Changing the Politics of Bitterness

By Vernon Jordan

Vol. 3, No. 1, 1980, p. 3

The year 1980 was when we saw the growth of politicized religion—a heady mixture of fundamentalist gospel with extreme right wing political ideology. It converts political issues into moral absolutes; honest disagreement over the issues becomes a sin, and tolerance for minorities an evil. I grew up in the church, read my Bible, and pray to my God, and I know God is not a right-winger. The true message of Christianity is brotherly love and compassion, not the hate and hardheartedness of our home-grown ayatollahs.

Extremism doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it needs a climate that sustains it. Just as fish need water, extremism needs a social climate that fosters a new politics of bitterness.

And that’s what we have today. A once-dominant America has had to face the fact that it lost a war against a small Asian country; that it is dependent on other small countries for raw materials; that it no longer rules the world’s markets; that the once-mighty dollar is weak, and that social changes mean Blacks, women and other minorities claim rights and privileges once reserved for White males.

An expanding economy and a reasonable rate of growth would enable most people to accept these inevitable changes. Growing interdependence at home and abroad would make sense to people who could count on tomorrow being better than today.

But instead, America seems locked into a pattern of self-destructive recessions that weaken our productive capacity and throw millions out of work. We’ve had six major recessions in the past twenty-five years; three in the past ten years. No sooner do we climb out of one recession than another slams us down again.

Along with this kind of insecurity recessions breed is the insecurity that comes with high inflation. More income buys less goods. Dreams of owning a home dry up. Savings vanish.

Recession-bred insecurity results in a society that is anxious, unwilling to accept social changes, and nostalgic for older times and values. It is a society fearful of the future, and fearful of its neighbors.

But, America can change, and Black people need to help America to change. We may be the last people left who truly believe in the American Dream, in the principles of freedom and equality that made this nation so great. We’ve got to help other Americans regain their lost dream; we’ve got to help America overcome the selfishness and fear that grips it, and come back to the principles of justice and righteousness.

In this year of doubt and confusion, we must remind a forgetting nation that this land is ours too, that we have lived here since before the Pilgrims landed, and we are here to stay. This nation too often forgets that this land is sprinkled with our sweat, watered with our tears, and fertilized with our blood. It too often forgets that we helped build America’s power and glory, that we dug taters, toted cotton, lifted bales, sank the canals and laid the railroad tracks that linked ocean to ocean; that we’ve died in America’s every war.

We’ve seen American change. We’ve made American change. And to that end let us neither stumble nor falter, rather let us mount up with wings as eagles, let us run and not be weary, and walk together children, and not faint.

Vernon Jordan is president of the National Urban League, a native Southerner, and a former staff member of the Southern Regional Council.

1981 Alabama and Georgia Legislatures: Revenue and Spending Top Priorities

By Clint Deveaux

Vol. 3, No. 1, 1980, pp. 4-5

Lawmakers in Alabama generally agreed with legislative activists in their state on the issues likely to be key during the 1981 legislative session. Topping the list of major concerns are: education, taxation and spending priorities, community development and unemployment and reapportionment. The Alabama legislature convenes Tuesday, February 3, 1981.

A revenue shortfall for Alabama’s Special Education Trust Fund combined with an increasingly inadequate state-local funding formula has generated heated debate about education priorities. Only Mississippi and Georgia spent less per pupil on elementary and secondary education than Alabama, according to National Education Association estimates for 1978-79, and Alabama’s local communities shared less of the public education budget than the local communities of any state except Alaska, Hawaii, Kentucky and New Mexico.

The trend toward earmarking of specific taxes for particular expenses has compounded Alabama education’s financial problems. As economic conditions have worsened and as tax and spending limitations have been adopted, revenue collections from taxes designated for the Trust fund have not grown at a rate adequate to meet Alabama’s educational needs. The current year’s educational expenditures are being reduced by 7 percent across the board.

While many agree that Alabama needs to generate new sources of revenue to meet its unmet responsibilities, Governor Fob James seems determined to reduce state expenditures—especially in the area of social services. The impact of this policy on the Department of Pensions and Securities which administers the Aid to Dependent Children program is devastating. Such shortsightedness will also geometrically reduce the matching federal funds which flow to Alabama’s economy.

Several new “sin taxes” on consumer items not considered necessities were passed during the last session and more such proposals are expected next year. A major battle on increasing the state-wide sales tax is also expected. Many legislators fear the increase will pass, making Alabama’s tax scheme more regressive than it already is. Proposed increases in corporate income taxes have failed in each of the last two sessions.

In 1978, an election year, the legislature passed a “lid bill” designed to limit property tax increases which were the result of a state-wide property reappraisal ordered by the federal courts in 1971. Threats of a renewed suit because of reappraisal failures generated a proposal, accepted by the courts, from Alabama’s Revenue Commissioner, Ralph Edgerton, Jr. He proposed a county by county “maintenance” updating beginning in October 1980 to be completed within two years. State Finance Director Sid McDonald sees the “lid bill” as a “permanent and dangerous roadblock to sensible funding.” He is critical of Alabama’s property taxes which are the lowest in the country.

Most progressive legislators expect their major effort will again be a negative struggle to kill or at least soften the impact of the regressive tax measures that surely will emerge. They, nevertheless, expect the enactment of some regressive tax proposals which will place a disproportionate burden on poor Alabamians.

Legislators and state leaders are disturbed over the failure of either government or business to focus on Alabama’s sagging economy. Many legislators see economic development and the creation of jobs as a major priority with little state effort now directed toward that end.

Recent history and major changes in population growth patterns dictate that reapportionment will be a contentious issue in Georgia and Alabama. While Georgia’s legislature is expected to produce acceptable plans, few knowledgeable Alabama observers expect the plans produced by the state’s House and Senate to survive justice Department scrutiny or anticipated federal court challenges.

Alabama already has a joint legislative committee at work on reapportionment. Georgia’s two reapportionment committees are likewise already at work, with their staffs gathering data and resources and examining potential computer formulae for reapportionment plans. While no general approach is acknowledged by the legislative leadership, both states have indicated that special legislative reapportionment sessions will be held in the fall of 1981. Final figures from the 1980 census on which reapportionment will be based are expected next June. Resolution of presently ongoing litigation by major cities challenging the undercount of minorities, aliens and the poor will surely affect the outcome and may change the timing.

While Alabama has suffered revenue shortfalls and has had to prorate its expenditures, Georgia has consistently underestimated its revenue expectations. The budget planning process is thus a major concern to Georgia legislators from a very different perspective. At the beginning of each session a supplemental budget is determined allocating the surplus revenue to the current fiscal year. Georgia’s surpluses in 1978 and 1979 were $161 and $133 million respectively. Georgia’s revenue officials expect more than a $140 million surplus to be available from fiscal 1980 for supplementary allocation in 1981. Within both the supplemental and the general budgets, however, the highway requests have always received full support while human services requests have been cut back.

In addition Georgia lawmakers have expressed strong interest in tax reform, AFDC, medicaid and infant mortality, day care and revision of the state’s usury laws. Tax reform proposals from Governor George Busbee and the Tax Reform Commission are expected to generate conservative opposition, and a perennial proposal to increase the state’s sales tax is again likely.

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The state department of human resources and the governor have made priorities of increasing aid for families with dependent children-AFDC payments. Support for these proposals by updating the standard of need and increasing the cash outlays is increasing in the legislature.

A major proposed revision of the state’s usury laws is expected along with new provisions of consumer loan interest laws. Most interest rate increases passed during the 1980 session were coupled with a sunset provision reverting to the previous lower rates in July 1981 without legislative action. The joint committee examining the usury laws is expected to propose permanent higher rates.

The 1980 legislature eliminated 1100 slots for day care and after school care programs from the social services budget. Expansion of infant mortality programs and medicaid is needed and will be likely proposed. Also, Grady Hospital will again seek state financial support. These needs can be met with the state’s current revenues if the legislature chooses to give greater priority to human services.

The Speaker of the Georgia House has long supported four-year terms for legislators as well as increased salaries or staff allotments. While often unpopular, these measures may appear before the session ends.

Georgia’s legislators are expected to gather on January 12th and, after Speaker Thomas Murphy gavels the House into order, more than a hundred pounds of bills and paper will be introduced for passage. Only days later will anyone know if the planned agendas survive.

Clint Deveaux is a former state legislator and directs SRC’S Southern Legislative Research Council.

New Project To Assist Officials

Staff

Vol. 3, No. 1, 1980, p. 5

State legislators in Alabama and Georgia are often frustrated by the lack of support services. House members in the two states have only their desks on the chamber floors as offices. The combined salary and expense allotments are so low that hiring research staff is prohibitive and indeed many legislators serve at a considerable financial and business sacrifice. These circumstances prove so frustrating that the Speaker of Georgia’s House has publicly lamented that qualified young Georgians simply can’t afford to stay in the legislature.

This is the frustration that generated the Southern Regional Council’s new project, the Southern Legislative Research Council. It will provide research, analysis and general staff to twenty-five to thirty legislators in Alabama and in Georgia. The goal is to provide the help that is otherwise not provided and thus to show the great potential for more effective legislators when they have individual staff. Lawmakers served will be those who are most directly concerned with the needs of Black and poor Georgians and Alabamians.

Former Georgia state legislator, Clint Deveaux directs the project. The staff includes Virginia Montes, research coordinator; Andrew Hall, research analyst and Vicki German, secretary. Interns, four in each state, will assist the staff during the legislative sessions. A panel of experts and resource people knowledgeable in priority areas will be available to provide information, legislative drafting assistance and testimony before legislative committees. The project will also distribute a newsletter as often as twice weekly to keep its legislative “clients” and others up to date on legislation.

Project “clients” have been chosen based on a combination of factors including: the percentage of Blacks and poor in the districts, the member’s legislative record or verifiable reputation on issues generally regarded as important for Blacks and the poor in their states, the evaluation of lawmakers by reliable local activists in the legislative process and the member’s positions of leadership on committees or in their chamber.

Each prospective client was surveyed to determine areas of priority concern. The survey results combined with interviews, conversations and meetings with lawmakers, officials and others have helped set priorities, reflected in this accompanying review.

By focusing on two or three areas of concern for thorough attention the project hopes to enlarge its impact. State budget plans begin with a surplus in Georgia and a shortfall in Alabama, but in both states poor and Black citizens are inadequately served and have seldom been the beneficiaries of the legislative process. The Southern Legislative Research Council does not presume to represent this oft ignored constituency. But the legislators served by the project will be better equipped to more forcefully and more successfully press this constituency’s interests with the project’s assistance.

A Defeated Herman Talmadge and the Black Vote

By Betty Norwood Chaney and Steve Suitts

Vol. 3, No. 1, 1980, pp. 6-8, 22-23

Because no one before or since his death is remembered by Blacks with as much reverence as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., his ideals have become the political yardsticks by which the activity of others is measured. Every election year in Atlanta conflicts crop up between Coretta Scott King, wife of the slain leader, and some other Black leadership—often the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization he founded—over who measures the candidates most accurately by Dr. King’s standards.

This campaign year was no exception. In late October, SCLC’s former president and executive director, Ralph Abernathy and Hosea Williams, endorsed Ronald Reagan for president, to the horror of many Black leaders. Ms. King was shocked and reminded the public that her husband once called Reagan a second-rate actor and a warmonger. Williams retorted that if the Carter administration had given him as much federal money as it had supplied Ms. King’s non-profit center he also might have supported Carter.

While spotlighted nationally, this crack in Black leadership was a slight tremor when compared to the split that graphically was played out in Georgia’s senatorial campaign with U.S. Senator Herman Talmadge. In fact, the senate race may have been the clearest example of what has happened to King’s vision of Blacks in Southern politics.

Back in the summer, Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson, known for his oratory, endorsed Lt. Gov. Zell Miller for the U.S. Senate, making the statement that any Black voters who supported incumbent Herman Talmadge “might as well walk down Auburn Avenue and spit on King’s grave.” Talmadge, who was denounced by the Senate in October 1979 for reprehensible conduct that “tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute,” has long been considered a staunch segregationist by many. “All that King fought for was opposed by Herman Talmadge and is opposed by Herman Talmadge,” Jackson said, with the agreement of others such as Julian Bond. Talmadge never supported one piece of civil rights legislation in his 23 years in the Senate.

Talmadge, whose election as governor back in 1948 was considered the “No. 1 job of all Georgia Klansmen,” has been referred to as “Klan loving ‘Hummon’ Talmadge.” One of the laws he signed as governor required every voter in the state to “reregister,” in an attempt to reduce the number of Blacks registered to vote.

Talmadge’s positions on human rights are clearly worse than Miller’s. Miller supports the extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Talmadge has voted against the original bill and its extension. Miller worked to pass the Georgia Fair Employment Practices Act, which makes discrimination in employment illegal, while in 1955 Talmadge wrote that the establishment of the Federal Employment Practices Commission “would steal away our birthright of freedom and put all of us at the complete mercy of such organizations as the NAACP.” Miller supports affirmative action programs which attempt to correct past injustices. On June 28, 1977, Talmadge voted against the use of federal funds to administer affirmative action programs in hiring, promotions and school admissions.

A few days after Jackson’s statement, however, State Rep. Alveda King Beal, granddaughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr., now in her first term as a state legislator from Atlanta, announced her support of Herman Talmadge. In a prepared statement she said, “People may ask why I’m endorsing Sen. Talmadge. I ask why not. For those who say Herman Talmadge fought against civil rights, I say he had a lot of company…We must believe that men can change. I believe in change. Today Herman Talmadge is fighting for all Georgians, Black and White.”

In thanking Beal for her support, Talmadge referred to the fact that he was a close and personal friend of her grandfather, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. The senior King did have kind words to say about the senator throughout most of the campaign, but had always stopped short of endorsing him. Then in a surprise move, during the weekend before the primary, King lined up with 50 to 60 other Black ministers in Atlanta in support of Zell Miller. He offered a motion that the group back Miller and promote his candidacy from their pulpits on Sunday morning. The motion passed unanimously.

King was unavailable for comment later that day. Then the very next day in Savannah he urged Black churchgoers there to “follow the leadership,” referring to a group of ministers who had lined up with Talmadge.

King finally declared he would not endorse anybody. He told the Savannah group he could only “suggest” that they follow the leadership of the pastors and ministers who were trying to do the best for them.

In the meantime, Coretta King

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thought that she had better clarify her position amid all the confusion and announced her support of Miller. However, another respected Black leader, Jesse Hill, president of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, a member of the King Center board, and former Atlanta Chamber of Commerce president, barely stopped short of an endorsement of Talmadge. Days before the election Hill held a news conference for the sole purpose of offering high words of praise for Talmadge, calling him “one of the most effective, hard-working senators serving us in the United States Senate.”

Some other Black leaders across the state were more direct. For example, one of the first Black elected officials of Dawson, Georgia, Robert Albritten, distributed a letter endorsing Talmadge, citing the funds the senator had helped secure for Black colleges and his influential position in Congress.

Thus, what at the outset appeared a clear choice for Black voters in Georgia’s 1980 senatorial election—a choice between the son of Eugene Talmadge, the state’s most notorious racist, who had grown up to be called a friend of the Klan and author of a well-known treatise endorsing segregation, and a host of other contenders, one considered a liberal—was anything but that.

The election returns showed signs of the Talmadge Black support. Although Miller was able to secure nearly 25 percent of the total vote in the first primary and forced the veteran senator into a runoff for the first time in his 30-year political career, Talmadge came back to claim a resounding victory over Miller with almost 60 percent of the vote. Miller’s campaign had been banking on a heavy turnout of Black voters to overtake Talmadge in the runoff. An examination of 14 predominantly Black precincts around Atlanta following the election showed only 25.9 percent of the electorate voted in the runoff election whereas the statewide turnout of all voters was over 40 percent. Moreover, from 20 to 25 percent of the Black precincts voted for Herman Talmadge. In short, the incumbent won with noticeable Black support.

When Zell Miller conceded the Democratic primary and went off to the local theater to see a Willie Nelson film he had missed while campaigning, Mack Mattingly reminded the Georgia press that he was the Republican challenger. Not impressed, Senator Talmadge refused an invitation to debate and went on back to Washington after thanking his friends and supporters for their victory. Mattingly, who lived on the Georgia coast, had never held public office. He had run a small campaign in an unsuccessful bid for a congressional seat earlier but had earned little public recognition and not many votes.

The Republican campaign had begun earlier in the summer when Mattingly became the party’s nominee in a primary where less than 100,000 Republicans voted. Handsome and energetic, Mattingly traveled the state walking the cafes of small south Georgia county seats and competing with grocery handbills in Atlanta suburban shopping centers.

As November approached, Talmadge began considering his opponent more seriously. He gathered his colleague from the Senate, Sam Nunn, and Governor George Busbee as cheerleaders for his campaign. He also once again activated without fanfare his efforts with Black leaders who had supported him in the primary.

Mattingly did not court the Black vote perhaps because his contacts and association with Black leaders across the state and in Atlanta could be counted on one hand. He did appear at a political forum at predominantly Black Atlanta University but, under questioning from students, had difficulty identifying exactly which country was Zimbabwe. Before an older crowd of Black businessmen and preachers at Atlanta’s Hungry Club, Mattingly admitted his performance at Atlanta University had not been his best and assured the audience that he was sensitive and concerned about their problems.

The campaign ended with a flurry of television ads by both candidates. Mattingly’s spots hammered away at Talmadge’s poor attendance during important votes in Washington while Talmadge reminded people of his accomplishments for Georgia in the last three decades. Black leaders throughout the state did not become visible in the campaign and were concentrating on the presidential race where many responded to the Abernathy-Williams endorsement of Ronald Reagan.

By early evening November 4, as votes came in to the Talmadge headquarters where Alveda King Beal and others gathered to celebrate Talmadge’s victory, wire services and television networks quickly projected a victory for the senior senator. From the earliest moment, Talmadge himself was more cautious and would say for the TV cameras only that “I want to see some arithmetic.”

And so he should. By 10:30 on the morning of November 5 after the Talmadge campaign had declared victory, the Atlanta Journal contradicted its sister morning paper, the Constitution, with bold two-inch headlines: MATTINGLY WINS. Georgia’s preeminent politician had lost to a Republican who only six months earlier was unknown to probably 99.9 percent of the Georgia public.

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The voting returns in the general election are an apparent contradiction of the Democratic primary in urban and suburban areas. Among the 10 metropolitan counties in Georgia in the Democratic primary Talmadge won seven and received no less than 40 percent of the vote in the remaining three. In the general election, Talmadge won only two of the 10 counties (see Chart #1).

For example, Talmadge carried Cobb County, bordering Atlanta on the northwest, with about 54 percent of the vote, against Lt. Gov. Miller. Against Mattingly, Talmadge picked up less than 30 percent of the vote.

The voting within Atlanta followed the same contradictory pattern. Almost every precinct which Talmadge carried in the Democratic primary, he lost in the general election; moreover, the predominantly Black precincts in the city switched from majority opposition to majority support for Talmadge. The majority White precincts in the city flipped the other way: from majority support to majority opposition of Talmadge (see Chart #2).

The Black support for Talmadge on November 4 was not without some defection across the board in almost every precinct. For example, while Miller carried the Black precinct at Collier Heights School in Atlanta by 78 percent, the flip gave Talmadge only about 64 percent of the vote in his race against Mattingly.

In south and middle Georgia counties outside the metropolitan area, Talmadge maintained much of the same White support against Mattingly as he had had against Miller. Indications are, however, that in many of the largely Black populated counties, voters also reversed from primarily opposing Talmadge in the Democratic run-off to supporting him in the general election.

Although some north Georgia counties deserted the Talmadge column on November 4 after giving him a majority in the Democratic run-off, the Black voters were probably the only ones who, as a group, actually voted against Talmadge in the run-off and two months later went back to the polls and voted for him in the general election. Georgia’s voter turnout in the two-party contest was almost twice that of the run-off. In the metropolitan areas which Talmadge lost to Mattingly, the increases were mammoth. In Cobb County two-anda-half times more than the 40,000 voters in the Democratic run-off came out to vote in the general election. These new voters—suburban, predominantly White —chose Mattingly in overwhelming numbers.

In the White urban precincts of Atlanta the turnout also increased—by a little less than twice as much as the run-off—and most of these new voters probably favored Mattingly. In these precincts Talmadge actually received a few less votes than he did in the run-off with the lower voter turnout. At Christ the King Church in a White section of Atlanta, Talmadge received 366 of the 608 votes in the Democratic run-off but only 281 votes of the total 1,121 in the general election.

Black precincts also increased their turnout although not in numbers like the suburbs. Yet, even if all the new Black voters who came out only in the general election had supported Talmadge, some Blacks who voted in both elections had to flip-flop for Talmadge. Blacks more than any other group tried to save Talmadge by changing their vote.

The supreme irony of Herman Talmadge’s defeat has to be the fact that, more than anyone else, Black voters tried to save him. While the Black precincts gave Talmadge almost one in five votes against Miller in the Democratic run-off, they provided Talmadge with his strongest support, about 70 percent of their vote, in the general election.

In the race against Miller, Talmadge’s support in the Black community is said to have come from the power of incumbency and seniority.

Some political observers believe that the political IOU’s of Talmadge’s 30 years of service in Georgia allowed him to collect the Black support he received. His assistance, for instance, in helping the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Social Change obtain federal funding probably did have something to do with the King family’s vacillation. (Since the Democratic primary the property surrounding the King Center has been designated a national historic park by Congress.) Also, because of his support for Morris Brown College, the AME ministers who run the school gave him the Man of the Year Award and their endorsement.

There are other examples. Talmadge interceded on behalf of the Wheat Street Baptist Church with HUD on problems they were having with a highrise for the elderly. “I have met a lot of White politicians who say they are for equal rights, but then they fail to deliver when it comes to equal opportunity. Herman Talmadge has delivered. He has never hesitated to use his seniority and his influence in fighting for minority business development,” says the Rev. William Holmes Borders, pastor of Wheat Street Baptist Church and a veteran civil rights advocate. Borders is highly esteemed in the Black community and when he says that “Herman Talmadge has delivered,” it becomes gospel to a large number of people.

Continued on page 22

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CHART #1
Atlanta Precinct Returns in Democratic Runoff and General Election
Talmadge Support Reverses

	Atlanta Precincts	Runoff (August 1980)			General Election
	SAMPLE WHITE	Miller (%)	Talmadge (%)	Total	Mattingly (%)	Talmadge (%)	Total
	8A (Jackson School)	300 (48)	325 (52)	625	927 (77.3)	272 (22.7)	1,199
	8B (Sutton School)	417 (52.3)	380 (47.7)	797	1,179 (79.3)	308 (20.7)	1,487
	8C (Adult Ed. Ctr.)	200 (40.2)	298 (59.8)	498	697 (77.7)	200 (22.3)	897
	8D (Ga. Easter Seal)	373 (49.3)	383 (50.7)	756	1,199 (77.1)	357 (22.9)	1,556
	8E (Mitchell School)	332 (43.1)	439 (56.9)	771	1,002 (68.0)	471 (32.0)	1,473
	8F (Brandon School)	312 (43.8)	400 (56.2)	712	1,011 (80.0)	253 (20.0)	1,264
	8G (Campbell-Stone)	412 (46.2)	479 (53.8)	891	1,149 (73.0)	426 (27.0)	1,575
	8H (Christ the King)	242 (39.8)	366 (60.2)	608	840 (74.9)	281 (25.1)	1,121
	SAMPLE BLACK
	10A (Miles School)	599 (86.1)	97 (13.9)	696	367 (33.4)	731 (66.6)	1,098
	10B (Adamsville School)	420 (85.9)	69 (14.1)	489	262 (31.5)	569 (68.5)	831
	10C (Fire Sta. 9)	426 (81.0)	100 (19.0)	526	298 (30.5)	680 (69.5)	978
	10D (Adamsville Ctr.)	475 (81.9)	105 (18.1)	580	325 (30.8)	729 (69.2)	1,054
	10E (Collier Hts. Sch.)	156 (78.4)	43 (21.6)	199	89 (35.9)	159 (64.1)	248
	1OF (Union Baptist)	439 (79.1)	116 (20.9)	555	249 (30.7)	563 (69.3)	812
	10G (Anderson School)	303 (79.5)	78 (20.5)	381	153 (25.6)	444 (74.4)	597
	10H (White School)	260 (82.8)	54 (17.2)	314	141 (29.3)	341 (70.7)	482

CHART #2
Urban County Returns in Georgia’s Democratic Runoff and General Election
Talmadge Support Reverses

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Evelyn Broadus, a former employee of Zell Miller, was a paid staff member at Talmadge’s Atlanta headquarters. Her decision to support Talmadge over Miller was due to no shortcoming on the lieutenant governor’s part, she said, but simply because she felt we needed someone with seniority. “He has been in office and he knows how to get his way,” she said. Betty Stevens, a counselor with the Atlanta Board of Education, agreed. “It’s just common sense,” she said. “It takes experience and seniority to be effective. Talmadge has shown he has some clout.”

Stevens, however, like several other Blacks interviewed, also expressed a dislike for Miller. “If the only bad thing people can say about Talmadge is that back in 1945 or so he was a segregationist, well, it hasn’t been 15 years ago since Zell Miller was Lester Maddox’s right-hand man. Miller was executive secretary to Maddox during the former governor’s term of office. Maddox was elected governor after his segregationist stands were widely publicized.”

Savannah Alderman Roy Jackson voiced a similar opinion: “Some say that Talmadge was a segregationist leader 25 years ago,” Jackson said. “I say he had a lot of company. The leader of the pack was Zig-zag Zell, who we are being asked to vote for on the basis that he is not a segregationist. Zig-zag Zell kept Gov. Lester Maddox’s office while Maddox was away making axe handles.”

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He went on to question, “If Zig-zag Zell is not a racist, why did he call Martin Luther King a communist? If Zell Miller is a great friend of the Black and poor people, why in his 1968 campaign for Congress did he say all the federal funds being used to help the Black and poor people should be used to investigate communist infiltration of the NAACP?”

These sentiments may have played a part in the general election. Probably more certain, Blacks in Georgia voted a straight Democratic ticket on November 4 and Talmadge was in that column. In addition, Mattingly was an unknown candidate who had no public record of sensitivity to Blacks and was a member of the party of Ronald Reagan whom Georgia Blacks rejected in overwhelming percentages at the polls.

By any arithmetic, the voting returns in the Senate race show that Black voters lost. Their candidates lost because their choices were muddled by divisions among Black political leadership during the Democratic primary and because in the general election they had no where else to go than to Talmadge. Black voters also lost because there never was an opportunity to coalesce with White voters on any of the candidates. When the Black voters chose one Senatorial candidate, overwhelming numbers of Whites in the state chose the other.

Sixteen years after the Voting Rights Act and Blacks’ first unfettered opportunity to vote, Black voting is becoming more pluralistic and divided. In many ways a natural development, this division has come about at a time when White voting appears more unified both in the Democratic primaries and the general election. If the trend continues, the power of the Black’s ballot, which King envisioned as the strongest weapon of change, will be reduced to supporting seniority and incumbency, the old tools of the status quo, as the best, if inadequate, means for change in Southern politics.

The trend of declining Black voter turnout is nothing new, as Leslie Dunbar, formerly director of the Field Foundation, noted the Southwide, historic development earlier this year. “In each presidential election from 1964-1976, the proportion of Blacks casting their ballots was lower in the South than in the North and West… What we have,” Dunbar said, “is a nation that in these years takes voting less and less seriously, with Black Southerners being the least interested of all …. I see no reason to expect voter interest, including that of Black Southerners, to rise unless the issues at contest become stronger and differences between parties and candidates more real.”

For Southern politicians, the Miller-Talmadge contest shows clearly some of the results of trends Dunbar observes. With almost every viable White politicians’ record spoiled by at least a moment or two of racism (if not usually considerably more), the yardstick for more and more Black leaders will be the “here and now” politics of who can offer real help. The past will be for them little indication of the real political differences. And until those differences between candidates are so contrasting and real to the Black electorate that there is really only one choice again, the present is the future for more and more Black voters regardless of the candidate’s past.

Betty Norwood Chaney is senior editor of Southern Changes magazine.

	County	Runoff (August 1980)			General Election
	Urban	Miller (%)	Talmadge (%)	Total	Mattingly (%)	Talmadge (%)	Total
	Bibb (Macon)	10,111 (39.5)	15,462 (60.5)	25,573	19,610 (45.0)	23,988 (55.0)	43,598
	Chatham (Savannah)	13,905 (46.5)	15,994 (53.5)	29,899	25,857 (49.7)	26,126 (50.3)	51,983
	Clayton (Atlanta)	6,775 (38.4)	10,863 (61.6)	17,638	23,123 (60.0)	15,422 (40.0)	38,545
	Cobb (Atlanta)	18,158 (46.2)	21,103 (53.8)	39,261	70,293 (70.6)	29,213 (29.4)	99,506
	DeKalb (Atlanta)	40,494 (58.8)	28,402 (41.2)	68,896	103,777 (69.1)	46,483 (30.9)	150,260
	Doughtery (Albany)	6,171 (43.8)	7,916 (56.2)	14,087	13,579 (51.3)	12,882 (48.7)	26,461
	Fulton (Atlanta)	57,599 (59.7)	38,814 (40.3)	96,413	102,523 (56.6)	78,715 (43.4)	181,238
	Gwinnett (Atlanta)	9,336 (43.0)	12,382 (57.0)	21,718	34,595 (67.9)	16,386 (32.1)	50,981
	Muscogee (Columbus)	9,708 (56.5)	7,476 (43.5)	17,184	21,565 (59.6)	14,633 (40.4)	36,198
	Richmond (Augusta)	9,223 (49.2)	9,542 (50.8)	18,765	24,254 (53.4)	21,128 (46.6)	45,382
	SOUTH GEORGIA
	Camden	1,088 (39.2)	1,690 (60.8)	2,778	1,107 (34.7)	2,079 (65.3)	3,186
	Coffee	2,152 (35.8)	3,860 (64.2)	6,012	2,523 (39.4)	3,885 (60.6)	6,408
	Decatur	1,090 (31.3)	2,396 (68.7)	3,486	2,010 (36.2)	3,547 (63.8)	5,557
	Mitchell	1,429 (31.8)	3,070 (68.2)	4,499	1,949 (31.9)	4,168 (68.1)	6,117
	Tift	2,005 (33.9)	3,906 (66.1)	5,911	3,380 (43.4)	4,402 (56.6)	7,782
	MIDDLE GEORGIA
	Hancock	414 (47.4)	459 (52.6)	873	504 (24.2)	1,576 (75.8)	2,080
	Jefferson	775 (29.0)	1,896 (71.0)	2,671	1,355 (30.8)	3,039 (69.2)	4,394
	Talbot	967 (44.7)	1,198 (55.3)	2,165	637 (34.6)	1,206 (65.4)	1,843
	Upson	1,690 (32.5)	3,515 (67.5)	5,205	2,631 (34.4)	5,010 (65.6)	7,641
	Wilkinson	594 (33.4)	1,183 (66.6)	1,777	1,096 (34.8)	2,050 (65.2)	3,146

Southern Republicans for a Change

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 3, No. 1, 1980, pp. 10-13

As deeply conservative Republican candidates began to celebrate their victories to the local bands’ tunes of “When the Saints Come Marching In” and “Dixie” late evening November 4 and early morning November 5, almost all historical truisms of Southern politics were discarded in one place or another to the blurred disbelief of life-time Democratic officials who wondered out loud what had become of the God-given virtues of a Southerner being a member of the party of Jefferson and Jackson. Not since 1964, when Barry Goldwater raced to be president, had the Republicans been able to take over so many seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate reserved for Democrats since Reconstruction.

Ronald Reagan took ten of the South’s eleven Southern states, leaving in the Democratic column only the President’s home state where U.S. Sen. Herman Talmadge was defeated by little-known Republican Mack Mattingly. In three other Southern states—North Carolina, Florida, and Alabama—Republicans were also elected to the U.S. Senate so that in January only two Southern states—Arkansas and Louisiana—will not have at least one Republican U.S. Senator.

Republican victories were also impressive in races for the U.S. House. The party picked up nine new seats in the South and, except in Georgia, won every contest where a Democratic incumbent had retired or was defeated in the primary election. In South Carolina’s first district, Republican Tom Harnett defeated Pug Ravenel, the Democratic candidate who won the gubernatorial race in 1974 only to be disqualified by the courts as a non-resident and who unsuccessfully challenged Sen. Strom Thurmond in 1978.

Although not one incumbent Republican Representative in the South lost on November 4, five incumbent Democrats who faced Republican challengers including two in Virginia and two in North Carolina were defeated. Three of these Democratic incumbents were members of the South’s congressional delegation who were rated highly by traditional liberals, labor, civil rights and civil liberties groups. In January, almost one-third of the South’s delegation in the House will be Republican, and across the South only Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee Democrats can claim that their party survived all new Republican challenges in congressional and state-wide races.

Two years back, if not only a few months ago, most of the eager Republican candidates who sought to challenge Democratic incumbents in November were virtually unknown. While a few had run successfully for offices in previous years, even fewer had held any public office. A loyal party member, Frank White in Arkansas was the president of a savings and loan association in Little Rock who even the financial institution’s customers probably couldn’t have named six months ago. Insurance executive Albert Lee Smith of Birmingham had unsuccessfully campaigned for the U.S. House two years ago but only among Republican regulars. An outspoken professor and an ally of U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, John P. East in North Carolina had been active in politics for years but, because he is confined to a wheelchair as a polio victim, the new senator had seldom been in the public view before this campaign.

The Democrats, on the other hand, had an impressive gallery of rising stars and well-established political bodies. The youngest governor in America, Bill Clinton of Arkansas, was handsome, articulate, and politically savvy. While worried earlier in the year about the intentions of Georgia Democratic Lt. Gov. Zell Miller, Senator Herman Talmadge was a public servant with 24 years of seniority and constituent services to prove his worth despite the U.S. Senate’s denunciation of his financial dealings. Rep. Bob Eckhart of Texas had served his district for seven terms and was renowned throughout the country.

Overcoming public obscurity, the Republican march to victory in federal elections resembled a traveling road show where minstrels performed political miracles defying all the time-tested rules of who can win and lose in Southern politics. Regional pride, love of seniority at any cost, religious tolerance for any faith so long as it was bedrock Protestant, and downright disgust for anything relating to “sexual perversion”—known in more pluralistic circles as homosexuality—had been human emotions which every Southern politician used to observe rigorously. In this election, the South rejected as president one of its own; Georgia tuned out the country’s third ranking U.S. Senator; Alabama elected its first Catholic to the U. S. Senate; the politically right Christians in Birmingham debunked a Baptist preacher; and Jackson, Mississippi voters re-

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elected a congressman who had recently admitted to frequenting homosexual gatherings in Washington, D.C., where he had been arrested on criminal charges. Amazingly, this generous dose of political tolerance was bestowed by voters only on Republicans.

The redeeming virtue of these and other winning Republicans was apparently bedrock conservatism that endorses a balanced federal budget, increased military spending, and curtailed federal programs. These newcomers’ views are largely carbon copies of the speeches and newsletters of most of the Southern Republicans elected to Congress since 1964.

The images and style of N.C. Sen. Jesse Helms constitute the political figure that most successful Republicans resembled this election. Articulate and unhesitating, Helms has become one of the chief spokesmen for the Republican opposition to government spending, except for roads or defense, and almost any issue held precious by liberals, feminists, and racial minorities. While his record among every liberal and civil rights group is always one of the lowest, Helms has done more than simply act as a political mannequin for Republican candidates to imitate.

For his friend John East, Helms used the extensive mail fundraising apparatus of his Congressional Club, which raised more than $7 million for his own re-election last time, to generate campaign funds to defeat Democratic U.S. Sen. Robert Morgan. In Alabama, the new Republican Senator, Jeremiah Denton, tells the story of how Helms inspired the former prisoner of war to do more than simply organize a chapter of the Moral Majority—to get into politics and win.

The organized conservative campaign groups such as the Moral Majority and the Christian Voice also had their hand visibly in the triumph of some Republicans. Rep.-elect Albert Lee Smith of Birmingham was a member of the local chapter of the Moral Majority. In Houston, Bob Eckhart’s successful Republican opponent had strong support from conservative religious groups. In Florida, Paula Hawkins picked up the endorsement of several visible conservative Christian organizations. And in the last few weeks of the campaign, Jimmy Carter was attacked in radio ads broadcast largely in Southern rural areas as the friend of the gay community. There was, however, little of the extensive, expensive television campaigning against incumbents by these groups as undertaken in other parts of the country against dyed-in-the-wool liberals such as George McGovern and Birch Bayh.

The Southern Republican challengers’ own television spots, especially during the last couple of weeks of the campaign, may have had a critical effect in gaining three Senate seats. “The East campaign pumped in a helluva lot of money in TV spots a week before the election,” says Raymond Wheeler, former president of the Southern Regional Council and Charlotte, North Carolina physician. “They repeatedly showed (Senator Robert) Morgan as a Mafia-type figure who had given away the Panama Canal and Nicaragua to Communists and had weakened the country’s ability to defend itself.” Much of Mack Mattingly’s million or so dollars were spent in Georgia on television ads that hit hard at Senator Talmadge’s absenteeism on important roll call votes in a time of inflation and unemployment. And Jeremiah Denton in Alabama saturated metropolitan areas with ads that reminded voters of his heroics as a captive in North Viet Nam (recalling for some how he blinked the word “TORTURE” by Morse code as he was forced to read a conciliatory statement for North Viet Nam on behalf of the POWs) and his mature conservative positions.

In most of the hotly contested congressional races, Southerners could perceive very little philosophical difference between the parties’ candidates. In Charleston, Democratic nominee Ravenel and Republican Harnett both favored a strong defense and could argue only over who could get a seat on the Armed Services Committee to best carry out their pledge. Each candidate produced a letter from his party’s leadership in the U.S. House to prove that if elected he would have the appointment on the committee which the Charleston representative has held for more than 20 years. When House Speaker Tip O’Neill of Massachusetts praised Ravenel in his letter, Harnett chided his opponent, who had spent several months in Washington as a Department of Commerce official, as a part of the big-spending Washington crowd.

A series of Senatorial debates in Alabama evidenced so little substantial disagreement that one local wag suggested that the events were really “political weddings.” Age was the one factor which Republican Denton tried to stress: “There are a lot of 31-year-olds smarter than me … but Jim Folsom isn’t one of them,” the Republican would say. Folsom, the tall, handsome son of former populist Gov. “Big Jim,” stressed most often one difference. He was a Democrat and his opponent was a Republican.

Most of the defeated incumbents in Congress were attacked for their

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record of free spending and creating a weak defense. Texas Rep. Bob Eckhart of Houston stood by his record of opposing big business and assisting consumers although successful Republican challenger Jack Fields, supported by oil money, succeeded in picturing Eckhart as too-liberal-and-too-out-of-touch. Much of the same drama of issues and allegations was played out in Birmingham, where Smith defeated incumbent Republican John Buchanan in that party’s primary, and in Virginia where Republican challengers defeated Democratic Reps. Herbert Harris and Joseph Fisher in the suburban areas outside of Washington.

The Republican gains mark unmistakably a two-party system in the South’s congressional offices. With almost half the Senate delegation and a third of the congressional delegation from the South, Republicans have made good on the 1964 efforts to establish another viable political party. Nashville Tennessean editor John Seigenthaler, a long-time supporter of the national Democratic party, foresaw developments not long ago when he observed “Southerners of good will have fought for decades for moderation and a two-party system and, now, that we’re getting it, God save us from it.”

While election returns may portray the unholy demise of a solid Democratic South to party regulars, the sum of Republican victories is most likely a big step towards restoring the solid South—the conservative solid South. Since the 1948 presidential election and the walkout at the Democratic National Convention of Dixiecrats led by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina in protest of the civil rights plank, the national Democratic party and the Southern Democratic state and local officials’ party have gone their separate ways. This enduring split has been the best political opportunity for Southern Republicans to be elected to federal office.

Since the split of the Democratic party, incumbent Democrats who go to Washington have been susceptible to the Republican attack that they have become a part of the “Washington crowd” of the Democratic, big-spending, wasteful government officials who’ve lost touch with their constituents. What Mississippi’s former segregationist Gov. John L. Williams recently said of Ronald Reagan on the campaign stump has been the appeal of Southern Republicans for decades: “He is a man of the party of Lincoln who believes in the principles of Jefferson.”

In a South where Thomas Jefferson may no longer be second even to the Confederate memorial statue as the symbol of resistance to the federal government (at least to the working politicians), Republican victories in 1980 occurred usually where Democrats were convincingly described as too liberal, too much a part of the Washington crowd, and too beholden to minority groups.

As Birmingham Rep. John Buchanan now knows, local Republicans are willing to clean their own house for the sake of conservatism even if it runs the risk of losing one of their seats in the South. Buchanan and most of the Southern Democrats whose voting records of the last two years had drifted from traditional Southern political conservatism will not be returning to Washington (see companion story).

Every defeated Democrat south of the Mason-Dixon and west of Amarillo, except for Herman Talmadge, has probably thought or said that Jimmy Carter is to be blamed for their fate. While he may be responsible for his own defeat, Carter can’t easily be held responsible for the Republican Southern sweep.

The notion of a presidential candidate’s political coattails is not what it used to be, if it even can hold true by any definition today. In federal elections in the South, especially, it is hard to find those White voters who nowadays pull only one party lever and quickly leave the voting booth. Early Southern county and precinct returns for the November election show that most voters who chose Reagan as president and a successful Republican con-

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gressman also voted for local and state Democrats. On the other side, probably as many as half of the voters who supported Democratic congressional candidates in the South supported Ronald Reagan for president. If Carter had really driven folks out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican, the Democratic casualty list would have been long indeed.

Large numbers of Southern Black voters do still vote straight tickets in the South and they did so this year—again for the Democrats. In early returns from predominantly Black precincts, results show that Jimmy Carter’s plea to the Black community was heard and that Blacks responded in impressive numbers. For Democrats in the cities and the rural, largely Black populated areas, the Black turnout and their strong party support was a major part of the Democratic vote in local, state and congressional races. These were votes that could have stayed home.

Although there weren’t any political coattails, Ronald Reagan surely helped cause the defeat of congressional Democrats by spurring a heavy turnout of suburban White voters and establishing an attractive campaign agenda which lesser Republican candidates could use in the South. The theme of “getting the government off the backs of the American people so they can do what I know you do so well” was by the end of the election a Reagan cliche that other Republicans put into their own advertising and stump rhetoric. In a region that voted overwhelmingly in 1968 for Richard Nixon and George Wallace, in that order, the conservative, anti-Washington slogan of the Reagan campaign provided an excellent tempo for the Republican congressional candidates.

For those observers who watch Southern politics over time, the presidential election was probably not much of a surprise. Since Lyndon Johnson, the South’s other native president in this century, carried only six Southern states in 1964, presidential elections in the South have been largely Republican affairs. In 1968 and 1972, Richard Nixon carried the South. In 1976, Carter defied the trend successfully and carried the region—with not only the advantage of regional pride but also an anti-Washington campaign. Promising a government “as good as its people,” Carter had all the needed credentials four years ago—a native son, a conservative record as governor, and a theme appealing to the Southern antipathy for an enlarging federal government. With those themes, Carter carried the South by only about 4 percent. In this election he was only a native son and carried only his home state.

Despite the landslides, future Republican gains in Congress are certainly not assured. The Democratic machinery still has a stronghold in the South at local and state levels and with Democratic state legislatures redrawing congressional lines over the next couple of years, Republican congressmen may not be able to establish a base of support in only two years to survive strong Democratic challengers and re-districting.

President Reagan will likely have a better time in the future South. Unless the last 16 years of Southern presidential politics are interrupted by a new Democratic coalition, Ronald Reagan will probably act as the South’s new favorite son for as long as his constitution and the country’s permit.

Steve Suitts is acting editor of Southern Changes.

Conservative Republicans Take Washington Seats

By Staff

Vol. 3, No. 1, 1980, p. 14

Nine of the more than thirty new Republican seats in the U.S. House of Representatives will come from the South as a result of the November general election. While maintaining their 24 present House seats among the Southern delegations, Republicans also have gained four U.S. Senate seats from North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and Alabama.

Southern Democrats suffered a hard right swing from voters who aimed their harshest blows at moderate Democratic representatives. One-third of the South’s Democratic representatives whose voting records in any way favored civil rights, civil liberties, labor, and liberal groups was defeated by the conservative Republicans. In all congressional elections where Southern Democratic incumbents were not to return to Congress because of defeat in the primary or retirement, Republicans won. All newly elected congressmen ran on a platform more conservative than their predecessor’s.

Those U.S. Representatives who served in the last Congress and won’t be returning to Washington from the South because of defeat at the polls are listed below with ratings on their voting records from 1978 and 1980 by civil rights, civil liberties, labor, and liberal groups.

Defeated Southern Congressmen and Their Voting Record
U.S. House of Representatives

		Leadership Conference on Civil Rights	ACLU*	ADA*	COPE*
		1980	1980	1978	1978
	ALABAMA
	John H. Buchanan (R)	57%	50%	30%	44%
	FLORIDA
	Richard Kelly (R)	0%	3%	5%	0%
	Edward J. Stack (D) +	100%	77%	—	—
	LOUISIANA
	Claude Leach (D) +	14%	23%	—	—
	NORTH CAROLINA
	Richardson Preyer (D)	57%	57%	55%	60%
	Lamar Gudger (D)	29%	27%	25%	30%
	SOUTH CAROLINA
	John W. Jenrette (D)	71%	33%	40%	74%
	TEXAS
	Ray Roberts (D)	0%	23%	15%	22%
	Bob Eckhardt (D)	86%	83%	75%	89%
	Joe Wyatt, Jr. (D) +	29%	10%	—	—
	VIRGINIA
	Herbert E. Harris, II (D)	100%	80%	70%	90%
	Joseph L. Fisher (D)	100%	87%	60%	65%

U.S. Senate

		Leadership Conference on Civil Rights	ACLU*	ADA*	COPE*
		1980	1980	1978	1978
	ALABAMA
	Donald Stewart (D) +	75%	47%	—	—
	FLORIDA
	Richard Stone (D)	75%	37%	25%	50%
	GEORGIA
	Herman E. Talmadge (D)	38%	20%	40%	42%
	NORTH CAROLINA
	Robert Morgan (D)	38%	20%	25%	35%

* ACLU is the rating of the American Civil Liberties Union; ADA is Americans for Democratic Action; COPE is the ratings of the AFL-CIO political arm.
+ Not serving in Congress in 1978 session.

South Carolina Senate Remains Totally White

By Mary Frances Derfner

Vol. 3, No. 1, 1980, pp. 14-15, 22

“It’s about time we elected a Black State Senator,” declared the posters and the handouts on the street. Many South Carolinians, both Black and White, agreed that Bill Saunders, Charleston broadcasting executive and director of the Committee on Better Racial Assurance (COBRA), a human services agency, should become South Carolina’s first Black state senator since Reconstruction. Saunders’s record included voter registration drives in the 1950s, original membership on the State Human Affairs Commission, work as principal mediator in the 1969 Charleston hospital strike, and extensive service on task forces and committees working on problems of youth, the elderly and handicapped, health care, education, economic development and crime. As Director of COBRA, a group designed in part to establish a bridge between Charleston’s Black and White communities, Saunders had worked with all elements of Charleston and Georgetown Counties, and seemed an ideal candidate.

Saunders won the hotly contested June primary and runoff elections and became the Democratic nominee for State Senate Seat 1, Charleston and Georgetown Counties, with the support of what he describes as “one of the best coalitions ever put together in Charleston,” involving “the whole nine yards” of the population. Active in the Saunders campaign were South Carolina Governor Richard Riley, Charleston local businessmen and civic leaders, and, says Saunders, more people who gave $2 and $5 contributions than were involved in any campaign of its size in local history. Despite this broadbased support, Bill Saunders lost to Charleston County Republican Party Chairman Glenn McConnell, receiving slightly less than 46 percent of the district wide vote.

Local Republican and Democratic party officials cite the “coattail effect” of Ronald Reagan’s presidential victory and the mood of the electorate as the main reasons for the defeat of

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Democratic candidates, including Bill Saunders, within Charleston and Georgetown Counties. Both parties also agree that the Republicans out-organized the Democrats, particularly in predominantly White, suburban precincts, with a resulting turnout of only 60 to 65 percent of registered voters in majority-Black precincts compared to a turnout of from 70 to 80 percent of registered voters in majority-White precincts.

Bill Saunders concurs that the major reasons for his defeat were “anti-Carter sentiment and the mood of the country,” stating that local Democrats would have stood a better chance had the local and national races been separated on the ballot. Saunders also accuses the local media of ignoring the real issues in political campaigns and stressing irrelevant and irresponsible comments made by opposition candidates. “If you want to talk issues and not run a nasty campaign, you’re out of luck,” says Saunders.

Saunders blames his defeat to a lesser degree on confusion within the Black community. One Black faction urged split-ticket voting while the Democratic Party urged straight-ticket voting. There was also less-than enthusiastic support of Saunders from some traditional sources generated by the fact that the State NAACP has been seeking to have the state senate reapportioned into single member districts for quite some time. The fear that

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the election of even one Black to the state senate would endanger a single member reapportionment plan tempered the support of some Black leaders. The Chronicle, Charleston’s Black newspaper, while supporting Bill Saunders, noted reservations that perhaps the reason Saunders was able to garner so much White support was the fact that White politicians were trying to defuse the single member district reapportionment attempt; the NAACP, while supporting Saunders, expressed a belief that his election might harm their reapportionment suit.

Whatever combination of reasons led to the defeat of Saunders, he does not believe his race was one of them. Statistics showing that Saunders received approximately the same number of votes as White Democrats in local races seem to bear him out. “I got a lot of White votes,” says Saunders, expressing a hope that local Blacks will realize this and not make a racial issue of his defeat. Racial issue or not, the defeat of Bill Saunders leaves the South Carolina State Senate 100 percent White, and enables some future candidate once again to claim: “It’s about time we elected a Black State Senator.”

Mary Frances Derfner is an occasional writer in Charleston, S.C., for Southern Changes.

Black/White Voting in the South

Staff

Vol. 3, No. 1, 1980, p. 15

Early precinct returns from across the South show that Blacks went to the polls in record numbers on November 4 to give Jimmy Carter 80-90 percent of their votes. Also, Southern Black voters apparently turned out in greater numbers and voted more consistently for Carter than Blacks in the rest of the nation.

Breaking at least a 12 year trend, more than 65 percent of the registered Black voters may have turned out in both urban and rural areas in the region to cast their ballots. In places such as Birmingham (Ala.), Jacksonville (Fla.), and Baton Rouge (La.), predominantly Black precincts reported 60-70 percent turnout. At Hudson High School in Birmingham, for example, almost 79 percent of the Black precinct’s voters cast a ballot on November 4. At the same time, Black precincts in Montgomery (Ala.) and Atlanta (Ga.) showed returns more in the neighborhood of 45-55 percent.

While not as heavily populated, rural Black precincts showed almost a uniform pattern of high voter participation. In LaFayette Parish in Louisiana, mostly Black boxes showed 60-65 percent participation as did those in Gadsden County, Florida. At one precinct in Wilcox County, Alabama, where Black officials were elected for the first time to county commission and school board positions, the turnout was more than 95 percent.

Across the country most projections show that approximately 54 percent of the Black vote went to the polls. If so, Southern Blacks exercised the franchise in greater proportion than Blacks nationally.

Most who did go to the polls voted for Jimmy Carter. All reporting, targeted precincts in the South show that, without exception, 70-95 percent of the Blacks in poor, middle-class, or rich neighborhoods voted for Carter. In some voting places in both rural and urban communities, Reagan didn’t receive a single vote. In Birmingham, largely Black precincts often showed more than 90 percent support for Carter.

ABC News projected that roughly 80 percent of the nation’s Black voters cast ballots for Carter.

Despite the increased Black turnout, White voter participation in the South was probably even greater. Setting new records for regional voting in a presidential election, as many as three out of four registered Whites-and in suburban areas even larger at timesmay have voted November 4. This trend contrasts sharply with roughly a 50 percent national turnout.

While they went to the polls in droves, Southern White voters supported Ronald Reagan. Giving Reagan more than a clear majority, White voters in rural areas were, however, more loyal to their native son than urban and suburban Whites. Carter did carry a few of the predominantly White urban areas in Tennessee, Louisiana and a few other states; however, he lost most of them throughout the South and seldom carried suburban voters whose ranks have been escalating since 1976. In the suburban South, White Southerners voted Republican in percentages as large as 70-75 percent.

More than in any other election in recent history, the Southern registered voters believed it was important to go to the polls. As in the past, Black and Whites found their hope and vision for the future in different candidates.

Woodcutters Organize: Echoes of Change in the South’s Backwoods

By Wayne Greenhaw

Vol. 3, No. 1, 1980, pp. 16-19, 22

The tall huskily-built Black man opened his mouth and let his baritone voice ring out through the small plain rectangular frame church in southwest Alabama.

Proud of his heritage, ready to pass on to his children and his children’s children all that he knows of his past, Ralph Lee Johnson is trying his best to hang on to whatever he can make in the present.

A pulpwood man, whose father was a woodcutter and whose great-grandfather came over to this country from Africa on a slavery ship, Ralph Lee Johnson ekes a living out of the Piney Woods like more than 150,000 others in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

Living in a three-room house he put together out of scrap plywood, two-by-sixes he carved out of soft hardwood with his bare hands and strong shoulder muscles, he and his wife Maggie and their four children burned to frazzles in the hot sun of the summer of 1980. Sweltering in the shade, he said, “We done all the work we could do back in the spring, and now—usually when we’re working the hardest—there’s nothing to do.”

Ralph Lee Johnson blames no one person or institution for his present predicament. “It’s tough times,” he allows, and he knows that south Alabama, northwest Florida and southern Mississippi were all hit hard by Hurricane Frederic in the fall of 1979. Following the storm, hundreds of thousands of feet of timber were down and had to be cut, and the situation resulted in a surplus supply at the paper mills.

“I can’t honestly sit here and blame the paper companies. I know they have to make money. That’s what they are in business for. I blame the woodcutters themselves, like me and my friends in these woods, for not organizing and making sure that we always have enough work—whether there is a hurricane or what, ” Ralph Lee Johnson says.

While he provides for his family out of a scrawny garden, where even the collard greens appear to beg for needed water, he has put his trust in an association of pulpwood workers. Since the mid-1960’s, Ralph Lee Johnson has seen associations appear and reappear, and he has become skeptical of their importance.

“The people from the outside come in and start talking and build up our hopes. We listen, and we think they know our situation and will work for us. We get worked up about making the life in the woods better. We all know it has to be better.”

Seven years ago, when the pulpwood workers’ situation in the South received national attention, Ralph Lee Johnson was satisfied that the Gulfcoast Pulpwood Association, founded by a group of cutters near Hattiesburg, Mississippi in the late 1960s, would be the answer to his and other cutters’ problems. “It has helped a great deal,” Johnson remarks. “The leadership has continued to function, we have won several big lawsuits, but the economic situation for the cutter is still terrible.”

Black minister A.L. Richardson of Mobile County, Alabama, and his associate, James Graham of Wayne County, Mississippi, believe that through continued organization “the woodcutter will see the light within several years. Already the paper companies are beginning to make concessions to us. Even the little givings in help a great deal when you look at the big picture. It is really not different from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It has the same foundation: people have to be given their human rights; they will not stand to be oppressed forever.”

Other White and Black leaders in the woodcutters movement throughout the backwoods southland say the old-time White power structure kept the poor Blacks and Whites apart for a long time. “The George Wallaces and the Ross Barnetts and the Faubuses pushed poor Whites and poor Blacks against each other, living in a turmoil of hatred because of the colors of our skin, and at long last we sat down, took a deep breath, and looked around,” says William J. Gaines of Waycross, Georgia, who admits having ridden with the Ku Klux Klan during the 1950s and 1960s. Since shortly after World War Two, Gaines has been a pulpwood cutter. “By the early 1970s, I think we were beginning to see that we had more in common with our Black neighbors than we did with the three-piece-suited cigar-smoking politician sitting in the statehouse. We could see that we had been blind as bats to the real problems, which was that of feeding and raising our children and making something out of our lives. We had been beaten down, down, down, by our own hatred. Now, all of a sudden, we were stunned. We saw that that Black man down the road was starving just like we were. He was getting screwed by the rich paper company people just like we were. The system he was working in was the same one we were working in, and the only way we could ever get a fair break – either Black or White—would be to stand together, side-by-side, hand-in-hand, and face the giants together.”

Several woodcutter associations cropped up over the South. The newest, and thus far the most successful, has been the Southern Woodcutters Assistance Project (SWAP) backed by

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the Board of Homeland Ministries of the United Church of Christ, an ecumenical project also supported by several other Protestant groups and Catholic orders.”

In February of 1979 a group of 39 woodcutters and their families met in Canton, Mississippi, and agreed to set up a purchasing cooperative. “The idea was: you have to start somewhere,” according to Jeff Sweetland, who after working with Cesar Chavez’s efforts in California joined SWAP during the spring of 1980.

“One of the biggest problems faced by the woodcutter and his family is that he owes so much. He becomes so indebted to the wooddealers; and the paper companies he can never really get out of the hole. Everything is marked up so high, and with interest added, the cutter historically has been in debt to the company store,” Sweetland points out.

The coop concentrated on chainsaws, chains, material, supplies that would be used every month, things that wear out and have to be purchased over and over, and the savings to an average woodcutter amounted to about $75 per month. During its first year the coop sold almost $50,000 worth of merchandise that had been marked up very little.

In August of 1979 some 300 members of the coop met in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where they decided to expand to a full-fledged association. With almost unanimous effort, the United Woodcutters Association was formed, and anybody who cut wood, hauled or helped in the process was eligible to join.

“We deliberately started north of Jackson so we wouldn’t have jurisdictional fights with the Gulfcoast Pulpwood Association,” says Sweetland. “By now we have run into less than 10 people in our area involved with the GPA,” he adds.

With United Church of Christ minister Jim Drake, another former assistant to Chavez, working as coordinating officer, the UWA was established, elected a national executive board, and went to the federal government for the charter of a credit union which would further help problems of indebtedness. By early 1980 the first federal credit union for woodcutters was chartered. And today it works like any other credit union with members paying in shares, and soon the cutters will be able to make loans at low interest rates. Previously they had been forced by economic conditions and geographic isolation to go to the dealers, companies and loan-shark-type finance operations.

Also in Philadelphia, the group agreed to form United Woodcutters Services, a non-profit organization to assist the cutters with problems in worker’s compensation, insurance, and other legal areas. “We provide services to any woodcutter, whether he is a member or not,” explains Sweetland.

In August of 1980 the United Woodcutters Association decided to make its presence known politically. Times were rougher than during the past five or six years, although the weather was ideal for woodcutting. Some woodyards were given quotas, some were shut down for two and three weeks in a row, and some turned down hardwood and would take nothing but pine. Other problems that had been in existence since the beginning of woodcutting and the pulpwood industry continued.

As much as ever, many woodcutters were given the short stick, where the cord of wood is measured incorrectly at the woodyard and the cutter is paid less than he should be paid for the wood he delivers. The woodcutters complained

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to the UWA, and it was decided in Forest, Mississippi, at a legislative convention attended by more than 650 persons that the UWA should seek legislation.

“The people passed a resolution to go after the legislature in the state capitol,” Sweetland says. “The UWA wants a Fair Pulpwood Scaling Practices Board created. Where there is no equal bargaining now between the woodcutter and the wooddealer, the board would protect the interest of the woodcutter,” Sweetland explains.

“The key feature of the board would be to issue operating licenses to woodyards and revoke such licenses if the yards abused their privileges,” he adds. Sweetland believes UWA can get such legislation passed next year.

A third-generation pulpwood farmer and woodcutter, Ralph Lee Johnson believes “we have made a few strides in the right direction. But we have a long, long way to go. It has been an uphill battle all the way, and I can’t see the top yet.”

Johnson likes to preach at the Nazareth Primitive Baptist Church “where most of us attend, where we pray to the Lord to provide for us if it is His will, and we empty our tortured souls out for Him to see us bare as the day we were born.”

Not unlike the woodcutters throughout the South, Ralph Lee Johnson has been in debt to his local woodyard for all of his adult life.

“I started helping my Daddy cut wood down near Pensacola, Florida, some forty years ago. I was not even in high school. I was about this tall, but my muscles were developed, and I could drive the mules about as good as a grown man.

“We didn’t have mechanical skidders back then. When we cut logs down in the swamps we had to go in with a team of mules, wrap ’em good with chains, and pull ’em out. Sometimes it’d take a day of hard work just to get a log or two out of bad swamp, especially in late fall, after the rains, or in the spring. It wasn’t like it is today, and it ain’t easy today.

“Back in those days we not only had hard times with old-fashioned equipment, we had a hard time with the people in the industry. The first paper companies formed their woodyards out in the Piney Woods to take care of people like my Daddy and other woodcutters. The woodyards were the middlemen. They worked directly for the paper companies as agents. They bought from us. It’s the same system we operate under today. We can never take our wood directly to paper companies. We go to this woodyard or that woodyard. We are assigned to one in our area. If we cut wood way over yonder, closer to another yard, we still have to deal with this one. We have to haul right on by. I’ve passed by three or four during some hauls, using more gas, then going back, cutting more wood, and hauling it to the yard again. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but that’s the way it is. It ain’t changed since I was a little boy. And my Daddy back then told me his Daddy had had to do the same thing with his oxen pulling a cart loaded with wood.

“I remember Daddy getting the short stick from the yard down in Florida. It was a bad time. A short stick is a bad count on your cord. A cord of wood is supposed to be 128 cubic feet. That’s the measure. But one yard Daddy worked out of down there had him pile his wood in an old pig pen. They said that when the wood came up to the top of the fence, that was a cord. If it had had a true measure, it would have actually been about one and a half cords.

In another place, over in Georgia, the yard manager walked out to the truck, looked it over, then wrote in his book. He said he judged cords with his naked eye. Daddy would then haul his wood into the yard, dump it into a pile that had already been unloaded by other trucks, waiting there for the railroad cars to come and get it and take it to various paper mills, and Daddy wouldn’t know what the man determined until he pulled up in his empty truck and walked into the office for his slip. If the manager liked you, you got a good count. If he didn’t, you got short sticked.

Ralph Lee Johnson and his fellow woodcutters throughout the South, from the South Carolina Appalachians to the Texas hill country, have experienced the same humiliations. They continue to be at the mercy of the gigantic paper companies. And more and more of these companies have been moving southward recently because more timber is available, longer cutting seasons are open in the Sun Belt, and the labor force is separated and unorganized. “I believe that now is our chance to break out of the old mold of our fathers and move into the Twentieth Century,” Ralph Lee Johnson preached late on a sweltering August Wednesday afternoon in the church where he and others preach the gospel on Sundays. Johnson was telling woodcutters from a radius of nearly one hundred miles about the necessity of organizing.

“The pulpwood business is where the coal miners were back in the early thirties. They were getting the black lung disease, and they were dying, and their widows and their babies got nothing but misery from the companies. They were working in the poorest of conditions. They saw the light in the labor unions, and they joined hands

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and stuck together. Now they have better wages, better working conditions, insurance and workmen’s compensation.

“Look at us! Look at Johnny Jefferson back there! Stand up, Johnny!” A man who had been as tall as Ralph Lee Johnson once stood. He was bent forward, and his face showed the agony of years of suffering, and right arm was nothing but a nub.

“Johnny Jefferson is one of us. Most of y’all know him. He cut wood with the best of ’em until nine years ago. Nine years ago he was working up in Washington County, cutting for Larry McCollum, and the chainsaw slipped and caught his arm and tore it to shreds.

“I know you’ve all seen a wild chainsaw. I know you’ve all seen blood gush out of a man’s arm. And I know you’ve all seen men who were out there cutting until they lost a hand or an arm.”

“Johnny, how much did they pay you for your arm?” Ralph Lee Johnson hollered.

Johnny Jefferson said nothing. He sat and shook his head.

“They didn’t pay you one red cent, did they, Johnny?”

Again, Johnny Jefferson shook his head.

“Mister Larry McCollum came by to see you in the hospital didn’t he? He’s a real good man. He don’t mean no harm. But he did not empty his back pocket and give it to you, did he?”

Johnny Jefferson was silent.

“Larry McCollum or R.J. Simpson over in Mississippi or Raiford Greene over in Louisiana or any of the other dealers, they won’t give you one red cent. And you might as well be talking to a loblolly pine as to talk to International Paper or Gulf States or Union Camp or St. Regis or Georgia-Pacific or Scott or Masonite or any of the others.

They want the wood, but they don’t want to take the responsibility for getting it out of the forest. That’s the pure and the simple of it. When some poor cutter like Johnny Jefferson cuts off his arm, they turn the other way. They don’t want to have anything to do with it. They say we are independent contractors. I say we are workers. We do their work for them.

“For more than a hundred years, since the first Southern paper mill opened in South Carolina in the eighteen-hundreds, the woodcutter has been getting the short stick. We have complained. We have mostly hung our heads and walked away. In our silence, there is sadness. In our silence, there is grief. I grieve over my children and their children’s children. But I will grieve no longer, because I know now that the woodcutters will join together and fight for their rights.

“When my boy went into the business, he had to borrow money from a dealer, he bought his second-hand truck from the dealer, and even his saw and grease and oil were bought on credit from the dealer. After the man charged fourteen and fifteen percent interest, there’s no way he will ever get out of debt. It’s a lost cause from the beginning. And I know all of you are in the same predicament. And many of your children are already planning to be woodcutters. They don’t know anything else.”

From his audience, Ralph Lee Johnson received a chant of “Amen! Amen, brother,” and people nodded in unison.

Ralph Lee Johnson, moved by his own monologue, nodded with them. He knew he was one of dozens of speakers at various churches and meeting places throughout the South during the sum-

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mer of 1980, urging woodcutters to unite. He knew he was part of a movement which had started at various crossroad junctions all across the southland during the late sixties but failed to grow to fruition during the seventies. He knew too that he had taken the first step, along with the other leaders, in a direction toward unionizing the pulpwood workers of the southeast.

“Like a man who walked among us not too long ago in another battle for human rights, I have a dream.” His voice rang through the naked rafters. It was strong and heartfelt and not without the fiery tone of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “I think that it is time for all pulpwood peoples to hold themselves proud. We do not do a slave’s work. We are craftsmen in a trade.”

And the “Amen” sound came again.

“We need to walk together through the forest of hopeless dreams and climb the hillside of success. We can do it together! ”

As suddenly as he had spoken, he bowed his head and closed his eyes. He said a prayer for all of them: paper company, woodyard dealer, and woodcutter.

Then Ralph Lee Johnson, who had been cutting wood in the forests of the South since he was a boy, asked them to join with him. And the Blacks and Whites held hands and swayed rhythmically as they sang, “Oh, oh, oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day . . . ”

Wayne Greenhaw is a freelance journalist in Montgomery, Alabama and is author of several books about Southern events and people.

Blacks Elected in Wilcox County

By Randall Williams

Vol. 3, No. 1, 1980, pp. 20-21, 22

For Larry Threadgill, whose family has been active in civil rights organizing and Black politics here since the early 1960’s, things are looking up. It has not been too many years ago that his older sister was being beaten as she took the first pioonering steps to integrate the local White high school. Nor has Threadgill forgotten having his shirt ripped off by the White superintendent of education as still more Blacks tried to register at that same school a few years later.

When he was subsequently expelled, Threadgill skipped from the 11th grade to college and graduated with a pre-law degree. In 1978, a chance weekend visit to help a Black man campaign for office brought him home. His candidate did become sheriff and another Black was elected tax collector, making history in Wilcox County. Threadgill chose not to go back to Atlanta. Now in the election just past, four more Blacks have won public offices in this Black Belt county in southwest Alabama.

At least it seems, change is in the wind here.

In January, for the first time ever, Blacks will take seats on the Wilcox County Commission and the Board of Education. About 70 percent of Wilcox County’s citizens are Black and they now have a determined and effective political organization. With a majority of Black voters, at last united, they will elect more Blacks in two more years and will control both these boards. Given recent trends and the mood of the Black electorate, it may now be impossible for a White to be elected in Wilcox County.

The Surprise is not that this is happening, but that it took so long. In the restaurant at the Bassmaster Inn in downtown Camden the morning after the September 2 Democratic primary, the mood of the Whites eating there was eerily reminiscent of what one used to read about Rhodesia. The threat has not yet arrived, but its shadow looms large on the horizon. “I’m about to sell what I got and move to to Australia or somewhere,” a forest ranger muttered.

Asked if the effectivenss of the Black political organization does mean that Wilcox Whites are now locked out of public offices, Larry Threadgrill replied: ” I hope it does not. I hope we have some good White peope in Wilcox County. I would hate to completely segregate the whole thing. I worked for integration in education and politics. I would hate to turn around and defeat my purpose. All I want to see is just some responsible people in office, be they Black, White, Japanese or Indian. If a Black is elected who doesn’t have the interest of the whole county at heart, I will work just as hard to get him out as I’ll to get a White out”.

Sheriff Prince Arnold echoes Threadgill, saying, “If a man goes in there and proves that office is for the full power of the people, he can get elected.”

Arnold became the youngest Black sheriff in the United States when he was elected over five White opponents in 1978. Arnold’s age, 27 at the time of election, and his color gained him national prominence, an invitation to President Carter’s Salt II White House Conference, and a seat at the 1980 Democratic National Convention. Arnold is generally considered by both Whites and Blacks to have done a good job as sheriff. The statistics indicate that crime against persons and property have declind slightly since he took office. (Previously White sheriffs had tended to ignore Black-on-Black violence; Arnold put out the word early that he would not). He says he has tried to fulfill a campaign promise to “treat everybody the same”, making point of keeping on his staff a white deputy who had been with the former sheriff.

“The only thing people want is to be treated like a human being and Whites who do that can get elected. But I don’t know too many in the offices now who do,” Arnold says.

The catch is theat the Whites who would be the most acceptable candidate to Blacks, those who are themselves most willing to accept Blacks, the young professionals, are the least likely to accept to seek public office. One such White man revealed that a group of about 30 young professionals recently met to discuss their shared belief that the mayor of Camden was inadequate for the office. The group tried to select one of their own to run against the mayor, but each person nominated declined too busy, not planning to stay in Camden, conflict with job, etc. Not one of the 30 young professionals was willing to run.

Even if, however, Blacks take complete control of the government of Wilcox County, they will be shut out of the greatest power base of all, the economic bloc. Wilcox is a relatively large county, roughly 900 square miles of land, some of the richest, balckest soil in North America. Before cotton was dethroned, virtually all of this land was farmed. Most of the farms were huge by Alabama standards–3,000 acres and up. Today 70 percent of the land is in pine forests, either privately managed or under the control of the giant paper companies. McMillan-Blodell, a Canadian wood products company built a $77 million plant here in the 1960s and is now the county’s largest employer (the Wilcox Board of education is second). Today’s farm products are beef cattle, soybeans and some cotton. All farming is heavily mechanized. If he has $80,000 to spend for a piece of equipment, it is possible for one man, riding in an air-conditioned and CB-and stereo equipped cab, to do the work that previously took a small army of slaves, sharecroppers, or hired field hands. There are only a handful of Black landowners in the county, most of them in Geese Bend, the isolated section on the far side of the river from Camden. Blacks there own farm land because of an experimental Farm Security Administration program of the 1940s.

The transition from crops to trees and the mechanization of the farming created or coincided with,depending on one’s point of view, the exodus of Blacks from Wilcox County. The county’s population to be 13,000. the loss has been among the Black population; the White populaion has remained steady and may have increased slightly. In another two decades, the Black-White population in Wilcox County could be about even.

But meanwhile as long as they have a majority, Blacks have an opportunity to make substantial changes in the way Wilcox County is run. The first necessary step seems to be to broaden the revenue base. With control of the school board and the county commission, and with a unified Black voting bloc, an increase in property taxes could be effected. This is not a new idea; as early as 1966 a published report cited landowners’ fears that Blacks would take control and raise taxes.

Will it happen? During the recent campaigns, the screening committee asked the county commission candidates what they would do about taxes. One of the men who was ultimately elected said he thought the answer was to impose a sales tax “because that would be easiest and fairest”. The screening committee endorsed his candidacy anyway, hoping that before he takes office he can be made aware of the distinctions between progressive and regressive taxation.

Should a tax initiative be successful, there would be considerable irony in that the same wealthy landowners and merchants who dominated the schools when Blacks’ slice of the pie was almost invisible would now have to pay for the improvements so long needed for education. Of course, to effect significant change in taxation, Blacks will also have to gain control of the Board of Equalization, a body which has the authority to reduce property assessments if a lnadowner feels his taxes are too high. This board’s members are nominated by the county commission, the school board and the Camden city council. Aside from the paternal attitude expressed by school board member Robert Lambert, who says Whites need to control the board because Blacks are financially inept, one wonders if White determination to control the school board long after White children had left the public schools might be linked to the essentials need to control the appointments to the Board of Equalization.

One also wonders why, in a county which has almost 70 percent Black population, it has taken until 1978 and 1980 to elect Blacks to important county offices. Sheriff Prince Arnold says it was fear that kept Blacks from realizing the full strength of their numbers at the voting booth “fear of the structure in this county”. School board member-elect K.P.Thomas says flatly that the fear of losing their jobs made many Black teachers work against Black political efforts. “Most of the time to get hired, you had to make committments not to be in this or be in that. During the election time the superintendent and the school board members get out among the teachers and workers and campaign against the people who are running. This is what hurts us so much.”

Fear, intimidation, White influence–each of these explanation is a part of the picture of political ineffectiveness which handicapped Blacks up to this time. It is a waste if effort, really, to wonder why change was so long cominh. Wilcox county was one of the handful of “cipher” counties in which there were no Blacks registered when the Voting Rights Act was passed. Says Monroe Pettway, a Black farmer, “I remember when I wasn’t no Black registered voters in Wilcox County. Right there in Gees Bend we were the first ones to register over to that court-house. The White folks over there went crazy. Acted like they didn’t know where the courthouse was and some of ‘e, working in the courthouse.”

There is an expression “Colored Peoples’ Time,” which is sometimes used (with no respect) to describe the in-their-own-time pace at which older, especially rural, Blacksconduct their business. Certainly years of dealing with the Wilcox White folks would teach one a thing or two about patience, perseverance and prayer. Ultimately, he best explanation may be merely that it took time for Blacks to gain their leadership network, and to realize, as Prince Arnold pointed out, that “it could be done.”

Now, of course, time seems to be on the side of the Blacks, though the Lord knows there are problems enough to keep them occupied.

Randall Williams is an Alabama journalist now in Georgia