The Present Danger

By Alex Willingham

Vol. 6, No. 5, 1984, pp. 1-3

In the current presidential campaign, the forces of reaction have sought to win by controlling the tone of public discussion. By portraying Reagan’s superficiality as innocent pleasantry, any real concern with issues can be put down as nuisance. If the Republicans succeed it will merely postpone candid discussion of the national condition and obscure the present danger.

For years Reagan has engineered a reputation as essentially harmless, good natured and tolerant. Now, the forces he has asembled, and who have assembled him, pose a real danger to the ideals of open and egalitarian society and to the gains we have made in recent years. Unless the Reagan Administration is defeated in November, popularly elected leaders will constitute the main threat to established freedoms.

The present danger arises out of this president’s rhetorical stance for “less government” and the reality of an increasingly invasive new statism of the right wing. As federal domestic policy, “Reaganomics” is deceptively dressed as a comprehensive alternative to the social welfare state. In practice it has come to represent a marginal attack directed not against manifest shortcomings of welfarism, but against a few redistributive reforms developed since the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

These programs applied innovative strategies to improve the lives of blacks and the poor. They were “re-distributive” because they promoted the “transfer” of money to the disadvantaged and mandated “maximum” participation by recipients. These programs covered the concerns of much of the progressive thought of the times: 1) an alarm that large sections of the nation continued to live in material poverty and 2) the belief that the ability of people to conquer misfortune would be enhanced by their participation in the policy making process.

These concerns dovetailed with the activism of the Civil Rights Movement and became interwoven with the fight to ban racism and all other forms of discrimination from our society.

In its heroic moments the Great Society tried to be affirmative. It sought to move away from safety net policies and to move toward strategies for empowerment. It realized that

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government’s innovations of the past–for example Social Security or the G I bill–offered models which suggested how to adress current problems. It realized that piecemeal legislation would not overcome stiff resistance to an open political process. Bold action was needed: We got the War on Poverty (1963) and the Voting Rights Act (1964).

Innovative federal policies were enacted even in succeeding Republican administrations. In certain cases–Head Start, the Voting Righs Act, Legal Services–there have been powerful, positive results. The success of the effort–both in getting the attention of government and in realizing some of the intended goals–promoted an optimism about some federal programs.

But the Great Society was hardly an unqualified success. By the Carter years, with an array of social programs in place, and a Democratic administration in power, mounting doubt grew about the actual function of welfare policy. Improvement–although present–was incremental at best. A full-scale debate was about to start. It would have focused on the large residual population still untouched by the programs. Any number of possible reforms would have been debated including administrative streamlining, changes in funding levels, or decentralization. There would have been concern about the “professionalization” of the delivery system. The question would have been raised: after all, can the goals we seek be accomplished within the American two-party system?

An unheralded achievement of the Reagan Administration has been to coopt that debate. Reaganite hostility to Great Society goals and programs took the ground out from under the looming critique and transformed would-be critics of the troubled sub-system into defenders of the status que ante.

The Reagan forces tapped a preexisting skepticism. “Neo”-conservatives, some of whom were former advocated of reform, were the idealogical point-men for the Administration. Black neoconservatives–typified by Thomas Sowell–gave racial legitimacy to the view. The argument took the form of a general attack on government activity. In common, “neo”–liberals and “supply-siders” used the documentation of continuing misery to argue that positive government was bad and, in any case, could not deliver on the crucial matter of anti-poverty reform. At one point Sowell, who has never been accused of understatement, claimed that Brown v. the Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision against school segregation, was undue government interference. No sacred cows here: positive government was necessarily evil and especially so in trying to implement lofty intentions. Reaganites went to Washington determined to cripple its governing institutions.

What is revealing, however, is the limited nature of the cutback. The basic welfare structure remains in place even after a full Reagan term. There have been program cutbacks, to be sure, and they have had disastrous effects on the recipient population. Yet the troubled structure is still in place. No doubt much of this comes from congressional resistance.

It is possible to interpret these developments as a defeat for Ronald Reagan. In fact however, they seem to represent changing priorities of conservative forces operating at the helm of a powerful state apparatus. Now, in domestic affairs, the threat of the Reagan regime comes less from a frontal attack on government than in the way it would prune its operations to make this a more paternal, as opposed to participatory, bureaucracy. The positive state would become a tool for on-going administration of a permanent underclass rather than a means of its transformation.

The new statism of the Reaganites is the basis for alarm. It comes at a time when the Republicans have nearly completely capitulated to right wing extremist groups. The spiritual fervor of these groups is sustained by anticipation or expanding their influence through the exercise of official authority.

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Boring within the Republican party represents something of a turnabout for these groups. The fundamentalist network had been part of the base used by Jimmy Carter to gain national prominence. Yet Carter, whose personal religious expression fit the mode, disappointed many of the born-again–especialy in his formal allegiance to separation of state and church. This congregation has gone over to Ronald Reagan who is much less religious but who has been willing to support government-enforced prayer, segregated religious schools, and the like–and who is willing to individualize responsibility for whatever plight grows out of oppressive social conditions.

Reagan’s posture encourages resistance among those who use race, sex or religious beliefs to protect their advantages.

When Reagan went to Washington, it first appeared that our greatest domestic threat would come through efforts to abolish social welfare programs that help the poor or, in attempts to frustrate the enforcement of hard-won civil rights gains. And, indeed, his Administration has cut federal support of basic human needs and has subverted the enforcement of justice. Yet, today the danger is not that the Reaganites will cut back on government power, but that they will use it to actively promote conformity. Insofar as Reagan, his New Right or business allies are perceived as merely racist or excessively frugal, we obscure the real threat his reelection will mean to the poor, to women, to minorities–and to our hope for democratic society.

Alex Willingham lives in Shreveport, Louisiana. He is editor of the Voting Rights Review.

Wolves in Robes

By Hal Crowther

Vol. 6, No. 5, 1984, pp. 3-4

To people outside North Carolina, it may sound like a parochial, partisan quarrel between courtroom personalities who rub each other the wrong way. But the decision by Judge James H. Pou Bailey of Wake County Superior Court to publicly oppose the nomination of Samuel T. Currin for a federal judgeship is one of the state’s most significant political stories, and one that deserves national attention.

Bailey, the Superior Court’s senior resident judge, is a conservative Democrat and a personal friend of Sen. Jesse Helms, who recommended Currin for the nomination. It isn’t his habit or his style to become involved in political controversies. His decision was obviously a matter of personal conscience, and it was crucial because he’s one of the few public officials in Eastern North Carolina whose personal reputation and lack of further political ambition make him immune to the kind of tactics the Currin crowd seems to employ against its enemies. His statement was neither mild nor diplomatic.

“I personally believe Sam Currin would use any method for any purpose he thought was right,” Bailey said. “I can conceive of no more dangerous person than a fanatic with power. If he is appointed a judge, that’s what we would have.”

This is, on a small scale, the same kind of “enough is enough” that secure, older conservatives were finally forced to declare to call a halt to the reckless rise of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. They ,were the only ones who could. McCarthy’s critics on the left and even in the center had been neutralized by fear and public ignorance.

Currin, age thirty-five, a former aide to Sen. Helms, is a right-wing zealot who has been clawing his way to power in the office of US Attorney for North Carolina’s Eastern District. The Colcor investigation, of which Currin was partial architect, was the code name for a much-publicized probe of official corruption in Columbus County, North Carolina. There were impressive indictments, but no major convictions after it became apparent that most of the federal cases were based on the agent-invented crimes that are currently so fashionable in law enforcement circles. When it became more than a rumor that assistant US attorneys had tried to sucker several of the defendants’ lawyers into embarrassing situations, Colcor was generally discredited.

Colcor finally soured with both judges and juries, but not before it ended the careers (perhaps mercifully) of a lieutenant governor and a state senator, among others. More damning evidence against young Currin is the current testimony by one of his former assistants that he lied under oath to justify the firing of an employee, Nancy Jones. Worse yet, the sexual insinuation of the story that he apparently concocted shows a brutal kind of disregard for her career and reputation.

There are those who feel that a forced resignation and even disbarment would be a more fitting reward for Samuel T. Currin than the federal bench. But more important than Currin’s personal shortcomings, which seem to be legion, is the symbolic split between conservatives like Judge Bailey and conservatives like Currin. I suggest that even Sen. Helms is unaware of the alarming emptiness of some of these fierce young men that he sees as his political heirs.

A conservative is profoundly distrustful of major changes in the way people speak, dress, build their houses, arrange their families, use their land, direct their energies and have sex with each other. I’m afflicted with this distrust as much as anyone I know, and I’m sure I share it with Sen. Helms. It’s a mixture of secure values and sick nostalgia. The Senator’s wisdom, like his ignorance, is a product of his own time, a time that is, in a sense, time past. The test of

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character for a conservative, which I feel the Senator fails, is whether he can exert his influence without attempting to condemn or coerce the people who don’t share his background and can’t share his views.

Conservatism with or without character is proper to people approaching middle life, at the, earliest. There’s something unnatural about a youthful reactionary. He isn’t trying to preserve anything, in a responsible way, because he hasn’t been around long enough to examine things properly, to determine what’s worth preserving. He’s merely giving up that time in his life when he might have the energy and idealism to make some improvements. Young conservative movements attract gullible, spiritless kids, joiners and conformists. And, unfortunately, fanatics. Young men and women who love to accept and impose authority, capable of passionate commitment of obsolete and oversimplified ideologies. It’s not surprising that Currin and some of the Congressional Club’s other iron babies are referred to in private as “the Hitler Youth.” And it’s natural, in a political movement that attracts a lot of sheep, that wolves rise rapidly.

As Judge Bailey pointed out, there could be nothing much worse than making judges of them, even at the traffic-court level. Inevitably many of our cases would be decided not on their legal merits but on what we seemed to represent to the judge–whether he sees you as one of his own or one of the others. In matters of pure law, of precedent and constitutionality, it would be impossible to exaggerate the destructive potential of men who had been such unscrupulous prosecutors, let alone their ideology.

This case is North Carolina’s, but it epitomizes a national crisis. Never in fifty years, not since the first election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, has the power of the federal courts been open to such harsh and narrow-minded men. To me the most critical issue in the 1984 presidential election is the advanced age of the current Supreme Court, and the likelihood that Ronald Reagan, reelected, will appoint (on the reccommendations of key advisors like Jesse Helms) four or five new justices in his second term. They’ll be relatively young justices, and it means that our children and even our grandchildren will grow up in a country far more repressive and intolerant, more cramped and rigid and uncharitable, than the one we grew up in. With Ed Meese as Attorney General, Sam Currin on the federal bench and his slightly older counterparts on the Supreme Court, there’s going to be very lisle in this country that we oldtimers are going to recognize as justice.

(Currin’s nomination, along with those of other controversial judicial candidates, has been put on ice to be revived after the November election.)

But I understand that seventy-five percent of the electorate isn’t interested in that issue. They aren’t interested in the environment or in the world population explosion, which our government is currently addressing with the most shortsighted and reactionary policy any American government has presented on any crucial issue in the twentieth century. They aren’t interested in what happens to old people, minorities, unprotected women, disabled veterans or any groups they don’t belong to. They aren’t seriously worried about the arms race or about a President (what an intergalactic fathead he really is, that senile soap salesman we send around the world on Air Force One) who drives the Russians crazy by making jokes about blowing them to pieces. The voters aren’t especially offended by an administration that is creating a republic of, by and for affluent white men.

All they’re interested in, according to the polls, is the economy. Like pigs at the trough, they signal their preference turning their snouts toward whichever candidate seems to have the most swill in his bucket. And snout voting, as I call it, is most predictable among the fattest pigs. Gluttony fires a hunger that starvation can’t touch.

Snout voters are going to look up from the trough some day and find their lives in the hands of men who make Samuel T. Currin look like a shy legal scholar. Men whose idea of criminal justice is to pick out types that look suspicious and tempt them and hound them until they commit crimes. Men who would take you, your pregnant 14-year-old daughter and the doctor who has the reckless courage to give her an abortion and put all three of you behind bars. They’ve as much as promised. You may or may not have a full belly, but that’s going to be expensive swill.

Hal Crowther, principal columnist for Spectator Magazine in Raleigh, North Carolina, formerly covered law and education for Time, and media for Newsweek. More recently a film and television scriptwriter, he lives in Pittsboro (NC) and teaches courses at Duke University.

Changing Decades

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 6, No. 5, 1984, pp. 4-8

This year, Southern Regional Council marks the fortieth anniversary of its founding. Today, as in the past, the Council’s vision of the South’s future radiates from a belief in democratic principles. From its beginning, the Council has affirmed the nation’s democratic values while at the same time holding them up as a standard by which to measure and change Southern realities. Thus it has analyzed, exposed, and helped to remove many of the cruel ways in which democracy has been thwarted by segregation, disfranchisement, and the denial of hope and opportunity to the region’s people.

As the South’s olderst biracial organization, the Council’s uniqueness lies in its ability to help others turn knowledge and vision into tools for constructive change. Over the past four decades it has played a major role in reconstructing the South. It challenged the all-white primary system and then helped to lead the way to enfranchising and registering formerly powerless blacks. In recent years it has helped to increase the effectiveness of legislators who represent blacks and the poor. It has persistently analyzed, exposed, and found means of opposing racial violence. It has helped to free many of the South’s workplaces of low wages and discrimination. It has helped to integrate the federal courts. Thirty years ago, when the Brown decision was handed down, the Council was already in the forefront of the attack on segregated schools and it has remained a watchful advocate of equal educational opportunity. Perhaps most important of all, the Southern Regional Council has cast a vision of what a humane and democratic South might look like.

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Many of the Council’s objectives have been achieved, but its work continues to be vital to the South. Indeed, the very achievement of many goals has had the ironic effect of disguising new ways in which opportunities are blunted, the disadvantaged abused, and democracy denied.

Now, as in the past, the Council’s task is to provide research, information, and technical assistance to individuals and groups who are able to bring change and to provide forums for Southerners of good will to think and act together. In a new era aptly called the “Age of Information,” the Council is uniquely suited to use its skills and “data bases” to shape the region’s future for the better.

No facet of Southern life ought to escape the Council’s ,attention, but the agenda for the future has been drawn up around the following broad concerns where democratic principles must be affirmed and extended: (1) the ballot box, (2) the workplace, (3) the schoolhouse, (4) the courthouse, (5) the marketplace of ideas and information, and (6) the uses of technology and information.

The Ballot Box: More Democratic Governments in the South

No more important task lies ahead for the region and the Council than assuring that government in the South at all levels becomes truly democratic. Almost twenty years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act the promise of democratic government remains elusive, often obstructed by the way political power is allocated through the drawing of district lines for Congress, state legislatures, county commmisions, city councils, and school boards. As the US Supreme Court has said, redistricting is a primary means by which “racial and political groups have been fenced out of the political process and their voting strength invidiously minimized…”

For almost four years the Council has been drawing model redistricting plans designed to promote democratic government and to prevent the dilution of minority voting strength. It has drawn more than three hundred model plans, for jurisdictions at every level, which have been used by lawyers, government officials, and community leaders. But much more remains to be done. There are more than a hundred congressional districts, eighteen hundred state legislative districts, and almost ten thousand local government districts in the region for which political boundaries must be redrawn after every census. Since 1980, community groups and citizens’ organizations too often have been unable or unprepared to critique, adequately, proposed redistricting. While progress is being made and plans continue to be challenged and redrawn, redistricting in this decade is already a missed opportunity because so few historically disfranchised groups were prepared to participate effectively in drafting, assessing, and proposing fair redistricting plans.

To make matters more complex, local and state govern” meets have begun to employ sophisticated means of drawing plans using modern computers and other related technology. Because of a lack of access to data and expertise in computers, community goups have been and will increasingly be at a disadvantage.

The Council proposes to help here by continuing to assist local groups to draft model reapportionment plans and to begin to prepare for the reapportionment of the 1990s. Our continued work will require the development of sophisticated bases of data, improved uses of computers and computer programming, and strategic technical assistance to local groups and organizations in the use of data and computers. Already the Council has prepared perhaps the only computer programming for micro computers that will develop adequately fair reapportionment plans of local governments. This work and the increased the use of accessible computer technology in this field must continue.

The Council will also extend its research and technical assistance to assure that the Voting Rights Act is fully enforced. By helping local groups participate in the administrative review of voting changes in the South and by monitoring the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, the Council can help to assure that all stand equally at the ballot box.

The work in both redistricting and enforcing the Voting Rights Act can be effective only if there is a systematic collection and analysis of the major indicators of political participation and political effectiveness. In the South today, there is a dearth of reliable, timely information on the level of voter registration, voter turnout, voting trends, voting records, and other demographic changes in government jurisdictions. Historically, Southern segregated governments have had considerable self-interest in refusing to collect such information and in denying it to others. In this way, they could evade detailed evaluations of the full level of political participation which they were impeding. Today, much of this information remains uncollected by the states and scattered in many different places. Without hard, reliable data collected and easily available, the tests of how political participation can be increased for all are almost impossible.

The information that is available is usually collected today at the county level–making it woefully inadequate in judging accurately the current levels of political participation and the effective methods of increasing it. Data on the major indicators of political participation must be collected and analyzed on the precinct level; this level of information can enable real assessments of the problems and barriers. Without this information there simply cannot be a systematicc analysis which indicates where scarce resources and activities should be placed.

The final focus of our work in this area will be our continued research and technical assistance, by request, to

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State legislators on issues relating to the poor and blacks. In the last several years, state governments have become increasingly important in deciding the fate of both state and federal programs that aid the disadvantaged. At the same time, the opportunity for state officials in the South to address, on their own, the problems of poverty and discrimination has noticeably widened.

Since 1979, the Council has provided state legislators in the Deep South with research, analysis, model legislation, and current information about issues relating to blacks and the poor. This work has remarkably improved the ability of state officials to address the historic needs in the region and it is setting a standard by which state governments can become more effective and more representative by their improved use of information and research. It must continue if democratic governments are to serve all Southerners.

The South is now moving into its second generation of democratic government unbridled by segregation. If the region is to travel from the end of segregation to the presence of full democracy, a journey that can benefit both the region and the nation, the Council’s efforts to assure the democratic promise of the ballot box will be essential.

More Democracy in the Workplace

Attracted to the South’s low-wage, non-union labor–lower wages than anywhere else in the country–and its cheapened land, both resident and newcomer companies created an unparalleled number of jobs during the last decade and, with the aid of the climate, earned the area the name of the Sunbelt. The sun by no means shines in all Southern backyards however, and in fact a storm of clouds appears on the horizon. Almost forty percent of the growth in jobs and personal income for the South in the last ten years has been concentrated in parts of Florida, Texas, and Virginia. Three Southern states lost as many jobs in the last five years as they had gained in the first five years of the 1970s. Unemployment in the region as a whole remains above the national average.

The Sunbelt fascination may turn into an extended disaster. The economy of the nation and the region is increasingly becoming international and this trend surely limits the future prospects for jobs in the South so long a’ low wages and cheap land are its major attractions Corporations already threaten Southern workers and communities with relocation to Central America, Africa or Indochina where wage scales are abysmally low. In the absence of workplaces in which meeting the needs of the region’s people is as important as maximizing profits, the South’s hopes and the Sunbelt’s glitter soon will be eclipsed.

The Council hopes to address many of these issues with its recently created Southern Labor Institute. The Institute will bring together representatives of labor unions, business civil rights organizations, environmental groups, govern meet, education, and other interests to help create common agendas for the region’s economic development. It will also carry out research to monitor and assesses the South’s development of industrial relations and policies that promote the welfare of workers.

In the next few years the Institute will develop a sound, alternative economic development strategy for Southern states and local governments–a strategy that avoids the heavy reliance upon cheap land and cheap labor. At the same time, the Council will recognize the problems of capital formation and need for marketing expertise by small, minority-owned, worker owned, and local businesses in the South’s increasing service-oriented economy. Work in this area will include: (1) monitoring and encouraging governmental and private practices of equitable, accessible capital formation, especially among religious groups, churches, and labor unions, and, (2) establishing a network in which marketing expertise and product development can become available to a larger number of minority, worker-owned small businesses.

Also, today, more than seventy percent of the land of the South is served by ostensibly democratic, economic institutions–the electric utility cooperatives which by law are controlled by their customers. Through years of neglect and a history of segregation, these economic institutions with six billion dollars of assets in the South, have become unresponsive to needs for job creation, a balanced ecology, and prudent use of energy in their own communities. This essential industry in the South will continue to be a central concern of the Council’s research and technical assistance in an effort to improve democratic decision-making, promote jobs and protect the environment.

The Schoolhouse: Equal Opportunity to an Excellent Integrated Education

The goal of excellence in education has little, if any, opposition in the South or the nation. But controversies do arise over how to define excellence and how to make certain that no students are denied a full opportunity to achieve it. Following its long-held views, the Council will increase its work in this area in the years ahead in order to assure that citizens of all races and incomes have an opportunity to find the agreeable means by which everyone has the opportunity for an excellent education.

The involvement of local community groups and parents in the decision-making in schools was instrumental in the resolution of many problems encountered in dismantling the legally segregated school systems of the South and that involvement is essential for any equitable agreement on the

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means to achieve improved education for all. The Council will encourage local and state groups to develop agendas and define ways of improving the administration and quality of educaion, regardless of race or income.

The Council will also continue its research and analysis of trends in the South relating to equal opportunity in education and its assessment of the effects of different means which federal, state, and local governments can choose to accomplish this goal.

Of particular importance, especially in the rural South, is the continued existence of tax-exempt, segregation academies. These private discriminatory schools have an influence not only in keeping white children away from public schools but also in influencing local and state public policies concerning school administration and school finance in both urban and rural areas. The Council will examine this area of education and especially the effects of segregation academies on education in the region.

The Courthouse: Just Men and Women in the Institutions Of Justice

Few institutuions have been as important in shaping the future of the South as its institutions of justice. The federal courts have had a central role in shaping the region’s future and while that role has diminished in recent years, the courts remain a strategic influence upon the course of the South.

For much of its history, the Council has been concerned about who are the men and women who occupy important positions in the institutions of justice. That concern will continue in the future. It was not until 1979, after the release of an SRC report, that the federal courts adopted an equal opportunity plan for employment. It has also been only: recently that civil rights lawyers, blacks, and women have had an opportunity to be appointed to the federal bench. At the state level, surveys by the Council in the late 1970’s showed that most judicial and quasi-judicial administrative agencies remained predominantly white and too often entirely segregated.

Through research and technical assistance, the Council will continue to monitor, study, and prod the courts to be fully integrated and fair institutions.

More Democracy in the Marketplace of Ideas and Information

As it continues to help shape public policy options, the Southern Regional Council will also continue trying to reach the hearts and minds of Southerners, to make human relations and government more democratic. Its public education work has involved assistance to the news media, conferences, the publication of magazines and special reports, and, most recently, radio and television production. In the future, the Council will increase its efforts to reach a larger number of Southerners who in the decades ahead can share a vision of the region.

The use of mass media by the Council will continue to branch into new areas as we try to diversify the marketplace of information and ideas. Already, the Council is preparing radio programming for distribution to public and commercial radio stations across the region and exploring ways of establishing syndicated programming to different stations throughout the area. This programming will provide information, education, and a sense of history about the region in lively and entertaining formats.

In television, the Council also has begun efforts to reach a larger audience. With the Atlanta Media Project, the Council recently established the Southern Network, where it produced each weekday two hours of non-partisan programming for nine weeks about the presidential candidates in the South. This programming was distributed by cable systems to more than one million households in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. The Council’s first venture into production of programming will be followed by a cooperative venture of groups across the region, and perhaps the country, to provide by cable a link among people and organizations of good will.

As it has for more than forty years, the Council will continue to provide information, consultations, and advice on regional isues to the regional, national and international news media. This informal service helps to illuminate problems and opportunities and to guide the coverage of issues by the mass media. A formal part of this assistance to news media may be a yearly press institute where bureau chiefs, editors, and reporters meet and discuss the major regional issues.

The Council also hopes to improve its services to the news media by providing a subscription service of microfilmed newspaper clippings. This collection covers more than thirty years and contains more than 1.3 million newspaper clippings about people, places, and events of the South’s recent history. For subscribing news media, this microfilm service would be available in order to provide background on issues, place, or people through computer retrieval. This service will also be used to improve the Council’s general use of an increased “data base” in research and technical assistance in other areas.

Although the Southern Regional Council intends to move further in reaching a larger audience through mass communications, it also intends to maintain its own modest journal of opinion which is a tradition as old as the organization and as important as free thought. Now named Southern Changes, the Council’s magazine provides a

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means for covering emerging issues and helping Southerners to think critically about the region as a whole. In the days ahead, the Council hopes to begin to syndicate some articles in Southern Changes to daily and weekly newspapers around the country in order to enlarge its readership and to provide a regional perspective on current events which is seldom available elsewhere.

As the Council reaches out to new eyes and ears it will also need to understand better the currents of opinions in the region. Complementing other aspects of its work, the organization will begin periodic surveying of the opinions of the public (and different segments of the public) in the South. Private and public leadership will also be surveyed on major issues and concerns from time to time. This polling should permit the Council to perceive better the public understanding of issues and its own need for additional public education and research. Surveying will also be used as a tool in other areas of the Council’s work for assessing opinions on education, understanding patterns of political participation, and aiding in testing marketing concepts for emerging worker-owned and minority businesses.

More Democratic Use of Technology and Information

In this age of information, new and alternative technologies–some very simple and others very complicated–are shifting radically the manner in which services are provided and decisions are made. In this dramatic shift, no sector of society appears less equipped to master the changes than the long-standing comunity groups who represent the historically disfranchised of the South. Computers, telecommunications, health care technology, solar technics–these and other developments of recent years must be understood and mastered by community leaders in the days ahead if their constitutencies are to be represented adequately.

In the future, the Council will explore ways to help community groups and non-profit organizations in the South find useful applications for new technologies. This area of work will be done in very practical ways and as an extension of SRC’s ongoing work.

By increasing its own capacity to use new technologies, the Council will share its technical knowledge, computer programming, and practical applications with others across the region so that there can be more democratic access and use of the technology and information on which the region’s future will be built.

“A Bunch of Renegades”

In dealing with the old or the new, no region of the country has experienced greater and more rapid change than the South. In that fact lies the promise of even greater change for the region and the nation. It is the promise of democracy: that people can change themselves, their institutions and their government for the better. To that simple notion, so precious and fragile today as in the past, the Southern Regional Council has devoted its energies. With increased capacities the Council will continue, as one of its founders, Ralph McGill, said, “to be a bunch of renegades who insist upon telling the truth.”

Steve Suitts is the executive director of the Southern Regional Council.

Time and Time Again: The Women, the Union and the Vanity Factory

By Paula Mclendon

Vol. 6, No. 5, 1984, pp. 8-17

Sarah Boykin: Mr. Hundley was the plant manager when we first started organizing. They told us that he had found a better job. But I don’t believe that because he had twenty years in with Vanity Fair. And he went to that cabinet shop right up the road. I don’t believe he would have thrown away that many years.

I think they got rid of Mr. Hundley because he didn’t have t in his heart to do the things that Vanity Fair likes done to their employees. He was a Christian man. He was a good man too. When we started organizing, everything changed. They had to get rid of him because he was too easy, too soft. They had to get rid of him. They gave us Larry Windham. That was the meanest man that ever walked in Vanity Fair.

Emily Woodyard: Mr. Hundley respected the women. He wanted to get the work out, but he wouldn’t ride you like you were a machine or something. The rest of them did. It didn’t matter to them as long as they got their quota out and they looked good on that little piece of paper that came out.

In 1976, Sarah Boykin, Emily Woodyard, Wilda Blackmon and Rebecca Blackmon led a successful union campaign in Jackson, Alabama, at Clarke Mills, a division of Vanity Fair Mills, manufacturers of women’s apparel. Local 118 of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) came into being by the narrow margin of sixteen votes out of over five hundred cast. The union was bitterly resisted by the Clarke Mills’ management and by the parent VF Corporation, a non-union multi-plant operation that employed approximately eight thousand women in south Alabama and the Florida panhandle.

In 1979, these four women, textile workers each with over a decade of experience, sat down to talk with me about how and why they came to form a union.

In 1982, after a company counter-campaign in which Vanity Fair employed a considerable array of intimidators against union supporters, Local 118 was decertified.

In 1984, I asked Sarah, Emily, Wilda and Rebecca for another interview together. They talked about the circumstances which led to the loss of their union. They considered the various wiles and coercions of Southern manufacturers like Vanity Fair. They also talked about themselves and their co-workers–what they had learned, and what they had gained from all they had given to the union campaign.

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The Setting

Jackson, a town of six thousand people’ sits along Alabama’s Tombighee River in Clarke County, about sixty miles north of Mobile. Clarke was a cotton plantation county in the antebellum South. Fifty percent of its 1850 population of 9,800 consisted of slaves. Today, blacks comprise forty- tree percent of the county’s total population of 28,000.

Nearly half of Clarke County’s black citizens live in poverty.

During the twentieth century, Clarke County’s agricultural production has undergone a long and steady decline. In the decades since World War 11, commercial pulpwood and timber interests, together with Clarke Mills, have dominated the local economy. Ninety percent of the county’s land is forested; only eight percent is devoted to farming. As in many coastal plains counties of the South, a few individuals and companies have assembled large landholdings into pine plantations ranging from ten-thousand to seventy-thousand acres each. Clarke leads Alabama’s counties in the yearly cutting of pine lumber and is near the top in pulpwood production.

Scotch Lumber, Allied Paper Company and Clarke Mills together account for more than three-fourths of the county’s three-thousand manufacturing jobs.

Since its beginnning in 1939, Vanity Fair’s Clarke Mills has drawn its workforce from local women. Today it is the largest employer of women in a county where only sixty-three percent of adult whites and twenty-six percent of black adults have high school diplomas. Residents are quick to acknowledge Vanity Fair’s significant role in the local economy, yet the low-wage, labor-intensive industry has hardly brought prosperity.

The decision to try to organize a union at Clarke Mills arose not out of any one disagreement with Vanity Fair but came as a result of accumulated frustrations. Women found it increasingly difficult to support families on wages of $2.65 an hour. Retirement and health benefits were inadequate. “Used to be,” recalls an elderly former employee, “your retirement check would just about pay your light bill.”

Workers expressed dissatisfaction with workplace policies such as the longstanding practice of mandatory overtime and the partiality shown by supervisors in determining work assignments and in selecting those workers who went home during lay-offs. Workers could not make complaints without fear of reprisal. The company, it was said, maintained an “open door policy”: the door was open and you went out of the plant if you disagreed with management.

Except for my narrative background and occasional bridging of time and topics, the women’s words and their perspectives fill the following pages. Their voices are joined occasionally by that of Richard Boykin (Sarah’s husband) and Eileen Brown, the ILGWU organizer who worked in the Clarke Mills effort.

Sarah Boykin: The company had been in Jackson thirtysomething years. They had all the time they needed to prove themselves and they didn’t. There would never have been changes without our local . You would either have done what they said or you would have been at home.

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I never had any trouble with Vanity Fair. They had never done anything to me that I didn’t let them know how I felt about it. But there were so many people there that I would see crying–just crying to no end. They were so upset they’d just lose all control. That would upset me. I don’t know; I have a very tender heart for other people. I don’t like to see people mistreated. And there are those–somebody could be standing over them with a gun and they’re not going to try and defend themselves.

I would come home and tell my husband about it. I would just cry and he would ask me, “Why are you crying?”

I said, “Because if you had seen it then you would cry.”

He said, “Well don’t cry. What you need to do is get a union.” So that’s how we started.

I was the one who first contacted the union. This was around March, 1976. I spoke with my husband’s union representative, Herbert Belt. [Sarah’s husband, Richard, worked for the United Parcel Service, represented by the Teamsters.] Mr. Belt told me his union did not handle garment workers. He let the ILGWU know I wanted to talk with them. I guess it must have been probably a couple of weeks after the first mention of the union a Mr. Ashley was supposed to have met us. He didn’t show. A couple of us carried the meeting on.

The first time we met it was just a few of us. We didn’t sign anything, but we wanted to have phone numbers so we could keep in touch. At the fourth meeting we had thirty-five to show. Sometimes it would be less members, sometimes more.

Wilda Blackmon: But this too. The people wouldn’t come out. They were still afraid to say “union” in the plant.

Sarah: If you said “union” to one lady she would say, “Oh don’t talk to me about that. ” She said, “They don’t even allow you to say union in this plant.”

Emily Woodyard: They tried to have a working condition where you were scared to talk to your neighbor.

Rebecca Blackmon: That was supposed to have been mandatory at one time–that you could not talk during work hours.

You sit there for twenty years doing everthing the company says without questioning, you’re not going to change overnight. You have to be shown that even though you are standing up and saying, “Hey, look, you didn’t treat me right,” that the company can’t eat you. You’re going to have to be shown time and time again.

Emily: I had been working at Vanity Fair since I was eighteen. It was 1974. I was running late as usual. I had my card, trying to clock it. It was one minute till. We had a three minute whistle and a seven o’clock whistle. And there was a man who said, “You’re not clocking that card.” The man grabbed me and would not let me clock in.

That never left me. I made the statement if I ever found a way to do anything to make it better at Vanity Fair I’d do it.

Wilda: I went to work there twenty-three years ago. The day I really made up my mind to look into the union was when one of the engineers came out–I was doing a most difficult job. I mean it was almost impossible to do and I had found a better way to do it. He came out and found out the way I was sewing it and asked me, “Who do you think you are to change my method?” I had to go back to his way, a harder way. That’s the day I started looking at the union.

Rebecca: What motivated me was the income. I didn’t think I’d get rich working under a union but I thought we could get a better wage.

The Company

The VF Corporation designs, manufactures and markets apparel through three wholly-owned subsidiari–in addition to Vanity Fair Mills–H.D. Lee, Inc. and Kay Windsor, Inc. Vanity Fair Mills posted profits of $15.5 million on sales of $184 million in 1982. H.D. Lee’s eight production sites in north Alabama, combined with Vanity Fair’s eleven plants in south Alabama, make the VF Corporation one of the state’s largest private employers–with some 8,500 workers.

Vanity Fair Mills originated in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1899 as Reading Glove and Mitten Manufacturing Company. After several changes of names and production lines, Vanity Fair began shifting its manufacturing to the non-union South in 1937 by opening plant in Monroeville, Alabama–thirty-five miles east of Jackson. By the late 1950s, the company had ceased all its Pennsylvania production.

The opening of a textile plant in 1939 in Jackson, then a town of three thousand, offered many white women their first opportunity to work for non-farm wages. Vanity Fair’s Clarke Mills began by producing silk stockings, but soon converted to rayon and nylon lingerie. The plant is still known to older citizens of the area as the “silk mill. ” With the construction of a new sewing facility in Jackson in 1975, the original factory became the site of knitting operations, producing Vanity Fair fabric.

One long-time resident recalled the subsistence farming that was still familiar when Vanity Fair arrived. “Folks didn’t have nothing to do with. You couldn’t make a penny. Just what little if you hoed or picked cotton. That’s all there was. The silk mill took a lot of folks out of the field.”

The company played upon this historical sense of gratitude and dependence among older white women workers when organizing efforts began in 1976.

Following the Monroeville and Jackson plants, Vanity Fair built factories in several similar south Alabama towns: Atmore, Bayou La Batre, Butler, Demopolis, Luverne and Robertsdale. So hospitable was Alabama for Vanit Fair that the company now runs only two out-of-state plants, both in the Florida panhandle. At every location, their workforce is overwhelmingly female.

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In the mid-1970s, Vanity Fair expanded operations in both Monroeville and Jackson. A cutting plant opened in Monroeville in 1973. This meant that Vanity Fair could dye, finish and cut the fabric manufactured in nearby Jackson. The finished and cut fabric could then be distributed to the various sewing plants, which by l 975, included Clarke Mills. It was at the sewing facility that organizing efforts were initiated in 1976.

Clarke Mills’ sewing plant–a one-story, windowless, slab–sits on what was once a farm just outside the Jackson city limits. In 1976 the sewing plant employed over five hundred workers. Nearly all were women. There were four hundred sewing machine operators, fifty-three examiners who checked finished garments for mistakes, thirty-six packers, and seven mechanics (all male).

The plant’s work was divided among eleven operation or production lines, each of which had its own supervisor and one “service girl ” who made sure that sewing machine operators always had the materials they needed to work without interruption.

To earn more than minimum wage, the women had to meet a “production” quota, a quantity of work calculated by time-motion stud ies and set to a torturous pace.

Sarah: When you have to sit there and do so many garments in so many minutes–and this is an eight hour job–it’s not easy. It’s not easy. A lot of times I psyched myself out, you know, “I can do it.” But you don’t always do the same job. Styles change, jobs change, you change machines.

I think that the people that pack are very skilled, more so than a machine operator. But they can’t run a machine. Then, on the other hand, I can’t pack either.

You have to be skilled, in my sight, to be able to pack those garments as fast as they do. When you have a job where “production” is the main word, you are forever busy. And you would be surprised one minute will cost you a dollar.

The Women

Sarah McDonald Boykin grew up in nearby McIntosh where her mother worked for a local restaurant and the family farmed. Like her thirteen brothers and sisters, she left home after high school graduation, eventually living in California for several years. She returned to Jackson in the 1 960s to be near her family. She met and married Richard Boykin, a native of Clarke County and an active civil rights worker.

Sarah began work at Vanity Fair in 1966 at the age of twenty-two. She was among the first black women trained as sewing machine operators. Sarah was elected president of Local 118 in 1976.

Sarah: I had heard Vanity Fair didn’t hire black people. This was in 1965. I went up and put in an application. The first thing they told me was I didn’t pass the test and that I needed to pass the test in order to be hired. So I forgot about it. And one day they called me. It was in April 1966, I believe.

Wilda Blackmon has always lived in Jackson, Alabama. One of eleven children, married since she was fifteen, Wilda first began at Vanity Fair over twenty years ago as a sewing machine operator. She continued to work there on and off through the birth of her three children.

“This last time,” Wilda recalls, “I had been back working for ten years. Up until we got the union, you couldn’t take time off to have a baby. You had to quit and come back in. Now you can have maternity leave and your time continues with the company.”

As the shop steward, Wilda was responsible for handling worker grievances. She also served as president of the local after the departure of Sarah Boykin in 1980.

Rebecca Blackmon was unique among the union supporters in that she had held supervisory positions with Vanity Fair on several occasions. In 1976she was employed as a machine operator.

Rebecca: I went to work at sixteen. I worked on and off for about thirteen years. I was skilled at sewing on nearly every machine. I worked in the press and pack department.

I very much surprised people by being for the union. I had several of them tell me that they were shocked because I had been a supervisor and to be a supervisor is the ultimate in the company.

Emily Woodyard, like Rebecca Blackmon and Wilda Blackmon, is white. She was one of fifty examiners who worked at Vanity Fair in 1976. Both Emily and Rebecca were members of the shop committee that negotiated the local’s first contract. Neither she nor Rebecca had completed high school when they went to work at Vanity Fair.

Emily: One thing they used against us, Becky and myself, was that we had not finished high school. They’d say, “Look at the people that’s your leaders.” So we went back and took our GED tests. Now we’ve got a high school diploma.

In 1976 the ILGWU sent organizer Eileen Brown to Clarke Mills. An organizer for the past ten years, Eileen travels throughout the Southeast for the ILG but still lives in her hometown of Talladega, Alabama. For over fifteen years, Eileen, a mother of three children, worked as a sewing machine operator.

Emily: Eileen was a key factor. I do not think just any organizer could have carried it off. She had what it took to go out and meet the people. She could go in their homes.

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Rebecca: She was just basically a decent person.

Emily: And that came across with people who would not let an organizer in their home. Even they had to admit she was a good person.

The Union

Soon after the union drive began, rumors began to circulate that Clarke Mills would close if the campaign were successful.

Eileen Brown: If you can just imagine you’re working in the plant. You feel a lot of these people accusing you of taking their jobs away, causing work to be short, causing the plant to close. It’s not easy at all.

Emily: Say two supervisors would get behind one operator while she was sewing and talk about–well, say our work turning up in another plant, machines being moved.

Rebecca: Things that were not supposed to have been happening. Yet they were making sure that the people that would be the most scared of it knew what was happening.

Sarah: I reported rumors to the union. The main one was about a supervisor who said Vanity Fair was the first one that hired black women out of the cotton patch and that if the union were voted in we would be back in the cotton patch.

This rumor contradicted the actual experience of black women. Excluded from jobs in Clarke Mills until the mid-1960s, these women did not come to Vanity Fair from the fields. The fields, by then, had been planted in pines. The rumor revealed more about the attitudes and perceptions of whites than about black women workers. But it did touch on the crucial issue of available wage work.

Vanity Fair held a virtual monopoly on jobs for black women in the town of Jackson where today ninety percept of all managerial, administrative, sales, clerical, technical and professional work (with the exception of teaching) continues to be held by whites.

Eileen: Work slow-down times were different when the campaign was going on. I’m sure what they did was step up the change of styles. You’d go in and this girl was laid off for so many days and that girl was laid off for so many days.

And you’d go visit them in the evening and she’d say, “Lord, no, I can’t sign a card because if I do and they get word of it, they’ll fire me.”

Nobody had ever told her point blank, “I’ll fire you if you sign a union card.” But the implications were there. The little strategic lay-offs. If they felt we were beginning to get a little deeper in, there would be lay-offs in that section.

Rebecca: Even though the supervisors or management could not come out directly and say, “You will be fired if you go through with this,” they could tell you the same thing in so many ways. And you’d know what they were saying.

Emily: The supervisors would come out of meetings every morning–they’d spread rumors. They would harass the people on their line and when we’d take it to the company, “We didn’t know they were doing it.” “They’re not doing it because we told them to.” And of course the supervisors would keep their mouths shut.

But the company was putting them up to it. The company was schooling them on what to do. They’d pick out people that they knew they could…

Rebecca:…buffalo. That they knew they could scare to death and just ride them. Stand over their shoulder and pick on everything they did. Or stand there and just talk.

Prejudices, not only of race but of sex and class, were exploited in an attempt to divide workers at Clarke Mills: white workers against black workers; sewing machine mechanics (all male) against sewing machine operators (all female); and sewing line supervisors against operators.

The male sewing machine mechanics actively opposed unionization even though–because wage increases were based on current pay and they were the highest paid workers–they would receive the greatest gain from the 19771LG contract. According to March, 1979, payroll records, sewing machine mechanic Paul Pan en, who would lead the later decertification effort, averaged $6.37 per hour during a two-week pay period. During the same time period a sewing machine operator with thirty years experience averaged $3.38 per hour.

While organizers drew little or no support from men in the workplace, one man who did offer moral and practical support during the organizing campaign was Sarah Boykins’s husband, Richard. He made after-hour visits to workers’ homes, attended meetings, and enlisted support among members of the black community.

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Eileen: Sarah’s husband, Richard, would do his job and then if there were people way back in the hills–see he knew everybody because he’s the UPS (United Parcel Service) man–he would go with us. He would go wherever he was needed.

Richard: I think the company didn’t fight the union as hard as they would have if it had been men. They didn’t think that the women were going to be successful. It surprised the devil out of them when they won.

Wilda: It was nerve wracking. But in the end the tears were worth it all. One person asked me, they said, “Well, if you do go union who will go to negotiate the contract? You know nothing about it.”

I said, “Well, we’ve learned this far. Why can’t we continue to learn?”

They said, “You mean you’re going to get on the road?” And there wasn’t a trip we took that I wasn’t there.

Richard: A lot of times I would come home in the evenings and get in my car and drive around through the county–Barlow Bend, Whatley, Grove Hill–to get cards signed.

Eileen: Home contacts are the mainstay. That’s what you do from day one until day zero because you have to have a contact with the people. Where the company can have a command audience, we can’t. We have to do ours while they’re off, while they’re home.

Richard: Some of the people, especially the older people, they would say, “Vanity Fair has been putting bread on my table for twenty years. Why should I turn against them?”

I would tell them, “If Vanity Fair is putting bread on your table they’d send you a check at the end of the week. You wouldn’t have to get up and go out there each morning at seven o’clock.”

Wilda: And so many of them came back with, “If you start this union Vanity Fair will close their doors.”

Emily: They did move our work out of the Jackson plant. We had shevelva [trade name for brushed nylon fabric used in manufacture of women’s lounge wear]. I was on shevelva. And the shevelva line turned up in Butler. We would go to meetings in Butler and the girls would say, “Well, we’re doing shevelva. It’s your work. They will shut the plant down.”

And they would take my card–your cards have four different places you could cut it and put your clock number on it and put it with different work if you split your bundle. And my work was being split up back then. If they found bad work on other people what they were doing was taking their numbers out of the pockets of shevelva robes and putting my number in it. I got to where I marked my numbers with a certain kind of mark, a different one every day or cut the corner off. I fixed the card where they could not use it but one time.

I had a big mouth. And I wasn’t afraid to stand up and tell Larry Windham in the meeting what I thought of him. I even put George Heard [director of industrial relations] on the spot. I came right out and asked him if we were going to be fired for our union activities whether or not it went in. “Say for instance it wasn’t voted in,” I said. “Are we going to be fired?”

He didn’t answer.

So I spoke up even louder and asked him again. He didn’t have any choice but to answer, “No, the company cannot fire you for your union activities.” I feel like putting him on the spot had a lot to do with me being put on the spot.

Sarah: I think I’d be right in saying they laid off the majority that were very outspoken and that supported the union.

Richard: But they made it a point not to mess with the committee members. They didn’t push them around because they were scared they’d get kickback from the Labor Relations Board.

Wilda: But even during the campaign we did not get easy jobs. We were in the plant. We took the worst. When we would leave at 3:30 in the afternoon our machines would be sewing fine. Go back at seven in the morning with trouble.

Sex, Race and Class

Wives and/or mothers first, the women who organized Local 118 felt strong obligations to their families. They experienced varying degrees of conflict as the result of their activities depending on the amount

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of support they received at home. The decision to organize Clarke Mills, in the face of traditional demands of work and family, was a major act of assertion.

Emily: Women are at a disadvantage. They put in their eight hours a day–or ten–whatever is required of them. They go home; they cook supper; they tend to the kids. And they get ready for another day at the plant.

Rebecca: There are unions in this town–granted, they are the men’s jobs. And that’s one thing l cannot understand because a lot of the women working at Vanity Fair had husbands who worked on union jobs. And yet they didn’t want Vanity Fair organized. I really do not understand it. The men worked at union jobs and made good money. They paid union dues. The women had grown up with it.

Emily: It’s got something to do with the men saying, “Hey, I want her home to cook cornbread.”

Wilda: I don’t think any of them liked to see us away from home but it was something that we believed so strongly nobody would say, “Don’t do it.”

Sarah: We had to go out. Leave home at six o’clock in the morning–I’d have to make a few stops on the way to work–and get back at midnight.

You would just work your heart out trying to see some sign of improvement and people would just be so ugly to you. You’d let all your work get behind at home. You’d go home and work real hard and go to bed. You couldn’t sleep. You lay there thinking, “What have I said or what have I done to cause these people to feel like this?”

Potentially divisive racial issues were a constant concern during the months before the election and afterwards during contract negotiations. The biracial shop committee tried to overcome workers’ racial prejudice and build unity. On the overnight trips to out-of-town negotiation meetings, black and white committee members shared hotel rooms.

Sarah: The first time I shared a room with Wilda Blackmon. After that we decided everybody would share rooms, with one white and one black to the room. Wilda wore the name of “rigger lover” and they call me a “honky.” You had to not hear that and keep on pushing.

As the sir-month campaign drew to a close, the pressure at the workplace increased but so did the determination of the women.

Sarah: I never thought about what it would be like if we lost until after the election. It never crossed my mind until the evening before the election. This girl was riding home with me. We were coming along Forest Avenue and I stopped at the IGA. I said, “Well, tomorrow is the big day.”

She said, “You know we’re going to lose.”

And I stopped in the middle of the street and said, “Don’t say that. Don’t say that.” I said, “If that’s the way you talk get out of my car.” And I was going to put her right out in the street.

And she said, “Well, we ought to think about that. It’s going to be hard if you lose.” But I never really thought about it. It never even crossed my mind.

Of the approximately 530 workers eligible to vote on October 29, 1976, 509 cast their votes: 260 in favor of union representation and 244 against the union. (Five votes were challenged and not included in the final tally.)

Eileen: The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) conducts the election. You go into booths. You mark your ballot. You put nothing else on it–“yes” or “no.” And you bring it out and drop it into the box.

There are usually two observers from the company and two from the union and they stay with those ballots from the beginning until the count. When the ballots are counted, they are read “yes” and “no” and “yes” and “no.” And you die a little bit every time you hear a “no.”

During meetings held in Atlanta in 1977 plant committee members Wilda Blackmon, Sarah Boykin, Rebecca Blackmon, Vevelyn Gilchrist and Eleanor Shaw, together with James Goldberg, legal counsel for the ILG, pursued contract negotiations with representatives of Vanity Fair. In their first contract, negotiated in October of 1977, plant committee members won wage increases, an additional holiday, improved health and welfare benefits and job seniority. The contract also provided for a grievance procedure with arbitration, the first step in providing a more equitable balance of power between employer and employee.

Sarah: Used to be if you didn’t come in on Saturday when they’d want you to work overtime, Monday morning you were in the office. And you possibly wouldn’t have a job. After the contract, it was different. Overtime wasn’t mandatory. You could say no.

As the first and only union in the Vanity Fair chain, Clarke Mills’ Local 118 continued to face opposition from a management who sought to stop union activity from spreading to the remaining Vanity Fair sites. Company representatives filed objections with the National Labor Relations Board following the October, 1976, election. These objections were resolved in favor of the local.

When contract negotiations were completed in 1977, Vanity Fair granted gains won by the union to its nonunion employees.

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Wilda: In negotiations they’d say, “We can’t do this because we’ve got so many workers. If we do it for you we’re going to have to do it for them.” So we knew from the beginning that we were really negotiating for every plant Vanity Fair owned.

In 1979 workers indicated that the local brought immediate, if modest, improvement to Clarke Mills. But at the same time they expressed the belief that Local 118’s presence brought no fundamental change of attitude on the part of Vanity Fair and, in fact, exacerbated management attitudes and working conditions.

Sarah: At first, when we went in, you could just feel the resentment.

Emily: They’re still punishing the people for voting the union in. In the past you could run a high unit hour over there. You’d work yourself to death but you’d have a fair paycheck. But they messed our work up.

They don’t bring in good styles. They bring in the short running styles where in the past the Jackson plant had a slip style that ran for years. Now they’re putting in the six weeks runners. It takes six weeks to work the bugs out of it.

In Vanity Fair’s case if they would quit spending all that money trying to fight it and put a little bit of it back into people’s pockets they would have much happier employees. You have a lot of women there that’s supporting their families.

Rebecca: The women are what made Vanity Fair the company it is. Not only the women doing the work–the actual work–but the women buying the products. And the company still will not recognize the fact that to keep the women working like they are they need to treat them better. They just have not accepted that.

By the end of 1980, as Local 118’s first contract neared expiration, several of the union’s most experienced members no longer worked at Clarke Mills. Some had leg because of personal and family demands, a few had located better jobs in the Jackson area. The loss of these women made the local more vulnerable when a petition for decertification was filed.

Wilda: Every time a good strong union member would leave you would get a little bit of hack. “She couldn’t take it no more. She had to go.”

Emily Woodyard left because of the birth of her third child in 1978.

Emily: I certainly had not planned on leaving. I had planned to stay there. It’s a daily struggle with myself because I’m not over there actively involved.

Rebecca: My husband’s health was not good. He became totally disabled. And there’s no way one person working at this plant could support a family. So I knew I had to do something.

I left Vanity Fair voluntarily in 1979.1 really hated to leave the plant because of the people, leaving the people. I went to work at a chemical plant making two-and-a-half times the salary that I had made, with a union, better working conditions, retirement, the whole works. I was there until 1983 when the plant cut production, leaving a lot of people out of work.

Sarah: I had an allergy problem. I was allergic to the fabric and dust at work. I was spending more than I made on medicine. I went back on two separate occasions. The last time I told them I would not be back.

Sarah Boykin subsequently took a position as a paralegal. She resigned as president of the local in the fall of 1980 and was succeeded by Wilda Blackmon.

Sarah: A lot of times I’ve thought about it. I really hated I resigned. It was a hard thing to do. I felt sad. It came down to my health or the job and I chose my health.

On September 17, 1980, Local 118 and Vanity Fair entered came into a memorandum of agreement extending their contract, with modifications, through 1983. On that same date Paul Parden, sewing machine mechanic and an employee for over twelve years, petitioned the NLRB seeking a decertification election.

Parden obtained legal representation from The Center on National Labor Policy,; an organization that describes itself as “a non-profit, non-partisan charitable legal foundation that works through the courts to restore individual rights lost through abuse of union power.” Headquartered in northern Virginia, the Center’s list of clients has included the Stevens People and Friends for Freedom, a group of J.P. Stevens employees supportive of the company in its battle against the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers.

Parden, who is white, continued to act as the leader of those workers who opposed the union. He argued that the union was not strong enough to do its members any good, although he and other mechanics benefited the most as the result of the local’s first contract. There was no apparent advantage for Parden if the local was decertified. Rumors persist that mechanics and supervisors were promised

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raises and/or bonuses in return for their opposition to the union.

Rebecca: The mechanics are a small group but at some time or another they talked to almost every sewing machine operator in that plant. They have access to every examiner. There’s no person in that plant that a mechanic cannot go talk to.

Wilda: I went to the first open meeting they had. Paul Parden and Benny Harrison were there. The lawyer said he was free. It didn’t cost Paul Parden anything to bring him down here. The lawyer said he was interested in getting the company out from under the union. He explained how to get the union out. To the best of my knowledge the only black women that went in were with me.

Emily: Benny Harrison was a preacher. A lot of women would just flock in behind him because he was.

A decertification election was held in July of 1981. While initially impounded, the ballots were later counted and revealed that a majority were cast against the UH ion by a vote of 199 to 11 7. This election was set aside in April, 1982,followingan NLRB administrative hearing.

Testimony at the hearing called into question Vanity Fair’s neutral position in the election campaign. The company first posted its “no solicitation, no distribution” notice in 1978. According to the new policy, employees were forbidden to solicit or distribute material on company time or company property.

Numerous breaches of the policy took place when collections were made for retirement, baby and birthday gifts. Moreover, Tupperware and Avon products were sold during work time with the knowledge of supervisors. In contrast, a sewing machine operator who passed out union buttons in the workplace in 1981 received an immediate reprimand from Joe Nichols, personnel supervisor.

Administrative Law Judge Huffon S. Brandon found that Vanity Fair applied its no solicitation policy to prohibit all union activity while taking no action to prohibit non-union solicitation. He ordered a new election for September 1982.

Time and Time Again

Although the union prevailed in the 1982administrative hearing it was not to be taken as encouraging sign. The local’s ability to counter fears and to generate support had declined between 1976and 1982. Union membership dropped to forty-five by the time of the NLRB-ordered election.

On September 24, 1982, the vote went against the union 188 to 134.

Wilda: I don’t know what the members expected. I think they wanted a miracle–for the union to go in, all their jobs to get easier and their pay to get better. We never promised anything like that.

We had gained a contract that the company had to go by. We had several grievances that we went through satisfactorily. In fact we got back pay for some of the girls. We got standards lowered on some of them. But three-fourths of them would not even file a grievance on their standard when they couldn’t reach it. And I couldn’t go in the office and file a grievance for them.

Workers’ fears were reflected in the fact that in all three elections there were many more union votes than union members. The company’s campaign of intimidation never lost its effectiveness. A union dues checkoff provision in the local’s contract meant that the identity of union supporters was readily known.

The fears that Vanity Fair would close its doors rather than accept a union were intensified by the decline (from five-hundred to 350) in the number of jobs at the plant. That many of these lost jobs had been held by black women, the local ‘s strongest supporters, also hurt the union. Compounding the situation was the loss of experienced and committed leaders like Rebecca, Emily and Sarah who had devoted so much time and energy to the campaign. Their influence extended beyond the work place and into the community. Their absence was felt deeply by the union women who remained at Clarke Mills.

In addition, the ILG’s attempts to broaden their base of support by organizing Vanity Fair plants in surrounding counties were unsuccessful.

Emily: If we could have gotten the cutting plant in Monroeville we would have been on a roll. But when we lost the cutting plant it was downhill. We hung on but all those plants were watching us to see if we were going to survive.

Wilda Blackmon was the last to leave Clarke Mills. She continued to work for a year following the 1982 decertification election.

Wilda: I left last year the week before Easter, 1983. I came home that afternoon–I can’t remember if it was Monday or Tuesday–with chest pains that lasted through the night. I got up the next morning and went to the doctor. They sent me to Mobile and the hospital that day. I stayed in the hospital the rest of the week under heart monitor.

When I went back to work Joe Nichols put me in a training room on a mirror hemmer. That is the most difficult, nerve-wracking job there is to learn. It’s finish hemming a garment. You have to hold the same width of fabric in the machine all the way around. That was the most difficult job in the plant for an old operator to learn. Now for a new operator coming in off the street who has never worked on the machines before, it’s easy to pick up. I worked on it one day. I went back to talk to Joe. I told him that no way could I take it right then. I got another doctor’s leave and stayed off a couple of weeks.

When my leave was up I went in and said, “Joe, if you have something in this plant that I’m capable of doing that I’ve already been trained on I’ll be glad to come back to work.” He said there was nothing else in that plant to be done except mirror hemming and I could “take it or leave it.”

Sarah Boykin, still employed as a paralegal, adopted a daughter in 1981 and is in the process of adopting a son. Emily Woodyard, now the mother of four, works for a grocery store chain. Rebecca Blackmon recently began a job as an office worker. Neither woman plans to return to Vanity Fair.

Rebecca: I don’t think I could sit there all day again-

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hour after hour–just sit there.

Emily: After being on the job I’m on now, I can say the same thing. I don’t see any future at Vanity Fair.

Wilda: To me the job wasn’t the most important part of my life. But to a lot of them it was. It was their life. They will admit that real quick. I can’t see them enjoying the work, but some say they do. Needing the money is more.

Sarah: I get angry. All the days and nights I left my family and this is where it ended. What did I really gain? I think about that. Did I help or hurt others? I don’t know.

Rebecca: I have mixed feelings. Sometimes I have trouble dealing with some aspects of it. I really do. Because we really gave a lot of ourselves. From leaving the kids at home and all of that.

We really believed a union would help Vanity Fair. I never thought much about what the consequences would be. I never thought I was wrong. I still don’t think I was wrong.

If you don’t take care of yourself nobody else will do it for you. And that’s a hard lesson to learn the way we did.

Emily: I believed once we got a union in it would stay.

Rebecca: I did too,

Emily: I did not know the committee was going to go in different directions.

Rebecca: I don’t think anybody did.

Wilda: I don’t regret any of the things I’ve done. I’m happy with my life as it is now. That’s all behind me. It was an experience for me to go through–a learning experience. It taught me self confidence. That I was capable of being an equal to any of the people in the plant. The supervisors were not above me–not even the plant manager or personnel manager. I’m not saying our education was the same, but education doesn’t always make a smart person.

Emily: You can get a union voted in. Just because you get the contract signed, it does not stop there. You’ve got to educate people. Whether it’s to get them to a union meeting, which is practically impossible, or whether it’s waiting ’til their feathers lay down and you can talk to them. It won’t happen overnight. It won’t happen in six months. It won’t happen in a year. All the company had to do was wait long enough.

Sarah: It happened once. Even though it’s no longer there, it happened after all. That’s why I know it can happen again.

Paula Mclendon is a native of Jackson, Alabama who now lives in Birmingham.

The Union Comes to Dooly County

By Dave Ransom

Vol. 6, No. 5, 1984, pp. 17-18

“We made history!” rejoiced Bettie Lloyd, after she and the forty-seven other workers at Rosewood Nursing Home in Byromville, Georgia–predominantly black, mostly women–voted this summer two-to-one to unionize.

She was right. By voting to become a chapter in SEIU Local 579, they were leading the way in rural south Georgia, where employers have made it clear that their distaste for unions is as strong as their appetite for low wages.

Byromville is a small town in Dooly County, a farm county of some eleven thousand people. The town’s main industries are a cotton gin, a fertilizer plant, a packing house–and the nursing home.

When local 579 staff members from Atlanta leafletted workers at the nursing home last February, they got a flurry of interested phone calls.

The Rosewood workers described arbitrary firings, low staffing, lack of respect, and incredibly low wages, remembers Peter French, the staff member who helped them organize.

The pay at Rosewood is the lowest of the three homes operated by Beverly Enterprises that Local 579 has organized in Georgia. Workers with ten or fifteen years at the home are making less than $3.65 an hour, says French. “We’re talking long-term poverty.”

Since many of the women have children to feed, and are sometimes alone in doing so, they often must hold second jobs. Some families pick fruit or work in the packing sheds during peach season “to make ends meet.”

A particularly difficult supervisor made things worse. “We figured we had to get something in to help us out,” says Jessie Bell Spivey, now chief union steward at the home.

But home workers were equally concerned about the patients. There wasn’t enough linen, they told French. Not enough clothing. Not enough food–breakfasts without eggs, dinners without meat.

“I enjoy working with old people–they really need us,” says Mrs. Spivey, a fourteen-year veteran at the home who began working the night shift years ago so she could get her children off to school in the mornings.

But the home’s administration, she said, stood between the workers and doing a good job.

The patients at Rosewood come from all across Georgia. But many are from the small towns in Dooly County, and some have been members of the congregations of the churches that home workers attend. Beverly gets the lion’s share of its income from federal Medicaid payments for these people’s care, including high ax-executive salaries and a good profit.

In effect, the good people of Dooly County are paying federal income taxes to support their old folks–only to

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have Beverly skim off their profits, leaving the old folks with meatless dinners and paying poverty wages to the people who take care of them.

When Rosewood workers began looking at the union as an answer to their problems, the home’s management didn’t take kindly to it. Twice administrators drove slowly by union meetings–held at one worker’s house trailer on a dead-end road. And they began giving supporters a hard time on the job.

When the workers’ organizing committee began handing out leaflets, Jessie Bell Spivey was one of the first to stand by the door with them. Two days later the home found a pretext to fire her. She thinks they believed she was the “main, head leader” and that getting rid of her would throw fear into other supporters and weaken the the drive.

“But they didn’t give up,” she says, proudly, “They got stronger.” The firing just strengthened their conviction that management was going to keep messing with them until they stood up against them, united.

Spivey is active in her church and the local women’s club as well as the Dooly County chapter of the NAACP. Her husband is Byromville’s only black city council member. She is known to be a good, conscientious worker. So her firing also strengthened community support for the Rosewood workers, from whites as well as blacks.

Support for the workers’ drive to organize was shown at a meeting they held at a local church. With hymns and prayers they sought the path to justice, rising to recount their mistreatment and their grievances.

George Winters, the principal of the local grade school, who remembered working as an orderly at the home, was there to give his support. The Rev. James Orange of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference(SCLC) reminded them that south Georgia workers need to stick together more than anywhere else because of the animosity towards blacks getting organized.

The ministers of two local Baptist churches and Roscoe Keaton, head of the county NAACP chapter, also pledged their support.

Casting their ballots secretly in an election supervised by federal authorities, the Rosewood workers–nurse’s aides, orderlies, dietary, laundry, and maintenance workers–voted to join the union thirty-one to fifteen. Then they held a joyous victory celebration.

Additionally, Beverly investigated and reinstated Jessie Bell Spivey, with back pay. Despite their vote, many workers didn’t believe it would actually happen. “When I went back, people acted like they were crazy,” says Mrs. Spivey. That’s when she said to herself, “There’s something to it, I know there’s something to it.”

For Rosewood workers, voting for the union is only the first step towards achieving that “something.” Next–and perhaps even more difficult–is winning a legal contract with Beverly that outlines wages, benefits, working conditions.

But Local 579 President Herman Lewis, who credits a “very strong” organizing committee with the election win, thinks that their strength can also win a contract.

Tell Beverly one thing, says Mrs. Spivey: “Do unto others as you wish them to do unto you.” If management can live by that rule, she says, they will earn the goodwill of their workers and all–including patients–will benefit.

Dave Ransom is editor of Service Employee.

Editor’s note: The two-year long campaign of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) against the nation’s largest nursing-home chain, Beverly Enterprises, came to an end in March of this year with the signing of a precedent-setting agreement. Beverly, a company that disdained collective bargaining and had attempted to break SEIU unions wherever possible, has been brought to the bargaining table. The agreement ends Beverly’s strong antiunion campaign and pledges it to negotiate contracts in nursing homes where the union has won an election. As the nation’s largest union of health care workers, SEIU is getting on with the task of organizing the tens of thousands of low-paid Beverly workers who need a union contract. The March, 1984 agreement has bolstered efforts in the North and West where the SEIU already had many strong locals. In addition, an organizing campaign is underway in the South, where Beverly Enterprises has dozens of nursing homes.

Tending Our Gardens

By Tom Hatley

Vol. 6, No. 5, 1984, pp. 18-24

I.

My grandparents grew two kinds of sweet potatoes in back of their farmhouse in central North Carolina. The main staple was the orange-skinned type, so much like the color of the soil that you had to look carefully not to miss them in the field after plowing them out for harvest. These were the potatoes that the neighbors would store over the winter in small mounds built on the edge of their garden out of insulating layers of leaves and clay. This backyard technology dated from the days when the potato was a folk remedy for hunger, with the prescription, “take an old cold tater and wait.” Today the Big Star advertises them every day of the year. The other potato variety was narrower and whiter, more root-like than the orange-skin. This root was tended and planted for the sole purpose of making smooth and reliable potato pies. The orange-skinned was properly a sweet potato, with its roots in the indigenous agriculture of South America; the second variety was a yam, first domesticated a world apart in West Africa or Asia. Both had come to North America a bit earlier than the time that my Pennsylvania Dutch forbearers, pushed out of the Rhineland valleys, were moving onto the promising new ground of Pennsylvania and later North Carolina.

Large scale agribusiness today offers a simpler vision of agriculture in the South. The fields that grow soybeans, cotton and corn are as wide as the genetic base of commercial crop seedstocks is narrow. Yet back of many farmhouses

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and even alongside suburban ranch houses are gardens that still buck the trend toward uniformity. These gardens often exhibit diverse horticultural and ethnic traditions in Southern gardening. One of the most persistent as well as the most hidden of these historical connections has to do with the Afro-Americans and their gardens in the colonial Caribbean and Southeast.

The obscurity of this tradition which is renewed with every spring planting of okra, milo, eggplant, peanuts or yams is partly due to the fact that its earliest practitioners were Caribbean black slaves and native Americans of the same region. The colonial Caribbean was a cultural middleground, and Afro-Americans were among the importers, brokers, and popularizers of new crops from their homelands. Yams and okra as well as other plants with strange-sounding names–tanniers, long collards, benne–all grew on small “provision gardens” which were alternately ignored and encouraged by slave owners. Some plants were carried northward into the fields of the Cherokees and other native American groups as early as the seventeenth century, and were later adopted into the kitchen gardens of German immigrants who had strayed into the South. The openness of colonial farmers to all new crops probably made some of the strange “provision garden” plants seem less unusual than they appear to be today, when matched against the cool-weather- and basic-soil-loving favorites of organic gardening manuals such as Crockett’s Victory Garden.

However, these migrants were also able to move north and become assimilated into the diet and gardens of the English and German settlers of the Southern backcountry because of an ecological compatibility between Africa and the warmer and wetter parts of the American South. The native ground of yams, okra, and the like, is the old and acid-weathered clay of the hotter latitudes. The red clays breaking the surface and raising clouds of dust in schoolyard playing fields are close kin, in soil family relations, to those soils of West Africa and South America. The same closeness extends to plants, and every summer these tropical crops, whether African or new-world analogues of African plants, break through the soil in the American South, retelling in many small harvests the achievements of the AfroAmerican style of gardening.

When the African plants first appeared in the new world, their importers were Afro-American slaves, interested in the reform of plantation agriculture on their own terms. When tall grass with tight clusters of glossy black seeds called “guinea corn” first came to the Caribbean, in the eighteenth century, it quickly became a preferred grain raised in African new world gardens. The species was brought to American ground by African hands, as an early botanist of the region notes: “[the plant] is rarely seen but in the plantations of Negroes who bought it from Guinea, their native country, and are therefore fond of having it.” When, as was more often the case, African plant stocks could not be transported, new world plants cultivated by native Caribbean peoples were at hand. Where enough latitude was allowed them, free blacks and slaves traded back and forth with Amerindians, and experimented with new-world substitutes for the crops left behind. This was only a temporary transaction, however, as even earlier than the advent of the slave trade, native Americans of this region had been disappearing, pushed off their islands forever by enslavement, disease, and psychological shock and depression. African blacks, first transported as replacements, laborers substituted for this dying people, thus became the ironic sharers in a new world planting tradition.

More often, blacks in the Caribbean or the American Southeast were left on their own in finding their way with the plants and animals upon which they were partly forced to rely. Sometimes a kind of botanical dead reckoning guided them, with identifications made on the basis of similarities of leaf shape and flower color. The names of some plants growing in the Southeast today are reminders of their

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accomplishment. The small tree called the paw paw (best known in the refrain, “What are you doing? Picking up paw paws”) gained its name in this fashion. In Amerindian language of the Caribbean, paw-paw specified the papaya, a native tree of the region. The same name was stencilled onto another tree of a different region, apparently because of basic botanical logic: the yellow oval of the ripe papaya fruit corresponded in color and shape with the fall leaves of the paw paw. A colonial botanist recorded the salient facts about the plant in an aside: “All parts of the tree have a rank if not fetid smell; nor is the fruit relished but by a very few, except negroes.” This interest was more than a matter of taste, since the African kin of the paw-paw had important medical uses in the homeland of blacks transported to the new world.

Identifications were not always on first sight, and an older African botanical vocabulary often enabled Africans to read their new world better and thus to estimate the help it would give them in their radically changed lives. Part of this ability to translate between these two worlds, as in the case of soils, stems from the underlying environmental kinship of the Caribbean and the Southeastern Coastal Plain and Piedmont. There are ancestral ties between tropical and subtropical plants which, though distributed from continent to continent, are all similar in appearance. The paw paw patches growing along the rich bottomland of muddy Piedmont creeks are members of the custard apple family which has outliers across the tropics, in Asia as well as in Africa.

Another set of plants provides a silent commentary on this exchange. “Elephant ears” are familiar today as plants lined up along the edge of main street porches along with pots of ferns, their utility as a food crop long forgotten. The term “elephant ears” encompasses, however, several distinct plants, all with starchy, edible roots and all with an origin in tropical America, Africa, or Asia. One of these plants is taro, a crop which came out of southeast Asia, and then made its way under the African alias ‘dasheen.’ Once across the Atlantic, dasheen was probably grown interchangeably with South American root crops such as manioc or cassava, and tanniers. In fact, all of these plants were aroids, resembling each other in flower shape and growth form, even though originating in widely separate but often tropical regions.

The white yam grown in my grandparents’ garden, much like the dasheen, arrived by an earlier and equally confused route from Asia to Africa and, eventually, to America. By the time that this yam variety had been successfully naturalized in Africa and had taken its place as a staple of the peoples who lived in the region bordering the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa, the slave trade was already concentrating in the same area. In the drier savannah lands bordering the north of this region, grains like the millets–guinea corn–mentioned above already had a long history by this time. But in the southern yam zone root crops propagated by rooting cuttings instead of by planting seeds were of preeminent importance. Among the Yoruba, and Fon, “new yam” festivals were key ritual events, and this celebration even marked the beginnning of the calendar year for the Ibo. The spiritual centrality and meaning of the yam and its relatives in Africa must have been remembered by men and women after their enslavement in the new world. In this way, the millets and yams that were carried to the new world and traded within it by Africans were more than a dietary supplement. These crops allowed AfroAmericans to reject their temporal white master’s bread, to grow their own food, in what must have seemed symbolic “victory gardens.”

II

Not only the plants that grew there, but also the manner of tending the new-world AfroAmerican garden set it apart. To the eye of the former master, the garden of “Daddy Jupiter,” his former slave on the nineteenth-century Sea Island coast of Georgia, looked unruly and unfamiliar. Daddy Jupiter cultivated “…on his own accord a small patch where arrowroot, long collards, sugar cane, tanniers, groundnuts, beene, gourds, and watermelons grew in comingled luxuriance.” This ‘comingled’ style had distinct antecedents in West African gardens, and must have made the ‘middle passage’ as a mental image of how a garden should look and function, no matter where it was rooted. Plots resembling Daddy Jupiter’s nineteenth-century garden, still grow in the American Southeast (although the tradition’ is fading) and flourish farther south, particularly in the Caribbean.

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Anthropologists working on intensive gardening practices today have abstracted the technical reasons for the common success and widespread occurrence of this style of cultivation. The “comingled luxuriance” of Daddy Jupiter’s garden partly owed its productivity to the way in which his selection of crops mimicked both the structure of a natural plant community and its characteristic closely-packed assortment of plant species. Given the mixture of plants in his garden, Daddy Jupiter may have employed a two- or three-tier layering of the plants, as is often practiced today in the Caribbean, where tall crops such as corn, cassava, or sugar cane are commonly grown together with ground-hugging yams. In this way a local, ‘garden climate’ can be fostered to reduce insect populations and shade out weeds. Soil nutrients and water also are conserved and sometimes increased relative to row crop gardening. The intensive garden style thus blends agricultural and ecological logic to achieve its high yield. And the logic of this pattern of food growing is not confined to the garden plot, but will also work on a larger scale. Whether in gardens or in farm fields, tightening the land’s hold on potassium, phosphorus, or nitrogen provides a kind of inexpensive crop insurance for succeeding harvests.

Very often American scientists have probed nutrient and other efficiencies of small-scale agriculture in order to seek food-growing alternatives for supporting the increasing populations of the “developing world.” Ironically, the impetus for their work has often been the failure of the agricultural technology supplied by the “developed world” to provide nations with a dependable food sufficiency. Yet Americans are slow to apply this lesson at home or to direct the same kind of attention to our self-development that we are willing to offer abroad to a “developing world” that always seems outside our borders. An effective effort at agricultural change at home will, however, require remembering the lessons and traditions of the past and applying them to our future.

Just to the south, in the Caribbean, a historical crisis in agriculture occurred many years ago which prefigures some of the change Southern agriculture has faced and may face again. The sugar plantations in the Caribbean pioneered an industrial style of farm management that was modernized and adapted to the north, in our own region. Like many modern farming operations today, the plantation was from the beginning in chronically poor ecological health. Erosion, insect and plant diseases, and soil infertility, once they had taken hold, worked together to cause a constant drain against the land. In later years the economic vigor of these operations lagged as well, in spite of the involuntary subsidy drawn from the labor and farming skills of black slaves.

When the system faltered for the final time, blacks were left to apply their horticultural skills to their own ground, and the intensively cultivated garden plots that resulted became a lasting and reliable survival tool amid the poverty of postcolonial times.

The end of the plantation system in the American South was not succeeded by the integrated world of small farmers that some reformers had envisioned or, as happened in the Caribbean, by a peasant society granted autonomy by poverty, isolation, and resistance. Instead, the scale and manner of cultivation that marked pre-war times in the South carried over into the postwar period, bringing with it many of the problems that still shadow Southern agriculture today.

The major theme of the region’s agriculture continued to be a simple one of dependence on a handful of major cash crops. The amount of land turned over, fresh and damp, for planting each spring in the South, thus depended and has continued to depend on off-farm factors such as export demand end shifting government policies. Over the past 150 years, corn, then cotton, and most recently, soybeans, have played leapfrog for first place in the market. A kind of boom-and-bust cycle has resulted and has left its mark on the Southern countryside. In the down times of the thirties, when small farmers facing price declines, pest losses, and the cost of mechanization, walked away from their land, millions of acres in the South, abandoned and reclaimed by old field-grown pines, slowly pinched down the horizon with green. The remarkable scale of abandonment is reflected by the ninety percent share held by harvested “old field” pine in the Southern softwood market today.

During the boom times that followed World War 11, the cycle reversed itself temporarily, and in order to accommodate a ten-fold increase in Southern soybean acreage by the mid-seventies, new fields were opened in the former

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prairies on the region’s western edge. In other areas, such as the Piedmont, the fast growth of soybeans allowed double cropping, in effect double timing the land to produce two crops per year. Yet there is trouble on the horizon. Already the world markets fueling demand for soybeans are spurring competition for exports. Argentina is planting nearly six million acres of former pampa rangeland in soybeans, today, and is rapidly increasing the acreage devoted to this crop. Other potential commodity competitors, such as Brazilian-produced palm oil, have appeared on the horizon as an effective substitute for soybean oil as well, and the future for the latest Southern staple crop is less than bright.

Whether in Argentina or Missouri, the land itself always pays part of the cost of one- or two-crop dependency in agriculture. The most important damage comes from simple physical phenomena such as erosion. Today forty percent of Southern cropland is undergoing a rate of erosion that federal agencies concerned with the problem consider excessive. The process of erosion is elemental: rainfall on bare, plowed ground, as well as the steady scraping of the wind, removes the best part of the soil, the top soil that is alive with the soil organisms which are the essential agents of soil fertility. In older agricultural areas of the South, generations of erosion have clotted rivers and built deltas out of the subtracted fertility of farmers’ fields. In these sections successive new technologies–the iron and then the steel plow, chemical fertilizers, and herbicides–have masked the loss of soil fertility by raising average yields through the region. Yet lately, small signs are appearing that indicate a limit to the ability of new technologies to make up a cumulative deficit in the land. An indication of things to come may lie in the recently reported decline of Southern soybean yields–sometimes as much as ten bushels per acre–over the past few years. This sudden, small reversal in the upward trend of harvest yields can be explained in more than one way. Weed and nematode problems dampen harvest yields by competing with the growth of soybeans. And in areas of marginal fertility, erosion may be exerting a downward pull on production that will become stronger as soil depth and structure is further damaged. Yet these explanations could be read alternately as symptoms of the same underlying problem, of a Southern agriculture showing signs of nearing the limits of its productivity.

The newest strategy in Southern farming, called no-till or conservation tillage, is working only to hold onto the yield advances in Southern agriculture, instead of dramatically forcing up the yield of crops. Under “no till” a crop is planted in a field in which winter wheat or another crop has just been harvested, and in which weed problems (and a share of erosion damage) have been controlled by herbicides. The adoption of “no till” has been closely linked to the increase in Southern soybean acreage, in part because the method reduces the cost of double cropping, or taking two crops per year off the same piece of land. As we have seen, soybeans are naturally adapted by their fast growth and maturation to this agricultural strategy.

Although “no till” and soybeans (and corn) are natural partners, the “no till” system has also been aggressively marketed from two very different quarters. On the one hand, chemical companies have been in the fore. The “Southeastern No-Tillage Conferences” have been partly funded by chemical companies such as Chevron, which holds the US license to manufacture paraquat, a herbicide applied on approximately five million Southern acres this year. (Chevron has also been in the news recently to insulate itself from personal injury lawsuits stemming from the accidents with its very toxic product.) The second, and more objective voice proposing the expanded use of this new method has come from agronomists and soil scientists, who because of their intense concern about soil erosion put the stress on the term “conservation tillage” rather than “no till.”

In the final analysis, however, “no till” and the pattern of conventional tillage practiced over the past two decades in the South are surprisingly similar: both make use of nearly equivalent amounts of chemical herbicides and fertilizers to sustain high yields, and both are adapted closely to an export-based staple crop style of farming to which small and large producers are increasingly tied.

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The pattern of consolidation and increase in the scale of agriculture today is accompanied by a technology powerful enough to temporarily screen out small but real difficulties that may make the future of agriculture in the South more uncertain than it promises to be today. In Southern agriculture, like Southern forestry, uncertainty will be compounded by a lack of fundamental knowledge about the land and the impact of its cultivation. Some problems are as simple as teaching farmers to prevent spills, runoff from fields and misapplications of agricultural chemicals which can trigger kills of aquatic life in farm ponds and streams. Others promise to be more complex, as in the rapid establishment of weed strains genetically resistant to the chemicals designed to control them (as has happened in Virginia recently, with a paraquat-resistant strain of pigweed). Of course, fine tuning crop and herbicide rotations, responses to weed outbreaks and soil conservation in a well-managed farm is not impossible. But new and more powerful agricultural technologies as well as market demands for farm products will mean that good management will become increasingly difficult, with shorter response times and greater possibility of damage. Both new technologies and new farm programs are tools that foster a kind of optimism that problems can be calculated and managed away. Yet if the agricultural past and present of the South are any guide, the future will be accompanied by a high level of economic and environmental uncertainty.

One trend that adds appreciably to this trend toward instability is the increasing scale and corporate sponsorship of Southern farming. The capitalization of Southern agriculture by banks, insurance companies, and individual investors increases the problem of oversight. This is especially true in light of the willingness of corporations, buoyed by a managerial optimism distant from the traditions of farms and a set of government subsidies, to expand into lands formerly regarded as marginal. The superfarms purchased by Prudential Insurance Company subsidiaries in the sandhills of Nebraska and the peatlands of the North Carolina coast are one of many good examples. I he North Carolina operation, for instance, is centered on the production of staples such as corn and soybeans which are made profitable because of government price supports. This “subsidised” profitability then often depends on a margin of yield that can be achieved by large-scale farmers only through using new mechanical and chemical farming methods such as “no till” cultivation. In this way much of the intensification that is pushing the capacity of the Southern soil to a kind of natural limit may, in fact, be a surplus product.

Southern agriculture today is a game of limits, of shrinking margins of investment and crop yield, of the health of the land and with it the long-term security of food production. The problem down the line is more than one of credit and chemicals. Food crops must be grown in areas like the South, where food can be grown for regions where it cannot, and agricultural chemicals are one of many valuable instruments of cultivation. The problem is therefore one of social goals, of, in Wendell Berry’s phrase, a “culture and agriculture” challenged to break out of a dependent past in order to create a farming economy that can be stable over generations rather than riding the old roller coaster of uncertainty and jeopardy.

III

Among the lessons that the Southern past offers is that there is time enough for change. The Southern land, which has shown resilience in the face of centuries of damage, allows this time, and remembering the diverse cultural terrain of the South can open up new and needed possibilities for the future. European, Amerindian, and African approaches to growing food in gardens and fields are among the Southern traditions of ethnic cultivation that can teach their own lessons. The Afro-American way of gardening in particular seems to have a special message concerning the value of caution in agriculture.

In contrast to Southern agriculture today, the Afro-American logic of cultivation has been deeply conservative. In the coastal South and Caribbean, long after the business of the plantation was defunct, blacks tilled their gardens and survived. And in this sense the Afro-American gardening style deserves to be called a tradition, since, like all

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traditions, it has an active meaning and application for the present.

The Afro-American cultivation tradition offers a way toward changing Southern agriculture in a practical as well as a philosophical sense. Its ecological logic, tested and sound, can be applied to planting crops in fields as well as gardens. Stressing diversity and sustainablility, both key aspects of the tradition, may open up some acreage now growing soybeans at a loss to crop mixtures designed to allow both farmers and fields to benefit. And though not incompatible with chemicals, machines, and technology, its conservative nature can discipline change in farming in order to avoid stumbling into costly agricultural blind alleys.

Yet the overriding importance of this among other farming traditions in the South is that it was largely built out of a combination of desperately held tradition and improvisation as AfroAmerican slaves faced a new world forced upon them. Thus, it can provide a precedent to guide the personal experiments that many farmers, faced with difficulties, are already making on their own in intercropping crop varieties in a single field, in switching away from dead-end crops such as tobacco, in using new biological techniques to control harmful insects, or in adopting more efficient cultivation and irrigation techniques. Advocates of small farm diversification such as Booker T. Whatley in his Small Farm Technical Newsletter, build on the same tradition in arguing that farms can be managed as profitable market gardens, rather than simply as staple crop productions sites. Tending to the full agricultural past of the region will increase the ability of Southern agriculture to face the coming of a new and restrictive world, something like that encountered by Africans in the Americas. This world will be created partly out of three hundred years of damage to the land, and partly by the jostlings of the world markets for food and wood fiber in which the region continues to play a dependent role. Yet a groundwork for meeting this challenging new world flexibly and positively is already in place. Like the Afro-Americans on Jamaica who “took care to preserve and propagate such vegetables as grew in their own country, to use them as they saw occasion,” we should’ not forget to tend our own past in looking toward our region’s agricultural future.

Tom Hatley lives in Durham, North Carolina. His article “Forestry and Equity” appeared in Southern Changes for July/August, 1983.