Tribute to Gwendolyn Cherry

By Staff

Vol. 1, No. 6, 1979, pp. 2-3

On February 7, Gwen Cherry, the Vice-President of the Southern Regional Council, died in an automobile accident in Tallahassee, Florida. Her death leaves the Council without one of its valued officers and a dear close friend.

As a state leader in Florida, Gwen Cherry set new standards and precedents for the discussion of issues in government relating to Blacks, other minorities, women and poor of her state. As a national leader, Gwen inspired many with her singular devotion and joyful energy. She raised issues, took positions, and conducted the business of justice without fear of personal loss or concern for monetary reward.

As an officer and member of the Council, Gwen led the organization from a time of increasing despair and disbelief to a beginning period of hard work, faith in human nature

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and potential, and no-nonsense judgment tempered by humor and tolerance.

While often overworked, under-regarded and too often unseen, Gwen Cherry was an example of accomplishment and belief in principled equality which many Blacks and women immediately emulated and admired. Yet for everyone of any race or sex–Black or White, male or female–she represented the virtue of patience untouched by hate, the belief in freedom unbridled by cynicism, and a very unique insight into the tragic-humor of people who resist the call for action.

As a lawyer, Gwen Cherry represented the interest of clients and causes in court. Still, she spent as much time developing the potential of cooperation as exercising the art of an adversary.

As the first Black woman in the Florida Legislature, she was the spokeswoman at home and elsewhere for feminism and equal rights. Yet, she was much more to many more. Gwen Cherry stood alone to say “nay” when the lynching mob of the Florida Legislature pushed through the death penalty. She stood alone in saying “nay” when boards and commissions were filled without Blacks and women. She stood alone and said “nay” when the state rushed helter skelter to push Black and poor students out of the schools in the name of competency. Gwen Cherry stood alone when she proposed numerous pieces of legislation to aid the afflicted, the aged, the poor, and the uninfluential.

Like most of us, Gwen Cherry lost too many of the battles which she fought as a state leader, an officer of the Council, a lawyer, and a national figure. Her victories were too few. So long as she took breath, however, she continued her struggle believing that people of good will would someday, somehow act.

The most fitting and lovely tribute that we as her friends and companions can pay to Gwen Cherry will be to endure beyond the conditions against which she fought and to take her life and friendship as a special gift which enables us to be more wise, loving, and devoted to the just and humane world of which she gave us a clear vision.

A RETURN TO THE SUN

By Sun & REP

Vol. 1, No. 6, 1979, pp. 4, 12

Five thousand years ago men worshipped the sun. After a 50 century hiatus, man is turning his attention and hope – toward that same sun. Today, we are caught in the middle of the most sophisticated technological web ever spun on this earth. The spider is energy – fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, and nuclear power. There is one possible avenue of escape – the sun, and its energy in the form of wind power, water power, biomass, geothermal energy and others.

The energy dialogue poses three critical questions about our resources: (1) Are they limitless? (2) Are they safe? and (3) Who controls them? With regard to the first question, there is no infinite amount of any extractable natural resource: none are renewable. There is only so much oil, for example, and even though new reserves are periodically discovered, the cost of bringing oil to the surface is substantial and increasing daily. Also, the demand for energy is likewise increasing at an alarming rate.

The second point, safety, produces damning evidence against all fuels, especially nuclear power. Burning fossil fuels produces a staggering amount of air and water pollution; and nuclear fuels are hazardous to extract, transport, use, store and dispose of. Finally, because the raw material of fossil fuels is site specific, requiring elaborate extraction, transport, refining and distribution equipment and systems, no individual acting alone or collectively has the ability to control the fuel he uses for heat and cooling. The capital investment needed in bringing such fuels to homes, businesses and industries has been great, encouraging large and powerful corporations to dominate and control our energy.

Solar energy and its offspring, on the other hand, are limitless, ubiquitous and can be captured by anyone at a fraction of the cost of conventional energy. We simply must learn how to do it.

The price of coal and oil has been kept at artificially low levels for many years, encouraging over-dependence on energy resources which are environmentally hazardous and in some instances, dangerously depleted. Experts, however, now believe the sun can power 32 percent of America by the year 2000, if the government and private sector will direct their considerable expertise to the research and development of solar energy.

There is some basis for hope. From a budget of $1 million in 1970, Washington’s current solar technologies budget for fiscal year 1979 has exceeded $500 million, and along with hundreds of small manufacturers, the giants of American industry General Motors, RCA, General Electric, Grumman, to name a few are beginning to invest seriously in solar development.

Perhaps because of the energy crisis, a new philosophy has emerged about man’s relationship to technology and his environment. Recent events have shown that despite our presumed mastery of technology, technology is actually controlling us. We are learning that we cannot create our own environment and mutilate the one which nature has created and shaped over millions of years. We have learned that in an attempt to control and simplify our lives, we have instead complicated them and placed them in the hands of powerful and centralized interests far removed from the expression of public needs and desires. The movement for appropriate or small-scale technology is designed to enable all human beings to regain control over their lives. It is a recognition that we must understand. We must accept our limitations, as well as respect the world in which live.

Appropriate technology (AT) includes the various solar technologies, holistic and preventive health measures, solid waste recycling, acupuncture, natural foods production, organic gardening and cooperative arrangements of all types. In other words, AT encourages people to control the tools they need to enable them to live in harmony with their environment. AT recognizes that ecological balance must be maintained if disasters, crises, shortages, suffering and poverty are to be minimized; that greed must yield to need in maintaining the progress that we have attained in many fields.

Adopting the concept of AT might lead to some of the following: a group of Alabama tenant farmers receiving technical and volunteer assistance to grow and eat their own fish and use the inedible portions for fertilizing crops in an alternating cycle; a rural community in South Carolina building and heating their passive solar-heated homes for practically nothing, after a modest initial investment; a Nashville resource recovery waste system where thousands of tons of glass, paper and metals are collected, separated, sold and recycled, with proceeds to participating communities in a system where people can learn management skills.

Or it might lead to community gardens in Charlotte, North Carolina operated and maintained by groups of residents who supply, plant, harvest and eat organically grown vegetables at a fraction of their retail cost; Southern Georgia rural communities powered by wood-burning stoves, supplied with forest wastes for heating, cooking and washing; a community health clinic in Jackson, Mississippi, where doctors and trained volunteers teach and practice preventive medicine to residents

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and are supported by the Jackson community; farmers in the citrus belt of Florida taking their products by truck to St. Augustine, setting up market stalls and selling directly to consumers, eliminating middlemen and 66 cents on the dollar they lose when processors, transporters, packagers and retailers take their cuts.

These are some of the ways AT can – and is already beginning to operate in the Southeast United States. The potential is here. The Southeast receives more sunlight than most sections of the U.S.; there are few organized co-ops, many isolated farmers and rural communities. The Southeast is politically, economically and socially poor, but more and more voices are being heard; complaining, questioning and demanding action. People want power to control their own lives and their environment. They want to return, not to a harder, poorer life, but to one that is safe, healthy and satisfying. People want to see, feel, hear and smell nature, not destroy it. They want a community which reflects and blends with nature, not one that overpowers it.

AT can help lead us to that time and place, but it cannot happen without changes in many of our assumptions and values. And AT has something for everyone – the rich, the poor, the powerful, the needy, White, Black, urban dweller, rural farmer, businessman, tradesman – all of us. It is the belief that each of us is a human being with the right and power to control the basic needs of our own lives, free from outside manipulation, and with the dignity that only comes with economic well-being and the pride of self-sufficiency.

SUN/REP is a new, non-profit, public interest organization committed to the advocacy and commercialization of appropriate technology in the Southeast United States. Direct your inquiries to: SUN/REP, Suite 412, 3110 Maple Dr., Atlanta, Georgia 30305. Phone: (404) 261-1764.

Black Farmers: A Vanishing Breed

By Robert M. Press

Vol. 1, No. 6, 1979, pp. 5-7

Bolivar County, Mississippi-Mary Coleman hunches over, shucking corn on the wooden porch of the small crossroads grocery store she runs here. Weedcroppers from the cotton fields will stop in around noon to buy cold bottles of sodapop, crackers, and Vienna sausage.

Houston Coleman, her son, has come by to talk to this reporter about the problems he and other Black farmers are having. He is a big man, dressed in gray slacks, a long-sleeved shirt, and mud-spattered black street shoes. He wears a straw cowboy hat and talks in a booming voice.

“At one time we had too much rain; next it was dry,” he says, recalling the past several years.

“That puts you in the hole. You keep borrowing and borrowing. Then you have a bad crop and next year you have to go back and borrow again.”

In 1976 the Coleman family could not get a bank loan or a federal farm loan, even though they had been consistently paying off their old debts. They were told their “payback ability” was not good enough, says Mary Coleman. “But it was all because we were Black,” she contends.

Just when things began to look desperate, the Atlanta-based Emergency Land Fund (ELF) loaned them $12,000 which the Colemans have since paid back.

The aim of ELF is to help Blacks keep their farmland a challenge that is becoming increasingly urgent.

During bad times, a lot of Black farmers in the area have quit or rented out, says Coleman, who now owns about 300 acres, which he farms in cotton and soybeans.

He swings into his pickup and we drive down a gravel road, then turn onto a dirt track bordering his cotton field.

Several adults and a few children – including his nephew – are hoeing weeds among the long lines of green cotton plants. Coleman lifts a big jug of ice water from the pickup and sets it down for the workers – all of them Black.

It is in the upper 90s. No clouds.

Houston Coleman picks up a hoe and starts chopping at some weeds among the cotton. “A lot of Black folks have sold their land,” he says. “Now they’re up North and they want to come home and they ain’t got no home to come to.”

Black farmers are a vanishing breed in the U.S.

A new federal analysis shows the number of Black farm operators declining by 90 percent since 1950, compared to a 54 percent drop among White farmers.

In the same period, the amount of Black-owned farmland has fallen by some 70 percent to less than one-half of 1 percent of total U.S. farmland. The amount of agricultural land owned by Whites has increased slightly since 1950, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) analysis based on 1974 Census Bureau figures.

The number of Black farm operators, according to the analysis, dropped from about 550,000 in 1950 to 53,000 in 1974. The number of tenant farmers also has been falling.

In 1950, Blacks owned some 12.5 million acres of farmland, almost all of it in the South, compared to 3.8 million in 1974. Whites, in the same period, increased their

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farm holdings from 825 million to 887 million.

The federal figures reveal an even greater loss of Black-owned farmland than ELF has been citing.

ELF steps in when other loan sources, such as banks or the federal government, refuse to take the risk of lending to Black farmers. It also offers legal aid to help Black families keep ownership of land.

In Mississippi, the state with the most Black farmers, Blacks got FmHA operating loans (for seeds, fertilizer, and equipment) of $2,746,000, while Whites got $21,029,000, in fiscal year 1975, according to USDA figures cited by ELF.

The total FmHA loans for the same period for purchase of land and for development were: Whites $9,852,000; Blacks $662,000.

Department of Commerce statistics for 1974 show that in Mississippi there were 32,061 White-owned farms and 6,387 Black-owned farms.

Edward Pennick, ELF director, says the Carter administration’s “rhetoric” on helping Black farmers has been good, but tangible action is missing. He wants more Black lending agents in the FmHA, but the FmHA’s Pickinpaugh says there are few positions available.

And the problem is not limited to loans.

Some Black farmers in South Carolina suspected prejudice when graders at a White-run packing shed kept giving them less than the top grade (and hence less money) for their tomatoes. When they formed their own packing cooperative, other certified graders gave their tomatoes top rating, says Edgar Jordan, of the Southern Cooperative Development Fund in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Poor farm management. Many Blacks fail to look at farming as a business, says Jordan. They have “poor record keeping, poor farm management,” he says.

Many of the South’s Black farmers have not learned new technology,” he adds. This is also true of poor White farmers in the regions, he says.

One thing that would help, he suggests, is formation of more cooperatives for sharing equipment and marketing.

Sale of land by inheritors. Farmland in most Southern states is inherited under a legal arrangement that gives each heir an interest in the entire farm rather than a piece of land for himself. But any one heir can sell his interest or petition a court to order sale of the land so that proceeds may be divided up equally among heirs. It is one way to turn an asset into cash.

The problem arises when not all the heirs agree to the sale – or are even aware of it. This situation occurs most commonly among Blacks.

Often heirs have the false impression nothing can be done to their land unless all the heirs agree. But that is not the case, says ELF director Pennick.

Attorneys’ fees in Alabama for handling such sales can be as much as 10 percent of the value of the sale.

Inheritances often are further complicated by lack of a detailed will, says Joe Adams, of the ELF branch in Mississippi.

A case now before the Alabama Supreme Court challenges the constitutionality of such proceedings. In that case, one of more than 75 heirs to the English family farm of some 300 acres, much of it in timber, asked the court to sell the land and divide the proceeds. The other heirs objected to the sale. (A White attorney bought the interest of the selling heir before the sale but asked that the sale proceed.)

Behind the Black exodus from the farm lie the voluntary decisions of many rural Black families to search for a better life in the city. But it is argued that many Black farmers would have stayed on their land if they had been able to improve their income.

Median income among White farmers (in constant 1975 dollars) increased from $9,730 in 1970 to $11,237 in 1975, but Black median farm income rose only from $4,278 to $4,857, according to USDA figures.

Blacks, much more than Whites, tend to have smaller farms and fewer outside sources of income. They are more vulnerable during periods of sharp increase in farm operating expenses and during periods of bad crops.

“The problem is the bad years,” explains James Carmicle, a Black Mississippi delta farmer. “Just when you’ve met the high production costs,” he continues, prices for crops drop “and you can’t make it.”

Carmicle owns 53 acres and rents another 70. One 40acre plot he works carries three deeds his own and those of his two sisters. “I work hard all year, then at the end of the year I can’t meet obligations,” he laments.

ELF and others point to these problems contributing to the Black departure from the farm:

1. Prejudice in making loans to Black farmers.

2. Poor management of Black farms.

3. Sale of Black farmland by one of the heirs without consent, or sometimes even knowledge, of the other heirs.

4. Sale of Black-owned farmland for unpaid taxes.

What is needed, they say, are fairer lending practices, including appointment of more Black lending supervisors in the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA), more technical aid to Black farmers, and a change in state laws to make sales of farmland fairer to all involved.

Some help for small farmers is pending.

Congress is in the final stages of approving a bill to allow the FmHA to make loans to small farmers at 5 percent instead of the current interest rate of about 8 percent.

And the USDA is sponsoring several conferences over the next few months at which top department officials will meet small farmers and become better acquainted with

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their needs.

But on the main problems outlined by ELF, progress is slow:

Prejudice. Although its contention is difficult to prove, ELF asserts that Black farmers with small landholdings have a harder time getting loans than White farmers of similar circumstances.

“In some cases we’ve found this to be true,” says Lynn Pickinpaugh, new director of the FmHA’s production loan division. Complaints are investigated, but no large-scale discrimination against Blacks has been found, he asserts.

“Many times they say it is discrimination and it is other reasons,” says Pickinpaugh.

Speaking of what he has seen in the Mississippi delta, cotton farmer Houston Coleman says: “Most of the White folks are in the office – and they know what’s going on. Even if you qualify, a White man can run in there and grap a stipulation and twist it the way he wants to.”

Sale has been blocked until the appeal is heard.

Attorney Michael Figures, of Mobile, Alabama, representing the other heirs, contends such sales should not be allowed until any heir who wants to retain the land has been given first chance to do so. The same person should be given the right to buy out the others, he adds.

Tax sales. If a Black family living in Chicago, for example, inherits farmland in the South, the Southern county tax office might have lost track of them. An heir still living on the land may falsely assume he does not have to pay the entire bill until he is notified of long overdue taxes and forced to sell.

Notice for tax sales in some states is made only in the local newspapers, so distant heirs may never hear of the sale.

Once sold, owners often “redeem” the land. This means they can repurchase the land during a redemption period under conditions that vary from state to state. In Mississippi, for instance, the conditions include paying back the taxes, the cost of the sale, and interest on the unpaid taxes.

The redemption process is not always easy and takes time and added expense. One improvement, says Figures, would be to assure that any inheritor living on the land be given immediate right to repurchase it by himself, to the exclusion of the other heirs.

ELF has been operating a tax watch to alert heirs of pending sales. In Mississippi, says Adams, fewer Blacks are losing their farmland today as a result of tax-sales.

Robert Press is a staff correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor.

Reprinted by permission from The Christian Science Monitor. c 1978: The Christian Science Publishing Society. All rights reserved.

Solar Greenhouses: The Greening of the South

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1979 pp. 8-10

Publisher’s Note: I was in no mood to he convinced when Bill Dow began to explain his idea last year. As he sat with his legs draped around one of my office chairs, I wondered what kind of bedside manner I was about to experience from this physician who prefers T-shirts and tennis shoes as work garments.

There was a twinkle in his eyes, shielded only in part by the horned-rimmed glasses which kept poking back towards his forehead. Apparently, as a part of his ceremony, he scratched his head and asked, as if both of us might figure out the answer, “What could cut your heating bill 25-45 percent, produce some vegetables and fruit year-round, and only cost about $400?” “I thought we were going to talk about issues of health care or jobs…” Bill didn’t wait for the completion of the sentence. Just as well. He asked another question more direct: “Why not attach a greenhouse to your home, grow some vegetables in it, and use the warm air to heat your house in the winter?” A greenhouse onto my house. Fine, Bill, but what does this have to do with heating bills and food? “It’s all the same thing,” he said, with an arch in his voice and a shift in his chair. I knew then that he was going to enjoy this conversation:

Suitts: Okay, let’s see if you’re serious. Give me the basics.

Dow: While everybody else is talking about elaborate technology and fancy solar energy equipment, there’s something simple that a lot of folks can do that involves greenhouses. You know even in the winter a greenhouse overheats in the daytime and is generally ventilated to keep the temperature down in the low 80s. With a solar greenhouse, instead of ventilating the hot air to the outside, just allow the air into the house when it’s needed.

Suitts: That’s why you said solar greenhouse.

Dow: Yes. Not only would it act as a solar collector for heating the house during the day, but it also would contain heat storage devices so that the excess heat can in part he stored and then released at night. Then you have a heat source that can be used to maintain temperature.

Suitts: I think it’s going to be complicated.

Dow: Not at all. Let’s take it in steps. First, a greenhouse is to be attached to the south side of the dwelling. Obviously, you place the greenhouse at that location so that it can receive the full benefit of the sun from the east in the morning, from the south at midday, and the west in the evening. At the same time, the dwelling serves as an insulation and a barrier to the north which would be the side through which ordinarily the heat would escape during the winter days.

Suitts: Simple enough.

Dow: Yes, and there’s more. The second reason you place it on the south side is because the sun is lower on the southern horizon in the winter than in the summer. The fact is that much more heat passes through a surface when it strikes the surface on the perpendicular. Thus, in the winter, the greenhouse would give maximum heating potential because on the south side it would be perpendicular to the sun’s rays. Even at the coldest points in winter, the attached greenhouse on the south side could generate 900 heat with the winter sun.

Suitts: Okay. There’s heat in the greenhouse. Won’t it escape?

Dow: The storage of the heat can be accomplished in several ways. The two major types of storage are in the floor and in water. The floor of the greenhouse can be, for example, concrete slabs or gravel, each of which can heat up during the day either from direct sunlight or contact with the air. Then after sundown, the floor will gradually give up its heat to the greenhouse helping maintain the temperature. The storage of heat can also take place by placing water in various containers in the greenhouse. This is often done in 55-gallon milk containers. In either case, the principle is the same, the water heats up during the day and gives off heat at night. Thereby, you can store heat to

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warm the temperature in the night.

Suitts: Still, don’t you have to do anything else to prevent the heat from escaping?

Dow: Well, all the walls not covered with transparent material should be heavily insulated. The transparent “skin” or covering should be a double layer. The two layers, with air between, provide some insulation. The outside layer is usually a fiberglass acrylic material and the inside covering a polyethylene sheet. There are different types of covering on the market and the materials can vary.

Suitts: Tell me, what do we do with the hot air that we’ve got in the greenhouse? Carry me one step further.

Dow: Rather than venting the hot air which you have stored in the greenhouse to the outside, on the cold days of fall, winter, or spring, the warm air can be allowed to move into the adjacent house or building. Hot air moves to cold, you know, and by opening a window or a door from the greenhouse into the house, the warm air from the greenhouse will naturally move into the house. With an opening such as a door, the cold air off the floor will move into the greenhouse as the warmer air higher up in the greenhouse moves to the upper part of the door and into your house. If the opening is only a window, then the air can enter the greenhouse from a duct off the house floor to the greenhouse or from crawling space under the house and upon heating enter through the window.

Suitts: That sounds more like a doctor’s explanation of the respiratory tract. Are you sure about that?

Dow: A friend of mine in Durham, N.C., John Hatch, has a 8 X 16 greenhouse attached to his first floor with a sliding glass door. The living quarters are on the second floor. Throughout the winter, Hatch is able to turn off his heat at 9:00 a.m. and turn it on again a half-hour after sundown. Some people have used a fan to help move the warm air into the house. Same is true for heating the greenhouse at night. Some people use the passive heat of the storage facilities and others actively heat their greenhouses at night. An 8 X 16 solar greenhouse in Pittsboro, N.C., with seven 55-gallon drums of water storage, never got below 530 during this past winter. And that was without any additional heating and some very cold weather.

Suitts: What if the sun doesn’t shine for three or four days or a week?

Dow: If one is growing vegetables or plants sensitive to the cold and cannot be moved into the house, then there will be a need for a back-up heating system. This in all likelihood will simply mean leaving the opening to the house open so that heat from the house will hold the temperature up. The alternative which many people use is to simply put a heating unit in the greenhouse usually an electric heater or a wood stove. Another alternative some are using is to compost in an area adjacent to the greenhouse and utilize the heat given off by the compost.

Suitts: What about summer?

Dow: Indeed, the greenhouses do get hot in the summertime. However, adequate venting of the inside temperature will make it approximate the outside temperature. If this develops into a significant problem, a turbine vent can be put on the roof of the greenhouse. The turbine vents move a great deal of air and should hold the inside temperature about equal to the outside temperature.

Suitts: Bill, I gather this is where the business of growing the vegetables comes in.

Dow: Right. The food producing potential really is limited only by space and the grower. Many vegetables, such as tomatoes, broccoli, lettuce, turnips, spinach, onions, and others can be grown. Fruits, too. The greenhouse may serve to prolong the fall and help the spring start earlier. This also means that one can start seedlings which can be transplanted to an outside garden later. Houseplants, obviously, can also be grown in the greenhouse.

Dow: Oh yes, and then there’s fish.

Suitts: If you are going to tell me some story about how to multiply fish and loaves, I’m ready to declare it a miracle.

Dow: Seriously, there are several places in the country where people are experimenting with using water for storing heat and growing fish. And these are edible fish, not the aquarium sort.

Suitts: It sounds impressive, exciting; however, I go back to the beginning. Am I going to give up an arm and a leg to get a greenhouse built? For myself, I’ve never built a greenhouse and really wouldn’t know where to begin.

Dow: Actually, it’s very simple and if you just know the basics about carpentry and do a little reasoning and reading, the task is hardly insurmountable. There are several good reference books I’d suggest you might want to look at – studying some details in each of them. (References listed at the end). In total, the parts and materials will be around $400-$500.

Suitts: It’s such a simple idea and really very exciting. I suppose it has a great deal of potential.

Dow: These greenhouses can be very important to folks with a little money and a lot of time. Where the government is spending millions of dollars to help poor and low-income families cut down on their heating costs, perhaps they ought to think about this idea as a means for “weatherization.”

I don’t want to take us too far. But, there is a possibility of some jobs being generated here. This kind of building can be done by the hard-core, unemployed young whose skills are not yet developed. In rural areas in the South, young folks could build greenhouses in jobs programs for the elderly and the disabled and get some valuable skills which could be used in later life. Actually, the ideal people for this task would be the small and subsistence farmers who need supplemental income. This type work would allow the time needed for agricultural pursuits. The actual building can be done in three to four days.

Farmers have the basic construction and horticultural skill already. With some basic theory and design, background and information they should be able to get into this developing trade. Perhaps, with time this could be expanded to include other forms of solars and appropriate technology installation and maintenance. At the very least, the added income could help maintain these farmers on their farms rather than have them join so many already severed from their land.

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There are still some questions to be answered before the scale of this kind of project gets massive. True, the technology is simple and the undertaking is relatively inexpensive as a means of partially heating a house and producing food. Still, we don’t know precisely how much heat savings or food can be generated. We don’t know exactly what the cost efficiency comes to be. There’s a need for more data and more experience. I don’t mean that the question at this point is will it work. Rather, the question is how well will it work given certain conditions, such as the type of weather or the floor space to be heated in the house. Also, how well does it work in urban areas compared to rural; in the South, West, or even the North.

When you think about it, however, the possibilities may extend a long way. For instance, could the increase in humidity in the house coming from the greenhouse alleviate many of the upper respiratory tract problems which are bothering people in the wintertime because of dry house heat? Also, what about reducing stress? When people become more vulnerable to social and economic pressures, they become more susceptible to disease. So, it might he possible that a solar greenhouse which reduces heat arid produces food, could help somebody feel more self-sufficient, self-reliant, and make them less susceptible to disease. Maybe…

Suitts: Wait a minute. Let’s not put too much of the potential before the fact now. Come back to the ground floor. Where do we go from here?

Dow: For folks with money and the inclination to try it, they can begin to follow up on the idea for themselves. For those with no money – and these are really the people who might be helped the most – lending institutions, governments, churches, and foundations are going to need to make some money available for some exploration and demonstrations of how it all works. No matter how you look at it, it can’t be a bad return on the dollar: heat, food, possibly jobs, and perhaps improved health – all for a little time and a little more floor space in your house.

For information or inquiries, write Bill Dow, SRC, 75 Marietta Street, Atlanta, Georgia 30303.

REFERENCES:

The Food and Heat Producing Solar Greenhouse. Fisher Yanda; Building Using Our Sun-Heated Greenhouse, Helen Scott Nearing; The Solar Greenhouse Book, James C. McCullogh; “Organic Gardening Farming” magazine. December 1977.

Solar Greenhouses: A Method of Survival for Small Farmers

By the Staff of the Graham Center

Vol. 1, No. 6, 1979, pp. 10-12

Today, the American small farmer is an endangered species. As control of land and the farm economy has concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, one of the biggest migrations in human history has occurred during the past 40 years as millions of people have moved into urban areas. In 1977, American farms vanished at the rate of 500 a week. In the South, the nation’s fastest growing area, change in rural patterns are especially dramatic. Estimates project that Black-owned land in the rural South is disappearing at the rate of 6000 acres per week. At the present rate of attrition, the Black Southern farmer may well be extinct by 1990.

Preserving the small farm in this country will require significant changes in our present political and economic systems. Through a reliance upon non-renewable fuels and increasingly complex technology, U.S. agriculture has become agribusiness. One movement towards change has been the development of low-cost, energy-efficient methods and new skills appropriate to the background and resources of small farmers.

In support of this development, the Frank Porter Graham Center, a 400-acre demonstration farm and training center located in Anson County, North Carolina, is sponsoring a series of solar greenhouse construction workshops. These workshops will introduce solar-heating techniques, teach building skills, and begin to develop a local market for greenhouse construction. The Graham Center is conducting the greenhouse workshops with funds from the National Association of Farmworkers Organizations (NAFO) and the consultation and on-site assistance of the Solar Greenhouse/ Employment Project.

The Graham Center was established in 1972

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as a project of the National Sharecropper’s Fund. At present II farmers from Anson County and surrounding areas are enrolled in the Graham Center’s Small Farm Development Program, which offers technical and practical training for small-scale limited resource farmers. The greenhouse workshops are a component of this demonstration program which includes projects such as a 10sow pasture operation, 30-acre crop rotation system, large-scale composting, and dairy goat demonstration.

The Graham Center believes that solar-heated greenhouses can help cut the rising costs of food and energy. Virgil Chance, the Center’s farm supervisor, says, “With a solar greenhouse, you can grow vegetables in the wintertime and start planting earlier in the spring. You can also heat your house with it. You can grow potted plants and flowers, either for the family or for making money.”

Another of the workshops’ primary objectives is to train a limited number of farmers in greenhouse design and construction techniques. The Solar Greenhouse/ Employment Project envisions small farmers using these skills to create off-season employment opportunities for themselves.

Graham Center and the Solar Greenhouse Employment Project encouraged residents of Wadesboro, Charlotte, and other nearby communities to participate in the workshops. The first session was held during the last week of January. Using new materials, participants built an II X 18 greenhouse directly onto the southside of the Graham Center’s main building. The total cost of the pro-

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ject was $850, and the greenhouse now generates a substantial part of the main building’s wintertime heating supply.

Despite unusually cold and wet January weather, 45 people – including 17 local farmers attended the first workshop. Trainees were involved with all aspects of construction – pouring the foundation, framing, glazing, insulating, sealing, hanging and finishing drywall and painting. Instruction was also given in greenhouse design, cost estimating, and in specifying and collecting materials.

The second workshop, held in early February, was designed to demonstrate low-cost construction methods relevant to local needs and available resources. This greenhouse was built onto the southside of a Graham Center double-wide mobile home at a cost of $400. As in the rest of the rural South, trailors comprise an increasingly high percentage of single-family residences in Anson County. The supplemental heat provided by a solar greenhouse has been proven to lower the high cost of heating traitors by 25-40 percent.

The second greenhouse was built by local farmers and Graham Center staff with technical assistance from members of the Solar Greenhouse Employment Project. Costs were held to a minimum by using recycled building materials. The building crew salvaged metal roofing and lumber from an abandoned tenant cabin on the Graham Center’s property. Bricks, railroad ties, and other used materials were also collected around the farm and county.

In addition to their on-job teaching, Solar Greenhouse/ Employment Project conducted a series of evening classes. They covered the concept of solar energy as an alternative heating source, financing and maintaining the greenhouse, and the different uses of the structure in growing vegetables, ornamental plants, and herbs.

Methods of greenhouse composting and pest control were also discussed. The classes were held as part of the Graham Center’s regular twice-a-week curriculum for local farming families. All participants received building plans and detailed instructions following both workshops.

The third solar greenhouse, scheduled for construction in early March, will be sited next to a local farmer’s home and built of salvaged materials. Seven Anson County families (and 21 other participants in the first two greenhouse workshops) have expressed interest in adding on a greenhouse. “Around here we usually start to sow seeds on Good Friday. If I had a greenhouse we could set out with transplants already five or six inches tall,” says Alex Waring, a local farmer and member of the Graham Center staff.

The third project will be planned and built by local farmers who have been involved in the previous two. The Graham Center hopes to establish a revolving loan fund which will enable members of the Small Farm Development Program to borrow interest-free “seed” money for greenhouse construction. North Carolina state tax laws already allow a 25 percent credit for investments in energy-saving home improvements.

The combination of financial incentives, newly-learned skills, and cooperative working arrangements applied to this model of accessible, low-cost technology have made solar greenhouses one modest, but realistic way that people in this community can help themselves survive as small farmers in the rural South.

This article was prepared by the staff of the Graham Center.

Wilcox County–A Day in Wilcox County: 1967

By Floyd Hunter

Vol. 1, No. 6, 1979, pp. 13-14

Editor’s Note: As part of a report by the National Education Association regarding conditions of teaching and learning in Wilcox County, Alabama, Floyd Hunter wrote that “Life in Wilcox County slays the same in spite of a lot of talk about ‘progress’ and ‘change.’ Substantively the Negro, as least common denominator in the social scale, stays put. Until there is an emerging newness in relation to his lot, no basic social change can actually be noted in Wilcox County.”

That was eleven years ago. Today, with the recent election of two Blacks to important public offices, the “emerging newness” that Hunter talks about has been ushered in. Harriet Swift reports on that event in this issue. In the following pages, we offer you as companion pieces Hunter’s analysis of Wilcox County in 1967 and Swift’s account of a new day in Wilcox in 1978.

Life in Wilcox County stays the same in spite of a lot of talk about “progress” and “change”. The old ways take on new names, and the shift in nomenclature is called change. The basic ownership patterns have not changed.

Such social movements as may have occurred in Wilcox County in the past two decades are actually adaptations to shifting agricultural conditions and to the changing requirements of the national industrial production machine, a part of which now requires increased acreages of wood pulp-producing lands.

Substantively the Negro, as least common denominator in the social scale, stays put. Until there is an emerging newness in relation to his lot, no basic social change can actually be noted in Wilcox County.

In order to gain some empirical, firsthand impressions of Wilcox County, I began a series of chain-referral interviews with five separate roadside storekeepers and restaurant operators upon entry into the County (as will be described later, I also interviewed four families in the land ownership establishment and three Negro families). These lower middle class, socially marginal men and women, well described by Faulkner, are good informants about power personnel superior to them and about the social and economic conditions generally. Their place and fortune are dependent upon the stability and/or shifts of the whole social system. They are upwardly mobile and have their eye out for the main chance, and they so instruct their children. The opinions of the storekeepers were in some instances reinforced by sideline opinions of the hot-stove league loafing about.

There was general agreement that plantation farming is still the base of the establishment. A half-dozen family names were immediately given to me as being those of the landed establishment. Of these, in the time at my disposal, I was able to interview four. There were obviously a couple of dozen more families who could have served equally well as respondents.

My general, immediate impression from these interviews is that the squirearchy is firmly in command, but recognizes that it is being challenged by the Negro people. It considers the lower middle class an ally in keeping things as they are and wrongly does not consider these people a threat to plantation power. The older members of the ownership establishment are being replaced by those younger members who have been well indoctrinated for their positions; their indoctrination includes liberal doses of race superiority propaganda laced with the notions that rights of property, recognition, and privilege should be reserved for a few.

Attitudes toward race are often humorously put, e.g., “The old school Negro principal I knew well was a little different than the present ones. The old man was well educated, a graduate from Princeton, and he wrote poetry! His interests were more intellectual and not so active, if you get my meaning” (laughing roghishly) or “an awful lot of them [the Negroes] have got into the schools! Why, I think there’s three of them in Camden High right now!” There are the tired old references to the poverty and struggle of the grandfathers who returned from the “War” to “parched corn and chicory coffee and chick-pea flour for bread,” but no reference to the miserable poverty of the rural Negro ghetto today. There is considerable reference to the Selma March in disapproving tones and terms, applause for the freeing of those who have been charged with murdering Negroes, and concern that the “unfavorable publicity” over “recent events” might impede the industrial and agricultural “progress” that seems so evident on every hand to the “haves.”

There was the street along the state route on the west side of town – externally undifferentiated from a thousand such streets in smalltown America – along which the “retired” plantation owners (people who plant crops) and their retainers (lawyers, schoolteachers, and ranking commercial suppliers) live. Those who live apart – away from this charmed ecological inner-ground – apologize for their lack of status; a bailiffs wife, for example, who lives in the woods in the hills on the “wrong side” of town. Her husband, a self-made man, serves the requirements of the establishment.

There are the sly jokes about race that run around a circle of men at the restaurants which turn seriously into political questions observed in the headlines of the morn-

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ing papers.

There are the suspicious looks t a stranger who may enter a restaurant from a federal highway and who may dress slightly differently from those on the scene.

There are the subtle questions about where you are from and what your business might be. “How come you’re riding in a ‘rent car’?” They have observed the license number and are letting you know that they have.

There is the sad country music with interspersed conservative philosophy in the television commercials and narrow-minded pulpit orations.

There are the many, many Negroes in uniform, hardly seen by those around them, going to Vietnam.

There are the half-ton trucks with racks for hunting rifles and shotguns within easy reach over the driver’s seat.

One physically feels the relatively open, churlish hostility of some of the gas station attendants and their crony circles. There is sorrowful reference to the fact that a nearby plantation which once had 47 Negro family tenants now has but two families (living, as I noted, in tin-roofed shacks). The sadness, on the part of those who flatten and elongate their vowels, was over the loss of a “way of life,” a loss that I was at a loss to understand – for the way of life (again) seemed unchanged to me over any number of years that I can remember.

No, the establishment is in its Georgian-architecture squirehouses, the little fellows tending the store, and the Negro in his place, hanging seemingly vacantly around the stores but watching too. Only the seasons seem to change; yet there is a quarrelsome restlessness apparent among the secure ones, an inability to talk long without speaking of race.

Late in the afternoon, in trying to locate the school principal of the predominantly Negro community of Pine Gully, I had the opportunity of looking through the windows of several padlocked buildings which are called schools, but which more fittingly should be called prison houses for the very young. At this point, I shall leave a fuller description of these barren detention places – places without visible amenities for living or learning – to the judgment of the NEA Investigation Committee. One cannot help wondering, however, at the horror of boredom and frustrated purpose that such buildings engender in pupils and teachers alike.

Pine Gully itself is a Negro community of 200 or 300 families, as large as the White community, Pine Hill. Pine Hill appears on a local map; Pine Gully does not.

I spoke with only three people in Pine Gully, two of whom are related to the obviously inferior Negro “academy” (Negro high school).Academy is a euphemism applied to Negro high schools originally designed by the whites to make Negroes think they were getting halls of higher learning for their children rather than cesspools of educational despair. The cynical term is in the same category of white regard as the term professor applied to a lowly school principal. All repeatedly emphasized the “sorry,” tragic plight of the segregated, Negro schools. One man spoke at some length about the insignificant political position of the Negro in the local power structure. The other informants underscored what he had to say. This man was calculatedly “reserved” with me in the early moments of our interview, but warmed up to considerable militancy later.

Strangely enough, I saw this informant, even if a very minor figure, as a part of the existing power structure of Wilcox County. While he still is effectively barred from the upper reaches of the existing power structure, he is a part of the active, “in the wings” opposition that it wishes to placate and buy off. He is a man who, with a few votes, could be a real figure in the elective power apparatus of the County. He is not there yet, but he has a modicum of recognition and he is striving for more. He has learned to survive, and he is on the move. The ratio of power, however, in the Negro’s case in point is still 4,000 acres to 40. He owns approximately 40 acres of land and his house. He is an administrative employee at the high school – a position that is a slight nod of recognition by the general power-structure to a Negro they feel that they can or must trust. To him, there has been some progress. He says as much.

Yet this man, too, is caught in ambivalence. He refuses to be too critical of the establishment, because he, too, owns land. He is “officially” connected with those who educate the young. He says, however, “in case of trouble, if they come after me, they’ll have to come on my land, and I’ve got guns in my house and a light out front. I can see them, and they can’t see me. Or if I have to run to my car, to get out the back way, I got guns in it, too, and bullets aplenty.”

The informant finally summed up the power position of his race in this way:

“I asked the sheriff, How come you let the white folks get by with making all kinds of traffic violations while you catch the Negro for even thinking about making a traffic mistake?’ The officer replied, ‘When you niggers pay my salary and can hire and fire me, I’ll start treating you just like everybody else, and not before!’

Excerpted from Wilcox County, Alabama: A Study of Social. Economic, and Educational Bankruptcy, National Education Association, Commission on Professional Rights and Responsibilities, June 1967.

A New Day in Wilcox County: 1978

By Harriet Swift

Vol. 1, No. 6, 1979, pp. 15, 16, 28

“Bad Wilcox,” the civil rights workers used to call it.

“In Alabama they say that there are 66 counties and then there’s Wilcox,” sighs a federal official.

Wilcox County, resting squarely in the center of Alabama’s Black Belt, presents a storybook picture of the rural Deep South. Its sparse population has steadily declined since 1900, leaving only 16,000 people (about 68 percent of them Black) to populate the tiny towns and large plantations. A pleasing vista of fertile fields, rolling hills and proud Southern forests intertwined with the Alabama River, Wilcox is dotted with white-columned mansions and pathetic wood and tin shacks. The insular, provincial social life has bred a steady line of stock Southern characters from the imperious Miss Ann in the Big House to the wise and folksy Dilsey living out back.

The county’s abundance of traits identifying it as the archetypal Black Belt county have not gone unnoticed. In 1950 sociologist Morton Rubin published his well-known social anthropology study of the Southern plantation culture, “Plantation County,” which was entirely drawn from his field research in Wilcox County. Photographer Bob Adelman expanded his 1965 cover story on the county for the old Look magazine into a book in 1972, the poignant and moving “Down Home.” National Geographic, The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journalhave all used the county as a Southern metaphor, while its motherlode of social patterns and inculcated race and caste obsessions have been steadily mined by graduate students and historians.

The characteristics of Wilcox County that have made it such an attraction for writers and journalists are the same features that have kept it a segregated, repressive society that has driven away the best and brightest of both races. In 1970 the median family income was $3,920 a year, compared with $7,200 for the state of Alabama. A recent study based on conservative data indicates that 1.1 percent of the county’s population owns at least 70 percent of the land. The infant mortality rate is an outrageous 32.6 per thousand births. Until 1965 no Black person had voted in the county since Reconstruction. Under the eyes of federal

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marshals dispatched by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 Black voters were added to the poll lists. But Wilcox County remained in the tight grip of White office-holders until 1978, despite repeated attempts by Blacks to win seats on the county commission, school board and positions in the courthouse.

A combination of factors worked against the Black community, including splits within its own ranks. But none of these divisions and frustrations were visible on a rainy, bleak January night when men, women and children from all parts of Wilcox County and the Black Belt gathered to pay homage to the two men that they had finally catapulted into the antebellum red brick courthouse in Camden.

Billed as an inaugural ball and program, the evening had all the trappings of a formal event and was held in the cavernous National Guard Armory on Whiskey Run Road in Camden.

“Something has happened to the heat,” the Rev. Thomas Threadgill apologized to visitors who kept on overcoats and wraps over their tuxedos and evening gowns. No one mentioned that the armory is in the middle of a White residential section and almost adjoining the White segregation academy. At this moment of triumph there was enough warmth and generosity to ignore the chill and overlook the suspected pettiness.

The program was long and carefully structured. They had waited a long time and everyone was going to get a chance to share the glory. Ferdinand Ervin, a retired school principal, was the master of ceremonies and welcomed everyone to this “new day in Wilcox County.” It was the official theme of the program and every speaker used it at least once, some like Ervin rolled it out in a sonorous bass and savored each syllable.

Threadgill, a tall imposing man who has weathered untold crises in the county with courage and dignity took the podium early in the program. The unofficial leader of the Black community in the county, the “Rev.’s” influence goes far beyond the perimeters of his New Trinity Presbyterian Church.

“We come to make a collective pronouncement,” he said evenly. “We’d like to have some elbow room. To those crowding us in we say, get back and let us move about. Let us grow, mature and render contributions like other folk.”

“If there are those bent on preventing that, we say, ‘Get back. Here we come’.”

The “those” warned by Threadgill were not in attendance. Out of several hundred people gathered, only five were White: two out-of-county visitors and two old civil rights hands and their seven-year-old daughter.

Choirs from two county high schools were included on the program and their role was oddly reminiscent of a Greek chorus. One group was resplendent in blue robes, the other in pastel gowns and conservative suits. Their songs underlined the optimism and pride that filled the room like an aroma. “I want to be ready,” they sang earnestly, “to walk to Jerusalem.” Without a smidgen of irony, they poured most of their fervor into “God Bless America.” “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” sang voices that know what it is to attend a segregated school system that has little money and fewer resources – voices that know the hard physical labor of picking cotton and hauling water because there is not running water at home. Strong, clear voices that have rough edges and waver with emotion and energy said as much about the new day in Wilcox County as the men and women who held the podium.

The two new office-holders present an interesting contrast between the old and the new in the county. The newly elected sheriff is college-educated, young (26) and well versed in the unfussy rhetoric of the ’70s. He is a “home boy” who headed for California and found urban America unsympathetic and unlivable.

His colleague, the tax collector, is a white-haired veteran of many civil rights campaigns. He has lived in the county all of his life, making his way with various jobs at various times.

Prince Arnold, the sheriff, was introduced first. A former special education teacher, he radiated confidence and pride. A handsome, compact man in a well-tailored three-piece suit, Arnold stepped up to the podium and waited for the standing ovation to subside.

“We are facing crucial decisions in the year ahead,” he told the jammed auditorium. “We must win the war against racism by a landslide!”

He talked earnestly of brotherhood and unity, and like Threadgill, spoke to the people who were not there. “I will be sheriff of ALL the people of Wilcox County,” he vowed to warm applause.

Arnold then addressed himself to specific issues which had much to do with his election. “I’m greatly disturbed by the number of murders in Wilcox County,” he said as a murmur of approval circled the auditorium. “Today, here tonight, I am declaring a war on murder in Wilcox County!” This declaration was greeted with the most sustained applause of the night. The indifference of White law enforcement officials to crime within the Black community is a sore point in the county. Killings and other violent crimes are desultorily investigated and trials are casual. Light sentences are the rule and early parole is frequent. As one “Plantation County” resident explained to Morton Rubin in the 1940s: “When a White man kills a colored man, it’s self-defense. When a colored man kills a White man it’s murder. But when colored kills colored, it’s just one less nigger.”

Not any more.

The declaration of war was also extended to drug dealers, “overseers of those who would like to enslave us; Judases who would betray us for a few pieces of silver while calling us ‘brother.'”

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Arnold summed up his approach to law enforcement simply. “Freedom must be deeply rooted in responsibility,” he said. “We will work within the constitutional framework of the law.”

When the affable Jesse Brooks took over the speaker’s place he didn’t talk about his office (a non-controversial job) or campaign promises.

“I stand here before you as your tax collector,” he told his friends and neighbors. “But I also stand here tonight for someone else. I stand here as the grandson of a little Black slave boy who was brought down river from Charleston, South Carolina, to Lower Peachtree, Alabama, and sold for a thousand dollars. Thanks be to God there’s not going to be any more bidding off of human beings!”

It was a wildly emotional moment and Brooks stood in the center of it ramrod straight, letting the cheers and clamorous applause roll around him. It was a golden moment when the years of struggle, pain and despair were faced squarely and dismissed. The sufferings of that “little Black slave boy” had been vindicated. Against ridiculous odds something very fine and strong had survived in Wilcox County and was now going to take its place in the sun.

Brooks did not fail to mention that what is ahead is more struggle, but “we plan to push forward until justice runs down like mighty waters.”

He vowed to walk into the courthouse “just like John walked into Jerusalem” and begin working hard to build what he predicted will become “one of the best counties in God’s country.”

Bobby Joe Johnson, a Vietnam veteran who lost a hand and a leg in the war, stepped forward to close out the program. He is the president of the Wilcox County Democratic Conference, the Black arm of the Democratic Party in the county. He also has a seat on the more powerful Democratic Executive Committee, but it was the conference that sponsored the inaugural celebration. Johnson began introducing the evening’s “Special guests,” an exercise which turned into a sort of who’s who in the Black Belt. One by one he asked them to stand and be applauded, elected officials and activists from Perry, Dallas, Monroe, Bullock, Marengo, Lowndes, Greene, Macon and Montgomery counties. Men and women who had fought the same long, harrowing battles and knew the price that had to be paid to elect Blacks in Bad Wilcox.

Like those before him, Johnson reiterated the need to look to the future. He also took the occasion to announce his candidacy for the Wilcox County Commission in 1980. “We can’t stop now!”

“Things in the county are going real well,” says Bobby Joe Johnson a month after the inaugural ball. “Prince is doing a good job. Now there’s some that thought just because he was Black and they were Black, well, he’d just look the other way. But he arrested them and put them in jail. ‘If you break the law I’m going to arrest you,’ he told them.”

But there have been problems. The new tax collector isn’t scheduled to take over until this year’s taxes are all closed out in the fall. Until that time the current tax collector is not allowing his successor in the office. A small vexation, says Johnson. A plan has been worked out for Brooks to work in the tax collector’s office of a neighboring county until October.

Despite the great success of the inaugural ball, all did not end pleasantly. Several persons left the armory to find their tires slashed. Eye witnesses named the outgoing sheriff one of his former deputies and two other men as the culprits. All four have been arrested and charged. Although they have attempted to end the incident by apologizing and paying for the damage, they’ll be tried in circuit court.

But nobody expected Bad Wilcox to crumple in a day. “We’re making it,” says Johnson confidently. “We’re doing real well.”

Harriet Swift is a copy editor at the Birmingham Post-Herald.

Problems of Pain

By June Adamson

Vol. 1, No. 6, 1979, pp. 17-18

The X-rays had been taken and I lay on the emergency room cot in the curtained cubicle waiting for the doctor to see whether I had any reason to be in such pain. My car had gone into a skid on the icy interstate and I felt lucky to be alive. But the breath had been knocked out of me, and now there was this intolerable pain in my side and under by shoulder blade. It was a Sunday, and I felt grateful that an orthopedic specialist who was an acquaintance was willing to come to the hospital to help me.

On the other side of the yellow curtain that separated the cots that late afternoon someone was moaning. I was distracted from my own pain as the moaning became louder, and turned into incoherent babbling. Then came the pitiful crying, “Nurse. . . nurse. The voice was male, and by turning my head just slightly upward and looking across from the top of the cot where the curtain didn’t quite meet the wall, I could see the intravenous mechanism hooked up to the person who was my neighbor.

As that person twisted and turned as much as the IV tubing would allow, I caught a glimpse of the grimacing face of a Black man who must have been about 20. He wasn’t looking at me. His face was covered with perspiration and he seemed wild with pain. I averted my head again to stare at the yellow curtain. I didn’t want to stare at him. But I couldn’t help but hear as he called again, “Nurse . . nurse.”

A tall, lean male nurse came. I could see the lanky fair-haired boy, just turning into man, as he walked by the foot of my cot to answer the call. By this time the patient was calling out something else. “Trot … Trot . . .” and again mumbling incoherently.

The nurse said, “If you’re wanting water again, you can’t have it. I looked for your friend and I couldn’t find him. Now you just lay quiet until the doctor comes. He’ll tell you why you can’t have water until later. Lie still now. Don’t pull that needle out.” The voice was not unkind, but impatient, in an accent that meant the young man was a native of the Tennessee hills. I caught another glimpse of him as he turned and walked awkwardly out of the room.

The moaning began again even before he was out of the door. “Trot … Trot. . .” and again that incoherent mumbling.

Soon a young Black boy of about 15 or 16 walked by the foot of my bed glancing shyly at me as he hurried past into

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the next cubicle. I was the eavesdroppers again. “Water, Trot … please … water,” the voice from the bed begged.

“No,” said the visitor. “You know they told you, you can’t have water. Now you just lay there and be good. I called your mama and she said she can’t come before six o’clock because she had a headache and don’t have the money for a cab. A neighbor will bring her then, unless you’re badder. Then I’ll call her and she’ll find a way.” The visitor’s voice turned less business-like and more solicitous as he asked, “You ain’t badder, are you?”

There was no answer to the question, just the continued moaning and crying for water, and Trot, whoever Trot was, trying to be reassuring yet at the same time firm in refusing to get the water.

The whole episode occurred in only a few minutes, but I was beginning to wish my doctor friend would come so that I could get out of there. It was not only depressing to listen, but I thought I knew what was wrong with the young man in the cot next to mine. Drugs. It had to be drugs. An overdose? Withdrawal pain? I knew.

Why did this nice, clean, middle-class WASP hospital have to have such people here? I had no objection to his blackness. After all, I was a liberal. I had some Black friends. I contributed to the United Negro College Fund and had worked to support other Black causes. But the kind who took drugs… And everyone knows certain kinds of Black men abuse drugs more than others.

I didn’t feel much sympathy for that young man at that moment. I just wanted to know whether my ribs were broken, and if so what could be done about it, and if not, why I had this pain like I had never experienced before. It hurt to breathe and it hurt more to cough.

The moaning of the young man continued for awhile, along with the voice of his young visitor. Then another man in white strode across the foot of my cot and into my neighbor’s cubicle. I knew at once it was one of the doctors on emergency service. In an accent that told me his background was Latin American, his first question was, “How long have you known you have sickle cell anemia?” My heart sank, and I felt sudden shame as I fought the urge to say, “Oh, no,” aloud.

“Since I was about 15,” said the plaintive voice from the other cot, then, “Water … when can I have some water?” the patient asked piteously.

The doctor spoke again. “How long has it been since you’ve had a crisis like this?”

here was an answer, but it was inaudible to me.

The doctor continued, “You want water? Of course you can have water. Who told you you couldn’t have water? Would you rather have Gatorade?”

“Oh yes,” said the now relieved voice from the cot, his pain even then was still audible.

The doctor called for an orderly to get the Gatorade, and began talking to the patient about his high fever and plans to treat him when my eavesdropping was interrupted by the appearance of my own doctor. Yes, my ribs were broken and something would have to be done to relieve my persistent cough during the period of healing. I was helped into an elastic binding, and then from the cot and into an outer room to get the necessary prescriptions for pain and for the cough.

I’d had a peek into the drama of an emergency room. My next few weeks were nothing to look forward to, but I knew my ribs would heal. But I’ll never forget that young Black man and the kind of pain that would last for however much time he would live. And I had learned the pain of a new guilt. Even I, who had considered myself above it, had fallen into the trap of stereotyping.

June Adamson, a former working journalist, now teaches journalism at the University of Tennessee.

Segregation Order at Reidsville Prison

By Ginny Looney

Vol. 1, No. 6, 1979, pp.19-21

In southeast Georgia last summer, the day before Independence Day, a decade of legal precedent was overturned at Georgia State Prison in Reidsville when U.S. District Judge Anthony Aliamo ordered the segregation of dormitories for a 60-day period. The segregation order, issued to cool tempers and ease the tension, came after one prisoner was killed and five others were wounded during a racial fight, one of a series of revengeful attacks since November 1976 that killed five inmates and injured 47. The court told prison officials to assign Black and White inmates to alternating dormitories in checkerboard fashion; the cell blocks, dining hall, recreation and work areas remained integrated.

The court-ordered segregation marked the first time in modern history that a federal judge had directed a state to separate prisoners by race. Although prison officials said they opposed the order as a misguided and potentially troublesome attempt to end racial attacks, the state complied with the order without a legal challenge and later asked for an extension of it. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, representing the prisoners, also did not appeal the judge’s decision, preferring to publicly remain silent on segregation while privately negotiating for better conditions at the prison.

The 60 days of segregation grew to eight months finally ending in mid-February. The state vacillated and LDF acquiesced to the judge’s decision, thereby accepting the premise that separating the races was the only way to restore peace at Reidsville. Their illusion was dispelled in only a few weeks after the order was issued when racial violence again erupted in July and August.

Aliamo ordered the segregation as part of the Guthrie case, a class action lawsuit filed in 1973 to seek reform at the state prison. In 1974 one of case’s earlier orders, Aliamo required the state to integrate Reidsville and rejected requests to have segregated dormitories.

On at least four occasions since the state law requiring segregated prisons was found unlawful in 1968, integration at Georgia State Prison had been attempted but violence caused the experiments in integration to be short-lived. Therefore, Aliamo’s order continued a ten-year tradition at Reidsville of reverting to segregation to resolve racial violence.

The segregation of 1978, like its predecessors, was justified by arguments of security. Marvin Pipkin, a Brunswick attorney Aliamo appointed as special master in the Guthrie case, says he recommended the temporary separation of White and Black prisoners to the judge to return order to the prison and save innocent lives. “There were so many rumors and so much tension in the prison. I felt that if we separated the prisoners for an intervening period of time and let things cool off, it would help the situation. We were trying to stop the senseless assault of Whites and Blacks on each other,” he said.

“I felt the need for the life and health of inmates was more important on a temporary basis than saying to the prisoners, ‘Well, you’re going to have to live together’,” because there’s a Supreme Court decision which says that prisons have to be integrated.

The arguments favoring segregation in prisons may not have been modified over the past ten years, but in this case the party responsible for initiating the decision to segregate was unique. While prison officials acting alone have segregated prisoners by race for a few days and judges have permitted such racial separation, no judge has been known to use the power of the federal court to affirmatively order segregation, even for a short period of time.

“In Washington v. Lee (the Alabama case which first declared unconstitutional state laws mandating racial segregation in prisons), the court left open the possibility of segregating prisoners if race could be shown to be a specific problem. It’s my understanding that the judge took this case one step further by issuing an affirmative order to

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resegregate,” says Ralph I. Knowles Jr., associate director of the National Prison Project, which is affiliated with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Aliamo not only required the racial separation, but he also issued the order without the plaintiffs or defendants formally requesting it. “I don’t think either side particularly approved the action,” said Pipkin. “At the time they were saying they wanted to try something else.”

However, the only people publicly disapproving the court-ordered segregation were civil rights and prison reform groups. “It’s the worst sort of cop-out – to lay the problems at Reidsville on integration,” said Gene Guerrero, director of the ACLU of Georgia. “The conditions at Reidsville, which concern overcrowding and the way inmates are treated, go back 40 years.” After Aliamo extended the segregation of October for an indefinite time period, Tyrone Brooks of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference said, “I don’t believe this is the answer. It just makes people believe the only reason the problem of killings and violence is there is because of integration.”

In contrast, the prisoners’ attorney expressed only resignation when he said the order demonstrated how bad the situation had become at Reidsville. Although the LDF lawyers did not support the judge’s decision to segregate, they also did not initially oppose it and allowed it to continue unchallenged for eight months. Instead of seeking a reversal of the decision, the lawyers chose to continue discussions with the state’s attorneys on the unresolved issues in the Guthrie case, including the process of reintegration.

No challenge was made, says Steve Winter, an LDF staff attorney, because no one thought the original 60-day order would be prolonged for several months. In addition, “(t)here’s the problem of whether we could have won on appeal to the Fifth Circuit,” says Winter, who inherited the case in September. “We hoped that negotiations with the judge and the defendants would be more successful than litigation.”

The state’s position on the court order was even more muddled. Prison spokeswoman Sara Passmore says, “We particularly felt it wasn’t the solution because the major conflicts haven’t occurred in the living areas.” Her boss, Prison Commissioner David Evans criticized the “checker-hoarding” order when it was issued, particularly the time requirements. “When you pull inmates out to live in their own races for 60 days and then reintegrate them, I cannot see anything viable that will come of this,” he said. Two months later after two more racial fights at Reidsville, E vans wanted an extension to the 60-day deadline.

Gov. George Busbee supported Evans in his request for a delay in the reintegration of the dorms. The governor said to reporters, “I assume that the commissioner felt that the commissioner felt that we would be anticipating more violence if they were to be integrated at this time, before we were able to come up with the changes that we’re making down there in order to make this a maximum security facility.” At the same time the newly appointed warden of Georgia State Prison, Charles Balkcom, was suggesting that the cell blocks follow the segregation pattern of the dormitories. The confusion resulting from the contradictory statements – opposing segregation but wanting it continued and even expanded finally caused Evans to deny that the state had requested segregation and prompted the state Board of Offender Rehabilitation to reaffirm its commitment to integrated prisons.

The uncertainty surrounding the state’s position on segregated facilities was partially produced by statements prison officials and the governor made last spring before segregation occurred. While Busbee and then Reidsville Warden Joe Hopper said they countenanced integrated prisons because it’s “the law of the land,” they also made clear they thought that integration had caused much of the violence at the state prison. Following four racial fights one night in mid-March which killed one prisoner and injured 16 more, Hopper said, “I really don’t think they (federal judges) understand the problem. It’s not because they haven’t been made aware, because they know what the problem is. It is just that the law of the land of this particular philosophy (of civil rights) has to be enforced at all costs,” which he estimated as the lives of at least five inmates and many sleepless nights for him. Two weeks later Busbee told reporters, “I don’t think it’s humanly possible to totally prevent murder in prisons. The problem is coming because of integrated sleeping quarters.”

A critic of the state’s handling of problems at Reidsville disagreed with the governor’s explanation of the violence. After a fight in the prison gymnasium in June which injured nine men, Atlanta Voice columnist Charles King Jr. wrote, “Last week’s violence served the state well. It reinforced the official position taken by Reidsville officials and Gov. Busbee that Reidsville problems stem from forced integration. It is a thin alibi that pretends, ‘If the courts had not ordered us to integrate, we would have no conflicts.'”

Paradoxically, the most violent riot of the year and the first murder of a guard by inmates inside the prison in the history of Reidsville occurred three weeks after segregation was ordered to prevent more killings. On July 23rd a group of Black inmates being escorted to dinner overpowered their guards and took the keys. The inmates rampaged through two dormitories for nearly an hour, burning mattresses, killing the guard and two prisoners and injuring another guard. All the victims were White. In a racial attack on Black inmates less than a month later, White inmates in an integrated cell block killed one Black man and wounded three more while they were preparing for work.

The incidents show that segregation clearly doesn’t work to hold down violence, says Winter of the LDF. “If anything,” says Passmore, “it created greater power struggles.” Knowles of the National Prison Project says, “Once you segregate, you’re only asking for suspicion, paranoia, hostility and accusations that one group is given privileges

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that the other isn’t.” Warden Balkcom insists, however, that the segregation had a quietening effect.

Regardless of Balkcom’s observation, the state’s assignment to provide protection for every inmate may well prove as difficult to fulfill after the interlude of segregation as it was last summer. The obvious improvements have been made: the population has been reduced from 2,800 inmates to 2,100, and 125 additional guards have been hired. The state is under court order to maintain a 55 percent Black and 45 percent White population in the dormitories until single cells are constructed. But the problems of providing adequate facilities, meaningful activities and humane treatment at Georgia State Prison remain. The more immediate concern of dealing with people who may not want to sleep next to members of another race lingers. It is not clear that the state can fulfill its obligation.

One reason for the state’s difficulty may lie with its crew of predominantly rural, White guards who are paid to protect a predominantly urban, Black population. Suspicion and hostility exists between the two groups. Black prisoners have complained that the guards encourage tension and mistrust by allowing White inmates to keep weapons; the guards protest that they are wrongly blamed for the violence of the prisoners.

After repeated accusations that guards were passing weapons to prisoners, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation conducted an inquiry at Reidsville. Two guards were fired and 16 more resigned, primarily for smuggling drugs to prisoners, says Passmore. During the investigation Busbee said at a press conference, “There is, in my opinion, some evidence that a very limited number of these crudely fashioned weapons made in the prison, that their presence was condoned by a limited number of correctional officers.”

Winter cites the state’s lack of vision as another problem. When attorneys filed the state’s plan for reintegration last fall, it essentially said, ” ‘Trust us. We’ll do it by July 1979,’ ” says Winter. “Our experience is that the state hasn’t come up with a sophisticated response to the problem.” Expenditures support Winter’s contention that the state’s primary thrust has been the improvement of security for guards at the prison. The state appropriated $1.2 million after the guard’s death, primarily for equipment to protect the employees.

The guards won priority in another decision concerning inmates – their role in the process of reintegration. During the 1974 integration of the prison, community relations specialists worked with inmates to prepare them for the change. “The idea was to work from within and give inmates the feeling that they have a role in their destiny,” said Winter.

Such an active role for prisoners in February’s integration did not happen because of the abortive life last spring of the Inmates Unity Council, an integrated group of prisoners who wanted to reduce the violence and also negotiate for improvements in living conditions. The guards opposed the warden’s recognition of the IUC and threatened to sue the state. In August, Hopper, the warden who recognized the inmate council, was replaced by Balkcom, who stated he would never negotiate with inmate representatives. With Balkcom directing the reintegration process, it is doubtful prisoners will be given much responsibility for maintaining harmonious race relations. Yet, without seeking the help of prisoners in eliminating racial antagonism, it is difficult to foresee a reign of peace.

The ironies abound in this case of court-ordered segregation. A federal judge, the symbol in the 1960s of the federal government’s efforts to ensure equality, returned in the 1970s to the Southern way of segregating the races by law; indeed, the very judge who ended segregation at Reidsville in 1974 was responsible in 1978 for its resurrection. A civil rights group responsible for many landmark desegregation cases accepted the order to segregate without protest. A “New South” governor elected with the support of a majority of Black voters relied on an old refrain for explaining the cause of the violence. Finally, the racial violence, which segregation was expected to end, viciously reoccurred.

The judge’s decision to segregate the dormitories at Reidsville becomes one more example of the public retreat from a national commitment for racial equality. As one observer noted, “It’s interesting that a federal judge has recognized that at least in one institution a remedy against an old injustice is now itself a source of danger … (and) it’s very, very sad.”

The court’s experiment in partial segregation has proved as ineffective as wiring a fat person’s jaws to vary regular eating habits. With the artificial barrier removed, the prisoners must still try to live with members of the other race without fighting them, and prison officials must proceed with their attempts to contain violence. Segregation could not eliminate racial attacks at Reidsville unless it was expanded to include complete separation of the races at all times. No one, not even the White prisoners who want the checkerboard dormitories to continue, has suggested total segregation.

Unfortunately, the absence of moral leadership in this situation provides little encouragement that the state will be ready to adopt more costly and politically unpopular alternatives to preventing violence. Segregation has only succeeded in stimulating that dark racist side of humanity to manifest itself. For once segregated conditions are created, especially in a place where men react to problems through violence, it becomes more difficult to return to integration.

The one possibly hopeful result is that the state will finally abandon its unhealthy reliance on separation of the races as a means for overcoming racial antagonism. Surely the events of the past eight months have discredited such simplistic reasoning as integration causes racial violence, or segregation prevents it. If not, our public officials will be conceding that they lack control over the prisons and fostering inevitable triumph of racism.

Ginny Looney is a researcher studying the effects of rape on women and the ways they resolve problems caused by the assault.

Games Prison Bureaucrats Play: The Story of the Olympic Prison

By Andy Hall

Vol. 1, No. 6, 1979, pp.22-25

In 11 short months the small village of Lake Placid, nestled high in the Adirondack mountain range of upstate New York, will provide the setting for the 13th Winter Olympiad. President Carter will preside at the opening ceremonies to symbolize the Olympic tradition, and, no doubt, to enunciate the desire of the American people for world peace and freedom for all people.

The best athletes of some 40 nations will live together for three weeks of intense competition. The Olympic spirit of international cooperation and community, perhaps most tangibly represented by the Olympic Village, will captivate radio and television audiences around the world. Then the contests will end, the medals will be awarded, and the participants will head home. And finally, if all goes as planned, the Olympic Village will be quickly converted to the latest addition of what the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, minister at New York’s Riverside Church, recently described as the American Gulag. Olympic Village will become a federal prison!

For some the idea makes sense. For Olympics organizers, it is a free ride on the federal government. For area politicians, a federal prison may mean a few jobs for unemployed mountain people as prison guards. For prison bureaucrats, the Games provide a quick and easy means of further expansion. But as news of the Olympic Village-to-prison idea has spread, many others have been instantly appalled.

The prison conversion scheme was brought to life in early 1976 when Congressman Robert McEwen, representing the people of the Adirondack region – though perhaps

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more specifically the interests of the Lake Placid Olympic Organizing Committee (LPOOC) began going door-to-door among the federal agencies in Washington hoping to find one that would consider using the athletes’ housing complex planned for Lake Placid Games. It seems that Congress had appropriated construction monies for the complex and the other sports facilities on the condition that an appropriate afteruse be guaranteed upon the completion of competition.

McEwen and the LPOOC were beginning to become desperate in the Spring of 1976, since construction for a facility to house, feed, entertain and provide medical care for 1800 athletes and trainers in February 1980 needed to be funded and scheduled right away. Then McEwen heard ft Federal Bureau of Prisons Director Norman Carlson had Congressional authorization to build a prison somewhere in the Northeast. Carlson, as it happened, had a plan from a prison the Bureau had just built in Memphis, but he had located no site in the Northeast for the youthful offender prison he had convinced Congress he needed.

Carlson listened to McEwen’s eager description of International Olympic Committee requirements for an Olympic Village, including the security features deemed necessary in the aftermath of the tragic attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Games. He then opined as how it sounded just like one of his youth facilities.

For McEwen it was, “the answer to our prayers”. And though Norman Carlson had stated his firm philosophy in the June 1979 Congressional hearings, “that new institutions should be as close, as we can humanly get them to where the offenders are from, and where we can find staff and other resources,” on the other hand the Adirondack Enterprise quoted the opportunistic prison bureaucrat at a June 1, 1976, news conference at Lake Placid as saying, “As far as the location (of the proposed prison) goes, it’s great.” Lake Placid Mayor Robert Peacock voiced his approval that day as well. “It’s the most sensible idea anyone’s come up with yet,” he said.

Still, for months the prison afteruse plan floated quietly through various executive channels as an obscure budget item. Republicans McEwen and Carlson, and the minions of the Ford Administration developed a simple, effective strategy. Through the magic of bureaucratese the prison plan was artfully designated as a “secondary use”. The Olympic Village, as a facility to house contestants for only three weeks, became termed the “primary use”.

The word play would afford Director Carlson a handy and needed alibi when the conversion deal bobbed to the surface early in 1977 in President Jimmy Carter’s first budget. At that point Carlson claimed that, due to the unfortunate absence of any other federal need for the facility, the immediacy of the scheduled Winter Games, and the purely “secondary” nature of the prison afteruse, the Bureau of Prisons had no apparent choice but to concede the feasibility of using the building and, with great reluctance, take possession. Also, as the so-called “secondary” user, Carlson could also profess innocence and ignorance of the transmission of the budget request to the Hill for the needed $22 million appropriation. This was the perfect ploy to bypass a sometimes troublesome step for ‘the Bureau in the legislative process.

Representative Robert Kastenmeier’s House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Civil Liberties and the Administration of Justice, with responsibility for federal prison policy oversight, posed a threat to the Carlson-McEwen plan. Carlson knew from bitter experience that the oversight panel would not take kindly to the idea of locating a 500-bed prison in the remote hills of upstate New York.

In 1975 he had been called down by then-Subcommittee member Herman Badillo (D-NY) for locating a 500-bed prison in Otisville, New York, some 120 miles from new York City. Badillo had angrily criticized the Otisville location as far too distant for prisoner relatives and friends, and without needed local resources and a racially representative workforce pool.

The Director had been forced to promise the Subcommittee “. . . that we will consult with you in the future.” Thus, the Kastenmeier panel would undoubtedly be a tough row to hoe for a proposed prison not 120, but 350 miles from New York City or Boston, the urban centers from which the facility would draw the bulk of its young population over the years.

In early 1977, just before Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, the $22 million appropriation to locate a 500-bed youthful offender prison in the Adirondacks was cloaked as a “secondary use”, inserted in the budget as a supplemental appropriation for the fiscal year already half over, and slipped past the important policy oversight panel.

For there on it was a laugher for the fellows at the Bureau: Kastenmeier and fellow subcommittee members read about the Lake Placid prison in the papers – a fait accompli. Kastenmeier himself fumed but remained silent. Father Robert Drinan, also on the oversight panel, was infuriated. But he would be the only panel member to publicly condemn the supplemental budget secondary use maneuver. Father Drinan drew up a lengthy statement protesting the Olympic Village afteruse decision as made without benefit of full discussion or careful planning. He called the process “irresponsible.”

But with the Judiciary Subcommittee neatly sidestepped, the Appropriations Committee passed on the plan, disregarding Drinan and the criticisms of two of its own members, Yvonne Burke of California and Joe Early of Massachusetts. Though Burke and Early warned the disadvantages of the plan far outweighed the immediate, convenient short-term benefits, they were paid no heed. Construction was scheduled to begin the next month, in

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April 1977.

The remarkable history of the federal prison system since Richard Nixon’s ascension to the White House in 1969 is appreciated by few. It is, or has been, the least visible of the virtually invisible prison empires across the country. It is the largest of all incarcerating agencies in the U.S., operating 51 prisons and holding approximately 27,000 people at an annual cost (this year) of over $330 million.

The Bureau has led the national prison boom throughout the decade, adding 24 new prisons more than 9500 bedspaces – since the inception of the Nixon/Mitchell/Carlson Long Range Master Plan for prison expansion in 1969. That Master Plan generated federal prison construction over the last ten years equalling that of the previous 40 years of the Bureau’s history, with the agency pushing huge requests for bricks and mortar through the Congress in the early 70s with no real opposition.

Prison crowding has served as the most consistent rationale for the Bureau’s annual expansion requests, as it has for nearly every other prison system in the nation. Conservative politicians have voted for expansion, convinced that judges would fail to imprison dangerous criminals if prison capacity became insufficient. Liberals have supported prison growth, seeing no other way to alleviate a lack of individual cell space and the attendant health, privacy, and security problems.

Yet, no jurisdiction in the nation has been successful in resolving prison crowding through construction projects, as prisoner numbers have quickly swelled to fill added capacity, leaving prisons crowded once again. At this point, approximately 175,000 jails and prisons beds are planned across the country at a total cost in excess of $5 billion. The Southern states, traditionally the most dependent on imprisonment, account for 40 percent of known expansion plans.

The size of the 18-30 component of the population (particularly the minority segment of that group), worsening unemployment, and generally increased use of incarceration, have combined to inflate American jail and prison populations by 50 percent in the last five years, to nearly 600,000. This phenomenon has outstripped the most ambitious expansion programs. All the new American prisons have left the U.S. with the highest rate of incarceration among Western nations, with the sole exception being South Africa. (Georgia, now apparently the nation’s most enthusiastic user of prisons, even significantly exceeds South Africa, with one of every 234 Georgians behind bars at last count. One of every 47 Black males in Georgia is in jail or prison.)

The proportion of minorities present in the federal prisons has grown steadily since 1969, due to the quite unsurprising fact that sentences given Black and brown offenders are much more severe than those given Whites, even for first offenders. In fact, simple racial parity in sentencing would empty six 500-bed prisons in the federal system.

In January of 1975, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee decided to fund an office in Washington, D.C., the National Moratorium on Prison Construction (NMPC). The National Council on Crime and Delinquency, which had earlier called for a halt to additional prisons, joined in support. The Moratorium office was founded in the belief that prisons did little but exacerbate the problem of crime and that crime victims and the public in general had nothing to gain from the imprisonment of increasing numbers of persons. Prison construction requests were seen as the most strategic occasions in the crime policy process at which to advocate drastic curtailment of the practice of caging. The Moratorium project immediately began to investigate Norman Carlson’s agency.

If only beginning to fathom how the Lake Placid plan had come to pass, prison moratorium advocates in Washington and New York immediately recognized the significance of the government’s plan. It was a clear violation of Carlson’s stated policy on the location of Bureau institutions. The 500-bed youth prison could be guaranteed a Black and Puerto Rican population of 65 percent or higher, practically cut off from families and friends.

The campaign to “Stop The Olympic Prison” got underway in the Fall of 1977 as the National Moratorium office and its affiliate organization in New York (NYMPC) began working intensively. In New York, the leadership of the New York State Council of Churches moved to support a STOP organizing staff. From Washington to New York, STOP began the process of rallying broad support in order to bring the Olympic Prison plan to national atten

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tion.

Little by little, the David versus Goliath effort began having an effect. Due to the persistence of STOP and NMPC organizers, and the usual media interest in the staging of an Olympic competition, the plan involving the Olympic Village quickly gained stature as a significant controversy.

Criticism also spread quickly through the religious community, generating scores of resolutions opposing the prison from churches and regional denominational organizations. Many athletes and former Olympians were shocked by the conversion plan.

Significantly, athletes, religious figures, and prison critics from several of the countries sending participants to the Winter Games have also joined the STOP protest. Italian, French, Dutch, East German, Swedish, British, and Canadian opposition has been registered with the Carter Administration, Congress, the Bureau of Prisons, and Olympic officials.

As principal STOP organizer Brian Willson points out, the Olympic Prison controversy presents a clear international issue. “Other nations are wondering about our integrity and our dedication to the spirit of the Olympic Games in light of the U.S. decision to let this building become a prison,” Willson says. Indeed, the Carter Administration is very much aware of the contrast between U.S. afteruse plans and those made by the Soviet Union for the Moscow Summer Olympics later next year. The Moscow Olympic Village will be used to provide needed housing for Russian citizens after those Games.

The Soviet plans are doubly ironic for Americans approaching next February’s Games; First, it was known that a critical shortage of low-cost housing existed in Lake Placid. Yet, that need was rejected in afteruse deliberations, resulting in the appropriation of additional federal and local funds to build housing for senior citizens on another site in the area. Second, there have been many political rumblings about the idea of a U.S. boycott of the Moscow Summer Games due to the treatment of Ginsberg and other dissidents. One must wonder how Americans would react if the Russians went so far as to plan to convert their Olympic Village into a prison.

As the Winter Games draw closer, “Stop The Olympic Prison” organizers and supporters have considerable hope that the prison conversion plan will be averted. Two important factors may interact to cause Bureau of Prisons Director Carlson to relinquish the prize he grabbed three years ago. Illustrating the purely speculative venture of projective prison populations, the number of people held by the Bureau has fallen sharply over the past 18 months. At the same time, the desire of the U.S. Olympic Committee and associated amateur athletic organizations to establish a permanent athletic training center at Lake Placid has become clear.

The U.S.O.C.’s training site selection committee notified New York Governor Carey that its conditional selection of the full committee is expected soon. Although U.S.O.C. officials have not openly sought use of the Olympic Village as a part of the complex they envision, an athletic afteruse appears more and more attractive to others involved due to the heightening controversy over the ill-conceived prison plan.

Last December, Jim Anderson, Director of the quasi-governmental New York State Task Force on Sports and Physical Fitness, detailed the needs of such a permanent training center to STOP organizers. Adequate housing, medical, dining, and administration facilities would be required. Also, space would be needed for a planned sports physiology diagnostic center, a facility to improve exercise, dietary, and medical practices for athletes in training. Anderson said he could see no reason why the Olympic Village could not be easily adapted for such purposes instead of the planned prison use. Another large complex would need to be constructed in the area if the Village could not be used. A distinctly unwelcome prospect for those already outraged at the extensive environmental damage done in the construction of the Village facility.

Letters to President Carter and Kastenmeier have come in great volume from all over the country. The Wisconsin Congressman has reportedly received more personal letters on this issue than on any other during his II terms in Washington. Still, protest leaders believe Kastenmeier is waiting to see if anti-prison sentiment is sustained in the early months of the session before deciding whether to take a STOP amendment to his colleagues. And even if the prison is stopped, the larger issue of the need for thorough inspection of sentencing practices and the lack of community alternatives to imprisonment throughout the federal criminal justice system must come to the fore if the STOP campaign is to achieve its real goal.

For prison moratorium forces the Olympic Prison plan has presented an unexpected opportunity to reach more people in their effort against more prisons in the U.S. The STOP protest has already resulted in greatly increased visibility and support for the moratorium idea. Hundreds of letters to the Congress against massive prison building proposals and attempts to draft a harsh, new federal criminal code (last year known as Senate Bill 1437) have brought at least temporary success on the federal level. While the Lake Placid conversion plan represents only one in a long line of new federal prisons, it now serves NMPC and others as a perfect case in point of haphazard and cost-defective practices on the part of a federal bureaucracy just now receiving the close scrutiny they feel it has long deserved.

The Olympic Prison has brought the spotlight to a critical national question: Should scarce public resources continue to be invested to build further to America’s jail and prison capacity, or should the public and policymakers use the information and alternatives at hand to build paths away from the prisons? In just a few months, the world can learn whether “the land of the free” will open another lonely outpost in the American Gulag. Or will Jimmy Carter’s words at the opening ceremonies about the Olympic tradition ring true? The STOP folks hope you won’t sit and wait to find out.

Andy Hall was a coordinator in Unitarian Universalist Service Committee’s National Moratorium on Prison Construction, for the Washington, D.C., office for two-and-a-half years before moving to Atlanta recently to work for NMP in the Southern states.