Human Rights and the South

By Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1978, pp. 3-5, 28

In the closing months of the pre-atomic age, the Southern Regional Council was formed out of conviction that race was the central issue of the South. Though it may seem to us that nearly all else has changed during the hectic decades since, I doubt that race has yet yielded its place, though the problems it shapes and propels grow in their own various ways.

Nor has it yielded its place of primary importance elsewhere in the world. Even our own attention these days is more concentrated on the grim racial conflicts of southern Africa than on the still harsh relationships here. In truth, though, we can see that it is all one continuing struggle of mankind to free itself from a wrong turning it somehow made dark centuries ago, into the sadness, sickness and cruelty of racial pride.

There have been political revolutions that have blazed outward all over the world because they seemed to express noble ideals as well as partisan interests. One thinks, principally, of the American, the French, and the Russian Revolutions of modern times. I expect generations to come may see the Civil Rights revolt as like them, as America’s second sending forth of impulses toward freedom to enchained peoples. I don’t believe it is fanciful to see the road from Selma turning now toward Pretoria.

To say that is, of course, not to say that we stand on the edge of happiness. Twelve years after Selma we certainly don’t have freedom in any satisfying measure, and in some important ways, it sometimes seems to me, we are worse off. I have worked and lived most of the last 12 years in the New York area, and as far as I can judge, the conditions of Black and Puerto Rican poor (and most Blacks and Puerto Ricans are poor, or close to being so) have worsened by almost any measure one selects, whether it is political power, housing, employment, or schools. Indeed, when one considers the vast changes within the South and then looks at the conditions of the urban poor of the North, it is as if they, almost alone, sacrificed for the progress of others.

There have been other kinds of setbacks as well. We have traded in the, perhaps impossible, dreams of the sixties, and accepted meaner ideals in return. And, saddest of all, the grave has had its victory. We lost Martin Luther King Jr., and George Wallace survives. We gave up Medgar Evers, but Jim Eastland will run again and likely win. Robert Kennedy was killed, and Richard Nixon ruled. Whitney Young and Audrey and Stephen Currier drowned, but red-lining bankers and self-protective foundation boards go on as before, controlling the money. George Wiley drowned too, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan prospered. Walter Reuther; that man who always wanted labor to connect with humanity’s call, crashed to his death, while Frank Fitzsimmons, who wants only to connect with dollars, was becoming the single most powerful labor leader. These were crushing losses, and yet, unreplaced. There were others as well. Has any nation or cause ever lost so many of its natural leaders in such a short time?

Indeed when one looks back on the shining values of a dozen years ago and compares them with what columnist Bill Raspberry in the Chicago Sun Times correctly called the “situation ethics” of contemporary politics, what can we do but weep, or rage? What instructions about political morality are we supposed to receive when a month ago the Senate celebrated Messrs. Eastland and Stennis for their 30 years of joint membership in that body, three decades in which they have powerfully opposed just about any and every move toward human rights, justice for the weak and peace for the world. From the White House, Mr. Carter wished those men “many more years of dedicated service.” Surrounded by capers and cut-ups like this, one can only wonder if we are supposed to take politics seriously? Are we all expected to fall into the game, chanting I’m 0. K., you’re 0. K., Eastland and Stennis are 0. K., Helms is 0. K., Nixon too; the Vietnam War and all who made it-and especially those among its makers now called back to serve a Democratic president-, they’re 0. K. too.

All of this is done in the name of political realism, but I no longer can believe in that. Somehow down those winding roads of so-called realism, the poor of this and foreign nations as well always seem to stay poor. The wars and preparations for war ceaselessly plod on, and the owners of the world’s and our nation’s wealth go on owning it. John Lewis had it almost correct when he went up to Vanderbilt back in 1968 while still a staff member of the Southern Regional Council. In a speech titled “Human Rights-A Final Appeal to the Church” he pronounced “Woe unto the political leaders who listen to the voices of expediency and act in the interests of a Great Consensus, rather than do what is right.” Almost correct, because most of the woe, at least so far as we can see, falls not on the political leaders but on those they lead.

Let us confess, in honesty and fairness toward ourselves, that the ideals of the early sixties were perhaps too

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high and hard, that the hopes for nonviolence and the “beloved community” lie beyond us. Let us accept that, let that be our “realism,” even though any of you who share with me the good luck of knowing personally any of the heroes of South Africa, many of whom are now banned, will have to add that those same impossible ideals are moving people there as they once did here. Nevertheless, let us come down from the mountain, a bit. We do not need to come down so far.

The Southern Regional Council, along with the rest of the Civil Rights movement, has trusted in and practiced the methods of education, enlightened propaganda, political empowerment, and economic pressures of one kind or another. There have been at least two other methods. They were the methods of making friendships across racial lines and, to use a recent term, consciousness-raising. We need more of both today. It is too bad that the state and local councils on human relations have been allowed to decline. We need them, or their spirit, for the South is now as it was, a region where human relations, both bad and good but too often the former, weave the fabric of social life.

I have the feeling that, despite desegregation, there is almost less racial contact today than a decade ago. I have to admit that most of my own Black friends are ones I’ve known for a long time, and I suspect that too many other liberals, Black and White, might have to concede the same. We need to learn again why we used to like each other. So let us not be wholly preoccupied with “doing.” Let us give more time to “being” with each other, and in each other’s hopes and needs.

On the whole, I think the estrangement I sense is more the responsibility of Blacks than Whites, and the bridging of it will have to depend more on Blacks. There is a historical reason for that. At various points during the 1950s, it became clear that despite the loving and tireless effort of many good and even some great White Southerners, their leadership would not succeed. The reform of the South passed then to Black leadership. The greatest of Black leaders, Martin King, and others such as George Wiley knew how important it was that Black goals be linked with all those of democracy and peace. Their appeal was always to the nation as a whole to fulfill its Constitution, its principles, to become in its own interest transformed.

It is tempting today for Black leaders, rightfully impatient with the pace of change, to address themselves not to the whole nation or even to its liberal elements, but just to its political and corporate leadership, to its so-called “power structure,” and to speak as race leaders, not as popular or national leaders. That is what opponents of reform covertly or unconsciously welcome. For, if unemployment, poor learning in the schools, or crime in the streets are allowed to be seen as Black problems (or Puerto Rican or Chicano ones) they will likely never be solved, and their persistence year after year will only deepen and re-confirm, all racial stereotypes in White minds.

That is why one so fervently wishes that “summit” meetings of Black leaders would not merely make demands on Congress and the White House, but would see themselves, as their predecessors of a decade ago did, as the reform leaders of this nation, and would boldly claim the allegiance that is rightfully and historically theirs. Unemployment, bad schooling, and crime are not racial problems, no matter how many Blacks or Hispanics may be trapped in them. They are national problems, residues of inequitable political and economic systems, and the responsibility of all of US.

There is nothing I know of in the history of our times to lead one to believe that political office holders or corporate executives will do much about these tough and very real problems, unless the sort of Black and White multitude that demanded the reforms of 1964 and 1965 again come into being.

It is time for Black leadership to call upon White liberals to come back home. To do it, Black leaders will have to accept the fact that today Hispanic leaders must stand beside them. And it must be done without rancor; the time for scapegoating ‘liberals” is past. There will have to be an effort made to understand liberal devotion to causes like peace, anti-militarism, the sanctity of the environment, and the dignity and aspirations of women. But it is time for liberals to come back to the cause they slipped away from, the unfinished business of equality; and it is time for Black leadership to summon them. There has been enough knocking at the door of Washington and Wall Street. Those 50 percent Black youth unemployment rates will go downward only when the kind of liberal mass that brought about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is made again to know what democracy requires of it.

Energies have not, of course, been dormant. Possibly never in the history of our nation or any other have they so flourished. Those energies ended a wretched war in Vietnam, threw hard punches at the CIA and the government’s other lawless snoopers, probed the Pentagon, weighed obstacles to industry and consumer ravages of the environment, built countless and durable, if small, new community organizations, fought for the rights of children, hungry people, mental patients and prisoners, and gave women a new vision of themselves. And it all began in the heat of Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia and the rest of our South, just as was born here the impulse that has stirred Hispanics and Indians, and just as came from here the deeper resolve of people in southern Africa. And it all serves the same end, and though that end may not be as holy a one as the “beloved community” it is a good and lovely one nonetheless, of men and women living at peace with each other and with nature.

The South has had, as Vann Woodward put it, the burden of its own history. The South has also, of course, been a burden to the rest of the country. It still is, though becoming less of one. Its senators and representatives are almost never to be found at the forefront of good works. On the other hand, they are not, in anything like the degree they once were, barriers to the satisfaction of national

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needs.

I have spent some time recently studying certain votes of this 94th session of Congress, and I think what one can currently report is that the Southern delegations are about as bad or as good as the rest of Congress: which is a milestone in the further Americanization of Dixie, no doubt helped along by a Georgian at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. There is no distinction among the Southerners, certainly no Estes Kefauver or Frank Graham, nor anymore a Sam Ervin, William Fulbright, or Lister Hill who, though terrible on civil rights, would partially atone by distinguished service in some other area.

It is perhaps the age to which I’ve arrived, but all the world these days seems dominated by mediocre talents; in art, literature, science, philosophy, wherever, the days of genius or even brilliant sparkle seem gone, for a while. It would be too much to expect that Congress would rise above, or even up to the level of conquering modern mediocrity; and it does not.

If not generally worse than their colleagues, Southern congressmen and congresswomen do still sometimes hear the old tribal drums. Southerners in the House voted better than 2-1 to build the B-1, even over Mr. Carter’s opposition; but in the old days, not a third of them would have resisted the military. So one may take what consolation he can from that.

The worst display of Southern militarism came on the vote whereby Mr. Carter’s all-too-modest program to upgrade the less-than-honorable discharges of Vietnam veterans (which in disproportionate numbers were Black and other minorities) was mean-spiritedly put down by the House by denial to them of all veterans’ benefits. Only one representative of those states that once had themselves been in rebellion, Joseph Fisher of Virginia, voted for compassionate justice for those many thousands of young victims of our war-making in Vietnam.

One Vietnam veteran put the case exactly, though futilely, in a statement to a sub-committee of the House: “Those possessing bad discharges are already so burdened by unemployment, poverty, and lack of education that the benefits would have provided some new ray of hope to an otherwise dark future. One wonders why some congressmen persist in policies that result in holding down those who are already at or near the bottom.” (Interestingly, although nearly all the rest of the “Black Caucus” were against this punitive bill, Representatives Harold Ford and Barbara Jordan were not, choosing to stand with the Southern bloc rather than the racial one. May they find a better issue the next time they do! To their credit, both of them did vote against the B-1, as did nearly all the rest of the “Black Caucus.”)

On abortion, the Southerners in the House stood about 5-4 against on the many votes that have been taken in 1977 on the crucial issue of the use of Medicaid funds, a ratio no worse than the rest of the House (but one as good as it is only because of the astonishing support of the Carolina delegations). There have been so many votes taken on this issue in 1977 that an exact picture of where legislators stand is hard to come by, but on the votes in the Senate that I have examined Southerners are voting a consistent majority for the pro-abortion position.

If the tribal drums seem to be responded to less readily, the leading strings of economics seem about as tight as ever, all flighty talk of Southern populism notwithstanding. Sixteen of the Southern senators voted, against Carter, to end price controls for newfound natural gas. A bill in the House to end federal farm subsidy payments to absentee corporations came within a surprising eight votes of passage, but only 19 of its supporters were from the South. And so it goes. One could add more examples, to the point that Southerners in Congress seldom fail to wait on the interests of big oil, big finance, big farms, and big money in general.

I have gone to this length into congressional behavior for two reasons. One is to suggest to you that the South has a different political position than it used to have in relationship to the rest of the nation. Southern Blacks and White liberals used to look to Washington for indispensable help in solving their problems. That long lasting period of political dependency is now so close to being over that we may as well call it finished. Now the South must play its full part in the resolution of national issues, and has no excuse for not doing so.

Secondly, I wanted to suggest – and here I unashamedly speak as a liberal – that the South must play its part in the great liberal causes of our day. It was wrong, morally and politically unacceptable, for a Hill, Fulbright, or Ervin to be “good” on other issues, and reactionary on civil rights. It would be also wrong and unacceptable for a Southerner today to excuse his positions on war and peace and militarism, on secrecy and surveillance, on ecological necessities, on the economic rights of the poor, on the dignity of women, or on the claims of other minorities by doing a good turn here and there, or even many of them, for civil rights. When one bears of possible or actual support for an Eastland or Wallace or Thurmond, how dearly can one say the old dreams are valued?

I had an experience some years ago, in one of my first visits among Indians of the Southwest, which made me vividly realize something Black friends bad been gently and tactfully telling me, but that I had not heard well. I sat with some Indians one day, and they began attacking me- me! for policies and actions of the Government in Washington. It struck me forcefully that they weren’t distinguishing between me, tthe possibly,

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somewhat prideful critic of politicians and bureaucrats, and those very fellows: all one, all pale face. I’ve come to accept this. I can accept the fact that to a Black person, dealing with a White liberal may be only a variation of dealing with a White segregationist: all one, all White. It is beside the point. For the point is, to build a society at peace, with itself and other societies, to build a society with_ in which all men and women, and their children too, can find decent and dignified lives. And in the service of that purpose, we have all equal duties.

Our politics is throwing up men (e.g. Nixon and Agnew; you can add other, and many, examples) whose instincts are not for life and not for civilization, but for their destruction. Such men are a revolt against evolution. These are men who have the smell of death about them. But we are all infected with that plague, or else we would not elect and reelect such people. We lust for skill, we admire it and are infatuated with it, and we admire its possessors, those who can deal efficiently with the “system.” But being smart in dealing with the ” system” is small potatoes in this nuclear age. These men who govern us are the custodians of life itself.

Speaking about women, Erik Erikson once wrote that “True equality can only mean the right to be uniquely creative.” I believe the same can and must be said of Blacks, of Hispanics and Indians, of White ethnics long cast down; must be said of Africa and Asia and Latin America as they come into the councils of nations. What America wants and what the world wants is not simply for new groups to share in its few privileges, but for those new folks to bring with them their own rich insights and understandings, for them to shape society to themselves and not they to it and its death-ridden ways.

Talk like that sounds more out of place today than it did when Baldwin said he didn’t want to be integrated into a burning house. All I can say is that I have little faith that the house won’t burn unless those who, in our region and nation and world, are cut off from its power and riches find or create ways to make the economy and politics serve them, adapt to them, rather than be their suffocating embrace.

New ideas and values have more often than not come from “new” people, i.e. people newly emergent into social consequence. The world has no need for a “Black political theory” or a “female” one either; nor for a “Black” or a “female” theology, or life style, or what have you. But it is likely, I believe, that the thinking which may give birth to sanity in our lives and culture will be bred, is being bred, in the experiences and insights of being Black (or Hispanic, or Asian, or American Indian) or being woman.

And so I conclude by speaking again to you as Southerners, and as one who wants still to think of himself as a Southerner, and to such, and as such, say that I don’t like that bastard label “sunbelt.” The “sunbelt” is, at best, nothing more than an expanse of land and sunshine, at worst a place replete with problems you don’t need. To be a “sunbelter,” if that’s what it is called, is to be a rootless, non-historical person: and that, no matter what else, no proper Southerner can be. The South is not merely a geographical term. We are too far down the road of time for that. The South’s identity, all that it has to offer, is a history, and a spirit dragged and wrenched from it. A spirit that, at its deepest, knows that life – mere life – is worth all, because it can come back another day and is, anyway, in the final judgment all we have; and knows that each of us has claims on each other that may be denied for long, but not forever. Let the burden of Southern history be transformed now into the message of Southern history. Let the South stand publicly for what it has always stood privately since 1865, for life, for the tenacious holding on to it and for the unavoidable sharing of it.

To some it may seem ironic that “human rights” became the government’s announced foreign policy when a Southern moderate became president. Let us now not stop to ponder causes for that, but only give thanks for the event, while we closely and critically watch for its carrying out. If that policy grows out of a truly Southern understanding of the rightful needs of humanity, it will everywhere stand for the protection of life and the equal claims of all to it. And if so, the South would have turned the burden of its history into a lovely gift to our republic, and to human kind.

Leslie Dunbar is presently on leave from his duties as executive director of the Field Foundation in New York City. He is a former director of the Southern Regional Council and the author of several articles and A Republic of Equals published in 1966.

Editor’s Note: Last year Leslie Dunbar gave the major address at the annual meeting of the Southern Regional Council. This piece is adapted from that speech.

The South’s Clout After Its Retiring Congressmen

By Tom Fiedler

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1978, pp. 6-7

Early this year, when fighting erupted in the “new” civil war pitting the Sunbelt against the Frostbelt, the Southern Growth Policies Board packed up its research staff and moved north to Washington, D.C.

The reason was clear, executive director Blame Liner explained then; that war was being waged in the caucus and committee rooms of the nation’s Capitol and the troops had to be deployed accordingly.

But the move northward was also symbolic for another reason. Decisions affecting the South in the years ahead will be increasingly made by congressmen from the industrial North.

The move dramatized the fact that congressional power is shifting at an accelerating pace. And it is shifting away from Deep South lawmakers who had held a stranglehold on the congressional process for most of this century.

A decade ago it took little more than a phone call from Lyndon Johnson to Richard Russell of Georgia to initiate law. As often as not, national policy was determined over bourbon and branch water by men such as Wilbur Mills, John Sparkman, James Eastland, John Stennis, Sam Ervin, George Mahon or L. Mendel Rivers.

Though outnumbered by their counterparts from other regions, these and other Southerners controlled Congress so thoroughly that one writer described the institution as a Union Army run by Confederate generals.

They owed it all to seniority. But, in a twist of irony, the sureness of time that carried them to power also assured their demise.

“I was invited to a meeting with some of the senior (Southern) members,” recalls Liner. “Carl Perkins, Jennings Randolph, John Stennis and John Sparkman were there. And if it hadn’t have been for (Russell) Long and (Jim) Wright, I would have thought I was in a retirement community.”

Now, with the end of the 95th Congress, a combination of death, retirements and reform spurred ironically by the abuses the seniority system allowed – has virtually ended the Southern domination of Congress.

More importantly, because only one Southern democrat was elected to the Senate between 1956 and 1970, the power on many key committees will flow to Northern and Western liberals.

What that portends is dramatically symbolized on the Senate Judiciary Committee, birthplace of 60 percent of all legislation and arbiter of all civil rights bills. Sen. James Eastland, the pudgy, cigar-smoking Mississippi plantation owner – who once said on the Senate floor that “Negroes are an inferior race” – is retiring after 36 years.

He will be succeeded by Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts whose late brothers’ names are intrinsically tied into the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.

There are numerous other examples: John Sparkman of Alabama will turn over chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee to Frank Church, a liberal from

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Idaho; when John McClellan of Arkansas died early this year, his Appropriations Committee went to Warren Magnuson of Washington.

The Texas delegation alone will be stripped of almost 150 years of House seniority, more than half the South’s total loss of 216 years.

In the Senate, the South will lose through retirements 92 years of seniority. That doesn’t include the losses of men like McClellan and James Allen of Alabama – the South’s master tactician who died during this term.

When Congress reopens in January, the South will be able to claim control of only three major Senate committees: Armed Services, headed by 76-year-old Stennis of Mississippi; Agriculture, headed by Herman Tahnadge, 64, of Georgia (who is being investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee); and Finance, headed by Russell Long, 59, of Louisiana.

In the House, Southerners will preside over just two major panels assuming that they are elected by the caucus. Appropriations will shift to the control of Jamie Whitten of Mississippi and Government Affairs will continue under Jack Brooks of Texas.

Surprisingly, however, students of Southern politics don’t believe that this loss of seniority will have a negative impact on the region.

“It looks like we’ve suffered a tremendous loss,” said South Carolina Congressman Mendel Davis who, at 35, is typical of the “new South” lawmaker.

“But the interesting thing is that while (the power) was changing, Congress itself was changing.” In substance, the South’s loss of seniority coincided with a de-emphasis of the seniority system in Congress. The irony is that many of the reforms pushed in recent years by young, mostly Northern lawmakers were aimed at loosening the grip of oligarchal Southerners on the levers of power.

Today, non-Southerners assuming the key positions find themselves with far less clout than their recent predecessors. That, say relative newcomers like Davis, will protect the South from retaliation.

And at least as important is the fact that the “new breed” of Southern congressmen is ideologically undistinguishable from his counterpart from another region, and thus lacks the Southern consciousness of his forebears. There is only one explanation for this.

“Race was the issue that held the Southern bloc together,” says Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, 38, one of this breed. “Today we are more like the rest of the country.”

Lawmakers like Lawton Chiles and Richard Stone of Florida, Nunn of Georgia, Dale Bumpers of Arkansas,

Ernest Hollings of South Carolina and even House Majority Leader Jim Wright of Texas differ as a group from “frostbelt” congressmen only in the shadings of their accent.

That trend is being continued in balloting so far this fall. In Alabama and Mississippi the old Southern courthouse politicians have been snubbed in favor of fresh, often progressive faces. The match between young progressive Charles “Pug” Ravenel and arch-conservative Strom Thurmond in South Carolina, often called a race between the “Old South” and the “Changing South,” epitomized the contrast in ideology now offered voters, a contrast that wouldn’t have been possible there a decade ago.

“The ones who are being elected,” said Steve Suitts, executive director of the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Council, “are those who say they want to run government like a business.”

“They’ve got no ideology about race. They take the position that if they can uplift the whole population, they are uplifting all segments,” he said.

Liner of the Southern Growth Policies Board calls this the “Americanization of Dixie.”

Indeed, Liner argues that there may be such a lack of Southern consciousness among lawmakers today that the region will be vulnerable to power moves from those who are jealous of the “Sunbelt’s” attractiveness to new industry.

“If the new Southerners begin to act as a bloc again,” Liner said, “it will be only because moves (by Northern congressmen) have forced them into defending their own constituencies.”

But perhaps, as Nunn pointed out, the burden of protecting the South’s interest doesn’t have to be shouldered by a handful of congressmen anymore.

“After all,” Nunn said, “look who’s in the White House.”

Tom Fiedler is the Washington correspondent for the Miami Herald.

Southern Elections: A State by State Version

By SRC Staff

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1978, pp. 8-11, 25-29

Former populist Governor Big Jim Folsom of Alabama once said that politics was for him like, “courtin’ a beautiful woman – if you can’t spend a lot of money you’re gonna have to do a little lyin’.” Yet, the days of suds bucket and singing “you are my sunshine” off key – symbols of Folsom’s success – are gone and Big Jim’s confessed wisdom has been adapted for the modern times of Southern politics. Now, in courtin’ Southern voters, a candidate is required to do both.

This year’s Southerners witnessed more than $35 million spent by major candidates on advertising on radio and television stations. Most ads were designed simply to build an image of personality for candidates – leaving the public issues to be discussed in slogans. While the trend was not uniquely Southern, the changing nature of regional politics showed itself in the election’s results and may portend greater danger to candidates who wish to represent the interests of minorities and poor folk in the future.

In all major statewide races in the South, everyone who had a prayer’s chance spent at least a half million dollars and often more than a million. Those who didn’t – like defeated Democratic senate nominee John Ingram of North Carolina – didn’t come even close on November 7.

While Bob Graham was elected governor of Florida and spent less than his opponent, his total campaign expenditure was more than two million dollars – much of it his own money. Republican Lamar Alexander won the general election for the governor of Tennessee over a bigger spending Jake Butcher; however, Alexander spent around a million dollars on his own campaign. In most other races, the victor was the big spending candidate. Vhile it was not the relationship between money and politics alone that decided the South’s elections, its effects were paramount and will be increasingly exclusionary.

The fact is that like selling soap nowadays, if a candidate doesn’t have the millions to spend on advertising, chances for victory in a real contest are hardly worth the trouble. For candidates whose major constituency comes from the uninfluential, minorities, or the poor, the problems of raising enough funds can he deadly.

As disturbing, even Black candidates appealing largely to a Black voting constituency feel the need to have large advertising budgets. In Mississippi, Charles Evers attempted to win a plurality victory for the U.S. Senate by getting a huge turnout with some White votes. According to Jason Berry, campaign aide for Evers, one of the major problems of the campaign was its desperate need of funds for Evers to go on television. “But I haven’t seen you on television…” was a response Evers got even from Black folks as he campaigned throughout Mississippi. In post election analysis, campaign workers for Evers contend that if there had been more money and more television time, there would have been a better chance for Evers in both the Black and White communities.

While influential in its own right, the politics of big money went hand in hand with the politics of Southern conservatism this year. The old Southern hard-line, conservative Democrats who once occupied the U.S. Senate are being replaced by the newer, younger, and just as hard-line conservative Republicans. In Texas Mississippi, Virginia and North Carolina. Republicans who call themselves, “fiscal conservatives” were elected to the U.S. Senate. While a Democrat will return to South Carolina’s statehouse, Strom Thurmond returns to the Senate and a Republican conservative will become governor of Texas.

None of these candidates were elected with the large support of Blacks or other minorities. All talked about cutting government spending and eliminating the frills in government programs especially social programs. Even the more tolerant Democrats who won had to court voters with their own line of old time conservatism.

In Alabama, a sedate former state chief justice Howell Heflin sounded like daddy warbucks charging his opponent with making “America a second-rate power” by voting for a little cut in defense spending. State Senator Bob Graham, Florida’s next governor with a reputation as one of Florida’s leading liberals, attacked his Democratic primary opponent for “socialist leaning” and demanded the death penalty for rapists “who dare defile the women of our state.” Little was said in any campaign in the South of the virtues of giving folks decent jobs or making decent

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housing available.

The candidates who did run with direct populist appeals were roundly defeated. While none could be accused of having open, liberal tendencies, John Ingram of North Carolina and Pug Ravenel of South Carolina failed in their open appeals to Black and White voters. It just didn’t work in 1978.

Candidates who want to give special attention to the needs of poor and minorities have always found hostile audiences and enormous obstacles in seeking statewide offices in the South. The elections of 1978 will not be recorded as an exception to that fact. Rather, it may well be remembered as the time when big money and Republican conservatism became the fashionable ways to court Southern voters.

Alabama

Nineteen seventy-eight elections in Alabama produced a variety of collector’s items for Southern politics: campaign buttons for people running for other offices, bumper stickers for people who weren’t candidates at all, and hundreds of meaningless slogans (from “Let’s get on down that road” to a more familiar, aborted phrase “More than ever before “). Still, it was not politics as usual in Alabama.

Last year almost everyone expected the political scenario to be as predictable as it has been for the past 15 years. Prohibited by the state constitution from seeking another term as governor, George Wallace was expected to retire from the statehouse and seek the U.S. Senate seat to be vacated by retiring Sen. John Sparkman. Alabama’s other U.S. Senator, Jim Allen – the state’s most popular office-holder – was not up for reelection.

As he has for almost two decades, George Wallace began the tremor of events. Facing a campaign against former state chief justice Howell Heflin, Wallace voiced second thoughts about a campaign for the senate. Heflin, the architect of Alabama’s new judicial system and a relative newcomer to Alabama politics, had a broad constituency including lawyers, businessmen, labor and Blacks, and is especially popular in the more urban north Alabama. Finally, Wallace announced: he would not seek the U.S. Senate seat.

Soon another bolting surprise awoke Alabamians. Vacationing on the gulf shore of Alabama, Sen. Jim Allen died of a heart attack. According to Alabama law, the governor was to appoint an immediate successor and an election for the remaining two years of Allen’s term would be held later. Obviously enjoying the speculation that he might appoint himself, Wallace delayed the appointment. Calling a news conference to announce that he had not yet decided on Allen’s replacement, Wallace had changed his mind about going to Washington, many decided. After several weeks Wallace did announce the appointment of Maryon Allen, wife of the dead senator. Mrs. Allen immediately announced that she would run in the Democratic primary.

A state senator with a reputation for consumerism, Donald Stewart decided to remove his name from the growing list of candidates seeking to replace Sparkman and announced his candidacy to challenge Allen. Meanwhile, Congressman Walter Flowers had given up his easy bid for reelection and transferred his campaign to oppose Howell Heflin and seek Sparkman’s seat.

A squadron of other candidates also began printing literature and passing out buttons for their campaigns. More than half the members of the state senate were seeking a higher, statewide office. More than 10 people were running for governor and most of the statewide constitutional offices had at least five or six candidates. Surveying the field, one local political wag noted: “No wonder our crime rate is up.”

Alabama’s most popular female office-holder, State Treasurer Melba Till Allen, was in fact convicted during the summer on federal charges surrounding misuse of state funds. Allen, who was discussed as a possible candidate for the U.S. Senate before the trial, said upon conviction that both the Alabama people and God would vindicate her. Allen’s husband later announced that he would seek to succeed her.

As the Democratic primary approached, a former football star, part-time Republican, and millionaire inventor of the sand-filled, plastic dumbbell, Fob James appeared to develop momentum in his race for governor. Helped by a huge advertising budget and calling for “a new beginning,” James led the ticket with Atty. Gen. Bill Baxley a weak second. Apparently, James’ new approach and lack of experience in politics were advantages which Baxley was not able to overcome. With a slick campaign and an earnest face, James became Democratic nominee for governor in late September.

In the senate race, Heflin outdistanced Flowers in a run-off where the congressman emphasized his experience and the judge decried him as a part of “the Washington crowd.” In the other race, Allen and Stewart also faced a run-off in which Stewart was called “a liberal” and Allen portrayed as an “unladylike office-holder.” Stewart prevailed only to face another major challenger, Republican Jim Martin.

At one time registered to oppose the Democratic nominee for Sparkman’s seat, Martin realized Stewart as the “best” opponent and switched races. Supported by considerable Republican money, Martin waged a strong, two-month campaign. Having campaigned against Lurleen Wallace and John Sparkman in prior years, Martin accused Stewart of being liberal and doing nothing to bring down the utility rates of the power company, which he had opposed. Stewart emphasized his opposition to the large utilities and his work in the state Senate to help Alabama consumers.

In congressional elections. State Senator Richard Shelby

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of Tuscaloosa had no problem clef eating his Republican opposition to replace Flowers in Congress. In the primary, Shelby did face State Rep. Chris McNair, one of Alabama’s Black representatives. In a district with 38 percent Black population, McNair failed to gain enough White votes or a large Black turnout.

In other statewide races, all Democrats won with no trouble. Birmingham attorney, George McMillan, had won the Democratic run-off against his colleague, State Senator Bert Bank of Tuscaloosa. While Bank had the endorsement of the largest Black political organization in the state, the Alabama Democratic Conference, McMillan received substantial Black support. Former executive director of the Democratic Party of Alabama, Don Siegelman became secretary of state after defeating in the primary several candidates including the only Black female running for a statewide office, Leola Smith. Charlie Graddick ws elected attorney general.

A peculiar characteristic of Wallace politics – the election of a spouse for public office – failed to carry for other campaigns this year. Sen. Allen’s wife, who advertised herself as “Mrs. Jim Allen,” and the husband of convicted treasurer Melba Till Allen, who was cattily referred to as “Mr. Melba Till Allen,” both failed to replace their spouses unlike Gov. Lurleen Wallace in 1966.

There will be a large number of new faces in the state senate of Alabama this year largely because most incumbents were seeking other statewide offices. Alabama’s two Black state senators, U.W. Clemon and J. Richmond Pearson, were reelected. A Black lawyer from Mobile, Michael Figures, was also elected to the upper house.

Ten Black members of the lower chamber of the Alabama legislature will return; however, two will be new members. Four women and four Republicans will also be in the state legislature.

Local elections throughout Alabama appeared to penalize present officeholders. The plague of incumbency was apparently enough to shake up many local courthouses. In south Alabama, there will be several new Black county officials. For the first time in this century, the Sheriff and Tax Collector in rural Wilcox County, Alabama will be Black as will be the Sheriff of nearby, rural Perry County. Blacks constitute a majority of the population in both places.

Arkansas

Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton breezed through a primary election without a runoff and the general election with only nominal opposition to become the state’s youngest governor ever at age 31. Clinton, who was a Rhodes scholar and former campaign organizer for George McGovern in 1972, had considered entering the Senate race, but decided against joining a crowded field of like-minded candidates. As governor, Clinton is expected to give education a high priority and polish Arkansas’ image and tradition of electing more progressive politicians than the constituency they represent.

Coy. David Pryor, following a close primary race and run-off scored an easy victory in the general election to become Arkansas’ junior senator. Pryor nearly won the seat in a close race against Sen. John McClellan in 1972.

In the House contests, there are two new faces, Doug Brandon in the 2nd District, and Beryl Anthony in the 4th, leaving the House lineup of three Democrats and one Republican unchanged.

Florida

The election of Bob Graham as Governor of Florida represents one of the few instances in 1978 Southern politics where the traditional Democratic coalition including Blacks, labor, and liberals had a winning candidate. It also ends a long gubernatorial campaign where two millionaires came face to face in a contest where millions were spent.

Using the gimmick of working at a hundred different jobs during the past several months, Graham had an effective advertising blitz which surprisingly helped defeat his well-known opponent, Jack Eckerd. A Republican millionaire owner of chain drugstores and former head of the General Services Administration, Eckerd easily won the Republican primary using it mostly to campaign to Democrats as well as Republicans. Having sought the Senate post in 1974 and the Governor’s chair in 1970, Eckerd was probably hurt by the GSA scandals which were operating during his tenure in Washington.

Eckerd campaigned on the theme that government is a business and requires a business-like approach. In spending more than $5 million most of it out of his own pocket – Eckerd also apparently was showing voters that you had to sell a product before it could be bought. Graham disrobed his reputation as a liberal but did make direct appeals to minorities.

Graham’s victory was supported by a loose coalition of labor, businesses, Hispanics, Blacks, and urban and liberal voters, who in part helped him defeat Atty. Gen. Bob Shevin who led the ticket in the Democratic primary in September.

Another former office-holder, Edward Gurney, who was tried and acquitted for charges of receiving illegal funds as a U.S. Senator, was defeated by Democratic nominee Bill Nelson. In Miami, Rep. Claude Pepper was also reelected.

The only major female candidate in state elections, Paula Hawkins, ran unsuccessfully for Lt. Coy, as Eckerd’s running mate. In local elections, Florida’s three Black members of the state House of Representatives will return to Tallahassee next year.

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Georgia

Georgia voters, it appeared, would have an easy time of it at the polls this election. There were only six congressional races and five of them were not highly contested, although the Democratic incumbents, refusing to take their opposition lightly, did campaign actively throughout their districts. Coy. George Busbee faced Republican opposition statewide as did Lt. Gov. Zell Miller, but again without much contest.

But Georgia voters probably experienced more frustration election day than most other voters because they were confronted at the polls with a massive 12-page ballot crammed with 36 statewide constitutional amendments and 88 local amendments. The amendments were condensed, but they still made very tough reading.

Amendment 4 was probably the most controversial item on the general election ballot. It would have doubled legislative terms from two years to four years effective with next year’s General Assembly, but Georgia voters soundly rejected that proposal. Adding insult to injury they in turn supported Amendment 15 which authorizes the General Assembly to pass a law setting up a recall procedure for elected officials.

Georgians lost their opportunity to send a woman to Congress by electing Republican Newt Gingrich over State Sen.Virginia Shapard to fill the sixth district seat being vacated by retiring incumbent Rep. John Flynt. Shapard had the endorsements of first lady Rosalynn Carter, who came to the state in her behalf, and a number of other top state Democratic officeholders, but voters favored her opponent. No newcomer to the district, Gingrich had lost to Flynt on two prior occasions by narrow margins. He will be the first Republican in Georgia’s 10-member House delegation since 1974.

The other Democratic congressional contenders won overwhelming victories. Because of recent legislation, Busbee became the first Georgia governor to succeed himself in office. He and Lt. Gov. Zell Miller scored landslide victories, the worst defeats that Republican candidates for the two top state offices have suffered in more than a decade.

The Democrats also won three new seats in the state House for a total of 159. Republicans hold 21 seats. Black representation remained at 21 in the House and two in the Senate. Fourteen women will be included the next term, an increase of three. All of the Blacks and the women, except one, are from urban areas, principally Atlanta, Macon, Columbus, Savannah and Augusta.

Louisiana

Under Louisiana’s new primary system Sen. J. Bennett Johnston was reelected on September 16. Under the new system Louisiana has a non-partisan primary in which candidates of all parties run against each other. If a candidate receives more than 50 percent of the primary vote as Johnston did, he or she runs in November without opposition. If no one receives more than 50 percent, the top two finishers, regardless of party, face each other in November.

Because of the new primary system, all congressional races except one (4th District, Shreveport) were decided in the open non-partisan primary on September 16th. All of the primary winners were incumbents.

In the 4th District, veteran congressman, Joe D. Waggonner retired after 17 years in the House and nine candidates vied for the vacant seat in the primary. Two former state representatives faced each other in the November runoff and Democrat Buddy Leach defeated Republican Jimmy Wilson by a narrow margin.

Issues were not the main feature of this campaigneveryone in Louisiana is conservative. The effect of the open primary law is still somewhat uncertain, although it clearly seems to favor incumbents, it also seems to have the effect of making the elections in Louisiana uncharacteristically dull, and the voter turn-out unusually low.

In Shreveport, elections were held to elect representatives for a new Mayor-Council form of city government. Following a series of legal actions instigated by BULL (Blacks United for Lasting Leadership), and scandals involving the previous commissioners, the new charter and single member districts were approved by a 3-1 majority last April. This November, as a result of this fall’s election three Blacks will occupy seats on the seven member city council. This marks a dramatic change and new hope for Blacks in traditionally conservative Shreveport.

Mississippi

For the first time since Reconstruction, Mississippi will have a Republican in the U.S. Senate. The election of Thad Cochran, a member of Congress who went to

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Washington in Barry Goldwater’s sweep of the South in 1964, may well mark a new conservative Republican force in Mississippi politics as potentially powerful as the old Democratic regime of U.S. Senator James Eastland.

The shift in Mississippi’s political power was foretold last spring when rumors of Eastland’s retirement spread. When the rumors were confirmed, the June Democratic primary in Mississippi became a crowded contest among some of the state’s most formidable politicians. Fifty-oneyear-old Cliff Finch, in the middle of his term as governor, announced that he would seek Eastland’s seat. Former Governor William Waller, former Lt. Gov. Charles Sullivan, and former District Atty. Maurice Dantin also announced their candidacies.

The campaign for the June 7 Democratic Primary was a contrast between Finch’s folksy, backslapping style and the more subdued campaigns of Dantin and the others. Finch made an open appeal for support among Blacks and rural Whites and even published a listing of all Blacks he had appointed to high positions in the state’s largest newspapers. Dantin had the support of some of Eastland’s political allies as well as the state AFLCIO.

Perhaps hurt by allegations of corruption in his administration and a poor turnout of Black voters, Finch came in second in the primary and lost the run-off to Dantin. At the same time, Thad Cochran won the Republican primary without a run-off.

Three major candidates were in the general election. In addition to the two parties’ nominees, Charles Evers, Black mayor of Fayette, Mississippi ran a populist campaign. Speaking out against multi-national corporations and calling for more local, economic development, Evers’ low budget campaign attempted to pull a large number of Blacks with some Whites for a plurality victory. More than a few Black and White liberals, however, were disturbed by Evers’ opposition to courtordered busing and support for return of prayer in the schools.

While Evers made a strong showing and trailed Dantin by only about 50,000 votes, the effect of his candidacy was primarily to spoil the election for Democrats. Disengaged from the fragile coalition established in the late 60s between Black and White Democrats, Cochran was able to muster enough votes to lead the ticket.

Cochran is a representative standard bearer of Republi-

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canism in Mississippi. He favors lower taxes, strong defense, less money for welfare. While he has attempted to make some accommodations with Blacks in his congressional district, his voting record in Congress exhibits little sympathy for the problems of poor and Blacks in the state.

In congressional races, all of Mississippi’s incumbents were reelected. In Cochran’s old 4th district, which includes Vicksburg and Jackson, Mississippi, John C. Hinson, a Republican and former aide to Cochran was elected. Perhaps symbolically, Hinson defeated the son of Mississippi’s Democratic senator John Hampton Stennis, who had become a significant political figure in his own right in the state.

With the election of Cochran and his former aide, Mississippians clearly mark their readiness to desert Democratic ranks and they may soon have another chance. Republican Gil Carmichael is expected to be a strong contender in two years for the governor’s chair. Carmichael picked up 45 percent of the vote in his race against Cliff Finch last time. Also, Mississippians did not give Jimmy Carter a clear majority in the 1976 Presidential election (although he carried the state with 49 percent of the vote) and may not do so in 1980.

Mississippi’s three Black Democratic state representatives were not up for reelection this year. In two years, the expected reapportionment of the Mississippi Legislature may well add to their numbers; however, the general mood of Mississippians to vote conservative Republican may also add additional problems for all Democrats.

North Carolina

Armed with more than $7 million for campaign expenses and a strong reputation as a hard-line conservative leader, Republican Senator Jesse Helms swamped populist-styled Democratic nominee John Ingram who had defied pollsters and money to gain the Democratic nomination.

A former broadcaster, Helms will return to Washington for a second term as a conservative Republican with a national following from a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans three to one. Supplied with funds from throughout the nation by the dircct mail appeals of conservative fundraiser Richard Viguerie, Helms picked tip votes throughout the state and received a larger vote than his 54 percent in 1972.

Ingram is one of the North Carolina insurance commissioners who surprised everyone by defeating Luther Hodges, Jr. in the May 30 Democratic Primary runoff. Earlier, Hodges had led the Democratic ticket with almost 40 percent of the vote carrying 87 of the state’s 100 counties. Ingram had only 26 percent of the vote and his campaign appeal “I’m fighting for you” appeared to have an isolated following. In the run-off campaign, however,

Ingrain attacked I lodges as “the rich man’s candidate” and referred more often to Hodge’s background as a banker. Despite a large professional staff and many television campaign ads, Hodges trailed distantly behind Ingram in the run-off.

Ingram attempted to use the same approach against Helms in the general election. Calling the Republican “the five million dollar man,” Ingram asked audiences throughout the state how Helms could be a fiscal conservative when spending $7 million just to reelect himself. Ingram’s campaign suffered constantly because of lack of funds.

In mid-October when polls showed that Helms had a sizable lead over Ingram, the Democratic nominee simply reminded voters of earlier polls that showed Hodges as the leading contender. This time, however, the pollsters were right.

While there were no statewide offices up for reelection, members of North Carolina’s general assembly, who are elected every two years, were on the ballot. The state’s two Black Senators from Charlotte and Raleigh were reelected as were the four Black Representatives to the lower chamber.

South Carolina

“Old South” Republican Strom Thurman handily defeated challenger Pug Ravenel in a highly visible South Carolina election. Ravenel hammered away at Thurman’s past stands against civil rights’ issues, but Thurman, who has moderated his position considerably in the last six years, campaigned vigorously for the Black vote. Thurman’s new responsiveness to providing services for Black constituents apparently defused some of Ravenel’s campaign issues but did not result in a significant Black vote for the Republican candidate. In spite of Ravenel’s defeat, it is seen by some as a victory for racial moderation because of Thurman’s visible retrenchment on civil rights’ issues and providing constituent services to Blacks.

In other South Carolina races Dick Hey won the governorship for the Democrats and his running mate Nancy Stevenson won the lieutenant governor’s race, and will become the first woman to preside over the all-male South Carolina Senate. Two congressional races in the Palmetto state also sparked widespread interest in the 4th District (Greenville-Spartanburg) and in the 2nd District which includes Columbia and Orangeburg. Former Congressman James Mann retired from the 4th District seat, leaving the race open to former Greenville Mayor Max Heller, a Democrat, and Republican State Senator Carroll Campbell. Campbell prevailed over the more liberal Heller in a close race dominated by economic issues. In the 2nd District, Congressman Floyd Spence was thought to be vulnerable to a challenge by author-journalist Jack Bass, a Democrat. Spence easily won reelection to a fifth term,

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however, giving South Carolina two Republicans in the House. Both these victories were helped considerably by a large Republican vote as a result of the Thurman campaign. The Thurman coattails were also seen as responsible for Republican Henry Young’s victory as incumbent commissioner of Agriculture.

In the legislature, Blacks retained their seats, but two Democratic women lost their seats. Republicans on the Thurman coattails prevailed in most of the closely contested races to score a net gain in the lower South Carolina House coming especially from the suburban districts.

Tennessee

In Tennessee, Lamar Alexander, a Republican lawyer from Nashville won a clear victory over wealthy Knoxville banker Jake Butcher. Both men had run for the governorship before and went all out to win. Although the race was closely contested, there did not seem to be a great deal of difference on the issues. Butcher, who is a friend of Bert Lance, and not unlike him in style, received .strong support from President Carter, who visited the state on Butcher’s behalf. However, Alexander’s smooth and polished campaign kept Butcher on the defensive about his wealth and flamboyant banking practices. Butcher was able to capture endorsements from normally Republican newspapers in Knoxville and Nashville but that did not provide the support he needed for victory.

The race was characterized by free spending on both sides, but especially by the Butcher campaign which had over 300 staffers on the payroll. Spending was unusually high m the primary election as well.

Alexander was no doubt helped by incumbent Senator howard Baker who led the Republican ticket by defeating Democrat Jane Eskind of Nashville. Senator Baker, apparently looking toward a possible presidential bid in 1980, waged an all-out effort and rolled up a big margin to provide an impressive homestate base.

In other races, Democrat Harold Ford from Memphis became the only incumbent Black representative from the South and Tennessee Democrats kept their 5-3 advantage in the House.

Texas

The elections in Texas this year featured Texas style spending and very closely contested races for the governorship and Senate as well as a number of interesting House contests. Veteran Republican Sen. John Tower squeaked by former Congressman Bob Krueger. This contest in which the candidates spent nearly six million dollars was marked with bitter charges and counter charges and a handshake incident that may have cost Senator Tower some votes but not the election.

In the governor’s race, Republican Bill Clements, a former Deputy Secretary of Defense took a very close race from State Attorney General John Hill. Spending in this race also set new records with Clements spending $6.5 million of mostly borrowed money, and Hill about $2.5 million in a strict pay-as-you-go campaign.

Hill drew support from Spanish speaking Texans because of Clements’ percieved insensitivity to Hispanic issues. At one point in the campaign Clements was asked what kinds of programs for Hispanics he would implement as Governor; to which he replied “I’m not running for Governor of Mexico.”

Voting patterns seemed to indicate that Democratic margins in rural areas and minority communities were not enough to offset Republican advantages in Houston and Dallas-Ft. Worth. The margin in both races was less than three votes per precinct and the outcome was not decided until the day following the election.

Retiring Representative Barbara Jordan was replaced by Democrat Mickey Leland who along with Harold Ford of Tennessee will provide all of the Southern Black representation in this term of Congress. Texans also approved overwhelmingly a tax relief amendment linking state spending to the growth of the state’s economy.

Virginia

Former Navy secretary and husband of Elizabeth Taylor, John W. Warner was elected to the U.S. Senate in Virginia. Using much of his own personal fortune and a growing Republican organization in the state, Warner managed to overcome a strong challenge from Democrat Andrew Miller, a former Virginia attorney general, who had relied largely upon the traditional coalition of old time Democrats, Virginia educators, labor, and Blacks.

Unlike most other Southern states, Virginia nominates its party candidates through a convention system which for the Republicans met on June 3rd. The state’s former Republican chairman, Richard Obenshain, defeated Warner and two others to receive the Republican nomination; however, when Obenshain died in a plane accident, Warner became the Republican nominee and inherited the strong Republican organization.

Warner has emphasized his experience in Washington and talked of his tough negotiations with the Russians. He also has often been accompanied by his wife and movie star, Elizabeth Taylor.

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For most of the campaign Warner and Miller attempted to show the other as less conservative. Warner attempted again and again to tie Miller to populist and pro-labor leader Henry Howell, former Democratic lieutenant governor and called frequently for a strong national defense and large tax cuts.

Miller tried to keep his distance from Howell, talk like a conservative, accuse Warner of being less conservative, and still keep labor and Blacks in his camp. His efforts apparently failed.

For a time it seemed that both candidates were trying to see how much they could alienate Black voters. In September, Warner stated in a television interview that as Navy secretary he had worked to slow integration. He constantly refused to appear before the state’s largest Black voting organization or other Black organizations such as the NAACP. While Miller attended such meetings, he kept his distance at tunes and made few promises specifically to Black constituents.

The election marks another victory for a growing Republican party in the South. With Republican Governor John Dalton, the election of Warner puts an end to Democratic hopes to regain the strong rule that the late Sen. Harry F. Byrd maintained. While an unexciting campaigner, Miller was one of the Democrat’s most popular vote-getters and his defeat leaves Virginia’s Democratic party in some disarray.

Both candidates spent well over a million dollars seeking the nomination and election. Most state elections will be held in two years.

Tommy Lee Hines and the Cullman Saga

By Bob Dart

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1978, pp. 12-15

Squatting in the marbled hallways, the wrinkled hangers-on, found in any country courthouse, chewed and digested the carryings-on that had descended upon their town.

“We’ve never had enough niggers in this county to amount to nothing anyway,” allowed one oldtimer. “And what we had, stayed in their place. Now this thing will get them stirred up and it won’t ever be the same here.”

In the paneled courtroom upstairs, a Black man with an IQ of 39 – the guile and wisdom of a six-year-old child – stood accused of raping a White woman. Up Highway 31 a piece, the Ku Klux Klan and Black civil rights marchers – both awakened by the case – had been eyeball to eyeball at the town’s city limits a few days earlier.

Now in the courthouse, the weathered old men in faded bib overalls and narrow lapeled suits sensed that no matter what the trial’s outcome, things would never be the same in Cullman. Southern justice was on trial here; an old and a new South were clashing once again.

But the winds of change never stirred a small, silent man upstairs. Tommy Lee Hines slumped in his chair as strangers dissected his life, debated his fate, and all the while looked beyond the textbook law case they were writing. The 26-year-old retarded Black man understood little of what was happening to him, his family and friends said. For what is history to a man who can’t remember the days of the week?

“He was seven before he ever talked,” his daddy recalled. “But he was always a good boy. Always minded. Anything you’d tell him to do, he’d try to do it. He never sassed me or his mama. I never heard him say a cuss word.”

Tommy has always been special, his family and neighbors recalled. “I always knew he was different from the rest of my children. I had nine boys and three girls, you know,” explained Richard Hines. “But he ain’t crazy. I’ll tell you that. He’s retarded; just different.”

Tommy Hines never attended public school as a boy, his neighbors said. There were no facilities for a “special” Black boy growing up in Decatur, Ala.

“Everybody knew Tommy,” said James Guster, a neighbor of the Hines family in the northwest side of town – the Black section. “When we’d see him, he’d always be with relatives. We never saw him by himself.”

So Tommy Hines grew up insulated from the outside world by a protective family. “You know, that boy has never been to a picture show in his life.. he don’t know a

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nickel from a quarter,” his father said. “I never let him out to play much. Bigger boys would try to hurt him. He got knocked down once trying to play football. I couldn’t let him get hurt.”

Tommy Hines was past 20 when he started to school. The Cherry Street School – a center f or retarded persons – opened in Decatur and he was enrolled. After a battery of tests, the center declared that Tommy Hines is trainable, with a moderate retardation level. He could learn to do some tasks but could never function in society by himself.

“The thing I remember about Tommy is his big smile when he told me ‘I go to the Newcomb Street Church of Christ and I was baptized by Brother Alphonso Robinson,’ said Joel Loftin, a state official who tested Hines. He said he was moved that the two of them – worlds apart in intellect – had been touched by the same faith.

Officials at the Cherry Street School testified that Hines attended regularly and caused no trouble. Rosemary Wright, the White secretary at the school, said she sometimes went alone with Tommy to pick up school lunches.

“He was always well-mannered and very quiet … well behaved. He was a gentleman.”

But in the courtroom, a White man and a White woman painted a different picture of Tommy Lee Hines.

Decatur Police Detective Doyle Ward testified that Hines had been picked up for questioning after being spotted in a neighborhood where he was a stranger. The official said he thought the young Black man matched the description a rape victim had given of her attacker.

Under gentle questioning, Ward said, Hines had confessed to three rapes and had led police to the scenes of the crimes.

“I went by the train station, and I saw a girl I knew who worked there … When she went to her car, I grabbed her, and she tried to get away . . .” Hines allegedly told the police. He reportedly supplied details of the sexual assault on a 21-year-old clerk at the railway station.

The victim in the case said her attacker had worn a plastic garbage bag over his head, like a bonnet, but had left his face uncovered. In court, she pointed out Tommy Lee Hines as that attacker.

A bevy of defense witnesses attacked these stories. His teachers and testers said Tommy Hines was incapable of relating the confession that Ward testified the retarded Black man had told in his own words. The language of the confession is much too sophisticated for Hines, the school officials said.

Others who knew him said Hines was frightened of “authority figures” and would likely admit to anything he thought they wanted to hear, just to please them.

Asked the question, “How many women did you rape, two or three?” Hines would pick one answer, just guessing to try to be right, a defense witness said.. He told the police “three.”

A trusty at the Decatur jail testified that Tommy Hines was crying and praying loudly the day he allegedly confessed, the day police said he talked calmly and lucidly to them.

Richard Hines testified the police “wouldn’t let me see my boy (after his arrest). They shut the door in my face …told me he (a policeman) didn’t have time to talk to me.”

But the prosecution stood unshaken; the woman said Tommy Hines raped her and a policeman had a confession he said Tommy Hines dictated and signed.

The verdict would come from an all-White jury, nine men and three women picked from the populace of Cullman County, Ala.

Most of Cullman County’s 52,000 residents would just as soon have had the Tommy Lee Hines trial stay in Morgan County, where the rape occurred on Feb. 16,1978. But a change of venue – a legal quirk -brought the case and an unsought notoriety to the rolling farmlands and sleepy county seat of Cullman.

“Folks in Cullman ain’t mad at Hines,” said a state trooper assigned to guard the courthouse. “They’re mad at that judge in Morgan County who sent his trial over here.”

Less than one percent of Cullman County’s population is Black, and most of them live in an area outside of town known as The Colony. It’s a church-going county – not a legal drink to be brought within 50 miles – with a faded row of single-story storefronts lining Highway 31, the town’s main drag.

Cullman is a good place to live, its residents claim, and there had been little racial tension before the Hines trial arrived. “We have our coloreds in The Colony down there,” said one resident. “They’re treated as good as any Whites. They just stick to their business and we stick to ours. Their kids go to school with ours.”

“I’ve sold cars to the niggers around here for years, said another man. “They pay on time just like the White folks.” The White residents blamed a Black protest movement that took place in Decatur after Hines arrest for the move of the trial.

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“They (Blacks) never had any organization in Decatur before this,” a state trooper said. “But they seized on the case and used strong-arm tactics to organize. Then the Klan recruited for the first time in years. Tommy Hines is a scapegoat, caught between two radical factions. It’s really kind of pathetic.”

The “outside agitator” that northern Alabama Whites blamed for arousing the local Blacks is the Rev. Richard B. Cottonreader, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference project coordinator in the Hines case.

“I got involved when some local people put in a call to the national office,” Cottonreader recalled. “They wanted help so I was sent over here (from Gadsden, Ala.). I tried to arouse the community as best I know how.

“I don’t consider myself an outside agitator. I consider myself one of the best things that could have happened to Decatur at the time.” Cottonreader organized a long, hot summer of protests and confrontations with the KKK that thrust the Hines case into the national spotlight.

“It’s amazing what you can accomplish sometimes,” said Cottonreader, a slim man of 47 given to wearing denim outfits and a silver cross. “SCLC was needed here. We opened the eyes of the nation to the Tommy Lee Hines case. If we hadn’t been here, he would have been just one more Black on trial for rape.”

Indeed, the protests also awakened the long-slumbering Klan of northern Alabama. Once again burning crosses lit pastures and white-robed and hooded men spit out words of racial hatred.

Klan membership “skyrocketed” in Alabama, said KKK Kleagle Bill McGlocklin. “I look upon this as a rebirth of the Klan,” the Decatur service station owner said. He became an open Klan leader, he said, after reading that a Black organizer had said, “We’re going to get a piece of the pie in Decatur or there isn’t going to be any pie.”

The “Invisible Empire” of the KKK has changed, McGlocklin said. “It’s not like the old Klan. We don’t do any nightriding or burn churches. We’re into politics now. You can’t get anywhere with violence any more.”

“In four years,” he continued, “we want to grow so much that no one in Alabama politics – no county commissioner, state representative or governor – can be elected without the Klan’s endorsement.”

Blacks have organizations to represent them, McGlocklin countered, so Whites need one, too – the KKK. But he said most Klansmen carry guns and are still ready to act as vigilantes if they deem it necessary.” It’s like the T-shirt says. “If you want my gun, come take it.”

The Hines case produced a series of confrontations between the Klan and Black protesters: meetings that produced no violence but a lot of publicity. The confrontations climaxed on the opening day of Hines trial when robed Klansmen and other Whites met a group of Black marchers walking from Decatur at the Cullman city limits. Several of the Black marchers ended in jail.

Behind the protesters came a rash of rumors; tales the Klansmen and their sympathizers seized upon and embellished. “I know for a fact the Black Panthers are ready to come in,” a self-styled “Concerned Citizen” said outside the Cullman courthouse. “They’re staying at motels all over north Alabama, came from Atlanta, New York and Detroit. They get $32 a day expenses.”

The White men gathered each day under a pecan tree outside the courthouse and discussed how to handle the invasion of Black radicals they believed was coming. If

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Hines were convicted, they said, the Black groups had vowed to burn Cullman to the ground.

“The first one that strikes a match, his head comes off,” said one Cullmanite. “This is not Detroit. This is Cullman, Alabama.”

Across the courthouse parking lot from the tight knot of White men, young Black men and women from Decatur ate their lunch each day during a break in the trial of Hines, their neighbor. They, too, had heard rumors – of Klansmen ready to perform their own brand of justice on the young Black man. Two young Black men drove Hines to and from trial each day and stayed near him, calling themselves his bodyguards.

“We ain’t the same folk the Klan scared 20 years ago,” a woman in an Afro observed. “They’re dealing with a new Black man and woman.”

In northern Alabama, the Tommy Lee Hines case had awakened a racial confrontation that many felt had been put to sleep forever in the violent 60s. A veteran of 16 years with “the Movement,” Cottonreader said “Alabama appears to have changed a bit on the surface, but only on the surface. Racism,” he explained, “has gone underground.”

He said that once he moved in to work on the Hines case, he found other changes that were needed. “Alabama’s changing, but Decatur is more behind than the average town,” he said. “Tommy Hines was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I believe that Tommy Hines is a special person chosen by God to bear a cross for the Black people of Decatur.”

Sitting silently in the courtroom in a tan leisure suit, Tommy Lee Hines slumped uncomfortably, his dark eyes darted around toward the unfamiliar faces. Friends said he was unaware of what was going on; unknowing of the racial and legal turmoil his situation had caused.

“Hell, sometimes he doesn’t even know who I am,” said Harry Mims, one of Hines’ attorneys. He said his client hadn’t been able to help his defense at all.

The courtroom drama winds slowly down. The trial takes two weeks and the expected violent Black-White confrontation never comes.

The case boils down to whom the jury believes. A White woman says Tommy Lee Hines raped her. A White policeman says the young Black man confessed to the crime. Hines’ teachers, family, friends and state psychologists say he is retarded, incapable of committing such a crime. Tommy Hines himself says nothing.

Prosecutor Mike Moebes says Hines’ mental abilities are not the issue. “Retardation is not a defense,” he said.

The all-White jury deliberates for three hours before returning a verdict: Guilty.

Judge Jack Riley sentences Tommy Lee Hines to 30 years in prison and congratulates Moebes for doing a “tremendous job.”

Hines’ attorneys vow to appeal. Newsmen are ready to file their final story on the Hines case, eager to get on with the next assignment. Then judge Riley asks Hines if be has anything to say.

No, sir,” mumbles the small man. No one knows for sure what Tommy Lee Hines thought then, as state troopers led him to a car and jail. The “special” boy his family had sought to protect, the man with the mind of a six-year-old child, the man “with a cross to bear,” the convicted rapist – simply gazed mindlessly ahead.

Bob Dart is a staff writer for the Atlanta Constitution.

Tupelo: Hometown in Turmoil

By Betty Norwood Chaney

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1978, pp. 16-19

“Hey, they got a jitney jungle,” a Black kid with a Michigan brogue exclaimed to his traveling companion as the bus wound its way into the small Mississippi town. “That’s boss,” he concluded with approval. This link to his own home in the North suddenly elevated the South a bit in his esteem.

I awoke from a semi-doze at the kid’s words and looked out the window. I caught sight of a shopping center to my right and a fairground to my left. The streets were deserted and clean. As we pulled into the station my eyes scanned the top of the city’s courthouse and the police station. A view of the downtown shopping area, only a couple of blocks down the street, was cut off by some buildings.

Feeling a tinge of excitement, as I always did when arriving in this place, I aroused my sleeping four-year-old on the seat beside me.

“Wake up, honey,” I told him. “We are in Tupelo. Mama is home!”

It was a pleasant June evening, so pleasant that when I called the house for a ride from the bus station and found the line busy, I decided to walk the four blocks home. With bags in hand, my son and I walked north up the quiet familiar streets. The breeze was gentle and warm. When we reached Spring Street, I looked down out of habit to where my brother has a shoe store/shop. It is in the block with the pool hall, a cafe and the supermarket that gives

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credit, an area that for years has been dominated by rural Blacks coming to town on Saturdays.

Although my little boy and I were two Blacks walking the streets of Tupelo, Mississippi at ten o’clock at night, it did not occur to me to be afraid. My only concern was that some dog might spot us and make a fuss. Yet, this was the same Tupelo that one reporter graphically described that summer as a place where “a war of sorts” is being fought in the streets and “to some in this racially divided northeast Mississippi trading center, your skin is your uniform.” It wasn’t that I was unafraid of meeting some hooded Klansman patrolling these streets, the thought merely did not occur to me. For me, this was simply home, the place where I had grown up, where my mother and most family still lived and the place that I loved to visit much more frequently than I had the opportunity. It was, too, the place where, ironically enough, I felt most safe.

Our walk home that night was uneventful. Except for an occasional remark from me to my son, who was quieter than usual having just awaken, the walk was made in silence. Not even a resident dog acknowledged our presence.

On the surface, Tupelo appeared to be the same uneventful town that I grew up in during the fifties and sixties. At that time, although White families occupied the last three houses on my street – houses of comparable sizes and conditions – the similarities ended there and our paths rarely crossed. Racial confrontations between us were practically nonexistent.

On school days, I and my Black friends and neighbors beaded north to school and my White neighbors -certainly not friends – headed south or westward. Some of my schoolmates came from a further distance south, from a poorer, more dilapidated area across the tracks called Shake Rags.

When I was in school, it was a rare occasion for Blacks to get their pictures in the paper regarding school events. I can recall following the activities of the White girl my age that lived on my street through various newspaper clippings. Although we grew up within a few feet of each other, we never had an occasion to actually meet. She was always a popular girl and one year she was chosen one of Tupelo High School’s beauty queens. I remember reading the different newspaper accounts with a mixture of pride and envy – pride because a girl from my street was featured in the paper and envy because the same kind of coverage was denied to us Blacks.

All of that has changed now. A few years ago one of my nieces was chosen “Miss Tupelo High.” Her Black face graced the pages of the paper that had denied our existence ten years before. Now, it is not at all unusual to see Blacks pictured alongside Whites in photographs of school activities.

School desegregation in Tupelo had been another of those uneventful occurrences. Black parents here, unlike many others, both North and South, have few – if any – horror stories to tell about school integration or busing. Total integration of the schools in Tupelo exists and children from all over the city now head in the same directions for school without incidence.

Another visible change in Tupelo since the fifties and sixties is in housing. The reely structures in Shake Rags that used to house a large percentage of the Black population have been torn down and replaced with a housing project in the north end of town. Blacks are also moving into apartment buildings and complexes and some homes that were for “Whites only” a few years ago. Most important of all, “nice,” attractive brick homes are darting up constantly, bearing witness to the fact that Blacks in Tupelo are indeed progressing.

At least, this was the appearance of things. Because a temporary halt had just been called to the picketing while a recently-formed biracial committee held negotiations behind closed doors, this quietude easily belied the fact that “a war of sorts” was being waged here. The spring and summer of 1978 had been anything but quiet in Tupelo.

The Black community that laid dormant, for the most part, throughout the turbulent sixties when Blacks in many other Southern towns were raising up in protest of racial discrimination, had at last taken a stand and declared racial discrimination to be very much a factor in their town. They bad shocked the White community and some Blacks by calling and supporting a boycott of White merchants that was 80 percent effective in protest of police brutality and job discrimination. And in so doing, they had inflamed the radical element in the White community and brought forth the long-subdued Ku Klux Klan in numbers and force unknown in recent times. Near confrontations between demonstrating Blacks and countering Klansmen became common occurrences that spring and summer.

While actual racial confrontations seldom had occurred in Tupelo, an analysis of the city by the United League, a state-wide civil rights organization first invited to the area to help stage demonstrations in protest of police brutality, revealed that Tupelo had one of the worst records in the state in terms of racial discrimination.

The analysis showed that Tupelo with a population of approximately 27,000, of which around 25 percent were Black, bad very few – and in some cases – no Blacks in decision-making positions.

According to a spokesman for the League, at the time the analysis was done, with the exception of one alderman, there were no Blacks in city government in decision making positions; there were no Black store managers in any of the department stores or supermarkets; a brother of mine, appointed a few years ago after the schools were integrated, was the only Black on the school board. In no instances were Blacks employed in the workforce in proportion to their percentage of the population, except in menial positions.

There had always been grievances that needed to be addressed. I remember that in the sixties when I was in college my community’s lack of activity was a source of some embarrassment for me.

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According to Attorney Lewis Meyers of the North ‘ Mississippi Rural Legal Services the unique economical situation of Blacks in Tupelo has been a major factor keeping race relations “good.”

In Tupelo, the per capita income and the standard of living is high compared to many other areas where the plantation/sharecropping system needed only raw, unskilled labor. With Tupelo as a mercantile center, Blacks moving into northeast Mississippi were a bit more well-to-do. These middle-class Blacks became the traditional “Negro” leadership, Meyers recounts, and bad heretofore been successful in keeping the peace in Tupelo. They were a buffer zone for powerful Whites who were the ones the Black landlords and the funeral directors and the store owners had to face downtown on the bank board when they needed capital. Because of “interest tied to capital” the White power structure had been able to rely upon these Black leaders to “keep the peace.

Life began to change, however, after the Vietnam war drained the Black community and left scores of young, vibrant Black men jobless. The veterans that returned to the South in a recession to face unemployment in their hometowns and states, were a different breed from the ones a generation’ before. Disillusioned by the war, most faced no jobs, lack of stimulation and lack of direction. They were in no mood to let the peace be.

One of the forces which channeled this unrest into protest was Alfred “Skip” Robinson, a building contractor from nearby Holly Springs and founder of the United League, a grassroots organization that claims 35 chapters and about 70,000 Black members throughout northern Mississippi. According to Robinson, a middle-aged father of six, he gave young Blacks an identity, a sense of direction and a sense of purpose. Even his detractors admit that they are impressed with his ability to arouse the interest of the Black community. Walter Stanfield, a League organizer, says that Blacks in Tupelo have been willing to deal with past grievances, but until the League came to town, there was no organization around to provide the necessary leadership.

Robinson does not sound like the sixties’ leaders. He speaks of old problems with a different perspective. “We are not trying to integrate the neighborhood schools,” said Robinson. “In so many ways, integration was the worst thing that ever happened to Black people. We lost so much of our identity, things that were our own. Before integration there were more Black school principals in Mississippi than anywhere else. Now, around here, you can count them on one hand. We are taking up where the movement of the 1960s left off.”

Since Robinson’s leadership and the League’s work, there have been several important victories. For one thing, League-led protest resulted in the removal of the two officers from the police force that were implicated in the brutality suit. Not only that, but according to Stanfield, a Black building inspector has been named to the city government structure and a Black assistant has been assigned to the light and water department. Also Blacks have reportedly been hired as store managers in two stores and in several cases have received jobs that they would not have received otherwise. Meyers said, “We’ve gotten more people around here jobs than Mississippi Employment Service ever did.”

However, Robinson is increasingly being criticized for his uncompromising position by both Blacks and Whites. Several Blacks voiced their frustration over his refusal to negotiate on a settlement. Mary Douglas, a young Black mother who marched with her children on the picket line and later served on the biracial committee created to air grievances for the city, referred in particular to a meeting that included Mississippi senatorial candidate Charles Evers. Robinson had been so late for that meeting, it had to be rescheduled.

The Rev. William Rittenhouse, pastor of the biracial committee, said he saw Robinson’s continual failure to negotiate as a “betrayal of willingness to work problems out.” Aaron Henry, state NAACP president, denounced Robinson’s behavior as an attempt to exploit the situation to gain power for himself and his movement.

The animosity between the League and the traditional Black leadership has also divided the Black community. League members have frequently referred to old leaders as “Uncle Toms” and suggested on one occasion that since they bad not done anything for the Black community in all this time, maybe it was best they stay out of things now.

Many of the League members are so-called “street people” – the chronically unemployed, some with minor criminal records and former drug users – some of the established leaders point out. If they cut themselves off from us, they ask, where are they going to go when they need people to fill the leadership positions they are seeking?

Kenneth Mayfield, the local Black attorney who brought the police brutality suit sparking the protest was one of a group that extended the imitation to the League to organize in Tupelo. Despite the divisions, he is optimistic. He feels that all things considered what has happened in Tupelo in recent months has been -good.”

As a result of some of the activities over the past seven months, grievances have been brought to the fore and a “framework has been set” for finding solutions to those grievances. Mayfield is on a committee with four Whites that has been designated to draw up an affirmative action

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plan for the city to be approved by the mayor and the board of aldermen. The plan will attempt to increase jobs and representation of Blacks by Blacks, particularly, in the areas where they are most affected.

Mayfield has little doubt that the city administration will approve an affirmative action plan. In order for the ” sore to heal,” he says, the city must come up with an affirmative action plan.

A weekend visit to Tupelo in late October again found the city undergoing a quiet period. A “silent” boycott was on, but a lot of Black residents had gradually begun shopping again in the White-owned stores.

The League’s activities had been halted while they awaited the affirmative action committee report. The Klan reportedly busied itself that weekend by making an appearance at a high school band festival. A group of robed Klansmen supposedly walked past a group of young Black teenage boys and girls on the street and, as they passed, one of the boys, to the amusement of the other kids, grabbed the band flagpole and jestured at the Klansmen, 11 show you who’s afraid of who.”

All fear of the Klan appears to be gone from the Black community. Their main importance in Tupelo this whole period, one observer noted, has been in providing theatrics for the media. While the presence of the Klan did much to draw attention to the area, Rittenhouse feels that the situation in Tupelo was blown out of proportion indeliberately by the press. Although Blacks and Klansmen openly displayed weapons, no violence erupted, he pointed out.

However, Tupelo, the “All-American City,” with its symbols of growth and progress in northeast Mississippi, has had difficulty in explaining why this ‘littleness in thinking,” as Rittenhouse characterizes the Klan, experienced a rebirth in their town. Many Tupelo citizens have, frankly, been embarrassed by the whole situation.

The city now quietly awaits the results of discussions to what will be tomorrow’s situation. This time amid the quietude I sensed that something was indeed transpiring. Maybe it was the undercurrents of a grassroots organization again mapping strategy, or the Klan regrouping, or more division taking place among the Black community, or maybe it was simply a city making plans for a communal Thanksgiving Dinner as Ritterhouse, the Baptist minister, would like to think.

Perhaps, the change was within me – my perceptions. For, I had realized that Tupelo was indeed a battleground for racial issues not because it caught up with the protest of the sixties ten years later -not because of any one individual or organization. Instead, Tupelo had become the nation’s best known town for racial conflict largely because of the people and events which have grown since the civil rights movement. Like other places in Mississippi or Massachusetts, Tupelo’s signs of progress may have given most Whites the opinion that race relations are good” and many Blacks a reason to expect more.

In this way, quiet or in turmoil, my hometown is everyone’s. Tupelo is our town.

The Dying Memory of Hugo Black

By Thomas Noland

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1978, pp. 20-21

“Mr. Justice Black and myself were both natives of Clay County. Each of us dearly loved and revered our native origins and the peoples thereof. He brought to that community and that people very great honors and very great responsibilities to honor and respect his memory.

“No other community of people ever has faced such a situation and such an opportunity in the history of our nation as far as I know. If we fail to do our part he is not necessarily disgraced as much as are we.”

Southerners may disagree on how many Souths exist today, what with the media remaking Dixie, but few will deny there are at least two. One is Atlanta and Birmingham and Durham-Chapel Hill–the South of skyscrapers, of fine universities, of regional theatre and professional ballet; of Black public officials elected by a multi-racial constituency and of suburban apartments with names like Shadowood and Quail Ridge. The other, older and vaster, is the South of Clay County, Alabama.

A hundred miles west of Atlanta, Highway 9 dips and rises through fields of soybeans and corn, past paintless and decaying farmhouses with kudzu growing in the doorways. It halves the brief one-story town of Lineville and six miles further south spills into Ashland. Mayor E. L. Wynn is fond of saying Ashland (population 3,000) has the highest altitude of any county seat in the state. That constitutes Ashland’s only claim to fame in the eyes of most of its citizens. The phrase even appears on the town’s stationery. But there is nothing on the stationery, or in city hall, or around the courthouse square, to indicate Ashland was the childhood home of Hugo La Fayette Black, probably the greatest Alabamian of this century and one of the 10 most influential justices ever to sit on the United States Supreme Court.

Three blocks off the square, there is one thing that indicates Ashland is the childhood home of Black. It is one of those round signs with a star in the middle, left over from the Bicentennial; it stands rather incongruously in front of an appalling eyesore. A close look reveals the dilapidated structure to be a house. The porch has caved in and brushy vines obscure any view from the road. It is where Hugo Black grew up.

One other thing, a hundred yards down the road is, somehow, even more poignant. It is a sign in an open field which says, “Future Home of Hugo Black Memorial Library-Museum and Boyhood Home.” On February 27, 1976-the day after Black would have turned 90-more than a hundred people, some from Clay County, many from New York and Washington, celebrated Hugo Black Day there, and applauded as Ashland businessman Morland Flegel raised the sign.

Amid hand-shaking with film producer Otto Preminger (said to be researching a movie about Black), Mrs. Hugo Black and legal scholar Max Lerner, Flegel talked that day of the “overwhelming support” the project had received. He spoke of national fund-raising, local fundraising and a goal of $750,000 for the library-museum, including restoration of Black’s boyhood home and its removal to the project site.

Lerner, in a touching address, talked of reconciliation. “There was a period when Ashland and Alabama left Hugo Black,” he said, referring to the Brown decision in which Black concurred. “But the wonderful thing is, Ashland and Alabama came back to him, and there’s a lovely completed circle there.”

Only, Lerner was wrong. Alabama came back; the Alabama that partakes of the first South, the Alabama of the Birmingham University that sponsors a three-day Hugo Black symposium around his birthday each year. Ashland, the other South, did not. For despite what was said Feb-

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ruary 27, there will be no Hugo Black Memorial LibraryMuseum in Clay County. With funds at a standstill for the past two years, with local skepticism and hostility showing no signs of abatement, and with Ashland pursuing a different library in conjunction with the county, a subdued Flegel said recently, “It’s out of the question.”

The schism between Black and his own people did not begin in 1907, when Black at 21, left his native county for Birmingham to hang out his shingle. No one considered it a slight for the local boy to seek his fortune in the raw, rambunctious “Magic City.” Besides, Black had tried being an Ashland attorney and abandoned the idea only after a fire destroyed his office and his $1,500 set of law books. The homefolks, most of whom were acquainted with his astonishing record at Ashland Academy, expected great things of him, and knew he had to accomplish them in great places.

It certainly didn’t begin in 1926, when Black returned home to launch his campaign for the U. S. Senate. He gave a rousing oration against concentrated wealth, trusts, big railroads and high tariffs; he echoed the sentiments of the hill-country populists among whom he had grown up.

Nor did it begin in 1937, when Senator Black was confirmed in Congress as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court despite the revelation of his membership in the Ku Klux Klan. It was a national controversy; but Clay County was not a party to it. What mattered at home was that hugo Black, who, as a boy, used to listen to the lawyers in the steamy Clay County Courthouse, had reached the pinnacle of his profession. Who was going to care if he had once belonged to the Klan? “They were so pleased with his appointment they didn’t get upset about it,” says Elizabeth Dempsey, who was a girl at the time. “The town acclaimed him.”

It began, rather, on May 17, 1954, the day the Court announced Brown. The school desegregation decision struck at the heart of the complex system of mores and folkways that had grown up around race. For White Clay County, it was something akin to Cain killing Abel. How could Hugo have done it? He was one of us, they said. Or was he?

Herein lies the chief irony of Clay County’s rejection of Hugo Black-for, the fact was that he, despite appearances, never rejected Clay County; it made him what he was and he knew it. A hard scrabble childhood-his father was a small storeowner-taught him the economic reality of Alabama’s north-south division.

South Alabama, the Black Belt, harks back to the antebellum “flush times” of the state. Its politicians-Gov. George Wallace, Lt. Coy. Jere Beasley, and Wallace’s heir-apparent, Fob Jamesare inheritors of the hidebound conservatism engendered by the plantation system. Hilly north Alabama never partook of the manorhouse tradition and brought the myth only because of Reconstruction racial fears. Yeoman agriculture (and few Blacks) was the pattern before the Civil War and after. Clay County is securely with the north, and no one was surprised in 1892 when the rising tide of Populism gave birth to the People’s Party of Alabama-that self-conscious challenge to Bourbon oligarchy-in Hugo Black’s Ashland.

The truth concerning Black’s position on Brown was that he, like any leader, was both of them and above them; but Clay countians could only conclude he was against them.

An anonymous pundit came up with the nutshell analysis that country lawyers still rely on to explain Black’s apparent contradiction. “When he lived in Alabama,” the saying goes, he wore a white robe and scared the Blacks to death. When he got to Washington, he wore a black robe and scared the Whites to death.”

The first time Black came to Clay County after the Brown decision, he went to his old church, Ashland Baptist. He sat alone. Only one person, according to Ms. Dempsey, would speak to him publicly, and that was her father, the county attorney. “Daddy didn’t mind taking a stand on what he believed in,” Ms. Dempsey says, “and he thought the minister and the congregation should have recognized Hugo because he wasn’t a criminal.” Hugo didn’t return for years.

There is a new, younger minister now, but many parishoners remember Black’s visit. “We have a lot of good Christians in this town,” one man said when asked about Black, “but not to the point where they’re willing to forgive and forget.”

What else, besides good Christians, does Clay County have? It has 13,000 people, who farm, sell merchandise in Ashland and Lineville, work at the Ashland poultry plant or make slacks or tires in Lineville’s two industries. Their median family income in 1975 was $5,756. They send their children to integrated public schools where the White-Black ratio is rougly seven to one. At Clay County High School in Ashland, there is Bible study each morning, an exercise in submission to the letter, but not the spirit, of justice Black’s decision banning prayer in the schools.

“Read your Bibles, but don’t pray,” is how a 1977 Clay County graduate describes the teachers’ feelings. The students respond without much prodding. He remembers that for several months after Black’s decision came down, the teachers led prayer in defiance of the decree. It was nothing like the violence that eventually greeted Brown, but it smacked of the same never-say-die, I-dare-you-to-enforce-it philosophy. By and by the Bible reading evolved, a practice which the teachers more or less clandestinely encourage.

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Another constant reminder of Black’s apostasy is the nagging racial trouble at Clay County High. Until this year, cheerleaders were elected by popular vote. Last year no Black hopeful received enough votes to take a place on the squad, and Blacks demanded a Black girl be appointed. They also demanded that selections in future be made by a panel of judges, not by vote, and threatened to quit the football team en masse if their demands weren’t met. The principal relented; a Black girl was appointed, and the judging came about. Earlier this year the judges chose eight White girls and no Black ones for the fall squad, and the principal had his hands full again. Once more Blacks threatened to walk off the team if a Black girl were not appointed. This time, the principal refused, and all but one of the Blacks quit. Word got out that one White cheerleader carries pictures in her wallet of the former Black players; she is no longer asked out. The unspoken thought in many Ashland minds is: If it weren’t for Brown, we wouldn’t be having these problems. And the chief symbol of Brown for them is Black.

It made sense, therefore, for an outsider-Flegel is from North Dakota-to take the lead when Barney Whatley and others proposed some sort of memorial to the justice in 1972, the year after his death. Another early leader, Bill Wilson, was a rural resource development expert from Auburn University and not a native Clay countian.

In the early days Flegel and Wilson were confident the money would come, once a few broadminded community pillars led the way with substantial gifts. And it seemed at first they were right. The Ashland Town Council and Clay County Commission contributed a total of $43,000. The 14-member Board of Directors of the Hugo Black Memorial Library, Inc.-all Clay countians-managed to get the Black homestead on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

That same year, Flegel, Wilson and others went to Washington, where Chief Justice Warren Burger received them warmly-“He was just great,” Flegel said-and pledged enthusiastic support. Mrs. Black donated 175 cartons of Black memorabilia for future use in the re-

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stored home. Oliver White of Ashland, who owned the house, donated it to the group. They purchased four acres up the road (where the “Future Home” sign stands) and hired an architect to draw up plans for the library-museum.

Then things began going wrong. President Nixon cut off federal funds that would have been available for IIbrary construction under the Service Construction Act shortly before he resigned. That dashed hopes for federal support; hopes for state support died in 1975, when the Alabama legislature, one of the more reactionary in the country, defeated a proposal by Representative Gerald Dial of Lineville to provide $100,000 for the project if there were a surplus in the state’s general fund. Dial never found out whether the money would have, come through-his proposal was killed in committee. Whatley, a wealthy Denver attorney, had pledged to match whatever the state would ante up. The legislature’s decision hurt doubly, since everyone had depended on Whatley to donate generously.

By 1976 it was clear the project was floundering, and was starting to be a liability for those involved. Probate Judge J. B. “Bunyan” Toland, a relative of Black’s who was instrumental in persuading the county commission to help out, was beaten for reelection that year. A one-term probate judge is a rarity in Clay; most people agree that the Black project did him in. Robert Dockerty, a professional fundraiser hired to coordinate the national effort, clearly was not on the job. He organized a five-person committee in 1976, including such luminaries as former Associate Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, former University of Alabama President Frank Rose and Ed Elson, owner of Elson’s gift stores in Atlanta. At the time, Dockerty said, “It is my dear hope to have this whole thing finished in three months.” It’s been more than two years since then, and the committee’s efforts have yielded a grand total of $4,000. Flegel still wants to try to gather enough money to renovate and move the home, but even that will take several thousand dollars more than is now on hand. Dockerty is rarely at the office these days. His wife says, “He really hasn’t been very active on it recently.”

The death-blow for the library-museum came late last year. The Town of Ashland, in conjunction with Clay County, came up with a joint city-county library board and applied to the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for Community Development funds to build the Ashland-Clay County Library. Last spring, a $100,000 grant came through-enough to pay for most of the construction.

Was the city-county library a deliberate effort to foil the Black memorial? No one in Clay County will go that far. On the other hand, no one will deny that the more people saw how bogged down the Black project was, the more they doubted anything would ever come of it. “I think everybody’s in agreement that we need a library real bad,” one county politico said. “They went along with the Hugo Black thing because it meant a library, but if there was any other way, they’d do it.” Agnes Catchings, who serves on both library boards, put it bluntly. “The people wanted a library,” she said. “They didn’t want to wait.”

One can make a case for saying the Black library-museum failed because it was too ambitious for a county like Clay. Perhaps. But that begs the overreaching question of why Clay County still turns its back on its most famous son, whose work is admired throughout the nation.

A few years ago, when the project still seemed healthy, the Women’s Study Club sold its little library on the courthouse square to an Ashland businessman. The club decided not to donate the profits to the Hugo Black Memorial Library-Museum, Inc. That should have told Flegel, Wilson and Toland something about forgive-and-forget in Clay County, Alabama. The other South, patient and unredeemed, endures.

Thomas Noland is a staff writer for the Anniston Star.

Southern Women

By Tina Williams

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1978, pp. 23

In Atlanta recently, the YWCA Vocational Counseling Center in conjunction with Project Focus, a CETA funded program offering vocational counseling to high school students, hosted a career conference, featuring a panel of professional Black women in mostly non-traditional career areas. The purpose of the conference was to expose the mostly Black female audience to information, resources and techniques for job hunting.

Women about to enter the work force for the first time, college graduates and what is called unskilled or lesser skilled women discovered that they need not be trapped in pay-nothing jobs; that with actual skill assessment they, too, could find a rewarding career. The employment trends of Black women show them traditionally occupying clerical, office and other service jobs such as secretary, maid, waitress, teacher or nurse. Still more frequently than not, they are earning minimum wages. This conference brought together some of the women who dared to step out beyond established traditions. The common reaction to the conference was “I didn’t know there was a Black woman doing that.”

The panel included a personnel director for Burger King; a mounted patrolwoman with the Atlanta Police Department; a business manager of a YMCA; an insurance sales person and financial planner; an auto mechanic for Sears; a computer programmer for the Atlanta Constitution; an assistant manager for Southern Bell’s Network Design Group; a camerawoman for WXIA television; a special market manager for Coca Cola; a firefighter; and the manager of the largest Black hair care salon in the country.

The second part of the conference allowed participants the chance to develop tools and techniques to help them take that giant step into nontraditional career opportunities.

For information on how to organize a career conference of this nature in your community, write Tina Williams, P. 0. Box 743, Atlanta, Ga. 30303.

Tina Williams was the coordinator for the YWCA Vocational Counseling Center Conference. She lives and works in Atlanta.

Economic Development

By Mark Levinson

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1978, p. 24

The debate over Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) is one of the perennial attractions of the Georgia legislature. Each year, when all the other issues have been settled, when every legislator’s pet project is safely funded, AFDC remains, the subject for posturing and polemics, last-minute pleas and a final, anticlimactic vote. When they cut up the budgetary pie in Georgia, the slice that’s left over goes for AFDC.

AFDC is the program commonly called “welfare.” Though it started over 40 years ago as one of several New Deal programs to provide income to the poor, AFDC alone has come to bear the stigma of a “welfare” program. Common preconceptions of shiftless welfare mothers having babies and driving Cadillacs have come to obscure the fact that the principal beneficiaries of AFDC are children, children who are deprived of parental care because of the absence or disability of one or both parents. Over one in eight children in the United States today is receiving AFDC benefits.

It has in so many other things, the South has lagged well behind the rest of the nation in AFDC benefit levels. Of the 12 Southern states, only Virginia pays AFDC benefits above the national average. The rest are on the bottom of the ladder, from Kentucky, where the maximum benefit for a family of four was $220 a month in 1977, to Mississippi, where the same family could get $60. In Georgia, the most a family of four can receive is $148 a month.

But the annual debate in the Georgia General Assembly deals with more than just the amount of AFDC benefits. The conservative leadership of the House of Representatives, led by Appropriations Committee Chairman Joe Frank Harris, has made a practice of inserting restrictions into the state budget each year which keep the AFDC appropriation, in the same budget, from being spent in its entirety. Thus, legislators seeking more money for AFDC recipients are forced to seek technical changes in the language of the appropriations bill in addition to a larger appropriation.

In 1975, AFDC had grown to take up 7.6 percent of Georgia’s state budget; over $138 million was apppropriated for AFDC. But in that year, fiscal crisis struck. Sales and income tax receipts dropped drastically due to the recession, and Gov. George Busbee called the General Assembly into special session to cut the budget. Teachers’ pay raises and property tax relief got the ax. So did AFDC. Over $10 million was cut from the welfare budget. The percentage of the state’s own estimate of need which was actually paid to recipients dropped from 71 percent to 62 percent, cutting the maximum grant for a family of four from $161 to $141 per month.

What followed reads like a comedy of errors. In addition to the percentage limitation, the legislature had decreed that in no case could the average benefit per recipient exceed $32 per month. When the percentage of need paid was lowered, thousands of people receiving tiny benefits (and thus remaining eligible for Medicaid) were cut from the rolls. Without their $1 and $2 per month payments dragging down the average, it rose above $32. Since this was illegal, another cut in benefits had to be made. Again, thousands of beneficiaries with low payments were cut from the rolls, raising the average again. The process repeated itself one more time before state officials were able to bring it to a halt. By the time the dust cleared, over 100,000 people had been cut from the rolls in a six-month period, including almost all the “working poor.”

The intervening three years have been spent defensively, in a successful attempt to ward off further cuts in AFDC. Much of that modest success has been due to the efforts of Francis Pauley, an indefatigable 76-year-old former HEW worker who spends her retirement working for the Georgia Poverty Rights Organization. For four years, Pauley has stumped the state, meeting with church and civic groups, legal services clients’ councils and local activists from Rome to Brunswick. During the legislative session from January to March, she spends much of her time at the Capitol, lobbying legislators and challenging anti-AFDC pronouncements by the leadership.

Pauley’s work has had a cumulative effect. Today, while misunderstanding is still widespread, AFDC is clearly on the political agenda in Georgia. New groups, such as a ministerial organization called Christians Against Hunger in Georgia, have formed as concern about the low level of AFDC benefits has spread far beyond the activist community. Groups in every part of the state are organizing to contact their legislators about AFDC. A statewide public information campaign is underway to counteract common public misconceptions about AFDC. So far, the signs are positive. The state Board of Human Resources has recommended a 30 percent AFDC increase in its budget for 1980, and the increase has survived the first round of budget cuts proposed by Busbee.

One of the difficulties with AFDC in Georgia is that it is, to a large extent, a racial issue. Five out of six AFDC recipients are Black, so in counties with a small Black voting population, a vote against AFDC is a safe vote. Some rural representatives from areas with large Black populations have become solid supporters of AFDC; in turn, Black voters have kept administration floor leader Rep. Roy Lambert (D-Madison) and veteran Sen. Culver Kidd (D-Milledgeville) in office.

Each year, a few more votes are added to the small core of pro-AFDC legislators. But the proAFDC faction is still a minority. If there’s one thing that has become clear in Georgia, it is that legislation to benefit poor people will not come about through reliance on the conscience of legislators. In 1978, the name of the game is organization.

Marc Levinson, former news editor of Creative Loafing/The Atlantan is the coordinator of the Public Assistance Coalition in Atlanta and writes frequently for Atlanta Magazine.

Health Care

By Ron Sailor

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1978, pp. 25

Southwest Community Hospital currently has only 125 beds – but it wants to build a new wing with 75 additional medical-surgical beds. The construction request, however, has been repeatedly turned down by the state health planning and development agency whose approval the hospital must have if federal dollars are to be used in the construction.

The Black Atlanta hospital claims a 90 percent occupancy rate for its medical-surgical area, but the agency discounts this and concerns itself with the hospital’s over-all occupancy rate of less than 85 percent. Still, the biggest contention is being fought over the definition of what a “community” is.

The hospital has applied a practical definition of community as the 3.5 mile radius contiguous to the hospital. The agency uses an expansive definition including much of the southern, southwestern, and northwestern portions of Fulton County, where the hospital is located. Using its definition, the agency is steadfastly insisting that there are available beds in the immediate “service area” of the hospital.

Southwest Hospital administrator A.W. Mumford, in a recent meeting with Georgia Gov. George Busbee, sounded, what for him has become a familiar refrain, “We are concerned that if Southwest is not allowed to expand, then it will die for lack of growth and insensitivity will be the cause.”

Hospital administrators see the problem they are experiencing as being typical of the kinds of struggle facing Black hospitals around the nation and particularly in the South. In less than 20 years the number of Blackowned hospitals across the nation has dropped from just over 100 to 26. The remaining 26 all face a number of the same problems.

At least three factors are responsible for their rather precarious plight:

(1) All of the Black-owned hospitals must have the approval of state regulatory agencies if they hope to expand or improve their facilities. Without the approval, federal dollars cannot be used to reimburse cost. These agencies are shielded from any direct control, and are autonomous and independent. Yet, while these agencies are independent they are subject to pressure from the formidable medical and convalescent industries’ lobbies. Blacks have little clout and small representation on the agencies’ boards, thus it follows that Black interests are often subordinated.

(2) Most of the remaining Black hospitals are in need of expansion and face-lifting. Many were built during the days of segregation as a response to the refusal of White hospitals to care for both indigent and non-indigent Black patients. Even then the physical plants were not impressive and the full range of programs underdeveloped. They face the most critical need to expand and improve their operations at a time when federal restraints have been placed on the construction of new hospital beds.

(3) Group insurance programs have brought beds in newly constructed suburban hospitals into the reach of the Black community. In Atlanta, in less than 10 years, at least five such hospitals have opened. They come complete with wall-to-wall carpeting, papered walls and prestige. Black hospitals are forced to compete with community pride or historical reverence because as in the case of Southwest Community, they must fight to improve.

Ron Sailor is an editor for the Atlanta Daily World and a commentator for WAOK Radio.