Legacy of Violence

By Wendy Johnson

Vol. 24, No. 1-2, 2002 p. 3

Between 1882 and 1968, 4,743 Americans are known to have been victims of the terrible and violent crime of lynching. A recent article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution defined the word lynching as “an illegal death at the hands of a group acting under pretense of service, race or tradition.” More than 70 percent of those who lost their lives to a violent and unchecked mob in the name of preserving “tradition” were black. The allegations for which lynchings were carried out include such shockingly innocent acts as “being obnoxious,” “insolence,” “trying to vote,” “suing a white man,” “frightening a white woman,” and “acting suspiciously.” The very word–lynching–was a feared and hateful term and it continues to strike fear in many African Americans who can clearly remember acts of racial violence committed for breaches of “tradition.”

This brand of terrorism enjoyed a perverse popularity especially in the seat of the former confederacy where four out of five lynchings occurred. Mississippi and Georgia sowed the most violence, recording more than five hundred lynchings each. Nearly 93 percent of lynchings in these two states were committed against African Americans. Texas ranks third with 493 lynchings.

While many Ku Klux Klan branches helped perpetrate racialized violent crimes against blacks that went unpunished, community members colluded in ways incomprehensible. Elected officials, newspaper editors, and law enforcement officials were involved in many of these vigilante murders. Look carefully at the photograph on page 6. Countless community members and entire families bear peculiar witness to the lynch mobs’ offering–not in horror but in mutinous resentment and triumph. They push forward, some perched on friends shoulders or in trees, to better view the mentally retarded seventeen-year-old Jesse Washington as his executioners repeatedly lowered him into the flames and lifted him out again. A postcard of white boys slouched around Washington’s grotesquely charred and hanging corpse bears the chilling note, “This was the barbeque we had last night….your son, Joe.”

Emory University and the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site are showing several images of Jesse Washington’s lynching as part of a collection entitled, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, a rare exhibition of photographs, postcards, and artifacts documenting the history of lynching in America. These brutal images are being seen for the first time in the South.

Deeply disturbing, these images communicate immediately with the viewer: you find yourself holding your breath and flinching involuntarily. As your body physically reacts, your heart and mind reflexively ask “why such an exhibit?” James Jordan, curator for Without Sanctuary offers a response. “I want this exhibit to challenge the sense of safety that comes with denial. I want it to trouble the waters…..so that the virulent and growing racism, nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment of today will be understood to be a dangerous vestige of the recent past.”

In his article, “Return to Sender,” author Mark Auslander adds his explanation. He describes the process leading up to the exhibit, including public forums that debated exhibit intent and how to exhibit this violent phenomenon without wielding irreparable harm.

Several communities devastated by white mob violence over the past century have begun to confront these painful legacies of shared suffering and destruction and are designing actions for healing and reconciliation. “Lifting the Veil of Silence,” a workshop held in Atlanta last fall, brought nine of these communities together to liberate the truth about lynching. They feel an urgent need to “confront these atrocities against primarily African-American citizens, resurrect and record this history, remember the dead, and begin to heal these long neglected but still festering wounds.” The stories of several of these communities are offered in this issue.

Confronting a “dangerous memory” is an appeal for community remembrance and reconciliation. The challenge offered by the Without Sanctuary exhibit and these nine communities is a challenge we should all be willing to accept.

Wendy Johnson is executive director of the Southern Regional Council.

“Return to Sender”
Confronting Lynching and Our Haunted Landscapes
By Mark Auslander

Vol. 24, No. 1-2, 2002 pp. 4-7

Last year, I took a walk in the woods with a friend, an African-American man in his fifties whom I will call “James.” We had been seeking traces of an old slave cemetery, in which James had good reason to believe some of his ancestors were buried. Deep in the forest, he pointed out an old, gnarled oak that he was convinced marked the outer boundary of the graveyard. Finding this aged landmark was a relief, but a few minutes later, as we started back down the path, James paused and commented on the tree in different, more somber tones:

That tree’ll talk to you if stand out here in the dark. You’ll hear that Negro crying out to you, man. Can’t you hear?…Shoot. Look at that tree man. That’s an ugly tree. You never see limbs like that nowadays. That tree was bred for it. They just threw the rope up and pulled it up. Like this here, they just bring ’em here, hang ’em and throw ’em down in that pit. Shoot. You think that tree don’t know? Look at them limbs here. You don’t see limbs growing down like that. There been some dead folk here.

The same tree that moments earlier had positively revealed to him one set of buried secrets, about an honored slave cemetery, becomes a dark, ominous figure, hinting at nocturnal lynching parties.

A few weeks later, I found myself in conversation with another friend, a man in his eighties whom I will call “Daniel.” He recalled a moment nearly eight decades earlier, when he was a six-year-old African-American boy in a small Georgia community. On a bridge near the edge of town, while running an errand Saturday evening for his mother, he found himself surrounded by scores of hooded men robed in white, some atop white draped horses, all carrying flaming torches. He remembered his mother’s frequent admonition: if you run from the Klan, you will die; they will shoot you down. Daniel froze, not even breathing, until a vaguely familiar voice from one of the masked figures, cackled, “Best get your black ass home, boy!” He ran home and held his mother all night long. “All my life,” he says, “I’ve looked into the face of every white man in this county, in the store, at work, on the street. I ask myself, ‘Is this him? Is this the man who saved my life and who left me half dead inside for years?’ He haunts me still.”

These episodes are stark reminders that for many, the landscapes of Georgia, like many others across the nation, remain “haunted,” stalked by the remembered specters of racial violence, oppression, and hatred. As Martha, an elderly woman in Macon once told me, “every tree has a story.” These stories are often layered, ambivalently, with oscillating associations of profound belonging and horrific exclusion. The same tree that might summon up nostalgic memories of root-working or important moments in family history may also, moments later, trigger recollections of slavery, Klan rallies, or lynching. A face glimpsed in a store might one moment look benevolent, the next moment sinister.

For those influenced by the intellectual traditions of psychoanalysis, to speak of a person or a landscape as “haunted” is to imply that they are caught up in unresolved contradictions, in enduring traumas that cannot be neatly classified as belonging to the “past.” There are, to be sure, degrees of haunting. Some communities, families, and persons were vastly more traumatized than others, and some remain significantly more vulnerable to racial violence than others. Yet I would argue that the peculiar intimacy of systematic racialized violence in America, so often perpetrated by neighbor against neighbor, has rendered all of us, to some extent, “haunted,” all stalked by the specters of the nation’s under-acknowledged histories of terror within.

I found myself thinking of these conversations last winter, as Emory University held a series of public forums around the question of lynching photographs. As has been widely reported, James Allen and John Littlefield have placed their collection of photographs and postcards of lynching and racial violence, primarily taken between 1880 and 1920, on long-term loan in Emory’s Special Collections. These images have been published in the extraordinary book, Without Sanctuary, displayed on the web (www.withoutsanctuary.com), and exhibited in New York City and in Pittsburgh. Yet the images had never been displayed in a large-scale exhibition in the American South.

Should the photographs be displayed here, and if so, how? These questions were debated in public sessions on the Emory campus and at the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African-American History and Culture, and by a University task force of faculty, students, and staff members. Many noted that the images were initially produced and

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circulated as instruments of terror; dismembered, horrifically dismembered bodies were carefully posed, often surrounded by smiling, triumphant crowds. Would exhibiting these images of unspeakably violent death occasion a kind of pornographic voyeurism? Would modern onlookers, in effect, occupy the same position as the gleeful onlookers in the pictures? Would an exhibition inadvertently reduce those killed, nearly all of them African American, to passive, pitiful objects of morbid curiosity? Or, as many maintained, would seeing these images finally force thousands of viewers to confront a historical truth that they had never before truly grasped, that lynching was not an occasional aberration, but was rather a mass phenomenon, a pervasive spectacle of violence, an inescapable chapter in the American story?

In the middle of one of these forums, a young woman rose to speak. She had been of two minds about the show, she acknowledged. She knew that these images, many of them photographic postcards, had been sent through the mail in part to sow terror in the hearts of African Americans who might glimpse them. There was always the risk that displaying these pictures might again inflict pain and fear on some viewers. Yet, she mused, doesn’t this exhibition offer us the opportunity to re-direct these images, to circulate them along a different trajectory, to mark them, in effect, “return to sender”?

The phrase, “return to sender,” has stayed with me ever since. No exhibition or project can, or should, erase James or Daniel’s memories, or the memories of thousands of others haunted by the echoes of America’s long undeclared war against persons of color. Yet might new initiatives, in museums or other public spaces, help us collectively confront our inner demons and move us beyond the timeless repetition of trauma? Might there be ways to take these lingering specters and mark them, once and for all, “return to sender”?

It was in this spirit last year that a group of us at Emory began to work closely with our partners in a nearby organization, The Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee (MFMC), a group formed in the mid-1990s to publicize and commemorate the killing in July 1946 of four young African Americans, including one returning serviceman, near Monroe, Georgia. Since its founding the MFMC has demonstrated a remarkable ability to bring together varied constituencies, across lines of race and class, to work on projects of memorialization and social justice. As an anthropologist who studies ritual I’ve been especially fascinated by the work the MFMC has done in cleaning and restoring the cemeteries in which the victims of the Moore’s Ford killings had been buried in unmarked graves. Community attempts to mark the graves with permanent markers were repeatedly sabotaged by Klan members. In James Allen’s memorable phrase, even in death the victims were “without sanctuary.”

In this context, the work of restoring cemeteries strikes me as especially important. One night in the summer of 1946 a group of men gathered to commit an unspeakable crime, riddling the bodies of their young victims with hundreds of bullet holes. Now, on successive weekends, a group of people from varied backgrounds gathered to participate in the hard, physical labor of restoring hallowed ground. In a quiet fashion they sought to honor that which had been dishonored, to sanctify those long denied sanctuary. In the words of one MFMC activist, “sweat-producing labor is soul-cleansing labor.” If the bodies of the dead had been physically “dis-membered” by the murderers, then the modern cemetery work sought to “re-member” those who were lost, and by extension to “re-member” or reconstitute a shattered community. Since time immemorial, rituals–especially rites marking cycles of death and the regeneration of life–have bound together villages, communities, and nations. It is moving to watch such ritual practices emerging at this historical juncture, across the country at the grassroots level, as diverse persons and families seek new ways to meet on common ground.

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Over the course of spring 2000, we began to plan for a collaborative workshop that would bring together representatives of the many different community organizations around the nation doing comparable work, seeking to bring out the truth about lynching and “re-member” their local communities. Funded by a grant from the Georgia Humanities Council, the workshop was cosponsored by the MFMC, Emory University’s Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life (MARIAL) and the Auburn Avenue Research Library. We held the program, “Lifting the Veil of Silence: A Workshop on Racial Violence and Reconciliation” at Auburn Avenue on October 24-25, 2001.

For two days, representatives of nine different community organizations shared their stories. We heard in painful detail narratives of mass violence in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Rosewood, Florida in which entire communities had been devastated in the early 20th century. We learned new details of the killings in Chattanooga, Tennessee; Duluth, Minnesota; Monroe, Georgia; Ocoee, Florida; Orangeburg, South Carolina; Price, Utah; and Wilmington, North Carolina. In plenary and in small break-out sessions we pondered and debated the causes, meanings, and legacies of these events. What does it mean to tell the truth, and who, if anyone, owns the “rights” to these stories? Who is accountable for these crimes and what forms should accountability take? Is reconciliation possible without justice, in the absence of prosecution or formal judicial inquiry? What form would a South African-style “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” take in Georgia? How might the historical analysis of lynching productively inform current activism around issues of incarceration, the death penalty, poverty, and racial violence?

Again and again, we returned to the problem of what Toni Morrison has termed “re-memory,” the imaginative work of telling stories that had seemed lost, and in so doing, of re-creating moral and community bonds long frayed. What kinds of memorials are the most fitting to those killed in such terrible ways? How do we honor the victims without reducing them, and by extension all oppressed persons and communities, to the status of mere objects of pity? How do we move beyond simply re-affirming the relations of power, terror, and domination that were reflected by, and reproduced through, the initial acts of lynching? How, in short, do we make things different?

For Joseph Jordan, curator of the current exhibition of the Allen-Littlefield lynching photographs at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site (open May 1-December 31, 2002) the answer lies in giving voice to those whose voices were so long ignored. He opened the workshop by reading from the testimony of James Cameron, who narrowly survived a lynching in 1930. “How did I act when it came time for me to die?” he read. With those startling words, the line between distant victim and audience member was suddenly blurred. Such language breaks down the abstraction of statistical enumeration. Some of us were reminded of a rabbi’s commentary on September 11: it wasn’t five thousand people who died in the World Trade Center. It was one person, five thousand times.

For activists from Duluth, Minnesota, commemorating the 1920 killings of three young circus workers by a crowd of five thousand persons, the answer lies in mass, collective action. The photographs of the lynched Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie are among the most haunting in the Without Sanctuary collection. Two youths, their shirts stripped off, are trussed from either

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side of a lamp-post. A third young victim lies prone at their feet. An exultant white crowd surrounds them. The parallels in composition to classic images of the Crucifixion almost defy understanding; even the ribs of one youth are visible, a dark shadow at their base. At some unconscious level, did the photographer understand that he was complicit in another Calvary? African-American artists and poets have long noted parallels between lynching and Golgotha. (In Gwendolyn Brooks’ words, “The lariat lynch-wish I deplored/The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.”) Recently, scholars such as Orlando Patterson and Donald Mathews have argued that lynchings were often organized around the logic of ritual sacrifice and expiation; overtly or implicitly, the killers sought communion through the blood of the offered scapegoat.

The enduring power of these nightmarish images has posed a special challenge for the modern activists in Duluth. At first, they planned to commemorate the 1920 event through an image of a lamppost, to be used on posters and T-shirts. Yet, to some, the icon seemed too much like the old photographs; even the stark lines of the curved lamppost conjured up the traces of the desecrated bodies. A local artist finally hit upon an ingenious solution: the new image depicts the silhouetted figures of the three young men, standing straight and tall, backlit by the glow of a distant light source. In a subtle fashion, the street-lamp has been transformed from an instrument of terror to something else: the light of historical truth, perhaps, or even the ultimate promise of redemption. Images surely haunt us. Yet they also, in quiet ways, may help to heal us.

This summer, on the anniversary of the 1920 lynching, the Duluth organizers plan to turn the tables even more thoroughly. Ten thousand persons–twice the numbers who participated in the killing–will gather on the spot of the murder for a collective memorial. The photographs of that event, I expect, will be worth seeing.

On the final day of our workshop in October we held a modest memorial ritual of our own. Activists and scholars from around the nation gathered on a Sunday morning by the banks of the Appalachee River, at the little crossing known as “Moore’s Ford,” where George and Mae Murray Dorsey and Roger and Dorothy Malcolm were killed on July 25, 1946 by a group of white men, none of whom were ever prosecuted. One at a time, members of MFMC and students from the college where I teach quietly read the names of the 488 persons known to have been lynched in Georgia. Each name was precious, and yet there was a special poignancy to a phrase that recurred again and again, “Unknown Negro…Unknown Negro.” Lynching snuffed out thousands of lives before their time, and even erased, in some instances, the identities of the dead for all time.

James, who grew up hearing whispered stories of the Moore’s Ford killings, was at church that morning and couldn’t make it to the memorial service. But he heard about it from some mutual friends and has talked about it a few times since. As an “old time civil rights activist,” he says he’s lately been close to giving up on the current generation of young people. But gazing at photographs of the students at the ceremony he allows that there might be some hope after all. Remarking at the racial mix in the photographs, of African American, Latino, White and Asian students, he wonders. “Who knows what they’ll get up to?”

Recently, James and I took another walk in the woods. Once more, we passed that old oak. Thinking of our earlier conversation, I asked him if he found this sight disturbing. He shook his head, puzzled: “Hey, it’s just a tree.” Freud, I suspect, would be pleased: sometimes a tree is only a tree.

Of course, many might argue that in the shadow of America’s violent history against its own citizens of color, a single workshop, a single memorial service, or a single exhibition of photographs won’t change anything fundamentally. Aren’t these just symbols, images, ephemeral traces of light and shadow?

Yet when traversing haunted landscapes, light and shadow are, sometimes, the only things with which we have to work. I take some comfort from the thought that the exhibition of lynching photographs opened in Atlanta, capital of the “New South,” on May 1st, of all days. Mayday. Once an ancient rite celebrating the land’s regeneration on the day of spring’s return, now dedicated internationally to the dignity of labor and to our common humanity. What better day to bring some old images of dark times out into the light and stamp them, once and for all, “returned to sender”?

Mark Auslander teaches Anthropology and Sociology at Oxford College of Emory University and is a core faculty member at the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life (the MARIAL Center). With Rich Rusk of Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee, he served as co-coordinator of, Lifting the Veil of Silence: A Workshop on Racial Violence and Reconciliation. For more information about the Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee, visit: www.mooresford.net, email: richrusk@negia.net, or write to: 1851 Rays Church Road, Bishop, GA 30621-1206. The Without Sanctuary exhibit is housed at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta, Georgia, from May 1 through December 31, 2002. For more information on the exhibit and accompanying community events, visit: www.nps.gov/malu.

Communities Lifting the Veil of Silence

Staff

Vol. 24, No. 1-2, 2002 pp. 8-9

The 1898 Foundation, Wilmington, NC

During Reconstruction, some African Americans in Wilmington, North Carolina were able to achieve a degree of financial and professional success. In 1897, more than 13 percent of businesses were black-owned. The political success of the Populist party helped to boost several black residents into low-level political appointments and municipal jobs, angering many whites. White Democrats rallied to reclaim political power, circulating racist propoganda and charging that black men were a sexual threat to white women. Alex Manly, African-American editor of The Daily Record in Wilmington, responded by suggesting that some of the alleged “rapes” were consensual relationships.

When the votes on November 8, 1898 were tallied, the victorious white Democrats in Wilmington adopted the “White Man’s Declaration of Independence,” resolving that black office-holding was “unnatural,” that the city administration should resign, and that Alex Manly be banished. Prominent white citizens presented the Declaration to the black community, ordering a response by the following day. The next day, a mob of angry, armed white men destroyed the Daily Record office, placed a bounty on Manly’s head, and instigated the Riot of 1898, one of the worst racially and politically motivated episodes in American history. Homes and churches were damaged, businesses were destroyed, and the Republican officials were forced to resign.

Recently, Wilmington residents are memorializing the riot with a monument honoring the achievements of African Americans and other Wilmingtonians who fought for civil rights in the 20th century. The memorial will be located in the 1898 Memorial Park, close to the spot where the riot began in 1898. A fundraising campaign is underway. For more information about the Riot and the 1898 Foundation, visit: www.spinnc.org/spinsites/1898/memorial.

Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee, Monroe, GA

On July 25, 1946, twelve to fifteen unmasked white men shot George and Mae Murray Dorsey and Roger and Dorothy Malcolm, all African American, hundreds of times in broad daylight at Moore’s Ford bridge. No one was ever prosecuted for these murders. Civil rights activists and the Walton County NAACP formed the Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee in August 1997. This large biracial group of Georgians seeks to tell the story of the murders of the Dorseys and the Malcolms and to create a permanent living memorial. Several hundred Georgians searched for the missing graves of the lynching victims. Finding three of the four, they worked twenty-five days to restore two cemeteries and installed grave monuments at the gravesites. A military service on Memorial Day honored World War II veteran George Dorsey who was killed nine months after returning from the Pacific. MFMC’s efforts also led to Lamar Howard, who was beaten after testifying before an Athens grand jury on the 1946 killings, being honored with a Georgia House of Representatives resolution commemorating his courage. The group offers annual scholarships to local students who have learned of the lynching and charted a course seeking justice and racial reconciliation. To learn more about MFMC, visit: www.mooresford.net.

The Ocoee Project, Ocoee, FL

On November 2, 1920–Election Day–Julius Perry was dragged from his house in Ocoee by a group of whites and hanged, his body riddled with bullets. At least five other local African Americans were also either shot or burned that night and an entire black neighborhood, including at least twenty-four homes, two churches, a school, and a lodge, was burned. Why? Because African Americans had sought to vote that day.

The Republican Party had conducted extensive voter registration drives throughout the South that year. Perry and Moses Norman, another prominent local African American, had been actively recruiting blacks to register and vote. When Norman was refused at the polls, whites searched his car and found a gun. Norman was beaten, but escaped. When armed local whites, believing a “black uprising” was underway, searched for him at Perry’s home, shots were fired, and two white men were killed. Perry was then dragged from his home and killed.

The grand jury that followed exonerated all who were involved. Soon after, local whites ran the entire black population, including successful farmers, out of Ocoee, offering them token payments for their land. According to the 1920 Census, prior to the murders and rioting, blacks comprised almost 50 percent of the Ocoee population. Only two black residents were listed in the 1930 Census. Eighty years later, blacks accounted for only 2 percent of the population.

The Ocoee Project is a multiracial grassroots initiative that was formed to unearth the hidden history of devastation of Ocoee’s black community in 1920 and to

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spur the Central Florida community to take steps toward accountability. The Ocoee Project is working to post exhibits in local and state museums, unveil a memorial to the victims of the Ocoee Massacre, have information about the massacre included in Florida school curricula, and have reparations awarded to the descendants of those who lost their lives and their land.

Rosewood Heritage Foundation, Rosewood, FL

On January 1, 1923, Fannie Taylor said that a black man attacked her at home while her husband was working. The next day, a mob lynched Sam Carter, a blacksmith and outstanding citizen and resident of Rosewood, Florida. The mob continued to rage and by January 4th, they had burned cabins and houses near Rosewood and shot and killed Sara Carrier in her home. On January 6th, several children and women, who had been hiding in a well and nearby forests, were able to escape by train. The Florida Grand Jury, when it met the next month, found “insufficient evidence” to prosecute anyone for the Rosewood Riot and Massacre.

The story of this racist riot remained buried for nearly sixty years until reporter Gary Moore published the story in the St. Petersburg Times. Survivors and their family members soon after founded the Rosewood Family Reunion in Lacoochee, Florida. In 1994, the former African-American residents of Rosewood and their family members became the recipients of the first restitution payments for a racial riot. The state paid $150,000 to each survivor and the Rosewood Scholarship Fund was established.

Since that time, survivors and their family members have been working to educate others about the events of the Rosewood Massacre and their relation to racial justice in the United States. Rosewood Bus Tours has carried more than 7,300 student, military group, family, church, and community groups on an educational journey through Rosewood. With Florida Humanities Council funding, the Rosewood Traveling Exhibit was designed. And “Rosewood,” produced by Warner Brothers was released in 1997, providing a Hollywood version of the story to a broad national audience. To learn more about the Rosewood Heritage Foundation, visit: www.displaysforschools.com/rosewood.html.

Marge Baroni: The Awakening of Activism

By Susan Stevenot Sullivan

Vol. 24, No. 1-2, 2002 pp. 9-12

Marjorie Rushing Baroni (1942-1986) was in many ways an ordinary Southern woman of the last century. A housewife and resident of Natchez, Mississippi, she was neither wealthy nor famous. She was not killed in the civil rights days, nor were members of her family. She was willing, however, to live what she believed about the dignity of all people. She was an ordinary person who took an extraordinary stance for her time and paid a social and personal price for the rest of her life.

The daughter of poor, white, Mississippi sharecroppers and the mother of six children, Marge Baroni departed from her cultural upbringing to become a civil rights activist in one of the most active Ku Klux Klan areas in Mississippi. By living her faith in God’s equal love for all races, she endangered herself and her family and was ostracized by white society–including relatives, friends, co-workers, and members of her Catholic parish.

Books like Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi by John Dittmer;Silver Rights by Constance Curry; and Civil Rights Chronicle by Clarice Campbell testify to the heroic actions of ordinary people who have helped transform life as it is now lived in the United States. The sacrifices of such people, many acting in isolation and in the face overwhelming pressure to be silent and conform, helped to construct platforms upon which the highly-publicized people and events featured in history books have stood. These stories bring us history with flesh and bone, with feelings and particularity.

The central mystery for all such ordinary, extraordinary lives is “how” and “why.” How is it that Mrs. Baroni stepped-out despite the risks involved, to live her belief that all people are equal in the sight of God? Why did she persist, risking her life and the lives of those she loved?

The clues are in her life and her writings. They are uncovered in the remembrances of friends, family members, civil rights co-workers, and in the recorded history of the South. This article is a first attempt to scratch the surface of the mystery of Marjorie Rushing Baroni’s life.

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The Commerce of Natchez

The world into which Marge Baroni was born had been built, long before, on the backs of slaves. According to Ronald L.F. Davis, in The Black Experience in Natchez 1720-1880, by the 1790s slaves were arriving in Natchez in increasing numbers. He writes, “With the development of the cotton gin, the trickle of slaves coming into the neighborhood became a cascade. By 1810, more than 8,000 slaves lived in Adams County… That number increased to 14,292 on the eve of the Civil War… The old Natchez district had become a slave-populated, plantation economy.”

This plantation economy led to the erection of numerous estate mansions in and around Natchez. Davis describes the economic impact of slave labor in Natchez: “Students of Natchez history contend that district planters ranked among the richest slave masters in the South as well as–in many cases–the nation’s wealthiest citizens.”

As generations passed, the trappings of slavery were discarded, but the system of second-class status remained. Describing the evolution of 20th century race relations in Natchez, John Dittmer in Local People wrote:

“Before World War II, race relations in Natchez resembled the paternalism of the old regime, with organizations like the NAACP tolerated as long as blacks did not challenge the caste system. Now, however, Natchez had become a ‘New South’ city boasting an industrial base anchored by Armstrong Tire and Rubber, the International Paper Company, and the Johns-Manville Corporation. When in the early 1960s black activists began to press for social change, whites responded as they had during the days of first Reconstruction. With a substantial white working-class base, the Ku Klux Klan, under the leadership of E. L. McDaniel, was stronger in Natchez than in any other Mississippi community, even McComb.”

Childhood Challenges

Marjorie Raye Rushing was born August 16, 1924, to Percy Rushing and Clementine Loften Rushing. Margie, the oldest of their five children, was born in Brookhaven, just outside Natchez, on a farm the couple sharecropped.

One of Marge Baroni’s daughters, Mary Jane (Baroni) Tarver said that her mother’s family had a “hard life.” Problems between her grandfather, an often-violent alcoholic, and her grandmother, a “hard-shell Baptist,” created turmoil for the children in addition to the economic challenges.

In an essay entitled, “Whatever Happened to Joseph Edwards,” probably written in the 1980s as the start of her unfinished master’s thesis, Baroni wrote about her upbringing. “When I was growing up, my father moved us often. He was always looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We lived in a succession of rental houses in Natchez and in a number of tenant shacks on various farms in Adams County.”

While her hands became callused from months of hard, hot labor. Margie Rushing escaped into her fluid imagination. “My brother and I, as the eldest children in the family–we were eleven and thirteen respectively–were expected to do the work of farm hands, and we did. I remember picking cotton, sticking sweet potato slips into the ground, laying stalks of seed cane along the furrow our father ploughed for them… It was a hard life at times, especially for an adolescent, but in the hot days between the laying of the crops and harvest time, I was able to read for many hours. I always day dreamed, no matter what the chore, and had to be reprimanded often.”

At the age of forty-nine, Marge Baroni recalled the childhood foundations of her profound search for meaning and love.

“I have wanted, so intensely all my life, to live fully. Lying on my back in the middle of the peanut patch–looking at the September clouds and wondering what the future held for me. . . I was twelve years old, a dreamer, romantic, and irrepressible.”

The stress inflicted by her dysfunctional family added urgency to the search for transcendence and new perspectives amid the daily difficulties. It may also have created a sense of solidarity with those targeted by rage-filled abusers who need scapegoats.

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“I knew a little about corporal punishment,” she continued. “We always told each other, ‘You’re going to get a whipping.’ I think I got the most. For one thing I was the oldest of five children and my brother, next to me, was the only son. This automatically acted in his favor. . . . The sense of disapproval, the tension and violence, hysteria and clenched teeth that emanated from my parents’ unhappiness with each other kept my core from forming unscarred.

“. . . At any rate it is this spirit of exploration that has motivated my entire life. This and the search for evidences of love–the love of man for man, for woman, for child, for earth, for every growing thing, every created thing. . . even now the pattern is still growing, it is still becoming clearer.”

The pattern of noticing a difference in the way certain people were treated may have started in the immediate family, with her brother, but it soon widened to include the larger community.

In “Whatever Happened to Joseph Edwards,” she wrote about her growing awareness of inequality. “I knew, when I was a little girl, that something stood in the way of free intercourse among people. Before I recognized differences in skin pigment and came to know what it meant, I knew there was a barrier. I had noted the high, strained pitch of the shopkeeper’s voice when he spoke to a black customer. In the department stores I had seen handsome, dark women poised and austere, their faces closed against the loud questioning of the clerks. . . . “Although my mother never jerked me closer to her when we met blacks on the street, as she did when we passed the Chinese family who ran the grocery store down on Franklin Street, I could tell there was a special etiquette in her conversation with black men and women–even children. She became jocularly condescending, not natural as she when she was among her white friends and relatives.”

Leaving Natchez High School before she graduated, Marge married nineteen-year-old Louis Baroni, the son of an Italian sharecropper family who lived in Adams County. She was seventeen. Louis and Marge relocated as he searched for welding work in booming shipyards of World War II. The first of their six children, Neil, was born within a year. According to Louis, Marge insisted on returning to Natchez for the birth of their first child in August of 1942. The couple would live in Natchez for the rest of Marge’s life.

The Awakening of Activism

A process of personal transformation led to Marge’s conversion to Catholicism in 1947. By the mid-1950s, she became a friend of internationally-known peace and justice activist Dorothy Day, also a Catholic. More than two decades of correspondence and visits testify to a mother-daughter sort of relationship between the two women. The relationship influenced Marge’s activism.

By 1957, Marge stopped attending local concerts and theater events, which she loved and reviewed for the local paper. “The fact that (concerts and plays) were segregated became too much for me,” she wrote. “What was I doing there? How could I justify my belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man if I had no qualms about enjoying privilege because of the color of my skin?”

By 1962, Marge Baroni quit her job as an editor of the , because of their racist editorial policies. She informed her employer, “I could no longer work for a newspaper that purposely overlooked one-half the population, unless there was a murder, rape, or robbery implicating a member of that community.”

She began a public involvement in anti-segregation and civil rights organizations, such as the Mississippi Council on Human Relations. During this decade she established important relationships with such local activists as Father William Morrissey, a Josephite priest and the white pastor of the black Catholic church in Natchez, and others, such as Mamie Lee Mazique, activist and member of the parish. The courageous stories of these local people are intertwined with her own. Like them, Marge felt compelled to conform her life to her beliefs, whatever the cost.

In a 1977 oral history interview, Marge remarked on the challenge of integrity. “The thing is, it was perfectly acceptable for white people to sit down and talk about how black people were mistreated, so long as one didn’t do anything about it, so long as one didn’t attempt to change it. You could deplore it. You could be upset about it. You could say it was wrong. You could point to the Bible. . . You could read the Bible and study your religion, but you couldn’t practice it.”

For Marge, Mississippi’s litany of beatings and murders, legal challenges, and years of struggle all coalesced in the summer of 1964, Freedom Summer. Scores of students poured into Mississippi, as she put it, “to help break the bonds under which black Mississippians labored. . . It was the beginning of the end for the old Mississippi. . . Never before had it been so blatantly obvious that church, state, and local governments, educational and press organizations, and business institutions were dedicated in our state to the status quo based on separation of the races. This condition had existed in every area of life since the territory was first settled by the white man, and the land brought under control by his black slave.”

Her activities in 1964 included integrating the white library in Natchez with Chock Mazique, Mamie Lee Mazique’s son; attending Civil Rights Commission hearings; joining the Mississippi Council on Human Relations, which was meeting at Tougaloo College where she met

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Mickey Schwerner a month before he was murdered; and meeting at Natchez’s Eola Hotel to help integrate the dining room.

Ostracism and Threats

By December of 1964, her efforts triggered ostracism, first by extended family members, then by white Catholic parishioners and the white community as a whole. KKK smear campaigns and threats became common. At least one bombing attempt targeting the family home is acknowledged and shots were fired at the house. “We were always concerned about bombings,” Louis Baroni, her husband, said in an oral history interview in 2000 at his home on Monroe Street.

Louis Baroni who worked at the same Armstrong plant as bombing victim Wharlest Jackson, went in fear of his life for years. Each evening he inspected small pebbles he had placed on the hood of his car at the beginning of the shift, in the hope of detecting the tampering necessary to place a similar bomb in his car, ready to detonate on the drive home from work. For three years, no one at the Armstrong plant spoke to Louis Baroni. He may have kept his job due to his union membership.

In recent oral history interviews, it is clear that the Baroni offspring are, decades later, beginning to come to grips with the impact of these events on their childhoods. Their experiences vary with their ages at the time of the most harrowing events. Some of the younger children were taunted and insulted at times and all were conscious of the family’s isolation and being “different.”

Despite the impact on the children, their mother did not change her beliefs or her activities. Marge Baroni helped spearhead a drive to form the Adams Jefferson County Improvement Corporation (AJIC), a community-action agency conforming to Title II of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964–pioneering outreach efforts included Head Start, high school work programs, and adult literacy programs.

In 1969, Marge left her post as assistant director of AJIC to accept a job as an aide to Mayor Charles Evers of Fayette, the first African American to be elected mayor of a biracial town in Mississippi since Reconstruction. She worked for him for ten years.

The ostracism continued long after the defining years of the Civil Rights Movement ended. The isolation took an emotional and physical toll, which she candidly revealed in correspondence. It is possible that she suffered a nervous breakdown in the early 1970s. She went away for several weeks and two of her sons remember there was uncertainty about whether she would return. She did.

Dorothy Day, her friend and mentor, died in 1980. In 1981, Marge Baroni was diagnosed with colon cancer, a struggle which ended with her death in 1986.

Until the end, she continued her vocation as an activist. Several months before her death, an emaciated Marge Baroni was featured in an article in the weekly paper of the Catholic Diocese of Jackson. The story detailed her work to secure housing for a one hundred-year-old African-American woman.

Questions Remain

Who was Marge Baroni? Much more research is needed to answer that question. She was one of the very human, very ordinary people who took extraordinary risks. Much more of her story, and the stories of people like Father William Morrissey and Mamie Lee Mazique, remains to be told.

Perhaps history is made and hearts are changed one ordinary person at a time. To follow their example, we need to know who they are. “Who our heroes are and whether they are presented in a way that makes them lifelike, hence usable as role models, could have a significant bearing on our conduct in the world,” writes James W. Loewen in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.

Attempting to understand how Marge Baroni, and others, joined this company of extraordinary/ordinary people can help all of us see our own roles more clearly in the challenges that continue today.

A note from Dorothy Day in November of 1974 reads, “Dearest Marge, do excuse my long silence–but I’ve been thinking of you and our plans for the South–a farm in Mississippi somewhere between Natchez and Fayette. Idle dreams maybe but your energies and desires to serve the Lord, your love of people and interracial justice should find expression. . . .You have been a voice in the wilderness and a shining light to the blind!”

Susan Stevenot Sullivan lives in Atlanta, working as a writer and photographer with groups in ministry in the South. She was instrumental in the placement of Marge Baroni’s papers in the archives at the University of Mississippi.

Sullivan continues to piece together Marge Baroni’s story and would appreciate hearing from anyone who can add additional information (write to Susan Stevenot Sullivan c/o Southern Changes at 133 Carnegie Way, NW, Suite 900, Atlanta, GA 30303)

Race and Redistricting: Myths, Truths, and Facts

By Todd A. Cox

Vol. 24, No. 1-2, 2002 pp. 13-14

Federal court decisions regarding redistricting over the past several years have caused some to question how district line drawers can create redistricting plans that will provide all voters equal opportunity to elect candidates of choice. Since Shaw v. Reno, the courts have clarified the criteria for drawing district lines and made it clear that race can be a factor in redistricting and these clarifications have supported lawmakers and grassroots organizers who sought redistricting plans that allow fair representation for minorities in many states and localities since 2000.

But, the process of redistricting is not complete throughout the South. States like Louisiana and North Carolina are still developing plans and, more importantly, countless communities across the South have yet to draw new city council, county commissioner, and school board plans. For this reason, it is imperative that local activists supporting fair representation for minorities are well informed of the role which race may play in redistricting. Line drawers may still try to argue against creating districts that fairly reflect minority voting strength. These arguments will essentially be based on myths about the role of race in redistricting. In order to advocate for the creation of fair redistricting plans, be prepared to debunk these myths.

Myth: Race cannot be considered during redistricting.

Truth: It is okay to be conscious of race during redistricting. It is, however, important to avoid violating “traditional redistricting principles.” These include: making sure that the districts are compact and contiguous (ensuring that all parts of the district touch); respecting political subdivisions; and preserving communities of interest.

States and local jurisdictions are permitted to express and meet political goals even if the result is the creation of majority-minority districts. Hunt v. Cromartie, issued in April 2001, is the latest word from the U. S. Supreme Court on the role of race and politics in redistricting. In that case, a group of white voters sought to have North Carolina’s new 12th and 1st Congressional Districts ruled unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. The Supreme Court, however, found the 12th District constitutional. The Court pointed out that the North Carolina General Assembly simply sought to create a district containing very loyal Democratic voters and in so doing created a district that had a large concentration of African Americans who tend to vote Democratic, writing, “A legislature trying to secure a safe Democratic seat is interested in Democratic voting behavior. Hence, a legislature may, by placing reliable Democratic precincts within a district without regard to race, end up with a district containing more heavily African-American precincts, but the reasons would be political rather than racial.”

Myth: Jurisdictions are not required or permitted to create majority-minority districts.

Truth: Jurisdictions are permitted and may even be required to create majority-minority districts. Those drawing lines during the redistricting process are required to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which forbids the adoption of redistricting plans that have the result of denying voters an equal opportunity to participate in the political process because of their race, color, or membership in a language minority group. Those drawing lines must avoid creating redistricting plans that result in diluting the voting strength of minority voters. Dilution occurs when concentrated minority populations are fragmented or split between districts or over-concentrated in a district, resulting in minority voters having less of an opportunity to elect their candidate of choice than other voters.

Despite the requirement that line drawers not dilute minority voting strength, some individuals and groups may still advocate for dismantling a majority-minority district and spreading its voters between various districts in order to achieve some partisan political advantage. The determination of whether a particular redistricting plan violates Section 2 is very complicated and specific to the area being examined. It requires complex political and social science analyses of electoral behavior and of a community’s political history. Without this analysis, it would be inappropriate for those drawing district lines to dismantle majority-minority districts or fail to create them merely based, for example, on anecdotal information of minority electoral victories or hypothetical promises of future success.

Myth: The redistricting process is closed to the public.

Truth: Redistricting should be an open process. The redistricting process is open for participation by anyone, including individuals and grassroots organizations.

To get involved, first, educate yourself about the redistricting process in your state and community. Find out the redistricting schedule, the timing for hearings and developing plans, and how you can participate. You should get a copy of any proposed redistricting plans from the body charged with redistricting in your community and find out if the state or local government will provide the public access to redistricting computers so that you may develop your own alternative plans. Also, you should familiarize yourself with the census population data for your community, evaluating population characteristics and assessing the various demographic trends that have developed over the last

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decade. This data is available from various sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau.

Second, assemble the information you need to make your case for a fair redistricting plan and share it with redistricting officials. Make sure information proving the need for the creation of a particular majority-minority district is included in the redistricting record. This can take the form of letters, public hearing testimonials, studies, reports, articles, or expert analyses and should include:

• maps showing that reasonably compact majority-minority districts can be drawn;
• an examination of whether voting is racially polarized in your community;
• an assessment of the history of discrimination in your community and in the state, particularly to voting;
• a list of current electoral practices that have a discriminatory impact on the ability of minorities to cast an effective vote;
• an assessment of the extent to which minority candidates are excluded from nominating processes;
• an assessment of the social and economic disparities between minorities and whites in your community and the state in areas such as education, employment, and health;
• examples of overt or subtle appeals to or reference to race that have been made in elections;
• a record of the electoral successes and losses suffered by candidates of choice of minority voters;
• the lack of responsiveness of the governing body being redistricted to the needs of the minority community; and
• an assessment of how insubstantial a jurisdiction’s policy reason may be for not creating majority-minority districts and maintaining the current plan.

Third, some jurisdictions–including many in the South–are required to submit their redistricting plans to the federal government for review under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Under Section 5, certain jurisdictions with a history of discrimination in voting (“covered jurisdictions”) must submit any changes in law that could affect voting, such as redistricting plans, to either the Department of Justice (DOJ) or the federal district court in the District of Columbia for review to make sure that the law is not racially discriminatory. Even if a jurisdiction is only partially covered by Section 5, congressional and state legislative redistricting plans for the entire state must be submitted for review. Most jurisdictions submit voting changes to the DOJ which has sixty days to review and decide either that a given change is not discriminatory and approve or “preclear” it or that the change is discriminatory and disapprove or “object to” it. The states covered entirely under Section 5 are: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. States of which only certain counties or towns are covered under Section 5 are: Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, and South Dakota.

The DOJ welcomes the participation of individuals and community groups during the Section 5 process. Your goal should be to assist the DOJ in making a decision and your comments should include your perspective on the facts leading to the creation of the proposed redistricting plan. Your letter should be addressed to Chief, Voting Section, Civil Rights Division, Department of Justice, P.O. Box 66128, Washington, D.C. 20035-6128. The envelope and first page should be marked “Comment under Section 5.” Also, you may call the DOJ with your comments at: 1-800-253-3931 or: 202-307-2385 or arrange to meet with the Department to discuss the proposed plan. You may check the status of the DOJ’s review by visiting the Voting Section’s website at: www.usdoj.gov/crt/voting/index.htm. After the DOJ has made its determination, you should receive a copy of the decision if you participated.

It may be beneficial for you to seek the assistance of experts–a demographer, historian, or political scientist–who can help you in collecting and developing the information you will need during the redistricting process. A demographer uses census data to draw or redraw redistricting maps and can analyze the proposed redistricting plans and create alternative plans on your behalf. A historian will study the political and social history of your community, providing information about race relations and the interests that all members of your community have in common, and that, therefore, should be respected during the redistricting process. A political scientist will analyze election information to determine voting patterns among voters, including the degree to which minority voters have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. You may also wish to seek the aid of an attorney who can suggest the types of experts you need, provide advice about the redistricting process, and provide important legal arguments on your behalf in court or before the DOJ.

Redistricting offers a chance to maintain or alter the political dynamic on elected bodies. The right to vote is one of the most precious rights we enjoy in this country. Participating in redistricting gives true meaning to the right to vote by helping to create electoral plans that afford all voters an opportunity to participate in the political process.

Todd A. Cox is an Assistant Counsel with the Washington, D.C. office of NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. For more information about its political participation program or to request copies of publications, call: 1-800-221-7822.

Lillian Smith Book Awards

Staff

Vol. 24, No. 1-2, 2002 pp. 15-17

Each year, the Southern Regional Council hosts the Lillian Smith Book Awards in honor of the most liberal and outspoken of white mid-twentieth century Southern writers. In works such as Strange Fruit (1944) and Killers of the Dream (1949), Lillian Smith wrote boldly on issues of social and racial justice, calling persistently for an end to segregation. The Smith Awards honor authors today who, through their writing, carry on Smith’s legacy of illuminating the condition of racial and social inequity and proposing a vision of justice and human understanding. The 2001 Smith Awards honored the works of four writers. Pam Durban received the fiction award for So Far Back (New York: Picador USA, 2000). Natasha Trethewey received the poetry award for Domestic Work (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2000). Hal Crowther received the non-fiction award for Cathedrals of Kudzu: A Personal Landscape of the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000). Robert P. Moses received a special lifetime achievement award, recognizing his years of civil rights service in the Mississippi Delta and Boston as well as his book, co-authored with Charles E. Cobb, Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). Following are excerpts from Durban, Trethewey, and Crowther’s acceptance speeches and a review of Moses and Cobb’s Radical Equations. So Far Back Lillian Smith Book Awards juror Pegram Harrison introduces Pam Durban:

In So Far Back, Pam got the history of Charleston, its architecture, its mores, the names of its people, just right. She also got “just right” the complex, painful, horrific relationship that existed then and now among blacks and whites in that particular part of the world. She presents it sensitively, eloquently, and in such a way that you feel that there may be some hope for us after all. She says she didn’t set forth to include a moral in her book, that all she did was follow her characters as far as they took her. Well, I think that the fact that her characters took her as far as they did suggests that her profoundly insightful presentation of those tragic relationships emerged from her innate decency and sensitivity. Her book is elegiac, graceful, atmospheric, and elegant. It raises issues that we deal with today. We are fortunate to have Pam Durban use her powers of fiction to help us understand our complex frightening past.

Pam Durban:

For a short time in the early 1970s, I lived on a plantation on the Edisto River south of Charleston. The place was very old. I’ve seen it marked on a French trading map, dated 1698. When I lived there, the outlines of that older world were still visible: the big house on the river bluff, surrounded by live oaks; the shape of rice fields still sketched in the marshes; a row of falling down shacks back in the pines.

At the time, the importance of that place, its meaning as anything more than a world of ease and beauty was invisible to me. Nothing in my education or upbringing had taught or encouraged me to see or to understand it as anything other than the setting of the great Southern romance of the past. Growing up in the South in the 1950s, I’d been raised on stories in which it seemed to me that we white Southerners were the only ones who had lived there. And so I grew up blind and I grew up innocent of the larger story of Southern history. But I write in part to discover what I know and so I wrote So Far Back to explore and question the stories about the Southern past in which I was raised. Those stories and the innocence they often insist on, are the source of the inherited blindness of nostalgia which for so long has shaped the history of the South as it has been past down by generations of white Southerners.

I did research in all of the major Southern archives–in the South Caroliniana Library, the South Carolina Historical Society, and the Southern Historical Collection in Chapel

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Hill. I was glad to find the stories there in those primary sources, reach beyond the nostalgia, in a million pieces. It is there in letters, diaries, newspapers, magazines, books of law, and books of architecture. Then I had to research into myself to see if I could imagine the past without nostalgia and I found that it was hard work. I saw how ingrained those attitudes were about race and history and how easily I could find and warm to them.

I set the novel in Charleston and the surrounding countryside because that place feels to me like the center of the slaveholding world and the place where white South Carolina’s idea of itself was planted and grew and flourished. My intention was to bring to life that world and the world of the city of Charleston in order to question its assumptions and to trace the influence of its attitudes and opinions down to the present time. I did this not to refute or to deny what I found but to widen my sense of the South’s history beyond the romance on which I was raised in order to understand my people’s part in creating the story that we black people and white people have lived together for so long. In a way I wrote this book with my character Louisa’s resolve not to hand the story on unchanged. It seems to me that it is necessary to know and to acknowledge the part we play in things because, by acknowledging who you are and what you have done, you break down the belief in your own innocence and that is a healing act.

Domestic Work Lillian Smith Awards Jury Chair Patricia Derian presented the Smith poetry award to Natasha Trethewey:

Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi and attended Atlanta schools. She is the daughter of a poet and a very early reader. Natasha is the future of writing fulfilled and is now an assistant professor at Emory.

Her book is not only beautiful looking, but it is filled with beautiful, wonderful poems, just really spectacular.

Drapery Factory, Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956

She made the trip daily, though
later she would not remember
how far to tell the grandchildren–
Better that way.
She could keep those miles
a secret, and her black face
and black hands, and the pink bottoms
of her black feet a minor inconvenience.

She does remember the men
she worked for, and that often
she sat side by side
with white women, all of them
bent over, pushing into the hum
of the machines, their right calves
tensed against the pedals.

Her lips tighten speaking
of quitting time when
the colored women filed out slowly
to have their purses checked,
the insides laid open and exposed
by the boss’s hand.

But then she laughs
when she recalls the soiled Kotex
she saved, stuffed into hag
in her purse, and Adam’s look
on one white man’s face, his hand
deep in knowledge.

Natasha Trethewey:

My parents met at Kentucky State College. My father was a poor white boy from Canada who wanted to go to college and got out a guide to American colleges and universities and picked a really cheap one where he could get a track scholarship. So, he rode the bus and hitchhiked all the way down from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and ended up at an historically all-black college, very surprised. But he stayed and there he met my mother.

Because I was going to grow up both black and mixed-race in the South, my father always told me that I had something to say, that I had stories that needed to be told. However, some time ago when I was in graduate school, I was told that I was too concerned with my message to write real poetry. In that statement was imbedded the idea that a message had no place in a poem. Perhaps what was meant also had something to do with the kind of subjects deemed appropriate: social justice and universal understanding not among them, being too political.

Like any writer, I love words, the sound of them, the way that they feel in my mouth when I speak them. The way that figurative language can make the mind leap to a new apprehension of things. But I have always been more concerned with people than with words. Poet Phil Levine has said, “In my ideal poem, no ideal words are noticed. You look through them into a vision of people.” Levine’s is a vision that reminds us that words are not mere playthings,

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nor are they pure sound, divorced easily from their meaning and power. We know all too well the weight they carry. I am honored then most to be recognized for using them not only in the service of art, but also in the service of justice and understanding.

Cathedrals of Kudzu Pegram Harrison introduced non-fiction winner Hal Crowther:

Hal Crowther, author of Cathedrals of Kudzu, is a journalist and an essayist. E.B. White said, “An essayist can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter. He can be a philosopher, a scold, a jester, a raconteur, a competent, a pundit, a devil’s advocate, and an enthusiast.” Hal Crowther wears all these shirts and more. His essays are carefully constructed. They are of a piece. They are finely written. His writing is often lyric and often acerbic. It is always analytic. It is always incisive. He rejoices in spotting unclothed emperors. He gives unstinting praise where it is due. He enshrines with all their warts and faults some of his favorite authors such as James Dickey, Walker Percy, and Cormac McCarthy, and his other heroes, Judge Frank Johnson and Doc Watson. And he sings lovely songs to that god-given quintet: trees, drinking, dogs, poetry, and Southern belles. He deplores and excoriates racism. And he takes a lick at nostalgia and the myth of the old South. We are richer for his profound insights and skilled presentation.

Hal Crowther:

H.L. Mencken said once that his writing was “free of moral purpose. I am never much interested in the effects of what I write. I live in a deliberate vacuum.” That is exactly the opposite of my attitude toward my work. I have never written a word without that stump preacher’s prayer that everyone who reads it will see the light and accept the spirit. When I look at the list of past winners of the Smith Award, I see a lot of my friends and also my idols and role models. Several, like Denise Giardina, Will Campbell, and John Egerton, are both. I always thought of myself as a kind of an Atticus Finch, a careful small town liberal who might risk tar and feathers for a principle to do the right thing, but who is kind of uncomfortable when he sees men sitting in church without neckties.

What I love about Southern liberals, epitomized by the SRC, is that they are practical, hard-working, no-nonsense liberals and they have had to be. Down here, people committed to progress and justice had real dragons to slay and real crosses to bear. They didn’t waste their time or energy on the nitpicking and backbiting that provides the Rush Limbaugh’s of this world with easy charicatures of liberals. Down here, our liberals want your heart and your vote. They don’t want to prune your vocabulary. Liberals are a minority in this country. We can’t afford to squander our capital on the Lilliputian language wars. We can’t afford to appear petty or ridiculous.

The 2002 Lillian Smith Book Awards will be held on October 18, 2002 at the Sheraton Colony Square in midtown Atlanta. For more information, visit: www.southerncouncil.org/comm/smith.html.

“Drapery Factory, Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956” Copyright 2000 by Natasha Trethewey. Reprinted from Domestic Work with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota.

Radical Gift

Reviewed by J. Todd Moye

Vol. 24, No. 1-2, 2002 pp. 18-19

Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb, Jr., Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001. With a foreword by David Dennis.

You may not know it, but as you read this Ella Baker, Amzie Moore, and Fannie Lou Hamer are teaching kids to use complex graphing calculators in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Indianola, Mississippi; and Chicago, Illinois.

Well…not quite. But Bob Moses and Dave Dennis, veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, have used the organizing techniques and concepts they learned from Baker, Hamer, Moore, and others to teach lessons in math and citizenship to more than 40,000 underserved schoolchildren. Their Algebra Project is a community-organizing effort disguised as a school reform program.

In Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights, Moses and Charles Cobb tell the story of the Algebra Project’s development and relate its early successes. They make a compelling case that the stakes are just as high for the schoolchildren who are being “tracked” out of advanced math classes today as they were for the Mississippi sharecroppers who were until recently denied the right to vote. And, they argue, the changes that the Algebra Project organizing can produce will be just as revolutionary as the changes wrought by voter registration organizing have been since the 1960s.

The Algebra Project began quite by accident in 1982 when Moses asked his daughter’s eighth-grade math teacher if she could begin a more advanced program of study. The teacher responded by asking Moses to come in and teach algebra himself. (The request wasn’t as crazy as it might seem. Moses had taught mathematics at the elite Horace Mann School in Manhattan before the Civil Rights Movement took him to Mississippi, and in 1982 he was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award and a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard.) The first thing Moses noticed was that the classroom–in the progressive Martin Luther King, Jr., School in Cambridge, no less–was skewed along racial and class lines. Upper-middle-class white students were doing advanced math and a mixture of white students and children of color, all middle-class, performed at grade level. A third group of minority students and working-class whites was being taught remedial math. Moses began searching for ways to show all students that they could expect more of themselves.

Because Moses was “really a parent-organizer as much as a teacher,” he could be creative in his methods. Since then, he and his students in the Algebra Project have developed a truly innovative curriculum and spread the project into dozens of inner-city and rural school districts throughout the country. (Dave Dennis heads the Southern Initiative of the Algebra Project.

When students begin the Algebra Project curriculum the emphasis seems to be on teaching basic algebra concepts that will open doors to more advanced study. As an educational reform the program relies heavily on experiential learning and youth culture. Students go on field trips introducing them to concrete examples of the mathematical concepts they study, and then convince other kids that it’s cool to learn math. Older students teach algebra to younger students, and all learn. On this level alone the Algebra Project has been wildly successful.

Math test scores have increased dramatically in nearly every school system that has embraced the program, but that is not how Moses measures the Algebra Project’s success. The key transformation occurs, he says, not when more students start learning more advanced mathematical concepts but when students begin organizing and demanding equal access to educational opportunities. “Even the development of some sterling new [mathematics]

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curriculum–a real breakthrough–would not make us happy if it did not empower the target population to demand access to literacy for everyone,” Moses claims.

The Algebra Project’s underlying philosophy is similar to the one that motivated Moses’ Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) four decades ago. In order to create real change, he writes, young people “have to demand what everyone says they don’t want”-just as sharecroppers had to demand the right to vote. And just as Blacks demanding and attaining the right to vote changed southern society a generation ago, Moses thinks, middle school students demanding and attaining equal access to math literacy will change America in the 21st century.

Bob Moses served as SNCC’s Mississippi field director and embodied the organization’s motto “Let the People Decide.” He may have been the most un-leaderly leader of any social movement in American history, which somehow made him all the more charismatic. Moses’ SNCC colleagues in Mississippi would have walked through walls for him, and the power that he convinced local people to find in themselves was literally overwhelming. After SNCC imploded, Moses moved with his family to Tanzania, where he worked for Julius Nyerere’s Ministry of Education. For the most part he stayed out of the public eye even after returning to the United States in 1976, until the Algebra Project again thrust him into community organizing.

Radical Equations includes a long section of Moses’ meditations on the Mississippi movement of the 1960s. Students of the movement have been pining for Moses’ memoirs for a long time, and this may be the closest they ever come to reading them. This aspect of the book does not disappoint; Moses and Cobb seem incapable of composing a sentence about the Civil Rights Movement that does not include a piercing insight. “One of the valuable lessons of the Southern Civil Rights Movement is that you have to shake free of other people’s definitions of who you are and what you are willing and able to do,” they write, and this lesson clearly informs all aspects of the Algebra Project.

Charles Cobb, it must be said, is uniquely qualified to co-write this book. In 1962, when Cobb was a student at Howard University, he hopped on a bus bound for a CORE workshop on nonviolent direct action in Houston. On a stopover in Jackson, Mississippi, he got off the bus and found the local SNCC office. “How come you’re going to Texas for a civil rights conference when you’re right here in Mississippi [where all the action is]?” Tougaloo College student Lawrence Guyot asked. Guyot regaled Cobb with stories of SNCC’s voter registration efforts in the Delta-and the violent white responses they produced-and Cobb was hooked. Moses moved him to Ruleville, Mississippi, in the heart of the Delta, to register voters that fall.

By 1964 Cobb had diagnosed the underlying disease that affected the uneducated and disfranchised Black sharecroppers of Mississippi: they lived in a culture that told them repeatedly that they did not deserve a decent education, that they had no reason to want to vote. What they needed was an alternative culture that would allow them to define themselves. Cobb suggested that SNCC help the Black people of Mississippi create their own educational institutions so they could decide for themselves what they were capable of doing. This developing culture manifested itself most beautifully in 1964 with the creation of the Freedom Schools. No one individual was responsible for the idea of the Freedom Schools, but Cobb deserves a great deal of the credit. That spirit is clearly alive in the Algebra Project.

Moses is convinced that math literacy can be an organizing tool for education and economic access in the new century just as voter registration was for political access in the 1960s. We can only hope he is right. According to Department of Labor statistics, by 2010 every American job will require significant technological skills. Hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren in America’s poor and Black communities simply are not being prepared to compete for those positions. Jobs that require computer literacy already pay at least 15 percent more than those that do not, and the gap will surely widen in the coming decades.

Across America, low expectations for certain children are ensuring that high-paying careers will never be available to them unless school systems radically change the way they teach math and relate to students. Moses believes that “the absence of math literacy in urban and rural communities is an issue as urgent as the lack of black registered voters was in Mississippi in 1961.” Read this book, and you will agree. In several years we may consider Radical Equations, equal parts memoir and manifesto, the most important civil rights book of the new century.

J. Todd Moye is the director of the National Park Service’s Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project.

Recurring Deaths

Reviewed by Brenda Anderson

Vol. 24, No. 1-2, 2002 pp. 20-21

Randolph Loney, A Dream of the Tattered Man: Stories from Georgia’s Death Row, Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdsmans Publishing Company, 2001. With a Foreword by Will D. Campbell.

In A Dream of the Tattered Man, Randolph Loney sheds light on what has been a dark and abandoned ghetto in our criminal justice system today: death row. Loney’s book is a stirring account of what he has witnessed as a frequent visitor of Georgia’s death row. He unlocks the gate to the reality underneath our superficial understanding of the death penalty through his experiences visiting death row inmates in the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison near Jackson. Loney, a liberal minister and social activist who lives in rural Georgia, breaks the barrier our society encloses around convicted criminals by giving us an opportunity to get to know the human behind the criminal, something that otherwise our society would sadly overlook. By writing about the relationships with his friends on death row, Loney gives a voice to a deeper side of the story that is unfortunately suppressed and ignored.

The book’s title is taken from Loney’s recurring dream from which he feels the “tattered” man that appears in it is a reflection of himself. Loney views the tattered man as an inner darkness in him and as representing feelings of shame. He expresses his frustration and shame with the death penalty system that we, as a society, embrace. Aside from the brutality behind the death penalty, Loney argues that the death penalty is unfairly applied, only targeting the powerless. Loney’s seriousness and dedication in providing the weak with support is evident in his commitment to Georgia’s death row inmates. He stresses the need for embracing the “least” of those in our communities, instead of executing them.

Through his book, Loney shares his experiences as a witness to the culmination of years of societal, racial, and systematic repression and abuse. Stories of death row inmates that reach far back, often describing a childhood haunted by consistent abuse and trauma, illustrate the tragic lives these individuals experienced long before they were involved in crime. He walks us through the lives of the convicted before they fell to crime. The cases present how a negative environment at an early age can affect people enormously, critically affecting their behavior and decision-making as adults. Loney stresses the importance of recognizing the critical role that traumatic events in childhood could play in a person’s responsive behavior.

As Loney demonstrates in the stories he shares of the men on death row, the men’s pasts held overwhelming circumstances out of their control that inevitably affected them negatively. Loney invites the reader into his close friendships and expresses the deep ties he shares with these men. They become relationships that hurt when his friends are finally executed. As painful and depressing as his role becomes, he shares with the reader his struggle to continue being a witness and learn about the very people our state kills but knows almost nothing about. Loney gives voice to their humanity and presents us with a version of capital punishment that the system fails to acknowledge. He adds color and dimension to our black and white, one-dimensional perception of what the death penalty entails.

Jerome Bowden was one of these men on death row who made a tremendous impact on Loney. In 1986, Loney was distraught at knowing that all efforts to plea for a clemency had not been enough to save Bowden from his scheduled execution. Loney had hoped that by presenting Bowden’s unfortunate life story to Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Paroles, they would have showed mercy and commuted the death sentence to a term of life in prison. His efforts were, however, unsuccessful in preventing the

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execution. Loney describes Bowden’s childhood and the unlucky circumstances under which he got charged with murder. He states that ever since Bowden was a child, his mother knew that he was psychologically incapacitated. At the age of fourteen, a clinical psychologist diagnosed him as being “definitely retarded.” Bowden was black and poor; he grew up in a segregated community and was subject to discrimination based on his race and mental illness. Under his circumstances, Bowden never received the help he needed. As Loney explains Jerome Bowden’s case, he expresses the sadness and disappointment of realizing how our society once again failed Bowden in condemning him for a crime in which there was significant doubt to his guilt. The loss of this great individual was devastating to Loney. Yet, it offered him strength and a sense of hope, as Bowden not only left a mark in Loney’s heart, but in the courts as well. In response to Bowden’s tragic execution, in 1988, the Georgia legislature barred future juries from giving death sentences to the mentally ill.

Along with Bowden’s case, Loney narrates valuable stories of other men on death row that are very meaningful to him. By sharing a personal letter written after the execution of a dear friend, Loney tries to come to terms with the death of his close friend of many years. Coming to terms with our criminal justice system and realizing his important role in it, Loney has been deeply affected by the relationships he built with these men. Reading Loney’s stories of death row will leave the reader concerned about our ideals in justice and their true ramifications in a society more and more obsessed with poetic justice. Loney points to an important facet of the criminal justice system that has been ignored for too long. Who are we killing? And what is our role in the process? Society alienates and dehumanizes those whom our state condemns to die. Randolph Loney bridges the gap and brings us face to face with the ultimate punishment we brutally inflict upon ourselves. Loney’s touching account will broaden the reader’s understanding of what our death penalty system really means and will help the reader realize the discriminatory flaws deeply embedded in the system.

Brenda Anderson is a history major at Yale University in her senior year. Originally from Laredo, Texas, Anderson plans to attend law school.

Justice Under Law

Reviewed by Jack Bass

Vol. 24, No. 1-2, 2002 pp. 21-22

Frank M. Johnson, Defending Constitutional Rights, Edited by Tony A. Freyer, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.

In this slender volume, Tony Freyer characterizes Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. as “a unique figure in American history” and provides a useful collection of Johnson’s own articles, articulating his vision of justice based on law. This collection augments four biographies (one by this reviewer) of a federal trial judge unsurpassed in his impact for shaping Constitutional principles and expanding the civil rights of all Americans.

“Intellectual acuity conditioned by life experience shaped Johnson’s attitude toward the constitutional law governing race relations,” Freyer writes. Alabama Gov. George Wallace once declared that Johnson needed “a barbed wire enema.” In contrast, Martin Luther King, Jr. asserted that Johnson “gave true meaning to the word ‘justice.'” When Johnson died, his obituary in The New York Times filled an entire page.

Freyer, a University of Alabama law professor and legal historian, describes how as a trial judge from 1955 to 1979, Johnson “decided many of the most significant cases in American constitutional history.” Their social impact, such as his order allowing the dramatic march from Selma to Montgomery that created the climate in 1965 for passage of the Voting Rights Act, helped transform the American South.

The book begins with an introduction on “Johnson’s Unusual Origins and Early Career.” Nothing shaped him more than growing up in the Appalachian foothills of Winston County, the county in Alabama that, before the Civil War, grew the least amount of cotton and contained the fewest number of slaves. Unionists prevailed in the “free state of Winston,” where twice as many men–including two of Johnson’s great-grandfather’s brothers–fought for the United States Army as for the Confederacy. Johnson’s father was a “mountain Republican,” the only member of that party to serve in the 20th century Alabama legislature until the 1960s. He attended Republican national conventions and became friendly with such men as Herbert Brownell and Warren Burger, who in the Eisenhower Department of Justice would play the key roles in selecting federal judges.

What follows is the full transcript of the historically significant two-hour PBS interview of Johnson in 1980 by Bill Moyers and then eight articles on a range of subjects written by Johnson, each preceded by a historical overview by Freyer. He contends in his conclusion that Johnson’s rationale “for what others described as boundless judicial activism was fundamentally conservative.” Johnson’s core values, he says, rested “on basic equality under law and equality of opportunity.” For Johnson, the Constitution and its Bill of Rights created “a brand of individual liberty characterized by the fundamental right to personal security, opportunity, citizenship, and freedom of expression and conscience.”

The value of this book is to provide access to Frank Johnson expressing these core beliefs in his own words–the full expression of his philosophical analysis of what constitutes justice under law. The articles range over a quarter of a century, from 1966 on the roles of the attorney and the judiciary to the importance of equal access to justice and finally, in 1990, on “What is Right with America.”

One unfortunate omission is Johnson’s 1979 commencement speech at Boston University Law School, which was published in the Emory Law Journal in 1979 as “In Defense of Judicial Activism.” In this full response to critics such as Robert Bork, Johnson called for “an appreciation of the meaning of judicial activism.” He directly challenged the widely held legal doctrine of “neutral principles,” expressing his view that “the doctrine of neutral principles robs the Constitution of its vitality. It freezes constitutional thinking in the interests of theoretical purity. The Framers were pragmatic men and the Constitution is a practical blueprint: its genius lies in its generality. Perfect logical consistency has always given way to practical distinction. As well it should.

“If the law should beware unprincipled distinctions, it should also beware insufficient inconsistency. Religious differences, race differences, sex differences, age differences, and political differences are not the same. It is no mark of intellectual soundness to treat them as if they were. Moreover, if the life of the law has been experience, then the law should be realistic enough to treat certain issues as special: as racism is special in American history. A judiciary that cannot declare that is of little value.”

He emphasized, “It is one thing for a judge to adopt a theory of political morality because it is his own; it is another for him to exercise his judgment about what the political morality implied by the Constitution is.” The general language of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Civil War amendments (the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments) he asserted, appeals “not to a particular conception of necessity or reason or equality but to the concepts themselves.” (Italics in original)

For readers interested in engaging a great mind at work, Defending Constitutional Rights provides an opportunity to develop an understanding of what is required to create justice under law.

Dr. Jack Bass is professor of humanities and social sciences at the College of Charleston. He is the author of Taming the Storm: The Life and Times of Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., and the South’s Fight over Civil Rights, which won the 1994 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award grand prize, and author or co-author of six other books about civil rights and political change in the 20th century South.