Local Color Defaulting On Justice

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 4, No. 6, 1982, pp. 1-3

Long lines at the Supreme Court building in Washington are commonplace as tourists and school kids come daily to walk the halls and rummage the displays along its vacuous ground floor. Yet, many who lined up on the Court’s concrete plaza shortly after dawn on Monday, October 12 were congressional aides, lawyers and civil rights activists. They had come to hear arguments that would decide whether federal law now prohibits Bob Jones University of Greenville, South Carolina. and other segregation academies in the South, from enjoying a tax-exempt status.

The Court’s day began in usual fashion as the crier slammed his gavel and announced “O Ye, O Ye, the Supreme Court of the United States is now in session and may God save this honorable Court.” One of the lawyers who had stood in line cracked the joke, adapted to every Court: “It will take divine intervention to save the Burger Court.”

Here is a case where the issue of law is routine, even simple: can federal regulations that prohibit tax-exempt status for discriminatory schools and organizations be justified under provisions of a federal act. With such a narrow, almost technical issue at its heart, the Bob Jones case does not invoke the sweeping questions which another Court once faced in deciding if civil rights statutes and voting rights laws were permitted by the Constitution. Rather. this is a question of interpreting a federal statute which Congress has passed and can amend before or after the Court rules. As a legal matter then, it is not the sort of case for which lawyers and congressional aides usually stand in line.

The case did have an enticing mixed parentage. It was born out of that embarrassing moment of political insensitivity when Treasure Department officials, with the approval of the Reagan White House, decided to stop enforcing the federal regulation adopted originally under the Nixon Administration and observed under Ford and Carter. Coming on the heels of the President’s opposition to a strong version of the Voting Rights Act, the controversy contributed to a shifting public opinion which had already begun to cast Reagan as callous

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towards the poor and racial minorities.

This was also one of the first controversies for which the Reagan Administration had to build a rationale after the fact. Once it was clear that the White House would have to own up to the decision, the Justice Department issued a statement laying out the Administration’s view that Congress had not intended to permit such federal regulations when changes in the Internal Revenue Code were made. The President believed in the separation of powers and, if Congress wanted such a regulation, Congress would have to authorize it.

When the White House realized that its rationale failed to assert any presidential commitment to civil rights, it proposed some face-saving legislation. At the same time, when civil rights lawyers resurrected old, but pending, cases on the issue of tax exempt status for segregated schools, Reagan’s Justice Department stuck with its immobilized position, insisting on legislation from Congress.

Reagan’s position required the Court to adopt unusual procedures to bring the Bob Jones arguments before it. After the Justice Department switched sides, the Court found itself having to assign a lawyer to argue Justice’s rightful case. Their choice was William P. Coleman, a successful lawyer, former Republican Secretary of the Department of Transportation, and the first black Supreme Court clerk.

When asked why they stood in line to hear Coleman’s argument, a few leading civil rights lawyers and congressional aides seemed puzzled by the question. “It’s a big case,” was one response, hardly an answer to stand up under cross-examination. Another came closer, “I want to see how the Burger Court thinks it can worm out of this one.”

The importance of the case may have befuddled people because it cannot be gleaned from the questions of law which Coleman argued on one side and William Bradford Reynolds, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, argued on the other. Its significance lies in its unspoken statement about the changing role of the federal government in promoting civil rights and in the practical role that segregated academies play in obstructing integrated public education, especially in the rural South.

Although it was never mentioned during the Court argument, this controversy reveals that, within the federal government, the initiative for enforcement of civil rights may have fallen once again solely to–perhaps for the first time since the late 1950’s–the judiciary as the other branches default. The case would never be before the Supreme Court if, simply, the President had decided to enforce the federal regulation. Congress also could have prevented the case by, simply, restating its intent. The passage of a resolution or additional legislation would have served notice that federal law authorizes the denial of tax-exempt status to segregation academies. Instead of settling the controversy, both Congress and the President stayed their hands.

Thus, the case becomes the first true test of this Court’s will to follow the law in the face of hostility and indecision from the President and Congress and to repeat the role on issues of civil rights which the Warren Court began three decades ago.

The case is also important because the Court’s opinion will touch the fate of public education in many Southern rural areas. In the eleven states of the South, the enrollment of students in private schools with discriminatory practices has reached substantial proportions. From 1965, when less than 100,000 children went to segregation academies, the enrollment grew to almost 700,000 by 1975. Notably, such growth of enrollment appears to have leveled in the last five to eight years, corresponding with the time of the adoption and enforcement of the Treasury’s policy against tax-exemption.

In the heart of the South’s Black Belt, public education survives precariously because private segregation academies thrive. Most of these academies depended originally on donations of buildings and land from a few individuals, and most have continued to rely heavily upon rich benefactors. It is one of the supreme ironies of the Black Belt that many of the white members of the boards of education for public schools continue to send their own children to segregation academies.

If the Supreme Court decides in favor of Bob Jones University, and Congress and the President continue to disavow responsibility, public integrated education in the rural Deep South could be lost for several more decades.

An opinion by the Court against Bob Jones University, however, may not serve much better. As a test of the mettle of a President who says he will enforce constitutional rights at the point of a bayonet if necessary, the decision will place President Reagan in a position where his own personal opinions come in open conflict with a Court opinion which he had strongly opposed. In keeping with the change in the federal role, the situation could come to resemble the time when President Eisenhower’s conspicuous silence on Supreme Court

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decisions of school integration were read by Southern states officials as an implicit endorsement of massive resistance.

Other practical problems could arise. If the Court overrules the Justice Department, it is the President’s own Treasury agents who will decide if the regulation is enforced vigorously. So, even after a decision the actions of the President will speak as loud as the words of the Court opinion, in deciding to fate of public integrated education.

When the October 12 argument concluded, most civil rights lawyers who were there agreed on the outcome of the case: in one way or another, the Court will sustain the regulation. Some even speculated that the opinion might have the support of seven or eight Justices. They may be right. But, if the protection of civil rights and integrated public education now depends largely on the initiatives of the Burger Court, in the fact of a hostile president and an immobile Congress, O Ye, O Ye, God save this country.

Beaufort Academy–“None Ever Applied”

By George Mcmillan

Vol. 4, No. 6, 1982, pp. 3-4

If Congress wants to know how a typical tax exempt segregated school works in a typical Southern town it should look at Beaufort Academy in this South Carolina Low Country community.

Beaufort Academy is a flourishing place. It’s not in the least like one of those barren campuses plopped down on the rim of some Southern rural community, and presided over by a sweaty, panting, fundamentalist zealot.

Instead it is an attractive place with a country club air about it. It has 125 acres in the midst of pleasant suburbs, six buildings, including a library, gym, a music room, and twenty-four class rooms. It has an annual budget of $750,000, and 475 students in grades one through twelve.

These students would rather been seen dead than without their Izod shirts and Bass Weejuns. And the chairman of its Board of Trustees has been Henry Chambers, the mayor of Beaufort, one of the town’s best-dressed businessmen.

Beaufort Academy has been in the education business continuously since 1966, and it has never had a black student. Or, as its officials insist, “no black student has ever applied to us.” And yet it has complied with present IRS regulations and has tax exempt status. It does not pay any property tax, either. For one period it refused to pay social security taxes for its teachers.

It would seem that Beaufort Academy, having the best of both worlds, being both lily-white in fact and paying no taxes (except sales tax), would be content with its status of relative immunity and that its history as an institution in this town, in its relationships with other institutions, and especially the public schools, would be that of a benign one.

The opposite is true, and Beaufort Academy, and the private school forces which support it, have worked aggressively against public schools, and at one time came close to destroying the public school system here.

The lesson for Congress in Beaufort Academy’s story is that schools like Beaufort Academy enmesh themselves deeply in the social, economic, political and educational life of the town. They claim the allegiance of community leaders just when they are badly needed to help the public schools through the worst crisis in Southern public school history.

The affluent, influential, parents of Beaufort Academy students found themselves under pressure in the past decade to commit themselves to private education as a cause and not simply as an educational option.

In fact, the wounds have not healed yet from the bitter, destructive, fight that took place here between public school and private school forces in the years from 1974 until 1980. The battle eventually involved the Governor of South Carolina, and required a legislative act to bring the fight to a temporary compromise.

“You would almost be driven to the conclusion that a private school just can’t peacefully coexist with public schools,” is the moral one public school official drew from the battle.

In 1974, public school officials, “having weathered the worse of our integration troubles,” began to feel the pinch of a “dilapidated and unsafe,” school plant, and had some studies made of the needed improvements, one of which was done by a blue ribbon and apparently non-partisan committee of local people, some of whom had children in Beaufort Academy. A bond issue of $24.5 million was decided upon.

“Everything changed when better public education had a price tag on it,” says Nancy Thomas, one of those who got into the fight. She was one of a group of women who had worked together in the League of Women Voters in Beaufort and who became the nucleus of the side which fought for the public schools. The group included a former nun, a black woman who created and runs an organization of child care centers in the Low Country, a former high school teacher–most of these women were in their thirties and had small children in the public schools. They were guided by Robert Salisbury, the county superintendent of schools, a tough, aggressive and politically astute administrator.

The most determined and the most forthrightly belligerent opposition seemed to come from just one man. He is Charles Stockell, a retired Army colonel, executive director of the Beaufort Chamber of Commerce, and an

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instructor in international relations in the University of South Carolina (Beaufort). Stockell had previously been a spokesman for conservative causes locally. In the school issue, he announced that he was spokesman for the Committee for Accountable Schools. He spoke and he appeared on TV, radio, at civic groups.

No officers of his committee were ever announced, and no membership list was ever published. No public accounting of the monies spent in Stockell’s fight was ever made.

The Board of Education announced that it was going to advertise for bids on its bond issue on December 19, 1979. On December 14, two men and Stockell’s committee sued to prevent the bond sale.

This effectively stopped the bond sale, a local state senator settled the dispute by offering a compromise which was incorporated in a bill he introduced in the state legislature which gave the schools the right to sell bonds for $14.5 million.

The bonds were finally sold in 1980. New school buildings are being built but the cost in inflation and from increased interest rates caused by the delay is high if difficult to figure. When the bonds were first being talked about the interest rate was fi.5 percent; when they were sold it was 10.6 percent.

Stockell, even today, will not reveal the names of the Committee for Accountable Schools, except to reply to a questioner: “None of your damned business.” The lawyer who filed the suit says he “attended a couple of meetings where there were about fifteen men.” Charles Fraser, the original developer of Hilton Head Island and Chairman of the Board, Sea Pines Plantation Company, says that he was not a member but “I did attend a couple of meetings.”

One of the ironies of Beaufort Academy is that there is at least some part of the parental group who probably would not put racial segregation as the paramount reason for sending their children there. They would insist they want their children to have “a better education.” Another reason about which they would not be explicit is that they are part of a new class in the South, well-heeled young doctors and dentists and lawyers, mostly from less well-to-do rural or small town farm families in the South, who are ardently determined to fix a social class for themselves and their children–to put behind them all the allegations of being red-necked and bigots. In Beaufort it is, as they call it, “the Academy” which is the institution that performs that social function.

It may be that Beaufort Academy is not better than the public Beaufort High School or Battery Creek. There is really no way to know because Beaufort Academy is not certified by any of the usually-recognized certifying agencies–not by the state department of education, nor by the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges. “Just remember” said one state official, “they don’t have to meet any standards of any kind if they don’t want to or cants.”

The black community in Beaufort county has members on most of the public governing agencies in the county, and feels “relief,” and not frustration at being either able or unable to attend Beaufort Academy. “The worst thing to me,” said one of them, “is that it is training another generation of white Southern leaders in the myths, the stereotypes and the taboos of a segregated society.”

To the coalition of conservatives who apparently are seeking broader ideological objectives Beaufort Academy is a symbol of achievement and the embodiment of their ideology.

One of these is Charles Aimar, a local pharmacist, who founded Beaufort Academy. He is still an active and influential member of the board, and he served for some years as president of the South Carolina Independent Schools Association.

“I don’t believe in government-operated schools at all, not for anybody, not in any grade, high or low,” Aimar said the other day. “I think the free enterprise system can run education in this country and do a good job if it’s given a chance.”

Mr. Aimar says that he was “a contributor to” a “Freedom Library,” in Beaufort which was being run by the local John Birch Society at the time he organized Beaufort Academy. He says he would “rather not answer” on whether he was a John Birch member.

George McMillan its a freelance writer who lives in Frogmore, South Carolina.

Fifty Years With Highlander

By Sue Thrasher

Vol. 4, No. 6, 1982, pp. 4-9

At Christmas time in 1931 in Copenhagen, Denmark, a young man off an East Tennessee farm made a note to himself:

I can’t sleep but there are dreams: a school where young men and women can come and he inspired . . . expressing themselves through teaching history, literature, song and music, arts, weaving, and a life lived together. .. A school where young men and women living in close personal contact with teachers will learn how to take their place intelligently in a changing world, which at present presents so many baffling problems. It its hoped that the students will he able to make decisions for themselves on the basis of an enlightened judgment.

Myles Horton returned from Denmark and in November of 19832, he started his Southern mountain school soon named the Highlander Folk School. This year, the celebration of the Highlander Research and Education Center’s fiftieth anniversary prompts an overview of its three major periods of work: the Southern labor movement of the 1930’s and 40’s, the civil rights movement, and the struggle for Appalachian self-determination. The fiftieth anniversary also offers an opportunity to reflect upon Highlander’s impact as a regional institution and to ponder its role over the coming few years.

Myles Horton’s dream did not start in Copenhagen in 1931, but much earlier in the town of Ozone on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee. While a student at Cumberland College, Myles had been teaching Vacation Bible School for the Presbyterian Church. The third summer of teaching he arrived in Ozone and decided to

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try an experiment–getting adults together as well as the children.

In evening discussions at the church the adults would talk about their community. He was amazed at the response he got. Some of the people walked miles to the meetings. They wanted to know how to test wells for typhoid or hor to test their farmland. They also wanted to know about the possibility of getting jobs in textile mills.

One of the things Myles learned from these meetings was to trust his own ability as a group leader who didn’t have all of the answers. As he said later,

To my amazement my inability to answer questions didn’t bother them. That was probably the biggest discovery I ever made. You don’t have to know the answers! You raise the questions, sharpen the questions, get people to discussing them. We found that in that group of mountain people a lot of the answers were available if they pooled their knowledge.

That discovery triggered in Myles Horton the notion of a Southern mountain school. First, however, he returned to graduate from Cumberland University. After spending a year working with the YMCA in Tennessee, in 1929 he followed his dream to Union Seminary where he studied under Reinhold Niebuhr and Harry F. Ward. He then went on to the University of Chicago to study with sociologist Robert Park. More importantly, Myles met a Danish minister named Aage Moller who told him about the Danish folk high school movement. At the end of his year in Chicago, and still not ready to “begin” his new school, Horton decided to travel to Denmark to see firsthand the Danish folks schools.

During all of this time Myles wrote innumerable notes to himself. He was never quite sure exactly when it was time to begin. From Union he had gone to Chicago, thinking that he still needed to know more, but his uncertainty after a year there had prompted him to search for more answers in Denmark. But, he still didn’t have all the answers. Finally one night in Denmark, he decided it was time to come home and find himself a situation and a place. As he wrote later,

All at once I told myself, “All you do is get a place and move in. You are there. The situation its there. You start with this and let it grow. You have your idea; you know your goal. It will build its own structure and take its own form. Find the place, the people, the situation. Use your ideas as your lodestone and move into the thing and start.”

With the help of Reinhold Niebuhr, Myles began making plans to start his school for adults. Niebuhr signed the school’s first fundraising letter which was perhaps more specific than Horton himself would have stated it: “Our project is the organization of a southern mountain school for the training of labor leaders in southern industrial areas.”

Will Alexander, Director of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta, encouraged Myles to contact a young man named Don West, who also had the notion of starting a folk school. He met Don at the Blue Ridge Assembly in North Carolina and the two of them agreed to start this venture together.

From a friend Myles fondly remembers as Preacher Nightingale of Crossville, Tennessee, they learned about Dr. Lillian Johnson, an educator, who owned a home and property in the small community of Summerfield, Tennessee, on the Cumberland Plateau. Disappointed by her own efforts at cooperative-building, she agreed to turn her property and her house over to them for one year, to try this experimental school. A graduate of Wellesley, and former President of Western College for Women, Dr. Johnson had moved to Summerfield to establish a community school, but her plans of using the school as the focal point of cooperative efforts had not succeeded and she was anxious to see what the two young men could do with their notion of a folk school.

The place that Myles and Don found themselves in the fall of 1932 was Grundy County, one of the ten poorest counties in the United States at the time. the situation they found themselves in was one of desperate poverty. Grundy County had once been rich in coal and timber but as Aimee Horton says in her dissertation on Highlander:

Those resources were exploited in classic 19th century style, and the economy there had begun to collapse decades before the depression. The only thing left in Grundy County at the time was cut-over timber, mined-out fields, and unemployed workers.

Most of the people had turned to farming for a living–subsistence farming–they were desperately poor.

The first phase of Highlander’s work began to center around Grundy County and the small community of Summerfield. During the first three years that they were there, the Highlander staff helped establish a union for WPA workers and a community cannery. Mom Horton, Myles’ mother, helped set up a quilting cooperative. Later staff members helped establish a community nursery school. At the same time, however, the staff was beginning to look towards regional issues. Myles had

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never intended that Highlander be just a community school.

* * * *

By the time the CIO was formed in 1936, Highlander was in the thick of labor education. Myles helped select many of the Southern CIO organizers. And from then until the late 1940’s, Highlander was predominantly a labor school working very closely with the CIO and with some of the AFL unions. Unions from across the South sent members to Highlander to be trained in sessions ranging from one week to five weeks. Workers learned to put out a local union newspaper, to speak in public and to produce leaflets. They participated in courses on labor history, the history of social change and economics. Sessions were taught by Highlander staff members and by CIO and other union officials in the South.

By the late 1940’s however, Highlander’s role as a labor school was headed for an end. At issue was its relationship with unions who had been kicked out of the CIO for refusing to sign the anticommunist oath called for by the Taft-Hartley Act. More fundamental was the question of the independence of the school–whether it would be run by the CIO or whether it would maintain itself as an independent institution. The papers of Highlander for this particular period show how hard it fought to work with the unions, battling on the issue of race, subsidizing many of the union sessions–while also striving (naively in retrospect) for union support of the school.

Highlander did not espouse any particular ideology nor did it refuse to work with anyone because of ideology. Highlander did not apply a loyalty test to people who came to the school. At the same time. it had been very careful not to align with the Socialist Party, from which many of its early staff members had come. However, as political debate heated up within the unions, especially over the anti-communist provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, political debate heated up around Highlander. By 1949, it was apparent to both the CIO and Highlander that the uneasy truce that had existed for the past few years could no longer go one. The CIO did not attack Highlander, it simply dropped it from its list of approved institutions to hold its schools.

One of the most controversial issues, one that continued to arise throughout Highlander’s period of working with the unions, was the matter of race. Although Highlander had had a policy of being an integrated institution from the time it opened in 1932, the unions had been very reluctant to actually sponsor integrated schools. It was not until 1944, when the United Auto Workers held an integrated session at the school, that a residential session involved both black and white members. Eating at a table together, sleeping in the same dormitory rooms, using the same bathrooms were very emotional subjects during this time. Some of the members went away feeling that they had been changed by their living experience while at Highlander, but others were not convinced about a place that openly condoned white and black living–and especially one that had as many “Yankee” visitors.

Its union experience forced the Highlander staff to think more clearly about the issue of race and its meaning for the future of the South. This was one of the turning points in Highlander’s history.

* * * *

In the early 1950’s Highlander hosted small meetings to talk about the coming of school integration in the South. It was quite apparent to the staff and others who were concerned about social issues during that time, that a Supreme Court decision on school desegration would be handed down by the Warren Court.

In the summer of 1953, Highlander held three meetings on the issue of school desegregation. Community leaders came from across the South. Neither the staff nor the people they invited there knew exactly what would happen when people got there.

Here it is critical to understand Highlander’s role as an educational institution for developing leadership. Rather than go into communities and organize around a particular issue, Highlander’s goal was to pull out, train and help develop leaders from communities. This is seen most clearly in the civil rights period when people from across the South came to the residential setting of Highlander, talked about the issues at hand and then returned to their communities.

For fifteen years Highlander played an integral role in the civil rights movement. Until the passage of the first civil rights bill in 1964, it remained one of the few places available for interracial meetings. From tentative efforts with community leaders on school desegregation, the school moved to establish a major literacy and voting

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rights project in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, held workshops with students participating in the sit-in movement, actively participated in the training of civil rights workers for Freedom Summer of 1964, and continued following up on all of these efforts until the time of the Poor Peoples March in Washington in 1967.

* * * *

From its early days in 1932, Highlander had enjoyed a warm relationship with the surrounding community of Grundy County. Square dances held at the school, volleyball games, and community suppers were commonplace. In addition, Highlander operated a community nursery school, first organized by Claudia Lewis, who later wrote about her experiences in a book entitled Children of the Cumberlands. She was followed by Joie Willimetz, a graduate of Wellesley, who used her own personal contracts to raise money and supplies for the school. The Folk School also published a small community newsletter called the Summerfield News, the work of an Antioch student, Elaine Van Brink, who spent four years at Highlander. She toured the community on her bicycle gathering news for the paper, typed and mimeographed it at Highlander, then later distributed it with the help of local newsboys and girls. The newsletter featured poetry, community news items, and a gossip column.

Despite indications of good reciprocal community relations, however, there was always some opposition t o the school and its ideas. In the early 1940’s Highlander had come under attack by a local group called The Grundy County Crusaders, who had threatened to march on the school. Residents of the area who liked the school simply ringed the area, and no harm was done.

As Highlander made the crucial turn toward involvement in the civil rights movement, and its students were drawn from predominantly black communities, the Folk School lost its strong community ties. It was not the antagonism of the local community however, that succeeded eventually in closing the school, but the antagonism of the state.

In 1957, Highlander held its twenty-fifth anniversary.

One of its major speakers that year was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King had just finished a year of leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott and had recently moved to Atlanta to help set up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The governor of Georgia, Marvin Griffin, wanted to discredit King, and the state legislature of Tennessee wanted to discredit Highlander. When Dr. King spoke at Highlander, Governor Griffin sent a reporter and a photographer. A few months later a four page tabloid began circulating about the “communist training school in East Tennessee where Martin Luther King had been.” There were two billboards across the South during that time–“Martin Luther King at Communist Training School” and “Impeach Earl Warren.”

In 1959, Highlander was raided during a weekend workshop, two staff members were carted off to jail, and several counts were leveled against the school: operating a school for the profit of the director, selling beer without a license, and operating an integrated school. Selling beer without a license was the technicality that closed the school.

It took two years, until 1961, for the state of Tennessee to actually shut Highlander. Finally, the state confiscated and sold at auction approximately two hundred acres of land and several buildings, including a nursery, a community building, a library and staff houses. To this day, Highlander has never received any remuneration.

As soon as they could, the staff rechartered, reorganized and opened again under the name of the Highlander Research and Education Center.

* * * *

Through its participation in the 1967 Poor Peoples’ March on Washington and in Resurrection City, the encampment of poor people on the Mall, Highlander began another major shift of emphasis. Many people who gathered in Washington that summer believed that there was a possibility of realizing King’s dream of a multiracial poor peoples’ coalition. Several groups at Resurrection City encouraged Highlander to come back home and work in the Appalachian coalfields. Already it had begun making contacts in the mountains and had established strong ties with urban Appalachian groups such as the JOIN Community Union in uptown Chicago.

Highlander did come back to the mountains and began working more intensely with strands of a developing poor peoples’ movement in the Appalachians; included were anti-stripmine activists and various community action groups that were aided and abetted by the OEO (Office of Economic Opportunity) language calling for one-third representation of the poor. The staff during this time changed dramatically. It was much younger and more reflective of its new constituency.

The Appalachian period of Highlander is more difficult to categorize than the labor or civil rights periods. Even though there were very active groups in the

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mountains throughout this time, the movement in Appalachia never developed into the kind of mass mobilization that the Highlander staff hoped for. Perhaps, in order to succeed, it would have had to emerge with a mass movement of poor people from all over the country. On the other hand, perhaps Highlander attempted to expand too quickly during the late 1960’s, as it established a Highlander-West to work with Chicanos in the Southwest and set up extension programs in the uptown area of Chicago.

In 1971, urban renewed out of Knoxville, the school moved physically back to the mountains. It is located now near New Market, Tennessee on a 110 acre farm overlooking the Smokes. The Appalachian emphasis has evolved into current projects: a health program which works with clinics in the mountains and with the providers of basic human services; a resource and education center established in 1976; and a cultural program. More recently Highlander has developed a labor education program which came from work with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union and the United Furniture Workers Union.

* * * *

Highlander started out as a Southern/Mountain school and during its fifty year history it has been both of those things. The term Appalachian was not in vogue in 1932 when Myles and Don settled on the Cumberland Plateau, but Highlander was a well-known term, thus the Highlander Folk School. During its first two decades, Highlander worked with people from the mountains and with people from other parts of the South.

The school’s identification during those early years was much like the Cumberland Plateau where it was located — perched both figuratively and literally between the coalfields to the north and the agricultural regions to the south. Until the early 1950’s it was able to maintain itself successfully as both a Southern school and a Mountain school. During the period of the civil rights movement, however, Highlander became almost totally a Southern institution. Then during the late 1960’s and early 70’s it became a strictly Appalachian institute.

Much of Highlander’s work in the coalfields reflected the assumption that Appalachia is a colony. Currently Highlander is in still another stage of development and thinking about its region and about other regions. The distinctiveness of both the Appalachian coalfields and the South has eroded as they have both become more Americanized. The fact that each remains a colony–wealth from their natural resources is spirited away to absentee owners–makes them in one sense no more distinctive than the Indian lands of the Southwest or any of the Latin American, African or Asian nations plundered for their natural and human resources by trans-national corporations.

For the last five years, Highlander has neither called itself an Appalachian institution nor a Southern institution. As it once was in the early days on the Cumberland Plateau, it is again perched between two worlds. Its recent work with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union and the Furniture Workers. Union has placed Highlander once again in the position of working with black people from the South. Yet the work in Appalachia has continued and in many cases has grown and expanded. This is perhaps best exemplified by the land ownership study recently concluded, and by other work coming out of Highlander’s resource center.

Two years ago when Highlander started talking about celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, there was a commitment on the part of the board members and the staff to use this occasion to explore the future–to celebrate and affirm the past, but more importantly, to look as unflinchingly as possible into the future, and what may be expected in time to come.

In the 1930’s and 40’s, Highlander had a very clear cut decision to make: to work with the labor movement or not to work with the labor movement. In the 1950’s and 60’s, it had the same kind of decision to make regarding the civil rights movement. In the 1960’s and early 70’s, it found a natural place working in the Appalachian coalfields. The question arises in 1982: What is now Highlanders situation and place?

Its place now can neither be defined by a county or a regional line and its situation is one shared with all the people of the world–tottering on the brink of nuclear disaster.

While Highlander must take its cues from the place where it works most closely, both the Appalachians and the Deep South, and focus on the issues that affect the people of these areas, it is quite clear that the issues affecting Highlander and the people it works with are

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also issues that affect people all over the world. We cannot talk to people in one Appalachian community about toxic wastes without understanding that toxic waste has to be buried somewhere, and if not here then perhaps in someone else’s community. We cannot talk to people about absentee ownership of land without understanding that the same thing holds true in the Southwest and other parts of the country. We cannot talk about occupational health and safety as it relates to industries in this area and not understand that it affects workers all over the United States and all over the world. We cannot simply talk about the environmental health of the Tennessee Valley, lest our Canadian friends remind us about the effects of acid rain.

We feel poised on the edge of a new era at Highlander–an era which may see us working more again on issues that relate to minorities in the Deep South, and maintaining our ties with the communities of Appalachia.

The problem before us will be to keep our focus and understand always the strength and knowledge that comes from our own people. But we must also begin to see ourselves as part of a larger community. What is it that our Southern/Appalachian communities have in common with the Indian communities of the Southwest–especially as it regards the rape of the land and the theft of natural resources? What is it that we have in common with workers from Latin America as they battle the same trans-national corporations that affect us? And what do we have to teach other people?

Highlander doesn’t know the answers to all of these questions. The lesson we can learn from Highlander’s past is really the same as it was in 1932 as articulated by Myles Horton in the small community of Ozone.

You don’t have to know the answers. You raise the questions, sharpen the questions, get people to discussing them.

If anything is different now, it is that we must not only raise and sharpen the questions within our own community and region, but in the larger world community–anywhere that people are fighting for justice.

Illustrators: Malcolm Chisolm, artist and blacksmith, was on the Highlander staff in 1933. He left Highlander to fight with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and died in the Spanish Civil War.

Candie Carawan its currently on the Highlander staff.

Sue Thrasher is on the program staff at Highlander.

Denton and Helms: The Enemies Within. Patriotism in Peace

From the Arkansas Gazette

Vol. 4, No. 6, 1982, p. 9

Betty Bumpers’ Peace Links may draw from a remarkable episode in the United States Senate impressive reassurance that it is gaining in effectiveness and influence. The Senate, only hours before adjourning, not only adopted a resolution asking President Reagan to declare October 10 Peace Day under Peace Links’ auspices but also rose to put down a budding resurgence of McCarthyism.

The touch of McCarthyism was provided by Senator Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, who told the Senate after the resolution was passed that “Four organizations on the Peace Links advisory board are either Soviet controlled or openly sympathetic with, and advocates for, Communist foreign policy objectives.”

Courtly rules usually apply during open Senate session, but Senator Denton’s outrageous remark appropriately justified an exception to the rule, and senator after senator rose to reject the accusation. Among those rejecting Denton’s remark as nonsense were Mrs. Bumper’s husband, Senator Dale Bumpers, and Senator Gary Hart of Colorado.

There is absolutely no evidence that Peace Links has any degree of control by or association with Communists, and Senator Denton himself offers no basis for his accusation other than the fact that he said it. (Another demagogic political figure in these parts was fond of remarking that “just because I said it doesn’t make it so” but Senator Denton apparently sticks to what he asserts, without aopology.) Denton’s staunchest defender during the exchange on the Senate floor, some will say appropriately, was his fellow compatriot of the New Right, Senate Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Even Helms didn’t say that Denton knew what he was talking about, but instead criticized those senators who criticized Denton.

Now that Senator Denton’s flirtation with McCathysism has been answered on the Senate floor, the episode may turn out to be helpful to Peace Links and to Peace Day for it has called a good deal of attention to both. Peace Links was born out of the purest of motives end it remains guided by the purest of motives by Mrs. Bumpers and others who see it as a way to dampen the growing dangers of a nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Peace Links will not be discredited by such outrageous attacks as that made by Senator Denton. It is one of many grass-roots organizations that are demanding that steps be taken at the highest political levels to prevent a nuclear war. Peace Links and other like groups are practicing patriotism of a high order.

North Carolina Pays the Price

By Claude Sitton

Vol. 4, No. 6, 1982, pp. 9-11

Americans don’t ask much of those whom they send to the U.S. Senate. A senator can usually pass muster at the polls if he tips the pork barrel toward home occasionally, votes his constitutents’ pocketbook interests and keeps enough goodwill among his colleagues to avoid becoming an embarrassment to his state. Sen. Jesse Helms will leave Washington shortly it appears on two of those three counts.

Helms has offended the tobacco industry by switching his vote to assure passage of a tax bill that doubled the

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levy on cigarettes. He has drawn the contempt and ridicule of other senators by threatening political retribution against those who opposed his proposals on abortion and prayer in the schools. And, now, he has suffered two stunning defeats on these very issues in as many weeks.

Not even Helmsites can deny that the session soon to recess has raised more critical questions about his ability than any other in his ten years in the Congress. There’s much irony in this. Helms could not have asked for a brighter political prospect than that which faced him in the Senate two years ago.

The apparent political mood was conservative, if not reactionary. Ronald Reagan, the Tar Heel senator’s own choice, had assumed the presidency. Republicans had taken control of the Senate, thanks in some measure to the PACman blitz against moderates and liberals financed by Helms’ National Congressional Club. And hot-eyed disciples of the moral majority were flooding Capitol Hill to demand that congressmen and senators toe their radical, right-wing line. Given those odds, success was a certainty.

But Helms managed to blow it. All manner of excuses come to mind. Post-election polls indicated that the conservatism read into the defeat of former President Carter was more apparent than real and was by no means the radicalism espoused by the Helms’ camp. Further, the single-issue factions of the right are a contentious lot. Helms, who compromises grudingly at best, soon found himself feuding with them. This same rigidity added to the senator’s troubles with others.

Republican control of the Senate had given Helms the chairmanship of the Agriculture Committee, which once carried the obligatory prefix “powerful” before its name. One of the chairman’s important responsibilities, perhaps his most important, is shepherding the farm bill through the Senate. But Helms flunked his test as a legislative quarterback and Sen. Robert J. Dole, the Finance Committee chairman had to assume floor management of the bill to save it from defeat.

It’s possible that newfound fame had led Helms to feel he was above compromise. After all, had he not graced the cover of Time? But news magazine cover stories have hexed far greater figures than Helms. And, as observed by Lauch Faircloth, the canny state commerce secretary, “The higher the monkey climbs up the flagpole, the better you can see his rear.”

There’s a double irony in the recent twin defeats suffered by Helms under circumstances that once seemed so promising. He did not take a truly conservative position on either of the issues he chose for his fight-and-die stand in the Senate. Remember that the conservative theme sounded again and again in the 1980 campaign was “Let’s get government off our backs.”

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Instead of halting government intervention, Helms sought legislation interposing government between a woman and her doctor in that most private of decisions–whether to end a pregnancy. He endorsed interventionism again with an amendment to a debt ceiling bill, an amendment that would have permitted states to order prayers in the public schools, a blatant contravention of the Constitution’s pledge of religious freedom.

That latter piece of mischief also would have stripped the Supreme Court of authority to review state prayer laws. This raised the specter of constitutional amendments voted by the legislative majority of the moment. That and other aspects of the two Helms proposals proved too much for even some conservatives.

Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican whom Helms acknowledges as the father of conservatism, was among the naysayers. Goldwater said Helms had damaged the conservative cause with his radical measures and bullyboy tactics. And it was Goldwater who gave the coup de grace to the Helms prayer amendment with a motion to send the debt ceiling bill to committee with instructions to rid it of all riders.

Some other senators thought that Helms was less interested in government-imposed morality than in whipping up emotions that would generate contributions to his National Congressional Club. Undoubtedly, those Helms apponents standing for re-election will feel the club’s lash. But whether Helms’ objectives are ideological or monetary, his actions leave no doubt that he ranks them ahead of everything else. That means that even his constituents’ economic welfare and the goodwill of his colleagues, without which no senator can be effective, come second.

This session, then, poses a question that only North Carolinians can answer. That is whether the state wants to go on paying the price of keeping this true believer of radical stripe in the Senate.

Claude Sitton its the editor of the Raleigh News and Observer.

Worker Owned: Some Southern Beginnings

By Woody Connette

Vol. 4, No. 6, 1982, pp. 11-15

In September 1979, a small group of Windsor, North Carolina residents transformed a vacant automobile showroom into a garment cut and sew operation. They chose a name that desribes exactly what they are: The Workers’ Owned Sewing Company. There were no Chamber of Commerce ribbon cuttings, no features or accolades in the local papers and no beaming bankers congratulating themselves on this new business in the community.

Three years later, though, WOSCO is thriving, and praise for its quiet achievement is beginning to trickle in. I was surprised when I visited WOSCO in September 1982 because the company looks like any other cut-and-sew operation. A small, front bookkeeping office is dwarfed by the large sewing room where workers hem pieces of fabric into clothing. The industrial buzz is nothing like the comforting hum of a home sewing machine. Thread whips from large cones through the machine and into the fabric. Over to one side, other workers cut panels of fabric from large bolts of cloth with electric knives. At the far end of the room, workers inspect finished clothing before bagging, tagging and boxing items for shipment.

Unlike other cut-and-sew operations, however, all who come to work at WOSCO come with the understanding that they will become shareholders in the corporation. After three years of continuous operation, forty workers have bought into the company by purchasing one share of stock at a cost of one hundred dollars. These workers have elected a board of directors which in turn has selected Tim Bazemore to manage the business. Bazemore, a Bertie County native, had years of experience with another cut-and-sew business and was one of the leaders in establishing WOSCO. According to him, one of the principal differences between the worker owned business and any other business is that “there is a family-like atmosphere here. There is a feeling for other workers.”

All of the workers meet periodically to discuss the progress of their business, production and contract problems, and other matters. Cut-and-sew is a highly competitive industry. When I visited WOSCO, I was struck by the workers’ zeal. Yet there was no sense of apprehension in their speed and efficiency. They were not working to please a boss; they were working for themselves. Company profits mean profits to them personally, and profit is directly tied to their own productivity.

WOSCO started on a financial shoestring. At times, Tim Bazemore had to sell corn, soybeans or hogs from his farm to cover the payroll. No banks or other commercial lenders were interested. Twin Streams Educational Center, a Chapel Hill based organization that provides assistance to worker owned businesses, loaned WOSCO fifteen thousand dollars.

In the beginning, each pay day was viewed as a milestone. In recent months, the business has been showing a profit after meeting the payroll and other expenses, so that only $2,700 remains to be paid on their original Twin Streams loan. Suprisingly, WOSCO’s immediate problems come from being too successful. WOSCO makes blue jeans which are sold to a company which in turn sells them to K-Mart. The middleman with which it contracts has apparently heard of WOSCO’s earnings and is attempting to reduce the contract price. So far, the workers have refused to buckle under to pressure to renegotiate and may face layoffs. Bazemore and WOSCO Vice-President Lila Dudly regard this as typical of the problems faced by any cut-and-sew operation. They remain confident that WOSCO will continue to show profit and to grow. According to Dudly, “We’re going to have to prove workers’ owned to everyone in this area, because we’re the first. When we succeed, there will be more worker owned businesses here than anything else.”

The individuals who started WOSCO needed work,

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and took matters into their own hands. But WOSCO workers are not unique. Around the country, others are coming to realize that to save or preserve their jobs they too will have to take charge of their futures. Increasingly, employees are cooperatively taking ownership of plants that are threatened with closure. In a September 6, 1982 New York Times article, the Episcopal Urban Bishops’ Coalition said, “We suggest that the disarray now spreading through economic arrangements in America today may have its roots in the longstanding practice of workplace inequality and the lack of dignity through shared ownership.” Further, “We note that where cooperatively owned enterprises have existed in this country, and elsewhere in the world, productivity has been high.”

In Weirtown, West Virginia, workers are negotiating the purchase of a steel mill from their employer, National Steel Corproation, in the face of National’s plan to close the operation. At stake are the jobs of approximately 8,800 workers and the economic future of the community.

In northeastern South Dakota, the 180 members of Dakota Handcrafts, Inc. sew earthtone quilts and home furnishings sold in retail stores throughout the country.

In Oregon and Washington, several worker owner plywood companies, ranging in size from eighty to 450 workers, have been in business for as long as forty years.

Loaves and Zippers

Shortly after midnight, six nights a week, Percy White turns on the lights at the New Bern Bakery and begins mixing, kneading, rolling and cutting dough for the goodies that will fill the display counters in the morning. Around 2 a.m., his wife, Elnora, and other worker, Ernestine Patrick, arrive. The three of them work steadily, and by 5 a.m. open their doors to the public.

Fresh doughnuts, twists, long-johns and poorboys are ready when the customers come in. Cakes are baked to customers’ specifications in a dozen-odd flavors ranging from German chocolate to tutti-frutti. The Whites and Ms. Patrick remain behind the counter all day. If the work is slow, they may take turns dozing or minding the bakery while the others go out for fresh air. At 7 p.m. the bakery closes and its workers go home for a few hours of rest before starting the routine again.

Elnora and Percy White and Ernestine Patrick have been working at the New Bern Bakery since it opened in December 1981. Why do they work so hard? As with WOSCO, the bakery belongs to them. They started it from scratch with little more than hope. Its success will be their success.

It may never have occurred to the Whites’ and Ms. Patrick to open their own business had they not been among the five hundred employees who were abruptly thrown out of work by the Texfi plant in New Bern in July 1980. None of the Texfi employees received any advance notice of the plant’s closing. Elnora White had worked there for eight years. “Ernestine called and told me that Texfi was going to close,” Ms. White recalls, “I said, ‘It can’t be true. We just left there this morning.’ then the telephone just started ringing. Everyone was calling each other.”

For the Whites and Ms. Patrick, finding work in New Bern proved impossible. Local unemployment was already high, and they were competing with the other 497 Texfi ex-employees for the few available jobs. All three are middle-aged and black, and they watched as jobs went to younger and white workers. They realized that they must take matters into their own hands.

First, the Whites and Ms. Patrick met with several other former employees to consider reopening the plant themselves. They had heard of similar efforts in other parts of the country. A bit of study quickly showed them that the cost of retooling the plant was too great. Texfi had anticipated the closing and had done nothing to modernize production equipment.

Then, the idea of starting the bakery arose. Percy White had been a baker in New Jersey and the two women had years of experience cooking at home. With the assistance of the Center For Community Self-Help, a Durham, North Carolina nonprofit organization that offers technical and financial assistance to emerging worker owned businesses, the Whites’ and Ms. Patrick began a feasibility study. According to Ms. White, “We went door to door talking to people and businesses.” They finished their study convinced that a bakery would work.

Next came the long and difficult task of preparing a business plan and finding the money to lease a budding and purchase equipment and supplies. Banks and other commercial lenders in New Bern quickly turned down their loan applications. Again, the Center for Community Self-Help and Twin Streams Educational Center in Chapel Hill came to their assistance in arranging for loans. With this borrowed money and cash earned through yard sales, the Whites’ and Ms. Patrick opened their baked in December 1981.

So far, the bakery is breaking even, but to show a real profit it will need additional equipment and employees. The City of New Bern has applied for twenty thousand dollars from the North Carolina Small Cities Community Development Block Grant Progrm to enable the bakery to expand. If the state grants the money, the bakery will be able to begin a marketing campaign to raise customer demand to the bakery’s full potential. When that day comes, perhaps the Whites’ and Ms. Patrick will be able to cut back on their fourteen to nineteen hour days. For the present, however, none of the three workers compalins too much about the long hours. “You work for someone else all your life,” explains Ernestine Patrick, “Now you are working for yourself. This is a foundation.”

“We’ve got to work together to accomplish anything,” Ms. White adds. And to those who would follow their example, she warns, “Don’t go into it if you are not going to work together.”

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A few miles from the WOSCO plant in Windsor, North Carolina, a Talon zipper factory, located in Woodland, North Carolina, closed in February 1982, throwing over two hundred skilled workers into the depressed job market of Northhampton County. Eight of these former employees are now trying to start a worker owned factory called United Zipper Company. At first, they approached Talon to discuss buying the closed plant or its equipment. Talon, fearing further competition, refused to talk. Rather than sell, company agents destroyed the zipper machinery and let it go for scrap.

According to one worker, Beulah Sharpe, the cost of building a plant and purchasing equipment will amount to $700,000. The city of Murfreesboro has applied for $325,000 from the North Carolina Small Cities Community Development Block Grant Program to be used for this purpose. The balance will come from other lending sources. When the business begins, by late fall of 1982, there will be ten worker owners. Their plans project eventual growth to a work force of thirty-seven.

“At Talon,” says Ms. Sharp, “we were never involved in making decisions. Now we have to learn how to make decisions for ourselves. We’ve made mistakes along the way, but we have learned from them.”

Another worker, Doris Davis, adds that the learning will be important for them all in the future. “Instead of having high paid experts standing around telling us how to do things, we need to know how to do them ourselves. The more worker owned businesses there are in the state, the more business there will be to stay. They will not be as likely to jump and move somewhere else. We would like to set an example that would give other people courage to try the same thing.”

ESOP’s Fable and Workplace Democracy

“Worker ownership” means many things to different people. Many so-called worker owned businesses are in fact only partially owned by the employees under the provisions of an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP), which in most cases is designed by company management to take advantage of tax benefits. In a typical ESOP, employees who participate buy company stock through payroll deductions. Depending on the size of the company, the employees may come to own anything from a tiny outstanding stock to complete equitable ownership of the company.

Workers participating in an ESOP may or may not participate democratically in the management of the company, depending upon the particular provisions of the ESOP. Rarely do all workers own an equal share of the business under ESOP provisions. Employers like ESOPs because they have significant tax advantages. They have learned that employees are more productive when they own a piece of the action. The Washington-based National Center for Employee Ownership is the leading organization promoting worker ownership through ESOPs.

Every fable contains a bittersweet lesson, and ESOP is no exception. While ESOPs may be applauded for allowing employees the opportunity to purchase equitable ownership in the companies that employ them, much of the gain is illusory. One problem is that many companies tie employee ownership with a vesting scheme based on employee tenure. Thus, the employee who stays with the company the longest ends up with the largest share of the ownership. In a low paying, unskilled company with high employee turnover, the company management stays with the company the longest and ends up owning the stock.

Another problem with ESOPs is the emphasis they place on property ownership of company stock, with no real concern for democratic management of the business. Under an ESOP, stock is held in a trust, and through various schemes upper management can retain control over the voting rights that go along with the stock. For many worker owners, management is vastly more important than ownership. Thus, many worker owners and experts in the field question ESOPs as an option for worker ownership.

Among those who question the value of ESOPs are individuals like Steve Dawson, executive director of the Industrial Cooperative Association in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who asserts that effective employee ownership must involve more than having employees’ names on the rolls of stockholders. For these individuals, workplace democracy–the individual worker’s right to manage the workplace and share in the benefits of management–is paramount. For them, workplace democracy has little to do with property rights. Since democratic management rather than ownership is the key, the business becomes something of a vessel for the workers’ collective labor. Wages and job quality are the principal rewards. While the business itself may be a valuable asset, it is regarded as a legacy to be held intact for themselves and for future generations of workers.

In the best definition that I can offer, a worker owned business is one in which all workers own some share in the business, with each worker owner having one vote in the basic management of the business affairs and workplace.

Why worker ownership? Worker owned businesses can save existing jobs that are jeopardized by plant closings and relocations and can also create new jobs. This was one of the driving forces behind all three worker owned business ventures in eastern North Carolina. None

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of the eight individuals involved in United Zipper, for instance, has found a job in the seven months since Talon closed its doors.

Unemployment is especially high among minorities, the very young, and the older individuals. By September 1982, seven months after J.P. Stevens closed its Rock Hill, South Carolina plant, a Charlotte Observer survey showed that only thirty-seven percent of the former employees had found full time jobs. Only twenty -seven percent of the women employees had found jobs. The average age of those who found work was forty-one, and none contacted in the survey was below the age of twenty-six. The average age of those without jobs was forty-five.

Worker owned businesses can also operate more profitably than traditional corporations since a small portion of the gross revenue of a worker owned business is subject to taxation on the corporate level. Further, studies have shown that worker owners are generally far more productive than their counterparts in other businesses. Engineers who have timed WOSCO workers found that they work at greater speed than employees in other cut-and-sew operations.

A worker owned business is often willing to settle for a lower profit margin. Large corporations or conglomerates frequently cast off plants that are not as profitable as their other operations. They show little regard for the livelihood of those who may have served in the local plant for their etire working careers. To explain such a plant closing, a GAP Corporation vice-president once said, “We are a big company and this is a small division that we acquired twelve years ago in a merger.”

For the local employees of such a plant, operating the business as worker owners may be profitable enough to preserve their jobs and pay their wages. If they own the business themselves, there is no need to worry about earning excess profits to distribute to shareholders living outside the community with no real interest in the business. If they are able to show a profit it goes into their own pockets as salary dividends or stock equity appreciation.

Local business leaders and politicians have generally been skeptical or even hostile at the first suggestion of the creation of a worker owned business in their communities. Upon reflection, however, they have generally realized the positive effect that the business with its jobs will have in their communities. In the case of all three worker owned ventures I have described, local business and civic officials, in recent days, have been quick to offer suport and assistance. By and large, however, commercial lenders remain reluctant to extend credit because of their lack of experience in lending to anything but traditional businesses.

Among the greatest advantages of worker owned business are those which cannot be measured on a balance sheet. Worker owners must learn how to work together, how the entire business operates, how their individual responsibilities fit into the total business and how their business fits into the total economy. The worker is at once a student and a teacher. Taking charge of their work lives also better equips workers to take control of their personal lives and to participate in their communities. All of the worker owners I interviewed were proud of their struggles to make the businesses work and of how much they have learned in the process.

From AP to 00

Despite the attractions, all is not rosy in the world of worker ownership. Problems abound. The success stories can be countered with stories of failures. In Lincolnton, North Carolina, 210 textile workers lost their jobs and three weeks pay when their former employer quietly filed for bankruptcy and closed the plant in February 1981. I lived less than a block from that plant at that time and watched with anguish as the employees struggled through seven months of exhausting work trying to reopen the plant as a worker owned business. Obtaining financing, developing a business plan, negotiating with purchasers and suppliers and planning for democratic plant management was simply more than the core group of ten workers could endure. Today, the plant stands idle, and many of the former employees remain jobless.

One of the major problems facing worker owned business ventures is financing. Traditional lending sources have been extremely reluctant to extend credit. In partial recognition of this problem, Congress created the National Consumer Cooperative Bank (NCCB) to offer loans and loan guarantees to worker owned businesses and other cooperatives. To date, however, most of the credit extended by the NCCB has gone to well established consumer and producer coops rather than to emerging worker owned businesses. In addition, the turnaround time on processing loan applications, together with personal guarantees and collateral requirements, have frustrated worker owners. NCCB has proved virtually useless in the worker ownership’ movement.

In North Carolina, a handful of organizations have consciously developed a technical assistance system to support worker owned businesses. Twin Streams Educational Center assists worker owners in learning to make cooperative management decisions. Twin Streams director Wes Hare says, “We are committed to offering close, active educational support to workers as they learn to fill new business roles. We work with them to learn decision making, board of director functions, officer responsibilities, and other questions of policy–where decisions are made and by whom. We also conduct residential workshops of workers and technicians. We are constantly supporting education based on the ideas at hand, built on a foundation of political and community action, with concern for worker empowerment.”

Another organization, the Center for Community Self-Help in Durham, offers nuts and bolts assistance with feasibility studies, business plans, management, production, and marketing plans. The Center also offers legal assistance with incorporation and other matters. Recently, it has been instrumental in establishing the Corporation for Democratic Business to extend loans to worker owned businesses and in establishing a credit union. According to the Center’s director, Martin Eakes, response to the emerging credit union has been very promising, suggesting that it may well become one of the best available sources of financing for worker owner businesses.

Church organizations have been among the most promising funding sources. WOSCO, for example,

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received a sixty-thousand dollar loan from the United Presbyterian Church at below market interest rates. The Washington based Catholic Campaign for Human Development has also shown interest in financing worker owned businesses and had agreed to extend credit to the Lincolnton venture.

Worker ownership is also suffering an identity crisis. In the public mind, it is frequently associated with union concessions in failing industries. Around the country, savvy business managers are offering illusory ESOPs and other employee stock options in union contract negotiations in exchange for wage and benefit concessions. When labor refuses these offers, management criticizes them for wanting all of the benefits with none of the burdens that come with ownership. Although touted as employee ownership, these schemes are generally a far cry from the type of worker ownership described in this article. In Clark, New Jersey, the employees in a GM plant were given ESOP participation in exchange for a twenty-five percent cut in wages. While the employees acceptes this as part of a package, it is not the “worker owned business” that it has been trumped up to be.

In a similar vein, worker ownership has also been associated with traditional businesses offering ESOPs or other profit-sharing plans and token participation in workplace management. “Worker ownership” has been used to describe a confusing array of stock participation schemes. In a recent article discussing this identity problem, Industrial Cooperative Association Director Steve Dawson speculated that unless worker ownership can be distinguished from other business structures in the public mind, it “will become just another high-risk profit sharing scheme. Just one more shell in corporate America’s productivity game.”

To further complicate this identity problem, worker ownership has frequently been shunned by unions who could offer alternative image of worker ownership to that posed by corporate managers. While twenty percent of America’s union members belong to internationals that have taken affirmative positions on workplace democracy and employee ownership, many of the remaining eighty percent belong to unions that are hostile to the idea of worker-ownership. The United Zipper workers, for example, were all members of a local ILGWU while employed at Talon. When Talon announced its plans to close the plant, the national union officers offered no assistance when they were approached by the workers, all of whom were leaders of the union local, with their proposals to open a new plant.

In the Philadelphia area, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union has been instrumental in establishing worker owned supermarkets in the wake of many supermarket closings in recent years. According to Wendell Young, President of UFCW Local 1357, his union began negotiations with AP management in April 1982 for the lease of five former AP stores to be opened as worker owner supermarkets. On October 13, 1982 the first worker owned retail supermarket in the country opened under his union’s leadership in Philadelphia. The store, known as “OO”–short for Worker Owned and Operated–is completely owned by twenty-four full time worker owners who are also UFCW members. These worker owners have hired a professional manager who has no ownership interest in the business. The union is the bargaining agent between this manager and the worker owners. According to Mr. Young, “Our UFCW local supports the concept of worker ownership. Based on our experience here in Philadelphia and elsewhere, we believe that worker ownership is a way of saving jobs for UFCW members.”

Seeds of Hope

The worker owned businesses that I have seen are all relatively small. In every case, the workers have struggled against desperate odds to get started. In an economy that measures success by size–the size of the labor force, the value of corporate assets, the margin of profit–these businesses may appear insignificant. I live in that economy, and I have become adept at using its yardsticks for measuring success. Yet in these worker owned businesses, I see hope. They are rooted in the community as no other business can be. By not having to satisfy external shareholders or the growth expectations of a parent corporation somewhere else, they can survive wide fluctuations in the economy. They provide decent, stable jobs and give workers the chance to manage their own affairs. Around the country, workers like Elnora and Percy White, and small towns like Woodland and Windsor, are being ravaged by the drastic changes that we are seeing in the industrial production sector of the economy. There are welcome seeds of hope in these worker owned businesses.

Woody Connette is managing attorney at Legal Services of Southern Piedmont, Inc., in Concord, North Carolina.

The Germ of Laziness: Rockefeller Philanthropy and Public Health in the New South. by John Ettling, Harvard University Press, 1981.

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 4, No. 6, 1982, pp. 15-17

Toward the end of his study of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease, John Ettling writes that “so large a hand has the [Rockefeller] Foundation had in shaping the features of our society that any wholesale indictment of its operational philosophy or potential consequences usually reflects the individual critic’s disenchantment with that society itself.” Whether or not Rockefeller philanthropy has indeed had such a large hand, as compared with, say, Rockefeller capitalism, Ettling seems more than a bit enchanted. His dramatic, many stranded narrative of the 1909–1914 Southern hookworm campaign reveals how a parade of lives are saved through scientific evangelism, ill gained boodle is well spent, good will accrues to the lords of Standard Oil and encouragement is given to public health professionalization. The South, long the nation’s sick and sinful section, takes its medicine, begins to throw off its wormy ways and is restored. No mere intestinal tract, Ettling’s analysis is mesmerizing. What then, can be said for the breaking of spells?

Reflecting upon the beginning of decades of international health projects which the Rockefeller Foundation has carried out in the twentieth century, a former staffer

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with the Foundation once told me, “Tropical medicine grew largely from concern with the diseases that white men found when they were making tropical countries into safe places to do business.” So does charity’s irony begin at home. For the hookworm, that prototypical Rockefeller parasite from which a global do-good was elaborated, was a creature of (at first unsuspected) tropical origin that attracted attention when it was discovered in Southern whites and thought to be their “germ of laziness.”

Having reached what Ettling aptly calls an “ecological detent” with its native African hosts, the hookworm was a stowaway on the ship of slavery. Brought to the American South, it found a barefooted welcome between the toes and, circuitously, a new home within the intestinal walls of farm folk living on the sandy Coastal Plain and on Appalachian hillsides. Heavy infections were devastating, especially among the malnourished victims of the cotton economy. The hookworm sapped the blood and took lives outright or left its hosts weakened and susceptible to death from other diseases. Sallow, puff-bellied and easily exhausted, hookworm victims knew nothing of their plight or of how they contaminated the privyless ground around their houses with the shit which carried the eggs and larvae to infect and re-infect.

Then, along came Dr. Charles W. Stiles, son and grandson of Yankee Methodist ministers, well-stooled student in German methods of helminthology, discoverer of the hookworm’s abundance in the South. Stiles’ specialized training and his obsession with this particular parasite (he called it Necator americanus, the American killer, before its African origins were discovered), allowed him to exaggerate its importance as an historical force. Between Stiles and a number of newspaper popularizers, the hookworm was made to explain everything from the loss of the Civil War, to the section’s backwardness and poor whiles’ alleged lack of energy. Stiles blamed the fatigue, paleness and small size of cotton mill workers not on their long hours, exploited circumstances and young age, but on the hookworm. He estimated, and Ettling accepts without sufficient evidence, the proposition that forty percent of the Southern population had hookworm infection in 1910 so severe as to keep the South from full incorporation within bustling, modern America.

Ettling interprets the hookworm campaign upon a theme of turn-of-the-century public health philanthropy as secularized missionary work. Parasites substitute for nineteenth century sin in an evangelical crusade carried into the bowels of the New South by John D. Rockefeller (the Father), his son–John Jr., Dr. Stiles (the Prophet) and a host of Northern and Southern preachers’ boys. Yet, although Ettling’s insight is valuable in explaining zeal and method, its over-emphasis in The Germ of Laziness deflects understanding away from a sufficient inquiry into the false gods served by the missionaries.

Central to the story is Frederick Gates, son of a New York Baptist minister and architect of the Rockefeller philanthropic bureaucracy. Like Dr. Stiles, Gates nurtured obsessions, but of a grander scale: the getting and spending of fortunes. Even while helping the elder Rockefeller systematize and deploy his charity, Gates also helped him corner the Mesabi ore region of Minnesota.

Under Gates, Rockefeller philanthropy, following from Rockefeller money making, had shifted from a baronial manner into the rationalized, deliberative mode of corporate modern. As Gates saw it, the largesse through which a Protestant God had signified Rockefeller’s spiritual election demanded as much manly stewardship and close accounting in its disbursal as in its acquisition. Philanthropy ought not prop up those whose obvious lack of will and work had caused their failure in life’s competitions. But one could give another chance to those whose weaknesses and debilities grew from causes beyond their control. “Disease,” offered Gates, “is the supreme ill of human life, and it is the main source of almost all other human ills, poverty, crime, ignorance, vice, inefficiency, hereditary taint, and many other evils.”

It was Walter Hines Page, who, while a member of Teddy Roosevelt’s Commission on Country Life, had introduced Dr. Stiles to Gates. North Carolina’s Page was a New South publicist with a New York address, a cheerleader for the section’s reunion into an America which had set itself the World’s Work (the name of Page’s magazine) to do. So, in 1909, an eager alliance was struck between a parasitologist who held a hookworm determinist theory of history (and had been looking for a patron since 1902) and a philanthropy ordained by the laying-on of quite visible hands.

The high tone of the mobilization against the hookworm was set by Wickliffe Rose, chosen to be the South-wide administrator of the Sanitary Commission. Rose (Dean of George Peabody College and the University of Nashville, General Agent of the Peabody Fund, Executive Secretary of the Southern Education Board and member of the Slater Fund) had buried his origins as the son of a cotton farming fundamentalist Tennessee preacher under a meticulous persona, giving shape to one of the South’s first bureaucratic personalities. Ettling writes that Rose “stood out from his colleagues most noticeably for his deep-seated reluctance to stand out at all. Unlike many of the men with whom he worked, Rose seemed to take genuine satisfaction in anonymity.”

The gentlemanly Rose spun newspaper articles and a propaganda campaign, determined the spending of the million dollar budget, chose the physicians to direct each state’s organization and sought the alliances he felt were most necessary: with boards of education, public school teachers, women’s clubs, doctors’ associations. That public health work was needed in the South, there can be no doubt. That the South’s first major health campaign was dependent upon private capital and a remotely controlled chain of command had both immediate and ultimate consequences.

The hookworm campaign must also be seen, and this is an Ettling omission, in relation to the emerging bourgeois society of the Piedmont South in the 1890’s and 1900’s. Here, some oral history, courthouse research or a few afternoons in the local library reveal the particulars of the rise of town elites, shifting patterns of land ownership and mercantile wealth and the enmity between town and country or mill village folk. The builders of those fine Victorian houses which, even now, sit turreted and asymmetrical behind the oak-lined streets of most every city with a railroad to its name were a powerful and rising force in their country’s and region’s affairs.

These merchants, bankers, lawyers, editors, doctors

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and preachers were not only attuned to strictly local matters, but more and more they were involved with and imitative of national standards and market practices. If a mill owner sponsored community musicians, a uniformed Sousa band, not a hillbilly group, most likely won his nod. Campaigns such as those for hookworm eradication, privy budding, free white public schooling or even mandatory innoculations have to be seen not only as worthy causes of betterment, but as events through which elites influenced appetities, stirred needs, showed condescension, expressed control and re-arranged accustomed patterns of feeling. Such campaigns reflected, even as they attempted to foster and extend, the domains and contentions of social and economic powerholders. With the breaking of Populist resistance, with blacks as well as many poor white males disfranchised by recent state constitutional conventions and with Jim Crow established as the scapegoat for all seasons, New Southerners and their Northern allies could at last settle down to some serious profit taking. As they did, they elaborated only such necessary institutions of the modern state as their laissez faire attitudes begrudged or as an occasionally aroused citizenry could effectively demand. Often, the most persistent elements of this citizenry turned out to be wives or unmarried female kin of these same New South “men of affairs.”

When the Rockefeller hookworm crusaders called upon the forms of Southern ritual to shake out converts, the results are not clear to read. In several communities hookworm circuit riders organized camp meeting style gatherings with dinner on the ground, music, speechifying, an instructive sermon and the dispensing of doses of medicine. Yet it seems that much of this was show. Administrator Rose needed to record a large number of “cases treated” in order to please administrator Gates and Rockefellers. Ettling points out that Rose pitted “doctor against doctor in a kind of frenzied competition to roll up the numbers.” Dr. Stiles, sidelined by Rose for his lack of organizational diplomacy, estimated that more than half of the folk to whom the medicine was dispensed took it home and threw it away.

In the end, after four years of work, no Southern community could honestly claim that the Sanitary Commission had eliminated the hookworm from its bailiwick. Yet the Rockefellers decided that it was time to move their medicine show to a wider audience. When Gates ordered the tents struck and the stakes pulled, Rose grumbled a bit but complied. In May, 1913, the Rockefeller Foundation set out “to promote the wellbeing of mankind throughout the world.” Its first project, eased by the new British ambassador Walter Page, was to carry the hookworm campaign into the colonial territories of Great Britain.

As the Rockefeller Foundation’s Hookworm Commission departed the South, the section’s poverty remained. It, and not the hookworm, had been the real problem all along. Yet to have faced the origins of New South poverty required an introspection that the hookworm evangelists, busy with their attempts to chase the demons out of dispossessed poor whites, could not allow.

Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. By James H. Jones. New York: The Free Press, 1981. $14.95.

By Bess Beatty

Vol. 4, No. 6, 1982, pp. 17-19

In 1972 the Associated Press broke the story of the Tuskegee experiment, a forty-year study of the effect of syphilis on six hundred Macon County, Alabama, black men. Nine years later James Jones published Bad Blood, a history of what he describes as “The scandalous story of the Tuskegee experiment–when government doctors played God and science went mad.” Jones’ book is a thoroughly researched and dispassionate, although indicting, account of this experiment.

The story has a background imbeded in centuries of “racial medicine.” By the twentieth century syphilis had come to be considered by many physicians as “the quintessential black disease,” and, despite the insights of modern medicine, some continued to believe that it affected blacks differently than whites. Ironically the Tuskegee study grew out of changing attitudes, at least among public health officials, toward black health generally and syphilis particularly. By the 1920s contempt and neglect were beginning to give way to realization that scientific and medical insights should be applied equally to all races.

In 1929 the Julius Rosenwald Fund, renowned for its efforts on behalf of black education, began funding Public Health Service programs for blacks. The pilot program, planned to demonstrate control of veneral

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disease in five Southern rural counties, included Macon County, Alabama, which was eighty-two percent black and which had, despite the presence of famed Tuskegee Institute, the highest syphilis rate uncovered by the study. Although of short duration, the Rosenwald program eventually inspired a nationwide campaign to test and treat syphilis–an effort that excluded six hundred Macon County men who were involved in the original study.

The Tuskegee experiment, in which they were now involved, grew out of frustration at the termination of Rosenwald funding. Director Taliaferro Clark, who “would have preferred to . . . treat rather than to study syphilitic blacks,” settled for a less expensive project, The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, which was to become “the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history.” Dr. Clark planned to study empirically the long held notion that syphilis affected blacks differently than whites by comparing his findings to a study of untreated syphilis in white males in Oslo, Norway. Clark expressed no ethical qualms as he prepared for the “unparalleled opportunity,” but neither did he envision that the men would go untreated longer than the six months he expected the experiment to last. To assure local black support, the Tuskegee Institute was made partner of the Public Health Service and its name was applied to the study. Dr. Raymond Vonderlehr was selected to be in charge of field work and Eunice Rivers, a black nurse, was appointed to assist him. Initially some minimal treatment was included which would eventually evoke the scientific criticism that the experiment was invalid as a study of untreated syphilis.

But it was the ethical dimension that would eventually condemn the Tuskegee study as the most infamous episode in the history of government medicine in the United States. The program was couched in deceit from the beginning. Patients were told that they had “bad blood,” not that they suffered from a particular disease that was contagious and transmitted sexually. Those brought in for painful and dangerous lumbar punctures which were strictly diagnostic were told that they were receiving “special treatment.”

When Dr. Vonderlehr, who was making a career out of the Tuskegee work, was named to replace Clark, the decision was made to continue the study indefinitely. His plan entailed low-cost examination of each man, facilitated by Nurse River’s personal contact, until each could be “brought to autopsy.” Their efforts to keep the men involved in the study were facilitated by continued deceit, non-effective medication such as asprin, burial stipends, and occasional certificates and cash awards. The support- of the Tuskegee Institute and area physicians, both eager to participate in a national scientific study, assured the experiment’s survival. Although poor blacks in Macon County could rarely afford to see a doctor, the cooperation of area physicians was still profoundly significant because men who were “potential patients” were made “perpetual subjects . . . placed beneath a microscope for scientific observation.” How callous the Public Health Service became toward these subjects is indicated by a letter from Dr. John Heller, field director of the study, complaining of the availability of Civil Works Administration jobs for blacks because it “disrupted the Ethiopian population as regards staying in one place very long.” Heller later recalled, “No one questioned whether the experiment was ethical; no one even came close to doing so.”

Initially, denial of treatment was rationalized (by those who bothered to rationalize at all) on the grounds that the treatment available for syphilis could be as hazardous as the disease. This justification was rendered more difficult in the 1940s when the discovery of penicilin offered a safe, effective syphilis treatment, but by then the study had acquired a bureacratic momentum, a self-perpetuation, that made it immune from challenge. Leadership continued to come from within, and no one involved considered ending the work.

It was not until 1966 that Peter Buxton, a venereal disease interviewer in San Francisco, learned about the study and protested. Officials, still convinced of the experiment’s scientific merit and moral intergrity, rejected Buxton’s criticism and vowed to continue. Finally in 1972 they were overruled when the Associated Press, proded by Buxton, told the story. A nine-member and it was disbanded. Out of court settlement awarded the surviving syphilitics $37,500, with lesser amounts to their heirs and to those in the control group.

Beyond the specific appalling story it tells, Jones’ book is important for offering insight into power relationships in American society. Despite the repeated denials of the officials involved, the experiment serves as an example of the power of racism and elitism and as an indictment of the limits to the paternalism and liberalism which have allegedly served to temper these prejudices. Jones describes the health officials who originated the study as paternalistic compared to “the real black-baiters of the day.” They were of the progressive or liberal wing in American society which counseled government sponsored improvement of the environment for blacks and the poor. But the book reveals the stark limits to a liberalism and paternalism which views the dispossessed as more subject than human.

Bad Blood also demonstrates the dangerous potential

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of a science without ethics. The Tuskegee experiment had almost complete support from scientists within the Public Health Service, and was not challenged from within even after the Nuremberg trials sensitized the world to the potential of science gone mad. When the study was uncovered in 1972, the scientific community was most vocal in its defense.

This example of “moral astigmatism” within the medical and science professions make a strong case for closer government supervision of medical activity, but the question remains–who will supervise the government? Most appalling to many people was the revelation that a federal agency had conducted the experiment. It was, the Providence Sunday Journal charged, “flagrant immorality . . . under the auspices of the United States Government.”

Jones also questions why none of the hundreds of individuals involved protested. Sidney Milgram, in his study Obedience to Authority, claims that “Pure moral autonomy in the form of lone resistance to an apparently benign authority is very rare.” His conclusion is upheld by the example of scores of people who could have protested medical experimentation but did not. Jones makes the frightening comparison of the Public Health bureaucracy to the military hierarchy of Nazi Germany which “reduced the sense of personal responsibility and ethical concern.” He is particularly interested in why so many blacks cooperated with the Tuskegee work and conjectures that black professionals were responding to “the dilemma of black middle-class professionals who wanted to succeed in a society dominated by whites.” This was clearly true of Nurse Rivers, the most poignant figure in the book and the one official involved who had genuine concern for the welfare of the men involved. She was bound by forces of race and class as well as a professional hierarchy that demanded obedience to doctors and sex roles that “reinforced her ethical passivity.”

Jones’ book can be criticized for leaving the men involved as lifeless as they were considered by the experimenters. Nevertheless, he has told their story well: “a forty-year saga of lies and deceit, of unlettered men who had trusted and been betrayed by educated men.” As the major indictment of “the scandalous story of the Tuskegee experiment,” this important book deserves to be widely read.

Bess Beatty is an assistant professor of history at Shorter College, Rome, Georgia.

Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation. By Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon with Robert Alverez and Eleanor Walters, New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1982, $12.95.

By John Northrop

Vol. 4, No. 6, 1982, pp. 19-20

Hiroshima proved that the atomic bomb could wipe out cities, but it was years later before many people began paying much attention to the possible side effects of radiation. Big mistake.

Evidently, Americans have paid an extraordinary price for nuclear technology from almost the very beginning. Immediately after the war, American G.I.’s were assigned to help sweep up the rubble in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A few years later the veterans were dying from cancer in unusual numbers. Soldiers who had served as observer/guinea pigs near subsequent bomb tests also fell victim to cancer at an unusually high rate. Adding insult to injury, the Veterans Administration has denied most claims, refusing to acknowledge the apparent connection between radiation and the atomic veterans’ diseases.

True enough, it’s nearly impossible to prove exactly what has caused any given individual’s cancer, but statistics and common sense should tell us something. When men are dropping dead of the disease at rates of up to ten times greater than the rest of us, and the obvious common denominator is uncommon radiation exposure, we at least should give them the benefit of the doubt.

But there, precisely, is the problem. From the beginning, the burden of proof has fallen on those who believe that atomic radiation is dangerous, not on those who would have us think it safe. As a watchdog, the federal government has shown a feeble bark and a more feeble bite, proving most attentive to safety claims by pro-nuclear radiation authorities. Official radiation standards have tightened only as embarassing evidence has mounted that no amount of radiation can be considered “safe.”

Killing Our Own surveys the damage. Chapters discuss a host of radiation issues, including the use and misuse of medical X-rays, the hazards of occupational radiation exposure, and the health threat of routine releases from nuclear power plants. One of the worrisome problems with even low-level radiation is its potential impact on later generations. Genetic damage to a few individuals now can show up as widespread birth defects a few decades down the road.

Not that we’ll have to wait for other damage. In 1976, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commisssion admitted that the nation’s nuclear power program will cause 1,1001,300 cancer deaths and 2,100-2,400 genetic defects by the year 2000. This may seem a piddling sum compared with annual U.S. traffic deaths of up to fifty thousand each year. However, the NRC figures fall low in the range of atomic casualty estimates, and they don’t consider the consequences of an accident.

Like at Three Mile Island. In a chapter entitled “People Died at Three Mile Island”–an ironic reference to bumper stickers claiming otherwise–the authors point to official Pennsylvania state health statistics which show a sudden rise in neo-natal and infant deaths in the TMI area shortly after the 1979 power plant accident. The authors also show how Pennsylvania health officials have been playing games with the same statistics, trying to prove their own figures lie.

The authors don’t guess why, but one reason is plain enough. The state was a bit slow to order an evacuation of young chidren and pregnant women during the TMI crisis. If TMI radiation did kill those babies, who deserves at least some of the blame . . . ?

Which brings to mind a story from a quarter-century earlier than TMI. Atom bombs and reactors have much in common, as would any parent and child. Certainly their

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radioactive by-products are similar, as well as the health effects of these substances. For years, the bomb people freely polluted the atmosphere and wide areas of the American west with weapons test fallout. Until the 1960’s, the old Atomic Energy Commission, now broken up into the NRC and other agencies, steadfastly held that the fallout was almost harmless, despite a growing clamor by knowledgeable scientists that thousands of human beings would die from radiation effects.

In 1954, a Hollywood movie crew came to St. George, Utah, a bit downrange from the government’s Nevada bomb test site. The crew stayed three months filming The Conqueror, featuring John Wayne. By 1979, ninety-one of the crew’s 220 members had developed cancer, and half of those had died of the disease. Among the victims were the film’s stars–Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, Dick Powell and Wayne himself.

When People magazine put it all together in 1980, the implications were embarassing. “Please, God,” a Pentagon official was quoted, “don’t let us have killed John Wayne.”

The Duke is dead, but nuclear energy lives on. Every section of the nation has its share of nuclear facilities. In the South, Mississippi was the site of two underground bomb tests in the mid-1960’s. Tennessee Valley Authority electricity has powered uranium enrichment facilities since the beginning of the A-bomb program. Even with recent cutbacks, TVA’s nuclear power plant program is one of the largest in the world: South Carolina hosts one of the nation’s two major high level waste dumps. There’s even uranium mining in Florida.

As the nation’s poor (and everyone else) struggle through our new era of limitations, at least one industry maintains its favored status at the government trough. Big federal bucks still go to nuclear research and development despite ham-fisted cutbacks in alternative energy programs. Indirect nuclear subsidies also continue, like the legal monstrosity known as the Price-Anderson Act. Price-Anderson limits government and industry liability to a mere fraction of the multibillion dollar costs possible in an all-out nuclear power plant disaster. This means that if your neighborhood nuke goes haywire and your property is rendered uninhabitable for centuries, you’ll have to swallow most of those losses.

One suspects there won’t be much change soon in federal performance where radiation and health are concerned. Over the years, federal officials have ignored and even suppressed evidence that radiation is far more dangerous than atomic promoters would like.

Much of this is not particularly new. Killing Our Own consolidates a wealth of information from Peter Metzger’s The Atomic Establishment and other sources, all carefully noted. Indeed, this is one of the book’s strong points; it is an efficient overview of radiation information from a perspective not backed by industry money or government promotion.

The book’s other strong point is people. The authors have incorporated the personal stories of a good many radiation victims. Confronted by their anguish, the reader sees beyond the statistics and finds human faces. Individual agony speaks more directly to our sympathies and reinforces the impression that government and industry have behaved with insensitivity, even criminality.

Critics already have accused Killing Our Own of trafficking in hearsay. That’s a bit much, although it’s fair to concede that some of the evidence against the radiation establishment seems circumstantial. No matter. Convictions are won–and conviction shaped when circumstantial evidence is cogent. Killing Our Own probably won’t be the last word on its subject, but it will help shift the burden of proof in the court of public opinion. As the public grows more aware of the real and potential threats of atomic radiation, the nuclear establishment–including cooperative federal and state “regulatory” agencies–will be forced to admit the danger of its wares.

At last we’ll get to the real issue: Is nuclear energy really worth its high human costs?

John Northrop is a member of the Conservation Committee of the Birmingham Audubon Society.

Reapportionment Roundup

By Staff

Vol. 4, No. 6, 1982, pp. 20-24

Reapportionment moved into the courtrooms across the South during the summer as federal judges were deluged with petitions and prayers for relief from lawyers of civil rights groups attempting to halt primary elections which they charged were to be held under discriminatory districts. Despite the lawyers’ complete lack of success, November elections bring a bumper crop of new minority elected officials in the state legislatures and promise the election of two additional black members of Congress from the South–doubling the present number–by the middle of the decade.

In six Southern states, federal courts have jurisdiction over congressional or state legislative reapportionment which will be decided finally by the end of 1983. In some instances, such as Alabama and Texas, the courts may order early elections if the plans which the Justice Department and the courts approve differ substantially from those which were implemented temporarily for the 1982 elections. In other states such as Virginia and Georgia the dust is settled and the district lines have now been set in place for the remainder of the decade.

While a federal court has reviewed reapportionment plans in every Southern state, the impetus for improvements in representation for blacks and Hispanics has come from the Voting Rights Act and its provision that all voting changes including redistricting be examined by the Justice Department to decide if they have a discriminatory effect or purpose. Incumbent minority legislators have also played a critical role in creating districts where black or Hispanic voters have a controlling vote.

In Georgia, for example, a sixty-five percent black district would never have been created were it not for the wily politicking of state senator Jul fan Bond who in acts of political horsetrading was able to convince his colleagues to adopt a sixty-nine percent black district in Atlanta. It was the senate’s adoption of the Bond plan and the plan’s subsequent rejection by the state house which led to the confrontation that evidenced the racial intent of

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legislators such as Joe Mack Wilson, Chairman of the House Reapportionment Committee, who observed that “the only thing worse than a ‘nigger’ district is a Republican district.”

In Florida, the push for single-member districts did not even have the threat of rejection by the Justice Department or the courts. Aided by others, including the Florida Governor, black and Hispanic members of the legislature worked at building a coalition of support for a single-member district plan for both the house and the senate. In South Carol in a the legislative black caucus was instrumental in securing the addition of two majority black districts in that state’s plan, and in Alabama most of the changes which prompted the election of new black members were required by the Justice Department only after they had been proposed in special legislative sessions by members of the black caucus.

So far the federal courts have not been very hospitable to the claims of black plaintiffs, especially when proposed plans have cleared the administrative review of the Justice Department. In Virginia, the federal court found only that the legislative plans violated the principle of one-person, one-vote and did not hold that the plans diluted black voting strength in an unlawful manner. In South Carolina the three-judge federal court has turned away the claims of black plaintiffs and in Mississippi none of the congressional districts ordered by the court have a majority of black voters. To date the federal court in Alabama has not required a plan providing for increased black voting strength beyond what the Justice Department has demanded. The only federal court that has required the creation of a voting district for congressional or legislative races in the South with a majority of black voters has been the federal court in Washington which in effect sustained the decisions of the Justice Department.

In the first six monthsofl983,mostofthependingcases on state reapportionment will be decided by the court. Then, probably, only appeals to the Supreme Court will remain. The following summaries set the state for that final chapter and provide an outline on the effects of reapportionment of state legislatures and congressional seats in the South.

Alabama

Under a temporary redistricting plan ordered by a federal court, the September primaries in Alabama fueled hopes of gains for blacks in the state legislature. Among the significant victories were house seats in Jefferson, Tuscaloosa, Perry, and Dallas counties. A black woman, Pat Davis was elected to a fifty-three percent black house seat in Birmingham; James Thomas and Jenkins Bryant, Sr., were the victors of the Democratic primary for the house seats in the Black Belt; and Bryant Melton won a house seat in Tuscaloosa.

All but two black incumbents in the Alabama House were reelected. In one race the victory of a black challenger, John Rogers, is presently under court challenge by incumbent black Rep. Ronald Jackson who lost by thirty-three votes in an election where absentee ballots were found two to three days later in a car trunk and in the office of the Jefferson County sheriff. All three incumbent black senators were reelected.

The reapportionment issue in Alabama remains in controversy. Negotiations continue between the plaintiffs and the state’s lawyers working on the law suit challenging Alabama’s plan in federal court. By court mandate the legislature will be required to redistrict by March, 1983, and another election for state legislators could follow as early as the fall of 1983. The new plan will have to meet approval with both the Justice Department and three federal judges sitting in Montgomery.

Florida

In a Southern state where the courts have not been involved in state reapportionment, minorities in Florida may make major gains in the next decade in the state legislature as a result of this year’s redistricting. For the first time in the state’s history, the legislature adopted single-member districts and the results of the October 5th primary showed several victories for black and Hispanic candidates.

For the first time in this century blacks will be represented in the Florida Senate. Carrie Meeks, a black legislator from Miami has been elected, without opposition, in a district with more than sixty-five percent black population and state Rep. Arnett Girardeau, a black from Jacksonville, won over a white opponent to become the Democratic nominee for another senate seat. Girardeau’s district is forty-nine percent black. Blacks also were winners in eleven house seats in Democratic primaries and in two Republican primaries around the state in October. Seven of the black Democrats who won had no opposition on November 2 Jefferson Reaves, James Burke, and Willie Logan from Miami; James Hargrave of Tampa; Al Lawson of Tallahassee; Corrine Brown and incumbent John Thomas of Jacksonville. Only five blacks now sit in the Florida legislature.

Redistricting has caused some major shifts as well as gains in Florida’s black state legislative delegation. Of the present black house members, only one, John Thomas of Jacksonville, will be returning. While Girardeau and Meeks are likely to move to the senate, the two remaining incumbent black legislators were defeated in primary battles. Longtime Democratic representative Joe Lang Kershaw and John Plummer, the first black Republican to serve in the Florida legislature since Reconstruction, were defeated by political newcomers–one a black and the other a white Republican woman.

Other house primary victories by black Democrats include Doug Jamison, who defeated longtime NAACP activist Morris Melton in St. Petersburg; Alzo Reddick in Orlando, Bill Clark in Fort Lauderdale, and David Anderson a black in North Palm Beach area won a surprise victory in a district that is ninety-five percent white. A former Martin County school board member, Anderson faced white Republican opposition on November 2.

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Gains for Hispanics will be decided after ail the votes are counted from the November 2 elections; most are from Dade County and are viewed as conservative Republicans. Seven Hispanics are running for the house and one has been nominated for the state senate.

Georgia

Working against a court-ordered deadline, the Georgia Legislature approved a sixty-five percent black congressional district for the Atlanta metropolitan area in early August. The decision followed a week of lengthy debate which included a Saturdaysessionthatmetuntil4:30a.m. Sunday. The result was a plan, for use in the November election, that gained quick approval from the Justice Department and the federal court.

The state had appealed the Justice Department’s April decision. Justice had held that the drawing of a fifty-seven percent black, Atlanta-based, district was racially motivated in light of the earlier refusal of the state house of representatives to adopt a sixty-nine percent black district. Sponsored by Georgia Senator Julian Bond, the sixty-nine percent plan had passed the state senate.

After several days of hearings in June, a three-judge federal court in Washington issued an order upholding Justice’s decision. The court found “overt racial statements. the conscious minimizing of black voting strength, historical discrimination and the absence of a legitimate non-racial reason for adoption of the plan at issue.” When an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was rejected, the August special session was called and the General Assembly faced the task of improving on a proposed district which had a fifty-seven percent black population but only a forty-five percent black registered voter population.

Initial proposals by the legislative black caucus were introduced by Senator Bond and black Representative Billy McKinney, of Atlanta. They called for the creation of a 68.3% black district. House Speaker Tom Murphy countered with a proposed 60.9% plan and Rep. Al Scott, a black legislator from Savannah, introduced a compromise proposal of 64.7% black.

From the start, few capital politicos differed in predicting the likelihood of a black Fifth Congressional District, although Murphy publicly vowed his unyielding opposition to a sixty-five percent black district. One of the problems that faced Murphy and others was how to create districts that met the Justice Department’s requirements and assured the election of Democratic incumbents. This desire to protect Fourth District Congressman Elliott Levitas was especially evident when Murphy remarked that “we’d like to help Elliott if we can.”

For Levitas, the demographics of Fulton and DeKalb counties produced a threatening situation. A heavily black Fifth District, as proposed in the Bond-McKinney plan, would stretch across the southern portion of the two counties leaving the Fourth District holding the northern portions where high income whites are creating a Republican stronghold.

Throughout the session, Levitas and Fifth District Congressman Wyche Fowler worked the hallways and backrooms at the state capital attempting to hang on to as much friendly political geography as possible. In the end, as a former state legislator, Levitas was clearly more influential and Fowler’s Fifth District lost a sizable chunk of central Atlanta’s biracial Democratic community, much of the core of his support. To the new Fifth went a large portion of north Atlanta and north Fulton County; the Justice Department got a 65.02% black populated district. In the Fourth District, the outcome was suitably low in Republican character for Congressman Levitas.

Ironically, in early discussions in the 1981 special sessions and with the Justice Department, the legislative leadership had criticized Sen. Bond’s initial effort to create a black congressional district because it would split Atlanta. That issue turned moot when the goal became the prevention of a Republican challenge to Levitas.

While the plan won the narrow approval of the Justice Department and the state intervenors, the state’s proposed timetables, which called for a forty-eight hour filing period and primary elections within two weeks of the end of the special session, were unacceptable. The final timetable approved by the courts for election in the Fifth and Fourth included a primary date of November 2 and a general election date of November 30.

With so little campaign time left, two prospective black candidates, Sen. Julian Bond and Fulton County Commissioner Regionald Eaves, decided against battling the incumbent Fowler over the new district. Both noted that the timetable provided little opportunity to raise sufficient funds and plan a campaign. State Rep. McKinney, however, entered the race as an independent, McKinney (who is a Democrat in the state legislature received the endorsement of the legislative black caucus, Senator Bond and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young. Yet, Fowler’s reelection was never in doubt.

In state legislative races, blacks appear to have made several gains in both the Georgia House and Georgia Senate. In the senate, Rep. Al Scott and Rep. David Scott of Atlanta appear to have secured seats. Frank Redding has been elected to a new house seat in suburban DeKalb County; former city commissioner Mary Young in Albany; George Brown in Augusta. Estimates show at least twenty-five blacks will serve in the legislature when the General Assembly meets in January–a gain of at least three seats.

Louisiana

The September primary elections in Louisiana confirmed that its six incumbent congressional members will return to Washington. So ended a protracted dispute which began late last year when a Democratic state legislature created a majority-black congressional seat in New Orleans only to recant at the urging of Republican Governor David Treen. Seeing the promise of the [unclear] Louisiana black in Congress in this century fade away, black leaders and civil rights lawyers fought unsuccess-

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fully before the Justice Department and the courts to stop the plan.

Louisiana has an open primary which puts all candidates, regardless of party, on the ballot. Among the incumbents, two Democrats, Billy Tauzin and Buddy Roemer, had no opposition, and the other four received a majority of the votes in the primary.

Since a full hearing on the court challenge by black plaintiffs has not yet been held, the existing congressional districts could be changed before the 1984 elections. During the summer the federal court in New Orleans refused to overturn the legislative plan before this year’s elections although it indicated that a final decision on district lines beyond 1982 would be decided only after full discovery and hearing. The success of the black plaintiffs’ challenge is uncertain at best since the Justice Department did approve the plan under its authorized voting rights review. Federal courts seldom, if ever, disapprove of redistricting plans on the same issues which the Justice Department has considered and approved under its administrative review.

The possibility of a majority-black district in New Orleans appeared strong last November when the legislature adopted a plan creating just such a district. Never a favorite of many black leaders, Gov. Treen opposed the bill strongly, in pert because the black district would jeopardize the reelection of an incumbent Republican, Bob Livingston. After jawboning and threatening a veto, Treen had his way and the legislature recanted.

With such a clear record of racial intent, civil rights lawyers and members of the state legislative black caucus went to the Justice Department confident that they had a strong case. At the time, one of the lawyers, Bill Quigley, remarked: “This case presents the acid test of whether a Republican governor’s influence at the Republican Justice Department is stronger than the law.” After heavy lobbying from Gov. Treen, Justice approved the plan. It held that the state had shown the plan to be unmotivated by race and without discriminatory effort. The results of the acid test were in.

Mississippi

After a three-judge panel in Greenville, Mississippi turned away the pleas of black plaintiff Owen Brooks and others that the court create a congressional district with a sixty-five percent black population in the Delta, civil rights lawyers raced to the U.S. Supreme Court. It refused to disturb the lower court’s order to permit congressional elections in August with the court-ordered fifty-three percent black district.

Because the voting-age population and the registration rate of blacks are considerably below the level of the black population in general, the Court’s decision appeared to doom hopes of a district in which black voters would elect a candidate. Yet, news of the Supreme Court’s decision was followed quickly by the announcement of Mississippi Delta Congressman David Bowen that he would not seek reelection, and a field of six candidates, including black state Representative Robert Clark of Holmes County was sowed.

Almost every political analyst and writer in the state gave Clark very little chance of winning the nomination on August 17, although a few ventured that he might make it into a runoff. State labor leader Claude Ramsey however, was more optimistic and very supportive, especially since the state AFL-CIO had supported the fifty-three percent plan in court. Ramsey contended theta good candidate–black or white–could be elected in the Delta with such a plan and that the larger black majority plan would only “help Republicans elsewhere in the state.”

When the votes were counted in August, Clark had defeated his four white opponents and received fifty-six percent of the vote–enough to avoid a runoff. Despite lingering doubts that the white Republicans had voted for Clark in order to give their own candidates an easy target in November, Clark appeared to be on the road to Washington.

While Clark’s strong showing was, a victory for the almost forty percent black population in Mississippi who had not seen a black congressman go to Washington in their lifetime, the election results presented a real problem for Frank Parker, the lawyer who represented the black plaintiffs in the Greenville court. Whie the court will consider again the question of the district lines for elections after 1982, the judges will no doubt look with skepticism on Parker’s premise that racial bloc voting in the Delta by whites will keep black voters’ candidates from public office. Whie he may be able to call upon eighty-one years of Mississippi history to support his case, Parker will have to figure out how to convince the judges that this exception in Mississippi ought not set the rule in law.

South Carolina

In the face of challenges from the NAACP to congressional and state house reapportionments, South Carolina lawmakers now appear confident that their new district lines, used in this year’ selections, will be sustained by the federal courts. Adopted in early summer, the congressional plan avoided the creation of a majority black district near the coast. Nonetheless, it was approved by the three-judge federal panel, one of whose members characterized the NAACP’s arguments as “frivolous.”

The state house plan adds two new majority-black districts. It has also been approved by the courts and the Justice Department.

The state senate has not yet reapportioned, and a bitter fight looms as incumbents in the all-white chamber try to avoid single-member districts. Elections for the state senate in South Carolina are not held this year, and senators have until mid-1984 to develop their strategy.The black leadership, including the legislative black caucus in Columbia, are deciding how to present their best case before the legislature, the Justice Department, and ultimately the courts.

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Texas

When the Texas legislature returns to Austin in early 1983, they face once more the task of reapportioning both chambers of the state house, and, at the least, the congressional districts in the Dallas area. In June, federal courts ordered temporary plans for the elections but required that the state redo the plans in the 1983 legislative session.

A flood of paperwork was filed by lawyers for Democrats, Republicans and Mexican-Americans in June and July as they attempted to overturn lower court opinions for the primary elections. The first plan adopted by the Democratic state legislature generally protected incumbents although it appeared to offer more safety to incumbent conservatives, Republican or Democrat, than to the liberal Democrats. The highly partisan elections of November 2 should help all Texas Democratic congressmen win a more sympathetic ear from the state lawmakers.

Because of increased population, the Texas legislature had to create three new congressional districts this year. In this rearrangement the Hispanic caucus hopes to create one or two majority Hispanic congressional seats: in the state’s southwest and around Dallas. If the legislature fails, as seems likely, the effort will probably be continued in court by the Mexican-American Legal Defense Education Fund. The Justice Department and thc federal courts will likely decide if the failure to create such districts has a racially discriminatory effect or purpose.

Generating in court “enough paper to patch Houston’s freeway,” the temporary congressional districts appear to have helped no one more than the incumbents. When the final votes arc official in Texas, their composition will remain much the same.

In the state legislature. the number of Mexican-American legislators in the lower house may increase by four or five for a total of twenty-two as a result of the. November elections although no gains are expected in the state senate.

Virginia

After a year of special sessions and court litigation costing the state as much as a million dollars, the Virginia legislature created a single-member district plan for both houses which added five majority-black districts to the existing four. As the election results are being tallied in that state, some politicians and political observers are wondering what all the shouting was about.

Although the concepts of both single-member districts and majority-black districts were at the heart of the fears of many incumbent Virginia Assembly members, the “dreaded effect” that Democratic majority leader Thomas Moss of Norfolk predicted appears illusory six months after thc legislature acceded to the objections of the Justice Department and the courts. Forecasting earlier that single-member districts would cause an invasion of Republicans like Grant’s march through Richmond, the lawmakers’ predictions have not been borne out by election returns. Democrats will remain in firm control. At the same time. the four blacks in the Virginia legislature may not have their ranks doubled until at least the late 1980’s when voter registration and turnout are higher.

“When put in perspective. the fight in the legislature for over a year to keep out a total of three black lawmakers is absolutely incredible,” remarks Jack Gravely, the head of the NAACP.

This report was prepared by the staff of the Southern Regional Council.