Winning the South

By Ken Johnson

Vol. 11, No. 2, 1989, pp. 1, 3-4

For Democrats, the Solid South is history. This, having been true for the national party for some time now, is becoming the case for Democrats at the state and local level as well. Yet, despite the arguments that are being made with renewed vigor by many Southern white officeholders and party leaders about the need for a change of direction, close examination of the 1988 election results from one thousand racially segregated voting precincts from seventeen major Southern cities suggests that the Democrats can win in 1992.

Democrats can actually win a majority of the Southern states in the next presidential election with only a modest increase in Southern white support if–and it’s a big if–black and Hispanic registration and turnout equals that of whites in 1992.

That surprising conclusion emerges from a recent study by the Southern Regional Council of the 1988 presidential returns and county and statewide data. The evidence suggests that a coalition victory of the Democratic Party in the South may be much closer than many Democrats believe if the region can remove the barriers of race and national origin from the political process. With equal levels of registration and voting and continued strong minority support, Democrats need only a 5 percent increase of white support–little more than their 1988 gains–to win six Southern states, a majority of the region’s votes, and the next Electoral College.

In such a scenario, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas would move to the Democratic column.

In the eleven states of the Old South, black and Hispanic registration and voter turnout have generally been between 10 and 12 percent below white levels in

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recent years. No exact data is available because registration and turnout information is notoriously unreliable in some Southern states and is not broken down by race in others. Moreover, surveys such as the one taken every two years by the Census Bureau probably overstate black registration and voting.

How can such predictions be made in the face of recent arguments by many white Southern Democrats that the party must adapt itself to the conservative nature of white voters if it ever wants to win the presidency again?

The answer is that Democrats in the South actually did better in 1988 in gaining new white voters than they did in turning out black voters. Our study of one thousand Southern voting precincts shows that Democrats increased their white vote by almost 4 percent over 1984, but lost more than 20 percent of black voters.

The analysis shows that Democratic gains in predominantly white precincts were canceled out by a sharp decline in votes since 1984 in the majority black precincts. In fact, in all but eight of 458 precincts with 90 percent or more black voters, Michael Dukakis got fewer black votes in 1988 than Walter Mondale did in 1984.

The point is tricky, so listen carefully.

Data from the SRC study agrees with the exit polls that there was no significant decline in the percentage of blacks voting Democratic from 1984 to 1988. In fact, a precinct-by-precinct analysis shows an amazing sameness in the percentages of Democratic support over the four years. In Little Rock, for instance, the percentage of Democratic votes cast in black precincts was 86.96 percent in 1988, compared to 85.77 percent in 1984. In Birmingham, nineteen majority black precincts showed a level of Democratic support of 96.85 percent in 1988 and 96.17 percent in 1984. See Table 1.

Table 1: Percent of Democratic Voting in Black Precincts in Presidential Elections

City	Percent Democratic	Voting
	1984	1988
Birmingham	96.17	96.85
Huntsville	93.66	92.12
Montgomery	98.10	96.71
Little Rock	85.77	86.96
Miami	95.24	94.35
Atlanta	95.10	94.65
Augusta	97.11	95.99
New Orleans	94.59	95.82
Jackson	95.38	96.80
Charlotte	95.70	95.34
Greensboro	96.29	96.49
Columbia	86.52	97.51
Chattanooga	83.55	83.90
Memphis	96.47	96.40
Houston	96.90	97.19
Norfolk	90.88	89.45
17 City Total	95.10	95.30

Black Registration Fell

What changed? The answer is that fewer blacks registered and fewer blacks went to the polls.

In eleven of seventeen major cities surveyed, black registration has declined since 1984, and in sixteen of seventeen cities, black voter turnout also fell sharply. At the same time, white registration in some Southern cities increased, with a smaller drop–about 5 percent–than blacks in actual voting.

Democratic gains among white urban voters in 1988 in the South were nullified, by and large, by the party’s failure to increase the actual number of black votes. In Houston, for example, an increase of about 5,000 Democratic votes in predominantly white precincts was allowed up by a loss of about 24,000 black votes.

Although the Democrats carried no Southern state, their ticket made actual gains among white voters in Southern cities between 1984 and 1988. In fifteen of the seventeen surveyed cities, the percentage of white votes for Dukakis was higher than the percentage for Mondale. In Miami, the Democratic vote in predominantly white precincts increased from 21.65 percent in 1984 to more than 27 percent in 1988. In New Orleans, the increase was from 19 percent to 25.45 percent. Even in Houston, George Bush’s hometown, the Democrats increased their percentages of white voters from 22 percent in 1984 to 28 percent in 1988, and in all 95 white precincts, Dukakis got a larger percentage than did Mondale. In Greensboro, N.C., all fourteen white precincts enlarged their Democratic support and three of the white precincts were carried by Dukakis.

Suburban Registration Gains

However, countywide data also reveals that registration in predominantly white suburban counties of the South–where Republicans show strength–increased at a much faster rate since 1984 than the rates in urban and rural counties–where Democrats do well. These trends indicate that suburban counties which vote heavily Republican will become the most substantial voting influence in statewide elections in the South in the near future because their registration rates are increasing even faster than their population, in comparison with urban and rural areas.

Steve Suitts, the executive director of the SRC, suggests that “Republicans appear to understand the politics of Southern numbers better nowadays than do Democrats. Not only have the Republicans sponsored more aggressive registration efforts in areas of their voting strength, but they seem to understand the critical importance of minority voting in the South’s future presidential elections.”

South Carolinian Lee Atwater, the new Republican National Chairman, has said that his first priority is to win blacks to the GOP.

“Our analysis suggests that this interest in black votes is probably not the result of a political party’s soul-searching decision to seek a kinder, gentler, and more integrated constituency as much as it is a realistic political strategy to win future presidential elections in the South,” said Suitts.

The SRC analysis finds that if Republicans increase their minority support in the South by 6 percent, Democrats would have to increase their Southern white support by 11 percent–at current levels of minority voter participation–to win most of the Southern states. Obviously, such gains

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by Democrats in the South seem unrealistic.

New Democratic National Chairman Ron Brown understands these issues, because he was chairman of the party’s task force on voting rights and voter participation in 1987. The task force report called for substantial improvements in voter participation among minority groups. However, Brown has been so far a lightning rod for white Southern Democrats who claim that he is a symbol of the reasons why white Democrats are defecting to the GOP.

Democrats must take a hard look at the bushwhacking they got on Super Tuesday. The nation’s only regional primary did not prompt especially high levels of participation by Southern voters. Instead, it allowed “the illusion of a mandate for its candidates, while whites who stayed home on March 8 were far more willing to turn out on November 8,” said Suitts.

In some Southern cities, white voting in the general election was three times larger than on Super Tuesday. In thirteen of seventeen cities the turnout in white precincts in November was more than double the turnout on Super Tuesday. Meanwhile, in only one city did the black turnout increase by 100 percent or more. “Quite clearly,” says Suitts, “Super Tuesday did not coalesce white voters for any candidate in the Democratic Party.”

Black Votes Can’t Be Taken for Granted

It seems just as clear that Democrats cannot take black votes for granted; even if blacks continue to lean toward Democratic policies, the Democratic Party cannot assume an actual increase in support. As in the past, Democrats must address the issues of registration and turnout of their most loyal voters if they are to depend on them, in part, for victory at the polls.

At a time when the Republican Party has made black support a priority, the party of George Bush must realize that it begins that effort with more of a disadvantage than did Ronald Reagan, whose unpopularity among blacks now works against Bush.

The Republican voting strength in the South has been established solidly in suburban areas, and voter registration in the South has accelerated over the past four years. In fact, at current rates of registration growth, the suburban influence in Southern states will only increase.

The Democratic Party’s future in the South in presidential politics hangs on urban and rural areas, on the party’s ability to increase minority political participation to a level equal to that of white voters, and on attracting a small percentage of additional whites.

It is a future which the party has not yet fully recognized despite current Republican efforts to foil such a strategy before it takes root. It is a future that is entirely possible for the Democrats in 1992, though their past performance suggests they will have great difficulty in realizing it.

The complete report, “Winning the South in 1992: A New Analysis of the 1988 Presidential Election,” with all tables, charts and notes, is available for $35 from the Southern Regional Council, 60 Walton St., NW, Atlanta, GA 30303. (404) 522-8764. The report is by SRC staff members Ken Johnson, Steve Suitts, Betty McKibben, and Dorothy Dix.

Ken Johnson is program director of the Southern Regional Council and the co-author of “Winning the South in 1992: A New Analysis of the 1988 Presidential Election.” His article is adapted from that report.

Hightower Chooses a Populist Agenda

By Elaine Davenport

Vol. 11, No. 2, 1989, pp. 4-5

Jim Hightower has a way forward for the Democrat. Party. In order to pursue his strategy, Hightower has decided to run for re-election as Texas Agriculture Commissioner rather than challenging Republican Phil Gramm for a U.S. Senate seat in 1990, as was expected.

“While a run against Gramm might put me in the Senate, and while it would be good fun for me, campaigns are necessarily egocentric, leaving little behind in the way of a cohesive base that could elect not just me but others, ultimately to form a populist majority and produce populist politics,” Hightower wrote in The Nation, February 6, 1989. “And while I might be able to gather as much as $10 million, I would have to spend more time in the living rooms of the wealthy raising money than I could out in the communities raising issues, raising hopes and raising hell.”

Hightower wants to form a party within a party–a populist alliance that begins in Texas and spreads to the rest of the country. He wants nothing less than to “change the way politics is conducted,” starting with the Texas Democratic Party, and let that serve as a national model.

To do so, he proposes to rally progressive, populist forces already in place, expanding the concept that he and his staff have practiced within the Texas Department of Agriculture for the past six years. That has been to work “shoulder to shoulder with local communities to protect the environment and health of people associated with agriculture,” says Hightower. “We are challenging ourselves and the

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state’s farmers to build a diversified, consumer-oriented, sustainable agriculture. We have tapped the aspirations of everyday people, removing barriers to their economic endeavors and freeing their enterprise for the benefit of Texas. With the support of the legislature and the help of other agricultural institutions, we have offered the simple tools of self-help to build food processing facilities, to sell everything from grain sorghum to honey in the international market, to open up the $3 billion dollar-a-year organic foods market to Texas producers, to assure safer pesticide practices, to protect communities from toxic waste contamination–in general, to give people the means to get hold of their own destiny.”

Something akin to the old Farmer-Labor Party with an infusion of modern technology, the new alliance would encompass speakers’ bureaus, small-donor solicitation programs, policy development centers, campaign training, a network of progressive and populist elected officials in all areas, and a candidate recruitment program. Hightower is already talking with the state AFL-CIO, the association of trial lawyers and community organizations throughout the state, and seeking advice from organizations outside Texas such as the Legislative Electoral Action Project in Connecticut and Citizen Action in Chicago.

While running against Phil Gramm in 1990 would have been “more fun than eating ice cream naked,” Hightower has decided to eschew high-dollar, high-profile politics and “put my political capital into the more fundamental task of plowing the ground, scattering the seeds and nurturing the growth of a broad-based, grass-roots populist politics out of which a progressive government can arise.”

The question, says Hightower, is not whether the Democratic Party should go to the left or to the right, but whether it will go again to people themselves.

Elaine Davenport is a freelance reporter and audio producer who divides her time between Austin, Texas, and London, England.

A Southern Exposure for Spring Planting

By HRW

Vol. 11, No. 2, 1989, pp. 5-6

As soil is being worked and gardens laid this Spring, it may be useful to remember that all seeds are not created equal, and that there are alternatives to agribusiness and hybridization.

Southern Exposure, a seed exchange and gardening center in North Garden, Va., is one such alternative. (No relation to the Institute for Southern Studies’ journal of the same name.)

Begun in 1982 by Jeff McCormack, a botanist who previously ran the greenhouses at the University of Virginia, Southern Exposure is a leader among the growing movement to preserve genetic variation in agricultural crops. McCormack has been called a vegetable historian, and he and his wife, Patty Wallens, began their seed exchange from their kitchen table as a means of protecting some traditional varieties of garden crops from extinction.

They soon began receiving unsolicited donations of seeds from like-minded individuals who were enamored of particular plants that had been grown in their families for, sometimes, several generations. Today Southern Exposure has expanded to include hundreds of vegetable varieties, flowers, and fruit trees, many of which are not commercially available and some of which were feared to be extinct.

The Southern Exposure operation now includes a twelve-acre organic testing and demonstration garden; a lab and environmentally controlled seed storage; a customer list that is doubling every year; and a catalog full of seeds, gardening and seed-saving supplies, and general tips and advice. The business also has an unlisted telephone; to get their catalog, send $3 to P.O. Box 158, North Garden, VA

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22959. Those who place orders automatically receive future catalogs.

McCommack writes in his 1989 catalog, “Non-hybrid [seed] varieties introduced prior to 1940 are defined as heirloom varieties. After 1940, hybrids began to displace traditional varieties, and many became scarce or lost. We define a special class of heirlooms as ‘family heirloom varieties.’ These have been handed down within families for generations.”

These heirlooms are described and sometimes illustrated in the Southern Exposure catalog.

For example, the Large Early Greasy variety of pole bean is “from the mountain area of Mars Hill, N.C. Pods have medium strings, are flattened when young…grow 4 to 6″ long, and contain 6 white seeds per pod. Though not suitable for green shell out, it makes a high quality green bean when picked small. As is typical of many home saved seed of mountain people, there is some variation in this variety as to pod and seed size, shape, and maturity. The name ‘greasy’ refers to the lack of ‘fuzziness’ (plant hairs) on the pods. Has been grown for generations as a drought hardy, cornfield bean.”

McCormack says he is “concerned about the erosion of genetic resources and the trend toward replacement of standard or open-pollinated varieties by hybrids. Unless we have genetic diversity in our food crops, our whole food supply is vulnerable to epidemics…For this reason, we offer a diverse selection of open-pollinated varieties to help ensure a genetic reservoir of resistance to disease, regional adaptability, cultural and flavor qualities, and to ensure that the traditional varieties remain available to gardeners and farmers.

“What a shame it would be if we lost varieties such as ‘Stowell’s Evergreen’ corn or ‘Tappy’s Finest’ tomato. We would lose not only unique taste and quality, but also part of our agricultural and cultural heritage.”

Finally, there’s the Old Time Tennessee cantaloupe, which one gardener told McCormack is so fragrant he can find the melons in his garden in the dark-obviously healthier and even more entertaining than a trip to the refrigerator for a beer.

Cartoonist Jumps Ship in Atlanta

By HRW

Vol. 11, No. 2, 1989, p. 6

Doug Marlette, the Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist lured from the Charlotte Observer when Bill Kovach became editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has become the latest big name to leave the papers in the wake of Kovach’s resignation [see Southern Changes, December 1988].

Marlette, who joined Newsday in New York, said that under Kovach’s leadership the Atlanta papers had enjoyed “shimmering integrity and quality” and “rose to finally claim their rightful place.”

In his resignation letter, Marlette thanked the Constitution for “giving me such a great opportunity” and said he had tried “to find a way to stay here.” Instead, he wrote, “Like many Southerners before me, I head north with a sense of sadness and longing for what might have been.”

Elaborating on his leavetaking in an essay he published in Newsday and in the Charlotte Observer, Marlette said he wasn’t sure how the move “will affect my work and the way I see things, but I’m sure they will be affected. Artists are emotional teabags. We have a semi-permeable membrane for skin. Everything gets under our skin and eventually finds its way into our work.”

On the bright side, Marlette said he expected to find~ plenty of familiar themes in New York:

“I have long suspected that Malcolm X was right: The South is south of the Canadian border. The problems of my native region–the racism depicted by the jarring ‘white’ and ‘colored’ signs on the water fountains of my youth, the poverty and ignorance that crippled the spirit of the region–were just vivid symptoms of a disease that afflicts the nation as a whole. It’s not very far, it turns out, from Forsyth County, Georgia, to Howard Beach.

“Growing up in the South in the Sixties, we were the nation’s scapegoat and whipping boy–we wore our private demons and public neuroses on our sleeves–and the world had something to point at. However, I have noticed over the last few years that the South, as it homogenizes itself into the Sunbelt, has slowly relinquished its title, giving up its role as America’s designated punching bag.

“New York City, Bonfire of the Vanities, has claimed that position in the demonology of America’s collective unconscious. New York-bashing is a national sport now. New York is the new Mississippi–New York Burning.

“For all its glitz and glamour, and opportunity, the problems of modern life in the city have grown to such a scale and magnitude–drugs, homelessness, greed, corruption–that New York has become what Mississippi was in the Sixties–America’s problem child, the scapegoat, a mess.

“The issues loom large in this urban crucible. The problems are clear and easy to see. Like the setting of my Southern childhood, the contradictions and ironies and hypocrisies are vivid. It’s all a caricature–a cartoon, really. New York City is Toontown. This Southerner should feel right at home.”

Doug Marlette . . . on Marlette

By Doug Marlette

Vol. 11, No. 2, 1989, pp. 7-9

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following comments by Doug Marlette are–with a few recent additions and editing–taken from a 1985 interview conducted by Terry A. Schmitt for Target: The Political Cartoon Quarterly, which has since ceased publication. Marlette’s words and cartoons are pubIished here with his kind permission.

I was born in Greensboro, N.C. All my people lived in Burlington, which was a mill town. I grew up in Durham, and Laurel, Miss., and Sanford, Fla. My dad was in the service, so we moved around. The values and the attitudes that I see in my cartoons have to do with going to Sunday School at the Magnolia Street Baptist Church in Laurel, and taking civics classes at D.U. Maddox Junior High School. I always think of the attitude expressed in my cartoons as fairly conservative, fairly basic, coming out of that background.

When I got into high school and started thinking about a career, I thought that I would like to be some sort of artist. I didn’t know that you could be a cartoonist, although I was never serious in my art classes. When I had to draw a still life, I was always having the banana saying something to the apple. But nobody encourages you to be a cartoonist, nobody wants the responsibility for that. It’s like telling somebody to be an actor, “Go to New York, live in an attic, starve… ” Nobody wants that on their conscience.

So I aimed broadly at commercial art. My mother encouraged that but my father was skeptical–you know, he grew up in the Depression, which taught you the importance of making a living. Editorial cartooning became interesting to me as I got to be a senior in high school. I was starting to focus more on a career, plus this was the middle of Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement, and I lived in the South during all that.

My people were classically Southern–mill workers, cotton farmers, tobacco farmers, and very poor. The South

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was hit by the Depression much earlier and harder than the rest of the country. A lot of the most ardent New Dealers came from the South–that was where it first caught on, because they realized that something drastic and radical had to be done.

My grandfather voted for Franklin Roosevelt four times. He thought he was the greatest President we ever had. I asked him why that was, and he said, because Franklin Roosevelt was the only President we ever had who cared anything about poor people. But, ironically, in that same conversation, he followed that up by saying the only mistake Roosevelt ever made was he “should have let Hitler kill them Jews.”

I was always so impressed by my grandfather’s Populist sentiments, and then it was so contaminated by the racism. That kind of contradiction was so vividly played out in my family and in my background. That’s not just in the South; it’s in the entire country, that racism. But it was on the surface in the South and expressed more clearly and it gave the rest of the country something to point at.

People think of the South as being a very reactionary area. But there have always been these pockets of radicalism, and a contrary, anti-authoritarian streak that runs deep.

My grandmother was bayonetted by a national guardsman on a mill strike. I only learned that a few years ago. I’d always wondered where all these impulses in me come from, because all my family is just so conservative. Where did this rebelliousness develop? And then I find out that my grandfather was president of a union, and, maybe there are rebellious genes in me.

The questioners or challengers of the powers that be tend to be better cartoonists. You can have conservative cartoonists, but they will be challenging their own establishment. They’ll make the establishment Tip O’Neill or the Democrats, or whatever they see as the big, bad boogeyman. They’re going to be in tension with whatever they see.

I mean, it’s hard to do good cartoons that say “three cheers for the status quo,” you know, “hooray for the way things are!” Cartooning is a vehicle of attack. And so the best cartoons just have a rage. The satirists–Swift, Mark Twain, Joseph Heller–are disappointed with the way things have turned out, and they express a basic rage in their work. The trick is to channel that rage in a constructive way.

Everyone, it seems, imitates somebody early on and then progresses to their own style. I just had so many influences that there was never one that dominated. I was influenced by people like Don Wright, and some of those Mad cartoonists. But I look back on the stuff I did in college and it looks, more or less, like what I’m doing now. Although it’s been refined a lot.

When I started, the Vietnam War was changing the face of political cartooning. Cartoons were getting more inter-

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esting. Pat Oliphant was introducing that Australian, or European, style of cartooning. I was raised, like other people in my generation, on TV, and movies, and comic books. What I saw in Oliphant that was so exciting was that his political cartoons looked like Mad Magazine. It looked fun and it was satirical and the draftsmanship was exciting unlike the old style of Uncle Sams trudging in the swamps, rolling up their sleeves, and John Q. Publics with a lot of labels all over things–you know, clouds labeled “cloud,” and swamps labeled, “the budget.”

The task is to get in touch with what is essentially your way of seeing things. That’s the mistake imitators make. They think that, “If I could just do it like them. . .” I know this from my own experience, because, when I was younger, that thought dominated me. And when you thought up ideas, you thought, “Well, this sounds like a Conrad, or a Wright, so it must be good.” What’s sad about the imitators and copiers is that they all think that the magic is in somebody else. You know, Conrad did not learn how to be Herblock, he learned how to be Conrad. And Herblock didn’t learn how to be D.R. Fitzpatrick, he learned how to be Herblock. That’s what everyone’s task is.

Creativity is not just talent. Talent is not enough. Seed isn’t crops. There has to be a passion, a soul, a prism through which things go. And there is no “correct” way. It’s just whether you are being effective, and evocative, and saying something worth saying.

I like showing the banality of evil. I like to show that these goofy, mundane people are doing these horrible things–punching in the time clock at Auschwitz. I like turning symbols upside down and inside out, and playing with those things, so that it’s not predictable. That’s something that appeals to me and it’s some thing that I do instinctively.

I did this thing when Jesse Helms was re-elected [1984] and I had him at the window, with the Capitol in the background, and he was bending over and his pants were down and it said, “Carolina moon keeps shining.” I think none of the editors at my paper, except one–the edit page editor–wanted to run that. But they did run it, to their credit. And I would have gone to the mat on it. I tell you why I liked that cartoon. It does not have to do with showing somebody with their pants down. It’s easy to do cartoons that get reactions, if you want. It’s easy to hack people off, but that’s not something I’m particularly interested in. What I liked about that cartoon was that the metaphor, or the image, was so accurate.

Helms stopped talking to the paper after that cartoon. Our reporter, Bill Arthur, wanted to talk to Helms about which committee Helms was going to chair. And he ran into the Senator in the hall and Helms said, “I’m not talking to you,” and Bill said, “Well, why not?” Helms said, “You know why not.” And Bill said, “No, I don’t. I’ve been trying to call your office and nobody ever returns my call.” And Helms said, “You know why not–that cartoon.” Bill said, “What cartoon?” He had not seen the cartoon at that time. And Helms said, “You know what cartoon. And you can tell Rolph Neill,” the publisher, “that until I get an official apology from the Charlotte Observer, I’m not going to talk to you.”

I thought that was revealing about Helms’s personality, I mean, someone who dishes it out, and can’t take it. He’s real good at dishing it out…

But, what’s also interesting about that image is that Helms and I are a lot alike. In both cases, you’ve got these righteous people with causes or ways of seeing things that they want to impose on the rest of the world. And they want to show their asses. That’s why I knew that cartoon was so accurate. Because I’m a lot like that and cartoonists are a lot like that.

Bundy Killing No Cause for Celebration

By Leroy Collins

Vol. 11, No. 2, 1989, p. 10

Since I have a long record of opposing the death penalty, I have been asked what my reactions are to the Theodore Bundy execution.

I have made very clear my reasons for opposing the death penalty. In the first place I believe it is no deterrent to crime. There are many who do not accept this, but almost all the criminologists who have studied this issue and even the U.S. Supreme Court have concluded that the theory of deterrence cannot be supported. In confirming this I would point out that while many of our states have the death penalty, others do not, and the indications are that the crime rates of those who have no death penalty are no higher and in a majority of these the rates are lower, than in states that do have the death penalty.

Take two states–Texas and Massachusetts. In Texas since the death penalty has been reinstated, the murder rate has gone up, whereas in Massachusetts where there is no death penalty, over the same time the rate has gone down.

Now I don’t contend that if we in Florida abolish the death penalty our murder rate (which has recently increased rapidly) will come down because of that fact. But the fact remains there has been no plausible study that could lead one to conclude that having the penalty deters would-be murderers.

Now the Bundy execution, I accept. He was guilty of a long series of gruesome, heinous murders of innocent young children and women. The death penalty is a part of our law, and if anyone has ever deserved it, he did. And I felt with our citizens generally, a sense of relief that he can never, under any circumstances, kill again.

As a citizen, however, I felt ashamed and embarrassed over some of the macabre demonstrations of jubilation. The shouts of joy, the parties and epithets that were screamed, were indeed reminiscent of the Roman spectacles of passion by the crowds eagerly assembled to witness executions of that period. I couldn’t imagine anyone feeling joyous in the act of our state destroying a human life.

I am quietly accepting the execution of the law of our state. I learned this being governor and having the sworn duty to enforce the law, whether I liked or approved of a specific law or not. In fact, as governor I recommended the abolishment of the death penalty. But the majority of the legislators, representing the people of Florida too, saw it differently and declined to accept my recommendation. I did not try to put myself above the law. In fact, the state executed more people during my administration than in the administrations of all the governors combined who have succeeded me. Yet with every signing of a death warrant, I was distressed.

So Bundy has been executed. He was given the full penalty provided under the law. By his multiple heinous crimes, he deserved such under that law.

The execution saddened me. I do not exult in it. I think the exuberance and joyous party atmosphere it stimulated in some quarters, was in itself the reflection of a sickness.

The English experience remains impressive to me. With all their problems, they abolished the death penalty many years back. Their crime rates, their murder rates, are very small in comparison to those of the United States.

I am still opposed to the death penalty. This form of society’s revenge runs counter to my nature. After all, we are all children of God, even the sickest among us.

LeRoy Collins served as governor of Florida from 1955-1961. A life fellow of the Southern Regional Council, he writes a weekly column for the St. Petersburg Times, where these comments originally appeared.

Winthrop Rockefeller and Executions

By Martin Kirby

Vol. 11, No. 2, 1989, pp. 10-11

In the continuing debate over the death penalty, it is fitting to invoke the name of Winthrop Rockefeller, who was Governor of Arkansas, my home state, from 1967 to 1971. He managed to overcome the awful moral burden of immense wealth and lesser burdens of personal weaknesses to become, as Governor, a genuine moral leader, whose record looks better and better as the years go by. His career took

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place in a small state, and he has been dead a long time now, but his position on the death penalty presented the rare spectacle of a public of official actually living up to the Golden Rule, against opposition.

No one was executed in Arkansas while Rockefeller was Governor, and before he left office he commuted all thirteen existing death sentences. He also appointed a committee to review each case and recommend the apparent best alternative to a death sentence.

Rockefeller then issued a statement, saying: “What earthly mortal has the omnipotence to say who among us shall live and who shall die? I do not. Moreover, in that the law grants me the authority to set aside the death penalty, I cannot and will not turn my back on lifelong Christian teachings and beliefs merely to let history run out its course on a fallible and failing theory of punitive justice…failing to take this action while it is within my power, I could not live with myself.” (Quoted in The Arkansas Rockefeller by John L. Ward, LSU Press, 1978.)

This position seems self-evidently clean, pure and worthy of emulation, but in fact scarcely any public issue brings out the craven and trollish in both politicians and voters like the death penalty issue. Many politicians seem to perceive the voters uniformly as lusting after the blood of criminals like sharks in a feeding frenzy and to think, therefore, that the way to gain office and stay there is to throw them as many victims as possible. Too often these politicians are right. The situation reminds me of that which formerly existed in the South when politicians used to compete in the force and cleverness of their efforts to persecute black people. Winthrop Rockefeller was not willing to cater either to Southern racism or to the national predilection for capital punishment.

He died in 1973, not long after losing his third-term election, which he might have won if he had been willing to wreak some official violence, and he had many opportunities to do so. But his stand on the death penalty was consistent with his attitude toward violence in general. He could have permitted executions, and most of the voters would have cheered. He could have sent the State Police to shoot up the prisons on several provocatory occasions, and most voters would have applauded. He could have dealt violently with any number of public demonstrations, and a significant percentage of voters would have fawned on him. But he did none of these things.

Still, there was an irony inherent in Rockefeller’s career. In volatile times, he was successful at keeping the lid on violence of all kinds in Arkansas, and was therefore generally perceived not as heroic, but as soft. Why? Consider this snatch of song: “Texas John Slaughter / Made ’em do what they oughter. / ‘Cause if they didn’t, they died.”

This prescription was part of the theme song of a Walt Disney television series which I watched as a teen-ager. I’ve never been able to forget it. It is a near-perfect expression of the attitude that efforts at compassionate reform must overcome–the immense popular appeal of whatever seems practical, simple and tough. The last factor is often decisive. No compassionate reform is “tough” in the popular sense, which is a major reason why governors as well-intentioned as Winthrop Rockefeller are as rare as Bachman’s warblers.

Rockefeller was tough enough to use his office to do good; his stand on the death penalty was only one part of an administration that was humanitarian and ethical to a degree unprecedented in the history of Arkansas, and not exactly common elsewhere.

Someday, the death penalty not only will be abolished but generally regarded as something barbaric that people used to do, like worshipping oak trees and segregating races. In that future, I suspect that the moral heroism which was Winthrop Rockefeller’s will be recognized only as normal human decency, a mild confusion which I think would have pleased him.

Martin Kirby was a newspaper reporter in Arkansas during the last years of Winthrop Rockefeller’s governorship. He now lives in North Augusta, South Carolina.

Symbols and Mail Order Merchandising

Randall Williams

Vol. 11, No. 2, 1989, pp. 12, 14-17

Obsessions are never simple, and they usually lead to suffering. I, for instance, am almost reduced to going barefoot, my shirts are frayed at the collar and cuff, and I’m only thankful it was a mild winter for I badly needed a new jacket.

In my attire, you see, I have fallen victim to an obsession; for many months now I have been unable to order clothing from Land’s End, a mail-order company based in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, that previously was my favorite place to shop.

If you have a few minutes, I will share my sad story.

Land’s End sells well-made, sturdy, reasonably priced, low-key clothing. I’m a low-key guy; I silently cheered when Land’s End made a point of having no horses, alligators or other animals on their shirts. At one time Land’s End must have been a small company, though I saw a chart recently that put them sixth among U.S. mail order companies, with 1985 sales of $227 million. When I first saw and ordered from them years ago they at least gave the impression of smallness, and their catalogs were informative but nowhere near as slick as the four-color 150-pagers that now arrive with each new season.

Bear with me. The catalog is the point of this story.

Over the years I have watched that catalog evolve. I don’t have any old copies to prove it, but I think they used to say that all the models in the catalogs were Land’s End employees. That was okay with me, even reassuring–I don’t look like a model myself. I would get the catalogs, and I would order a few things every now and then. I liked the merchandise, and I like ordering things by mail, probably because I grew up in the country and almost everything we had came from Sears and Roebuck or Speigel. In fact, when I was a child I used to get baby chickens from Sears and Roebuck, a hundred chirping chicks at the time, in a cardboard box delivered by our mailman. Also, ordering from Land’s End was easier than going to the mall–it wears me out to go to the mall, and there are practically no retail stores left in downtown Montgomery where I live.

For a long time, things were fine. But as the seasons came and went, that catalog began to grate on me.

The catalog that really set me off was Vol. 23, No. 2, dated February 1987. It arrived in mid-January. I can remember the date because it was right after a large mob of Ku Klux Klansmen, members of other assorted hate

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groups, and plain white folks attacked an event promoted as a brotherhood march in memory of Martin Luther King Jr. in Forsyth County, Georgia.

You may remember the incident. The small group of would-be marchers were removed for their own protection by law enforcement officers. Their attackers asserted their intention to keep Forsyth County all-white, as it virtually had been since 1912, when widespread racial violence in the aftermath of a rape-murder literally drove black citizens from their homes and from the county.

Signs at the Edge of Town

In the years since, Forsyth, just forty miles from downtown Atlanta, had been one of those Southern locales which boasted signs saying, “Nigger, don’t let the sun set on you in ____ County.” We’ve all seen the signs, heard the stories, laughed or cringed, depending on our view or our color. Of course, that was twenty years ago. Now Forsyth has lost much of its rural feel and is growing fast because many people, white people, don’t mind working in black-majority Atlanta but prefer to live farther out, in suburbs which are said to resist plans for rapid transit because of fears of making access too easy for black criminals.

Two weeks and a media blitz after the first march, there was a second march. An estimated twenty thousand people from all over the United States marched to make a statement against the latest display of raw bigotry in one little backwater of America. Gradually the situation eased, the task forces wrote their reports, the reporters went home. To this day there are no blacks living in Forsyth County.

It was against this backdrop that the February 1987 issue of the Land’s End catalog arrived on my desk, and that I grasped what had been irritating me about the excellent work done by Al Shackleford.

Al is the copy director for Land’s End advertising and he has the hands-on responsibility for the catalogs. I know this because I called Land’s End one day and his was the voice that finally got on the line. Al sounded like a good person, and it’s obvious that he does good work.

But, no matter how good he is, if he had told me in advance what he was going to do in the February 1987 catalog, I would have laughed in his face and told him it was impossible.

I would have been wrong.

A few years ago Land’s End began using documentary photography to tell stories about some aspect of their products: hand shoemaking in New England, wool gathering in the British Isles, and such. For the February 1987 issue, a first-rate photographer named Archie Lieberman was commissioned to do a photo essay on U.S. cotton production, to make a point about the 100 percent cotton clothing sold by Land’s End.

A Turn in the South

Lieberman traveled through California, Arizona, Texas, Tennessee and Georgia, and his pictures of workers in the fields, gins, and mills are gorgeous and evocative.

Of the twenty-nine people in his essay, there isn’t a black face among them–one Native American and two Hispanics from Arizona, but no blacks. And as I rapidly thumbed through the rest of the catalog, I saw consciously what I had been realizing all along, that of the hundreds of models in the Land’s End catalog, every single one was WASP.

Seeing those photos just a few hours after reading about an attack on a brotherhood march, I had to ask, what is the difference between the view of America held by a rock-throwing mob in Cumming, Georgia, and the view held by a huge retailer with offices in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, and Chicago? Not much, obviously.

What had been bothering me about Land’s End was its aggressively white image of America. Of course we are talking about marketing, meant to sell a particular line of products to a particular audience. But I don’t dress that differently from black men of my age and occupation–or from Hispanics or Asians who live where I do, shop where I do, play and work where I do. I couldn’t believe that a company like Land’s End would be opposed to selling its goods to non-whites. [For additional discussion of media’ marketing stereotypes, see Southern Changes, July 1979.]

I quit ordering from Land’s End, but I continued to get the catalogs.

By now, my obsession was interfering with my work. No matter what kind of deadline I was under, as soon as the mail brought a new catalog, I ripped through it looking for non-white faces. Eventually a couple of Asian child models appeared in the back pages, but this only intensified my

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concerns.

One day I dialed Land’s End.

When I got Al on the phone, I introduced myself and said:

“…so I decided what the hell, I’d just pick up the phone and call and ask. I’m just curious to know whether it’s editorial policy or just coincidence or what, that essentially there is nobody in your catalog except white folks.”

There was a short pause, and then Al replied:

“Yeah. It’s not really editorial policy, Randall. It’s something we are aware of and we are working to correct. About the only thing, we have had Hispanic, Oriental, we’ve had kind of different ethnic groups represented in sort of an editorial context. In that sense, it’s not–that’s kind of a hard question to answer, but it’s not, you know, we realize that we are pretty, you know, about 99 percent Caucasian catalog. Let’s put it that way. And we are going to correct that.”

“Do you have any black customers?”

“Oh, I’m sure we do. It’s hard to say how many, but I know we’ve gotten–we just got a letter from a black family in California, pretty much, you know, kind of asking the same question you are asking and so I have no way of knowing how many black customers we have, but I’m sure we do have black customers. And I realize that if you are a black Land’s End customer and you get the catalog, you’re probably rightfully offended by the lily-whiteness of the catalog.”

Then I explained to Al how I had gotten his cotton photo essay right after the Forsyth incident:

“You know, I’m from here and grew up here and my people raised cotton and stuff like that and I just would have thought that it was pretty much impossible to do a piece on cotton production in the South without any black people in that piece. And yet, ya’ll managed to do it. Do ya’ll discuss this kind of thing within your company?”

“We do. I don’t really know what to tell you because it’s like a real sore point with a lot of us. Usually, when I get a call like this I would just refer it to our P.R.–the guy that’s in charge of our P.R.”

What does he say?”

“I really don’t know, to tell you the truth. I don’t know what the standard Land’s End response to this is, but I don’t see how it could be a very good one.”

“Is there somebody in the company that if ya’ll were to do a feature with black faces in it, or if you had a black model come along, would they say no?”

“Well, I tell you, I don’t want to get into that, really. You know, there have been quite a few people that have raised this point with us.”

“Inside your company as well as without, I take it?”

“Yeah. Oh yeah. But, I mean, it’s a regular–we defi-

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nitely get feedback from our customers kind of wondering, talking about the same thing that you’re talking about. It’s just an area that we realize that, or at least most of us realize, that we haven’t done a very good job. We are really looking forward to the day when you can get a Land’s End catalog and it represents America as it really is, rather than just like a select group of America.”

“Yeah, well, I have to say in ya’ll’s defense, ya’ll are not the only ones. I’ve become kind of obsessed by catalogs since I’ve been considering this.”

Yeah. Do you get the L.L. Bean catalog?”

“yeah.”

“I think L.L. Bean’s argument is that they only use their own employees as models. Being in Maine where, you know, let’s face it, there’s probably about 99 percent white, so that’s kind of how they rationalize what they do. You know, if you—”

“How about ya’ll’s work force? I assume ya’ll, you know, given you are partly in Chicago—”

“You know, actually, yeah, we have black employees. Our main operation though is up in Dodgeville and I’d say that’s probably 95 percent of the company is up there.”

“Is that mostly white up there?”

“Yeah. Mostly white. Rural farm country.”

“If I wanted to pursue this a little further, who would I ask for?”

“Probably the guy to talk to is our vice president of public relations, whose name is Terry Wilson.”

So Al and I said goodbye, and I called Wilson, introduced myself, and explained that I had already talked to Al and why.

“Well, let me try to be as direct as you’ve been. It is not a conscious policy on our part. In fact, we do not have a policy about who appears or who doesn’t appear in a catalog. A lot of these people, as you probably have deduced as you’ve been looking at it and have been a customer for a number of years, are customers of ours, some of them are employees, some of them are models, obviously, but we try to, our main objective is to make them look like real people who buy and use the clothes. Now at the same time, and in addition to that, we sell and we solicit customers all across the board, regardless of background or color or ethnic persuasion, or religious persuasion. We send our catalog to anyone who wants it. We solicit business from everyone we can find who we think is a potential customer. I’m not going to try to deny that what you say is true. The only point I would like to make is that it has not been a conscious effort. I think you and others have pointed this out to us. It bothers some of our customers like you and we do pay attention to these comments. It’s something we are looking into and that’s about all I can tell you at this point.”

“…What do ya’ll do when yell get people who comment like this?”

“Well, we monitor all the comments that we do receive from customers–positive and negative–and try to direct them to the people in the company whose area of responsibility the comments relate to, in this case, primarily the people who select the individuals who model the clothes in the catalog.”

“Do you think it’s a problem? What kind of an image do you think it presents in terms of what this country is supposed to be about and so forth for ya’ll to have a catalog like that? Now I’m not suggesting ya’ll are the only ones, mind you. I’m not saying that.”

Frankly, I don’t know whether we are or not. I can tell you that’s not the way we look at the catalog, either ours or anyone else’s. We haven’t and I don’t think we will start to count people who are so-called party poops. I get the same comments from the handicapped. I get the same comments from racial groups now and then. As I say, we are certainly out encouraging and soliciting business from anybody we think we can attract as a customer, regardless of who they are, where they are, or what color they are. It’s a marketing question as much as anything else and it’s something we are going to have to deal with.”

“Do you think you have customers that would be offended if you had black models?”

“Oh, I don’t think any more than are offended that we don’t. In fact, as I say, we do not have a policy about who’s in the catalog and who isn’t. We don’t select our models because of color or minority question. We select them for a number of other reasons which may or may not be valid, depending on the eyes of the individual who is in your shoes, the customer. We are trying to market our clothes as well as we can to as broad a group as we can and that includes blacks and [unintelligible], and handicapped and everybody else who can wear them. We make clothes to fit people, not their colors. All I can tell you is about that. At the same time, you are not the first person who has commented on the situation…”

Comments from Customers

“About when did ya’ll start getting comments like this?”

“Oh, gee, that I can’t honestly tell you. I haven’t been with the company that long to go back in history, but there are a few every now and then and I suppose there probably have been. Although I can’t say for sure.”

“But it’s not like these comments like mine just started during the last six weeks or something?”

“No.”

“And yet, up to this time, despite these comments, there have been no–you know, the catalogs haven’t changed, because I’ve been consciously paying attention. I guess I was unconsciously mindful of it for some time, but I’ve been consciously paying attention to it for two years now.”

“Again, I don’t argue with what you say, but at the same time we receive a large number of comments on a large number of subjects and we try to, as I said, evaluate each one in terms of what’s best for the business and what’s best in terms of trying to attract as many customers as we can. I get comments all the way from ‘why don’t you sell larger sizes,’ ‘why don’t you sell petites,’ and they run all over the lot so I assure you we pay attention to those. I don’t want to start repeating myself. That’s where we are.”

I didn’t want Terry to repeat himself, either, so I gave him my Forsyth County/Land’s End comparison and asked whether he saw the connection.

“I’m not that familiar with the situation that you mentioned, but I don’t know whether they are totally analogous because we are not out running people out of communities where they have a perfect right to go or we are not running them out of our property or burning crosses. We are not

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overtly endeavoring to do harm to people psychologically or .. physically. We are trying to simply present a line of clothing the best way we know how. The only thing I can fall back on is we would welcome as many minority customers as we could get.”

“Right, but you are not ready to put them in the catalog.”

“Well, you will have to draw your own conclusions about that, obviously. I think we have been making a little bit of progress. There have been, in the last few issues, a couple of minorities.”

“There appear to be two Oriental children in this issue, for example.”

“Yeah. So progress does not always come over night. I understand your concern. I know where you are coming from, and I appreciate your calling it to our attention. Ill make sure it will be discussed.”

I assured Terry I would try to help him, and for the past few months that was the end of it.

Yesterday, I got a new Land’s End catalog, Vol. 25, No. 3, March 1989. On page 147 there’s an Asian child. The same child is also on pages 146,143 and 139.

And…guess what. There, on page, 92, big as life, is an entire black family from Queens, N.Y., with a nice little story about them.

Well, it’s a start, Al and Terry.

I only wish that–given the unfortunate circumstance of blacks in Forsyth County being forced to leave their homes in 1912 and the historical and contemporary rhetoric by white supremacists who want to send blacks and (recent) immigrants “back to where they came from”-that you hadn’t used your first black models to illustrate a feature on luggage.

Randall Williams is the managing editor of the Southern Regional Council’s publications, including Southern Changes. From 1981-85, he was the director of the Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a tenure which contributed to an obsession with racial images already well-defined by living in rural Alabama for most of his life.

Lawsuit Alleges Bias in Real Estate Ads

By Staff

Vol. 11, No. 2, 1989, p. 14

In New York, a lawsuit involving the absence of black models in advertisements for housing is pending against the New York Times. The suit was filed by the New York Open Housing Center and the NAACP, although the NAACP subsequently withdrew from the case saying its internal policy of negotiating before suing had not been followed.

The complaint, filed January 12, charges that display real-estate advertising in the Times has essentially used only white models for more than 20 years.

A spokesman for the Times disputed the charges and said the newspaper had written in 1988 to real-estate advertisers urging them to comply with discrimination laws regarding ads for housing.

“Pictures of only white people give a message to Times readers that is loud, it’s clear, and it’s discriminatory,” said Betty Hoeber, director of the Center. A statement announcing the lawsuit said the plaintiffs wanted an agreement with the Times similar to an understanding reached in 1986 with the Washington Post, which now requires commercial real-estate advertisers to have a minimum number of black models in ads that use models.

The plaintiffs are represented by the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. Call Cheryl Packwood, 212-848-4980, for more information.

A Sampling of Other Catalogs

By Staff

Vol. 11, No. 2, 1989, p. 15

The Land’s End catalog is only one of many with racially discriminatory model selection. The following catalogs were received at one middle-income Alabama household over the past few months. While they obviously are not a comprehensive sampling of all the catalogs published in the U.S., they nevertheless show the pervasiveness of the problem.

• Sporty’s Preferred Living Catalog Christmas 1988. Sporty’s, based in Batavia, Ohio, sells a line of aviation equipment and accessories, but also has a catalog featuring household gadgets, games and gifts. Minority models: None.
• Eddie Bauer Gifts, 1988. Clothing, shoes, linens, gifts. Based in Seattle, Washington. Minority models: a few appearances in a 124-page catalog.
• L.L. Bean Winter Values 1989. Clothing, shoes, outdoor and recreational gear, gifts, items for the home. Based in Freeport, Maine. Minority models: None, although fewer of Bean’s product illustrations feature models than most catalogs.
• McRae’s Trends 89, and McRae’s Spring Rewards from Haggar. McRae’s is a Jackson, Miss., regional department store chain. These particular circulars feature women’s and men’s fashions. Minority models: None (although McRae’s does use black models in its newspaper supplement advertising).
• Lillian Vernon Christmas 1988. Gifts, novelty and seasonal items from a Mount Vernon, N.Y., company. Minority models: None.
• Gayfer’s and Jantzen Swimsuit Circular, March 1989. Gayfer’s is a department store chain; Jantzen is a leading swimwear manufacturer. Minority models: None.
• Gayfer’s Daisy Sale (newspaper supplement, March 1989). Minority models: Estimated 5 percent.
• Service Merchandise Sale Catalog (Fall 1988). Service is a Nashville-based discount merchandiser with more than 320 stores nationwide. Minority models: None (Page 26 does include photos of both black and white Ken and Barbie dolls, and there is an illustration of a “Michael Jordan Lil’ Sport basketball goal.”).
• Service Merchandise Spring &Summer 1989 Catalog. See also previous entry. Minority models: photo of Bill Cosby is in Kodak ad on page 85; child appearing with Playskool product on page 68 may be black; several minority children appear with white children in photos of playground equipment on page 58; otherwise, none.
• J.C. Penney Easter 1989 Sale (newspaper supplement). Penney is a national department store chain. Minority models: Yes, children and adults.
• Performance Bicycle Shop, Summer 1989. Based in Chapel Hill, N.C., this company sells clothing and accessories for cyclists. Minority models: 1 black male.
• American Express The Spirit of Spring 1989 Catalog. Clothing, jewelry, art, furniture, electronics. Minority models: None.