Rethinking Race and Poverty in the Global South

By Barbara Ellen Smith

Vol. 20, No. 2, 1998 pp. 3-4

The borders of the South are collapsing. The forces of globalization are reconfiguring demographics, workplaces, and-not just in Miami or Atlanta, but in Tunica, Mississippi; Big Stone Gap, Tennessee; and Kannapolis, North Carolina.

Among the most significant of these changes regards race: increasingly, we no longer confront a singular divide between Black and white, but a multivalent complex of “new” and “old” races. People from diverse nations and cultures are relocating to the South; those from Spanish-speaking countries find themselves newly identified as “Latino,” and are the fastest growing minority in many areas. Others from the many nationalities and ethnicities of Asia further diversify the racial demographics of some states, becoming “Asian American.”

This is not to suggest that the historic legacy of African-American exploitation and poverty is no longer significant; quite the opposite. The new racial configurations could undermine Black voting strength and the fragile political coalitions that have been built in some areas. They threaten to inflame overt racial antagonism among white Southerners as well as Black, who see their neighborhoods and workplaces increasingly populated with new racial groups, especially Latinos. They raise difficult political questions about who should be eligible for minority set-aside programs, affirmative action, and other race-specific remedies that were designed to address African-American disfranchisement and dispossession.

In Memphis, Tennessee, for example, where Black political power is recent and bitterly won, the African-American mayor met several months ago with a newly formed group of Latino business leaders. They sought access to the minority set-aside program for municipal contracts. Mayor W.W. Herenton was, to say the least, not receptive to their proposal.

Globalization of the South also carries profound implications for the origins and racial character of poverty. For more than three centuries, the South’s political economy has depended on the racialized exploitation of Black labor – whether as slaves, sharecroppers, or workers limited to bottom-rung jobs in the system of Jim Crow. One of the most perverse, cruel ironies of this post-Jim Crow, post-industrial era is the elimination of that longstanding (although racially subordinated) incorporation of working-class African Americans in the South’s economy. Now we see the deracination of working-class Black Southerners from any legitimate and secure economic role at all. Since 1950, the proportion of African-American men who are not in the labor force has risen by more than 50 percent in the South. Increasingly, the problem is not the discrimination of a rigid job ladder that relegates Black workers to the bottom rungs, but the operation of a global economy that pushes Black workers off the ladder altogether.

The far-reaching implications of globalization challenge our most basic concepts and assumptions about race and poverty. They require us to rethink even the words we use to discuss these twin issues.

“Race,” for example, has acquired a fixity that these global forces undermine. Not only do we tend to think of race as referring primarily to Black and white, we also think of it as a self-evident characteristic that we all possess in one form or another. But the processes whereby new races are at this very moment being created remind us that race is not inborn. “Native Americans” from the Yucatan do not define themselves as Latino or Hispanic – but they ironically become so through the processes of racialization at work in the United States. Their experiences, and those of the many other immigrant groups new to the South, reveal that race is not fixed and obvious, a product of birth, but something we make and re-make every day.

These processes of racialization and diversification also remind us that white is just as much a racial category as Black or brown. To be white is not to be merely “normal;” it is to be racially privileged. Being white can include unemployment, homelessness, sex discrimination for white women, and a host of other systematic disadvantages; on the matter of skin color, however, it involves unearned power and privilege. As long as we conceptualize race as an unfortunate label that applies only to African Americans, or even to diverse people of color, we fail to recognize it as a dynamic social relationship in which all are implicated.

Finally, these reconfigurations make it clear that race does not create fixed and monolithic groups. Even as globalization dispossesses working-class Southerners of all races, the new international division of labor rewards those knowledgeable workers who have the requisite education and skills. As a result, the gulf of class widens within racial groups.

Gender also is emerging as a more recognized distinction. The problems and opportunities facing women and men of the same race are not the same. Black women are not being thrown into prison at nearly the rates of Black

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men; conversely, Black men are not stigmatized as lazy welfare queens. Among Latinos, immigration appears to be heaviest among adult males, who are separated from their families-a pattern with many social implications for the Southern communities where they live. The overall point is that complex intra- as well as inter-racial dynamics and divisions are increasingly evident.

Globalization also requires rethinking our understanding of poverty in the South. Despite the momentous forces at work redistributing economic opportunity and disadvantage all over the world, our thinking about poverty is small, even petty-trapped in a language of pathology and an associated politics of blame. We have so individualized and moralized poverty that the fundamental issue-lack of economic power and resources-has been eliminated from the national debate.

We have arrived at the bizarre point where single motherhood has become both a synonym for poverty and an emblem of moral deficiency. This is not to deny the obvious arithmetic: two wage-earners will tend to make more than one. The point is that marital status and other morally-loaded individual attributes are used to characterize the poor as a whole, distinguishing them from upright, tax-paying citizens (and the truly rich who, as we all know, work very hard, always pay their taxes and never sleep around). Through this topsy-turvy logic, marital status has come to function as a stand-in for economic, or class status.

The issue is not moral inequality, however, but economic inequality. Indeed, we might do well to stop using the term “poverty” altogether, for the concept has been so appropriated by a right-wing definition of the issue. Poverty is a descriptive term that has come to connote an individual misfortune or deficiency that has nothing to do with those who are better off. But people are poor only in relation to those who have greater wealth; indeed, in some cases, people are poor because other people have great wealth. We should perhaps speak instead of economic inequality or, in some instances, class inequality.

When we conceptualize the issue as economic inequality, we begin moving toward an analysis of social relationships and root causes, rather than a description of misfortunes for which the poor are routinely blamed. We move the level of analysis away from individual characteristics, toward regional economic forces that are increasingly linked with those of the globe. How else are we to understand the presence of Somali refugees in the low-wage work force of rural Mississippi’s casinos? Or the new forms of disfranchisement and dispossession experienced by Mexican immigrants who work in North Carolina’s poultry plants under a cloud of suspicion and insecurity regarding their legal status?

Naming the problem as economic inequality also moves us away from an exclusive political focus on the ensemble of anti-poverty programs that are a fading legacy of the New Deal and Great Society. As long as our political energy and analysis concentrate on the terrain of social welfare, we risk missing the larger landscape of economic policy where much of the real action takes place. Defining the issue as economic inequality makes it clear that we need to address free trade, monetary policy, the tax structure, minimum wage – all the meat and potatoes of national and international economic policy.

Globalization is transforming the nature of race and poverty-indeed, the very character of the South itself. That does not mean that we can no longer speak of the South, for our distinctive past ensures that we will be dealing with the legacies of Southernness for some time to come. However, we are in the throes of momentous flux and instability. Global change raises troubling new questions, but it also signals new possibilities for intervention. Immigration and diversification open up the fixity of the Black-white divide, creating new potential for coalition-building. Growing economic inequality suggests new possibilities for class-based movements. A global future is upon us. What will we make of it?

Barbara Ellen Smith is director of the Memphis Center on Women at the University of Memphis.

One in Three Poor Children in America Lives in the South

Children’s Defense Fund

Vol. 20, No. 2, 1998 pp. 5-9

Memphis, Tennessee – Despite a booming national economy and budget surpluses in fifteen Southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia) a new Children’s Defense Fund report reveals that one-fourth of Southern children (5.5 million) remain poor. Half of them-2.6 million-live in extreme poverty with family incomes below half the federal poverty line. This means a family of three has to survive on cash income below $120 a week or $5.75 a person a day.

“This is not enough to feed, clothe, house, and educate a child,” said CDF President Marian Wright Edelman at an action forum on Children, Race & Poverty held May 4-5 at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis where Dr. King was assassinated in 1968.

“It is shameful that thirty years after Dr. King spent his final days fighting for better jobs, wages, education, and health care for children and families, child poverty rates in the South remain the same: 22.3 percent. Equally disturbing is the fact that the rest of the nation is ‘catching up’ with the South.”

Rising Inequity: Nation “Catching Up” with South

The CDF report, The High Price of Poverty for Children of the South, authored by Arloc Sherman, says the child poverty rate for all U.S. children in families jumped nearly 50 percent between 1969 and 1996-from 14 to 20 percent. In fact, 1996 marked the first time that the South no longer surpassed other sections of the U.S. in the number of children who live in poverty. The West’s child poverty rate is the same as the Southern child poverty rate.

“Something is wrong in America when, in 1996, the number of very poor people who live below half the poverty line (a mere $8,018 for a family of four) increased, while the current income of households in the top five percent increased by $12,500 and when Fortune 500 CEOs averaged $7.8 million each in total compensation which exceeds the average salaries of 226 school teachers a year,” Edelman added.

Although the high child poverty rates once unique to the South have now spread to other sections of the country, the South continues to have most of the nation’s worst pockets of poverty. Of the 100 poorest counties for children, 84 of them are located in the South. In these counties child poverty rates range from 43.7 percent in Val Verde County, Texas to 65 percent in Owsley County, Kentucky, the county with the highest proportion of poor children in America in 1993.

Rural counties (those outside a metropolitan area) account for seventy-nine of the eighty-four counties with very high child poverty. Because rural areas often have less expensive housing than other areas, it is reasonable to ask whether these counties are as poor as they seem. Although the Census Bureau is currently studying ways to adjust for geographical differences in cost of living, the present poverty definition relies on a single set of poverty thresholds, which are applied nationwide without adjustments for local variations in the cost of living.

The best available information on county-by-county cost differences, however, suggests that the cost of living in the South’s high-poverty counties is not dramatically different from the nation as a whole.

Wide Racial Gaps Remain

Although half of the poor children in the South are white, racial gaps in poverty rates remain wide. Black children in Southern families today are two and one-half times more likely than their white counterparts to be poor. This racial gap has eased only slightly from three decades ago, when the child poverty rate for Black children was three times higher.

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Since 1969, Southern poverty rates have risen slightly for white children in families (from about 13 percent to about 16 percent in 1996) and fallen for Black children in families (from about 49 percent in 1969 to 40 percent in 1996). These poverty rates by race now resemble the nation as a whole.

Because Black children account for an especially large share of all children in the South, however, Black children make up a large share of poor Southern children as well. Nearly as many poor Southern children are Black (2.5 million in 1996) as are white (2.8 million). In other sections of the U.S. by contrast, poor White children outnumber poor Black children by three to one.

Overlapping these racial comparisons, Census Bureau figures show that more than 1 million poor children in the South are Hispanic. The high poverty of Hispanic children in Southern families (36 percent) is approaching that of Black children. In Census data, Hispanic children may be of any race and most are classified as white. The large number of poor Hispanic children is due in part to the inclusion of Texas in the Census Bureau’s definition of the South.

Poverty Causes Child Hunger

Child poverty profoundly affects the healthy development and educational success of Southern children. Thanks in great measure to federal food stamps and child nutrition programs, starvation has abated. But hunger is still present in the South. More than 1.2 million Southern households (4.3 percent) experienced hunger in 1995 according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Another 3 million Southern households lacked secure access to food but did not have all the signs of hunger.

The nation’s highest rates of hunger were in the Southeastern states of Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee, as well as in the Pacific states of Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington.

Recent changes in welfare policy may make hunger worse for families with children. Among 411 families who had recently lost cash assistance in one Southern state, a 1997 government survey found that 27 percent had been

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unable to buy food at some point in the past, usually since losing benefits. In fact, families were twice as likely to have had problems buying food after losing welfare (15.3 percent) than when they still received welfare (6.6 percent). A later survey had similar findings.

More Southern Children Lack Health Insurance

Besides having the deepest poverty and most hunger, the South is home to the highest number and percentage of uninsured children of all four sections of the United States. One out of six children in the South (18.6 percent, or 4.8 million children) was without any form of health insurance or Medicaid in 1996. This proportion is higher than for the nation, where one child in seven (15.1 percent) lacks insurance.

Looked at another way, 42 percent of all uninsured children live in the South, even though those states contain only 34 percent of all U.S. children. The lack of insurance for Southern children is largely accounted for by the lack of private coverage offered by employers. Fully 38.5 percent of Southern children lacked private health insurance, compared with 33.6 percent of children nationwide.

South Adopts Harshest Welfare Policies

Since passage of the 1996 welfare law, the number of children and parents receiving welfare assistance across the nation has dropped by 20 percent. Some of the deepest caseload declines have been in the South where the caseload fell by more than 27 percent from August 1996 to September 1997, representing close to one milllion people no longer receiving assistance.

The new law provides states considerable flexiblity in designing welfare programs, and the Southern states have typically chosen the most restrictive policies in terms of child care assistance, education and job training options, time limits on eligibility for benefits, and sanctions for failure to comply with program rules. Benefit levels in the South have also consistently been lower than the rest of the nation. Moreover, although Southern states have a higher proportion of poor children than the rest of the nation, ten of the these states provide welfare benefits to smaller proportions of those poor children than the national average.

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Working Parents Earn Below-Poverty Wages

Despite strong job growth in much of the South-the numbers of employed Southerners grew 54 percent faster than in the rest of the nation between 1990 and 1997-this section of the U.S. continues to suffer a disproportionate concentration of jobs paying below-poverty wages. More than one in four working parents in the South (28 percent) earn hourly wages that cannot lift a four person family out of poverty, a higher proportion than in the rest of the nation (23 percent).

Most Southern poor families are working families. More than seven out of ten poor families with children in the South (72 percent) were working families in 1995, enduring poverty despite having at least one member who worked part-time during the year. Working poor families are even more common in the South than in the rest of the nation, where they comprise six out of ten poor families with children (61 percent).

Education Key to Income Disparities

In the South and across the nation, a fundamental split is emerging among America’s families-the widening gap in earnings between parents with and without a college education.

“During the 1980s, [Southern] workers with a high school diploma or less saw their real earnings stagnate or decline,” notes a 1996 report by North Carolina-based MDC, Inc. At the same time, Southern workers “with four years or more of college posted significant gains in earnings.” This growing gap by education level is found throughout the nation. As a result, more and more workers without a college education are left with earnings too low to lift a family of four out of poverty.

Making matters worse in the South, young adults generally continue to receive less education in the South than elsewhere. In March 1996, the proportion of 25- to 34-years olds who had not completed high school was greater in the West (18 percent) than in the South (14 percent) But for every other age group, the South had a lower high school completion rate than any other section of the U.S – West, Midwest, or Northeast. College completion rates among 25- to 34- year-olds were lowest in the South as well.

Southern Child Poverty Costs $50 Billion A Year

The damage to Southern children caused by each additional year of poverty at current levels is likely to have a substantial effect on the regional economy. CDF projects that, for every year that 5.5. million Southern children experience poverty, the amount they will later produce in the workplace will decline by about $50 billion, measured in 1996 dollars.

How large is $50 billion? This amount is larger than the total annual personal income the South received in 1995 from all farming plus the entire regional automotive industry and electronics industry combined. Moreover,

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the estimate of $50 billion is conservative in that it excludes other costs of child poverty to the Southern economy, such as poor children’s greater likelihood of repeated schooling, medical expenditures arising from chronic disability, and crime.

The $50 billion estimate was derived from similarly shocking nationwide cost estimates made by CDF, with the assistance of leading scholars including Nobel-prize winning economist Robert M. Solow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As detailed in CDF’s report Poverty Matters, the American labor market as a whole stands to lose as much as $130 billion in future productive capacity for every year that 14.5 million American children continue to live in poverty. The $50 billion estimate represents the South’s share of the $130 billion national total, based on the South’s proportionate share of children in poverty.

This $50 billion estimate marks the first attempt ever to calculate the costs of child poverty in the South. The projection does not attempt to take into account certain details specific to the Southern economy, such as the South’s greater proportion of poor children living below one-half of the offical poverty line, nor the South’s generally lower lifetime earnings compared to the national average. More detailed calculations that took account of these features might result in either a slightly higher or slightly lower estimate of poverty’s true costs.

What is clear is that all segments of Southern society share in paying the costs of children’s poverty – and would share in the gains if child poverty is eliminated. The costs of poverty will likely spill over to employers and consumers, making it harder for businesses to expand technology, train workers, or shoppers to buy a full range of high-quality products.

Moreover, these estimates of lost productivity do not include additional costs of poverty that will be borne by schools, hospitals, and taxpayers, as poor children are held back in school and require special education and tutoring; fail to earn and contribute as much in taxes; experience a lifetime of heightened medical problems and reliance on social services; and are exposed to problems like lead poisoning and family breakdown that in turn contribute to future crime.

Corridor of Change: Rob Amberg Photographs the Coming of I-26

Samuel Gray

Vol. 20, No. 2, 1998 pp. 10-13

In 1994, the state of North Carolina began construction of a seven-mile section of road in northeastern Madison County, North Carolina, that will eventually complete an Interstate highway link (I-26) between the Ohio Valley and the South Atlantic Coastal region. The completed highway will be a twenty-first century version of an ancient trans-montane corridor that possesses abiding historical significance. On the North Carolina side of the mountains, the route joins the legendary “Drovers Road,” the early nineteenth century trading path that connected Western North Carolina and East Tennessee mountains to low-country markets.

At that time, the road followed the fabled French Broad River in a tortuous route that was subject to scouring by flood waters every few years. In the Civil War era, this region was the scene of numerous atrocities and skirmishes that characterized a complex border region at war. Located in the geographic heart of the Confederacy, the mountain farmers of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee possessed few slaves and scant sympathies for the Southern cause. The result was a bloody war within the greater war that left indelible scars on the mountain communities.

In the later 1800s, the region’s scenic beauty attracted tourists arriving by train and stagecoach from Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, and Richmond, who were as often entranced by the “otherness” of the southern mountaineers as by the scenery. Travel descriptions of the gracious hotels and rugged country north of Asheville became a popular literary genre around the turn of the century. The tourists were followed by missionary ladies and folklorists. The rural, isolated quality of these predominantly Scotch-Irish communities made the area a rich trove of traditional craft, music, and story from the settlement period to the present. Francis Goodrich, a teacher from Ohio, organized the first of many cottage industry cooperatives for mountain craftswomen at Allan’s Stand along the Drovers Road in 1895. Cecil Sharpe first collected ballads in the area in 1916. He documented a folk music tradition that stretched back into eighteenth century England and continues to thrive today.

The construction of the interstate highway through this mountain corridor portends drastic economic and social changes for indigenous populations of plants, animals, and humans. The road will slice through family farms, pure springs, rural communities, orchards, creeks, and wildlife habitats. One church will be relocated and the graves in three cemeteries exhumed for reburial. Entire mountains will be moved, altering the scenic and ecological character of the landscape.

Construction on the Tennessee side of the mountain began in the late 1980s and was completed to the North Carolina state line at Sam’s Gap in 1995. At the same time, North Carolina Department of Transportation survey and core drilling crews were working their way through the thick woods on the slopes of the Walnut Range laying out the path of I-26 as it tracks southwest into the future. By the beginning of 1997, the road’s rights of way had been secured, timber cut, barns and homes razed or moved, and the last gardens harvested. Bulldozers began gnawing at massive slopes of Reed Mountain and Ramsey Ridge. The work of moving dirt, shaving off upland, filling in the valleys, channeling streams and springs, and making a road bed will go on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, until the road is finished in 2002.

In 1993, the Museums’ Cooperative Committee of the Appalachian Consortium, a regional educational organization, began to discuss the dramatic changes taking place along the I-26 Corridor. The committee, consisting of representatives from various Southern Appalachian regional museums, undertook the project of documenting, wherever possible, the impact of the road on the families and communities in its path. The committee began working with photographer and local resident Rob Amberg, as well as Mars Hill College students and area residents to produce a video, still photography, and oral histories of the road.

The goal of this undertaking is to record the sequential events along the construction right-of-way and their effects on the communities and people in its path. A second aim is to initiate a dialogue among regional historians, humanists, planners, and people of the local communities about the consequences of Interstate Highway development on indigenous rural cultures in order to bring into focus the shifting definitions of progress, regional identity, land use, spiritual values, and tradition.

Colorblind Injustice: Overcoming Shaw

By J. Morgan Kousser

Vol. 20, No. 2, 1998 pp. 14-16, 22

Students in history classes often confuse memorable events with important causes. Even those born long after the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march tend to make it the center of any discussion of the growth of post-Second World War African-American political power. It is a gripping event, featured in television documentaries, spotlighted in textbooks, easily discussed in class. There is violence, which always holds our attention; memorable protagonists, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Alabama governor George C. Wallace; a huge supporting cast, from nationwide civil rights advocates converging on Montgomery to Alabama State Troopers, Klansmen, and ordinary citizens, Black and white; a great, now consensual cause, the reenfranchisement of Black citizens illegally denied the vote for more than sixty years; a joyous climax, with King’s speech before a sea of avid faces standing in streets that had witnessed the epochal bus boycott less than a decade earlier; and a triumphant denoument in Washington a few months later, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

In fact, Selma was not the end of the twentieth century struggle to gain equal political power for minorities, but more nearly the beginning. It was not the dusk of the dark day of racism, but rather only the first light of a new era, one in which the battle had to be continued, long after the cameras and spotlights had been cleared away, in the workday activities of organizing, campaigning, litigating, and legislating against the still formidable legal and social barriers to equality. It is such subtle barriers and often overlooked or downplayed struggles, I contend in my new book, Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction, that have primarily shaped the course of race relations in America.

If we want to understand where we have been and influence where we are going, we should pay more attention to incremental changes in laws and nuances in judicial opinions, and somewhat less to the most conspicuous events; more to those who work largely behind the scenes to make relatively small changes in institutions and institutional rules, and less to the most visible leaders; more to happenings in cloak rooms in Atlanta and court rooms in Washington, and less to speeches, however grand and uplifting, in Montgomery; more to facts and history, and less to easy slogans like “colorblindness.”

It is the slow evolution, the institutional details, the day-to-day battles by too often forgotten women and men that determine whether the sudden revolutions led by celebrated heroes will flourish, falter, or fade.

This neglected history of strategies and cabals, of elections and trials, of commissions and legislatures, sets current events in a novel light. It is a different interpretation of the past and present of race relations than Americans generally get from the media or even from professors.

Understanding why recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions outlawing “racial gerrymandering” are neither colorblind nor just requires an examination not only of the opinions themselves, but also of the interpretation of history on which they explicitly or implicitly rest. To the authors and defenders of Shaw v. Reno (1993) and similar decisions, the Fourteenth Amendment is aimed not at discrimination against but at distinctions between people because of race. For them, the history of race relations in America is that of a dark, murky, and distant past now fortunately overcome by a natural process of enlightenment of opinion and behavior, not by anything governments did. Their view of the law is dangerously wrong, their version of history, disingenuously fanciful.

A comparison of the First and Second Reconstructions (after the Civil War and World War II, respectively) and studies of the passage of election laws and redistricting schemes in Los Angeles, Memphis, and the states of Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas from the 1950s through the 1990s suggest a starkly contrasting account of our history with quite different implications for public policy. And a review of Supreme Court opinions on racial discrimination before, as well as since, William Rehnquist became Chief Justice in 1986 demonstrates that the “conservative” judges’ interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment is in fact radical, unwarranted, inconsistent, and unprincipled.

Why did the First Reconstruction fail and why has the Second Reconstruction been relatively successful, at least until fairly recently? A systematic comparison of the reasons for the divergent courses of the two Reconstructions shows that a sequence of behaviors, solidified and influenced by election laws, resulted in the widespread disfranchisement of African Americans in the late nineteenth century. Racist and illogical Supreme Court decisions, stark partisan splits over racial policy, and a fluctuation in congressional membership caused by districting plans with a large proportion of marginal seats prevented the national government from perfecting adequate protective laws. Revolutionary changes enfranchised Blacks; incremental changes disfranchised them.

During the Second Reconstruction, a much more liberal Supreme Court, much less serious partisan divisions over racial matters, and stability in congressional membership allowed the Voting Rights Act to pass and to be amended and interpreted to meet contingencies that were not wholly appreciated at first. The recent stark reversals

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of precedents by a radical Supreme Court, the upheavals in congressional membership, especially in 1994, the increasing correlation between elected officials’ partisan affiliations and their stances on racial policy, and wholesale reinterpretations of the history of minority political participation and the Voting Rights Act by “conservative” academics and judges threaten to undo the civil rights progress of the Second Reconstruction.

Racial gerrymandering did not begin in the 1990s, it was not limited to the South, and its targets were Latinos as well as AfricanAmericans. In Los Angeles, intentional discrimination against Latinos in the drawing of districts for representatives to the nation’s largest and most powerful county government kept a growing Latino population from being able to elect candidates that it most preferred from 1874 through 1990. Only federal court decisions that were partially based on an earlier version of a chapter of this book forced Los Angeles County to redistrict fairly, to allow the 37.5 percent of its population that was then Latino to finally elect one of the five county supervisors.

Racism in Los Angeles is usually more subtle and less audible than it is in the South. That was certainly the case in Memphis in the 1950s and 60s. To head off the threat that an increasingly assertive Black community would translate their numbers into political power, white leaders in Memphis passed laws switching from district to at-large elections and from plurality-win systems to runoffs, as well as eliminating “single shot voting” that might allow Blacks to elect one favored candidate in an election in which several candidates who finished with the highest votes were elected. And Memphians were not bashful in announcing the racial purposes behind these actions. An earlier version of this paper was the principal evidence before a judge who threw out the runoff law, an action that resulted in the election of Memphis’s first Black mayor.

Georgia in the mid-1960s faced a Black power threat similar to that in Memphis, and “moderate,” as well as radical white segregationist leaders there responded in the same way Memphians did, by mandating runoff laws that made it much more difficult for Black minorities to elect candidates of their choice. In drafting election laws before the 1990s, race mattered most in the urban West, as well as the rural and urban South. Only with the help of the Voting Rights Act, employed by aggressive civil rights attorneys and a sympathetic U.S. Department of Justice, did minority voters overturn systems that were specifically designed to discriminate against them.

In 1991-92 favorable judicial decisions interpreting the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution enabled African-American and Latino politicians and interest groups that represented minority voters to enjoy a fair chance to frame election arrangements for the first time in American history. Supported by both the Republican and Democratic parties and at least tolerated by a white public opinion

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anxious to appear fair toward minorities, the resulting reapportionments produced the largest increase in minority representation in Congress and Southern state legislatures since the early 1870s. That upsurge, however, was too much for the right-wing majority of the Supreme Court.

Racial gerrymandering was nothing new in any of the states which produced cases that the Supreme Court decided. The first racial gerrymander in congressional districts in North Carolina took place in 1871, just after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment that enfranchised African Americans, and such gerrymanders continued until Blacks were disfranchised in that state in 1900 and resumed after a majority of Blacks in the state were reenfranchised in the late 1960s.

There has never been a congressional reapportionment in North Carolina at a time when a majority of Blacks could vote that did not contain a racial gerrymander. The Supreme Court just never noticed until Black Tar Heels in 1992, for the first time in the twentieth century, were able to elect African-American candidates to Congress. And in fact, the widely-ridiculed shapes of the two minority opportunity districts in North Carolina from 1992 to 1996 had more to do with partisan politics than with race.

Texas’s incomparably brutal politics has also historically produced repeated gerrymanders-personal, racial, and partisan. In Texas, however, minority politicians moved into positions of power within the Democratic party earlier than in North Carolina, and they began to win some modest redistricting victories in the 1960s and 70s. In 1981, a Republican governor in alliance with conservative Democrats managed to split the Black community in Dallas and force through a redistricting designed to inflame racial tensions within the Democratic party. That redistricting, overturned by a Democratic federal court and later, by a Democratic legislature and governor, taught Democrats a lesson that they applied in 1991: the party needed to reward its Black and Hispanic supporters to remain competitive with the surging Republicans.

Satisfying all factions within the Texas Democratic party, however, produced non-compact congressional districts that Republican district and Supreme Court judges declared to be purely racial gerrymanders. A federal judge who had been the chief counsel for the Texas Republican party in the early 1980s then redrew nearly half of the congressional districts in the state, insuring the defeat of a white liberal Democrat in Dallas and the exclusion of Houston Hispanics from congressional representation, in what the judge described as a nonpartisan, colorblind attempt to follow the Constitution.

Since the 1970s, the Supreme Court has required African Americans or Latinos who challenged laws or administrative procedures as contrary to the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to prove that the acts were adopted or maintained with a discriminatory purpose and that they have a current discriminatory effect against minorities. But when whites brought suit against redistricting arrangements in the 1990s, they were not required to prove that they were injured or that the boundaries were meant to have a discriminatory effect against them. Instead, whites only had to show that minority opportunity districts were not as compact as a hypothetical judge might have drawn, or that someone said the districts were drawn, in accord with the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act, to give minorities a fair chance to elect candidates of their choice. Either avowals of compliance with the Voting Rights Act or what Professor Lani Guinier has called “aesthetically incorrect” districts were sufficient to invalidate minority opportunity districts. Furthermore, any increase in the minority percentage in a Deep South district containing a large proportion of minorities was invalid, the five-person Supreme Court majority ruled. And any increase in minorities in any district whatsoever raised the suspicion that Democrats were trying to use “race as a proxy” for Democratic voting, which the “conservatives” also ruled unconstitutional.

The 5-4 Supreme Court decisions in Shaw v. Reno (1993) and its successors, and U.S. v. Hays (1995), Shaw v. Hunt and Bush v. Vera (1996), and Abrams v. Johnson and Reno v. Bossier Parish School Board (1997) were radical departures from earlier equal protection decisions and are inconsistent with each other. Based on formalistic standards that ignore both common sense and readily available empirical evidence, they impose a variety of racial double standards that amount to a separate and unequal equal protection clause that makes it much easier for whites than for minorities to win voting rights cases. They ignore or misinterpret evidence from the particular instances of redistricting that they consider, evidence that undermines their conclusions on racial intent. And along with other contemporary Supreme Court rulings on redistricting, they also impose a partisan double standard that strongly favors the Republican party that appointed the five-person Shaw majority and that benefits most strongly from the ethnic antagonisms that Shaw and the other decisions exacerbate.

Shaw and its progeny are not “colorblind,” as their defenders claim, but intensely color-conscious. They do not reflect the trend of modern equal protection law, but in their disregard of facts, twisting of language, and distortion of precedent, they introduce what I call “postmodern equal protection.” Designed to make Blacks and Latinos the only interest groups that cannot be recognized in redistricting, the Shaw line of cases, in a cruel irony, employs the Fourteenth Amendment to deny equality to those relatively powerless minorities that the Amendment was meant to protect.

It took the forces of reaction 28 years, from 1965 to

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1993, to re-form after that bloody Sunday at the Edmund G. Pettus Bridge in Selma, and this time, there was no televised confrontation to capture attention and rally support. Instead of a proclamation from a commander of the Alabama State Troopers, shortly followed by tear gas and a calvary charge, there was a mere Supreme Court opinion read by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, with no cameras present – a few pages of paper, the result of a long, rather quiet, and often not well understood process of reversing the direction of the Supreme Court and symbolically, of the Selma March. But the 1993 Shaw opinion, and all the lesser trends that it encapsulated, were together as significant as the confrontations of 1965.Shaw was a second attempt to send the voting rights forces back across the bridge in disarray and despair. The first time, the troopers’ triumph was temporary. The second time, the five justices have succeeded in gradually driving the civil rights forces in a long, slow retreat, in effect retracing the steps of the Montgomery March. To counterattack, to overcome Shaw, we must undermine its legitimacy by showing that it rests on distortions of history and perversions of law.

J. Morgan Kousser is Professor of History and social Science at Caltech in Pasadena. He has served as an expert witness in nineteen federal voting rights cases. His forthcoming book, Colorblind Injustice, will be published by the University of North Carolina in January 1999.

Voting Rights On Trial Again in Alabama

By Anne Braden

Vol. 20, No. 2, 1998 pp. 17-18

Connie Tyree is a thirty-six-year-old single mother and grandmother in Greene County, Alabama, who cares for three children and is a volunteer community activist. In 1994, she helped 249 absentee voters cast their ballots.

This year, Tyree cannot help anybody vote, and she cannot even vote herself. Instead, after years of community service untouched by any trouble with the law, she faces thirty-three months in prison; she was convicted in federal court in Birmingham of conspiracy to commit voter fraud. She is free now on bond, pending appeal, but a court order bars her from election activity.

Tyree is a victim of a new attack against activists working for voting rights and fair representation for African Americans in the Alabama Black Belt. Twelve people have been indicted-eight in Greene County, and two each in Wilcox and Hale counties. These are Black-majority counties, where African Americans have won control of local governing bodies.

The two indicted in Wilcox have pled guilty to misdemeanors to avoid jail time and the burden of a trial. A trial of the Hale County defendants is set for August. In Greene County, Commissioner Frank “Pinto” Smith has also been sentenced to thirty three months and removed from office. The others charged here will probably be tried in the fall. All are activists in the Alabama New South Coalition (ANSC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which organize for African-American political power.

Civil Rights Leaders Protest to Reno

A group of the nation’s top civil rights leaders met June 11 with U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno to ask the Justice Department to investigate the government’s activities in the Black Belt and to put a stop to the ” intimidation of African American voters.” State Senator Hank Sanders of Selma, Alabama led the delegation, which included NAACP President Julian Bond, NAACP Legal Defense Fund Executive Director Elaine Jones, and Martin Luther King III, the new president of the SCLC, which his father co-founded. Congressman Earl Hilliard (D-Ala.) and staff members representing Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), who helped arrange the meeting, participated. And, Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, co-chair of the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice (SOC) and co-publisher of the Greene County Democrat John Zippert took part by teleconference. Sanders said after the meeting, “It was clear to me that they were listening to us, and we were able to say what needed to be said.”

In a briefing paper presented to Reno and Assistant Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr., leaders pointed out that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) questioning of voters has produced a dramatic reduction in voter turnout. In the June 2, 1998 first primary election, overall voter turnout declined to 3,928 from 4,691 in the comparable election in 1994, despite the fact that the number of registered voters increased during the four-year period. Most striking was the decline in absentee ballots filed, from 1,118 in the 1994 first primary election, to 147 absentee ballots cast on June 2.

Absentee voting is always a major factor here because many voters are elderly and shut-in and many work outside the county. The activities that brought indictments against Tyree and others consisted of helping relatives, friends, and neighbors apply for, fill out, and submit absentee ballots-all legal endeavors. But investigators searched for people who would say an application or ballot had been filled out or changed without their permission.

Candidates supported by black voters have been hurt by the decline in turnout. For example, the incumbent prosecutor, Barrown Lankster, the first African American to hold the post, lost by 256 votes to the white prosecutor he ousted in the previous election.

This struggle began in the 1960s. After the people’s movement won the right to vote in a bloody encounter on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, the national spotlight moved away from the South. But in the Alabama Black Belt, African Americans proceeded to register voters and organize them. By the late 1970s, there were Black-majority governing bodies in five West Alabama counties.

Alarm bells went off among the white power structure

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that had always controlled the politics and economics of the Black Belt-and of Alabama. In the mid-1980s, in an attack similar to the current one, 212 voter fraud charges were brought against eight Black Belt organizers. Not one felony charge held up in court (see “Return to the Black Belt,” p. 19).

That attack boomeranged. People in the Black Belt fought back and organized a stronger political movement, with support coming from across the country.

And people went on voting. In most Black Belt elections, the turnout is a phenomenal 70 percent. “In Greene County, we think it’s low if it’s 70 percent,” says Booker T. Cooke, Jr., who is under indictment. “We usually get 80 or 85 percent.”

A chief architect of the 1980s indictments was Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, now U.S. Senator from Alabama, and then U.S. District Attorney in Mobile. Sessions, who comes from the old Black Belt power structure, also launched the current investigation before running for the Senate.

The indictments are part of a multi-pronged strategy. The old power structure set up a committee to counter ANSC, called Citizens for a Better Greene County, which includes some African Americans. There are ongoing efforts to pass laws that make voting more difficult, challenges to redistricting maps that have provided fairer representation, constant “investigations” of Black elected officials, and media reports that picture these officials as dishonest and incapable of managing government. Senator Hank Sanders notes that the many-faceted assault is ominously like the attacks that drove Blacks from office during the terror that followed Reconstruction in the last century.

Black Representation Has Brought Progress

For African Americans in Greene County, changes over the last thirty years are more than symbolic. This spring, people from diverse organizations-including the Southern Regional Council-took part in a caravan through Greene County to show support for voters. One thing we noticed was the attractive housing developments. Hundreds of new housing units have been built since Blacks took the reins of government and got federal grants.

“We used to live in dilapidated shacks without inside plumbing,” says Sarah Duncan, an activist since the 1960s who has registered hundreds of voters. Greene is still one of the poorest counties in the nation (see table on page 6, and although Blacks make up 80 percent of the population, more than 80 percent of the land is owned by whites.

Some small industry has come, bringing a limited number of construction jobs. Many African Americans work in government. There is a new high school. Water and sewer services extend to homes never reached before. A new health clinic serves six counties. And there is an African American bank, an activity center for the community, extensive cultural activity, and a courthouse named for Reverend William McKinley Branch, one of the county’s first black elected officials.

“Black people used to be afraid to go to the courthouse,” says Duncan. “Now we walk the streets without fear.”

Intimidation’s Cost

“Almost 1,000 of the 1,400 plus people who voted by absentee ballot in the Greene County general election in 1994 have been questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” states the report to the Attorney General. When three African-American churches were burned in Greene County, FBI agents approached voters to ask about these fires, then questioned them about absentee ballots. As yet no one has been indicted for the church burnings.

In the Tyree-Smith case, of the hundreds of voters they assisted, investigators found only seven ballots to question. Trial witnesses told what the FBI said to some of the people they questioned. For example: “Michael, you are in trouble, you need a lawyer, you may go to jail.” Some of the government’s witnesses changed their stories at the trial. Willie Carter, who was in jail for selling cocaine when he was questioned by the FBI, told the Grand Jury he had never voted absentee. But he testified later that he gave “Pinto” Smith permission to apply for an absentee ballot for him.

“They targeted our most vulnerable citizens,” says Laddi Jones, who covered the trial for the Greene County Democrat, a Black-owned community newspaper.

State and federal investigators have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on this investigation. Essentially, it is an effort to deal with a political struggle by using criminal charges-which undermines the democratic process itself.

A quote from elderly activist Daisy Nixon, “I’ll vote on,” became a rallying call during the 1980s attack. Although she has died, that spirit lives on. “We won’t stop now,” says Sarah Duncan. “I want my children and grandchildren to be able to live in Greene County and have a good life here.” Those of us who visited the area recently believe that spirit will prevail again, but again the people here need the support of justice-minded people everywhere.

Anne Braden is co-chair of the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice (SOC) and a Life Fellow of the Southern Regional Council. She was deeply involved in the defense of Black Belt voting rights in the 1980s.

Grand Opening: The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission

By Bill Minor

Vol. 20, No. 2, 1998 pp. 20-22

Mississippi recently had a Grand Opening. The grand opening of what? The old state Sovereignty Commission files, of course.

Many in the news profession have been itching to get their hands on the whole sorry mass of tomfoolery the old state segregation watchdog agency was up to during its seventeen years of existence from 1956 to 1973.

used to refer to it as the “KGB of the cotton patches” because of the way its agents went around spying on a lot of poor Black folks, many not long from the farm, if they bucked the system of white mastery. Of course, they also spied on some white folks as well, and doted on tracking anybody who came down from Yankee-land to “sow discord” among our happy Black folks.

The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission was largely a Keystone Kops operation, a bunch of bumbling would-be sleuths trying to prop up a dying system of white supremacy. What Commission agents mostly did, sinister though much of it was, was to compile a gumbo of innuendo, hearsay, and utterly false information about individuals who somehow came within the Commission’s scope.

My view is that what will be found in the files will offer very few nuggets of news or revelations not already revealed in print. What has been seen earlier, however, amounts to only part of the Sovereignty Commission files. The Grand Opening opens the whole works.

Looking at some of the Commission’s files brings back memories of how, as the Mississippi correspondent for the New Orleans Times-Picayune in the1950s and 60s, I constantly kept an eye on the Sovereignty agency, which had its office just down the hall from the press room at the state Capitol.

Opening of the entire Commission files results from a court order by U.S. District Judge William Barbour, who several years ago struck down an act of the Mississippi Legislature which had sealed the files for fifty years. His order turned the details of opening the files over to the state’s Department of Archives and History, which systematically cataloged the files and classified names appearing therein as “actors” and “victims.” An actor is anyone the Commission considered to have done something beneficial to the Commission and a victim was anyone under the Commission’s scrutiny.

According to the glossary which Archives and History prepared, I show up twice as an actor and twenty-three times as a victim. But I have not bothered to check out each instance I show up in the files.

Over the years I’ve seen some copies of some of the reports that went into the Commission files concerning me and they related to the journalistic work I was doing. For instance, the late Erle Johnston, the ex-Forest, Mississippi weekly editor who served as the agency’s executive director for six years, had reported to the Commission that he had “straightened Minor out” after I had broken stories that didn’t make his outfit look very good. My old friend Erle did assure me back some years ago that he had seen to it that my personal file had been shredded before he left the Commission in the late 1960s. As for “straightening me out,” I always kidded him as a miserable failure.

Governor J. P. Coleman, a moderate for his time, is credited or blamed for creation of the Sovereignty Commission in 1956. However difficult it may be for some to understand today, Coleman was under siege, at the time, by forces of the powerful segregationist white Citizens’ Council which controlled a large part of the Legislature.

Although, in conscience, Coleman opposed the idea of creating a segregation strategy agency in state government, he theorized that it was a way to keep the extremists off his back and that he could control what the agency did. Indicative of his restraint was an incident in May, 1959 when a Sovereignty Commission investigator intercepted a bizarre plan hatched by Citizens’ Council braintrusters to have NAACP national director Roy Wilkins arrested when he spoke in Jackson.

At the last minute, the Commission investigator stopped a Hinds County deputy from arresting Wilkins on an affidavit sworn out by a segregationist who later admitted to being put up to it by Citizens’ Council mogul William J. Simmons. The affidavit charged Wilkins with advocating overthrow of a 1956 state segregation law. Had Wilkins been arrested on such a charge in Mississippi, it would have given the state another huge black eye.

Citizens’ Council leaders seized control of the spy agency, ending the relative moderation of the Sovereignty Commission, when Coleman left office in 1960 and Ross Barnett moved in. Aside from getting the Sovereignty Commission to funnel some $100,000 in state funds to support Citizens’ Council programs, the Council also got the agency to do much of its footwork.

Of all the mean things done by the old state Sovereignty Commission, one of the most despicable was aimed in 1962 at weekly editor Hazel Brannon Smith of Lexington, Mississippi. At the time, Smith was struggling against an economic boycott of her Lexington Advertiser launched by the white Citizens’ Council in Holmes County.

The Lexington woman editor, who was white, had become friendly with some of the young civil rights workers based in Jackson who wanted to start a little newspaper called the Free Press. Because they were unable to get it printed in Jackson they asked Smith to print it for them in her Lexington plant. Needing the little additional revenue, she agreed to.

If she was not already under scrutiny by the Sovereignty Commission, Smith now became a prime target of Sovereignty agents. They tracked her every move. One day when she and her husband, Walter, delivered bundles of the Free Press to the office of the little paper, Sovereignty agents armed with cameras photographed the whole thing, showing Smith with several of the civil rights workers known to the Commission.

That was when another dark, deep charade was perpetrated by the Sovereignty Commission. It turned over copies of the photographs to an arch-segregationist state senator from Smith’s Holmes County. Next day, he took the floor of the state Legislature and, waving the damning photographs, denounced Smith as some kind of traitor to the state of Mississippi.

Of course, this entire sorry episode was calculated for one thing: to deliver the final economic blow to the already vulnerable Lexington Advertiser and drive Hazel Smith out of town, perhaps the state. But Hazel Brannon Smith was a tough customer. Somehow she kept the paper going, though barely. She was, however, so financially wounded that she would never recover.

Her editorial courage the following year in 1964 moved the Pulitzer Prize Committee to award Hazel its prize for editorial writing, which it said demonstrated “steadfast adherence to her editorial duty in the face of great pressure and opposition.”

In the early 1980s her husband Walter died. Then, after struggling more than a decade for survival, her newspaper succumbed amid a sea of debt in 1985. Not long after, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and in the spring of 1994, completely broke, Hazel died in a nursing home in Cleveland, Tennessee.

Back in the halcyon days of the Lexington Advertiser in the 1940s and early1950s, when she was a dazzling brunette bachelor lady, Hazel was the belle of the Mississippi Press Association. When she floated through the lobby of Biloxi’s grand old Buena Vista Hotel at MPA conventions, the lustful eyes of a dozen or more country editors followed her every move. Her Cinderella world changed radically, however, after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation ruling, which inspired the birth of the white Citizens’ Council in Mississippi. Holmes County became a hotbed of Council support.

Then, in 1955, when Hazel blasted the local sheriff for shooting a Black man in the back for no cause, the segregationist Council initiated its systematic boycott to destroy her newspaper. The sheriff sued her for liable, winning a judgment in the county circuit court. The judgment was overturned later by the state Supreme Court, but the expense of defending herself sent her into financial straits.

In 1993 a somewhat fictionalized movie of Hazel’s lonely battle against racial bigotry as a courageous editor was produced by the ABC network. It fell far short of telling the full story of her struggle against Mississippi’s Citizens’ Council and Sovereignty Commission and the paper’s demise.

The Sovereignty Commission was finally put out of business in 1973 when Gov. Bill Waller vetoed its appropriation, ending another sordid chapter of Mississippi history.

Sidebar: Alabama’s Segregationist Agency’s Files Still Closed

From Montgomery Advertiser, March 23, 1998. Reprinted with the permission of the Associated Pres.

The files of the Alabama Commission to Preserve the Peace, a state-funed gumshoe operation that snooped on civil rights activists and liberals in the 1960s and 1970s, have never been made public, unlike the files of a similar agency in Mississippi now drawing intense scrutiny.

Bur Steve Suitts [former executive director of SRC], who won federal court orders that closed down the Alabama commission and sealed its files in 1976, said he would have no problem with the public release of files if those named in the documents grant permission.

If opened, however, the files of the Alabama agency likely would be far less revealing than those in Mississippi of the clandestine conduct of state-paid spies who tracked black leaders, liberals, and social progressives of the era.

for one, all of the photographs were missing when a federal judge ordered the Alabama files impounded in 1976. Also, there were large gaps in the paper records; an agency worker testified some had been burned after the commission was sued.

“Clearly there had been some housekeeping,” said Suitts.

But what was left, he said, “was not as thorough or revealing as the files of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission.” Those files, after years of litigation, were made public last week, shedding new light on the secret lengths to which the segregationist power structure would go to curb those it saw as a threat.

Suitts, who in hte 1970s was director of th Alabama Civil Liberties Union and is now a wrtier and consultant in Atlanta, said in an interview there is nothing to prevent people from trying to find out through sourt procedures if they were named in the Alabama commission’s files or somehow wronged by the agency–and, if so, getting to see their file.

He said the files were sealed by then-U.S. District Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. “to protect individuals from the release of information often having no basis in fact–that could harm people.”

Suitts and the attorney who handled the case, Jack Drake, both said last week that the surviving files they saw in the mid-70s did not contain any direct acts by the commission. “One thing I remember is how amateurish the Alabama operation was,” said Drake.

But they said the files linked the commission to those who did have power to harm, and who were notorious for disregarding the rights of blacks and others seeking civil rights and an end to segregation during those years.

Suitts said the commission’s documents showed “the extent with which it was willing to vilify even the most innocent.” A new Head Start program, he said, was described in the commission files as “a future breeding ground for communism,” even though it was simply trying to teach little kids to read and write.”

Averaging three stories a day as a stringer for national media like the Associated Press, Newsweek, and The New York Times, and for many years at the New Orleans Times Picayune, Mississippi journalist Bill Minor helped bring the nation’s attention to the civil rights movement, Southern injustices, and corruption. Bricks and bullets shattered the windows and a cross was burned at the Capitol Reporter office, the weekly paper he owned in Jackson, after he published articles detailing the Klan’s resurgence and influence in state government. (For more about Minor, see “Eyes on Mississippi” in the August/September 1992 Southern Changes.)

Walking the Walk

Reviewed by David J. Garrow

Vol. 20, No. 2, 1998 pp. 23-25

John Lewis with Michael D’Orso, Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

David Halberstam, The Children, New York: Random House, 1998.

For readers who view the modern Black freedom struggle largely through the prism of Martin Luther King, Jr., both John Lewis’s new autobiography and David Halberstam’s history of the young Black collegians who launched the Nashville sit-ins of 1960 are potential godsends. Most movement scholars have long emphasized that many under-heralded activists like Lewis and Diane Nash, both of whom helped lead the Nashville sit-ins, often deserved far more credit for the movement’s victories than news accounts of the 1960s ever gave them. Anyone who reads either Walking With the Wind or The Children will come away with a clear and salutary understanding of how the civil rights struggle was indeed a “mass” movement, rather than any sort of hierarchical effort commanded by King or anyone else.

For me, any autobiography that’s written “with” or “as told to” some collaborator always has to prove its historical “bona fides”: are the words and recollections really those of the “author,” or are his or her real voice and memories lost among narrative regurgitations strung together by a ghostwriter?

Well, in the case of John Lewis I’m happy-very enthusiastically happy-to report that Walking With the Wind is without a doubt the best “movement” autobiography yet published. Its content is rigorously true to Lewis’s own personal experiences and stories, and its voice is very much the direct and candid timbre that everyone who knows John Lewis immediately will recognize.

Direct and candid also describe the way in which Lewis recounts his feelings toward many of his old allies. No one will accuse Walking With the Wind of pulling any punches, whether with regard to Lewis’s hotly-contested 1986 congressional campaign against fellow movement veteran Julian Bond or with regard to other relationships that also date back to the early 1960s. Lewis says that Congress of Racial Equality executive director James Farmer “struck me as very insincere,” and that Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) executive secretary James Forman “wasn’t quite upfront. There was something about the man that was just not real.”

No one will be surprised by Lewis’s respectful treatment of Martin Luther King, Jr. (“I owe more of myself to him than to anyone else I have ever known,” Lewis confesses), but many eyebrows probably will raise at Lewis’s characterization of his successor as chairman of SNCC, Stokely Carmichael, as “the last person I’d respect.”

Lewis powerfully and poignantly relates his childhood in rural Pike County, Alabama, and how his role in the Nashville sit-ins led to his involvement in both the founding of SNCC and the 1961 Freedom Rides. Lewis identifies the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s defeat at the 1964 Democratic National Convention as “the turning point of the civil rights movement,” and he mourns how SNCC itself began to crumble because of “the growing climate of suspicion and mistrust within our ranks” and “the loss of that unity of spirit and purpose that we had shared in the beginning.”

SNCC’s decline culminated in Lewis’s own replace-

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ment as chairman by the more media-hungry Carmichael in 1966, and Lewis says that “the pain of that experience is something I will never be able to forget.” After a brief sojourn in New York working for the Field Foundation, however, Lewis returned to Atlanta to work for SRC and the Voter Education Project and, in 1981, following a short stint in the Carter Administration, won election to the Atlanta City Council. Ever since his 1986 election to Congress, Lewis-unlike some other civil rights veterans-has demonstrated again and again how the values that first brought him into the movement in 1959 – 1960 have not been forsaken or forgotten.

David Halberstam’s The Children is a huge and sprawling account of the full life histories of eight Black college students-including John Lewis-whose participation in the sit-ins against white-only lunch counters in Nashville in the spring of 1960 helped spark the entire southern protest movement of the 1960s.

The Children is a valuable book but far from a perfect one. One of its two most glaring weaknesses is its very title, for twenty or twenty-one year-olds were not then and are not now usually spoken of as “children.” Halberstam’s rationale for his title is that the label originated with one of Nashville’s most supportive Black ministers, Reverend Kelly Miller Smith, but it’s a usage that may be misleading even if it is not actually demeaning. Three years later, when King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) did indeed recruit junior high school students to take part in protests in Birmingham, Alabama, “children” were indeed in the forefront of the movement, but the Nashville collegians were young adults whose courageous choices were carefully considered, not teenagers out on a lark.

Halberstam invests considerable energy in detailing his characters’ childhoods long before they arrived in Nashville. Some readers may wonder whether these Black young people, as distinct from others, came to nonviolent activism in part because of what Halberstam portrays as well-above-average parenting, but Halberstam never pauses to analyze the larger possible meaning of the individual stories he richly relates.

Another major influence in moving these particular young people to challenge Nashville’s racial discrimination was James M. Lawson, a young Black clergyman whose own spiritual commitment to nonviolent activism instructed and motivated others. Many people may not know the extent to which spiritual and religious faith sustained young activists like John Lewis, but Halberstam’s narrative captures that aspect of their lives powerfully and impressively.

One thing Halberstam does not capture, however, is his characters’ own voices, and this is The Children’s greatest disappointment. No matter who the person or what the context, Halberstam describes their thoughts and feelings exclusively in his own voice, rather than in theirs. This is both puzzling and, as the book proceeds, increasingly infuriating.

The problem is most starkly displayed in the book’s final paragraph, where Halberstam recounts a 1995 commemoration of the Nashville sit-ins’ thirty-fifth anniversary. “Of the many speeches that day, perhaps the most moving was given by Diane Nash,” Halberstam writes. Nash spoke “with a rare kind of modesty and elegance. She had been proud, she said, to be a part of something noble and generous, something which was larger than herself.” It sounds wonderful, but Halberstam never quotes a single word of it.

The absence of Nash and Lewis’s own voices from Halberstam’s account deprives The Children of added emotional power. It also sometimes leaves Halberstam repeating his own renditions of his characters’ feelings over and over again. For Curtis Murphy, one of the least known Nashville activists, the sit-ins “had been the most exhilarating and fulfilling experience of his life,” Halberstam writes. One hundred pages later almost the exact same description “the most compelling experience of his life”-again reappears.

Halberstam often reiterates the valid and emotionally crucial observation that for all the activists, not just Curtis Murphy, “their days in this cause would remain the most exciting and stirring of their lives.” Some early reviewers have criticized Halberstam for devoting the final third of his very long book to the “post-movement” lives of his main characters, but those chapters have at least as much emotional power as those that relate the sit-ins themselves. Readers will find themselves rooting for Curtis Murphy to overcome several post-movement years of depression and heavy drinking, as indeed he does. They also will be deeply drawn into the subsequent challenges successfully endured by Rodney Powell and Gloria Johnson

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Powell, two Meharry Medical College graduates whose marriage eventually ended after Rodney realized late in life that he was gay.

Halberstam’s willingness to report the private as well as the public lives of his characters is perhaps The Children’s greatest strength. All of us who have written extensively about the movement know full well that private life developments such as the marriage and subsequent divorce of Diane Nash and James Bevel (whom Halberstam correctly characterizes as “a considerable womanizer”), are important pieces of the movement’s interior story, but no one has come close to doing as good a job as Halberstam with this portion of the history.

The Children also does a commendable job of presenting Martin Luther King, Jr., from the vantage point of other activists whose private feelings about King sometimes were highly ambivalent. King intentionally avoided taking part in any of the 1961 “Freedom Rides,” and in the wake of that avoidance young student activists such as Nash came to doubt King’s courage and commitment. As Halberstam writes in relating Nash’s feelings, “leaders were not truly leaders unless they were willing to do everything that they asked of others.”

Relying on Lawson, Halberstam also accurately conveys what he calls King’s “increasing awareness that he had been selected by forces outside his reach for a task far larger than any he had either sought or wanted.” King always knew that sooner or later his task would end only with his own assassination, and Halberstam also faithfully depicts the despondency that overcame the entire movement after King’s 1968 murder.

But the emotional core of The Children is Halberstam’s wonderful ability to capture how all of the early activists never lost their profound and defining attachment to the days and events that overshadowed the entire balance of all their lives. For Diane Nash, “nothing she did ever quite equaled the sheer sense of fulfillment she had gotten in those early days.” She “missed desperately,” Halberstam writes, “not just the sense of purpose . . . but that of their selflessness” too.

Nash “often wondered if the Movement had attracted exceptional people, or whether instead had been a magnet for ordinary people who had been transformed into uncommon people because of their cause.” In the end she rightly decided that it had been “a little of both.”

David J. Garrow, Presidential Distinguished Professor at Emory University, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Bearing the Cross.

Listeners Respond to Will The Circle Be Unbroken?

Introduction by Barry E. Lee

Vol. 20, No. 2, 1998 pp. 26-28

“Without a doubt, this was the most impressive radio program I’ve ever heard,” writes a listener from Fort Myers, Florida, about the Southern Regional Council’s radio series Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Other listeners have commented on Will The Circle Be Unbroken? as a well-crafted and valuable oral history. Produced by George King, the series, which premiered in the spring of 1997 and was rebroadcast in 1998 on Public Radio International, highlights the contributions of ordinary people to the Civil Rights Movement in five Southern cities-Atlanta, Columbia, Jackson, Little Rock, and Montgomery-along with the music of the times. More than any other initiative sponsored by Council in the last twenty years, Will The Circle Be Unbroken? has generated an incredible flood of positive response and professional accolades in the field of radio broadcasting.

The tremendous effort that it took to produce the series and to get it broadcast on over 250 stations in thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia resulted in several prestigious awards. Among them are the 1997 Peabody Award, administered by the Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Georgia, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters’ Golden Reel Award, and the 1997 Nonprint Media Award for Outstanding use of oral history by The Oral History Association.

But perhaps as significant has been the more than one-thousand email responses from those who heard portions of the series. Reading through the responses makes the power of radio undeniably evident. For many listeners, the voices and the music bring back a flood of memories. For others the series makes them feel personally connected to an important historical era. Not surprisingly, numerous listeners felt motivated to take personal responsibility for the current state of race relations and to work toward multiracial understanding and cooperation. And still others see the series as the most powerful and effective teaching tool they have encountered.

You can visit the Circle’s web site at http://unbrokencircle.org. Tapes and CDs will be available in the fall.

Here are a few samples of the email responses received since first aired.

To: info@unbrokencircle.org Subject: Unbroken Circle radio series

Congratulations on having produced a fantastic radio program series. We are fortunate to hear it and it has moved us to tears. How good it is that you have done this, and that people, particularly us white folks, are hearing these stories that we’re sure are mostly unknown to mainstream America (and need to be known!). We are grateful for your work and proud of it.

If there is any way to purchase tapes of this, please let us know. Any kind of support we can offer, including membership in Southern Regional Council, please advise. We heard your program on Friday evenings, WQCS (88.9) out of Indian River Community College, Fort Pierce, Florida.

C. D. & S. G.

Melbourne, Florida

Subject: Your Civil Rights Series

I’ve really enjoyed the programs in this series. As I listen to the various interviews, I can see these people, the places, and the events unfolding. I live in Little Rock, I lived in Columbia, SC and Baton Rouge, LA. I met Rev. T.J. Jemmison. I met Mrs. Daisy Bates, here, in Little Rock. I remember the slaying of Dr. King: I was living in a suburb of Washington, D.C. at the time. The racial tension and riots were intense in that city. I am so glad you did these interviews before more of these Civil Rights activists have passed on.

You really tell the story of this Human Rights struggle very well. I can see this program taken further with the addition of visuals (videos,

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snapshots, slides, etc). It would make a great TV documentary or perhaps a college tele-course.

After this series finishes on NPR/PRI, where will it go? I’d like to suggest that it become a part of the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. It would add a great deal to what is already a fine display. Together, your audio and their audios, videos, displays, etc. could really explain well what happened during those times. It could become a very powerful, impressionable exhibit for all.

Subject: a bit more fan mail

I consider myself a public radio junkie. I like to think that this gives me pretty high standards. I just want to tell you that your show is one of the finest and most inspiring things I have ever listened to. History books, interviews with famous people-all excellent sources of information-simply do not have the power that these average, everyday heros have as they tell their stories.

I would be very interested in getting copies of the series to share with others not so fortunate to have heard it ‘live.’

Thank you for your work,

A. S.

Subject: NPR series

What a wonderful series! It is poignant beyond belief. I am 48 years old, and consider myself a strong liberal and civil rights advocate. However, I had no idea what really went on. There is not enough affirmative action in the world to make up for the indignities that most African Americans faced. Thank you for helping to further educate the public. White Americans just don’t have a clue, and that is partially why the outcome of the OJ trial was such an eyeopener.

Thank you again.

A. R. Elk Grove Village, Illinois

Subject: thank you

To the folks at Unbroken Circle:

I would just like to thank you for the incredible program that you have created on the Civil Rights movement. I sit rapt, listening to the voices of the times, the music, and the soothing and articulate narration of Vertamae Grosvenor. This documentary series is the most moving and informative I have ever heard. You all have done a spectacular job. I look forward to purchasing the audio cassettes of the series when they become available. I’ll keep checking the website for more info.

Thanks again for this important series, as we can all use a little reminder of our history to renew our dedication to the struggle for justice.

Inspired,

D. P.

Subject: amazing series

Just wanted to thank you all for this extraordinary documentary! The range of interviews, the music, the historical research, the footage, the editing, the moments captured, the ability of the interviewers to garner such open interviews-all outstanding.

Again, public radio producing something that commercial radio could never justify to its advertising mavens.

How do I get tapes of the series? I’m working with an elementary school in a very low-income neighborhood in Washington, DC, and would love to use this series in the classroom.

Thanks again for this masterpiece!

J. F.,

Clean Water Action

Subject: Thanks for series

I want to congratulate you on such an excellent series. I have caught several segments in the last few weeks and they are outstandingly well done.

Most importantly, I want you to know that you have opened my eyes and my mind to a deeper understanding of the whole experience of Blacks in America. For all the racial rhetoric I’ve heard in my 31 years, nothing else has so directly confronted me with the historical facts and experiences of American Blacks. Ironically and unfortunately, most rhetoric from civil rights leaders today has been a hinderance rather than a help to my right understanding of the racial issues we confront. But the truth you present in simple, personal accounts is the most powerful tool to foster real racial understanding, especially for people like me, too young to have experienced it firsthand. Thank you.

M.K.

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Subject: Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

Your series, Will The Circle Be Unbroken? is without a doubt the finest documentary I’ve ever heard. I have been riveted by every episode I’ve been able to catch, which unfortunately has not been all of them.

I was wondering if (i) you could provide me a list of the titles of each episode and (ii) indicate if the series is available on cassette or CD ROM.

Thank you for this program. You’ve raised the bar that all documentaries on the civil rights movement will have to measure up against.

S. K.

Chicago, Illinois

Subject: Your marvelous series!

I was a SNCC worker in southwest Georgia, 1963-5, and Atlanta, 1966. It was a life-changing experience for me, a rare opportunity to have an impact on history. Your series is superb. The mix of oral history, narrative by the incomparable Vertamae Grosvenor, and the civil rights songs and pop music of the time is very effective. While some productions on the civil rights movement are either just plain inaccurate or just don’t convey the feel of it, your series makes me feel as I did while I was part of it.

I also appreciate the substantial focus on SNCC, which is often slighted in favor of the “hero” interpretation of history, which I hear your programs contradicting. The movement was indeed made up of ordinary people doing extraordinary things with great faith and courage.You know, back in 1961-2-3, victory was not at all assured. We knew at the time that we could end up on the losing side, or it could have taken decades to do what we did in three or four years. If it had not been for the bravery and sacrifice of many people who never had their names in the news or the history books, we “outside agitators” would have been vulnerable to anything the Klan and White Citizens Council had to dish out.

Anyway, congratulations for an excellent job. As a member of the board of the Mt. Zion Albany Civil Rights Movement Museum (yes, it’s a mouthful), I would like to obtain a set of the tapes for our collection. Do you have a special rate for organizations like ours (non-profit 501(C)3)? Our objective is not so much to commemorate a time in history but to inspire the kids of today to do extraordinary things in their own way. Thanks again.

Subject: PBS Radio

I am 30 years old. I am white. I am a father of 4.5 children. I am a janitor. I find the galantry of the ordinary person who sacrificed and succeeded in the movements of civil rights awe inspiring. Listening to their stories I find their courage for overcoming inspiring. It is my hope that with them in my thoughts I may overcome and succeed. I applaud you for bringing their stories to all.

C. L.

Edmonds, Washington

Subject: Kudos

After listening to “Will The Circle Be Unbroken?” on WAMU tonight, I resolved to do what I’ve intended to do since the first episode: to write to thank you for a stunning series, and to offer my congratulations for radio at its best.

We are, I think, doubly blessed to have this series: it’s radio at its best *and* history at its best and most vibrant. How wonderful that folks in generations not yet born will be able to hear the voices of those who gave so much!

Again, deepest thanks.

J. H.

Subject: Radio Series

I am just done listening to today’s broadcast of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?. Your series is exceptionally informative, entertaining and emotionally charged. As a french national who arrived in the United States 5 years ago, it is important that I understand your racial history. My parents are originally from Martinique. Having been raised near the Swiss border, I have never experienced any form of racism while growing up. My American experience is slightly different. This is why your program is important to me. Have you, or are you thinking about publishing a book based on this program? What about the musical part? Could you tell me where I could buy some of the music you are using?

P.S.: The commentator is very good

S. M.L. B.

Reversal of Policy: SCETV Shows “The Uprising of ’34”

By Tom Terrill

In a reversal of its 1995 decision, South Carolina Educational Television finally aired the award-winning film, “The Uprising of ’34” on June 2. During a pre-recorded panel discussions after the airing George Stoney, co-producer of the film, James Morris, executive director of the South Carolina Manufacturer’s Alliance, and Thomas Terrill, professor of history at the University of South Carolina and a consultant on the film talked about the response evoked by the film in Southern mill communities.

The School of Journalism at University of South Carolina, in cooperation with the Department of History and Media Arts, conducted a symposium on the film on June 3 for students, faculty, and the public. Group viewings of the film are also planned.

Recent changes at SCETV are probably what made the June telecast possible. Paul Amos replaced Henry Cauthen as president of SCETV in April. Cauthen, who headed SCETV for more than two decades, had close ties to South Carolina’s textile industry, and prominent textile leaders contributed funds toward the construction of SCETV’s new facility, a large, handsome structure located in Columbia. Cauthen denied that he was responsible for the decision to block the telecast, but that seems very unlikely. Some of the SCETV staff had a major role in making the “Uprising” telecast a top priority, a position that Amos supported. (See Fall 1994 issue of Southern Changes for an acccount of the making of “Uprising of ’34”.)

Before its June airing, “The Uprising of ’34” had been seen by numerous audiences in South Carolina. One of the first showings of the film took place in Honea Path where seven workers were killed by gunfire. Five hundred people attended the Honea Path showing and a memorial service for the slain workers. The producers and friends of “Uprising” bought time for a late night showing in Greenville in 1995.

Seeing “Uprising” remains problematic in some places in the state. Carolina Alliance for Fair Employment (CAFE) rented the West End Hall in Easley, South Carolina, from the Chamber of Commerce in order to show the film on April 30. Easley officials, led by Mayor Bill Carr, canceled the rental. David Watson, executive director of the chamber, explained that the mayor’s office objected to the rental of the hall for the showing because “we are very cautious about renting it out to things that might be considered controversial.” “Employees and employers in Pickens County,” Watson said, according to the Greenville News , “enjoy a wonderful working relationship and in no way would we want to damage or cause controversy about a relationship that has worked since the founding of the county.”

CAFE protested the cancellation, and its members picketed the Chamber of Commerce on May 6. That evening CAFE ran “Uprising” at the Pickens County Public Library.

Tom Terrill is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. He is co-author of The American South: A History.