core residents are in need of an improved quality of living; and where our developmentally disabled and seniors are not receiving the services they should. As I explained, my concern is that a bitter political campaign that divides Florida by race or ethnicity would keep our state from focusing on these pressing issues-issues on which I must build a consensus.”

The ACRC is not persuaded however. “There is never a good time to solve a problem,” says Harmon. They are also confident that Bush’s lack of support will not be an issue for them. “If we could win in Washington with strong opposition from a popular, politically-established Democratic governor [Gary Locke], we don’t fear opposition from a new Republican governor,” explains Nguyen. The reason for this lack of republican support, according to Karen Narasaki, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, is the negative repurcussions that followed the party’s strong support of the initiatives in California and Washington. “Republicans looked at what happened in California and Washington and realized that it hurt them. The measures passed, but their candidates lost votes. They lost control of the legislature in California and Washington. It would be foolish for them to take up the cause again,” says Narasaki.

It is still too soon to tell how this lack of support will affect the campaign in Florida. The initiative campaign is only in the beginning stages: getting legally filed as a political action committee, and deciding on the language of the ballot. The approval process for an initiative is much more difficult in Florida than in either California or Washington. It must be approved by the local supervisor of elections, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and finally the state Supreme Court before campaigners can begin to gather the 435,000 signatures to qualify for the ballot.

Proponents of affirmative action who are working to counter this effort in Florida are hoping that the initiative never makes it out of the approval process. If it does, Harmon is certain that Florida’s voters will approve it: “the popular support is there, it just a matter of mobilizing that support.”

Mobilizing support through adept political strategy is what the ACRC excels in. While the tactics in each state differ, the particular political strategy it employs to publicize these initiatives and lure voters remains the same. It is this aspect of Connerly’s strategy that most threatens fairness.

Money

One of the ACRC’s strongest means to assist these campaigns is with money. It costs about as much to run an initiative campaign as it does to run any political campaign. According to Allen Douglas, the Florida campaign hopes to raise up to 10 million dollars for their initiative, which Harmon will begin doing as soon as the petition is approved. Much of this money will come through the ACRC’s

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fundraising efforts. According to a forthcoming report by the Institute for Democracy Studies (IDS), Connerly matched every dollar that the Washington Initiative 200 campaigners raised within the state with out-of-state money. As stated in its 1997 tax returns, the ACRC itself put up $177,650 out of its own budget.

Crucial to these fundraising efforts is the financial support of the Republican Party. In the campaign for Proposition 209 in California, for instance, the Republican Party donated 2.5 million dollars, over a third of the total amount raised. The GOP was similarly involved in the Washington campaign. Governor Bush’s very publicized snub of Connerly in Florida could have real political effects on the ACRC’s campaign there.

In addition to official Republican support, the ACRC/ACRI also receives money from wealthy businessmen and investors, and from leading national conservative thinktanks and institutes. The ACRC/ACRI itself refuses to divulge the names of its donors, stating that it wants to protect the anonymity of these benefactors. But according to the IDS research, Connerly’s organizations have received large donations from ultra-right wing groups, most significantly from the Bradley Foundation and the Scaife Foundation, both of which openly proclaim a conservative, “traditional values” agenda. Connerly’s anti-affirmative action initiatives are to be sure one of their causes that will restore conservative values.

Money alone is not necessarily the key to success. After all, with ample financial support from the Democratic Party, and corporations like Boeing and Microsoft, proponents of affirmative action in Washington were not able to win the day. Connerly and the ACRC have been particularly shrewd in devising a political strategy to seduce voters with progressive-sounding and benign rhetoric, while at the same, inflaming fears of racial competition and “preferential treatment.”

Ballot Language

The initiative language in both Washington and Florida follows that of California’s proposition 209: “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contraction.” Buzz words like “discriminate” and “preferential treatment” conceal the true intent of the initiative. Because discrimination

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and preferential treatment have historically been used against women and minorities, the language sounds as if the initiative is championing the progressive goals of the Civil Rights Movement. As state Senator Darryl Jones, chair of Florida’s Black Leadership Conference says, the language is so “massively misleading, it’s so benign that most of us would vote for it if we didn’t know what it really meant.”

Indeed, the NAACP discovered that during the Washington campaign, the ACRC had duped some of their African-American volunteers into thinking they were working for a progressive civil rights cause. Proponents of affirmative action in Florida will exert much of their effort in educating voters to the meaning and design of these innocuous, benevolent-sounding initiatives.

But Jones is also hoping that the vagueness of the language trips up the campaign before it reaches voters. Indeed, the drawn-out approval process in Florida is a large source of hope. Florida law states that ballot initiatives must deal with a single issue written in language that must be “forthcoming,” that is, it must do what it says it will do. The fact that the initiative as it is written deals with public education, employment, and contracting at once was not a problem in Washington or California, but it may be in Florida. For this reason, Harmon has put together four initiative petitions. One is all-inclusive and is modeled directly after California’s Proposition 209. The other three deal specifically with education, employment, and contracting, respectively.

It is on the “forthcoming language” clause, that Jones and his affirmative action colleagues proponents will focus, arguing that the initiative will in no way end discrimination and that Florida laws to counter the effects of discrimination and to act as a preventative already exist.

None of the (affirmative action) programs that these initiative programs target use the terms “preferences” or “preferential treatment.” “Preference,” notes Narasaki, “that’s a loaded term. It conjures up visions of unqualified people getting ahead solely based on race or gender.”

In fact, a recent poll conducted by the ACRI shows that 83 percent of Floridians (including 79 percent of African Americans polled) support eliminating “discrimination” and “preferences,” while another poll conducted by the Orlando Sentinel found that only 45 percent of Floridians support ending “affirmative action” (including only 18 percent of African-American respondents).

If the ballot language stated clearly that the intiative would eliminate affirmative action, then the measure would have a much smaller chance of passage.

This is exactly what happened in a failed initiative in Houston, Texas, to end affirmative action in public hiring and contracting in November of 1997. (The state of Texas does not have an initiative process, so the ACRC instead has been working there at the local level.) When supporters of affirmative action brought the language of the initiative to the courts, the initiative was changed to read that it would “eliminate affirmative action that benefits women and minorities.” The initiative was subsequently defeated by a 54 percent to 44 percent margin. The ACRC, of course, argues that the move to change the language was a “politically-calculated action” on behalf of the mayor and the liberal political establishment. “It is an inappropriate statement,” says Nguyen, “if it were true, we would support it.”

Public Rhetoric

ACRC and its supporters and allies across the nation repeatedly assert that they are not against affirmative action, “as long as it is broad-based and not discriminatory.” “We are not against helping the disadvantaged,” explains Nyugen, “but through aggressive outreach programs and recruitment efforts.” In this manner, supporters of these initiatives position themselves as not only benign, but as progressive, and even liberal. They don’t want to end affirmative action, they say, they only want to do away with unfair “discrimination” and “preferences.”

Besides language tactics, the ACRC and its supporters have other ways of affecting strategy. For one, they publicly distance themselves from extreme conservative or racially inflammatory positions. For example, Bullard and the ACRC had been very careful to disassociate themselves from another Michigan state senator, David Jaye, who for some years has been introducing legislation to eliminate “discrimination” and “preferences” in the Michigan legislature. Jaye, however, according to Bullard, is a “lightning rod”-a confrontational and controversial politician who has in the past said some very “racially inflammatory” things. “Jaye doesn’t represent mainstream Republicans nor the people of Michigan,” Ngyuen adds.

Similarly, the ACRC/ACRI does not divulge its funding sources presumably because many of its donors are affiliated with more right-wing positions than the ACRC/ACRI would like to be publicly associated with. For instance, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife-who according to the Sarah Scaife Foundation’s 1998 annual report, gave $275,000 to ACRI in 1998-is a controversial, ultra-right-wing figure, viewed as the financial engine behind the modern right-wing movement. According to the Washington Post, Scaife’s foundation has donated at least 340 million dollars to numerous conservative causes, media outlets, and institutions such as the Heritage Foundation, and The American Spectator. Last year, Scaife, heir to the Mellon banking fortune, was revealed as the chief financier behind various anti-Clinton activities (he was, for example, a primary backer of the Paula Jones case). While the ACRC/ACRI or Connerly himself may or may not be as politically conservative as these benefactors, they certainly do not want

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potential voters to think they are. Indeed, though their money comes from well-known Republican and conservative institutions, Connerly and his spokesmen are careful not to position themselves as right-wing or conservative in any way. Rather, they state emphatically that they are working for social progress and justice.

Such a position has the political effect of appealing to a large block of the public who is undecided, or who support a “mend it, don’t end it approach.” For example, a poll conducted on the eve of the Washington initiative by The Seattle Times revealed that “most voters expressed support for affirmative action programs for minorities and women but said those programs were in need of reform”

The ACRC’s rhetoric taps into this middle-of-the-road support. Indeed, it even argues that these initiatives have the effect of re-mobilizing and bringing new energy to affirmative action programs through “aggressive outreach and recruitment efforts.” Nyugen asserts for instance that in California, Prop 209 “forced people to get off their duffs and go out and aggressivly recruit and help the disadvantaged [initiate] active participation in disadvantaged areas.”

In this vein, the ACRI says that it approves of need-based affirmative action programs and supports the law the California legislature recently passed to accept the top 4 percent of every high school class into California’s university system. This law, enacted as a response to the dearth of minority enrollment in the university system in the wake of 209, aims to maintain diversity through the de facto segregation of California’s public school system. If the top 4 percent of every school are accepted, it will include the top 4 percent of minority-dominated high schools, thereby assuring minorities a place in the University system. But since each high school, to be sure, has a different standards for grades and test scores, the law will effectively re-instate the uneven standards of “merit” that ACRI supposedly disputes. Yet Nguyen says they support the law because “it will give hope to all individuals (the 4 percent law) wouldn’t devastate the applicant pool, it will strengthen it.” Washington, he adds, is looking “keenly” at California’s model.

In their support for “progressive” steps like the 4 percent rule, as well as their rhetoric which evokes the Civil Rights Movement, the ACRC/ACRI have not only disguised themselves as moderate and even progressive, they have framed proponents of affirmative action as reactionary, emotional conservatives who are afraid of reasonable and effective change. “For white people affirmative action is an issue,” asserted Ward Connerly last year at a Michigan public hearing, “for black people it is an emotion.”

“The insidious nature through which they camouflage themselves divides us,” responds René Redwood, executive director of Americans for a Fair Chance. “It does not bring us together.” She adds that supporters of affirmative action need to learn not only how to counter these political strategies, but they also need to work positively for progressive action that gets beyond the racial paradigm within which the debate surrounding affirmative action is stuck.

Indeed, at the same time that Connerly positions himself as non-discriminatory and broadminded, he continually speaks of affirmative action only in terms of race, tapping into white America’s racial fears and anxieties. Leslie Gross, staff attorney in the National Litigation Project of the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights, explains, “Connerly packages his pleas for colorblindness in race-baiting terms. He paints the issues in terms of black and white, targeting hot-button issues like busing. That’s not what affirmative action is about.” Similarly, Redwood and others have pointed out that Connerly talks about racial progress and ending discrimination, but he has no real strategy to implement such progress in schools or communities. “He’s either knowingly misleading,” according to Darryl Jones, “or he’s incompetent.”

Positive Action

Those actually working for racial equity and progress must implement a two-pronged strategy to counter Connerly’s efforts. In Florida, a coalition of pro-affirmative organizations has formed and has begun to plan their defense. The coalition, named FREE (Floridians Representing Equity and Equality) is made up of groups representing minority, women’s, labor, and other progressive concerns. First, they intend to educate the public about the real goals and designs behind the initiative effort; they will not let Connerly get away with his seemingly benign and enlightened rhetoric.

According to Florida’s NAACP director, Leon Russell, FREE will “smoke out” the Associated General Contractors’ role in the initiative, highlighting the “anti-competition” anxiety that bolsters anti-affirmative action feeling. “They [the contractors] want to remove the competition of women and minorities” says Russell, “We want to warn Floridians what this initiative is about. Floridians will support us if the language and purposes are clear.”

In addition to what Darryl Jones calls an “ongoing education” of the people of Florida, FREE also is planning proactive tactics to ensure affirmative action’s survival in the state. In 1998, FREE presented a proposed constitutional amendment to the commission appointed to review Florida’s state constitution (a revision that occurs every twenty years) which would ensure the maintenance of affirmative action programs in the state in order to remedy past discrimination. Russell said FREE backed off this proposal when national NAACP leadership feared it might bring out opponents and unnecessarily re-mobilize an anti-affirmative action campaign (after the 1997 initiative plan had died). Russell says now FREE will re-present their plan

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for a constitutional amendment that supports and guarantees public affirmative action programs in the form of a separate initiative campaign to compete with Connerly’s. If the group is successful in its petition campaign, there could be two initiatives on Florida’s ballot in the year 2000: one seeking to end affirmative action, the other seeking to ensure its survival. FREE’s initiative campaign, when launched, not only aims to subvert the ACRC’s initiative, but also to help educate voters to the real benefits and purposes behind affirmative action.

It is precisely this form of education that Americans for a Fair Chance’s Redwood argues affirmative action proponents need to be engaging in. Most of all, she asserts, “we need to take affirmative action out of the race-gender paradigm. Too many Americans are blind to the progressive results of affirmative action,” that have not only benefited women and minorities, but all Americans. These benefits include many things that Americans take for granted today-the public postings of job announcements, law enforcement officials representing their own communities, women as officers of the court which has changed how the courts view and treat rape and domestic violence, to name a few.

To make this point, we could learn something from Connerly’s strategy, Redwood adds. “We need to use white men the way they use minorities-as spokespeople-to show that the consequences of affirmative action have been the benefits to the nation as a whole.” Simply put, proponents of affirmative action need to start appealing to that large block of white America wavering in the middle of the road.

However, while Connerly may use fear and dishonesty to run his campaigns, proponents of affirmative action, Redwood insists, must insist on straightforwardness. “We are not willing to lie to people. We trust that people will see through it, and we can help them see those tactics.”

If FREE can do that, they will, in Russell’s words, “do something no other state has done,” that is face Connerly and win.”

“Its not the end of affirmative action” concludes René Redwood. “The face of America is the face of affirmative action.”

Amy Wood is a doctoral candidate in American Studies in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University. She wrote “Going Nowhere Fast: Affirmative Action Opponents Stymied in the States,” in the Spring, 1998 Southern Changes.

My University Under Attack:
The Anti-Affirmative Action Brigade Comes to Virginia
By Paul Gaston

Vol. 21, No. 2, 1999, pp. 10-11

You never quite know how strongly you will feel about a great public issue until it shows up in your yard. I felt the force of that truism when Linda Chavez came to town in March to talk about a study her Center for Equal Opportunity had released. What it said was that the University of Virginia was guilty of racial discrimination. Our affirmative action program, according to her study, violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause just as the segregation laws once had.

Before she arrived for her talk, the Center for Individual Rights announced that it was likely to file a lawsuit against us, based on the findings of Chavez’s study. It had already won a case against the University of Texas and was hot in pursuit of the University of Michigan. After all the years of struggle here to overcome our racist heritage-a struggle we have every right to be proud of-it now appeared that our new enemy was to be not from within but from without, an enemy boasting, without irony or embarrassment, to stand for equal opportunity and individual rights.

The large auditorium was packed, with many students standing. They heard Ms. Chavez tell them that you don’t “end discrimination by discriminating against new groups of people.” Our admissions policy, she claimed, “smacks of the kind of racism that has long plagued this nation.” We must not “continue to judge people based on the color of their skin.” Then she told us that Martin King’s legacy was on her side, not ours, because he believed in a color-blind society and wanted to judge people only on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

Her attempt to claim Dr. King for her side didn’t surprise me. Most “color-blind conservatives” I know distort his words to make them say the opposite of what he meant. It is true that he said that his dream was deeply rooted in the American Dream. But he also said that his nightmare was deeply rooted in the reality of American racism. I recalled that he had said, in his “dream” speech, something about the dream being a promissory note that had come back from the bank of justice marked “insufficient funds.”

In the aftermath of Chavez’s speech one of our student columnists wrote that our policy was to make it easier for blacks, because they are black, to get into the university than it is for whites. “The admissions office should not admit minority students under a different standard than white students,” he wrote. He then added his coup de grace: “This is racial discrimination, plain and simple.”

Of course it is not “racial discrimination,” plain or simple. I suppose the student meant no offense, but his statement seemed grotesque to me, claiming a moral equivalency between two diametrically opposed realities. It strains credulity to believe anyone can really believe that affirmative action and white supremacy are occupants of a common bed of evil. The same is true for the use of such popular terms as “reverse discrimination,” suggesting a turning of the tables by blacks on whites. Such assertions need to be swept away so they may not be used as justifications for the end of affirmative action.

Gearing up for the struggles ahead of us, I sat down to see if I could fashion a metaphorical broom. This is what I came up with.

Racial discrimination, in its historic sense, meant that black people, not individually but as a race, could not:

• attend schools attended by white people;
• attend schools equal to those of white people;
• drink from the same water fountains, relieve themselves in the same toilets, or wash their hands in the same basins used by white people;
• eat in the same restaurants as white people;
• sleep in the same motels and hotels; swim at the same pools and beaches as white people;
• sit next to white people in lecture halls, concerts, or other public auditoriums;
• sit next to white people on buses or streetcars or other means of public transportation;
• be born or treated in the same hospitals or buried in the same graveyards as white people;
• vote or hold public office;
• expect to live in the same neighborhoods, hold the same jobs, or attain the same standards of living as white people.

These are particular forms of historic racial discrimination. They are well-known for their place in law and as the manifestations of white supremacy the Civil Rights Movement sought to end. But we need also to recall the values and beliefs of the white supremacy culture that gave rise to and justified this racial discrimination, its ultimate reason for being. These included the belief that black people, not individually but as a race, were genetically inferior to white people and that this genetic deficiency was responsible for the fact that black people were: less intelligent than white people; more prone to crime than white people; diseased;

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unclean; untruthful; unreliable; immoral; violent; sexually promiscuous; and sexually threatening, through their men, to white women.

The list could go on. These beliefs also led whites to condone lynch mobs, poverty, malnutrition, and sickness; and invent means beyond counting of handing out insult and injury.

Affirmative action means none of these things. It bears no generic, historic, analogous, or constitutional relationship to racial discrimination and the white supremacy myths that created it. What affirmative action in education does mean is: a broad effort to identify potential black applicants and to encourage them to apply for admission, often in the face of institutional and emotional barriers; judging each applicant holistically as an individual, not as a member of a race; offering admission to black students whose application materials are predictive of their success in the university; offering admission to some black students whose SAT scores and grades are lower than those of some white or Asian or Hispanic applicants who are not offered admission; a systematic program of encouraging successful black applicants to accept their offers of admission; an objective measure of the success of these actions in achieving their goals.

These are the particular forms of today’s affirmative action. They are the manifestations of a philosophy rooted in the American Dream. The values and beliefs that gave rise to and justify affirmative action, its ultimate reason for being, need to be recalled. These include the belief that: black people, not individually but as a race, are not genetically inferior to white people; universities share a national obligation to acknowledge and use their resources to help overcome the effects of historic racial discrimination; Virginia’s obligation is peculiarly enhanced by its long history of slavery, segregation, and the denial of education to Afro-Virginians; the effects of historic racial discrimination are far from having been eliminated in social institutions and individual assumptions; abolition of affirmative action would be a major setback for the university’s effort to overcome the effects of historic racial discrimination; affirmative action neither excludes nor favors any individual solely on the basis of race; affirmative action is a positive, not a negative, action. It harmonizes with and is essential to the university’s overall mission to produce the best educated, most creative, responsible, and public-spirited citizenry possible.

Our admissions dean and his associates try to take a holistic approach, judging each applicant as a whole person, taking into account, in addition to academic ability, the peculiar interests, needs, talents, skills, sex, race, nationality, and place of residence-all these and probably more. The result is that some students from every applying category are rejected: white, black, Hispanic, Asian-as well as male and female, brilliant and not brilliant, rich and poor, athlete and non-athlete, the musician and the tone deaf, leaders and followers, Virginians and non-Virginians. To say that one of these whose application for admission is not successful is a victim of “discrimination” is to empty the word totally of its derogatory meaning-making choices on the basis of class or race or category without regard for individual merit; to show prejudice-and return it to its literal meaning-to make clear distinctions; to make sensible decisions; to judge wisely; to show careful judgment. Understanding the word this way would be a good thing, but it is not likely that an opponent of affirmative action would agree, nor would concede that we have to make choices and that our discriminating judgment should be trusted. And yet that is precisely what a moral and fair university must do to meet its obligations to the citizenry, the national interest, and the students. There is no magic formula, no fixed scale for assigning points for each human characteristic. There is discrimination, good faith, a sense of history, and the vision of a future made better by our colleges and universities.

So Ms. Chavez was wrong when she told her audience here that we are “discriminating against new groups of people.” She was wrong when she said that our admissions policy “smacks of the kind of racism that has long plagued this nation.” She was wrong when she implied that we “continue to judge people based on the color of their skin.” And she was wrong when she told us that Martin Luther King’s legacy was on her side, not ours. We need to hold on to these truths as we prepare for the struggles ahead.

Paul Gaston is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Virginia. He is a Life Fellow and former president of the SRC.This essay is excerpted from his booklet (June, 1999) “Reflections on Affirmative Action:Its Origins, Virtues, Enemies, Champions, and Prospects,” available from the University of Virginia News Service, Booker House, Charlottesville, VA 22903 or on the Southern Regional Council’s website at www.southerncouncil.org.

Reviewing The Test of Our Progress: The Clinton Record on Civil Rights: A Summary of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights Report

By Barry E. Lee

Vol. 21, No. 2, 1999, pp. 12-18

Thirty-one years since the Kerner Commission observed that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white-separate and unequal,” comes an updated warning by the bipartisan Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights in its 1999 report The Test of Our Progress: The Clinton Record on Civil Rights. “No one can deny,” the Citizens’ Commission observes “that much progress has been made since the Kerner Commission made its dire predictions. But . . . it is clear that many in our nation remain untouched by the civil rights laws and the access to service and opportunities that would make them full participants in society.”

Race remains a major determinant in American life, and complicating the picture even more than in the late 1960s, is the reality that the disparities are no longer between blacks and whites, but also involve Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans.

When Bill Clinton became president in 1992, advocates of civil rights waited hopefully as he promised to assemble a cabinet that “looked like America.” After twelve years in which the Reagan and Bush administrations alienated minorities from public policy- making through their stacking of federal courts with conservative appointees and encouraging a climate of racial intolerance-civil rights advocates welcomed Clinton’s recognition of America’s diversity.

What has seven years of the Clinton Administration accomplished in terms of civil rights? The Citizens’ Commission’s recently released study, The Test of Our Progress, is an evaluatuion of Clinton’s civil rights record.

The Citizens’ Commission was founded in 1981 after President Reagan removed the late Arthur S. Fleming as chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Fleming, along with a colleague from the Commission, William L. Taylor, created the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights. Bipartisan in nature, the Commission is composed of seventeen members, chosen from the ranks of government, business, or other arenas where civil rights were a high priority. New members are chosen by the current members and there are no term limits.

Published in 1999, The Test of Our Progress is a two-part study. Part one is a report on the response of the Clinton Administration and Congress to civil rights challenges and a series of recommendations. The second part is composed of working papers by authors considered knowledgeable by the Commission in particular areas of civil rights.

Many of the authors are lawyers, public policy experts, or advocates otherwise engaged in civil rights issues, including Todd A. Cox, a voting rights and school desegregation litigator with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and Nancy Krieter who is research director of the Chicago-based organization Women Employed Institute, an agency focused on female employment issues and poverty among women. The Test of Our Progress was co-edited by Corrine M. Yu, director and general counsel of the Commission, and by William L. Taylor, who is the vice chair.

Below are short summaries from the report of the Clinton record in the areas of justice administration (judicial nominations and confirmations), enforcement of voting rights, equal employment opportunity, affirmative action, educational equity, and the effectiveness of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Portions of the summaries that are in italics reflect my viewpoint.

Justice Administration

By the beginning of Clinton’s second term, the nominations and confirmations of federal judges became the scene of intense partisan fights, resulting in a trickle of confirmations and a backlog of delayed court cases. Not

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only did the Senate refuse to consider some nominees, but the Administration was also slow to nominate candidates for the federal bench. According to Elliott Mincberg and Tracy Hahn-Burkett, authors of the working paper “Judicial Nominations and Confirmations During the First Half of the Second Clinton Administration,” President Clinton initially sought to “increase diversity on the federal bench, particularly in light of the extremely low numbers of women and minorities appointed by Presidents Reagan and Bush.” But the politicization of the process prompted Clinton to surface an additional criterion: the nomination of “centrist” candidates who would not likely produce controversy during confirmation.

By late 1997, Clinton pledged to make the nomination and active support of candidates for the bench a priority. However, in the face of partisan opposition to progressive nominees, the President failed to mount a vigorous advocacy on behalf of his nominees. Mincberg and Hahn-Burkett suggest that the result of such timidity is the “erosion of the principle of judicial independence and the consequent degradation of the quality of justice delivered to the citizens of America.”

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

One of the primary tools available to the Executive Branch to monitor the application of civil rights laws is the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights. Although the Commission does not advocate, litigate, mediate, or enforce laws, it possesses special investigative powers including the power to hold hearings and issue subpoenas. While the Commission shaped the national civil rights agenda during the 1960s and 1970s, it floundered under Reagan whose appointees mismanaged and neglected the agency’s mission. These setbacks led to an erosion of public confidence in the agency and stagnation in its funding; adjusted for inflation, the Commissions budget declined 58 percent since 1980.

Despite the Civil Rights Commission’s inadequate funding, Michael J. Kelleher and Michael L. Walker, in their assessment entitled “The Performance of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission,” concluded that, “the Commission has continued to meet its statutory responsibility for monitoring and evaluating federal civil rights enforcement through its issuance of reports,” which are used by the President, Congress, the courts, governmental agencies, interest groups, and private citizens. As evidence, Kelleher and Walker noted that the Commissions’ 1996 report, Federal Title VI Enforcement to Ensure Nondiscrimination in Federal Assisted Programs, was instrumental in the reorganization of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s civil rights operations. It was the Title VI report which spotlighted the Department’s discrimination against Black farmers. Similarly, the Commission’s 1996 report prompted the U.S. Department of Justice to become more proactive in its enforcement of Title VI; the Department allocated more resources for enforcement activities and developed a public service announcement to inform the public of its rights under Title VI.

In 1999, the Commission has ambitious plans. One major project involves a comprehensive study to measure discrimination in the United States. The results of such a project will, according to Kelleher and Walker, “provide a stronger factual basis for conducting a national dialogue on civil rights and for developing federal, state, and local civil rights policies.”

The second major initiative planned for 1999 centers on a study of affirmative action in which the Commission hopes to: 1) determine the nature of the controversy surrounding affirmative action; 2) assess the positive and negative impacts of affirmative action, and; 3) measure the effect of efforts to eliminate affirmative action programs.

•While there are benefits to be reaped from both studies and Kelleher and Walker treat the proposals as a positive development, dangers lurk behind the latter study. The most flawed aspect of the proposed study is its inference that there are “negative impacts” associated with affirmative action. Given the successful assault on affirmative action in California and Washington state, and the evolving initiative drive in Florida, such rhetoric can be used to the advantage of affirmative action opponents. The Commission’s language appears to line up with President Clinton’s “mend it, don’t end it” approach to assaults on affirmative action.

Despite the Commission’s dubious proposal to study affirmative action, its role in matters of civil rights is even more important in today’s conservative climate. Kelleher and Walker contend that the White House must establish a strong connection with the Commission if it is to retake a leading role in civil rights policy. They urge the President to “entrust the Commission with responsibility for civil rights initiatives, including the analysis of discrimination in America or the ‘unyielding problems’ of poverty and race.” He must also publicly praise the Commission’s accomplishments and push for additional funding when warranted.

If President Clinton is to be remembered as being true to his pledge to honor the nation’s diversity and be responsive to the needs of minority communities, the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights must be a central component. Much work is required to restore the Commission’s credibility.

Affirmative Action

•Perhaps one of the most volatile, divisive, and politically partisan issues in recent years is the subject of affirmative action. It is in this arena where African Americans in particular looked the most to test Clinton’s intent on civil

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rights and where the White House has been most effective.

Under Clinton’s tenure, according to Sarah C. von der Lippe who examined the issue for the Citizen’s Commission on Civil Rights, there have been four major affirmative action battles; the Canady Bill which unsuccessfully attempted to end federal affirmative action; the battle over Bill Lann Lee’s nomination as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights; the effort by conservatives to end the Department of Transportation’s Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) Program; and Republican attempts to halt affirmative action in higher education.

Although the demise of the Canady Bill–also known as H.R. 1909 and the Civil Rights Act of 1997–was largely due to the fear by Republicans of being labeled as racially insensitive, its failure can also be attributed to stiff opposition by civil rights groups, most congressional Democrats and moderate Republicans, and mostly importantly the White House. As a result, H.R. 1909 was tabled in the House Judiciary Committee by a thirteen to four vote.

Of the four major affirmative action battles, President Clinton was most steadfast in his support for Bill Lann Lee, former director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and a vocal supporter of affirmative action. When the Senate Judiciary Committee refused to approve Lee’s nomination because of his support of affirmative action, Clinton took the unusual step of appointing him Acting-Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Appointing Lee to “acting” tenure signaled Clinton’s willingness to stand firmly behind a high profile and controversial nominee, something he was criticized for not doing with previous nominees such as Lani Guinier (nominee for Sssistant Attorney General for Civil Rights) and Dr. Henry W. Foster, Jr. (nominee for Surgeon General).

Von der Lippe gives Clinton high marks for his unrelenting stand on Lee’s appointment, calling the move “the right thing to do” and “defiant” in the face of partisan opposition. According to her, “The move did more than install Lee into the position he deserved; it served notice that the President would not be bullied on affirmative action. The President’s commitment to remain strong in his support of affirmative action sent a signal to conservatives that ending affirmative action would not happen easily.”

While von der Lippe gives Clinton high marks for his support of Lee, she is noticeably uncritical of his politically strategic defense of affirmative action, mainly his “mend it, don’t end it” approach. Such a strategy implies precisely what many affirmative action opponents contend – that the abuses affirmative action lead to “reverse” discrimination toward white males. The “mend it, don’t end it” approach is designed to appease the opponents by saying affirmative action is flawed but it works. The problem with that strategy is that it not only minimizes the tremendous success record of affirmative action, but it also attempts to appeal to opponents who wish to destroy rather than “improve” affirmative action. Very little if anything could be gained from pandering to the opponents on the right.

Perhaps the quietist challenge to affirmative action was Senator Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) failed attempt to end the DBE Program, a provision that provides that at least 10 percent of federal transportation contracts be granted to small and disadvantaged business, the majority of which are controlled by women and minorities.

Because the DBE program was implicated in the Adarand v. Pena litigation and was targeted by the Associated General Contractors (AGC), a well-financed trade association of construction firms with extensive lobbying experience, it attracted the attention of a key affirmative action opponent in the U.S. Senate, Senator McConnell. The Senator, supported by Ward Connerly, the AGC, and other affirmative action foes, mounted an effort to end the DBE program by attaching an amendment to a highway and transit infrastructure bill known as TE-21.

The assault on the DBE program failed because of a highly coordinated and intense lobbying effort by civil rights advocates, women and minority business leaders, a bi-partisan array of affirmative action supporters in the House and Senate, and, most importantly, the Clinton administration. Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater made it clear in a letter to Senate Majority and Minority leaders, according to von der Lippe, that he “would find it difficult to recommend ISTEA (the predecessor legislation to TEA-21) reauthorization legislation to the President for signature that did not include the DBE program.” Secretary Slater’s adamant support was bolstered by Attorney General Janet Reno’s constitutional support for the program and by the White House’s coordination of Congressional lobbying.

Not long after the DBE saga, a new threat to affirmative action emerged. Congressman Frank Riggs (R-CA) offered an amendment to a House education bill modeled after California’s Proposition 209 to end affirmative action in public colleges and universities. Like the DBE debate, the Riggs amendment attracted a broad coalition of opposition including educational groups, congressional leaders-the Congressional Black Caucus, the Women’s Caucus, and the Hispanic Caucus-a variety of pro-affirmative action forces, and the Clinton White House. As a result Congress defeated the amendment 249 to 171.

• On the whole, von der Lippe rightly contends that “the story of affirmative action in the 105th Congress makes it clear that who occupies the White House matters.” Without a concerted effort by key cabinet members and a well-coordinated lobbying effort by the White House, the outcome might have been different. Obviously the next election cycle will have high stakes. A Congress dominated by Republicans combined with a Republican president could spell trouble for

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affirmative action.

• Less compelling is von der Lippe’s assertion that because of the recent victories at the national level, “affirmative action proponents face a threat of complacency and over-confidence.” Such a development seems unlikely given the continued threat posed by deceptively-named anti-affirmative action groups such as the American Civil Rights Coalition, chaired by Ward Connerly. If anything, affirmative action proponents fear that opponents will have new tactics (see “Anti-Affirmative Action: Chasing the Intiative” on page 3) and that conservative legislators are biding their time for the political opportunity to launch future attacks.

Educational Opportunity

As the posturing over affirmative action revealed, education is a key battleground for conservatives. Not only is higher education a major concern, but control of public schools has emerged as a major point of contention. Dennis Parker, in his summary entitled “The Clinton Administration’s Record on Equal Education Opportunity in Elementary and Secondary Education,” notes that the challenge facing the administration was the development of an aggressive agenda to further educational equity in the Civil Rights Division’s Educational Opportunities Section, which falls under the supervision of the Acting Assistant Attorney General of Civil Rights, Bill Lann Lee.

While Congress stalled Lee’s appointment, Clinton named Thomas Perez as Deputy Assistant over the Educational Opportunities Section with a mandate to increase the Section’s outreach efforts and make it more assertive in the enforcement of civil rights.

Under Clinton’s tenure, the Section grappled with the perennial issue of school desegregation. Although a number of school districts remain under court-mandated desegregation orders, Indianapolis, Indiana, had its order terminated in 1998 and St. Louis, Missouri is currently negotiating termination of its order.

In the case of Indianapolis, children from the city were bused to suburban schools. When a district court denied the city’s effort to end the busing, the Seventh Circuit reversed and remanded the order on the basis that the arrangement was never meant to be permanent. Consequently, the Justice Department and the city negotiated an agreement to end the busing of some 5,500 African-American students, one grade per year. Additionally, the agreement contained a commitment to assist low-income and minority families in finding suburban housing, an effort to soften the segregated housing that would be exacerbated by returning the students to Indianapolis.

The Indianapolis agreement was harshly criticized in some quarters, according to Parker. Gary Orfield, a professor of Education and Social Policy at Harvard University and an expert on desegregation, concluded that the Justice Department unnecessarily compromised a strong case. Hired by one of the townships seeking to continue the busing program, Orfield, according to Parker’s summary, argued that “housing measures should complement, rather than replace, the existing programs, and that the plan would relegate Indianapolis’ students to an ‘extremely inferior’ school system.”

In St. Louis there is also concern about the long-term effects of ending desegregation where, like Indianapolis, students are sent to suburban schools. How the Justice Department handles this case “will have a profound effect on the future of desegregated schools in the country,” Parker concludes.

Unlike the desegregation cases, the Justice Department has been more cautious in its handling of cases involving public school programs-such as magnet schools-that consider race in making admissions decisions. Although the courts have indicated moderate acceptance of the notion of promoting educational diversity as a compelling interest, the Justice Department has not taken an active role in such cases. Instead, it has only submitted amicus curiae, or friend of the court briefs, recognizing diversity as a compelling interest.

• Even though Parker’s article concedes that such a strategy is “not the most aggressive position possible,” a more critical assessment is needed. The posture assumed here by the Justice Department infers indifference to the issue and contradicts Clinton’s firm stand on affirmative action in higher education. Equally as important, the pale responses seem to be a proverbial “throwing in the towel” on race-

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conscious admissions policies at the elementary and secondary levels. Such a development raises questions about the Clinton Administration’s commitment to affirmative action as it affects public schooling.

Voting Rights

Judging from Parker’s assessment of the Clinton record on equal educational opportunity in public schools, the Justice Department plays a key role in the President’s overall civil rights strategy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of voting rights. It was under Clinton’s watch that the more serious threat to minority voting rights appeared-Shaw v. Reno-in which the Supreme Court muted the creation of congressional districts favoring minorities. According to Todd A. Cox in his article “Enforcing Voting Rights in the Clinton Administration as We Approach the New Millenium,” the role of the Administration will be crucial to the fate of minority voting rights and “minority electoral gains will either be protected or suffer severely as we near the next century and the next redistricting cycle.”

In the current political climate, Cox sees three threats to minority voting rights that must be addressed by the Clinton Administration. The first is enforcement of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act following the Shaw decision. Although a number of minority districts have been invalidated because of the Shaw case, the Supreme Court has not voided the Voting Rights Act. Still standing is the notion of a compelling justification for creating majority-minority districts to remedy voting rights discrimination.

The Justice Department assumed the role of defendant in many of the numerous redistricting cases that were spawned by Shaw. The Justice Department’s defendant status has helped define the limits of the Shaw ruling. In Lawyer v. Department of Justice the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a state senate district in Florida, signaling room for race-conscious redistricting at the state and local level. Cox believes that the presence of the Justice Department in such cases is invaluable because it promotes “the successful settlement of cases and redrawing of districts that still provide minorities an equal opportunity to elect candidates of choice.”

While the Justice Department is an active defendant in Section 2 cases, Cox feels it must be more aggressive in filing Section 2 lawsuits where discrimination can be documented. “It is critical for courts and jurisdictions alike to understand that Section 2 compliance is still required and that the Department will hold jurisdictions accountable for any discrimination against minority voters during the next redistricting process,” concludes Cox.

The second threat to minority voting rights involves Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Covered jurisdictions must receive preclearance from the Justice Department before altering any voting standards or procedures. Presently, the Justice Department needs to redefine its enforcement of section 5 standards in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bossier Parish v. Reno which let stand a circuit court ruling that circumstantial evidence of discriminatory intent may not be considered in a Section 5 proceeding if the same evidence would be used in a Section 2 proceeding.

Cox urges the Justice Department to make clear that it will still prosecute Section 2 cases even if they do not violate Section 5. He also warns the Department not to overreact to Supreme Court rulings by charging section 5 procedures in such a way as to unnecessarily weaken enforcement.

The final threat to minority voting rights involves the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). Because the NVRA was so successful at registering poor and minority voters, congressional conservatives attempted to attach measures requiring proof of identity and citizenship, structures that would disproportionally affect poor and minority voters. Moreover, legislation was introduced to repeal the mail-in provision of the NVRA which would undermine its effectiveness.

According to Cox, the Justice Department’s role is to discourage jurisdictions from employing discriminatory or intimidating electoral practices and to aggressively prosecute those who act in this manner; to monitor areas with histories of discrimination and intimidation; and to proactively discourage illegal electoral procedures by lowering its threshold for interventions.

Cox acknowledges that while the Justice Department is vigilant in its enforcement of NVRA voter registration requirements at drivers’ license bureaus, he mildly chides the Department for its “much less systematic” enforcement of these provisions at public assistance and disability benefits offices in many states.

• Cox’s assessment of voting rights enforcement makes it clear that the Voting Rights Act and the NVRA anchor the protection of minority voting rights. These measures have little meaning without the Justice Department’s leading role as compliance officer. What is missing here is any way to judge whether or not the Justice Department has the capacity to meet its enforcement obligations. This is particularly relevant in the case of the NVRA where state agencies have responsibilities for enacting its provisions and local jurisdictions have been the culprits of discriminatory and intimidating practices.

The EEOC and the OFCPP

The effectiveness of the Clinton Administration’s policies regarding civil rights cannot be judge without exploring issues of employment opportunities. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is responsible

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for enforcement of fair employment laws and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCPP) ensures that federal standards are met by those with government contracts.

Over the years, according to Nancy Kreiter’s article entitled “Equal Employment Opportunity: EEOC and OFCCP,” the EEOC lost its viability and effectiveness. It fell to the Clinton Administration to reinvigorate the Commission. Consequently, by late 1994, the EEOC chair, Gilbert Casellas (who left in 1997) had in place a new leadership team.

One of the measures enacted to revamp the agency was the implementation of a new priority charge handling system, a system that prioritizes charges most likely to have merit. Although this new system halved the agency’s backlog of cases, there were unforeseen consequences. Rather than resolving issues of discrimination, the backlog of cases was sharply reduced by declaring the charges too weak to warrant further investigation.

Kreiter concludes that the most troubling aspect of the EEOC is its poor record in obtaining remedies for victims of discrimination. The settlement rate has plummeted from a high of 32 percent in 1980 to its current low of just 8 percent. Likewise, its no-cause finding rate-in which the agency concluded there was no cause for a finding of discrimination-reached an all-time high of 61 percent, a significant jump from its 1980 rate of 28.5 percent.

From a litigation standpoint, the agency also improved. Not only did the EEOC more than double the number of cases filed over the last two years, it also took a hard, public line against egregious employment discrimination in several high-profile cases. The EEOC was strategic in producing precedent-setting judgements against Texaco ($176 million), Publix Supermarkets ($81.5 million), and Mitsubishi ($3.4 million).

In spite of these highly-publicized successful settlements, Kreiter notes that the EEOC was criticized by civil rights advocates for not engaging more aggressively in class-action litigation. Although in recent years the agency increased its proportion of such suits to 30 percent of all suits filed, that level is far below the two-third’s ratio of 1980.

The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCPP) has an equally important role in protecting workers from discrimination. According to Kreiter, nearly one-quarter of American workers fall under the agency’s jurisdiction. Like the EEOC, the OFCCP was revamped to better monitor and enforce compliance with federal regulations. Not only were procedures amended to make the regulatory process more effective, but Reagan-era initiatives that hampered the agency’s work-the National Self-Monitoring System and the Standard Affirmative Actions Format which allowed employers to mask localized discrimination by providing national employment data-were terminated.

Besides policy improvements, the OFCCP also improved its enforcement capacity in some areas. In 1997, the agency trained its investigators on systematic discrimination, a practice abandoned since the Reagan Administration. In addition, the agency dramatically increased the number of compliance reviews conducted per year, resulting in an increased number of complaints filed and the debarment of eight firms by the Clinton Administration. (This number equals the total for both the Reagan and Bush years combined, but is less than one-third of the total for the Carter Administration.)

Because the effectiveness of the EEOC and the OFCCP was undermined by the Reagan and Bush Administrations, both agencies needed major overhauls in policy and enforcement procedures.

Conclusion • The inauguration of the Clinton Administration created a great deal of hope for civil rights advocates. President Clinton’s promise to assemble an administration that reflected America’s diversity seemed a welcome change from the regressive Reagan and Bush years. • After seven years under Clinton, it is evident that civil rights is an endangered species. The Test of Our Progress makes it clear that civil rights are under assault. The working papers highlighted here demonstrate that pockets of opposition to civil rights are emerging in nearly every measurable segment of our society-the workplace, the schoolhouse, the courts, and the polls.

Part of the problem faced by the Clinton Administration is that Presidents Reagan and Bush crippled many of the agencies-such as the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and the EEOC-created to promote civil rights. They also stacked the federal courts with right-wing appointees who later helped undermine previous decades of civil rights progress.

Added to the quagmire is the reality of partisan politics. Republican legislators in both houses of Congress block Clinton appointees, especially those labeled “liberal” and those who were not white males. They also attempted to underfund federal agencies with a civil rights mission.

Unfortunately, the President responded with the nomination of non-controversial centrist candidates, a strategy that threatens to undermine judicial independence and erode the quality of justice.

In other areas, the Clinton Administration also acted inconsistently. While the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights produced useful reports, its proposed affirmative action study could give fodder to opponents.

At the same time that the Administration defeated

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several challenges to affirmative action and stood firmly behind Bill Lann Lee, it raised serious questions with its “mend it, don’t end it” approach to affirmative action. Even more troubling was the Justice Department’s capitulation in the Indianapolis desegregation case. Such strategies prompt doubts about the Administration’s commitment to affirmative action.

The bitter-sweet performance in affirmative action is complimented by the Justice Department’s less than aggressive approach to section 2 and section 5 compliance and its enforcement of NVRA provisions at state public assistance offices.

With systemic employment discrimination still pervasive, the EEOC and the OFCCP improved its policy and enforcement standards, but failed to give adequate remedy to most victims of discrimination. The agencies must recover from years of apparent intentional neglect under Reagan and Bush.

The Clinton record on civil rights is a mixture of strong, principled advocacy, lukewarm cheerleading, and weak, misguided capitulation to conservative political pressure. Yet, President Clinton represents a refreshing relief to the anti-civil rights tone of the Reagan and Bush years, but has failed to measure up to Carter’s record. As the 2000 presidential election brings the possibility of Governor George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” to the White House, the future of national civil rights protections are very much in question.

Barry E. Lee is a program assistant in communications at the Southern Regional Council and a graduate student in history at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

Congressional Redistricting in North Carolina–Will It Never End?

By Laughlin McDonald

Vol. 21, No. 2, 1999, pp. 18-19

For the third time in six years, the U. S. Supreme Court has wrestled with the issue of whether North Carolina’s congressional redistricting is constitutional. Its latest decision,Hunt v. Cromartie (May 17, 1999), held that the trial court improperly invalidated the state’s 1997 plan without first holding a trial to resolve disputed issues of fact whether the plan had been drawn “predominantly” on the basis of race, or merely to preserve partisan balance in the state’s congressional delegation.

Since the decision didn’t decide the merits of the dispute, it is very possible that the case will come before the Supreme Court yet a fourth time after a trial in federal district court. But by then the millennium census may have touched off another round of redistricting and the whole, protracted, process of legislative enactment and legal challenge can start all over again, to the continuing dismay and confusion of the voters of the state.

The North Carolina litigation is Exhibit A for the proposition that there is something drastically wrong with the Supreme Court’s modern redistricting jurisprudence. After nearly a decade of litigation in the state, launched by Shaw v. Reno in 1993, neither the legislature nor the courts understand it, or can get it right.

Shaw v. Reno held that the North Carolina’s 1991 congressional plan was subject to challenge under the Fourteenth Amendment because it contained a “bizarrely”-shaped, majority-black District Twelve. The ruling was made despite the fact that irregularly-shaped districts have been drawn to protect white incumbents time out of mind, and despite the facts that the Court had previously held that a regular district shape was not constitutionally required and that the white plaintiffs did not allege that they had been injured or that their voting strength had been diluted by the challenged plan.

Prior to Shaw, the Court had consistently held that a personal and concrete injury was “an essential and unchanging” requirement for bringing a case in federal court.

On remand, the trial court found District Twelve unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court affirmed on the basis that race was the “predominant” factor in drawing the

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plan and the state had subordinated its traditional redistricting principles to race.

Shaw v. Hunt (1996)

In similar congressional redistricting cases from Georgia and Texas, in which the Court also invalidated majority-minority districts, the Court held that states may conduct redistricting “with consciousness of race” and are “free to recognize communities that have a particular racial makeup.” Indeed, according to the Court, it would be “irresponsible” for a state to disregard the provisions of the Voting Rights Act prohibiting minority vote dilution.

It is not at all apparent from the Court’s decisions when the use of race in redistricting is prohibited by the Constitution, and when it is permitted or required by the Voting Rights Act. Among the sharpest critics of the redistricting cases have been the four Justices who have made up a dissenting minority- John P. Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer. They have called the Court’s new standards “unworkable,” a “jurisprudential wilderness that lacks a definable constitutional core,” and an “invitation” to litigation.

The Court’s decisions are also fairly open to the charge that they embody a dual racial standard. In the Texas case, for example, the Court rejected challenges to a number of bizarrely-shaped, majority-white districts on the grounds that they were “political” gerrymanders and were not subject to strict constitutional scrutiny. At the same time, the Court invalidated three oddly shaped majority-minority districts on the grounds that they were impermissible racial gerrymanders. As Justice Stevens has pointed out in one of his dissenting opinions, “[r]acial minorities should not be less eligible than other groups to benefit from districting plans the majority designs to aid them.”

In response to Shaw v. Hunt, North Carolina enacted a new congressional plan in 1997. This time District Twelve was more regular in shape and was majority (53 percent) white. The state also claimed that it drew its plan primarily for political reasons, that is, to maintain the existing split of six Republican and six Democratic districts and that race was not a predominant consideration. The district court, without benefit of a trial, brushed aside the state’s explanations of how and why it had drawn the districts and summarily struck down the 1997 plan as “facially race driven.”

In reversing, the members of the Supreme Court were in agreement-something rare for this Court in a redistricting case-and held that the district court erred in deciding the dispute without a trial. But they said nothing to clarify or modify the Court’s redistricting standards. They also said nothing that indicates a realignment in the five-to-four split that has decided most of the prior congressional redistricting cases. As if to underscore the continuing division on the Court, the four dissenters filed a separate opinion concurring in the judgment of reversal, but without endorsing anything said in the majority opinion written by Justice Thomas.

In trying to pose workable standards in redistricting, it is well to recall the words of the late John Minor Wisdom, a former judge of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. In a school desegregation case in Jefferson County, Alabama, he drew the distinction between a “color blind” Constitution which, in his words, prohibits “a classification that denies a benefit or imposes a burden,” and a Constitution which must be “color conscious to prevent discrimination being perpetuated and to undo the effects of past discrimination.” Wisdom’s words apply equally to redistricting.

Plaintiffs, black or white, should be able to seek and get redress from the courts if a redistricting plan dilutes their voting strength or imposes an unequal burden upon them. But in the absence of dilution or other injury, the state should be free to take race into account in complying with the Voting Rights Act, in avoiding dilution of minority voting strength, in remedying the effects of discrimination, or simply in recognizing communities that have shared or common racial or ethnic interests.

Prior to Shaw, the Court frequently said that the basic purpose of redistricting was to reconcile the competing claims of political, religious, ethnic, racial, occupational, and socioeconomic groups. There is nothing in the Fourteenth Amendment, which was enacted expressly to secure equal treatment for racial minorities, which supports the notion that such competing claims can only be reconciled in districts that are majority white.

Laughlin McDonald is director of the Voting Rights Project, the Southern Regional Office of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Seeing Appalachian Cities

By Emily Satterwhite

Vol. 21, No. 2, 1999, pp. 20-22

Since at least the turn of the nineteenth century, the people of the Appalachian mountains have been stereotyped as backward, backwoods hillbillies. In popular culture, Appalachia uniformly consists of near-wilderness hills and hollows where folks live without access to any of the accouterments of modern life. The people who live there have been denigrated and scorned for what is seen as their inability or refusal to keep up with “progress.”

Reacting against the assumption that progress is an unequivocal blessing, defenders of an Appalachian way of life have acknowledged the persistence of a more rural, more isolated, and less modern mountain existence. Those defenders-Appalachian Studies scholars/activists, film makers at Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and others-simultaneously asserted the dignity of the rural mountain lifestyle. They pointed to Appalachians’ propensity to love and live off of the land as a antidote to a destructive, wasteful, and exploitative relationship to the environment. By accepting the premise that Appalachians are different from other Americans while reversing the value judgment placed upon them, Appalachianists have fashioned what Manuel Castells refers to as a “resistance identity.” The Appalachian resistance identity has been crucial to an Appalachian identity movement which continues to inform and galvanize.

A parallel form of identity politics has been very important in my life. In the women’s movement, identity politics serve to mobilize women against oppression, help them reclaim characteristics often denigrated as “feminine,” and open up new ways for imagining a just society. When I moved back to Bristol, Tennessee, in 1996, I found the potential of Appalachian identity politics to offer an alternative vision to our increasingly industrialized, money-chasing culture irresistible. Yet as I looked around me, I saw thousands of Bristolians, “Appalachians” and newcomers alike, living what was obviously not a quintessentially “Appalachian” lifestyle. At the same time, some city residents expressed their hope that Bristol could become the “Gateway to Appalachia.”

I turned to the Appalachian Studies literature to help me understand the dynamics. How to understand cities in an Appalachian context? Could city residents be considered Appalachian? Many shared a common history with others from the region-family who farmed the land or mined coal or still lived more than an hour from the nearest Blockbusters or (less and less) Walmart. Initially, I was unable to discover any discussion of what it meant to be city and mountain, or to inherit values which were apparently inherently contradictory. Until the past couple of years (in work by Appalachianists like Anne Mitchell Whisnant and Kevan Frazier), in any discussion of “Appalachian-ness,” the cities of the region seemed to disappear.

Yet even in 1965 when the federal government labeled the Appalachia an underdeveloped region deserving of aid, between 47.31 percent of its residents fit the federal definition of “urban.” Although the number of urban residents in Appalachia increased 15 percent from 1960 to 1990, the proportion of Appalachians living in urban versus rural areas in 1990 fell to 47.18 percent after reaching a high of 48.44 percent urban in 1970. However, the federal definition (designating residents of towns of 2,500 or more as “urban”) obscures the fact that in 1990, a greater proportion of Appalachians lived in the region’s largest cities than ever before.

To observe this shift, we might begin by looking at just the “core” region of Appalachia. Appalachian historian John Alexander Williams derived his definition of core Appalachia from the six historically most influential delimitations of the region. Williams’ definition covers 164 counties in eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, northern Georgia, western North Carolina and Virginia, and much of West Virginia. Although the U.S. Bureau of the Census designates residents of towns with a population of 2,500 as urban, it

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reserves the label “city” for those “incorporated places” with a population of 25,000 or more. There are numerous such cities in core Appalachia. As of 1994, the U.S. Bureau of the Census considered two core Appalachian cities-Chattanooga, Tennessee (pop. 152,000) and Knoxville, Tennessee (pop. 169,000)- “principal cities,” defined as cities with a population of 100,000 or more. The Census also distinguishes between principal cities and those cities whose population exceeds 200,000; no core Appalachian cities are among the seventy-seven U.S. cities which meet this criterion.

In addition to defining cities, the U.S. Bureau of the Census also designates metropolitan statistical areas and “Large Metropolitan Areas.” At least one county of seven Large Metropolitan Areas (defined as having populations of over 250,000) falls within core Appalachia-Chattanooga; Knoxville; Charleston, West Virginia; Huntington, West Virginia-Ashland Kentucky; Hickory-Morganton, North Carolina; Johnson City-Kingsport-Bristol, Tennessee-Virginia (the Tri-Cities); and Atlanta, Georgia. Of these, only Chattanooga, Knoxville, and the Tri-Cities “Large Metropolitan Areas” fall completely within core Appalachia. Two smaller U.S. Bureau of the Census metropolitan statistical areas, Asheville, North Carolina, and Roanoke, Virginia are also at least partially in core Appalachia. Of the two, only the Asheville statistical area (population 191,774) falls completely within bounds.

In 1990, the 164 counties had a population of 5,567,736. Whereas the U.S. Bureau of the Census definition indicates a steady percentage of Appalachians living an “urban” lifestyle, measuring the percentage of Appalachians living in these metropolitan areas establishes a different picture over time. In 1960, 19 percent of Appalachians lived in a county “anchored” by one or more of the MSA’s central cities (meaning the home county of Knoxville, Chattanooga, Bristol (both Sullivan County, Tennessee and Washington County, Virginia), Johnson City, Asheville, Charleston, and Morganton. However in 1997, 1,379,687 people, or 25 percent, of core Appalachian residents lived in a county for which at least part could be characterized as “city.”

Even more striking than this 6 percent increase is the shift in the percentage of Appalachians living in a metropolitan statistical area. In 1960, 24 percent or one out of every four Appalachians lived in a county which by 1997 had become part of a metropolitan statistical area. In 1997,

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2,145,813 people, or 39 percent of all Appalachians, resided within a metropolitan statistical area boundary.

What does this population increase of 15 percent in metropolitan counties indicate? It could be caused by an influx of non-Appalachian middle and upper class Americans moving into rather homogenous American suburbs surrounding cities with increasingly fewer Appalachians or fewer people retaining “Appalachian” characteristics. It could, however, mask a characteristically Appalachian desire to obtain paychecks in more urban or industrial areas while maintaining not a suburban but a more rural lifestyle (with cash-based employment augmented by farming or gardening) outside the city. The 15 percent increase in metropolitan Appalachians might be due to a combination of the two, or could vary according to the city in question, or could mean something entirely different.

The point is, we don’t really know.

Those interested in the production and persistence of “Appalachian-ness” and in the alternative values purportedly embraced by Appalachians have concentrated almost solely on rural Appalachia. Their work is of course vital to a complete understanding of the region; while some portions of the region have a very large metropolitan population (East Tennessee is 66 percent metropolitan), there are also huge tracts of the mountain region (as in a twenty-seven-county-area in southeastern Kentucky) in which no metropolitan statistical area can be found. Finally, however, recognizing the existence of cities within Appalachia may rearrange or even sharpen the tools available for thinking about the region and the political movement centered around it-for at least three reasons.

First, given the shrinking number of people who experience an unadulterated rural Appalachian lifestyle, it may become more and more difficult for people to claim the Appalachian resistance identity. The movement will be on ever-more slippery ground if it attempts to enlist only those who could be considered quintessentially Appalachian. Appalachian scholar-activists themselves have often come from, been educated in, or currently live in the metropolitan areas of the region. Preliminary discussions with some of today’s leading Appalachianists indicates that growing up in cities often meant greater exposure to stereotyping and denigration of mountain values and mountain heritage; this would indicate that rather than those who grew up isolated and to some degree sheltered, residents of large mountain towns or cities had the greatest need for the affirmation offered by the Appalachian identity movement.

Second, Appalachian cities may encourage more scholarship on the uneven geographic development associated with capitalism. Ultimately even the most rural of areas is involved in and affected by the same processes of urbanization as are cities-as evidenced by the rearrangement of demography and geography achieved by capitalists’ introduction of coal mining in Appalachia and by (to give a more contemporary example) the appearance of chain mega-stores in otherwise “rural” areas. Lastly, perhaps we need to ask if the accumulation of capital in Knoxville is any less damaging than the depletion of rural Appalachian resources for the enrichment of wealthy capitalists in New York.

The final suggestion I would like to make here is that grappling with the phenomenon of Appalachian cities, and perhaps the Appalachian-ness of cities or the urbanity of some Appalachians, may help to temper the tendency to romanticize the people of the region.

An ever-increasing number of Appalachian residents are being affected by and/or are participating in urbanization in the region. If it ever made sense to think of a pre-modern rural Appalachia entrenched against wealthy urban outsiders, we are quickly outgrowing the suitability of such a model. Appalachianists could continue to throw away inclusive geographic boundaries of the region and persist in pointing to the shrinking spaces of rurality and poverty as the “real” Appalachia. But to do so would mean missing crucial transformations in the dynamic economy and culture of the region. To do so would negate the threads of continuity between the region’s past and its present, between what options were available to the region’s inhabitants in the past and the options available now. It would seem crucial for us to understand how, in Appalachia, turn-of-the-century capitalism and mid-century industrialization have given way to a late-twentieth-century service economy and a continued concentration of people and wealth. Perhaps developing a new schema for understanding Appalachia-one capable of incorporating Appalachian cities-is the first step.

Emily Satterwhite is a student in American Studies at the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University in Atlanta.

Calculations used here are based on the Appalachian Regional Commission’s 1965 and 1997 annual reports, the U.S. Bureau of the Census’ “Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas: 1965,” and metropolitan statistical areas as defined in the U.S. Bureau of the Census’ 1984 County and City Data Book. Other sources include: Manuel Castells, The Information Age-Economy, Society, and Culture Volume II: The Power of Identity, Blackwell Press, 1997; Graham D. Rowles and John F. Watkins, “Demographic Change in Appalachia: Patterns and Trend,” report funded by the Appalachian Regional Commission, January 1995; and, John Alexander Williams, “Counting Yesterday’s People: Using Aggregate Data to Address the Problem of Appalachia’s Boundaries,” Journal of Appalachian Studies, Spring 1996, pp. 3-27.

REVIEWS

Reviewed by Pat Wehner

Vol. 21, No. 2, 1999, pp. 23-24

William Leach, Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life, New York: Pantheon Books, 1999.

In recent months, the phrase “common ground” has assumed an unusually concrete meaning for the political strategists and presidential hopefuls rehearsing their rhetoric for the 2000 elections. Launching his campaign around a “livability agenda” of car pools and emissions controls, Vice President Al Gore seems convinced the surest way of reaching the White House is by way of a pleasant suburban commute. Across the aisle, the chair of the House Republican re-election committee has reached a similiar conclusion after witnessing the emergence of a new political constituency, the celebrated “soccer moms of the 1996 and 1998 elections. Advising his fellow conservatives to concentrate less on gridlocked politics and more on the politics of gridlock, Representative Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia suggests the suburbs are “where the rubber is hitting the road today. ”

As the speeches, editorials, and blue-ribbon panels devoted to suburban “quality of life” issues continue to multiply, the publication of Country of Exiles has made William Leach appear a historian equally skilled at anticipating the future. But sometimes a book is more successful as a blueprint of what people are feeling at a given moment than as an explanation of what those feelings mean. This, unfortunately, is the case with Leach’s impassioned warning about our eroding sense of place in the late twentieth century. It is a curious and sometimes unsettling book, not only because of what it describes, but also because of how much it leaves unsaid. Like the new suburban politics, Country of Exiles slips too easily from real landscapes to rhetoric, glossing over, in the process, some rather troubling omissions.

People who have lived or studied the history of the South are well aware that writers have been alternately cheering and lamenting the destruction of a distinctive “regional identity” for more than a century. A cautious historian, Leach acknowledges the conflicting forces in our society that have made people more mindful of local roots in some periods, more inclined to restless motion in others. He suggests some measure of balance has been the typical state of affairs, but compares the 1980s and 1990s to the decades before World War I, the last period in which so few controls were placed on the movement of money, goods, and populations. As the century draws to a close, the emergence of a global market and the values espoused by its international corps of speculators, high-tech drifters, and free-market intellectuals has radically tipped the scales, resulting in a diminished appreciation for place as a “centering presence” in our lives.

Country of Exiles is most compelling when Leach is elaborating on this claim. His first chapter introduces some unlikely revolutionaries in the form of Southern trucking magnates Malcolm McLean and J.B. Hunt, whose experiments with shipping containers during the 1980s provided the basis for an increasingly seamless network of distibution. No longer confined to the traditional transportation hubs, manufacturers began to consider the cost advantages of locating their plants in places like Spring Hill, Tennessee and Lincoln, Alabama. More pointedly, Leach’s second chapter explores the perspective of the business elite whose “flexible” management strategies have taken full advantage of these innovations. Unhindered by distance and sharing few loyalties to place, corporate executives have learned to use mobility as a weapon, relocating and outsourcing production to hold down wages and keep labor unions at bay. Leach includes some outrageous examples of the vocabulary that justifies these policies, such as Harvard Business

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School theorist Rosabeth Kanter’s division of the world into the market-savvy “cosmopolitans” and the backward masses of “locals,” “stay-put workers,” and “isolates” who must learn deference to those holding more frequent-flyer miles. Labels such as these confirm what a political strategist recently told The New York Times: “It’s hard to separate class from geography.”

These discoveries, as well as a depressing assessment of how the administrations at research universities have adopted a corporate attitude in their pursuit of “world-class excellence,” underline the absolute indifference many powerful insititutions of the day exhibit towards their immediate surroundings. But in focusing so intently on those forces that have a hand in “destroying” place, Leach offers little more than an abstract illustration of what an attachment to “somewhere” can provide. It is frustrating how readily he departs from any specific, recognizable location -be it neighborhood, town, or region-where he might discover the voices of people who resist the marginalization of their homes and histories. In this respect, his chapter on the tourist industry, in which he attempts to unravel the tangled politics of casino gambling on American Indian reservations, is both the most successful and the most unsatisfying. While Leach quotes tribal leaders on both sides of the debate, he draws his evidence selectively from every corner of the country, resulting in too few details about the process by which individual tribes decided whether or not to support casino construction. Likewise, though he sympathizes with non-Indians who live near reservation lands and have found their lives disrupted by the influx of tourists, he gives no hints about how to reconcile the “fragile vestiges of a tradition of place” with tribal rights to self-determination.

Above all, Leach is concerned with a loyalty to place as the basis for shared values and community connections. But without some standard of justice, there is little to decide whether a definition of community will be inclusive or be defined by an understanding that certain people don’t belong. Of course, to hear them speak, homeowners’ associations that draw up restrictive covenants act in the best interests of “the community.” Moreover, in criticizing multicultural perspectives as fashionable opinions complicit with the global designs of business, Leach mistakes the multiculturalism of the marketplace-in which all people have an equal right to a sales pitch- with a multicultural politics that acknowledges the existence of important differences-especially in relationships to power.

Most stunning of all, Leach roundly asserts that race, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity “bear little relation to real places,” a position that can only be maintained by ignoring environmental racism, gendered divisions of the workplace, anti-gay “lifestyle” ordinances, immigration laws, and numerous other examples. Indeed, it is through such place-specific struggles that many oppressed people have arrived at a clearer sense of their own personal and group identity.

With so many familiar landmarks disappearing beneath the manicured lawns of office parks and subdivisions, it’s easy to appreciate Leach’s prefatory note that he wrote Country of Exiles out of “a need that could not be suppressed.” But the finished product is better regarded as an impressionist’s landscape than a set of directions to follow towards a better future. In the end, Leach might be well advised to consider whether, as has been suggested by the geographer David Harvey, place is not so much being destroyed as the differences between places are becoming that much more important. Still, with so many politicians, pollsters, and media professionals sharing this great awakening to the significance of place in our lives, we should all be prepared for an election season where riding tractors are considered the definition of a grassroots issue.

Pat Wehner is a doctoral candidate in American Studies in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University in Atlanta.He is currently working on a dissertation that explores changing notions of social class among media and marketing executives.

Bridging the Gap

Reviewed by Vicki L. Crawford

Vol. 21, No. 2, 1999 pp. 25-26

Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African-American Women in the Sturggle for Covol Rights. New York: Oxford, 1997

As the body of writing about women in the Southern black freedom struggle continues to grow, new studies take a comparative and analytical approach to the varieties of women’s activism and the ways in which race, class, gender, and culture shape leadership and political roles. Sociologist Belinda Robnett’s How Long? How Long? attempts a unified, comprehensive account of African-American women activists from 1954-1965. By placing black women at the center of analysis within the broader history of the Southern civil rights movement, Robnett aims to reconceptualize the movement’s leadership and organization as well as delineate the complexity of women’s experiences. Robnett examines the roles of activists within seven movement organizations National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Women’s Political Council (WPC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE),the Montgomery Improvement Association (MM the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Using oral testimony from the women themselves, Robnett explores relationships among movement participants and offers a critique of black leadership. Also, Robnett challenges claims regarding sexism in the movement as she unravels the complex web of relationships among the movement’s leaders and rank-and-file.

Robnett provides us a “socio-historical” analysis of the movement framed by a womanist/black feminist stand point. Using the term defined by novelist Alice Walker, such an analysis reflects “a consciousness that incorporates racial, cultural, sexual, national, economic and political considerations.” By examining both the “Symbiotic” and “conflictual relationships” between black women and men, Robnett challenges conventional theories of leadership as well as theories of social movement formation. She argues that “a substantial proportion of the processes of recruitment, mobilization and sustenance” of the Civil Rights Movement was performed by African- American women. Black women had limited access to key positions of formal leadership, even though they were well-represented among the rank and file. As “bridge leaders,” a term Robnett coined, women sewed in an important intermediate capacity; they were the vital link between nationally recognized male leaders and the masses of people. Critical to the movement’s success, especially at the local level, they were able to “bridge, extend, amplify and transform” the movements message.

Robnett’s chapter “Women and the Escalation of the Civil Rights Movement,” is the book’s strongest, best-articulated example of her theory of bridge leadership at work. Here, she examines the role of women in sustaining the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. She correctly attributes the overall success of the 381-day boycott to the infrastructure provided by middle-class women of the Women’s Political Council (WPC). Under the leadership of Alabama State college professor Mary Fair Burks, who founded the organization in 1946, this group of professional black women had long been concerned about the discriminatory treatment on city buses that African-American women who

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rode to and from their jobs as domestic workers endured each day. At least three years prior to the arrest of Rosa Parks, the WPC conceived the idea for mass protest and attempted to negotiate with the mayor and the city’s bus officials, warning them that, if conditions on the buses did not improve, the black community would be forced to take action. Following Parks arrest, in the early stages of mobilization the WPC was instrumental in working with black male leaders to formulate plans for the boycott. Women’s leadership was relatively visible at the outset; however, as formalization of movement activities coalesced and organizational structure emerged, their visibility and power receded. Instead, men were given titled positions within the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association evil A), the organization behind civil rights activities in the city. While women did, in fact, chair certain committees within the MIA, such as Welfare and Membership, a gendered division of labor emerged.

Insightful interviews with key movement participants such as Mrs. Johnnie Can and Mrs. Thelma Glass illuminate how, in the absence of access to formal leadership, women re-directed their energies in support of men while creatively seeking avenues for political self-expression. According to the author, “gender, as a construct of exclusion, produced a particular context in which women participated. This level of leadership, while largely invisible to the media and many scholars, was a critical link in movement formation.”

Robnett offers other examples of women’s bridge leadership, notably the role of women in the early years of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Here again, the symbiosis of women collaborating with male leadership is evidenced as well as the conflicts and tensions they experienced in dealing with men whose conventional views on women were gender-biased. She explores women’s roles within the youth-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and attributes their greater participation and influence to the organization’s structure, which was based on leadership by consensus and decentralization of power. This factor tended to mitigate against traditional beliefs-though they did surface- and offer a “free space” where young people, both black and white alike, were able to move beyond the confines of stereotypical roles. Robnett chronicles the heroism and risk-taking activism of SNCC’s powerful, black female leaders, including Muriel Tillinghast, Faye Bellamy, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, Diane Nash, Carole Merritt, Mary Lane and others. In discussing women’s roles within SNCC, however, Robnett’s categories become a bit unwieldy. Ella Baker, for example, was described as a “professional bridge leader” while Diane Nash was considered as a “formal local community bridge leader.” The subtle distinctions become a bit confusing and indistinguishable.

Robnett takes on the thorny issue of sexism within SNCC and the emergence of feminist consciousness that grew out of white women’s experiences in the movement. She criticizes some earlier studies of gendered relationships within SNCC that excluded the experiences of black women while over-emphasizing the relationships between black men and white women.

Robnett concludes by tracing the ideological shift from civil rights to black nationalism and the backlash to women’s leadership which emerged in the late 1960s and early 70s. The shift to Black Power in SNCC led to a more centralized organization, one which was less inclusive of black women’s leadership. She argues that contemporary black leadership is predominantly male, a pattern which owes its legacy, not to the egalitarian, all-inclusive philosophy of early SNCC, but to the legacy of black nationalism which followed after 1964. Citing recent examples such as the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas situation and the Million Man March, Robnett suggests that in recent years, we have experienced an escalation of gender tensions between black men and women. She contends that future generations must reclaim the legacy of the civil rights years, particularly, the early SNCC model, where black women were at the forefront of the struggle for social change.

There are still so many stories to tell, particularly in recounting the experiences of grassroots women. Activists such as Mississippi’s Winson and Dovie Hudson, and L C. Dorsey, for example, deserve attention. I am also looking forward to hearing more from SNCC’s white female participants, some of whom were interviewed here. Robnett’s significant contribution to scholarship on African-American women’s activism has deepened our understanding of the Civil Rights Movement and raised a number of critical questions worth further pursuit.

Vicki L. Crawford is a professor of history at Clark-Atlanta University in Atlanta. She co-edited Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965, published in 1990 by Carlson Publishers.

Mississippi, Chillin’

Reviewed by Allen Tullos

Vol. 21, No. 2, 1999, pp. 27-28

Cookie’s Fortune. Directed by Robert Altman. Screenplay by Anne Rapp. Director of Photography Toyomichi Kurita. Music by David Stewart. October Films.

“Pride and Pretense are the jockeys of misfortune” warns the message-board outside the First Presbyterian Church of Holly Springs, Mississippi. Given the location of Cookie’s Fortune and its opening scenes, moviegoers are justified in wondering what has become of another familiar, page, rider–Prejudice. Put out to pasture with his stalking horse Doo-dah, if we are to take seriously filmmaker Robert Altman and screenwriter Anne Rapp.

Appropriate to the 1990s’ mood of localism in politics and quiescence and retreat on the civil rights front, Altman’s newest project locates an idyllic Southern small town where racial history seems but a quaint complexity in a genealogy connecting everyone as family. “Which means I’m part black?” exclaims the hopeful, anti-belle Emma Duvall to her old friend, but newly discovered African-American cousin, Willis Richland. Well, maybe we won’t go that far just yet.

In its promising opening scene, Cookie’s Fortune plays upon our popular culture archive of situations charged with racial expectation and the eagerness with which we reach for the suspect profile. The film begins late on the night of Good Friday, the Holly Springs streets deserted except for a quietly patrolling sheriff’s cruiser. A black man, whom we have just seen steal a pint of Wild Turkey, knocks at the rear window of a van while inside, a young, white woman undresses. She quickly turns out the light and doesn’t answer.

We follow the stocky man as he breaks into a house, startling a elderly, white, female resident. It turns out that Willis Richmond (played by Charles S. Dutton) and Jewell Mae “Cookie” Orcutt (Patricia Neal) are the best of friends and he’s come late, but dependably, to clean the family pistols. Quickly, our suspicion turns to trust. As witnesses in the dark, we have sorted the seeming from the genuine about this intruder and connected with Cookie’s Fortune‘s central theme. The relationship between the good-humored, quick-witted Willis and pipe-smoking Cookie, in her maroon Mississippi State Bulldog jersey and matching sneakers, is moving and almost plausible, the best part of the film. It is gone however, in a matter of minutes.

Cookie’s suicide is the most salient surprise and break-through, sympathetically and effectively evoked. A physically infirm and mentally-slipping woman, lonelier each year after the passing of her lifemate Buck, childless Cookie

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opts for death’s golden boat and golden wings while she still has the wits, will, and courage to choose. She pulls the trigger on one of Buck’s old peacemakers and the feathers fly.

The film follows the consequences of Cookie’s choice, as her estranged, niece Camille Dixon, a fading Southern flower, attempts for reasons of family vanity and propriety, to cover-up the suicide. Rather than face this embarrassment, Camille, with her dominated sister Cora in tow, allow Willis to stand falsely accused of murder. An atavistic character for the era that haunted the childhood of Tennessee Williams, Camile has not reckoned on just how much things have changed in Mississippi–this new Mississippi, home to such popularly elected humanitarians and civil rights boosters as U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and Governor Kirk Fordice.

Sure of their fishing-buddy Willis’ innocence, but needing someone to charge and hold while the mess is sorted out, sheriffs’ officers take him into custody. Willis seems a little put out, but no sweat. Not to worry. In millennial Mississippi, African-American men suspected of killing white women can expect a standard-issue Atticus Finch, an unlocked jail cell complete with gorgeous and devoted white female roommate, a clean wool blanket to pull up on a chilly night after the Scrabble-playing visitors have left, a feast cooked by an officer’s wife, and a bluesy-but-upbeat soundtrack suggesting everything’s going to turn out just fine.

Meanwhile, the out-of-town forensics expert bumbles along and the out-of-town, black-and-suave investigator is befuddled. The message? Go back into the Heat of the Night, clueless, suspicious, Mister Tibbs. Between white and black communities, between juke joint and church sanctuary, we can handle this ourselves.

Holly Springs’ legacy, as told through passing shots of historical markers, is that of a town once-swarming with cotton, yellow fever, and Confederate generals. To move Cookie out form under the long shadows of complicity in the rewards of a place so long dependent upon the exploitations of black labor and the domination of black people, the film invokes the story of her husband, the gambler Buck Orcutt. Gambling is narrative’s and perhaps life’s, way of pretending to give the slip to history. In the turn of cards or the roll of dice, the winnings seem to wash their hands of any nasty labor that might have produced them. Buck rode into town in 1929, year of the Great Crash, with two pistols to his name. Soon he had amassed his bride Cookie, an antebellum mansion, the little house out back that Willis Richland would come to call home, and a collection of fake jewelry appropriate to “the biggest suck that ever lived,” in the film’s constant talk of fishing and luck.

But before Willis can be freed in a Holly(wood) Springs ending to claim the big house willed to him by Cookie as her nearest kin, there are a few distractions. There is considerable bumbling around by Jason (a rookie officer descended from Barney Fife), some hokey in the poky between Jason and Emma (Barney never got this lucky), and the First Presbyterian Church’s Easter production of Oscar Wilde’s scandalous play Salomé (as abbreviated and directed by Camille Dixon) with its themes of adultery, murder, wanton sexuality, suicide, and necrophilic vampirism echoing and anticipating the course of the filmic story.

Cookie’s Fortune is not slight, as several reviewers have suggested (by this I think they mean in need of multiple rocket launchers firing from all directions upon cars crashing through flaming windows thirty stories up), but, rather, low-key in giving the appearance of being thoughtful. Frequently deft in everyday, evocatively-lit detail and alert to the humorous possibilities of the moment, the film is deaf to its own unreality. It would have us believe Holly Springs is kept from utopian harmony only by that haunted scapeghost of Victorian ladyhood, in all her manipulative trappings, indulged eccentricities, and unacknowledged offspring. Cookie’s Fortune acts as if the struggle for racial justice has no bitter legacy, contemporary consequences, nor work left to do.

Allen Tullos editor of Southern Changes and is a professor of American Studies in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University.

“My Mind Stayed on Freedom”
Mae Bertha Carter, 1903-1999
By Connie Curry

Vol. 21, No. 2, 1999, pp. 29-30

Down the aisle they came. They were her thirteen children and their spouses, thirty-six grandchildren and spouses, thirty-five great grandchildren, godchildren, sisters and cousins, aunts and uncles, and nieces and nephews. They ranged in age from seven months to eighty years, over a hundred strong-the family of Mae Bertha Carter-there to celebrate her life and to say goodbye.

The funeral service was held on May lst in the gymnasium of Drew High School, Sunflower County, Mississippi. Thirty-four years ago, Mae Bertha and her husband Matthew enrolled four of their children-the first black students-in that previously all-white school. Their four younger children desegregated the elementary school. The eight Carter children graduated from Drew High School. Seven of them later graduated from the University of Mississippi. Eviction from their sharecropper’s house, job loss, and years of harassment and intimidation preceded their ultimate triumph. (See “A Right To Be There,” Southern Changes, August/September, 1992).

At Mae Bertha’s funeral, Senator Willie Simmons, the first African American since Reconstruction to be elected from the Delta to the state legislature, thanked her for helping in his campaign. Congressman Bennie Thompson, and representatives from the American Friends Service Committee and the Children’s Defense Fund paid tribute to her leadership and dedication to justice and equal education. The family had asked me to speak as well and I was hard put to talk about a friendship that went back to 1966, when I first met the family. The friendship with Mae Bertha was renewed in 1988 and blossomed in my recording the story of the Carter family in Silver Rights (1995, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill), and then in travelling with her as she spoke in over a hundred cities across the country.

At her funeral, I needed to talk about the Mae Bertha I knew personally and loved deeply. I spoke of her being the wisest woman I have ever known and of her words that echo over the years to us:

A letter to the American Friends Service Committee when she was fighting for Head Start money in the ’60s: “Richard Nixon doesn’t need to be president of anything.”

A newspaper story: “Why must they send my son to Vietnam when they won’t let him in the schools?”

To a university audience: “Clinton should be ashamed of himself for that welfare reform. Makin’ it so we all have to lock our doors and be afraid of each other.”

To a very upper-middle class, well-educated black audience: “You have forgotten how to talk to poor people. If you forget where you came from, you ain’t going nowhere.”

To me one day when she observed someone talking on the phone too long: “If you be talking that long, you GOT to be lying.”

Giving advice to my sister Ann on how she had raised her thirteen children and related to her grandchildren and great grandchildren: “You got to love ’em. You got to see each one as a person. And you got to listen to ’em.”

On Trent Lott: “Well he’s just crazy. If it’s the last thing I do, I’m gonna picket if they try to honor him at Ole Miss

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with that department or building or something.”

In the past year: “You know, you can’t let this cancer get you down.”

And she didn’t. She told us, “I’ve got my little angels and the covering that comes over me to keep me safe. You know we’re all going to Chicago-just some of us are gonna get there first.”

She went to Baskin Robbins for ice cream the day before she died, telling the home healthcare service to just “take me off the list,” when they explained that she had to be at home to get the health care.

Mae Bertha loved to tell her story and, a few weeks before she died, she gave a three hour interview for use by the Children’s Defense Fund. In an earlier video interview, she stands in her yard in a red and white polka dot dress and a straw hat with a flower in the middle, talking about the state of the world and people not voting when “folks died so we could vote.” She raises her hand and says, “If you ain’t doing nothing to change things, you are guilty, guilty, guilty.”

Writing here of Mae Bertha gives me the opportunity to tell perhaps my favorite tale, about the accompanying photograph.

It took Mae Bertha and me thirty-three years to discover that we both loved Elvis Presley. On a trip to the Delta in 1995, my sister Ann and I saw a yard full of plywood cut-outs, figures of all kinds–leprechauns, football helmets, musical instruments, blues singers. I bought an Elvis figure and took it to Drew where we were to visit Mae Bertha. I was going to ask her to keep it for me until I brought my car to take it back to Atlanta.

We put the figure in the carport and Mae Bertha sat down, strummed her hairbrush and sang, “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog” to his image. Ann, who is a photographer, told me to pull up a chair and sit with the two of them.

Next time I went to Drew in my car, Mae Bertha said to me, “Now, you haven’t come to take my man.” And I didn’t. “You know Elvis loved all of the people,” she once told me.

Feeling low in her final months, she would play her tape of Elvis singing “How Great Thou Art,” and other gospel songs and “it would lift me up.”

“St. Augustine reminds us,” I said at Mae Bertha’s funeral, “that we are drawn to a god-shaped vacancy and we spend our lives trying to fill that vacancy.” Mae Bertha Carter helped thousands of people from Maine to California from age five to ninety-five to fill that vacancy with a vibrant spirit of love and unwavering devotion to justice.

Mae Bertha, we carry your spirit in our hearts and pray that you will keep singing to us to wake up each morning–as you–with “our minds stayed on freedom.”

It was her favorite song and we sang it again there in the school before she was laid to rest beside Matthew at the Union Grove Cemetery, out in the country on a bright and soft spring Delta afternoon.

Connie Curry lives in Atlanta. In the spring of 2000, the University Press of Mississippi will publish her book on civil rights leader Aaron Henry.