The Poverty of Policy

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 1-3

In late August the casualty list for 1986 in America’s half-hearted war on poverty revealed that fourteen percent of Americans were living in “official” poverty (an annual income of below $10,989 for a family of four). As this year’s Census Bureau statistics stood four-tenths of a percent lower than a year egg, the White House proclaimed a victory for its style of free enterprise. If the numbers had increased, leading Democrats and others (with whom I have joined in the past) would have bitterly indicted the Administration’s cruel policies. Either way, the announcement has come to signify a passing moment of political theater and the continuance of very poor public policy.

The annual procession of poverty statistics each summer is becoming a ritual without meaning, something like those troop counts for the Vietnam War fifteen years ago. The harsh debate about slight changes in each set of new figures obscures the continuing tragedy of our national policies. And like the Washington officials in that war, both Republicans and Democrats in the national debate over poverty today find it is easier to count the poor than to address the policies attacking poverty. Behind the war of words, we really have a standoff in the war on poverty.

Beginning with the assumption in 1980 that poverty in America was a myth, the Reagan Administration has now stopped its direct attacks on the programs of the poor-after six years of budget cutting. In part, the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget Act constitutes a liveable, temporary compromise for the Administration. Although programs such as food stamps and AFDC are exempt from semi-automatic reductions, the pressure to reduce the deficit at a pre-fixed rate gives the Administration plenty of opportunity to shrink further these and other poverty programs. The Democratic House of Representatives also has decided

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to live with this arrangement, apparently believing it is better than the higher cuts on poverty programs in previous years.

A temporary truce is also in effect on the debate over government policies concerning the poor. Overshadowed at the moment by discussions on budget deficits and tax policies, poverty as an issue does not now exist at the White House. It will not be an issue until the Administration’s special commission on welfare reform is ready to release its newest arguments and recommendations. On this front, too, the Democrats appear to welcome the hiatus; certainly in this election year very few members of Congress have been asking the Administration what it has done for the poor lately. And to all who oppose the President’s policies on poverty, Reagan’s current posture of benign neglect seems like a vast improvement.

The momentary neglect, however, is not so very benign. Whatever the August figures show, we know that we have lost substantial ground over the last six years in reducing poverty. The effect of our neglect is becoming frightening. One child out of every five is poor. Every other black child under the age of six lives in poverty. Women now constitute the largest segment of the adult population in poverty-sixty percent of all poor over the age of eighteen. One out of every three blacks is poor; Hispanics have equally high rates of poverty. Three of four poor persons are women and children.

For Southerners the most recent economic trends offer further bad news which neglect won’t help. The two Southern states that have enjoyed a boom economy since 1980 have now gone bust. In Texas and Louisiana unemployment has reached record high levels since late spring, and food banks across these states may soon be incapable of handling the rising need-a trend already seen in many other parts of the South. While these problems in the oil states will not show up in the poverty surveys until 1987, they are real and will not be solved by official neglect in Washington.

Of course, the Administration’s silence is not forever. Within the next twelve months the White House will announce its new poverty policies when it releases a report from the presidential commission on welfare reform. While others will be busy keeping food banks and shelters open during the winter, the commission will be assembling its arsenal of facts, figures and interpretations on poverty. Once more, the public discussion on poverty will be framed and limited by the Administration’s own perspective, probably concentrating on fraud and abuse. Once more, the debate will focus on the failures of the past rather than its successes and potential. And the people of the South and the nation will have to struggle with themselves once more if they are to resist blaming the victims of poverty for its presence.

Rather than debate over the latest count on poverty, we need to construct a framework for future debates on policies. Although America seems to hold few truths to be self-evident nowadays, the trends of poverty over the last several years already tell us the direction that we can take in developing new policies. At this point there are several major propositions: First, the federal government must increase the minimum wage for all workers in the United States. Today the head of a family of three persons earning the federal minimum wage and working full-time lives $1,300 below the threshold of poverty. The current minimum wage is a subminimum wage. A fair change could remove as many as four and one-half million people from poverty and would require no additional administrative costs to the government. This is a vital anti-poverty measure that could do more than any other single, simple, act to

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reduce poverty.

Second, the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws in the job market must be strengthened. In part, the extraordinary poverty among blacks, Hispanics ant women tells of the missed opportunities in the workplace too often still caused by discriminatory hiring and promotion. Fair employment practices for minorities and women mean a reduction in poverty.

Third, affordable child care must be provided for poor women who work. With so many women and children among the poor, and with the rise of single-parent families, nothing very realistic will be done in the private or public arena to reduce poverty without affordable child care. Five million children under the age of six are poor and almost six million poor are of grammar school age. Without child care, the want ads for many jobs will not and should not be answered by poor mothers with infants and young children who find working a losing proposition.

Fourth, jobs should be available to all adults who can work. Providing a job to an adult in poverty must not be a vindictive act, a punishment for being poor. A job must help the individual with income and work experience. Full employment at decent wages is the most sensible way of virtually eliminating poverty.

Fifth, non-institutional care must be available to those adults incapable of caring for themselves. A small part of the general poverty population and a large segment of street people are struggling desperately, but fruitlessly, to help themselves. Non-institutional care must be provided.

These are simple principles; they do not trespass human dignity nor propose to bankrupt the government. They suggest that personal initiative and work should be seen for the poor not as punishment but as opportunity. They are not the only principles on which a practical, compassionate poverty program can be constructed, but they go a long way in shifting the debate.

The South and the nation must summon the will and resources to arrest the current trends of poverty. We surely need to know where the poverty statistics stand, this year and in future years. But more than anything else right now, we need to enact policies that will bring people out of poverty. Among all the numbers, that is whet really courts.

Steve Suitts is executive director of the Southern Regional Council.

Cells for Sale

By Harmon L. Wray, Jr.

Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 3-6

The rush to transfer government services and functions from public to profit-making hands has lately found its way to the “field” of incarceration and corrections. The current leader in this new growth industry is the Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America, chartered in January of 1983 and financed by Hospital Corporation of America founder Jack Massey of Massey Burch Investments, Inc., the South’s largest venture capital company. According to CCA president and former Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Tom Beasley, the Corrections Corporation of America alma to ~be to jails and prisons…what Hospital Corporation of America has become to medical facilities nationwide.”

Declaring that “the market is limitless,” Beasley (age 43) hopes to “solve the prison problem and make a lot of money at the same time.” CCA currently has seven contracts to own and/or manage detention centers, treatment facilities, jails and workhouses for federal and local jurisdictions in several Southern states–three in Tennessee, one in Florida, two in Texas (for illegal aliens), one in North Carolina. But this is small potatoes compared with what CCA intends to do: take over the entire prison system of particular states, and prepare for a bid on the federal system. “The private jail market is ripe,” reports Barron’s, the business weekly. “And it is brokers, architects, builders, and banks-not the taxpayers-who will make out like bandits.. In less than a year, CCA has more than doubled the size of its staff, now at 500.

The proposal CCA made to the State of Tennessee in the fall of 1985 was the boldest move yet in prisons-for-profit and showed why the company is considered the most aggressive and well-connected of the capitalist corrections firms. CCA initially proposed to buy out and operate the state’s prison system, under federal court order since 1982, as well as build and manage two new prisons (later expanded to five new institutions). Thanks to effective lobbying by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, the CCA bid was tabled last year by the Democratically-controlled state legislature. The action came during a special session called for the prison crisis by Republican governor Lamar Alexander, a CCA supporter who once rented a garage apartment to law student Tom Beasley. Alexander has spent seven years overseeing an unconstitutional prison system but has never set foot inside one of his state’s prisons.

This year, the General Assembly, under the influence of nine full-time, high-powered CCA lobbyists paid an estimated $100,000, passed a more moderate privatization bill. Before the session Tom Beasley had

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said, “I intend to get a chunk of this system.” Soon he will: the 180-bed Carter County work camp opens September 1, probably under CCA operation. But the legislation (which AFSCME plans to challenge in court) prohibits further privatization of Tennessee prisons for three years.

The ambitions of Beasley and other prison entrepreneurs are not limited to Tennessee. In fact, once CCA lost its bid for all Tennessee prisons, it pursued a smaller “chunk” primarily in order to avoid the embarrassment of having no home-state contracts to advertise in its sales pitch to other jurisdictions. Last December Beasley said that if the Reagan administration decided to sell the federal prison system (as the The Wall Street Journal had just reported it might), CCA would make an offer. CCA was one of three firms bidding for the multi-million dollar Moundsville, W.Va., prison, site of a New Year’s Day prisoner rebellion. Reportedly, CCA has been working on proposals for state prison systems in Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Misissippi, and Kentucky, as well as several western states. At this writing, CCA contracts to operate jails are pending in Sante Fe, N.M., and Key West, Fla. Meanwhile, CCA’s Tennessee competitor, Corrections Associates Inc. (CAI), recently landed Tennessee and Alabama county jail contracts and a prison consulting contract with the Alexander administration. CAI’s good fortune came on the heels of the resignation of its new president, Hubert McCullough, as Governor Alexander’s finance commissioner.

The McCullough-Alexander connection is only one of many personal, business, and political linkages evident in the prisons-for-profit field. Like CAI’s McCullough, CCA lobbyist Tom Ingram, 39, a former journalist and social worker, has been a prime mover with the anti-labor Tennessee Business Roundtable. Ingram also managed Alexander’s two winning gubernatorial campaigns and served as his chief-of-staff for four years before forming his own public relations and business consulting firm. Others in the CCA-Alexander circle include CCA stockholders who are current and former Alexander cabinet officers, CCA administrators who are former state GOP chairpersons, a CCA lobbyist who was a Democratic state senator, and two prominent public figures who in 1985 sold their CCA stock to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest: Honey Alexander (the governor’s wife held $5,000 of stock) and House Speaker Ned Ray McWherter ($33,000), the Democratic nominee to succeed Alexander. In this fall’s general election, McWherter faces former Republican governor Winfield Dunn, a Memphis dentist who became a multi-millionaire as an executive for Hospital Corporation of America. Both Dunn and McWherter have called for the state to experiment with private operation of some prisons.

Another connection is the US Military Academy. Before graduating from Harvard’s law and business schools, CCA treasurer and major investor Doctor R. Crants was Beasley’s West Point roommate. CCA stockholder Samuel W. Bartholomew, of the Nashville law firm Donelson, Stokes Bartholomew, was their classmate (’66).

Three of Bartholomew’s children are also stockholders. Another West Point alum and major CCA investor is T. Don Hutto, the corporation’s executive vice-president. Hutto, an ex-prison guard who became commissioner of corrections in Virginia and Arkansas, has since 1984 been president of the American Correctional Association, which oversees prison accreditation standards. Unlike other corrections-related professional associations-the National Sheriffs Association, the National Conference of State Trial Judges, the National Association of Criminal Justice Planners, and the American Bar Association–the ACA under Hutto’s tenure has supported prison privatization.

While the prisons-for-profit trend has national dimensions, CCA leadership has focused much of the attention onto the South, where all of CCA’s current contracts and most of its financial backers are located (investors include Vanderbilt University, Hospital Corporation of America, and that symbol of public service delivery, the Tennessee Valley Authority, itself often the target of privatization initiatives). Many members of CCA’s management staff have worked in corrections departments in Southern states, including Virginia, Louisiana, Texas, and Alabama.

Critics of corporate punishment have raised a number of issues which call the privatization trend into serious question. Tennessee Attorney General Michael Cody and the ACLU National Prison Project note that the state would retain ultimate legal and fiscal responsibility for assuring private prisons’ compliance with state and federal constitutions and court orders. It also appears clear that governments cannot contract their civil liability to private concerns. Noting CCA’s lack of a track record in operating a state prison for long-ternm adult offenders, Cody also questions its estimates of operating and capital expenses and doubts the state’s

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ability to buy back its prisons in case of a private firm’s bankruptcy, incompetence, or unwillingness to continue. Cody suggests that privatization might encourage the public to believe, mistakenly, that Tennessee can solve its corrections problems simply by building more prisons.

A 1985 Tennessee legislative report points out that privatizing does not mean that construction costs are not a liability of the state; rather, the liability has been deferred.” Mark Gray of AFSCME wonders if an artifically low cost presented in an initial contract would lead to government dependency on the private firm, making it “impossible to resume operations in the future without huge capital investments. The private contractor is then in a position to raise its prices” in order to maximize profits. Former Minnesota corrections chief Ken Schoen has pointed to “defense” contractors’ use of similar tactics as a way of “capitalizing on the public’s fears to assure an ever-expanding system, while the basic insecurities remain.”

Closely associated with such economic concerns is the question of just how a private firm will be able to operate prisons as inexpensively as it claims. Public employee unions like AFSCME and the Tennessee State Employees Association point to workers’ loss of civil service rules and benefits under private prison managers, along with the possibility of lower wages, a minimal workforce, an anti-union atmosphere, and inadequate training of correctional officers. It may be no accident that corrections capitalists’ favorite hunting ground for contracts has been the historically low-wage and under-unionized South. And, whether they are called “prison guards” or “correctional officers,” those workers who staff our society’s cages are already among the lowest paid of all government employees.

Certainly, prisoners themselves could suffer harmful effects from possible cost-cutting for the sake of profit maximization. CCA’s initial proposal to Tennessee proclaims the intention of developing a “full-employment economy within the correctional system.” Given the history of Tennessee’s and other Southern states’ “privatization” and “profitization” of prisons, one might be excused for expecting some contemporary variations on the old convict lease systems and chain gangs. Journalist Ronnie Dugger’s discomfort over the proposed privatization of the Texas prison system might also apply to other Southern states: “In the company prison, we will be putting state-sentenced inmates under the command of the employees of the corporation and forcing the state-sentenced inmates to labor for the profit of the corporation. What will keep a privately-owned Texas prison from being in its very nature a state-created system of slave labor for private profit?” Constitutionally, slavery is legal as punishment for crime, and our Southern prison populations are, of course, overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately black and Hispanic.

Apprehensions on the part of prisoner advocates and those who abhor slavery may not be unfounded when one considers the professional history of T. Don Hutto, the man CCA touts as its foremost corrections expert. The CCA’s executive vice-president’s career includes a stint as warden of the Ramsey Unit in Huntsville, Texas, in the 1960s, when the system of using inmates to guard and discipline other inmates, later outlawed in federal court, was “at its strongest,” according to the Texas Observer. A 1985 article in The Nation reported that during Hutto’s tenure as corrections commissioner in Arkansas the US Supreme Court ruled that state’s prison system unconstitutional and found that officials “evidently tried to operate their prisons at a profit.” “Inmates were required to work on prison farms ten hours a day, six days a week, often without suitable clothing or shoes, using mule-drawn plows and tending crops by hand….Punishment for minor misconduct included lashing with a wooden-handled leather strap…and administering electric shocks to ‘various sensitive parts of the inmate’s body.’ The trial court called the prisons ‘a dark and evil world completely alien to the free world.'” When confronted with this criticism, a CCA offical responded that The Nation essay was “a libelous article” and that Hutto had in fact cleaned up the unconstitutional Arkansas system.

The questions raised by Hutto’s track record and by a look at the history of profit-making out of the hides of prisoners were echoed by Michael Walzer in The New Republic: “Helpless men and women have never fared well at the hands of profit-seeking entrepreneurs. The incentive system is all wrong. Who will look after the interests of prisoners? Who will be watching the prison owners as they run their ‘own’ business?”

Prisoners and their advocates in many Southern states lock at the decades of class-action litigation efforts to remedy their unconstitutional prison systems (now ten years in Tennessee) and wonder how much longer it would have taken had the prisons been

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privately owned during that time. The potential for foot-dragging and buck-passing would surely increase substantially under private ownership and implementation of state functions. The Tennessee Senate Speaker’s favorable response to the privatization concept speaks volumes: “If somebody else ran it, somebody else would be in court. We wouldn’t.”

An analogy with recent corporate mobility trends, another point made by Walzer, is especially striking when seen in a Southern context: “This is probably the chief economic advantage of privatization-that it offers a (temporary) escape from the enforcement of constitutional norms. The resulting savings are like the profit added when a factory moves from a union to a non-union territory. If the union catches up, the old situation is restored. Similarly, if the courts catch up, we will find oursleves again where we are now, with judges struggling to do what state legislatures and Congress ought to do-reform the prison system.”

Perhaps the most critical flaw in the privatization move is that it is inherently expansionist. A corporation paid per prisoner and per diem will look to lock up more and more people for longer and longer stretches. Recall the historic Southern practice of determining the county sheriffs’ pay according to their jail counts. CCA’s Tennessee proposal assumed a steadily expanding prison population (despite the falling crime rate), and its preferred per diem method of being paid has already led to cost overruns for local taxpayers at its Chattanooga penal farm.

The US locks up a larger percentage of its population than any country in the world, with two exceptions: South Africa and the Soviet Union. Some of our Southern states rank even higher than those nations. We ought to be reducing our costly, ineffective, cruel, race- and class-biased overreliance on incarceration in favor of community-based alternative sentences for non-violent offenders, such as victim restitution programs. Other effective alternatives to incarceration include intensive probation, community service work, victim-offender mediation, and required drug and alcohol treatment, GED preparation, vocational training, and job placement. Such options are used frequently with white collar criminals, but perpetrators of street crimes are scarce in these programs.

Organizations such as AFSCME, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Sheriffs Association, the Vera Institute of Justice, and the National Association of Criminal Justice Planners have all voiced the fear of an inevitable expansionism in this new “growth industry.” Vera Institute’s Michael Smith, noting that “the private sector has an enormous investment in stimulating demand,” fears corporate advertising campaigns to heighten the public’s fear of crime and trigger a “lock ’em up” reaction resulting in an increasing number of cages, captives, and dollars.

NACJP director Mark Cunniff, calling CCA’s Tennessee takeover proposal “incredible,” points out that “private contractors can lobby in ways that a public agency cannot.” When those doing the lobbying are close friends and political advisers of governors and legislators, many of the traditional lobbying techniques will be unnecessary.

Perhaps Ken Schoen has put it best: “Private operators whose growth depends upon an expanding prison population may push for ever harsher sentences. With the public’s unabating fear of crime, and the lawmakers shrinking from any move that appears to be soft on criminals, the developing private prison lobby will be hard to resist. Any drop in the crime rate will be attributed to long prison sentences. An increase will add weight to the call for more prisons. And the taxpayers will finance the profit-makers while double-locking their doors at night.”

Michael Smith says that the scenario sketched out above “worries me enough so that I want to look first at making government innovative and responsive.” This points toward a possible third option, between the inefficient and incompetent status quo and the CCA-type prisons-for-profit. Walzer suggests, “…we should deputize nongovernmental agencies to perform some prison-like functions….we all might benefit, prisoners, too, from a little flexibility, unorthodoxy, experimentation. But this will have to be the work of nonprofit agencies, with publicly recognized programs and explicit authorization. We should not be contracting out, as if these were not our prisoners; we should be bringing new ideas into the orbit of public service.”

The most reasonable conclusion to be drawn from all this is simply that the citizens and legislatures of our Southern states should avoid the new “dungeons for dollars” game like the plague. The privatization debate distracts us from the real issue of our society’s failure to deal with crime in any way other than a knee-jerk, repressive fashion. This is especially true in the South, which tends to have the highest incarceration rates, the longest sentences, and the most executions.

Most citizens-white and black, rich and poor, male and female-regularly report that crime and punishment constitute one of the most salient and urgent issues in their lives. Almost no one, however, is satisfied with our criminal justice system as it is.

As I have suggested, there are alternative approaches to the issue of crime and punishment, but only a few prisoners, lawyers, academics, and prison reform advocates seem to know or care much about them. As in the field of health, our society’s primary approach to crime ought to be a preventive, environmental, “public health” strategy. The implications of this approach reach beyond even such a necessary action as the denial of easy handgun access. We must resist and recast the media glorification of violence, insist upon economic and political equality irrespective of race and sex, confront the climate of national militarism, and reconstruct an American culture and economic system propelled by human greed. Meanwhile, we will continue to have to lock up violent, dangerous offenders, but, for the many others, our motto should be “from the cage to the community,” which is largely where the problem is and must be dealt with. We must refuse the exploitation of public hysteria and institutional fatigue by the entrepreneurs of captivity.

Harmon L Wray, Jr., lives in Nashville where he is a staff consultant with Project Return and teaches prison ministry at Vanderbilt Divinity School.

Taking the Fifth

By Marilyn Davis and Alex Willingham

Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 7-9

Two election contests have drawn much attention to Georgia this year: a race crucial in determining the party alignment in the US Senate, and a struggle between long-time allies that will send a strong and articulate black Southerner to Congress. Indeed, the Senate campaign helped prompt the congressional one.

The race for the House seat took place in Georgia’s Fifth District, centered in Atlanta. Georgia, and the nation, have become accustomed to the special nature of the state’s Fifth District, since mid-century one of the South’s most volatile and visible political theatres. During the last forty years, the Fifth has sent Georgia’s first woman to Congress, followed her with an arch-segregationist, later with Andrew Young, and most recently, white liberal Wyche Fowler.

This year Fowler left his congressional job and won the Democratic Party’s nomination for the US Senate. In making the run for the Senate, Fowler is testing whether a record built in his old district, composed entirely of urban voters and a majority-black population, can sit well with the citizens in rural, whiter and more conservative areas of the state. Some answers were provided in the August 12th primary. Fowler captured the Democratic party nomination against leading contender Hamilton Jordan (once of the Carter White House staff) without a runoff. Now, in one of the country’s most important campaigns, Fowler faces Reaganite incumbent Mack Mattingly this fall.

With Fowler gone, the action in the Fifth’s Democratic primary turned upon the rivalry of two civil rights veterans: Georgia state aerator Julian Bond and Atlanta city councilmember John Lewis (both age 46). Lewis was to eventually win the nomination in a come-from-behind upset decided in the run-off primary on September 2.

The Fifth District has a black population of sixty-five percent (the black voting age population is sixty percent). Bond and Lewis were hoping to become just the third black among the 138 members now serving in the US House from the eleven Southern states (blacks make up twenty percent of the population of the South).

Lewis, son of an Alabama sharecropper, was a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. At the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. made his “I Have a Dream” speech, Lewis received national attention when march organizers demanded that he censor and tone down his own public remarks. Two years later, he was one of the main targets of police attacks at the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the Selma to Montgomery March.

Lewis later directed the Southern Regional Council’s Voter Education Project. His first attempt at public office came in 1977 when he made an unsuccessful attempt to win the congressional seat. He was appointed head of the federal Action agency in the Carter Administration. In 1981, he won election to the Atlanta city council and became a chief advocate of ethics in government. In 1985 he was reelected over token opposition.

Bond is also a former SNCC leader (he was communications director), active in voter education. He is one of three children of Horace Mann Bond, the renowned educator and historian. In 1966, after being elected to the Georgia General Assembly, Bond was denied his seat when he stood firm in support of SNCC’s anti-Vietnam War policy statement. He was able to join the state legislature only after a legal battle which drew international attention and support.

Although still too young to accept the office, at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago Bond’s name was placed in nomination as the party’s vice-presidential candidate. Bond has been widely sought as a gifted public speaker, particularly on college campuses. He once hosted NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”

The contest between Bond and Lewis meant that Georgia would send to Congress a civil rights activist with strong credentials appropriate for a congressional district that has struggled for decades with the declining traditional symbols and the new and complex strains emerging in contemporary Southern politics.

The beginning of that struggle may be dated from a special election held in February of 1946, when Fifth District voters sent Helen Douglas Mankin, Georgia’s first woman to Congress to fill the unexpired term of the recently resigned veteran Representative Robert Ramspeck. That year’s special election marked the first time Atlanta’s black voters had been allowed to participate in a congressional election since 1929. Their participation had been prohibited by the White Primary system under which voting in the nominating elections conducted by the Democratic party was limited to white citizens. Democratic nomination amounted to victory.

When the time came for Mankin to run again, in the regularly scheduled primary election of 1946, blacks gave her strong support. She received an overwhelming vote in the Ashby Street precinct that was to become a bellwether of black political participation in Atlanta.

Representative Mankin’s tenure was short. She won a popular majority in the regular primary, but was denied the nomination when Democratic party leaders decided to make a “special exception” and apply the rules of the county unit system–another of Georgia’s traditional disfranchising devices.

The ultimate victor that year was James C. Davis, ally of the openly racist Eugene Talmadge whose faction then controlled the Democratic party and whose views could not have been more in contrast to those of the majority of the Fifth’s population.

The county unit system insured the continued renomination and reelection of Davis, although he drew consistent opposition and, in 1952, again lost the popular vote. Blacks always opposed Davis and his segregationist views. In 1954, Morris Abrams, then flying the banner of Southern liberalism, lost a party

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nomination to Davis. Abrams received ninety-four percent of the vote at that Ashby street box. When the county unit system was declared invalid in a 1962 Supreme Court decision, Davis did not seek reelection.

In the following years, the Fifth was to elect a white Democrat, Charles Weltner, who would be one of the few Southerners to vote for civil rights legislation, and who resigned his seat rather than run on a ticket with an avowed segregationist. Weltner was replaced in 1966 by one of the region’s first Republicans Fletcher Thompson.

In 1972, after an attempted gerrymander by the Georgia legislature, the white majority district elected Andrew Young as the state’s first black congressman. Young was known as a close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr. He then worked as director of the Atlanta Community Relations Commission–a position that afforded him wide contact among the district’s voters and established his reputation as a mediator. During Young’s years of campaigning for Congress, he enjoyed wide bi-racial voting support. He received a critical fourth of the white vote in that first winning election and increasingly larger proportions in his reelection efforts.

Young served until 1977 when he accepted an appointment by President Carter to head the US delegation to the United Nations.

Despite the growing black population in the Atlanta area, the Fifth District remained majority white. Boundary lines were drawn in such a way as to split the black voters among three congressional districts. During the 1980 reapportionment, an attempt was made to redraw the lines. The Georgia legislature refused, but was eventually forced, to improve matters when a federal court held the districts to be discriminatory. New lines were drawn creating a majority black population in the Fifth District in 1982.

The Fifth elected, after Young, Wyche Fowler, a white who shared the moderate views of Atlanta’s black middle class. Fowler served and won reelection as the racial make-up of the district was reversed.

The idea of a white representing a black majority seemed to suit the fancy of a district where a black had represented a white majority. Black leaders praised Fowler’s voting record and his attention to serving constituents. He was adept at campaigning within the black community. During the Reagan drive to dismantle social programs targeted to urban and minority citizens, Fowler was a dependable opponent.

The arrangement became uncomfortable, however, as potential rivals began to insist that the district select a black representative. In 1984, SCLC activist Hosea Williams and three other blacks challenged Fowler, who nevertheless won handily. This year, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, as well as an opportunity to challenge the freshman Mattingly, Fowler chose to make his move for the Senate.

Although ten candidates entered the contest when Fowler decided not to seek the congressional seat, the Fifth was really Bond’s to win or lose.

National celebrities and politicians–including Rosa Parks and New York mayor Ed Koch–came into the district to campaign, most of them supporting Bond. Former New York Representative Shirley Chisholm,

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now head of the National Black Women’s Political Congress, came to endorse Jan Douglass, one of five women candidates.

The August primary in the Fifth developed within a broad consensus on issues among the candidateds. Most opposed intervention in Central America and supported effective sanctions against apartheid in South Africa. On the whole, the candidates were sharply critical of the Reagan effort to cirpple domestic programs, curtail civil liberties, bloat the military, and politicize the government’s civil rights agencies.

Bond’s frontrunner status was taken for granted both by the other candidates and the news media. He was the leading fundraiser among the group and enjoyed wide recognition in the opinion polls. Consequently he became the target of “negative advertising” by opponents who perceived him as vulnerable among white voters.

Specially-targeted radio spots said Bond would promote racial division, an allegation based on speeches in Bond’s 1972 A Time to Speak, A Time to Act, a book which responded to the growing racial and socioeconomic differences between the inner city and the suburbs. Other radio spots claimed Bond to be delinquent in his federal tax payments. No taxes are currently in arrears but in recent years, the allegation said, some had been.

Such charges exploited a stereotype of Bond as a media personality, ineffective, disorganized, and lazy.

Bond’s defenders argued that his persona and glamour were further reasons to commend him to voters. They pointed, also, to his twenty years of perseverance in the Georgia legislature which should be seen, they said, in relation to the hostility he encountered. A conservative, white, “old boy,” leadership not only despised Bond’s presence but often used its powers spitefully to limit his access. A loyal constituency repeatedly resumed Bond to office.

An opposite image from that of the flashy, glib, Bond dogged John Lewis, a man whom the editors of Time once called a saint. In this year’s campaign he enjoyed the endorsement of the Atlanta Constitution (as he did in 1977). Yet in ’77 (and again in ’86,) there were questions about whether he is dynamic enough to give effective representation.

Lewis’ defenders pointed to a personal history marked by hard work, sacrifice and principled dissent. They say his persistent advocacy of ethics in government while on the Atlanta City Council illustrates his best quality, integrity. Lewis’s ethics proposals walked with leaden feet among some of his colleagues (four of the current council members have had brushes with the law), but he has pursued this knotty and sensitive issue with characteristic courage.

Some Atlanta voters, wondering at what spot the ethical footsteps might trespass across the threshold of civil liberties were startled when, in the strained final days of the first primary campaign, drug testing was made an issue. Lewis and several others volunteered to undertake drug testing at a local hospital. Bond refused. The action set the tone for a Run-off campaign marked by considerably sharper controversy. Lewis hammered away at the drug theme manipulating it, and other conservative domestic and foreign issues as a strategy to appeal to white voters.

On the eve of the August 12 primary, Bond hoped to win outright. A day later he received forty-seven percent of the vote to Lewis’ thirty-six percent (double what was granted to him in the pre-election polls) forcing the September 2 runoff.

Despite his failure to avoid a run-off, Bond demonstrated strong vote getting power. Of the 242 precincts in the district, Bond carried over seventy perecent on August 12. He outpolled Lewis in the black precincts (getting as high as seventy percent of the vote and averaging sixty-one percent), but came in third overall in the white precincts. Bond also won a majority of the precincts (sixty percent) in the run- off.

In August and again on September 2, Bond won low income black precincts by comfortable majorities. The crucial difference in the election was the refusal of whites to vote for Bond in appreciable numbers. Upper income whites, were especially reluctant to vote for Bond. Precincts of affluent whites rarely gave him more than ten percent of the vote. The extraordinary majorities Lewis enjoyed among white voters furnished the key surprise in the voting and poses a new set of questions about the quality of politics to be expected in a district with such contradictory voter preferences between the affluent white minority and the low income, inner city black majority.

Only seventy-thousand voters (twenty-nine percent of the 230,000 registered) came out for the August 12 primary–about the same number as voted in the September runoff. The small voter turnout is a striking irony given the roles these two men have played in voter registration.

Even in the Fifth District, black voters continue to suffer special disadvantages in the political process, the results of a legacy of underparticipation, of continuing disparities in social and economic opportunities, and of growing doubts about the capacity of political leadership. Despite fifteen years of black progress in office holding, voter registration among Atlanta blacks reaches only about half its potential.

The 1980 census shows that in Fulton County (a major part of the Fifth District) less than half of black youth live in two-parent homes. In black, female-headed households with children, the median annual income is $6,000, less than half that of similarly situated whites. The county’s $25,000 median income for white families is twice that of black families. One census tract in a black community in the Fifth District shows the median family income at $2,900. By contrast, the highest median family income in the Fifth ($53,000) is in a white neighborhood.

No single election will change these disparities and inequalities. They are a reminder of the challenge facing the Fifth District. The competition between Bond and Lewis has been uncomfortable for those who see them as pure symbols of the movement years. The campaign has created definite expectations–and hope –about the future. Despite the near-reverence for both men, it is only realistic to admit that the problems that face the Fifth and the country are much more resistant to symbolic and even electoral change than they seemed in the days of Movement victories.

Marilyn Davis teaches political science at Spelman College in Atlanta. Alex Willingham is research associate at the Southern Regional Council and a contributing editor of Southern Changes.

In Wallace’s Wake–New Demagoguery for the Eighties

By Randall Williams

Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 10-12

“Alabama has it all,” brag the interstate billboards leading into the Heart of Dixie. The slogan is aimed mostly at Florida- or Louisiana-bound tourists but nowadays applies equally well to the contest for the state’s governorship.

The Democratic primary and run-off were held in June, but the party’s nominee was undeclared until August due to legal challenges and an order by a three-judge federal panel barring certification of the apparent winner. Among the judges signing the order was Frank M. Johnson Jr., known by many Alabamians over the past quarter-century as the “real governor” of the state for the control he exerted in orders on prisons, schools, mental hospitals, public hiring and civil rights.

In the 1960s and 1970s Johnson’s legal activism was necessary to fill the vacuum left by the inaction of Gov. George C. Wallace, who always found it expedient to let the Federal courts force state officials to do the politically unpopular. It seemed fitting that Judge Johnson’s latest legal entry into Alabama justice came as another Wallace vacuum loomed.

George Wallace, at last, is retiring from the office he has held for four terms, five if you count the term of his first wife, Lurleen, who was elected as his surrogate in 1966 when the law forbade consecutive terms. Contending in Wallace’s wake were Lt. Gov. Bill Baxley, the favorite and the champion of a large but loosely knit coalition of labor voters, blacks and Wallaceites; former Gov. Fob James, well-liked by business (“the rich get richer and the poor get Fobbed”); former Lt. Gov. George McMillan, darling of the reform-minded and determined to avoid the “wimpy” image that may have cost him the Governor’s Mansion in 1982; and . . . Atty. Gen. Charlie Graddick, the law-and-order dark horse who has emerged as the latest demagogue in an Alabama lineage stretching back through George Wallace to Cotton Tom Heflin and William Lowndes Yancey.

Graddick is the New version of the Old Wallace. Many who remember only the extremities of the past find it hard to call Graddick a racist because he actually does nothing overtly against blacks; his popularity with racists is due to the fact that he largely ignores the quarter of the state’s citizens who are black, and that he is a demagogue for the Eighties, a subtle master of euphemisms and code phrases that communicate racial meaning without the blatantly nasty words of the previous generation.

In winning the attorney general’s office in 1978, Graddick transformed himself from an unknown Mobile County district attorney with a series of stark, loud television commercials claiming he would get tough on crime. In a speech, he declared he wanted to “fry [murderers] until their eyes popped out and you can smell their flesh burn.” Once in office, he waged a highly publicized prosecution of “food stamp cheats” and feuded with the prison commissioner who sought to relieve the state’s growing inmate population through alternatives such as work release and restitution programs. Critics accused him of being a poor, frequently reversed prosecutor, indifferent to white-collar crime and to such public nuisances as KKK paramilitary training.

Like former Gov. James, Graddick is an exRepublican who switched parties to run a state-wide campaign. Although Alabama has become, since the Second World War, one of the most conservative states, giving large votes to GOP Presidential nominees, it has not elected a Republican governor since Redemption. Alabama’s junior Senator, former admiral and POW Jeremiah Denton, is the first Republican elected to statewide office in more than a hundred years. However, the Goldwater sweep of Alabama in 1964 elected several Republican congressmen, and in recent years a growing number of Republicans have been elected to county and legislative offices. The GOP currently holds two of the state’s seven Congressional districts.

Graddick and James owe their political careers to that still-small contingent of Alabamians who have declared themselves Republicans and to that large and growing block of voters who identify philosophically with the GOP even though they still call themselves Democrats in state and local elections. In short, the Reagan vote. Baxley, on the other hand, stumped vigorously for Mondale and Ferraro in 1984, and he gets his strongest support from the backers of that losing ticket.

Baxley was a two-term attorney general before Grad lick, but there is practically no other similarity

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between the two. Where Graddick seems to evoke the old racial passions, Baxley repudiates them. A decade after the fact, he reopened the case of the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church and convicted a former Ku Klux Klansman for the murders of the four children. Baxley, a law student in 1963, said he was motivated by his shame and anger that people could do such a thing in his state and get away with it.

As attorney general, Baxley was viewed as a tough, able prosecutor but may have been most respected for the job he did recruiting a talented crop of young Alabama lawyers, including some who had left the state to work on Wall Street and the first black assistant attorney general in Alabama history. He then prosecuted murderers and white collar criminals with equal vigor.

On the negative side, the bachelor Baxley had a reputation as a playboy and a gambler who had made and lost large sums in Las Vegas and in the commodities market. Though he had married before making his first attempt at the Governor’s office in 1978. the image stuck with him, renewed in the recent campaign by intimations of an affair with an Associated Press reporter who quickly resigned her job and left the state.

Baxley led the June 3 primary voting by eighty thousand votes, with Graddick a strong second. Graddick then picked up the endorsement of McMillan, causing Baxley aides to charge that McMillan–who had called Graddick unfit to serve before the election–had offered to endorse Baxley in exchange for payment of McMillan’s considerable campaign debt. Graddick probably did not need Fob James’s endorsement; those voters had no place else to go.

Alabama does not require party registration, but voters in its primaries do pledge to support the party nominees in the subsequent general election. Alabama law expressly prohibits voters in one party’s primary from supporting another party’s candidate in a run-off.

Graddick attacked Baxley as the candidate of special interests, playing up donations of about $100,000 Baxley received from political action committees supported by the Alabama Education Association and on Baxley’s endorsement by both of the state’s black political organizations. Graddick was the only candidate who did not seek the black endorsements; in fact, he did not even campaign in the west Alabama Black Belt. Graddick received more donations than Baxley, mostly from businessmen, industrialists and business-related political action committees. Among his biggest contributors were well-known Republicans, including former Nixon Postmaster Winton Blount, and June Collier, the “Buy American” auto parts manufacturer who was appointed by Reagan to the Industrial Policy Advisory Committee.

Two weeks before the June 24 run-off, polls placed Baxley and Graddick almost even.

The Alabama Democratic Party began a statewide campaign aimed at discouraging the 33,000 voters in the June 3 Republican primary from crossing-over to vote in the Democratic runoff; there was no statewide Republican run-off and only token local contests. Candidate Graddick, the state’s top law officer, declared that cross-over voting was legal. The day before the election, one of his assistants, the chief of the voting fraud unit of the Alabama Attorney General’s office, after meeting with Graddick campaign officials, issued a letter advising county election officials that they faced possible legal actions if they attempted to prevent Republicans from voting in the Democratic run-off.

The run-off voting was the closest in recent Alabama history, with Graddick on top by 8,756 votes, less than a percentage point of the almost one million total. Graddick’s campaign workers began answering the phone “Governor-elect …” the next day, but Baxley refused to concede without a recount.

Then Baxley supporters filed an election challenge to the state Democratic Party charging that as many as 20,000 Republicans, far more than Graddick’s margin of victory, had illegally crossed over on June 23. After a few days of deliberation, Baxley filed his own concurrent challenge. The charges made sense: In a television interview on election night, Graddick thanked Republican voters and said the crossover vote had made the difference in the run-off. Jean Sullivan, a Republican National Committeewoman from Selma also had bragged to the press that Graddick had been elected by Republicans, and, on the weekend before the run-off, a series of television commercials had been aired in which four Republican state senators stated that crossover voting was legal.

The party challenge was soon followed by a class-action federal lawsuit filed by a black county commissioner and his wife alleging that Graddick had violated Section Five of the Voting Rights Act by advising voters that it was legal to cross over. Graddick had illegally diluted the black vote by changing election practices without preclearance from the Justice Department, the suit charged.

On Aug. 1, federal judges Johnson, Truman Hobbs and Myron Thompson ruled on the voting rights issue.

In strong language, the Court concluded, “The June 24th runoff was so close, the number of illegal crossover voters so great, and Mr. Graddick’s violation so flagrant, this Court cannot take the chance that Mr. Graddick received the Democratic nomination as a result of his illegal actions.” The judges barred the Alabama Democratic Party from certifying Graddick as its nominee and said the Party could either certify Baxley (if it could be proved that he would have won except for crossover votes) or could call a new runoff between Graddick and Baxley.

“It is absolutely clear,” the Court continued, “that as a candidate and, more importantly, as the Attorney

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General, Mr. Graddick made every effort to get voters to violate the anti-crossover rule.”

The Court had no sympathy with Graddick’s argument that the anti-crossover rule was unenforced in the two previous elections, saying, “We note also that during the entire time the crossover law remained on the books and allegedly unenforced, Mr. Graddick was the chief legal officer of the state of Alabama.”

With this directive from the federal courts, a five-member committee of the Alabama Democratic Party began hearing the party challenges. On August 15, the committee certified Baxley as the winner based on votes legally cast, although the committee never actually declared it had evidence showing how many crossover votes had been cast nor what percentage of the crossovers went to Graddick. The committee declared Graddick’s actions amounted to “malconduct” and that he had “abused the power of his office” and failed to maintain “separation between his campaign efforts and the official acts of his office.” The subcommittee, as had the federal court, accepted statistical evidence showing that almost all crossovers voted for Graddick, more than enough to change the outcome of the election.

Graddick then went into federal court himself but was rejected in an opinion even more sharply worded than the first. The judges said the attorney general showed “a complete misunderstanding of the controlling legal principles of the case.”

In true Wallace style, Graddick bitterly attacked the federal judges, comparing them to a piano player “on the first floor of a house of ill repute” oblivious to actions on the second floor. He called himself the “people’s candidate” and charged that the election had been stolen by the Democratic subcommittee, a “gang of five.”

Over Labor Day, Graddick traveled about the state raising funds for a November write-in campaign. Political observers in Alabama say a successful write-in campaign would be almost impossible due to the complexity of the procedures and the effort required of voters, and would help Baxley by taking votes from his Republican opponent.

The Republican party leadership, while nervous about a Graddick write-in, is jubilant over the Democratic in-fighting. The two-party system has been born in Alabama, optimists among them have declared, with the expectation that many nominal Democrats are now so disgusted that they will make the jump to the GOP. The Republican candidate, Guy Hunt, a quiet former probate judge who could not buy an audience two months ago and is still often unrecognized as he works the shopping mall crowds, is a classic case of the man in the right place at the right time. Whether he has staying power depends on the depth of the anti-Baxley and anti-Democratic Party sentiment, and on Graddick, who is demagoguing around the state with the energy–if not the style–of a young George Wallace. If Graddick drops the write-in campaign and Hunt proves to be the dull but clean figure he seems, the Republicans’ odds of taking the statehouse will improve from none to possible.

But November is a long time off, and Baxley can still win. He is a skillful campaigner and a strong debater, and he has a large following of loyal Democrats who will work hard for him and the party. His immediate challenge is convincing the uncommitted that it was Graddick— not a five-man Democratic conspiracy— who stole their votes through his willful and greedy violation of the Voting Rights Act.

Excerpts from booklet published during Alabama Democratic Primary campaign by forces opposed to Lt. Gov. Bill Baxley and linked to Atty. Gen. Charles Graddick. The comic book-style piece is customized on the back cover (below) to attack Baxley, but is otherwise a generic attack on the National Education Association. NEA officials say the same booklet has been used in other states by right-wing organizations.

Randall Williams is the managing editor of Southern Changes and a partner in the Black Belt Communications Group of Montgomery, Alabama.

CDC Study Reveals–South’s Hysterectomy Rate Highest

By AET

Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 13-14

Nearly five million American women underwent hysterectomies in the last decade, making this procedure one of the most frequently performed operations for women of reproductive age and an important public health concern. Since 1970, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta have provided epidemiologic surveillance of hysterectomies performed on women from fifteen to forty-four years of age. This summer the CDC released a report which examined, among other factors, the influence of race and geographic section of the US on hysterectomy rates for 1981-1982, and which updated the analysis of hysterectomy rates for 1970-1980. The results of the survey contain striking findings for women of reproductive age in the Southern states.

The data that was used for this surveillance effort was gathered from 1970 to 1982 as part of the ongoing National Hospital Discharge Survey. This survey samples hospitals throughout the US in order to estimate the number of patients, their diagnoses and the surgical procedures they undergo. The sample of hospitals is designed to reflect an overall distribution of short-stay hospitals in the United States. In most cases women will have a hysterectomy done in a short-stay hospital. The CDC survey is a sample, not the actual number of hysterectomies done in the US, and as such may contain unknown biases.

A 1983 analysis showed that the nationwide hysterectomy rate declined from 1975 to 1980 among women of reproductive age. The current study however, indicates that the noted decline may have begun to plateau, although rates in 1982 were the lowest since 1970. The average age at time of hysterectomy for women in the fifteen to forty-four age group was similar in all geographic areas, ranging from 34.2 years in the South to 36.6 years in the Northeast.

As in previous years, major differences in hysterectomy rates by section of the country have persisted (see Figure 1). The South continues to show the highest rates. The most striking differences exist between the South and the Northeast. The hysterectomy rate for women of reproductive age in the South was two and a half times that for women in the Northeast.

During 1979-1980, differences in hysterectomy rates between blacks and whites declined noticeably. In 1981, however, the rates of blacks and whites diverged, only to converge again in 1982. In 1982 (the most recent year for which data is available), for the first time since surveillance began in 1970, blacks had a lower hysterectomy rate than whites.

Variations in hysterectomy rates by section of the country have persisted since 1970. Lacking more than the limited data from the sample study, CDC researchers are quite cautious about speculating on the regional differences. “As epidemiologists in the federal government,” comments Dr. Kathleen Irwin, researcher on the CDC study, “we feel that our job is to present the numbers and let other people speculate on them.”

The CDC study suggests only that “patient-related factors may include regional differences in the incidence of gynecologic conditions and in general attitudes toward surgery or sterilization during the reproductive years. Physician-related factors may include regional differences in trends in training and practice.”

“If there were true differences in the South compared to other regions,” asks Dr. Irwin, “what could these be? There could be a whole range of differences. Our study looked at only one factor at a time: race, region, age group for the United States. We didn’t look at race and region at the same time. It could be an age-related phenomenon: that the age distribution in the South is different than in other parts of the country among women who are likely to get hysterectomies. It may be that there is a higher prevalence in the South of certain diseases of the uterus which are treated with hysterectomies. It could be that physicians in the South are more liable to treat a given condition with a hysterectomy.

“Because of the nature of our analysis,” says Dr. Irwin, “we’re not in a position to say which one of those things or which combination it could be.”

“It’s disturbing to me,” commented clinic administrator Lynn Thogersen, of the Atlanta Feminist Women’s Health Center, “as a women’s health care

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provider, and as a woman, to see the rate of hysterectomies for women in general being so high, and especially to see the difference for women in the South when compared with other areas of the country. Certainly we wonder if all these hysterectomies were necessary.

“One thing that might have a bearing on the numbers in the South,” continues Thogersen, “is the fact that in all of the Southern states, unlike states such as New York and California, Medicaid no longer pays for abortions, and hasn’t since about 1981. We wonder if in fact women are choosing hysterectomy as a way of controlling their fertility because other options aren’t available to them.

“And I wonder if one reason that rates of hysterectomies have dropped in other sections of the country is due to the availability of tubal ligations as a method of sterilization. Sterilization, including both male and female, is now the most used method of contraception in the United States, but it’s mostly women who are choosing sterilization.

“Statistics like these,” concludes Thogersen, “make you want to ask many other questions for which we have no answers. What, for instance, is the difference in hysterectomy rates between black and white women in the South? Between poor and middle-class women? What, if any, significance can be read in this study about the traditional timidity and acceptance of professional authority shown by women in the South toward the largely white male ranks of physicians? Simply put, we need to know much more about what lies behind these disturbing rates.”

The CDC study, “Hysterectomy Among Women of Reproductive Age, Unites States, Update for 1981- 1982,” was published in the CDC Surveillance Summary, Vol. 35, No. ISS (June 1986). The study was conducted by Kathleen L Irwin, M.D. and Herbert B. Peterson, M.D. (both of the Epidemiologic Studies Branch) and Joyce M. Hughes and Sara W. Gill (of the Research and Statistics Branch), Division of Reproductive Health, Center for Health Promotion and Education.

Empty Rituals in the War on Drugs

By Hal Crowther

Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 14-15

Two months dead and Len Bias is still making headlines. When cocaine claims a victim who’s young and famous and a gifted athlete, it has to be someone else’s fault. Find the dealer–some other black kid on a Washington street corner who might have made twenty sales that same night, and who still may not know that he had the honor of selling the coke that killed one of the most amazing atheletes I’ve ever seen. Shake down all his friends, bring charges agains the kid who rolled up the dollar bill, or the one who owned the little spoon that carried the fatal spoonful. Fire his coach, Lefty Driesell, whose greatest fault is that he always tries to protect his players when he’d be better off protecting himself. Turn over the whole Maryland athletic department, test a lot of urine, find some players who can read.

That’s the way we do it here. They tried to pin first degree murder on the poor woman who assisted in the messy departure of John Belushi, a notorious glutton for drugs of any description. Because he was a celebrity, I suppose, and her prosecution satisfied some kind of national hunger for a scapegoat. Everyone who knew Belushi knows that it would have taken a women’s volleyball team to keep him away from the drug, once it was in the same room with him.

It’s a waste of police work, an empty ritual like most of the speeches that are mumbled over the dead. Bias and Don Rogers, like Belushi and all the uncelebrated cadavers before them, took the drugs because they wanted it, because they thought they needed it. Putting the blame on their suppliers is just as dishonest as putting the heat on Mexico, and on Panama and Columbia. It’s the United States that’s the world’s great cocaine consumer of the world, a market so rich that the economies of several countries depend on our insatiable habit. We are the John Belushi of nations. We should have Belushi and John Delorean on our stamps and coins.

While we threaten Mexico for its modest exports, our domestic industry is in a growth spiral so colossal that thugs in Miami will be purchasing Fortune 500 companies before the year 2000. With cash. In the last two years agents have seized fifty major cocaine laboratories in this country, some with a weekly capacity of one thousand pounds of cocaine. The largest, in upstate New York, was discovered by accident when a neighboring building caught fire. The cocaine hotline in a New Jersey hospital gets fourteen hundred calls every day. The Coast Guard in North Carolina admits that it’s losing the battle against cocaine smugglers. Monster profits have inspired unprecedented daring and ingenuity among smugglers. Agents have found packets of cocaine under the tongues of fish. A small boat can earn its owner $25,000 on one major smuggling mission; a drop site for a major shipment is worth $100,000.

In New York City, dealing cocaine has become almost legal–only one of three people arrested on felony drug charges is ever indicted, far less jailed–simply because there are so many cases that the courts can’t begin to deal with them. New York’s elite narcotics task force, Operation Pressure Point, has made eighteen thousand arrests since 1984, fifty-eight hundred of them felony arrests. Fewer than twelve hundred cases have resulted in indictments, and only 476 dealers were sentenced to as much as a year in jail. Judges, with rapes and murders backed up (last year they got through half of one percent of their cases), tend to snarl at presecutors who waste their time with cocaine.

“A lot of judges feel narcotics cases are second-rate cases,” complains the police inspector who runs Pressure Point. “They don’t care for low-level cocaine sales. At the plea-bargaining stages, they ask “Why did you bring me this garbage?”

Like bootleg liquor during prohibition, cocaine in America is distributed on such a scale that law enforcement is becoming a joke. It takes a lot of nerve to blame Mexico. If you were a Latin American, with an attitude toward the United States that might range

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anywhere from loathing to ambivalence, could you resist the opportunity? They’ll never stop us with money or rifles, but they can help us burn ourselves up from the inside out. As much as anything else, I think they’re motivated by morbid curiosity about our capacity for this terrible stuff. How deep is the American nostril? And it’s not as if the United States has ever neglected a foreign market on moral consideration. When our scientists decided that cigarettes were hopelessly poisonous, our tobacco companies raced to exploit the foreign markets before word got around. The baby formula scandal, an American company’s attempt to eliminate breastfeeding in the Third World, is still one of the classic stories of greed and cynicism. In most years, the United States leads the world in the sale of guns and armaments, which are somewhat more controversial than cocaine. In countries where we have special interests, we give the guns away.

Any Latin who sells drugs to Americans can call himself a patriot. Cocaine is the “now” profession in the Western Hemisphere, for any youngster with the courage to pursue it. Maybe it’s only timidity that keeps me from emulating John Delorean myself. To get rich, and at the same time to contribute to the self-destruction of affluent fools? It would be hard to imagine a more satisfying career. Show me the philosophy that makes it more objectionable than selling chocolate to the obese, or selling Wild Irish Rose to wings.

It’s time Americans quit pointing fingers and owned up to their habit, as individuals and as a society. Alcoholics don’t cure themselves by blowing up distilleries and bashing bartenders. Why should we pay the police to protect us from ourselves? When a kid dies on cocaine, the correct question isn’t “Where did he get it?”, it’s “Why did he want it?”

Any progess has to start there. Cocaine has been around a long time. When I tried to trace the authorship of the cocaine song that Mike Cross sings (“Cocaine…runnin’ round my brain…”) the trail led way back beyond Leadbelly and the Rev. Gary Davis, into dim unrecorded music history. The song is in the public domain. Why is this disreputable old standby the glamor drug of the Age of Reagan? Overpriced, addictive, lethal, brief in its promise and long in its revenge.

It has something to do with risk, with gambling. A rational human being, faced with the uncertainty of existence, will try to improve the odds. Americans, with an increasing level of obsession, will try to beat the odds. Supporters of North Carolina’s Shearon Harris nuclear plant wrote an incredible number of letters comparing the odds against a nuclear accident to the odds against death by snakebite, or yellow fever. You can’t convince me that those letters weren’t written by morons, but I can see that they were distinctly American morons. When the novelist A. G. Mojtabai visited Amarillo, Texas, which sits on top of all the nuclear weapons assembled in the United States, she found the locals more than happy with their odds. More alarmingly, she found that the city was home to most of the fundamentalist “Rapture” sects, which believe that Armageddon is O.K. because the Lord is going to snatch them up just before the bombs go off. Figure the odds those guys are playing.

When reporters asked a bunch of street kids if the death of Len Bias had changed their attitude toward cocaine, most of them said “No.” It was as if the death lottery was over, Bias had lost, and their odds were just as good, if not better, for the next one. “I think of Len Bias as a person who just had bad luck,” said one kid in Brooklyn.

The spiritual capital of the United States is Las Vegas, and Las Vegas is the spiritual armpit of the world. Gambling is a wide streak in the national character that’s being exploited as it was never exploited before. The gambler’s fatalism and machismo make a potent speedball. It’s the age of the quick fix, elation without foundation, a bloated stock market where crazy gamblers thrive, windfall profits at the expense of everybody’s future. Cocaine is its drug. Sure things and safe drugs are for old maids. Fly now, pay later. And don’t be afraid. The odds may be narrowing, but the odds are still on your side.

Hal Crowther writes for the Spectator of Raleigh, N.C., from which this article is adapted.

Uneasy Victories in the Supreme Court

By Laughlin Mcdonald

Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 15-18

During the 1985-1986 term, the Supreme Court decided eight major race discrimination cases. Four involved employment discrimination and affirmative action, three involved jury selection and the seventh voting rights. In all eight, the basic positions (if not the specific remedies) advocated by minorities prevailed, while the restrictive interpretations of civil rights law urged by the Reagan Department of Justice were decisively rejected.

In the first of the employment cases, Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, the Court held that a school board could not lay off non-minority teachers with more seniority than minority teachers who were retained as part of an affirmative action plan. The Court reasoned that “layoffs impose the entire burden of achieving racial equality on particular individuals, often resulting in serious disruption of their lives. The burden is too intrusive.” Although minority teachers were denied a measure of protection in Wygant, the decision as a whole was a victory for affirmative action.

First, the Court indicated that race-conscious affirmative action plans, including the use of hiring goals, are constitutional as part of the nation’s commitment to eradicating racial discrimination. Second, the Court rejected the Department of Justice’s suggestion that affirmative action must be limited to

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specific, identifiable victims of past discrimination. Since it is often impossible to prove which particular minority would have been hired in the absence of discrimination, the adoption of government’s position would have meant the end of meaningful affirmative action. Third, an employer can justify an affirmative action plan by showing a reasonable basis for concluding such a remedy is appropriate; an employer need not have, in fact, discriminated in the past.

In Sheetmetal Workers v. EEOC, the Court, building upon Wygant, held that an affirmative action plan to increase minority membership in a union could be required in cases of “persistent or egregious discrimination” or where necessary “to dissipate the lingering effects of pervasive discrimination.” In the third employment discrimination case, Firefighters v. City of Cleveland, the Court upheld a voluntary affirmative action plan to hire minority firefighters even though it may have provided broader relief than a district judge could have ordered after a trial.

Finally, in Bazemore v. Friday, the Court ruled that the North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service had a duty to eradicate salary disparities between white and black workers, even though the disparities had their origin prior to the time federal anti-discrimination laws were made applicable to public employers.

The Court’s employment discrimination cases are the most significant setback to date for the Reagan Administration’s five and-a-half year crusade to eradicate hiring goals and restrict relief to the few identifiable victims of discrimination. In rejecting the Solicitor General’s arguments, the Court frequently used strong language accusing the government of “misconceiving” controlling legal principles and “twisting” the meaning of applicable statutes. The rulings of the Court suggest that the Department of Justice under its present leadership has lost much of its institutional credibility, and that its arguments were viewed as part of a rightwing political campaign rather than as based upon the rule of law.

The Supreme Court also significantly strengthened the protection of minorities in jury selection during the last term. In Batson v. Kentucky, it held for the first time that a prosecutor’s use of peremptory challenges to strike black jurors in a particular case violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The law prior to Batson had been established, ironically enough, in a case decided during the years that Earl Warren was Chief Justice, Swain v. Alabama. Swain held that a prosecutor’s use of peremptory challenges was immune from judicial review, except were blacks were removed in “case after case, whatever the circumstances, whatever the crime and whoever the defendant or the victim may be.”

The Swain standard, which was all but impossible to meet, had been increasingly criticized by legal commentators, while a number of lower courts had circumvented the decision by ruling that the use of challenges by a prosecutor to exclude blacks in individual cases violated the Sixth Amendent’s guarantee of a fair and impartial trial or could be prohibited by a court in the exercise of its general supervisory powers. Despite the enlightened trend of dissatisfaction with Swain, the Solicitor General strenuously, and predictably, argued that a defendant could not establish a constitutional violation by showing “only” that blacks were systematically struck from the jury. The argument failed to persuade the Court.

In a second case, Turner v. Murray, the Court held that a capital defendant accused of an interracial crime had a constitutional right to have prospective jurors questioned about their possible racial bias. In the final jury selection case, Vasquez v. Hillery, the Court reaffirmed existing law that the exclusion of blacks from a grand jury was not harmless error, but required a new trial no matter how old the original conviction was.

In the last of the racial discrimination cases, Thornburg v. Gingles, the Court construed for the first time Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Congress amended Section 2 in 1982 to provide that voting practices are unlawful if they “result” in discrimination. Prior to 1982, an election law could only be invalidated if minority plaintiffs showed that it was adopted or was being maintained with a discriminatory purpose. The Court not only affirmed the constitutionality of Section 2, but significantly simplified the test for determining if an election plan using at-large voting was unlawful.

According to the Court, an apportionment plan violates Section 2 by causing impermissible vote dilution if the plan permits a bloc-voting white majority usually to defeat the candidates supported by a politically and geographically cohesive minority. Factors such as a lingering history of discrimination, racial campaign appeals, a depressed minority socioeconomic status, etc., which Congress had indicated in the legislative history were relevant to a vote dilution claim, were held by the Court to be supportive of, but not essential to, a Section 2 violation.

The new test adopted by the Court to measure vote dilution based on race is analogous to the one-person one-vote formulation that measures vote dilution based on population inequality. Both focus on racial patterns in election returns and in census data. Both avoid excesive investigation into historical and social factors and contain readily ascertainable standards for the lower courts to apply.

Thornburg also held that plaintiffs were not required to show that white voters were voting purposefully to exclude minorities from office to establish bloc voting, and that the election of a token or minimal number of blacks could not be used to defend an appointment plan which worked usually to dilute the minority vote. The latter ruling was a specific rejection of the Solictor General’s argument in the case that Section 2 protected only token–not equal–minority political participation.

Despite the fact that the Court as a whole reiterated its commitment to racial equality this term, there was a significant degree of division among the individual justices. Seven of the eight discrimination cases were ideologically polarized, i.e., Brennan and Marshall (the left wing of the court) voted together and took a different position from that of Burger and Rehnquist (the right wing of the court) on one or more major issues. (See Table I)

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Table I: IDEOLOGICAL POLARIZATION IN RACE DISCRIMINATION CASES

JUSTICE	BRENNAN/MARSHALL	%	BURGER/REHNQUIST	%
Stevens	7	100	0	0
Blackmun	7	100	0	0
Powell	3	43	4	57
White	3	43	4	57
O’Connor	3	43	4	57

The margin for victory for civil rights resulted from the consistent support of the Brennan/Marshall position by Stevens and Blackmun, and the inability of Burger and Rehnquist to hold the votes of White, Powell, and O’Connor more than about half the time.

The importance of the White/Powell/O’Connor bloc can be seen from the fact that these three justices were more frequently in the majority than any other members of the Court. As Table II shows, O’Connor voted with the majority 89 percent of the time, and Powell and White 75 percent of the time. Burger and Rehnquist voted most frequently in the minority. (See Table II)

Table II: JUSTICES MOST FREQUENTLY IN MAJORITY OR MINORITY*

JUSTICE	MAJORITY	%	MINORITY	%
Brennan	7	70	3	30
Marshall	7	64	4	36
Stevens	7	70	3	30
Blackmun	7	70	3	30
Powell	6	75	2	25
White	6	75	2	25
O’Connor	8	89	1	11
Burger	4	50	4	50
Rehnquist	3	37	5	63
*This table treats opinions in which a justice concurred in part and dissented in part as both a majority and a minority opinio

Brennan, the senior exponent of the Court’s liberal philosophy, was suprisingly influential on the term’s discrimination cases. He wrote four of the eight majority opinions and was more frequently aligned with the other justices than any other member of the Court. As Table III shows, Brennan, Marshall, Blackmun, Stevens and Powell voted together at least half of the time. None of the other justices approached that level of agreement. (See Table III)

Table III: VOTING ALIGNMENT IN RACE DISCRIMINATION CASES 1985-1986 TERM*

JUSTICE	BRENNAN	MARSHALL	STEVENS	BLACKMUN	POWELL	WHITE	O’CONNOR	BURGER
Marshall	88%
Stevens	63%	25%
Blackmun	50%	25%	13%
Powell	50%	13%	13%	13%
White	38%	13%	13%	13%	25%
O’Connor	38%	0%	0%	0%	38%	25%
Burger	13%	0%	0%	0%	25%	13%	13%
Rehnquist	13%	0%	0%	0%	38%	13%	13%	38%
*To determine the frequency of agreement, the number of times two members of the Court voted together was divided by the eight race discrimination cases decided by the Court in which both justices participated. Justices were considered voting together only if they joined the same opinion, concurrence or dissent. Although justices occasionally voted together more than once in a given case, their alignment under such circumstances was given a value of 1.

The term’s racial discrimination cases do not, of course, provide a full picture of the Court’s general treatment of civil and constitutional claims. They also fail to show the Court’s gross disregard for the rights of politically more vulnerable minorities, such as gays and Orthodox Jews. In Bowers v. Hardwick, for example, the Court ruled that the Constitution affords no protection from criminal prosecution to gays who participate in homosexual acts in the privacy of their homes. In another case, Goldman v. Weinberger the Court held that the military could forbid an Orthodox Jew from wearing a yarmulke, despite his sincere

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religious beliefs and the lack of any service-related need.

A court that turns its back on the deeply held beliefs of a religous minority and leaves the regulation of intimate relationships to the whim of a hostile majority, may in the long run provide scant protection for the rights of racial minorities. President Reagan has recently nominated the most ideologically inflexible member of the Court, Justice Rehnquist, to be Chief Justice. He has also nominated Antonin Scalia, another rigid conservative, to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of current Chief Justice Burger. More Reagan appointments would surely tilt the Court significantly to the right, jeopardizing the continued constitutional protection of the Nation’s racial minorities.

Laughlin McDonald is director of the Southern Regional Office of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation.

The Shame of Contra Aid

By W.W. Finlator

Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 18-19

The Old Testament prophet called down woe upon those who said that darkness was light and light was darkness. We today fall within the shadow of that prophetic judgment since, led by our super-patriotic President, we have come to call what is truly American, un-American, and what is truly un-American, American. Consider the contras and Nicaragua, for there, our President would have us believe, the former Somoza death squads can be likened to George Washington’s freedom fighters at Valley Forge.

To achieve such self-deception requires a leadership skilled in the art of misconstruing the American dream. From the Monroe Doctrine, to the Good Neighbor policy of Franklin Roosevelt, to the present crisis, we have been assured that our relationship with Central and South American nations has been one of justice, freedom, and democracy. Actually, we have treated these countries as US colonies. We have set up and maintained repressive, despotic, governments. We have frustrated and defeated movements by the people of these countries to achieve justice and freedom for themselves. Nowhere has America, while believing its motives pure and unmixed, been so cynically and systematically un-American than in its dealings with these nations. Nicaragua is now exposing the sham and shame to the world.

Millions of Americans are waking up to these dark chapters to our history and we are angry at what our militaristic President is doing to the people of Nicaragua, angry that a spineless Congress supports him and, in the South, particularly angry that our timid representatives fall such easy prey to his jingoistic rhetoric. It is for us to hold these Southern politicians to strictest account, as one day all of us surely will be held in account for what we are doing to that suffering nation.

But, it is what we are doing to ourselves in the name of Americanism that concerns me for the moment. In supporting the contras and keeping alive the war and destruction in Nicaragua we are violating the heart and soul of our nation, in several ways.

First, we are in violation of the spirit and letter of our Declaration of Independence when we try to crush the yearning and striving of Nicaraguans for justice and

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freedom. It is as though the loyalists, following the American Revolution, and after leaving or being driven out of colonies, had regrouped on the Canadian border and with reenforcements from a hostile European nation, resumed the conflict as “freedom fighters.”

Secondly, we are in violation of the spirit and letter of our Constitution and its Bill of Rights. Rather than attempt to understand and support the strivings of Nicaraguans who wish to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty” to themselves and their families,” we support a war of terrorism while hypocritically decrying a communist take-over and international terrorism. When you think of the kidnappings, tortures, burnings, maimings, pillage and murder, you have to spell it terrorism, pure and simple, underwritten by the US Government. This is not only deceitful and hypocritical, it is also plain un-American.

Thirdly, we are in violation of the spirit and letter of the Charter of the United Nations. The World Court, which we helped to set up and have appealed to in the past, has found our involvement in Nicaragua in violation to the UN Charter. We have become, as it were, an international outlaw to our own structure for justice and peace. The Oval Office seems to exult in this outlaw posture.

The final violation is theological. Millions of our citizens insist that America is a “Christian” nation. That such a designation contravenes the state-church separation principle is an argument I should like to push on another occasion. But, assuming, for the moment, that we are a “Christian nation” we have to define what is “Christian” and then we must decide who does the defining. This could lead to endless mischief and controversy. Perhaps most Christians would agree on the centrality of John 3:16 where we are told that God so loved the world that he sent his Son into the world to save it. From this we deduce that Jesus in His incarnation identified himself with all people, and apparently with a special option for the poor and lowly. The classic passage for this is the one in which Jesus tells us that he was hungry and we fed him, he was thirsty and we gave him drink, naked and we clothed him, sick and we visited him, imprisoned and we came to him, and then he added that inasmuch as we did these things for others, even the least, we did them also to him.

It takes no effort of imagination to see that these are literally the same basic needs of the vast majority of the people of Nicaragua, and indeed of all nations south of our border and the third world. But they are needs that neither their government, nor their church has met. When at long last the people have undertaken for themselves to achieve a just and peaeful and compassionate society, “Christian” America is prepared to use every means to prevent them. We are, I say, in violation of our religious faith!

For these reasons a moral outrage in America is in order. And this is why we cry shame, shame upon so many of our Southern members of Congress and why we must hold them to strict account.

Rev. W. W. Finlator is the retired pastor of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, N. C.

Steve Earle’s Hope on the Highway

By Jay Orr

Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 19-21

Steve Earle has caused a stir in the Nashville music industry with the release of his debut album, Guitar Town, on MCA records. In February 1985, I first saw Earle and his rock ‘n’ roll band, the Dukes, in the basement of a high-rise residence hall at Vanderbilt University. On that Friday night he played to a disappointing turnout. Despite the small draw-fifty or seventy-five at most – Earle appeared shy and retreating, but engaging all the same. His four single releases on the Epic label had not achieved any commercial success, and Earle’s performance had a devil-may-care quality. Now he has signed with the Nashville (read “country”) office of another major label, and Guitar Town, with its fetching combination of rock rhythms, socially-conscious themes, and pedal steel and twangin’ guitars, has won the attentive ear of this town and the nation.

In his first single from Guitar Town, “Hillbilly Highway,” Earle sings in the voice of a character whose lineage has always answered the call of opportunity. Grandfather left home and the mines for a job in Detroit; as a young man, father also goes away-first to college and then to a job in Houston; and the narrator quits school to learn guitar and become a musician.

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Earle himself left school after the eighth grade for the same reasons. From his home near San Antonio, Earle traveled around Texas and Mexico, associating with and learning from older songwriters like Townes Van Zant (for whom his son is named), Richard Dobson, Rodney Crowell, and Guy Clark. He put in a stint as a bassist in Clark’s band.

Earle moved to Nashville in 1974, where he worked at the usual odd jobs (tennis court builder, billboard hanger, carpenter) while he nurtured his musical ability in bars, honky tonks, and coffee houses. He also went through three marriages in pursuit of his elusive dream to become a successful songwriter.

In 1982 a small independent Nashville label, LSI, issued Earle’s premier recording, a four-song disc entitled Pink and Black. He signed with Epic in 1983, and that label released four respectable, rockabilly-style singles over the next two years.

During the lean years Earle did score as a songwriter. His songs were recorded by Carl Perkins and Waylon Jennings, and by younger artists like Vince Gill and Steve Wariner. Johnny Lee had a top ten hit with “When You Fall in Love,” a song from the early LSI ep, with help from vocalist Kim Wilson of Austin’s Fabulous Thunderbirds.

Guitar Town appears when Nashville record offices are scrambling to re-establish an identity that will appeal both to traditional country audiences and to the record-buying youth market. “Urban Cowboy” chic has faded, and country music sales figures show a corresponding decline relative to the years of abnormal prosperity. Country label executives have gone in search of artists like Gill, Wariner, Marty Stewart, Dwight Yoakum (with whom Earle is frequently compared), Randy Travis, Sweethearts of the Rodeo, T. Graham Brown, Rodney Crowell, and Rosanne Cash, in hopes that the more progressive images of those artists will help shed the rural, provincial stereotype associated with country music. Of this crop of new artists only Earle has made an aggressive charge at the problems confronting blue-collar youth in rural communities.

Some of Earle’s compositions have a political and

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social perspective that parallels the recent work of rock musicians Bruce Springsteen and John Cougar Mellencamp. This might surprise some, coming as it does from a Nashville artist who, in his MCA biography, says of his music: “It’s country ’cause I talk like this. And it’s country because I write lyrics, and I tell stories, and I record in Nashville.” Political statements by country artists and on Nashville recordings have often distinguished themselves by their conservative, reactionary attitudes rather than by any progressive urges. Songs like Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee,” “The Fighting Side of Me,” and “Are the Good Times Really Over,” and, more recently, Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U. S. A.,” and Kenny Rogers’s “The Pride is Back,” have extolled the patriotic status quo and made country artists popular visitors to the White House during the Johnson, Carter, Nixon, and Reagan administrations.

Earle maintains a different music tradition, as common as the penchant for jingoistic themes but seldom acknowledged by those who would dismiss all country music as right-wing hayseed warblings. Like recent releases by Hank Williams Jr. (“This ain’t Dallas”), Alabama (~40 Hour Week”), and Dwight Yoakum (“Miner’s Prayer”), Earle champions frustrated working men and women, and disillusioned young people in anthemic couplets like the one in “Good Ol’ Boy (Gettin’ Tough)”: Gettin’ tough /Just My Luck/I was born in the land of plenty now there ain’t enough/Get/in’ cold/I’ve been told/Nowadays it just don’t pay to be a good ol’ boy.

In “Someday,” the interstate highway hides a small town from motorists bound for Memphis, but it also promises a way out for the narrator who frets over the narrative possibilities:

There ain’t a lot that you can do in this town/ You drive down to the lake and then you turn back around/ You go to school and you learn to read and write/ So you can walk into the county bank and sign away your life.

Earle also writes of the personal reverberations of life in a changing and uncertain time. “Goodbye’s All We Got Left,” “My Old Friend the Blues,” “Think It Over,” and “Down the Road,” (Earle’s closing song in live performances) touch emotional places left tender by daily anxieties. “Little Rock ‘n’ Roller” will affect all who have had to communicate over miles with a little loved one.

In an interview with Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times, Earle offered an assessment of the role he hopes his songs can fill:

“In the end, you either cheer people up [with your songs] or help them exorcise some problems they have–and people need a bit of both right now. The mood of the country as a whole is that things aren’t as they are being advertised. Lots of people are going hungry. Even more have had to downscale their expectations. They are confused. They remember everything they heard about this country in school and they wonder what happened to it.”

With the help of a strong band, bright production, and appealing melodies, Earle’s powerful lyrical offerings do cheer and exorcise at once.

Guitar Town has won acclaim from pop music’s critical heavyweights, and Earle has toured nationally with another group of critics’ darlings, the Replacements, a hard-edged rock band from Minneapolis. In his interview with Hilburn, Earle promised that his next album, “will lean more toward social observation and commentary than [Guitar Town].” Good news for those of us who hope Nashville and country musicians can continue to produce music with regional, cultural, and social importance.

Jay Orr works at the library of the Country Music Foundation in Nashville.

Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter

Reviewed by Peter H. Wood

Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 21-24

Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter by Theodore Rosengarten. With the Journal of Thomas B. Chaplin (1822-1890). New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986. $22.95. Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes by the Georgia Writer’s Project. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1940; reissued with an introduction by Charles Joyner, 1986. $26.00 (paperback $9.95).

“All God’s dangers ain’t a white man.” This memorable reflection on the nature of Southern history came from a black sharecropper, recalling the effect of the boll weevil on his cotton crop. The listener was Theodore Rosengarten, a Brooklyn-born student of “American Civilization,” doing research in the late ’60s on the history of Southern tenant farmers. His book, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, received the National Book Award in 1974 and has become regarded as a classic in the realm of oral history. Combining the best of the new social history with the South’s rich narrative tradition, the volume won an immediate place on every shelf containing the important modern works

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about the region.

Instead of using his first book for ante at the poker tables of academia, Rosengarten settled near a small fishing town on the South Carolina coast where he now lives with his wife and sons. There he has continued to fish the waters of Southern history with the same patience and satisfaction that he brings to shrimping and crabbing in the tidal creeks of the Lowcountry. His most exciting historical catch occured in 1979, when archivist David Moltke-Hansen at the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston showed him the lengthy manuscript journal of Thomas B. Chaplin, a member of the antebellum elite and the owner of Tombee Plantation on St. Helena Island near Beaufort. After much careful work, Rosengarten completed a three-hundred-page portrait of Chaplin, and with the assistance of Susan W. Walker he edited and annotated the journal itself. The historian’s judicious appraisal and the fascinating primary source are both included in Tombee, along with maps, genealogical charts, and copious notes.

It is hard, literally, to know where to begin in this massive book, for the biographical treatment and the detailed journal go hand in hand. The latter begins in 1845 when Chaplin, age twenty-two, already controlled the lives of more than sixty enslaved Southerners, who grew cotton for him on a 376-acre plantation facing Parris and Hilton Head Islands. His wife Mary, also twenty-two, had already borne four children and a fifth was on the way. The journal ends in 1858, seven years after Mary’s death and six years after Chaplin’s marriage to her half-sister, Sophy. By then, the diarist was approaching the end of his volume-and the end of an era. But for twenty years after the Civil War Chaplin occasionally looked back over his personal record and added revealing afterthoughts and comments. At the beginning of 1886, four years before his death, he inserted a three-page epilogue and closed out his personal ledger for good. Dependent and morose, broken both physically and economically, Chaplin was living with Sophy on the farm of a relative, where he could “only work a garden try to raise poultry.” He and his wife, Chaplin concluded, “are both feeling the effects of age can’t stand much more thumping tumbling about, I pray the remainder may be passed in peace and ease. So this ends.”

Thomas Chaplin, like Nate Shaw, had a distinctive personality and a complicated life. Both men lived close to the soil of the Deep South, and each in his way endured a good deal of thumping and tumbling about. Their worlds were determined by who owned the land and what crops it could yield. They each witnessed, and were shaped by, the region’s travails over race, and they faced many of God’s other dangers as well. Both engaged in continuous and judicious observation of their own place in society. Moreover, both had the good fortune of ending up in the fine mesh of Rosengarten’s casting net, so that their unique character traits and archetypal qualities could be observed by others. But here the similarities end. For Shaw, though a generation younger, told a story that sounded strange and novel-if relevant and disconcerting-to most modern ears. Chaplin’s tale, on the other hand, gains interest precisely because we inevitably hold it up beside well-worn images of antebellum cotton planters.

Naturally, he fits none of these contradictory stereotypes we have inherited. Far from an opulent patriarch, he remained insecure about his economic holdings and his personal status throughout his life–though not so insecure as to become a Simon Legree. “My heart chills at the idea, and my blood boils,” he wrote in his journal in 1849 after seeing how a neighboring planter had whipped a crippled slave and then chained him by the neck in an outhouse overnight to choke and freeze to death. The more we get to know Chaplin, the more he seems like a character out of a Chekhov play. And like most Russian landlords before the abolition of serfdom, this member of the South’s rural elite has a very imperfect sense of the forces that are holding him up and tugging him down.

Occasionally, life imitates art so thoroughly that whole passages from the diary read like notes from a fiction writer’s journal. An Ellison or Faulkner would beam to have created a protagonist who has weak vision in one eye due to the burst of a rocket at a Fourth of July celebration! Or consider Chaplin’s entry for May 9, 1846. He was sailing across Broad River with two other white men and four Negro slaves when a sudden squall

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capsized their vessel and left them clinging to the overturned boat. “One poor fellow named Monday could not swim though we got him on the boat twice the third time he went down, never to rise again poor fellow….” The rest eventually managed to right the boat and row to shore. Chaplin lost all his best hunting and riding equipment and a set of gold studs, but he saved his water-soaked pocket watch.

“A broken watch is a small thing next to a life that’s lost,” Rosengarten observes, “but Chaplin did not see it that way….Faced with great losses he clung to small things. Always aware of his class, the things he recalled when he had been stripped of everything were emblems of pleasure and ease.” This applied not only to an overturned boat but to an overturned land title, not only to a brief spring gust but to the five-year storm of war that arrived at St. Helena with the Union gunboats. “Thus, we find him,” Rosengarten concludes, “missing his old oak chair when what had passed out of his hands were his house and land; and fretting over the loss of silver forks and spoons when what had perished was the social order.”

In offering a portrait of the master of Tombee plantation, Rosengarten also provides a picture of the social order of the Sea Islands, or part of it. His narrative and notes trace networks of kinship and debt back and forth across the Lowcountry from Beautort to Charleston to Savannah with a care that should delight any Daughter of the Confederacy. (References to various Chaplins take up more than a page and a half in the index.) At the same time, the author displays a consciousness toward the non-elites that most dedicated plantation watchers still lack. But as Rosengarten himself points out in a chapter on “The Chaplin Family,” blacks outnumbered whites eight to one on St. Helena Island during the antebellum period and by about that much at Tombee.

While it might not be fair to ask Rosengarten to take up the task himself, it is worth remarking that a portrait of the local slave community could now be undertaken with the same attention to detail. One wonders whether the far-too-cautious Lyndhurst Foundation, which supported Rosengarten with Coca-cola bottling money from Chattanooga, would be willing to fund an equally well-crafted study of members of the island’s black majority? Hopefully, the current efforts of the venerable Penn Community Center to bring St. Helena’s black history to life will soon bear fruit, though we must wait to see whether the acclaim for Tombee will be used by funders to further such designs.

While they are making up their minds, they can examine another challenging book that has appeared this summer: Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes. It represents a collaborative effort by the Savannah Unit of the Georgia Writer’s Project, set up by the Works Projects Administration, and it first appeared in 1940. At a time when forgetful and careless bashing of the New Deal is sanctioned from on high, it is a credit to the editors at the University of Georgia Press that they have reissued this volume as part of their handsome and selective “Brown Thrasher” series. It includes an informative introduction by Charles Joyner whose recent book about the Waccamaw Neck region of South Carolina, Down by the Riverside, affords the best available study of a black community in the Lowcountry.

Drums provides an intriguing companion volume to Tombee. It concerns Georgia rather than South Carolina; it focuses on blacks rather than whites; and it uses oral history and an ethnographic approach rather than archival research and biographical techniques to make its points. But it describes a world close to Thomas Chaplin’s own in a hundred ways, and the impressive photographs by Muriel and Malcomb Bell, Jr., help bring the inhabitants of that world to life. Black and white residents of Tombee would have had no trouble recognizing the “Wooden grave markers at Sunbury: or the “Praise House at Sapelo” pictured here. They would have felt thoroughly at home around Lewis McIver’s fishing nets, Katie Brown’s mortar and pestle, Cuffy Wilson’s tote basket, or Julius Bailey’s ox cart-more at home no doubt that some of these people’s far-flung grandchildren might feel today.

The pictures from the original edition have been moved prominently to the front and introduced with a note from the photographers. Though somewhat darker and smaller than they were in the original, these shots (clicked from under a black cloth, with a bulky Kodak camera on a tripod) retain their freshness as strong portraits from a period known for its impressive visual studies of everyday people. “We had seen the Julia Peterkin / Doris Ulmann collaboration, Roll, Jordan, Roll,” the Bells recall. “The soft focus of the Ulmann portraits was not to our liking, [but] Ulmann’s remarkable

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ability to capture an attitude and to reflect her subject’s character we hoped to emulate.” For this edition the Bells have added some interesting new images from their files, such as the picture of a “Goatskin-covered log drum made by James Collier” that provided the cover design for the original book and the sensitive photograph of Cuffy Wilson and his granddaughter. Many of the previous images have been cropped less tightly, and what is lost in the intimacy of a close-up face is gained in the inclusion of background setting. Why some of these images have been reversed in the current edition seems deserving of explanation.

“Our picture-taking expeditions were always led by Mary Granger,” the Bells relate, and it would be useful, perhaps inspiring, to know more about this “confident and cheerful” woman. (Joyner tells us only that she “was a cosmopolitan and well-traveled novelist” with a formidible intellect.”) Granger was the district supervisor of the Savannah Unit of the Georgia Writer’s Project, and as its “unquestioned leader,” the photographers remember, “she told us of her proposed study of African cultural survivals she believed to be extant along the Georgia coast.” In the late ’30s this hypothesis remained unfashionable on most fronts. As Joyner explains, dominant Southern historians like U. B. Phillips were ignorant and disparaging about African cultures, while northern sociologists like Robert E. Park had accepted a “catastrophist interpretation of the black cultural experience”–one that still receives nodding acceptance from many mainstream scholars. The essence of this view had been stated in 1939 by the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier: “Probably never before in history,” Frazier wrote, “has a people been so completely stripped of its social heritage as the Negroes who were brought to America.”

But Granger had different ideas, and she put together a group of advisors who could endorse, or at least tolerate, such research. The work paid off, and though it was dismissed by critics at the time, Drums and Shadows has come to be regarded as a pioneering work, however dated or patronizing some passages may seem. Even the controversial use of phonetic spelling in transcribing interviews now appears useful on balance, as understanding of the roots and logic of the Gullah dialect continues to grow. Meanwhile, Granger’s basic premise about African survivals has proven so true that a new generation of scholars run the risk of dismissing it as boring and old-hat at just the time when increased western knowledge of historical African religions and cultures is opening up new layers of potential research.

Today we find ourselves thinking as much about Africa’s current events as about its past, and one can hardly read these two excellent books without reflecting on political and cultural conditions in South Africa. We glimpse that world through the narrow keyhole provided by the American media, censored at one end by an embattled white minority that would understand perfectly the gag rules of Thomas Chaplin’s South and at the other end by our own inertia, myopia, and ignorance. With righteous officials still telling us which historical comparisons we cannot make, the urge builds to contrast and compare on our own, as shown by Steven Lawson’s excellent essay here in Southern Changes in May. If both these books make good reading when examined alone, and better reading when considered together, they may prove best of all when regarded in a wide comparative context that links them to our present concerns.

Peter H. Wood lives in Hillsborough, N.C., and teaches Early American History at Duke University. He is the author of Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion.