The Long Haul

Wendy Johnson

Vol. 17, No. 3-4, 1995 pp. 1-2

A federal court lawsuit filed November 17 challenges the constitutionality of yet another congressional election district. The newest challenge, to U.S. Representative Robert Scott’s Virginia district, represents the eleventh majority-black or -Hispanic district to be challenged by associates of the “Campaign for a Color Blind Society Legal Defense and Education Fund.” In its aggressive and deliberate campaign to undermine and destroy hard-won democratic ideals, the political right wing has been skillful in standing history on its head–taking language and concepts defined and shaped by the Civil Rights Movement to undermine its past victories.

This misappropriation causes confusion, blurs the lines between inclusion and exclusion, and hides the real debate about the potent and powerful role race plays in the daily workings of this country, not only in gaining fair electoral representation, but also in having access to quality education, well-paying jobs, and equal opportunities.

Take, for example, the California “Civil Rights” Initiative. This proposed constitutional amendment for the November 1996 ballot (if it gains enough signatures) reads: “Neither the state of California or any of its political subdivisions or agents shall use race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin as a criterion for either discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group in the operation of the State’s system for public employment, public education or public contracting.”

The proposed amendment doesn’t sound ominous but its application would, in effect, give opponents of affirmative action a mighty club for beating back the gains of women and minorities in public agencies and schools. If the amendment becomes law, all public con-tract set-aside programs for minority and women-owned business would end; state schools could end minority

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scholarships and diversity programs; government agencies would be exempt from setting up an affirmative action program–except by order of a judge.

Essentially, this so-called civil rights initiative would wipe out state-sponsored affirmative action–even where an agency has admitted past discrimination. When the language for this amendment was tested in a state-wide poll (designed by Louis Harris for the Feminist Majority Foundation in April 1995) 81 percent supported it.

But when told the initiative results in “outlawing all affirmative action programs for women and minorities,” 58 percent opposed the California initiative. When asked about a different proposition: “The state may use affirmative action programs designed to help women, minorities, and others who have not had equal opportunities in education, employment, and in receiving government contracts to achieve equal opportunities,” a solid 68 percent to 25 percent majority supported it.

Not only have those who seek to end minority office-holding stolen the language of the Civil Rights Movement in an effort to undo laws supported by a majority of Americans, they have imitated Movement strategies as well, building a grassroots base and utilizing the federal courts to press their cause.

Alabama State Senator Hank Sanders best characterizes our struggle: “The fundamental assumption about the Civil Rights Movement is that its work is or will be finished. The reality is that it will never be finished in our lifetimes. In our efforts we often ran one-hundred-yard dashes, but we are in a marathon, so we really have miles to go.”

We have blazed trails with major advances in voter registration, redistricting, and the election of leaders from previously disenfranchised social groups. Now a complacent and disaffected population becomes more and more cynical of the electoral process as a way to achieve social change, of redistricting as a mechanism for advancing democratic goals, and of the possibilities for a common language of understanding in the struggle for civil rights.

As we prepare for the miles ahead, we must craft a progressive unity for civil and human rights. The language, principles, and concepts articulated by architects of the Civil Rights Movement are no longer commonly understood. We must study our history, reassert our roles as stewards of democracy and fairness, and revitalize the language and concepts of justice that have been perverted and twisted by the partisans of reaction.

More than anything else we must begin to craft a political and social movement that can capture the imagination of millions of Americans and move citizens of the South and of this country to greater political participation at local, state, and federal levels.

The Latest Attack on Voting Rights

By Alex Willingham

Vol. 17, No. 3-4, 1995 pp. 3-5, 13

In the past two years, decisions by the U. S. Supreme Court have voided congressional election systems in Georgia and threatened those in other states including North Carolina, California, Louisiana, and Texas. These decisions testify to the latest round of American racial conflict. They respond to opposition by whites to state district plans, drawn after the 1990 census, that promote the election of racial minorities protected under the federal Voting Rights Act. Civil rights groups and minorities had argued successfully that the Act required state officials to consider race and to maximize minority-race districts. Many did, and bitter complaints came from white voters. This resistance has now been consummated by the Court’s decisions in two closely watched opinions, Shaw v. Reno (North Carolina) and Miller v. Johnson (Georgia) , resulting in the most serious attack on voting rights in more than a decade.

The situation created by the Court’s opinions has effects on equity as well as hard political implications. Respecting equity, these opinions represent a major challenge to organizations working on franchise issues particularly where that work seeks to guarantee access to a meaningful ballot for minorities. Politically, the decisions could have a major impact on the make-up of Congress and state legislatures which have crucial roles in setting the nation’s public policies. The current attack on minority voting rights is remarkable for the dogged persistence of those opposed to fair representation in politics. The attack is remarkable, too, coming at a time when blacks and others covered by federal voting law are finding it difficult to mobilize their communities for an effective politics.

This is not the first effort to weaken the Voting Rights Act which became law in 1965. The government has revisited the Act several times for extension and amend-

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ment. On each occasion, coordinated drives were made to limit the Act’s impact. In 1982 and in 1992, reconsideration involved reenactment of crucial provisions concerning the pre-clearance process of Section 5 and the cover-age of language minorities.

The Act was also amended in 1982. This was made necessary by a restrictive Supreme Court decision in Mobile v. Bolden. In that decision, the Court had restricted the reach of the Act, based on its interpretation of what the law meant–had Congress intended to disallow those election devices that operated in a discriminatory way or merely those purposefully designed to discriminate? The amendment made clear that the law was to apply to those situations where election devices operated to discriminate against racial minorities, thus limiting the need to inquire about intent.

Restricted Debate

Through the 1960s and 1970s, much of the contention over voting rights had to do with decisions about whether systems of election (at-large or multi-member) were discriminatory. By the 1990 round of redistricting, the focus of contention had shifted to aligning districts in single-member systems. The effect was to direct attention to the design of district lines, heightening anxiety about the prospect of minority “racial gerrymandering.” This subtle shift in the mechanism of reform had the consequence of highlighting the intentions of the reformers–as opposed to the intentions of the creators of the racially tainted at-large systems in disrepute.

In prior encounters over provisions of the Act, minorities mobilized the civil rights community to make effective appeals, either to convince the Congress to clarify its meaning or to litigate persuasive arguments before the Court. Accordingly, opponents of the Act were rebuffed and, because of that, one can find some reason to be optimistic in the current period. Recalling those efforts, however, should not minimize the peculiar challenge presented this time around.

The situation since the 1993 Shaw decision, while similar, is really much more troubling. Now, the terms of discussion set by the Court’s opinions severely restrict the realm of debate. Racial motive is used as a dominant criterion of decision and its application to election reforms–and certainly its application as the sole consideration in redistricting–is deemed inappropriate even when used for demonstrably benign ends.

The Court’s rulings also restrict the arena of decision-making about reforms by shifting to an interpretive process centered in the Court itself. The effect is to

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remove the issue from the political process, insulating it in the purview of the judiciary. As such, even the partial victory I would claim minorities scored in Miller (i.e. the move away from reliance on geographic shape), feeds the restrictive process by removing what appeared, despite its many problems, as an objective standard in principle.

The current attack on voting rights then, is a shrewd response by an ideological and politicized majority on the Court. The Court has placed itself in the pivotal position by structuring debate to close off political avenues. Its calculations will block the bi-partisan alliances and spirit that have sustained support for fair representation. The Court’s sense of judicial involvement on this issue contrasts sharply with its attitude in other areas where it has deferred to the political branches (at least under the Reagan and Bush presidencies). These maneuvers will make it much more difficult to respond effectively in ways similar to the past.

One effect of the Court’s current utterances–and one that calls attention to the larger environment–is a language quite troubling for the way it characterizes officials elected by minority voters of the same race. Though representing itself as honestly grounded in color-blind beliefs, the Shaw argument is actually carried by images that stigmatize officials of color where there is no reason to doubt their worth and where no such aspersion is cast on majority race candidates elected by white voters! The minority race district is caricatured. It “bears an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid.” Such language reinforces mindless assumptions about racial homogeneity. Persons elected from such a district “are more likely to believe that their primary obligation is to represent only the members of that group rather than their constituency as a whole.” This is irresponsible and amounts to official stereotyping. It is not likely to have practical effects in election outcomes in communities–race voting, after all, is the condition upon which these remedies are built–but such language will serve to give sanction to backlash and authorize judgments that do not correspond with the actual public record of the elected representatives.

Chilling Comparisons

Race remains an ominous factor here, despite immersion in the idiom of a color-blind society, and the perfidy of these decisions may have less to do with actual reduction in minority representation than with how we construct the meaning of that representation. The 1990 round of redistricting actually maximized the election of minorities, but the language of Shaw and Miller, and the resulting media discourse, serves, in the face of widespread minority office holding, to keep alive the specter of race, to stigmatize aspiring public servants, and to imply a “place” for them at a lesser status than their white counterparts.

I will avoid simplistic comparisons to the overthrow of Reconstruction, but the analogy is suggestive in the direct way in which the current decisions–coming after three decades of voting work–apply to actual political power exercised by racial minorities. The removal of at-large elections and the crafting of majority-minority districts in fact account for the overwhelming number of minority persons now serving in public office at the federal and state levels. An attack on these arrangements is an attack on what power and influence minorities can enjoy. In that sense the comparison to Reconstruction is chilling.

And this comes at a time when, despite the substantial gains in levels of minority office holding, voter turnout among poor and minority populations continues to be disappointing. The low rate of voting is caused in part by well-known conditions of poverty and access. But it is also increasingly reproduced by the direct intervention of campaign organizations attuned to the imperatives of minority race mobilization. Campaign managers in a number of states resort to sophisticated racial appeals to exploit white fears. The Republican party has deployed so-called “ballot security” programs in black and brown polling precincts. In New Jersey, that tactic was supplemented by direct payments to suppress the turnout in black precincts. Harassment of minority elected officials by means which include targeted government-sponsored sting operations in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and Louisiana have worked to remove effective voices.

The ability to use the vote–and to fashion a politics around it–is really the main line of defense against the rollback in government policy now being engineered by the congressional Republicans. Effective use of the franchise will be especially important in the volatile electoral alignments emerging in the late 1990s. It is clear that while New Right formations have a number of policy positions that threaten minority populations, their stance on voting policy and empowerment is just as suspect. They champion term limits and other policies that limit the exercise of official authority and interfere with the discretion of the voter, but are silent about the reduction of registration barriers. Opposition in defiance of the

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motor voter law has developed in a number of states including at least thirteen where lawsuits have been filed to force compliance.

A White Man’s Country

The larger political alignment becomes crucial in thinking about the latest attack on voting rights. At its current pace, this alignment is certain to produce consolidation of a right-of-center governing elite grounded in private wealth, hostile to broad popular governance, and opportunistic with respect to personal rights. It will exercise an astute sense of the way race can be used to ignite political movement. The result is a reemergence of circumstances and forces that simply do not support equal rights. They envision a white man’s country. These forces have a long history in opposition to reform. They were in strenuous opposition to the demonstrations at Selma to the Voting Rights Act itself, and to all the other efforts to redress racial inequalities.

What the country faces is hardly a minor correction on race matters. In these closing years of the twentieth century, we have before us a comprehensive and consistent ideology and an alternative politics. It is a threat to basic constitutional arrangements that affect personal liberties, including religious freedom and abortion, as well as programs that deal with opportunity for economic advancement. These touch the lives of the poor, women, racial minorities, youth, the accused, and the lower middle class.

Against this background it is clear that the U. S. Supreme Court is making a major error in the decisions on race and politics. It has interrupted a steady flow of success and interferes with full development of the potential of the representatives chosen from minority communities. It demands that the civil rights community go back and debate issues that should have been exhausted in previous decades.

The Court’s invoking of white racism to rebuke meaningful thinking about race is Orwellian, unpersuasive, and reckless. It serves to summon fear and hostility at a time of unusual unrest and declining faith in public institutions. It agitates a right-wing politics that feeds on self-serving thought. To abandon minorities on the theory that we are color-blind would be tragic and ironic in the centennial year of the Atlanta Compromise, the event that consummated Jim Crow disfranchisement.

Alex Willingham teaches courses on politics and race at Williams College and is currently chair of the Highlander Center Board of Directors.

A Democracy To Be Proud Of

By Cynthia A. McKinney

Vol. 17, No. 3-4, 1995 pp. 6-7

One positive development to come out of the Supreme Court’s narrow five to four decision striking down majority-minority districts is the broader discussion it has sparked regarding the way we elect members of Congress in general. Low voter turnout, distrust of elected officials, the term-limits movement, and the increasing desire for a third party are all strong indications that Americans are no longer satisfied with our representative democracy as practiced through the winner-takes-all assumption. As majority-minority districts across America are targeted for dismantling, many are discovering that oddly shaped super-majority white districts are quite common as well, yet remain unchallenged. For many, this apparent double standard is an indication that the entire method by which we draw congressional districts is flawed.

It is important to remember that majority-minority districts exist only because our winner-takes-all assumption makes it inherently more difficult for African-Americans to have representation–due to racial block voting–particularly in the South. Four hundred years of slavery, segregation and discrimination have, without a doubt, created a set of circumstances and interests unique to African-Americans. Such interests can rarely be reflected in public policy as long as simple majorities are required to control state power. If we remain wedded to a system which does not employ proportional voting, majority-minority districts will continue to be necessary in order for African-Americans to have a stake in our polity. Hence, majority-minority districts are not the problem, they are merely symptoms of the much larger dysfunction under-mining our electoral system. Out of all the democracies in the world, only four–including the United States–still rely on the winner-takes-all method of electing public officials. The rest of the world’s democracies have discovered that giving 100 percent of the state’s power to the candidate who can secure 50 percent of the vote plus one, is not equitable.

In its present form, our winner-takes-all assumption manifested through a system of single-member districts limits voter choice. More often than not, Americans find themselves going to the polls to vote against someone rather than for a particular candidate. Our current method of electing political leaders lumps a wide range of issues into one platform, forcing voters to cast their only vote in favor of someone who they nominally support on a few issues. Recently, I introduced legislation which would repeal the 1967 federal statute requiring states to draw single member congressional districts. This law was in-tended to prevent the use of at-large districts, which were routinely employed in the South to dilute black voting strength. However, multi-member districts used in conjunction with cumulative voting, preference voting, or limited voting, not only preserve the voting strength of racial and political minorities, but also increase choices for all voters.

Under these three voting methods, voters would have several votes to cast. Moreover, they would be electing more than one officeholder to represent them in the U.S. House of Representatives (unlike the current system whereby citizens have only one representative in the lower chamber) . If, for example, you liked one candidate’s position on taxes and another candidate’s position on abortion, you could vote for both and conceivably see both elected. By the same token, you would have the choice of casting all your votes for one candidate–the choice is yours. Such a system would necessarily encourage independent candidates to run, since winning would become more feasible. There is nothing in the Constitution which requires us to continue with a winner-takes-all assumption, practiced through single-member districts. In fact, some of these alternative voting methods are currently used in a number of municipalities and counties across the United States. Hence, proportional voting is already working in America.

Many political analysts have said that redistricting is the process by which candidates chose their voters (not the voters choosing their representatives). Cynicism in our political system is at an all-time high while voter turnouts are at record lows. Campaign finance reform and lobby reform are steps in the right direction, yet only solve part of the problem. Americans are a diverse people

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with diverse interests–how is it that most of us only have two choices on election day?

The current redistricting battle gripping my home state of Georgia will happen again in just five years. After the next census, states across the nation will grapple with the Voting Rights Act, and how best to maintain the integrity of black voting strength in the context of the Supreme Court’s redistricting decision. However, trimming majority-minority districts will not cure the underlying problem which made these districts necessary in the first place. Such maneuvering will only serve to reinforce suspicions that the shape of some majority-minority districts is being used as a pretext to remove African-American legislators from Congress. Juxtaposed to ultra-bizarre looking districts such as Texas’ 6th–which is 91 percent white and proclaimed constitutional–attacks on majority-minority districts will only provide proof that a double standard exists in the reapportionment process.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of women’s suffrage. Just as the concept of women exercising the right to vote was difficult for many to accept 75 years ago, abandoning our winner-takes-all assumption will likely meet much resistance in the beginning as well. However, the debate about proportional voting must begin at some point. Although I disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the constitutionality of my majority-black district, I do believe that we can use this unfavorable situation to start the debate over expanding our democracy and creating more electoral choices for the American electorate.

U. S. Congresswoman Cynthia A. McKinney represents Georgia’s 11th District.

The Supreme Court and Voting Rights: `Bizarre’ Districts or Bizarre Decisions?

By Pamela S. Karlan

Vol. 17, No. 3-4, 1995 pp. 8-13

Last term, the Supreme Court took action in five voting rights cases: it struck down Georgia’s majority-black Eleventh Congressional District; it denied standing to white voters in Louisiana who wished to challenge the state’s majority-black Fourth Congressional District although none of them lived there; it upheld without comment California’s legislative and congressional apportionments; and it agreed to hear oral argument regarding the constitutionality of Texas’s and North Carolina’s plans. These decisions reveal a Court seemingly committed to reviewing challenged congressional districts one by one and issuing opinions that depend so heavily on the peculiar facts of each case that they provide no real guidance to lower courts or legislatures.

This essay raises three broad questions: First: Who now has legal standing to bring a wrongful districting claim? The rulings in Shaw v. Reno (North Carolina)* and Miller v. Johnson (Georgia) reveal that the Court’s majority is not really concerned with the equal protection of individuals or groups, but rather with fundamental questions of governmental structure that raise political questions the judiciary is ill-equipped to handle. Second: Whose task it is to determine what a republican form of government means in a multi-racial, pluralistic society? In looking at the actual elements of wrongful districting claims, few constraints now exist to prevent arbitrary judicial intervention in the apportionment process. Third: What has become of the Voting Rights Act? States now find themselves walking a tightrope. If they draw majority-black districts, they face lawsuits under the equal protection clause; if they do not, they face objections under section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and lawsuits under section 2.

I

Prior to Shaw v. Reno, there were basically two types of voting rights injuries: disenfranchisement and dilution. Disenfranchisement occurs when an individual is denied the ability to cast a ballot. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and de-annexations (like the notorious “Tuskegee gerrymander”) are examples of disenfranchising provisions. Dilution occurs when the votes of some group count for less than those of other voters. Dilution can occur be-cause of malapportionment,the use of at-large elections, or gerrymandering that “cracks” or “packs” a group’s voting strength into a fewer-than-optimal number of districts.

Shaw v. Reno identified a new form of equal protection claim in which a plaintiff may argue that a reapportionment statute “though race-neutral on its face, rationally cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to separate voters into different districts on the basis of race, and that the separation lacks sufficient justification.” Plaintiffs in this kind of “wrongful districting” case need not prove either that they were denied the right to vote or that their votes were diluted.

Put bluntly, by letting these individuals sue, the Supreme Court has granted standing to individuals whose real complaint is that they have been injured by racial integration or at least racial integration in which whites do not remain the predominant group. This notion of injury harkens back to a deeply disturbing assertion expressed in the 1950s that so-called “neutral principles” of constitutional law required that white individuals desire not to associate with blacks be accorded the same respect given to blacks’ claims for full inclusion in the polity.

Shaw v. Reno had identified special “representational harms” that might occur if race played too large a role in the districting process. But Miller threatens to abandon any requirement that the plaintiffs even allege, let alone

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prove, these harms. Neither the district court nor the Supreme Court discussed whether racial polarization in Georgia had increased. Neither court made any findings about whether the Eleventh District’s representative, Cynthia McKinney, had ignored her white constituents or their interests. Indeed, the Supreme Court denied the possibility that white constituents even had any interests correlated with their race.

The Court’s nonchalance about standing conveys a central point about the wrongful districting cases: they really aren’t individual rights lawsuits in the first place. Rather they concern the meaning of our system of representative democracy. The Court permitted the Miller plaintiffs to go forward, not because they could show some injury, but because it needed to give somebody the ability to challenge the districting process. For all their equal protection rhetoric, the wrongful districting cases are instead really addressed to what Justice Thomas has termed the “political landscape of the Nation.” The Court has smuggled into the equal protection clause a decision that really speaks to what constitutes a republican form of government in multiracial twentieth-century America.

Ironically, Justice Thomas’s radical critique in his Holder v. Hall concurrence–which he aimed at the Court’s decisions under the Voting Rights Act–much more closely describes the Court’s behavior in the wrongful districting cases. Shaw v. Reno and Miller threaten, as Justice Thomas wrote, to “immers [e] the federal courts in a hopeless project of weighing questions of political theory.” They ask courts to “make decisions based on highly political judgments–judgments that courts are inherently ill-equipped to make,” and “develop theories on basic principles of representative government, for it is only a resort to political theory that can enable a court to determine which electoral systems provide the ‘fairest’ levels of representation.”

As we shall see in the next two sections of this essay, the Court has yet to discover, or articulate in a fashion it thinks the lower courts can apply, a standard for deciding when race-conscious districting is permissible. It has injected the judiciary into the middle of a highly politicized process in order to impose a contestable political philosophy of the meaning of democracy in a multiracial society; and it has manufactured a conflict between its newly-created cause of action and the political branches’ consensus as intended by the Voting Rights Act.

II

On its face Shaw v. Reno was a case about district appearance. Given the electoral importance of race in much of the nation, it is as unlikely that a majority-black district would be created by accident as it is that a majority-Republican district would be drawn accidentally. Unless the Court was prepared to review the propriety of every congressional district in a state with a sizeable minority population, it needed some threshold limiting principle. The concept which emerged from Shaw v. Reno–that irregularity of boundaries (“bizarreness”) triggers strict scrutiny–is not an especially workable legal principle. Bizarreness is a relative concept. It requires that we have some understanding of what would be normal or regular. But in many states, the most observed “traditional districting principle” is the outlandish political gerrymander. In Louisiana, for ex-

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ample, the trial court struck down the newly-drawn, majority-black Fourth District–which resembled the post-1970 majority-white Eighth District drawn to ensure Gillis Long’s reelection–describing both districts as “bizarre.” To call a district “bizarre” if it is drawn to create a majority-black constituency, but “traditional” and safe from attack if it is drawn to create a majority-Republican or -Democratic constituency makes a mockery of the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment and gives trial courts a roving warrant to strictly scrutinize districts they don’t like.

In Miller, the Court replaced the Shaw v. Reno “bizarreness” concept with a “predominant factor” test. Now, a plaintiff must show, either through direct or circumstantial evidence (like the district’s shape) that the legislature “subordinated traditional race-neutral districting principles, including but not limited to compactness, contiguity, respect for political subdivisions or communities defined by actual shared interests, to racial considerations.” But what does it mean to say that race is the “predominant factor” in an apportionment plan? If “pre-dominant” really means infinitely preferred to all other goals, then race is never the predominant factor in the real world.

Three criteria omitted from the Court’s list of “traditional” districting principle–equipopulousity, partisan advantage, and incumbent protection–are virtually sure to loom equally large in a legislature’s redistricting calculus. Ironically, it’s often precisely the fact that these three concerns come before race that can explain much of the irregularity of shape of majority-black districts. In Texas, for example, the legislature declined to draw an extremely compact majority-black district in Dallas because two white, incumbent Democrats each wanted to keep substantial numbers of reliably Democratic black voters in their districts. The shape of the newly created majority-black district–which was essentially slipped into territory grudgingly ceded by the two white incumbents, and which had to reach out tentacles to incorporate pockets of white (not black) voters necessary to reach the ideal district population–reflects not the dominance but the subordination of the black community’s interest. If the black district had been drawn first, it could have been regular, and presumably would then have been protected from attack; only because it was drawn last did it flout “traditional” districting principles.

Miller’s declaration that “[a] State is free to recognize communities that have a particular racial makeup, provided its action is directed toward some common thread of relevant interests” further muddies the waters. The Court never explains what counts as a “community” or a “relevant interest.” First, few political subdivisions have

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the precise population to entitle them to a congressional district of their own. Every district will reflect the agglomeration of many “communities.” Communities sometimes stretch across political subdivision boundaries and sometimes contain only part of a formally defined jurisdiction. Are individuals who live in different townships but who attend the same church, work in the same industry, and to belong to the same political organization a “community”? A black textile worker who attends an AME church and votes solidly Democratic may feel far more of a sense of community with a similarly-situated individual who lives in another mill town forty miles down the highway that she feels with a wealthy white Presbyterian who lives in a racially homogenous, gated community on the other side of town. Some of that solidarity will be overtly racial, some of it will be the product of interests less mechanically tied to race, and some of it may be only fortuitously correlated with race. When it comes to congressional representation, as opposed to seats on a city council, it is particularly likely for voters’ most salient interest to be tied to socioeconomic factors rather than local residential ones.

Second, one would have to be not only colorblind, but deaf and dumb as well, not to recognize that questions of racial justice and issues with racial overtones form of significant part of the current legislative agenda and that racial issues may themselves define communities of interest. Of course, anti-discrimination measures such as the Civil Rights Acts, the Fair Housing Act, and the Voting Rights Act protect, and were supported by, Americans of races. Nonetheless, as the Court recognized in Hunter v. Erickson, members of minority groups are particularly interested in such provisions.

Shaw v. Reno and Miller treat the assumption that black voters “think alike, share the same political interests, and will prefer the same candidates at the polls” as “offensive and demeaning”. But what if, in some jurisdictions, that assumption is true? In many states, black voters–even if they do not always think alike–do share the same political interests ad prefer the same candidates at the polls. In recent history throughout much of the South, for example, blacks vote in near-monolithic numbers for Democratic candidates while a significant majority of their white counterparts prefer Republicans. “Traditional” political gerrymanders of the past generation have taken this fact into account: white Democratic politicians deliberately place black voters in their districts in order to shore up their electoral base (though not so many as to jeopardize their winning the nomination); Republicans generally draw themselves overwhelmingly white districts. If courts were to apply strict scrutiny to every districting decision in which “race was the predominant factor motivating the legislature’s decision to place a significant number of voters within or without a particular district”, they would have to scrutinize not only a few majority-black congressional districts, but many majority-white districts as well, since “substantial” numbers of voters are moved into or out of those districts on the basis on race.

That courts are unwilling to engage in that kind of wholesale scrutiny rests on assumptions every bit as “offensive and demeaning” as those the supreme Court beholds in others. First, characterizing the use of black voters to fill out majority-white districts as “political” rather than racial treats them like Hamburger Helper. Second, it assumes the normality of majority-white districts, however configured, and starts from a premise of suspicion about majority-black districts. Finally, to tell black citizens who have organized to lobby for and obtain the districts they prefer that their common interests are illusory or unworthy of satisfaction is chillingly reminiscent of the assertion in the notorious Dread Scott case of 1857 that blacks have “no rights which the white man [is] bound to respect.”

Ultimately, Miller with its disallowance of race as the “predominant factor” of districting, is no more successful that Shaw v. Reno at articulating a standard that explains when the inevitable reliance on race in the redistricting process is permissible and when it is not.

III

In the wake of Miller, a wrongful districting claim has two elements. Initially, the plaintiffs must show a predominant racial motivation. If they do, then “the State must demonstrate that its districting legislation is narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling interest.”

The second element will almost inevitably be bound up with sections 2 or 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman’s important book, Quiet Revolution in the South(see my review in Southern Changes, Summer 1995) persuasively shows that the creation of majority-black legislative and congressional seats in the South is almost entirely attributable to the Act. Absent legislation, denials of preclearance, or the threat thereof, Southern states would have created very few

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black districts. Defendant jurisdictions will normally claim that their districts were “compelled” by the Voting Rights Act and that this compliance with the Act provides a sufficient justification for their districting decisions.

Miller seems to leave open the question “[w]hether or not in some cases compliance with the Voting Rights Act, standing alone, can provide a compelling interest independent of any interest in remedying past discrimination.” The legitimacy of race-conscious districting has therefore become quite unclear.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits electoral arrangements that result in minority voters having less opportunity than other voters to elect the candidates of their choice. The Court has required plaintiffs challenging an apportionment plan to prove three threshold conditions: that the minority group “is sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district”; that it is “politically cohesive”; and that “the white majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it … usually to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate.” The remedy for a section 2 violation is race-conscious districting. By proving their case, plaintiffs show that “racial and ethnic cleavages … necessitate majority-minority districts to ensure equal political and electoral opportunity.”

Shaw v. Reno seemed to assume that section 2 would come into a wrongful districting case at the justification stage. But perhaps section 2 applies as much at the triggering stage. If the minority community is “geographically compact,” then “a reapportionment plan that concentrates members of the group in one district” should not trigger strict scrutiny in the first place, since a compact majority-black district is fully consonant with traditional apportionment principles. Compliance with section 2 negates the first element of a wrongful districting claim; it should be unnecessary even to reach the question whether the state’s interest is compelling.

The more difficult issue is narrow tailoring, particularly given this plausible scenario: a state’s failure to draw any majority-black district would violate section 2, but to serve some other legitimate state interests, the state would prefer to draw a less compact–or even highly irregular–black district instead of the compact one plaintiffs might use to establish section 2 liability. If only the regular district can pass muster, then wrongful districting doctrine violates itself, since it demands that the state draw aesthetically regular majority-black districts even if this means sacrificing other concerns such as protection of incumbents, partisan allocation of seats, and recognition of other communities of interest. “Narrow tailoring,” however, is not a term borrowed from couture to describe elegance of line; rather, it refers to whether the state’s reliance on race went beyond what was necessary to provide equal political opportunity.

As for section 5, both Shaw v. Reno and Miller seemed to reaffirm the vitality of the nonretrogression principle: a reapportionment cannot leave minorities worse off. Nonretrogression also requires race-conscious districting. Furthermore, section 5 (like section 2) reaches intentional discrimination: preclearance will be denied unless the jurisdiction can show that its plan is not purposefully discriminatory. Despite three decades of case law and administrative practice, some ambiguities that are relevant to the wrongful districting cases remain. For example, what is the baseline for measuring retrogression in a jurisdiction which has gained congressional seats, as many Southern and Western states with substantial minority populations have? For example, after the 1980 census (and the Busbee litigation), Georgia, with a roughly

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25 percent black population, had one majority-black district out of ten (10 percent). As a result of the 1990 census, the state received an eleventh seat. Would a new plan that simply preserved the pre-existing majority-black district be retrogressive since the proportion of majority-black seats would decline from 1/10 to 1/11 (9 percent)? Does section 5 therefore require the state to draw two majority-black districts? This issue seems likely to spawn additional litigation.

The real friction between the Voting Rights Act and wrongful districting jurisprudence is pragmatic and institutional. The combination of lax standing requirements, ideological and partisan incentives to sue, and a receptive, activist federal judiciary guarantees that jurisdictions will find themselves walking a tightrope. If they do not draw majority-black districts in most areas with substantial black populations. they will both find it difficult to obtain preclearance and, if they do, will face traditional section 2 lawsuits. But if they do draw those districts, they will find themselves em-broiled in wrongful districting litigation. There is now no realistic way for a jurisdiction to avoid costly and divisive litigation.

It makes sense for the Court to step in when there are individuals or groups being denied their right to participate or to have their votes fairly counted or to have their views taken into account in the legislative process. But when complainants have suffered no particular injury, but simply object to the prevailing democratic theory, the Court’s intervention is entirely unjustified. As Justice Harlan warned in 1962 in Baker v. Carr, “[i]n the last analysis, what lies at the core of this controversy is a difference of opinion as to the function of representative government,”–precisely the kind of question that should be hammered out in the political process.

Current wrongful districting doctrine is inherently unstable, as the Court’s visions and revisions over the past three Terms have suggested. Democracy, no less than liberty, finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt. The Court’s inability to articulate and identify a concrete harm to any identifiable individual suggests that the Court has embarked on an effort to impose its own vision of democratic theory on a resistant political process. And the Court’s decisions, with their heated rhetoric about “political apartheid” and “balkanization” and their potential eviction of half the black members of Congress, are, as Shaw v. Reno put it, far more likely than race-conscious districting to “carry us further from the goal of a political system in which race no longer matters–a goal that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments embody and to which the Nation continues to aspire.”

Pamela S. Karlan is Roy L. and Rosamond Woodruff Morgan Research Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. A more extensive version of this article, “Still Hazy After All These Years: Voting Rights in the Post-Shaw Era,” will appear in the Cumberland Law Review.

Charles G. Gomillion

By Robert J. Norrell

Vol. 17, No. 3-4, 1995 pp. 14-15

A few weeks ago I lost my hero–Charles Goode Gomillion, a 95-year-old man of whom relatively few people will have heard. But for me he embodied true greatness, and the meaning of his life speaks clearly to us today.

A sociology professor at Tuskegee University, Gomillion led African-Americans in that small Black Belt town in a thirty-year struggle to gain the right to vote. In the late 1930s he began to organize professors to challenge the local board of registrars, which allowed only a handful of African-Americans to go the polls.

Whites feared that if a significant part of the eighty- percent black majority got the franchise, white political control would be lost. Gomillion and his group confronted a solid wall of white opposition, but it was no pistol-packing, Rebel-flag-waving mob as one could find in some parts of Alabama during the civil rights years. They met a genteel dismissiveness– enunciated in the elongated vowels of the Black Belt aristocrat–toward any black interest.

When well-educated black people tried to register to vote they were told they did not own enough property. If they owned property, they were told they did not know enough about the U.S. Constitution. If they met both prerequisites, black people were required to have two whites “vouch” for their good character. If a black person somehow got vouchers, the registrars often lost his or her application.

One day in 1941 Gomillion, frustrated over the registrars’ dishonesty to a young professor, looked the all-powerful county probate judge in the eye and issued an ultimatum: Register this man to vote or we’ll sue you in federal court. At that moment the civil rights movement began in Tuskegee.

For the next twenty five years, Gomillion and his Tuskegee Civic Association kept an unrelenting pressure on local officials to register qualified blacks. It was fourteen years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. It proved to be a tedious, frustrating struggle. Through the 1940s and ’50s, Gomillion’s group pursued the registrars as they lied to applicants, hid from them, rejected them for no cause. Gomillion was committed for the long haul. As a child he had adopted as his personal motto, “Keep everlastingly at it.” A colleague of his told me years later: “Gomillion is a very obstinate man. He will follow anything through.”

That obstinance finally paid off. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 created a commission to investigate denials of voting rights, and the very first place scrutinized was Tuskegee. It was hardly an accident. The methodical Gomillion and his organization had kept a record of every black person who had tried to register for the past fifteen years, and thus they knew everyone who had been turned down.

When the commission held nationally televised hearings in Montgomery in 1958, a parade of professors recounted the registrars’ shenanigans. National opinion registered shock at such undemocratic behavior. In the meantime city officials in Tuskegee, alarmed at the small but steady rise in black voters, had gotten the Alabama Legislature in 1957 to redraw the city limits to put out almost all of the town’s 400 black voters.

The gerrymander was the final insult to Gomillion and his group. They organized a three-year boycott of city businesses, and they sued the city to reclaim their voting rights. In 1960 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Gomillion v. Lightfoot that a gerrymander designed explicitly to deny black people the right to vote was unconstitutional. The case brought Gomillion a moment of fame, but he never registered much interest in it.

He was focused on a new suit brought by the Justice Department under legislation shaped by the testimony taken earlier about Tuskegee discrimination, which resulted in Judge Frank M. Johnson’s angry 1961 order telling the Tuskegee registrars exactly who they would register and exactly where he would put them if they failed to obey him.

Blacks soon gained a political majority in Tuskegee, and in 1964 they elected the first black city councilmen. They had gained political power before the passage of the

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1965 Voting Rights Act, which for the South as a whole was the starting point for black political power.

But the triumph of democracy would be bittersweet for Gomillion. He was committed to interracialism, which meant in the 1960s he wanted to share power with whites in Tuskegee–even though they had refused all along to share power with him. Every February during the 1940s and 1950s, while the registrars were visiting one indignity after another on black people, Gomillion and his organization had held “Race Relations Sunday,” at which they observed the need for racial reconciliation. Usually no more than one or two whites showed up, but he kept at it year after year because he believed his community would be made better by the cooperation of blacks and whites.

Interracialism became a hard sell to some African-Americans in Tuskegee in the mid-1960s, because it seemed naive and unmanly to share power with segregationists. Gomillion was challenged by both local activists who wanted a turn at the throttle and Tuskegee Institute students who thought his interracialism was out of date, Uncle Tomish.

The challenge angered many older activists who felt unappreciated for their long years of work, but perhaps the least bothered was Gomillion. He saw that the times had turned against his leadership and he quietly stepped aside and watched Tuskegee become a black-run town by the early 1970s. That was when I met him and began to try to understand the meaning of his life.

It ultimately dawned on me that I thought of him in heroic terms–much like how I think of Abraham Lincoln. Gomillion was an American hero, a man who believed in something bigger than himself–the ideals of freedom, equality and democracy–and worked for them with no guarantee of success, no assurance of favor, no expectation of fame.

Charles Gomillion lived a long life and witnessed vast improvements in American race relations, but all his 95 years were seasons of conflict between blacks and whites, and they ended on a day I was depressed about race in America, the day after the O.J. Simpson verdict. My hero would not want me paralyzed by pessimism. “Keep ever-lastingly at it” is the message of his life.

Americans must keep at the business of improving race relations even as we endure one of our periodic surges of suspicion and alienation. Blacks and whites must act together and look for common ground, but with the understanding that we are unlikely ever to see things exactly alike.

There is no guarantee that race relations will get better tomorrow, and it’s a sure bet we won’t solve the problem. But the life of Charles Gomillion shows how we can face the future.

Robert J. Norrell is professor of history at the University of Alabama and author of Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee. He wrote this article for The Birmingham News.

Anne Romaine

By Gene Guerrero

Vol. 17, No. 3-4, 1995 pp. 15-17

On October 25, Anne Romaine died in Gastonia, North Carolina of complications from a burst appendix. She died about a week before she would have turned 53.

Anne was best known for her music. In 1966 she and former SNCC Freedom Singer Bernice Reagon, who now leads Sweet Honey in the Rock, founded the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project which for many years organized music tours of the South featuring grassroots black and white performers of traditional Southern music including Johnny Shines, Phyllis Boyens, Rev. Pearly Brown, Sparky Rucker, the Balfa Brothers, Ralph Stanley, Billy Ed Wheeler, the Georgia Sea Island Singers and Mabel Hillary. It was Anne who gave the legendary Nimrod Workman exposure on the national stage leading to his Smithsonian Institution appearances.

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Appropriately enough, there was music at her funeral from former Atlanta school board member Bob Waymer, and from Mike Seeger, Hazel Dickens, and Alice Gerrard, who served as mainstays of the Southern folk tour. Before they sang, Highlander Center’s Guy Carawan, who with his wife Candy has done as much as anyone to preserve and celebrate traditional Southern music, gave Anne the credit she deserves. While a lot of people talked about it, Carawan said, Anne actually collected together the South’s musical heritage and directly gave it back to thousands of Southerners through the folk tour and later through the “Grassroots Days” festivals she organized in Nashville’s Centennial Park. It wasn’t just music. It was music celebrating the struggles of Southerners for justice. Hazel Dickens later commented that it was on the folk tour that she was first able to sing music with a message.

Anne came by her music naturally. Her father was a successful lawyer who once served as a state senator and retired to an Arabian horse farm near Gastonia. His father had been a second-shift weaver at Cannon Mills in Kannapolis where his mother ran a beauty shop. Anne grew up playing the piano, singing “Sweet Hour of Prayer” in her church, and watching country music star Arthur Smith, who had a regular show on a Charlotte television station. In high school, Anne organized groups to sing the rock and roll music which swept the South just as it swept the rest of the country.

In the ninth grade Anne, like many churchgoing teenagers, decided to become a missionary. Unlike most, Anne, always driven and determined, did it. After spending a couple of years at Queens College in Charlotte, where she first took up the guitar and then dropped out of her sorority, Cookie, as she was know at Queens, took off for Moreila, Mexico where she worked in a mission hospital, played piano at devotionals, and assisted the minister in services. After graduation from Queens, Anne worked at the Arkansas Girls Reform School near Little Rock where she counselled young women and sang songs like “Will Your Lawyer Talk To God.” At the same time, like so many other white Southerners, she watched the 1964 Summer Project in nearby Mississippi wondering what she could do and if she should get involved.

Her chance came that fall when she enrolled in graduate school at the University of Virginia. She quickly fell in with a number of students who were active in local civil rights efforts and with the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC). She and Howard Romaine, who worked in the SSOC/SNCC White Folks Project during the Mississippi Summer Project, were married that year and spent the next summer in a student-organized voter registration project in Southside Virginia.

She and Howard then lived in Nashville in a tiny apartment next door to the SSOC house where Howard was on SSOC staff. On her own, Anne began to plan what became the folk tour. I was there in the SSOC house one day when Anne told us she had somehow gotten Johnny Cash’s telephone number. She wanted to talk with him to see what he thought of the folk tour idea, but she was nervous about calling him. We pushed her to make the call and a few minutes later she came back, bouncing up and down with excitement. Not only had she called Johnny Cash’s house, but Mother Maybelle Carter answered the phone and spoke with Anne for a long time, offering encouragement and assistance. Anne was off and running.

As she organized the folk tour, she also worked on her Masters from the University of Virginia. It was a history of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party largely compiled from lengthy oral interviews she conducted soon after that summer of 1964 with MFDP leaders. Many scholars consider her thesis one of the most valuable histories of that critical period of time.

Later, living in Nashville where she worked as a curator with the Tennessee State Museum, she met Roots author Alex Haley. She conducted extensive interviews with Haley and was finishing up a biography of him at the time of her death. She co-produced the 13-part “Carry It On” series on traditional music for PBS, wrote many songs, and recorded albums for Rounder and Flying Fish Records.

Eventually Anne moved back to Gastonia, helping to produce “The Uprising of ’34” documentary about the great Southern textile strike of that year, and giving seminars at the Gastonia History Museum. Next spring she planned a major traditional cultural festival in Chapel Hill where the archives of the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project are now located. At last year’s first Southern Student Organizing Committee reunion it was agreed that the second reunion ought to be held to coincide with the Chapel Hill festival.

For me, what was most moving about Anne’s funeral was not the past, but the present Anne was working to create when she died. One of the first to stand to pay tribute was David Moore, an African American man who said in remembering Anne it was important not to forget her work on race relations. He went on to describe their work together on a county task force on drugs and violence. Later a white minister, Rev. Skip Dunford who served with Anne on a Presbyterian anti-racism “Oneness Through Diversity” task force said, “everyone who knew Anne saw that when she was present she was a catalyst, a spark.” Rev. Dunford pledged that Anne’s lifetime of work for civil rights would continue.

Somehow, even as she travelled through middle age, Anne managed not only to be active, but to continue to play leadership roles–not just in music, or in history, or in “race relations;” but in all three. Her leadership makes it all the more tragic that she was struck down so young.

As she worked on the larger issues, she managed to touch individuals as well. Anita Norris became a close friend after Anne came to her, years ago, for a psychic consultation. Anne pushed Anita to go back to school. Anita did, recently earning a Masters in Social Work from Case Western University. She now works as a social worker in North Georgia hospices. After Anne’s death Anita said, “To the end she fought to be who she was. She made an impression on everybody she met. She was a sparkler. A Fourth of July sparkler.”

Yes she was.

Anne Romaine was one of the more than forty million people in the United States without health insurance. Founded in her memory, the Anne Romaine Memorial Fund supports organizing efforts for universal health care and health care justice in the South. Donations can be made by writing: Anne Romaine Memorial Fund, c/o Fund for Southern Communities, 522 Hill Street, SE, Atlanta, GA 30312.

Gene Guerrero worked with Anne Romaine in the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC) and on the Great Speckled Bird underground newspaper. For information about the second SSOC reunion write him at 7059 Eastern, Takoma Park, MD 20912.

The Light of Freedom

Remarks by Charles M. Payne

Vol. 17, No. 3-4, 1995 pp. 19-20

Editor’s note: The following essay is an edited version of Professor Payne’s remarks at the Lillian Smith Book Awards luncheon held in Atlanta on November 3. His book I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle was co-winner of the Smith Award for non-fiction.

Some very nice things have happened to me as a result of writing I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, but this is one of the nicest. The fact that the Lillian Smith Award comes from the Southern Regional Council, an institution rooted so deeply, so firmly in the history about which I am trying to write, makes it special for me. It also makes it special for me because I come wedged between two really remarkable pieces of scholarship.

The works I’m talking about specifically are last year’s winner, John Dittmer’s Local People, and this year’s co-winner, Adam Fairclough’s Race and Democracy. Those are just two startlingly good pieces of work. You have to read them together to see how they play off one another in order to fully appreciate them. One is clearly going to be for a long time the definitive work on the Louisiana movement, the other is clearly definitive on the Mississippi movement. I don’t see anything that can be produced in the near future that, taking the movement as a whole, can speak with such power. Again, I’m glad to be running in that kind of company.

What I think they have done, apart from the sub-stance of what they say about their respective movements, is ushered in a new methodology for studying the civil rights movement. It’s a framework of inquiry which is very different from what we’ve had before.

We are in the process of creating a stance in the scholarly world such that the people who actually made the history are being written back into it. It matters to those people and it matters to us that we understand the thousands of people it took–not simply the few celebrities and politicians and national civil rights leaders–to make that movement work. It matters that we understand the difficulties against which they worked, an under-standing which you don’t get if you simply look at a few national organizations and national leaders. It will be a long time before scholars feel comfortable sitting down and writing a top-down analysis of the civil rights movement again. The climate has changed.

It will be a long time before people write another serious work on the movement and not wonder: What were the Willie Peacocks doing? What were the Annie Divines doing? What were the Doris Jean Castles doing? What were the Lois Elliots doing? What were the people at the heart of the local movement doing? That question has been firmly established among scholars by the publication of these two books.

Professor Fairclough and Professor Dittmer also have established a climate in which we will not have segregated history. I actually think there are places in the world for segregated history, by which I mean books about black struggle which only talk about blacks. or books about the struggle which only talk about how whites were reacting to it and shaping the context of it. But part of the power of both of Local People and Race and Democracy is that they put those two things together. You see a dance between blacks and whites.

The publication of these two books also marks the end of what I think of as 1960s fetishism. It didn’t all happen in the sixties. John Dittmer’s book opens with a scene from the 1940s: Medgar Evers is just home from the war, he and his brother are going to register. Dittmer’s point is that if you want to understand Mississippi in ’63 when Evers was killed, you have to begin at least in ’46.

I learned as much about the Reconstruction period from Professor Fairclough’s book as I have from a great many books which are on Reconstruction. You cannot study the sixties as something in isolation from the long traditional African American struggle. And there are ways in which Connie Curry’s book might trump everybody on this one. Her Silver Rights [see Casey Hayden’s review in this issue of Southern Changes] takes one activist family from Sunflower County, Mississippi, and asks the ques-

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tion–and answers in such lovely detail: How over a generation does this family shape for itself an activist family culture? If you go back to the 1890s and the grandparents and the great-grandparents of the children who entered the Mississippi public schools in the 1960s–How can you from see family strengths flowing from generation to generation? No one does that part of the story better than Connie.

When you take that long view you get a sense of the value of sheer persistence. People would knock their heads against walls that did not seem to be moving, but they kept knocking and knocking and knocking until they got the response they wanted. And in these times when so little that is positive seems to be happening, one hopes that there’s a moral.

Finally, I hope these books will also represent the end of direct-action fetishism. As Professor Fairclough says, the traditional framing of the movement is that it happened between Montgomery and Selma; nothing be-fore that and very little after it. But within that broad framing there is an even more common frame: the movement happened between the Freedom Rides and Selma. So it’s the first half of the sixties that really capture our attention, and for obvious reasons. There’s so much drama, there’s so much obvious courage, there are so many twenty-second sound bytes. There is simply so much that is dramatic, it covers up and buries any sense of the nondramatic–what was happening when David Brinkley was not there. What that means is a return to asking questions about indigenous organizations.

What did unglamorous fraternal groups, such as black insurance companies, contribute to the shaping of the movement? Nothing that makes the nightly news. You have to look deeply into the organizational roots of the black community to understand what made the dynamism of the early sixties possible.

Another aspect of the end of direct-action fetishism is that these books are paying far more attention to the late sixties, far more detail and attention to the question of what actually came out of the struggle. At the ground level, what did the desegregation of schools mean in Louisiana and Mississippi? And of course, you come up with a real mixed message. A substantial part of the black middle class in Louisiana gets destroyed by the desegregation of the schools. An awful lot of principals and teachers lose their jobs. The relationship between a great many black communities and schools in which they felt a sense of ownership, a sense of pride was severed. When you go through the role that the federal government played in undermining some of the most important community initiatives in the late 1960s, it’s still inexcusable and still barely understood. I refer you to Professor Dittmer’s discussion of the Child Development Group of Mississippi, and what Washington did to them.

It makes you cautious about getting into celebratory history. What I mean by celebratory history are those–and there were a lot of these last year for the thirtieth anniversary of Freedom Summer–in which some volunteer was going back to Sunflower County, Mississippi, or wherever it happened, and they were talking about “My gosh, we can eat at the Holiday Inn” and “My gosh, so-and-so’s child is now the police chief . . . and I just wouldn’t have believed that in nineteen–” And there’s a place for that; if you lived through those times and you go back after two or three decades, you cannot help but be impressed. But understand what it is you are saying. You are saying that after decades of hard struggle, after the loss of many lives, black people can now do things that all Americans have taken for granted since day one. I mean there’s something which you can celebrate, but you also have to be very cautions about over-celebration. You’re just getting to the starting line–that’s all that’s happening here. The more clearly you understand the ambiguous payoff of the movement that came in the late 1960s, the more firmly you can guard against celebratory history.

What is all of this going to mean? Darned if I know. It’s clear that scholars like Dittmer and Fairclough are calling for a longer view of the movement, a deeper view of the movement, a more complicated sense of what the movement was about. It’s absolutely clear to me that for most black Americans, I think for a great many Southerners, and great many Americans of a certain generation and period, the primary metaphor for social change in this century is the civil rights movement. That was a time when we think we got something done, a time when we think ordinary folks like ourselves were able to weigh in the scale of history.

If this scholarship is eventually going to have the impact that one hopes outside the academy, one other thing that may happen as we complicate people’s visions of one of their primary metaphors for how social change is made, is that they will be able to take more and more effective routes towards reaching for some kind of change. Their ability to analyze the situation and their ability to help us move out of that situation may be increased by these increasingly complicated analyses of how people have made change in the past. That’s a completely self-serving thing for a scholar to say, cause it implies that the work you do matters.

But it’s a thing that we can hope for. And it’s my sense that it is with just such hope and amid just such hope, the Southern Regional Council was born in the 1940s. So it seems appropriate for us to continue to renew our hope some fifty years later.

Charles M. Payne is Associate Professor of African American Studies, Sociology, and Education, and a fellow of the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University.

Meet Wendy S. Johnson, SRC’s New Executive Director

Staff

Vol. 17, No. 3-4, 1995 p. 21

Wendy S. Johnson, former executive director of the Appalachian Community Fund, comes to the Southern Regional Council with a record of fifteen years leading effective and strategic nonprofit programs in the region.

Johnson served first as an appointed member and then, in 1979, as executive director of the Human Rights Commission of Bowling Green, Kentucky, (her hometown) where she made effective use of the Commission’s powers to take complaints, determine probable cause, and hold administrative hearings on allegations of discrimination in employment and housing.

Seeking new arenas to expand her involvement in pushing for equity, Johnson joined Southeast Women’s Employment Coalition to lead a newly created project on non-traditional employment and eventually served as SWEC executive director. A coalition of women leaders organized to assist and support challenges to systemic race and sex discrimination in the South and Appalachia, SWEC held that economic opportunity was at the heart of this struggle for justice. Through organizing, advocacy, and effective use of the administrative complaint system and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, SWEC documented and changed employment policies and practices which adversely impacted low income black and white women.

A commitment to build the resources necessary for successful community-based projects led Johnson to her post as executive director of the Appalachian Community Fund. Through the ACF, a community foundation established to bring financial and technical assistance to organizing and advocacy work, she helped build support for numerous grassroots projects in the Appalachian counties of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia.

As co-chair of the National Network of Grantmakers, an organization with a membership of individuals involved in a broad spectrum of grantmaking interests, from individual donors to the staff and trustees of foundations–both large and small, private and public, corporate and community Johnson has worked to promote diversity in philanthropy, as well as exchange information and strategies about social change fundraising and grantmaking between donors and activists.

From ACF, the transition to SRC “embodies all the dynamics for one to try to live in a world that develops full potential and equity,” says Johnson. “I am ready to put my shoulder to this work, to join with other folks who have stake in this organization to shape a strong future role, as we continue to work for fairness, equity, and basic human rights.”

BOOKS:
Shining in Sunflower
Reviewed by Casey Hayden

Vol. 17, No. 3-4, 1995 pp. 22-23

Silver Rights by Constance Curry (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1995, 258 pages).

In the dialect of local black Mississippians in the Freedom Movement of the 1960s, civil rights were “silver rights.” This book is the story of one family who went after those rights.

Matthew and Mae Bertha Carter, sharecroppers in Sunflower County in the Mississippi Delta, and parents of thirteen children, sent their kids to the white schools in Drew in 1965. They did so because the black schools didn’t operate all year, closing twice to allow black children to chop down the weeds in the cotton fields and then pick the cotton. And the black schools were inferior; Matthew and Mae Bertha Carter knew that because they went to segregated schools themselves. Drew was known among civil rights workers as one of the most dangerous towns in the state.

Immediately upon the Carters’ making their intentions known, the plantation overseer drove up in front of their home and honked. Matthew looked out her front window and said over his shoulder to Mae Bertha, “It’s started.” Matthew went out to talk to the overseer. Mae Bertha put their old phonograph on a chair on her porch and played a record of John Kennedy’s 1963 speech in support of a civil rights bill. She turned it up loud.

The overseer sent Matthew in to talk some sense into her and Mae Bertha said, “You tell Mr. Thornton I am a grown woman. I birthed those children and bore the pain. 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,” said Matthew, “I’m not going to tell him all that.” But Matthew Carter did tell Mr. Thornton they weren’t moving their children.

What follows is a story of terror and nobility of character. In its intimacy Silver Rights brings to mind James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. But Connie Curry’s book is a product of its time. At its center is the love and trust between Curry and the Carters. As field secretary for the American Friends Service Committee during the 1960s and ’70s, Connie supported this family throughout their struggle. She draws not only from her weekly correspondence with Mae Bertha Carter, but on intensely honest and beautifully edited oral inter-

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views with the whole family (see “Son Ham’s Hat” in Southern Changes, Spring 1992, and “A Right to Be There,” Fall 1992).

Agee wrote about his characters, but Connie writes with her friends. And where Agee embroidered, Connie pares away. She knows these words and facts hold their own power. It’s a deceptively slender book. Woven around the story are glimpses into numerous underreported areas of African American, Southern, and Movement history. We learn of the work of many devoted organizations and individuals in support of the Carters during their years of struggle.

We experience the personal meaning of Mississippi education statistics, rural sharecropper economics, and the way cotton bolls cut your fingers when you pick. We learn about the American Friends Service Committee with its person-to-person, no-nonsense style, as well as the other predominantly white religious groups which supported the frontline civil rights organizations. We witness the impact of the organizing work of SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party on a single family. We follow the lives of the Carter children that result from their courage in integrating all-white schools. The era appears in human scale and in microcosm.

Marion Wright Edelman, who wrote the substantial introduction to Silver Rights, suggests that we hold the Carter family in our hearts. I find I do, without effort, especially Mrs. Mae Bertha Carter, splendid in her fear and courage.

The first day Mrs. Carter sent her children off on the school bus to the white schools, she felt sick, and she lay on her bed all day and prayed. But when the kids came home from school, that day and every day, their parents were there to talk it over, to help their children process the heavy load of loneliness and insult the children were carrying, to come through without hatred or self-destruction. Despite all the support and later accolades, and despite the wider life that opened to her as a result of the decision she and Mr. Carter made, it was a hard row Mae Bertha Carter had to hoe: lonely, long, loving, and shining like silver in the sun. Silver Rights will light your path.

Casey Hayden entered the Southern movement during the 1960 sit-ins and worked with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee during the same period Connie Curry worked with AFSC.

Rendering Wallace

Reviewed by Steve Suitts

Vol. 17, No. 3-4, 1995 pp. 24-27

The Politics of Rage: George Wallace and the Transformation of American Politics, by Dan T. Carter (Simon and Schuster, 1995, 572 pages).

Beginning in Clio, Alabama (evoking the name of the Greek muse of history), and ending not too distantly in the future, George Wallace’s life seemingly has been destined to be one of the grand morality plays of American politics, full of human pathos, the rough pageantry of consumptive ambition, and the ironies of forgiven mortal sins. His is also an essentially Southern story, one in which losers like him–be they good or evil–have more to tell us about ourselves and our times than many of the victors of our national history.

Now, with the arrival of The Politics of Rage: George Wallace and the Transformation of American Politics, Southern historian Dan ‘F. Carter has captured the essence of this tragedy in an easily readable, remarkably insightful biography of both Wallace and “Wallaceism,” recreating how the man and his movement “to stand up for America” reshaped the language and limits of today’s American political system. Seldom has a living politician’s biography explained so clearly, so convincingly, both the person’s complex nature and his unacknowledged, en-during influence on national life. And, like relatives enjoying a dishonorable inheritance about which they never speak, rarely have the heirs of a politician’s achievements been so reluctant to admit the source of their legacy.

As in most worthy biographies, Carter’s book begins by exploring how Wallace’s formative years, spent as a poor white amid a rural, south Alabama county that was largely black, poor, and profoundly segregated, helped to shape his sense of the world. Despite a few choppy transitions in this early chapter (I bet from the hands of an impatient commercial book editor insisting that readers always want to get to the juicy stuff quickly), the rendering is nonetheless lively and persuasive. Wallace came of age during the Depression under the strict, watchful eye of a mother who, by default, reared her children virtually alone. As a boy, George excelled at boxing, although he played other competitive sports. “We were fighters because we went through a period of time when we fought to exist,” Wallace recalled. Yet, as insistent as the hard times in Barbour County was a tradition of white supremacy, assumed whenever necessary over the decades with force or violence, by both the county’s “best” and lowliest citizens.

By the time Wallace went to the University of Alabama during the Roosevelt era, his combative nature was mated with a love of politics–and its opportunities to cajole, entice, and excite people to believe in him. In campus politics, as a flunky in Montgomery, and later as a state legislator from Clio, Wallace coalesced and supported a wide range of politicians who held nothing in common but public office. He ran errands for a crusty, old reactionary legislator; associated with hill country Republicans (including Frank M. Johnson, later a fearless, faithful federal judge whom Wallace condemned in personal terms for more than thirty years); and within eight consecutive years supported the policies of both a conservative governor and “Big Jim” Folsom, one of Alabama’s few liberal governors. If Wallace had a political philosophy, it was simply whatever people wanted to vote for. As Carter expertly reminds us, Wallace’s passionate ambition throughoutthoughout [sic] his career was winning votes, charming

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and seducing voters, receiving the wholehearted adulation of those who did not know him. Not the ideology of segregation or oppression, not the lust for power nor the seediness of greed, but his unsatisfied hunger for others’ boundless, unreasonable admiration seemed the fuel for his prodigious, combative journey toward the highest offices in Alabama and the nation.

When George Wallace ran for governor in 1958 in Alabama, he was barely able to support his family, whom he saw infrequently, even before the all-consuming race began. After his loss, he was penniless, bitter, and exhausted. His marriage was at best a formality; his family an afterthought. Yet, on the night of his defeat he was already preparing another race in four years, as he vowed to friends that no one would ever “out-nigger” him again in politics. Over the next ten years, Wallace made good on his promise.

After winning the governor’s seat in 1962 on a campaign of “Vote right, vote white, vote for the fighting judge,” and staging soon afterwards his masterful, nationally televised “stand in the schoolhouse door,” George Wallace quickly became the leading spokesman against racial integration across the South and, increasingly, the nation. With small contributions from millions and the large donations of a few of America’s wacky wealthy like Bunker Hunt of Texas (who believed that civil rights was a communist plot), Wallace ran for president in 1964,1968, and again in 1972, until Arthur Bremer, a deranged white man seeking a moment of personal infamy, crippled Wallace for life with pistol shots at close range. In 1964, as the South’s most popular politician, Wallace won more than 30 per-cent of the votes in Democratic primaries in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland. In 1968, as an independent candidate, he received more than ten million votes; in 1972, he won Democratic primaries in Florida, Indiana, Michigan, and Maryland before his permanent paralysis ended an active candidacy.

Back in 1962, after Wallace’s inaugural speech as governor pledging “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” Martin Luther King, Jr. warned the American public that “Wallaceism is much bigger than Wallace.” King’s prophetic words came to pass within ten years, as Wallaceism reshaped the nature of American politics. Frequently on national television, in interview programs and on the news as a presidential candidate, as well as in countless campaign rallies and campus speeches, Wallace defended segregation and racial discrimination as matters of “states rights,” “law and order,” and “anti-communism,” as had most segregationists before him. But George Wallace did something far more potent, far more damaging: he also convinced millions of whites, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon, that they, not segregated black folks, were the victims of a misdirected society.

Condemning “permissiveness,” crime, busing, big government, Godlessness, and briefcase-toting bureaucrats with their “racial quotas,” George Wallace found the modern code for the language of social issues–language and issues that allowed a significant number of whites, especially men, not only to escape the reckoning of their consciences about racism, but also to blame blacks for creating society’s real problems without ever once mentioning the word “nigger.” Wallace also rehearsed how to harness religious fundamentalism in politics through his direct mailings and his own rallies, which often included the techniques of a Billy Graham crusade or church revival.

It was this emerging Wallaceism, Carter carefully documents, which led Richard Nixon to fear that George Wallace, more than almost anyone else, could topple his ambitions for Republican hegemony. Between 1968 and 1972, Nixon watched Wallace carefully and whenever possible, by illegal campaign contributions or IRS investi-

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gations, attempted to ruin him. During the presidential campaigns, Nixon skillfully shifted his own rhetoric, tactics, and policies in order to incorporate the emerging Wallaceism without Wallace–a political packaging that provided most of America’s white voters with an even more attractive seduction. While Wallace, the presidential candidate, made racism feel virtuous with his coded language of social issues and blame-the-nameless-blacks, the national press and television kept capturing Wallace, as an Alabama politician, making direct racist appeals at home–a political expediency that helped to keep the governor’s chair and state government as the base for his national campaigns.

For some of us who lived in Alabama during these times, this particular duplicity hardly seemed to rank among George Wallace’s sins. Another deception was far more damning and dangerous. For while Wallace often spoke both at home and across America consistently about “states rights” and “law and order,” his state government in the 1960’s was focused on only one objective: to preserve segregation at any cost, including the lawless and unnecessary injury of hundreds of peaceful protesters and the lives of more than a dozen civil rights workers and black children–all victims of shootings and bombings which Wallace and the state police explicitly condoned, attempted to ignore, blamed on outsiders or civil rights workers, or worse. Finally, in Carter’s work, we have documented what some of us suspected at that time–that Wallace’s men, including the head of the state police, worked to keep killers from being caught or convicted for these offenses. What we already knew, and what Carter illustrates, is that George Wallace encouraged the violent hate groups and nurtured the climate of lawlessness in Alabama, from which despicable white men could and did kill without remorse or even a real public accounting for their crimes. Wallace was also among the first of the Southern governors to set up state spy organizations using police surveillance, planned mischief, and public pressure to keep local citizens from challenging his administration’s policies. Sadly, this kind of gross abuse of power was something that neither George Wallace nor Richard Nixon needed to learn from anyone.

Over the last two decades, in the long, irregular shadows of Watergate, these misdeeds of George Wallace have been all but forgotten, as Wallace the politician has faded away. In fact, a biography by Steven Lesher published last year blindly, extravagantly reconceived Wallace as the political godfather of both Republican conservatives and Southern moderates like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, remembering Wallace’s role as a Southern segregationist as if he was just a choir boy following the music sheets of history (see Southern Changes, Spring 1994). Wallaceism, however, has survived and grown. The recent heirs to Wallaceism–Ronald Reagan, Ralph Reed of the Christian Coali-

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tion, and Newt Gingrich, among others–have created a much more polished imagery, one in which both the coded words and the politician’s own fashionable style go down well at the country club and the Lions Club, although many of the symbolic terms (“welfare cheats,” “permissiveness,” etc.) remain the same; moreover, the heirs of Wallaceism like Ralph Reed have attempted shamelessly to disown their lineage by turning history on its head and claiming, as their own, the legacy of Martin Luther King instead of George Wallace.

Ironically, George Wallace also separated himself from Wallaceism after 1972. Confined to a wheel chair, often in deep pain, Wallace sought out civil rights leaders to tell them he was sorry for what he did, while repeating assurances that he never was really against blacks. In 1974 and again in 1982, unable to extinguish his need for mass approval, Wallace ran for governor seeking and receiving substantial black support despite both his in-ability and disinterest in governing a state. Left with no better choice on the ballot than an old reformed seg who at least knew how to please “them that brung him,” Alabama’s black voters were willing to forgive, if not forget. Hence, in the twilight of his public career, ignored by the heirs of his political legacy, George Wallace was embraced by the people whom he once oppressed.

In September of this year, in a published interview with John F. Kennedy, Jr., George Wallace stated that he has asked God to forgive his sins, although when pressed to name an act for which he might need forgiveness, Wallace showed a moment of his old spirit: “I tell my sins to God, not to people like you,” he replied to Kennedy. Wallace also repeated like a daily prayer his claim that, while he mistakenly fought to preserve segregation, never was he against black folks and never has he sought to be forgiven by any mortal for any of his past.

It is as if George Wallace wants others to confess their forgiveness of his sins, without anyone here on earth ever undertaking a strict accounting of them. There may still be something left, after all, of the old political alchemist who gave so many Americans a way to forgive and forget their own racial sins, and of the man who sought the distant adulation of multitudes and the genuine love of almost no one. It is, in any event, an act of moral vainglory that ought to be granted in the presence of a helpless, tortured old man who is so near his own final judgment.

Yet, when that day comes, if St. Peter’s accounting of the life of George Wallace and of Wallaceism resembles the one that Dan Carter has so scrupulously given us, George Wallace and his political heirs can hope only that God will have mercy on their souls since the muse of history surely cannot.

A native of Alabama, Steve Suitts was executive director of the Southern Regional Council until earlier this year when he began his status as a Southern ne’er-do-well under-taking independent research and writing