Money Matters in Education

By Luz Borrero

Vol. 25, No. 1-4, 2003 p. 3

The Southern Regional Council has long advocated full government responsibility in providing equal access to high quality education. This fundamental duty directly affects the lives of most minority and low-income children and youth. State and federal government must commit the necessary revenues and support to ensure that all children receive the same quality education that middle and upper class students do.

The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, legislation to improve the basic skills of the approximately 47 million U. S. public school students, presents more obstacles than support for struggling children and schools. The Act focuses heavily on penalties for low-performing schools and offers little assistance to help those schools improve. No Child Left Behind mandates that states develop and implement accountability plans for academic performance and measure student progress through annual statewide testing. Schools can fall short of performance standards and risk losing federal funding if not enough students take the text. School populations are divided into subgroups by race, ethnicity, income, disability, and limited fluency in English. If less than 95 percent of any subgroup completes the tests, the school is not making adequate progress. In Georgia this year, 846 schools-42 percent of Georgia’s public schools-failed to make adequate progress. More than 60 percent of those “failing” schools failed because of insufficient participation. If a Title I school fails to meet “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP) standards for two consecutive years, under federal law, the school is placed on a “Needs Improvement List.” It is required to offer supplemental tutoring services, and its students are eligible to transfer to a higher-performing school at the expense of the school district or the school will face restructuring and ultimately the state take over of the school.

According to the Congressional Research Service, full funding of Title I programs, that reach 12.5 million high poverty students, would require $30.39 billion dollars for the 2003-2004 school year. Congress, however, authorized only $16 billion for Title I. Even this small amount was rejected by President Bush whose budget included only $11.3 billion to cover the costs of Title I programs. If we truly want our children to succeed, if we truly want “no child left behind,” we must provide schools with the resources they need to educate our young people, not concentrate on what will happen to under-funded schools when their students do not succeed.

According to a recent General Accounting Office report, if states use tests that blend multiple choice questions with open-ended questions, the cost to states will amount to $5.3 billion from now until 2008. To support states in this process, Congress has appropriated only $2.7 billion, leaving struggling state governments to fill in the gaps.

The implementation of the twelve-year strategy presented in the No Child Left Behind Act has turned to the effectiveness of state-developed plans. These plans must meet accountability requirements by school year 20132014, demonstrating that all students are proficient in reading and math. States and school districts that do not comply risk losing their federal funding. At a time when educators are struggling to comply with the imposed tougher academic standards and facing potential sanctions for “failing schools,” states must provide the resources to break down the barriers that prevent children in poverty from receiving a high quality education.

According to the Georgia Department of Education’s preliminary report on schools that did not meet state testing goals, seventy-eight Title I schools in sixteen school systems are currently subject to sanctions under the No Child Left Behind Act. In addition, forty-eight schools in eleven public school systems will be subject to sanctions if they fail to meet the AYP standards for a second year. Sanctions include allowing students to transfer to another public school in the system.

The Southern Regional Council intends to closely monitor the consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act that places a lesser emphasis on adequate funding and greater emphasis on sanctioning schools that don’t meet standards. With adequate funding of public schools, low-income students are capable of performing at the level of upper and middle-class students. Minority children can learn as well as white children. We must insist on the allocation of public resources to enable that success.

Luz Borrero is the executive director of the Southern Regional Council.

Embracing Thanatos: The War Machine and the Bush Administration

By Dan T. Carter

Vol. 25, No. 1-4, 2003 pp. 4-5

This year, Congress is on track to approve a Bush administration defense budget of $400 billion, a figure meaning that the United States now consumes more than 45 percent of the earth’s military expenditures. And that total does not include this year’s supplemental appropriations of as much as $87 billion for ongoing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq or the $30 to $35 billion absorbed by the secret “black budget” of the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence operations.

But this is only the beginning. While state and local governments scramble to maintain essential services and federal programs for the poor and working class face new restraints, Pentagon planners have outlined future increases that will lead to military expenditures of $500 billion annually by 2008-a 33 percent increase over today’s spending levels and twice the amount of the mid-1990s.

In the wake of September 11, we are told that these staggering increases are essential in order to protect American security. But even a cursory examination of the Pentagon’s budget shows that most of these escalating expenditures are for elaborate weapons systems that are useless in confronting the asymmetrical national security challenges we are likely to face in the years ahead.

If our armada of supersonic aircraft, ponderous motorized artillery and high-tech weaponry is irrelevant in the struggle to control international terrorism, it is easy to see why this war machine is so politically popular. In the 1970s and 1980s, defense contractors astutely recognized the importance of spreading the pork and they strategically located their subcontracting production facilities across the congressional districts of key Republican and Democratic legislators.

But the new war machine is particularly beloved by the Bush administration. First, it is essential in supporting the imperial aspirations of the conservative neo-imperialists who now shape American foreign policy.

Second, the lucrative and essentially non-competitive contracts offer an irresistible cash cow for the defense contractors and other corporate patrons of the Bush administration. The millions in campaign contributions they in turn pass on to the current White House occupant (and other Republican and Democratic politicians) is a minor add-on to the cost of doing business.

The aftermath of the war in Iraq offers a classic example of this inherently corrupt relationship. Five major companies–Halliburton, Bechtel, Fluor, Parsons, and the Washington Group–received billions of dollars of non-competitive contracts for post-war Reconstruction and placed themselves in a commanding position to receive the lion’s share of the $100 billion that will be spent rebuilding that war-torn country. And what do these companies have in common? They are politically well connected and they have given lavish political contributions to the Republican party.

Third, these staggering increases in military expenditures–when coupled with the Bush administration’s trillion dollar tax cuts for the wealthy-conveniently reinforce conservative demands that non-military expenditures be “restrained.” Behind a façade of “compassionate conservatism,” the Bush administration moves by stealth toward the goal bluntly outlined by conservative ideologue Grover Norquist: gradually reducing the federal government’s social programs until they can be “drowned in a bathtub.”

The events of the last two years have once again reminded us that war is always the enemy of social justice in a democratic society. But this administration already has earned a special place in historical infamy for its

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willingness to engage in what Nobel laureate George Akerlof has called “a form of looting” as it mortgages our future with its short-sighted economic policies and militaristic adventurism. The impact of this neo-imperial militarism is felt around the world provoking resentment from former allies and unalloyed hatred from those who once responded to us with a mixture of admiration and hostility.

For those of us in this country who support the broad goals of a humane social democracy, it is particularly painful to see the way in which Bush administration policies skillfully unravel a safety net slowly constructed over much of the last century.

As we transfer trillions of dollars in tax revenues to the rich and billions of dollars to weapons of mass destruction, public schools cut short their academic year, colleges, universities, and trade schools raise their tuition as much as 30 percent and the number of uninsured Americans rises past 41 million even as cash-strapped states enact new measures to eliminate the desperate poor from Medicaid rolls.

No one said it better than President Dwight Eisenhower a half century ago: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.” A world in arms was “spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

If we can quantify the waste in economic resources, it is difficult to measure how this endless “war against terrorism” corrupts our political process by creating fear, dependency, and passivity on the part of the American people. Grappling with the difficult tasks of fighting poverty, protecting the environment, or ending racism and sexism requires complex thought, sustained civic engagement and difficult–and sometimes painful–choices.

By contrast, the war in Iraq, a short, relatively bloodless assault by our overwhelming forces on a hapless and depleted army, allowed television networks to transform bloodshed into a spectator sport, a video arcade in which death was seldom allowed onscreen. At the same time, the media–acting in concert with this administration–offered us the emotional comfort of a jingoistic patriotism driven by Madison Avenue slogans (‘The Axis of Evil,” “America Fights Back,” “Operation Iraqi Freedom”) and Manichean rhetoric (“evil-doers,” “mass murderers,” “barbarians,” and “you are with us or against us”).

Like the German soldiers who marched off to the First World War with “Gott mit uns” (God with us) stamped on their belt buckles, we convinced ourselves that we were the embodiment of all that was decent, honorable, and noble. According to Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, Bush assured him that “God told me to strike at al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did ….” But John Adams reminded us more than two hundred years ago that power “always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws.”

Certainly it would be hard to argue that the conflict in Iraq and the accompanying war on terrorism has led to decency, honor, and nobility. Growing numbers of Americans have finally begun to realize that our President and his advisers have knowingly and deliberately lied to us in their rush to war. What is less recognized is the way in which the entire nature of political debate has been debased. Within a week of the blast, Bush was calling for the apprehension of Osama Bin Laden “Dead or Alive,” with a clear preference for the former. More recently, the State Department’s coordinator for counter-terrorism gave a reporter his recipe for killing Osama Bin Laden and then confirming his death to the world. “Take a machete and whack off his head, and you’ll get a bucketful of DNA….It beats lugging the whole body back!” This is the language of swaggering schoolyard bullies, and it reflects the coarsening of our foreign policy and our values as a nation.

Twenty years of covering global conflicts convinced New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges that this circle of violence was a corrupting death spiral from which neither victim nor perpetrator escaped. But in his book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, Hedges recognized the seductive power of “that process of dehumanizing the other, that ecstatic euphoria in wartime, that use of patriotism as a form of self-glorification, that worshiping of the capacity to inflict violence–especially in a society that possesses a military as advanced as ours.”

No one should underestimate the difficulties of reversing these reckless and destructive policies at home and abroad for they are sustained by an army of well-funded and ideologically committed activists who have pushed their agenda with guile and passion for more than half a century. Perhaps their greatest success has come from nurturing a sense of fatalism and passivity on the part of the American electorate, a belief that nothing can be done.

Our first task is to reject in our own thinking that very fatalism by offering an alternative vision of what we might still become as a nation. And then we must act.

Dan T Carter is Educational Foundation Professor of History at the University of South Carolina.

Missing Martin

By Paul M. Gaston

Vol. 25, No. 1-4, 2003 pp. 6-7

Forty years ago, a quarter of a million Americans came to Washington in a march for jobs and freedom. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “I Have a Dream” speech, the riveting highlight of the occasion, began with a prediction that the day would “go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.” And so it did.

Now at its fortieth anniversary, the March on Washington is being commemorated all over the world, putting me in mind once more of the warning flag the southern writer James Agee hoisted many years ago. “The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can strike is to do fury honor,” he wrote. “Official acceptance is the one unmistakable symptom that salvation is beaten again, and is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas.”

Strong language. Vintage Agee. And, like most sweeping generalizations, it obscures some truths as it illuminates the big ones. Furious struggles for liberty are not universally robbed of their power to inspire; but they are routinely appropriated to serve other agendas and ambitions.

King’s “Dream” speech has become especially vulnerable. For one thing, it has been used to turn the Civil Rights Movement into yet another example of the heroic and dramatic story of American democracy. His dream, he said, was “deeply rooted in the American dream.” And so the Civil Rights Movement, as it swept away segregation and disfranchisement, came to be understood as a heroic and dramatic example of the self-corrective nature of America’s unique democracy. One can hear Agee warning us to see that this is “the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas.”

For many white Americans, probably most of them, the Civil Rights Movement’s success in dismantling Jim Crow was proof that their nation could reform itself to get on with the business of making the American dream possible for all. It affirmed their need to believe in the essential beneficence of the American republic. It echoed their belief that racism could be excised from the body politic without altering the structure of their society. It vindicated their faith in the unique superiority of their country.

This was not Martin King speaking. Those who thought it was missed his meaning. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he said it was necessary to move beyond the reformist tactics of the previous decade. The abolition of segregation and the acquisition of the right to vote were important but they were not the goals of the Civil Rights Movement, not ends in themselves. The meaning of freedom, he was to say often, reached far beyond those building blocks.

“We must recognize,” he said, “that we can’t solve our problems now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.” Among other things, this would require facing the truth that “the dominant ideology” of America was not “freedom and equality” with racism “just an occasional departure from the norm.” Racism was woven into the fabric of the country, intimately linked to capitalism and militarism. They were all “tied together,” he said, “and you really can’t get rid of one without getting rid of the others.” What was required was “a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society.”

That phrase–“a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society”–was not uttered in the “Dream” speech of 1963. The time was not right for it. The Jim Crow shackles had to be smashed first. But the phrase carries the essential message and embodies the enduring legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.–and it is a message virtually air brushed from history. His radical critique was drowned out from the beginning by angry White House rejections, white fear of the Black Power movement, escalating riots in Northern cities, and liberal integrationists’ continuing loyalty to their reformist principles of contained social change. Even before the reaction of the Nixon Administration set in, the King who would remake the “architecture of American society” was absent from school books, anniversary celebrations, and political oratory. Julian Bond had it right when he wrote that ‘We do not honor the critic of capitalism, or the pacifist who declared all wars evil, or the man of God who argued that a nation that chose guns over butter would starve its people and kill itself….We honor an antiseptic hero.”

This antiseptic hero was the product of the whole culture, a culture innocently unable to imagine itself as fundamentally flawed. The right-wing assault on civil rights over the last generation, however, has been anything but innocent. It has appropriated King himself as its

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ally in rolling back the things for which he and his comrades stood, fixing on the “Dream” speech as its primary text. King’s “My dream is deeply rooted in the American dream” statement is interpreted to discredit his radicalism; and his hope for the day when people would be judged “by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin” is enlisted in the battle against all legislation and programs that might help to undo the effects of three and a half centuries of racial exclusion and exploitation.

Pundits and politicians of the right, lavishly supported by an ever-increasing number of think tanks, have fixed on, and shamelessly distorted, these two fragments. George Will, conceding the existence of continuing poverty and disadvantage, explains them as the “terrible price” blacks have been made to pay “for the apostasy of today’s civil rights leaders from the original premise of the Civil Rights Movement.” That premise, he declares, was that “race must not be a source of advantage or disadvantage.”

Will’s fellow journalist Rush Limbaugh wonders how “the vision that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had for a color-blind society has been perverted by modern liberalism.” Newt Gingrich and Ward Connerly, blasting what they call “the failure of racial preferences,” conjure up King’s “heartfelt voice” wishing for an end to judging people by skin color. Linda Chavez, prominent crusader against affirmative action, came to my university a few years ago to admonish us to cease judging applicants “based on the color of their skin.” Dr. King, she told us, would be opposed because our policy “smacks of the kind of racism that has long plagued this nation.” She and a legion of others have given life to what George Orwell, in his novel 1984, called Newspeak, the use of words in ambiguous and contradictory ways, telling lies by appearing to tell the truth.

Were he to come back to make a fortieth anniversary speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, reflecting on the manipulation of his legacy to discredit his mature prescription for his country, we should not be surprised to hear an oration entitled “I Have a Nightmare.” One can imagine the long catalogue of abandoned commitments to racial justice. Then, recalling his wish for “a radical redistribution of economic and political power,” he might note the cruel irony of deepening poverty, a widening gap between rich and poor, and a tax policy designed to make it wider. Remembering his hostility to militarism, he might summon his powerful rhetoric to condemn his nation not only for the massive destruction it wrought on another country but for apparently justifying its actions with untruths. Then he might recall words he spoke to the United States Senate shortly before he was assassinated: “The values of the marketplace supersede the goals of social justice.” Looking out toward the White House, he might conclude by reflecting on the nation’s identification of its democracy with those very marketplace values and how it seemed to be on a messianic mission to spread the values of what it called “free market capitalism” to its newly conquered lands and their neighbors. It would not be a pretty speech.

We miss the man who might say these things and regret the way we missed understanding what he did say to us; and we hope for the day when his message will be heard in the voices of an aroused citizenry ready finally to bring about “a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society.”

Paul M. Gaston, Professor Emeritus of Southern and Civil Rights History at the University of Virginia, is a past president of the Southern Regional Council and a contributing editor of Southern Changes. He is the author of The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (NewSouth Books) and other books on southern history.

Rally ‘Round the Flag Boys: Continued White Flight from the Democratic Party

By Laughlin McDonald

Vol. 25, No. 1-4, 2003 pp. 8-9

When Sonny Perdue took the oath of office in Atlanta in January 2003, he became the first Republican governor of Georgia since Rufus Bullock of Albion, New York, was elected to the post in 1868 during federal Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War. Perdue’s election completed a process that began with the defection of whites from the Democratic Party beginning in the late 1940s.

Southern Democrats, under the leadership of Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and styling themselves “Dixiecrats,” staged an open revolt against Harry Truman and the national Democratic Party during the 1948 presidential election because of the party’s pro-civil rights stance. Governor Fielding Wright of Mississippi, Thurmond’s vice-presidential running mate, warned that the protection of minority rights called for by Truman and his Committee on Civil Rights “aimed to wreck the South and our institutions.” Thurmond for his part railed against the proposed federal rights initiative and declared that ,.all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches, and our places of recreation.” In the ensuing election, the Thurmond/Wright Dixiecrat ticket carried four southern states-Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina-and marked the beginning of the end of the white Solid South which could always be counted on to vote Democratic.

The formal development of the Republican Party in the South took place later around the 1964 presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater, who adopted a Southern Strategy of opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Southern Strategy, like the Dixiecrat movement, was a calculated effort to attract white Democratic voters who were furious about the racial changes taking place in the South. Sonny Perdue’s election was no exception.

While some pundits have offered other explanations for Perdue’s defeat of Roy Barnes, the seemingly popular Democratic incumbent, the best explanation for Perdue’s upset victory stems from Barnes’s successful campaign prior to the 2002 election to remove the Confederate battle flag from its conspicuous place on the state flag. The Confederate battle emblem had been placed on the state flag in 1956 as part of the state’s response to the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down racial segregation in the public schools. Georgia’s white leadership fervently embraced a philosophy of State’s Rights, a cornerstone of which was massive resistance to Brown and its threat to the state’s vaunted “way of life” built upon white supremacy and subordination of the Negro. The legislature, with only one dissenting vote, adopted an Interposition Resolution in 1956 declaring the Brown decision “null, void and of no force or effect.” It pledged to take all measures to defeat “this illegal encroachment upon the rights of [the] people.”

The legislature then went on to adopt a new state flag that incorporated the most potent symbol of white defiance of federal authority and the emerging Civil Rights Movement: the battle flag of the Confederacy. “[The new flag will] leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that Georgia will not forget the teachings of Lee and Stonewall Jackson,” said Denmark Groover, a chief sponsor of the change. “[It] will show that we in Georgia intend to uphold what we stood for, will stand for and will fight for.”

Georgia’s white leadership lost the battle to nullify the Brown decision. But it continued to nurture a State’s Rights ideology, which frequently bubbled to the surface in the form of opposition to federal civil rights legislation, particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Another manifestation has been the ongoing defection of conservative whites from the Democratic Party in protest over its civil rights policies. “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” goes the popular mantra, “the party left me.”

One of those who left the Democratic Party was Sonny Perdue. He was first elected to the state senate in 1990 as a Democrat, but bolted the party eight years later and was reelected as a Republican. After the November 2002 election, four white senate Democrats followed Perdue and defected to the Republican Party, giving the GOP a majority (30-26) in the state senate for the first time since Reconstruction. The four defectors were rewarded by being named chairs of important senate committees.

Prior to the 2002 election, the business and civil rights communities in Georgia began agitating for a change in the state flag. Keeping the old flag, they said, was not only an insult to African Americans, but would inevitably embroil the state in economic boycotts and divisive litigation of the kind that had plagued neighboring Alabama and South Carolina over their flying of the Confederate

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flag atop their state capitols.

Governor Barnes, bowing to the mounting pressure, pushed through a bill in the General Assembly, with virtually no public input or legislative debate, that created a new state flag. The Confederate flag was removed from its central position and was placed inconspicuously at the bottom in a row of other state flags from colonial days to the present. Barnes showed considerable courage and leadership in purging the flag of an admitted and intended symbol of white supremacy, but he also deeply offended many of the state’s white voters.

A traveler around the state in the weeks leading up to the November election could not fail to be struck by the proliferation of pro-flag, anti-Barnes signs and sentiment. In rural Paulding and Polk Counties in the northwest, the Confederate flag was flown in angry protest in many a front yard. In Dougherty and Worth Counties to the south, signs containing the Confederate flag and the message to “Boot Barnes” were nailed to trees and fence posts along the roads. On the dock of the Kilkenny Marina in coastal Bryan County, the 1956 flag fluttered defiantly in a warming sea breeze blowing in from St. Catherines Sound.

Many things could have cost Barnes votes, including his support of a controversial road project (the Northern Arc) and his policy on education, which teachers complained unfairly held them responsible for poor student performance. But the controversy over the flag was the most loaded with emotion and symbolism, and probably the most costly for Barnes. On election night, when Perdue claimed victory, his supporters, almost all of whom were white, crowded around him and triumphantly waived the Confederate flag. And on the day when he took the oath of office in Atlanta, airplanes trailing the Confederate flag circled in the sky overhead.

The Confederate flag was the emblem of the mythic and heroic old South, which many whites felt Barnes had dishonored. The flag was also intertwined with a host of other race related issues, such as white opposition to affirmative action, public spending on social programs that benefited minorities, and redistricting that enhanced African-American voting strength. According to one Perdue supporter, who undoubtedly spoke for many, Barnes was “too close” to blacks. Whites believed that Sonny Perdue, who said during his campaign that he favored a public referendum on the issue, could be counted on to rally around the Confederate flag and all that it represented-if not a return to the pre-Brown era, then a refusal to capitulate to the demands of the state’s black community.

The controversy over the flag continued to boil during the 2003 session of the state legislature. Perdue backed off of his pledge to hold a referendum on restoring the 1956 flag and accepted a compromise that involved the adoption of yet another state flag-this one containing red and white stripes and the state coat of arms in gold on a blue field-with a referendum to be held in March 2004 on whether to retain that flag or the one adopted during Barnes’s term as governor.

Georgia has come a long way from the days of white redemption, which drove Rufus Bullock from office, as well as from the massive resistance of the 1950s and 60s. But the recent gubernatorial election shows that race remains dynamic and divisive in the state’s political processes, and that many Georgians still refuse to forget what the Confederate flag stood for: the defense of slavery and preservation of the white privilege.

Laughlin McDonald is director of the Southern Regional Office of the ACLU, and author of A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Fighting to Find the Facts: Virginia Organizing Project on Racial Profiling

By Steve Vaughan

Vol. 25, No. 1-4, 2003 p. 10

To solve a problem, one first needs to know how bad the problem is. While that might seem to be stating the obvious, a majority of the Virginia General Assembly disagrees with that common sense assertion.

For the second year in a row, legislators have refused to pass a bill that would require Virginia police to record and retain records on the reasons for and the results of traffic stops in order to come to grips with the extent of the racial profiling problem in Virginia.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that racial profiling abounds in Virginia. The state’s principal of the year, an African-American man in Charlottesville, tells of having to carefully teach black students how to deal with police when pulled over for no apparent reason. Just before the legislature began in January, the normally conservative Richmond Times-Dispatch ran an informative story on what appeared to be a pretext stop caught on tape. A key black legislator, Delegate Kenneth Melvin, (D-Portsmouth) cast the deciding vote to kill a bill that would have required primary enforcement of the state’s seat belt law–one of Democratic Governor Mark Warner’s key legislative goals–for fear that it would serve as an excuse for “driving while black” pretext stops.

Mary Randolph-Preston, a Virginia Organizing Project (VOP) member and law enforcement professional, says that racial profiling is systemic in Virginia. “In the training course, the examples of criminals they use are always people of color,” she said.

Lawmakers should never act on the basis of anecdotal evidence, and neither State Senator Henry Marsh, (D-Richmond), the sponsor of an anti-racial profiling bill, or the VOP, wanted the legislature to act rashly. Instead, Senator Marsh’s bill took a reasonable approach, seeking the facts through statistical evidence. They weren’t interested.

“Do you think that really happens?” asked Senator Steve Newman, (R-Lynchburg), a member of the Transportation Committee that voted Senator Marsh’s bill down. Days earlier VOP had arranged a meeting with Newman and his constituents in which he was told about racial profiling in Virginia and in his district.

That meeting, and others like it, were a part of VOP’s push to pass Senator Marsh’s bill. VOP also sponsored a television forum in Charlottesville to discuss the problem and generated opinion pieces and letters to the editor in support of the bill. Unfortunately, the bill died on a party-line vote in committee.

As they had in 2002, many legislators pleaded poverty, using the state’s budget crunch as an excuse to kill Senator Marsh’s bill, estimated to cost $1 million.

In 2002 the General Assembly passed a bill supported by Governor Warner that would increase diversity training for the state police. Advocates of ending racial profiling say that’s not enough. Many believe that the state police, a well-trained and well-educated force in comparison to local police and sheriffs departments, is likely not the center of the problem. Without detailed statistics on when, where, and how often racial profiling occurs, the state cannot create a training program that addresses the problem. If the state were to document and examine the evidence it would likely find-as has been found with excessive force complaints-that a very small number of law enforcement officers are responsible for a large number of the racial profiling complaints.

VOP continues to support Senator Marsh is his efforts to end racial profiling. He has pledged to reintroduce his bill in the 2004 legislative session and VOP is trying to mobilize grassroots support for the measure. VOP is in the process of planning a media campaign in support of the law in order to get the widest possible exposure for the stories of racial profiling victims in newspapers and on television news programs.

While the reality of racial profiling seems to be well known in the African-American community, it isn’t on the radar screen of white Virginians. VOP hopes to change that though grassroots organizing. By emphasizing the extent of the anecdotal evidence of racial profiling, VOP hopes to stimulate Virginians’ desire to find out the truth behind the stories by asking their state leaders to compile statistics that will provide the best evidence on the issue.

Because you don’t solve a problem by ignoring it.

Steve Vaughan is the Communications Coordinator of the Virginia Organizing Project, a Charlottesville-based statewide grassroots organization dedicated to challenging injustice by empowering people in local communities to address issues that affect the quality of their lives. To learn more about VOP, visit: www.virginia-organizing.org

The Pryor Threat

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 25, no. 1-4, 2003 pp. 11-12

What happens when the Bush administration’s obsession with handing federal judgeships to shrewd and articulate, right wing, strict-constructionist ideologues draws too big of a crowd to slip a nominee unnoticed through the door? Perhaps by the time you read this, Senate Republicans and Zell Miller (D-GA), back from summer recess, will have given up their all-out push to confirm Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor as a judge on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. If not, seek cover for your children and your children’s children. If so, consider how lengthy a record of reactionary positions, outrageous advocacies, and conflicts of interest must exist to deny a Bush choice, and then only by filibuster.

Granted, the prize is big and the unwinding promise of Pryor’s backward-looking future (he’s forty-one) seems to stretch on forever. The Eleventh Circuit, based in Atlanta and handling federal appeals from Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, is one stop below the U. S. Supreme Court. Most cases that come into the Eleventh end in the Eleventh. Bill Pryor was nominated only after the Senate Judiciary Committee of the 107the Congress refused to advance the President’s first choice, federal magistrate William H. Steele, also from Mobile, who, like Pryor, was strongly opposed by African-American civil rights organizations.

In Pryor’s confirmation hearings, the man the Wall Street Journal called “the intellectual leader of Alabama Republicans” became entangled in the loose ends of a divided mind. Unpersuasive to Democrats that he could consistently separate his widely expressed political and religious beliefs from his judicial rulings, Pryor was also brazen, even for members of the Millionaires Club, in peddling access.

As to Bill Pryor’s beliefs, let’s revisit a vivid Saturday in April, 1997, when thousands of ultra-conservative Christians from throughout the U. S. rallied on the Alabama state capitol steps in Montgomery to support one of circuit judge Roy Moore’s demagogic seasonal dances: his defiance of a court order to take down a Ten Commandments display from the wall of his north Alabama courtroom. Preceded by the sounds of Christian rock and accompanied by the waving of U.S. and Confederate flags, Pryor took his place with other speakers of the day: Governor Fob James–who threatened to call out the national guard to keep “Moses” Moore’s Commandments hanging–Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed; neo-con talk show host and presidential candidate Alan Keyes; Don Wildmon of the American Family Association; and George Grant, who in a 1993 book regretted that unreformed homosexuals could not be executed as they were back in the good Old Testament days.

“God has chosen this time and this place,” Pryor told the crowd with chilling assurance, “so that we can save our country and save our courts for our children.” Reloading, he blasted Roe v. Wade: “I will never forget January. 22, 1973, the day seven members of our highest court ripped the Constitution and ripped out the life of millions of unborn children.”

As Alabama’s attorney general, Pryor has traveled and spoken widely on behalf of the New Federalist Society, states rights zealots in a prettified package. New Federalist beliefs, for example, inform Pryor’s opposition to the multistate lawsuit against tobacco companies. Pryor also favored a lenient path for electric generating companies to upgrade their coal burning plants without being forced to add pollution control devices. He sought to cut back the number of appeals for death penalty inmates. For staunchly defending the firearms industry, he won the National Rifle Association’s highest award.

Impeccable, hermetic righteousness goes a long way with Bush strategists and talent scouts such as Karl Rove, who advised Pryor and applauded his aggressive outspokenness as the Alabama attorney general roamed beyond Alabama, firing off amicus briefs. One of these was in defense of the sodomy law that was overturned by the Supreme Court this June in Lawrence v. Texas. Here Pryor argued, much as Pennsylvania Senator Rick

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Santorum did, that permitting same-sex relations would open the door to the legalization of “prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography and even incest and pedophilia.”

Pryor’s confirmation difficulties should be laid in large part to over-reaching by his major handler in the confirmation process, fellow Mobilian Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, III, the junior senator from Alabama. Sessions, as desperate as Bush and company are to gut federally-protected rights and services, badly miscalculated the diverse, national resistance Pryor’s nomination generated, and he was ineffectual in diffusing it.

Among their last desperate acts to gain votes, the Pryor camp complained of anti-Catholic prejudice, especially with regard to the attorney general’s position on abortion. They ran media ads intended to pressure still-undecided senators in two heavily Catholic states, Maine and Rhode Island. The strategy backfired. As the New York Times editorialized, this was a “false, cynical and divisive charge.”

Along straight party lines, the Judiciary Committee vote was ten to nine in favor of confirmation. On the Senate floor, the Democrats chose to filibuster the Pryor nomination and, by summer recess, had rallied enough members of both parties to avoid cloture.

What’s to be learned from the Pryor episode? That others are sure to follow. That the Bush Administration will keep pressing for judicial nominees whose obliging logic is too far afield to be justified by the court-ordered election victory George Bush claimed, or by his lip service to “compassionate conservatism.” With the future at stake, this is how the law’s chilliest blood transfuses the veins of undemocratic America. One pending ultra-conservative nominee is Texas Judge Priscilla Owen.

Finally, despite the piled-high extremism of the Alabama attorney general, senators seemed most troubled by the appearance of influence peddling through an organization Bill Pryor conceived and co-founded: the Republican Attorney Generals Association. Why did this take so long to be noticed? In March of 2002, the Washington Post reported that RAGA was soliciting large contributions “from corporations that are embroiled in–or are seeking to avert–lawsuits by states.” Pryor saw nothing wrong with this. “I am proud to support [RAGA], and it does not create a conflict of interest,” said the man who would render justice blind.

Allen Tullos is editor of Southern Changes.

FILM: Education and Incarceration?

Reviewed by Randall Burkett

Vol. 25, No. 1-4, 2003 pp. 13-14

The Intolerable Burden. Directed by Chea Prince. Produced by Constance Curry. Blue Stream Production Films, 2003.

Regular readers of these pages will be familiar with Constance Curry, whose prize-winning book Silver Rights (1995) chronicled the courageous battle by Mae Bertha Carter during the mid-1960s to gain an equal education for her children in the segregated public schools in Sunflower County, Mississippi. The troubling documentary film, The Intolerable Burden, directed by Chea Prince and produced by Ms. Curry, is required viewing for everyone moved by Curry’s account of Mrs. Carter’s struggles.

In the brief span of 56 minutes, the viewer is treated to a moving visual portrait of Mrs. Carter, a portrait that makes clear the determination, the wit, and the grit of this daughter and shaker of the Mississippi Delta. But the film does much more than that. Through four thematic segments–Segregation, Desegregation, Resegregation, and an epilogue, Education or Incarceration?–it concisely recounts the virtual abolition of Mrs. Carter’s accomplishments at the hands of a recalcitrant white power structure that refuses to this day to cede control of the public school system. Two of the current all-white school board members in Drew, Mississippi, including its chair, have held their seats since Mrs. Carter first challenged them, in spite of the fact that virtually no white students are now enrolled in Drew’s public schools.

Whites in Sunflower County and throughout much of Mississippi and the South have invested enormous resources in all-white private academies that leave the public school curriculums eviscerated, the physical plants deteriorating, and the economic base of the schools in shambles. The Intolerable Burden depicts these white

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academies–the underside of the much-touted private school reform movement–to be a bastion of Confederate hero worship and resegregation, the South’s “No, never!” that still resonates across the region and, indeed, much of the nation. Meanwhile, in the town of Drew itself, Main Street is boarded up, manufacturing has departed, real unemployment hovers above 25 percent, and young black males who remain in town have little else to do but get caught up in street life. The only growth industry is the nearby Parchman State Penitentiary, where far too many of Drew’s youth end up–including one of Mae Bertha Carter’s own grandsons.

Indeed, one of the most unnerving segments of this film is the epilogue, which demonstrates the parity between the dropout rates in public schools and the incarceration rates in the prison system. In Mississippi over the past four decades, the prison population for black males has increased nearly ten-fold, while the amount budgeted for prisons has skyrocketed to more than $240 million. As one of the many eloquent and thoughtful interviewees concludes, incarceration has ceased to be punishment and instead has become an industry that has taken on a life of its own.

The promise of progress through education in a single public school system, the bedrock of Mae Bertha Carter’s faith, appears to have become but another in a string of broken promises. Not only she and her husband but also her children paid an enormous price–psychological, social, and economic–for the education they received. While all of her children made it through high school and seven graduated from college, the prospect for the future of their own children, had they remained in the Delta, would be very bleak. The cost of the pernicious persistence of racism in our nation continues to mount for individuals as well as for our society as a whole.

This is a film on which to reflect, and then to act.

Randall K Burkett is curator of African-American collections in the Special Collections and Archives Division of Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University. For more information or to order a copy of The Intolerable Burden, call 800-876-1710 or visit www.frif.com.

BOOKS: Georgia’s Quest for Fair Representation

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 25, No. 1-4, 2003 pp. 15-16

Laughlin McDonald, A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

For the last three decades, Laughlin McDonald has been democracy’s lawyer in Georgia. Following his mentor, Charles Morgan Jr., McDonald and his longtime colleague, Neil Bradley, have been involved in more cases attempting to expand voting rights in Georgia than any other lawyers. Now, the director of the Southern office of the American Civil Liberties Union has written the first history of voting rights in Georgia.

A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia will be more accessible and engaging to all readers than the off-putting, scholarly title suggests. McDonald has condensed into a slim volume his hard-won knowledge and understanding of the history of voting rights in Georgia since the Civil War. While court cases are the author’s primary markers, he includes the voices and perspectives of both black community leaders who struggled for political rights and white Georgians who considered black voting a heart-stopping attack upon the “Southern way of life.”

The book is heavily footnoted like a lawyer’s brief, but McDonald documents the story of resistance and change in Georgia with an open style. There are no lawyer’s wooden phrases here. This history is full of court cases woven together with instances of violence, intimidation, subterfuge, political chicanery, moral blindness, self-interest and collective acts of courage. It is a book that scholars will use, teachers of state history should assign, activists will appreciate, other attorneys will cite, and readers of non-fiction will find informative and knowing.

By the middle of the book, many younger readers may find it difficult to comprehend why Georgia’s white leaders spent so much of the state’s limited resources and intellectual capital over more than a hundred years trying to keep African Americans from exercising the simple democratic right to vote and to have that vote count in electing candidates to public office. McDonald leaves readers to explore on their own this lesson in the persistent nature of racism, but he does make clear how the methods and themes of resistance persisted over generations in Georgia.

Empowering hand-picked grand juries to select hand-picked school board members, creating one-man county governments, and selectively applying at-large voting schemes–all are techniques that McDonald traces from earlier Georgia history as obvious efforts to defeat black voting that continued into recent years. Yet, the most striking evidence of this long trail of resistance is the language that McDonald quotes from opponents of black voting. There isn’t much difference in what white Atlantans bemoaned when “nigger aldermen” were elected in the 1870s during Reconstruction and what Georgia state representative Joe Mack Wilson of Marietta, the chairman of the house reapportionment committee, said about “nigger districts” being created in the Atlanta area in the 1980s.

McDonald has a good eye for the details of Southern irony. He notes, for example, how in 1868 a black state senator–who happened to be named George Wallace–was expelled from the Georgia legislature on trumped-up

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allegations. He also highlights Herman Talmadge’s claims in 1955 that “God advocates segregation” as if the Good Lord was nothing more than a hired lawyer in someone else’s high court.

One interesting part of Voting Rights Odyssey is McDonald’s inclusion of segregationist activities by some of Georgia’s recent and current white leaders. It can be no accident that McDonald includes a couple of outrageous quotations from federal judge Robert Elliott when he was a young, ambitious politician in the 1940s. Similarly, the author includes segregationist remarks and strategies from Georgia governors Ellis Arnall and Carl Sanders, now generally revered as Southern moderates or liberals during the 1950s and 60s. McDonald also chronicles former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s efforts as a young school board member in Sumter County to block the construction of a black elementary school because white parents worried it was too close to a white school. The author does not suggest in any way that these public figures should be judged solely by their early remarks and actions, but seemingly he also does not want history to judge their public careers without considering these incidents.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this book is what the author does not include in the last half, which covers recent history. Rarely-and only when the story seems to require it-does McDonald reveal his own involvement in voting rights cases. In truth, McDonald and his colleagues at the ACLU’s Southern office handled most of the cases that helped to move the Voting Rights Act from a distant federal law to a living reality in Georgia in the last thirty years. This book easily could have been written in the first person-as the personal story of one lawyer’s dedicated efforts to bring democracy to the county courthouses, city halls, school boards, and Georgia’s gold dome where the state legislature sits.

This third person history reflects the choice of an unassuming, thoughtful lawyer who possesses a courtly deference to others as the real heroes of good deeds. McDonald clearly prefers his readers to understand the themes of Georgia’s voting rights history far more than he wants them to admire his own central role in helping to shape it. As a careful author of the voting rights history of Georgia, Laughlin McDonald has written the accessible book of record. As democracy’s lawyer, he has helped to give that book-and Georgia-a much better ending.

A native of Alabama, Steve Suitts is the program coordinator of the Southern Education Foundation in Atlanta and a former executive director of the Southern Regional Council.

A Highway Up From Darkness

Reviewed by Robert J. Norrell

Vol. 25, No. 1-4, 2003 pp. 17-18

J. Mills Thornton III, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2002.

At the end of the Selma march, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a kind of valedictory address of the Civil Rights Movement near the front of the Alabama state capitol in which he reflected on the sequence of events that had brought them to that moment in history. King recalled the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, and then the Birmingham demonstrations which made “the conscience of America begin to bleed,” and finally Selma, the most honorable and inspiring “pilgrimage of clergymen and laymen” in the nation’s history. Over the past decade, King concluded, the Civil Rights Movement had gone “from Montgomery to Birmingham, from Birmingham to Selma, from Selma back to Montgomery, a trail wound in a circle long and often bloody, yet it has become a highway up from darkness.”

Dividing Lines takes us up this highway and gives anyone interested in understanding the Civil Rights Movement our most sophisticated explanation for activism in arguably the three most important places for understanding what the movement did and did not accomplish. It contains three separate studies of communities–Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma–in the Civil Rights Movement. Although connections between the communities are made occasionally, J. Mills Thornton treats each one’s history as unique and autonomous.

His central point is that civil rights activism emerged in each place when city politics developed “cracks” in the entrenched order and presented African Americans with opportunities to seek improvements in their conditions. Out of the dynamic of white political fracture and black political opportunism grew the movement that ended segregation and disfranchisement.

Thornton’s method offers a chronological description of developments that reveal the contingency of events-how one occurrence in a particular circumstance begat another set of actions in a slightly altered context until, after many such cycles, the community had been transformed. Readers must make a commitment to the book, with well over 300,000 words and extensive detail about each place. The author assumes that the reader knows the larger narrative–the “Eyes on the Prize” story line–and he mostly ignores historiographical debates in the text, even with those authors he flatly contradicts.

Several distinctions set this work apart from the existing literature. Readers familiar mainly with the King-centered narratives of David Garrow, Taylor Branch, and Adam Fairciough will find here far more hard-nosed criticism of King’s motives and actions, at least as they pertained to these cities. A fiercely independent mind, Thornton does not defer to King’s heroism, explores his failures as a leader and the inconsistencies of his decision-making, and frankly does not give him his due until the end of the book. Fred Shuttlesworth, the courageous Birmingham ally of King, is at the center of Birmingham story, but he also is held to much stricter account than he got in Diane McWhorter’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning Carry Me Home.

Certainly no history of the movement has dealt more seriously with white conservative attitudes toward civil rights activism, which until now has been a glaring lacuna in the literature. He explains how white attitudes toward blacks hardened when challenged but also how splits among segregationists emerged as white violence threatened economic progress. Nor have the so-called “moderate” whites been so precisely and sympathetically characterized. Similarly, he demonstrates sensitive understanding of the black middle-class in the three cities, especially when they were at odds with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s national strategy for change.

Better than anyone else, Thornton explains the crucial relationship between black activists and the posture of the individual federal courts in Alabama and reveals how the emerging symbiosis between street protests and particular judicial rulings represented one of the most important contingencies in the civil rights story.

Some of Thornton’s boldest analysis comes when he carries his story past 1965, especially as he dissects

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attitudes in Selma. Positing that politics usually finds a practical settlement to disputes through compromise, even if it creates much ill will, he writes that “in Selma, as in other southern communities like it, the historical division of race can seem so completely to submerge other distinctions, and the fears and resentments surrounding race can remain so powerful and so obdurate, that the capacity of political institutions to locate an acceptable accommodation is severely diminished.” Blacks then sought favorable solutions from an external source, the federal courts, and whites were left believing that “federal power was engaged in an essentially vindictive persecution of their region and city, requiring a series of revolutions in social and political practice.” Moreover, the younger generation of African Americans lacked the sense that their parents gained during the civil rights struggle that they could change their world. Thus on both sides, people believed “that their destiny was no longer theirs to determine,” and Selma and other communities like it “lost the will to make its own compromises.”

Notwithstanding this great admiration for the work, two notes of dissent must be made. Thornton argues so vigorously for a political explanation for why activism emerged in these three cities that he does not acknowledge that some of his evidence supports alternate explanations. For example, at crucial points in all three cities, white businessmen challenged the harshest forms of white supremacy as a detriment to future economic progress. Thornton provides the facts but does not entertain analytically the possibility that economic motives had overridden political concerns. Nor does he address the sociologists’ “mobilization” argument-that the movement followed the accumulation of blacks’ resources in improved education, communications, and group institutions-for which he also provides abundant support.

Similarly, the focus on the internal political developments in the three cities is not connected to Martin King’s powerful ideological appeal. His invocation of American democratic values and Judeo-Christian morality moved national politics and the federal government to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Events in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma were crucial in making King’s ideological appeal. As Thornton suggests at one point, the highway up from darkness was lighted by King’s ability both to show the contradiction between segregation and American democratic values and to attract the attention of people far beyond Alabama’s borders to that reality.

Robert J. Norrell holds the Bernadette Schmitt Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is author of the award-winning Reaping the Whirlwind: the Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee, and other books.

Jumping on Racism with Both Feet

Reviewed by Ellen G. Spears

Vol. 25, No. 1-4, 2003 pp. 19-20

“Racism is such a powerful force in this country, you have to always be jumping on it with both feet just to be able to hold it down, to hold it in check.”1

– State Senator Hank Sanders,
Selma, Alabama

Catherine Fosl, Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Anne Braden is one of a few white Southerners who have been jumping on racism with both feet for more than five decades. Leaving a privileged childhood in pre-civil rights Louisville, Kentucky and Anniston, Alabama, she became a journalist, activist, civil rights leader, and mentor to today’s social justice movements. In Subversive Southerner, Catherine Fosl, who teaches women’s studies and humanities at the University of Louisville, has given us an important gift, tracing the formative influences on Anne Braden and interpreting her brave actions against brutal Cold War era politics in the South.

Fosl traces key elements of Braden’s unlikely transformation into one of the South’s most enduring civil rights activists-beginning with a mother who recognized and encouraged her daughter’s intellect and talents; strong, progressive women professors at women’s colleges who nurtured Braden’s leadership skills; and an early career as a journalist. Through reporting jobs, first at the Anniston Star and then, at the Birmingham News, Braden confronted the grim underside of racism and poverty faced by Alabama’s laboring and black citizens.

Her marriage to radical activist and mentor Carl Braden, fellow journalist at the Louisville Times, brought her into a world of people who shared a sharp critique of U.S. society. Significant organizational influences included the Civil Rights Congress and Southern Conference on Human Welfare, later the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), which Anne and Carl Braden staffed from 1957 to 1974. Anne began editing SCEF’s newspaper, The Southern Patriot, in 1957.

Fosl very effectively reprises ground Braden herself covered in her 1958 book, The Wall Between, which was reprinted with a new epilogue by the author by the University of Tennessee Press in 1999. Both books recount the maelstrom that followed the Bradens’ simple bold act of purchasing a home in a white Louisville suburb on behalf of an African-American couple, Charlotte and Andrew Wade, in May 1954, just two days before the Supreme Court’s action overturning school desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education. The Wades held out courageously against shots fired into their Jefferson County home and a cross burning on their lawn. For the act of aiding the Wades, the Bradens, first Carl and then Anne, and five other whites, were charged with sedition and Carl served eight months of a fifteen-year sentence.

Biographies succeed best when they illuminate the times lived. Seeking out details from numerous oral and archival sources, Fosl does far more that recount the story of the Bradens and the Wades and the sedition trials that followed. Her essential insight: red-bailing was wielded as a vicious wedge to split civil rights, labor, and peace movements from each other and from their natural allies in the left-wing of the labor movement. For a time, despite their consistent work against white supremacy, Fosl points out, the Bradens had to fight their way into the Civil Rights Movement as well.

Out of their experience with the Wade case, and the repression that followed, Braden developed a basic strategy: you use each attack as a platform to reach more people with what you were trying to say. Anne and Carl traveled the South organizing for SCEF, and became sensitive observers of the interworkings of power and race.

The original working title for the manuscript, “No white person in the South can be neutral,” reveals the core principle that has guided Braden’s life and work: the centrality of race in solving the sharp contradictions in American society. Together, the Bradens put racial justice at the center of “a radical interracialism, rooted in the Old Left, with race as the fulcrum toward a broader economic and social justice.” Braden’s refusal to live in complicity with the privileges of race and class, her insis-

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tence, by word and example, to whites especially, on the necessity of anti-racist action, has touched the lives of younger activists.

On the trail of this extraordinary woman, Fosl has utilized a gender lens. Describing the Bradens’ balancing of shared speaking tours, caring for children, and the tensions of dealing with sharp political differences with parents, Fosl covers concerns that often went unaddressed in the movement and that have often been overlooked in many civil rights biographies.

Fosl encountered a difficult biographical task. Braden was often too busy making history–working for rights of political prisoners, organizing against an upsurge of klan and police violence, and building new coalitions around progressive electoral strategies and for environmental justice-to devote much time to collaborating on the book. Faced with a somewhat unavailable, very much alive “subject” who must live with the consequences of the portrayal, also an accomplished journalist who had already written about some of the key events in question, Fosl utilized oral history in a unique form of collaboration, incorporating Anne’s words directly into the narrative.

With this book, Fosl has added a valuable contribution to other recent biographies of white women civil rights activists that include Kathryn Nasstrom’s Everybody’s Grandmother and Nobody’s Fool (2000), about the Georgia anti-poverty activist Frances Freeborn Pauley, and the collection by Connie Curry and others, Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Civil Rights Movement (2000).

I wanted far more about the Anne Braden that I have come to know in recent decades, a leader on the National Rainbow Coalition board, listened to by Rev. Jesse Jackson and others, as co-chair, with Rev. Ben Chavis and later with Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, of the Southern Organizing Committee for Social and Economic Justice (SOC), as ally with Rev. C.T. Vivian in anti-klan efforts, a stalwart in the Kentucky Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression, and innumerable south-wide justice campaigns.

More scholarly work is needed that addresses the debates in the 1970s, 80s and 90s as skillfully as Fosl has handled Braden’s life during peak Cold War years. Such work might illuminate how the vestiges of that era still circumscribe today’s social justice movement, yielding understanding of Braden’s stance in declining to specify her relationships on the left. Her position, refusing to sanitize or demonize herself or others by spelling out associations with the Communist Party, still provokes questions at book-signings and among historians. Former SRC Executive Director Steve Suitts addressed that controversy when he presented to Braden the Southern Regional Council’s highest award in 1992. “More than virtually all other Southerners–at times more than the leaders of the Southern Regional Council–,” said Suitts, “Anne understood the devastation that would befall the South, and did, when people replied to the accusation, “Communist,” with the reply, ‘Not me!” That response, said Suitts, “divided Southerners of goodwill into ineffectiveness” (Southern Changes, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 1993).

In these days of Patriot Acts, the legacy of Cold War era McCarthyism isn’t as far past as we might like to think. The code word terrorist has largely replaced communist as the demonizing noun, but present challenges to individual privacy, freedoms of expression and of association recall the McCarthy era. Progressives and liberals today are often divided into ineffectiveness by an approach to differences that prevents the overarching alliance necessary to combat the anti-democratic, racially retrogressive policies of the Bush II era.

In today’s climate, at 79, Braden continues to seek effective coalitions, working into the night at her office at the Braden Center in Louisville longer and with more determination than many activists half her age. “History, I fear, will not do her justice since Anne’s contributions represent characteristics that are not only too rare but too rarely appreciated,” Suitts also noted in that 1992 speech. Fosl’s insightful book honors Braden’s too rare contributions. Perhaps this book will encourage more people, young and old, to examine their choices and live as she has done, jumping on racism with both feet.

Ellen G. Spears, former associate director of the Southern Regional Council, is a Ph.D. candidate at Emory University and a contributing editor to Southern Changes.