Civil Rights In The Popular Culture

By Julian Bond

Vol. 14, No. 2, 1992, pp. 1-2, 4-7

It was a familiar story with a different twist. On October 3, 1991, members of a white sorority at the University of Alabama attended a campus mixer dressed in blackface, basketballs stuffed in their shirts to imitate pregnancy.

The predilection of Southern white men to dress in black-faced drag had been appropriated by their sisters. Whatever advance against gender stereotyping of bigots this episode may reveal, these Tuscaloosa students were living a minstrel ritual over 150 years old. A century and a half before Amos and Andy, black-faced whites drew humor and instruction from imitations of blacks.

As apologies and a protest march followed public exposure of the Alabama incident, it became one of

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several that demonstrated how pervasive racial imagery in our culture remains. “It is racism,” one white student told the New York Times, “but I don’t think they planned it to be racist.”

On Halloween eve, a white student appeared at a Harvard medical school costume party dressed as Clarence Thomas–in blackface and black robe. A black student asked him to leave, and when he didn’t, gave him a wound requiring eighteen stitches to close.

The students at Alabama probably didn’t plan their actions to be racist; something in their lives and culture, something in their history, instructed them that pregnant black women were figures of fun, and no harm was intended to anyone.

The Atlanta Braves intended no harm either with the “tomahawk chop.” “We’re just having fun,” said one fan. But two teams in Atlanta’s baseball history presaged this year’s slur—the Atlanta Crackers, and the Atlanta Black Crackers of the Southern Negro League. It’s surely no accident that the most offensively named football team–the Redskins–is located in a Southern city, or that the team was the last in professional football to hire a black player.

In our daily lives, other mixed messages are broadcast, absorbed, interpreted, and recast. They come, as we do, from a history of stereotypes and inequality, and they blend media and movement, race and reality, culture and civil rights.

* The author of the sequel to Gone With The Wind found it easiest to dispense with black characters; dialect might be offensive, she said, and it was best to dispatch Mammy to an early grave.

* Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), the leading warrior in our cultural/political battles, fights funding from the National Endowment for the Arts for photographs featuring frontal nudity of black men, leaving many to wonder whether Helms’s objections are a psychological fig-leaf intended to cover natural endowments he finds threatening.

* One of this season’s most critically acclaimed television shows–“I’ll Fly Away”–is set in the period of great hopefulness in race relations, the late 1950s, just before the activist civil rights movement exploded on the South and nation. The hero’s name–Forrest Bedford–is taken from Nathan Bedford Forrest, the muleskinner who was the leader of the original Ku Klux Klan. Elsewhere on television, the 1990s racial scene is primarily an occasion

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for sit-corn laughs, with jolly, tubby blacks screaming at each other in ebony imitations of the established genre.

* White Southerners fare little belier than blacks; “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Petticoat Junction,” the “Andy Griffith Show,” and “Green Acres” have been updated to “Designing Women” and “Evening Shade.” Indeed, “I’ll Fly Away” is descended from the movie “To Kill A Mockingbird.” But in today’s incarnation, a passive voice has been given the black character, acknowledging today’s sensibilities and the disproportionate number of blacks who watch television.

* At the July 4th dedication of the new civil rights museum in Memphis, the master and mistress of ceremonies were chosen not from that movement’s rich history of heroes and heroines, but from the world of television. Waving to the crowd, Cybil Shepherd, a Memphis native, and Blair Underwood from “LA Law” basked in the spotlight on the platform, while Daisy Bates watched the proceedings from a wheelchair. Underwood took pains to assure the audience he was sympathetic–“I understand the movement,” he said, “I’ve made two movies about it.”

Against this cultural background, mixed messages also unfold in our political lives.

* On November 9, 1991, the white voters of Louisiana almost elected Nazi Republican Klansman David Duke as governor. Pre-election public opinion surveys revealed that most Louisianians knew his past and did not care.

* The week before, the voters in Mississippi chose a clone of David Duke as governor; Kirk Fordice railed against quotas and called for repeal of the Voting Rights Act. His ad against welfare closed with a photograph of a black woman with a child; something in his culture told him that picture would speak what even he dared not say out loud.

* A series of books and other tracts, written by white neo-liberals, blame blacks and pushy women for the demise of liberalism in the United States. They argue these groups have asked too much too often of our society-anti-black backlash isn’t bigotry, they proclaim, but simply a clash of values between unfair preferences and old-fashioned meritocracy, between a pro-black and pro-female preference present and a 100 percent white male quota past. This lament is quickly oozing into the national political discourse, but unlike David Duke and Kirk Fordice, its proponents are too ashamed to make their argument explicit. Southerners will recognize a familiar cast to this debate; much like the Southern moderate’s position on civil rights in the 1960s, these new

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Bourbons argue that attacks on racism undermine good will and provoke racist reaction.

* A small group of black male academics, in a black-faced Iron John male bonding ritual, chant in unison that affirmative action produces racism, rather than being a reaction against it. Their reward is admission to a charmed circle of success and undeserved preference on op-ed pages, television interview shows, and in newspaper book review columns.

* The news media reports that black-on-black tribal violence continues to plague parts of Africa; in Eastern Europe, “ethnic conflicts”—never “white-on-white violence”–are to blame.

* The President of the United States announces that a proposed law that was a “quota bill” yesterday is not a “quota bill” today. The only change was in the quota of Senators which would vote to uphold the President’s promised veto. That quota shrunk when they discovered the White House had been lying to them–and the American people–about what the bill would do.

* A Supreme Court nominee who had demanded judgment on the basis of his character–not his race–raised the race shield by describing himself as the victim of a “high-tech lynching.” No one stepped forward to remind the nation that no black man was ever lynched for molesting a black woman, or to ask whether his accuser might not have been the victim of a “high-tech rape.” Art immediately imitated life as television’s “Designing Women” based an episode on the characters’ reactions to the clash between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, and while in real life Clarence Thomas wins, on television it is clear that Anita Hill was triumphant. Or at least in the small screen’s fiction she was believed.

Color shapes our culture, and culture shapes our politics, and in turn our politics shape our culture. Presidents Bush and Reagan borrow their best lines from movie scripts: “Make My Day” and “Read My Lips.” In so doing, they try to assume the persona of the characters who spoke these lines, the lone warriors fighting to protect a soft world that has surrendered to the others, to women, to minorities.

I teach college students a course on the history of the Southern civil rights movement. They come to the class with preconceived ideas–some true and some not. They know women played a larger role in that movement than most history books admit–they not only know Rosa Parks but also Jo Ann Robinson and Ella Baker–and they know many of the men in the movement wanted women kept comfortably in their place. They believe Malcolm X played a larger personal role in the South than in fact he did. While his politics informed and changed the movement, Southerners almost never saw his person, but my students want him to have been there at King’s side.

They get their information from their culture, from newspapers and magazines, from rap music sampling and celebrating Malcolm X, from new and critical histories of Martin Luther King, from seeing women swell mass meeting crowds and Daisy Bates facing down the President in “Eyes on the Prize,” from other documentaries

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like “We Shall Overcome,” from movies like ‘The Long Walk Home” and “Glory” and even the awful “Mississippi Burning,” from television mini-series like “Separate But Equal.”

A few years ago, the popular culture discovered the civil rights movement, as it had earlier discovered the war in Vietnam. Both have by now become profitable nostalgia franchises, enriching their exploiters while impoverishing our history. The lessons we are taught–in superficial treatments of the struggle for human rights–is that a war was fought against racism by noble white Americans and the good guys finally won. Just as today the music of the 1960s sells raisins, the myths of the sixties sell movie tickets.

Over the last few years, nearly thirty movies and television shows have focused on the sixties movement. Their heroes and heroines are Klan wives, FBI agents, Northern summer student volunteers, white Southern college coeds and Northern campus-bound radicals, nearly everyone except the black men and women who lived and died in freedom’s cause. These shallow treatments of America’s finest hour are a reflection not of the movement but of their makers’ world, a world where only white men control the process of production and ensure their product perpetuates the supremacy of white America. In these productions, whites fight and win the war–blacks are empty shadows barely seen.

Now two other movies introduce new audiences to two mythic figures from our past. Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK” and Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X” will teach Americans–especially young Americans–more about these two icons of the sixties than a thousand biographies or a thousand history books. Both Stone and Lee are master publicists. Both know there is an unsatisfied hunger for examination of the sixties era. Another movie planned on Martin Luther King will focus on an interracial romance from his university years; this failed romance, the movie will argue, was the fuel for his dedication to equal justice.

There are some exceptions–veterans of the early 1960s voting drive in Mississippi have contracted with a Hollywood producer to create a movie based on their experiences, and they have veto power over script and theme written into their agreement. In “The Long Walk Home,” Hollywood successfully captured the private conflicts behind the highly publicized Montgomery Bus Boycott. Former SNCC worker Endesha Mae Holland (now Dr. Holland of the State University of New York) has written a play, From the Mississippi Delta, based on her life in the movement.

As Todd Gitlin has written, the 1960s were Years of Hope, Days of Rage. They were also years of intense and passionate involvement in causes their participants knew

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were just and right. Most of these productions miss that. They miss both the justice of the cause and the evil and breadth of the opposition. With few exceptions, the movement on film is seen as aberrational behavior, triggered by some incident that propels a sleepy black population into action.

Writing about Nelson Mandela, Nadine Gordimer said: “his people have never revered him as a figure of the past, but as the personification of the future.”

The views of heroes past we get are seldom predictive of what our common future might be. Instead, they are rosy, flawed visions of our past. Our heroes are summoned to celebrate a mythic yesterday. We cannot see in them a prescription for tomorrow.

The 1960s decade was a successful mass mobilization against entrenched racism, and later, against imperialism. Racism’s legal standing, in public accommodations and the ballot box, was eradicated rather quickly. But if its legal grip has been broken, its psychological and cultural grip remains strong. Race and racial prejudice remain the greatest determinants of life chances in our society today. They decide our political behavior as well.

But just as the culture carriers have absorbed the movement, so has the rest of the nation. In my lifetime, I have seen a proliferation of “rights” movements which now embrace the majority of the American people. Today, through administrative order, court decision and legislative act, the protected classes extend to nearly all Americans, including men over forty, white ethnics, the aged, short people, the chemically dependent, the left-handed, the obese, and members of all religions. We need to examine how the road to civil rights became so crowded, and what the consequences are.

There is something seriously wrong when the claims of the descendants of property sold in the African slave trade are held equal with the claims of short, chemically dependent, left-handed white men. Retiring federal judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. of Alabama understands this. He told a commencement at Boston University years ago: “Religious differences, race differences, sex differences, age differences and political differences are not the same. It is no mark of intellectual soundness to treat them as if they were. Moreover, if the life of the law has been experience, then the law should be realistic enough to treat certain issues as special; as racism is special in American history. A judiciary that cannot declare that is of little value.”

A culture which cannot declare that is valueless too.

The recent series of elections–from Louisiana and Mississippi to Pennsylvania–have lessons for us all. Ninety-five percent of blacks voting in Philadelphia voted against Richard Thornburgh because he was the man who helped Ronald Reagan and George Bush fight civil rights laws in court and argue against quotas in the court of public opinion. Thousands of white voters in Mississippi and Louisiana voted for fascist candidates because they ran race-baiting campaigns.

There is much in our past and present worth examining and celebrating, in our culture and our politics. There are, in our history, great lessons of success as well as failure. One unexamined area of the sixties past is the break-up of the progressive youth movement, which foundered on the rocks of race. Many of us recall an understanding then that the mission of white progressives was to work and organize against racism in white middle-and working-class constituencies. That effort obviously didn’t get very far; the lack of success stemmed at least in part from lack of commitment.

Today’s excessive victim-blaming stems, in part, from deeply rooted doubts about the premise of equality itself. If that is so, perhaps we need to draw new lines in the dust. Those who want to dispense with equality except as a fond remembrance should declare themselves and stand on their convictions. At least then we will know who stands for what.

In today’s political and cultural formulations, our riotous past has created an uneasy present where Americans believe strange things: that the anti-war movement created disengagement from overseas entanglements, not the war itself; that powerful black militants, not entrenched white racism, created racial preferences; that the women’s movement, not an economy that forced women into work, threatened the traditionalist family; that pushy women and aggressive blacks pushed America into decline.

These are the lessons too many Americans have learned from our past or absorbed from the culture. We’ve forgotten that the movement created culture too. The Free Southern Theater brought Godot to Greenwood and put Purlie in a real cotton field. The Mississippi Freedom Summer schools found poetry in black school children. The movement’s music now inspires everywhere from the dismantled Berlin Wall to Tiananmen Square. And the movement’s vision resounds everywhere.

We examine ourselves more today than I remember our doing in the past. We deconstruct texts and lives, looking in the entrails of the movement for some connection to the present, but except for imitations of life, we find few.

There is a challenge–for scholars, students, for the ordinary women and men who made the movement then and who make it now–to hold on to and uplift the lessons of the past. Our task is to see that the best of our people and their culture–not the worst–is preserved, celebrated, imitated and expanded now and in the future.

Julian Bond, formerly of Georgia, now writes, lectures and teaches from his home base at American University in Washington, D.C.

Undemocratic America: A Former Secretary of Labor Explains Our Trend Toward a More Imperfect Union, and Offers Some Recipes for Change

By Ray Marshall

Vol. 14, No. 2, 1992, pp. 8-14

TODAY, AS IN THE PAST, America has a tendency to proclaim that we as a nation are doing quite well in achieving the goals of a democratic society. After all, the United States is the world’s oldest, continuing democracy. We have the world’s largest gross national product. We enjoy one of the largest per capita incomes in the world, and, at least until recently, we had the highest wages in the world (we are now about thirteenth). For many, these signs of status are indisputable evidence of the full blessings of democracy.

These findings cannot be dismissed. However, a more honest, searching examination of the state of democracy in the United States leads, I believe, to a much more discouraging, even alarming conclusion. In fact, as the first modern democracy, the United States now may rank last among the industrialized democracies of the world in achieving, as a whole, the goals of a democratic society. Said another way, simply, the United States may now be the most undemocratic nation among the industrialized democracies of the world.

The United States is a rich country mainly because of our past, not because of our present and probably not of our future. The two things that made us the world’s richest economy are no longer important advantages to us. One is we had an abundance of natural resources when natural resources were much more important. Second, we had the mass production system and economies of scale made possible by a large internal market. That is how Henry Ford could reduce the cost of a touring car from $850 to $350 in six years.

Both of those are no longer important advantages. Indeed, in many ways they are both now disadvantages. Abundance of natural resources has caused us to neglect our people. Healthy, educated, motivated people have become the overwhelming source of economic power. That is the reason that countries like Japan and Germany, who have very limited natural resources, are giving us trouble. They have developed their people. We have not.

We still have the resources. We have attained wealth because of mass production and economies of scale and the products of our past.

The Reagan and Bush administrations have done a lot to reverse the progress that we were making in improving the economic conditions of our people. Nobody should doubt that we have made progress. Those who want to see the progress continue have to be alert to the possibilities of backlash. We must be alert in building the foundations for lasting change.

We have made some progress in dealing with discrimination. I applaud the distance we have come but I regret the big distance that we still have to go. Anybody who believes that we have solved that problem is looking at different evidence from the evidence that I see. In fact the thing that worries me the most about our present situation is that we have some very dangerous political movements underway. Particularly the use of racial poli-

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tics. If you go back and look at the history of when you are likely to get serious conflicts and riots and physical conflict between the races they are ordinarily preceded by racial politics. It is unfortunate that we have seen a return to that. We ought to do everything we can to prevent that from happening. We saw it happen in the last Presidential campaign. I think we are going to see it in the next one. I think the White House is planning for it. I know for a fact they are. We must condemn it as vigorously as we can.

A number of other problems cause me to be concerned about democracy in America. I will start by defining democracy in its industrial, social and economic as well as political dimensions and then discuss why have be not used the political system more to try to strengthen democractic systems. Then, I will suggest what should we do.

My orienting hypothesis is that, in terms of all of its dimensions, the United States is the least democratic of any major industrialized country.

One of the best indications of economic democracy is income distribution and earnings. The United States has the most unequal distribution of income of any major industrialized country. It is now more unequal than at any time since we have been keeping the numbers. Seventy-five percent of American workers are worse off in 1992 than they were in 1971. Real wages have declined substantially.

The only thing that keeps real family income from being as low as real wages is that households are selling more labor. More women are working. That has made it possible to maintain family incomes despite declining real wages for men, but that is obviously self-limiting–not many families have another spouse to put into the workforce.

The only people who have improved their position in the last twenty years are college-educated people. We probably have the most elitist school system of any major industrial democracy. It was consciously organized as an elitist system. It was organized so that one part of the school system would supply the managerial, professional, and technical elites and the other part of our school system would mass-produce people to work in the factories and fields. What we called Taylorism was imposed much more rigorously on schools than on any other institution. It was a very authoritarian, undemocratic, and elitist system. That is still the condition that we are in.

The developments during the 1980s have exacerbated the inequalities. In the United States, as Bob Reich

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has emphasized, the wealthy have seceded. This is no way to build a more perfect union. How have they seceded? They go to private schools. They segregate themselves in housing. They oppose the kinds of investments that we need to make in our people in order to be world class and to improve our institutions and our systems.

Inequality as extreme as ours destroys democratic institutions. People can see how it destroys a society. What people often do not see is how inequality tends to destroy the economy. It is very hard to solve a society’s economic problems if you have unequal distribution of income. If you correlated economic performance of various countries with income distribution you would find that those countries with the most equal distributions of income have the highest economic performance. That should not be a surprise. The reason is very clear. You get more support–in the sense of the community’s will to do things that improve the conditions of everybody–if you have more internal unity. If you get the income disparities and the polarization that we have now in the U.S., it becomes very hard to get the people with the economic power to agree to the kind of investments in people that have to be made in order for a society to function well in the kind of world that we live in today.

I think it is terribly dangerous that the wealthy have seceded. Our public schools are becoming increasingly minority. Is this a threat to democracy? You bet it is.

The public school system is the one institution that should be a unifier, that should help us form a more perfect union. It should give us a common interpretation of our past and a common vision of our future. This cannot occur if you have segregated, fragmented, elitist schools.

There is a big difference between elite schools and elitist schools. Ours are becoming more and more elitist all the time. We have a movement underway called the choice movement that would like to make the elitism permanent. Some people who are a part of the choice movement make it clear that is exactly what they have in mind. They want to destroy the public school system. That would be a huge problem for us.

Poverty Undermines Democracy

The United States has a larger proportion of its people in poverty than any other major industrial country. We have twice as large a proportion of our children in poverty as Japan or any west European country. I do not have to tell you what kind of problem that creates for the future. The family is our most basic learning system. Poor families, with some amazing exceptions, are not very good learning systems. We can do a lot about that, but we tend not to. We do not have a family policy. People know we do not have a national health system, but neither do we have a family policy–even though we keep saying our people are our most important asset. In the way we treat our children, we do not act like they are very important. This bodes ill for our democracy.

In terms of industrial democracy, I believe we are in worse condition than any other industrial country. American workers have less job security and less control. Our workers are probably the least class-conscious of any workers in the world. Our employers are probably the most class-conscious of any employers in the world. Our employers have greater hostility to unions and the right of their workers to organize and bargain collectively.

When I talk to employers in other countries they are always puzzled. They say that in the United States you have the only labor movement in the world that openly embraces capitalism, yet the capitalists have formed a council for a union-free environment.

You cannot have a free and democratic society without a free and democratic labor movement.

We of course have a very strong ideology of individualism. I think one of the main reasons for this situation in industry is that the mass production system, with an authoritarian management and Taylorism, was more deeply entrenched in America than any other country. This was a very authoritarian and undemocratic management philosophy. The basic idea was to reduce workers to appendages of machines; remove all need for workers to think so that they would behave automatically and so they could be easily replaced. In this system, management controls the work through bureaucracy, with a few people at the top to do the thinking.

We imposed that industrial system on our schools. That is one reason the education system started using women for teachers. They were supposed to be easily controlled. The basic idea was that some male professors of education would figure out what you needed to teach. One of Taylor’s principles is that there is one best way to do everything. This is sheer nonsense but it is still widely accepted. Management’s job was to find out what that was, model it, and cause the bureaucracy to impose it on the teachers and students in the classroom and the workers in the workplace. You could mass-produce students who were literate but did not have to do a lot of thinking. And this is what was done for a while. The trouble is that today all of our people have to think if we are going to make it. An undemocratic industrial and educational system is

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obsolete, but we are having trouble doing away with it. One of the best ways to do away with it is a healthy dose of industrial democracy.

Why has our political system not done much to strengthen our social, economic and industrial democracies? There are a number of reasons. One is that we have had a strong laissez-faire ideology in the United States that resists the use of government to solve problems. The people who set up the federal government wanted it to function only in emergencies or to do routine things like sell stamps. Inmost other things they wanted a balance of power, a separation of powers, so that it would be very difficult for the government to move. Individualism is one of our important strengths, but excessive individualism becomes a weakness. We have individualism run amok, producing a limited sense of community.

I think our political leaders have misread the signs. The current Administration thinks that what is happening to democracies all over the world, with the triumph of the Japanese and western European economies, is a triumph of laissez-faire. Whoever believes that does not understand a lot about what has gone on in Japan, Germany, and Western Europe. A strong partnership between the public and private sectors, not laissez-faire, caused Japan to emerge as a major power. The Japanese will tell you that if they had stuck with laissez-faire, they would still be stuck making toys and dishes. The Japanese had no comparative advantage in automobiles. They created that.

Because of the ideology of laissez-faire in the United States, we did not develop economic strategies to improve the conditions of our people. The consequence of that is that we have backed into what many observers regard as the worst kind of economic strategy we could have thought of.

If you are going to be competitive in a globalized economy you can only do it two ways. One is to cut your wages. The other is to improve productivity and quality. What we have been doing for the last twenty years is cutting our wages. We backed into that. We did not have a strategy, and did not even believe we needed one.

I just co-chaired a commission on the skills of the American workforce. We studied 2,800 companies in the United States and six other countries. We asked: How are you competing in the world? Every other country–Singapore, Japan, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Ireland–said they were going for the high-wage option. When we asked why, they gave two reasons. First, they would lose a low-wage contest. There is no way the United States is going to compete with Mexico when it comes to low wages, though we are getting ready to do just that through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Second, you really would not want to win a competition for the world’s lowest wages.

The European Community and the other industrialized countries that we studied pursue the high wage option: they do not let companies pursue the low-wage strategy. But if a nation has no economic strategy, if you just leave companies alone, that is what they will do. Especially if you have an uncertain economic environment with high real interest rates, the companies’ incli-

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nation is to compete by cutting wages. Indeed, only 5 percent of American companies told us they were pursuing the high-wage option. They were honest about it. On the other hand, a majority of the companies in the other countries said they were pursuing the high-wage option.

Why are companies behaving this way in the United States? First, we were told that incentives offered employers in the United States is to pay low wages and shift the work to low-wage places. The U.S. tariff code gives that incentive. The absence of any economic and social policy gives that incentive. The high real interest rate causes employers to take a short view. Secondly, some said, what difference does it make to us? We are maximizing profits and we can do it either way. We can either shift the cost to the workers through cutting wages, or we can try to make all these investments to go for a high-wage strategy. Employers get the profits either way. They can shift the stuff down to the Mexican border or to Sri Lanka and then ship it back into the United States almost duty free. The only duty paid is the value added from low wages. So why should they care which way they do it?

What we must say to businesses is that in the long run there will be no place to hide if they keep running to lower and lower wage locations. That is what happened to us here in the South. We had a low-wage strategy. We recruited a lot of industry that was on its way to the Third World to start with. And we are now left with depressed places.

The whole country has been backed into this situation by not having a strategy. Thus the polarization of the incomes of our people. The only people who are better off during the last decade are the people at the top. This is one of the biggest dangers that we face in our economic democracy.

Opponents of economic strategies say they cannot figure out what to do; that we cannot “pick winners and losers.” What I would say to them is that it is not hard to determine the strategic industries of the future, but if you cannot, just start with the German and Japanese lists, which are identical. Companies call that benchmarking.

Let the government do a little benchmarking. Above all, do not do what the administration is planning to do with the North American Free Trade Agreement which is to accelerate this low wage strategy. Why not do what they are doing in the European Community? They are bringing the Spanish and Portuguese wages and labor standards up to the German levels, not reducing the wages and working conditions of the high wage countries.

Laissez-faire Education

We do almost nothing for kids who are not going to college. We spend more on college than any other nation–as you would expect an elitist country to do. Relative to our GNP, we spend less on kindergarten-through-twelve than most other industrialized countries. We do almost nothing for that seventy-five percent of our workforce that does not go to college. In other industrialized countries there are professional technical training systems. We need such a system here.

We have been unwilling to adopt effective social policies because of individualism and laissez-faire. We even perpetuate the ridiculous doctrine that children are responsible for their own problems. We believe more than most countries that learning is mainly due to genetics; the reality is that learning is mainly due to access, hard work,

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and supportive learning systems. We also believe national health systems or family policies create irresponsibility. We perpetuate myths about why people are in the conditions they are in.

We also have very inadequate leadership in our foreign economic policy. We are preoccupied with military aspects of foreign policy and not with economic aspects. We seem not to understand the indivisibility of democratic institutions.

Economic Democracy

What should we do in order to form a more perfect union? First, we should let the guiding principle for our economic policies be the building of a sense of community, in the sense that we are in this together.

Second, we ought to do everything we can to strengthen our democratic institutions. We have the lowest voter turnout of an industrialized country because a lot of people do not see that the democratic system can work to improve social democracy, and industrial democracy, and economic democracy. So why vote?

We have found in Texas, though, if you give the people a real choice they will take it. That is how Ann Richards got elected Governor of Texas. That is how one of my former students, Ernie Codes with the Texas Industrial Areas Foundation (TIAF), has been organizing people at the grassroots to make democracy work for ordinary people. This translates political action into better streets, safer streets, and better schools. A TIAF affiliate took two of the worst schools in Fort Worth and by organizing parents and community caused the school board to provide the resources to make it possible for parents, teachers and local principals to improve those schools. The democratic system can work but we have to make it work. We have to do a lot to reduce the advantage that well-monied special interests have in the democratic process.

We need to strengthen industrial democracy. We need to strengthen unions and the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively. We ought to give this a high priority. We tried to do this in the Carter Administration and failed but I think if we get another chance we ought to go all out. We ought to modernize labor laws. Our present laws do more to protect employers than they do to help workers. Workers in this country do not really have an effective right to organize and bargain collectively. We ought to enact this right. We ought to require some workers councils bylaw. If the Carter Administration had survived, one of the recommendations I wanted to make was that we have labor-management safety and health committees. Other countries find that some organized means for worker involvement in the workplace has greatly strengthened their economies, their ability to improve productivity and quality.

We ought to give workers more control of their pension funds. What we have now is legalized embezzlement with the single-employer funds. Workers are told that they do not know enough to manage their own funds. This must change. Workers can hire people to manage their funds. With almost $2.5 trillion, pension funds are the chief source of equity capital, so their joint control by workers and companies would therefore be a good way to strengthen economic democracy.

We ought to do more to strengthen employee ownership plans. I am on the board of Republic Engineered Steel, which was bought by the steel workers from LTV. Under worker ownership, Republic was made much more competitive than it was under LTV’s management. The workers are more likely to have a long-run interest in the success of their company and therefore will be more likely to be motivated to make it succeed.

The only people who have real long-run interests in most large publicly held corporations are the workers. Institutional investors could not care less about the steel business. They could not care less about the auto business or any of the rest of these. Workers do. Therefore wherever you get economic democracy you do not necessarily strengthen the performance but if you get employee ownership amid participation then performance tends to take off.

I believe we also need a national youth service in order to provide a unifying influence for the country. This is to some degree the moral equivalent of war. I had that experience. I grew up in an orphanage where we did useful work. We were self-sufficient. When I was fifteen years old during World War II I joined the Navy.

I came in contact with people I had never come in contact with before. I had never seen a Republican before. I had never seen Catholics or Jews. Being in the Navy with a common purpose unified us. We forgot about some of

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the prejudice we had in our backgrounds. A lot of young people today not only feel unloved, they feel unneeded. There are a lot of useful things we can put young people to work doing. I think that would help form a more perfect union.

I also think we ought to strengthen possibilities for projects like Ernie Cortes’s. We ought to encourage grassroots democracy.

We ought to strengthen social democracy. We need a national health insurance system. We need a family policy that would guarantee that children will be taken care of regardless of whether you can find the father or not. Our present system is very inequitable. In fact, it is crazy. It depends on the court you happen to get into and the state you happen to live in.

We must work to strengthen industrial democracy. We ought to adopt a high-wage development strategy for the same reason that every other country has. Because we would not want to win the war for low wages. First, we have got to get macroeconomic policy in order. We need to have a sensible trade policy. Our trade policy has made it difficult for companies that develop technology in the United States to ever benefit from it. Other countries can dump, do what they call capital blockage–deny you the ability to recover your capital. Keep you out of their market as the Japanese do until they can build up economies of scale to penetrate your market and take it over. My Japanese friends say, do you think we are irrational to do that? I say no but I think we are irrational to let you do it to us. The Japanese are not mainly responsible for our problems, we are. We therefore need to have a strategy to see to it that we develop and use leading-edge technology. The trouble is the people who administer our trade laws believe in laissez-faire. They somehow look on it as sin that they are involved in enforcing a trade law. They do not believe that you ought to have trade laws. Therefore they are not very vigorous in their enforcement. They do not have a common objective like seeing to it that we are a full-employment, high-wage society.

We need to greatly strengthen our education and training systems. I invite your support of the High Skills and Competitive Workplace Act of 1991 which was introduced October 1, 1991. This legislation would do a number of things to really help this country. It would require that you have standards for everybody to graduate from high school which we do not have now. It would be a way to drive the system and make schools responsible for seeing to it that all children meet these higher standards. If students have not made satisfactory progress toward those standards by the time they are sixteen years old we recommend they be allowed to leave that school and take their money with them and go to a youth center, modeled after the Jobs Corps, which can be a very efficient learning system. Right now, dropouts subsidize the system because there are no financial incentives for schools to prevent dropouts. Schools get their money on the basis of average daily attendance, ordinarily for some weeks in October–weeks when they put on campaigns for you to show up. Door prizes. If your name is pulled out of the hat, you go to the Bahamas or win a new car. After that they hope some of you never show up again. Guess which ones?–the hard cases that need the schools most. If students could take their money with them, the schools probably would pay a lot more attention to trying to keep those students.

We ought to strengthen the apprenticeship system in this country. We ought to encourage more workforce training. Every company ought to be required to set aside one percent of payroll for the education and training of their frontline workers. Our elitist systems spend a lot on managerial training, but they spend almost nothing for the education and training of frontline workers.

We ought to provide four years of education for everybody who meets the new higher standards for graduation from high school or all adults over eighteen years of age. We need something like the GI bill, made universal. This could do more to strengthen economic democracy than almost anything you can think of. Because it is becoming more and more difficult for low-income people to get education, we are therefore being polarized.

In the international arena we ought to pay a lot more attention to economic aspects of our foreign policy and a lot less to the military. We need to think about building international institutions that will fit existing realities, not those of the 1940s, which undergird our present international institutions. We particularly need to include labor standards in all international economic rules to encourage political, industrial, social and economic democracy in all countries.

The Southern Regional Council and the South have a chance to try to strengthen our democracy. I think we ought to be ashamed of it the way things now stand. Sometimes you can shame people into doing the right things. That’s what happened when we studied six other countries instead of just looking at the United States. Some of the employers on our commission would not have believed what they found if they had simply been told about it in advance.

Abraham Lincoln said, “I’ll get ready and my time will come.” One of the most important things that we can all do is to get ready. Because of what is happening in the world, for those of us who believe in democracy, our time is coming.

Economist Ray Marshall, vice president of the Southern Regional Council and president of the Southern Labor Institute, teaches at the University of Texas. He was U.S. Secretary of Labor during the Jimmy Carter presidency.

Son Ham’s Hat

By Connie Curry

Vol. 14, No. 2, 1992, pp. 15-17

I first met Matthew and Mae Bertha Carter in January 1966. I was Southern Field Representative for the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker service organization. My job was to investigate the reports of intimidation and reprisals against black families who were attempting to desegregate the schools under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In order to comply with federal guidelines, many Southern school districts instituted “Freedom of Choice” plans which provided that all parents could send their children to the school of their choice. The white opposition assumed that black families would not dare choose to send their children to an all-white school.

In fact the Drew Municipal School System was so sure of its control of the situation that they opened up all twelve grades to freedom of choice, while many neighboring systems began with only one or two grades, adding one each year. Drew was and is a tiny cotton town in the middle of Sunflower County, in the middle of the Mississippi Delta. The Carter family sharecropped twenty-five acres on the Pemble Plantation nine miles out from Drew, but their choice of schools fell under the Drew plan. On August 11, 1965, Mae Bertha and Matthew were the first black parents to enroll their seven school-age children in the previously all-white schools in Drew.

In 1990, I decided to record the story of this “choice” which so dramatically changed the Carters’ lives. Often on my research trips Mae Bertha and I would get in the car and ride around Sunflower County. On one of our drives,

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we passed by land that once had been the Birch Plantation. Mae Bertha’s mother, Luvenia Slaughter, had lived here until she married in 1919. “Right over there,” said Mae Bertha pointing to a collapsing barn, “is where they shot down my uncle. Right in that field. A mob crew shot him down like a rabbit. I was ’bout seven years old but my momma says that when they shot him, it blew the hat right off his head. No one would even go pick up poor old Son Ham’s hat. The people were too afraid. That hat it just blew and blew across the fields.” Mae Bertha’s story of her uncle, Son Ham, is one of many such stories one hears in the Delta, undocumented, anonymous except for those who witnessed the tragedy or grieved for the lost loved one.

On another day, another car ride, near a place called “Hitchin’ Hill” on the outskirts of Drew, Mae Bertha pointed to collapsing barn. “You know that’s where they actually murdered that Emmett Till boy. It belonged to a cousin of one of those white people who killed him.” Emmett Till was the fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago who was brutally murdered in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman. The all-white, all-male jury took one hour and seven minutes to acquit the two white men accused of the crime. ‘They put him in the truck,” Mae Bertha said, “and then they put him in the Tallahatchie River. Some black peoples near Hitchin’ Hill heard him holler, but they all left a long time ago.”

Unlike Son Ham’s story, Emmett Till’s story was widely reported. The written accounts and graphic photographs of his mangled body shocked and outraged the nation and galvanized the burgeoning civil rights movement. The story sank deep into the psyches of young black and white people who were themselves fourteen at the time. Nine years later during Freedom Summer many of them would come to the Delta and do work that changed the social order forever.

Emmett Till’s story also affected the Carter family in a manner completely unforeseeable at the time. Naomi, third child and third Carter daughter, was twelve at the time of the murder.

She vividly remembers hearing about it and hiding in the house with her brothers and sisters when it got dark and their parents weren’t home yet. The impact of the fear, the closeness of her age to that of Emmett Till and the rumors that the killing had taken place so close to their plantation made her realize for the first time what racism could really mean.

She feels sure that the realization became a lasting impetus for her own later involvement in the Civil Rights movement; she returned to Sunflower County in 1965 to

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march, sit-in and go to jail in Jackson. She became a constant source of support and encouragement for her parents and the younger children in their choice to attend the white schools.

On an earlier trip to Mississippi, I had driven with my sister Ann, her two-year-old son Walker, and my friend and neighbor from Atlanta, Lisa Rogers, to a few miles north of Greenwood to look at the well-preserved remains of an old plantation house.

We were lost and in need of directions. The road was flanked by cotton fields as far as the eye could see, but in the midst of these cotton fields was what appeared to be the remains of a derelict town. We stopped, Ann and Lisa got out to photograph some old stores. Ann went inside a filling station, which seemed to show signs of life, to ask for directions. When she returned to the car, she mentioned that the old man behind the counter had eyed her with suspicion and hostility.

I had not paid much attention to our whereabouts up until then. However, as we turned back towards Greenwood, I looked back and saw by an old road sign that we had been in Money, Mississippi. Money, as it stands today, consists of an abandoned cotton gin, a post office trailer, a filling station and two old stores, both vacant with peeling paint and faded signs. Across the railroad tracks are a few ramshackle houses. I realized that Ann and Lisa had been poking around with their cameras at the very store where the events leading up to Emmett Till’s murder had taken place.

Even before our visit to Money, another moment brought Emmett Till to mind. It was November 5, 1989, and I was in Montgomery, Alabama, attending the dedication of the Civil Rights Memorial designed by Maya Lin, creator of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. The memorial in Montgomery consists of a curved black granite wall and a large circular black granite table inscribed with the names of forty who died during the struggle for civil rights. A constant stream of water from the center of the table flows evenly over the names. The wall behind reads, in a Martin Luther King Jr. quotation from the prophet Amos.

We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

On the morning of the dedication, before thousands of people thronged to the ceremony, Julian Bond, his brother James, his mother Julia and I had gone early to see the memorial. As we sat on a nearby wall in the early autumn sunlight, we saw Mamie Till Mobley, Emmett Till’s mother. Slowly she traced her son’s name on the table, and as her finger formed the letters engraved there, her tears mixed with the flowing waters of the black granite and spilled into the pool below.

I have been back to Money once since my first visit. I had wanted to return with full knowledge of where I was. Lisa accompanied me, and we had brought along a friend of hers, Walker Sims from nearby Sumner. The trial of the two men accused of Emmett Till’s murder had taken place in the courthouse in Sumner. It had been raining for seven days. The road to Money runs north right between the Yalobusha and Tallahatchie rivers. Both had overflowed their banks and swallowed up the cotton fields. The brown water came up to the narrow country roads and, right or left, it looked as if houses and trees were sitting in the midst of lakes.

Marooned cats and dogs sat on the porches of homes that residents had abandoned for higher ground. It was the bleakest and coldest of days and a strong wind whipped waves across the flood. We felt the strangeness of being surrounded by waters that extended to the horizon, and the fear of being stranded. Two pickup trucks stopped to watch us until we moved on. I sensed, as I often would on these trips, a place that did not want to be reminded of its past.

After fifteen years as director of the Office of Human Services for the City of Atlanta, Connie Curry is working on a book about the Carter family, “Silver Rights: One Family’s Struggle for Justice in America.” Another segment of her research for the book appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 1991.

A chorus for freedom and sell-determination

Reviewed by Mary A. Twining

Vol. 14, No. 2, 1992, p. 23

World Music of Struggle: We Shall Overcome, Folkways/Columbia/Smithsonian tape (CT 47850), produced by Worth Long, Ralph Rinzler and Don DeVito.

At a benefit for some political candidates from Blakely, Georgia, Charles Sherrod begin to sing as an introduction to his “few words” of exhortation. “A Charge to Keep I Have…,” he sang, thereby opening up in a breathtaking moment his moral commitment to his own conscience, which would not rest well if he had not done all he could to ameliorate the suffering around him. The power of the words, the song and the singer took me back to the 1960s and 1970s when we believed telling the truth about what was going on would truly help to solve some problems. What has come clearly into focus since that exciting time is that the struggle continues.

Trying to segregate the African American freedom struggle from that of the peoples all around the world, people have labeled it “Civil Rights.” All, in fact, are fighting for human rights, a label freely used about other people’s conflicts. Nowhere is this a luta continua sentiment more beautifully expressed than in this fervently sung performance, taped live at the 1990 Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife.

Recorded with clarity by the Smithsonian/Folkways staff for Columbia, the tape is technically well produced with only small interruptions in the sound quality as the Azanian (South African) double quartet broke into the toi-toi which added visual charm with auditory challenge. The recording is otherwise clear, making one feel present at the occasion, which generated a great deal of excitement for an overflow audience. The dedication and passion of the singers carries the urgency of the message. The engaging musicality of their songs and instrumentations pull and fascinate.

The producers, Worth Long, Ralph Rinzler and Don DeVito, deserve congratulations for their accomplishment in bringing out this tape. Anthony Seeger’s essay and the excellent liner notes are well illustrated with pictures of the artists. We are given discography and references to the program book of the 1990 Festival and the fine program ably curated by Jacqueline Peters, who has also written a number of informative articles in that publication.

The gospel fervor of the opening “This Little Light of Mine,” a mainstay of many a human rights gathering, obviously inspired the audience as much as it ever did the meetings. Those who were involved in the American social reformation, as many were in the South in the sixties and seventies, will find themselves plunged into memories of the imperatives of that time by the Freedom Singers.

Hazel Dickens, who has sung on the frontlines of labor strife for many years, brings that emotion to the women’s defense. Her lively rendition of “The Coal Tattoo” brings to mind Atlanta’s recently departed, and much missed, Esther Lefevre, whose voice similarly inspired urgency behind the social and moral struggle being fought. The beauty and authority of the music has aided many workers and organizers to survive the onslaught of violence, prejudice and unreason, the deadliness of which was so aptly illustrated without benefit of music in a recent television broadcast concerning the trial of West Coast neo-nazi Tom Metzger, who was found by a Seattle jury to be responsible in the skinhead beating death of Ethiopian American Mulegreta Seraw.

The finale, “We Shall Overcome,” is a veritable United Nations of the dispossessed with bass singers who underwrite the whole with the undeniable authority of an old traditional African American style. The Spanish version says ahora (now) instead of “someday.” These singers from different parts of the world show us the unanimity of the human struggle for freedom and self-determination which has many cultural faces and voices.

It is good to know that the passionate flow of song continues unabated, but it hurts deeply to realize, as few enough do, that the need for the action these songs represent and symbolize also persists. In fact, abuses of human rights endure in an increasingly cynical world. This tape, however, serves to remind us of hope and persistence.

Mary A. Twining teaches English and folklore at Clark Atlanta University. She and her husband Keith E. Baird are co-editors of Sea Island Roots: African Presence in the Carolinas and Georgia (Africa World Press, 1991).

A complex web of irony and contradiction

Reviewed by Gene L. Davenport

Vol. 14, No. 2, 1992, pp. 24-25

Shades of Gray: Dispatches from the Modern South by John Egerton. (Louisiana State University Press, 1991, 268 pages).

John Egerton has been chronicling the changes of the South for a quarter of a century in the pages of publications as diverse as the New York Times, the Progressive,American Heritage, and Southern Exposure and in his own books, the most notable, perhaps, being The Americanization of Dixie. (Actually, Generations and Southern Food, each in its own way, also contribute important perspectives on the changing South.) The subjects of his essays have likewise been diverse.

In Shades of Gray Egerton has collected over a dozen of his best essays of the last twenty-five years, provided an update on the people and events reported in each, and pulled together elements of several essays into a closing reflection.

As noted in the comments on the dust jacket of the book, the thread that ties the essays together is the complexity that lies beneath the surface of each. In essays on the integration of Ole Miss Law School, the history of once-segregated Hammond Academy, and the struggle of the Prince Edward County, Virginia, public schools, Egerton portrays the conflicts in term of the natural resistance to change on the part of institutions, the inevitable surrender of institutions to change when survival is at stake, and the fact that changes in racial opportunities do not necessarily mean the elimination of racism.

“Alex Haley’s Tennessee Roots” and “The Heritage of a Heavyweight” (the latter an essay on Muhammad Ali’s ancestors) depict, respectively, the continuing ambivalence of whites in the “modern South” toward African-American Southerners who have achieved international status and the complexities and ironies of sexual relationships and their consequences in the South.

In an especially perceptive essay on “West Virginia’s Battle of the Books,” Egerton analyzes the 1970s struggle over textbooks in Charleston and Kanawha County, as at heart a cultural struggle between economic classes, between urbanites and country people. Because the churches in the United States have become so thoroughly identified with their various subcultures, however, the struggle manifested itself as an essentially religious one. Ironically, says Egerton, the anti-book forces were fighting for a return to a narrow kind of instruction that had contributed to their own subordinate status in the community in the first place.

The subjects of the other essays range from what happens when the intolerance of frightened people is joined with the duplicity of government officials (“The Trial of Highlander Folk School” and “Maurice Mays and the Knoxville Race Riot): to the failure of liberal programs and conservative policies, alike, in their efforts to deal

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with the victims of change (“The King Coal Good Time Blues”). They extend further from the tenacity of a public servant forcing the nation to confront its responsibility for its older citizens (“Claude Pepper’s Last Crusade”) to the ambiguities of a zeal for justice when that zeal is coupled with human ambition and power (“Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center”). The Claude Pepper essay was based on Egerton’s exhaustive research for what became an aborted biography of the congressman from Florida, and when it was published in the New York Times Magazine was heavily edited, apparently for reasons of space. Printed here in full (as are all the essays), the essay reveals how unfortunate we are that the biography was never completed.

I sometimes think that John Egerton doesn’t know how to write a bad sentence. He combines the insight and honesty of a first-rate journalist with a compelling use of words and, especially important, a genuine empathy for the people about whom he writes. Although he is technically an essayist, he has an eye for detail that is far more penetrating than is found among most news reporters. He can write dispassionately of the harsh views held by some toward Morris Dees, but be hesitant to invade the privacy of a major figure in the Maurice Mays story. Whereas the media look for heroes and villains, someone to hype and someone to ridicule, Egerton sees the history of the South as a complex web of irony and contradiction in which there are few villains, fewer still to ridicule. Even when he writes of men or women who seem to have no redeeming qualities, he seems to see them as actors in a drama that transcends mere human calculation and judgment.

In the closing essay Egerton expresses his own hope for the future of the South in words that reflect the title of his earlier book, The Americanization of Dixie-The Southernization of America:

What we are witnessing now is the integration of the South with the rest of the nation. In the literal meaning of word “integration”-“to make whole”-lies our hope for the future. If we do it right, we will make the United States truly one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. In that best of all worlds, the South would spread its strengths throughout the land, and the best qualities of the rest of the nation would permeate the South, and we could retain and perpetuate our regional identity and our Southern heritage within the larger context of the united country. In the same manner, the real integration of black and white cultures in this society would bring about not the erasing of one for the sake of the other, but a fusion of the two in such a way that we could each be both singular and plural, multicultural brothers and sisters.

Surely, that is a dream worth nourishing, a goal worth seeking. To borrow the words of a familiar liturgy: “Let the people say ‘Amen.'”

Gene Davenport lives in Jackson, Tennessee, where he is Professor of Religion at Lambeth University.

A mythical vision of a non-meddling military

Reviewed by Charles Bussey

Vol. 14, No. 2, 1992, pp. 25-27

Negative Intelligence: The Army and the American Left, 1917-1941 by Roy Talbert, Jr. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991, xiv, 303 pages).

In October 1989, I sat in St. James Episcopal Church at Hyde Park, New York. Walter Cronkite received the Freedom of Speech Award at the FDR Four Freedoms Celebration, and he said:

Government cannot be allowed to conduct its business behind closed doors. Those citizens

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who don’t demand to know what their government is doing in their names are assuming a dangerous liability.

Cronkite’s words moved me then. After reading Roy Talbert’s book, Negative Intelligence, four years later, they make me want to preach!

A historian at the University of South Carolina’s Coastal College, Professor Talbert served as an Army officer assigned to the Counterintelligence Division of the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence in the 1970s. His interest in writing a history of military surveillance of American radicals began with that assignment.

Surprised by the volume of material for the pre-1941 period, Talbert chose to close this volume with that date.

It is necessary to make a distinction between “positive” and “negative” intelligence, as they were in that time defined. The former involves obtaining supposedly useful information about the enemy. The latter, clearly dangerous to America’s own freedom, was concerned with “opposing the enemy’s effort to use undercover agents to learn about or to harm one’s own side.” The term “negative” is no longer used. The nearest approximation today is “counterintelligence.”

Talbert discovered that pre-World War II Military Intelligence was consistently more concerned with countering leftist or reform forces within America than with foreign spies.

A list of organizations and people who were under watch included: the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the ACLU, the NAACP, an oldie called the Committee of Forty-Eight, Scott Nearing, Eleanor Roosevelt, Reinhold Niebuhr, Joseph Lash, Herbert Croly, Will Durant, Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. The list goes on.

According to Talbert, the tale “is a dark and bizarre

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story, and there were days when I came up from the microfilm reader… depressed over the misdeeds of my countrymen.”

Clearly dismayed over his findings, and the fact that efforts to keep the Army out of domestic issues consistently failed, always did at the first hint to social crisis, Talbert’s story makes Cronkite’s warning in 1989 all the more poignant. With the incompetent leadership America suffers under today, social crisis looms large on the horizon. And with it, more “negative intelligence”?

It’s up to us–as concerned American citizens–to demand more from our elected leaders, to want and demand openness and public accountability. We didn’t get it from Military Intelligence between 1917 and 1941; let’s want, and demand, it now.

One person under scrutiny in 1941 was Williams College professor Max Lerner. His “sin”? He favored ‘a new world order’! Also, according to Talbert’s information, some intelligence agents said that Lerner used “the word democracy” as a synonym for socialism.

Despite delimination agreements of 1941-42, which restricted domestic surveillance to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, the Army remained in the field. One man, Ralph H. Van Deman, was clearly the founding father of military intelligence.

His story from 1915 until his death in 1952 is enough to frighten anyone with the merest interest in the Bill of Rights. Van Deman served “negative intelligence” both in the government and as a private citizen.

In fact, one of the terrifying features of this horror tale is the close relationship between military intelligence and private super-patriot groups. Van Deman a J. Edgar Hoover fan. In 1937 (by then he was retired), he offered Hoover his files on people and groups he considered subversive. This file was substantial; he had 85,000 index cards!

Hoover refused, Van Deman’s index cards were of a different size than the FBI’s making a merger difficult. Besides, according to Hoover, “‘We apparently have all pertinent material anyway.'”

Talbert’s book is thoroughly researched; his bibliographic essay will be immensely helpful to anyone interested in the subject; the prose is serviceable. My hope is that he-and others who read his book–will take chunks of this tale and retell it for the public in Op-Ed pages across the nation.

As Talbert recognizes, “Most Americans… have had a pristine vision of a country unencumbered by a meddling army. Like so much else in history, that belief turns out to be largely mythical.”

Myths are wonderful ways to tell great and powerful stories.

But in this case Americans need the plain truth.

Charles Bussey is a historian at Western Kentucky University (where he is also this year’s president of a vigorous American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter).

A strong figure in a tumultuous era

Reviewed by Leslie Dunbar

Vol 14, No. 2, 1992, pp. 27-29

Chronicles of Faith, The Autobiography of Frederick D. Patterson, edited by Martia Graham Goodson, with a foreword by Harry V. Richardson (University of Alabama Press, 1991, xiv, 220 pages).

Frederick D. Patterson was one of the dominant figures of the black community for half this century. President of Tuskegee Institute from 1935 until 1953,

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principal founder of the United Negro College Fund, executive director of the Phelps Stokes Fund, advisor to just about everybody.

His autobiography, as told to Professor Goodson, depicts not only the life of a distinguished man but the era during which he worked and led. The book is filled with quick portrayals of the America of mid-century, such as these:

When I heard [in 1941 or 42] about the plans to include blacks in the new Air Corps, I was anxious to learn more…. I met with Robert Patterson, the assistant secretary of war I told [him], Tuskegee Institute is available if flying is going to be offered on a segregated basis. We do not want it if there’s a chance of immediate integration.’ …Patterson told me in unequivocal terms that military flying would not be integrated.

* * *

I began voting when I became president of Tuskegee Institute. In fact, I voted as soon as I became head of Tuskegee, Dr. [Robert Russa, second president of Tuskegee, Patterson’s predecessor and father-in-law] Moton had voted, and I assume Booker Washington did also, although I don’t know that he did so. I learned in 1935 that I would be allowed to vote for the first time in my life–because I was Tuskegee’s president.

* * *

After blacks in Alabama got the ballot, the Tuskegee Civic Association had to fight gerrymandering. One of the first actions taken by the white citizens in an effort to exclude blacks was to gerrymander just about all the black citizens out of the Tuskegee district, where their vote would have counted. The map of the election district looked like a snake.

* * *

Dr. Carver was not race conscious. He had been born a slave, kidnapped as a child, and ransomed for a horse. Yet on question of race, he offered no comment. He never spoke of it, at least not with me. There was one exception: the occasion when he turned over his life savings to me for the establishment of the George Washington

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Carver Research Foundation. The money was in government bonds. Carver said that buying the bonds was an act of patriotism in which all citizens could indulge, not just white citizens.

* * *

…the court’s admonition [in the School Desegregation Cases, 1954] to move ‘with all deliberate speed’ tended to have the opposite effect of what had been anticipated…. While we were waiting for integration to happen, the immediate need was for greatly improved education opportunity under the existing segregated system As we told the story of what the United Negro College Fund schools were doing…people of goodwill and intelligence were not deterred in contributing to the Fund. Some were, but by the same token, some wanted to see black people remain segregated anyway. We never asked….

* * *

When I went to Phelps Stokes, [A. Philip] Randolph bawled me out for what he said I was not doing…. In all my years at Tuskegee, I had to watch my conduct, lest I get Tuskegee Institute in trouble and damage its value to students. I thought it wisest to steer clear of controversy on the race issue. Dr. Moton had done so. Booker Washington had done so; and I simply fell into the same pattern…. It wasn’t that I didn’t agree with Randolph and [Channing, Patterson’s predecessor at Phelps Stokes] Tobias… I listened to what he [Randolph] had to say, but I didn’t do any differently. After working for forty years, you form habits Nonetheless, I participated in the March on Washington 11963] and spoke to Randolph there to let him know I was present. I also joined the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery March…I don’t think I spoke to Martin Luther King or other civil rights leaders there. I was simply present in the crowd, mixing with the marchers.

Dr. Moton had acquired land on the York River in Tidewater Virginia, and had built there a large home, to which he had retired after leaving Tuskegee. The place was Capahosic. Later, Dr. Patterson worked strenuously to transform it into a retreat and conference center, accomplishing this, and at the same time protecting the estate from white developers, through creating the Robert R. Moton Memorial Institute. I attended a couple of conferences there. Between gargantuan repasts conferees sat and conversed on the grass–lucky ones on folding chairs–in the shade of a giant oak, Dr. Patterson himself in a lawn chair at the center, looking Jehovah-like. One session had some useful importance for the civil right movement.

It was in the Summer of 1961, and somehow Kennedy administration representatives, some foundation executives, some others like myself, and a group of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) members had been convened.

The SNCC members were more than participants; they were also a big item on the agenda. Today it may seem incredulous that they, who were to carry the heaviest load of the voter registration work of ensuing years, had in 1961 to be persuaded that it would not be a cop-out. But such was the case, and the Capahosic meeting was important in overcoming their wariness. Capahosic was one of several occasions that year where the SNCC members experienced being met with respect by older and established persons. They had to secure the right of being listened to, too often against resistance.

Chronicles of Faith, handsomely designed and printed by its publisher and enriched by numerous interesting photographs, will deepen anyone’s understanding of a strong man and the tumultuous years in which he lived and worked.

Leslie Dunbar is the book review editor of Southern Changes.

A brave voice in the wilderness

Reviewed by John Egerton

Vol. 14, No. 2, 1992, pp. 29-30

Simple Decency & Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement, 1938-1963, by Linda Reed. (Indiana University Press, 1991. 257 pp.).

In a half-century of painful fits and starts preceding Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott, a thin trickle of Southerners, white and black, opposed the angry tide of racial discrimination that flowed from region-wide passage of the segregation laws.

The efforts were meager, halting, ambivalent, and finally, woefully inadequate. On a few occasions, independent people and delegates from Southern organizations and institutions came together in hopes of finding comprehensive solutions to the region’s social problems.

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Such gatherings sometimes emboldened people to be more frankly and outspokenly critical, more courageous, than they dared to be alone.

Of all these collective quests for what historian Linda Reed calls simple decency and common sense, none was bigger or more ambitious–or initially more promising–than the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, an all-Southern network of progressives organized in Birmingham in November 1938.

Reed’s book is the first full-scale treatment of the SCHW and its education and research wing, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, since Thomas A. Krueger’s book, And Promises to Keep, was published 25 years ago. With the benefit of those additional years of hindsight, historians can now put these two groups in sharper perspective, and Reed does that well. Of particular value is her assessment of the increasing activism of SCEF after it split with the founding group and the latter folded in 1948 (Krueger’s study didn’t go beyond that date.)

Among the strengths of Reed’s study is her discourse on the realization among white liberals in the organizations that Jim Crow laws were at the root of the South’s social, cultural, political, and economic malaise (most blacks had long since figured that out). With insight and sensitivity, she shows how massive was the resistance to such outspoken whites as James Dombrowski, Clark Foreman, Aubrey Williams, and Virginia Durr, all of whom were branded as radicals and eventually as Communists by the reactionaries in power. It was red-baiting, in fact, as much as anything else, that finally sealed the doom of the two organizations.

The involvement of some prominent public figures of the time in SCHW and SCEF activities–Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Porter Graham, Mary McLeod Bethune–is well-handled here though not much is added to earlier accounts. Of more interest to me is the new and revealing material on some lesser-known activists, both white and black, whose contributions to the cause of racial justice deserve wider attention. In this group are such people as Carl and Anne Braden, Osceola McKaine, Witherspoon Dodge, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Lucy Randolph Mason, Paul Christopher, Maury Maverick, Homer P. Rainey, and John B. Thompson.

Well before Brown and Montgomery, a remnant of Southerners of both races tried to point the way to a season of social change that they saw as long overdue, ultimately inevitable, and in the best interests of the region and its people.

For their idealism and vision, says Linda Reed, they paid a high price. Her book brings a fascinating band of progressive Southerners into focus, some of them for the first time, and follows them from the late thirties into the sixties. They bear following, and remembering. So does this book.

John Egerton lives in Nashville and from there describes, comments on, and interprets the South with rare quality and distinction.