INTERCHANGE
A New Magazine: Our Creed and Hopes
By Steve Suitts

Vol. 1, No. 1, 1978, pp. 2-3

This first issue of Southern Changes is nothing new.

On four prior occasions during the last 34 years, the Southern Regional Council has announced the premiere of a new publication. Each has differed: one endured for 27 years and another did not live to celebrate an anniversary. All attempted to mark a new and distinct emphasis within the organization and a revived hope in the South’s future.

The publications’ names show, perhaps, the changing perception of the region by an organization born in the days when segregation of the races was fact enforced by law. The Southern Frontier was the Council’s first publication and lasted for two years. Then, in 1946, it was revised in title and format as the New South.

“The change lies in this,” the first edition of New South, stated, “that SRC will from now on strive to study and solve the problems implicit in (our) goals as parts – symptoms, if you like – of the overall problem of the South, which is the region’s need to develop a fuller use of its resources, both natural and human, to achieve a healthy balance between the agriculture and industry within the region. The democratic corollary to this, of course, lies in the duty of every Southerner to see to it that such development, as it is achieved, is used wisely and shared fairly by all, for all. It is to this development and the democratic shaping of the South’s growth that SRC will give most of its effort.” The magazine urged its readers to join in the task of making the “New South” a reality.

From 1946 until 1974, the magazine’s contributors wrote about the South with sympathy and outrage. They illuminated the obvious and obscure problems, pled with and cajoled Southerners to do better – to help bring social change.

Harold Fleming, a former director of the Council and one of the old hands at New South, reflected in its final issue that “to be honest, New South helped create the image of Southern readiness for change that somewhat exceeded the realities of the day.” Nonetheless, the New South found hope when it was scarce and marshaled an intellectual force which often plain facts could only bring.

It was just four springtimes ago when New South and its companion tabloid, since 1970,South Today, were merged into a new, colorful, and glossy magazine, Southern Voices. Although its editor observed that “there is even a Southern feel to the universe, suggesting that perhaps the stars are ironically right for this unprecedented venture,” it was not to be. After ten months, financial problems silenced Southern Voices.

During its short life, the magazine marked a change in perception. It was a time, the Council decided, when Southerners of all persuasions could speak to one another about problems and solutions – a time when the entire collected expressions of the South reporting, poetry, fiction, art, photography -could be reproduced in one medium for all to see.

With the echoes of Southern Voices still an influence today, we commence another publication. It too, has a new name and is the product of that mysterious process of “vision and revision,” influenced by the traditions, virtues, and the failures of those who came before. Compared to Southern Voices, this magazine is a modest undertaking. It has no color, no departments for art, fiction, or poetry.

The magazine will not attempt to attract every Southerner with the general, diverse expressions of Southern life and culture. Its appearance is different and the texture of its paper and its content feel different.

Hopefully, Southern Changes will have the riches of analysis, investigation, reporting, interviews, story-telling, and commentary. The magazine will mainly be a forum for reliable, concise reporting and interpretation on the issues and events of the South, with emphasis on the plight of the poor and the Black Southerners who, along with others, still seek a just settlement. It will attempt to review the moods, events, developments, and inactivities of the region. It will have little of the virtues and the sins of doctrinaire propaganda. It will attempt to show what is good and decent and hopeful about Southerners and their place. It will highlight the accomplishments of Southerners and the events of today and measure how far we have come in our march with the aspirations and ghosts of yesterday.

It will be called Southern Changes.

With only slight exaggeration, no single word has infiltrated the conversations of Southerners on the porches, in streets, or at statehouses more than the word “change.” For more than a century, it has been the inspiration of Black Southerners; for most of the Council’s existence, the hope of all liberal White and Black Southerners. It stirred the dreams and thoughts of some leaders and for others threatened the institutions and traditions they lived by. The prospects of change mothered racial tensions since folks, whom academicians called “change agents,” would not let it come in the by and by. The time for change was now.

Until the past few years, it was mostly the Southern liberals who wanted change to come rapidly. All others wanted none, thank you m’aam. Not so anymore, it seems.

Nowadays, many folk who once promoted race-mixing want to slow down some of the changes going on in our region. Poets wryly speak of losing our “distinctive Southern character.” Some writers yearn for the days before air conditioning when Southerners would sit and talk to one another. Others think we have gone far enough. Activists, who once marched to the hymns of “We Shall Overcome” and hummed the popular tune about “the times they are ‘a changin’,” now petition to stop the construction of super highways or nuclear plants.

However, not a few of those Southerners who never quite mastered the pronunciation of the word Negro now proudly boast that the South is changing. Industry, growth, money, skyscraper- they all dance in the minds of these and many others who have taken up the uncharacteristically Southern habit of judging success by a balance sheet. Perhaps, even the region’s identity is under change.

The South as a marked region is losing currency. The geography of the South has been enmeshed with a territory larger and more amorphous-the Sunbelt. It goes from the East Coast to Southern California. Some say it is a state of mind as well as place. When journalists, planners, and businessmen speak of our future, it is the Sunbelt, not the South which usually holds their attention. While some of us will not quickly cotton to the self-identity of a “sunbelter,” the changes which are spreading across the South must be reckoned with. The prospects of a better income which sometimes comes with economic development can’t be shooed away by the

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poet’s turn of a phrase nor should it be dismissed necessarily as an attack upon our Southern way of life. In a region where 40% of the nation’s poor live, the promise of a decent income ought not be shunned. And it ought not be a hoax.

Amid the growth and changing nature of the South, there also remains too much unchanged. Life in the South for too many Blacks and poor is still as it was. Low pay, no pay, poor housing, no jobs, try again next week, they don’t work because of welfare (a grand total of $2,800 each year for a family of four in Mississippi), high infant death rates, dirt roads, impure water- the chant of conditions and attitudes continues to stir the cycle of poverty and discrimination. Also, other minorities and many women are denied opportunities which national goals should guarantee to all.

With and without the changes, clarity of purpose and unity of vision are rare commodities in our times. Events and developments seem duplicitous with promise on one side and failure on the other; the complexity of social issues and the failures of government to live up to its goals confuse us all. We live in a South where we must now select carefully the changes which we invite and the ones which we oppose. Hence, the subtitle, “a chronicle of the ongoing struggle for equality.”

This publication will attempt to help us all understand the region we know as the South and ourselves, our neighbors, and the forces which influence our lives. In doing so, Southern Changes claims a new creed which borrows heavily from those original thoughts of the 1940’s. If all else seems questionable, the major concern for Southerners at home and abroad today is how will our region change. We hope that this magazine and the Council, jointly and separately, will help us know the question and the answers a little better.

As a publication which will go mostly to individuals who are associate members of the Council, Southern Changes will be read by a community of people in and outside the region who know that the futures of the South and the country have always, and will always, be tied mysteriously into one fate. It possesses the adversarial and cooperative; the patriotic, loyal, and heretical – the opposing qualities which make living in the South exciting and worrisome.

If nothing else, Southern Changes will try to keep us all from masking our uncertainty with nostalgia or blind faith in the future’s holdings. We will try to understand ourselves and our region and our country. We will try to muster a sense of purpose and recognize accomplishments and failures in ourselves and our region’s work. It is a task which for all Southerners is as old as our history and for the Council as dated as its first publication.

Let us journey together.

The Burden of the South and Nation In Another Political Year

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 1, No. 1, 1978, pp. 5-6

Southern politics has seldom offered an opportunity for hope or joy to the agitating Southerner. For those of us who bel eve that race and equality have not surrendered their central place in the life of the South, the scars and terrors of past political defeats have made us reluctantly more the observant than the participant. Perhaps, it has sharpened our ability to see clearly. Or, like the neighborhood wag sharing the tales of some highway accident, it may be that we’ve come to be satisfied with describing politics instead of engaging it.

Yet, this year of all years brings a hope for some Southern liberals that the nature of politics is changing, that the politicians’ views have improved, and that the nature of our problems has changed. As proof, it is noted that some of the most skillful masters of the old school of Southern politics are passing away from their places of political eminence. John McClellan of Arkansas, James Eastland of Mississippi, John Sparkman and Jim Allen of Alabama: none will sit in the U.S. Senate in 1979. Indeed, we are reminded that there has been no other year in the past twenty in which so many of the partricians of Southern heritage have relinquished their places.

A little more memory may also tell us, however, that there have been countless numbers of days when we’ve tried to find major societal movements in our politics overnight, and only a few of them have sustained a lasting, progressive influence Remember when some were excited that Southerners stuck with Roosevelt through three administrations as Democrats and then it all fell apart as they walked out as Dixiecrats on Truman and the civil rights plank. Remember the hope when John Kennedy carried much of the region in 1960 and the despair when Barry Goldwater did it in 1964 and Richard Nixon in 1968 and again in 1972? There was a moment of euphoria the night Terry Sanford became Governor of North Carolina in the early 1960’s and more than a moment of sadness when Jessie Helms went to the Senate from the same state in 1972.

Political Symbols

In observing the present changes in the Senate, we must also recognize the limits of political symbols. Despite our excitement and enthusiasm during a campaign, Southerners have always known that politics carries a duplicity -not always intentional, but apparently inevitable. Thus, we must realize campaign symbols for what they are and are not.

When Governor Bill Finch kissed a Black baby in Mississippi in his race for the US. Senate, we know that an old social custom had been broken. But, we don’t yet know from that gesture how much Finch cares about the interests of ‘poor Blacks or even what he’ll do on legislation for poor children. And his campaign didn’t tell, at least publicly. After Alabama State Representative John Baker, seeking a seat in the U.S. Senate, attacked George Wallace for his 1963 stand in the schoolhouse door in a political telecast, we were assured that Baker, if elected, would not make a fool of himself this fall when Blacks register at the University of Alabama. But, we really have not been told anything about how a Senator Baker would vote on legislative proposals to desegregate the University of Alabama and other state schools.

Obviously, the art of political speech to say nothing and to say something at the same time doesn’t always have a Southern trademark. Still, our campaigners have commanded the technique so long and so well that we ought to resist on principle, as well as experience, the temptation to gauge the progress of our times by the symbols and illustrations of our political campaigns.

Lest we be overcome by me temptation to say that this year is the exception, we ought to remember also that each of the men who leave the U.S. Senate did survive all major political challenges in their careers and most likely would have done so once again if they had stood for reelection.

If we can’t learn from politics much detail about ourselves, perhaps we should look at the deeds of those already elected and the opinions of those who elect them to know how well we stand. And here, I am no more encouraged than I was on those late summer nights when I stared in disbelief at the election returns which crushed my hopes and my candidates for that year.

The State of Equality

For my view, there appears no question that the day-to-day support for the campaign to achieve equality in the South and the nation is more diminished today than at any other time in the past ten years. While freedom from irrational discrimination has been embraced by our laws and popular opinion, the means to achieve equality have not.

To be sure, past work in the South and elsewhere has moved an entire segment of people out of the bondage of constant fear, intimidation, and humiliation. No longer can Blacks as a whole be dispossessed of property, life, and culture by sham laws and capricious hatred. The law of the land and its enforcement do not prohibit that massive denial for most and offer individual protection for some. And importantly, the work of the past couple of decades for civil rights has inspired a renewed attempt by many other groups in society to strive for their own equal treatment.

Yet, as historian C. Vann Woodward reminded us ten years ago, “equality (is) a far more revolutionary aim than freedom…” The attainment of this goal does not always invoke blatant hatred and

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outrageous open cruelty. Instead, the work to achieve equality often involves the relationship of everyone in almost every corner of their lives. Perhaps for this reason, It is a difficult achievement and remains largely unachieved in Southern and national life today.

Promises Unkept

Of the more than ten million Blacks who live in the South today, about seven million live in counties where more than 20% of the population is Black. Yet, not more than two out of ten of these communities has had a Black elected official in the last 100 years. There remains almost 40 counties and three times as many towns in the rural South where Blacks represent a majority of the population but have never had a Black elected official. The obstacles to full, effective voting and candidacy by Blacks exist in the large part because of continued local resistance by government officials and the growing disinterest of the federal courts.

A recent survey of the employment practices of 16 Southern cities shows the continuance of a massive pattern of discrimination against Blacks and women. The results are shocking: almost three fourths of all Black males continued to work for the Southern cities in garage and maintenance. While nine out of ten of all the high-salary positions are held by White males, none of the cities has a Black female making $13,000 or more.

Another report recently revealed that in the last reported fiscal year, the Southern states refused to participate fully in federal programs offering social services to the poor. In a region where welfare is viewed mostly as a handout to the Black poor (a perception that ignores the fact that more Whites in the South are poor than Blacks) and where we have the largest number of poor in the nation, the 11 states of the Old Confederacy failed to spend more than $120 million of federal funds which were available to provide social services such as hot meals, crisis counseling, or day care.

The state of our Southern being is not exceptional, it appears. Similar trends can be found throughout the country. Perhaps, a poll conducted by the New York Times and CBS News late last year shows clearly what is the heart of our troubles in the region and the nation. According to the poll, which didn’t ask which political leader is as popular as Walter Cronkite, three out of four Americans endorse laws providing equal job rights for Blacks, women, and the handicapped; however, an equal number–three out of four also opposes strongly any “extra consideration” for remedying past job discrimination. In fact, only Blacks as a majority favored any such “extra consideration” at any time.

It is important to note than one major source of opposition to “extra consideration” came from those very groups of Whites who once supported the civil rights movement of the 1960’s. The poll evidenced that White liberals in every region opposed the idea of “extra consideration” to remedy job discrimination at a rate of more than two to one. An endorsement of the principle, but not the means to achieve it, it appears.

Another disturbing, non-political poll last year showed that more than four out of ten of all White churches in the country remain segregated and, that in the South almost six out of every ten prohibit Blacks.

No doubt, there will bean opportunity for some of us to shed a bit of our present despair about politics when a cold November evening in the South shows the final results of this year’s voters’ wisdom. As in the past, some good folks may be elected. More important than those results, however, will be the actual results which come from our own attempts to restore the nation’s faith in the importance of equality and to push the South and the country towards a future without the lingering burdens of inequality.

In that primary effort, we have no cause yet to voice our last hurrah.

My Sons Are Growing Up Racists

By Robert Hilldrup

Vol. 1, No. 1, 1978, p. 7

All my life, I’ve heard it said that the difference between us whites, South and North, is that the Southerner loved Blacks as individuals, and hated them as a race, while Northerners loved them as a race, and hated them as individuals.

Now, I see this pattern emerging in my own family: my sons are growing up racists, despite having lived in a family which was consistently involved in efforts to promote integration and racial justice.

To relate these efforts, by my wife and by myself, and the things we have endured from both Black and White as a result, would be self-serving. Worse, it would be embarassing, because what we have suffered is relatively little in comparison with the suffering of others–Black and White. Yet I am sure I speak for others who share my wife’s persuasion and mine when I say that there is a growing feeling of isolation among us today, caught as we are between the hardening attitudes of fellow Whites at one end and the malignant violence of Black hatred at the other.

I have asked myself over and over why this trend, this attitude, seems to be emerging in the lives of our three boys. They are not budding Klansmen. In their collective lives, they may have had one fight each, and that was not interracial. They don’t want to move from the home they have occupied since infancy in an integrated neighborhood. They still seem to enjoy the company of their Black companions and friends from college, from high school and from junior high.

But the signs of hardening hearts are there.

Perhaps I remained silent too long, listening, instead of talking. But parents who talk too much miss a chance to listen. And most of the time, the listening is a pleasure: talk of girls and soccer and baseball and food and cars and the eternal lack of money since we are a family which must struggle financially in a way that seems to us a bit grimmer than for most.

So we sat one evening, the college sophomore and I, alone in the summer twilight and I came at last to ask him about the changes in racial attitudes which had appeared in him and in his brothers.

He was silent for a moment, and I sensed that he was choosing the words for his answer as carefully as I had chosen my question.

“Dad,” he began, “I’m sorry. I know what you and mom have been through (as White educators in a Black school system), but it doesn’t change what we see and what happens to us.”

What followed was almost a litany and I knew, somehow, that speaking in terms of social policy and economics and politics and power didn’t cut it with him. To this young man, and to his brothers, it was a matter of personal affront, of right and wrong.

He talked of the noise and vandalism in our neighhorhood that has increased with the arrival of more and more Blacks–Blacks with middle class jobs or better. He talked of the racial epithets that had been hurled at him and his mother from some of these same families.

He spoke of his brother in high school, who makes do with hand-me-down clothes, and of how he feels to see Blacks dressed in the most expensive way getting “free” lunches when he has to pay.

He talked of his own experience as a bag boy in a grocery where half the customers–and 90 per cent of the shoplifters–are Black, yet all come from the same middle class homes and apartments.

He talked of the struggle we were all sharing to try to put him and his brothers into the ranks of the college-educated, and then he named Black high school classmates accepted by colleges which rejected him when their scores were a combined total of 700 on college boards.

He talked of what his brothers saw in the public schools, of Blacks who would not attempt to do assigned work, and made it impossible for others to do theirs.

“Dad,” he said in conclusion, ‘Get with it. You and mom are living in a dream world.”

That’s where he’s wrong. My wife and I are all too aware that, proportionately, the negative stories and experiences of his life do come far, far too often from Blacks. The wellspring of hatred is overflowing in many areas of the modern South where Blacks now have economic, political or numerical control. It does not feel good to be a minority and a blameless victim.

I know how my sons feel, and I am alternately saddened, ashamed and outraged. Yet I also know how Blacks of another generation must have felt, and this adds to my confusion, for the outrages being commited against Whites today are not coming so much from the Black generation which might be justified in extracting revenge, but from the youth which has known equal rights at worst, and favored treatment frequently.

My son went on and talked of other things: Blacks who wouldn’t take minimum wage jobs that White students were fighting to get; of our White neighbors who have been murdered and assaulted by Blacks.

The Darkness fell over us and our words and I couldn’t help but think that Black Southerners and White Southerners need now, more than ever, to strive toward fairness and decency and justice, for each and for all; that indeed, we cannot stand separately and alone.

For with power comes responsibility. The Black majority which will not work with the Whites to provide mutual safety and opportunity will find, in the long run, that it cannot guarantee its own. For both the Southerner and the Black are minorities in this nation and the return of the Holocaust is something we dare not forget.

Mr. Hilldrup was director of public information for the Richmond (Va.) Public Schools from 1969-76 during the integration and busing controversy.

Politics and Medicine in a Small Southern Town

By Seth Borgos and Joshua Miller

Vol. 1, No. 1, 1978, pp. 11-12

The first time we heard of Dr. Wayne Smith he sounded like a character out of Ibsen or Sinclair Lewis. A courageous, reformminded doctor criticizes the corrupt local hospital and thereby incurs the wrath of the medical establishment because he violated the unwritten rule that doctors protect their own. He incurs the hostility of the community because the rate of patient attendance of the hospital rapidly drops.

What we found in Keber Springs, Arkansas, did not quite match the scenario. Wayne Smith is a combative man, a perfectionist. His criticisms are probably legitimate, but they’re conventional. The doctor may never be vindicated because the community may never reach a consensus on whether or not he was right, and there is no deus ex machina to supply the answer. The argument over Wayne Smith will go on for a generation. In the meantime, the town is bitterly polarized, and the hospital suffers.

Heber Springs is a pretty town. It sits 60 miles north of Little Rock and is the county seat of Cleburne County. Wayne Smith began his Heber Springs practice in July, 1968, deciding as he did to pursue a medical career after a decade of service in the Armed Services as a personnel counselor. It was his first private practice; after completing an internship in Little Rock he had moved to Heber Springs because his wife’s family was from the area. When Dr. Smith arrived in town there was no public hospital. A new county-owned hospital opened in October of that year and Smith promptly joined the medical staff.

Soon after Dr. Smith began taking patients at the hospital he witnessed a number of disturbing incidents. Once, he found the blankets supplied for newborn babies full of holes. Another time he rode out with the hospital ambulance to pick up a man and the door of the ambulance jammed and Smith had to tear it off.

On one occasion a Jehovah’s Witness was admitted to the hospital. The family of the patient informed the hospital staff that, because of his religious beliefs, the man could not receive any kind of blood or blood products. The nurses assured the family that they would not give the patient any plasma; instead they gave him “packed cells.” When the family discovered that “packed cells” were in fact a blood product, the family telephoned their physician in outrage. The doctor said in reply, “You’re damn fools.”

A major problem at the Cleburne County Hospital was the constant squabbling among the personnel. The medical staff was riddled with petty jealousies. The nurses found that many of the doctors were far from receptive to being called at their homes after hours for medical advice, even when the doctors were on emergency room call. Sometimes the nurses were subjected to abusive language; other times the doctors would simply refuse to take the call, or relay instructions through their wives. It got to the point where the nurses were drawing straws; the loser had to call the doctor. The doctors could be equally uncooperative when the nurses wanted them to come down to the hospital at night to deal with special problems. The nurses deeply resented the doctors’ attitude. As one of them said, “I take pride in knowing my job as a nurse. I ‘don’t call a doctor on small things, so if I do call him I expect him to come.”

In the Spring of 1974, Smith felt he could no longer accept

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the situation quietly. He decided to go to the hospital board with a list of specific grievances and proposals for improvement in hospital procedures. He showed the list to some of the nurses, one of whom showed it to another doctor on the medical staff. The doctor approached Smith and threatened to “stomp” him. Smith replied, “You may stomp me once, but if you do, you’d better kill me, because if you don’t kill me I’ll be back with a gun and kill you.”

After this incident Smith resolved to go along and get along th the rest of the medical staff. He intended to do his work quietly within the existing structure and not make waves.

“I tried this for about two years,” Smith said, and I found I couldn’t live with myself, knowing that patients were going into the emergency room… not being mistreated, but being ignored.” On July 2, 1976, Smith informed Sam Rector, the hospital director, that he intended to resign from the medical staff in the near future, and that he would no longer schedule anything other than emergency surgery at the hospital.

Smith stopped attending hospital staff meetings, and the medical staff invoked the hospital bylaw which automatically suspends doctors who miss three consecutive staff meetings.

Smith responded by joining with one hospital nurse, one former hospital nurse, and two of his patients in a one million dollar lawsuit against the hospital staff and the Board of Governors. The suit, filed on April 26, 1977, in Federal district court, listed 21 alleged violations of the Hill-Burton Act, the Medicare and Medicaid Acts, and the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Three days after the suit was filed, Paula Penn–the hospital nurse who had joined in the suit-was fired by Sam Rector. She asked the court to issue a preliminary injunction ordering her reinstatement, but was turned down. The suit is now scheduled for trial this Fall.

While many of Dr. Smith’s patients are old-time residents of the area, his most vocal defenders are newcomers like Mrs. Helen Puckett, who moved to Heber Springs from Memphis, Tennessee, three and a half years ago. The Hospital Board, on the other hand, is an appendage of the local Democratic party, and is entirely composed of long-time residents. In the words of Mrs. Puckett, “These men grew up together …When this controversy began they stuck together sort of blindly.”

The hospital controversy is instructive for what it tells about the relationship between politics and medicine in any small community, including those which are far less dynamic than Heber Springs. The key to that relationship is the dependence of the community upon its doctors and its hospital. In a larger city, there is a choice of hospitals, and no one doctor’s opinion would carry so much weight.

“You’ve got to examine the doctor/patient relationship to understand all this,” said John Barnes, editor of the Heber Springs newspaper, The Arkansas Sun. “If you go to your doctor here and he says the hospital is no good, you’re going to be very reluctant to go to that hospital. If you go to your doctor and he says there’s nothing the matter with the hospital, you’re likely to believe him. You’d put your life in his hands. People are divided on this thing along the lines of who their doctor is. Dr. Smith’s patients believe Dr. Smith, and the other doctors’ patients believe their own doctors.”

Smith’s detractors consider him rigid, combative, and quite possibly paranoid. And indeed, Smith is a Puritan. He has ferocious contempt for medical mediocrity and political cowardice. He says, When a patient is sick and needs the care of the doctor and the doctor doesn’t come down because he’s too lazy, or ornery, or drunk–then he needs to be criticized.”

If there is a touch of arrogance in Dr. Smith, his patients are unaware of it. They describe him as a doctor of unusual warmth and concern for the dignity of the patient. “Most doctors treat the symptoms of disease; Dr. Smith treats the whole person. Most doctors treat high blood pressure by giving the patient a pill. Doctor Smith may prescribe the pill, but he’ll also try to deal with the problem which caused the high blood pressure in the first place,” said Helen Puckett.

One reason why many citizens are reluctant to criticize the hospital and are anxious to “put this matter behind us” is that the community cannot afford to see the hospital go under. With the next closest health facility thirty miles away, the dependency on the hospital is even more extreme.

In additicn to its medical value, the hospital is a potent symbol of community achievement, and that is why it has become a political football. Dr. Smith says that he does not understand the political connection. “I’m not conversant enough with politics to decide what their motive 5.1 smell a rat, I see it, but I can’t dissect it. I can’t see what makes it tick.” What he’s missing is simply an essential political dynamic, the peculiar process by which power becomes an end in itself regardless of its value to the person who pursues it. In a small comriunity like Heber Springs, there are only a limited number of political arenas.

“You don’t touch the church; that’s sacrosanct,” says Peter Miller, a former editor of the Arkansas Sun. “You can only screw around with the schools so much. So what’s left? Generally, you get politically involved in things that really don’t mean a damn, like whether to hire a new policeman. What under normal conditions would be a local, minor situation, becomes a major confrontation. It’s crazy, but it happens here all the time. That county gets polarized over anything.”

What lies at the center of this controversy is not opposing medical philosophies (e.g. professionalism vs humanism), but the paradox of professionalism itself. Professionalism has earned its bad name in medicine, law, and teaching. It has come to mean a cold, bureaucratic approach to personal, human tasks; protection of incompetence and mediocrity; mystification and elitism. Of particular relevance to the democratic citizens’ movement is the tendency of professionals to feel more loyalty to their institutions than the needs and demands of the community. They want to mask political decisions as matters requiring only professionals’ judgements.

Yet, Wayne Smith is a professional, and his fierce dedication to his work, his sense of a special calling, is responsible for bringing the issue out into the open. He looks at his work as a vocation, not a job. A vocation entails a set of standards, a sense of responsibility, and pride, and commitment. From his point of view his fight has been to prevent the erosion of professional standards in the face of the indifference of the hospital administration and the governing board. The problem, Paula Penn says, is that the members of the hospital board are “plain ordinary people” who “don’t want to admit that they don’t know what’s going on at the hospital.”

The solution to the problem ot making institutions responsive to the community cannot be as simple as the catchword “community control” or “deprofessionalization.” To deprofessionalize medical care in a town like Heber Springs is to hand it over lock, stock, and barrel to the local Democratic chieftans, some of whom take the attitude that running the local hospital is not different than running a warehouse. Community control in Heber Springs means placing medical care in the hands of a small segment of the community. In this matter, as well as in many other things, the answer may lie in finding the right balance between democracy and authority, and in not mistaking all politics for democracy.

How To Tell You’re In The South

By Richard K. Thomas

Vol. 1, No. 1, 1978, pp. 13-15

For two centuries students of regional science have engaged in debates over the existence of a Southern region of the United States. If one is willing to concede that there Is, In fact, a “South,” the question still arises as to where it begins and where it ends. Can some defining phrase be applied to the South in a manner similar to that by which the Mississippi Delta has been delineated as stretching from the lobby of the Hotel Peabody in Memphis to Catfish Row In Vicksburg? Or, are its boundaries too vague to be clearly defined? Is the transition from the South to the North, to the Mid-west and to the West too gentle to be noted or is there a sociocultural boundary noticeable to any traveler?

Since the 1900’s, a series of attempts have been made to set the boundary between the South and the non-South. Some of the more subjective criteria utilized in this process have been derived from popular conceptions of the region. An example often noted in the media is the Mason and Dixon’s Line. This 18th century demarcation, while initially serving to settle a boundary dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland, came to be popularly accepted as the line separating the free and slave states. Despite the suggestion that the term “Dixie” is derived from this boundary, it is rather ineffective at setting even the northern perimeter of the region. (Not only that, but many of the stones implanted to mark its location have been stolen by souvenir hunters.)

A more scientific approach to the use of folk terminology in defining the region was attempted by John Reed, His analysis was based on the existence of the identifiers Southern” and ‘Dixie” as attached to places of business. By examining the telephone directories of nearly 100 U.S. cities for the existence of companies, storages and agencies which included one of these terms in their name, he was able to delimit the section of the country where “Southern” was most frequently utilized and another similar, but not coterminous, area where “Dixie” predominated.

Some have suggested that Southerners constitute a bona fide “ethnic group” just as do PolishAmericans or MexicanAmericans. This would connote a certain Internal cohesiveness founded on shared attitudes, beliefs and values that, for the most part, cut across lines of race, sex, age and Income. The most frequently discussed manifestation of a Southern ideology is the traditional emphasis placed on racial segregation stemming from the notion of White superiority. This emphasis, it has been suggested, more than any other factor has made the South, and Southerners, distinctive.

Early in this century the pioneer Southologist, Howard W. Odum, expounded a delineation of the South–he preferred the term “Southeast”–based on objective measures reflecting the economy of the region. Simply put, the South ended where agriculture ceased to be the major source of employment; the rest of the Nation began where non-agricultural pursuits became dominant. To this end, Odum utilized over 700 indicators of the economic characteristics of the South and its borderlands. These included such variables as pasture land, farm acreage, extent of erosion, characteristics of wage earners, government outlay and types of vehicles. By utilizing this method he was able to precisely outline the area popularly termed the “South.” Other of Odum’s persuasion now use similar criteria.

Finally (in significance if not vintage), there is the administrative delineation by the Bureau of the Census dating from 1942. The South outlined here is one of four grand regions into which the U.S. has been divided. It stretches from the East Coast to the western border of Texas–and as far North as the Maryland-Pennsylvania boundary. Thus, the South is drawn to include the likes of Oklahoma, West Virginia and Delaware.

This delineation is repugnant, of course, to the sensitivities of my real Southerner, who can only snicker when he reads the “states within each of these divisions are for the most part fairly homogeneous in physical characteristic, as well as in the characteristics of their population and their economic and social conditions.”

Admittedly, some East Texans are descended from the same Scotch-Irish bloodlines flowing throughout the Ozarks and the Appalachians, and Oklahoma is filled with Choctaw and Cherokee Indians whose traditional homelands were in the Deep South. But even given the fact that any real man in Tennessee owns Western boots and a hat, these states cannot be included with the likes of Alabama and Georgia. And what about Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia? Even if the last-named were admitted by default because of its Appalachian continuities to the South with Kentucky and Tennessee–let’s face it–Delaware and Maryland are as far North as central Ohio.

In an outburst of understatement one demographer has recently suggested that because of “changes In social and economic conditions” a different grouping might now be considered. Such a realignment was considered in 1955 when the distinction between regions was more obvious than today; the difficulty of changeover, however, was considered too great.

For my part each of these attempts to mark off what Is generally perceived as the South has serious deficiencies. First of all, folk categories are often derived from no-longer-appropriate historical distinctions, they are hard to measure (how does one

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quantify “Dixieism”?); and they may mean. different things to different people. Reed’s attempt is commendable but overlooks the fact that it is easy to adopt a name. Thus non-Southern cities are filled with companies bearing the descriptors “Dixie,” “Southern,” and “Rebel.” Reed himself points out that Chicago has more “Southern” entries than does Macon, Georgia. Although the acceptance of business names such as “Northern” and “Yankee” will be slow in gaining acceptance in the South, it is probable that the Southern region will have less of a monopoly on its traditional descriptors.

The use of psychosocial criteria in delineating the South suffers on two related grounds. In the first place, regional “character” as embodied by a generally accepted ideology is difficult to define and measure. Moreover, even the most tradition-bound ethnic group is certain to react and adapt (if not acquiesce) in the face of changing social conditions. The South is no longer isolated in any real sense and is, for all practical purposes, in the mainstream of 20th-century America.

A case in point is the traditional depiction of the South’s people as racist. In view of the wide media coverage of recent racial conflicts outside of the South, it may be redundant to cite the changing status of Southern race relations. Southern schools are now more integrated than Northern schools; Southern neighborhoods more integrated than Northern neighborhoods. And three decades of public opinion polls have demonstrated the following transformation: in 1940, 98% of White Southerners considered separate school systems essential, while in 1970, only 16% of this group would object to sending their children to a school which included some Black students.

Furthermore, the political ideology of the Southerner has undergone considerable metamorphosis. Once solidly Democrat,the voters of the South have cast off long-lived party allegiances and–if the polls are to be believed–Southerners are today slightly less “conservative” than are Westerners and Midwesterners.

The method of delineation using objective data is the most susceptible to the forces of change. The South has become industrialized to an extent not imagined at the end of World War II and the region now leads the rest of the nation in urban growth. The traditional Southern ties to the land have weakened, in practice it not in sentiment. The emergence of agribusiness and the neoplantation in the South has depleted the ranks of farmers and farm laborers to the point that the agricultural pursuit is no longer a distinguished attribute of the region.

In view of the failures of all other methods, I propose an alternative and, I believe, foolproof process for accurately demarcating the South. This method combines some of the best characteristics of earlier attempts–objectivity, an embodiment of the psychosocial character of the people, and a reflection of the economic system of the region. Furthermore, it overcomes some of the deficiencies of other approaches. It uses easily collected data; it allows for a sharp rather than vague delineation of regional boundaries; and its defining measure has remained unchanged in the face of modernization.

It is important, I feel, to describe the manner in which this “revelation” came to me. I had held an interest, off and on, in the notion of a Southern-ness existing around me and felt, like most residents of the region, that there were some, however vague, boundaries that set us apart from the rest of America. The first inkling of the existence of some defining characteristic came to me on an automobile trip three years ago from Memphis to St. Louis. Unquestionably, I was starting in the South with a destination in the non-South, but it could not really be deter-

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mined, I thought, where one ended and the other began. If one takes old Highway 61 into Missouri, a much better idea of the changing terrain–from Mississippi Delta to Missouri hills (the foothills of the Ozarks, I believe)–is evident. Not only does the topography suggest a transition is underway. Foreign-sounding names like Biehle, Weingarten and River Aux Vases appear on maps and roadsigns. Baptist churches give way to Lutheran and Catholic houses of worship. And what Southerner can forget the initial surprise at seeing St. Jude Acres subdivision beside the road? Although these changes are not abrupt and no clear-cut lines separate delta geography from Ozark-foothills or fundamentalism from ritualism, it is clear to the traveler that a transition is taking place.

It wasn’t until Perryville, midway between Cape Girardeau and St. Genevieve, that the full implication of the border crossing was apparent. And it was here at the Intersection Cafe in Perryville that I discovered the key to the delineation of the South. Sitting in the restaurant, I felt an uneasiness; something told me we were at the border, but I could not ferret out the source of this feeling. I was convinced that the transition was taking place, but I needed proof.

Then, in a most unlikely place–the menu–I discovered what appears to be the one most significant variable in setting off the South and the non-South. There, listed under “Beverages”seeming to leap out–was “Pop.” That was it! The line between the South and the non-South could be drawn at the point–a precise one, too–where carbonated beverages are no longer referred to as “cokes,” “colas” or “soft drinks” but are ordered as “soda,” ‘pop” or “soda pop.”

Subsequent research has borne out this significant breakthrough with such points being identified all along the border. On the west, as one passes from Dallas to Tyler, Texas, the same phenomenon is observed. A line can be drawn setting off East Texas and cutting through Oklahoma; likewise across the northern reaches of the Southland; eastward from Perryville along a line stretching across southern Indiana into northernmost Kentucky (actually through the Cincinnati metropolitan area), on across Southern Ohio, through the heart of West Virginia and-alas!-cutting the northern fifth of Virginia, the essence of the Confederacy, off from the rest of the state.

Admittedly, the research on this important topic is in its early stages and extensive data collection and analysis have yet to be implemented. The conclusions to date have been based on unsystematic observations and interviews with selected “experts.” Thus, the precise boundary-a border over 2,100 miles long, by the way–has not been established at every point. (It is probable that the final delineation will resemble more of a saw-tooth pattern than the smooth line suggested above.)

In any case, it appears that a foolproof method for delineating the South has been discovered. The faults df other methods are now really glaring. Anyone can name their company “Dixie Rents” or “Southern Leather”; ideology and beliefs are compromised in the face of changing conditions; agrarian lifestyles and occupation give way to urbanization and industrialization.

But the day when the boys who hang around the Red Ace filling station in Cullman, Alabama, walk into Grigsby’s Grocery and order an orange pop, we’ll know the South is dead.

“How To Tell You’re In The South” was first printed in Southwestern Journal Southwestern at Memphis, Spring 1977.

A Dilemma: Overpopulation in Southern Prisons

Bob Powell

Vol. 1, No. 1, 1978, pp. 16-17

“A free, democratic society cannot cage inmates like animals or stack them like cattle in a warehouse and expect them to emerge as decent, law-abiding, contributing members of the community. In the end, society is the loser.”

Judge Charles R. Scott

With these words and the stroke of a pen, in 1976 Judge Scott, a Federal Judge in Florida, found the Florida prison system in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution barring cruel and unusual punishment.

It is not an uncommon thing these days for Southern prison systems to be in this predicament. Across the South since 1975, five states have been told to stop overcrowding their prisons and a sixth, Tennessee, is currently a defendant in an undecided case. Chan Kendrick, the former director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Tennessee, who filed suit against the facility said the overcrowded conditions at the Transit Building, a converted warehouse made into a makeshift prison, were “simply unbelievable.”

The main cause of the Eighth Amendment violations in regard to prison conditions centers on overcrowding. The South’s prison systems are the most crowded in the nation. Overcrowding not only means an excess of bodies, but also overused medical facilities and overworked personnel. Funds that could be used for rehabilitation are often used elsewhere.

And despite popular opinion to the contrary, overcrowded prisons are not solving any crime problems. If anything at all, they are creating more. The crime rate continues to go up and recidivism soars.

Five of the top six states with high prison populations in ratio to the general population are in the South. These states, ranked in order from second to sixth, are North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Texas.

The source of this data, the March 1978 issue of Corrections Magazine, lists four other Southern states as being in the Top Twenty. They are Virginia (12th), Louisiana (16th), Tennessee (17th) and Arkansas (20th).

And who is to blame for this wonderful state of affairs in Southern prisons? Even the administrators, the usual heavies of the correctional system foul-ups, cannot be held responsible for this condition. Prison administrators may be accountable for a lot of the defects of the system, but failing to warn the public about overcrowded conditions in the prisons is not one of them.

According to a New York Times article dated January 24,1976, the prison administrators were trying to warn the Southern Governor’s Conference about the overcrowding crunch at that time.

The front page Times article said, “Southern prison officials are recommending a broad program of liberal reform to relieve prison overcrowding that they agree has reached crisis proportions.”

The Governors had all sent representatives to that gathering. Surely, at least one Southern Governor heard the ringing words that the Secretary of the Department of Corrections for South Carolina, William Leeke, told his colleagues: “I feel personally we are going way beyond locking up the dangerous offender. It would appear, and I believe most of my colleagues would agree, that in many cases we are locking up people where it is totally counterproductive to our purpose.”

Leeke also warned that, “Increased tension and possible violence is the result of all this overcrowding. I know in my jurisdiction we are seeing more assaults of inmates on inmates and inmates on personnel.”

“The first thing that overcrowding does is create tension,” said Leroi X (Mason), an inmate at the Virginia State Penitentiary.

Mason, a recipient of ACLU’s award for defense of the Bill of Rights, said overcrowding also produces crime and theft inside the prison. In Virginia where inmates get paid for the work they do, overcrowding causes unemployment and unemployment causes those inmates without jobs to steal from other inmates.

Despite the warnings, the politicians have found it productive in getting reelected to push for tougher crime laws, longer sentences and mandatory sentencing. In the United States, prisoners are given from two to three times longer sentences than European offenders for the same offense. Plus, they serve up to half or two-thirds of the term, a period considerably greater than the one European prisoners serve for the same offense.

But being rational does not always get the votes. When Federal Judge Frank Johnson of the Middle District of Alabama declared the Alabama prison system in violation of the Eighth Amendment in 1976, Wallace got into his favorite form denouncing liberal, soft-headed judges.

While one expects that from a man who stands in school house doors to block the desegregation of schools, Wallace’s next door neighbor, Governor George Busbee, an alleged moderate, pulled one from the same bag of tricks.

In March of 1978, James Moss, a prisoner at the Georgia State Penitentiary in Reidsville was killed in an interracial scuffle. Sixteen others were wounded in the disturbance.

Prisoners blamed the death and injuries on overcrowded conditions. After all, prisoners pointed out, Reidsville was built for 1,500 and now houses, 2,700.

Busbee blamed the killing on that all time favorite Southern bogey man, race. The Atlanta Journal on April 7, 1978 reports Busbee as saying, “The problem at Reidsville is caused by the integration of the sleeping quarters.”

In Virginia, a state that ranks relatively low in overcrowded prison conditions, one can still see the headaches that overcrowding is causing for that state.

In the early 1970’s, Virginia made plans to close the State Penitentiary in Richmond. Called by its occupants, “the Walls,” the ominous structure, partially designed by Thomas Jefferson, was supposed to be closed by 1978. It is still in operation today and its supposed replacement, the Meckleburg Correctional Center, is already filled to capacity.

In nearby Powhatan County, Virginia, which has numerous minimum security prisons, the state is putting prisoners in old surplus house trailers. Local jails have become so overcrowded that the state refuses to take any new prisoners.

Powhatan County residents are upset about Virginia’s new plans for more prisons there. The residents argued that more jails would turn their county into a “penal colony” where prisoners outnumbered residents.

If that was not enough in Virginia for one year, the Federal District Court for the Western part of the state declared that the Bland, Virginia Correctional Center was in violation of the Eighth Amendment for its overcrowded conditions.

Further South, Alabama was still trying to get around Judge Johnson’s court order and reduce overcrowding. But Alabama was

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finding the going rough.

In 1978, attorneys for the Alabama Board of Corrections admitted that, prison construction “planned or currently underway won’t keep pace with the number of new inmates.”

“The sad thing about prison reformers,” says Gene Guerrero, director of the ACLU of Georgia, “is that they know about the direct relationship between jobs and imprisonment. Yet, they tell legislators that through some new gimmick or new prison, they can deal with the criminal problem, while at the same time researchers are finding in Georgia that 75% of the state’s sharp increase in prison population is directly attributable to unemployment. Despite knowing this, what they propose is building a new prison.”

There were other voices that were warning against locking up prisoners and throwing away the key. One of these was William G. Nagel of the American Foundation, Institute of Corrections, a research group.

On February 9, 1976, Nagel wrote the following letter to Richard Kwartler of Corrections Magazine:

“Any attempt to understand the increase in prison population should start with a study of practices in the South. On December 31, 1965, ten Southern states held 49,435 prisoners. According to your tabulations, the same ten states now hold 86,380 prisoners. That is an increase of 75.5%.”

Nagel also pointed out that the other forty states had prison population increases of just 3.1%, but that the crime rate had increased in the South faster than in the North.

Another study by Nagel’s American Foundation concluded that a state’s rating on conservatism or liberalism had nothing to do with its success in fighting crime.

In a 1977 meeting of the American Correction’s Association (ACA), Nagel and the American Foundation said, “There is no significant relationship between a state’s rating on liberalism or conservatism and its reported rate of crime. However, conservative states have more people incarcerated.”

The key culprit seems to be the law and order philosophy of heavier sentencing, less parole and probation and more time served in jail.

Added to this are stingy legislators who don’t want to give the image to the folks down home that they are coddling criminals or putting up money for country club prisons.

On top of all this is the fact that nobody wants a prison near his home, even if the general populace does favor putting all the crooks away.

The most extreme example of this syndrome of wanting more prisons but not in my neighborhood occurred in Morristown, Tennessee where irate citizens tried to dynamite a 40% completed prison.

Depending on your degree of political realism, some may be shocked to know that New South racism has a lot to do with prison overcrowding. To a pessimist, that overcrowding in prisons might be the new wave to fill the void of what to do with Black folks.

There is a disproportionate number of Blacks in prison as compared to their proportions in the general population. For instance, the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond has a 70% Black population but Blacks constitute only 25% of the general population. Reidsville, Georgia has a 70% Black prison population and only a 30% Black general population. Black prison population proportions in the South are usually double their proportions in the general population.

What comedian Richard Pryor called ‘justus” often passes for justice: Various studies, including one by the ACA, show that Blacks tend to get longer sentences for the same offense and have more encounters with police. “Those who say prison camps are concentration camps for the Blacks and the poor are quite correct,” Guerrero said, “because it is Blacks and the poor who are pushed out of the economy when hard times come.”

Perhaps using something of an overstatement, a Black Virginia mother whose son is serving 75 years in a prison there for the alleged rape of a white woman accurately described this kind of Southern prison: “I look around my church and wonder where all the young Black men are. All I see is women and old men. But now I know. They are all in prison.”

The extreme insult, after locking all these folks up for years, is that study after study indicates that incarceration is a huge failure.

At the 18th annual Southern Conference on Corrections, back in the Stone Ages of 1973, it was noted in a report that “students of prison subculture have long understood that habitual forms of incarceration will increase the likelihood that convicted offenders will persist in criminal activities after their release from prison.”

It’s a social merry-go-round. We put people in jail for corrections and punishment and they come out crazier than when they went in.

At the same conference, so called alternatives to incarceration, even “alternatives to court exposure” were called an “obvious future trend.”

These alternatives have hit upon hard times. Court room alternatives are now overshadowed by plea bargaining and overloaded court dockets.

Alternatives to incarceration such as half-way houses, work release centers, community work sentences, etc. could be utilized to cut down on the prison population. But the percentage of prisoners in these type of facilities has not increased significantly in the last four years or so.

The choices are clear. Just like the man in the Sunoco commercial says about services to automobiles, “You can pay me now, or pay me later.” The same holds true for the prison overpopulation problem. Either society can make a real effort to reduce overcrowding and its root causes, or it can pay later when expensive Federal court cases roll around and when the soaring crime rate and increased recidivism requires more and more of your tax dollars to build more and more caging facilities.

Life Expectancy and School Experience: Some Findings in North Carolina

By Betty H. Landsberger

Vol. 1, No. 1, 1978, pp. 18-19

Editor’s Note: In the mid 1970’s, a difference of at least 15 years in life expectancy was found to exist between White females and Black males in the population of the United States. This finding led Dr. Betty H. Landsberger, a member of the School of Nursing a the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to do some research into the possible contributing causes for this significant difference in life expectancy rates. What she found is that school experience may be one of the contributing causes. A condensation of her research follows.

Increasing attention is being paid to the fact that males ao not perform as well as females in school and to the emotional consequences which this situation causes for them, consequences which have in fact been equated with the concept stress. Also, for several years, concern has been expressed regarding the consequences of Black and minority groups performing poorly in school.

These variations in school performance among the four race/sex groups–White female, White male, non-White female, non-White male–are possibly related to their health conditions, and thus to their different life expectancy rates. The concept of stress provides the linkage between school experiences and life expectancy.

Writing about different health conditions, Dr. Robert Wilson gives a perceptive description of the extent of the problem for individuals living in disadvantageous circumstances in our society:

…various states of ill health in the most disadvantaged sectors of the population rest not only on the obvious defects of nutrition, housing, preventive medical care, and so on, but also on a syndrome of social psychological insufficiency …A damaged sense of identity and a damaged sense of competence may themselves be viewed as intrinsic “dis-eases” of the total psychosocial equilibrium of the individual. In turn, these deficits may provide a necessary, if not sufficient, casual strand in the production of a range of illnesses.

A number of scholarly investigators have hypothesized linkages between life experiences and several of the leading causes of death: various heart diseases, lung cancer, and alcoholism, as well as accidents and homicide.

Figures regarding vital statistics for North Carolina for 1975 demonstrate two facts about these illnesses: 1) they were indeed prominent as causes of death for all ages for the total population; 2) when figures for the race/sex group are given separately, rates for these causes (as well as total death rates) were found to be particularly high for Black males, usually followed by White males–at one age group, and for some causes, by non-White females–while rates for White females were almost always far lower than the other groups.

Life Expectancy

The story of life expectancy differences among the four race/sex groups of North Carolina during the past half-century follows the same pattern. Females of both races have made dramatic increases in years of life expected at the point of birth. Meanwhile, the story of males of both races is a different one. While life expectancy for all males increased by about ten years between 1925 and 1950, the gain did not continue after 1950 for males of either race. Though all four groups had a longer life expectancy in 1970 than in 1925, their averages were much farther apart by 1970.

In 1970, the difference in life expectancy between White females and Black males was 17 years. The White females’ life expectancy of 76 years was eight years more than the figure for Black females, and nine years more than the 67 years for White men.

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While these statistics are the result of several probable causes,anunlikely place where the issue of life and death may be heavily influenced is the school. A review of a recent study in North Carolina shows the connection.

School Experience in North Carolina

A group of children who began kindergarten in 1970 and finished third grade in 1974 were tested and their development assessed in a variety of ways at the beginning of kindergarten and the end of the first year and again at the end of third grade. The 800 children involved at the beginning were the kindergarteners in a network of 18 early childhood demonstration centers across the state. In the schools making up the network, there was a representative balance of rural and urban, poor and not-so-poor, and Black and White populations.

The findings were examined to compare the four race/sex grol/ps to decide the extent to which their school experience, as reflected in primary school performance, correlated to life expectancy.

From the testing it is clear that in school the White female group did fare best of the four race/sex groups. The performance of this group was high, from beginning kindergarten to end of third grade. Interestingly, White males began kindergarten performing higher than White females; however, their performance declined from that point and fell far below the females by the end of third grade. The figure for poor White boys was below poor White females as well at the end of third grade.

Differences between White boys and girls at the end of third grade were tested to see whether they were statistically significant. This was done with two achievement tests, and with social-emotional tests. Girls excelled over boys on all tests.

On a comparison by race, the study showed the performance of non-Whites of both sexes to be substantially lower than the Whites of both sexes.

Thus, White females, whose life expectancy rates are highest by far, did very well in school, with achievement levels in all subjects, social-emotional measures and cognitive ability at the top of the four groups. White males, on the other hand, experienced a decline from kindergarten entrance, where their performance was slightly higher than White females.

Most striking, the performance of Black children of both sexes was considerably lower than Whites at kindergarten entrance, in fact the percentiles of measurement were almost 2 to 1 for Whites over Blacks.

Undoubtedly, much frustration and little gratification is experienced by individuals performing at or near the bottom in their experiences day after day in class rooms. The difference in life expectancy between the sexes for Blacks is far greater than is indicated by the school experience differences. Poverty is another risk factor. There is proportionately so much more poverty in minority racial groups that the already noted differences in death rates by racial groups inevitably reflect the influence of poverty.

Mortality and Illnesses

It is admittedly a long way from the third graders at nine years old to the ages at which death rates for lung cancer are high. Yet, surprisingly similar correlations for these same groups appear in data on the health status of children in the same ages.

While the possibility of damage from poor school experience may be felt over the long haul of 50-60 years, it also appears that the mortality rates for youth are consistent with the differences among the sex /race groups which the in-school study shows, and the more years in school, the greater these differences become. The death rates for the age groups 5-9 years, 1014 years and 1519 years for races and sex/race groups separately are as follows:

White

Age Group (in years)	Both Sexes	Male	Female
5-9	33.6	34.1	27.5
10-14	34.1	43.3	24.4
15-19	99.1	144.5	52.4

Non-White

Age Group (in years)	Both Sexes	Male	Female
5-9	46.3	55.9	36.6
10-14	44.6	57.4	31.6
15-19	114.8	164.3	65.4

Morbidity, or what is better understood as frequency of illness, is another measurement of health status. The literature regarding child health in the past few years from Great Britain as well as the United States has contained many reports giving substantial attention to a ‘new morbidity.” Put very simply, in the

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wake of the great successes in virtually eliminating illnesses which were so common until a few years ago–measles is an example of a recent ‘conquest–other forms of disorder and poor health have come to take their plares. Prominent among these are failure to thrive” among ntants, and “learning disabilities,” “emotionally tur1ed behavior,” and “hyperactivity” among presch:J; and school-aged children.

Some studies indicate that the new morbidity” is of special concern among the poor, minority-group cnikiren, those in innercity neighborhoods, and among males more than females. One researcher also found both poor achievement and emotional disturbance to occur frequently in his sample, where children were mostly inner-city, minority-group members He found a higher incidence of both problems among m-les. Hence, the higher incidence of the “new morbidity” seems to match roughly the groups for whom school experience will probably cause the most stress.

By the studies already done, there appears to be little doubt that school experience takes a toll on the health status of the same groups and in particular that the 15 years less in life expectancy of poor Black males in our nation is an outcome predictable from that picture. This is especially the case when the differences of careers and economic well-being (that often follows poor achievement in school) are taken into account.

Certainly, more research needs to be done, especially in carefully examining through educational and psychological testing school achievements and experiences of children in terms of race/sex groupings. Also, health professionals must give increased attention in their research and practice to the effects of the school experience and to begin to identify ways to address the problems of present and future health as related to the school experience.

Most important, everyone, including school administrators and policymakers, must begin to recognize that much more than functional literacy and academic achievement is at stake when our children enter the portals of our schools for the first time.

To do poorly in school is bad enough in its immediate and short-run consequences. It is even more serious if it does indeed contribute to stress-related illness and to “earlier than necessary” death for some of the groups in the population. There seems to be a clear need for “affirmative action” programs to benefit those grc.ups at highest risk in their school experience, beginning at the kindergarten level or earlier. Surely public education should play the role of minimizing rather than maximizing the health risks of well over half the population it is designed to serve.

The Politics Behind Georgia’s Fair Employment Practices Law

By Ginny Looney

Vol. 1, No. 1, 1978, pp. 21-23

In an election year, bill-signing ceremonies become as fine an occasion to judge the issues of an incumbent governor’s campaign as a speech at a barbecue picnic in Southwest Georgia. When Governor George Busbee signed the 1978 Georgia Fair Employment Practices Act into law in March, he spoke highly of the new law which could not have existed anywhere in the South 15 years ago. He called the bill “one of the most significant pieces of legislation to pass the general assembly in many years.”

Busbee made it clear to the press and other observers, however, that equal opportunity in employment would be brought to Georgia “through the type of working relationship already established and because our people want to do what is right.” Echoing the strident words shouted in the past to resist such changes, the New South governor employed the old rhetoric about the way change effectively occurs. He said that fairness in state jobs won’t come through threats, coercion, unruly demonstrations or nuisance court actions.”

The mixed symbols of the old and new politics of Georgia with which Busbee enacted the new legislation and campaigned for reelection explain much of the background behind the new law. The governor was campaigning for votes when he said that equal opportunity for a state job will now be afforded all applicants because officials want to do right.” Honorable intentions did not cause any appreciable difference in Black employment after Busbee issued an executive order in July 1976, encouraging state agencies to hire and promote more Blacks and women. Eighteen months later he was admitting privately that the executive order had failed.

It was not goodwill, but the methods Busbee dismissed as ineffective that led the general assembly to pass a law this year prohibiting discrimination in state employment. The threats of expensive lawsuits and the possible resulting coercion of a federal court order on state hiring convinced legislators to adopt a bill attempting to correct a problem rather than wait for a judge to impose an unwanted solution.

An expanded version of the Fair Employment Practices Act had originally been introduced 10 years ago. Two Black Georgia state legislators offered the bill again in 1976 and 1977. It was assigned to the Human Relations Committee where it remained until Busbee became directly involved by introducing similar legislation last February.

No magic caused the bill to pass, says a special assistant to the governor, Chuck Pierce. He attributes its enactment to the culmination of three years of work. This year the focus of the bill was narrowed to discrimination in public employment, and groups advocating equal opportunity for the handicapped, women, and Blacks were encouraged to lobby their legislators, he said.

Members of the Black legislative caucus emphasize different reasons for the support of the governor and the general assembly. ‘The pressure from complaints that might have resulted in class action suits which would have cost thousands of dollars to defend” was a major impetus, says Rep. Clint Deveaux. The two-term Atlanta legislator and lawyer said Busbee decided to support the bill as soon as it became apparent that the federal government was seriously investigating complaints which state employees had filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Some political pressure exerted by Black leaders probably encouraged Busbee to support the bill. Busbee received a large percentage of the Black vote in his election as governor and the support of the Black caucus for his legislative programs during the past four years. Therefore, when the caucus near the beginning of the 1978 legislative session publicly criticized Busbee and demanded to know how he planned to increase the numbers and salaries of Blacks in state government, the governor was willing to meet with caucus members to discuss their grievances. Agreeing that a racial imbalance among employees’ salaries existed, Busbee told the caucus he would introduce legislation to handle employment discrimination in state government.

The Black caucus exerted direct pressure on Busbee and the general assembly members in other ways. Rep. Mildred Glover of Atlanta, chairperson of the state merit system overview committee within the caucus, introduced a resolution seeking the support of House members for a petition of Black caucus to EEOC “to proceed with dispatch in its review and investigation of the charges of employment discrimination in Georgia state government.”

“We were in the process of creating turmoil within the general assembly,” says Rep. J.E. (Billy) McKinney, who filed complaints with EEOC against 11 departments in 1974 for their small percentage of Black employees. A roll-call vote on the resolution was to be requested to create particular pressure on White legislators representing predominantly Black districts. Five members of the caucus also traveled to Washington to ask the Department of Justice to review McKinney’s complaint about job discrimination and consider filing suit against the state. After Busbee’s bill was introduced, Black legislators canceled the House vote on the resolution and requested a further delay in EEOC investigations.

Most persuasive with fellow legislators, Rep. J.C. Daugherty said, was the cost of defending the state during investigations. Work production was lowered when staff had to respond to requests for information from EEOC, the Office of Civil Rights and the Office of Revenue Sharing, said Pierce, the governor’s assistant. We pointed out that we can either develop within the state the mechanism to address the charges or face answering those charges in investigations or court.”

The bill’s supporters cited cases against Alabama and Mississippi which had resulted in federal judges governing the process of hiring state troopers and other state employees. Daugherty reflected, ‘We dian’t think Georgia, being an enlightened state, that we needed to have a federal judge controlling our hiring.”

On March 9, 1978, the signature of George Busbee rflade the bill law. Unlike their counterparts to the west, Georgia elected officials, with their “enlightened” self-image, decided not to fight in the courts. Fearing what the “feds” might do, the state finally took affirmative action. It was politics as usual in the South.

During noon-time ceremonies on “Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials Day,” the day the Fair Employment Practices Act passed the House of Representatives, the governor called the legislation “a landmark declaration that affirmative

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action is the official policy of state government.” While unprecedented in the state of Georgia, the anti-discrimination bill is neither bold nor landmark legislation. It is not even unusual in the South, just late. Every state once belonging to the Confederacy, with the exceptions of Alabama and Mississippi, has some version of an equal employment opportunity office. A couple are more expansive in both their coverage and enforcement powers.

The Georgia law prohibits discrimination in state employment on the basis of race, sex, religion, color, national origin, handicap, or aoe (between 45 and 65 years). It provides for an administrator and a nine-member advisory board selected by the governor. Attorneys appointed to hear charges not settled through conciliation may order the hiring, reinstatement, or :ronotion of employees who are victims of discrimination. The Lw’s enforcement sections allow the imposition of $1000 fines if the Office of Fair Employment Practices (OFEP) makes public, v,thout permission, information obtained during investigations; 1 an employer retaliates against a person filing a charge; or if an ridividual files a frivolous charge against the state.

The law is limited because it deals only with state agencies, departments, and commissions. We cannot touch the private sector” or local governments, says G. Duke Beasley, the deputy regional director of EEOC who Busbee appointed in June to direct the OFEP. Beasley plans to push for amendments in the general assembly which would give the new office enforcement powers over private employers. “If I represented the state, why would I want the federal government to look at anything that happens in this state without my having an opportunity to correct it myself?” he asks to illustrate why he thinks the general assembly members will approve expanded authority for his office.

Other Southern states, like Florida and Tennessee, have state agencies which enforce antidiscririunation laws in public and private employment. North Carolina’s commission has authority only for voliJnta)i activity. The South Carolina Human Affairs Commission, created in 1972, has enforcement powers only in public employment but has handled disputes in private employment when employers request the state agency to consider a case. Reports that EEOC was planning to open an office in South Carolina to deal with employment practices in the textile industry led state legislators to introduce a bill giving the Human Affairs Commission power of enforcement in private industry.

In the Georgia law the compromises made to gain its passage may further reduce its effectiveness. In the House provisions for private attorneys designated to represent complainants during administrative hearings were deleted, although the law does allow the attorney general to represent the complaining party. The Senate reduced the life of the agency to two years unless the legislature votes to extend it.

More fundamentally, senators changed the tone of the bill by adding a provision fining persons $1 000 for frivolous charges,” an ominous sign to potential complainants, and expanding the sections disallowing “preferential treatment.” The law reads,”Quotas because of imbalances in employee ratios shall not be permitted” nor can employers hire or promote someone on the basis of their race, sex, age or handicap.

While the laws covers the handicapped, the state senate attempted to exclude them. Senators were moved by “confusion and fear–fear that they would have to hire every wino off the street,” says Tobiane Schwartz, an EEO specialist with the Army who lobbied to keep handicapped persons covered under the law. Their concern remains evident in the act’s definition of the “mentally handicapped” person. While the physically handicapped must prove their handicap does not interfere with job performance, the mentally handicapped must prove with medical evidence that their impairment has been “removed.” As Schwartz points out, “What does mental impairment mean? Does that include epilepsy or mental retardation? You will never be able to show that a mental impairment has been removed.”

For several weeks this spring, applicants for the job of director were submitting resumes to the governor’s office. More than 100 were received. Members of the Black legislative caucus, other legislators supporting the bill, women’s groups, and Black groups were asked to submit recommendations. Gov. Busbee interviewed six people for the job, including Tobiane Schwartz, former state Sen. Leroy Johnson and Sharon Adams, the head of the state Commission on the Status of Women. The person chosen, Duke Beasley, had not applied for the job.

There is some irony in the process by which the director was hired and he, in turn, hired people for the five staff positions. The agency charged with making certain that state goverment hires on the basis of merit rather than patronage did not widely publicize its job openings. While the selections were legally made, they clearly did not follow the spirit of the law. No written notices announcing the search for staff were circulated. Chuck Pierce, the governor’s aide who coordinated the hiring process, said solicitationsfor a director and staff were unnecessary because qualified applicants across the country were seeking the jobs.

Duke Beasley was selected as director because of his experience, says Pierce. “We could not afford to orient someone. Ve needed someone who could move in day one.” As deputy

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regional director of EEOC since 1972, Beasley had both administrative and compliance responsibilities for eight states in the Southeast. During 1975 and 1976, he served as regional acting director. He is on loan to the state for one year, which can be extended, during which time the federal government will continue to pay his salary.

The experience which impressed Busbee enough to hire Beasley had an opposite effect on some members of the Black caucus. The chairman of the caucus, Rep. Bobby hill of Savannah, called Beasley a “tired bureaucrat” shortly after his appointment, explaining, “I’m not interested in paperwork and memos.” Rep. McKinney said he was “not overly impressed because the director came from EEOC, and EEOC has a record of total, absolute failure.”

The lawmakers’ criticism illustrates the challenge of the director’s job. EEOC has a backlog of 400 to 500 complaints against the state which will be deferred to OFEP. Since EEOC has been unable to eliminate the backlog, it will be a difficult task for Beasley’s new staff to achieve in two years.

Such difficulties do not daunt Beasley. He is proud of the staff of EEOC specialists he inherited from the state merit system, which has been under contract with EEOC to investigate charges of state employees ‘I predict within 60 days that we will be the most viable agency in the state because of my own personality and how I manage,’ he said in an interview at the end of his first week as director.

Sitting in his partitioned corner office, no larger than an elevator, the 56 year-old administrator was separated from his stiff by a glass wall which allowed him to survey the room. He w scheduled to use a spacious executive’s office, he said, but requested instead to work in the same crowded, temporary offices as his 14-member staff. Since he feels a manager is only as good as his staff, Beasley hopes to guide them by example and discipline to be hardworking, fair, and beneficial. The father of seven frequently refers to his philosophy of child-rearing to explain his management style. On a first-name bris with his employees he hopes each will treat every complaining party walking through the door “the same as they would the governor.”

Beasley and his staff began working on July 3, a day when many workers chose to take a holiday. One of their firt jobs has been the clearing of 131 EEOC complaints assigned to the state By disposing of those cases this summer the staff will be ready to begin work on the complaints which EEOC will release to OFEP when it gains “deferral” status. Deferral status means that EEOC defers investigatory powers to the local or state agency which by law has authority to investigate and enforce antidiscrimination laws.

Although enthusiastic and confident about the potential impact of his office, Beasley did express concern about getting state employees to know their rights and to view his agency as the place to exercise those rights. At the same time, his emphasis focuses on settling complaints through conciliation. “Much can be done depending on the attitude of department heads. If one thing is necessary to bring about job opportunity, it is that the head of a department must be receptive to change. If thuy don’t change, there will be an unnecessary expenditure of money to respond to lawsuits.”

Along with his staff, Beasley has a difficult job ahead. He has a year to end a backlog of complaints which the federal agency he helped run has been unable to eliminate. He must inspire a staff with a reputation for slowness in investigating complaints already contracted to the state. He must try to gain the respect of employees dissatisfied with their treatment at work and employees mistrustful of any interference in the administration of their department while trying to alter the views of both groups. Finally, he must deal with the political pressure from legislators who want state employment to reflect the percentage of Blacks in the state’s population.

The Black caucus plans to monitor his work. “We will want a quantitative accounting of complaints of discrimination settled and in whose favor,” says Rep. Glover. “We want Duke Beasley to be accountable so we will be looking closely.” Rep Deveaux predicts the 1978 act will turn state government upside down, but not without time and controversy. “It will take a long time.”

It is too early to tell if OFEP will be able to bring equal opportunity to Georgia state government. Like the executive order before it, the Fair Employment Practices Act has forestalled any federal intervention for at least two more years. Hopefully, it will be more effective in transforming attitudes of employees, employers and elected officials about what is “right” in state government. Gov. Busbee may then claim that “working relationships alreadyestabIished- were responsible for bringing equal opportunity to state government. Most likely, the law’s effect will grow slowly following the same circuitous evolution that has moved Southern politics unwillingly in the past fifteen years from the talk of diehard, vehement hatred to the language–if not the deeds–of self-serving enlightenment.

Economic Development

By Staff

Vol. 1, No. 1, 1978, p. 25

An order which was issued recently by the Secretary of Transportation, is expected to substantially increase opportunities for minority owned firms. However, the order has sparked a controversy in Atlanta over the definition of who is a minority.

The order, which is now being prepared as a guideline for state highway departments, will require that each state establish specific goals for using minorityowned businesses as contractors and subcontractors. The regulation is expected to require that state transportation departments appoint a compliance officer and staff to implement the goals. A policy statement expressing “a commitment to utilize minority business enterprises in all aspects of procurement to the maximum extent feasible” will be required of all recipients of federal DOT grants. Because of the size and priority that transportation department budgets usually receive, the order could open numerous opportunities for minority contractors.

The problem with the order is that a minority” company is defined as one 51%, or more owned and controlled by racial minorities, or by women, regardless of race. A coalition of civil rights and feminist leaders have vowed to have a “head-on tight” with the federal government over this definition.

In spite of the obvious uod in tentions of including women as minorities, many people feel that it will have a negative impact. Aside from pitting women against minorities in competition for contracting opportunities, the definition also permits the spirit and intent of the order to be violated while carrying out the letter of the law. An established contractor, by signing 51% interest in his firm over to his wife or daughter could become an “instant minority-owned firm,” thus thwarting the efforts being made to assist fledgling Black and other minority owned businesses.

At this point the order is still in the process of implementation by the operating elements of the Department of Transportation. The Department is still open to comment about the regulation for aid recipients, interested groups, and the general public. Comments should be addressed to Gary Gayton, Special Assistant to the Secretary for Minority Business Enterprise, Department of Transportation, Washington, DC.

The Atlanta group, known as the “Coalition on Minority and Female Participation in Government Contracts,” is composed of more than 25 civil rights and feminist groups. They are proposing that DOT issue two sets of regulations, one setting goals for racial minorities, and another setting goals for women, with neither group being forced to compete against the other. Surely this regulation can be adjusted in some way so that it will accomplish what was intended and prevent abuse by greedy contractors looking for loopholes. Again public comment is the means by which this will happen; write the Transportation Department and let then’ know what you think.

Despite the possible flaws in the order, this new regulation is an important ruling that warrants one’s full attention. The order allows DOT to terminate or deny federal funding to recipients who fail to carry out “an adequate minority business enterprise affirmative action program.” The order also requires that recipients (state transportation departments and others) must inform their contractors and subcontractors that failure to carry out this program may constitute a breach of contract which could result in termination.

Because the order has only recently been issued. implementation by state departments of transportation has not yet begun. However, several states, including Georgia, are now actively seeking minority firms to prequalify and list as contractors and subcontractors. As is the case with most government projects, the prequalifying, bidding and contracting process can be complex and demanding. Companies wishing to take advantage of contracting opportunities should start now to familiarize themselves with the process. P copy of the order as issued by Secretary Brock Adams can be obtained from the Department of Transportation, Office of the Secretary, Washington, DC. Ask for DOT Order #4000.7A, dated March 3, 1978.

Southern Women

By Staff

Vol. 1, No. 1, 1978, p. 25

A group of individuals gathered in Atlanta recently with Karen Nussbaum of the Working Women Organization Project (WWOP) to discuss the problems of Southern working women in the office place. This meeting represented the Project’s first attempt to. start new organizations of women office workers in the Southern region.

Ms. Nussbaum, citing U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said, “Women earn .56 to every dollar a man earns on the average. When it comes to expenses, however, women have to pay a full dollar for every dollar a man pays.” She further stated, “Discrimination is not found only in your paycheck.. working women are often treated unfairly when it comes to lob descriptions, working conditions,promotions and respect, as well.”

The WWOP was started in 1973 arid now has over 10,000 members in 18 cities around the country. The group provides training, resource materials, and also organizational and technical support to women interested in organizing in their office for better working conditions.

Although there are laws protecting women against discrimination in employment, these laws often do not protect women against lob segregation, or patterns of work and sex discrimination. To further complicate the problem, often times there are no men with whom to compare salaries and benefits doing the lobs that women are assigned to do. Particulary active around National Secretaries Week, the group launched a program calling for “raises not roses” in an effort to emphasize the wage disparities currently existing in the workplace.

While the group stresses its good working relationship with organized labor, the majority of the members of WWOP groups are working in small offices where unionization is not frequently an effective solution. One of the most useful aspects of WWOP is that it is not necessary for an entire staff to participate. Individuals can loin and benefit from the training and materials as well as members of a larger staff. Group negotiation is one of the many tactics used by WWOP in their problem solving tactics.

Women interested in finding out more about the Working Women Organizing Project and their plans for activities in the South should contact the group at 1258 Euclid Avenue, Room 206, Cleveland, Ohio, 44115 or telephone (216)566-8511.