Deadly Cuts: Grady Hospital and the National Health Care Crisis

By Murphy Davis

Vol. 21, No. 3, 1999 pp. 3-5

The county commissioner looked perplexed. “You understand, don’t you, that we’re the bottom of the food chain here. You’re coming to us because you know who and where we are. But we’re not the real cause of this crisis at Grady Hospital. It’s much bigger than DeKalb and Fulton Counties.”

The commissioner is absolutely right and she is absolutely wrong. Grady, Atlanta’s public hospital since 1892, is facing a $26.4 million deficit for the 1999 calendar year. To cut costs, the administration recommended to the Hospital Board that they begin to charge even the poorest of the poor a five dollar charge for each clinic visit and a ten dollar co-payment for each prescription and medical supply. This policy attempted to lay the budget problems on the backs of the city’s poor. If enacted, it would amount to a death sentence for some Grady patients, especially the poorest many of whom are elderly and/or with chronic illnesses that require several medications to sustain life and health.

The situation at Grady is a local problem with local causes. It is also a symptom of a national crisis with national causes. Local governments are responsible for the problem; local governments are victims of the problem. The health care crisis is a particular place where the national drama is being played out on a local level. Perhaps it might also be the place where we come together nationally and bring about significant change.

Over the past twenty years, the United States has undergone massive and sweeping changes that have increasingly consolidated resources into fewer and fewer hands. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between 1980 and 1997, the mean household income of the lowest quintile (20 percent) rose a mere 1.45 percent ($129). The wealthiest quintile, on the other hand, enjoyed a mean household income increase of 26.9 percent ($32,952). A significant number of people near the top have accumulated more money and possessions than anybody could ever need in one lifetime. The middle class is more vulnerable. The working class is close to falling over the edge. The poor have sunk more and more deeply into the misery of substandard housing, homelessness, prison, and limited access to good schools, proper nutrition, and health care.

Health care has not all of a sudden become an issue of privatization. Much to the detriment of the common good, health care has long been understood as a commodity in the United States. It has more often than not been a problem for poor people to find adequate care. But we have had at least some sense of the obligation of government to care for the public health. It has, for several generations, for instance, seemed imperative that we sustain the agencies that monitor, test for, and treat infectious diseases. It has been an acceptable notion that all children, regardless of economic circumstances, should be immunized to protect them from preventable illness. We have even supported programs like Medicaid and Medicare to insure at least minimal care for the very poor,

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people with disabilities, and the elderly.

But now even this minimal level of care provided from public resources in the United States is under fire. Since the early 1980s, a steady and persistent legislative and judicial program has given advantages to wealthy individuals, corporations, and institutions and increasing disadvantages to working class and poor people. Public institutions and services have been opened up to the forces of privatization for the purpose of increasing profits for the already-wealthy and destabilizing the lives of workers. All services and institutions are becoming fair game for the market and all space is becoming commercial space. Prisons and jails are being constructed and managed by corporations whose stocks are soaring. And while Corporate America bites off larger and larger chunks of the public funds, the strident resistance to government “interference” by planning or regulation is a steady theme.

The values and language of the market have come so to dominate our common life that ethical discussion, or religious or moral discourse have begun to seem quaint if not completely irrelevant. The bottom line is everything. Those who matter are consumers. But poor people (by definition, those without capital) are not consumers, so they, literally, don’t count. In fact, they don’t even exist except as commodities in the prison industrial complex.

At the same time, on national, state, and local levels, we have cut programs that help the poor and vulnerable among us. The results are increasingly disastrous for individuals, families, public institutions, and the common good. The Grady crisis represents this unfolding drama.

As a single example of the national trend and its local impact, two pieces of federal legislation, the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, and the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, have meant a loss of $28 million for Grady Hospital in 1998 -more than this year’s projected deficit. As people have been moved “from welfare to work,” they have often moved into low-wage, dead-end jobs that almost never provide health insurance. Without access to Medicaid, these families continue to depend on Grady for medical services, but the patients cannot pay for services and medication, and the hospital can no longer be reimbursed by Medicaid. Grady’s plight is one that is also affecting teaching hospitals across the country.

The state of Georgia has taken the federal cuts and made even deeper cuts in Medicaid and Medicare. The DeKalb and Fulton County Commissions, which are legally responsible for Grady have voted for less and less county support for the hospital since 1992. Simply put, the emergency that Grady faces has been created by specific policy decisions at every level of government over a period of years. Some folks knew doggone well what was happening, a few people protested in vain, and the rest seemed to be watching television and shopping at the mall. But as the cuts continue to trickle down to the local level, they are deadly for the poor, the sick, and the vulnerable.

The crisis is local, so the organizing has to begin locally. The elected officials closest to home are those who must first take the heat for this multi-level assault on public institutions and poor people. They are responsible for their own malicious policy decisions. And they are responsible for not raising cain with state and federal decision-makers who helped them to craft this disaster.

For us, the Grady Coalition, there is a rich privilege in being part of a diverse and growing coalition that is confronting the local health care emergency and crying out for those who cannot cry out for themselves. When we forced a discussion with the Grady Board, they voted to temporarily rescind the co-payments. We made a commitment to work with them and help advocate for additional funding to meet the deficit. We knocked first on the door of the Fulton County Commission and were received by those commissioners who are friends of the poor and advocates for Grady. They allocated an additional $3.5 million. When we went to the DeKalb County Commission and CEO with the same appeal, we were met with a stone wall.

On May 11, thirty members of our coalition of activists were arrested for praying and singing when the DeKalb Commission once again refused to discuss the hospital. It was, without a doubt, the largest and most diverse group arrested for an act of civil disobedience in Atlanta since the Movement activities of the 1960s. We were clergy and laypeople, Christians, Jews, and Buddhists, women and men, gay and straight, Black, white, and Asian, students and retirees (the oldest were seventy-nine and eighty-one), medical professionals in white uniforms and members of organized labor taking the day off. While we were loaded onto the police bus and taken to jail, two hundred or more supporters sang and prayed. Then they moved the vigil to the DeKalb County jail.

On June 8, the DeKalb Commission approved $1.1 million for the Grady Pharmacy.

We are continuing this struggle on several fronts. We are appealing to Governor Roy Barnes to get involved to make state resources available to move past this crisis toward long-term resolution of Grady’s support as a regional and state resource. We understand that this must include discussion and action for public hospitals in every area of Georgia.

We are also looking toward public dialogue about the responsibility of the private institutions that have a role in Grady’s long-term health. Emory University made its international reputation as a medical school and research center at Grady Hospital. The medical school has been a major source of Emory’s growing wealth and power. With

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an endowment of eight billion dollars, Emory’s is the fastest-growing endowment of any private university in the nation. It is time for the wealth to be shared to endow Grady’s future as a resource for health care for the poor and the excellent teaching context that it continues to be.

Other private sources that must be called to accountability are the many for-profit hospitals in the Atlanta area who sometimes send their patients to Grady when insurance monies have run out. We understand that some cities or regions levy a tax on for-profit hospitals to help support public hospitals. Drug companies and insurance companies must be called to account for their massive profits and pricing based on market feasibility rather than their own costs. And finally, Morehouse Medical School and other smaller teaching institutions and programs must be called into the discussions to explore shared responsibility for this precious resource in our community.

With our local partners, we must seek new ways to work together to advocate in Washington. The Balanced Budget Act will bring deeper cuts in the coming years. Our health care system is in serious trouble. We must stop the damage and move toward a national health insurance plan.

We in the United States, spend some four thousand dollars per person per year for health care, more than any other people in the world. This is a cost nearly twice any other country and a much higher figure than other industrialized countries like Canada and Great Britain. And their expenditure pays for a health care system that provides access to care for everyone.

The diverse and lively coalition that has formed around the Grady crisis is a long-haul group of committed activists. We are working and planning together with clarity that we have a long road ahead. We look forward to learning more of how this struggle has taken shape in other cities and regions. And we hope to be part of a growing movement that will struggle for not only a guarantee of decent health care for all God’s children, but justice, housing, freedom, and peace for every woman, man, and child.

Reverend Murphy Davis is a partner at the Open Door Community, Inc., an Atlanta community of Christians who minister with the homeless and prisoners, particularly those on death row. Davis is the coordinator of the Southern Prison Ministry.

Teaching the Movement: “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” Now Available with a Curriculum Guide

Staff

Vol. 21, No. 3, 1999 pp. 6-7

How many high school history courses fail to get past World War II to cover the Civil Rights Movement? When courses do treat the Civil Rights Movement, how often do they focus on only a few prominent leaders and major events, giving little voice to the ordinary men and women across the South and their daily efforts that made the Movement?

Though a growing body of scholarship on the U.S. Civil Rights Movement has emerged in the past decade, there remains a disturbing absence of materials that make this crucial period of our history accessible to students. Knowledge about this chapter in U.S. history is essential to understanding our diverse society today.

As the title of the lead article by national NAACP Board Chair Julian Bond in SRC’s special issue of Southern Changes featuring “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” reminds us, “Democracy Demands Memory.” In describing the results of a racial attitudes survey by SRC, Bond noted “The more poll respondents knew about our history, and the more results of ending race-specific remedies to discrimination were explained to them, the more likely they were to respond thoughtfully, rather than with bumper-sticker answers.”

During the past seventeen years, the SRC undertook an extraordinary oral history project that evolved into the nationally-broadcast public radio series, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” This one-of-a-kind audio series and its accompanying curriculum provides students of today with the historical background necessary to promote racial justice. And by combiming the personal stories of so many individuals who go unmentioned in most history books with the popular music that filled the airwaves at the time, the series makes the history accessible and engaging for students.

Background on “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”

Created out of the desire to record the words of a generation of Southerners who worked to overthrow Jim Crow and extend democracy to all Americans, the audio series documents a local history seldom recorded in textbooks. Through the personal histories of 250 individuals in five Southern communities-Atlanta, Georgia; Columbia, South Carolina; Montgomery, Alabama; Little Rock, Arkansas; and Jackson, Mississippi-the series chronicles the Civil Rights Movement. “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” goes behind the headlines to the emotional events that took place in the living rooms, courtrooms, church basements and streets of these five key cities where the Movement took hold between 1940 and 1970.

The Civil Rights Movement remains one of the most dramatic and important epochs of American history. While ending the cruelty of segregation in the South was its original inspiration, the Movement reshaped our national sense of equality, and planted in the American consciousness a new perception of individual rights that profoundly influenced later societal movements of the poor, women, the physically challenged, and other minorities. Because of this social movement, the meaning of the U.S. Constitution was vastly expanded, and federal laws greatly enlarged individual liberties and protections.

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As a consequence of the Civil Rights Movement, the nation’s political system swelled with millions of new voters, and the American workplace expanded with the talent and productivity of workers with new opportunities.

At the heart of the Civil Rights Movement were literally thousands of men and women who did extraordinary deeds when faced with the personal dilemmas of segregation. In hundreds of local communities throughout the American South-over a period of decades-the Civil Rights Movement was a social phenomenon which drew its strengths and sufferance from the common condition of segregation throughout the region. This common condition created, over the years, a sense of common purpose and, ultimately, common destiny for both black and white citizens.

Interviews with people who participated in the Civil Rights Movement provide the content of the radio series. Hundreds of inspiring stories are connected and enlivened by music from the period, adding vitality and making the series more accessible to people, young and old. Almost every popular musical style of the period is used, including Blues, Rythym and Blues, Rock and Roll, Jazz, Country, Spirituals, Pop, and several “Movement” songs. With rare power-the authentic movement for civil rights-the movement of the unnamed and uncelebrated, comes to life through the voices of those who acted to overthrow segregation and racial inequality.

The Peabody Award-winning series, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” was first broadcast in 1997 on National Public Radio on more than 250 stations nationwide. Due to the tremendous response from the listening public to that initial broadcast, the series was rebroadcast in 1998.

Covering Race: A Deep White Sleep

By Loren Ghiglione

Vol. 21, No. 3, 1999 pp. 8-9

Can three voices from the past help us improve press coverage of race? Recall the messages of three Americans: Harry Golden, Robert Maynard, and Ralph Ellison. Cigar-chomping humorist Harry Golden kept alive his Charlotte, North Carolina monthly, The Carolina Israelite, from 1942 to 1968, despite advertising boycotts orchestrated by white supremacists. He used wit to express his support for desegregation, earlier than most below the Mason-Dixon line. Recognizing that bank counters, supermarkets, and department stores allowed whites and blacks to stand in the same line, Golden proposed his “Vertical Negro Plan”: Take the seats out of schools and have all students stand at their desks.

Golden also implemented his “Out-of-Order Plan” by persuading a department store owner to turn off the water to a “White Only” fountain and slap on an “Out of Order” sign. Within three days Golden wrote, whites — without even a whimper of complaint — were drinking “segregated water” from the “Negro” fountain. If Golden were alive today, he might be proposing, now that “Interngate” is over, a press quarantine plan for Washington. The nation’s news organizations would be required to remove all their reporters from covering the White House and other over reported Washington beats in favor of covering underreported parts of the world and institutions.

Suddenly The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, serving a city that sees itself as important to African-Americans and interested in Africa, would have a correspondent in Africa. Suddenly newspapers would be regularly covering nursing homes, mental institutions, and prisons — usually over looked by the press except for stories about executions.

Prisons are especially on my mind, I suppose, because I took my journalism ethics students to Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, an 18,000-acre former slave plantation. Accompanied by Wilbert Rideau, the “lifer” who edits the famous Angolite prison news magazine, the students interviewed prisoners, including several on death row.

If the press is struggling to find ways to introduce a serious discussion of race into its pages, then it might want to read and listen to Rideau talk about Angola. In an article titled “The Sexual Jungle,” for example, he talked about race as a factor in sexual violence. He quoted a study that showed 56 percent of Philadelphia jail rapes were black on white; 29 percent were black-on-black and only 15 percent were white-on white. Rape was not a matter of sex as much as a weapon of power and prestige, racial subjugation and revenge.

Robert Maynard was the first African-American owner of a historically white metropolitan daily, The Oakland Tribune. Robert and his wife, Nancy, pushed the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) to adopt in 1978 a goal for the newspaper industry — that its newsrooms be as diverse as the United States population by the year 2000. With months to go, people of color make up 26 percent of the population and only 11.5 percent of reporters and editors.

Last year, I was asked by the president of ASNE to present to its board a set of recommendations to ensure that the Year 2000 goal of racial ethnic parity would at least be achieved early in the 21st century.

As is the habit of academics, I responded with a long- winded 14,000-word report, filled with a dozen recommendations. But really the problem is not one of new ideas but of old-fashioned will. If you want coverage of the total community, you need news industry bosses de voted to achieving newsroom diversity.

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Newspapers know that minority internships — which appear to be gradually declining — work. They know that ASNE’s eight minority job fairs a year — which once numbered sixteen a year — work. They know that the setting of diversity goals by news organizations work. They know that offering “management of objective” financial rewards for achieving diversity goals works. They know that monitoring and measuring progress toward achieving those goals works for Gannett and other companies. As Wall Street Journal Senior Editor Joseph Boyce said

“This is a question of will. The editors who make up ASNE are the same people responsible for this not getting done.”

Ralph Ellison saw the black press as an antidote to white blindness.

“That [black press] has not been read and still isn’t read by most whites today is to their disadvantage and to our detriment,”

he wrote.

“This country cannot be run without adequate reporting from all levels, directions and frontiers.”

As a subscriber to the Atlanta Daily World and the Atlanta Inquirer, I agree with Ellison. But I also think Ellison is making a broader point, a point worth emphasizing. Bea Hines, who worked as a maid before she became the first African-American woman reporter at The Miami Herald, spoke eloquently at Emory University in Atlanta last year about her knowledge of white people — about what they ate from washing their dishes, about their personal life from cleaning their clothes and homes.

“But white folks aren’t as knowledgeable about people of color,”

Hines said.

I remembered her words while reading a Sunday New York Times column by Jana Wolff, a white woman who adopted an African-American infant boy.

“That’s when I woke up from a deep, white sleep,”

Wolff wrote.

“Suddenly racism, which had always existed outside my focus, became my focus. When children of color become your children, anonymous struggles become personal ones with names and faces that you know.”

I see the lip service paid to equality, diversity, and harmony as “the integration illusion,” to quote Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown, authors of the recent book, By the Color of Our Skin.

“Integration really means managed tokenism,”

they write. Whites still flee neighborhoods when African-Americans buy houses or register for school. White reporters — and reporters of color — still socialize separately, for the most part. Businesses, including news companies, still maintain management ghettoes for people of color in public relations or community relations. College life, religious life, virtually every part of life divides along racial lines. Integration depends on tireless effort. Few people seem willing to make that effort.

Loren Ghiglione, former director of the Journalism Program at Emory University, is now director of the Annenberg School of Communication’s School of Journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He was president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) from1989-1990. This essay is excerpted from his talk at the “What’s Right and Wrong about News Coverage of Race” panel held at Emory in February of 1999. Photo of Harry Golden provided by the Charlotte-Mecklenberg Public Library. Photo of Robert Maynard provided by the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.

Which Came First, the Statue or the Oppression?

By James W. Loewen

Vol. 21, No. 3, 1999 pp. 10, 27

Below is an excerpt from James Loewen’s most recent book, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites and Monuments Get Wrong, published in October 1999 by New Press, 416 pages.

Markers and monuments don’t cause history. It’s more the other way around; dominant groups use their power to erect historic markers and monuments that present history from their viewpoint. This process typically distorts the past to explain and celebrate their own domination. In turn, controlling what people say and think about the past is an important source of social power. Thus monuments and markers do make a difference. Perhaps George Orwell would not mind this rephrasing of his famous couplet: Who controls the present controls the landscape. Who controls the landscape controls the future.

Three counties in south central Arkansas show these connections between the social structure of an area, its ideology, and the story its historic monuments tell. Camden, the county seat of Ouachita County, looks like a traditional town in the plantation South, complete with columned mansions. The Ouachita County courthouse sports a traditional monument, “To our Confederate Women,” (see photo) dedicated in 1914. It joined a Confederate monument put up in 1886 in the Confederate Section of Oakland Cemetery that replaced an even earlier obelisk. These cemetery monuments were put up shortly after the war by people who grieved the dead.

By 1914, when Camden’s monument to Confederate women went up, most wives and widows and almost all mothers of Confederate soldiers were no longer alive; clearly the memorial was not intended for them. Instead, like most monuments to the Confederacy, Camden’s is future-oriented. In its words, whites erected it in hopes that the “patriotism” of these women “will teach their children to emulate the deeds of their sires.” In 1914 the “Lost Cause” was no longer lost: regarding race relations, although not secession, Confederate ideology was securely in the saddle. The monument implies this triumph: “Their inspiration transformed the gloom of defeat into the hope of the future.”

Confederates and neo-Confederates never took over the landscape in Dallas County, the next county north. The courthouse in Fordyce has no statue and the town looks less traditionally Southern.1 Dallas County looks “neutral”-neither Confederate nor Unionist. But the next county north is Grant, named for a Union general; its county seat, Sheridan, is named for another. The Grant County courthouse grounds have a marker for the “Blue Star Memorial Highway” (a tribute to the armed forces of the United States) and a memorial for soldiers of the two World Wars-both lacking in Ouachita County-and nothing for the Confederacy.

These place names and memorials are not incidental. Contrasting social structures in the three counties led to different ideologies that are visible today in these names and monuments. Before the Civil War, Ouachita County was good land for cotton farming, drawing planters with their slaves from Alabama. The land in Grant County was never conducive to large-scale plantations. Few slaves were brought to it before the Civil War; its inhabitants were mostly white small farmers. Dallas County was intermediate, with some slaves and some independent white farmers.

In turn, the ideological clues on the landscape point

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to and reinforce differences in society that persist even today. In 1990 only 62 percent of black residents in Ouachita County owned their own homes, compared to 74 percent in Dallas County and 88.5 percent in Grant County. African Americans made less than half as much as whites in per capita income in Ouachita and in Dallas, but three quarters percent as much in Grant County. These numbers confirm what the landscape implies: that Grant County is the most hospitable of the three for African Americans.

Plantations involved enormous exploitation. But today few people in the three counties make their living from the land, so the presence or absence of plantation social structure no longer explains the racial disparities in the three counties directly. Plantations left an ideological legacy however, visible on the landscape. When Confederates are heroes, as they are on the streets of Camden, then for citizens-white or black-to argue for social or economic equality can seem a bit outlandish. Thus “Which came first, the statue or the oppression?” is more complicated than it seems. The oppression came first, clearly, for without slavery no Confederate cause would have arisen, hence no statue. But these monuments and names symbolize and help maintain (in Ouachita) or decrease (in Grant) the racial disparities that still exist in these counties that still look Confederate, neutral, and Unionist today. Changing the landscape is therefore one step toward relieving the oppression.2

Jim Loewen is the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong and is coauthor of Mississippi: Conflict and Change which won a Lillian Smith Award in 1976. Loewen taught race relations at the University of Vermont and now lives in Washington, D.C. where he continues his research on how Americans remember their past

Title I in Alabama: The Struggle to Meet Basic Needs

Citizen’s Commission on Civil Rights

Vol. 21, No. 3, 1999 pp. 12-15

The Citizens’ Commission for Civil Rights, a nonpartisan organization founded in 1982 to monitor Federal civil rights policies and practices, has launched a study to assess the progress made by the federal government, the states, and four targeted communities in complying with the 1994 amendments to Title I contained in the Improving America’s Schools Act. Below are excerpts from the second of several reports on this issue in which the Citizens’ Commission highlights field research in high-poverty communities in Alabama, a state that was chosen because of its long and severe legacy of underfunding education and denying educational opportunities on the basis of race. The study was published in the summer of 1999.

The struggle for equal educational opportunity for African-American and poor students in Alabama at the end of the twentieth century endures in the shadow of the long history of state-imposed, racially separate, and unequal provision of public schooling. Alabama fiercely resisted dismantling its dual system of public education in the face of the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education and congressional enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Brown held that racial classifications imposed by the government for the purpose of separating blacks from whites violated the United States Constitution; ten years later, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, it became official national policy to prohibit discrimination on the basis of race in education, employment, and a host of other aspects of American life. Most of the state came under federal court order to desegregate its public schools in September 1963, when Governor George Wallace issued an executive order to delay the opening of school in Macon County.

Indeed, Alabama has been a staging ground for the great legal and political campaigns to enforce both the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution as they apply to education. But despite these battles, many vestiges of the old “separate but equal” educational system remain, including low levels of spending, the lack of capacity to teach specific advanced skills, low levels of literacy, and pervasive and staggering family poverty rates. Many poor students start school without the most basic preparation, due to family poverty, lack of quality preschool programs, and the absence of mandatory kindergarten.

Research has demonstrated that concentrations of poverty in rural and urban areas multiply the adverse consequences of poverty on a child’s achievement The more students from low-income families, the greater are a school’s needs for: additional highly trained staff, more personal attention, an enriched curriculum, extra instructional materials, after-school and summer classes, and parent involvement programs.

While the federal role in education is limited, the national government has a vital role in ensuring equality of educational opportunity. The national interest in education has been manifested for the past three decades primarily through the civil rights laws, and through Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Title I, an $8 billion program that now serves nearly 10.5 million students in some 50,000 schools, has for years provided funds to Alabama school systems and schools that have high concentrations of poor children.

The Title I program (which was renamed Chapter 1 between 1981 and 1994) is the federal government’s largest program providing financial assistance to the nation’s elementary and secondary schools. In 1994, the most recent reauthorization of this law, Congress substantially overhauled the Title I program to shift the focus from remedial education to high standards and higher achievement-reforms that had been advocated by professional educators and a broad coalition of civil rights and education organizations, and endorsed by the Clinton Administration. These reforms called for raising academic standards; building the capacity of schools; adopting testing and assess-ments that fairly and accurately measure what children know ensuring accountability by school officials; and ensuring the inclusion of all children, especially those with limited English proficiency and disabilities.

The new law, while potent, is not self-executing. Whether disadvantaged children will reap its benefits depends largely on the extent to which officials at every level carry out their respective obligations. Nor is the new Title I expected to meet its goals in isolation. Rather, it must be integrated into state, district, and school efforts to improve learning for all students.

Key Findings

• Alabama has made a start on education reform in the past four years by adopting the Courses of Study (the
  

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  state content standards) and by holding schools and districts accountable for at least a minimal level of student achievement for the first time in the state’s history. Little progress has been made, however, in implementing the 1994 changes in Titie I and integrating them into a comprehensive and coordinated standards-based set of reforms devoted to substantial and continuous progress toward high achievement for all students.

• Educators fear that tough new graduation requirements, including a new high school exit examination, will result in massive failure. In their view, current elementary and secondary grade preparation, high school curriculum, equipment, materials, and inadequately trained teachers are not equal to the task of ensuring student success.

• The use of the schoolwide option under Title I to upgrade the entire educational program in schools at or above 50 percent poverty has increased enormously since 1994. The Citizens’ Commission found two schools-Tuggle Elementary School in Birmingham and Adams Elementary School in Gadsden-that are using the option as the law intends and producing student progress. In other places, however, schoolwide programs exist in name only.

  Among the factors that distinguish Tuggle and Adams are:

  • ✓ The use of trained specialists to address children’s specific needs-e.g., Reading Recovery teachers at Tuggle and English as a Second Language teachers at Adams;
  • ✓ Plentiful and high-quality professional opportunities for all teachers, who also possess great discretion in determining the kind of training they require to best serve students;
  • ✓ Principals who are strong instructional leaders, but who also delegate much of the decision-making responsibility to their staff;
  • ✓ High expectations for all students even though they come from very low-income or non-English-speaking families and communities with high concentrations of poverty;
  • ✓ An intense instructional focus on literacy skills-decoding, phonics, and reading comprehension-supplemented with literature in print and audio formats; and
  • ✓Strong support from district officials and recognition for accomplishments.

• In the lowest wealth districts in the Black Belt, Title I funds are used not to address the special needs of poor children, but to meet basic needs that should be met by state and local authorities. The lack of nonfederal resources in these districts is attributable to the inequities in the state’s education finance system.

  misuse of Title I funds has deprived disadvantaged, low-achieving students of those extra enhancements-such as more highly trained and qualified teachers, extended learning opportunities, and supplementary curriculum-that would enable them to achieve at much higher levels.

• Professional development resources, which are critical to student improvement, are meager in Alabama. Most of what passes for professional development are one-shot workshops or lessons on test-taking skills and objectives, rather than concentrated, sustained, and compensated work both in classrooms and outside of school.

The Alabama Reading Initiative is a promising start in devoting attention and resources to training teachers how to teach reading, the area acknowledged to be the state’s lowest area of performance. The State Department of Education has overlooked the use of Title I funds that could expand participation in the Alabama Reading Initiative to many more schools and students.

Recommendations

High Standards for All Students
• Alabama must substantially raise its expectations for student learning at all levels for elementary and junior high school students.
• Stronger precollegiate education will increase the numbers of African-American and other disadvantaged students entering and graduating from college and technical training institutions.
• Alabama must adopt performance standards.
• Superintendents and principals must not let student performance standards become a new way to sort and track students.
• The content standards, performance standards, and samples of student work should be translated into Spanish or other languages spoken by limited English proficient students in the state.

Fair Assessment for All Students
• Alabama should replace or supplement the SAT 9 with a criterion-referenced text that incorporates the performance standards and is aligned with the Courses of Study. The new assessment should cover all subjects required to be taught in the state’s schools, as the SAT 9 does now.

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• Alabama should issue new guidelines for the inclusion of and accommodations for disabled and limited English proficient students that comply with Title I and the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
An Accountability System for All Students
• Alabama’s new accountability system should be designed to measure substantial and continuous progress of all students toward attainment of proficiency. No school or district should be found “in the clear” unless all students, including those who are poor and limited English proficient, are making progress.
• The state should establish goals in terms of the time schools and districts will have to bring virtually all students up to the level of proficiency.
• The accountability system should not rely exclu-sively on one test.
• Schools should be held accountable for the sub-stantial and continuous progress only of those students who are enrolled for a full school year.
• Copies of the State Superintendent’s Report Card should be sent to each parent.

Equalizing Resources among Districts So That Title I Addresses Special Needs

The findings in this report underscore how far many schools in Alabama-particularly those serving large numbers of African-American and poor children-are from achieving acceptable levels of academic performance. The children who attend such schools will have little hope of future success, including passage of the new high school exit examination, unless the state takes emergency measures to address resource disparities, to redeploy federal funds, and, ultimately, to provide such children with effective instruction. The consequences of not acting are likely to include: wide-spread failure, particularly of disadvantaged children, on the high school graduation exam; prolonged litigation; the continued low ranking of Alabama among states; and dim prospects for the state’s future.

• For Title I to serve its purpose of providing edu-cational opportunity for disadvantaged students, the state legislature must address the underfunding of Alabama school districts by taking significant steps both to equalize expenditures between well-off and poor districts and to ensure that all districts have adequate state and local dollars to provide a constitutionally adequate education. Resources should be sufficient and deployed to support effective measures to ensure that all children are provided the instruction and assistance they need to meet the state’s standards.
• In order to eliminate the temptation to use Title I to meet basic operating expenses, the State Superintendent should act swiftly to issue a directive to all school districts clarifying Title I’s fiscal requirements.
• The state should further act to provide guidance to districts and schools on the kinds of supplemental services and expenditures that would have the greatest impact in Title I schools. These may include: lowering class size further in the highest poverty schools; after-school, tutoring, and summer programs for students who need extra help; enhanced professional development opportunities; working with parents to improve their literacy and involvement with their children’s education; and meetings among teachers to collaborate and provide support on school improvement efforts.
• Finally, school districts in Alabama should target Title I funds to the highest poverty schools, those above the average of poverty for the entire district.
_Developing the Capacity to Enable All Students to Meet State Standards
• All teachers and support staff in Title 1 schools must receive high-quality school-based, and continuous professional development above and beyond state requirements and school accreditation standards.
• Title I funds should be made available to support all forms of professional development and should be geared to the Courses of Study, the standards that define what students should know and be able to do. Teacher training must go beyond one-hour sessions on test-taking skills and classroom management, to include subject-matter knowledge, working with experienced mentor teachers, observing other teachers, meeting with other teachers, and visiting high-performing, high-poverty schools outside the district. Professional development must be seen as much a regular and ongoing part of daily school life as is taking attendance.
• State Superintendent Ed Richardson should address the purpose and proper use of Title I funds at his regular meetings with local superintendents. He should send a strong and message to local superintendents that they must comply with the law and that improper expenditures will not be tolerated.
• Title I training should be provided to members of Alabama’s state education associations and of local teachers’ organizations.
• Alabama must also devote attention and resources to preparing teachers to work with its growing limited English proficient student population. A special effort must be made to recruit and certify bilingual teachers.
• School and district officials must exert initiative and leadership to convey to parents the necessity of their children’s attendance.

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The Federal Role
• The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Ele-mentary and Secondary Education should provide technical assistance for the Title I staff in the Alabama Department of Education on the fiscal and program requirements for school districts.
• It is urgent that the U.S. Department of Education accelerate its continuing technical assistance to Alabama. The U.S. Department of Education also should take enforcement action where necessary, including a fiscal audit of Alabama in order to determine whether Title I funds are being used to supplant state and local funds, particularly with respect to the hiring of classroom teachers.
The Public’s Role
• Education reform and professional organizations, child advocates, and community groups should pay more attention to how Title I funds are used in districts and schools.

Title I rules, regulations, applications, budgets, and school report cards-all of which are public documents-can be advocacy tools. Asking questions about Title I raises awareness. Principals and teachers often do not know what can be done with federal funds; school board members and parents may know even less. Federal law requires state education departments to investigate and respond to complaints about violations of Title I or misuse of funds. In addition, advocates can work with schools to involve parents in their children’s education, to organize family literacy programs, and to support students’ academic efforts. Alabama has momentous challenges ahead. Alabama has embraced high standards at the end of schooling-the high school diploma-but not at the beginning. Failure rates on the pilot tenth grade exam this year should not be used as a reason to back off standards. Standards for student achievement prior to high school are too low. Higher standards for all students, trained teachers who can enable students to meet the standards, and supports for student learning must exist at all ages from preschool to high school. Otherwise, state policy will perpetuate the cycle of poverty in Alabama in generation after generation.

Excerpts from Title I in Alabama: The Struggle to Meet Basic Needs were printed with permission from the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights. One free copy of the study may be obtained by contacting the Commission at: 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 400, Washington, D.C. 20036; phone 202-659-5565; web site www.cccr.org.

Lillian Smith: A Struggle for Wholeness

Staff

Vol. 21, No. 3, 1999 pp. 16-18

Internationally acclaimed as author of the controversial novel, Strange Fruit (1944), Lillian Smith was the most liberal and outspoken of white mid-twentieth century Southern writers on issues of social, and especially racial, injustice. When other Southern liberals such as Ralph McGill, Hodding Carter, Virginius Dabney, and Jonathan Daniels were charting a cautious course on racial change, Smith boldly and persistently called for an end to segregation. For such boldness she was often scorned by more moderate Southerners, threatened by arsonsists, and denied the critical attention she deserved as a writer. Yet she continued to write and speak for improved human relations and social justice throughout her life. Born December 12, 1897, Lillian Smith grew up in Jasper, Florida, the daughter of a prominent business and civic leader. Smith’s life as a daughter of upper-class whites in the small-town Deep South ended abruptly when her father lost his turpentine mills in 1915 and moved the family to their summer home in the mountains of Clayton, Georgia. Financially on her own, Smith’s plans were altered when her parents, in ill health, asked her to direct their summer camp for girls. Under her direction from 1925 through 1948, Laurel Falls Camp became an innovative educational institution. Encouraging emotional and psychological as well as physical development, Smith helped the daughters of white upper-class southerners question their world and begin to envision the possibility of change. Through the camp Smith also met Paula Snelling, and began the life-long relationship that encouraged and sustained her writing career. Smith and Snelling entered the public arena by publishing a small literary magazine they co-edited from 1936-1945. Publishing and reviewing the literary work and opinions of black and white women and men, the magazine addressed a wide range of political, social, and economic issues and quickly achieved acclaim as a forum for liberal ideas in the region. Smith also wrote and published six books between 1944 and 1964 with a perceptive analysis of the South and human understanding. These works include two autobiographical works through which Smith examined the South’s legacy of “sin, sex, and segregation” on its children and sought “an image of the human being I could be proud of.” Smith’s books also urged fast compliance with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. the Board of Education decision and to reveal her personal experiences with the young civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s. Although she rarely identified herself with any organization, Smith was deeply respected and sought after by those who actively worked for justice in the South. She supported, advised, and criticized the work of such national and regional organizations as the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Congress of Racial Equality, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Southern Regional Council. Since 1968 the Southern Regional Council has sought, through an award in Lillian Smith’s name, to recognize and encourage writers and books that have literary merit, moral vision, and honestly represent the South-its people, problems, and promises. This year’s award ceremony, honoring J. Morgan Kousser and Leroy Davis, will be held at noon on November 6 at the Sheraton Colony Square Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. Call (404) 522-8764 for more details. .The following excerpt from Fred Hobson’s new book, But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative, (Louisiana State University Press 1999) examines the motives and inspirations of Lillian Smith’s writings.

The great purpose of all of Lillian Smith’s work was to demolish barriers between people-and racism and sexism as well as distinctions of class and religion built those walls. Her crusade against racism, then, was really a part of a larger crusade, against needless separation of any kind. The overriding theme of her work was a struggle against fragmentation, for wholeness. “My literary aim,” she wrote an acquaintance in 1964, “has been to search and probe for the meaning of racism as a symptom of men’s fear of the future, a symptom, too, of their fear of evolving into a more complex thinking human being.”

Smith originally entitled her first novel “Walls”-a book, never published, based on her China experience-but “Walls” could also have served as the title of her most notable book, Killers of the Dream, her narrative of confession (for her family and region as well as herself) and of conversion. Originally published in 1949, and issued in a revised edition in 1961, Killers of the Dream was an impassioned plea for racial harmony as well as a harsh depiction of southern life, “a schizophrenic invention without parallel,” one reviewer wrote, “an insane dichotomy from the cradle to the grave.” Smith herself said her book could have been produced only “in a tight, closed culture:” “A German, reared as a child in the Nazi days,” might have

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written it. But she had written the book, she insisted, not to expose the South so much as to understand it-and herself. Her intent, “as was [that in] St. Augustine’s Confessions,” she explained, was “not to give answers but to find the big question s that I could and must live with in freedom.” Indeed, her book was ” a kind of existential confession: this is life in a segregated culture as I saw it, felt it, heard it, experienced it, and was shaped by it.” Or, as she commented another time, “I had to write this book. It was like a ghost flitting in and out of my mind until I did.” She “had to find out what life in a segregated culture” had done to her:” “I had to put down on paper these experiences so that I could see their meaning for me.”

Killers of the Dream had been a long time in the making; much of what Smith had thought and written over the previous fifteen years prepared her for it. In 1936 she and her longtime companion, Paula Snelling, had begun a magazine, eventually called South Today, in which she had pondered the sins of white southerners. Repeatedly she had written of the “racial fear and hatred” among southerners, the “profound guilt for our treatment of the Negro,” and “the rationalizations by which the white man eases his guilt.” Her own culpability she had proclaimed as freely as the seventeenth-century Puritans had confessed their sinfulness, declaring in an editorial entitled “Act of Penance”: “We in the South who feel so much shame are not without sin….We can now perform the ancient rites of handwashing…but we shall not be free of guilt until we rid our region of inertia and ignorance and poverty.” She was well aware of her evangelical tone, remarking in a letter in 1939, “we sound like missionaries with a powerful solemn purpose.” As she went about the business of converting others, Smith was also intent upon transforming herself. Even the writing of her novel Strange Fruit in the early 1940s had been “therapy” that “removed a long amnesia about my hometown.” Smith “wrote down some things I did not know were true until I saw them staring back at me on the page.”

Smith later said that in writing Killers of the Dream she explored “layers of [her] nature” she had never touched before, that “my beliefs changed as I wrote them down.” Killers, thus, was not only a book about her racial conversion; the writing process was part of the conversion, part of the shedding of old beliefs, the transformation.

Smith later maintained that her book, though a “personal memoir,” was also “Every Southerner’s memoir,” and writing in 1949 she seems to assume that every white Southerner feels as she does about the “haunted” past:

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We defend the sins and sorrows of three hundred years as if each sin had been committed by us alone and each sorrow had cut across our heart….We have known guilt without understanding it….We southerners have identified with the long sorrowful past on such deep levels of love and hate and guilt that we do not know how to break old bonds without pulling our lives down.

In the mid and late 1950s, in speeches and in essays, Smith continued to pursue the demon, segregation. In her 1955 treatise Now Is the Time, she hailed the 1954 Supreme Court decision-which, she maintained, had “freed whites”-and urged southern leaders to end segregation immediately; her words met with publicly respectful but condescending remarks from Ralph McGill, Hodding Carter, and Howard Odum. Racial segregation, she asserted, was “a symbol of the deep pervasive illness in our culture that has dehumanized us all”; it represented “that estrangement from God which oppresses modern man; it subsumes all the fragmentations of modern times.” Racial guilt continued to be Smith’s central theme: “To stem our guilt, we began to defend the indefensible: we declared that God had made the white race superior to other races.” The emerging Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, gave her great hope: “By the reiteration of those powerful words love, compassion, redemption, grace, [it] is compelling us to search for truth, that of our region and of ourselves.”

Smith’s concluding chapter in the 1961 Killers of the Dream, then, transcended race; it moved further and further into the realm of the spiritual, into a reflection on brokenness and healing and on man as a creature in a “dangerous state of flux,” “only partially evolved,” and in need of redemption. Transcendence and redemption were again Smith’s themes the following year in Our Faces, Our Words, also a tribute to the Civil Rights Movement and a work that is, in many ways, an extension of Killers of the Dream. After telling the stories of several civil rights workers and sympathizers-including a white minister, plagued by conscience, who has determined that “some of us whites may need to die for our collective sins”-Smith speaks in the final chapter in her own voice. “Redemption,” she affirms, was the goal of the early Civil Rights Movement: “There was a surge of joy, of adventure, yes; of courage….It was beautiful to see. Perhaps never in American history has there been a movement of such gayety and intellectual richness.” Those associated with the movement were engaged in a “search for the good life which they hunger to substitute for the hollow thing-obsessed life too many of us have lived. And all of it streaked with a fine sense of humor and humility they express in prayer.”

BOOKS
Contingent Lives
Reviewed by Terry Easton

Vol. 21, No. 3, 1999 pp. 19-21

Rebecca Sharpless, Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999

;

Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997

.

Despite the fact that cotton production in the South has been a perennial subject of research, two recent books about cotton farming in central Texas, Rebecca Sharpless’ Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices and Neil Foley’s The White Scourge, bring attention to a Southern cotton region so far given scant review. Readers already attuned to the intricacies and iniquities of the post-Reconstruction era crop-lien system in Deep South states such as Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Mississippi will find recognizable features in Sharpless’ and Foley’s accounts. Perhaps unrecognizable, however, will be Sharpless’ and Foley’s delineations of the unique intersections between race, class, and gender in twentieth century central Texas cotton farming. Most significant, both authors deftly illuminate the ways that the standard black and white, tenant and landowner model of Southern race and class relations fails to adequately describe the cultural milieu of King Cotton in Central Texas.

Studying nearly identical geographic regions from roughly 1900 to 1940, Sharpless and Foley document similar facts about cotton farming in central Texas. Not only had Texas become the leading cotton-producing state in the nation by 1890, but by 1920 central Texas had become a highly racially-aware, multi-ethnic region comprised of African-Americans, Anglos, Czechoslovakians, Germans, Mexicans, and Mexican-Americans of various social classes including wage laborers, sharecroppers, tenants, and landowners. Moreover, marked by significant cultural and technological change, by the early 1940s cotton farming no longer held sway for many of the Texans who had once lived and died amidst the cyclical, often desperate rhythms of cotton cultivation.

Sharpless and Foley foreground different though concomitant reasons for the cultural and technological shift in central Texas cotton farming. Sharpless illuminates how, at least for those who could afford it, beginning gradually in the 1930s and then much more rapidly in the 1940s, the increasing use of the automobile shaped the cultural changes which occured in central Texas cotton farming during the first forty years of the twentieth century. The accompanying road improvements, the pull of people to cities and nearby market centers for entertainment and commercial consumptive practices, the greater access to labor-saving urban devices such as electricity and running water, and the growth of service-sector jobs and WWII industrial employment in towns and cities spurred rural-to-urban migration.

Despite sharing these and many other factual similarities, Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices and The White Scourge differ thematically, methodologically, and stylistically. Sharpless, for example, aims to document the daily lives of cotton-farming women of the Blackland Prairie, the “funnel-shaped expanse of chocolate-covered clay” in central Texas that connects San Antonio to Sherman, Paris, and other communities just north of Dallas. Sharpless organizes Fertile Ground,

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Narrow Choices

around women’s participation in the commercial economy (as field worker), the domestic economy (as housewife), and the reproductive economy (as mother). Sharpless analyzes the physical conditions of women’s daily lives to determine how a majority of them, especially those of the poorer tenant, sharecropping, and wage laboring classes coped with, among other things, the grim, daily reality of inordinately long workdays, shoddy housing, and insufficient or unhealthy supplies of food, water, and clothing.

Farm living was particularly harsh for children, and mothers did the best they could to provide ample food, clothing, and shelter for them. Blackland Prairie native Mary Ann Collier Campbell, for example, recalls that she and her siblings did not wear shoes from the time “the mesquite tree bloomed” until “the onset of winter.” Bernice Bostick Weir remembers a specific incident in her childhood on the Prairie: “When we moved down on the creek, there wasn’t any toilet. And so I don’t know how long it was we lived there-we’d have to go out around in the bushes or a ditch or something.” Inez Folley reveals that in her childhood strenuous labor permanently damaged her back: “And we had to bring water from the tank to the hogs. My brother was five years older than I, and we’d take a big tubfull of water and I’d hold one handle and he’d hold the other and so I know that’s why I had a weak back, is because I lifted too much, too hard a load, when I was young. My back was still growing.”

In what can only be described as a cruel irony, Sharpless demonstrates how, for many, living on the nutrient-rich Blackland Prairie, a place where a one-crop export economy dependent on prices determined far away prevailed, the basic requirements of life often proved elusive. “In Hill Country,” Sharpless writes, “a Mexican family of two children and three adults lived in a smokehouse with no floor or windows.” In 1920, an African-American woman on the Prairie reported that her family had been eating only twice a day because they were trying to “stretch their meager portions of food.” According to Sharpless, even though many tenants, sharecroppers, and laborers often moved in search of a better farming situation, they frequently ended the harvest just as they had begun it: “in debt and in want.”

Using autobiographies and memoirs, oral history interviews, and contemporary reports of rural reformers, Sharpless assembles a remarkable narrative of women who frequently worked from dawn to dusk as they “pulled in double harness” (worked at home and in the fields) to make life more bearable for their families and themselves. Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices is particularly strong when Sharpless draws from the perspectives and experiences of African-American, Anglo, Czech, German, Mexican, and Mexican-American women of the landowning, tenant, sharecropping, and laboring classes to illuminate the multiple ways that the lives of Blackland Prairie cotton-farming women intersected under the constraints of Southern patriarchy, racism, and class bias. When studying, for example, the foodways, folk cultures, communal events, consumptive practices, and labor patterns of Blackland Prairie women and their families Sharpless showcases her keen ability to analyze the ways in which gender, race, ethnicity, and class inflected the real and symbolic value of mundane items such as home heating systems, window screens, privies, housewares, staple foods, soap, water, clothing, farm animals, and implements.

Because Sharpless takes advantage of the quickly-dwindling opportunity to document orally the daily lives of early twentieth century central Texas cotton-farming women, Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices is imbued with a sense of urgency. Even though the grim, often desperate lives of rural women on Texas cotton farms are portrayed rather bleakly in Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices, Sharpless writes with a sense of guarded optimism. Rather than romanticize or portray Blackland Prairie women merely as oppressed victims of Southern patriarchy and national agricultural trends, Sharpless instead shows us how they “usually worked hard, tried their best, and sometimes failed in their attempts to create comfortable lives for their families and for themselves.” Because Sharpless masterfully weaves together oral and written sources, Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices reads effortlessly and intelligently. Most readers of history, particularly those sympathetic to oral history, will readily identify Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices as an historical account of central Texas cotton farming.

Less readily recognizable as traditional history, though equally important in understanding central Texas

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cotton farming and the cultures it produced, is Neil Foley’s The White Scourge. In addition to studying nearly all of the Blackland Prairie, Foley extends the imaginary borders of central Texas to include the eastern region of Texas which connects the Prairie to Houston, and the southern region of Texas which connects the Prairie to Corpus Christi. Similarly, Foley casts a wide net as he analyzes the ebb and flow of labor markets, migration, and immigration in central Texas. Whereas Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices relies on the pedestrian, everyday language of daily life on central Texas cotton farms, The White Scourge is steeped in the language of cultural studies. Peppered with phrases such as “racial geography,” “ethnoracial status and identity,” “wages of whiteness,” and “fissuring of whiteness,” The White Scourge can be added to the expanding corpus of historical studies which aim to contextualize the social construction of “whiteness.”

Foley deploys the contemporary metaphor “agricultural ladder” to explicate the Jeffersonian yeoman ideal which asserted the belief that white, male farmhands could climb ascending rungs from hired hand to sharecropper to tenant farmer to farm owner. According to this “master trope for agrarian whiteness,” farm ownership “was both the symbol of and the passport to full citizenship in the democracy of rural America.” Of course, in a period and region invested in racial and gender inequality, Anglo men, not African-American, Mexican or Mexican-American men and women, were expected to rise to farm ownership.

As Foley demonstrates how increasingly difficult it was for anyone to attain farm ownership in the cross-cultural borderlands of central Texas, he also elucidates how movement up or down the agricultural ladder refracted deeply held personal and public convictions about race, class, and gender indentity categories. White landowners, bankers, merchants, reformers, and eugenicists, for example, disparaged white men who did not ascend the ladder, positing their inability to rise as individual failings stemming from ignorance, inefficiency, laziness, discontentness, and shiftlessness rather than local and national problems such as soil depletion, the sharp rise in land value, the high cost of credit, and the low price of cotton. Foley’s overarching thesis clearly supports the idea that in central Texas, regardless of individual traits, the opportunity for tenants, sharecroppers, and wage laborers of any race to rise up from farm laborer to farm owner sharply dwindled with each passing decade.

In 1915, white cotton farmer H. L. Cook revealed the hardscrabble life of tenant farming when he reflected on his own life as a tenant farmer: “I have lived in shacks that were not as good as the landlord’s horse stable. I have dug wells, built houses, cow lots, hogpens, corncribs, horse sheds, grubbed out patches, repaired fences, cut ditches, all without cost to the landlord . . . . Our children grew up without education; and yet we are poor . . . . I will have to spend the rest of my days with broken-down health and pain and aches . . . . Shame, Shame on a system that will allow it.”

When white men failed to ascend the agricultural ladder, their degree of whiteness and masculinity waned in the eyes of upper-echelon whites. Alternatively, in some cases sharecropping and tenant Mexicans and Mexican-Americans with “manly courage” were viewed by some labor leaders, at least minimally and for a short time, less “dark” and therefore more “white” and “masculine” when they joined unions or organized their own, voiced their outrage about unfair credit practices and exploitative recruitment policies, or refused to work or live under unjust conditions proposed by cotton growers. Mr. Hernandez, a Mexican tenant for fifteen years and an organizer for the Socialist Renters’ Union and the Land League complained: “The landlord would not let me have land for a garden. He never has built a crib or . . . let me plant feed for my teams . . . . He does not want to fix the house for me. If a child walks across the floor the whole house shakes; the wind comes through the cracks. When it rains everything gets wet.”

For Foley, the white scourge was not, as novelist Edward Everett Davis in his 1940 novel The White Scourge and contemporary reformers proposed, cotton farming or even the “worthless human silt” and “white trash” it purportedly attracted like “iron filings to a magnet.” Rather, the white scourge exemplifies the way whiteness itself became a crucible for competing claims to racialized, gendered, and classed notions of power and privilege.

Using evidence primarily from archival collections, census reports, and governmental records, Foley provocatively illuminates how interactions between Anglos, African-Americans, Mexicans, and Mexican-Americans “ruptured” the “black-white polarity” of a cross-cultural, multi-racial borderland region simultaneously Southern and Southwestern. More than mere academic jargon, Foley’s linguistic and conceptual manipulations allow us to envision the expanding parameters of Southern labor studies and social history.

Whether read separately or in tandem, The White Scourge and Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices perceptively and incisively demonstrate how, during the first forty years of the twentieth century, central Texas cotton farmers lived, in Sharpless’ words, “contingent lives.”

Terry Easton is a graduate student in American Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. His primary focus is labor history.

Mama Dip’s Kitchen

By Mildred Council

Vol. 21, No. 3, 1999 pp. 22-24

For nearly twenty-five years, Mildred Council-better known as Mama Dip–has nourished folks in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her restaurant, Mama Dip’s Kitchen, is a much-loved community institution that has gained loyal fans and customers from all walks of life, from New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne to former Tar Heel basketball player Michael Jordan. Her much anticipated cookbook, Mama Dip’s Kitchen showcases the down-home, wholesome, everyday Southern cooking for which its namesake restaurant is celebrated. Southern Changes is pleased to offer the following excerpt from this new book.

I was born a colored girl in Chatham County, North Carolina, to Ed Cotton and Effie Edwards Cotton; grew up a Negro in my youth; lived my adult life black; and am now a seventy year-old American. I have always known myself as Mildred Edna Cotton Council. The cultural names haven’t changed my feelings of being an American citizen. I have experienced the Negro or black American cultural world in a tiny area of the United States of America. I grew up and lived in poverty most of my life without knowing it. My children, too, grew up in poverty never knowing that they were poor. Our house just leaked. No screen doors. An outdoor bathroom and little money.

Our family was happy to sit around the table at dinner time, eating, poking jokes, and having fun. It didn’t matter if the dishes and the cups didn’t match. (Sometimes just a pie pan would do.) Early childhood experience equipped me to raise my children to accept life by being happy, learning about life and its struggles and disappointments.

I was raised on a farm in Baldwin Township, Chatham County, where I started cooking at an early age.

I was called “Dip” by my brothers and sisters because I was so tall (today, I’m six feet, one inch) and had such long arms that I could reach way down in the rain barrel to scoop up a big dipperful of water when the level was low. Filling up water buckets for the kitchen had its benefits though, as it was on my trips in and out of the kitchen with water that I first learned to cook, watching how Roland [a family friend] or my older sisters made things with their “dump cooking” methods and making mental notes about how ingredients went together.

Dump cooking means no recipes, just measure by eye and feel and taste and testing. Cooking by feel and taste has been a heritage among black American women since slavery, and that’s the way I learned to cook. When I talk about dump cooking, I am thinking of fresh vegetables (planting and tending a vegetable patch and then cooking and canning its products has also been a tradition for black women), homegrown or from a farmers’ market. I think of peeling potatoes, stringing beans, chopping onions, huffing peas, washing greens, and more. Farm fresh is the highlight of country dump cooking. If you buy food too far ahead, its not fresh when you cook it. Some vegetables keep a long time when refrigerated, but remember, usually they have already been refrigerated before you buy them.

Fruit for cobblers or pies was picked by all the children. We would just taste the fruit for sweetness and add the amount of sugar that we felt was needed. For more sweet fruit and for country pie taste, a little salt was always added to mellow the sugar with the fruit.

Vegetables were a pan or basket full or a head or two of cabbage, ears of corn, a small bucket of potatoes, with a piece of meat for each person. Measuring cups were not found in our kitchen. I learned to pinch the salt or pour it in the palm of my hand. Then I would taste the juice from the pot. Measuring by eye or feel, I still find that my hands serve well for this, and tasting gives your pot that personal touch. After I left home, I had no measuring cups or spoons in my kitchen (salt and pepper were used right out of the container) until my children began to cook. Even then, I encouraged them not to rely on measurements too much. I would tell them to try learning to pour salt or pepper into their hands and then dumping it into the pot.

In 1945, when Papa made up his mind that we would move to Chapel Hill, I was really upset. When I had been to town with him before, I’d seen girls in bobby socks, pleated skirts, and sweaters with shiny combs and magnolias in their hair, and I just couldn’t see myself sitting in a classroom with them. My Grandmother Martha, a midwife in Durham, came to visit us, and I cried about what was going to happen to us. She told Pap about a beauty school on Fayetteville Street in Durham that was good training work for girls. They accepted students with an eighth grade education, but I was already in the tenth grade. Nevertheless, Pap agreed it was a good idea, and I went to live with Grandmother Martha until Pap moved us into town in a one-horse wagon. When I saw the movie The Color Purple, it reminded me of our move from Chatham County into Chapel Hill.

I never wanted to go to beauty school. I wanted to cook and hear people talk about how good my food was, like they did at church when we had homecoming in August. Still, I went to beauty school and then to work at Friendly Beauty Parlor on West Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. I worked there for a few months, though I never really liked it.

Times were very hard after the war for everyone. My husband Joe worked at the sawmill, like a lot of other men, but when it rained there was no work and no money. I began work in the dining hall on the University of North Carolina campus, preparing vegetables for the cooks and as a short order cook at the Carolina Coffee Shop, which is now one of the few restaurants in Chapel Hill that is older than mine.

When I began having my babies–our first child, Norma, was born in 1949–I could work only until they found out I was pregnant. Between then and 1957, all my other seven children (including twins in 1953) were born in between different jobs. The hardest time in my life was after the twins’ birth, because both of them–and I–became sick. For almost a year, my right eye would not close, and people began to call me Mrs. Boe, for the man with a patch over his eye on the

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Bohemian Beer label.

My cooking continued–at Kappa Sigma fraternity and at St. Anthony Hall, when Charles Kuralt was a student there, and for Professor Hugo Giduz and later his son Roland and his family. Joe’s parents opened Bill’s BarB-Q on Graham Street in Chapel Hill. It was a landmark during the integration era because it served lunches for jailed demonstrators. I worked there, too.

In 1957,1 began working with my mother-in-law in a tiny take-out restaurant business. Through this experience, I began sharpening my business skills.

In 1976, I was working at UNC Memorial Hospital when George Tate, who was the first black realtor in town, offered me the opportunity to take over a failing restaurant on Rosemary Street in Chapel Hill. I didn’t even have the money to put anything down on the deal until my next paycheck. I had only $64 to buy enough food from a local grocer to make breakfast the first day that my restaurant opened. On a Saturday evening, around seven o’clock, some of my children and I went in and cleaned nearly all night getting ready for our first day.

Sunday morning I stopped by Fowler’s Food Store on Franklin Street to shop for breakfast. I purchased bacon, sausage, eggs, grits, flour, coffee, sugar, salt, catsup, chickens, Crisco, cheese, cornmeal, and trash bags, spending almost all of my money and not realizing that I could not have changed a ten dollar bill if someone had given me one first thing that morning. I don’t know how many times we ran out of eggs and bacon. The breakfast trade was good enough that I left for the grocery store to buy food to make lunch, and then I used the money from lunch to buy food for the evening dinner. At the end of the day, my profit counted out to $135, and I was in business! I named my restaurant Dip’s Country Kitchen.

Since then, I have not looked back.

Preparing and eating different foods has been a mind and soul experience for me. Over the years I have observed that many important discussions take place and many important decisions get made at a table over a plate of food. All over the world, each country has its own cuisine, and whatever the agenda, food is always important. Whether it’s at a picnic or a fancy dinner, food always brings joy to family, friends, and strangers. The best is sometimes the easiest to make. Southern cooking seems the simplest.

Mama Dip’s Kitchen is published by the University of North Carolina Press and is available in bookstores; via the publisher’s website at http://www.uncpress.unc.edu; or by calling 800848-6224. This excerpt is reprinted with the permission of the publisher. Copyright © 1999 by the University of North Carolina Press.

Sidebar: Aunt Mary’s Old-Fashioned Stacked Double-Crust Applesauce Pie

This was made with homegrown apples that ripened about the middle of August or early September. Buy tart apples such as Rome or Fuji to make this pie. Aunt Mary made her stacks three high, but some people stacked theirs six high.

• 6 cups peeled, sliced apples
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 1/4 cups sugar
• 3/4 stick butter or margarine, cut into pieces
• 2 tablespoons flour
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract
• 2 recipes double pie crust dough

Preheat oven to 375°. Cook the apples in the water, stirring to cook evenly until just tender. Remove from heat and add the sugar, butter, flour, nutmeg, and lemon extract. Mix well.

To make the crust:

• 3 cups plain flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 cup shortening
• 1/4 cup cold water

Put the flour, salt, and sugar in a bowl. Add the shortening and mix everything together well, using a fork or your fingertips, until crumbly. Add the water and mix to form a moist ball of dough.

On a floured board, roll out the dough; reserve half for the top crust and use half to form a crust in the bottom of two 9-inch pie pans, prick the crusts a few times with a fork and bake for 10 to 12 minutes. Let cool. Put the apple mixture on top of the baked crusts, dividing it evenly between the two pies. Place the top crust over the apples, seal the edges, and prick the crust a few times with a fork. Bake until the crust is brown, about 45 minutes. When cool, remove the pies from the pans and stack one on top of the other to make a double-stacked single pie. Serves 12.

In Memorium: Pat Watters (1927-1999)

By John Egerton

Vol. 21, No. 3, 1999 p. 25

Journalist and author Pat Watters, SRC’s director of information from 1963 to 1975, died in Abbeville, Louisiana, on August 3 after a long struggle with cancer and emphysema. He was seventy-two. Friends and colleagues will long recall his soft-spoken, shyly self-deprecating manner-but also, and perhaps most memorably, his passionate and eloquent advocacy of racial justice in the South and nation.

A native of Spartanburg, South Carolina, Watters attended public schools in Georgia-Albany, Brunswick, and Atlanta-and earned a bachelor’s degree from Emory University and a master’s in journalism from the University of Iowa.

As a reporter, editor, and columnist for the Atlanta Journal from 1952 to 1963, and then in his highly visible post with the Southern Regional Council, Watters traveled throughout the region covering most of the major events of the Civil Rights Movement. In addition to his many contributions to the Journal and other publications of the Council, he wrote three books on Southern social issues and numerous articles for such national magazines as The Nation, The New Republic, Look, Harper’s, and Atlantic Monthly.

Former New York Times Southern correspondent Roy Reed, who often worked with Watters while reporting on the Movement in the 1960s, recalled his distinctive voice, both spoken and written. “Pat had one of the few remaining authentic south Georgia accents,” said Reed, “and he managed, by some mysterious touch of magic to infuse his writing with it. You could read his words and at the same time, hear his wonderful voice speaking them.”

In 1967, Watters and Reese Cleghorn, then an associate editor of the Journal, co-authored a contemporary history-Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: The Arrival of Negroes in Southern Politics-based on SRC’s Voter Education Project. Two years later, Watters wrote The South and the Nation , and in 1971 he followed with Down to Now, a personal and reflective backward glance at the receding movement.

SRC chose Watters in 1974 to serve as editor-in-chief of its most ambitious publishing venture, the bimonthly magazine Southern Voices . Though it folded after only four issues, the venturesome and distinctive journal of politics, culture, and the arts was widely admired by writers and readers alike. It was the prototype for several general-interest Southern magazines to follow.

Watters left SRC in 1975, but continued his writing career as a freelancer, producing three more books and dozens of articles for national magazines. In 1991, he and his wife, Glenda Hebert Watters, moved to Lafayette, Louisiana, where Watters taught journalism at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. They moved to Abbeville in 1996.

His survivors, in addition to his wife, include his son and daughter, Patrick and Ellen Watters, both of Boston.