Drums of War

By U.S. Representative John Lewis

Vol. 24, No. 3-4, 2002 pp. 3-4, 12

Remarks by Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) September 27, 2002 at the Howard University Convocation in Washington, D. C.

I was born the son of sharecroppers on a small farm outside of a little town called Troy, in the heart of rural Alabama. It is a great distance from that farm to our nation’s capital. And if you had told me when I was growing up on that farm–or sitting in for civil rights–or going on the Freedom Rides–or marching from Selma to Montgomery for the right to vote–if you had told me then that I would be here, as a Member of Congress, I would have told you “you’re crazy, you’re out of your mind, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

As a nation and a people, we have come a great distance since I grew up in what was then the segregated South. We have seen the end of Jim Crow and legal segregation. We have seen African Americans elected to office in great numbers. In my home state of Georgia, four of the thirteen Members of Congress are African-American.

For all the distance we have traveled, we still have many miles to go. The scars and stains of racism remain deeply embedded in our society. A worsening economy and growing national deficits threaten the well-being of all our citizens. We continue to poison the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat.

Rising health care costs threaten to deprive more and more people of basic medical care. I have said it before, and I’ll say it again. Health care is not a privilege; it is a right. We have a moral obligation to care for those who are ill, sick, and disabled.

We really cannot look to our President to address these problems. He is too busy beating the drums of war. While beating the drums of war, President Bush hopes that we do not hear the victims of Enron, WorldCom, and Global Crossing. He hopes that we do not hear the cries of the homeless. He hopes that we do not hear seniors who cannot afford their medicine. He hopes that we do not hear young people for whom Social Security may not exist. No, we cannot look to the President for answers. Nor can we rely on others to make America as great as she can be.

Look to your left. Look to your right. Look in the mirror, and you will see the answer to the problems that confront our nation–and the world. You will see the leaders of tomorrow. You can make a difference. You can change the world. Mother generation of students had a dream-a dream that we could build the Beloved Community–an all-inclusive community–a community at peace with itself.

During the 1960s, I saw many young people–many students–grow up by sitting down. By sitting down and sitting in, they were standing up and speaking out for what is best in America: Justice. Equality. Freedom.

Because these students decided to act, we witnessed nothing less than a non-violent revolution under the rule of law. A revolution of values, a revolution of ideas.

Our struggle in the American South was not a struggle against people, but a struggle against bad laws, bad customs and bad traditions. We were not fighting Alabama Governor George Wallace, or Birmingham Police Commissioner Bull Connor, or Selma Sheriff Clark, who beat us, fired tear gas at us and trampled us with horses. We were fighting Jim Crow, literacy tests, and poll taxes. We were fighting a system that tried to deny us the civil liberties we exercised in order to gain civil rights. I often think that if we had the technology we have today, I don’t know what the Civil Rights Movement could have accomplished. We didn’t have a web site, a fax machine, or a cellular telephone. We didn’t even have CNN or computers.

But we did have the Constitution on our side. And the Bill of Rights. And we had ourselves–ordinary people–

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men and women just like you–fighting for a just cause.

We literally put our bodies on the line. We used extra-legal means and methods to remove many of the scars, stains, and symbols of racism.

Despite all of the progress we have made, too many of us–black, white, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American–are being left out and left behind. Now it is your generation’s turn. It is up to you to make a difference. It is up to you to change the world.

You must dream dreams and make them real. Your generation must not be content to sit in the stadium of life as observers, you must enter the arena as participants and do what you can to make our society a better place. Do not accept injustice, inequity and intolerance. Find a way to get in the way.

When I was growing up in Alabama, my mother and father would tell me not to get in trouble. But I got in the way; I got in trouble. And it was good trouble–it was necessary trouble. You must be maladjusted to the problems and conditions of today.

As Horace Mann, the father of modern education in America, once said, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” But it is not enough for us to win victories only for the humanity that lives on our shores.

Recently we recognized the anniversary of one of the most tragic and terrible events in our nation’s history. On September 11, 2001, terror came to America’s shores. Nineteen men, inspired by a radical faction of Islam, killed more than three thousand Americans. Three thousand innocent civilians. Three thousand men, women, and children.

In New York, the terrorists targeted the World Trade Center. They attacked the World Trade Center because they viewed the towers as a symbol of America. And they were right. But it was not the capital, commerce, and finance that symbolized America. It was the people who worked–and died–there. Side by side, shoulder-to-shoulder, hand in hand, black died with white. Muslim died with Jew. Pakistani died with Indian. English died with Irish. Under the rubble of the World Trade Center Towers, tattered and torn, lay part of the great mosaic that constitutes the American quilt.

We live in a nation that dominates the world with great power and strength. Socially, culturally, economically, and militarily, we have no peer. American ingenuity, freedom, and democracy have conquered the world. It is a battle we did not win with guns, or tanks, or bombs, or missiles–but with ideas, values, and principles.

She may not be perfect, but the United States is the greatest nation on earth. Despite the remaining problem of race, we are the world’s most diverse, tolerant, and accepting nation. Our economy offers such hope and opportunity that people will risk their lives to come here. Our fundamental values of democracy, freedom, and equality have grown steadfast over the two hundred plus years of our history.

We must not allow our success and our strength to make us complacent or arrogant. Being complacent makes us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks like the ones we experienced last year. Being arrogant will lead us–unilaterally–to war.

When the community of nations looks at the United States today, they do not see a shining city on the hill. They see a President furiously beating the drums of war. Every day, every hour, the President and his advisors ignore the world’s problems to demonize the second coming of Saddam Hussein.

It makes me so sad to see the President, the Commander in Chief, going from state to state, from city to city, beating the drums of war. Instead of educating our children, we will teach Arab children the hardships of war. Instead of concerning ourselves with the pollution that poisons our air, water, and food, we worry about the poisons that may or may not exist in a desert five thousands miles away.

Bombing Baghdad may make is forget about our nation’s poor schools, but it will not educate our children. Invading Iraq may distract us from corporate scandals, but it will do nothing to replenish the nest eggs of American workers.

For every black man in college–for every black man with a college degree–there is a brother in jail. How will war solve this problem? How will war keep our youth from robbing, stealing, doping, and killing?

Still, our President proposes war. He proposes that we, the strongest nation on earth, invade a sovereign nation. He asks that we go to war unattacked–unprovoked–unilaterally. This I cannot and will not support.

It is time to lay down the instruments and tools of violence. War as an instrument of our foreign policy is obsolete.

I truly believe we must give peace a chance. War is bloody, it is vicious, it is evil, and it is messy. War destroys the dreams, the hopes, and aspirations of people. I urge the President and his national security and military advisors to heed the words of the spiritual–“I am going to lay my burden down, down by the riverside. I ain’t gonna study war no more.” As a great nation and blessed people, we should be moved by the wisdom of that song.

If September 11 teaches us anything, it is that we are not immune from the strife, hatred, and zealotry that

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plague the world. War does not end strife–it sows it. War does not end hatred–it feeds it. War does not end zealotry–it spawns it.

Faced with poverty, ignorance and discontent, how do we help our brothers, our sisters–and ourselves? The quest for peace is as old as the dawn of history–and as fresh as the morning dew. One day, a great nation will offer a different way, a better way, a more excellent way–a way of peace–a way of nonviolence.

We must use our resources–not to make bombs and guns–but to solve the problems that effect humankind. We must feed the stomach, clothe naked bodies, educate and stimulate the mind. That is the direction in which a great nation should move.

As Mohandas Gandhi said, “the choice is nonviolence or nonexistence.” Or, as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, ‘We must learn to live together as brother and sister, or perish as fools.”

For those who say that war is a necessary evil, I say you are half right. War is evil. But it is not necessary. War cannot be a necessary evil, because nonviolence is a necessary good. The two cannot coexist. As Americans as human beings–as citizens of the world–as moral actors–we must embrace the good and reject the evil.

We must beat our swords into plowshares and study war no more. It is my deepest hope, my prayer, that the lives and teaching of Gandhi and Dr. King will inspire you–that you will seek, and accept, and embrace the philosophy of nonviolence–that you will build the Beloved Community.

Congressman John Lewis, (D) represents Georgia’s Fifth District in the U.S. House of Representatives, serving there since 1986. Lewis led the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965, a critical event leading to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. He also directed the Southern Regional Council’s Voter Education Project from 1970 to 1977

The Masters of Augusta

By Julian Bond

Vol. 24, No. 3-4, 2002 p. 5

Discrimination takes many forms. It may not always be illegal, but it is always wrong.

Prejudice based on race or gender is wrong, whether it occurs at a public university, the work place, or an exclusive private golf club. The golfers who play at such clubs and the members who belong to them condone discrimination by their presence.

In the case of Augusta National Golf Club, the corporations who purchase memberships, the sponsors who supported televising the Masters’ Tournament, and the broadcasters now without sponsors–they’ve been “hooted” away–also endorse and sanction discrimination.

Golf has had a troubled history, despite a black man, Dr. George Grant, having created the foundation upon which it rests; he invented and patented the golf tee in 1899. Two black men, Oscar Bunn and John Shippen, qualified for the U. S. Open in 1896 over the objections of some white players. (Shippen finished fifth.)

A black architect. John Bartholomew, designed many courses where he could not play. In reaction to golf’s early whites-only and men-only policies, blacks formed the United Golf Association in 1928–women and whites were welcomed in their tournaments.

In 1943 the Professional Golf Association (PGA) adopted a”Caucasian clause” excluding all non-whites, and exclusion became par for the course. Only recently have blacks been allowed to join exclusive clubs, and then only after threats of nonviolent protests. Thirty years after the enactment of Title IX, giving women equity in college sports, Augusta National Golf Club still refuses to admit women. Notably, while the organization of professional women golfers, the LPGA, has spoken out against Augusta’s policies, the all-male PGA maintains a disgraceful silence, even as the first woman has qualified to play in a PGA event.

Equally silent are Augusta members like Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer. Tiger Woods, while expressing the view that Augusta’s policies are wrong, has resisted efforts to make him withdraw from 2003’s Augusta tournament. Woods has also properly resisted efforts at racially profiling him into a leadership role on this issue.

One can argue whether the fight over admitting already privileged women to an elite private club is worthwhile; alter all, don’t most women face much more pressing and immediate problems?

Of course they do, but intolerance has to be rebuffed wherever it appears. Symbols are important too, and the exclusion of women from Augusta sends the message that women are not the equal of men–in the clubhouse or the boardroom.

Couldn’t the energy expended on this fight be better used elsewhere?

The only energy spent so far is an exchange of letters between the National Council of Women’s Organizations NCWO) and the aptly named “Hootie” Johnson.

The masters of Augusta have much for which to answer. They excluded blacks until public pressure forced change. They still exclude over half of all blacks–women. Public pressure will end this wrong-headed policy, too.

When it does, women and men will have taken an important–if small–step “fore-ward.”

Julian Bond is a Distinguished Professor in Residence at American University and a history professor at the University of Virginia. Since 1998, he has been Board Chairman of the NAACP. Bond served as a member of the board of the Southern Regional Council from 1996 to 1998.

Effective Racial Profiling Legislation

By Susie Hartigan

Vol. 24, No. 3-4 2002 pp. 6-7

Racial profiling presents one of the most pressing civil rights issues of our time. It extends beyond direct victims to negatively affect all persons of color of all generations and income levels. It undermines the legitimacy of the criminal justice system and hinders effective policing in the communities that need it the most.

Under the narrowest definition, racial profiling occurs when a law enforcement officer stops and questions, searches, and/or arrests someone solely on the basis of that person’s race or ethnicity. This definition, which has been incorporated into a few states’ anti-profiling statutes, is so narrow that it would exclude police actions based on multiple motives; for example, on a person’s race and age, or on a person’s race and the high crime rate of the neighborhood in which they are stopped. A broader more realistic definition encompasses officers’ use of race or ethnicity as a factor in deciding to stop, question, search; or arrest someone.

Monitoring in a number of jurisdictions around the United States has revealed that racial profiling results in an overrepresentation of people of color among those stopped by the police. For example, a 1996 study in Maryland found that while African Americans accounted for only 16.9 percent of the drivers on 1-95, they constituted 72.9 percent of the drivers stopped and searched by the Maryland state police.

Civil Rights Violation

Racial profiling is a civil rights violation with profound economic, social, and personal consequences for all people of color, of all income levels and all ages. Innocent persons of color are repeatedly stopped, questioned, and searched for reasons that would not result in similar actions toward white drivers. Neighborhoods in which African Americans and Latinos live are often targeted for “aggressive” enforcement of traffic laws, and conversely, people of color are also stopped in white neighborhoods because they look like they “don’t belong.”

Racial profiling is the first stage in a criminal justice process in which institutional racism works to the disadvantage of people of color. At every stage, persons of color are treated more severely than their white counterparts. “In a society dedicated to the ideal of equal justice under the law,” writes David Harris, “forcing one group of citizens to put up with disparate treatment because of the color of their skin is positively abhorrent.” A policy of treating all citizens like criminals in order to catch the offenders favors crime prevention over all other values, even people’s civil rights.

Unsound Policing

Racial profiling not only discriminates against people of color, it is an unsound, inefficient method of policing. One traditional law enforcement justification for racial disparities in police stops is that it makes sense to stop and search people of color in greater numbers, because they are more likely to be guilty of drug offenses. The reality is that people of color are arrested for drug offenses in connection with vehicle stops at a high rate because they are targeted at a high rate, not because they are more likely than whites to have drugs in their car. Studies have shown that people of color are no more likely than whites to be found with contraband. Dr. John Lamberth, in a study of stops by Maryland State Troopers on 1-95, found that the “hit rate”–the percentage of searches in which contraband was found–was the same for black and white drivers, 28 percent. New Jersey’s attorney general reported in 1999 that the hit rates for motorists stopped by New Jersey State Troopers were 10.5 percent for white drivers and 13.5 percent for black drivers. New York’s attorney general reported that in “stop and frisk” incidents in 1998 and 1999, the arrest rates were 12.6 percent for whites, 11.3 percent for Latinos, and 10.5 percent for blacks. In 1998 the U.S. customs service reported similar numbers for stops and searches in airports nationwide. Their hit rates were 6.7 percent for whites, 6.3 percent for blacks, and 2.8 percent for Latinos.

Profiling also impedes effective police work by damaging police-community relations, alienating communities of color from the officers who are supposed to serve and protect them. A 1999 Gallup poll found that nationally, 42 percent of African Americans believe they have been stopped by police because of their race, 77 percent of African Americans believe racial profiling is widespread, and 87 percent disapprove of the practice

People of color are more likely than whites to be victims of crime. They need the protection offered by effective police work. Mistrust of the police makes people less likely to cooperate by reporting crimes and aiding police investigations.

Twenty states have enacted legislation addressing

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racial profiling: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Washington, and West Virginia. Of these, the Missouri law is the strongest.

Key Components of Effective Anti-Profiling Legislation

Mandatory, Ongoing Data Collection – The first step toward addressing racial profiling is for law enforcement agencies to collect data on the race of all the drivers they stop, as well as related data about the character of the stops. This is necessary for identifying the problem and giving direction to efforts to eliminate profiling both as a practice of individual officers and as an institutionalized departmental policy.

The most essential element of an effective statute is a mandate for the collection of data on all traffic stops by all state and local law enforcement agencies. The California, Oklahoma, and West Virginia acts require no data collection, falling short of this basic requirement. The North Carolina, Tennessee, and Washington laws require only the state police to collect data. Six states–Connecticut, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, Rhode Island, and Utah–have laws mandating data collection by all state and local law enforcement agencies.

Data should be collected indefinitely. The recording requirement may deter law enforcement officers from racially motivated stops they might otherwise have made. Also, the collection of race data for all traffic stops is necessary to ensure that the police are not violating the civil rights of citizens of color. Data collected so far a sites around the country, anecdotal evidence, and public opinion polls all indicate that racial profiling is a widespread and common civil rights violation.

Racial profiling is an important law enforcement issue that affects civil rights. Allowing local municipalities to decide whether or not to collect data will give us only a fragmented idea of the extent of racial profiling and how to address it. Under voluntary programs, different localities will collect different information, making comparison and analysis difficult at best. Unless the state sends a clear message that it takes the issue seriously as a civil rights concern, we cannot hope to deal with it effectively.

Necessary Data Categories – The better state statutes require officers to record enough data to allow analysis of racial disparities not only in the number of stops, but in the character of the stops (whether a search was conducted). The necessary categories are the location, date, and time of the stop; the race, age, and gender of the driver; the reason for the stop; the disposition of the stop; and data relating to searches.

Search data in general is necessary because people of color are not only more likely to be stopped by the police; once stopped, they are also more likely to be searched, or to have their vehicles searched. Information about the results of a search is necessary for analysis of the “hit rates,” the rates at which contraband is found when people of different races are searched.

Independent Analysis of the Data – A credible data-collection and analysis program requires the use of an independent consultant to design and analyze the data.

Accountability Measures – Data collection programs should be linked to accountability of both police agencies and individual officers. Public dissemination of the data collected is also an important part of accountability. Reports should include only summary data for police agencies, excluding information that would permit. the identification of individuals. Most current statutes require reports to the governor and the legislature, but like the Rhode Island statutes, state laws should specify that these reports become public records.

Accountability of individual officers should be a matter for the employer agencies. Missouri law requires each law enforcement agency to adopt procedures for determining whether any officers have a pattern of disproportionately stopping people of color and to provide counseling and training to any such officers. The Sacramento police require the officer’s badge number on each stop record, and information from the officers’ personnel records will be turned over to the independent consultant analyzing the data.

Advisory Committee – Statutes should include provisions for the involvement of affected communities in the oversight of the data collection. Rhode Island’s statute calls for a racial profiling advisory board to work with the attorney general in designing ‘data collection, and in choosing who will analyze the data. The advisory committee includes legislators, a professor of statistics, and representatives from the Police Chiefs Association, the state Commission for Human Rights, and the Rhode Island Urban League. This provision is a step toward remedying the persistent underrepresentation of people of color in decision-making bodies addressing racial profiling. It provides an opportunity for police and community representatives to begin working together to address racial profiling and to begin developing the cooperative relationships necessary to heal the divisions.

Susie Hartigan is a Research Fellow, focusing on issues in the criminal justice system at the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota. For more information on IRP, visit: www instituteonraceandpoverty.org.

The People Behind the Profile: Stories of Racial Profiling

Staff

Vol. 24, No. 3-4, 2002 p. 8

The Campaign Against Racial Profiling is a project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a nationwide non-partisan organization of 300,000 members dedicated to preserving and defending the principles set forth in the Bill of Rights. Started in 1999, the Campaign Against Racial Profiling has been instrumental in raising the issue of racial profiling and making the term “DWB, “or “Driving While Black,” a household word. Through litigation, legislation, education, outreach, and media awareness, CARP addresses racial profiling in all its forms and against all racial and ethnic groups, including Latinos, Asians, and native Americans, and, post-9/11, the targeting of Arabs, Muslims and South Asians by federal and state enforcement agencies. Following is a selection of stories of racial profiling in the South compiled by the ACLU.

Florida – In 1997, Aaron Campbell was pulled over by Orange County sheriff’s deputies while driving on the Florida Turnpike. He was wrestled to the ground, hit with pepper spray, and arrested. It turned out that Campbell was a major in the Metro-Dade Police Department and had identified himself as such when he was pulled over for an illegal lane change and having an obscured license tag. Said Campbell, “The majority of people they are searching and humiliating are black people. That’s why I was so angry. I went from being an ordinary citizen and decorated officer to a criminal in a matter of minutes.”

Georgia – William Baker, an African-American businessman and candidate for the Treutlen County Board of Commissioners, was followed by the Johnson County sheriffs deputies for eighteen miles before they pulled him over, searched his car and belongings for drugs, and ticketed him for following another car too closely.

Kentucky – Dejuan Wheat, a former University of Louisville basketball star, was pulled over while driving in downtown Louisville late one night in 1998. The officers, who claimed they were looking for a truck like his, made Wheat get out of his vehicle while they searched it and ran warrant checks. When a black officer recognized Wheat, the officers let him go.

Texas – A video installed in compliance with Texas’ new racial profiling law captured the beating death of legal immigrant Luis Torres by Baytown PD in late January 2002. Mr. Torres was extremely ill and disoriented, but the video shows him calmly speaking and cooperating with officers Micah Aldred, Bert Dillow and Sgt. Rodney Evans; he clearly does nothing to provoke them before an officer leg-whipped his feet out from under him, knocking him to the ground. Torres did struggle as officers subdued him. One officer could be heard to say, “Put your knee on his neck.” After he was handcuffed, the officers continued to pummel Mr. Torres into submission. When the officers realized he was “turning colors,” they attempted to resuscitate him. Even before the investigation had begun, Baytown interim Police Chief Byron Jones said he believed the officers followed proper procedure and Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal has said he will not seek to indict the officers.

West Virginia – On April 30, 2002 at 9:45 pm, three African-American college students were pulled over in Charleston for failing to signal when changing lanes. They were stopped by nine police officers with their guns drawn and were handcuffed and forced to kneel on the ground while their car was thoroughly searched. They were released without being charged for their failure to signal when changing lanes.

Reform in Alabama?: The Nation’s Worst Tax Structure

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 24, No. 3-4, 2002 p. 9

In a state known for Truman Capote, Harper Lee, and Rick Bragg, the most compelling, controversial, widely read, and strategically ignored piece of writing this election year was “An Argument for Tax Reform Based on Judeo-Christian Ethics” by Susan Pace Hamill, professor of la at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. (See page 10 for an excerpt of Hamill’s article.)

Challenging the piety of politicians and the priorities of religious leaders in the Heart of Dixie, where nine out of ten residents say they practice some form of Christianity, Professor Hamill warns that “individuals claiming to be part of the People of God can no longer complacently tolerate Alabama’s tax structure” which she identified as “the worst in the whole country.”

Susan Hamill is the most recent to rail against Alabama’s regressive tax system and the antiquated 1901 state constitution which keeps it in place. Over a decade ago, the editorial page writers of the Birmingham News won a Pulitzer for their year-long, relentless hammering at tax reform. Nothing changed. Since then, Washington think tanks and state public policy institutes have hurled their own damning studies at Alabama’s inadequate and inequitable ways of generating tax revenue. Governors and legislators come and go. Still nothing has changed.

As the state’s rankings in educational opportunity, quality of life, and social welfare consistently remain at or near the national bottom, frustration is building among African-American voters, progressive white Democrats, and even some business interests disgruntled over the shamefully inadequate funding of public education. With her rigorous analysis of Alabama’s tax structure wrapped in the prophetic and redemptive rhetoric of Old and New Testaments, Susan Hamill’s study may yet provide the catalyst.

“Tax policy,” she told a statewide public television audience this fall, “is a lot more boring than Judeo Christian ethics. And in a community made up of people of faith it probably would carry a bit less weight.”

Dedicating her tax study to “Alabama’s children…the most vulnerable and powerless segment” of the state’s population, Hamill and a team of research assistants have painstakingly documented how a combination of income, sales, and property taxes “economically oppresses low income Alabamians and fails to raise sufficient revenues to adequately fund the public schools.” The state’s income tax, the least fair in the U.S., kicks in well under the poverty line while “greatly favoring higher income taxpayers” with exemptions and deductions. Alabama’s regressive sales tax, among the nation’s highest and most burdensome to lower income citizens, generates more than 50 percent of revenues. St. Matthew is not pleased.

Hamill’s study, published in the Alabama Law Review and readable online (www.law.ua.edu/staff/bio/shamill.html) saves its hottest fire for the state’s property tax–the nation’s lowest–and its primary beneficiaries, the owners of forest land. While forests occupy more than 70 percent of Alabama’s land mass, and timber may well be the state’s number one industry, taxes on forest land comprise less than 2 percent of all property tax income. Through their lobbyists’ grasp upon the state legislature and by wrapping their industry in popular anti-tax rhetoric, large landowners along with wood, pulp, and paper companies have locked-in the present inequities. The sorry result, concludes Professor Hamill, “fails to meet any reasonable definition of fairness and violates the moral principles of Judeo-Christian Ethics.”

Professor Hamill, a United Methodist who devoted a year’s sabbatical from law school to researching and writing the tax study as a master’s thesis in theology, comes down hard on religious leaders’ special responsibility to protect the rights of the poor. “While fully recognizing the supremacy of the secular state in all matters related to governmental power,” she insists that Christians must live up to their professed beliefs. She hopes that recent resolutions by Alabama Baptists, Methodists, and Episcopalians for tax reform that will bring relief and justice to the state’s poor are the beginning steps of a necessary groundswell. As for the Christian Coalition, which has powerful base in Alabama and professes to “defend the rights of the poor and marginalized, Hamill points out that its proposals of flat or sales taxes “have the effect of benefiting wealthy families at the expense of middle and lower income families.” Instead, she insists, redress for a tax system oppressive to “the least of these” must be the true measure of Christian polity.

Allen Tullos is the editor of Southern Changes and associate professor of American Studies at Emory University.

Reform in Alabama?: The Nation’s Worst Constitution

By Susan Pace Hamill

Vol. 24, No. 3-4, 2002 pp. 10-11

There is a great deal of discussion in the press and among citizen groups, as to the need for constitutional reform in Alabama. Pointing to a tax structure that unfairly burdens the poorest Alabamians while raising dismally inadequate revenues and a legal structure that severely interferes with local governments’ ability to meet local needs, constitutional reform supporters accuse Alabama’s constitution of wrongfully locking in the present tax inequities and thwarting other desperately needed improvements.

It remains, however, extremely difficult to convince average Alabamians that something as abstract and seemingly removed from day-to-day life as a constitution could possibly be guilty of concrete harm. A colleague, stopping me in the hall, expressed this dilemma well: “I wish someone would explain exactly how and why our constitution causes such bad results.”

A quick look at the United States Constitution, which enjoys widespread recognition as the highest example of how a constitution should work, provides helpful background. The U.S. Constitution guarantees all people certain fundamental rights, including freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, due process of law, equal protection under th laws, and the right to vote.

The U.S. Constitution also delegates to Congress (the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives) the power to pass laws addressing a variety of issues, for example, regulating commerce between the states, borrowing money, and levying federal taxes. By reserving powers to the individual states, the U.S. Constitution strikes a healthy balance between federal law covering issues of national concern, while allowing the states the ability to meet their needs, without seeking permission from Congress.

The U.S. Constitution is the shortest, most effective and longest lasting constitution in the world largely because it guards these fundamental rights without unnecessarily obstructing the ability of Congress and the state legislatures to meet their separate needs. Both Congress and state legislatures pass and amend laws under a legislative process that does not involve the cumbersome procedural steps necessary to amend a constitution.

The U.S. Constitution was not intended to be amended often and has only been amended 17 (not counting the first ten amendments which make up the Bill of Rights) times over the past 200 years. Most of these amendments either create greater fundamental rights or establish broad procedural safeguards of major importance. By guarding the fundamental rights of all people while delegating to Congress and the states the power to pass laws without being encumbered by the constitutional amendment process, metaphorically the U.S. Constitution resembles a well functioning air conditioner over a long, hot Alabama summer: both silently keep oppression at bay without interfering with the business of day-to-day life.

Alabama’s constitution fails to even come close to resembling the U.S. Constitution. Rather than guarding fundamental rights and appropriately delegating the power to pass laws to the State Legislature and the local governing bodies, Alabama’s constitution contains numerous detailed provisions that do not belong in a constitution. Alabama’s constitutional amendment process unreasonably obstructs both the Legislature and the local governments from meeting state and local needs. By subjecting proposed changes to state and local laws to the constitutional amendment process, Alabama’s constitution makes it extremely difficult to change the details of these laws.

The negative effects of Alabama’s constitution can be clearly seen in the area of taxation. Rather than following the model of the U.S. Constitution, which would delegate the authority over all tax matters to the Legislature or the local governing bodies, Alabama’s constitution contains a thicket of tax provisions. It caps the state income tax rate, mandates certain deductions, dictates the process for assessing the value of property and strictly limits property tax rates and the actual dollar amount that can be collected from property taxes.

The requirement that a constitutional amendment is needed to raise property tax rates, has produced the largest number of amendments in any single category, over 200 of the more than 700 amendments. This proves that Alabama’s constitution forces local governments to jump through unnecessary procedural hoops and represents only one of many examples that make Alabama’s constitution a spectacle and an object of ridicule.

The harsh consequences of Alabama’s constitution do not stop there. The burdensome constitutional amendment process severely obstructs the ability of the Legislature to amend the tax structure for fairness. As a result Alabama’s tax structure immorally oppresses the poorest Alabamians while greatly benefiting the wealthiest Alabamians. The income tax structure taxes the poorest Alabamians deep in poverty, at income levels starting at

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as low as $4,600 a year. The constitutionally mandated deductions and the low assessment ratios for property taxes allow the wealthiest Alabamians to escape with the lightest tax burden. For example, timber property, which covers 71 percent of Alabama’s real property and earns substantial profits accounts for less than 2 percent of Alabama’s property taxes, averaging less than $1 an acre per year.

The constitutional limitations on property taxes result in Alabama’s property tax and overall revenues being the lowest per person in the nation. As a result Alabama cannot fund minimum needs such as public education, thereby immorally denying the poorest Alabamians a minimum opportunity to improve their lives. In addition these dollar limitations on property taxes force local governments to raise sales tax rates to levels among the highest in the nation, causing Alabama to rely on sales taxes for more than 50 percent of its revenue. These sales taxes, which can be raised under the less cumbersome procedures of the legislative process, fail to exempt even the most basic necessities such as food, and harshly burden the poorest Alabamians.

Although Alabama’s critical need for tax reform is one of the most important issues deeply intertwined with the issue of constitutional reform, Alabama’s constitution significantly blocks improvement and progress in a number of other areas. Due to restrictions embedded in the constitution, the state and localities must go through the cumbersome constitutional amendment procedure or secure permission from the courts to borrow on the full faith and credit of the state or local government. Constitutional restrictions also inhibit the ability of counties to exercise police powers to protect residents in the areas of health, safety, land use planning, and future growth.

For example, local zoning rules to keep hog farming sufficiently distant from people’s homes have been seriously delayed by the constitutional amendment process. Even more astounding, a county had to obtain a constitutional amendment in order to forbid prostitution in that county. The numerous constitutional amendments addressing economic development convict the constitution as guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of being a stumbling block in an area vital to the state’s future.

Metaphorically, Alabama’s constitution resembles a broken down air conditioner in the middle of a long, hot Alabama summer: both allow a highly oppressive environment to obstruct the business of day-to-day life. Before any real progress is possible in Alabama, the constitution must be reformed because it subjects laws that should be covered by the state or local legislative process to the constitutional amendment procedure.

Alabama’s constitution always was and continues to be an immoral document. The purpose behind many of the provisions, including the property tax limitations, of the 1901 Constitution was to deny black Alabamians basic rights and protections, such as the right to vote as well as minimum education and health care. To this day Alabama’s constitution oppresses the poorest Alabamians and stands as a barrier keeping Alabama at or near the bottom in all measurements of minimum well being. The act of defending Alabama’s constitution is as illegitimate today as the creation of it was a century ago.

Susan Pace Hamill is a Professor of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law and can be reached at: shamill@law.ua.edu. This essay is based on her working paper “Constitutional Reform in Alabama: A Necessary Step Towards Achieving a Fair and Efficient Tax Structure,” which was prepared under the auspices of the Samford State Constitutional Law Project and submitted to the Committee on Taxation and Debt of the Alabama Citizens Commission For Constitutional Reform and will be published in the Cumberland Law Review, This working paper as well as Professor Hamill’s in depth study of Alabama’s tax structure can be found on the internet at: www.law.ua.edu/directory/bio/shamill.html

BOOKS: The Terrorist Next Door

By Daniel Levitas

Vol. 24, No. 3-4, 2002 pp. 13-15

Daniel Levitas, The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right, New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, Nov. 2002.

Written by Atlanta author Daniel Levitas, The Terror1st Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right traces the emergence of white supremacist paramilitary groups from their roots in the post-Civil War period, through the segregationist violence of the civil rights era to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and beyond. It details the origins of the right-wing tax protest movement of the 1970s, the rural radical right of the 1980s and the militia movement of the 1990s. Levitas has written widely about racist, anti-Semitic, and neo-Nazi groups and has testified as an expert witness in American and Canadian courts since 1986. The former executive director of the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal and the founder of the Georgia Rural Urban Summit, he has worked throughout the United States with civil rights, religious and community groups, and law enforcement agencies seeking to respond to bias crimes and hate group activity. The Terrorist Next Door is Levitas first book and it has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. For more information see www.terroristnextdoor.com In this excerpt, adapted exclusively for Southern Changes, Levitas traces the origins of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which barred the use of the military in civilian law enforcement. Since 9-11, President Bush has revived debate over the scope of the Act with a proposal to study possible revisions of the law in light of the perceived need to have the military play a greater role in combating terrorism on American soil. While Levitas acknowledges that the Act is an important guarantor of civil liberties, he unearths important and new history with his thoroughly documented discovery that passage of the law “was not driven by any high regard for constitutional liberties, but by the Civil War-era legacy of states’ rights and white supremacy.”

Although the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act was characterized by one federal judge as an “obscure and all but forgotten statute,” the law was an exceptionally significant piece of legislation. Its passage by a Democratic Congress was designed to prevent federal marshals in the South from using army troops to protect the lives and rights of blacks after the Civil War. As such, the Act was a symbolic and actual triumph for defiant Southerners who sought to undermine black rights, maintain white supremacy, overthrow Republican state governments, and establish “home rule.” Passage of the Posse Comitatus Act coincided with the end of Reconstruction and marked the beginning of a grim new era for African Americans in the South, whose lives for most of the next century were ruled by Black Codes, lynch mobs, and Jim Crow until the Brown decision and the passage of federal civil rights laws in the 1960s.

While the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prevented the army from enforcing civilian law, its passage was not driven by any high regard, for constitutional liberties, but by the Civil War-era legacy of states’ rights and white supremacy. As such, the Act marked the symbolic–as well as the practical–resurrection of states’ rights after the collapse of Reconstruction.

Despite the military defeat of the Confederacy, armed vigilantism targeting blacks and their Republican allies was widespread across the South. The problem was especially severe in Louisiana, where thousands joined groups like the Knights of the White Camellia, the White League, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Regulators, to prevent newly enfranchised blacks from voting and to block Republicans from assuming office. Like the paramilitary rifle clubs of South Carolina, these roving bands of white supremacists specialized in political assassination, armed attacks on meetings, and wholesale massacres. Such violence produced more than, one thousand deaths in Louisiana alone in the three months leading up to the presidential elections of 1868. More carnage followed the elections of 1872, which produced rival contenders for local and state office, including the Louisiana governorship.

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This violence led Congressman Charles H. Joyce, a former Union Army officer and Republican from Vermont, to describe Louisiana as “cursed with a class of vicious and desperate men, who have kept society in a feverish arid choleric state, filled the land with crime and violence, set at defiance the regularly constituted authorities of the government, and rendered life, liberty, and property unsafe and insecure.”

On September 14, 1876, United States Attorney General Alfonso Taft instructed federal marshals to monitor polling places if they suspected bloodshed during the upcoming Presidential election. He also reminded them of their authority to form a posse comitatus of local civilians, militiamen, or federal troops if they felt it was necessary to enforce the law. Eventually seven thousand special deputy marshals were dispatched throughout the South to keep the peace that November.

The presidential contest pitted Republican Rutherford B. Hayes against Democrat Samuel J. Tilden and proved to be the most contentious election in American history. Although Tilden emerged from election night with an overwhelming lead in the popular vote, he won only 184 electoral votes, one vote shy of the number needed to win the presidency. In late January 1877, a national commission was established to count the electoral votes and resolve the turmoil. The result was the historic Southern Compromise in which Republicans agreed to recognize Democratic administrations in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina if Democrats agreed to accept Hayes as president. The deal also called for the removal of federal troops that had been guarding Republican governors in South Carolina and Louisiana. By agreeing to return these troops to their barracks, Northerners conceded that the army would no longer be used to protect blacks, and other Southern Republicans from those former Confederates and Southern whites who felt compelled to subjugate or attack them, no matter how viciously.

The constitutional crisis that produced the Southern Compromise was resolved in 1877, but it wasn’t until the following year that Congress gave its final approval to legislation that would, once and for all, sharply limit use of the army as a posse comitatus and a force that could otherwise intervene in civil affairs.

Appeals to states’ rights and rhetoric about Southern sovereignty dominated debate on the proposed legislation, which was introduced by J. Proctor Knott, a lawyer and congressman from Kentucky. A onetime state legislator who became Missouri attorney general at twenty-nine, Knott had been a pro-slavery Unionist living in Missouri when a Union Army colonel had him arrested in 1861 for refusing to take a loyalty oath supporting President Lincoln. Knott was briefly imprisoned at the U.S. Arsenal in St. Louis, and the experience embittered him for life.

“The most diabolical atrocities of the French Revolution pale with insignificance” compared to the crimes committed by federal troops during the Civil War and Reconstruction, proclaimed Knott, who asserted that his Missouri political career had been “crushed by a set of thieving scoundrels under the guise of patriotism.” Seventeen years after Knott was released from Union Army custody, he drafted the Posse Comitatus Act. In its final form, it read:

From and after the passage of this act it shall not be lawful to employ any part of the army of the United States, as a posse comitatus, or otherwise, for the purpose of executing the laws, except in such cases and under such circumstances as such employment of said force may be expressly authorized by the Constitution or by act of Congress; and no money appropriated by this act shall be used to pay any of the expenses incurred in the employment of any troops in violation of this section; and any person willfully violating the provisions of this section shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $10,000 or imprisonment not exceeding two years, or by both such fine and imprisonment.

On May 28, 1878, the Posse Comitatus Act was approved as an amendment to the Army Appropriation Bill, with 130 members (all but one of them Democrats) voting “yes,” 117 voting “no,” and 44 not voting. Hardly a Southerner could be found among those who opposed the Army Appropriation Bill and only five of the “no” votes were cast by Democrats.

Although the Act’s sponsors gave great speeches about the danger of standing armies and the risks of military despotism, their prime motive was to secure Democratic (read: white) control of the South.

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Because a strong case can be made against using army troops as a civilian police power, it is easy to see the Posse Comitatus Act as a guarantor of civil liberties. And it is. But that reality doesn’t negate the fact that Democrats in Congress who supported the Act did so because they wanted to block enforcement of the nation’s new civil rights amendments and laws, not because they wanted to guarantee the liberties of America’s black citizens.

Thus, the effect of the Act was to permit violence and vigilantism across the South, not to obstruct it.

Passage of the Posse Comitatus Act completed the work of the Southern Compromise of 1877 and was one of many signposts marking the restoration of white supremacy across the South. From a legal standpoint, it prohibited the flexible use of federal troops by governors, sheriffs, and federal marshals, but its value to Southern whites was also largely symbolic. Like the Southern Compromise, it signified the erosion of a national political will to protect black rights. No matter what practical limitations the Act placed on civil rights enforcement in the post-Reconstruction South, white supremacy had triumphed, and the Southern states were “redeemed” by 1878: free to oppress their black inhabitants through the viciously enforced customs of segregation and the laws of Jim Crow.

The New South Creed: Introduction

By Robert Jefferson Norrell

Vol. 24, No. 3-4, 2002 pp. 15-16

Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking, Montgomery: New South Press; 2002. With a new afterword by the author and a new introduction by Robert Jefferson Norrell.

An excerpt from Robert Jefferson Norrell’s Introduction to the new edition of this influential book:

With more than thirty years gone by since the original publication in 1970 of Paul M. Gaston’s The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking, it is appropriate to consider why this book has an extended life when so many books–and perhaps even a few equally meritorious–have met the more common fate of publications of that vintage. One might guess that there are simply a lot of old fogies like me who prefer to wear shoes, shirts, and jackets more than a decade old. But the New South Press’s edition of The New South Creed presumes that many new readers will want a copy. I purchased mine for $1.98 when taking Professor Gaston’s undergraduate course on the history of the South at the University of Virginia in 1972.

There are many good reasons why The New South Creed should find new readers. First among them is the book’s important subject, which was succinctly described on the jacket of my first edition: “The dream of a new South–prosperous, powerful, racially harmonious–that developed in the three decades following the Civil War, and the transformation of that dream into widely accepted myths shielding and perpetuating a conservative, racist society.” It is the story of how some articulate editors and promoters embraced a set of ideas that enabled a defeated, demoralized South to view itself as revitalized and forward-looking, even amid the reality of continuing poverty, sectional division, and race exploitation. It explains how the South embraced a gospel of industrial development in spite of its historic commitment to plantation agriculture; promoted the reconciliation of North and South, and black and white in the South, even though much of it was only an image projected not a reality fulfilled; and celebrated romanticized memories of the Old South and the Confederacy while creating a harsh and exploitative social order in the present.

For those who night rightly he skeptical of the opinions of a sentimental student about his mentor, let us note how the critics received the book when it first appeared. Amid overwhelming praise, the only persistent criticism

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of The New South Creed was that Gaston should have taken his main analysis further than he did, which is to about 1890. The historian Dewey W. Grantham thought he should have analyzed further the relationship between the populists and New South Creed propagandists. The literary historian Louis Rubin did not believe that North Carolina journalist and publisher Walter Hines Page should have been included among New South myth makers, because Rubin insisted that Page was more a reformer than a promoter. J. Morgan Kousser, a “social-science” historian, criticized Gaston for believing the rhetoric of the New South promoters about allowing African Americans to vote, when their actual political behavior proved them to be opposed to black political influence. Most other readers have given Gaston more credit for skepticism of their words. Beyond this mild nitpicking and the occasional right-wing editorialist-turned-reviewer still promoting Lost Cause myths at a bad southern newspaper, The New South Creed enjoyed high praise. “Not only does he dissect the ironies as they develop richly over time in the New South creed,” Howard Zinn said of Gaston, but he also “understands with unusual clarity the greater irony–that the Southern mythology, with all its distinctiveness, turned out to be part of a national mythology.” Arthur S. Link, biographer of Woodrow Wilson, declared that Gaston moved “gradually yet inexorably toward a climax that is enormously relevant and meaningful in our present-day confusion and perplexity.”

The New South Creed has stood the test of time as a historical interpretation. Since 1970, the important books that have covered similar topics either build upon the ideas in The New South Creed or they take up topics well removed from the main questions of economic development, political action, and human relations that occupied Gaston. In some ways the book that most significantly complemented The New South Creed appeared the very next year: George M. Fredrickson’s The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (1971). In a manner similar to the way Gaston examined the thought of New South publicists, Fredrickson explored the evolving race thinking that justified the white-supremacist social order, using journalism and fiction as texts to examine the times.

One of the most useful and widely cited books on the twentieth-century South since its publication was James. C. Cobb’s The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development 1936-1990 (1992). Cobb credited Gaston with being the first to identify the “status quo orientation” of the New South creed, for recognizing that the “pursuit of industrial expansion could have a conservative as well as liberalizing effect” when other interpreters “blamed rural, agrarian influences for the South’s shortcomings and theorized that only urbanization and industrialization could save the region from itself.”

There has been a debate about “myth” as a method to explain what Southerners did with the memory of the Civil War. Gaston wrote that myths were not “polite euphemisms for falsehoods, but are combinations of images and symbols that reflect a people’s way of perceiving truth. Organically related to a fundamental reality of life, they fuse the real and the imaginary into a blend that becomes a reality itself, a force in history.” In a 1971 review of The New South Creed, George Fredrickson questioned Gaston’s use of myth and proffered instead the term “ideology” because he thought it suggested a stronger relationship between the New South ideas and the “class and caste relationships that underlay the growth of the ‘New South’ mentality.” In fact, there seems to be little real difference in the way Gaston used myth and the way Fredrickson and the dictionary define ideology. Perhaps because of its broader currency in social-science disciplines, “ideology” has had more adherents in intellectual discourse in recent years.

The 1990s brought much discussion of history as “constructed memory,” an interpretation of the past that reflects the group identity of those who are presenting it. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, David Blight, and other historians have encouraged the exploration of Southern memory on the assumption that little such work has been done, and new studies of memory are appearing. In fact, The New South Creed represents a fine study of the social and political construction of memory, but one that is firmly modernist in its critical concern for the lasting moral implications of history’s uses. The New South Creed makes direct and effective connection between interpretation of the past–whether it is called myth, tradition, memory, ideology, or civil religion–and the social realities that it justified and upheld: a social order of deep class division and awful caste exploitation, a region that has needed not just analysis but change.

For its continuing importance as an interpretation of the Southern past, its literary grace, and its passionate commitment to history’s intimate connection to the present, The New South Creed remains a great opportunity for readers who care about the South, the past, and the possibility for a better future.

Jeff Norrell holds the Bernadotte Schmitt Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. A former student of Professor Gaston at the University of Virginia, he has since taught at Birmingham-Southern College and the University of Alabama. He is author of the award-winning Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee, and other books.

New South Creed: Looking Backward, 2001-1970

By Paul M. Gaston

Vol. 24, No. 3-4, 2002 pp. 17-18

An Excerpt from the Afterword to the New Edition of The New South Creed:

Thirty years in the life of a book, not to mention in the life of a book writer, rush by swiftly. The New South Creed, conceived as the tumultuous 1960s were about to begin, was completed as they were about to end. Or almost completed. The manuscript submitted in the fall of 1968 ended with chapter six, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” I had no intention of following the creed’s trajectory in the twentieth century, a risky undertaking at best. My editor, however, persuaded me to take the risk. The result was the epilogue, “The Enduring Myth.”

That epilogue has been a persistent magnet, regularly drawing my thoughts back to the unending ways in which societies thwart their own best natures, justifying their undemocratic actions and ideologies by the myths they let envelop them.

At the end of my pessimistic summary of the legacy the New South movement bequeathed to the twentieth century, I wrote that ‘I could record no solid achievements, only a “widely spread image of its success, a mythic view that was as far removed from objective reality as the myth of the Old South.” My reflections then on what in fact followed included some heartening material progress along with substantial loosening of Jim Crow’s grip on the region, thanks to the Civil Rights Movement’s revolt against the values of the New South creed. Now three decades on I would have to add that the escape from rust-belt stagnation coupled with mounting disappointment in the promise of life “up South” sent whites and blacks alike to glimmering (and air-conditioned) sun-belt cities and their surrounds to join in unprecedented Southern boom times.

………….

To sort out the complex interacting forces underlying the reactionary mood of the past thirty years will be no easy task for future historians. Among other things, they will have to explain how manipulations of the history of the Civil Rights Movement have served to justify reaction. At the center of this will be the image of the mythic Martin Luther King, Jr. It will be equally important, perhaps more important and likely more difficult, to capture the ways in which the transformation of the political and demographic worlds of the South and the nation engendered both material and psychological needs for mythmaking.

At the beginning of the 1970s the Southern political scene appeared to some observers to be on the verge not only of accommodating the liberating changes brought by the civil rights movement but of actually expanding them. The confessional remarks of South Carolina’s Senator Hollings, which I quoted on page 220 in the Epilogue, showed that the region’s leaders could admit that poverty and racial discrimination had resulted from conscious choices that could and should be undone. The decade then opened with the inauguration of a series of progressive governors–Linwood Holton, John C. West, Jimmy Carter, Reuben Askew, and Dale Bumpers–who brought fresh hope. Governor Holton, the only Republican among them, courageously stood up for integration in a way almost never seen in Southern political leaders. For that he was stripped of further influence in his party, a clear posting of the Republicans’ invitation to wavering Southern Democrats to join them in forging a new party of resistance. The invitation was accepted, thus snuffing out the brief hope of a decisive break with the rock-ribbed conservative past. In time the promise of a new era of prosperity, national reconciliation, and racial harmony, voiced at the beginning of the decade by the New South governors, was appropriated by the transformed Republican Party in ways that reminded one of how the Redeemers had embraced the New South creed a century earlier.

Composed primarily of ideologically committed white males, leaders of the emerging Republican Party, generally wealthier than their fellow citizens, encouraged and profited from the civil-rights backlash. Their task was made easier, as Dan Carter puts it, by “the general increase to the region’s suburban population.”

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Among the migrants from the cities to the suburbs were many of the moderate whites who had earlier won plaudits for saving the region from the worst excesses of Massive Resistance, staring down the hard-line segregationists who threatened to privatize the educational system. Once public education was saved, however, they let pass by the opportunity to create a genuinely integrated school system (in fact few of them ever had such a commitment), let alone an integrated society. Instead, they endorsed so-called “freedom of choice” and other schemes that soon became the favored means of maintaining token integration. The mass exodus that followed then separated white Southerners from the deeper and unresolved issues of the Civil Rights Movement and furnished the environment in which they grew increasingly comfortable with the gathering force of the counter-Reconstruction sweeping across not just the South but the nation as a whole.

It was in the suburbs that the new constellation of prosperity, moral innocence, Southern redemption, and national reconciliation was seen most brightly. There, as Matthew Lassiter writes, Southerners “became the architects of a “colorblind” discourse that gained national traction as an unapologetic defense of residential privilege and suburban spatial boundaries.” The gated community symbolized the new suburban society, distanced both spatially and ideologically from the city. Well-guarded out-of-reach property values insured the perpetuation of a homogeneous society of middle- and upper-middle-class families, thus helping to insure a new form of segregation.

As this separation was accelerating, class now joined or even supplanted race as the primary dividing line. Both the South and the nation grew more prosperous while the gap between rich and poor widened. Henry George’s century-old identification of the association of poverty with progress as the. nation’s great enigma once again called for acknowledgment and resolution. The Southern economist and one-time Secretary of Labor, Ray Marshall, was among several who answered the call. He concluded, a 1992 study with the finding that the United States “now ranks last among the industrialized democracies of the world in achieving, as a whole, the goals of a democratic society.” Martin King would have understood for he had come increasingly to see that his country’s goals were too heavily tilted toward the virtues of laissez-faire capitalism and individual greed. Marshall’s conclusion that “inequality as extreme as ours destroys democratic institutions,” however, seemed perverse and alien in the suburbs.

…………

I wrote in the 1970 epilogue to The New South Creed that “wars commonly redefine the nature of domestic concerns and cause old issues to be shelved.” The Vietnam war, then approaching its end, had a profound effect on American self-confidence for a while, seeming to undo the nation’s historic sense of invincibility and exceptionalism. With wars as a shaping influence, much of American history since then has been the story of reasserting old claims to the twin virtues of innocence and invincibility. C. Vann Woodward believed the felt need for such comfort had led to an escape in the 1980s from Vietnam malaise. “Not only was the pulse of self-esteem strong,” he wrote; “it pounded with self-righteousness. A fatuous complacency quieted the rigors of guilt, and innocence was restored by fiat.” The subsequent military ventures in Africa, the Middle East, and southeastern Europe called in various ways upon the mythic view of the nation to sustain and justify its actions. In the aftermath of the September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Americans turned for succor to the myth as never before. Once again, as if by executive order, bonds of community were declared to be strong and enduring, the divisions and contradictions within quieted by the uniquely menacing threat from without. None of this augured well for deconstructing the values by which Southerners and’ other Americans lived or for understanding the legacy bequeathed them by the architects of the New South creed over a century earlier.

Paul Gaston is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Virginia, where he taught southern and civil rights history. He is a Life Fellow andformer president of the Southern Regional Council as well as a contributing editor to Southern Changes.

Black Mayors

Reviewed by David Chalmers

Vol. 24, No. 3-4, 2002 pp. 19-22

David R. Colburn and Jeffrey S. Adler, editors, African American Mayors: Race, Politics, and the American City, Urbana; University of Illinois Press, 2001.

The breakthrough came in 1967 when Richard Hatcher was elected mayor of Gary, Indiana, and Carl Stokes was elected mayor of Cleveland, Ohio. Over the next thirty years, voters, elected African-American mayors in more than 300 cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Birmingham, and Dallas. Washington, D.C. and others were black majority cities, but Denver, Ann Arbor, and Spokane, which have negligible black populations, also elected black mayors. University of Florida historians, David Colburn and Jeffrey Adler have summed up the electoral experience of sixty-seven cities with populations over 50,000. In addition to Hatcher and Stokes, they have gathered essays on Harold Washington in Chicago and “Dutch” Morial in New Orleans, David Dinkins in New York, Tom Bradley in Los Angeles, Marion Barry in the District of Columbia, Coleman Young in Detroit, and Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young in Atlanta.

By the end of the 1960s, urban political campaigns took over from civil rights protest in the streets as the big show in black America. In the South. the struggle for power replaced the struggle for participation. Among the mayors profiled, only Hatcher, Andrew Young, and Marion Barry came out of the Civil Rights Movement. Coleman Young had been a labor organizer for the UAW, but the others were middle class professionals, educated in law and graduate schools, military service, and in local and state politics.

White resistance was more bitter and longer lasting in the big cities of the North and Midwest. The police were particularly hostile and Democratic Party organizations often worked for white Republican candidates. The race issue was less overt and lingering in the newer, more prosperous cities of the West and South, such as Raleigh, Charlotte, Dallas, Denver, Spokane, Seattle, San Francisco, and Houston.

In most cities, black mayors got elected by sweeping energized black electorates, combined with a sufficient portion, depending on local composition, of liberal white, Jewish, gay, and Latino voters. Race remained a persistent factor, but performance in office and political alliances became more important. In the 1980s and 1990s, voters became more accustomed to black candidates, and white support grew.

The revolution in black political participation has not been matched by a social revolution that many black people hopefully anticipated and whites feared. The resources and political power were not there. As the poor crowded into the cities, white out-migration was taking jobs and the tax base to the suburbs. Manufacturing was going overseas, the economy slowed in the 80s, and state governments and President Reagan’s Washington were less interested in helping.

Mayors faced structural limits on their powers. Vital boards, commissions, and agencies were beyond their reach, controlled by the county or state, or, in the District of Columbia, by the Congress. Almost a century before, the New Orleans commercial community had shifted power out of city hail as a protection against the Irish emergence. Within the black communities black mayors faced opposition from black nationalists and patronage-oriented black politicians.

Struggling with the problems of race and poverty,

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issues which counted to African Americans were crime and police treatment, jobs and minority hiring, inadequate schools and social services, neglected neighborhoods, the need for low-income housing, and recreation.

There were important gains. Institutional racism declined. Police behavior improved. There was minority hiring and promotion, affirmative action programs and minority set-asides, summer jobs for young people, and housing rehabilitation. Successful black mayors struggled to reform politics, city government, and social conditions, built machines, and made alliances and compromises. Often their successors became traditional patronage politicians. Of the mayors studies, Richard Hatcher, “Dutch” Morial, and Harold Washington were given credit for the strongest leadership in office.

Relations with the business community were crucial. His focus on the needs of long neglected black neighborhoods led the white business community and the press to batter Maynard Jackson’s administration in Atlanta. Peacemaking brought a shift in priorities, co-opting black business and political elites who hoped that private sector growth would benefit all. Priorities shifted from low-income neighborhoods and housing to downtown revitalization and tax benefits. Stadium building aided tourism at the expense of neighborhoods.

Both historians have studied business community history. In an earlier edited collection with Elizabeth Jacoway, Southern Businessmen and Desegregation (LSU Press, 1982) Colburn showed the role of the business community reaction to the 1964 Public Accommodation Law in fourteen Southern cities. Although politicians called for Resistance’ wiser businessmen counted the costs of social disruption. In Tampa, Columbia, Dallas, and Atlanta they took leadership in the necessary steps to avoid becoming another Little Rock. In non-growth cities like Louisville, Augusta, Memphis, and St. Augustine where they held back, conflict took to the streets.

In his book on the civil rights conflict in St. Augustine, Florida, Racial Change and Community Crisis (Columbia University Press, 1985). Colburn recorded the opposition of the business community to racial accommodation, led by the major bankers and John Birch Society elites, which opened up the city to Klan violence.

The coming to political power of African Americans in the nation’s cities has been a political, but not a social or economic revolution. Now, with its fourth black mayor, Atlanta has undergone a rapid evolution. Maynard Jackson came over time to “embrace the priorities” of the business community. His successor, Andrew Young, told the business leadership “I didn’t get elected with your help, but I can’t govern without you,” and was even more business-minded. His successor, Bill Campbell, who served after the study’s time-line, primarily contented himself with exploiting Georgia’s great cash-cow, Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport complex. In 2001, Atlantans elected the highly capable Shirley Franklin, who had run the city for Andrew Young while he was representing Atlanta to the world. Perhaps, in time, Colburn and Adler will find reason to write about a new kind of African-American mayors.

Over the thirty-five years since the election of the first African-American mayors, a rapid evolution has taken place with as yet unrecognized psychological consequences. In a heavily urban United States, most white Americans have a close awareness and interactive relationship with a powerful, well-educated, sophisticated black man or woman–their mayor.

David Colburn is Provost of the University of Florida. David Chalmers is Distinguished Service Professor of History, Emeritus of the University of Florida, and is author of a forthcoming book, BACKFIRE: How the Ku Klux Klan helped the Civil Rights Movement.

Sidebar: African-American Mayors in Cities with Populations above 50,000

• Floyd Adams, Jr., Savannah, GA 131,510 Population (57.1% Black)
• James M. Baker, Wilmington, DE 72,664 Population (56.4% Black)
• William V. Bell, Durham, NC 187,035 Population (43.8% Black)
• Robert Bowser, East Orange, NJ 69,824 Population (89.5% Black)
• Charles Box, Rockford, IL 150,115 Population (17.4% Black)
• Lee Brown, Houston, TX 1,953,631 Population (25.3 % Black)
• Willie Brown, Jr., San Francisco, CA 776,733 Population (7.8% Black)
• Josathat “Joe” Celestin, North Miami, FL 59,880 Population (54.9% Black)
• Michael B. Coleman, Columbus, OH 711,470 Population (24.5% Black)
• Glenn D. Cunningham, Jersey City, NJ 240,055 Population (28.3% Black)
• Preston Daniels, Des Moines, IA 198,862 Population (8.1% Black)
• Ernest D. Davis, Mount Vernon, NY 68,381 Population (59.6% Black)
• Roosevelt F. Dorn, Inglewood, CA 112,580 Population (47.1% Black)
• Jack Ellis, Macon, GA 97,255 Population (62.5% Black)
• Gwendolyn A. Faison, Camden, NJ 79,904 Population (53.3% Black)
• Jack Ford, Toledo, OH 313,619 Population (23.5% Black)
• Shirley Franklin, Atlanta, GA 416,474 Population (61.4% Black)
• Willie W. Herenton, Memphis, TN 650,100 Population (61.4% Black)
• James Halley, Portsmouth, VA 100,565 Population (50.6% Black)
• Sharpe James, Newark, NJ 273,546 Population (53.5% Black)
• Robert Jones, Kalamazoo, MI 77,145 Population (20.6% Black)
• Wilmer Jones-Ham, Saginaw, MI 61,799 Population (43.3% Black)
• Harvey Johnson, Jr., Jackson, MS 184,256 Population (70.6% Black)
• Terry Johnson, Oceanside, CA 161,029 Population (7.4% Black)
• William A. Johnson, Rochester, NY 219,773 Population (38.5% Black)
• Kwame Kilpatrick, Detroit, MI 951,270 Population (81.6% Black)
• Bernard Kincaid, Birmingham, AL 242,820 Population (73.5% Black)..
• Brenda L. Lawrence, Southfield, MI 78,296 Population (54.2% Black)
• Mamie E. Locke, Hampton, VA 146,437 Population (44.7% Black)
• James Mayo, Monroe, LA 53,107 Population (61.1% Black)
• Rudolph C. McCollum Jr., Richmond, VA 197,790 Population (57.2% Black)
• Lorraine Morton, Evanston, IL 74,239 Population (22.5% Black)
• C. Ray Nagin, New Orleans, LA 484,674 Population (67.3% Black)
• Elzie Odom, Arlington, TX 332,969 Population (14.5% Black)
• Douglas Palmer, Trenton, NJ 85,403 Population (52.1% Black)
• Willie Payne, Pontiac, MI 66,337 Population (47.9% Black)
• Eric Perrodin, Compton, CA 93,493 Population (40.3% Black)
• Paul Richards, Lynwood, CA 69,845 Population (13.5% Black)
• Wayne Smith, Irvington, NJ 60,695 Population (81.7% Black)
• Woodrow Stanley, Flint, MI 124,943 Population (53.3% Black)
• John F. Street, Philadelphia, PA 1,517,550 Population (43.2% Black)
• William E. Ward, Chesapeake, VA 199,184 Population (28.5% Black)
• Wellington E. Webb, Denver, CO 554,636 Population (11.1% Black)
• Anthony A. Williams, Washington, DC 572,059 Population (60% Black)

Source: 2002, National Conference for Black Mayors, Inc. For a full list of the 465 African American mayors, visit www.blackmayors.org.