Voting rights denied

By The Editors

Volume 14, No. 3, pp. 1-4

George Bush celebrated the July 4th weekend this year with the most flagrantly anti-democratic act of his presidency—the veto of the National Voter Registration Act. The bill, which passed both houses of Congress with wide but not veto-proof margins, would have increased voter rolls from a disappointing 60 percent to an estimated 90 percent of eligible voters. With this Presidential exercise in arrogance, supporters of the legislation are left for the time being with the arduous but essential campaign to improve voter registration laws state-by-state.

Bush’s veto should be seen for what it is—a partisan Republican strategy to limit the franchise and deny access to the voting booth. In a year of growing citizen rebelliousness against the privileges of public officeholders, our chief public official fears—as he well should—an expanded electorate, though the bill would not take effect until after the 1992 elections.

The President’s terse veto message inexplicably cites “no justification” for the bill, though seventy million Americans remain unregistered. He rehashes fraud and corruption arguments but, as always, with no substantiating evidence. In fact, the twenty-nine states that register voters at motor vehicle bureaus and the twenty-seven states that allow registration by mail, have found no cheating.

Bush further cites “unnecessary, burdensome, expensive and constitutionally questionable federal regulation,” but what more constitutionally protected activity for government could there be than insuring citizen

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participation? It is here that Bush reveals what is the real heart of Republican aversion to the bill—what is radical about this bill It makes voter registration an official function of the state.

With the slogans of democracy on its lips, the United States intervenes around the world. Yet the U.S. ranks last of twenty major industrialized nations in voter participation—the only one where the burden of participation is on the citizen.

The bill’s nickname, the “motor voter” bill, while handy, does a disservice, for this legislation would have gone much further than enlisting people with automobiles. Not only would the National Voter Registration Act have automatically registered drivers’ license applicants, it would have required employees in public assistance, unemployment compensation, and offices serving the disabled to register voters. It would have encouraged the creation of additional registration sites. It would have provided for registration by mail in federal elections. Registered voters would have stayed registered, ending wholesale purges so effectively used to control the outcome of Southern elections.

The results, extrapolating from states which already apply these methods, would have been dramatic (see graph on page 3).

The National Voter Registration Act would have lent even greater significance to the struggle for power by disfranchised voters than the sheer numbers of new registrants. The legislation would have re-created a state obligation to register voters, shifting the authority for voter registration from the fiefdoms of county registrars to a matter of state responsibility.

That obligation was abdicated as early as 1944, when the all-white primaries were ended as a result of Smith v. Allwright.

With the effects of Smith, states looked for new ways to prevent the franchise from being used by black voters. “Every voter registration officer is a law unto himself,” said political scientist V.0. Key, in his 1949 book, Southern Politics. To shield their mischief from scrutiny, states stopped keeping reliable records about voter registration, especially by race. Even now, some major Southern states, like Florida, Mississippi, and Texas, have no state record-keeping system for voters.

When the states stopped, the Southern Regional Council started, painstakingly documenting county by county, compiling and publishing the estimates of voter registration by race in the Southern states, in order to prove that, despite the claims of most Southern white politicians, blacks could not register and vote in the South.

Under the leadership of Wiley Branton, Vernon Jordan, and John Lewis, the Voter Education Project was

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established as a special project of the Southern Regional Council from 1962 until 1972 to show how registration could happen. Two million Southern voters were registered as a result of VEP’s work. Working together with local organizations, VEP proved that democracy might yet come home to the South.

But not without a price. In Mississippi, voter registration efforts by COFO (the Council of Federated Organizations), headed by Bob Moses, assisted by Dave Dennis, met with immediate violence. While the public accommodations bill, an issue of custom and comfort, even economics, provoked reaction, it did not match the violence that erupted over the right to vote—a question of power. As Mae Bertha Carter, of Sunflower County, Mississippi, puts it in this issue of Southern Changes, “there’s strength in voting. Voting is hiring and firing power.”

Faced with energetic black registration, white leadership took other measures. For instance, at-large voting schemes were implemented in South Carolina and other Southern states. Voting precincts were malaligned. These and other schemes diluted black voting strength, making it virtually impossible for local black voters to elect candi-

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dates of their choice.

New initiatives had to be taken to attack at-large plans and win fair redistricting for disfranchised voters. After Selma’s Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, when John Lewis and other civil rights workers were beaten and tear-gassed, the U.S. Congress responded to the horrors of televised violence and, within weeks, passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Act prevented any state or local jurisdiction with a history of low voter registration and resistance to black voting from making changes in election rules and procedures without the approval of the U.S. Justice Department. The Act—which largely affected Southern states—also provided for private litigation and for Justice officials to enforce fair rules for political participation.

During the last thirty-five years, the Voting Rights Movement has served as the means of enforcing the Voting Rights Act. And with apparent results. Fifty years ago, not one black elected official represented the South; now there are greater numbers at the state and local level than in any other section of the country.

As a result of fair redistricting, black representation in Congress from the South could triple after the November 1992 elections. There will be thirteen to fifteen new members of Congress representing the South from majority black districts—more than at any time in U.S. history. At the same time, Hispanic voters will send a record number of House members of Congress to Washington.

Yet, low levels of registration continue to plague the democratic process. While black voters in some parts of the South are catching up with whites in levels of registration, it is chiefly because all levels of registration and voting are low and falling. At a time when redistricting will allow members of the new Congress and state legislatures to represent the diverse populations of our nation, the South and the nation need to send new voters to the polls to continue the reawakening of our democracy. The government needs to help people register—not keep them from voting.

George Bush is the first president in the twentieth century to veto a voting rights bill. As John Lewis, now a member of Congress, states, “like a thief in the night, the President wants to steal our best hope for the expansion of American democracy.” —The Editors

Below, for example, the Atlanta Constitution and Journal covered the Bush veto. U.S. newspapers and electronic media largely ignored Bush’s veto of the National Voter Registration Act and the significance of the story. Because of the President’s partisan concerns, the United States is certain to remain the industrial nation with the lowest rate of voter participation in the world.

‘MOTOR VOTER’ BILL VETOED:
President Bush on Thursday vetoed legislation requiring states to register voters when they apply for driver’s licenses or government benefits, saying it would impose needless, costly and constitutionally questionable federal regulation. “It would also expose the election process to an unacceptable risk of fraud and corruption without any reason to believe that it would increase electoral participation to any significant degree,” Mr. Bush said in his veto message.
ATLANTA JOURNAL CONSTITUTION

The Salt of Memory— Nostalgia, Class, and the Lesbian in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

By Julie Wilson

Volume 14, No. 3, pp. 5-11

“Of course, most of the house is all boarded up and falling down now, but when we came down the street, the headlights hit the windows in such a way that, just for a minute, that house looked to me just like it had… some seventy years ago, all lit up and full of fun and noise… I guess, driving by that house and me being so homesick made me go back in my mind… “—Ninny Threadgoode1

Ninny’s words strike a clear, piercing note in the heart of rural Americans who have witnessed the steady erosion of their farms, towns, and lives. Trying to read about such experiences is never easy. Trying to write well about them may be even harder. One author who gives it a try is Fannie Flagg—a successful Southerner extraordinaire. A talented radio personality, television comedienne, film actress, and most recently novelist, Flagg has a distinctive style. She exhibited this individuality as early as her teens, when she wore a wet suit, mask, and flippers in the Miss Alabama swimsuit competition. This quirky, feminist humor shows up in her novels Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man (1981) and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (1987). Flagg exhibits a gift for storytelling. She spins her tales at the deceptively easy going pace of the Southern, rural American grapevine. If you rely on stereotype alone, you will most certainly overlook Flagg’s complicated characters and messages. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe especially demonstrates this sophistication. Recently adapted to film, the characters Ninny, Idgie, Ruth, and Evelyn endear themselves to us as old friends. My mother and I came home after seeing the movie and speculated for hours (a

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crucial downhome activity) about these women’s lives. Although we are Midwesterners and they are Southerners, we recognized a rural connection and excitedly chatted about them as we do people who live or once lived just down the road.

We soon discovered that one very troubling thing happens to the reader or viewer of Flagg’s story. It seems the subject matter induces a nostalgic homesickness. Images of rural America—especially, it seems, of the rural South—when presented to the larger culture can appear to be an untapped wellspring of bright solidarity and folksy idealism. Of course, those of us who live in the fields and valleys know that this is a tainted stereotype; yet, like Ninny Threadgoode, we can still be tempted to “go back in our minds” to an imagined past.

Nostalgia, that longing for things, persons, or situations that are not present, comes from the Latin root word nostos which means “a return.” Both the German and French words for nostalgia (heim weh and nostalgie, respectively) mean “homesickness.” In the book Nostalgia and Sexual Difference Janice Doane and Devon Hodges describe nostalgia as a counterproductive yearning that not only “put[s] women in their place—[but puts] writing in its place too.”2That place is always decidedly in a nonthreatening past. “In a nostalgic mode of articulation,” they explain, “the referent…acts as an authentic origin or center from which to disparage the degenerate present.”3 As described by these authors, nostalgia can be considered a dangerously propagandistic part of some representations. Interestingly, Fredric Jameson disagrees. He cautions us from entirely dismissing nostalgic narrative. He writes,”…if nostalgia as a political motivation is most frequently associated with Fascism, there is no reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present…cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other.”4 When we engage a novel or film like Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe we cannot ignore the troubling, dialectical nature of nostalgia.

How often do those of us who identify as rural Americans wish we could return to the past? Certainly we are uncomfortable with the present—crumbling homesteads, flattened economies, bumpkin stereotypes. But homesickness is a symptom of some systemic malady, not a cure for it. We should explore nostalgia by asking questions of it: Can a representation of rural America exist without nostalgia? Does the nostalgia in Flagg’s novel tend to most easily placate white rural Americans? What are the dangers of succumbing to the repressive impulses of nostalgia (unexamined racism, classism, and heterosexism) that Jameson describes? And at the same time, how can we appreciate the prophetic poignancy of Flagg’s rural American characters without attempting to run back to the past and be comforted by them?

Perhaps bell hooks begins to answer these difficult questions. Whites can learn much from advice she offers the African-American community in her book Yearning. She writes, “If we fall prey to the contemporary ahistorical mood, we will forget that we have not stayed in one place, that we have journeyed away from home …. We have not gone the distance, but we can never turn back.”5 It takes a brave pair of eyes to keep looking forward in today’s political and cultural climate. Those of us who are white must especially listen carefully to hooks’ words. We must find a way to allow narratives like Flagg’s to infuse us with a forward-looking strength, not a back-paddling homesickness. I don’t believe Flagg intentionally wishes to blur our vision. A close look at her novels shows that she has considered those peculiar institutions of racism, heterosexism, and classism. However, beneath her work rushes a strong undercurrent of nostalgia. The most overt manifestations of this precarious undertow appear in the film adaptation of the novel where, unfortunately, a good deal of ahistorical license reigns.

We can use the text of Flagg’s novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe to demonstrate several disturbing trends in contemporary American culture. First of all, it seems that we use nostalgia to trivialize rural narratives. Flagg’s stories are most often labeled “oldtimey” or “sentimental.” I believe discounting rural experience in such a way allows us to deposit mythological “traditional family values” into the stereotype of the rural American. We also show a tendency to displace class onto the figure of the outsider, since at heart we believe that American culture is classless. How do we do this? Most often by denying our contemporary class locations—other times we do it by displacing class onto race. Unfor-

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tunately, we also have an habitual tendency to overlook gay, lesbian, or bisexual lives in these narratives. For example, we contort lesbian sexuality into the universal, unthreatening value of “friendship.” This is because we believe we will keep lesbians powerless by enclosing them in the homophobic circle of the traditional American family.

The Story

Let’s take a closer look, then, at Fannie Flagg’s novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe and see what we find there. There are many story lines in this book, weaving from the past into the present and back. We are introduced to a white, Southern, middle-aged, working-class housewife named Evelyn Couch. Evelyn and her husband Ed are coded as upper working-class—by the house they live in (tiny clone subdivision), Ed’s occupation (insurance agent), Evelyn’s career aspirations (Mary Kay dealer), their cars (Fort Escort and Ford LTD—known as “the poor man’s Lincoln”) and food and drink cues such as the omnipresent can of Budweiser.

Quite by accident Evelyn meets Ninny Threadgoode at the Rose Terrace nursing home. Ninny is a spry eighty-six year-old (white, Southern, and rural-American) who enjoys telling stories about her past. She wryly notes, “It’s funny, when you’re a child you think time will never go by, but when you hit about twenty, time passes like you’re on the fast train to Memphis” (p. 6). Evelyn’s friendship with Ninny changes her life. At first a deeply depressed woman who feels her life is out of control, Evelyn eveatually takes charge of it with the help of Ninny, Stresstabs Number Ten, and Mary Kay cosmetics.

Through her memories, Ninny narrates other story lines; these take place in her hometown of Whistle Stop, Alabama, and are mainly concerned with two white women (Idgie and Ruth) who ran the Whistle Stop Cafe in the 1920s and 30s. The cafe operated as a community center of sorts that brought people together. Of course, it’s necessary to point out that the cafe brought primarily white people together in a time of severe segregation. African-Americans were quietly sold food from the back door of the cafe.

Although Flagg does not label Idgie and Ruth “lesbian,” she codes them as such. This problematizes the novel by encouraging a more complicated look at early twentieth-century American society. In the film adaptation, Ninny says, “Everyone was in love with Ruth,” and we are supposed to know that this includes Idgie as well. Friendship, or more specifically, what Catharine Stimpson calls primal love is the dominant thread in the fabric of these stories.6 The two main bonds are those between Idgie and Ruth in the early twentieth century and Evelyn and Ninny in the late twentieth century. Evelyn is so depressed she fantasizes about suicide; Ninny saves her from this fate. Evelyn also saves Ninny by becoming her

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emotional support. Idgie saves Ruth’s life by rescuing her from a violent marriage. And Ruth saves Idgie from a lonely and aimless alcoholic existence. Other story lines show Sipsey saving Ruth’s baby, and the Whistle Stop Cafe’s owners saving homeless transients from starvation. Most often, Flagg suggests that bonds of friendship lead to salvation of one kind or another.

It might be a good idea to take a closer look at one thing these women are saving their friends from—marriage. For Idgie, it doesn’t exist as a possibility. For Ruth, it is a violent and vicious trap. For Evelyn, marriage has alienated her from a good view of herself and a connection to other women. Out of this foursome, only for Ninny is marriage represented as positive and lifegiving. And incidentally, she buried her husband thirty-one years before she met Evelyn!

An important story line in Flagg’s novel tells the tale of the African-American characters Sipsey, her son George, his wife Onzell, and their children Naughty Bird, Jasper, and Arvis. Flagg attempts to place the realities of African-American life next to the realities of white life in order to show the real-lived texture of racism in twentieth-century America. This story line is important because of the way Flagg develops the African-American characters. An omniscient narrator exposes the hardships these characters face, as well as the joys they experience. These sections ground the book and help the reader resist a cloudy, ahistorical nostalgia. Flagg successfully persuades the reader that this period of history is certainly not one African-American characters would wish to return to. This information should give the homesick white person some pause. To the detriment of the film, however, the story of Sipsey’s family is not included. This makes the movie much more vulnerable to nostalgic racism. In the film, the African-American characters are only seen in servant/worker representations (except for when Sipsey attends a funeral). We do see the characters of Mrs. Otis’s daughter Naughty Bird and the nurse Geneene—but not often enough to balance out the subservient representations.

Much dramatic tension in the story comes from the character of Ruth’s abusive husband Frank Bennett. Sipsey murders Frank when he comes to steal Ruth’s baby. This murder becomes an important element in the plot of the novel. Idgie takes the rap for Sipsey, because she assumes the law will gladly hang an African-American woman for a white man’s murder. In the novel this justifiable homicide is part of the plotline, but it doesn’t really become more important than Evelyn and Ninny’s story, Ruth and Idgie’s story, or the story of Sipsey’s family. Of course, it certainly is not incidental to the plot—it operates as a taut thread that pulls the other stories together. In the film this murder is raised to a more central plot position where it provides conventional suspense for the viewer.

Ultimately, in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle

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Stop Cafe

the main event is Evelyn’s profound life change. She achieves this transformation by listening to stories about Ruth and Idgie’s life together. Although Ninny tells other stories, the ones about Idgie and Ruth are the ones that Evelyn repeatedly asks for and about. Interestingly, her identification with and empowerment through lesbians would support the argument that this story can be seen as inherently lesbian. It also seems as though the story plays best to a white, female audience of all sexual persuasions. Evelyn’s transformation is a good example of the dialectical nature of nostalgia. Although she is positively influenced by Ninny’s memories, she also nearly loses touch with reality because of her obsession with them. Flagg writes, “Sitting there all these weeks listening to stories about the cafe and Whistle Stop had become more of a reality than her own life with Ed in Birmingham” (p. 134). What about Class?

Identified by sociologists as one of the fundamental types of social stratification, “class” is a difficult term to define in contemporary American society. Much of this is because of an overt mystification of class, as well as definite regional variations of this horizontal layering. Most Americans, when asked, will identify themselves as middle-class. There are usually only two factors people take into consideration when asked about their class location—education and income. Womanist Katie Cannon challenges this simplistic notion by positing at least thirteen clear class indicators—among them ancestry, social distance, manners, values, and language. In the book The Imperial Middle Benjamin DeMott writes, “Several hallowed concepts—independence, individualism, choice—are woven into this [American] web of illusion and self-deception. But presiding over the whole stands the icon of classlessness….”7 Despite obfuscation, ignorance, and outright denial, class does operate as a major force in American society. The class structure of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism as theorized by Weber and Marx has changed over time, to be sure, yet it remains a relevant point of departure for any analysis of American culture.

Far from being absent, class permeates Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe—both the novel and the film. Often, however, a feel-good nostalgia threatens to blur our view of it by making us feel so warmly about Whistle Stop, Alabama, that we fail to take a clear-eyed look at the class structure in place there. By wiping our eyes we can begin to see that Whistle Stop society indeed has clear class divisions. It seems a good argument to posit that class is most obviously displaced onto the figure of the outsider—primarily the African-American community, white transients, and racist villain Frank Bennett.

Whistle Stop residents appear to be fairly homogeneous in the story; they seem to be free of hierarchy. Even Poppa Threadgoode—probably the most stable figure in Whistle Stop—as Ninny remembers, “…wasn’t rich, but it seemed to us at the time he was. He owned the only store in town” (p. 26). Whistle Stop consists of a group of like-minded, cohesive citizens. Perhaps they ultimately represent the traditional American family community; purportedly always middle-class and certainly always white.

Class distinctions become most apparent when the outsider enters the scene. We see some examples of a lower class in the figures of white, homeless transients who drop in and out of Whistle Stop. The upper classes are perhaps represented by Frank Bennett. He is definitely an outsider—an out-of-stater who owns eight-hundred acres of land. His shoes are polished to a bright sheen and he has his hair barbered regularly. Unfortunately, the film confuses this notion somewhat by representing Bennett’s home as shoddy and unpainted. Lastly, the institution of racism creates obvious outsiders.

Whistle Stop is a town where whites exist in a position of race and class power over African-Americans, who live across the tracks in an area called “Troutville.” In Ninny’s memories they are all dirt poor—seemingly only one class of people. Flagg tries to show us much more; the intersection of class and race is complicated in the novel when she includes middle to upper-class African-American characters. Our omniscient narrator shows us Chicago and Birmingham communities where the population is much more diverse. George and Onzell’s son Arvis, for example, falls in love with a town very different from Troutville. In “the overalls of a country boy” he views Birmingham, Alabama—an exciting, turbulent urban environment unlike slow-moving Troutville.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers confuse an already confusing issue by trying not to displace class onto race. In order to demonstrate that everyone in Whistle Stop is really equal, they show the town of Troutville as a shanty town with African-Americans and whites living together in poverty. One scene even goes so far as to show Ruth teaching a racially integrated group of small children how to read. The filmmakers end up exercising too much license with historical reality here. The book, to its credit, attempts to describe the more accurate situation of strictly segregated racism.

What about Lesbians?

The lesbian as a category of identity is a phenomenon new to the twentieth century. In The Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick writes, “Foucault among other his-

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torians locates in about the nineteenth century a shift in European thought from viewing same-sex sexuality as a matter of prohibited and isolated genital acts…to viewing it as a function of stable definitions of identity.”8 This shift from acts to identity impacted the representation of same-sex relationships between women. Much of the issue of lesbian representation has to do with visibility. How can one assume when a character is lesbian? Fortunately, there are many traditional lesbian cues in twentieth-century fiction; among these are cross dressing, butch/femme roles, the lesbian bar, food sharing as sex, psychological trauma that supposedly induces same-sex desire, and tragic, premature death.

From such stock cues, we can conclude that Flagg’s characters Ruth and Idgie are lesbians. For example, Idgie only dresses in men’s clothes, Ruth only in women’s—this codes them as butch/femme. Idgie also spends a considerable amount of time at the Wagon Wheel River and Fishing Club, an establishment run by bisexual Eva Bates—much to the consternation of jealous Ruth. And Ruth later tragically dies of cancer at age thirty-two. Another typical indicator is food standing in for the sexual act. We see Idgie offer ajar of honey to Ruth. When Ruth accepts this offer, we know she accepts more than just honey.

Like class, lesbianism is alive and well in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe—albeit not always clearly recognizable. And it is unfortunately only distilled into white characters, something that should not be overlooked. Lesbianism is also obscured by a heterosexist variety of nostalgia, and because of this is perhaps even more difficult to see than class. Idgie and Ruth are firmly ensconced within the quintessential American family—the Threadgoodes. We know this is not the usual stomping ground for out lesbians! Is the lesbian invisible then? Definitely not. As shown above, the novel and the film outline several stock lesbian cues when introducing both Idgie and Ruth. For example, in the film we are led to believe that after Idgie and Ruth witness the death of their mutual, heterosexual love interest Buddy (Idgie’s big brother and Ruth’s boyfriend) they are indelibly marked for lesbianism. Interestingly, this never happens in the book. Why would the filmmakers have inserted such a scene if not to try to provide a homophobically “logical” reason for this most tenacious friendship? Upon close examination, and in so many ways, Ruth and Idgie can be seen as the classic American, twentieth-century, white lesbian couple.

The film displaces and diminishes overt lesbianism in a variety of ways, while at the same time exploits the sensuality between the female characters. Food stands in for lesbian sexuality. Ruth and Idgie kiss only once (a brief peck on the cheek during a skinny dipping scene), but they do have a raucous food fight where they have ample opportunity to touch as they smear edibles all over each other. Still, viewers are not shown a tongue kiss or sex scene, and it is possible that by transferring these lesbian cues onto the traditionally noble value of “friendship” a viewer can leave the theater in denial of the lesbianism in the film. The problem with Ruth and Idgie is not that they are invisible to a heterosexist lens, but rather, skillfully manipulated by it.

Some other questions we might ask in relation to the issue of lesbianism in the story have to do with the transhistorical value of friendship. Could the lesbian, trapped inside the traditional, supposedly middle-class, white American family be forced to serve as a vessel for the value of friendship, or Stimpson’s “primal love,” which saves the women in this story from physical, spiritual and/or emotional death? Perhaps so. We might come to this conclusion especially because of the fact that the lesbians are suspiciously only in the past. There are no visible lesbians in Evelyn’s world. This is especially strange since she lives in the post-Stonewall era. If anything, the 1980s should be the place to find lesbians. But we aren’t shown any. So we should wonder just how Ruth and Idgie are used to embody the concept of a primal love. It also seems that this transhistorical love takes a decidedly heterosexist twist and ultimately “evolves”—from Ruth and Idgie’s lesbian love to Evelyn and Ninny’s platonic, apparently heterosexual, mother/daughter love.

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Is the apolitical/pre-Stonewall/non-feminist lesbian being held up as the ideal here? Idgie and Ruth are accepted in their community because they never openly identify themselves as lesbians. They are instead, “best friends.” Did Ruth and Idgie pass as straight? Or did they simply exist on the edge of an historical moment that forboded great changes in the concept of lesbian identity? Is Flagg trying to give contemporary lesbians an assimilationist message here?

Certainly we see lesbians represented in a non-threatening manner in this story; visible to the eye, but vulnerable to the studied manipulation of filmmakers who reinforce the deliberate ignorance of homophobic viewers. Because of the general paucity of lesbian representation in novels and films, however, Ruth and Idgie—despite manipulation—do seem a welcome sight. Certainly the lesbian viewer is accustomed to taking the bad with the bad! For example, compared to the grossly caricatured representation of the lesbian in films such as Basic Instinct, Ruth and Idgie appear to be the salt of the lesbian earth. If we see the story as an affirmation of lesbian agency in the early twentieth century, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe may indeed show the positive side of a look back towards “home.” It is crucial, however, that we not get so excited about Idgie and Ruth that we cast a hasty, non-critical gaze.

The Salt of the Earth

Oftentimes rural Americans are called “the salt of the earth.” Perhaps salt can be a helpful metaphor for the situation we find ourselves in when we try to sort out the issue of nostalgia in rural narratives. How can we represent our memories of rural America without succumbing to nostalgic close-mindedness?

A bible story tells of the flight of Lot and his family from Sodom. Warned by God to flee without looking back, Lot’s wife (unfortunately, the story does not tell us her name) disobeyed and took a last glance. This sight turned her into a pillar of salt. Why did this unnamed woman look back? Why did she become salt? Her glance can be seen as folly or bravery; perhaps both. And how many of us might have done the same thing? After all, it was her lifelong home she turned back to gaze upon. In antiquity, salt was often associated with a destruction of life, a land gone to waste. Yet among the ancients, to eat salt was also to create a bond of friendship. Today we take things that people say with “a grain of salt” when we suspect untruthfulness. Epsom salts soothe our tired feet. Smelling salts bring us out of a dead faint. We know we need salt in moderate, heathful doses; heathcare workers caution us from oversalting foods. Perhaps nostalgia is the sickness we get from overdosing on the precious salt of memory. We need to exhibit the same courage Lot’s wife did and look back—even if we risk the wrath of hetero-patriarchal gods. But we must not look too long, lest our minds become rigid, close-minded pillars of memory.

We see that nostalgia can be a destructive force. Yet we also know our memories of life in rural America are crucial data in a battle against far more destructive powers. How, then, can we take action? Perhaps a few ways we can do so are by looking hard at our soft memories, listening critically to our own stories, and making a concerted effort to be aware of our social location.

Let’s return to bell hooks’ message about yearning. She tells us not to let ourselves turn back, however strong the longing. She calls us to ask the hard questions of our soft memories; to try and stretch our minds; to see our tendency to conspire with strong undercurrents of feel-good nostalgia. She encourages us to confront the mind-numbing power of homesickness. Bell hooks’ challenge should definitely not be lost to white America. It calls us to task. Part of white people’s internalized racism manifests itself in our habit of looking through blurry eyes at the past. This clouding allows us to overlook the racism, classism, and heterosexism in our history; and it makes us sick with the moral agony of harboring unethical, contradictory doses of isms fed to us daily by our media and by each other. Clinging to the skirts of an ahistorical past only makes our sickness worse.

Can nostalgic memory ever be revolutionary? If, like Evelyn Couch, our look back empowers us to make positive changes in our present situation, then the answer is “yes.” However, more often than not, nostalgia infects us with an unshakeable social illness. This sickness weakens our desire for social justice, and revolutionary impulses drown in the too-salty waters of ahistorical recollection.

NOTES

A rural Kansas native, Julie Wilson, currently lives and works in Atlanta where she is an Emory graduate student.

Bill Minor’s Forty-Five Years of Progressive Journalism

By Michael L. Cooper

Vol. 14, No. 3, 1992, pp. 12-17

Bill Minor received a call in late 1947 from A. J. Liebling, media critic for the New Yorker. Liebling had read the young Times-Picayune correspondent’s articles on the newly-formed Mississippi Bureau of Investigation and was incredulous. Would the MBI really be a secret police, its agents and actions known only to the governor, Liebling asked. And were these agents really authorized to search and arrest without warrants?

Those were the facts, Minor responded, the state’s anti-labor legislature had created the MBI to combat a violent strike against a bus company. Liebling also learned Minor was a stringer for the Associated Press, and the wire service had sent the MBI story to media across the nation.

Surprised that none of the many newspapers he skimmed ran an article about this Southern “Gestapo,” Liebling wrote a column chastising the nation’s media for overlooking such an important story. Subsequently, major newspapers ran articles on the MBI, and the unwelcomed attention kept the governor from activating the agency. Minor’s reporting had brought the unconstitutional abuse of power to the nation’s attention and made Mississippi politicians change their ways.

A few months earlier, on his first assignment as the Picayune‘s Mississippi correspondent, Minor covered Theodore Bilbo’s funeral. Bilbo had been governor and U.S. Senator, offices that he won and held with a great deal of vitriolic race baiting. Less than a decade after the fiery demagogue had been buried, the racist system he represented began to crumble.

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The MBI and the Bilbo articles were portentous. When the civil rights movement roiled Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s, other local news people either joined the white opposition or were intimidated into silence. But Minor wrote daily accounts of the maneuvering, violence, and repression. He was an important source of reliable information for Mississippians and for countless visiting newsmen. His reporting influenced public careers and policies. Today, these columns and articles are a valuable record of white supremacy’s death struggle in a state once infamous for its racism.

“My own situation in those civil rights decades was a unique one,” Minor explained in a recent article, “I was something of a war correspondent behind enemy lines covering the battle of blacks to achieve first class citizenship.” Black protest in the South and the frequently violent white response transfixed the nation. Newsweek, AP, and the New York Times used Minor as a stringer, and he contributed features to the New Republic, the Herald Tribune, and other prominent publications. The reporter filed an enormous number of stories. Just for the Picayune alone, Minor estimates, he wrote an average of three news stories a day, over a thousand a year. And the Sunday Times-Picayune published, “Eyes on Mississippi,” an op-ed style column that allowed Minor to express his own views.

Some of the most horrific events of the civil rights movement occurred in Mississippi, drawing news people from across the nation. The trial in 1955 of two men accused of lynching fourteen-year-old Emmett Till attracted scores of out-of-state and foreign reporters. Other sensational stories followed: the Mack Charles Parker lynching in 1959, James Meredith and the Ole Miss riot in 1962 when a French correspondent was killed, Medgar Evers’ assassination in 1963, and Freedom Summer in 1964 when three, young rights workers were murdered.

Minor and Mississippi in the ’60s

The 1960s were a time of challenge, stress, and glory for Minor. Black protests and white resistance made Mississippi a difficult and dangerous place for a fair-minded and dedicated reporter. Minor’s colleagues in the national press recall their admiration for his work.

Joseph B. Cumming Jr., Newsweek‘s Atlanta bureau chief from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, states, “Bill Minor was the only good reporter in Mississippi during those crucial, historic years … in position to report consistently and aggressively and honestly in the local press what was going on in the controversial racial story of the 1960s.”

Jack Nelson, Atlanta bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times in the 1960s, recalls, “No reporter covering the South in those days, including myself, would have thought of going to Mississippi to cover a major story, whether on politics, economics, or civil rights without checking with a man we all recognized as an expert, Bill Minor.” Nelson remembers relying on Minor’s vast network of contacts while writing a series of articles on the Ku Klux Klan. “He could tell you who was in the Klan or was sympathetic. He could tell you how much the Klan had infiltrated the state police or the governor’s office. He knew who to talk to and who not to talk to.”

Minor, as a stringer for the national media, contributed to numerous widely-read stories about events in his home state. In 1963, former Governor J.P. Coleman gave the reporter transcripts of secret telephone negotiations between U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Governor Ross Barnett over James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi. In 1962, a federal court ordered the state to admit the black man to the all-white university. Governor Barnett’s defiant speeches fanned smoldering anger among white Mississippians, and they rioted the day federal marshals escorted Meredith to his Ole Miss dormitory room. When the smoke and tear gas cleared, two people had been killed, damage totaled several millions of dollars, and 20,000 federal troops occupied the small university town of Oxford. Newsweek ran a two-page story on the secret negotiations between the liberal presidential candidate and the arch-segregationist that, according to the article, “gave a fascinating view of men in power trying to accommodate to political reality.”

Minor is most proud of a story he uncovered for the Picayune in 1961, seven years after the Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional and three years before the integration of any public grade school or high school in Mississippi. A contact at the state department of education, Minor recalls, asked him to drop by the department during the lunch hour. On the receptionist’s desk in the empty office the reporter found an envelope with his name on it that contained a secret, state-sponsored report of local expenditures by race of every school district in the state.

“It was shocking,” Minor explains, “in some school districts white children received $100 to every $1 spend on a black child.” The report was additionally damning because nearly a decade earlier, in an effort to avoid federal intervention, the legislature passed the biggest tax hike in the state’s history to fund a major education program intended to make black schools equal to white schools. “It was a tremendous report,” black politician Henry Kirksey told Newsweek‘s Joe Cumming, “that never would have seen the light of day except for Bill Minor.” This report found its way to the offices of several liberal congressmen who used it in their arguments for passage

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of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Minor again caught Congress’s attention in a New York Times article in 1965. He quoted Harold Cox, a local federal judge hearing formal complaints from blacks who had been prevented from registering to vote, as saying they were “niggers acting like chimpanzees.” Minor remembers the article caused an uproar in Washington where several congressmen wanted to impeach Cox. This controversy, Minor believes, chastened the judge and made him more responsible.

The black community, half of the state’s three million residents, respected Minor even before the civil rights movement. “He gave the white community an opportunity to judge the black community by a different point of view,” says Aaron Henry, the long-time president of the Mississippi NAACP. As early as 1948, Minor devoted articles to fledgling black political efforts and to the gross inequality in public education. “It was unusual to write about black concerns,” Minor explains, “but the Times-Picayune gave me freedom to write about anything. I was very careful not to come out pro-integration, but to show injustices in the system.”

Minor’s editors were not always happy with his articles. The Picayune was “a very conservative paper,” and it editor, the late George Healy, “didn’t like to rock the boat,” remembers Walter Cowan, a retired editor of the States Item, a now-defunct afternoon paper also owned by the Times Picayune Company. “His editors appreciated Minor only to a point. In my estimation Minor was the best reporter on the Times-Picayune. If I had had him a lot of his stories that were inside the paper would have been on the front page.”

This conservatism, says Mississippi editor and pubusher John Emmerich, who has served on four Pulitzer prize committees, kept Minor from being nominated for a Pulitzer. In the 1950s and 1960s, three Mississippi journalists—Hodding Carter II, Ira Harkey, and Hazel Brannon Smith—won Pulitzers for their writings on the civil rights struggle. The New Orleans newspaper never nominated its ace reporter for a Pulitzer or, for that mattter, for any prize or award. Minor’s work during the early civil rights era was honored in 1966 when the Neiman Fellows at Harvard University awarded him the Louis Lyons Award for conscientiousness and integrity in journalism. (The previous recipient was Edward R. Murrow.)

The local media flagrantly distorted its coverage of the civil rights movement. In his book, Mississippi: The Closed Society, published in 1963, Ole Miss history professor James Silver observed, “The Mississippi press mounts vigilant guard over the racial, economic, political, and religious orthodoxy, of the closed society. . believe the extent to which news is manipulated…. The inspiration for Negro demands becomes the Communist Manifesto, not the Declaration of Independence. Shotgun blasts fired into Negro homes become an NAACP plot.”

While the local media distorted the news, public officials were uncooperative or hostile. “There is a conspiracy at every level of government, local and state, against the free flow of information,” Minor complained in one of his Sunday columns. Mississippi did not require public boards and commissions to meet openly until 1975. Eight years later the state passed its first law permitting public access to government records.

It was tough to be a good journalist here in the 1950s and 1960s, acknowledges Emmerich, a young columnist and editorial writer in those years for his family’s newspaper in McComb, a town south of Jackson. “Mississippi felt besieged,” he says, “there really was antagonism toward the outsider. It was a time when the whole state went crazy looking for people to blame. Minor covered every tough civil rights story at a time when many reporters were considered the enemy.”

The seared emotions of those years dogged Minor and his family twenty-four hours a day. Bill, his wife Gloria, and their three sons—Paul, Jeff, and Greg—lived in a small, ranch-style house in a modest suburb in north Jackson. Their neighbors and friends were all quite nice, Gloria Minor explains, but some subjects, such as civil rights, were just too controversial to discuss.

Most people thought Bill Minor was a radical, recalls Jeff Minor, who was a teenager in the mid-1960s. “We couldn’t talk with our friends about politics. And our views were a lot different than theirs,” says Jeff, who is now an optometrist in Jackson. “I couldn’t understand their hatred and anger about blacks.”

The Minors lived with a great deal of stress. Gloria remembers her husband “working very hard, long hours,” and the many breaking stories that abruptly ended dinners and holidays. Jeff too remembers that, “Dad worked under a lot of tension, he was a man of perfection, volatile. He yelled a lot and ran the house like a battleship.”

“I used to go after everything like it was the most important thing in the world,” Minor says earnestly, “I was a much tougher writer then than I am today. I had pretty thick skin,” he adds in a softer voice, “but I still liked to be liked.”

He seems to wince when he talks about attending a party for legislators hosted by his long-time friends, Eliza and Governor William Winter. Minor had been writing stinging articles faulting the progressive-minded governor for not standing up to the conservative legislature. Fuming about the articles, Mrs. Winter stopped Minor at the door and demanded, “What are you doing here?”

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A Courageous Example of Small Town Journalism

In 1976, the Picayune closed its Mississippi bureau because of declining circulation. The New Orleans newspaper offered Minor a job in Washington, D.C. And the Los Angeles Times asked him to run its new bureau in Houston. Minor and his family considered moving to the nation’s capital, but the Picayune refused to increase his salary despite the higher cost of living in the District of Columbia. “With the kind of money they were offering me,” Minor recalls, “I would have starved.” Plus, the newspaper’s Washington correspondent changed his mind about retiring, so even with thirty years of experience Minor would have been the junior correspondent.

Minor says he never seriously thought of leaving Jackson. He was not interested in advancing his career by moving around the country working for more prestigious, better paying news organizations. After investing a good part of his life in the state, he explains, he felt “important to Mississippi,” and “wanted to stick around to see how things turned out.” Minor became owner, publisher, and editor of the Capital Reporter. He once described the weekly as “a liberal, independent newspaper with sharp political insight, hard-hitting news and investigative stories.” Syndicated Washington columnist Jack Anderson called the Reporter, “one of the most courageous examples of small-town journalism.”

For five years the little weekly shook up Jackson’s political and business establishment. One story, “Tie Powerful Banker to Jury Fix,” described how Herman Hines, the president of the state’s largest bank, obtained a list of federal grand jurors for a friend under investigation for racketeering. While the court clerk who provided the list lost his job, the influential banker survived the incident unscathed.

Another story disclosed that Jackson’s top narcotic officer had flown to Miami to inspect a wooden statue seized by customs officials. The hollow statue, mailed from Jamaica to another well-known Jackson banker, contained three pounds of marijuana. Despite the Reporter‘s front-page article, “Pot Cover Up for Prominent Banker,” Jackson authorities never officially investigated the incident. But, infuriated by the article, the well-connected businessman organized an advertising boycott of Minor’s paper. (A federal court later convicted the banker of fraud and income tax evasion and sent him to prison.)

The Reporter soon found itself staring at a double-barreled threat, the advertising boycott on one side and Ku Klux Klan intimidation on the other. In the late 1970s, Minor says, his newspaper ran a series of investigative articles detailing the resurgence of the Klan and its growing influence in state government. The “invisible empire” responded characteristically by shattering the Reporter‘s windows with bricks and bullets and by burning a cross in front of the office. But the Klan proved less of a threat than the hostile business community.

The advertising boycott caused the little newspaper to cease publication in the fall of 1981. The Reporter had a circulation of about six thousand and cost some $5,000 a month to publish, Minor explains, it was under-capitalized and probably doomed from the beginning. Despite its short life, Minor is still quite proud of his weekly. “I wrote some stories with zing in ’em. Nobody else would touch those stories until we printed them. We raised some kind of hell and we changed some things. I don’t regret having my own newspaper in my career. That’s the goal of every reporter. But I do regret how tough it was on me.”

When asked about the Reporter, Gloria rolls her eyes, looks heavenward and groans. Bill worked sixty-hour weeks, she remembers, writing, editing, and supervising

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his young staff. He never paid himself. The family depended, Gloria says, on her small paycheck and the health insurance provided by her state job. Minor earned money syndicating a column and running a legislative reporting service.

The Reporter expressed Minor’s unabashed liberalism. During most of his life, liberals in the Deep South were a rare and endangered species. Minor attributes his abiding liberal values to his experiences in the hardscrapple years of the 1930s.

“My conditioning during the Depression made me a liberal. I never did forget about the underdog or little people,” he emphasizes before describing a childhood of abject poverty and his family’s dependence on New Deal social programs. Born in 1922 in Hammond, Louisiana, Wilson F. Minor was christened for the doctor who delivered him. But his mother and everybody else called him Bill. (The Times-Picayune did not allow its reporters to use nicknames, so his byline always appeared as Wilson F. or W. F. Minor.) His father, a native Mississippian whose grandfather had served in the Confederate infantry, worked as a printer when he had a job. But Jacob Minor was an alcoholic and frequently unemployed. In one four-year period, usually after being evicted for not paying rent, the family moved twelve times. In the early 1930s, Jacob worked for the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, and his family depended on the cheese, powdered eggs, and other commodities that the federal government gave away.

Minor graduated from high school in the southeastern Louisiana town of Bogalusa. His hard work and intelligence won him a tuition scholarship to Tulane University in nearby New Orleans. To pay room and board Minor held part-time jobs, and the New Deal’s National Youth Administration paid his wages of fifteen cents an hour. After graduating from Tulane in 1943 with a major in journalism and a minor in political science, Minor joined the Navy and served first as an ensign, then as a lieutenant on a destroyer in the Pacific during World War II.

The young navy officer saw some of the war’s fiercest fighting, but his most poignant memory was the day President Roosevelt died. “I went out on the bridge and cried,” he recalls. “We loved Franklin Roosevelt. I felt back then that he saved our lives. My only role model, my only hero was Franklin D. Roosevelt I believe in the New Deal and everything it stood for.”

Kind of a Mission

Minor’s New Deal liberalism, some critics claim, is all too apparent in his reporting. “If Bill Minor can be criticized for something it’s for not being objective. He has his heroes and villains,” observes long-time friend John Emmerich,who publishes thirteen Mississippi newspapers, ten of which carry Minor’s syndicated column. Referring to the state’s old guard conservatives, Emmerich says, Minor “felt kind of a mission to expose those guys for what they were. His heart was always with the reformist.”

A look at Minor’s columns seems to confirm Emmerich’s observations. The reporter has praised many of the state’s few progressives such as Lucy Howorth, “the long-time heroine of the women’s movement in Mississippi,” and Cardinal Bernard F. Law, who in the 1960s was a young Mississippi priest “working at reconciliation between the white man and the black man.”

Minor often lacerated conservatives. For example, he felt that long-time legislator and former house speaker Buddy Newman, one of the state’s most powerful politicians, “represented the forces of darkness leading Mississippi in the wrong direction.” Asked for his opinion of the journalist, Newman replied tersely, “Mr. Minor is a socialist and I’m a conservative. He’s been cutting on me for forty years, and I don’t have a nice thing to say about him.”

Minor insists he always treated people fairly. ‘I was the first investigative reporter in these parts. I couldn’t always be a nice, get-along, go-along person. I could get along with people but I always reserved the right to be critical.” A good example of that attitude is Minor’s friend-

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ship with William Winter, who is generally regarded as Mississippi’s most progressive governor.

The two men first became friends in 1947. “I was always very fond of William Winter,” Minor says, and when he ran for governor, “I personally thought he was the most qualified of the candidates. I promoted his candidacy in subtle ways.” The reporter, the politician, and their wives often discussed issues over dinner. “Bill and I had many of the same ideals and ideas about the state,” says Winter, now a prominent lawyer in Jackson. “I felt free in discussing issues with him not only as a reporter, but as someone committed to constructive change.” After Winter became governor in 1979, Minor began criticizing his friend’s policies. “I was trying to push him to show more guts,” he explains, “because I felt he could accomplish more. His major accomplishment was in education, one of my long term interests.”

The journalist also took a critical look at local civil rights activists. After the summer of 1964, he remembers, “I received a lot of criticism from blacks when I wrote about COFO [Council of Federated Organizations] being rife with extremists, possibly communists, who were alienating local blacks. Some of the old blacks who I had a lot of confidence in were upset about the radical influences in COFO. It was the first time that I made any attempt to show division in the ranks. A lot of blacks didn’t like that.”

More recently, Minor clashed with influential black politician Aaron Henry. In the early 1980s, he printed an accusation by a former Henry associate who claimed that, some years earlier, a successful candidate for Coahoma County sheriff had paid Henry $12,000 to deliver the black vote in that north Delta county. “I didn’t know the man who made the statement,” Minor says, “but I knew his reputation and I figured he was reliable. I didn’t know the sheriff was still alive so I didn’t check with him.” Minor claims he tried, unsuccessfully, to check the story with Henry.

Henry won a $20,000 slander suit against the man who made the accusation, and the politician sued Minor for libel, but later dropped the suit. Surprisingly, at a time when libel suits were popular weapons against the press, antagonists initiated suits against Minor only twice and both were dropped before trial.

Minor has many admirers, particularly in the press. Writing in his flagship newspaper, the Greenwood Commonwealth, Emmerich observed that, “Minor knows more about Mississippi politics—the people involved, the controversies, the deals made, what went on behind the scenes—than any other journalist.” Claude Sitton, the chief southern correspondent for the New York Times during the 1960s, believes that, “No Southern newspaperman has done more for civil rights and civil liberties than Bill Minor.” And Jack Nelson, now the chief of the Los Angeles Times Washington bureau, says that Minor “is one of the great reporters of our time.”

Still the state’s best informed political journalist, Minor twice a week writes a column called “Eyes on Mississippi,” which is syndicated in forty-five local newspapers. But today he is less apt to pursue a story as though “it was the most important thing in the world.”

He and Gloria obviously take good care of themselves and look years younger than they are. Minor, at seventy, is a trim five foot ten with engaging blue eyes and thinning flaxen hair. The couple travel when Gloria has time off from her state job as a workers claims arbitrator for the Workers Compensation Commission. They have visited Europe more than a dozen times. They like to spend time with their five grandchildren, all of whom, Minor is proud to say, are growing up in Mississippi.

The journalist is surprisingly optimistic about his home state and, despite nearly half a century of political reporting, about human nature. “Most of my dedication comes from the proposition in journalism that people had a right to know what was going on in government even when they didn’t want to know. You can bring about change just by making people aware of corruption.”

Michael L. Cooper was born and raised in eastern Kentucky. He now lives in New York City where he writes nonfiction for children. This fall Dutton/Lodestar will publish his next book, Playing America’s Game: The Story of Negro League Baseball.

A Right to Be There

By Constance Curry

Vol. 14, No. 1, 1992, pp.18-23, 25

It was Mae Bertha Carter on the phone. “I’m on my way to raise hell with the Mayor,” she told me. “The City Council didn’t reappoint Beverly to the School Board.”

In 1986, Beverly Carter, daughter of Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter, was the first African American to be appointed to the Drew, Mississippi, school board. Drew, with a population of 2,000, is in Sunflower County in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Sunflower is the home of Senator James 0. Eastland and the birthplace of the White Citizens’ Council in 1954—two months after the Brown decision. In the 1950s, Sunflower black people comprised almost 75 percent of the total population of 56,000, but only 0.3 percent were registered to vote. The number of black registered voters has increased dramatically over the years, but old arrangements and the power of intimidation and violence linger. Even with a majority black population in both the town of Drew and in the county, registered black voters make up only 50 percent of the electorate.

“And just being registered doesn’t make the difference,” says Mae Bertha Carter. ‘People don’t know how important it is to vote. There’s strength in voting. Voting is hiring and firing power. But some of ’em can’t read the names or the offices. We need some voter education. People aren’t scared any more, they just aren’t in the habit.”

Beverly and Mae Bertha spent the month of June

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canvassing door-to-door and taking people to register. As a result of this year’s redistricting, a special election on August 4 sent the first black senator from the Sunflower area to the state legislature—Willie Simmons.

Bringing change to Sunflower County is not a new thing for Beverly Carter or her family. Matthew and Mae Bertha Carter joined the NAACP in 1955, a very risky act for the era that began with Brown. At the time, they and their families before them had been sharecropping on various Delta plantations for fifty years. By 1965, they were living on the Pemble Plantation, nine miles from Drew, and were the first black family to enroll all seven of their school-age children in the town’s previously all-white schools. Carl Carter, the youngest child, entered the first grade in 1967. The eight Carter children remained the only African American children in the system until the fall of 1969 when others entered the eighth grade, and when the elementary school was desegregated under court order.

Finally, after five years of litigation, in the fall of 1970, the complete Drew school system was ordered to desegregate. All eight of the Carter children graduated from Drew High School and went to college; seven of them graduated from the University of Mississippi.

Beverly majored in journalism and returned to Drew after graduation in 1979. Today she works, as she has for the past twelve years, as office assistant at the Kroger’s in Cleveland, Mississippi. She is a single mother of Kerry, age ten—who attends Hunter Middle School—and Shayla, age three. Since her return to Drew, Beverly has worked with her mother fighting for improvements in the public school system.

When a member of the Drew school board resigned in 1986, the black community realized that this was a chance to get a black person on the all-white school board. Beverly recalls telling her mother that she was going to write a letter of interest. “I didn’t really mean it at the time, because I just knew for sure that they weren’t going to pick Mae Bertha Carter’s daughter. I would be the last person they would pick. But I put my letter in just to show that there were black people interested. And believe it or not, I was appointed.” A City Council member later told Mae Bertha that they might as well appoint Beverly and make it official because they knew Mae Bertha would be at all the meetings anyway.

Beverly was the only African American and the only woman on the five member board. Several of the men on the board remained from the years when the Carters had filed suits against them ranging from dress code issues to workbook fee violations. Beverly arrived as the lone voice on many issues such as maintenance of high standards for teacher hiring and public advertising of jobs as required by law. Her consistent questioning and unwillingness to rubber stamp school board decisions is what led to her not being reappointed.

When Mae Bertha and Beverly talk about the problems with today’s Delta schools, I am taken back to the 60s when the Carters desegregated the Drew system. At that time I made many visits to Drew as Southern Field Representative for the American Friends Service Committee. Also, over a ten-year period, Mae Bertha Carter wrote weekly letters reporting on their ordeal. Then, as now, the issue was the struggle of parents to get a better education for their children. In the 60s, black parents were fighting against a hundred-year history of racism and segregation by law. Often, they were also fighting for their livelihood and their lives.

Under Title Vl of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, school districts were mandated to provide plans for desegregation, and the U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare was the designated agency for enforcement. There was general confusion on how to enforce Title VI. Local school officials were told to develop a desegregation plan, but they wanted to know exactly what constituted compliance.

Sunflower County Population

	1960	1970	1980	1990
Total	45,750	37,047	34,844	32,000
White	14,730	13,619	13,089	11,604
Black	31,020	23,428	21,591	21,092
Black %	(67)	(63)	(62)	(64)

Town of Drew Population

	1960	1970	1980	1990
Total	2,143	2,574	2,528	2,349
White	1,287	1,380	1,212	1,019
Black	835	1,194	1,301	1,322
Black %	(39)	(46)	(51)	(56)

School systems, particularly in poor southern rural areas, knew that they could not operate their schools without the help of federal funds, but many of their board members were convinced that integration would destroy public education in their district. Systems capitalized on the confusion and lack of clarity in Washington and submitted “freedom of choice” plans which provided that all parents could send their children to the school of their choice.

Lloyd Henderson, an HEW staff person assigned to Mississippi in 1965, for a time believed that “if they were given the opportunity to choose, and if the plans were administered honestly, black children would enroll in the white schools in droves, thus causing white children to be assigned to the black schools.

In fact, ‘freedom of choice’ was conceived as a means of achieving tokenism in the rural areas. Washington officials knew that they would get no more desegregation than had been gained through the ponderous process of the courts. Ten years later, in 1975, Lloyd Henderson wondered aloud how federal officials could expect black families caught in a century of racism and violence to choose to send their children to an all-white school. “How could anyone have seriously believed that an economically dependent class of people could assume the burden

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of bringing about compliance with the federal law. Under such circumstances choice could never be free.”

The five white men who constituted the board of trustees of the Drew Municipal Separate School District in 1964 knew that failure to obey the federal law would mean the loss of several million dollars. They knew that the Drew system could not operate without this money. Throughout the 1964-65 school year, they calculated a plan that would result in the least amount of desegregation and yet be acceptable to HEW.

The first signs of impending change in Drew came in May of 1965. Black children brought notices home from school which their parents were to sign and return if they wanted their children to attend class straight through from September to May. This would mean the end of the split sessions in which school was scheduled according to the needs of the cotton crops. The children of sharecroppers were let out of school to chop cotton in the early spring; they returned to school in the “laying-by time” of summer months, and then went back to the fields in September and October to pick the cotton.

Mae Bertha and Matthew signed the notices with little hesitation. Later the children told them they were the only parents to do so. Other parents said their children had to chop and pick cotton.

If their seven children did indeed attend school for nine months straight, Mae Bertha did not know how their family was going to survive the following year. It would severely limit their capacity for chopping and picking the cotton on their twenty-five acres.

The family heard nothing more from the school system. The summer heat returned to the Delta. Then, on July 12, the Drew school board unanimously adopted a resolution outlining the desegregation plan accepted by HEW. Federal guidelines mandated that the plan be published in the local papers and that parents be given adequate notice. The full text of the July school board resolution appeared in the Sunflower County News on Thursday, August 5, 1965. It began:

“WHEREAS, as the result of judicial decisions and statutes enacted by the Congress of the United States, it is without question that enforced racial segregation in the public schools of Mississippi and other States is illegal, and that compulsory separate but equal school systems for the white and negro races will no longer permitted….”

The rest of the resolution outlined the Drew Plan in detail. Parents or guardians of pupils must exercise their choice by returning a registration form to any of the five schools in the district. So sure was the Drew School System of their control of the situation that they opened up all twelve grades to freedom of choice, rather than the minimum of three required by HEW.

August came, and Drew waited like dozens of other Delta towns. Main Street was only a few blocks long with its one-story businesses only on one side of the street. Fifteen diagonal parking places stretched in front of Timberlake’s Pharmacy, Fred’s Five and Dime. two office fronts, Western Auto, and Miller’s Furniture. The other side of the street was the frontage for the tracks where the trains came to pick up the cotton at the Sunflower Gin. Drew’s few residential streets, segregated by race, originated at Main and played out like Main Street itself in cotton fields surrounding the town. Seemingly unchanged by any Washington directives, or by the tumult of the Freedom Summer Project the previous summer, Drew and Sunflower County dozed under a blanket of heat.

Mae Bertha Carter understood politics well. “You have to live in Mississippi to really know about Mississippi. Now the white folk think they know black people and the black people think they know the white people. Now the black people know what the white man likes before he tells them and some things he don’t even have to be told. White man didn’t even have to go to the black’s house and say don’t send your child to the school, cause we know what the white man likes. So we know one another. And they were sure that they had everything around Drew so no blacks would be coming around their schools. They were so sure of that. But they didn’t know about us out there on the farm.”

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On August 6th, the Drew Municipal School District mailed out “freedom of choice” notices to all parents of school-age children in the district. Ruth, entering the eleventh grade, was the oldest of the school-age Carter children. She knew it would be difficult to leave her friends in the black school, but she jumped at the chance to go to the white school. Not only could she get away from the cotton fields, she believed that eventually her family’s choice might change a social order that she had hated since she was a young girl. Larry and Stanley, also entering the high school, along with Ruth, sensed what their actions could mean. They discussed going to the “white school” with the four younger children. The children kept telling each other it was the right thing to do.

Mae Bertha was visiting relatives in St. Louis in August of 1965 when the freedom of choice papers arrived. She received a letter from Ruth. “Come home. You have some papers to sign saying what school we want to go to. We want to go to the all-white school.” When she came home, all seven of the children said that they indeed wanted to go. Matthew and Mae Bertha told their children, “If you want to go, we want you to go.”

It was clear to Mae Bertha. “Why I decided that I wanted them to go was I was tired of my kids coming home with pages torn out of worn out books that come from this white school. I was tired of them riding on these raggedy buses after the white children didn’t want to ride on them any more. I was just tired, and I thought if they go to this all-white school they will get a better education there. The school board was all white and over both the white and black schools, but it was concerned about their kids more than they were about black kids.

“In fact, when you would go to the black school, the kids were eating lunch once or maybe twice a week. The teacher would get just so many tickets to issue out, and I would hear my kids saying something like, ‘Well maybe I’ll get a ticket today to eat,’ and then sometimes they’d come home and say ‘Well I was lucky today. I got a ticket to eat.’ And see, them white children was eating lunch every day. So that’s why we signed the papers. We had seven children to go, three to the elementary school and four to the high school. So we integrated both of those schools.”

News of the enrollment of the Carter children spread throughout Sunflower County. The next morning, Mr. Thornton, the plantation overseer drove up in his pickup truck and blew his horn in front of the Carter’s house.

“Mae,” Matthew called as he went out to the truck, “it’s starting.”

He went out to the pickup truck. Thornton told Matthew that he’d heard about the enrollment. He proceeded to say why it would be best to go back to Drew and withdraw the children. They could get a better education at the black school. They would have no friends at the white school. Neither black folks nor white folks would have anything to do with the Carters any more. Besides, those poor whites who lived over on the federal land unit real near the Carters could cause them a lot of trouble. Then he offered to go to Drew with Matthew and “withdraw ’em out.”

Matthew said he didn’t need the help and that if he decided to withdraw the children, he would go himself.

Meanwhile, Mae Bertha who had been standing on the porch listening, went into the house and got a record of the June 11, 1963 speech that President Kennedy had given on national radio and television calling for what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The speech was delivered just a few hours before Mississippi NAACP leader was slain outside his Jackson home shortly after midnight on June 12. Mae Bertha put the record on a little player on the porch and turned it up…. “And when Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only. It ought to be possible, therefore, for American students of any color to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed up by troops…. We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scripture and as clear as the American Constitution.”

Mae Bertha stood by the door. Kennedy was talking as Matthew stood out by the truck. Finally Thornton said he would go down to the barn and give Matthew time to talk to Mae Bertha. “You go out there,” Mae Bertha said with resolution, “and you tell Mr. Thornton that I am a grown woman. Them are my children and he cannot tell me what to do about my children, like withdrawing my children out. And I’d be a fool to try and tell him where to send his kids.”

“Well, Mae, I’m not going to tell him all that.” They

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told Thornton that they had decided to keep the children in the white school.

The next morning about three o’clock, Matthew heard a noise. He looked out the window and by the time he said “What are all those cars doing coming in here,” gunshots were being fired into the windows, on top of the house and across the porch. Bullets hit above a bed where children were sleeping. No one was hurt. Everyone moved to the floor below the window in the back room to wait for daylight.

In the morning, Mae Bertha went to Cleveland to see Amzie Moore and Charles McLaurin, SNCC project director. They called the FBI office in Jackson. When the FBI and the high sheriff arrived, they wondered why Mae Bertha had gone all the way to Cleveland to call when she could have gone to some of the white people’s houses nearby.

“Go where?” asked Mae Bertha. “Let me tell you one thing, man, I ain’t go no confidence in a white man living in Mississippi.”

Today, she laughs, “I wasn’t going to no white folks’ house calling. That’s probably the ones who shot into the house.”

“So, they looked all around, and Mr. Thornton came in the house to help ’em look for the bullets. They took bullets out of the wall, and that’s the last I heard from the FBI or anybody about that shootin’.”

The news of the shooting spread as quickly in the black community as word of the enrollment had spread in the white. When the forms first arrived, black families had discussed the matter of transferring their children to the white schools.

They had been afraid of reprisals. The shooting incident ruled out the choice completely.

The Carters had no money. The peonage of the sharecropping system meant buying food and supplies on credit from the plantation store, paying when you had a little money and always staying beholden to the plantation owner and in debt to the store. A few days after the enrollment, Matthew went to Bob’s, the store that usually gave him credit. Had he heard right, the owner asked. Had Matthew been over to Drew and enrolled his kids in the all-white school? He said Matthew had until three o’clock that afternoon to take the children out of the school. Rather than the weekly order of staples needed to feed ten people, Matthew went home with only a little package of food.

“Mae,” he said, “I’m catching hell everywhere I go.”

“But you know, we was crazy,” Mae Bertha recalls. “We was going to stand up for it. I didn’t care and I didn’t know what the end was going to be. We was so afraid after the shooting. We slept on the floor for three nights and then I thought about wheat the preacher had said at one of them mass meetings in Cleveland-that everybody’s afraid and it’s okay to be afraid but you can’t let it stop you. And a coverin’ came over me, and we got up off the floor and we have never been on the floor no more.”

SNCC worker, Prathia Hall Wynn, who was monitoring school desegregation in the Delta for the American Friends Service Committee, sent a report on the Carter family to Jean Fairfax at the AFSC office in Philadelphia. Fairfax called John Doar at the Department of Justice to ask for help.

Friday, August 31, 1965, was the first day of school in the Drew Municipal School District. Matthew was up at 5:30 to get water from the pump, heat up the kettle and the big dishpan on the stove, and fill the tub in the bedroom. He bathed and dressed Deborah and Beverly, the two youngest girls.

The older children quietly got themselves ready. Mrs. Carter lay in bed wondering if she had the strength and will to face the fear that pressed in upon her. It was the first day in Drew that black children would attend public school with white children. Those seven children were hers. They would be desegregating both the Drew High School and the A. W. James Elementary School. But the principles of “freedom of choice” and “desegregation” seemed high-flown and irrelevant as Mae Bertha thought of the day that faced her children: Deborah, 6; Beverly, 8; Pearl, 9; Gloria, 11; Stanley, 13; Larry, 15; and Ruth, 16.

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After breakfast, the children got their quarters for lunch and went with Mae Bertha out on the front porch to wait for the school bus. By 7:30 the sun was out in strength. The bus that had picked them. up in previous years normally wended its way through the cotton fields, down dirt roads stopping at the sharecropper houses. Would this bus driver know where to pick them up? Would he stop? Would they be the first on the bus? Where would they sit? How would they know where to go when they got to school?

The bus stopped at the house and the children left the porch and got on. They were the first to be picked up. They sat two by two near the front, with Ruth taking a seat by herself. Mae Bertha watched until the bus was out of sight. Her eyes filled and she took baby Carl back into the house.

“When the bus pulled off, I went in and fell down cross the bed and prayed. I stayed on that bed and didn’t do no work that day. I didn’t feel good and stayed cross the bed and when I heard the bus coming, I went back to the porch. When they came off one by one, then I was released until the next morning. But the next morning I felt the same way, depressed, nervous, praying to God. I wasn’t saying a whole lot of words; just saying, ‘take care of my kids—no time for all those other words. And I didn’t do housecleaning until the children came home. After about a month, I started easing up a little bit. I had prayed to God so much! I had been going to church and talking about trusting in Jesus, but I never trusted Jesus until my children went to that all-white school. That school brought me to God!”

Each of the eight children have a story to tell about their experiences in school, but a constant theme in each is Mae Bertha’s reminder, “That’s not a white school. It’s your school as well as theirs. You have a right to be there. Always remember that.”

Today, four of the Carter children, besides Beverly, remain in Mississippi. One son lives in Longview, Texas, another is in the Air Force in Turkey. Ruth, the oldest, who was the most discouraged by the experience moved to Toledo, Ohio, after graduating from Drew High School. Mae Bertha has thirty-six grandchildren and thirteen great grandchildren, including the offspring of her first five children who left before school desegregation.

Matthew Carter died in 1988 at the age of seventy-eight. Mae Bertha still lives at 166 Broadway. Drew is now a very poor town with a majority black population most of whom are on welfare. Main Street in Drew looks much the same except for the boarded-up stores. Cleve McDowell, the first black man to enroll at the University of Missis-

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sippi Law School, hangs his shingle in front of a Main Street office. Burner Smith, who grew up in Drew, is the first black chief of police.

However, the greatest sense of change once again is coming from the public school system. While the public schools have remained almost all black since 1971, by the 1980s some white parents could not afford tuition ($1800 per child) at private segregated academies, and their children began entering back to public education. In the 1991-92 school year, 40 percent of the children in the city system were white.

As white parents realized the shocking state of the Drew schools, they began to join with black parents to work for change. The failure to reappoint Beverly without giving any reasons is one of the causes taken up by an integrated group who call themselves The Drew Concerned Citizens Group (DCCG).

Janet Free, a young white woman, is one of the DCCG leaders. Janet’s maternal grandfather was a sharecropper in Sunflower County. Janet’s parents have always believed that the public school system belongs to everyone and that Christian duty commands people to work together. Although in 1970, Janet was the only white student in her seventh grade class, she and her three sisters never fled to the private academy.

Today, she works as a bookkeeper in a Cleveland bank. She is married to Reverend Lonnie Free, pastor of the Church of God in Ruleville, four miles from Drew. Lonnie Free also stayed in the public schools when they integrated. Now, their two children attend public school in Drew.

Since most of their concerns could be remedied with proper expenditures, the Drew Concerned Citizens Group is trying to learn how school tax money and federal funds are being spent. For three years, there have been no new library books. Substitute teachers are used in place of regular teachers. Band uniforms are ten years old. Restrooms are unsanitary and often without toilet paper. School buses are old and unsafe, and the school buildings are not in good repair.

In the past, several school board members had sent their children to the all-white private academy, yet they continued to control the public school system. DCCG members seek to be part of the decision-making process affecting the education of their children. In the past a lack of knowledge of the workings of the political system has hampered change. Three of the school board members are appointed by the City Council and two are elected from the rural areas surrounding Drew. These selections are made at staggered times and with rules that remain confusing to many parents. DCCG wants to educate and mobilize parents for future city council and school board elections.

“Sounds just like the 60s sometimes,” Beverly and Mae Bertha say, as they talk about the task before them. “But you know, we won and kept our children in the white schools in the 60s by the help of God and hard work. Now we’ll just have to set these schools straight.”

Constance Curry lives in Atlanta where she is currently writing a book about the Carters of Sunflower County.

Race

Reviewed by Julian Bond

Vol. 14, No. 3, 1992, pp. 26-27

Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal , by Andrew Hacker (Charles Scribners’ Sons, New York, 1992, xiii, 257 pages)Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession, by Studs Terkel (The New Press, New York, 1992, x, 403 pages)

The publication of these complementary books on race in the months before Los Angeles and several other cities exploded in a sad repetition of the urban riots of the 1960s gives them special timeliness. They repudiate a series of recent tracts which also argue that race is too much with us. These earlier authors—neo-conservative black academics, neo-liberal journalist—-argue generally for benign neglect of problems associated with race, or for market solutions to the deliberate underdevelopment of human capital. Terkel and Hacker argue convincingly we haven’t paid attention enough.

Studs Terkel is the well-known Chicago radio personality who has written several other highly praised oral histories focused on American subjects. His ability to listen while his subjects talk and reveal themselves and his affinity for working class voices seldom heard in discussions of the past or present make him a delight to read.

Andrew Hacker is an academic who brings a scholar’s eye and an impassioned liberal’s anger to his view of what Terkel describes as “The American obsession.” His book is a worthy successor to Myrdal’s 1944 An American Dilemma, although Hacker’s prognosis is harder, taken together they offer invaluable insights into what Americans mean and think when they see race. Although Terkel draws on earlier interviews he’s conducted for other books, and Hacker gives background to present-day reality, these aren’t histories: these are books about Americans today.

Southerners reading Terkel will appreciate how many of his Chicagoans are migrants from the South, and his conversations with three residents of Durham, North Carolina—C. P. Ellis, a former Klansman; Ann Atwater, a black woman who helped Ellis overcome his racism; and Howard Clement, black Republican city council member now more conservative than the former Kleagle—demonstrate both the complexity of American racial attitudes and the difficulty of assigning political positions to individuals based on preconceived notions of who they should be. Other Southerners—C.T. Vivian, Will Campbell, Charlise Lyles—speak here too.

While many of Terkel’s talkers are poignant and hopeful, there is an aura of sadness about both books, especially so in the aftermath of the breakdown of law and order in Simi Valley and the poverty-stricken discourse and repetitious debate that followed. Hacker

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quotes Benjamin Disraeli to describe America’s enduring racial divide: “two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thought, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.”

Hacker’s Two Nations is a description of a frightening condition without prescription for its cure; so is Terkel’s Race. Hacker marshals facts and surveys to prove what many readers will already know; Terkel’s subjects add a human face to Hacker’s statistics, and prove Disraeli wrong, for many of Terkel’s talkers live or work in an interracial—if imperfect—world. Although presented in very different forms, it is only this which sets one book apart from the other. Hacker’s numbers represent stark racial divisions. Terkel’s voices, both blacks and whites, in their sharing with us seem less stark.

Race serves important functions for many Americans. It defines class standing, differentiates between “us” and “them”, wins elections, and creates profits.

The Rodney King riots created an explosion in race-talk and analysis, most of it designed to return the discussion of racial division to the Social Darwinism of the early twentieth century, to culture rather than color. But the backward turn of the debate on race didn’t begin in Los Angeles; it has been oozing back into the discourse for several years. If blame for black joblessness, crime, teenage pregnancy, and family break-up can be assigned to a lack of underclass values instead of racial bias, to poverty of the spirit instead of the gross upward redistribution of income which occurred during the Reagan years, or to welfare state-bred laziness instead of the transformation of the American economy from an highly-paid industrial to a minimum wage service base, if all this can be believed then the problems of the ghetto can only be solved by ghetto residents themselves, thus absolving government and excusing non-ghetto citizens of any responsibility: when ghetto residents heal themselves, they’ll be welcomed into the national polity.

These books demonstrate again and again how bankrupt and bogus our national dialogue is. Terkel’s people aren’t interviewed on talk shows. They don’t write op-ed pieces. Their opinions aren’t solicited by pundits. Policymakers want their votes, not their views. But many of them in their unobserved daily lives are making a larger contribution to healing the racial divide than do most of those in official position.

Hacker’s charts and graphs make poor television, and his expositions require more than a quick sound bite. We’ve been taught not to listen to any argument that takes longer than fifteen seconds to hear or five minutes to read. These books argue against racial sloganeering.

Terkel arranges his interviews in topics, such as “Friends” or “Welfare,” creating a context in which his subjects—blacks and whites—talk about race. They are interrupted by “Overviews”—a larger portrait—from a journalist or academic.

Hacker’s chapters also divide his discussion into familiar subjects. Anyone looking for statistical underpinning for arguments about what race means and what it does to us will find his book the more useful of the two. Some of his tables sadly refute the notion that some things, once perfect, are getting worse; they suggest instead they’ve always been awful and are worse today only by degree. The numbers of female-headed households have been three times greater among blacks than whites for forty years. Black unemployment rates were 2.08 times those for whites in 1960; in 1990, they were 2.76 times as high.

But everyone concerned about our national obsession should read both these books. Hacker may occasionally depress readers, and Terkel may uplift them, but both make a common sense contribution to the on-going dialogue on race.

Julian Bond, currently lives in Washington, D. C, and teaches at the University of Virginia.

Incidental Ambassadors

Reviewed by Linda Blackford

Vol. 14, No. 3, 1992, pp. 28-29

An Education in Georgia , by Calvin Trillin, Foreword by Charlayne Hunter Gault (University of Georgia Press, 1991, 180 pages)

If prevailing wisdom is correct, the events and conditions detailed in Calvin Trillin’s An Education in Georgia are—if not completely gone—then at least unfamiliar to Southerners who grew up after the shadow of segregation was lifted, in 1961, Trillin, then a Time magazine reporter, chronicled the entrance of the first black students into the University of Georgia, a haven of some of the most distinguished alumni, and hardened racists, in the South. He recounts the long court battles before Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter were finally admitted, the riot that sent them home a week after they arrived, the gibes, the taunts, the cruel and total isolation.

Unfortunately, prevailing wisdom too often represents the casual chatter of optimists, not the truth. After reading Trillin’s book and breathing a sigh of relief that all that is over—the book was, after all, first published in 1964—a disquieting fear creeps in with the realization that complacency about progress is not only dangerous, but misguided. Trillin’s book recalls William Faulkner’s advice about history—”The past is not dead, its not even past”—and reminds us to look at today’s college campuses and witness the so-called progress that has been made. To be sure, black students on college campuses in the South and, indeed, in the North, are no longer outcasts, but the racial lines stand out as clearly as they ever did in the past, and black and white interaction is guarded and infrequent. Confederate flags may no longer fly over the campuses nor do hostile crowds greet minority students, but the uneasy truce that exists on campuses today is a far cry from the promised land of racial unity envisioned by desegregationists three decades ago.

Trillin followed the facts of the case in 1961 but never lost interest in the consequences. He notes, “As a reporter then based in Atlanta, I had covered both the week-long trial that resulted in their admission and the events that followed their arrival on campus in 1961, and in the spring of 1963, about ten weeks before Charlayne and Hamilton graduated, I returned to Georgia from New York, where I had been living to see how integration had worked out at the University of Georgia—whether or not the Student Heroes had ever become simply students and how two bright young people happened to become student heroes in the first place.”

Trillin held to his original intent, detailing the legal and political changes and ramifications, but never moving too far away from the two main characters, Hunter and Hamilton. Trillin was there when the two black students arrived and witnessed the riot in front of Hunter’s dorm a week later, after which Holmes and Hunter were suspended, “for their own safety.” Once they were reinstated with a court order, their real life began. Real life as two black students at an all-white school was, as Hunter recall in her introduction to the book, “the closest thing to a surrealistic dream I have ever experienced.”

Hunter and Holmes were instantly famous. They, along with other black students like James Meredith, in Mississippi, furthered the “Cause,” far more tangibly than marches or sit-ins, by forcing unwilling participants in integration to face the future. But what Trillin never loses sight of is that this episode was not just about the Cause or segregation, but about two young people who made history without necessarily wanting to do anything more then be college students.

The fact that they became student heroes was unavoidable. Hunter and Holmes had been selected as two of the best and brightest to come out of middle-class black Atlanta; their records had to be impeccable so the admissions department could have no excuse for denial. Hunter got more attention for being a pretty girl and living on campus; it was she who had to bear the most insults and invisible barriers everywhere she went. Holmes lived in Athens’ black community, quietly making Phi Beta Kappa and ignoring the students around him with as much scorn as they ignored him. He also coordinated successfully his relationship with the Cause, spending weekends speaking to young people around the South. Hunter was much more ambivalent about the Cause, and about accepting her situation; as Trillin describes:

But, more and more, Charlayne had come to recognize the irony of spending a week end in New York, where everyone found her charming, and then returning to the long weeks in Athens, where she was likely to be sneered at when she went to the Co-op for a cup of coffee. There was a special kind of loneliness, she discovered, in being the best-known

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student on campus and a student undesirable at the same time. Moreover, her ambitions were not as easily related to the Cause as Hamilton’s—she had no desire to be the Number 1 student at Georgia or to be admitted to Emory Medical School—and she felt a certain hollowness in being honored as a student hero without having done anything that was, by the ordinary standards of collegiate success, heroic.

Or, as Hunter said,

“When I go to those meetings, people try to make me feel that I’m representing the whole Negro race, and that’s not right. I’m not an ideal girl or a perfect student. I don’t want to be an ideal girl—just a girl.”

The other heroes of Trillin’s book are the families and lawyers who worked behind the scenes, and many of the. professors at Georgia who helped get Hunter and Holmes admitted and make to their stay, if not pleasant, then bearable. Notable among them were Jesse Hill, representing the Atlanta Committee for Cooperative Action, and Donald Hollowell and Constance Baker Motley, lawyers for the plaintiffs through the arduous court battle.

Fortunately, Trillin the reporter is never too far away from Trillin the humorist, who pops up from time to time, always ready to record the theater of the absurd. When a white professor at Georgia calls the N.A.A.C.P., the N.A.A.C., Trillin remarks, “It seemed to me that the dean’s courtliness was slipping; white Southerners often have difficulty with the names of Negro organizations, presumably on the theory that if they are mispronounced often enough they will go away.”

Beyond the individual stories that Trillin captured is the as yet unfinished tale of the South and its racial relations.

Trillin’s objective yet moving prose underscores the truth of the phrase, Le plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose. An Education in Georgia stands in its own right as a scroll of one of the most significant events in Southern history and a startling testament to the advances that still must be made.

Linda Blackford is a young news reporter with The Observer of Charlottesville, Virginia.

Demanding Change

Reviewed by Cecily McMillan

Vol. 14, No. 3, 1992, pp. 29-32

Praying for Sheetrock , Melissa Fay Greene (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1991, 416 pages).

There have been, over the years, more young white liberals than can ever be counted who ventured to small Southern towns hoping to improve the lives and political opportunities of the black people who lived there. Stirred by outrage at what seemed such obviously unjust economic and living conditions, these idealists set to their work—as VISTA volunteers, Legal Aid lawyers, tutors, community organizers.

Some stayed; a trickle keep coming; most, in the end, leave. Their stories of what might be called an internship with the poor get told around the table in Atlanta or Chapel Hill, to grantgivers in New York, to thesis advisors in Cambridge or Ann Arbor.

Yet as their lives continued, with considerably more buyancy than the lives of their old neighbors, the subtleties of their experience can fly like chaff when the hard kernels of accomplishment are gathered for examination. What, at the time, seemed a crucial, telling thing—an unlikely someone’s willingness to act, another’s slight gesture of hesitation, the way the day felt—ends up as a detail, and maybe an exotic one at that.

Melissa Fay Greene was one of these idealists, but in her non-fiction book “Praying For Sheetrock” the chaff stays with the wheat. In the way of a writer of fiction, she tells a dramatic story of what happened when a group of black people demanded change, by paying closest attention to circumstances that produced those who acted, to the forces of history and family and community that informed their acts. If Ms. Greene did not herself stay, the dramatic events of the 1970s in McIntosh County, Georgia (population 7,500), stayed with her, and she remained loyal to its subtleties. She has managed by observing closely and listening well to convey how what came to pass indeed occurred.

The story at the center of “Praying For Sheetrock” involves the awakening of a small, dispersed black com-

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munity which found itself all at once caught up in a dramatic struggle to secure its civil rights, job opportunities and fair representation on elected boards and committees. The process by which this occurs—the incident that triggered it, the meetings in the backwoods churches, confrontations with the mayor and councilmen, the lawsuits filed in Federal Court—is the inherent drama.

But Ms. Greene’s persistent interest is valuing what takes place in the shadows, where life is full of doubt and uncertainty. Underlying questions of how change occurs, if it can last, what toll is taken on those who do the hardest work and how we are to judge them, become embedded as the book’s themes.

The way in which she’s organized her story leads the reader to appreciate the poignancy of her character’s condition—the title refers to one person’s hope for an improvement in life’s basics—and to realize the weight of their expectations. As the story proceeds, she allows it its momentum, and then follows a little behind it, in its wake, as if to make sense of the choppy waters it has stirred up. Instead of taking her lead from her conclusion, and judging her subjects in light of the final outcome, she allows them to reveal themselves.

The sections of oral history that are threaded through the book serve this end especially well. She has the insight to notice herself as an outsider: she lets people talk. Nor is she romantic. She never pretends to be more of an insider than she was. She gives her subjects fair hearing. She lets us see that they, black and white, voted or acted as they did for reasons-maybe ones not always the wisest or most just—, rationales that were part of larger patterns of behavior and rooted in their history and character.

She navigates a difficult moral course here, for in questions of race one person’s weakness or indifference, if it can be called that, can often lead rather directly to another’s sorry state. It is only at the very end of the book, and perhaps because of the story having run out, that she misses a chance to extend the balanced moral understanding that otherwise characterizes the work.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has lived in a small Southern town that hours and decades have been spent to insure that things stay as they are. The activities of common life, and in particular the centers of power, change little over the years. In McIntosh County, as in many rural counties, it was understood that a few people and a few phone calls settled everything, and it was up to everyone else to maintain the setting where those assumptions could safely operate.

This, then, was Darien, the county seat. For despite national progress in voting and educational opportunities, despite riots in

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Watts, the assasinaton of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., SNCC, and Black Power, the habits of race relations in Darien remained unchanged as a way to manage social movement, as reliable and effective and as natural a feature of the landscape as a series of synchronized stoplights on a long, long avenue. It was a place where there were no racial problems. In the words of a county clerk, “nobody really did think about it because nobody was thinking racially one way or the other.”

The main broker of power was Tom Poppell, the High Sheriff who inherited the post from his father and who, over the years, had pocketed his share of whatever slim pickings were to be had from local businesses, be they sleazy or straight. His legendary charm seduced, practically implicated, those he encountered, of whatever race. “If you weren’t careful, he’d your best friend,” a man tells Ms. Greene.

If history and the legacy of slavery had created a community of black people who were dependent on his good graces, and whites who allowed him his power in exchange for their peace, then the physical fact of a highway running through Darien gave Tom Poppell a treasure chest for his kingdom.

Gaudy signs lured Yankee tourists and truckers; prostitution and rigged gambling emptied their wallets. Their fleecing became his fortune. He oversaw the corruption that favored the white operators, but also made sure that if, say, a truck overturned, its spilled cargo would mean Christmas in July for the poor blacks who were welcome to take what they could carry.

It was, then, somewhat startling to everyone who was conscious of the way the game was played that, one day, someone, in this case the chief of police, felt compelled to act out of character, to step outside his role. It can be said that on that March day in 1972, the very idea of civil rights floated into McIntosh County—the day when the Chief Hutchinson impulsively and brutally shot a black man who had been making ruckus while flirting with a girlfriend, the day a stammering, disabled boiler maker named Thurnell Alston stepped forward from the shadows and articulated the black community’s grievances.

Alston did it, kept doing it, in meeting after meeting, in running three times in an at-large district and losing. Finally, with two friends and help from lawyers in the Georgia Legal Services office, suits were brought, districts were multiplied, changes were made and Alston was confirmed at the ballot box.

Until this climax, Ms. Greene is careful to remind the reader, in numerous passages that loop gracefully back into history and description, that even though political life was improving for black people, and at a pace, the culture in which they lived was slower in catching up. Even the sultry setting connives, threatens, almost as a character itself, to doom progress.

In the end, Thurnell Alston comes to tragedy. His community, thinking the work is over, or simply satisfied they had elected someone to broker their interests with the white powers, begin to ignore him. He wished to expand their narrow interests, to, in fact, give them something to vote for. They fail him by turning from his vision. His son is killed in a horrible accident; he becomes vulnerable to bribery; depression overcomes him. When he is implicated in a nasty drug sting, even his lawyers shake their heads at his foolishness and denials.

Ms. Greene is less forgiving of Alston than a reader might have expected. Given the portrait of the community she has drawn, one dominated by Tom Poppell’s justice and make-do morality, her disappointment in Alston seems harsh. It’s true, the facts do him in, and it’s true she echos the general perception of him. And yet in his case, unique in her chronicle, she somehow fails to extend herself as a writer, to give him an understanding context in which his dismal, sad, unravelling can be humanely understood.

Perhaps, in the end, when her intense drama runs its course, she is limited by the very form of non-fiction she close for her story. If she seems hamstrung, maybe it is because within the world of fact, the price Alston paid for stepping out of his given role was not given enough value. People wanted more from him than he was able to give: his constituents wanted him to be a better person, to be able to ask the questions no black person in their midst had asked before and to trust white people, while at the same time manage his private rage. They expected him to enter the closed world of white power, to be nicked and ignored by the majority, and, somehow, to remain unchanged by the experience.

A Legal Services worker (maybe Ms. Greene herself, maybe many idealists like her) expected more, too.

He says: “We idealized the black civil rights people. They represented something we were looking for, but they were regular human beings. They were real people and real people are imperfect. They just happened to be on the side of a political struggle we happened to believe in, but in a lot of ways it was just politics as usual. It was a

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mistake to put them all on a pedestal.”

“What were they really like? Who the hell knows?”

It is this burden of expectation that seems at the heart of race relations today. It doesn’t seem enough, in Darien or nationally, to call it a day, to be contented with knowing what we know, to say by way of summing up that the hopes that once united us have failed us, and that racial inequality will continue. “Praying For Sheetrock” goes a great distance toward understanding what it was that poor black people wanted and to what point they were willing to go to see that change occurred. The question is, then, what is it that Ms. Greene and other idealists expected to see happen or expect for the future?

The fact that racial injustices were remedied through political means in Darien should not be put aside in light of Alston’s fall; nor should national progress be discounted because deeper, vexing work for social changes lies ahead. To travel from disappointment to hope will take time. Coming to know Thurnell Alston is a start. Finding a way to understand his limits, and the limits within each of us is perhaps our next step. That may be the most important lesson to come from a story Ms. Greene calls “large and important things happening in a very little place.”

Cecily McMillan is a writer who divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Frogmore, South Carolina, where she has been active in local public affairs.

Old Truths

Reviewed by Tony Dunbar

Vol. 14, No. 3, 1992, pp. 32-33

The Measure of Our Success, A Letter to My Children and Yours, Marian Wright Edelman (Beacon Press, 97 Pages)

You need to know a little bit about Marian Weight Edelman before you pick up this book, or else you might not fully savor its ninety-seven pages of ethical, political, and parenting instruction. “South Carolina is my home state and I am the aunt, granddaughter, daughter, and sister of Baptist ministers,” is how it begins. A little daunting.

Fortunately, a great many people will recognize her as the president and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, as a human rights fighter, and perhaps also as the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi bar. Others who don’t will come to know her in the months ahead, when she sure is to be featured in national magazines and on talk shows in the promotion of this book. It is her integrity and record that add power to her words, most of which are venerable.

The Measure of Our Success is organized around a personal letter to Edelman’s three sons and then her 25 “Lessons for Life.” Other small chapters deal with her own upbringing in Bennettsville, South Carolina, at the hands of upright, industrious parents (he, a minister who taught her to stay busy and account for herself; she, a fundraiser for the church and care-giver to the elderly who always “earned her own dime”) and an extended family of relatives and church members. Her letter and the 25 Lessons for Life are a “spiritual and family dowry” for her children.

The treasures in this dowry are simple and familiar. “Treat others as you’d like to be treated,” she tells her sons. “It is the only ethical standard in life you need.” From the first Lesson (“There is no free lunch. Don’t feel entitled to anything you don’t sweat and struggle for”) to the last (“Always remember that you are never alone”) there is nothing here—and I am confident Ms. Edelman would agree that would not—fit well into one of the Reverend Wright’s sermons. But there are some very special things about this book.

One is that, in her choice of moral thinkers to quote in support of her precepts, she is mindful of the great Southern black teachers of her parents’ generation and before, those who led the rising out of slavery and Reconstruction. Howard Thurman, Mordecai Johnson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Benjamin Mays, Dr. J.J. Starks, and Vernon Johns share her pages with, more popularly known figures such as Gandhi, Einstein, and Shel Silverstein, and they mingle compatibly.

Another special thing is that Edelman does not let us forget that there is a social and political dimension to personal responsibility. She skillfully illustrates simple advice, like “Be a can-do, will-try person” (Lesson 18) by asking, “If the Soviet people and their extraordinary leader Gorbachev could dismantle Communism, can’t we in America envision and wage an end to child neglect, poverty, and family disintegration, which are graver threats to our national future than nuclear weapons?”

And throughout the book is the emphasis on good parenting and taking responsibility for the nurturing of children.

She lectures young men on sexual responsibility and urges parents to love their children unconditionally and to teach them by example. In the final chapter she asks the good questions. How can we afford the Persian Gulf War and the thrift and bank bailout while we say we cannot fund more child care for working families or mobilize doctors, teachers, and social workers to fight the tyranny of poverty and child neglect and abuse?

This is one of the most condensed books of wisdom since The Prophet. It could probably be read most usefully

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by teens and new parents.

Everyone, however, can take gentle inspiration from Edelman’s simple message. We must care for our young. For spiritual and community well being we must engage in individual service and private charity. And, “Collective mobilization and political action are also necessary to move our nation forward in the quest for fairness and opportunity for every American.”

An hour or so spent with The Measure of Our Success may recall past mornings in Sunday School (which may have a pleasant feel) and may also remind us of the significance and the challenge contained in old truths.

Tony Dunbar practices law in New Orleans and writes about the South. His latest book was Delta Time, about the Mississippi Delta’s present look. (An earlier version of this review appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.)

New Georgia

Reviewed by Calvin Kytle

Vol. 14, No. 3, 1992, pp. 33-35

The Politics of Change in Georgia: A Political Biography of Ellis Arnall , by Harold Paulk Henderson (University of Georgia Press, Illustrated, 1991, 345 pages)

When World War II ended, my generation came home to a Georgia in which for the first time in our memory gallus-snapping Eugene Talmadge did not personify the state’s politics, “Woolhats” and “Rednecks” did not constitute the voting majority, and appeals to white supremacy did not dominate State Capitol rhetoric. In letters from the States, in the pony edition of Time, and occasionally from bulletins on Armed Forces Radio, we had learned bits and pieces of what had been going on in our absence. (That most of the news from Georgia, unlike that of only few years before, was of a kind to be read with pride rather than embarrassment had been especially appreciated by those of us quartered overseas with Ivy League Yankees.)

It was not, however, until after conversations with older friends who’d been on the home front and seen the reforms roll out of the Capitol that we began to realize just how and to what degree Georgia had changed, and in what ways it had not. However briefly, we were exhilarated by the assurance that the change were permanent and all to the good, and that the climate was receptive for more.

The man largely responsible for this “new” Georgia was Governor Ellis Arnall, whose rise and rejection are documented in this overdue and welcome biography by Harold Paulk Henderson.

Ellis Arnall’s honored place in Georgia history is confined to a period of about six years. In 1942, at age 35, he was the beneficiary and aggressive exploiter of the worst political mistake Eugene Talmadge ever made—a quarrel with the Board of Regents that brought loss of accreditation of the university system. Elected governor shortly after a constitutional amendment extended the term from two to four years, Arnall proceeded to push through a legislative program without precedentfor sweep and reform. With the help of an obliging General Assembly, he restored accreditation and established a teachers retirement system, incidentally increasing salaries by 50 percent.

He lowered the voting age to 18, abolished the poll tax, paid off the state’s debt, created Georgia’s first comprehensive planning agency (the State Agricultural and Industrial Board), and, as the centerpiece of an entrepreneurial approach to economic development, led an ultimately successful battle against regionally discriminatory freight rates. Although considerably short of his objective, since it left the state’s basic political structure in place, he also won approval for a new state constitution. On the platform and in the press, he conveyed the impression of a confident, intelligent, generous-spirited, refined but scrappy young politician, in such contrast to his predecessors that national media inevitably embraced him as the spokesman for a New South, as they had Henry Grady a half century before. In 1946 Northern liberals began to promote him seriously as a contender for the vice presidency.

During this time, it was tempting to sentimentalize Arnall’s achievements and, particularly on the race issue, to extrapolate expectations that were in fact little more than wishful thinking.

It was commonly said, for instance, that his victory over Talmadge once again proved the decisive role of gubernatorial leadership; that the same electorate that could respond to “one of us” could respond even more enthusiastically to a leader “better than us.” It was also widely assumed that Arnall’s acceptance of a 1945 federal court decision invalidating the white primary would open the political process to re-consideration of all forms of racial discrimination.

In 1947 a series of bizarre events shocked us back to

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the old Georgia. Thanks to the then operative county unit system, Eugene Talmadge won the gubernatorial primary, despite the fact that his chief opponent, James Carmichael, got 16,000 more popular votes. Then, a month after the general election and only a few weeks before the scheduled inauguration, Eugene Talmadge died. The constitution made no provision for the death of a governor elect and in the ensuing controversy Talmadge’s son Herman, backed by leaders of the legislature, forcibly claimed the governor’s office. Anticipating his father’s death, Herman had managed to get 600-odd faithfuls to write his own name on the general election ballot.

By this time, Ellis Arnall’s political career was over. His last official act, performed with as much dignity as he could muster in an appallingly humiliating circumstance, was to resist the Talmadge takeover by filing for a Supreme Court ruling; it finally came after 63 days of chaos and effectively seated the lieutenant governor-elect, M.E. Thompson, as the legitimate successor.

Ellis Arnall moved to the sidelines and into the shadows. The conventional wisdom held that he had become too liberal, that he had catered to the national media and enhanced his own image at the state’s expense.

But Ellis Arnall went on, of course. He was president of the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers from 1948 to 1963.

At President Truman’s invitation he served for six months as chief of the Office of Price Stabilization during the Korean War. He founded an insurance company, thrived on the national lecture circuit, and enjoyed a prosperous law practice. In 1966, at 59, he decided to run again for the governorship. As Professor Henderson points out, “the county unit system, segregation, and black disfranchisement had collapsed under the pressure of federal intervention,” and Arnall was convinced that his progressive record would now win popular support. He lost in a runoff to segregationist Lester Maddox. His error, according to a columnist for The Atlanta Constitution, was that “he assumed that Georgia was basically different from the state of twenty years ago; it simply had not altered that much.”

Henderson, a professor of political science at Abraham Baldwin College in Tifton, Ga., has told Arnall’s story with faithful attention to the record and in a prose style that departs from the academic mainly by being blessedly free of jargon. The book’s structure is one common to textbooks, which is to say that every chapter ends with a summary of what the reader has just been told, often in the same words, a formula that may verge on the boring, depending on the reader’s attention span, but one that has the virtues of clarity and emphasis.

Despite an annoying amount of redundance (for one thing, Professor Henderson seems to be mortally afraid of losing antecedents, so that names are repeated in too many places where the reader is anticipating a pronoun), this is an easy book to read. It can be recommended as a modest but valuable contribution both to our understanding of twentieth-century politics and to the increasingly impressive list of titles from the University of Georgia Press.

In fairness to Dr. Henderson, I have to remind myself that this is “a political biography,” as he is careful to make clear in his sub-title. I take this to mean that he has sought to deal almost exclusively with Arnall’s influence on the political process and public policy.

Therefore, except for early references to his well-to-do-family, readers can expect to find in these pages very little about the influence that other individuals had on Arnall himself, and even less about his indebtedness to various civic, religious, and public interest groups that in the mid-thirties served in their separate ways to promote more rational and humane consideration of social problems.

There is, for example, no mention of the campaign led by John A. Griffin and Glenn Rainey to abolish the poll tax, or of the so-called [Philip] Weltner movement in 1936 that, by advancing the anti-Talmadge candidacy of Judge Blanton Fortson, became an early warning of those deficiencies in the university system that exploded so dramatically five years later. Josephine Wilkins’s Citizens’ Fact Finding Movement is mentioned only in passing, whereas Arnall himself once credited his election and many of his administrative reforms to the spirit the movement evoked.

Similarly, an exclusively “political biography” leaves one to wonder what really moved Arnall, who majored in Greek as an undergraduate at Sewanee, to become a politician in the first place and, perhaps more important, what made a liberal of him. Henderson says only that Arnall’s family background “preordained” him to be a

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politician, that his father was pleased when young Ellis decided to get a law degree, and that before he was many months at the University of Georgia Arnall was telling his classmates he expected to be governor one day. There are in Henderson’s telling a few clues to Arnall’s personality (which inclined to the cocky), and enough episodes to suggest that one of his problems in the exercise of leadership was that, like many bright and privileged people, he found it hard to suffer fools gladly. There is, too, enough here—particularly in those passages dealing with Arnall’s treatment of the race issue—to illustrate how agonizingly difficult it was in the milieu of his times to stay ahead, but not too far ahead, of his followers. But for any true and indepth insight into motives and character, a reader will have to look to a biography as yet unwritten.

Regrettably, Dr. Henderson’s otherwise splendid work does not satisfactorily answer the fundamental questions: Was Ellis Arnall a political opportunist or was he instead—that rarest of activists—a skillfully practical idealist? Was he a sincere, committed progressive with a coherent program whose behavior in office introduced a new and higher standard for political conduct in Georgia, or was he essentially an intuitive and expedient reactor to issues as they surfaced?

Was his 1966 defeat attributable to the tenacity of old racial fears or was it rather the result of some flaw of personality, a matured arrogance perhaps, that made it impossible for him to recognize and appeal to the no less real changes in the Georgia electorate? Some, all, or none of the above?

In 1948, as Governor Arnall departed and the Talmadge era resumed, Calvin Kytle wrote for HARPER’S magazine a prophetic article titled “A Long Dark Night for Georgia.” Educator, businessman, acting head during the Johnson administration of the Community Relations Service, and publisher, Kytle now lives in Chapel Hill.