Vivian Malone Jones and the VEP: From Integration to Voter Registration

By Christena Bledsoe

Vol. 1, No. 2, 1978, pp. 8-10

Sometime in her youth, Vivian Malone Jones decided she wanted to go to college. That wouldn’t have been such an unusual decision except that her family was poor. Her father was a laborer. She was one of seven children. She lived in Alabama. It was the early 60s. And she was Black.

“I just knew I was going to college,” she says, her voice rising with inflection as she remembers. “It was one of those things that – I just knew.”

It was 1961 and she was 18. She set her sights on becoming a certified accountant. She applied to the University of Alabama and was told “no,” due to a crowded enrollment situation. An unspoken reason stood out though. The school was all-White and accepting her would have meant integrating the university where Alabama’s well-bred White families for generations had sent their young.

She was admitted to the state’s Black school, Alabama A&M, where Alabama tradition said she belonged. She majored in business education, the closest available field to her career choice, and attended for two years. But she wasn’t satisfied. She wanted more: she wanted to be able to pick the school where the education received would help accomplish her goals. She persisted in trying to get into the University of Alabama. She sought advice from NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York and two years later her admission was ordered by a court.

She was, however, throwing herself and her family into an emotionally charged, possibly dangerous situation. Several other Black students changed their minds about entering the university after a man who identified himself as a representative of the state of Alabama spoke to their families.

” ‘You know,'” she recalls his words, “‘there’s going to be trouble here and we can’t guarantee your child’s safety under these conditions. Are you sure you want your child to go in there?'”

Her family believed she should stick with her plans. They received threatening phone calls and had police protection for six months. “But nobody ever bombed the house or burned a cross. That’s pretty good considering,” she says now.

The day finally arrived: June 11, 1963. She waited silently in a car, along with fellow would-be student James Hood, while U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach confronted Alabama Governor George Wallace. at the school door.

The TV cameras glowed, the pencil press recorded and the event became etched in the memories of Americans everywhere. It was a flamboyant extravaganza – some say staged so that Gov. Wallace could have his show – testifying that the South was reluctantly changing, that racial barriers were going to be broken and that doors to education and the social mainstream were opening for Southern Blacks.

As she sat in the car, she concentrated on how she would fare academically. “I was in. I knew that. I worried about maintaining grades with the pressure I anticipated would surround me.” She decided to push fear out of her head. “You can’t afford to let it dominate your thoughts. There are other things a lot more important that you need to think about as opposed to, ‘My God, what happens if someone fires a shot?’ You just don’t deal with that kind of thing. If you really are that concerned about your physical safety and security, then it’s probably not for you to be in a place like that.”

Today Vivian Malone Jones finds herself part of the Southern legend of change, safely chronicled in the pages of history. She went on to become the first Black to graduate from the University of Alabama. From there she moved to Washington, D.C., where she became a research analyst for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and later an employee relations specialist for the Veterans Administration’s central office. While in Washington, she also pursued the M.S. Degree in Public Administration at George Washington University.

She keeps a front page clipping as a memento of her admittance to the University of Alabama in an office drawer, but at 36, she’s too young to be content with memories from the past. Today she finds herself in a world swirled by the ’60s promise of change that was never fulfilled.

Today Jones sits near a poster that proclaims, “Hands

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that picked cotton now can pick our public officials,” and discusses her work. She now is the executive director of the Voter Education Project, a non-profit corporation based in Atlanta that has striven to promote change through the political process.

She assumed the VEP directorship in August of 1977, after former director and civil rights figure John Lewis was appointed associate director of ACTION, the federal voluntary agency. She came to VEP after several years as director of the Civil Rights and Urban Affairs Division for the Environmental Protection Agency. Widely acclaimed for its work, VEP, which began as a special project of the Southern Regional Council but became a separate entity in 1970, has assisted the voter registration of almost 3 million Blacks throughout the South.

The Black vote now counts. In 1976, Black voters, particularly in states like Mississippi, assured the election of the President. Just I1 years earlier, a U.S. president had used his office to secure passage of a Voting Rights Act designed to eliminate illegal barriers interfering with Black citizens’ right to vote.

The turnabout sounds dramatic and is. It is also misleading. Southern Blacks are far from being full partners in the political process. Despite spectacular gains such as winning the majority of Atlanta and New Orleans, they are underrepresented at the statehouse level, in the county commission and city council chambers of the South and in the U.S. Congress as well.

VEP faces a massive job ahead if the majority of Southern Blacks ever are to register and exercise their right to vote, thereby shaping a political system responsive to their needs.

Right now those prospects don’t look good. Statistically speaking, VEP’s job is half-done at best. Millions of Southern Blacks have not taken advantage of the right to register to vote, perhaps three to four million in all.

“The problem that we’re running into is that once you’ve registered all the people who are eager, willing, or at least the only thing they needed was a little motivation, then you get down to the hard-core group,” explains Jones, a tall, poised woman with a collected air.

Youths, aged 18 to 25, constitute the largest number of unregistered Blacks. Their interests tend to be scattered and they see little reason to register or vote unless an issue specifically touches them.

In rural areas where older Blacks dominate, they often don’t vote. “They’ve been accustomed to things as they were 15, 20 or 30 years ago and really see no hope for getting out of that situation.”

Another problem is that many who registered earlier failed to vote. Their names have been purged from the polls. “We’ve got the age-old problem of educating people about why it’s important to vote.” VEP attempts to pass the word that in other similar communities Blacks registered and were able to put into office officials that represented their interests.

That, ultimately, says Jones, is what voter registration is about. It’s a complicated task. It takes learning issues, learning which candidates represent your interests and lending campaign support.

“Once you’ve satisfied your basic needs of food, shelter and clothing you can concentrate on some of those more sophisticated areas. It’s difficult to get someone to contribute even a dollar when they’re looking for work,” Jones assesses.

VEP provides funds and technical assistance to registration projects run by community groups, such as the NAACP or SCLC. The work is being hamstrung by inadequate finances. Like many non-profit corporations, VEP was dependent on foundation support that sharply dwindled in the mid-70s recession. Despite efforts to expand its financial base, VEP hasn’t yet fully recovered. Its budget, a maximum of $457,000 this year if sought after funds are received, is half its early 70s size. Permanent staff has shrunk too. “We have to turn down maybe 12 requests for every one that we’re able to fund.”

Given the combination of complex field work and financial restrictions, Jones is reluctant to set a timetable for when most Southern Blacks will be registered. “I think we’ve done very well with what we’ve had,” she responds. “We’re dealing with large numbers of people who have never voted in their lives, their parents didn’t vote. When you think about the political process and how long it’s been in effect, then 16 years (VEP’s existence) represents a very small period.”

Among projects underway, VEP is funding a Florida project designed to register the handicapped and a pilot Georgia program, Project 23, the results of which later may be applied to other states.

Project 23 takes its name from the 23 Georgia counties where the majority of the population is Black. Most are located in middle and southwest Georgia, a few are spread elsewhere.

Many of the counties have no Black elected public officials. “If you’ve got a majority of 75 percent and 80 percent in some cases, and no Black elected officials, then something’s wrong with the process. “It’s like South Africa almost,” she says, diminishing with a small laugh what to some might be an unpopular analogy.

What VEP has done is to go into the 23 counties and look

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for impediments that keep Blacks from registering or running for office. A commonly found situation was that of confining voter registration to the courthouse, despite the ready convenience of widely frequented sites such as grocery stores or shopping centers.

Often the hours set for registration were so restricted that Blacks had trouble taking advantage of them. VEP experienced difficulties also in getting deputy registrars appointed to assist the registration of Blacks. In a few instances, restrictions were extreme. Jones speaks of situations where registration was held in a White home and Blacks were told to enter at the back of the house. She also speaks of a “couple of cases” where ballots were marked so that it was known who voted for whom. “This can lead to intimidation if you don’t vote for the right person.

A number of the counties now have expanded registration sites and hours and some elected officials more representative of the population. In one area, more than 99 percent of the Black populace has been registered. But problems remain. VEP frequently gets calls from area people concerned about “how the votes were counted or what happens to the ballots . . . As long as those kinds of things are still happening, we will continue Project 23.”

As she views the South from the perspective of the 60s, Jones says she would have expected much more change.

She lives in a neighborhood undergoing transition from White to Black. This is the second neighborhood she has lived in where for-sale signs have appeared on White owned homes after Blacks began moving in. She expects her current Atlanta neighborhood to be 75 percent Black within a year. “I expected that by now people would not be running when Blacks moved into the neighborhood.”

She expected that a system would have been developed by now which would have eliminated the poverty still affecting masses of Southern Blacks. In her field work, she looks around and often exclaims, “My God, this is just as it was when I was growing up.”

She recalls a recent conversation with a Black neighbor that illustrates both a lack of change and a reluctance to push the status quo.

As a point of curiosity, she asked what the fee was for the nearly private country club. “The person I was talking to said, ‘Oh, I’ve been wanting to join, but they don’t allow Blacks to join.’

“I asked, ‘Have you applied?’

“No, she hadn’t.

“This is the same kind of mentality we’re talking about when I talk about someone not going down to register or not running for office because ‘Blacks don’t do this.’ ”

Recent events, Proposition 13, the Bakke Supreme Court case, and decisions favoring the seniority system, disturb her.

“I think that some of the kinds of problems that are cropping up are the result of a settling process. It will be interesting to see which way these things go because I think it can set us back considerably if this trend continues.” She believes the country will be in for “a lot of turmoil and disruption if that happens.” She declines to speculate on the form of turmoil though, doubting that anyone could have predicted the riots of the 60s. She advocates protest through the ballot box. “That’s when it is being used properly.”

If change indeed occurs, what kind of society would she like to see it produce?

“If you’re talking about the ultimate – what I consider to be the kind of situation where we’ll say ‘Yes, we’ve arrived and things are really great.’ I think that’s the time when people can truly move into society without the overriding factor being race or sex.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever see this in my lifetime. I really don’t. I doubt it.”

Nonetheless, she appears determined to work for change, as determined as when she won the right to enter the University of Alabama. She notes that James Hood, who entered with her, recently said he would not go through the harrowing experience again.

“I feel just the opposite. If I had to do it again, I would. There is absolutely no question in my mind … I couldn’t accept that condition anymore today than I could back in 1961 when Wallace was saying I couldn’t go to that school.”

Christena Bledsoe, a former newspaper reporter, is a free-lance writer living in Atlanta.

Tupelo: Hometown in Turmoil

By Betty Norwood Chaney

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1978, pp. 16-19

“Hey, they got a jitney jungle,” a Black kid with a Michigan brogue exclaimed to his traveling companion as the bus wound its way into the small Mississippi town. “That’s boss,” he concluded with approval. This link to his own home in the North suddenly elevated the South a bit in his esteem.

I awoke from a semi-doze at the kid’s words and looked out the window. I caught sight of a shopping center to my right and a fairground to my left. The streets were deserted and clean. As we pulled into the station my eyes scanned the top of the city’s courthouse and the police station. A view of the downtown shopping area, only a couple of blocks down the street, was cut off by some buildings.

Feeling a tinge of excitement, as I always did when arriving in this place, I aroused my sleeping four-year-old on the seat beside me.

“Wake up, honey,” I told him. “We are in Tupelo. Mama is home!”

It was a pleasant June evening, so pleasant that when I called the house for a ride from the bus station and found the line busy, I decided to walk the four blocks home. With bags in hand, my son and I walked north up the quiet familiar streets. The breeze was gentle and warm. When we reached Spring Street, I looked down out of habit to where my brother has a shoe store/shop. It is in the block with the pool hall, a cafe and the supermarket that gives

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credit, an area that for years has been dominated by rural Blacks coming to town on Saturdays.

Although my little boy and I were two Blacks walking the streets of Tupelo, Mississippi at ten o’clock at night, it did not occur to me to be afraid. My only concern was that some dog might spot us and make a fuss. Yet, this was the same Tupelo that one reporter graphically described that summer as a place where “a war of sorts” is being fought in the streets and “to some in this racially divided northeast Mississippi trading center, your skin is your uniform.” It wasn’t that I was unafraid of meeting some hooded Klansman patrolling these streets, the thought merely did not occur to me. For me, this was simply home, the place where I had grown up, where my mother and most family still lived and the place that I loved to visit much more frequently than I had the opportunity. It was, too, the place where, ironically enough, I felt most safe.

Our walk home that night was uneventful. Except for an occasional remark from me to my son, who was quieter than usual having just awaken, the walk was made in silence. Not even a resident dog acknowledged our presence.

On the surface, Tupelo appeared to be the same uneventful town that I grew up in during the fifties and sixties. At that time, although White families occupied the last three houses on my street – houses of comparable sizes and conditions – the similarities ended there and our paths rarely crossed. Racial confrontations between us were practically nonexistent.

On school days, I and my Black friends and neighbors beaded north to school and my White neighbors -certainly not friends – headed south or westward. Some of my schoolmates came from a further distance south, from a poorer, more dilapidated area across the tracks called Shake Rags.

When I was in school, it was a rare occasion for Blacks to get their pictures in the paper regarding school events. I can recall following the activities of the White girl my age that lived on my street through various newspaper clippings. Although we grew up within a few feet of each other, we never had an occasion to actually meet. She was always a popular girl and one year she was chosen one of Tupelo High School’s beauty queens. I remember reading the different newspaper accounts with a mixture of pride and envy – pride because a girl from my street was featured in the paper and envy because the same kind of coverage was denied to us Blacks.

All of that has changed now. A few years ago one of my nieces was chosen “Miss Tupelo High.” Her Black face graced the pages of the paper that had denied our existence ten years before. Now, it is not at all unusual to see Blacks pictured alongside Whites in photographs of school activities.

School desegregation in Tupelo had been another of those uneventful occurrences. Black parents here, unlike many others, both North and South, have few – if any – horror stories to tell about school integration or busing. Total integration of the schools in Tupelo exists and children from all over the city now head in the same directions for school without incidence.

Another visible change in Tupelo since the fifties and sixties is in housing. The reely structures in Shake Rags that used to house a large percentage of the Black population have been torn down and replaced with a housing project in the north end of town. Blacks are also moving into apartment buildings and complexes and some homes that were for “Whites only” a few years ago. Most important of all, “nice,” attractive brick homes are darting up constantly, bearing witness to the fact that Blacks in Tupelo are indeed progressing.

At least, this was the appearance of things. Because a temporary halt had just been called to the picketing while a recently-formed biracial committee held negotiations behind closed doors, this quietude easily belied the fact that “a war of sorts” was being waged here. The spring and summer of 1978 had been anything but quiet in Tupelo.

The Black community that laid dormant, for the most part, throughout the turbulent sixties when Blacks in many other Southern towns were raising up in protest of racial discrimination, had at last taken a stand and declared racial discrimination to be very much a factor in their town. They bad shocked the White community and some Blacks by calling and supporting a boycott of White merchants that was 80 percent effective in protest of police brutality and job discrimination. And in so doing, they had inflamed the radical element in the White community and brought forth the long-subdued Ku Klux Klan in numbers and force unknown in recent times. Near confrontations between demonstrating Blacks and countering Klansmen became common occurrences that spring and summer.

While actual racial confrontations seldom had occurred in Tupelo, an analysis of the city by the United League, a state-wide civil rights organization first invited to the area to help stage demonstrations in protest of police brutality, revealed that Tupelo had one of the worst records in the state in terms of racial discrimination.

The analysis showed that Tupelo with a population of approximately 27,000, of which around 25 percent were Black, bad very few – and in some cases – no Blacks in decision-making positions.

According to a spokesman for the League, at the time the analysis was done, with the exception of one alderman, there were no Blacks in city government in decision making positions; there were no Black store managers in any of the department stores or supermarkets; a brother of mine, appointed a few years ago after the schools were integrated, was the only Black on the school board. In no instances were Blacks employed in the workforce in proportion to their percentage of the population, except in menial positions.

There had always been grievances that needed to be addressed. I remember that in the sixties when I was in college my community’s lack of activity was a source of some embarrassment for me.

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According to Attorney Lewis Meyers of the North ‘ Mississippi Rural Legal Services the unique economical situation of Blacks in Tupelo has been a major factor keeping race relations “good.”

In Tupelo, the per capita income and the standard of living is high compared to many other areas where the plantation/sharecropping system needed only raw, unskilled labor. With Tupelo as a mercantile center, Blacks moving into northeast Mississippi were a bit more well-to-do. These middle-class Blacks became the traditional “Negro” leadership, Meyers recounts, and bad heretofore been successful in keeping the peace in Tupelo. They were a buffer zone for powerful Whites who were the ones the Black landlords and the funeral directors and the store owners had to face downtown on the bank board when they needed capital. Because of “interest tied to capital” the White power structure had been able to rely upon these Black leaders to “keep the peace.

Life began to change, however, after the Vietnam war drained the Black community and left scores of young, vibrant Black men jobless. The veterans that returned to the South in a recession to face unemployment in their hometowns and states, were a different breed from the ones a generation’ before. Disillusioned by the war, most faced no jobs, lack of stimulation and lack of direction. They were in no mood to let the peace be.

One of the forces which channeled this unrest into protest was Alfred “Skip” Robinson, a building contractor from nearby Holly Springs and founder of the United League, a grassroots organization that claims 35 chapters and about 70,000 Black members throughout northern Mississippi. According to Robinson, a middle-aged father of six, he gave young Blacks an identity, a sense of direction and a sense of purpose. Even his detractors admit that they are impressed with his ability to arouse the interest of the Black community. Walter Stanfield, a League organizer, says that Blacks in Tupelo have been willing to deal with past grievances, but until the League came to town, there was no organization around to provide the necessary leadership.

Robinson does not sound like the sixties’ leaders. He speaks of old problems with a different perspective. “We are not trying to integrate the neighborhood schools,” said Robinson. “In so many ways, integration was the worst thing that ever happened to Black people. We lost so much of our identity, things that were our own. Before integration there were more Black school principals in Mississippi than anywhere else. Now, around here, you can count them on one hand. We are taking up where the movement of the 1960s left off.”

Since Robinson’s leadership and the League’s work, there have been several important victories. For one thing, League-led protest resulted in the removal of the two officers from the police force that were implicated in the brutality suit. Not only that, but according to Stanfield, a Black building inspector has been named to the city government structure and a Black assistant has been assigned to the light and water department. Also Blacks have reportedly been hired as store managers in two stores and in several cases have received jobs that they would not have received otherwise. Meyers said, “We’ve gotten more people around here jobs than Mississippi Employment Service ever did.”

However, Robinson is increasingly being criticized for his uncompromising position by both Blacks and Whites. Several Blacks voiced their frustration over his refusal to negotiate on a settlement. Mary Douglas, a young Black mother who marched with her children on the picket line and later served on the biracial committee created to air grievances for the city, referred in particular to a meeting that included Mississippi senatorial candidate Charles Evers. Robinson had been so late for that meeting, it had to be rescheduled.

The Rev. William Rittenhouse, pastor of the biracial committee, said he saw Robinson’s continual failure to negotiate as a “betrayal of willingness to work problems out.” Aaron Henry, state NAACP president, denounced Robinson’s behavior as an attempt to exploit the situation to gain power for himself and his movement.

The animosity between the League and the traditional Black leadership has also divided the Black community. League members have frequently referred to old leaders as “Uncle Toms” and suggested on one occasion that since they bad not done anything for the Black community in all this time, maybe it was best they stay out of things now.

Many of the League members are so-called “street people” – the chronically unemployed, some with minor criminal records and former drug users – some of the established leaders point out. If they cut themselves off from us, they ask, where are they going to go when they need people to fill the leadership positions they are seeking?

Kenneth Mayfield, the local Black attorney who brought the police brutality suit sparking the protest was one of a group that extended the imitation to the League to organize in Tupelo. Despite the divisions, he is optimistic. He feels that all things considered what has happened in Tupelo in recent months has been -good.”

As a result of some of the activities over the past seven months, grievances have been brought to the fore and a “framework has been set” for finding solutions to those grievances. Mayfield is on a committee with four Whites that has been designated to draw up an affirmative action

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plan for the city to be approved by the mayor and the board of aldermen. The plan will attempt to increase jobs and representation of Blacks by Blacks, particularly, in the areas where they are most affected.

Mayfield has little doubt that the city administration will approve an affirmative action plan. In order for the ” sore to heal,” he says, the city must come up with an affirmative action plan.

A weekend visit to Tupelo in late October again found the city undergoing a quiet period. A “silent” boycott was on, but a lot of Black residents had gradually begun shopping again in the White-owned stores.

The League’s activities had been halted while they awaited the affirmative action committee report. The Klan reportedly busied itself that weekend by making an appearance at a high school band festival. A group of robed Klansmen supposedly walked past a group of young Black teenage boys and girls on the street and, as they passed, one of the boys, to the amusement of the other kids, grabbed the band flagpole and jestured at the Klansmen, 11 show you who’s afraid of who.”

All fear of the Klan appears to be gone from the Black community. Their main importance in Tupelo this whole period, one observer noted, has been in providing theatrics for the media. While the presence of the Klan did much to draw attention to the area, Rittenhouse feels that the situation in Tupelo was blown out of proportion indeliberately by the press. Although Blacks and Klansmen openly displayed weapons, no violence erupted, he pointed out.

However, Tupelo, the “All-American City,” with its symbols of growth and progress in northeast Mississippi, has had difficulty in explaining why this ‘littleness in thinking,” as Rittenhouse characterizes the Klan, experienced a rebirth in their town. Many Tupelo citizens have, frankly, been embarrassed by the whole situation.

The city now quietly awaits the results of discussions to what will be tomorrow’s situation. This time amid the quietude I sensed that something was indeed transpiring. Maybe it was the undercurrents of a grassroots organization again mapping strategy, or the Klan regrouping, or more division taking place among the Black community, or maybe it was simply a city making plans for a communal Thanksgiving Dinner as Ritterhouse, the Baptist minister, would like to think.

Perhaps, the change was within me – my perceptions. For, I had realized that Tupelo was indeed a battleground for racial issues not because it caught up with the protest of the sixties ten years later -not because of any one individual or organization. Instead, Tupelo had become the nation’s best known town for racial conflict largely because of the people and events which have grown since the civil rights movement. Like other places in Mississippi or Massachusetts, Tupelo’s signs of progress may have given most Whites the opinion that race relations are good” and many Blacks a reason to expect more.

In this way, quiet or in turmoil, my hometown is everyone’s. Tupelo is our town.

The Dying Memory of Hugo Black

By Thomas Noland

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1978, pp. 20-21

“Mr. Justice Black and myself were both natives of Clay County. Each of us dearly loved and revered our native origins and the peoples thereof. He brought to that community and that people very great honors and very great responsibilities to honor and respect his memory.

“No other community of people ever has faced such a situation and such an opportunity in the history of our nation as far as I know. If we fail to do our part he is not necessarily disgraced as much as are we.”

Southerners may disagree on how many Souths exist today, what with the media remaking Dixie, but few will deny there are at least two. One is Atlanta and Birmingham and Durham-Chapel Hill–the South of skyscrapers, of fine universities, of regional theatre and professional ballet; of Black public officials elected by a multi-racial constituency and of suburban apartments with names like Shadowood and Quail Ridge. The other, older and vaster, is the South of Clay County, Alabama.

A hundred miles west of Atlanta, Highway 9 dips and rises through fields of soybeans and corn, past paintless and decaying farmhouses with kudzu growing in the doorways. It halves the brief one-story town of Lineville and six miles further south spills into Ashland. Mayor E. L. Wynn is fond of saying Ashland (population 3,000) has the highest altitude of any county seat in the state. That constitutes Ashland’s only claim to fame in the eyes of most of its citizens. The phrase even appears on the town’s stationery. But there is nothing on the stationery, or in city hall, or around the courthouse square, to indicate Ashland was the childhood home of Hugo La Fayette Black, probably the greatest Alabamian of this century and one of the 10 most influential justices ever to sit on the United States Supreme Court.

Three blocks off the square, there is one thing that indicates Ashland is the childhood home of Black. It is one of those round signs with a star in the middle, left over from the Bicentennial; it stands rather incongruously in front of an appalling eyesore. A close look reveals the dilapidated structure to be a house. The porch has caved in and brushy vines obscure any view from the road. It is where Hugo Black grew up.

One other thing, a hundred yards down the road is, somehow, even more poignant. It is a sign in an open field which says, “Future Home of Hugo Black Memorial Library-Museum and Boyhood Home.” On February 27, 1976-the day after Black would have turned 90-more than a hundred people, some from Clay County, many from New York and Washington, celebrated Hugo Black Day there, and applauded as Ashland businessman Morland Flegel raised the sign.

Amid hand-shaking with film producer Otto Preminger (said to be researching a movie about Black), Mrs. Hugo Black and legal scholar Max Lerner, Flegel talked that day of the “overwhelming support” the project had received. He spoke of national fund-raising, local fundraising and a goal of $750,000 for the library-museum, including restoration of Black’s boyhood home and its removal to the project site.

Lerner, in a touching address, talked of reconciliation. “There was a period when Ashland and Alabama left Hugo Black,” he said, referring to the Brown decision in which Black concurred. “But the wonderful thing is, Ashland and Alabama came back to him, and there’s a lovely completed circle there.”

Only, Lerner was wrong. Alabama came back; the Alabama that partakes of the first South, the Alabama of the Birmingham University that sponsors a three-day Hugo Black symposium around his birthday each year. Ashland, the other South, did not. For despite what was said Feb-

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ruary 27, there will be no Hugo Black Memorial LibraryMuseum in Clay County. With funds at a standstill for the past two years, with local skepticism and hostility showing no signs of abatement, and with Ashland pursuing a different library in conjunction with the county, a subdued Flegel said recently, “It’s out of the question.”

The schism between Black and his own people did not begin in 1907, when Black at 21, left his native county for Birmingham to hang out his shingle. No one considered it a slight for the local boy to seek his fortune in the raw, rambunctious “Magic City.” Besides, Black had tried being an Ashland attorney and abandoned the idea only after a fire destroyed his office and his $1,500 set of law books. The homefolks, most of whom were acquainted with his astonishing record at Ashland Academy, expected great things of him, and knew he had to accomplish them in great places.

It certainly didn’t begin in 1926, when Black returned home to launch his campaign for the U. S. Senate. He gave a rousing oration against concentrated wealth, trusts, big railroads and high tariffs; he echoed the sentiments of the hill-country populists among whom he had grown up.

Nor did it begin in 1937, when Senator Black was confirmed in Congress as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court despite the revelation of his membership in the Ku Klux Klan. It was a national controversy; but Clay County was not a party to it. What mattered at home was that hugo Black, who, as a boy, used to listen to the lawyers in the steamy Clay County Courthouse, had reached the pinnacle of his profession. Who was going to care if he had once belonged to the Klan? “They were so pleased with his appointment they didn’t get upset about it,” says Elizabeth Dempsey, who was a girl at the time. “The town acclaimed him.”

It began, rather, on May 17, 1954, the day the Court announced Brown. The school desegregation decision struck at the heart of the complex system of mores and folkways that had grown up around race. For White Clay County, it was something akin to Cain killing Abel. How could Hugo have done it? He was one of us, they said. Or was he?

Herein lies the chief irony of Clay County’s rejection of Hugo Black-for, the fact was that he, despite appearances, never rejected Clay County; it made him what he was and he knew it. A hard scrabble childhood-his father was a small storeowner-taught him the economic reality of Alabama’s north-south division.

South Alabama, the Black Belt, harks back to the antebellum “flush times” of the state. Its politicians-Gov. George Wallace, Lt. Coy. Jere Beasley, and Wallace’s heir-apparent, Fob Jamesare inheritors of the hidebound conservatism engendered by the plantation system. Hilly north Alabama never partook of the manorhouse tradition and brought the myth only because of Reconstruction racial fears. Yeoman agriculture (and few Blacks) was the pattern before the Civil War and after. Clay County is securely with the north, and no one was surprised in 1892 when the rising tide of Populism gave birth to the People’s Party of Alabama-that self-conscious challenge to Bourbon oligarchy-in Hugo Black’s Ashland.

The truth concerning Black’s position on Brown was that he, like any leader, was both of them and above them; but Clay countians could only conclude he was against them.

An anonymous pundit came up with the nutshell analysis that country lawyers still rely on to explain Black’s apparent contradiction. “When he lived in Alabama,” the saying goes, he wore a white robe and scared the Blacks to death. When he got to Washington, he wore a black robe and scared the Whites to death.”

The first time Black came to Clay County after the Brown decision, he went to his old church, Ashland Baptist. He sat alone. Only one person, according to Ms. Dempsey, would speak to him publicly, and that was her father, the county attorney. “Daddy didn’t mind taking a stand on what he believed in,” Ms. Dempsey says, “and he thought the minister and the congregation should have recognized Hugo because he wasn’t a criminal.” Hugo didn’t return for years.

There is a new, younger minister now, but many parishoners remember Black’s visit. “We have a lot of good Christians in this town,” one man said when asked about Black, “but not to the point where they’re willing to forgive and forget.”

What else, besides good Christians, does Clay County have? It has 13,000 people, who farm, sell merchandise in Ashland and Lineville, work at the Ashland poultry plant or make slacks or tires in Lineville’s two industries. Their median family income in 1975 was $5,756. They send their children to integrated public schools where the White-Black ratio is rougly seven to one. At Clay County High School in Ashland, there is Bible study each morning, an exercise in submission to the letter, but not the spirit, of justice Black’s decision banning prayer in the schools.

“Read your Bibles, but don’t pray,” is how a 1977 Clay County graduate describes the teachers’ feelings. The students respond without much prodding. He remembers that for several months after Black’s decision came down, the teachers led prayer in defiance of the decree. It was nothing like the violence that eventually greeted Brown, but it smacked of the same never-say-die, I-dare-you-to-enforce-it philosophy. By and by the Bible reading evolved, a practice which the teachers more or less clandestinely encourage.

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Another constant reminder of Black’s apostasy is the nagging racial trouble at Clay County High. Until this year, cheerleaders were elected by popular vote. Last year no Black hopeful received enough votes to take a place on the squad, and Blacks demanded a Black girl be appointed. They also demanded that selections in future be made by a panel of judges, not by vote, and threatened to quit the football team en masse if their demands weren’t met. The principal relented; a Black girl was appointed, and the judging came about. Earlier this year the judges chose eight White girls and no Black ones for the fall squad, and the principal had his hands full again. Once more Blacks threatened to walk off the team if a Black girl were not appointed. This time, the principal refused, and all but one of the Blacks quit. Word got out that one White cheerleader carries pictures in her wallet of the former Black players; she is no longer asked out. The unspoken thought in many Ashland minds is: If it weren’t for Brown, we wouldn’t be having these problems. And the chief symbol of Brown for them is Black.

It made sense, therefore, for an outsider-Flegel is from North Dakota-to take the lead when Barney Whatley and others proposed some sort of memorial to the justice in 1972, the year after his death. Another early leader, Bill Wilson, was a rural resource development expert from Auburn University and not a native Clay countian.

In the early days Flegel and Wilson were confident the money would come, once a few broadminded community pillars led the way with substantial gifts. And it seemed at first they were right. The Ashland Town Council and Clay County Commission contributed a total of $43,000. The 14-member Board of Directors of the Hugo Black Memorial Library, Inc.-all Clay countians-managed to get the Black homestead on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

That same year, Flegel, Wilson and others went to Washington, where Chief Justice Warren Burger received them warmly-“He was just great,” Flegel said-and pledged enthusiastic support. Mrs. Black donated 175 cartons of Black memorabilia for future use in the re-

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stored home. Oliver White of Ashland, who owned the house, donated it to the group. They purchased four acres up the road (where the “Future Home” sign stands) and hired an architect to draw up plans for the library-museum.

Then things began going wrong. President Nixon cut off federal funds that would have been available for IIbrary construction under the Service Construction Act shortly before he resigned. That dashed hopes for federal support; hopes for state support died in 1975, when the Alabama legislature, one of the more reactionary in the country, defeated a proposal by Representative Gerald Dial of Lineville to provide $100,000 for the project if there were a surplus in the state’s general fund. Dial never found out whether the money would have, come through-his proposal was killed in committee. Whatley, a wealthy Denver attorney, had pledged to match whatever the state would ante up. The legislature’s decision hurt doubly, since everyone had depended on Whatley to donate generously.

By 1976 it was clear the project was floundering, and was starting to be a liability for those involved. Probate Judge J. B. “Bunyan” Toland, a relative of Black’s who was instrumental in persuading the county commission to help out, was beaten for reelection that year. A one-term probate judge is a rarity in Clay; most people agree that the Black project did him in. Robert Dockerty, a professional fundraiser hired to coordinate the national effort, clearly was not on the job. He organized a five-person committee in 1976, including such luminaries as former Associate Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, former University of Alabama President Frank Rose and Ed Elson, owner of Elson’s gift stores in Atlanta. At the time, Dockerty said, “It is my dear hope to have this whole thing finished in three months.” It’s been more than two years since then, and the committee’s efforts have yielded a grand total of $4,000. Flegel still wants to try to gather enough money to renovate and move the home, but even that will take several thousand dollars more than is now on hand. Dockerty is rarely at the office these days. His wife says, “He really hasn’t been very active on it recently.”

The death-blow for the library-museum came late last year. The Town of Ashland, in conjunction with Clay County, came up with a joint city-county library board and applied to the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for Community Development funds to build the Ashland-Clay County Library. Last spring, a $100,000 grant came through-enough to pay for most of the construction.

Was the city-county library a deliberate effort to foil the Black memorial? No one in Clay County will go that far. On the other hand, no one will deny that the more people saw how bogged down the Black project was, the more they doubted anything would ever come of it. “I think everybody’s in agreement that we need a library real bad,” one county politico said. “They went along with the Hugo Black thing because it meant a library, but if there was any other way, they’d do it.” Agnes Catchings, who serves on both library boards, put it bluntly. “The people wanted a library,” she said. “They didn’t want to wait.”

One can make a case for saying the Black library-museum failed because it was too ambitious for a county like Clay. Perhaps. But that begs the overreaching question of why Clay County still turns its back on its most famous son, whose work is admired throughout the nation.

A few years ago, when the project still seemed healthy, the Women’s Study Club sold its little library on the courthouse square to an Ashland businessman. The club decided not to donate the profits to the Hugo Black Memorial Library-Museum, Inc. That should have told Flegel, Wilson and Toland something about forgive-and-forget in Clay County, Alabama. The other South, patient and unredeemed, endures.

Thomas Noland is a staff writer for the Anniston Star.

Fighting Discrimination in Macon: A Return to the Streets

By Yvette Sparks

Vol. 1, No. 4, 1979, pp. 4-7

During the height of the civil rights movement when the call for integration resounded throughout the country, Macon, Georgia heard the reverberating echo. The calls for equal access to lunch counters and front seats on buses were sounded there, too.

Blacks in Macon and elsewhere marched, sat-in, picketed, boycotted and went to jail in the name of equality. They fought against the White power structure for rights that had long been denied them. Some concessions were made some gains were won.

But today, another call is ringing throughout Middle Georgia’s major metropolitan city. It is a call painfully reminiscent of an era gone by. Civil rights activists in the conservative Southern city still are pleading for an end to discrimination in the city’s hiring and promotion practices.

“In Macon we still aren’t even n the tokenism phase, and we are approaching the 80s,” says the head of a civil rights organization which is currently waging a battle to end alleged discrimination.

The city’s newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) has taken up the battle cry and has caused governmental and business leaders to take notice. Both governmental officials and businessmen have denied that discrimination exists, saying they have worked to insure that “qualified” Blacks move up on the employment ladder.

In other areas of life in Macon, they readily point out that Blacks have achieved significant gains over the last few years. Five of the city’s 15 City Council members are Black. Three of the 10 members of the Bihh Board of Education are Black. A Black judge sits on the Municipal Court Bench. And a few other Blacks hold appointive positions on quasi-influential boards.

Herbert Dennard, executive director of the Macon chapter SCLC, does not deny the fact that Blacks in Macon have conic a long av in terms of meshing into the

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total fabric of life there. But he hastily adds, they still have a long way to go. Dennard and others also fear that the gains Blacks and poor people made in the 1960s are being threatened today, because of a “rightist resurgence.”

The nation is faced with a dramatic philosophical shift to the right, Dennard believes. And to emphasize his point, he cites the Supreme Court’s Bakke decision and the recent sentencing of Tommy Hines – a mentally retarded Alabama man convicted of raping a White woman.

And because of this shift away from Blacks and the plight of Macon’s unemployed and underemployed Black population, the SCLC has picked up some of the tools of the past. The group strongly believes that “die hard discrimination” prevails in local governmental units and with private employers, some who have historically refused to hire Blacks, the group says. So to fight the discrimination it sees, the SCLC has decided to resort to the effective tactics of its founding fathers.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others rallied masses of people together with fiery speeches, marches, pickets and boycotts. Recently, the SCLC began using those same tactics in their struggle to end the alleged unfair hiring and promotion practices in Macon. Many in the White community and some in the Black community scoffed at the idea of returning to the days of the 60s. Fifteen years ago, some said, nonviolent marching measured the height of the human spirit. It’s not necessary now.

Other avenues of change exist. Work for change within the system, use of voting power, filing of suits, some have suggested. But Dennard and some others feel that while they are using the modern redresses which take longer, they can call attention to their cause by “placing their feet in the street.”

“We shall march as many marches as necessary. We will picket and will file suits and boycott until we win appropriate concessions,” the group has declared. And in the month of November, an estimated 2,000 people marched through downtown Macon, singing and calling for an end to discrimination. Pickets followed and later meetings with business and governmental officials.

The group has also involved the U.S. Justice Department in its fight against alleged discrimination. Federal officials are monitoring the charges of discrimination lodged by the group, which point out that Blacks are not being hired or promoted fairly to managerial positions.

Earlier in the year, a federal agency cited the City of Macon for discriminating against Black and female employers. The Office of Revenue Sharing (ORS) warned that Macon could lose more than $2 million in revenue

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sharing funds if it doesn’t take steps to promote more Blacks and women to supervisory positions.

The ORS study found that only 2.4 percent of Macon’s supervisory personnel are Black, while Blacks make up 39 percent of the workforce. Only 1.6 percent female supervisors were found in the 11.4 percent work force that they comprise.

While the report said that the city’s promotion practices are not “inherently discriminatory,” it added that procedures have resulted in “Blacks and females occupying a disproportionate percentage of nonskilled, lower-paying and traditionally clerical-type jobs respectively.” Blacks and females have all but been excluded from supervisory positions, it continued.

Macon’s Mayor Buckner Melton defended his city’s affirmative action efforts by saying that the city administration has made a “dramatic increase” in the number of Black employees in nonlabor positions. However, he also admitted that Blacks still hold most of the unskilled jobs.

The investigation of the Office of Revenue Sharing started about one year ago, as a result of a discrimination suit filed by 16 police officers two years ago. The suit of the Black officers combined with a more recent federal suitled by two city electrical workers will put the city’s romotion policies on trial.

The joint suit is scheduled to be heard in February. The police officers are charging that the city’s police department is biased against Blacks in promotion and evaluation practices, denies training opportunities to Blacks and fails to maintain a working atmosphere free from racial intimidation. The two electrical workers charge they were passed over for promotions in favor of a less qualified White worker.

Other suits are also pending. One involves a deputy in the Bibb County Sheriff’s office who alleges that the county uses unfair testing and promotion practices. Both county and city officials are taking close looks at their departments and at their affirmative action plans.

Macon is being watched because of what you, the Blacks, are doing.”

Macon is being watched, one business official told leaders of the SCLC, “because of what you, the Blacks, are doing.” He cautioned them against allowing their efforts to dissuade industry prospects from coming into Macon. It would hurt the very cause for which they are working, more jobs and fair employment for Blacks, he said.

And the SCLC gave the assurance that the group would not do anything to block the flow of new industries into the Middle Georgia town. But neither did it intend to let unfair employment practices prevail. “It is our position that in an effort to keep peace and harmony in any city, it is necessary to gain and maintain fair employment opportunities for all citizens,” said SCLC president Henry Ficklin.

Yvette Spark is a Macon, Georgia free-lance writer.

A New Day in Wilcox County: 1978

By Harriet Swift

Vol. 1, No. 6, 1979, pp. 15, 16, 28

“Bad Wilcox,” the civil rights workers used to call it.

“In Alabama they say that there are 66 counties and then there’s Wilcox,” sighs a federal official.

Wilcox County, resting squarely in the center of Alabama’s Black Belt, presents a storybook picture of the rural Deep South. Its sparse population has steadily declined since 1900, leaving only 16,000 people (about 68 percent of them Black) to populate the tiny towns and large plantations. A pleasing vista of fertile fields, rolling hills and proud Southern forests intertwined with the Alabama River, Wilcox is dotted with white-columned mansions and pathetic wood and tin shacks. The insular, provincial social life has bred a steady line of stock Southern characters from the imperious Miss Ann in the Big House to the wise and folksy Dilsey living out back.

The county’s abundance of traits identifying it as the archetypal Black Belt county have not gone unnoticed. In 1950 sociologist Morton Rubin published his well-known social anthropology study of the Southern plantation culture, “Plantation County,” which was entirely drawn from his field research in Wilcox County. Photographer Bob Adelman expanded his 1965 cover story on the county for the old Look magazine into a book in 1972, the poignant and moving “Down Home.” National Geographic, The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journalhave all used the county as a Southern metaphor, while its motherlode of social patterns and inculcated race and caste obsessions have been steadily mined by graduate students and historians.

The characteristics of Wilcox County that have made it such an attraction for writers and journalists are the same features that have kept it a segregated, repressive society that has driven away the best and brightest of both races. In 1970 the median family income was $3,920 a year, compared with $7,200 for the state of Alabama. A recent study based on conservative data indicates that 1.1 percent of the county’s population owns at least 70 percent of the land. The infant mortality rate is an outrageous 32.6 per thousand births. Until 1965 no Black person had voted in the county since Reconstruction. Under the eyes of federal

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marshals dispatched by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 Black voters were added to the poll lists. But Wilcox County remained in the tight grip of White office-holders until 1978, despite repeated attempts by Blacks to win seats on the county commission, school board and positions in the courthouse.

A combination of factors worked against the Black community, including splits within its own ranks. But none of these divisions and frustrations were visible on a rainy, bleak January night when men, women and children from all parts of Wilcox County and the Black Belt gathered to pay homage to the two men that they had finally catapulted into the antebellum red brick courthouse in Camden.

Billed as an inaugural ball and program, the evening had all the trappings of a formal event and was held in the cavernous National Guard Armory on Whiskey Run Road in Camden.

“Something has happened to the heat,” the Rev. Thomas Threadgill apologized to visitors who kept on overcoats and wraps over their tuxedos and evening gowns. No one mentioned that the armory is in the middle of a White residential section and almost adjoining the White segregation academy. At this moment of triumph there was enough warmth and generosity to ignore the chill and overlook the suspected pettiness.

The program was long and carefully structured. They had waited a long time and everyone was going to get a chance to share the glory. Ferdinand Ervin, a retired school principal, was the master of ceremonies and welcomed everyone to this “new day in Wilcox County.” It was the official theme of the program and every speaker used it at least once, some like Ervin rolled it out in a sonorous bass and savored each syllable.

Threadgill, a tall imposing man who has weathered untold crises in the county with courage and dignity took the podium early in the program. The unofficial leader of the Black community in the county, the “Rev.’s” influence goes far beyond the perimeters of his New Trinity Presbyterian Church.

“We come to make a collective pronouncement,” he said evenly. “We’d like to have some elbow room. To those crowding us in we say, get back and let us move about. Let us grow, mature and render contributions like other folk.”

“If there are those bent on preventing that, we say, ‘Get back. Here we come’.”

The “those” warned by Threadgill were not in attendance. Out of several hundred people gathered, only five were White: two out-of-county visitors and two old civil rights hands and their seven-year-old daughter.

Choirs from two county high schools were included on the program and their role was oddly reminiscent of a Greek chorus. One group was resplendent in blue robes, the other in pastel gowns and conservative suits. Their songs underlined the optimism and pride that filled the room like an aroma. “I want to be ready,” they sang earnestly, “to walk to Jerusalem.” Without a smidgen of irony, they poured most of their fervor into “God Bless America.” “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” sang voices that know what it is to attend a segregated school system that has little money and fewer resources – voices that know the hard physical labor of picking cotton and hauling water because there is not running water at home. Strong, clear voices that have rough edges and waver with emotion and energy said as much about the new day in Wilcox County as the men and women who held the podium.

The two new office-holders present an interesting contrast between the old and the new in the county. The newly elected sheriff is college-educated, young (26) and well versed in the unfussy rhetoric of the ’70s. He is a “home boy” who headed for California and found urban America unsympathetic and unlivable.

His colleague, the tax collector, is a white-haired veteran of many civil rights campaigns. He has lived in the county all of his life, making his way with various jobs at various times.

Prince Arnold, the sheriff, was introduced first. A former special education teacher, he radiated confidence and pride. A handsome, compact man in a well-tailored three-piece suit, Arnold stepped up to the podium and waited for the standing ovation to subside.

“We are facing crucial decisions in the year ahead,” he told the jammed auditorium. “We must win the war against racism by a landslide!”

He talked earnestly of brotherhood and unity, and like Threadgill, spoke to the people who were not there. “I will be sheriff of ALL the people of Wilcox County,” he vowed to warm applause.

Arnold then addressed himself to specific issues which had much to do with his election. “I’m greatly disturbed by the number of murders in Wilcox County,” he said as a murmur of approval circled the auditorium. “Today, here tonight, I am declaring a war on murder in Wilcox County!” This declaration was greeted with the most sustained applause of the night. The indifference of White law enforcement officials to crime within the Black community is a sore point in the county. Killings and other violent crimes are desultorily investigated and trials are casual. Light sentences are the rule and early parole is frequent. As one “Plantation County” resident explained to Morton Rubin in the 1940s: “When a White man kills a colored man, it’s self-defense. When a colored man kills a White man it’s murder. But when colored kills colored, it’s just one less nigger.”

Not any more.

The declaration of war was also extended to drug dealers, “overseers of those who would like to enslave us; Judases who would betray us for a few pieces of silver while calling us ‘brother.'”

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Arnold summed up his approach to law enforcement simply. “Freedom must be deeply rooted in responsibility,” he said. “We will work within the constitutional framework of the law.”

When the affable Jesse Brooks took over the speaker’s place he didn’t talk about his office (a non-controversial job) or campaign promises.

“I stand here before you as your tax collector,” he told his friends and neighbors. “But I also stand here tonight for someone else. I stand here as the grandson of a little Black slave boy who was brought down river from Charleston, South Carolina, to Lower Peachtree, Alabama, and sold for a thousand dollars. Thanks be to God there’s not going to be any more bidding off of human beings!”

It was a wildly emotional moment and Brooks stood in the center of it ramrod straight, letting the cheers and clamorous applause roll around him. It was a golden moment when the years of struggle, pain and despair were faced squarely and dismissed. The sufferings of that “little Black slave boy” had been vindicated. Against ridiculous odds something very fine and strong had survived in Wilcox County and was now going to take its place in the sun.

Brooks did not fail to mention that what is ahead is more struggle, but “we plan to push forward until justice runs down like mighty waters.”

He vowed to walk into the courthouse “just like John walked into Jerusalem” and begin working hard to build what he predicted will become “one of the best counties in God’s country.”

Bobby Joe Johnson, a Vietnam veteran who lost a hand and a leg in the war, stepped forward to close out the program. He is the president of the Wilcox County Democratic Conference, the Black arm of the Democratic Party in the county. He also has a seat on the more powerful Democratic Executive Committee, but it was the conference that sponsored the inaugural celebration. Johnson began introducing the evening’s “Special guests,” an exercise which turned into a sort of who’s who in the Black Belt. One by one he asked them to stand and be applauded, elected officials and activists from Perry, Dallas, Monroe, Bullock, Marengo, Lowndes, Greene, Macon and Montgomery counties. Men and women who had fought the same long, harrowing battles and knew the price that had to be paid to elect Blacks in Bad Wilcox.

Like those before him, Johnson reiterated the need to look to the future. He also took the occasion to announce his candidacy for the Wilcox County Commission in 1980. “We can’t stop now!”

“Things in the county are going real well,” says Bobby Joe Johnson a month after the inaugural ball. “Prince is doing a good job. Now there’s some that thought just because he was Black and they were Black, well, he’d just look the other way. But he arrested them and put them in jail. ‘If you break the law I’m going to arrest you,’ he told them.”

But there have been problems. The new tax collector isn’t scheduled to take over until this year’s taxes are all closed out in the fall. Until that time the current tax collector is not allowing his successor in the office. A small vexation, says Johnson. A plan has been worked out for Brooks to work in the tax collector’s office of a neighboring county until October.

Despite the great success of the inaugural ball, all did not end pleasantly. Several persons left the armory to find their tires slashed. Eye witnesses named the outgoing sheriff one of his former deputies and two other men as the culprits. All four have been arrested and charged. Although they have attempted to end the incident by apologizing and paying for the damage, they’ll be tried in circuit court.

But nobody expected Bad Wilcox to crumple in a day. “We’re making it,” says Johnson confidently. “We’re doing real well.”

Harriet Swift is a copy editor at the Birmingham Post-Herald.

Eatonton, Georgia: Rural Black Community Organizes for Change

By Alice Swift

Vol. 1, No. 7, 1979, pp. 22-23

The days of White mobs gathering to lynch a Black man simply because he is Black are gone, but there are still some occurrences with the same level of hatred behind them. What happened in Eatonton is a case in point.

Until recently, Eatonton, Georgia, had a curfew which forbade anyone from being on the streets or in a public place between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. This curfew was in the city records, but not to the knowledge of many people, especially the Black community. It had never been enforced. As one local citizen of Eatonton said, “I have been here most of my life and I’ve never heard anything about a curfew. We always came and went as we pleased, anytime we pleased.”

But, late one night, a White town policeman killed a young Black man, while he was taking a walk, and the only excuse the policeman offered was a never-before-used curfew. Moreover, the policeman knew the young man and knew that he had the habit of taking late night walks.

However, according to a reliable source, “On that particular night, the policeman tried to stop the victim, but he simply kept on walking. So, at the next corner, the law enforcer’ shot the young man through the ear lobe; the bullet lodged in his skull.” The town policeman, who had killed a Black man before, shot the man for no apparent reason. The victim had no weapon, nor was he committing a crime. One of the witnesses reported that the “policeman tried to put a knife into the victim’s hand, but didn’t have chance to do so.”

“We had a tough time getting that policeman to trial,” said Willie Bailey, a respected community leader in Eatonton. The town officials appointed Bailey as the first and only Black bailiff in the town’s history “to shut me up.” Bailey is very influential in the Black community. Nevertheless, the policeman was acquitted by a jury of eight White men, three White women and one Black woman. The policeman was dismissed from his duties as an on-the-street policeman, however, he was given a higher paying position behind the desk.

This incident led the small Black community of Eatonton, Georgia, in the red clay hills of Putnam County, to unite and fight against unjust practices in their hometown. They formed the Putnam County Improvement League, open to anyone in the Black community “that is serious about making Eatonton a just place for Blacks to live.”

One of their most recent accomplishments was in having the dormant curfew removed from the town’s records. The league sued the town of Eatonton to have the curfew abolished. The lawsuit resulted in a ruling that the ordinance containing the curfew was unconstitutional. Had the league not put forth its efforts, the dormant curfew would probably still be on the books.

A temporary curfew was again established during the year when, due to arson, three of the largest and most prominent churches in Eatonton were burned. However, this time before the final decision was enacted, the town officials checked with the Black community and requested their approval.

The league has also been instrumental in bringing political change to Eatonton. After the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Blacks in Eatonton were still losing races. The elections in Eatonton were held on an at-large basis. The league filed a suit against the city in 1977 alleging that the atlarge elections decreased the strength of the Black vote, since all the voters elected each council member. Black candidates from the community would systematically go down to defeat because of the town’s majority White vote. Bailey, one of the main plaintiffs in the case, recalled that it didn’t matter how many Blacks were registered as long as more Whites than Blacks voted or as long as “race made a difference in the White community.” Without any substantial support from the White community, a Black could not get elected.

As a solution, the league asked the court to reapportion the city council, the school board and the county commission into single member districts. Hence, a fair number of districts would have Black majorities. With the single member districts, each district elects its own member of city council. Even though the solution does not guarantee that Blacks will automatically win the majority Black districts, it does guarantee that they will not automatically lose.

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Due to the efforts of the league, in 1977, Eatonton elected its first two Black town officials. The two members of the city council are working very hard to improve the situation for Blacks in Eatonton. George Williams, one of the newly elected officials, said that “We are still very much in the minority since it’s only 2 out of 7, but we are learning. We are almost 200 years behind and it is a slow learning process.” The city council works together for the entire community while, at the same time, trying to teach the entire community a few things about the Black community.

Another area of concern for the league is the upkeep of the community itself. It sponsors numerous clean-up campaigns street by street in the Black community. It wants to upgrade the community’s living conditions and help the community realize that dignity should be very much a part of their lives. Fannie Farley, a vice-chairperson of the league, stressed that sometimes “our people feel that since they are getting welfare, they can be excused for not maintaining their living conditions properly.”

According to Neal Bradley of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, “Proper cleaning of sewers and proper playground facilities are not always provided by the city in small rural towns.” Situations such as-this make it even more difficult to keep the Black community upgraded. Hence, small towns with groups such as the league are important in that they help show the city the Black community will survive despite city inattention.

One of the league’s pet projects is one designed to inspire the Black child academically. Farley pointed out that the Black child “lacks motivation. He has got to be exposed to areas other than football and basketball!” The league tries to get the schools to encourage the children to believe in themselves. However, Farley said, “The school officials and teachers don’t care, so it is all up to the Black community.”

Although Eatonton has been a model of the new strength coming forth from small town Black communities, there are other Black rural counties that are just as active and involved as Eatonton. In Wadley, Georgia, for instance, a suit is pending because of fraud in a recent city election. A Black candidate lost the election to a White candidate by only four or five votes. The voting officials contacted Whites concerning errors on their absentee ballots but did not contact Black voters.

Blacks in small rural towns are beginning to fight back. They have gone unrecognized and underrepresented by their city governments for too long. Now some small Black communities are coming into focus demanding their rights.

A freelance writer, Alice Swift lives in Athens, Georgia.

The Election of Birmingham’s Black Mayor

By Ron Casey

Vol. 2, No. 3, 1979, pp. 11-14

Apparently there were two sets of voices vying- for Officer George Sand’s attention as Birmingham Police Department car 71 pulled into the convenience store lot the night of June 22. The first was that of a White store employee whose co-worker stood inside with a bullet wound in his shoulder. “They’re in there,” Sands would later say he heard the worker yell as he pointed to a dark green Buick on the parking lot. “Look out. They’ve got a shotgun. They shot Mike.” A group of Blacks would later testify they had been standing across the street yelling a different message to Sands: a warning he did not acknowledge.

In plainclothes and with drawn revolver, Sands and his partner began to edge toward the car, commanding its occupant to remain still. As the two officers reached the back door of the vehicle, the passenger lunged suddenly downward into the seat. Sands responded with an almost instantaneous burst of gunfire. Three of his four bullets struck 21 year old Bonita Carter in the back. Later it would be learned that the young Black woman had apparently had nothing to do with the assault on the store employee. She had been an acquaintance of the assailant and had gotten into the car at his request when he ran away.

The shooting awoke racial tensions in Birmingham that had lain dormant for more than a decade. And those tensions would become a double-edged sword that would, on the one hand, cut through the city’s racial past and pave the way for its first Black mayor and, on the other, hound a man of long standing liberal credentials from office.

David Vann, a onetime law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black and a Birmingham attorney, had been elected mayor of the city four years before by the narrowest of margins after forming a shaky coalition of liberal Whites and Blacks. That was possible because the city that elected Vann was drastically different from the White supremist steel town of the early 1960s. In the decade since the days of Bull Connor’ White suburban flight had almost equalized the city’s racial make-up and the young, but growing, University of Alabama in Birmingham, with its mammoth medical complex, had replaced U.S. Steel as the city’s largest employer.

Still, when Vann first got word of the Carter incident, he must have sensed its potential for harm. -His liberal reputation did not make him popular with the city’s conservative Whites. He had

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been instrumental in filing the suit that brought an end to the decades-old gerrymandering of the Alabama Legislature making “one man – one vote” the law of the land and had also been one of the driving forces behind a change in Birmingham’s form of government that drove the segregationists of the 60s from office.

With the Carter shooting, his strength in the Black community, he must have known, was being blasted away by a hail of gunfire from a policeman’s revolver.

Try as he might, Vann would not be able to find a common ground that would allow him to compromise the issue. On one side were the city’s Black leaders, led by local SCLC President Abraham Woods, who were clamoring for Sand’s dismissal. On the other side were the members of the Birmingham Fraternal Order of Police, the closest thing in Birmingham to a police union. Only a couple of months before, they had called their first strike ever, and after the Carter shooting, they were demanding that Sands be left on the force until a grand jury could look into the matter.

Vann tried his first compromise; Sands would remain on the force while a biracial committee of eight civic and religious leaders held open hearings and took sworn testimony on the matter. In the meantime, Vann also would call for a review of the situation by the police department’s own Firearms Discharge Review Board.

After more than a week of testimony, the ad hoc committee reported it could find no justification for the shooting. The police board, however, voted 5-1 that the shooting was within department policy. Vann again was faced with a dilemma.

Again, he tried a compromise. Sands was within policy so he could not be fired, said Vann. But that was only because the policy was faulty. Vann ordered it changed and also ordered that police officers be given training that would make them less likely to use unnecessary force.

The compromise pleased no one. Blacks were not only irked by the Bonita Carter incident, they were also mindful of the fact that similar incidents had gone largely without resolution in the city’s recent past. Within a week after Vann announced his decision, thousands of demonstrators, led by Woods and SCLC national President Joseph Lowery, converged on Birmingham’s main street for a protest march. It was the largest held in the city since the 1960s. At the end of the march, however, instead of police dogs and fire hoses, the marchers met David Vann who had arranged for

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them to have a stage and sound equipment. He marched the last few steps of the demonstration himself singing “We Shall Overcome” with the marchers.

Vann’s conciliatory gesture only caused him more political problems with conservative Whites, who felt he had sold out the police department. And his efforts did him little good with the Blacks. Black leaders announced they would begin a “selective boycott,” saying that certain White business in the city would be affected. The boycott would not end, they said, until Sands was removed from the force. Vann held firm while the boycott plans were being laid. But shortly after Blacks met with representatives of the Birmingham Area Chamber of Commerce, another curious event transpired. Vann suddenly announced that Sands’ lawyer had sent him a medical report. Sands, said the report, had been affected by all the tremendous strain he had been under and would have to retire from the force indefinitely.

It had taken about 30 days for the coalition that David Vann had been nurturing for four years to be ripped apart. As summer wore into September, and the pack began to gather for the October election, it was becoming clear that for Vann the handwriting was on the wall.

The pack that gathered ranged all the way from the likes of Mohammed Oliver of the Socialist Workers Party to Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Don Black. It also included one of Vann’s longtime allies and the man who probably more than any other had been responsible for shaping the political fortunes that put Vann in office – Dr. Richard Arrington Jr. Four years before, as both Arrington and Vann sat on the City Council, Arrington began to air a series of citizen police brutality charges in open meetings, placing then Mayor George Seibels in the same kind of situation that the Bonita Carter incident would leave Vann facing. Arrington, a Black educator, subsequently endorsed Vann and swung massive Black support his way.

Also in the 1979 race were City Councilman John Katapodis, a Harvard-educated former Birmingham school board employee, Larry Langford, a city councilman and onetime television news reporter, and Frank Parsons, a local attorney and travel agency president.

Despite the racial overtones, it was a relatively lackluster campaign. Of the major candidates, Vann campaigned on his record and Arrington on his eight years experience as a councilman and abilities as an administrator. The only controversy that surfaced concerned an incident that won Parsons the almost unanimous condemnation of the Birmingham media. Speaking before an all-White civic club, Parsons told members words to the effect that Blacks in the city would bloc vote and that Whites had better do the same if they didn’t want to end up with a Black police chief.

That incident would make the run-off election that followed all the more tense. After all the primary ballots had been counted, the city had pretty much voted a racial ticket. Blacks, by and large, voted for Blacks and Whites voted for Whites. Arrington led the ballot with 33 percent of the vote and only a small portion of that coming from Whites. The closest man in the race was Parsons who had only 16.5 percent of the ballots, all White. Vann, who had been armed with a $70,000 campaign arsenal (a good portion of which came from businessmen and leaders in Birmingham’s suburbs) finished a dismal fourth behind Katapodis. Most of Vann’s votes came from the affluent, White Forest Park section of the city and the area around the University of Alabama in Birmingham. The mayor did not carry a single Black box.

During the next three weeks, the campaign between Arrington and Parsons would further polarize the city and draw two former mayors into the contest.

Birmingham has more registered White voters than Blacks (71.259 – 57,301). Parsons knew his best chance to win was with a heavy White turnout.

For Arrington, there was a slightly different

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game to be played and, in some ways, a much harder one. That game consisted of: (1) turning out a record Black vote; and (2) at the same time capturing at least 10 percent of the White ballots in a city which had gained a national reputation for its racial prejudice.

But Arrington would have help in his effort. Both the city’s major newspapers endorsed the former college dean and to help overcome the fears of the White business community, Alabama Lt. Gov. George McMillan, a native of the Birmingham area, hosted a luncheon for Arrington which had as its drawing card the appearance of most of the city’s other elected officials. Though Vann would refuse to endorse anyone outright, as the campaign developed, he would make it known that he personally planned to vote for Arrington.

In the Parsons’ camp was former Mayor George Seibels – the man Vann and Arrington had been able to unseat four years before. Seibels took out full-page newspaper advertisements accusing Arrington of racial politics and of playing political football with the Birmingham Police Department. Though the Fraternal Order of Police would not endorse candidates for fear of losing the organization’s tax-exempt status, a group of police wives took out ads supporting Parsons and several hastily-organized “law and order” groups gave Parsons their endorsement.

The effect of the pressure on city voters was evident on election day. Some 68.8 percent of the voters turned out.

Though it was nip and tuck through most of the long night of vote tallying, Arrington finally took the election by a margin of only 2.2 percent. He had won it by turning out massive support in all the city’s Black boxes and by being able to pick up somewhere between 12-15 percent of the Whites vote, a substantial portion of which came from the areas of the city that had supported Vann during the primary.

Two weeks later, after a graceful concession speech by Parsons and calls for unity from Parsons, Seibels and Vann, Richard Arrington Jr. was sworn in as Birmingham’s first Black mayor. Looking out over the crowd in Boutwell Auditorium – named for former Mayor Albert Boutwell who had been in office during much of the racial turmoil of the 60s – Arrington recalled how his father, a sharecropper, had been forced to borrow the money for the bus ticket that brought him to Birmingham and a job in the hot steel mills.

“The story of my parents’ quest for a better quality of life and their faith that it could be found in this valley is the story of many other families who came to Birmingham seeking a better chance,” said Arrington as Parsons, Seibels and Vann looked on from the speakers platform “. . – In this valley they have been able to make a decent living, to educate their children and to watch this valley grow; and for some, like my parents, to see their children attain positions of responsibility they never dreamed of.”

Ron Casey is an editorial writer for the Birmingham News.

Reflections on Racial Progress in Mississippi:1964 Freedom Summer and Rosedale Mississippi 1979

By Ivory Phillips

Vol. 2, No. 4, 1980, pp. 12-16

Editor’s Note: In October 1979 a conference was held in Jackson, Mississippi to commemorate and assess the civil rights activities in the state during the summer of 1964. Known as Freedom Summer, it played an important part in changing the old system of segregation. It brought about 1,000 volunteers into the state to help in political organizations, to set up “freedom schools” and to bring national attention to conditions in Mississippi. It was a summer filled with violence, resulting in the murders of the three civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.

The four-day conference brought back together many of the summer’s participants. Following in the next pages, two writers give their impressions of the conference and reflect upon the conditions in Mississippi and the country 15 years after.

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In October 1979 Tougaloo and Millsaps Colleges in Jackson Mississippi hosted and Robert McElvaine co-ordinated a conference examining and commemorating Mississippi’s Freedom Summer of 1964. Like many other well-packaged media presentations in the past five years, this was a show-piece to reveal how much progress the state has made. Fortunately or unfortuiately, most of the sessions revealed how little has actually changed since 1964.

Racial progress can be viewed in a then and now comparative manner. When done this way the 1964 Freedom Summer and the Civil Rights Movement, out of which it grew, loom larger than life. Such a progress report would read well.

Prior to the 1950s lynchings were common and police brutality prevalent. It was the period of the mid-50s and 60s that many nationally-publicized slayings took place Emmett Till, Mack Charles Parker, Rev. George Lee, Vernon Dehmer, and Medgar Evers. It also happened that thousands of Blacks left the Mississippi delta fleeing racial violence, and seeking economic improvement. Middle age and elderly Blacks who migrated from the state reveal today that they still have fears of Mississippi. Most are surprised at the changes they see when they visit the state today. Lynchings are now a rarity – due in large part to new laws and exposure by the national press.

Before the turbulent years of the Civil Rights Movement there was little semblance of justice in Mississippi courts. There were very few Black lawyers and court witnesses were treated disrespectfully. Punishments for White on Black crime were almost non-existent while punishments for Black on White crime were swift and severe. This was the era when Elmer Kimball, Bryon de la Beckwith, J.W. Milam, Roy Bryant, and other Whites went free while a 14year-old Black boy was lynched for allegedly whistling at a White woman.

The climate has changed somewhat. There are now many more Black lawyers in Jackson and in the various legal services offices and a little more justice, thanks to these lawyers and the Supreme Court.

The majority of Blacks worked on farms or as personal servants, with a large minority of teachers, ministers and small businessmen before 1964. Pay scales and work assignments for Blacks were most often degrading. Labor unions were almost non-existent. Businesses and public agencies did not have Blacks above menial positions.

Today as a result of federal laws Blacks are in most agencies and most are no longer on the farm. There is also strong support for the AFL-CIO and teacher’s unions.

No longer are there “White only” signs sporting public establishments. Blacks do not have to keep on driving when they need to use a public toilet, happen to be hungry or sleepy.

The days of segregated schools are gone. The vast majority of Mississippi children now attend integrated schools. There are no more hand-me-down books and equipment for Black schools.

Prior to the mid-60s only about 22,000 Blacks were attempting to vote. In most counties fear and discriminatory laws kept Blacks away from the polls, and, except for the all Black town of Mound Bayou, Blacks did not hold public offices.

As a result of the Civil Rights Movement and federal laws, over 500,000 Blacks are now voting. There are now over 600 Black elected officials. And, White candidates court rather than ridicule Black voters.

These reflections of racial progress hide many continuing injustices. If racial progress is to be

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discussed, the negatives as well as thepositives must be addressed. Rosedale, Mississippi, selected as a case study on racial progress in Mississippi, is for this reason much more typical than Jackson, Mount Bayou, Biloxi, or even Vicksburg.

Rosedale is located in northwest Mississippi, on the banks of the Mississippi river. Its population of 2,600 is mostly poor, mostly rural, and mostly Black.

Like the rest of Mississippi, Rosedale was slave country. Like the rest of Mississippi, Whites quickly returned to power after Reconstruction. Along with White rule came other characteristics of the rural American South.

This overwhelmingly Black town had long had two schools – one Black and one White. They were strictly segregated, with Blacks getting second-hand equipment and materials from the White school. Black teachers were paid less. As late as 1960 the per capita educational expenditure for Black children was $2.32 while that for White children was $125.10. There was often friction between Black and White students. School officials assumed that Black students were intellectually inferior to Whites. Consequently, physics, economics, and trigonometry were dropped from the Black school curriculum and replaced by health, sociology, and business arithmetic. Finally, Black administrators were subservient to White ones.

Since the schools were integrated in 1970 there is now only one school. Nevertheless, since that time the system has lost its Black junior and senior high school principals. No Black has been appointed superintendent nor served on the school board. The previously White school retained its name and became the senior high school. Discipline for Black and White students is arbitrarily different, with Blacks being dealt with more harshly especially through expulsions and suspensions. Because Blacks would dominate, there is no longer any viable parent-teacher association.

Even in the midst of integration there is segregation. The percentage of Black teachers in the system declined as White former bus drivers, postal clerks and aides have been hired. Some White students have left the public schools to attend all-White private academies. Many Black students have been arbitrarily placed in special education classes where there are very few White students.

Prior to 1964 the overwhelming majority of Blacks in Rosedale were farmers-plantation dwellers and day laborers. They were paid 34 percent of the per capita wages for the state and earned slightly more than $1,000 for the eightmonth working year. Other Blacks earned slightly more as maids and as personal servants. At the top of the economic ladder were the $2700 teachers, the $2400 preachers, and the “lucky” businessmen. The businessmen generally operated barber shops, beauty shops, funeral parlors, grocery stores, and auto repair shops.

In those early days, Whites generally worked at different jobs. Even those doing the same work grocery store, saw mill, factory – received higher pay than Blacks. With few available jobs, most Blacks lived in poverty and depended upon welfare and/or social security. The welfare payments were always small and different for Blacks and Whites.

The biggest economic change witnessed in Rosedale during the 60s had nothing to do with the Civil Rights Movement. That change was agricultural mechanization which required far fewer Black laborers. Now 44 percent of the Black population lives in poverty. It also paved the way for more industry. Consequently, today there are as many factory workers as farm workers in Rosedale. And, although the pay differentials are gone, job assignments and promotions place Blacks at a disadvantage. Even in 1969 Black median family income was $2,534 compared to a White median family income of $8,129.

Black businesses are still confined to small, single proprietor juke joints, barber shops, beauty shops, auto repair shops, and the like.

One Black factory worker who was born in Rosedale summed up the economic condition in this manner. “They built a new steel factory but that didn’t help the job situation much. Young people are still leaving as soon as they get out of school.”

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It is almost as if the justices in the Plessey v. Ferguson decision were speaking directly to the ruling fathers of Rosedale. From that day until some years after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, all public facilities and accommodations were strictly segregated. Those which did not have separate White and Black sections were generally open to Whites only.

In those areas where visible signs were not erected, the adamant, insulting attitude of proprietors and patrons were quite sufficient to maintain the desired order of things. In addition to public places, churches were strictly segregated unless some prominent White attended a function at a Black church and occupied a place of honor. Finally, if any White person ever ventured into a Black home it was as a bill collector, legal authority or some paternalistic figure. On the other hand, if any Black person ever ventured into a White home it was as a worker and by the back door.

As one visits Rosedale today there is virtually no evidence of segregation in public places.There are still, however, all-White private academies for elementary and high school children. Church services are still segregated. And, there still exists the all-White private Walter Sillers Memorial Park and the all-White V.F.W. The private vestiges of segregation seem to suggest that the people are still segregationists at heart. They are only integrated out of fear or respect for the law.

Closely akin to the segregationist attitude of Whites has been the submissive attitudes of Blacks. At stores and other commercial establishments Blacks stood back while Whites were given first service. Regardless of ages, Whites addressed Blacks as “boy”, “girl”, “uncle”, and “aunt”, while Blacks addressed Whites as “Mr.” and “Miss” and answered with “yes sir”, “no sir”, “yes m’am” and “no m’am”. Blacks were also careful not to offend a White person in speech, looks, nor gestures.

Under such conditions it is not surprising that few genuine friendships were formed across racial lines. At the same time, however, White men frequently took sexual advantage of maids, field workers, debtors and other Black women. During that early period the abuse was so prevalent that one elderly Black woman expressed her contempt for White men in the following manner. “They are worse than dogs. They want to go to bed with a colored woman for little of nothing but kill that same woman’s son and dump him in the river.”

Today walking along the streets of Rosedale one can bear the same expressions of submissive respect tt Black’s have for Whites and the condescending disrespect that Whites have for Blacks. It is fair to say, however, that it is not nearly as prevalent among Black adolescents as it had been prior to the 1960s.

There are still very few interracial friendships. And, although the incidents are not as numerous nor as flagrant as previously, there are still cases wherein White men sexually exploit Black women.

There is still much evidence of Black fear of Whites. This is true whether the White person is a law enforcement officer, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, orjust an angry average citizen. This fear was contrasted by a recently appointed Black official in Rosedale who said these Blacks won’t obey any Black policemen. But when we had only White policemen they dared not act the way they do now.

Looking back to the period of Reconstruction one finds that America’s first full term Black senator was from Rosedale. The town also produced in the 1870s two Black lawyers, one Black judge, one Black sheriff, one Black superintendent of education, and several state senators and legislators who were Black. That was one hundred years ago.

After Reconstruction only a handful of Black preachers and teachers were permitted to vote. Discriminatory laws, the Ku Klux Klan and adamantly racist attitudes turned back virtually all Blacks before 1964. That being the case, no Blacks felt they had a chance to win any office. Blacks also did not participate in the deliberations of the Democratic party. (The Republican party had been driven out of existence at the close of the l800s.)

As a result of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the presence of federal registrars, there are now more Black than White registered voters, 800 to 600. This improved situation has motivated

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Blacks to run in almost every election since 1969. They recently won offices as mayor and aldermen.

The revival of the White Voters League in 1979 to co-ordinate White strategies and solidify power against Black candidates, shows that attitudes have not changed. Arguments at polling places between election officers and legitimate poll watchers reveal the continued need for federal supervision. The revival of the Ku Klux Klan in 1979, riding through the heart of town with no permits, demonstrates the fact that Whites prefer Blacks being politically powerless. As these anti-Black activities take place the words of an earlier White racist in Rosedale, speaking of White tactics to end Reconstruction, sound current: “Any trick might be employed that seemed to promise a chance of success.”

The case study of Rosedale adds a sober perspective to the much lauded racial progress in Mississippi and shows what little impact the summer and the movement had on much of the state. In Rosedale and much of the state,a small amount of behavioral change and even less attitudinal change has taken place since 1964.

Only with this irrsight can some sense be made out of the piadoxes abounding in Mississippi today. Robert Earl May, a Black youth of 14 can be sentenced to life in the penitentiary without parole on charges of armed robbery-while progress is claimed because Reuben Anderson is appointed a county judge. The Ku Klux Klan can ride through the heart of town and the headquarters of Black legislative candidate Judy Gambrel can be bombed while progress is claimed because the teachers associations have integrated. Campaign workers for county supervisor candidate Benny Thompson can be fired by the incumbent but progress is claimed because the legislature was reluctantly re-apportioned. Paternalistic and opportunistic Whites can attempt to re-write the history of the 1964 Freedom Summer and the Civil Rights Movement while progress is claimed because such a conference can take place peacefully involving Blacks and Whites.

Ivory Phillips is chairman of the Social Science Department at Jackson State University.

The Unmaking of a Black Candidate: Memphis

By Terry Keeter

Vol. 2, No. 5, 1908, pp. 13-15

Otis Higgs, Jr. told the public that he did not want to be elected mayor of Memphis simply because he is Black, and in November the voters turned around the meaning of his remark and made that wish come true: he was not elected, simply because he is Black.

Higgs campaigned hard in both the Black and White communities and made an unprecedented number of public appearances before church, civic and political groups. But as Higgs was pledging not to. run a campaign based on color, he was probably also setting a record in colorless campaign rhetoric. The former state criminal court judge failed to attract any undecided voters and went into election day with much of his hardcore support coming from the same knee-jerk liberal and Black-for-Black’s sake voters he had the day he announced.

Shortly after the election some political observers maintained that Higgs was simply a victim of racial prejudice and, regardless of his positions or what he had to say, he would have been defeated by White fear of a Black mayor. Voting patterns leave little doubt that he did lose solely because he is Black. The final returns gave incumbent Mayor Wyeth Chandler 120,207 mostly White votes, or 52.9 percent, to 107,323 mostly Black votes, or 47.1 percent, for Higgs.

Jesse Turner – a member of the Shelby county board of commissioners and NAACP natiqnal treasurer – presented to the local NAACP branch an analysis of the voting. Turner’s report showed Chandler with a meager 1,300 Black votes, or 1.4 percent, and 88.6 percent of the White votes – leaving Higgs with 98.6 percent of the Black votes and 11.4 percent of the Whites. Black registration comprises 42.5 percent of the 343,157 registered voters in the city – or 145,832 potential Black votes.

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According to Turner, the 66 percent total voter turnout represented 64 percent of the Black voters and 68 percent of the Whites. The election – a rematch of the 1975 runoff for mayor showed a substantial increase from the 58 percent turnout registered four years ago.

As an obvious Black-White matchup, the election returns posed the real question of whether Higgs could have won in spite of the fact that he is Black. Could he have attracted more Whites? Could he have won on the issues?

The biracial support for Higgs was at first impressive. He had the endorsement of the municipal fire and police unions, several other labor organizations and the editorial page endorsement of the city’s largest newspaper, The Commercial Appeal. But, armed with endorsements that no Black mayoral candidate ever had,Higgs failed to translate this support into votes.

Much of his failure could possibly be traced to the start of his drive for the mayor’s office. The former judge had problems with his campaign organization. In the early weeks of the race, Higgs’ campaign was about as organized as a street fight and not nearly as exciting.

During this period, campaign leaders spent almost $14,000 on rent for a headquarters, threw a fund raiser that lost considerable funds, and agreed to lease a ton of billboard space which resulted in a lawsuit from a minority businessman.

After such moves it became obvious that the Higgs’ campaign was not getting anywhere and something had to be done. Higgs frantically met with Black leaders such as Russell Sugarmon, the NAACP’s Maxine Smith, Vasco Smith and Turner and begged their help. It was a pitch, however, for the group leaders in the Democratic Voters Council – not to help set campaign direction and decisions, but to handle the grass roots ward and precinct work to get the Black voters to the polls on election day.

For Sugarmon, who as a candidate for county court several years ago had been snubbed by Higgs, the decision was not easy. He chose, however, to go to work for Higgs and became listed as a campaign manager.

The Higgs campaign soon expanded from a single manager to two, three and then four. But Sugarmon quickly brought a sense of organization to the camp and devised a complicated yet effective plan to get out votes. For the first time the campaign began to use some of headquarters building that was eating up funds in monthly utility bills.

Some fences could not be mended. No help came from U.S. Rep. Harold Ford of Memphis and his politically powerful machine. Nor was there an endorsement from James E. Smith and his local of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. (AFSCME s strained dealings with the Black mayor in Atlanta, Maynard Jackson, were cited as a prime reason that Higgs failed to win an endorsement from the Memphis local.) Only token support came from the predominantly Black union group.

However, the Black turnout was one that could have spelled victory under normal circumstances. Almost 65 percent of the registered Blacks voted and almost all voted for Higgs. But work by Chandler’s camp -. coupled with a series of poor top level decisions in the Higgs campaign – pushed almost 70 percent of the White voters to the polls – mot to vote against him.

The final two weeks before the election were a series of disasters for Higgs as his campaign came apart at the top.

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For weeks, Higgs had blasted Chandler for running a racist campaign and had the incumbent on the defensive. Chandler had made the job easy by attending a citizens counsel meeting and pledging allegiance to the Confederate flag, and by asking the Election Commission for a “White only” list of voters who failed to go to the polls in the first city election in October.

Failing to understand its advantage, the Higgs campaign decided to bring together 16 Black elected officials – and no Whites to endorse the candidate. Although Higgs had the support of some White officials, the move allowed Chandler to make charges of his own concerning racism and wiggle out of a trap he had dug for himself. It may have been the key factor in determining where moderate White votes would go election day.

The Higgs campaign also decided to call a press conference where the candidate would neither confirm nor deny a police report relating to a cross-burning alleged to have occurred because the candidate had an illegitimate son born 21 years ago. The media had been skeptical of the cross-burning and its connection with the claim of an illegitimate son until the candidate held his press conference. With the candidate himself focusing on the allegation without denying it, the media and others went after the story. Even some of the staunch Higgs supporters saw this as the straw that broke the back of a campaign that had already been weakened by poor decisions.

In the last days, Higgs continued to maintain a hectic pace of speeches and appearances. Yet he spoke to neither the issues nor the voters. Throughout his campaign Higgs displayed a consistent lack of decisiveness. Many of Higgs’ positions on important matters facing the city were “maybe” or “I’ll have to look into that.”

The “maybe” included such items as a tunnel for the interstate highway through Overton Park a proposal that might solve the controversy raging for decades but at heavy expense. Items under “I’ll have to look into that” included the multi-million dollar sludge burning plant – one of the largest capital improvement projects in the city’s history.

Higgs’ firm stands appear general or even peculiar. They included such items as “to be tough as nails on crime,” to be ”fund a ni e ntally fair” with municipal fire and police unions, to let the Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce name his chief administrative officer and for some reason apparently known only to the candidate to change the name of Beale Street to Beal Street-USA.

Higgs also spoke not to the crowds, but somewhere above them. “I can walk and talk with kings and potentates and still speak the common language of the simple garbageman,” he said, in a somewhat pompous tone that appeared to reach about an equal number of kings, potentates and garbagement “The renaissance in this city must begin with a new mayor,” he said early in the campaign. The “disconnected frankness of the community” in discussing city problems “must be replaced by projections of positivism and affirmatism. We should be harmonious here if for no other reason, for pragmatic reasons.”

In the face of such lofty pleas the election returns showed a divided city Black and White. The saddest result for the city of Memphis is that W. Otis l-liggs, Jr. lost the race for mayor because he is Black.

Higgs should have lost the race because his campaign was a colorless gray.

Terry Keeter is a reporter for the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tennessee.

An Observation on New Orleans

By A.B. Assensoh

Vol. 2, No. 6, 1980, pp. 7

Former Alabama Gov. George Wallace had achieved such racial notoriety that before my arrival from Africa in New Orleans, I perceived that all the Southern region of the United States was an extension of the state of Alabama. I knew of the existence of the other 10 states, including Louisiana but I seldom placed them within the geographical ambit of the South.

The state of Louisiana, in which I reside now, seems to have been blessed with the presence of several bayous and the Superdome described as a monument beyond imagination. New Orleans can easily fascinate the new visitor. Upon my arrival, in January 1979, 1 was anxious to visit several historical sites. I visited the former Congo Square, now called Beauregard Square, named after a Confederate general. I also had a glimpse of the famous French Quarters, the citadel for near-decadence, where male and female prostitution reportedly thrives like the oil industry.

Strangely enough, the city appears to thrive on traditional ways, as it continues to be divided into parishes instead of counties. In some of these parishes can be found communities of foreign language groups, examples of which are the Hungarian settlement on the boundary line between Tangipahoa and Livingston Parishes; German groups in Acadia; Bohemians in Rapides; the Spanish settlements in St. Bernard; and the citrus-growing Yugoslavian community in the lower part of Plaquemine Parish. It was, also, interesting to note that more than any other racial group, the New Orleans French have maintained their culture, religion and, indeed, mode of living.

On the buses, at parks, in the restaurants, in classrooms, at work and even at conferences or seminars, one is able to observe how Blacks and Whites interact in New Orleans. Since the old folks, both Black and White, find it uneasy and uncomfortable to stand up for long on buses and streetcars, one may occasionally find them seated comfortably among one another. But the energetic White youngsters often prefer standing.

When I first came to New Orleans from Stockholm, Sweden — where I had lived for almost five years and had seen little or no racism – I did not know much about the local racial situation. One day, on a bus, therefore, I shifted from a seat to make room for a White boy standing to sit by me. Instead of sitting down, he said, “Thank you, I will stand here.”

A.B. Assensoh, currently studying at Dillard University in New Orleans, is a professional journalist from Ghana in West Africa.