Democracy in the South

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 12, No. 2, 1990, pp. 1-3

Like an old Chinese proverb coming south for the winter, one side of democracy in the American South today shows troubling, even treacherous signs of crisis, and on the other side are rare moments for important opportunities. This contrast is, of course a part of the ironic history of political participation in the South which has delivered the region from the land of segregation of thirty years ago to being home for most of the nation’s registered black voters today. It is that essential characteristic of a region that can encompass in one year more violations of the voting rights of its minority citizens than any other while electing more minority officials than all others.

The dangers to democracy which haunt the South today are both immediate and far-reaching. The region’s population growth over the last ten years presents real obstacles to maintaining the voting strength of minority citizens beyond the local level. Most of the growth, for example, has been in suburban Congressional and legislative districts where minorities are a small part of the population and where incumbent voting records often show indifference or even hostility to the interest of black and Hispanic citizens. Racial bloc voting continues throughout the region, fencing out minority voters from any substantial influence in presidential elections. And Southern state officials–often elected with the support of minority voters–appear today as adamant in their opposition to the enforcement

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of the Voting Rights Act as they were decades ago. (Witness the never-ending oppositions of state officials to a fair redistricting of the Arkansas legislature and the judicial districts in seven Southern states.)

Other signs of crisis are no less troubling. In three Southern states during the last year, whites claimed “reverse discrimination” in federal courts as they invoked the Voting Rights Act to promote their own political rights, apparently oblivious of the need to show that they had been the victims of a history of racial discrimination in voting and in society. In 1989, a state court judge in Georgia dismissed local criminal indictments because of jury discrimination–not enough whites were on the jury, he claimed. And in South Carolina a public restaurant openly defied the provisions of the federal public accommodations law, apparently on the belief that those laws were not going to be enforced any longer.

These peculiar events took place within the backdrop of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decisions on “race-based remedies.” In its opinion holding that efforts to assist minority contractors by the City of Richmond were unconstitutional, the U.S. Supreme Court stated: “Classifications based on race carry a danger of stigmatic harm. Unless they are strictly reserved . . . they may in fact promote notions of racial inferiority and lead to a politics of racial hostility.”

The Court’s reference to a “politics of racial hostility” reflects the language used by opponents of renewal of the Voting Rights Act in the Congressional debates in 1982: “All too often the task of racial classifications in and of itself has resulted in social turmoil…[and]…the proposed changes in Section 2 [of the Voting Rights Act] will inevitably ‘compel the worst tendencies towards racebased allegiances and divisions.'”

These similarities are more than linguistic: the fundamental rationale undergirding the Supreme Court’s ruling against minority contracting–and affirmative action in employment in its other recent cases–applies to all remedies for racial discrimination, including the creation of majority black districts in voting cases. Increasingly, race-based remedies are suspect in the federal courts no matter what they’re aimed to correct.

These signs of the times are serious indicators of dangers amid both our folkways and stateways. When the city council of Richmond, Va.–the old seat of the Confederacy–is frustrated by the U.S. Supreme Court–the authors of legal equality in the twentieth century–in an attempt to remove the vestiges of race discrimination, we should realize that no longer will traditional institutions defend and expand opportunity for all in the future. We must take seriously the jeopardy that can befall both the letter and the spirit of democracy in the South from both old friends and old foes.

Nonetheless, the South is poised to deliver another set

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of historic advances. With an expected gain of ten Congressional seats in Southern states after the 1990 Census, minority voters have a chance to increase their strength through the creation of additional Congressional districts with a majority of black and Hispanic voters. The legal movement for enforcing the federal Voting Rights Act is continuing to remove old and new barriers to full political participation, and the numbers of black, Hispanic, and white officials elected by the votes of minority citizens continue to enlarge. It was not, for instance, a change of heart, but a change in the voters of Richmond that moved the city council to embrace local legislation promoting minority contracting.

Of course, only one of these contrasting signs will become the signal feature of the South’s future–depending upon what Southerners of goodwill do now and in the future. As in the past, these times call for perseverance with those enterprises that have worked and experimentation with others that promise new results in promoting political participation. It is a time for redoubling and improving upon current, effective work, for reinforcing the public understanding of the necessity for such work, and for boldly searching for new ways to further democracy for all.

In this spirit the Southern Regional Council has a timehonored place as an institution which believes in, and whose work enlarges, the promise of democracy in the American South. More than any other private institution in the region during the twentieth century, the Council has been able to bring both vigilance and innovation to the challenge of expanding democracy. These qualities, hopefully, will also be evident in the strategies and activities which both the Council and other Southerners engage over the next few years for enlarging democracy in this region we stubbornly call home.

Steve Suitts, a native of Alabama, is the executive director of the Southern Regional Council and the publisher of this journal.

The Vote and Change

Julian Bond

Vol. 12, No. 2, 1990, p. 4-9

These edited remarks are from a panel discussion held on political participation during last winter’s annual meeting of the Southern Regional Council. The participants, all with long involvement in the drive to expand political participation, included former SNCC leader and Georgia State Senator Julian Bond, former Little Rock mayor Lottie Shackelford, former Alabama legislator and national Democratic Party operative Tony Harrison and Texas voting rights activist Andrew Hernandez. All are members of the Southern Regional Council, Harrison and Shackelford are former presidents of the organization. Bond narrated the program, which was taped for television broadcast and is available on videocassette from the SRC.

JULIAN BOND: Ms. Shackelford, let’s begin with you. You were a high school student in Little Rock in 1954 when the Supreme Court said that separate but equal was against the law. Many believe that’s the beginning of the modern civil rights movement and the present day emphasis on the right-to-vote. What are your recollections of the political scene in Arkansas at that time?

LOTTIE SHACKELFORD: I think that Daisy Bates would be the first to say that she was merely trying to make certain that all students, particularly black students, had equal access for educational opportunities. And while the Court decision came down in ’54, the Little Rock schools went back and forth for three years as to when and how they were going to integrate. Then in 1957, of course, we had the Little Rock Nine who actually did integrate Central High School.

A lot of folk have asked, “Why nine?” I tell them that the number started off being 250, but as each year would pass, the number would drop. Some students no longer wanted to be a part. Some parents were being threatened about their children participating. So on that day in September 1957, there were only nine students still willing to go. Had the date been put off even one more day, we may have had eight or seven. But that did start an awakening-not just in Little Rock and the South-about what was needed to bring about equality and justice for all.

BOND: A moment ago you remarked that your father sold poll taxes, and a great many people won’t understand what that meant. What did you mean?

SHACKELFORD: You needed a poll tax to be eligible to vote. As opposed to registering to vote, you bought a poll tax.

BOND: How much did it cost?

SHACKELFORD: One dollar, at that time which was quite a bit of money. And I helped him sell poll tax receipts.

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BOND: So he would buy a quantity and then sell them back to potential voters?

SHACKELFORD: Right. He always believed that folks should exercise their right to vote. And, that was his way of making a contribution. He’d go into the rural areas outside Little Rock and sell those poll tax receipts. Go into churches and neighborhoods.

That’s one of the things that black folk in Little Rock were quite complacent about at that time. In their view they didn’t feel they were being denied so much. And, I think that’s another reason the impact of the desegregation crisis in ’57 had such a meaning there. Too many people were satisfied with the way things were going. While in rural areas black folk were saying they could not vote, in Little Rock, if you bought a poll tax receipt, you could vote.

Somehow or another they saw that as equality because white folk couldn’t vote either without a poll tax receipt.

BOND: Do you recall any fear accompanying your father’s efforts when you got outside Little Rock, out in rural Arkansas? Do you remember people being afraid to buy a poll tax?

SHACKELFORD: No, but then he never ventured much farther than the central Arkansas area. He didn’t get down into the Delta area.

BOND: Mr. Harrison, you’re an Alabama native and it is in Alabama, and Selma particularly, in 1965 that a massive demonstration resulted, finally, in the passage of the Voting Rights Act from which stem most of the political protections evident about us all over the United States for a wide variety of groups today. What are your recollections of the period before ’65 leading up to the Selma-Montgomery march?

TONY HARRISON: I was too young to have a personal recollection of that. But my grandfather was a voter. And, he was a teacher and minister. My fondest recollection of him is not about voting, but about his reading. He was always reading. In the summer he would be sitting on the porch after he had done his chores, and he would be trying to read the paper and I would be up trying to disturb him from his reading. He’d just ignore me and keep right on going.

BOND: As an Alabama state Iegislator, you helped reapportion the state legislature, did you not?

HARRISON: I had watched very carefully the reapportionment process in 1970 and ’74. And subsequently I ran for the legislature and won. So I was active in the process following the 1980 Census in which we expanded the base of participation from that in ’74.

BOND: Could you have helped to create additional black representatives in the Alabama state house and senate had it not been for the Selma movement in ’65 and even what had happened in Little Rock in 1957?

HARRISON: I don’t think there was any political participation of any significance in the South. The South was very clear that the poll tax represented a process for the denial of the franchise to all but primarily white males. So without the Selma march which brought the Voting Rights Act, my own participation would not have been possible. Once we got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of ’65, we also had the litigating process that brought one-man one-vote and which then turned out to be the basis for all of the redistricting. If I’m not mistaken, that comes out of Tuskegee, Alabama.

BOND: A natural turn to Mr. Hernandez, whose organization works primarily with Hispanics in the southwestern part of the United States. It was 1972 that the Voting Rights Act was extended to cover Hispanics. What did that extension mean to the kind of work that you do now? Could it have happened without this extension, this widening of the pool, in effect?

ANDREW HERNANDEZ: Absolutely not. In the same way that the passage of the Voting Rights Act opened up the doors of political opportunity for blacks in the South, where they went from 2-3 percent of the electorate to 30 percent of the electorate in some of the states, with extension of the Voting Rights Act to Hispanics in the Southwest beginning in the early ’70s, we saw a dramatic change in Hispanic participation. As the barriers came down, Hispanic participation went up.

In the same way that blacks went from a people who couldn’t participate because they were shut out of the process, Hispanics went from a group who had the lowest registration rate and the lowest turnout rate in the country of any other group in the early ’70s to in the ’80s a group that has the highest registration and turnout rate. Frankly, prior to the extension of the Voting Rights Act to Hispanics, at a time when the population was literally booming, the actual number of Hispanics registered to vote went down. That’s pretty hard, to be tripling your population and actually go down in the number of people registered to vote.

BOND: Why did that happen?

HERNANDEZ: There was an induced apathy in our community. It was induced by an array of election devices

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that shut Hispanics out of the political process; for instance, gerrymandering. When we first started our work in 1974, I was given the assignment to look at why Hispanics couldn’t win where they were in the majority. There were sixty-seven counties we identified in Texas that should have elected [Hispanic] county officials but that had not. That’s pretty distressing and we tended to blame our own people for it.

And when you got the leadership together and asked why we couldn’t win, somehow the finger was always pointed at apathy. That they were too poor to be organized.

What we found in those sixty-seven counties was that every single one of them was gerrymandered. The lines were drawn in such a way that Hispanics couldn’t win, no matter how much they registered, no matter how much they voted. When people were saying their vote didn’t count, they were telling the truth. The system had been set up to insure that their vote didn’t count.

BOND: What about other barriers? We heard Ms. Shackelford talk about the poll tax. What about other exclusionary barriers?

HERNANDEZ: We faced the annual registration for the poll tax. But another barrier unique to Hispanics was learning English. A large number of our older citizens weren’t afforded the opportunity to learn English. When they were growing up and when they were working they knew as much English as they needed to know to pick up people’s clothes, to clean their houses and take care of their children, and to cut their yards.

They didn’t figure they needed any more English than that. So having the ballot printed in English only denied people their citizenship. People who had sent their children to war, had paid their taxes all these years, and been faithful to American ideals but who had never been given a chance to learn English. When-under the Voting Rights Act-bilingual ballots were printed, our participation increased.

We also started attacking by litigating. We had filed lawsuits and were victorious in voting rights cases. When our people started winning at a local level and they started seeing change our participation went up.

In the Southwest the number of Hispanic elected officials increased from 1,500 in 1976 to close to 4,000 today. In Texas, one of the Southern states that we are talking about, we went from about 700 elected officials in 1974 to 1,600 today. We’ve doubled the number of voters, we’ve doubled the number of elected officials. I think that in Texas and in Florida you’re not going to win statewide elections unless you capture a significant part of the Hispanic vote.

BOND: And what has it meant to the general public in the states where you work to enfranchise this large segment of the population that formerly was just shut out; what difference does it make? If I were a devil’s advocate here: who cares? What difference does it make if Hispanics vote, if their lines are drawn properly?

HERNANDEZ: Well, in a democracy, anytime you have a large portion of the population shut off and alienated from the political system, that population, pretty soon, is going to try to bring down that system. They have no part in it, no share in it. Democratic institutions are fed and nurtured by people’s participation.

But there’s another issue that has to do with the fact that Hispanics bring energy, skills, and wisdom to this country. The other side of it, let’s say we don’t do anything. Let’s say we don’t integrate people, we don’t give them an opportunity. In Texas, by the year 2025, blacks and Hispanics will make up a majority of the population.

Are you going to have a majority of the population shut out economically, politically, and culturally from the life of that state?

HARRISON: In Alabama, the relegation of blacks to a second-class citizenship economically has denied growth to that state. If you look at the gaps between white income, black income, and Hispanic income across the region and the nation, you see lost economic opportunity. You can’t buy a house, you can’t feed your children, you can’t buy health care, you can’t clothe your family. That has relegated this society to a slower growth. We have a third-world nation living in the midst of the wealth of America. Racism continues to be the determinant of not only political but economic decisions. Racism is just a hell of a thing.

HERNANDEZ: I think the first stage in a people’s development is always the acquisition of power. The second stage is the exercise of power. I think we’ve gotten pretty

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good at moving into the acquisition of political power. But we’re still learning our way on how we as minorities exercise that power.

BOND: 1990 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Selma march and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. What does tomorrow hold? We see David Dinkins in New York, Douglas Wilder in Virginia–are these aberrations? Are we going to see more dark faces in unfamiliar places? What’s going to happen next?

HERNANDEZ: There’s no question that we will see more blacks being elected and we’ll see Hispanics being governors within this decade, and perhaps some black and Hispanic senators.

I think that the challenge for the ’90s is to exercise the power. For a long time our politics was protest politics, meaning you try to stop that thing from happening to you. It’s a redress of grievance, Well, that’s the politics that you’re involved in when you’re not on the inside. And we still need to do that.

But there’s another politics that’s emerging within the Hispanic community. In Texas we say, “dance with the one that brought you.” And what brought us was voter registration. What brought us were the Voting Rights Act lawsuits, and we have to be vigilant about that. What bought us was the commitment of black and Hispanic leaders and families and parents to do something better for their community and their children. We can’t leave that behind.

At the same time, we need to make sure that we start paying attention to the time when we will be the majority. By 2010, 30 percent of all the children in America will be minority children. In the five largest states in this country, minority children will be the new majority. That’s within our lifetime. When my boy is my age, he could be living in a state in which a majority of the people there are Hispanic. We need to prepare ourselves for being the majority and that means proposing from public policy perspective things that make our society more opportunity-filled, freer and more just.

The whole process is still very much alive and well in the black communities. The realities of our politics in northern cities is often still based upon that kind of participation. In 1991 after the census is taken and the new line-drawing process begins, we will come to the table with knowledge about what reapportionment is. We know how to try to make it work for us. I think we’re going to see an expansion of black, Hispanic and other minority participation during the 1990s and the redrawing process that will follow the 1990 census will lay foundations for that expansion.

BOND: Ms. Shackelford, let me shift gears a little bit and come to you. Your biography says you are the first woman mayor of Little Rock. We hear now about a woman’s vote. We see women’s preferences influencing decisions in the New York City mayoral race and the Virginia governor’s race. What does this mean?

SHACKELFORD: I think that in the beginning days of the women’s movement when we were fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, it still wasn’t clearly defined. It was almost pitting one against the other. Say me as a black woman, whether I’m a woman or a black in the sense of how I related to issues. There is no “if, and, or but” about it. The abortion issue is a woman’s issue. And, for the first time now, I think you can see the impact of the woman’s vote, black or white, rich or poor, in the sense of how they are impacting upon elections. And I think the past elections in Virginia and in new York show that.

BOND: You can argue that black women have been much more successful, proportionately anyway than white women. There were at one time, in proportionate number, more black women in the Congress than there were white women. There are a number of black women who have had electoral successes on the lower level. What’s going to happen in black politics in the United States, what new faces are we going to see? Neither Douglas Wilder nor Dave Dinkins is a babe in arms. These are men who have been around in political office for years and years. What new faces, fresh faces,

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female faces are we going to see in the future?

SHACKELFORD: We have not had a black woman governor. We have not had a black woman mayor of a truly major city. We have not had a black woman senator. We have very, very few black women who have found entry into corporate policymaking. You give me an economic chart and black women are still on the bottom; a political chart, we’re still on the bottom.

But, in the sense of new faces on the horizon, I see many more women now because they have had the opportunity or have been forced to be a part of the economic mainstream. Really working to take care of families themselves. Exposed-which means they are more concerned about politics because they understand the relevance of politics and economic well-being. We’re going to see more educated women who will not just focus on careers, but will focus on politics.

BOND: Mr. Hernandez, earlier we were talking about generations in politics. How is the first generation of Hispanics elected in Texas and the first generation of blacks elected in Alabama and Arkansas different from those elected in the last five to ten years?

HERNANDEZ: I think you’ll find two major differences. The first generation of leadership tends to be elected out of communities where the districts or jurisdictions are predominantly black or Hispanic. And as such, they come out of a struggle of protest. The second generation of Ieadership has less of that struggle of protest because the political process has been more accessible to them. But they’re tending to win now in districts where they make up 20 to 30 percent of the population. For example, the mayor’s race in Denver is won in a city where only 13 percent of the population is Hispanic. We see that happening much more. That means that their politics are not going to be as ethnically driven.

The more that women are integrated, the more that Hispanics and blacks are integrated into the national body politic, the more they’re going to be talking about justice, opportunity, and freedom. I think you’re going to see a renaissance in those values coming from segments that have been left out and now are being brought in. Because they are close enough to their history to remember a time when they were excluded, they will be more faithful to keeping the promise for all the citizens.

Once there were folks who said that you shouldn’t give people who don’t own property the right to vote. There were others who said you shouldn’t have freed the slaves, or given women the right to vote. There were folks who said you shouldn’t pay attention to those rabble-rousers in the South in the 1960s who made the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation come true. I think that future generations will look back at this generation that’s in the vanguard of transforming American life and say that this generation stood for what was best in America. And, those that resisted, stood on the wrong side of history.

BOND: Tony Harrison, we see in the headlines all kinds of racial and ethnic conflict, gay bashing, attacks on Asians, attacks on Hispanics, incidents such as Bensonhurst in New York. What does this say to us, twenty-five years after the Civil Rights Movement began?

HARRISON: It says that we are going through some frustrating times. I think Andy touched it when he said that you are sort of at the castle door. I think that there’s a lot of resentment, frustration, and lack of understanding in the white community that is festering.

The fact is that the economy is not generating enough opportunities for America’s people. White folks feel that blacks, Hispanics, and Asians are getting what’s theirs. The fact is that the economy isn’t generating jobs enough for all of us. And white folks are resenting what they see.

I don’t think it speaks negatively to where we are coming from, I think it speaks more to white frustrations. In this context, just the other day I was watching a television piece on eastern Europe. A Solidarity leader was attending a big rally in Chicago. The highest population of Polish people outside of Poland in one city is Chicago. I hope the Poles in Chicago will understand my struggle. Their struggle and my struggle is basically the same. Racism impedes their ability to see that.

Those kids in Bensonhurst were almost first generation Italian emigrants.

Why did they come to America? Freedom, economic opportunity? The same things I want. Racial tensions remain because the society has so segregated us that we have not learned enough about each other or appreciated our respective histories and those are the tensions that we

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are seeing.

I’m hopeful that with the new participation of blacks, Hispanics and Asians we can make this society as vibrant and vital and energetic as it ought to be and can be. We have to continue to pursue the political acquisition of participation and of power. We have to make the schools responsive to educate our children and help them understand that if they are not ready for participation in that society that’s coming in ten years they’re going to be cast aside.

The drug wars in the inner-cities of today are, I think, a direct by-product of the absence of hope and the absence of a sense of the future that these kids are faced with- overbearing pressure built upon generations of exclusion and denial. As long as our children cannot see past the moment that is in front of them, they can’t plan for tomorrow. When they can’t plan for tomorrow, there is no hope.

I think that racism is going to impede this society’s acceptance of the changing reality that Andy described. We’ve got every nation here in America. You can find somebody from every place in the world right here. And those Americans can in fact provide linkages back to South America, back to Spain, back to Europe, back to Africa. And all of the Asian countries are represented here.

But I don’t think we really understand the wealth of human diversity that we have in this nation, because we have been so historically tied into restricting access and restricting participation.

‘You Have a Right . . .’ Voices from the Movement in Mississippi

Edited by George Littleton

Vol. 12, No. 2, 1990, pp. 10-14

The following narratives are condensed from interviews conducted by young people from Bloodlines, regroup of black Mississippi high school students with a special interest in the seeds of the Civil Rights Movement in their area. The people they interviewed were all active in the Movement in and around Holmes County, Mississippi, which includes the communities of Lexington, Durant, and Goodman. Holmes County is deep in the Delta, along what is now north/south Interstate 55 above Jackson. The excerpts reprinted here focus on voting rights, although other signs of the times are visible which shed light on the struggle for the ballot. It is worth noting that for some of the interviewees the Civil Rights Movement began in the 1930s, and only came to a head in the Delta in the freedom summers of the early 1960s. These interviews also point up the often overlooked truth that dirt farmers and other grassroots soldiers started the Movement which only later attracted its stars. The interviews were edited by George Littleton.

Mr. T.C. Johnson

Interviewed by Jaqueline Collins & Reginald Skinner July 21, 1989. Lexington, Miss.

When I first got into the Movement, they had me like a so-called leader to encourage the others to come to meetings because a lot of people knew me. I had some influence, and I was puttin that to help where we could get on track to help the entire situation. I had seen a lot of abuse, and this made me make the effort to better conditions in Holmes County.

When I first went up to try to register to vote, it was only three of us but we was met by some of the deputies. This kinds put a little fear in your mind. Old Man Sims, who was practically blind, was in front, and the dogs was just charging at his legs, but he couldn’t see. We still had the courage to proceed into the courthouse. When we go in the courthouse we had to go in the circuit clerk’s office–that’s where we went to try to get the forms and try to fill ’em out to register to vote. We proceeded filling out the forms. It was what grade you were, how old, were you a citizen and a whole lotta questions. Some I thought was just pathetic–how many bubbles in a bar of soap? That was under Henry B. McClellan. We stayed in there so long till I was leaning on the counter, and he asked me did I want to go to jail. And I said, ‘No, the only thing we came up here for was to try to register to vote.’ And he asked me if I wanted to see the sheriff. I told him, ‘No, I didn’t come to see the sheriff.’ Then he messed around; we was in there from about nine o’clock till about two. He would go get coffee and it would take him ’bout two hours and a half to return. You gotta sit and wait. You didn’t feel too good sitting there. That’s how slow and unconcerned they were about you trying to get registered to vote to better your condition.

We went up there several times [to try to register to vote]. The next time, a pretty good bunch was going, and me and my wife and two more ladies went up. They were still giving you the runaround, askin’ you all kinds of silly questions, going through the motion again. It was still dragging feet and wasting time, and only one or two could get in that day.

They would treat you very ugly, talking about throwing you in jail and calling the sheriff. This was an experience I had never felt, trying to do something for your rights and they further misusing and intimidating you. It was awful, and you couldn’t even get a lotta peoples to even go up because they was already fearful; they knew how things were in the county, that white folks was running it and if you didn’t do what they wanted, they would make it hard for you. Or catch you on the road and beat you up. And wasn’t nothing did about it because they wasn’t handling whites for doing anything to blacks.

But after I went, it gave me more courage to go back where I’d be a registered voter. And that’s what’d make me proud; I could tell the young black generation that it’s not so hard now. We were the first three from the east side of Lexington ’cause there was a group ahead of us from down by Mileston, the first fourteen. They took a lotta abuse. I think the sheriff went out and cursed ’em out and made ’em get off the grass.

[The sheriff’s] main purpose was to hinder blacks from coming to the courthouse. He could get you upset and afraid. Lotta people just wouldn’t go if they saw the dogs out there. They would be saying things to you, ‘Get the hell offa that grass.’ They had signs out there: ‘Keep off the grass.’ And if you step on the grass, they would carry you to jail. And this would disencourage a lot of blacks from even going up to try.

[We were never threatened] for trying to register at that particular time. It came down later when we started entering children in the white school. It was the county schools, but at that time it was the white schools. And I put my youngest son, Leander Johnson, over there and they

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cut my funds off–what I was borrowing to farm on. They came by and told me a group was comin’ to see me about why was I doin this or was I being paid by the government. And I just told em I wanted my child to get a good education so he’d be able to make it through the world.

Once I was comin’ from a meetin down to Mileston, and I had four or five youngsters with me. The sheriffs and the constables and the game wardens would get across the track and catch us. I knew the routes through the country roads and the hills so I could bring them a different route. Once when we got to Lexington, they had two cars across the blacktop. I just whirled and went the other way. Fear is part of it, but I was trying to shun trouble at that time.

SNCC and CORE was the first to come in [to help blacks register] and was kinda like the freedom riders comin down South. They had a staff and connections with lawyers from the North, and they would come down and help us do sit-ins and go into places where blacks wadn’t allowed. They would help us do these things, getting through the county, gettin’ peoples organized. They could come in and mingle pretty good. They knew partly what they were doing. They could get more of the people together at these meetings than we who were living here.

I guess that’s because people were just really searching for good leadership and somebody to stand up and tell ’em what the whites couldn’t do to ’em. because the blacks here were slow about moving. But they would come in with us and get peoples to promise they would come out and help do things. So they had pretty good connections with the peoples here.

[The white volunteers] would fall in and just fit right on in. They were coming from the North and had a little more hang with ’em than some of the blacks here. Some of ’em came six months, a year, and left. But Sue and Henry Lorenzi stayed on throughout the whole action because when they left most blacks what wanted to register had done been up and registered.

[The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (FDP)] was mostly to help get peoples registered to vote. And it would help you get organized to go in and sit down in a lotta these places where blacks wasn’t allowed in the regular Democratic Party. By 1967 we had enough blacks registered in Holmes County so the FDP ran a group of candidates.

I ran [for supervisor] to help the peoples more, cause I wanted it fairly and squarely with all of ’em. Of course they tried to keep blacks from voting. That was the first priority. They could always get who they wanted to. [On voting day] I went to each polling place, shook hands, and checked out was it being fair and square. We had federal observers, but it didn’t seem like they was much help. They just observed like they was sent to do. We had quite a few disturbances on voting day. Whites and blacks would kinda get uptight to each other or say some violent things.

It was mostly the farmers–the poor farmers, the dirt farmers–that started the Movement. [Their advantage was that] the farmers had a acre or two, or ten or twenty, so he had his own little shack and his farm; he was making his living mostly from the earth. The teachers had to go through the school ‘sociation, and they were always afraid if they got out there, they would hear their name. The Superintendent and the rest of the people would get on ’em, and if they didn’t quit, they would fire ’em. But now we did get one teacher–Mrs. Bernice Montgomery. She was the first teacher that really came out and stuck with the Movement and the peoples. Seem like she had her mind made up. And her husband saw the Movement needed help so he got in it, and that gave her more courage whether she got fired or whatnot. She didn’t care what happened back there at the job. She just came with a full desire to help the people move forward. Later on you had other teachers to come and associate some with it.

There was some tension between the poor farmers who were first involved in the Movement and the teachers and preachers who came later on. They were all tryin’ to work towards one cause, but it would be a little tension because the grassroot people were the first to do anything to get the peoples together, where the preachers was afraid and the teachers was mostly afraid of gettin’ fired from their job; they didn’t wanna be involved at that time. So it was just the grassroot level people. And you get some of these old peoples, they didn’t want you to talk about it or come to see you because they knew what would happen. And we got turned down a lot of times from the black minister. He said he didn’t believe in mixing politics with the Bible, but it was fear is what it was.

William B. Eskridge

Interviewed by Dwayne Buchanan John Darjean August 2,1989. Carrolton, Miss.

I been in the Civil Rights Movement since nineteen hundred and thirty-two. But I had to be in it very slowly at that time. I believe the first time I got in the real Civil Rights Movement was in the sixties, Mrs. Blackmon put me in it. I went to a meeting and this young fellow was there named John Allen. Before I left there that night they had made me president of the whole thing. Consequently, I had to go to work and from then on we had quite a few meetings, quite a few run-ins and so forth. But my main role was to try to guide the thing in order to keep down as much violence as we can. Of course I was older than most of the people here that was in the movements.

Way back yon’, in 1928, we were tryin’ our best to get people registered to vote. We went to a state convention in 1928 and came back and got started. And we got about fourteen or fifteen people in the movement. Eventually we

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got that many registered, too.

The state convention was in Jackson, and the main party leader was Perry Howard, a Republican. The onliest way we could get in politics at that time was through the Republicans because the Democratics called themselves lily-white Democrats–you couldn’t get in there. So we decided we’d get a group and go vote. I believe ’twas 1932, we had about four teams go and vote. The day came for voting, I went to the poll in Carrolton. I think I was teachin’ school in Benton. I planned to leave school at that time. They didn’t want me to have a ballot but I told ’em ‘I got to have a ballot.’ And they gave me one and I voted that time. Now, one man was ‘spose to go to McCauley–he went, but the white people told him ‘Now, Uncle, you’re qualified but we advise you not to go.’ And those who were to follow me in Carrolton didn’t. So you had one man voted and you know what position it threw me in just havin’ one man voting.

When I went back to get another contract to teach school, one of them board members told me ‘If I hear of you teachin’ politics in that school, we gon’ put you out the next day.’ I looked at him and said, ‘Now I’m not down there to teach politics, but I do teach civics, and whatever comes up in civics I’m teachin it.’ And that settled it. You had to have, at that time, a way around them. You couldn’t just come out the way we do today. So I got over that hurdle. And after I voted once or twice more, but this was in Democratic–well, some’s Republican–because this was general election. I went to the polls at that time and they didn’t wanna give me a ballot. And we had a lawyer here–mighty fine man, old man Ewell–and they asked him was I qualified. ‘Yeah, Eskridge’s qualified.’ So that settled that. After that, why, I had to quit politics. My reason for quittin’ was if I couldn’t get enough folks to follow me, I wasn’t doin’ nothin but but hurtin myself. Because I knew I would soon be in a place where I wouldn’t have a job. So I pulled back and didn’t vote any more until way on up.

But during that Civil Rights Movement, I believe we went to Carrollton there one day to register people to vote. I told the sheriff and the Chancery Clerk what we was plannin’. Course I knew they didn’t like it, but still they had to accept it. After I told ’em that, he told me how he l gonna put ’em in jail if they keep on like they goin’. And

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I told him, ‘Now, you’re the sheriff, I can’t tell you what to do, but one thing: it may be better if you don’t.’ We stayed around that courthouse all day long and didn’t a single person register.

‘Twas against their religion to let black folks register. A few had a chance, but nobody could pass the literacy test. Back in the thirties we had to pay a poll tax but didn’t have to take no literacy test. That came later. Early on, they figured black folks didn’t have the money to pay a poll tax, and later they had to use the literacy test.

Mr. Mrs. Cooper Howard

Interviewed by Felisha Dixon Jeffrey Blackmon July 28, 1989. Goodman, Miss.

I was in the first march that they had here in Holmes County to get people registered. We had about 200 people, cause the rest of the people was just afred. They was saying what was gain’ to happen was that we was gain’ to get killed, the white people gain’ to kill us. Well, I figure like this: I went to taken my basic training in Aberdeen, Miss., and I marched on that soil and in Illinois, California, and Hawaii. So if I can march in the army where they fightin’ at, surely if this is a free country I can march here.

But that’s when they had the old dogs. That German Shepherd dog, he was at the door, and he would bite. And see, then people wouldn’t go in there, because they knew the dog would bite. Mr. Henry McClellan know ’bout that. He was the circuit clerk, but he would not help you or didn’t want you to come in there to get registered. And most of our professional people was scared to go into that office. They went down to the Post Office under federal registrars. The grassroot people went up there while it was tough, amongst the dogs and the bad sheriff and those bad people. We went up there and got registered.

We registered by havin’ the Justice Department come in and they told ’em that these people had to register. Then they moved the dog back. But as long as you was in there, they talked to you so bad. Talkin to old people, tellin ’em, ‘I ain’t gon’ help you. You can stay there and look like a coon, old possum!’ He told my daddy that. My daddy were eighty year old. I say not one thang, cause if I hadda open my mouth, he woulda said something to me. Then I would’ve put him across the counter.

The freedom riders came in about this time, but we had already decided we was gonna do it. But we would have went up and got turn away. Never would have got registered. We would have been in the same fix, like back in slavery. But those people had the backin’ of the NAACP, SNCC, COFO. They had a lawyer from the president office.

It helped to own land at that time, and because I did I never did suffer. A lot of people were put out of where they were working. Take the school teacher who could not participate in SNCC or anything concerning civil rights. Bernice Montgomery was the only teacher that stood up. And very few preachers would come out.

Viola Winters

Interviewed by Michael Hooker Tamara Wright August 1,1989, Durant. Miss.

After the trouble we had getting hired at the plant and integrating public facilities, we met at Second Pilgrim Rest Church with the Freedom Democratic Party–the FDP. There wasn’t any black folks here voting. So we went up there in Lexington to the courthouse. We had a hard time; they had a lot of questions to keep you from registerin’. Then when we started to voting, we had a hard time doing that ’cause we had to go round trying to beg them to come out of the house to vote. Black folks wasn’t use to anything like this. We had a hard time. I was sittin’ when the voting happening when we put Representative Clark in what he is now in Jackson [first black in Mississippi legislature since Reconstruction]. We sit down and take names–how many white and colored voting. I was sittin’ there one voting day, and a white man come up and told me ‘Get up and get outta here!’ Then I saw the pistol in his pocket. But, y’see, I didn’t get up. Finally I saw Mrs. Irene Johnson come in and I told her go and get somebody to identify this man, but when she come back he was gone.

The hardest time we had was trying to get registered. They didn’t want color’ folks to vote. They didn’t want equal rights. They had it so long to themselves, they don’t want us with them. They can’t help it now.

It kinda worries me that after all we did to vote, black folks don’t vote today. But black folks ain’t never had nothing. Seem like some don’t even want nothing. They still out there with the white man. A lot of ’em right now will carry messages back to him.

Dr. Martha Ann Davis

Interviewed by Marvin Noel Willa WilliaMiss. November 8, 1989. Brozville Road, Miss.

Along with three young men, I started the Lexington Action Group (LAG) before the civil rights voting vet, as we know, back in Lyndon Johnson’s time. It was also during a time when John F. Kennedy was president, so there were a lot of positive things going on. But before that time there was a lot of die-hard black independent farmers who simply were not pleased with not having a voice in government and not being able to vote. So they challenged the system. And because of our involvement with them, we started going to their little community meetings as they

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planned strategies to try to eliminate some of the barriers to voting.

When we began to get organized and actively involved, we went up and harassed the then-circuit clerk Henry McClellan, to ask him questions such as ‘How do you know what part of the Constitution of Mississippi a person who is trying to register to vote will have to interpret?’ And, of course, he would never give us straight answers to the point that he would try to tell us, ‘Who are your parents? I need to find your parents because you’re out of order.’ This was during a time when most black folks considered white folks as being superior to them. So I guess I, along with the young men, we were sort of militant and sort of crazy, and I think it was because of the way we had been brought up by our parents.

The LAG was like a youth arm to the establishment of the Freedom Democratic Party, and during that particular time in the sixties there was really no formal civil rights organization per se. But there was always somebody–no matter how small or how large the cluster of people–that everybody looked up to. And it was always the independent farmers in the lead, not the folks who worked on plantations.

One of the most scariest moments that I can recall was after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we were getting people that lived on plantations that joined the independent farmers down in the Delta to come to Lexington, to the courthouse, because at that time that was the only place you could register to vote. Everybody had come to the circuit clerk’s office. And I recall very well, we had to do it like in the late evenings or by dark, because usually you couldn’t talk back to black folks in the daytime because they were busy working in the fields or taking care of the big house, as they called it. And most blacks was afraid to talk to you if you mentioned the words ‘civil rights.’ That was just something you didn’t want to identify with because people had no other alternative for survival except to stay on these white peoples’ plantations. So now here we are saying that ‘You need to be men and women. You’re of age. You need to go and register to vote. You have a right to have a say in what happens.’ And then after that the slogan ‘One-man one vote’ evolved.

But on this particular plantation past Tchula we were trying to explain to the people what they had to do when they went to the circuit clerk’s office to register to vote. And here comes this white man up with a double-barreled shotgun and he cocks it at us teenagers. And we just stood there. We were scared to death, don’t get us wrong, but we just stood there to the point where he said ‘I don’t wanna catch ya’ll on my place no more.’

In the Mileston area we were successful at organizing to the point that people from the north that were sympathetic to the causes of voter rights, justice and equality for black folks, sent us large sums. of money, to put together this basically black community in Mileston and Homes County.

As a result of organizing the LAG a lot of opportunities came my way–thanks to people like Reverend J.J. Russell and T.C. Johnson, who would take us the back way through Hebron to the Mileston Community Center. And Reverend Willie James Burns stands out because he gave me an opportunity to go to Macintosh, Ga., (to the Citizens Education Program, headed by Dr. Martin Luther King) and really learn how to train people in voter education. I worked with people like Hartman Turnbow who was one of the first people to take on Henry McClellan, and people like Julian Bond, Joe Lewis, Andy Young, Dorothy Cotton, and C.T. Vivian. As a result of that training we would come back and train the next group of young people. We were on a mission. Before that the older people had to depend on the freedom riders or other outsiders. So for the old people this was a new avenue.

When the first challenge was made to the Democratic Party after the FDP was formed, I had an opportunity to be there for that first convention in Atlantic City, N.J. where we challenged them to say that, ‘Hey, this Democratic Party from Mississippi doesn’t represent the people of Mississippi, cause we got all these black folks in Mississippi and they have no representation.’ And at that time the Democratic Party was basically lily-white in Mississippi, and therefore it’s kind of ironic ’cause seemingly the tides are turning. But my mother reminds me that when she was a child, what black folks that could vote outside of areas that called themselves sort of ‘liberated’ did was vote Republican. They were not Democrats. And I thought that was interesting and asked her the other day did she think as young people we should be training them to be Democrats or Republicans? And she said, ‘Neither one. Instead we should be training ya’ll to be thinking.’

The Biggest Texan: John Henry Faulk 1913-1990

By Virginia Durr

Vol. 12, No. 2, 1990, pp. 15-17

Editor’s note: When John Henry Faulk died in Texas on April 9, 1990, many people lost a treasured friend and this nation lost one of its most passionate and articulate advocates of free speech. One of Faulk’s friends and fellow first amendment advocates was Virginia Foster Durr, a life member of the Southern Regional Council, who remembers John Henry here-with a few digressions-as an entertainer, a friend, and a down-home defender of particular American values.

John Henry had a room in New York City. He was just getting on the radio at CBS then and I was in New York with my daughter Lucy and another friend. Mary Price was running the Southern Conference for Human Welfare office in New York and she had arranged for us to stay in John Henry Faulk’s apartment. This was during the end of the war, about 1945. Well, we got there and his apartment was in the home of Pete Seeger’s mother-in-law. She came from a very old family in Virginia not far from where we lived [the Durrs lived in Washington, D.C., at this time, where Clifford Durr was a member of the Federal Communications Commission].

She [Seeger’s mother-in-law] had married a Japanese who was a prince or something. We first knew Pete Seeger because he had called us when he had taken his family in a van and gone down to Florida. He had his father-in-law with him who was a resident in Virginia. On the way [they were still in Virginia] they stopped with a picnic lunch in a park. Anyway, he called us and said his father-in-law was in jail. He had been arrested because in the park there was a sign that said, “Nobody but Aryans.” He wasn’t black but he was Japanese. My husband knew somebody there in [forgets the town]. He had to pay a $25 fine and we sent him the money. The lawyer got them out of jail and Pete sent his family on on the train and he was going to drive the van on back. The old man was shook up because he had never been arrested before for being a non-Aryan. He was upset about it.

But he got out of jail and that night Pete stayed over

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with us and said he wanted to pay us back for what we had done. He wanted to do a concert and he asked me if I could get some people to come and I got twenty-five people together. So we had a Pete Seeger concert all to ourselves for about five hours. The next time I saw Pete was in London and he had sold out every ticket six months before: 12,OOO seats. We got hold of him and had tea with him and he offered us two tickets but unfortunately we had another engagement. He was just on top of the world. I’ve never seen anybody as exultant and happy and thrilled as he was. He felt like a new day was dawning. He’s a very attractive man.

Anyway, John Henry knew Pete Seeger. They were both folk singers, you see, and John Henry had a room from his mother-in-law. They had a house down in the Village there. When we got there we went to bed. There were two beds in the room and my daughter was in my bed and I woke up and there was a man wandering around the room. He said, ‘What are you doing in my room?’ I said, ‘This is John Henry Faulk’s room,’ and he said, ‘I guess we’re roommates.’ He told me to go on back to sleep and we did.

Early the next morning John Henry came by and picked up my daughter Lucy to be on his radio show. All she was supposed to do was yell ‘Whoopee!’ or something like that but she was thrilled to death to be on the CBS show with John Henry Faulk. After that he got more and more prominent and got on the big shows.

From the standpoint of oratory he was just terrific. He was very funny and very amusing. A terribly charming fellow. He was just doing fine. He was married and divorced and then married again. He had several children. He had three wives and the last was an English girl, and Yohan was her child. He was very close to him. John Henry was doing fine and made lots of money and was getting to be kind of a super luminary in the fifties after the war.

Then the Red Scare began. He was on the CBS news and one of the sponsors was a grocery chain and it seems John Henry addressed the unions. They accused him of being a Red. Palmer Weber was another Southerner, and he made a lot of money on Wall Street and he persuaded John Henry to fight the suit against him. They took years and years to fight the suit but in the meanwhile he stopped being a super luminary and he lost all the jobs he had.

No one thing happened to him-just making speeches before the unions, red unions as they called them. It was this grocery chain that was after him and that brought the suit against having him on the radio. John Henry would sing at union meetings. He would tell delightful, funny stories and act them out on stage. But he got into such a bad fix that his wife left him. He came back down to Austin, Texas, and he was really just as poor as Job’s turkey. He managed to make a living the last 20-odd years by teaching and speaking on the radio.

For a while he had a big public radio broadcast from Dallas that went all over the state of Texas. This was after the bad press Dallas had gotten on account of the death of John Kennedy.

So ho wanted to go on the air and make Texas seem more attractive to people. But this was a liberal outfit and the Ku Klux had gotten after them and had gotten on their wire, on their frequency. John Henry had Cliff [Durr] come down to speak on the radio show on the first amendment and when he started to speak this voice came out of the blue and said, ‘We know who you are. You damned lowdown communist nigger lover from Alabama. George Wallace has told us about you.’ It was the most dreadful thing that ever happened. John Henry would try to say something and they would come on and say, ‘Aw, you act like a country boy but you’re nothing but a damned lowdown communist nigger lover.’

It was truly terrible. It was the complete end of free speech because this Klansman or whoever he was…segregationist…had taken over the public radio system. That night he was asked to be on a statewide radio system and we went to the show and the same thing happened there-‘Damned nigger lover.’-I never did know how they managed to break in that way but John Henry had to give that show up because he couldn’t handle it, really.

[Still] he was one of the most happy, cheerful people I’ve ever known in my life. His great belief in the world was in free speech, the first amendment. He supported my brother-in-law Hugo Black and Bill Douglass. What’s so amazing is that these people who had everybody against them-my husband, Palmer Weber, John Henry-stood up for free speech, and a ‘nigger loving communist’ was about as lowdown as they could call you, and they did it if you stood up for free speech. It was very difficult to make a living. People seemed to have gone crazy in a way. These racial feelings that had been around for generations were augmented by this vague communist threat. So John Henry really had a big problem. He got blacklisted and always had a hard time after that.

But he was a great hero. His last years were torture when he had cancer because it was behind his eyes and they couldn’t get at it. When he died he was full of pain. I talked to him on the phone just before he died and he was as cheerful as could be.

He came to visit in Montgomery a number of times. He was part of the Conference for Human Welfare and did a great deal of speaking and traveling. You have to realize how delightful he was, and charming and humorous. All these men that I mentioned, they were augmented by their love of the South and their state. John Henry was the biggest Texan there ever was in the world. He got a job under Lyndon Johnson but they went after him and he had to withdraw it. I was wanting to get away myself. I didn’t

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have that devotion to the South like Cliff had. In any case we stayed and I’m still here. I’ve gotten very fond of Montgomery, Alabama, but we are on the bottom of every list about things like poverty and education.

But John Henry was so funny. He would change his personality and be Uncle Bud and Aunt Mamie and Cousin Rosa Lee or whatever. He would play the part of these country people in Texas come to town. He was a very dramatic person. The oil industry almost ruined Texas and John Henry didn’t get any of that money and I don’t know how he lived but he stayed in Texas.

The last time I went down to see him I went with him to a university and he got an overwhelming ovation. This was before Cliff died in 1975. He spoke a lot at universities. I think he had just gotten a job at a university in west Tennessee but he died. He was also a playwright. But young people today don’t even know his name outside of Texas. This is a sad time you know. John Henry has died and Walker Percy died and Myles Horton up at Highlander. All these people are like the-John Henry’s death was in the New York Times and the Washington Post but nobody mentioned it here. Walker Percy was in the paper, but of course he is a native Alabamian.

Virginia Durr’s recollections of John Henry Faulk were recorded, transcribed and edited by George Littleton.

A decade of litigation a Southern ‘Devil’s Island.’

Reviewed by Laughlin McDonald

Vol. 12, No. 2, 1990, pp. 17-19

Reform and Regret by Larry W. Yackle (New York: Oxford University Press. 1989. 322 pp.).

Reform and Regret, by Larry W. Yackle, is an engrossing, carefully written story of two federal lawsuits, Pugh v. Locke and James v. Wallace, filed in 1974 to reform the Alabama prison system. The need for reform was great.

As Yackle describes it, most inmates were warehoused in large, unsupervised dormitories where the strong preyed on the weak. None of the state’s institutions met basic public health standards or the state’s fire safety code. Medical care was grossly inadequate. Inmates were poorly fed, denied adequate exercise and reasonable opportunities to visit with their families, and there were few educational and vocational programs.

The disciplinary unit within Draper Prison epitomized the worst of the system. Inmates in the doghouse, as the disciplinary unit was called, had no beds, no lights, no toilets, no running water, and no reading material. They were fed once a day and allowed to shower only once every eleven days. They were never released for exercise. Each punishment cell was only thirty-two square feet in area–the size of a sheet of plywood. Despite that, as many as six men were crammed into a single cell, for weeks at a time.

The conditions at Draper were not unique. Severe overcrowding was routine throughout the system, as was violence. Rapes and beating were common. There was no system of classification to separate the violent from the nonviolent inmates, and there was a shortage of guards. At Fountain, two officers supervised some 1,000 prisoners. The number of guards was reduced at night with the predictable result that those on duty, for their own safety, never ventured into the dormitories after dark.

“Discipline” was often maintained by the inmates themselves. Prisoners, called “strikers,” supervised inmates on work details and enforced order with hoe handles, broomsticks, and homemade knives. Other prisoners, called “flunkies,” patrolled the dormitories at night and were responsible for breaking up fights. It is not surprising that inmates seemed always heavily armed. According to Yackle, prisoners felt it was better to risk being caught with a weapon by a guard than to chance being caught without one by another inmate.

An Alabama newspaper referred to the state’s prison system as a “Devil’s Island.” Robert Sarver, a former director of the Arkansas Department of Corrections, and an expert witness in the lawsuits, gave an equally damning assessment. Prisons were “very dirty and unbelievably overcrowded.” Prisoners lived in a “veritable jungle,” and on food he could not “attempt” to eat himself. Inmates were like “caged animals” and lived a “demoralizing, debasing, degrading and ultimately destroying existence.”

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The plaintiffs in Pugh and James were inmates who filed their initial complaints pro so, or representing themselves. Jerry Lee Pugh, a 27-year old white male, had been severely beaten during a race riot at Fountain in 1973 and charged that prison officials had failed to afford him adequate protection. Worley James was an eighty-year-old black man who spent more than a quarter-century behind bars. He claimed that prison officials had failed to provide him with adequate medical care and to rehabilitate him while he was in custody.

Fortunately for Pugh and James, their cases were assigned to Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. in Montgomery, one of the brightest and most activist judges in the federal judiciary. Judge Johnson took the complaints seriously and quickly appointed two local lawyers to represent the plaintiffs. The lawyers in turn agreed to coordinate their efforts and broadened the suits into class actions challenging the operation of the prison system as a whole. They also enlisted the aid of several civil rights organizations–the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Civil Liberties Union of Alabama and the National Prison Project. As a result of this series of events, the pro se complaints of two obscure Alabama inmates were transformed into major public interest litigation.

The plaintiffs made three related, but progressively more ambitious, arguments. First, the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment is violated when prison officials maintain conditions that produce a pattern of violence against individual inmates. Second, inmates have a right to rehabilitation, and the maintenance by prison officials of conditions which frustrate that right or cause deterioration is also cruel and unusual punishment. Third, reliance on long-term incarceration with limited parole opportunities in large, secure, rural prisons is itself a violation of the Eighth Amendment. This last claim was clearly the most radical, for it was nothing less than an attack on the traditional American system of incarcerating people for the commission of crimes.

The cases went to trial in the summer of 1975. After six days of devastating testimony, the state conceded that its prison system was in violation of the Eighth Amendment. Judge Johnson ordered certain immediate reforms, such as closing the doghouse at Draper, and issued a full opinion in January 1976. He ruled that the totality of conditions in the prisons constituted cruel and unusual punishment. He also accepted the first two theories of unconstitutionality put forward by the plaintiffs: prison officials had failed in their “duty to provide inmates reasonable protection from constant threat of violence,” and “prison conditions were so debilitating that they necessarily deprive inmates of any opportunity to rehabilitate themselves, or even to maintain skills already possessed.” He declined, however, to rule that the Alabama prison system itself was a violation of the constitution.

The court ordered sweeping changes to bring the system up to constitutional standards. The population of each facility was restricted to “design capacity.” The state was held to the minimum standards established by the U.S. Public Health Service and was ordered to establish a plan for the classification of all prisoners, including identifying and segregating violent inmates. At least one guard had to be stationed inside and one outside each dormitory at all times.

The prison system was required to hire new guards and reduce “the racial and cultural disparity” between the staff and the inmate population. Prisoners had to be given a “bed off the floor” and a minimum of 60 square feet of living space, three square meals a day, “meaningful” jobs and a chance to enroll in basic education courses and vocational training programs.

What followed were years of legal wrangling and foot dragging by the state, which Yackle describes in exquisite detail. There were appeals, modifications of decrees, the appointment of monitors, and numerous compliance hearings. Implementation became so problematical that the court placed the entire prison system in receivership in 1979.

Judge Johnson, who moved to the Eleventh U.S.

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Circuit Court of Appeals, was replaced on the case by Robert Varner, and lawyers, all of whom exceptionally able and dedicated, shuffled in and out of the litigation as it proceeded through its permutations.

The legal maneuvering was accompanied on the political side by fingerpointing and grandstanding by state officials upon whom fell the responsibility of implementing the federal court order. Prison administrators accused the legislature of not appropriating enough money to make needed changes, while the legislature accused prison officials of being inefficient and wasteful. Governor George Wallace, who had castigated the judiciary during the battle over desegregation in the 1960s, charged that “ [sic] thugs and federal judges had “just about taken over society.”

By November 1984, however, as a result of judicial cajoling and coercion, including the actual release of prisoners from overcrowded facilities, enough progress had been made to allow the plaintiffs to enter into an agreement dismissing litigation, subject to being reopened in the event of backsliding by the state. Judge Varner signed the agreement into law and the prison litigation came to an end.

Yackle surveyed the prison system two years later and assessed the extent of reform. Four new prisons and a variety of community facilities had been built which significantly relieved overcrowding. Prison staff had doubled and many of the new correctional officers were black. A system-wide classification system was in operation, and there were greater opportunities to participate in work release and educational programs. The level of violence had dropped substantially. Medical and mental health care were much improved and disciplinary cells were equipped with bunks, mattresses, toilets, and electric lights.

To be sure, the reform was far from complete or adequate, and the cost of even limited reformation had been eleven years of frustrating, bitter litigation. But these are not Yackle’s principal regrets. Rather, they are that “something fundamental had not changed; men and women were still kept in cages, and long enough to ensure that they could never again function as ordinary citizens.”

Regrets, of course, are a function of expectation and the possible. It was probably unrealistic to expect a judge, even one as sensitive to constitutional claims as Frank Johnson, to invalidate the prison system itself. The author might have enhanced our sense of lost opportunities, however, by spelling out in more detail alternatives to the routine use of long-term confinement. There may be better ways for society to deal with people who commit crimes, but Yackle does not tell us what they are. Surely one alternative, and it has nothing whatever to do with penology, is the development of a society that does not breed crime, a society in which those who need decent jobs, housing, and educational opportunities can get them.

Laughlin McDonald is director of the Southern Regional Office of the American Civil Liberties Union and a lawyer who has himself been actively involved in numerous cases involving prisons, noting rights and civil rights.

Telling a Mouthful about the South.

Reviewed by Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 12, No. 2, 1990, pp. 19-22

Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, co-editors. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. $49.95.)

Is an encyclopedia, and this one in particular, a book or an event, an event that should be written about elsewhere in this magazine? It is here, in the back of the book, that the duty has been assigned, and I shall endeavor to consider it as a book, albeit one of a distinctive sort.

Doing that is made difficult right off, because I–and I am reasonably positive every one of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture’s many other reviewers–have violated a reviewers first obligation: to have read the whole book. My plea in extenuation is that I have read a lot of it, and some of all of its twenty-four parts.

The parts proceed alphabetically from Agriculture to Women’s Life. The usual practice of encyclopedists has avoided subject classification. The editors of the E.S.C. added to their challenges by making such. As many topics

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overlap subject areas they had the problem of deciding where to put them. There are, by hasty count, more than fourteen hundred articles–and my first high-heaped praise is of the editors’ accomplishment in lining up about eight hundred persons to write them–and the placement of these many pieces has presented reviewers something to criticize. Given the task the editors faced one ought to spare the criticism. Reflecting on the difficulty, for example, of deciding whether to place the article on “Desegregation” under Black Life, Law, Politics, Social Class, or Violence suffices both to illustrate how close the judgment calls could be and to be accepting of the editorial decision, which in fact put this one under none of those but Education instead. Cross-references do help.

Some assignments do, however, apparently reflect a different kind of editorial judgment, one that expresses valuation. Placing the article on “Harry Crews” under Media, rather than Literature was probably an innocent slip. But to place “Margaret Mitchell” and “Frank Yerby” under Mythic South and “Lillian Smith” under Women’s Life instead of Literature are irritating literary valuations.

Another favorite area of comment by reviewers has been to note omissions: if this person is in why is this other one not, is the common approach. As in, if “Julian Bond” why not John Lewis and Robert Moses, if “Patsy Cline” and “George Jones” why not Kitty Wells and Johnny Cash, if “Hank Aaron,” “Ty Cobb,” “Dizzy Dean,” and “Satchel Paige” why not–for goodness sakes–Willie Mays? Well, why not indeed? Such are the perils of encyclopedia construction, and the joys of sideline critics.

Some omissions are more serious, however. How, for perhaps the leading example, can there be any reasoned justification in such a venture as is the Encyclopedia for the neglect of Thurgood Marshall, who has done as much as any person of this century to transform the South? (And if the grounds are that he was by origin but a Marylander, this man who has strode the South both literally and by influence for decades, those grounds did not keep out his fellow Marylander, H. L. Mencken.)

Another difficulty for the reviewer is that to comment on style or substance would be unfair when there are many articles, written by a small army of writers, and when numbers of them are yet unread. There seems no principled course other than to consider the tome as a whole, which means to concentrate on concept and outline rather than substance. Some articles are quite good, some are bad, and I think everyone who explores the book would say the same although not agreeing on which. I will note, however, examples of what in my opinion are good and poor models of the genre of encyclopedia essays.

The aforementioned piece on school “Desegregation” is an example of the former: clear, compressed, accurate, and obviously authoritative. Here, as elsewhere, the suggested bibliography is one that probably everyone familiar with the topic would want to revise–in a variety of disputable ways–but the important thing, the essay itself, is all one might turn to an encyclopedia to find.

On the side of bad models, I trust that an exhaustive reading of the encyclopedia would not turn up another article worse than “Newspapers,” in the Media section. I say that without concern here for its content–though it is generally atrocious–but because it is a very model of what an encyclopedia article should not be, for it is stuffed with the essayist’s personal preferences. Readers are told, for example, which are the “best” newspapers in each state and who have been the “courageous” editors of the South, and the fact that both lists are well off the mark is less to be noted than that such subjective judgments have no business in a reference work.

These two articles do not stand alone; there are many others which are very good and appropriate, and there are some others that, like “Newspapers,” are inappropriate. But fundamentally, the Encyclopedia is to be appreciated in terms of its concepts and architecture. The latter is easier to discuss. As noted, the book has twenty-four subjects. Was that necessary? Would the work be just as interesting were it more conventional, essays simply arranged alphabetically? Possibly so, but the editors are entitled to their belief, and their implied assertion that here are the twenty-four most salient aspects of the South does give another big thought to chew over. I have no fault to find with the outline. The inclusion of some subjects–I think especially of Violence but also Ethnic Life–is fresh and unexpected and altogether correct.

Each part has a Consultant who has contributed an introductory essay. In areas where I presume to trust my own judgment I single out Politics as a section where the Consultant has written a fine and trenchant introduction (concluding with the understated sentence, “Whether state governmental policies that favor public aid for industrialists, oppose labor organization, support relatively low taxes and services, and tailor social policies to the needs of land developers and real estate brokers will benefit the region’s people as a whole and will alleviate racial and other social problems remains an open question.” The ensuing

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articles are well chosen and–with only a scant few bobbles of fact and a wisp of blind overconfidence in southern peoples, as in suggesting that states which export such as Helms and Gingrich have outgrown demagogy’s attractions–well handled. This section can be read and studied as a first class treatment of a single subject, and is strong evidence of the good sense behind the editors’ plan of constructing the E.S.C. around subject areas.

The other side of that is, however, that with subjects as fluid and changeable as Politics and most others in this volume, to deal with them once, if that has been well done, almost commits the publisher to bring out revisions from time to time.

And finally, concept, beginning with the question, “Should this have been done at all?” Should we who live and work in this geographic region known as “the South” be deliberately deepening the sense of being Southern, of Southernness, of being, in one of the essayist’s words, “enthralled by the southern consciousness and its traditionalism?”

Or, on a somewhat different level, should we be burrowing ourselves more and yet more deeply into the digs started by Howard Odum, converting the South into “data,” which can be added to and mined and re-mined endlessly. Odum is, indeed, the intellectual patron hovering over the Encyclopedia, for it as did he expresses a uniquely Southern (as far as I detect) blending of social science and romantic attachments. The E.S.C. believes that there is a Southern “way of life,” and its text is meant to be the lineaments and the interpretation of that “way,” or culture.

John Shelton Reed, in the foreword to The Disappearing South?, an interesting collection of essays by specialists in the study of Southern politics (edited by Robert P. Steed, Lawrence W. Moreland, Tod A. Baker. University of Alabama Press, 1990. xii, 224 pages $26.95), has written: “one enduring element of ‘southern distinctiveness’ has been a concern for what that distinctiveness might be, a concern that amuses other Americans when it doesn’t just get on their nerves. This book’s title places it in a long tradition of inquiry, further specified by its subtitle, ‘Studies in Regional Change and Continuity,’ and one continuity has been the persisting worry by several generations now of thoughtful Dixiologists–journalists, students of history and literature, scholars from nearly every social-science discipline–about whether they have anything left to talk about.”

This is one of those matters which believing makes so; at leas/partially. If people who live in the South believe that they do have a distinct culture, then they have one. If observers cannot (as some able ones say they cannot) point to basic differences between the Southern “way of life”-of the Southern “mind”–and that of other regions’ folks, but if Southerners themselves continue to believe there are these differences, then so much for facts. A quarter of a century ago, I wound down an essay by asking, “Ten years from now, or 20, will people living between the Potomac and Rio Grande still identify themselves with each other, still feel worthwhileness in calling themselves Southerners?”

I answered then, “I do not know.” The answer now seems to be in. They do. They do, and too often for generally bad reasons. The Encyclopedia celebrates superficiality (“Goo Goo Clusters”) and seriousness in almost the same breath and indiscriminately. In doing so it is true to the present day South. An article on “Bonnie and Clyde” is almost as long as the immediately following one on “Capital Punishment;” that is to trivialize. So is the equality between “Snake Handlers” and “Southern Baptist Convention” or between a piece on “Armadillo” and its preceding ones, “Appalachian Coal Regions” and “Appalachian Mountains.” There is playful fascination with coltish things such as “Jack Daniels Distillery” and “Murder Legends.” The examples could, unfortunately, be multiplied. This side of E.S.C. is depiction of a South that does not care or give a damn, and today’s South is in fact much like that.

In which particular, the contemporary South is at one with the nation as a whole, as we became in recent years.

The editors say, “Black culture is central to understanding the region and the Encyclopedia’s attempt to explore this perspective in specific, detailed topics may be the most significant contribution of the volume toward understanding the region.”

They are certainly correct about the centrality of the black presence and experience. And there is, to be sure, a considerable quantity of space given to blacks and their concerns, though some opportunities are missed; there is, for one, only slight attention given to the black bar, its history and growing role.

But can an encyclopedia, with the constraints which the form imposes on even so unconventional one as this, be fairly taxed with a social or political mission? The great Encyclopedie served one, but has or can any since?

If the E.S.C. is intended to elevate regional racial cultures as well as describe them then it would have to be appraised on very demanding requirements. Those would include the measure by which it alters what are for white racial liberals today’s governing rules in their relations with the black community: keep a distance; engage with blacks only in politics; never publicly find fault and be ready to praise when publicly called upon; and never move a step in advance of black leaders in calling for institutional integration, even though that generally means not at all.

If such a measure were applied to the Encyclopedia, I doubt that it would pass; in that failure, it would be well representative of the region: and in fact, of the nation, no distinction there, at all. Until the section on Violence is

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reached, this is a book which wants the South to be liked, or at least respected. wants Southerners to feel good about themselves. The section on Violence is different, but one discordant note does not greatly change the rhythm.

Where do blacks fit into that? I cannot say that I hope they will–in these days of bullying small nations and turning away from the poor I am against any Americans feeling good about themselves–but I do hope they will find themselves and their cultures, and some of their troubles and their aspirations, justly depicted in these pages.

Leslie W. Dunbar, former executive director of both the Field Foundation and the Southern Regional Council, is the book editor of Southern Changes.

A mayor who was never addicted to steel.

Reviewed by Charles Morgan Jr.

Vol. 12, No. 2, 1990, pp. 22-23

BACK TO BIRMINGHAM: Richard Barrington, Jr. and His Times by Jimmie Lewis Franklin (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1989).

Whether to review the biography, the subject of it, the place, or “the times” is rarely answered by reviewers. Here is my answer. Dr. Franklin, a professor of history at Vanderbilt University, has produced a carefully researched chronicle of the life of Mayor Arrington. He strives for accuracy and seems to achieve it. It is worth reading if you are running against Richard Arrington or are seeking his support.

Each year in the United States fifty thousand new books are published. Whether fifty thousand good sentences are annually written or uttered in the United States is a question more pertinent to our collective future than are most books which, if put to the torch, really would produce a bonfire of the vanities.

In this book Dick Arrington emerges as a man who from college “watched closely the unfolding civil rights events” and who “preferred a life of the mind” to a life of politics, which is, apparently, mindless. The book does him a disservice for it is a scholarly vivisection of his political campaigns and service such as would render any politician–mayors Daley and Curley of Chicago and Boston, even the fictional Frank Skeffington–boring. Of course it is possible to write about politics in a way that would make the lives of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Huey P. Long, and John F. Kennedy boring.

“Things have been mighty quiet here lately,” some used to comment about post-1963 Birmingham. True enough, and it is hard to tell an interesting story about The Quiet. The city, however, could provide a good novelist virgin timber. The bawdyhouses and wildness of Birmingham’s early years, the struggles of immigrants in the only non-seacoast Southern city that had many of them, and the competition of poor blacks and poor whites to get the right to live in company houses and buy from The Company’s stores would provide some writers a rich prelude to changed politics in what black folks used to call the “Johannesburg of the South.”

During the Depression, Birmingham–quite understandably–had about as many Communist Patty members as there were in the rest of the South. In its bad old days U.S. Steel exercised raw power. At one time it even expropriated a substantial share of the county’s tax dollars and invested them in “the Company’s schools.”

Why not? The entire city had been created for steel. In the early years Lloyd Noland, a physician fresh from work on the Panama Canal, was hired by U.S. Steel to drain work areas to make them inhospitable to mosquitos and habitable for its labor. Even the way that the water flowed had been decided by steel.

Today there is concern about the homeless. In Birmingham in the 1930s there were those who tried to live in cold, dirty coke ovens for want of another home–and were evicted-but it was the near killing of a white man, Joseph Gelders, by prominent citizens whose livelihood was drawn from U.S. Steel and the ensuing investigation by Senator Robert LaFollette’s committee that resulted in a detente-like end of violence between steel and labor. These events did give William Bradford Huie his first novel, Mud on the Stars (renamed Wild River) but other than that they go unremembered.

In the mid-1940s the city’s efforts at post-war diversification were futile, for steel owned the town’s economy “lock, stock, and mill,” beginning with 50,000 prosperous steel and mine workers.

It was the civil rights revolution and the decline of steel that set Birmingham free and made the election of a Richard Arrington inevitable, but this book treats them like far away ghosts that needlessly haunt the city and its culture.

Dr. Arrington was not a participant in civil rights and labor struggles. He is a product of them, an heir to them, a kind of trustee for the past, and as he seeks to forge a way into that future he is governed by that past.

The driving force of the city was steel. It left. Blue-collar Birmingham stayed behind and so did the ever-present memory of the power of steel to veto all other private en-

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terprises. Like East European nations that depended on government for their capital, Birmingham and its bankers depended on steel. Like the white paternalism that governed opportunities for black folks, steel’s paternalism became the habit of white folks. Local business leaders were leaders in satellite industries, like the slag companies that sold waste products, the fabricators that fashioned steel products, and the casters of pipes that left on the trains that had come to Birmingham because of steel. The leading citizens were bankers and barristers who served whims delivered from Pittsburgh and New York.

The world changed. Airplanes, for example, flew over, around, and through Birmingham. Today, Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, and Miami serve the transportation needs of the South. Some might wonder why, after deregulation, a few of Birmingham’s wealthy residents didn’t buy a jet and set up an airline all their own. The answer probably comes from habits of dependence developed by business leaders who depended on Steel for all major decisions. Today Birmingham does have hard-driving, young entrepreneurs. One reason is that these younger people had never become addicted to Steel.

It was government, state and federal, that created the new Birmingham presided over by Mayor Arrington. Now the largest employer is the University of Alabama’s sprawling medical complex. That brought to the city outstanding physicians, who brought with them others with entrepreneurial attitudes. They and younger citizens offer the “Magic City” its best chance to recapture that hundred year-old monicker.

One night a few years ago I went to a fundraising affair for Mayor Arrington in Washington, D.C. Held in a rather dimly lit room and populated by perhaps one hundred people, ninety-five of whom were black, local black leadership chatted until Richard Arrington entered. As he spoke, it dawned on me that I had heard everything he was saying: the bad days of the past are gone; Birmingham is moving forward as a progressive city; hope is abounding; tomorrow will be a better day.

Richard Arrington sounded exactly like his white predecessor, David J. Vann, who had sounded exactly like his white predecessors George Siebels and Albert Boutwell, who had sounded exactly like their white predecessors Jimmy Morgan and Cooper Green. Mayors of Birmingham were its official greeters and for more than forty years I had heard them speak of hope and promise and dreams. But more important were the voices that had come from the pulpits of black churches and the police commissioner’s bull horns.

Yet this Mayor was speaking the same “Mayor’s words” in a different time. Now the state has a Republican governor and the county commission is presided over by a Republican Harvard graduate named Katopodis who has a doctorate. Blacks represent the city in both houses of the state legislature. The Democratic congressman is Jewish. Some judges are black, others are white women. The police chief is from Brooklyn.

The words uttered by Dick Arrington’s white predecessors had been unbelievable. It dawned on me now that I believed those same words when they were spoken by Dick Arrington, probably because of his race. Birmingham, Alabama, had not merely elected a mayor of reason–it often had done that–but had elected a black man as mayor; and–rest in peace Bull Connor–Birmingham, Alabama, has a mayor who is a PhD. And all because the civil rights movement came to town, and “big steel” left, and the City was set free.

The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture says of Charles Morgan Jr. that he has been “involved in much of the litigation that altered political and social life” of the South. During the 1960s up to the mid 1970s when be departed company from the A.C.L.U. and took up private practice in Washington, no lawyer did more or with more commitment, and none with more lasting cadet.

The Cold Hard Truth

By J.L. Chestnut, Jr.

Vol. 12, No. 2, 1990, p. 24

Editor’s Note: It has been a turbulent in Dallas County, Alabama, where the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act was celebrated earlier this year with more than just reenactments. A bitter controversy over white control of majority black public schools has involved arrests, sit-ins and, as J.L. Chestnut indicates, the reopening of long-festering wounds.

In Selma, a white judge issued a restraining order to prevent the arrest of six white school board members for allegedly having violated the criminal statute against secret school board meetings. In adjacent Lowndes County, black school board members were arrested the other day and released on $500 bond for allegedly having violated the same law.

Small wonder a growing number of blacks are now as cynical and distrustful of the Alabama judicial process as I have been for 40 years. A black teacher protested to me about a “double standard of justice.” She brought a picture of white Selma School board members taking an official school vote in the office of their attorney. The teacher doesn’t know the half of it.

For the first time I have some doubt that Selma will survive. As late as 1990, this city continues to represent an extremely conformist society as closed and narrow as was the case in 1960. Intellectual dissent is viewed as heresy and only white mainstream positions are acceptable. Everything else is “radical.”

Scores of white Selmians are afraid to speak the obvious truth openly. They quietly deplore and complain to me and other selected blacks. Not one thinks he or she could survive standing publicly for the right if it conflicted with the “party line” established by certain white politicians.

That is pitiful and a guaranteed recipe for disaster.

Many things are dreadfully wrong in black Selma and all of them cannot be attributed to white racism. I have made that point in this space often and in great detail. Each time white Selma reacted predictably with an outpouring of amens and agreement.

But, Selma cannot survive in the 1990s on that rationalizing, almost non-nourishing diet.

Refusing to attack the debilitating wrongs that systematically destroyed the bodies and minds of many black youngsters while condemning the black community for not reacting like well-behaved ladies and gentlemen is a sick process. And, most blacks reject it.

I recall white Selmians in the 1960s claiming they thought race relations in Selma were fine. I remember their claims that “our Negroes” were satisfied.

How many whites would have been satisfied with segregation, discrimination, no justice, no vote and no status as a human being for white people?

Why would any white presume to think blacks were satisfied? Why would any white person presume blacks are satisfied with manifest discrimination in 1990?

We are dealing with a social cancer in Selma and in America that is more than 100 years old.

Nevertheless, there is no problem in Selma that cannot be solved; however, we can’t solve the problems running from them.

I am not afraid of the truth.

It’s the lies we need to watch.

Peace.

J. L. Chestnut is an Alabama trial lawyer and writer.