New Century Politics

By Wendy S. Johnson

Vol. 22, No. 2, 2000 pp. 3-4

The social activism of the 1960s gave us some of the most powerful and ground-breaking legislation of the last century–legislation that embraced the themes of freedom, justice, and democracy–most notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As a result, millions of formerly disfranchised minorities gained a political voice through the power of voting. In the last two decades, we’ve seen a dramatic and disturbing rightward shift in our national policy. In this new century, we face a number of challenges as the future enforcement of these policies is thrown into doubt.

As we prepare for the first presidential race of the new century and the much-anticipated and debated 2000 Census count results, minority voting rights are at a crossroads and questions continue to be raised in the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Threats to minority voting rights increased shortly after the 1990 reapportionment/redistricting cycle, which resulted in dramatic electoral gains for African-American and Latino voters in the 1992 elections.

Led by the case Shaw v. Reno, a series of lawsuits followed that threatened the erasure of minority opportunity districts. Since 1993 thirteen majority-minority congressional districts have been overturned. On the eve of the new redistricting cycle, the courts are still battling over redistricting plans developed after the 1990 Census. The North Carolina 12th district, first challenged in 1992, is back at the Supreme Court for the fourth time as we enter the new decade.

While the Census Bureau crunches numbers for its decennial report, Democrats and Republicans alike are busy filling their political warchests in order to win as many seats as possible. This greedy grab for political seats by any means necessary could have direct impact upon the number of existing majority-minority districts that can be maintained and more importantly, the number that can be gained. Edwin Bender’s article, “Soft Money Showered on the States: Redistricting and Election 2000,” gives you the details of how party efforts are sucking in soft money to influence redistricting outcomes.

The census data will introduce potential perils to the new reapportionment-redistricting cycle–multiple racial and ethnic categories. The reporting format of these multiple categories could become a useful tool for advancing the effective enforcement of civil rights laws or a powerful weapon for opponents of fairness measures.

With dozens of favor-seeking corporations contributing in excess of $100,000, Corporate America is revealed as a key underwriter of both the upcoming Democratic and Republican national conventions. Jim Hightower’s essay, “The Flim-Flam Campaign: Corporations Buy the Conventions,” provides another sobering yet maddening example of the need for wholesale reform to get money out of politics.

As we list toward the November elections do you know which races to watch and candidates to watch out for? In this issue Sarah Torian has provided an overview of key contests around the South, where the candidates stand on issues that we care about including civil rights, affirmative action, education, and the environment.

As we work to revitalize civil rights enforcement and reduce racial inequality we must, in Barbara Jordan’s words, “make America as good as its promise..

We, you and I, our neighbors, our voting age children, our clergy and labor leaders, our business leaders, and our teachers must demand leadership in developing proactive and effective responses to racial inequities and civil rights concerns from our presidential, congressional, and state leadership. We must make these same demands of community, religious, and political leaders where we live-because there is broad public support for revitalizing existing policies that offer equal opportunity and create new policies to meet the needs of the 21st century.

Demanding accountability from our leaders can take many forms-from letter writing campaigns to community organizing initiatives. But arguably, the most basic and important way to demand this leadership is to make our voices heard on election day.

We shared with you the results of our national survey in our report Seeking on America as Good as its Promise, which established that there is wide support for reducing racially identifiable inequality through tools such as affirmative action among other approaches. Key findings of the publics’ views on political participation and fairness remedies included:

• 83 percent believe that African Americans should be represented politically in proportion to their numbers in the population;
• It is in the best interests of the country if our elected officials reflect the racial and ethnic background of the
  

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  entire population (76 percent);

• Most Americans support affirmative action (56 percent).

These findings contrast starkly with the assertions of our conservative Congressional members and affirmative action opponents who deny the need and importance of active civil rights enforcement.

As a solution to deepening enforcement of fairness measures, the American public is calling for proactive and assertive leadership. Leadership is critical in marshalling and mobilizing existing support for racial fairness. If our leaders are pro-active in nurturing these threads of hope, the next generation will be ready to follow.

While two out of every three youth aged 18 to 24 do not vote, more than three out of four of this age group (77 percent) say reducing racial inequality is a top or above average priority, compared to 57 percent of older Americans. These same young Americans are somewhat more likely (88 percent) than older Americans (76 percent) to say it is important that voting districts be drawn so that blacks can obtain representation in office comparable to their numbers in the population.

While the 2000 elections are only months away, the expiration of Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is slated for 2007. Ellen Spears’ article, “The 2000 Elections and Voting Rights Act Renewal” argues that it is not too early to make the connection between who we vote into office in November and the prospects for balanced and fair consideration of renewing and extending this critically important piece of legislation. Much is at stake.

Findings of support for progressive leadership and young people’s faith in the power of political engagement signal hope for the future. However, if young people aren’t making their opinions known at the polls, their impact is greatly diminished. Can the upcoming presidential election capture the imagination of our disfranchised youth and, hopefully, their votes?

The article, “Young Voters Flee the Polls,” addresses the growing disconnect and disenchantment of young voters with electoral politics. Uninspired by party politics, our youth have abandoned the electoral process. What is our role as leaders, young and old, in nurturing a new attitude and understanding towards effective political engagement? Achieving a democratic and fair society is not a spectator spoil. What have you done lately to encourage young adults to exercise their franchise?

Wendy S. Johnson is executive director of the Southern Regional Council

Soft Money Showered on the States: Redistricting and Election 2000

By Edwin Bender

Vol. 22, No. 2, 2000 pp. 4-5

Early in the 2000 election cycle, as the presidential candidates began their campaigns in earnest, the Tennessee Republican State Executive Committee was rolling in soft-money contributions passed down from the Republican National State Elections Committee. Usually low on the RNC’s priority list for party-building funds, Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show the Tennessee Republican Party had received $423,000 as of August 1999, putting it second on the priority list behind California.

Why the largesse to a state that in the 1998 cycle ranked eighteenth on the list of recipients of RNC soft money and fourteenth in 1996?

Possibly the RNC is bent on embarrassing Vice President Al Gore on his home turf. But a more likely reason is how the 2000 Census and the subsequent redistricting will affect Tennessee legislative and congressional districts. If just two additional Republican state senate candidates win in 2000, then the Democrat Party’s control of the senate will have been broken, and Republicans will have a stronger say in how the redistricting process plays out.

Greg Wanderman, executive director of the Tennessee Democrat Party, told the National Institute on Money in State Politics (the Institute) that the Republican Patty of Tennessee has made winning two seats in the state senate a priority, specifically because of what that would mean to the redistricting process. Brian Eastin, executive director of the Tennessee Republican Party, agreed emphatically: in GOP circles. 2000 is the battle and redistricting is the war. It’s crucial. Here in Tennessee it’s the focus, taking (two seats in) the senate, because of redistricting.” And the national party has expressed “a great deal of interest” in seeing that those seats and others in states with narrow margin go to Republican candidates. RNC Chairman Jim Nicholson announced that the national party will devote millions in contributions to the effort nationally.

If the GOP succeeds in Tennessee, Eastin said, then the GOP-controlled senate could block any redistricting plan that th1 Democrat-controlled house may propose, moving the process to the courts. The state party feels it could live with a plan that was approved through the courts.

A similar pattern can be seen in Georgia where five state senate seats will alter control of the redistricting process. Georgia was third in receipt of early RNC soft money, but was twentieth in 1998 and seventh in 1996.

In Missouri, the RNC funneled more than $870,000 directly to candidates in the 1998 cycle in an effort to seize control of the legislature where Democrats now control

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the house by ten seats and the senate by two.

The campaign over who will control the decennial redistricting process has been called “the D-Day of politics” by Tom Hofeller, a Republican organizer for the redistricting issue. Redistricting committees and commissions the nation over will be using new census data to reconfigure legislative and congressional election districts once census data is in. In states with legislatures that are controlled by narrow margins, a win or two in the state house or senate in 2000 could mean the difference between a redistricting committee controlled by Democrats or Republicans. And how those districts are drawn will directly affect the outcome of many congressional campaigns.

As a result, national party organizations have been flooding the states with both hard and soft money, to influence the redistricting process, and enhance their candidates’ chances of controlling Congress. The states where a win or two could make a difference, according to data from the National Council of State Legislatures, include: Arizona, Connecticut, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin.

An analysis of available campaign-contribution data by the Institute found that the Republican Party began its war early and has had a decided advantage going into the 2000 elections. Republican Party comittees so fair in 2000 have received more soft money than their Democrat counterparts in thirty-five of fifty states.

The contribution data analyzed was drawn from two primary sources-the FEC, which discloses contributions from national parties and sources to all fifty states–and the Institute’s databases of state records, which show funds coming to statelevel candidates and committees from all sources, including national parties and committees. This report and underlying data will be updated regularly as new state and federal data is released and processed, and will be available on the Institute’s web site (www.followthemoney.org)

Soft Money Debate Rages

Soft money is a buzzword nowadays for all that’s wrong with the nation’s political system. Special interests or individuals that have given the maximum amount directly to candidates, turn around and write enormous checks to the national parties and, with a wink and a nod, are assured that that money will be used for “party-building” activities only, as required by law. But they know that much of the money supports the party’s candidate du jour in so-called “issue advertising.”

It’s all legal, thanks to the soft-money loophole written into the campaign finance laws that came out of the Nixon-Watergate era. It must be bad, though, otherwise why have all four major candidates for presidency in 2000 called for reducing or banning soft-money contributions? Why has Congress spent thousands of hours over the past twelve years debating campaign finance reform and the soft-money loophole?

The debate continues over who can out-reform whom. All the while the checks keep coming in–more than $697 million to the two political parties over the last nine years, according to the Campaign Study Group. Expect a record amount of soft money to be contributed in the 2000 election cycle as the candidates vie for the “reformer” label, and as Gore prepares for an all-out general-election assault.

As the debate escalates and the cash flows, only the public loses. Tracking who gives soft money, where it goes, and who spends it and on what, is difficult. For many, it’s impossible. And because national party committees often funnel this money to state committees, which trade soft money for hard money to give to candidates, the money trail becomes even more difficult to follow.

Edwin Bender is research director for the National Institute on Money in State Politics in Helena, Montana. For more facts and figures on the role of soft and hard money in state campaigns, see the Institute’s website at: www.followthemoney.org.

The FlimFlam Campaign: Corporations Buy the Conventions

By Jim Hightower

Vol. 22, No. 2, 2000 pp. 6-7

Ready or not, heeeeere they come. [music: Happy days are here again] The Republican and Democratic national conventions have come to town! You’ve seen the pageantry on TV, the bunting and balloons, the speeches… but what they haven’t shown you is the bald-faced corruption behind the hoopla, the selling of the very conventions that formally choose the nominees of the two big parties.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that major corporations in need of major favors from the White House, Congress, and other governmental agencies, poured major bucks into the two national conventions. AT&T (lobbying for control of the long distance phone market), Lockheed Martin (lobbying for more Pentagon money), General Motors (lobbying for more global trade deals), Ernst & Young (lobbying for lax financial regulation), and Microsoft (lobbying to keep its monopoly position) are among the dozen corporations that underwrote both conventions. Microsoft, for example, already gave more than $5(X),000 to host the Republican convention in Philadelphia, and the same sum to host the Democrats in Los Angeles.

This kind of payola not only puts the corporate stamp on the consciousness and consciences of both parties, but it also buys special access for the CEOs and lobbyists of the favor-seeking companies. While the charade of democracy plays out on the convention floor, these executives are in private skyboxes and at closed functions, wining and dining the nominees and top lawmakers of the two parties. As one CEO told the Inquirer when asked to explain why her company would sponsor both conventions: “We need these folks to know who we are.”

Republican and Democratic conventions once were important to democracy, choosing the nominees, writing the platforms, and debating big issues. But today, they’re political farces. The delegates are nothing but stage props for the TV show, while political and corporate powerbrokers meet behind the scenes to assure that plutocracy rules, despite the public pretensions of democracy.

No matter which party wins, AT&T, Microsoft, Boeing, Disney, and Exxon win. They’re among dozens of giants that put at least $50,000 each into the pockets of both camps, not only buying the loyalties of the candidates, but also controlling the political debate. So, basic kitchen-table issues that matter to most people are not even on the table for discussion, because the money masters of the Gore-Bush flim-flam campaign don’t want their candidate–or you and me–talking about such troubling issues. Here are just a few examples of what the Democrats and Republicans are NOT discussing, much less challenging

• The Mugging of the Middle Class. Gore and Bush gush about the glories of the razzle-dazzle Wall Street “Boom,” but neither mentions that eight-out-of-ten Americans are experiencing more bust than boom, with corporate downsizings, farm bankruptcies, and family debt soaring.
• Merger Mania. Every industry is being consolidated and conglomerated by huge corporations swallowing each other to become MegaHuge, gaining monopoly power that cuts our jobs, raises prices, squeezes out small competitors, reduces service, and bullies our communities. Yet Gore and Bush quietly take millions from the merging barons and stay eerily silent.
• Globaloney. Rapacious corporations are empowered and even subsidized by our government to export U.S. jobs, exploit foreign workers and the environment, and undercut our very right to self government. Gore and Bush, however, are funded by the corporate globalists, so neither see, hear, or speak any evil about this outrage.

Stopping the Money Corruption of Politics

Gore and Bush are shameless poseurs on the reform issue, cynically prancing on the far edges of reform, while neither they nor their parties want even the modest changes they’re willing to talk about Both are locked onto the matter of “soft money,” the unlimited millions that corporations and unions give to the political parties (though overwhelmingly its corporate cash that plays in the soft money game). Gore would outlaw soft money, and Bush would outlaw it for corporations and unions, but allow CEOs, fat cat investors, and other individuals to continue pumping millions through the soft-money loophole.

Not a whisper do we get from these two reform frauds on public financing of all elections, which is the one way we finally could get the corrupting private money out of the process. If you want public policy to reflect genuine public

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interest, rather than private interests, we’ve got to fund the democratic process publicly, rather than privately. Doing this closes all loopholes for special interest money, but it does something else that might be even more important. it allows regular people to run for office again, since a teacher. small farmer, retail clerk, cab driver, or whomever could get access to the same pool of public campaign funds to which incumbents and elites would have access. Already, Arizona Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont have passed state laws for public financing, while Connecticut, Missouri, and Oregon will vote on it this year. Why not a national debate?

On these and dozens of other key issues–from the stupid drug war” to the crying need for universal health care–Gore and Bush are not engaged in an election, but in a scurrilous scam to preserve the status quo And status quo” is Latin for “the mess we’re in”

Jim Hightower, author of “If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates” continues to produce his daily talk radio show “The Chat and Chew,” and gives speeches nationwide. To find out more information about his newsletter and other endeavors, go to www.jimhightower.com For detailed information on soft money in the 2000 election and national pony conventions, visit the Center for Responsive Politics website at: www.opensecrets.org

Young Voters Flee the Polls

Staff

Vol. 22, No. 2, 2000 pp. 8-9

If nonvoters constituted a political party in America today, far and away more citizens would belong to it than to all other political parties combined-and that party would be growing rapidly. In the 1998 midterm elections, various surveys show that more than six out often eligible voters or 128 million registered voters failed to vote, a 2.5 million increase over the 1994 midterm election. This continues a thirty-eight-year trend of declining participation rates in both presidential and midterm elections. One recent study found that our electorate has decreased to the point that, among the 131 democracies in the world, the United States ranks 103rd in voter participation.

One of the most alarming realities shaping the steady drift of Americans away from the voting booths is that young people, eighteen to twenty-four years of age, are far and away leading this nonvoting trend. “I’m registered to vote and I guess I usually do, but that is mainly because it helps me gain residential status for school purposes,” says Tara Mitchell, a twenty-two-year old African-American student at Georgia State University in Atlanta. “I do see the bigger picture, that each vote adds up, but I don’t really feel like it does. Most of my friends do not vote. They just don’t see it as a very big concern.”

The participation rate for young people in the 1998 midterm election was a startling 15 percent The eighteen to twenty-four year-old cohorts 32.4 percent participation rate in the l996general elections is seventeen percentage points lower than the next lowest age group–twenty-five to forty-four-year-olds–who turnout at an uninspiring rate of 49.2 percent. Comparing the youth vote with the voting age cohort with the highest participation rate–seniors (those sixty-five and older)–is even more revealing. Two of three seniors vote. Two of three youth do not vote.

The trend towards nonvoting from the mid-1960s to 1996 is evident in every section of the country, but the South has led with a decrease of 11 percent The extent of youth nonvoting in the South has, up to this point, not been quantified. “There are no youth voting statistics for the South,” explains SRC Fair Representation Director and Youth Empowerment Project (YEP) co-coordinator Winnett Hagens. “A comprehensive, longitudinal evaluation of youth political participation and nonparticipation in a region that is impacted across the board by nonvoting is critical to understanding what needs to be done to reverse these trends. That is just what we plan to do with YEP.”

A disproportionate share of the politically alienated in America is drawn from an underclass with a limited stake in the system as presently constituted. Many of the non voters in this underclass are convinced that the system is loaded against them. Minorities especially perceive policies formulated by predominantly-white legislatures and city councils with a suspicious and cynical eye.

This nonparticipation among youth, however, crosses racial and ethnic lines. Participation statistics for the 1996 presidential election show that 32.4 percent of black, 15.1 percent of Hispanic and 33.3 percent of white eighteen to twenty-four-year-olds voted in the 1996 elections. (The lower rate among Hispanic youth may be attributed to the fact that many Hispanic youth are immigrants and, therefore not registered to vote.)

The current epidemic levels of nonparticipation erode the legitimacy, capacity and the stability of our governing institutions. Youth play a crucial role in the durability of a democracy because they constitute the substance of renewal which replenishes the democratic tradition across generations. Yet, says Georgia Representative Bob Holmes (D-Manta), director of the Southern Center for Studies in Public Policy at Clark Atlanta University and co-oordinator of YEP, “Young people seem to feel that the system is broke and they don’t want to be apart of it.”With nonvoting among American youth running at least 70 percent at its lowest troubling questions arise regarding future leadership recruitment prospects for our democracy.

The main benefit of broad public participation in the political process by young and old alike is the creation of public policy that advances the common interests of all rather than the particular interests of a few. The explicit premise of democracy has always been the proposition that the hardest problems confronting a social order demand the collective genius of all for successful resolution. Given the growing complexities of an unstable world order, to engage youth in the political order is not only a means of replenishing our traditions of civic involvement but it is also a way to bring into the public arena new perspectives, energy, enthusiasm, imagination, insight, and ingenuity sorely needed to solve the most difficult problems facing us today.

There is no doubt that a great multitude of causes languish because most voters, especially most young voters, choose not to exercise their franchise. Indeed, one way to appreciate the critical importance of youth disengagement is to ask the question: what issues are sufficiently relevant to youthful voters to draw them into active participation? “I think a lot of the issues that are important to older people are also important to younger people, but in a different way–welfare, healthcare, public education, censorship, how the government is creeping into our lives,” says Matielyn Williams, a nineteen-

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year old African-American student at the State University of West Georgia in Carroliton who is already registered and planning to vote in her first election this fall. “We are entering the working classes and are beginning to be impacted by these things and need to have a voice.”

In an effort to combat this growing alienation of American youth from the political process, the Southern Regional Council, in partnership with the Southern Center for Studies in Public Policy at Clark Atlanta University, is undertaking the Youth Empowerment Project, a sixyear project which will both document this trend in the South and develop pilot youth leadership development programs to nurture and grow youth political engagement. “I think there is a growing alarm regarding the precipitous decline in youth voting and political participation, shared by the Southern Center for Public Policy and the SRC,” explains Hagens. “We want to see youth coming back to the voting place.”

For more information about the YEP project, contact Winnett Hagens at (404) 522-8764 x39, or by email at: whagens@southerncouncil.org.

Election 2000 Across the South

By Sarah E. Torian

Vol. 22, No. 2, 2000 pp. 10-13

Across the South, affirmative action, felony disfranchisement, the environment, and public education hang in the balance as states elect new governors, legislators, congresspeople, and judges. From the potential Republican ascension to complete statewide control in Virginia to the removal of more than sixty senior legislators in Florida due to term limits, this fall’s elections will determine who is in control during the post2000 redistricting, whose agendas will be proposed and endorsed, and the extent of minority and female political representation as we enter the next century. Following are brief summaries of some significant elections and issues on the ballot across the South this November.

Disfranchised Voters in Alabama

In the state with the highest percentage of disfranchised black voters in the country (31.5 percent) and the highest percentage of disfranchised voters overall (7.5 percent), Alabamians are gearing up for an important judicial election year. Four seats on the state supreme court, currently with a five-to-four Republican majority, will be up this year, including that of Republican Chief Justice Perry Hooper. Etowah County Circuit Judge Roy Moore (R), who gained fame for defying a judicial order to remove the Ten Commandments from the wall behind his courtroom bench and stop Opening court sessions with a prayer, will face Civil Appeals Court Judge Sharon Yates (D), the first woman to sit on the Alabama Civil Court of Appeals, in the race to fill Hooper’s open seat.

Currently, there are two African-American judges sitting on the state’s highest court-Judges John Henry England (D) and Ralph D. Cook (D).Although that number on a Supreme Court bench of nine correlates with the percentage of the Alabama population that is African American, they are the only two minority judges on a statewide bench in Alabama. Both will be facing Republican challengers this fall. England, who was appointed to his seat last year by Democratic Governor Don Siegelman, will be running against Jefferson County Circuit Judge Tom Woodall and Cook will face Baldwin County Circuit Judge Lyn Stuart Jerome Gray of the Alabama Democratic Convention believes that both England and Cook will prevail but that the races will be tight “Blacks do not make up a majority of the Alabama population and there is racially polarized voting. Those two factors will combine to make these close races.”

Alabama is one of only ten states in the country to disfranchise first-time felons while in prison, under probation or parole, and after their sentences have been completed (Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Virginia are other Southern states that disfranchise first-time felons for life.) Currently, more than 80 percent of Alabama’s disfranchised citizens have completed their sentences, and many of these are African American. Of the 241,100 adults disfranchised in Alabama, about 105,000 (43.5 percent) are African-American men. In a state where African Americans compose 26 percent of the population, this figure demonstrates the importance of having fair representation in the criminal justice system. Robert Smith, field coordinator of the Alabama Democratic Party Black Caucus explains, “The current system of disfranchisement is incredibly unfair. Most [disfranchised citizens] have already served their time, paid their retribution to society. And still they are required to go through along, difficult application process to the board of pardons that includes DNA testing and can take more than a year.”

“Eight Is Enough” Term Limits Pose Threat in Florida

Florida is gearing up for more political action than usual between now and November 7. This year the state’s “Eight is Enough” term-limiting constitutional amendment will take effect, opening up more than sixty of the state’s 160 legislative seats. That is nearly one-half of the house seats and one-fourth of the senate seats. Two-term Republican U.S. Senator Connie Mack is retiring this year and a three-way battle is underway to fill that seat Also, spurred by state legislators Kendrick Meek (D-Miami) and Tony Hill (I)Jacksonville), efforts are underway to energize the African-American vote in response to Governor Jeb Bush’s “One Florida” plan which eliminated affirmative action from the state’s public colleges and universities.

Many longtime legislators were forced to step down at the end of the 2000 session due to Florida’s term limits law, including dean of the legislature Senator W.D. Childers (R-Pensacola) and house Democratic leader Representative Us Miller, Jr. Having taken control of the House and Senate in the 1996 elections and currently holding a seventy-five to forty-five majority in the House, the GOP is expected to retain control of the state house. But with a twenty-five to fifteen majoiityin the senate and eightRepublicansbeingtennedoutcompared to onlythree Democrata, the GOP could potentially lose control of the senate. Demo.’ crats are working hard towards that end with hopes of having strong representation as the state begins the 2000

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redistricting process.

With the term limit-imposed turnover this year, there is a serious threat to current minority leadership. There are twenty, African-American legislators and about fourteen of these are being forced to step down because of term limits. There are also fourteen Latino legislators in Florida, four of whom will be stepping down because of term limits this year. For most of those seats, minorities are among the major candidates running for election, but they will lack the boost in name recognition and experience provided by incumbency.

Maneuvering for retiring U.S. Senator Connie Mack’s seat are three candidates. U.S. Representative Bill McCollum became the presumptive Republican candidate in June as state Education Commissioner Tom Gallagher dropped out of the race. McCollum, called a “pugnacious ideologue” by the St. Petersburg Times, played a key role in the impeachment of President Clinton and is beloved by the Christian right.

Florida Insurance Commissioner Bill Nelson, the only Democratic candidate thus far, served twelve years in the U.S. House before being elected to his current position in 1994. Since his Republican challenger had been consumed in his battle for the Republican nomination until June, Nelson has only recently begun to campaign full force, emphasizing traditional Democratic issues from preserving Social Security and Medicare to enhancing public education and protecting the environment.

State Representative Willie Logan (D-Opa-locka) rounds out the field of contenders for Mack’s seat. The victim of a statewide controversy in 1998 when white House Democrats dumped him as their choice to be the next speaker, Logan endorsed Jeb Bush for governor in 1998 and could potentially cost Nelson black votes this fall if he stays in the race. With $310,000 raised and mostly spent, Logan campaigned in May and June on a motorcycle tour that covered the length of the state but has received little media attention.

Since Gov. Jeb Bush pushed through his anti-affirmative action “One Florida” plan this spring and Ward Connerly postponed his anti-affirmative action referendums until 2002, that issue will not be on the ballot this fall. State Representative Tony Hill (D-Jacksonville) and State Senator Kendrick Meek (D-Miami), however, are working hard to inject affirmative action into the election season. Neither representative is up for reelection, but both are travelling the state, campaigning for “Keep Florida Alive – Take Five,” a get-out-the-vote drive that encourages people to take election day off and carry, five other voters to the polls in order to make their voices heard ‘about affirmative action.

Flag Controversy Enters Georgia

With the Confederate baffle flag now moved from atop the South Carolina capitol to the statehouse grounds, the flag issue is moving into the neighboring state of Georgia Remembering the repercussions of then-Governor Zell Miller’s attempts to have the flag changed in 1993. most anti-flag Georgia legislators are “ring to hold oft the debate until after the 2000 elections when all 236 seats of the legislature are up for a vote. African-American Rep. Calvin Smyre (1)-Columbus) explains, “We made a decision this session to forego it and wait until 2001. I don’t know if we would be able to put our finger in the dike again and keep the dam from breaking.” Legislators might not be able to avoid the debate for long. Rep. Bob Holmes (D-Atlanta) predicts that Earl Ehrhart (R-Powder Springs) will try to force the issue of the flag into the debate. “It’s a windshield issue. They will try to make people take a stand on it one way or the other and use that against them in the fall.”

The Confederate battle flag, popularly termed the ‘Stars and Bars” was incorporated into the Georgia state flag in 1956, in direct protest of court-ordered integration. Mississippi and Georgia are the only two states which include the Confederate battle flag in their state flags.

With GOP Senator Paul Coverdell’s death in July, and Governor Roy Barnes’ subsequent appointment of former Georgia Governor Zell Miller to fill Coverdell’s seat, battle is underway among Republicans to determine who will run for the seat this fall. Although many Republicans have considered a candidacy, the field has narrowed to one-term U.S. Senator Mack Mattingly (1981-1987). Mattingly, a longtime friend of Coverdell, argues that he

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has the experience to assemble an effective campaign team. Democrat Zell Miller maintained high voter approval during his two terms as governor (1990 to 1998), making him a formidable foe for any Republican challengers.

U.S. Representative Bob Barr (R-7th district; Rome) is up for reelection this year and may be facing a significant challenge in Altanta businessman and Bartow County farmer Roger Kahn. A moderate Democrat, Kahn is not attacking Bands infamous role in the Clinton impeachment trials, but rather is suggesting that Barr’s time would have been better focused on issues that impact his constituents such as Social Security, education, traffic congestion, and urban sprawl After Jim Williams, Barr’s Democratic challenger in 1998, garnered 45 percent of the vote on a budget of less than $10,000. Kahn, with his $700,000 and conservative positions on many issues, may be a strong challenger against Barr in the conservative district

North Carolina: Vouchers and Vinroot

For twenty years, the Tar Heel State has exhibited a trend toward voting Republican, and has consistently gone Republican in the last four presidential contests. That fact bolsters GOP hopes to replace Democratic Governor Jim Hunt this year with a Republican and they are hanging their hopes on Richard Vinroot, a corporate lawyer and former two-term mayor of Charlotte (1991-1995). Vinroot, who battled with in the Republican primary to position himself as the most conservative candidate, gained prominence while mayor of Charlotte by privatizing thirty-three of the city’s public services.

Vinroot will face State Attorney General Mike Easley and Barbara Howe at the North Carolina polls in November. Easley, in his second term as state attorney general, won the Democratic nomination with much party support and currently leads both Vinroot and Howe in the polls.

Howe is a homemaker and part-time aerobics instructor in Oxford and is targeting home schoolers, drug legalization groups, and death penalty opponents in her efforts to gain support and raise campaign funds.

A recent statewide poll conducted by the Raleigh News and Observer showed that education was far and away the highest priority in voters’ minds this year. Both major party candidates have proposals to improve the state’s public education. Easley is proposing a lottery with the proceeds going to reduce class sizes, especially in kindergarten through third grade. Vinroot’s agenda supports “parent choice” with an expansion of charter schools and tax-paid vouchers for private schools, and an end to busing for the purpose of desegregation.

John Dornan of the Education: Everybody’s Business Coalition, a nonpartisan coalition of education and business organizations that have surveyed this year’s state candidate’s education proposals and hosted debates, recognizes a stark difference between Easley and Tlmroot’s education plans. ‘The biggest divide between the candidates is their stances on vouchers,” Dornan explains. “Vinroot, his proposals, and his campaigning style are very similar to Governor Jeb Bush’s in Florida. He is calling for a voucher and opportunity scholarship plan very similar to Florida’s.” Dornan also noted that, although his organization and the broader coalition were nonpartisan and did not endorse candidates, all member organizations of the coalition, including North Carolina Citizens for Business and Industry, the state School Board Association, and the North Carolina Public School Forum, had “taken a strong opposition to vouchers and opportunity scholarships.”

Republican Control in Virginia

Will Virginia, as it has for the past seven years, continue its Republican revival? In 1993, after a twelve-year run of Democratic governors, Virginians elected George Allen. Since then, the Republican Party has gained control of the state senate, is one seat shy of controlling the House of Delegates, and holds every statewide office except for the seat of U.S. Senator Chuck Robb. Robb, a two-term incumbent; faces former governor George Allen this fall. If he should lose, it will be the first time in more than a hundred years that no Democrat holds a statewide office.

Allen has amassed a campaign war chest almost twice as large as Robb’s. If successful in his Senate bid, Allen. with close party ties across Virginia, is expected to gain the mantle of state party leadership. Toward that goal, he is running on an anti-“Clinton-Gore-Robb” platform in a state that has voted Republican in all presidential elections since 1964, while proposing a $58 billion tax cut-including elimination of the “marriage penalty” and estate taxes, and a $1000 education tax credit During his tenure as governor (1994-1998) though, Allen had a poor record on environmental issues and is already facing critical television ads sponsored by the Sierra Club. The state’s more than 140,000 state employees will also likely remember the derogatory statements Allen made about them while governor, while parents in the state exhibit mixed reactions towards the state Standards of Learning achievement tests that Allen implemented.

Senator Robb, who defeated Oliver North (of Iran-Contra notoriety) in his last reelection, combines a conservative stance on defense and fiscal issues with a long-time support of civil rights issues, including support for gays in the military, federal affirmative action programs, and a woman’s right to choose.

Three unexpected Congressional retirements and a change of party also add interest to Virginia’s 2000 elections, as well as the situation of representation of minorities and women. Currently, all thirteen Virginia Congresspeople are male and white except for African-American Represen-

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tative Robert Sisisky. Nine-term Republican Representative Herbert Bateman (1st district, Newport News), will be stepping down this fall Lawrence Davies, an African American and former mayor of Fredricksburg, will-be the Democratic candidate facing Delegate Jo Aim Davis (R-York County) for the seat If Davis wins, she would become the first Republican congresswoman from Virginia. Davis supports traditional conservative measures including federal tax cuts, increased military spending, strict limits on abortion, and opposes gun control and gay rights.

Another woman, Democrat Jody Wagner is running to fill Representative Owen Pickett’s (D-Norfolk) seat in the second district Wagner, a Virginia Beach lawyer and civic leader, will face State Senator Ed Schrock (R-Virginia Beach). With two successful campaigns in the district, Schrock is expected to beat first-time candidate Wagner.

Representative Tom Bliley, Jr. (R-Richmond) of the seventh district is retiring and vacating the chair of the commerce committee after twenty years in the house. Eric Cantor, a wealthy lawyer and businessman who served as Bliley’s campaign chairman for the past three elections, will be the Republican candidate for the position and Warren Stewart, former superintendent of the Goochland County Schools, will run as the Democratic candidate. In a district that tends to vote Republican at every level of government, Stewart faces an almost impossible battle.

Virgil Goode in the “Southside” fifth district (Danville) is causing waves by declaring a change of parties. A two-term conservative Democrat, Goode is running this year as an independent with Republican endorsement. He will face no Republican challengers in the very conservative rural district in the heart of tobacco country, but will face Democratic challenger John Boyd, the President of the National Black Farmers Association. Boyd led the NBFA’s complaint that the U.S. Department of Agriculture discriminated against black farmers in a lawsuit that won a multi-million dollar settlement against the Department.

Independent Injecting Issues into West Virginia Race

Representing the newly-formed, pro-environment Mountain Party, writer and activist Denise Giardina is raising important issues in West Virginia’s gubernatorial race. Giardina, author of The Unquiet Earth, winner of the 1992 Lillian Smith Book Award, is campaigning against the environmentally-destructive form of mining called mountaintop removal. She is also challenging the absentee landownership of much of West Virginia’s land, timber, and minerals by outside corporations that do not pay commensurate property taxes. She seeks to have corporate-owned land appraised and taxed for its actual value. Giardina also hopes to prevent the gaming industry–which in 1999 contributed more to the state’s politicians than any other industry, including coal–from spreading through the state. And, she wants to protect small community schools from the trend toward consolidation.

Giardina will face Republican incumbent Cecil Underwood and Democratic Representative Bob Wise (7th District, Charleston). In a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans two-th-one, Republican Underwood won in 1996 with, much Democratic support after the Democrats split along business-labor lines in the primary. At age seventy-seven, he is the nation’s oldest governor and is emphasizing family values, increased technology and road construction, and decreased welfare rolls in his bid for reelection. Wise, who has served West Virginia in the U.S. House since 1992, is highlighting Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) reform, increased economic diversity, and affordable prescription medicine for seniors.

Just getting her name on the ballot has proven to be difficult for Giardina in the current climate of two-party politics. In an effort to loosen ballot restrictions last winter, the West Virginia legislature reversed the law that prevented anyone who signed an independent candidate’s petition from voting in the Republican or Democratic primaries. The law, however, did not change the requirement petitioners must state that the signee will not be allowed to vote in the party primaries, discouraging many from signing independent petitions. By the petition deadline of May 8 though, Giardina was able to submit 18,000 names, well above the 12,562 required.

Recognizing the stiff battle ahead, in which many political scientists see the election as a tossup between the two major party candidates, Giardina sees her campaign as more than the tally of votes on November 7. Here’s what is crucial,” she says. “I don’t know if I will get the most votes in this election, but I have already won’ by opening up the electoral process in this state. I have, won by starting to talk about real issues, not public relations fluff, by challenging other candidates to spend at least a tiny portion of their millions of dollars on the real needs of people in West Virginia. And all that before any vote is cast”

Although most media attention this fall will focus on the presidential election, across the South, 134 House seats, seven Senate seats, two gubernatorial seats, and hundreds of state legislative and local positions will be on the ballot in November. With only a six-seat GOP majority in the U.S. House and a five-seat GOP majority in the U.S. Senate, party control will weigh in the balance as will equal access to higher education, minority and female representation, the 2000 redistricting schedule, and the environment.

Sarah Torian is editorial coordinator at the Southern Regional Council.

The 2000 Elections and Voting Rights Act Renewal

By Ellen Spears

Vol. 22, No. 2, 2000 pp. 14-15

Alarmist email messages surfaced in the late 1990s claiming that “African-Americans will lose their right to vote in 2007.” While the 110th Congress will not in any direct sense, be deciding whether or not black or Latino voters will retain the right to vote, key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965–including Section 5, which gives the U.S. Department of Justice enforcement powers in covered jurisdictions–will end in 2007 unless Congress moves to extend them.

Why does this event in 2007 matter so much right now, when congressional action on renewal is seven years away? The 2000 elections will set the stage for political decision-making throughout the decade: electing a president who may make more than one Supreme Court appointment, installing state legislators who will decide the contours of congressional delegations for the decade, and shaping the partisan balance in Congress. The campaign to extend this important protection, which gives a tool to effectively enforce the Voting Rights Act, should begin now, on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Act.

Voting Enforcement Under Fire

The new president will also name Justice Department leadership, whose enforcement authority in voting rights lawsuits has been under fire during the past decade. Opponents of majority-minority districts in the 1990s moved from arguing against the Justice Department’s application of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to arguing against the constitutionality of Section 5 itself. This assault on Section 5 is dangerous because this extremely important provision of the Voting Rights Act is temporary.

Many of the provisions of the Voting Rights Act are permanent, they do not require congressional renewal. This includes Section 201, which imposes a nationwide ban on literacy tests, and Section 2, which prohibits all discrimination in voting and secures victims the right to challenge such discrimination in court.

However, the temporary Section 5-which requires certain jurisdictions, mostly in the South, with a history of voting discrimination to preclear all proposed changes in voting laws or procedures with the U.S. Attorney General or the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia has been a particularly effective remedy for discrimination in voting.

Under Section 5, within covered jurisdictions, the burden of proving that any proposed change has neither the intent nor effect of weakening the representation of minority voters lies with the state or local government, not the victims of discrimination. State or local officials must prove that a proposed change in voting laws is not discriminatory in purpose or effect Wore the amendments can be implemented. If Section 5 is not extended in 2007. however, jurisdictions will once again be able to pass and implement voting laws with discriminatory effects-laws which minority voters can then challenge only after-the-fact through the slow and expensive process of litigation.

The preclearance provisions have already been weakened. The Bossier Parish, Louisiana case decided by the Supreme Court in January 2000, curtailed the effectiveness of Section 5, by holding that intentionally discriminatory changes in voting were objectionable only if they made minority voters worse off than under a previous practice.

Currently sixteen states, or parts of states, are covered by Section 5: all of Alaska, Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, and some counties or towns in California, Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, and South Dakota.

Some of these states or parts of states were brought under the aegis of Section 5 due to a 1975 amendment to the Voting Rights Act passed to protect language minorities who had suffered historical discrimination. Opposition to this amendment, which requires bilingual elections in certain areas, surfaced during the 104th Con-

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gress. A bill was introduced in the House that called for its repeal. The bilingual provisions will also come up for renewal in 2007.

A further danger lies in the fact that any time provisions of the Act are opened up for debate, there is no guarantee that Congress would confine its review to the renewal of those provisions.

A Fight lies Ahead

The 1982 extension of the Voting Rights Act was passed only after vigorous organizing by civil rights forces at every level and by a Democratic Congress during a Republican administration hostile to voting rights expansion.

The 2000 elections will seat the state legislators who will begin the redistricting cycle after the census numbers become available in 2001. Those legislators will determine how congressional seats will be allocated, affecting who gets elected to Congress. As in previous cycles, Section 5 will be one of the most important tools in the hands of minority voters and their allies in the redistricting process.

Challenges to redistricting plans made by states and localities are handled by the federal courts. An activist judiciary played an unprecedented role in determining the shape of state legislatures and congressional delegations during the 1990s. The Supreme Court is frequently divided five-to-four on voting rights cases, with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor often the swing vote. Supreme Court appointments and other nominations to the federal bench made by the administration elected in November 2000 will shape redistricting outcomes for the next decade. The Republican-controlled Congress has obstructed President Clinton’s judicial appointments.

The renewal debate will determine whether the Voting Rights Act has teeth in it–whether the influence gained by minority voters will suffer severely or progress.

Ellen Spears is associate director of the Southern Regional Council. You can reach her by e-mail at espears@southerncouncil.org. Preston Quesenberry contributed to this article.

Teaching “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” in South Carolina Schools

By Diane Raschke

Vol. 22, No. 2, 2000 p. 16

On June 14-15, SRC consultant and former education programs director Marcia Klenbort conducted an in-depth workshop for teachers from across South Carolina on using “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” in grades 6 through 12. Following the workshop, the article below, entitled “Distant Voices to Recount South’s Civil Rights Clashes: Key Civil Rights Voices Come Alive for Local Students in a New Documentary” appeared in The State newspaper.

More than 250 new voices will help some Columbia, South Carolina, students learn about the Civil Rights Movement this fall.

They belong to the men and women, both famous and ordinary, who shaped civil rights history in the South from 1940 to 1970. Framed by narrative and period music, they speak through an award-winning audio documentary that will soon be heard in four Columbia schools.

Educators from all over the state, including four from Columbia, will pilot a new curriculum that complements the Southern Regional Council’s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” civil rights documentary. A June workshop at the South Carolina Archives and History Center taught educators how to use the 13-hour series in the classroom.

Gussie Tucker, a member of the WA Perry Middle School Task Force, said first-person narratives make the series outstanding.

“The emotions when they’re talking are something you can’t see in a movie because other people are playing the part,” Tucker said. “This is a primary source. You can hear and actually know what they were feeling, being part of the Civil Rights Movement”

Teachers from A.C. Flora High School, Keenan High School, Heathwood Hall Episcopal School, and Joseph Keels Elementary School will pilot the program in Columbia, and Tucker hopes to sell WA Perry teachers on it as well.

The documentary has won several honors, including the prestigious Peabody Award in 1998.

The full title of the series is ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken? An audio history of the Civil Rights Movement in five Southern communities and the music of those times.”

The communities are Montgomery, Alabama; little Rock, Arkansas; Jackson, Mississippi; Atlanta. Georgia; and Columbia, South Carolina. Four of the series’ twenty-six half-hour segments focus on the Midlands region of South Carolina.

The series includes the work of the Richland County United Citizens’ Committee in integrating Columbia’s schools; the Clarendon County segregation case, Briggs v. Elliot and the “Orangeburg Massacre,” the 1968 incident in which state troopers fired op protesters at South Carolina State University, killing three.

This local connection is important, said Lalitha Shastri, a social studies teacher at Heathwood Hall.

“That’s away of saying to the kids that it happened on your doorstep,” she said. “You’re walking the streets where this happened, you’re living in the area where this happened, you’re living the legacy of this.”

Co-sponsors of the program with the Southern Regional Council are the South Carolina Humanities Council and the state Department of Education.

Diane Raschke wrote this article for The State newspaper based in Columbia, South Carolina.

REVIEWS: An Essential Toughness

Reviewed by John Dittmer

Vol. 22, No. 2, 2000 pp. 17-18

Andrew M. Manis, A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press. 1999.

The first thing you need to know about the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth is that he was fearless. A case in point: during the 1961 Freedom Rides, hundreds of Montgomery blacks were trapped inside First Baptist Church, surrounded by a large mob of angry whites. Outside of that perimeter, Shuttlesworth had CORE leader James Farmer in tow. How to get to the relative security of the church? His biographer tells us what happened next:

Shuttlesworth: “Jim, we have no choice. We’ll have to go through them.”

Farmer: “We’re going to have to do what?”

Shuttlesworth: “We’re gon’ have to walk through that mob.”

Before Farmer could answer, however, Fred began to march into the teeth of the horde and elbowed his way toward the church, shouting, “Out of the way. Let me through. Step aside.” Farmer, a much larger man than his trailblazer for the day, scuttled up to follow in Shuttlesworth’s trail, while the ocean of angry white hoodlums obeyed his word. In an occurrence Fred saw as tantamount to the parting of the Red Sea, a path opened up through an ocean of angry whites, allowing Shuttlesworth and Farmer to make an exodus into the “safety” of First Baptist Church.

Perhaps it all goes back to the Klan’s Christmas bombing of the Shuttlesworth home four years earlier, when Fred walked out of his bedroom after “eight to eighteen sticks of dynamite went off within three feet of this] head.” Shuttlesworth later testified that “I knew in a second.. that the only reason God saved me was to lead the fight”

In A Fire You Can’t Put Out, Andrew Manis has written a fascinating biography of the life and times of the civil rights activist who will always be associated with Martin Luther King’s 1963 Birmingham campaign. Manis shows us that far from being a Southern Christian Leadership Council functionary. Fred Shuttlesworth, more than any other black minister/activist, embraced and articulated the spirit of the men and women at the grass roots level, those local people who made Martin Luther King Jr. possible.

The early chapters are more autobiographical than biographical: Shuttlesworth is the major source for this account of his growing up near Birmingham in a family dominated by wife-beating stepfather and a demanding mother. Fred’s family lacked the social heritage, formal education, and professional status of the upper or middle class.” In such an environment, Fred quickly developed -an essential toughness- that would serve him well throughout his adult life. What saved the young Shuttlesworth from a life of obscurity was his intelligence, ambition, and his conversion to Christianity.

A historian of religion. Manis firmly grounds Shuffles-worth in the African-American Church. Unlike King, whose formal education at Morehouse, Crozer, and Boston University prepared him to pastor an elite congregation. Shuttlesworth worked his way through blue.collar Selma University, developing a theology grounded in fundamentalist belief rather than philosophical understanding. In the pulpit, Shuttlesworth relied on improvisation rather than on a more thorough preparation of his Sunday sermons. He instinctively knew how to move a congregation, and quickly rose through the ranks to become pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham.

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Manis provides adequate treatment of the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations, and the key role Shuttlesworth played in the SCLC-led movement; covering familiar ground when he discusses Shuttlesworth’s resentment over the media attention King received and King’s apparent willingness to sacrifice local concerns for favorable national publicity. But the most interesting parts of this fascinating biography deal with Shuttlesworth’s life in the 1950s, when he bravely fought a lonely battle against segregation in America’s Johannesburg. His Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) was the vehicle for the attack on Jim Crow, as time and again he stood up to Bull Connor and the Klan, despite jailings, beatings, more bombings, and psychological warfare waged against his family.

What kind of person could not only survive, but apparently thrive in a society built on white supremacist terror? Manis obviously thinks highly of his subject, but this is no hagiography. Shuttlesworth comes across as a courageous but flawed human being. Whether in the home, in his church, or in the inner councils of the ACMHR, Shuttlesworth insisted on having his way. A male chauvinist (Manis says that Shuttlesworth’s major redeeming quality as a husband was that he did not beat his wife, Ruby!), he ruled his family with an iron hand, neglecting his parental role while devoting his time to the Birmingham movement (One of his daughters recalled her surprise when her father actually showed up for her high school graduation.) Shuttlesworth loved the limelight; and his boastful comments about his relationship with famous people like the Kennedys speak both to his ego and his insecurity.

Still, the Fred Shuttlesworth who sticks in the mind is the militant warrior who stood up for human rights in Birmingham at a time when to do so was foolhardy if not fatal. Inside the movement he championed the progressive Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) and its spokespersons Carl and Anne Braden, while more cautious leaders like Andrew Young were warning against associating with SCEF, labeled “pro-communist” by such statesmen as Senator James Eastland.

Andrew Manis observed that Shuttlesworth was “the person most willing to sacrifice his own well-being for the cause.” Perhaps Diane Nash, the SNCC activist also known for her dedication to principle, put it best when she said, “Fred was practically a legend. I think it was important for there to be somebody that really represented strength, and that’s certainly what Fred did. He would not back down, and you could count on it. He would not sell out, and you could count on that?

John Dittmer is a professor of history at DePauw University and is working on a book on the Medical Committee for Human Rights.

Civil Rights Unionism

Reviewed by Leslie Marie Harris

Vol. 22, No. 2, 2000 pp. 18-19

Michael Keith Honey, Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Mention Memphis, labor, and the Civil Rights Movement and most people will immediately think of Marlin Luther King, Jr.’s, ill-fated visit to the city to support striking sanitation workers, and his assassination in April 1968. King’s visit was part of the late-1960’s turn from a focus on legal rights to economic equality. But as Michael Honey’s Black Workers Remember demonstrates, black workers themselves had long struggled to overcome economic and occupational hardships, without the help of high-profile civil rights organizations such as the NAACP, SNCC, or CORE. Honey’s work continues a trend in Civil Rights history that examines the struggles of southern blacks against Jim Crow racism before the 1954 Brown decision and the sit-ins and boycotts of the 1950s and 1960s. Through the voices of black men and women, Honey convincingly argues that the history of civil rights activism in the South should begin in part with the struggles of black workers as early as the 1930s to break through occupational color bars in industrialized urban areas.

In a less well-known aspect of the Great Migration of southern blacks to the north, blacks also moved from the countryside to southern cities, and from the plantation to southern factories in search of better wages and greater freedom in urban areas. In Memphis, however, such hopes were only partially fulfilled. Black workers earned better wages in the city at the Firestone Tire Factory, Federal Compress Company, and Memphis Furniture Company than they had in rural areas, and factory work was sometimes easier than farm labor. Blacks were less isolated in Memphis than in rural areas, with greater opportunities for collective social and political lives. But the majority of black men and women who journeyed to the city still faced Jim Crow conditions on the job and off and limited opportunities for political and economic advancement From the 1910s until his death in 1954, the political machine of Mississippi-born white supremacist Edward Crump controlled the city. Crump bought the votes of blacks and whites, while incorporating Ku Klux Klan members into his political machine and the police department. Middle- and working-class blacks feared Crump’s machine, with good reason: Crump’s control of the police meant that any talk of civil rights or unionizing resulted in violence. In the late

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1930s, several blacks who spoke up against Crump’s machine were run out of town. As the police commissioner explained, the purpose of the Memphis police force was to keep Memphis “a white man’s country.. . any negro who doesn’t agree to this better move on.”

Northern companies that operated in Memphis quickly acquiesced to the Jim Crow system. Black workers were paid less than whites, and given the hardest jobs. Jim Crow dictated segregated lunchrooms and bathrooms; in factories, for blacks that sometimes meant no lunchrooms and outdoor bathrooms that were little better than holes in the ground. Men’s factory wages were so low that sometimes their wives returned to rural areas around Memphis to pick cotton. Black men and women often worked two or more jobs in order to make ends meet For thirty years, Ida Branch, a widow raising two sons, worked two jobs, seven days a week: she worked as a domestic for a white family from 9:00 a.m.to 4:00 p.m., and at Firestone from 10:00 p.m. to 7:15 am.

Black workers joined unions to fight for better working conditions and racial equality. Their “civil rights unionism” first challenged the Jim Crow occupational structure in factories. With “ambiguous” help from national and local unions, black workers forced are-assessment of their wages and their abilities in factories. Black workers in Memphis also used unions as a basis of support for broader civil rights concerns, as when members of Local 19 travelled to Jackson, Mississippi, to protest the 1951 execution of black truck driver Willie McGee, who was charged with raping a white woman. In Jackson, the police rounded up members of Local 19 and threatened to “march [them] right on down to the river” and kill them before ordering them out of town “at their earliest convenience.” Mississippi U.S. Senator James Eastland’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, partner to the House Un-American Activities Committee, called Local 19’s vice president Earl Fisher to a hearing about the union’s alleged communist influences. Although Fisher’s responses to the Committee’s questions led Eastland to say that “the Negro officials here are dumb …they have simply been used by designing people,” Fisher won the larger battle by getting through the hearing without implicating himself or anyone connected with the union as a communist, and thus avoiding arrest.

Such small victories chipped away at the edifice of Jim Crow in Memphis. By the 1970s, wages were equalized between blacks and whites, and a variety of factory jobs (skilled, unskilled, and supervisory) were integrated, as were restrooms and cafeterias. Unfortunately, such integration occurred as industrial occupations declined in number. Mechanization in factories, as well as movement of factories out of the country, pushed both blacks and whites out of industrial jobs. But while many whites had enough education to move into non-manual labor jobs, black men did not. The income gap between black and white men widened again. Black women fared slightly better, many had more education on average than black men, and were able to enter teaching and “pink collar” clerical jobs. As a result, the income gap between black and white women narrowed between 1950 and 1990. Despite black women’s better-paying jobs, black men’s under- and unemployment continued to negatively impact the black family as men worked two or more jobs and were still eligible for welfare because of the low wages. And whites, even those who faced unemployment problems similar to blacks in an era of de-industrialization, continued to rely on the wages of whiteness to place themselves above blacks and avoid uniting with them in struggles for equity for all workers.

Honey’s book brings together many compelling stories of life and labor in Memphis. Black men and women tell in their own voices of their pride in their work and their anguish at the struggles they endured during and after Jim Crow. Honey has provided a valuable service in bringing to a wider public these less well-known voices of the civil rights struggle that demonstrate a person’s ability to contribute to the creation of a more equitable society.

Leslie Marie Harris is an assistant professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Film/Television: Lost Highways

Reviewed by Allen Tullos

Vol. 22, No. 2, 2000 pp. 20-22

“George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire,” a film in The American Experience series for the Public Broadcasting Service. Produced and directed by Daniel McCabe and Paul Stekler for WGBH, Boston. Written by McCabe, Stekler, and Steve Fayer. Executive Producer Margaret Drain. Based in part on The Politics of Rage by Dan T. Carter. 180 minutes.

George Wallace, white reaction’s pit bull in the desegregation and voting rights battles of the 1950s and 60s. was–in his prime–a corrupt, power-obsessed governor who cultivated a climate of terror, intimidation, and murderous violence. Bands played “Dixie,” rebel flags waved, Klansmen blew up children and shot “agitators,” police chiefs unleashed dogs and fire hoses, and state troopers broke the heads but not the spirits of demonstrators. There was, Martin Luther King Jr. concluded, “blood on the hands of Governor Wallace.”

By the 1970s, Wallace had taught many Americans to speak his language in other words. As perennial chieftain of Alabama and thwarted candidate for president, Wallace abetted a changing political mood, wielding a coded language of backlash against “liberal” federal judges, coddled criminals, affirmative action initiatives, government safety nets, anti-nuclear protesters, women’s-libbers, gays, and foreigners. Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich, Perot, Helms, Bush, Lott, and Delay are among the most well-known names that owe a debt to our downhome tactician of divisive swill. In retreat on issues ranging from welfare reform to national health care, Clinton Democrats have also voiced phrases from the Wallace lexicon. Among national politicos, only Pat Buchanan (“I don’t think the Governor owes anyone an apology”) publicly and proudly acknowledges the legacy.

Had not a would-be assassin’s attack in 1972 left paralysis and painkillers as constant companions, thickening his tongue and slowing his wit, George Wallace might have become the presidential spoiler he intended. Kingmaker for an election thrown into the House. Or perhaps an extended, rancid career in public bullying and logjamming such as that fashioned by Jesse Helms. Or, chief viper in the talk radio nest. His poisonous, slashing style anticipated this, too.

On Easter Sunday and Monday nights this April, PBS’s The American Experience featured a television rendering of the life and meaning of George Wallace. In Part One, the miter-producer team of Steve Fayer, Daniel McCabe, and Paul Stekler were rewarded when they stack close to the painstaking research and main themes of Dan T. Carter’s 1995 book The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (now in a revised edition from Louisiana State University Press). With the second episode, however, as filmmakers and historian seemed to part company. “George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire” turned toward the simplifications of an evangelical conversion narrative.

In slighting our need for a realistic social memory of Alabama and America’s violent experience with Wallace, “George Wallace” opts for a limiting biographical form that comes to center too exclusively upon the tale of an individual’s ruthless rise, prideful fall, and redemptive suffering. As the filmmakers lose their sense of historical proportion and perspective, we lose sight (or never see) many who should be key witnesses throughout–the persons most directly and lastingly affected by Wallace’s reign of white terror. After three hours, the film arrives at its violin-stained ending, having squandered too much time tracing the daily movements of batty gunman Arthur Bremer, having shown the Maryland shooting over and over and over and over, and having milked for emotional effect the pathetic figure of a badly aging, addled, and tormented Wallace.

Also lost in “George Wallace,” to the point of withholding evidence, is the important work of Professor Carter’s follow-up book From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994 (Louisiana State University Press, 1996) which traces Wallace’s legacy upon political strategy and rhetoric in our supposed post-civil rights era Video clips of

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present-day officeholders and popular pundits echoing Wallace-style phrases would reveal that his nasty ghost remains with us. Not making these connections is a critical omission consistent with the filmmakers’ naive political balancing act: is The Governor to be reviled as a racial opportunist or admired for sticking-up for states’ rights against an overweening big government? No wonder a huge majority of PBS viewers (see http://www.pbs.org wgbh/amex/wallace/sfeature/poll_results.html apparently came away believing that George Wallace’s lasting impact on American politics was “positive.”

The television documentary gets off on a fine footing, establishing the situation of sustained agricultural collapse in Wallace’s hometown of tiny Clio (namesake of the muse of history), Alabama, during the time of his childhood. Born in 1919 to a “poor, but not desperately poor” family, George Wallace was the son of a father with a reputation as a quick-tempered, alcoholic failure and a mother who sought for her family the civilizing influences of small town life. Young George, as Professor Carter points out in a key insight, forged an early identity upon the “twin anvils of resentment and an almost pathetic search for affection and respect.” At age fourteen, standing where Jeff Davis had once taken his presidential oath, Wallace vowed one day to become governor. Already, he had spent years soaking up political lessons from Barbour County, a practice-ground that had produced five governors.

Technically well-edited from material that took years to acquire, “George Wallace” moves quickly with the commentary of family members, long-time journalists who covered the campaigns and confrontations, aging former cronies, a precious few past opponents from the streets and courtrooms, and historian Carter. Congressman John Lewis and Selma civil rights attorney J. L Chestnut offer keen firsthand perspectives. The stars of both of these men continued to rise after Wallace’s flared and crashed. In compelling style, Chestnut recalls Wallace’s early career under the influence of the racially moderate Governor Big Jim Folsom. The young circuit judge proved surprisingly sympathetic to underdog blacks and whites, especially in cases pitting them against Big Mule attorneys from Birmingham. Despite Wallace’s formal courtesy of insisting that Chestnut and his clients be addressed as “Mr.” by anyone practicing in his courtroom, the film leaves unnoted and unanswered the deeper issue of whether Wallace ever overcame his core belief–widely shared by his generation of white Southerners–that African Americans were a separate, inferior race.

Using archival photographs and broadcast footage to striking effect, “George Wallace” has to labor against a miasma of vapid narration read by the apparently sleep-deprived actor Randy Quaid. Non-judgmental matter-of-factness, if this is the intended effect, conveys a lack of urgency, as if nothing much was, or remains, at stake. All along, the images are telling another story.

The film does outstanding work revisiting 1958, that watershed year in George Wallace’s political life, the time of his first defeat and of his “faustian bargain.” It came in the Democratic race for Alabama’s governorship, when, badly misjudging the climate since the Brown decision and the Montgomery bus boycott, the “lightin’ little judge” ran as a “responsible segregationist.” Wallace’s opponent, attorney general John Patterson, was a vicious racist who had the backing of the Ku Klux Klan. Wallace had spoken out against the KKK and refused its support, receiving instead the NAACP’s endorsement. Wallace lost heavily and felt the sting deeply. He infamously vowed never to be “out-niggered” again.

Soon Wallace turned to the demonizing of former friend, federal judge Frank Johnson, and the cocky posturings of chip-on-the-shoulder resistance that would win the votes of white Alabamians and stir a climate of violence. In 1963, his theatrical stand in the schoolhouse door, temporarily denying the admission of two black students under the guise of resistance to the tyranny of the “Central Government,” brought him national notice. Not mentioned is that the day following Wallace’s “stand,” Medgar Evers was murdered outside his home in Mississippi.

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Through speaking trips and media appearances– and we are made to feel the high drama and intense feelings of these rallies–as Wallace explored presidential politics, he tapped into and aggravated anti-black resentment as well as the generalized anger of blue collar voters in and outside the South who felt alienated from both political parties and thwarted in their efforts to realize American Dream mobility. Bushel baskets of small contributions rolled in. From Florida to Michigan, California to Maryland, George Wallace hauled the invective.

For those who don’t remember or who are too young to know, major money for Wallace’s forays came through graft and kickback schemes that were run out of the Alabama governor’s office by brother Gerald and henchman Seymore Trammell (“I was George Wallace’s hatchet man and son of a bitch”). This is an extraordinary moment in the film, worthy of the best of “Sixty Minutes.”

With the no-doubt unintended effect of suggesting that Wallace’s menace and ensuing mayhem might, in hindsight, be laughed-off like a good-ol’-boy joke, “George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire” takes part of its title, and its misguided musical leitmotif from a wacky, Hank Williams party-hearty song. When played as background to the all-too-serious events of the freedom struggle years, the result is trivializing. The song proves inspired only once, when the surreal truly breaks through–as General Curtis (“Bombs Away”) LeMay, Wallace’s choice for vice-president in the 1968 campaign, is pressing his pro-nuclear, Dr. Strangelove option. As for the film’s persistent, grating, original score, imagine soured Creedence with an occasional shuffle into the spasms of a distracted fiddle band. And, of course, violins near the end of the trail leading to forgiveness. Hank’s “Lost Highway” would have more tragically evoked George and most of the white South in the twentieth century.

“George Wallace,” the film, begins to lose its overall direction about halfway through. Part One ends with nothing like Birmingham’s Fred Shuttlesworth saying: “Governor Wallace caused a lot of suffering, and a lot of misery, and I believe a lot of deaths.” No, Reverend Shuttlesworth is made to say that early and speedily and then step aside. Instead, as the backlash politics of rage rolls across the United States in the late 1960s, and as Wallace trots to get in front of it, we get the monotonal Quaid gathering himself to read the script: “In the growing chaos of violence, protest, and rising crime, millions of Americans would come to believe that one man stood against the forces tearing the country apart.” This may work as a teasing, tune-in-next-time call for a hero, but it dismisses the purposes of millions of other Americans’ protests on campuses and in the streets.

Part Two of “George Wallace” moves more toward what we expect from AE’s Biography than what we need from PBS’s American Experience. The further into the film we go, an as-told-to story of pain, personal scandal, and purgatory takes over. Selective forgetfulness and the entropy of the forgiveness narrative give the slip to more troubling social memory. The conclusion is a missed opportunity for assessing–and mourning–the lengthy damage of the Wallace phenomenon, for examining the shifting tides of current racism, and for weighing the implications of Wallacism for our present moment. According to a Southern Poverty Law Center survey, Wallace’s Alabama, mired for decades in racial obsession, now counts more hate groups than any other state. Is this coincidence or an instance of fruit falling near the tree? The film might have inquired.

In “George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire” the filmmakers end up letting the subject call the parting shots. But when measured by Clio’s broader arc, how much does it matter that George Wallace ultimately found, or returned to, his mythical “true self’?

Allen Tullos is editor of Southern Changes