My Sons Are Growing Up Racists

By Robert Hilldrup

Vol. 1, No. 1, 1978, p. 7

All my life, I’ve heard it said that the difference between us whites, South and North, is that the Southerner loved Blacks as individuals, and hated them as a race, while Northerners loved them as a race, and hated them as individuals.

Now, I see this pattern emerging in my own family: my sons are growing up racists, despite having lived in a family which was consistently involved in efforts to promote integration and racial justice.

To relate these efforts, by my wife and by myself, and the things we have endured from both Black and White as a result, would be self-serving. Worse, it would be embarassing, because what we have suffered is relatively little in comparison with the suffering of others–Black and White. Yet I am sure I speak for others who share my wife’s persuasion and mine when I say that there is a growing feeling of isolation among us today, caught as we are between the hardening attitudes of fellow Whites at one end and the malignant violence of Black hatred at the other.

I have asked myself over and over why this trend, this attitude, seems to be emerging in the lives of our three boys. They are not budding Klansmen. In their collective lives, they may have had one fight each, and that was not interracial. They don’t want to move from the home they have occupied since infancy in an integrated neighborhood. They still seem to enjoy the company of their Black companions and friends from college, from high school and from junior high.

But the signs of hardening hearts are there.

Perhaps I remained silent too long, listening, instead of talking. But parents who talk too much miss a chance to listen. And most of the time, the listening is a pleasure: talk of girls and soccer and baseball and food and cars and the eternal lack of money since we are a family which must struggle financially in a way that seems to us a bit grimmer than for most.

So we sat one evening, the college sophomore and I, alone in the summer twilight and I came at last to ask him about the changes in racial attitudes which had appeared in him and in his brothers.

He was silent for a moment, and I sensed that he was choosing the words for his answer as carefully as I had chosen my question.

“Dad,” he began, “I’m sorry. I know what you and mom have been through (as White educators in a Black school system), but it doesn’t change what we see and what happens to us.”

What followed was almost a litany and I knew, somehow, that speaking in terms of social policy and economics and politics and power didn’t cut it with him. To this young man, and to his brothers, it was a matter of personal affront, of right and wrong.

He talked of the noise and vandalism in our neighhorhood that has increased with the arrival of more and more Blacks–Blacks with middle class jobs or better. He talked of the racial epithets that had been hurled at him and his mother from some of these same families.

He spoke of his brother in high school, who makes do with hand-me-down clothes, and of how he feels to see Blacks dressed in the most expensive way getting “free” lunches when he has to pay.

He talked of his own experience as a bag boy in a grocery where half the customers–and 90 per cent of the shoplifters–are Black, yet all come from the same middle class homes and apartments.

He talked of the struggle we were all sharing to try to put him and his brothers into the ranks of the college-educated, and then he named Black high school classmates accepted by colleges which rejected him when their scores were a combined total of 700 on college boards.

He talked of what his brothers saw in the public schools, of Blacks who would not attempt to do assigned work, and made it impossible for others to do theirs.

“Dad,” he said in conclusion, ‘Get with it. You and mom are living in a dream world.”

That’s where he’s wrong. My wife and I are all too aware that, proportionately, the negative stories and experiences of his life do come far, far too often from Blacks. The wellspring of hatred is overflowing in many areas of the modern South where Blacks now have economic, political or numerical control. It does not feel good to be a minority and a blameless victim.

I know how my sons feel, and I am alternately saddened, ashamed and outraged. Yet I also know how Blacks of another generation must have felt, and this adds to my confusion, for the outrages being commited against Whites today are not coming so much from the Black generation which might be justified in extracting revenge, but from the youth which has known equal rights at worst, and favored treatment frequently.

My son went on and talked of other things: Blacks who wouldn’t take minimum wage jobs that White students were fighting to get; of our White neighbors who have been murdered and assaulted by Blacks.

The Darkness fell over us and our words and I couldn’t help but think that Black Southerners and White Southerners need now, more than ever, to strive toward fairness and decency and justice, for each and for all; that indeed, we cannot stand separately and alone.

For with power comes responsibility. The Black majority which will not work with the Whites to provide mutual safety and opportunity will find, in the long run, that it cannot guarantee its own. For both the Southerner and the Black are minorities in this nation and the return of the Holocaust is something we dare not forget.

Mr. Hilldrup was director of public information for the Richmond (Va.) Public Schools from 1969-76 during the integration and busing controversy.

Dooty’s Last Stand

By Jerry Bledsoe

Vol. 1, No. 2, 1978, pp. 13-15

She had thought this would be the day, and all morning Luemer Plumley, whom her sisters call Dooty, sat on the porch watching and waiting.

She watched expectantly as the power company truck lurched up the rough mountain road and one of the men got out and climbed the pole and tinkered with the wires at the top. She watched as they went on up to the church and passed back down again. And still she waited, but they didn’t return.

It was almost two o’clock in the afternoon when she finally broke her silence and spoke to her sister, Della.

“Deller, I just as well cook us some dinner,” she said. “We’re not a-goina git no power today.”

“Well, Dooty,” said Della, “is that what you wuz a-waitin’ fer?”

With that, Luemer went into the rickety house and fired up the big wood cookstove in the tiny kitchen. She had dreaded it. It was a hot August day, and the heat in the kitchen was soon almost unbearable. On a similar day a couple of weeks earlier, the preacher had come to visit and found Luemer cooking dinner. She had looked at him and said, “If hell’s any hotter than this little kitchen, I sure don’t want to go there, do you?”

Besides, she had been looking forward to using her new stove. It wasn’t a new stove, actually, just a small, used electric range. It sat in the corner across from the wood stove, plugged up and ready, but powerless, and now Luemer would have to wait for another day to use it.

She guessed she could wait all right. After all, she had been waiting a good part of her life for electricity to come up Glassy Mountain.

“Been a-lookin’ to git it up here fer 25 years and it didn’t come,” she said, “just till we got so old we can’t enjoy it.”

Glassy Mountain is in an area of Greenville County, South Carolina, known as the Dark Corner, once a notorious moonshining district on the North Carolina border. It had always been sparsely settled, mainly by Plumleys. It was one of the last mountain enclaves where electricity had not reached.

The poles came now, marching up the new road, a long, winding, unpaved gash in the mountain, so steep and dangerous some mountain people refused to use it and still drove the old road, rutted and narrow, on the other side of the mountain. But others came up the new road, people from towns and cities far distant. They came in cars and trucks and jeeps, and some of them came carrying strange contraptions, great wings that they strapped to themselves so that they could leap off the cliffs at the top of the mountain and glide to landings on Highway 11, far below.

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Back in the winter a jeep had come, filled with whooping people, sliding and spinning in the snow, pulling a sled wildly behind, and just in front of the house, a man had come flying headover-heels out of the jeep and landed on the bank in front of the house with a sickening thud. The jeep had gone on and left him, and Luemer and her sister watched, terrified, from behind the door as he struggled, cursing, in the ditch.

“Every time he’d git up, he’d take the longest pause you’ve ever seen,” Luemer would say, recalling the scene, “then he’d go back down again.”

Finally, the jeep had returned, and the occupants got out and snatched up the man and strapped him across the hood, tied like a trophy deer, and then the jeep careened off down the mountain. The next morning, when Luemer listened to the news on the battery radio and heard a man had been found murdered in a ditch, she was sure it was that man she had watched struggling in the ditch.

Such goings-on the sisters had never seen before, but they had become a regular thing since the new road had come. “All the time,” Luemer said. “It’s a sight. It’s awful.” It had caused her to start keeping a gun close at hand. “No sir, they better not git off that road out there,” she said. “I’m not a’goina fool with them ol’ drunkards.”

For most of their lives, the sisters’ isolation on Glassy Mountain had been rarely infringed. There were only three of them now. There had been four until April, when Ellen, the youngest, the talkative one, died in a hospital. Mattie, too, had been in the hospital recently. The oldest at 78, she was staying with her son, off the mountain.

Only Della, 75, and Luemer, 67, remained at the old homeplace. Of the two, only Luemer had never left. Della had married and gone off down the mountain for 21 years until her husband died in 1957, when she returned. Luemer never saw any reason for marrying or leaving the mountain.

There had been 10 of them – five boys and five girls when they moved to this house in 1919 from another house on the mountain. It was an old house even then, built around a log cabin. Their father died the year after they moved in, and through the years, the sisters watched the others go one by one. Their mother died in the house in 1946. “She laid and prayed all the time for her grandchildren to come home from the Army,” Luemer said, “and just as soon as the last one come home, she died.”

In all those years, neither the house nor the sisters’ way of living had changed very much. They still cooked on the woodstove, fetched water from the spring, read by the light of oil lamps, plowed their garden with the help of a mule. Chickens and guinea hens scratched in the bare front yard as they always had, and hounds still lounged under the front porch. Luemer would allow no cats in the house, no dogs on the porch.

But then the new road had come, bringing people and trouble from distant places, and finally the electric hues had followed (although not until the sisters, and their nephew down the road, and the small church up

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the hill had paid $1,500 each to the electric co-operative), and now Luemer knew things would never again be the s neon Glassy Mountain. She had already heard that people from Greenville were coming to build vacation homes nearby.

Even after Luemer and Della had paid the money to bring the electric lines to their house, it had looked for a while as if they might not get electricity after all. The house had to be wired. An electrician showed up one day and told her it would cost $2,000 to do the job, but the sisters didn’t have any money left.

Then Jim Tankersley heard about it. He lives in River Falls, not far from Glassy Mountain. He knows the mountain and the people who live on it well. For more than 25 years, Jim Tankersley was a federal agent, a revenuer, one of the government’s top still-busters. He has always been close to the people in the area. He came up the mountain with a friend from Greenville, Shorty Vaughn, and they wired the house at no charge. Not long afterward, Shorty came back bringing the electric range.

“He said he’d fetch a Kelvinator refrigerator next Sunday or the next,” Luemer said. “I wouldn’t have had lights atall if it hadn’t been for keepin’ us milk. I told ’em all along I didn’t care about power. But we love our milk and butter, and you can’t keep it in this heat.”

Luemer didn’t know what the holdup was about for getting the power on. She’d thought the men might come back after dinner, but a storm came instead. It brought sharp lightning and heavy black clouds that sent water rushing down the gullies on the road, “a real field soaker,” Luemer called it.

When it was over, she and Della sat on the porch with visitors, enjoying the freshness and coolness the rain had brought.

Luemer told about laying in wait in the chickenho use for a black snake that was stealing her eggs and finding nine unbroken eggs inside it when she killed it. Della, a thin, frail woman, told how she swells so bad and never feels good anymore and has to go to bed before dark every day.

The subject of television came up. Luemer laughed when she was asked if she’d ever watched TV. “I’ve not watched one enough for my head to stop swimmin’. Only time I ever watched one was Billy Graham, that big preacher, and ever’ time I was about to git interested, they cut ‘im off.”

“Would you watch it if you had one?” she was asked.

“I guess everybody does, I would too.”

Two chickens got into a dispute over something one of them had scratched up in the yard. The dogs came out from under the porch where Della had shooed them and loped off toward the road.

“They goin’ now to hunt a squirrel,” Della said.

Somebody mentioned how nice and cool and quiet it was on the mountain now, and Luemer looked at the electric lines that still dangled, unconnected on the side of the house and said she expected that surely the men would come tomorrow and cut on the power so she wouldn’t have to put up with that hot kitchen again.

Jerry Bledsoe, a free-lance writer and a staff columnist for the Charlotte Observer, has served as a contributing editor for Esquire Magazine. He resides in Asheboro. North Carolina.

Bending With the Wind: A Lesson in Survival

By Al Burt

Vol. 1, No. 4, 1979, pp. 14-16

In his 72 years. Virgil D. Hawkins has learned something about the ways to fight and to survive and sometimes to succeed. But he wonders whether he ever can explain these hard lessons to the young. Some want to listen, and some do not.

He was not the gunfighter who sought one dramatic showdown to decide whether he would live free or die. His has the patient courage, the kind easily misunderstood. He became free by inches, demanding year after year after year what was his, and finally winning.

At age 42, Hawkins applied for admission to the University of Florida Law School, and the application was denied because he was Black. That was 1949. For nine years he pursued a steady legal battle. Three times it went before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1958, a federal district court ordered that he he admitted. Then, with victory in his hands, he passed it up and went to Boston University. Because of him, other Blacks were able to enter his home state’s principal law school, but he went North.

The unusual story continues. He earned a Master of Arts degree at Boston University, and a law degree at the New England School of Law, but subtle racism drove him hack South. “I didn’t like that,” Hawkins said. “I never knew where I was. In the South you always know. It’s just like walking on a carpet with a snake in it. I’d rather see the snake out here so I can hit him than to have him hiding in that carpet and I don’t know when he’s going to bite me.”

Hawkins returned to Leesburg, Fla., his north central Florida home, and went to work. He never took the Florida Bar examination. He explained that he had to support his family and that he got involved in making a living and kept putting it off, and found it hard after all the years away to settle down to studying again.

In 1976, he petitioned to be allowed to practice law in Florida without taking the examination. The Florida Supreme Court agreed, stating that Hawkins had a “claim on this court’s conscience.” In February 1977, 28 years after his quest began, he was admitted to the Florida Bar. “It’s durability that counts,” he said.

Hawkins, a stocky, gray-haired man who wears goldrimmed glasses, now works in a secondstory office above a shoe store in Eustis, Fla., as director of consumer affairs for the Lake County Community Action Agency. He also practices privately in nearby Leesburg. Most of his work involves minor criminal and civil cases before the county court.

Not everyone understood the course he chose, nor do they all understand now, but to Hawkins it was the intelligent way. “I wanted to do it,” he said, explaining his decision not to enter the University of Florida Law School after fighting to clear the way. “I knew they were settin’ for me. ready for me. I would have been the whipping boy. I didn’t want that.” He took away their target, made it easier for the others. He tries especially hard to tell young people how it was, and does not always succeed.

A big moment for him came when the University of Florida Law School invited him to he a member of a discussion panel there. He got a lot of questions. “They liked

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me,” he said happily. “The Black kids up there appreciate me. They were interested in the truth about segregation. They wanted me to explain how it was then, how we stood up against it. They respected me for what I did. They didn’t understand it all, but they liked me and it made me feel good.”

That was the exceptional experience, however. He worries because most of the young he encounters are not so receptive to the hard lessons he offers. He talks to them and tells them about the past and tries to explain, but they expect the answers to be more swift and more complete.

“The young ones,” he said, shaking his head. “They think if you’ve got gray hair, you’re a headbower; that you went along with everything. You weren’t violent, they say. They think they know everything.

“My Daddy told me how the pines and the oaks were the first to get blown down in the hurricanes, but the palms had a chance because they bent with the winds.

“The young don’t understand that. They have the idea of throwing bricks and retaliation and things of that type. They think that when you’re born, you’re born in a pasture of instant success. All you have to do is step outside and be an instant success.

“Don’t have to do anything, don’t have to try anything, don’t have to suffer anything.

“They think they can get on a show and answer a few questions and win a million dollars. They think they can touch the right fellow and get a job. They don’t care anything about being fit for the job. Being prepared for it don’t make any difference. Just want the job.

“Black youth has too far to go. He is behind, way behind. He don’t have time for pointing fingers and that stuff.

“When O.J. Simpson gets the football, he don’t stop to find fault with the men trying to tackle him. He just outruns ’em.

“All the things they said and did to me in my day, if I paid attention to them, if I stopped to hate, I never would have done anything.”

Not many men could speak so bluntly and expect to retain stature in their community. Hawkins can because he has been through the fire, even though it was the fire of another time and he did it his own way.

Hawkins’ story remains an important one because it combines human and practical dimensions with bona fide credentials of suffering and eventual success. He was born south of Leesburg near Okahumpka, then a kaolin mining town, the son of a laborer who preached each Sunday in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He had seven brothers and sisters.

He attended the first six grades in an all-Black elementary school where one teacher in one room taught 60 children of all grades. “It was tough in those days. Most counties in Florida were tough then,” he said. “Blacks didn’t have much chance. It was generally conceded you didn’t do certain things, like go to town at night. There were separate restrooms, separate waiting rooms, separate fountains. Everything was separate.

“A Black man was not thought of as an individual, unless he had a particular White friend. Then they might say, ‘Old Virgil, he’s all right. We’ll do this for him.’

“A Black man had no rights, no rights whatsoever. He just bowed and took whatever the White man gave him. He could be satisfied or be shot.”

After the sixth grade, he went to Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, where he cut and split and stacked furnace firewood to pay his way.

“A Black man paid as much to go to high school as the White man did to go to college. We had to go away somewhere.” Only one of his brothers and sisters made it as far as Edward Waters College with him.

Briefly, he attended Lincoln University in Chester, Pa., and then came back to Bethune Cookman College in Daytona Beach, where he worked and went to school parttime until he got a bachelors degree. At that point, he returned to Leesburg and began the struggle to attend law school at the state university just 70 miles up the road in Gainesville.

Hawkins now declares himself to be a happy man, not a bitter one. He thinks bitterness is a distraction from the ,pb n=”16″/ goal and a waste of effort. “We’ve got to put on the whole armor of citizenship,” he said. He keeps looking for a way to make the young realize that in other times and other circumstances there was something heroic even in the heritage from Uncle Tom” and the “handkerchief heads.”

“They were fighting but at the same time bowing and accommodating the situation so that when the sun started shining the Black man could stand up like a palm tree.

“They were taking all that for their ancestry,” Hawkins said. “If they could take those lashes on the back, I could take the verbal lashes. Each of us has to do the best we can in our time.”

Virgil Hawkins, a patient warrior, warns of snakes in the carpet almost in the same breath that he praises Uncle Tom and the “handkerchief heads.” Some do not understand that, but it is his way.

Al Burt is a roving columnist for the Miami Herald.

The Wallace Phenomenon

By Dale Russakoff

Vol. 1, No. 5, 1979, pp. 7-9

Perhaps a rosy-cheeked, 18-year-old beauty said it best when she pushed toward the center of attention at “George Wallace Appreciation Day” in Montgomery recently.

The crowd around him was hugging, kissing and praising the frail, outgoing governor, who reached out from his wheelchair with both hands to grab them, calling most of them by name.

Finally, the girl pushed forward and threw her arms around his neck. “I love you, Gov. Wallace,” she blurted out. “You’re the only governor I’ve ever known.”

A beaming Wallace squeezed the pretty girl’s hand. “Don’t you worry, honey,” he reassured her. “I’ll be around a while.”

There is now a generation of Alabamans who have known no other word for governor than Wallace. Love him or hate him, they have had to take him personally, for he has become part of their imagination and identity as well as their history.

Monday, January 15, 1979, George Corley Wallace at 59 became a private citizen for the first time in almost 23 years, including 12 years as governor and two when his wife was governor and he ran the show.

He seems to blot out his predecessors in the memories of those Alabamans in or around their 20s, who in fact have lived under other governors. More than a governor, he was like a force his boiling image constantly on television; his rousing, revivalistic tones on the radio; the hate, love, fear and belief that he stirred throughout the country.

The faithful who came to the Montgomery coliseum to bid Wallace farewell that weekend didn’t seem to know his secret. Some said with confidence that he was a great conservative, but others called him a liberal and still another,” a populist, pure and simple.”

There was one common thread, though. Almost everyone around Wallace that day described him in personal terms, and most used the word “love.”

That is the way Wallace is asking to be remembered not as a man who left waves of hatred in his wake, certainly not as the detested target of the massive Selma March for Black voting rights in 1965.

Now he says in published interviews that race was never at the heart of his argument – that he believes integration is best for Alabama.

He was standing up for his state against the federal government – not trying to keep the Black people down, he says.

He said the same thing last year when interviewed on the Alabama civil rights movement by a reporter, a native Alabaman, who didn’t remember it that way.

“But the federal government wasn’t the only force asking Alabama to change. Weren’t large numbers of Alabama Blacks asking the same things?” I asked.

There was a pause. “Did you say you grew up in Alabama?” Wallace asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Turn it off for a minute,” he said, motioning toward the tape recorder. If this was an Alabaman he was talking to, it would be a personal talk.

The tape recorder was duly turned off, but the following exchange was committed to memory:

“I honestly said (in the 1960s) that I was for the existing order,” he said. “Of course many people were then, and I

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was one and the same. Your own parents were probably the same. You say you’re from Alabama. They probably supported me.” He folded his hands as if the point had been made.

“No, governor, they didn’t support you.”

“They didn’t?” He seemed deeply troubled.

“No, sir.”

“Well, then, they were ultra-liberals,” he said, with a decisive nod of his head. His voice got deep and spooky, the way it did in his television speeches when he’d warn in ominous tones about those “u-u-u-ultra liberals” in the North and in Washington, D.C. Once again, the point seemed to be made.

“No, sir, they were just normal people to me,” I said.

We talked for another hour, as darkness closed in outside, and his long office began to seem hollow and lonely. We ranged over the civil rights movement, the messages he sent to the federal bureaucracy, the people he had stood up for over the decades.

“We’ve got to get her out of there,” a Wallace press aide was overhead saying in the outer office as Wallace continued to talk about his long career.

Meanwhile, Wallace pulled out compilations of his 1974 election returns, showing heavy support in several majority-Black areas. “Go ask any of these people if I fight the Black people,” he said.

It seemed desperately important to him that no one go away thinking ill of him or believing he had caused harm to any people or the state.

One historian says it will take a generation to unravel the Wallace phenomenon. Who was the man and what did he mean, and how did he touch those nerves – not only here in Alabama. but all over the country? I think he’ll he judged at least as important as Huey Long.”

Ironically. he began political life as a “liberal.” in Alabama terms. He rose out of South Alabama’s Barbour County as a classic populist in the 1940s.

He thrived on personal contact from his college days onward, it is said. He tromped through fields, walked streets, sent Christmas cards, and reached deep and wide among the state’s common people. “I like to touch people,” he was quoted as saying.

It was perhaps that grassroots heritage that gave him his remarkable rapport with the American working class, whose response to him shocked and horrified established national politicians.

He was elected governor in 1962, 1970, and 1974. When the Alabama Constitution prohibited him from seeking a consecutive term in 1966, he ran his wife. Lurleen, as his proxy. She triumphed without a run-off against a field of nine, but died a painful death from cancer while in office.

Lt. Gov. Albert Brewer then took the reins for the only interruption in Wallace’s rule between 1963 and now. Wallace defeated him in 1970. (Rumors were spread during the run-off that the Brewer family shared sex and drugs with Blacks.)

It was said – and it was true – that a rainy election day bode well for Wallace because his supporters would trudge through mud and floods to vote for him. The other candidates’ backers would probably worry more about getting wet.

In Alabama, at his height, Wallace could muster a crowd of 1,500 at a village shopping center or a country road crossing where only a few dozen people lived. He seemed fired by the crowds, as if he could suck in their energy and fury, and run on it for hours. It was as if there were something deeply personal between them and him.

It is impossible to forget the frenzy that erupted at his inaugural address in 1963 when he drew the line in the dust and declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever” – the phrase for which history will probably remember him, despite his pleadings to the contrary.

He was just carrying on the battle of the people of Alabama, standing in as their proxy, doing their bidding, he now says. And when he ran for president in 1964, 1968. 1972 and 1976, that was for Alabama too, he says.

And the crippling wounds that Arthur Bremmer inflicted on him at the crest of his presidential drive in 1972? That too, was for his people, he says. “I appreciate your letting me he your instrument.” he said in a recent speech.

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“Knowing what has happened to me as a result of it, I’d do it all over again.”

Wallace’s close aides are seriously concerned about his future. They fear he will be lonely even lost – as a private citizen.

He is divorced, partially deaf, paralyzed from the waist down and plagued by pain and by swings of mood. A relative says the excitement of a loving crowd is about the only thing that takes his mind off the wrenching pains.

Wallace has been named head of fundraising for rehabilitation services at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. The job will allow him to live and work in Montgomery, the state capital, where he gained his spot in history.

He also plans to join the speaking circuit, with the help of a Nashville publicity agency. Recently, he moved into a new house, custom built to make it easy for him to move around in a wheelchair. And the state Legislature has voted to assign him two state troopers for the rest of his life, 24 hours a day, at a cost of $200,000 a year.

He needs them to lift him in and out of cars, and generally to ease his movements.

Friends and supporters also kicked in cash to buy him a $15,258 Lincoln Continental limousine. (The dealer made them a price – about $12,000, aides say.) It is identical to the shiny black car he has used as governor, except its cushiony interior is maroon instead of gray.

The car was displayed next to the podium at George Wallace Appreciation Day, and long lines of couples took turns posing in front of the sleek new car as friends snapped their pictures with Instamatics.

When the keys were presented to Wallace, he wiped his eyes. “I’m deeply moved,” he said.

Even within the festive atmosphere, there were signs that the “Wallace phenomenon” had unravelled. The crowd, including about 25 Blacks, numbered only 1,500 – the number he used to draw at rural crossroad rallies.

An estimated 12,000 had come to his 1963 inaugural ball in the same coliseum. And in Houston on the same weekend as Wallace Appreciation Day, 45,000 cheering fans met the Houston Oilers for a rally at the Astrodome, even though they’d just lost a playoff game to the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Still, the crowds pushing toward Wallace’s wheelchair felt as thick and intense as in the old days. They came from throughout the state, senior citizens from Geneva, relatives from Clayton, a beautician from Jasper, a gas station operator from Troy, a sherriff, bank employees, lunch counter owners – the coalition that first gave Wallace his phenomenal hold on the state.

Many of the men wore imitation straw hats with Wallace stickers around the brim, and the women were decked out in Wallace buttons of several vintages. One woman wore a pendant that had Wallace’s picture encased in clear plastic.

“Give ’em my love in Jasper. What’s goin’ on in Geneva? Well, hello, sherriff!” Wallace went on and on, reminding them all that he knew them by name, hometown and profession.

After the singing of “Dixie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” announcer Doug Benton, a state official who has introduced Wallace at almost every political rally he ever addressed in any state, said the familiar lines:

“I want you all to stand and welcome the star of our show, America’s greatest living statesman, the honorable Gov. George C. Wallace.”

Wallace was wheeled on stage. Flashbulbs seemed to explode all around his picture. He sat tall and beamed for the cameras, the crowd clapping in the background, the band twanging out familiar, good, country cadences.

Wallace’s face glowed with color, and he exuded the enthusiasm and life that many of his friends had seen only infrequently in past years.

But all at once, there was stillness around the governor’s wheelchair. Everyone on stage had clasped his hands, kissed him or hugged his neck. The pictures had all been taken. It was ending, you could feel it.

The governor’s hands, which had both been reaching minutes earlier to the crowd of wellwishers, rested on the wheels of his chair. Both of his cheeks were smeared with various shades of lipstick. And there he sat, ramrod straight in his wheelchair, posing with a huge, almost blissful smile for the cameras that weren’t going off anymore.

Reprinted from The Atlanta Journal and Constitution.Dale Russakoff is a staff writer for the Atlanta Journal.

Montgomery Widows: A Struggle to Survive

By Roxie Hughes

Vol. 1, No. 5, 1979, pp. 15-17

Florence, who prefers not to be otherwise identified, lives in the same small white house east of downtown Montgomery where she was born some 90 years ago. She lived alone until she became ill recently and now shares her home with a neighbor who takes care of her. Her main concern, she says, is getting plumbing in her neighborhood so that she can have an indoor toilet.

A 74-year-old retired home economist who prefers to be called Evelyn lives in the Cloverdale section of Montgomery, one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city. Along with her part-time maid, Evelyn lives with Sammy Davis and Jet – her cats. She spends much of her time collecting American pattern glassware and studying the stock market.

A third woman, Pearl, who describes herself as “once a woman of means,” rents a modest house bordering Highway 85 for $50 a month. Pearl, 88, said she prefers living alone to living in a nursing home after having had one “unpleasant” experience at one nursing home. But she refuses to talk about it. She used to read romance novels until her eyes grew weak, she said.

These three women are members of a large and quickly growing segment of the Montgomery County population – elderly widows. Census figures from 1960 show that widows in Alabama, 14 years and older, numbered more than 153,350. By 1970, that number had grown to 184,430.

Although the widows represent a variety of social, economic and educational backgrounds, as well as a range of lifestyles, they share many of the same problems that often come with old age and widowhood. They talk about making the adjustment, losing their spouses and how they tried filling the void created by that loss. They fear increasing crime in the city and wonder what new burden inflation will place on their limited incomes. Some say they have problems maintaining their homes, others face declining health and most value their dwindling number of old friends. Almost all say the adjustment to losing their spouses was hard at first.

“After you become a widow, you have to change your lifestyle completely,” said Evelyn, who was widowed eight years ago. “We live in an even-numbered society and widows just don’t fit in. You need four, eight or 12 to play bridge,” she said. “Although friends will tell you that their friendship will last until the end of the world, you wind up having to find other widows to hobnob with.”

Florence said she had to make several changes in her life when her husband died nearly 62 years ago. She and her husband were evangelists and spent years pastoring as a team African Methodist Episcopalian churches in Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Ohio, and Brantford, Ontario, Canada. They also traveled to Algeria as missionaries, she said.

She returned to Montgomery after her husband died and shortly thereafter she became ill. She no longer pastors

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church although she always carries her preaching license, now yellowed and cracked.

“I never know when I’m going to be called on to preach,” she said.

Pearl said after her husband died 22 years ago, she went hack to being a private nurse, and retired only three years ago.

“After we got married, he wouldn’t let me work, but when he died I nearly lost everything. I was sick for two years afterward and during a seven-year period I had to bury my sister, a brother, a sister-in-law and a niece,” she said.

“I was broken down and I haven’t had anything since.”

Many of the widows said inflation affects their retirement benefits in varying amounts. They were forced to give up something, most said.

Nearly 35 percent of the elderly people in Alabama rely on social security as their sole means of income, according to census figures. The figures also indicate that close to 44 percent of the people over 65 in the state are living below the poverty level.

Anne Brett, a 69-year-old retired zoology college professor said she had to give up her car after her husband’s death.

“Although I carefully budget my money so that it tides me through the month, I just couldn’t own my car,” she said.

“So I take a bus or my son or some friend drives me from place to place.”

Florence, who receives about $200 monthly in social security benefits, said that she is having no problems feeding herself but is unable to make some necessary repairs on her home.

“That’s just not enough money to do what needs to be done to my house,” she said. “My door needs to be fixed and some of the boards on my house are falling off.” She has nailed shut half of the rooms in her house because “there’s not much I can do about those rooms that are falling in.” But she compensates for her surroundings with potted plants which line her walls and cover every table and counter top.

Pearl said her $207 social security check covers her rent, utilities and medicine bills. She also pays a 14-year-old girl from the community to clean up and cook for her in the afternoons. “I don’t know how I budget it, but I try to buy food with whatever’s left over,” she said.

Valla Ferguson, an 88-year-old retired nurse who is partially blind said she could hardly make ends meet with her social security check.

“My medicine bill is so high that I had to give up buying meat and milk,” she said. “I’ve gotten so thin that my doctor said if I got any thinner, he wouldn’t have anyone to bill.”

Valla said she cooks one meal a day and is hoping to start getting two free meals from a state agency.

Crime is considered a serious problem among many of the widows. Evelyn said her neighborhood is made up almost entirely of widows and “when dark comes, we don’t

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dare go out,” she said. “During the day we travel in twos and we don’t carry pocketbooks.”

Pearl said she feels “reasonably safe” in her neighborhood although she has had her pocketbook snatched once and one of her social security checks taken from her mailbox.

Since she is bedridden, she leaves the key to her front door on her porch so that neighbors can check on her during the day. “But I take that key in at night, latch my door and I have started locking my mailbox,” she added.

Dorothy Gibbs, a retired high school counselor, said, “The crime rate doesn’t really frighten me, but I usually have a companion with me wherever I go and am very careful.”

Many of the widows said loneliness is hardly avoidable with the losses.

Ophelia Sippial, 80, an insurance company employee, said she leads a quiet life but is not lonely.

Ophelia, a widow for 11 years, said, “1 love getting up in the morning to watch TV news and my favorite talk shows and game shows.”

“Sometimes I have dinner with one of the neighbors in the apartment and we take turns cooking for each other.”

Dorothy Gibbs said she escapes loneliness through teaching piano lessons to children and through doing volunteer work at the Fairview Medical Center and the Crippled Child and Adult Association. She is also active with the League of Women Voters and church organizations.

“I guess I’m used to being independent because when my husband was alive he worked in another town and came home on the weekends.” However, she added that she no longer attends activities that “require couples” since her husband’s death.

Anne Brett, widowed for 28 years, does tridimensional decoupage, an art form that includes piling and gluing layers of paper to get a raised effect.

She also cooks for senior citizens each month through a free meal program at her church and teaches Sunday school.

Still there are others like Pearl and Florence who are immobilized by illness and spend much of their time at home.

“I spend my days lying here on my couch, and only walk back and forth to the bathroom and kitchen,” Pearl said.

“It’s hard for me to see my television, but I sometimes listen to my radio.”

Florence, who only goes out when she attends church on Sundays, said, “I don’t get lonely because I don’t have time to think about getting lonely. There’s too much else for me to think and worry about.”

Roxie Hughes is a staff writer for the Alabama Journal in Montgomery.

Problems of Pain

By June Adamson

Vol. 1, No. 6, 1979, pp. 17-18

The X-rays had been taken and I lay on the emergency room cot in the curtained cubicle waiting for the doctor to see whether I had any reason to be in such pain. My car had gone into a skid on the icy interstate and I felt lucky to be alive. But the breath had been knocked out of me, and now there was this intolerable pain in my side and under by shoulder blade. It was a Sunday, and I felt grateful that an orthopedic specialist who was an acquaintance was willing to come to the hospital to help me.

On the other side of the yellow curtain that separated the cots that late afternoon someone was moaning. I was distracted from my own pain as the moaning became louder, and turned into incoherent babbling. Then came the pitiful crying, “Nurse. . . nurse. The voice was male, and by turning my head just slightly upward and looking across from the top of the cot where the curtain didn’t quite meet the wall, I could see the intravenous mechanism hooked up to the person who was my neighbor.

As that person twisted and turned as much as the IV tubing would allow, I caught a glimpse of the grimacing face of a Black man who must have been about 20. He wasn’t looking at me. His face was covered with perspiration and he seemed wild with pain. I averted my head again to stare at the yellow curtain. I didn’t want to stare at him. But I couldn’t help but hear as he called again, “Nurse . . nurse.”

A tall, lean male nurse came. I could see the lanky fair-haired boy, just turning into man, as he walked by the foot of my cot to answer the call. By this time the patient was calling out something else. “Trot … Trot . . .” and again mumbling incoherently.

The nurse said, “If you’re wanting water again, you can’t have it. I looked for your friend and I couldn’t find him. Now you just lay quiet until the doctor comes. He’ll tell you why you can’t have water until later. Lie still now. Don’t pull that needle out.” The voice was not unkind, but impatient, in an accent that meant the young man was a native of the Tennessee hills. I caught another glimpse of him as he turned and walked awkwardly out of the room.

The moaning began again even before he was out of the door. “Trot … Trot. . .” and again that incoherent mumbling.

Soon a young Black boy of about 15 or 16 walked by the foot of my bed glancing shyly at me as he hurried past into

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the next cubicle. I was the eavesdroppers again. “Water, Trot … please … water,” the voice from the bed begged.

“No,” said the visitor. “You know they told you, you can’t have water. Now you just lay there and be good. I called your mama and she said she can’t come before six o’clock because she had a headache and don’t have the money for a cab. A neighbor will bring her then, unless you’re badder. Then I’ll call her and she’ll find a way.” The visitor’s voice turned less business-like and more solicitous as he asked, “You ain’t badder, are you?”

There was no answer to the question, just the continued moaning and crying for water, and Trot, whoever Trot was, trying to be reassuring yet at the same time firm in refusing to get the water.

The whole episode occurred in only a few minutes, but I was beginning to wish my doctor friend would come so that I could get out of there. It was not only depressing to listen, but I thought I knew what was wrong with the young man in the cot next to mine. Drugs. It had to be drugs. An overdose? Withdrawal pain? I knew.

Why did this nice, clean, middle-class WASP hospital have to have such people here? I had no objection to his blackness. After all, I was a liberal. I had some Black friends. I contributed to the United Negro College Fund and had worked to support other Black causes. But the kind who took drugs… And everyone knows certain kinds of Black men abuse drugs more than others.

I didn’t feel much sympathy for that young man at that moment. I just wanted to know whether my ribs were broken, and if so what could be done about it, and if not, why I had this pain like I had never experienced before. It hurt to breathe and it hurt more to cough.

The moaning of the young man continued for awhile, along with the voice of his young visitor. Then another man in white strode across the foot of my cot and into my neighbor’s cubicle. I knew at once it was one of the doctors on emergency service. In an accent that told me his background was Latin American, his first question was, “How long have you known you have sickle cell anemia?” My heart sank, and I felt sudden shame as I fought the urge to say, “Oh, no,” aloud.

“Since I was about 15,” said the plaintive voice from the other cot, then, “Water … when can I have some water?” the patient asked piteously.

The doctor spoke again. “How long has it been since you’ve had a crisis like this?”

here was an answer, but it was inaudible to me.

The doctor continued, “You want water? Of course you can have water. Who told you you couldn’t have water? Would you rather have Gatorade?”

“Oh yes,” said the now relieved voice from the cot, his pain even then was still audible.

The doctor called for an orderly to get the Gatorade, and began talking to the patient about his high fever and plans to treat him when my eavesdropping was interrupted by the appearance of my own doctor. Yes, my ribs were broken and something would have to be done to relieve my persistent cough during the period of healing. I was helped into an elastic binding, and then from the cot and into an outer room to get the necessary prescriptions for pain and for the cough.

I’d had a peek into the drama of an emergency room. My next few weeks were nothing to look forward to, but I knew my ribs would heal. But I’ll never forget that young Black man and the kind of pain that would last for however much time he would live. And I had learned the pain of a new guilt. Even I, who had considered myself above it, had fallen into the trap of stereotyping.

June Adamson, a former working journalist, now teaches journalism at the University of Tennessee.

Half Pints and Rain Barrels: Hunger in Alabama

By Wayne Greenhaw

Vol. 2, No. 7, 1980, pp. 17-19

A dark-skinned woman with a sharp straight nose, aged twisted lips,and legs slightly bigger around than a half dollar, Annie Bell Brown looked surprised when more than forty people walked into her scrub-brush front yard.

She sat on a ragged old sofa somebody else had discarded years ago. She leaned forward and dipped Garrett snuff, and she cradled gnarled arthritic fingers gingerly around a swollen elbow that hung limply in a sling. A week before a local teenager had found her lying in a dirt street of Black Jack. Her arm was broken. Small dogs played around her frail body. The young man picked her up and carried her to an emergency room nearly twenty miles away.

Annie Bell Brown is one of about two-hundred residents of Black Jack, a no-man’s-land tucked between Saraland and Satsuma in Mobile County in south Alabama. Neither the county nor the towns will claim the territory.

A native of nearby Plateau, where she was born with a twin sister seventy-four years ago, she now wiles away her time on the porch of the one-room unpainted shanty for which she pays twelve dollars a month. The dwelling is furnished with a wood heater-stove, a rundown mattress on rustied springs, a refrigerator, and a rickety chest-of-drawers.

When the forty-some-odd people from Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Washington D.C. visited her on a Coalition Against Hunger tour, Mrs. Brown, a widow, showed surprise in her big brown eyes. “I don’t get no food stamps,’ she said. “I don’t have the strength to stand in line all day,” she added. Asked if she could use food stamps if somebody brought them to her, her face lighted. “I sure could,” she said.

“I don’t know nothing about no Medicaid, Medicare or anything else like that,” she said. She receives a check for nearly $150 each month from Social Security, she said. “That’s from my husband, who passed,” she explained.

In a cupboard near the stove sat a one-pound plastic of black-eyed peas and a partial can of Luzianne coffee. In the refrigerator was a half-pint of milk and a jar of peach preserves.

Asked about plumbing, she pointed toward the rear of the shack where an outhouse teetered at the edge of a ditch. And she said the pump where she got her water was some fifty paces down the dirt road.

Sipping the strawberry Kool-Aid offered by Bill Edwards, a young man who has been fighting Alabama hunger most of his adult life, she half-whispered, “The Lord sent y’all. I know He did.” And local Black state senator Michael Figures took down her name and address. He said he would have someone with a food stamp form

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to her front porch by nightfall.

On the way north into Choctaw Indian country, Bill Edwards said that this is what his Coalition Against Hunger is all about. “We want to make the public aware that problems like this exist in our communities.” And a man from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development agreed. “It’s not just in the big cities of Washington, New York, Newark, Atlanta, it’s everywhere,” he said.

Within an hour the group bumped down a clay road in the Piney Woods near the Alabama-Mississippi border. Tall, handsome, Roman-nosed John Rivers, a fourth generation Choctaw, told about the problems of being the third race in a south Alabama county “where nobody ever wanted anything to do with you. We were told by the White people that we were not theirs. And the Black people didn’t want us. When I was a boy we had three separate schools for the three races in Washington County.”

He guided the way to a small frame house where a sickly olive-complected child clung to the skirt of his undernourished mother. The woman said her husband had died six months earlier. She was on food stamps, but they barely provided enough food for her and her four children. The other two boys and a girl were in school. As the group tromped through the crowded cabin, a representative from the county pensions and security office almost fell through the floor when her foot weighed upon a loose board.

Less than a half-mile away the group pulled into the grassless yard of a tiny house. It looked like something a middle-class child would build as a play hideout in the backyard of a suburban home. Out of the front door of the plywood and cardboard dwelling ran a three foot high little boy with a beaming round face and twinkling brown eyes. “Hi,” he said, “my name’s Bubba.” And the first woman reached down and swooped him up into her arms and uttered, “Give me a hug, Bubba,” and he hugged with a huge grip.

Inside the ten-by-fifteen-foot two-room house stood a barefoot woman in a red print dress. Two girls slightly smaller than Bubba held to her sides. She had sharp Indian cheeks, raven hair, soft brown eyes, and skin the color of the deep red clay. She invited the group into her neat well-scrubbed home.

Standing on the back stoop, she pointed out where she, her husband, and their three children had lived before the old house had burned to the ground. There had been no insurance. There was no way to rebuild.

“We tote water from up there on the hill. And up yonder

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we go to the bathroom. We catch water off the roof. We bathe in washtubs. And I wash the clothes in that there pan.”

“There ain’t no electricity. It got cut off. The power company got my bill mixed up with a fellow up the road. By the time we got it straightened out they said we owed $124 and I’d have to pay it to have the electricity turned back on. But we don’t have that kind of money.”

“It gets kind of cool in the winter. We have that canned gas. It’s a little and have to have it filled every week, and I cook with that.”

Holding her head high and defiant, she said, “When you are poor, you do what you have to do.”

On the way to yet another place Bill Edwards reiterated his old fight against an apathetic public. An angry young man, Edwards has been shaking his finger in the face of the rich and the fat for at least a decade.

A Californian, Edwards grew up in Orange County “which I guarantee you is just as backward in its way as much of Alabama,” he says. Studying history and political science at California State College in Fullerton, he came to the University of Alabama’s graduate school in 1969 and took a masters degree in social work.

Working with the National Democratic Party of Alabama, a predominantly Black splinter group in the early 1970s, Edwards developed a quick and deep insight into the state’s political world. He also worked with VISTA through Miles College in Birmingham. Again with Miles College, he moved to Greene County where for four and one-half years he had “quite an experience, saw poverty at its worst, watching the splitting-up factions of the Black people’s political life.” Then, for two years, he directed the Alabama Migrant and Seasonal Farm Workers. He and his wife, a teacher from Birmingham, moved to Loachopoka between Auburn and Opelika in central Alabama and he began work with the Coalition Against Hunger.

Totally committed and estimated, Edwards slips into a passionate speech punctuated with cold hard facts. He looks back on President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty as the beginning of the dream to rid the country of hunger. “At that time the nation began its dream about actually doing something about poverty, actually getting the people out of poverty ” he says.

“All you have to do is look and see, and the myths about poverty die hard and fast. Some people believe all poor people are lazy, drive Cadillacs, eat gourmet meals from food stamps. These people work hard, keep their homes clean, and barely have enough to eat,” he states.

With Edwards on the day in the south Alabama country was Hollis Geer, staff attorney of Legal Services Corporation of Alabama, the co-sponsor of the hunger tour. Geer, who represents many of the Mo-Wa (short for Mobile-Washington counties) Indians, rides the country circuit at least once a week to check with her outlying clients.

A native of Boston, Geer moved with her family to Huntsville, Alabama, when she was 12, and after graduating from Duke in anthropology spent two years in Liberia and Ghana. Back in Boston, she worked with prison reform groups and attended Boston University Law School.

While still in school, she worked with Legal Services Corporation offices in Knoxville one summer, “and I knew I wanted to come back South and do this kind of work.”

In the push and shove world, she makes room in local churches for intake sites to meet with her clients. And soon she hopes to share an office in Chatom, seat of Washington County, with the Coalition Against Hunger people.

As the dust-coated school bus rocked back toward the tour’s starting point, Bill Edwards creased his forehead and spoke about the people. Leaning forward, he hit his fist into his palm “There is so much that we have to do. It’s an up-hill battle, but we think we can do it.” And to his side Hollis Geer nodded her head in agreement as the bus passed several tar-papered shacks with a scrawny collard patch and a rustied-out car in the front yard.

Wayne Greenhaw is a freelance journalist in Montgomery, Al. and is author of several books about Southern events and people.

The South Remembered

By John Marquerd

Vol. 2, No. 8, 1980, pp. 9-10

This is a superficial report. How could it be otherwise, based as it is on a short visit to the South last March. In fact, I have been telling your editors I am deeply resistant to writing it, so unclear are my impressions of the South and what it represents.

But they, good people, have persisted, so I shall try. I owe at least that much to the fantastic hospitality you-all gave us.

I hail from another South, sicker, more confused even than yours. Not terminally ill, I believe and hope; in fact there are even signs that the patient is stirring, sitting up in bed, if you like, but no more. Will she recover? She could, but it is too early to tell.

Theoretically, your South and mine have nothing in common, no shared symptoms other than metabolisms that are chemically the same. Yet when we visited you, my wife and I saw signs that made us remember, spots that looked like our spots, albeit in nothing like as virulent a form.

And strangely, we saw in your country so little real contact, perhaps even less than we have at home. Perhaps more than anything else, that worried us. Do Black and White Americans not mix? Play bridge together? Have home movies together? Have lunch together? Typists? Scholars?

We saw so few signs of it, that we began to wonder. Could it be that our travel program, our own special itinerary, took us only to people who didn’t happen to be mixing? Surely, we thought, even if that was so we should see more togetherness on the streets, in the fast food places, in the buses.

Slowly, unwillingly, we started to think that perhaps we were seeing it as it is. That despite all the legislative and judicial support for equality, that was all it was. Equality, but not togetherness. If that is all that lies ahead, it will be a great disappointment.

For, in our terms, the patient sitting up is only beginning to consider equality. As it was with you, sport has proved the starting point. From sport is following public amenities, restaurants, some bars and hotels. Our government and much of White South Africa is nowhere near even thinking of political, educational or residential equality. To the extent that we profess to do so, it is on a segregated “equality” —a sort of ‘you in your small corner and I in mine’—type.

In the workplace, too, we are unequal, yet, as I think back, I am not sure that where “equality” is breaking through it does not bring with it much more friendship, more contact, than in your case. Perhaps it is because it is early days that this seems so; maybe it is because we had so little before that every little scrap we now find is appreciated; maybe because our Black fellows know that time and numbers are on their side, that eventually they must gain so much more. Who knows? All I can say is that (as Whites) we found it harder to get easy acceptance and friendship from Black Americans down South than here. Of course, that may just be because we’re Africans.

Are we unfair to draw this kind of conclusion? A Black Birmingham politician thought we were. “In those heady days of the ’60s we thought everything was going to change totally. Now that seems naive. I mean, anyone could tell you that if there was a

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revolution in South Africa that wouldn’t right everything overnight.”

Wise words. Yet, amazingly, that man lived in such a different part of Birmingham from those quite charming and elegant Whites who took us to him. When I gave them the address they were clearly surprised, perhaps taken aback. They’d probably been there far less often than I have to Soweto, our great segregated metropolis near Johannesburg. Not that it was all that far away from downtown Birmingham; it just seemed to be.

And then we lunched in an elegant, gracious club, ate corn pones, and other Southern delicacies, in a place where we were served by smiling retainers who reminded one of the slaves in Gone With the Wind, apparently happy with their lot, safe with what they knew. Would that club admit our Black politician friend? We doubted it.

We went to San Antonio. Is that the South? We guess not. A dear guide in Maury Maverick. Now —totally new impressions once again. Mexicans. To us, a quite different community, one that was also in some ways far outside the American dream. And, we couldn’t relate to it in the same way —it seemed much further from home. This might be the South, but it seemed more South American. Not that it wasn’t delightful and interesting —just different.

But back to the town on the Mississippi. The levee. Apartheid. Well, not really. But strange things similar in nature.

Delightful, cotton planter hosts. Their daughter and son at the local private school. On the way to drop them there we passed the local public school. That at least was integrated.

“Do you have any Black folks in your school?” we asked. (Here in South Africa our daughter’s school is proud of its first four or five Black students. More next year, we hope).

“No.” A pause. “Not that there are any rules to stop it.” Pause again. “It’s just that none have qualified.” Deep pause. “Had a doctor once, applied. We sent him application forms but he never sent them in. Just stirring trouble, I guess.”

I asked his daughter, a keen tennis player, if she played against that public school in matches. “No sir” she answered.

It turned out that most of their school matches meant travelling thirty, forty miles. “Why don’t you play them,” I asked.

“I dunno, sir. Mostly private schools play private schools.”

I probed. So much like home. Such genuinely held beliefs that it was all for the good, for the good of the children, for the good of society, for the good of all concerned. Genuine horror still at the sight of a Black man with a White girl, especially that way round! Could be home.

But I must not be unfair. Your fine country has achieved so much. Even if the Brown case hasn’t really reached the levee, there is so much that is good, so many real achievements, that I feel presumptuous in even writing as I have.

So let me leave you with my two favourite anecdotes, both from Washington (which I guess can just about qualify as the South too). Millard Arnold telling me that he and some friends had held an after dinner discussion recently to try to recall when last they’d really felt affected by racism. And it was sixteen years ago, deep down South (of course!) when he hadn’t known and had stood there, trying to flag down a “White” taxi, until an old man, wiser than he, had shown him where he’d get a taxi. Only sixteen years ago! So recently!

There’s hope for us yet. As there is from the fact that 25 years ago (only 25) Maury Maverick was fighting in court for permission for a Black to box a White in Texas. Shades of Johannesburg, where the change took place two years ago.

For how soon we all forget. There is, in the Smithsonian, a Norman Rockwell painting of a little Black girl, dressed all in white, red ribbon in her hair, being escorted to school by four distinguished, brave, elders. A tomato has hit the wall behind her.

As I looked at it, recalling how recent it all was, a crowd of school children came by, mostly White but a few Black kids too.

Their teacher, filled with the same sense of contemporary historical pride that I was, stopped the class. “Just look at that.” The two Black boys looked, shrugged, moved on. She summoned them back.

“Do you know what that is?” she demanded. They didn’t. She beamed “It’s the start of integrated schools.” They shrugged again, moved on again.

I thrilled to it. You should never think you have not made progress. Those boys said it all. Integrated education was no longer an issue to them. Other things will be, no doubt, but not that. That is growth, real growth.

I envy you that growth. Liberals here dream about a day when we too will take for granted the right of every citizen, whether Black or White, to live where he wants, to go to school where he lives, to sell his services where he likes, if all does not seem well to you Southerners, remember us, for you have given inspiration to those who have so much less.

John Marquerd is the manager (publisher) of The Star, the biggest selling daily in South Africa. Until August of last year he was the manager of The World, a Black daily banned by the S.A. government in 1977, and its successor in title, Post. (The editor of these two papers, Percy Qoboza, was detained for five months when the paper was banned). Marquerd visited the South briefly when he visited the Southern Regional Council.

Woodcutters Organize: Echoes of Change in the South’s Backwoods

By Wayne Greenhaw

Vol. 3, No. 1, 1980, pp. 16-19, 22

The tall huskily-built Black man opened his mouth and let his baritone voice ring out through the small plain rectangular frame church in southwest Alabama.

Proud of his heritage, ready to pass on to his children and his children’s children all that he knows of his past, Ralph Lee Johnson is trying his best to hang on to whatever he can make in the present.

A pulpwood man, whose father was a woodcutter and whose great-grandfather came over to this country from Africa on a slavery ship, Ralph Lee Johnson ekes a living out of the Piney Woods like more than 150,000 others in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

Living in a three-room house he put together out of scrap plywood, two-by-sixes he carved out of soft hardwood with his bare hands and strong shoulder muscles, he and his wife Maggie and their four children burned to frazzles in the hot sun of the summer of 1980. Sweltering in the shade, he said, “We done all the work we could do back in the spring, and now—usually when we’re working the hardest—there’s nothing to do.”

Ralph Lee Johnson blames no one person or institution for his present predicament. “It’s tough times,” he allows, and he knows that south Alabama, northwest Florida and southern Mississippi were all hit hard by Hurricane Frederic in the fall of 1979. Following the storm, hundreds of thousands of feet of timber were down and had to be cut, and the situation resulted in a surplus supply at the paper mills.

“I can’t honestly sit here and blame the paper companies. I know they have to make money. That’s what they are in business for. I blame the woodcutters themselves, like me and my friends in these woods, for not organizing and making sure that we always have enough work—whether there is a hurricane or what, ” Ralph Lee Johnson says.

While he provides for his family out of a scrawny garden, where even the collard greens appear to beg for needed water, he has put his trust in an association of pulpwood workers. Since the mid-1960’s, Ralph Lee Johnson has seen associations appear and reappear, and he has become skeptical of their importance.

“The people from the outside come in and start talking and build up our hopes. We listen, and we think they know our situation and will work for us. We get worked up about making the life in the woods better. We all know it has to be better.”

Seven years ago, when the pulpwood workers’ situation in the South received national attention, Ralph Lee Johnson was satisfied that the Gulfcoast Pulpwood Association, founded by a group of cutters near Hattiesburg, Mississippi in the late 1960s, would be the answer to his and other cutters’ problems. “It has helped a great deal,” Johnson remarks. “The leadership has continued to function, we have won several big lawsuits, but the economic situation for the cutter is still terrible.”

Black minister A.L. Richardson of Mobile County, Alabama, and his associate, James Graham of Wayne County, Mississippi, believe that through continued organization “the woodcutter will see the light within several years. Already the paper companies are beginning to make concessions to us. Even the little givings in help a great deal when you look at the big picture. It is really not different from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It has the same foundation: people have to be given their human rights; they will not stand to be oppressed forever.”

Other White and Black leaders in the woodcutters movement throughout the backwoods southland say the old-time White power structure kept the poor Blacks and Whites apart for a long time. “The George Wallaces and the Ross Barnetts and the Faubuses pushed poor Whites and poor Blacks against each other, living in a turmoil of hatred because of the colors of our skin, and at long last we sat down, took a deep breath, and looked around,” says William J. Gaines of Waycross, Georgia, who admits having ridden with the Ku Klux Klan during the 1950s and 1960s. Since shortly after World War Two, Gaines has been a pulpwood cutter. “By the early 1970s, I think we were beginning to see that we had more in common with our Black neighbors than we did with the three-piece-suited cigar-smoking politician sitting in the statehouse. We could see that we had been blind as bats to the real problems, which was that of feeding and raising our children and making something out of our lives. We had been beaten down, down, down, by our own hatred. Now, all of a sudden, we were stunned. We saw that that Black man down the road was starving just like we were. He was getting screwed by the rich paper company people just like we were. The system he was working in was the same one we were working in, and the only way we could ever get a fair break – either Black or White—would be to stand together, side-by-side, hand-in-hand, and face the giants together.”

Several woodcutter associations cropped up over the South. The newest, and thus far the most successful, has been the Southern Woodcutters Assistance Project (SWAP) backed by

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the Board of Homeland Ministries of the United Church of Christ, an ecumenical project also supported by several other Protestant groups and Catholic orders.”

In February of 1979 a group of 39 woodcutters and their families met in Canton, Mississippi, and agreed to set up a purchasing cooperative. “The idea was: you have to start somewhere,” according to Jeff Sweetland, who after working with Cesar Chavez’s efforts in California joined SWAP during the spring of 1980.

“One of the biggest problems faced by the woodcutter and his family is that he owes so much. He becomes so indebted to the wooddealers; and the paper companies he can never really get out of the hole. Everything is marked up so high, and with interest added, the cutter historically has been in debt to the company store,” Sweetland points out.

The coop concentrated on chainsaws, chains, material, supplies that would be used every month, things that wear out and have to be purchased over and over, and the savings to an average woodcutter amounted to about $75 per month. During its first year the coop sold almost $50,000 worth of merchandise that had been marked up very little.

In August of 1979 some 300 members of the coop met in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where they decided to expand to a full-fledged association. With almost unanimous effort, the United Woodcutters Association was formed, and anybody who cut wood, hauled or helped in the process was eligible to join.

“We deliberately started north of Jackson so we wouldn’t have jurisdictional fights with the Gulfcoast Pulpwood Association,” says Sweetland. “By now we have run into less than 10 people in our area involved with the GPA,” he adds.

With United Church of Christ minister Jim Drake, another former assistant to Chavez, working as coordinating officer, the UWA was established, elected a national executive board, and went to the federal government for the charter of a credit union which would further help problems of indebtedness. By early 1980 the first federal credit union for woodcutters was chartered. And today it works like any other credit union with members paying in shares, and soon the cutters will be able to make loans at low interest rates. Previously they had been forced by economic conditions and geographic isolation to go to the dealers, companies and loan-shark-type finance operations.

Also in Philadelphia, the group agreed to form United Woodcutters Services, a non-profit organization to assist the cutters with problems in worker’s compensation, insurance, and other legal areas. “We provide services to any woodcutter, whether he is a member or not,” explains Sweetland.

In August of 1980 the United Woodcutters Association decided to make its presence known politically. Times were rougher than during the past five or six years, although the weather was ideal for woodcutting. Some woodyards were given quotas, some were shut down for two and three weeks in a row, and some turned down hardwood and would take nothing but pine. Other problems that had been in existence since the beginning of woodcutting and the pulpwood industry continued.

As much as ever, many woodcutters were given the short stick, where the cord of wood is measured incorrectly at the woodyard and the cutter is paid less than he should be paid for the wood he delivers. The woodcutters complained

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to the UWA, and it was decided in Forest, Mississippi, at a legislative convention attended by more than 650 persons that the UWA should seek legislation.

“The people passed a resolution to go after the legislature in the state capitol,” Sweetland says. “The UWA wants a Fair Pulpwood Scaling Practices Board created. Where there is no equal bargaining now between the woodcutter and the wooddealer, the board would protect the interest of the woodcutter,” Sweetland explains.

“The key feature of the board would be to issue operating licenses to woodyards and revoke such licenses if the yards abused their privileges,” he adds. Sweetland believes UWA can get such legislation passed next year.

A third-generation pulpwood farmer and woodcutter, Ralph Lee Johnson believes “we have made a few strides in the right direction. But we have a long, long way to go. It has been an uphill battle all the way, and I can’t see the top yet.”

Johnson likes to preach at the Nazareth Primitive Baptist Church “where most of us attend, where we pray to the Lord to provide for us if it is His will, and we empty our tortured souls out for Him to see us bare as the day we were born.”

Not unlike the woodcutters throughout the South, Ralph Lee Johnson has been in debt to his local woodyard for all of his adult life.

“I started helping my Daddy cut wood down near Pensacola, Florida, some forty years ago. I was not even in high school. I was about this tall, but my muscles were developed, and I could drive the mules about as good as a grown man.

“We didn’t have mechanical skidders back then. When we cut logs down in the swamps we had to go in with a team of mules, wrap ’em good with chains, and pull ’em out. Sometimes it’d take a day of hard work just to get a log or two out of bad swamp, especially in late fall, after the rains, or in the spring. It wasn’t like it is today, and it ain’t easy today.

“Back in those days we not only had hard times with old-fashioned equipment, we had a hard time with the people in the industry. The first paper companies formed their woodyards out in the Piney Woods to take care of people like my Daddy and other woodcutters. The woodyards were the middlemen. They worked directly for the paper companies as agents. They bought from us. It’s the same system we operate under today. We can never take our wood directly to paper companies. We go to this woodyard or that woodyard. We are assigned to one in our area. If we cut wood way over yonder, closer to another yard, we still have to deal with this one. We have to haul right on by. I’ve passed by three or four during some hauls, using more gas, then going back, cutting more wood, and hauling it to the yard again. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but that’s the way it is. It ain’t changed since I was a little boy. And my Daddy back then told me his Daddy had had to do the same thing with his oxen pulling a cart loaded with wood.

“I remember Daddy getting the short stick from the yard down in Florida. It was a bad time. A short stick is a bad count on your cord. A cord of wood is supposed to be 128 cubic feet. That’s the measure. But one yard Daddy worked out of down there had him pile his wood in an old pig pen. They said that when the wood came up to the top of the fence, that was a cord. If it had had a true measure, it would have actually been about one and a half cords.

In another place, over in Georgia, the yard manager walked out to the truck, looked it over, then wrote in his book. He said he judged cords with his naked eye. Daddy would then haul his wood into the yard, dump it into a pile that had already been unloaded by other trucks, waiting there for the railroad cars to come and get it and take it to various paper mills, and Daddy wouldn’t know what the man determined until he pulled up in his empty truck and walked into the office for his slip. If the manager liked you, you got a good count. If he didn’t, you got short sticked.

Ralph Lee Johnson and his fellow woodcutters throughout the South, from the South Carolina Appalachians to the Texas hill country, have experienced the same humiliations. They continue to be at the mercy of the gigantic paper companies. And more and more of these companies have been moving southward recently because more timber is available, longer cutting seasons are open in the Sun Belt, and the labor force is separated and unorganized. “I believe that now is our chance to break out of the old mold of our fathers and move into the Twentieth Century,” Ralph Lee Johnson preached late on a sweltering August Wednesday afternoon in the church where he and others preach the gospel on Sundays. Johnson was telling woodcutters from a radius of nearly one hundred miles about the necessity of organizing.

“The pulpwood business is where the coal miners were back in the early thirties. They were getting the black lung disease, and they were dying, and their widows and their babies got nothing but misery from the companies. They were working in the poorest of conditions. They saw the light in the labor unions, and they joined hands

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and stuck together. Now they have better wages, better working conditions, insurance and workmen’s compensation.

“Look at us! Look at Johnny Jefferson back there! Stand up, Johnny!” A man who had been as tall as Ralph Lee Johnson once stood. He was bent forward, and his face showed the agony of years of suffering, and right arm was nothing but a nub.

“Johnny Jefferson is one of us. Most of y’all know him. He cut wood with the best of ’em until nine years ago. Nine years ago he was working up in Washington County, cutting for Larry McCollum, and the chainsaw slipped and caught his arm and tore it to shreds.

“I know you’ve all seen a wild chainsaw. I know you’ve all seen blood gush out of a man’s arm. And I know you’ve all seen men who were out there cutting until they lost a hand or an arm.”

“Johnny, how much did they pay you for your arm?” Ralph Lee Johnson hollered.

Johnny Jefferson said nothing. He sat and shook his head.

“They didn’t pay you one red cent, did they, Johnny?”

Again, Johnny Jefferson shook his head.

“Mister Larry McCollum came by to see you in the hospital didn’t he? He’s a real good man. He don’t mean no harm. But he did not empty his back pocket and give it to you, did he?”

Johnny Jefferson was silent.

“Larry McCollum or R.J. Simpson over in Mississippi or Raiford Greene over in Louisiana or any of the other dealers, they won’t give you one red cent. And you might as well be talking to a loblolly pine as to talk to International Paper or Gulf States or Union Camp or St. Regis or Georgia-Pacific or Scott or Masonite or any of the others.

They want the wood, but they don’t want to take the responsibility for getting it out of the forest. That’s the pure and the simple of it. When some poor cutter like Johnny Jefferson cuts off his arm, they turn the other way. They don’t want to have anything to do with it. They say we are independent contractors. I say we are workers. We do their work for them.

“For more than a hundred years, since the first Southern paper mill opened in South Carolina in the eighteen-hundreds, the woodcutter has been getting the short stick. We have complained. We have mostly hung our heads and walked away. In our silence, there is sadness. In our silence, there is grief. I grieve over my children and their children’s children. But I will grieve no longer, because I know now that the woodcutters will join together and fight for their rights.

“When my boy went into the business, he had to borrow money from a dealer, he bought his second-hand truck from the dealer, and even his saw and grease and oil were bought on credit from the dealer. After the man charged fourteen and fifteen percent interest, there’s no way he will ever get out of debt. It’s a lost cause from the beginning. And I know all of you are in the same predicament. And many of your children are already planning to be woodcutters. They don’t know anything else.”

From his audience, Ralph Lee Johnson received a chant of “Amen! Amen, brother,” and people nodded in unison.

Ralph Lee Johnson, moved by his own monologue, nodded with them. He knew he was one of dozens of speakers at various churches and meeting places throughout the South during the sum-

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mer of 1980, urging woodcutters to unite. He knew he was part of a movement which had started at various crossroad junctions all across the southland during the late sixties but failed to grow to fruition during the seventies. He knew too that he had taken the first step, along with the other leaders, in a direction toward unionizing the pulpwood workers of the southeast.

“Like a man who walked among us not too long ago in another battle for human rights, I have a dream.” His voice rang through the naked rafters. It was strong and heartfelt and not without the fiery tone of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “I think that it is time for all pulpwood peoples to hold themselves proud. We do not do a slave’s work. We are craftsmen in a trade.”

And the “Amen” sound came again.

“We need to walk together through the forest of hopeless dreams and climb the hillside of success. We can do it together! ”

As suddenly as he had spoken, he bowed his head and closed his eyes. He said a prayer for all of them: paper company, woodyard dealer, and woodcutter.

Then Ralph Lee Johnson, who had been cutting wood in the forests of the South since he was a boy, asked them to join with him. And the Blacks and Whites held hands and swayed rhythmically as they sang, “Oh, oh, oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day . . . ”

Wayne Greenhaw is a freelance journalist in Montgomery, Alabama and is author of several books about Southern events and people.

Aaron Henry from Clarksdale

By Worth Long

Vol. 5, No. 5, 1983, pp. 9-12

This is Aaron Henry and I’m from Clarksdale, have always lived here. Born outside of the city limits on a plantation called Flowers’ Brothers. It’s still out there. I grew up chopping cotton, picking cotton, slopping hogs, milking cows, doing all the things that a country boy does. No nostalgia, that’s simply the area of my beginning.

When I was a youngster, going to school out in the country, white kids were able to go to school seven months and black kids went five. Now the rationale for that was the black kids had to help cultivate and harvest the crops and do the work. Many of the white kids were sons and daughters of the plantation owners.

It was not right, from my earliest perception, that white kids would go to school seven months, we couldn’t go but five. That was one of the things I worried my mother about. I also worried her about why did I have to step back when a white person walked into a store although I was there first and why couldn’t I drink water out of certain barrels which were marked for whites. But most of all I kept on her case about the school months.

One day my momma called me. She say, “Aaron, come here.” She say, “About this five months and seven months school deal. I want you to know you my boy–and you don’t need but five. The rest of them jokers they go to have seven, but you my boy, you don’t need but five.” Hell, I been cocky ever since.

My mother was involved with the Methodist church as long as I can remember. And the white and black women of the Woman’s Society of Christian Service–they were trying to Christianize Japan–often were in our home. My parents were in their homes. When they came they brought their children. I got to learn and to know their kids just like their kids got to learn and to know me. In that way I developed very early an understanding that white folks put on their pants one leg at a time. I always had the feeling that there was no such thing as white supremacy and black inferiority.

Neighbors used to tell my momma, “This boy going to get his fool self killed. I heard him talking to Mr. So-and-so and he wasn’t being mannerable. He says ‘yes’ and ‘new’ to white folks and he don’t call them Mr. and Mrs. He don’t say ‘yazzum’ end ‘nome.’ You oughta teach him better cause he’s going to get hurt if you don’t.”

I heard it often. Neighbors come into the house–and in those days, grown people talked and they asked the

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children to leave. A lady’d say, “Mattie, I got something I want to talk to you about.” Momma’d say, “Aaron, you; need to go outside for awhile.” I’d listen and I’d hear what they were saying.

In my time when a child was growing up, every adult in the neighborhood was his momma and his poppa. You messed up and they got a hold of you. When your momma come home, they told her and you got another whipping. So I was always anxious to know what they were telling momma, cause I was kinda tough. I was doing what I felt came natural being a boy: climbing trees, shooting birds, stealing watermelons and plums, all those kinds of things.

The major kind of resistance that blacks were engaged in as I grew up had to do with the farm economy and the determination of blacks to earn or to obtain what they’d earned. In many instances, the white landlord at the end of the year had the habit of not dealing fairly. Those blacks who stood up were often asked to move off the plantation. They were singled out as troublemakers. And this is where you heard the horror stories as I was a child, about how blacks were misused by whites largely because of either their unwillingness to do work that they felt was more and above the reward they would receive for it, or their demands for pay for the work that they done.

You remember the old black folksong, “When Do We Get Paid for the Work That We’ve Done?” That’s pretty much the basic reaction of blacks toward white supremacy as I grew up.

As an eleventh grade student at Coahoma County Agricultural High School, we had a teacher, a young lady who had finished school at Dillard and had done some work at Fisk. Her name was T.K. Shelby. She was very much aware of the NAACP and black life. As extra reading material she had our class engaged in stuff like The Soul of Black Folk by W.E.B. Dubois, Black Boy by Richard Wright, and Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith.

Well, at the conclusion of our junior year, she encouraged us to take out a membership in the NAACP Youth Convention–which at that time was a quarter. And most of us did.

Now that sort of ties into my further activity upon graduation from high school and the next year going directly into the armed service. The armed services in World War II, when I went in, was as segregated and discriminated as any facet of American life. Black and whites didn’t live in the same areas, didn’t eat in the same dining room, didn’t play on the same playground. We even went to the movies on separate days. It was a completely apartheid situation.

Those of us who had come into the armed services with at least a smattering of a feeling that this was legally wrong often found ourselves allying with the NAACP unit in the nearest big town. We did basic training in Fort McClellan, Alabama. There was an NAACP chapter in Anniston and one in Birmingham. That’s where we participated in trying to overcome segregation and discrimination in the armed forces. We later were billeted in California. So I just can’t remember any time in my adult life when I was not involved in trying to overcome the evils of segregation.

Now ever since I can remember anything about black life, blacks have always resented mistreatment at the hands of whites. Even during slave ship days there were blacks who jumped overboard rather than be slaves. And women who threw their children in the mouths of sharks in the water rather than have them grow up as slaves. Any of us who think that the phrases we are coining now, and the leaders that are on the scene now, and the issues that we are dealing with now, that we are the first persons of the black community to have the enlightenment to do that, we are as stupid as the fourteen year old boy who thought he discovered sex. It has been around a long time. Don’t remember when there was not a movement by the black community that said, this is wrong and we are going to overcome it.

But certainly the efforts of blacks in this state to have an equal voice and a fair share of what it was, really goes back to an organization known as the Black and Tan Republicans which was the early voice for black freedom in this state. Before Roosevelt in ’32, I’m sure most of the blacks in this state considered themselves Republican allies, because of the fact that the slave question had ended during the time we had a Republican president in the White House, Abraham Lincoln. The Republican party in the South continued to permit blacks to participate, wherein the Democratic party became a white exclusive club.

On the event of the presidential election of 1876, which brought together Samuel J. Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes, when Hayes became President of the United States, the end of the first effort at participation began to erode because of the positions and the edicts from the White House that he began to express. And all America became energized about this segregation thing to the point where in 1896 you remember that in Plessy vs. Ferguson, although Plessy had ridden the Illinois Central Railroad train, every day when he got ready to St. Louis and sat where he wanted to, in 1896 the conductor came to Plessy and told him, “I’m sorry, but in this dining room you’ve got to sit behind the curtain.” Of course Plessy refused to sit behind the curtain and was thrown in jail. And the Supreme Court ruled in 1896 that segregation was the law of the land, when it decided that as long as things are equal, they may be separate.

Restaurants had an aisle generally down the center and whites went on one side and blacks went on the other. Stores had a custom–if not a law, to always serve all the white folks present before any of the blacks were server! regardless to when who came into the store. There were

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curtains on the buses which blacks sat behind and whites in front as long as there were no whites standing. If there were whites standing, the curtains were moved and the blacks who had been sitting had to stand. Blacks rode in the front car on trains, right behind the coal car with all its soot and debris. The whole system was geared toward making things as comfortable as possible for whites, and as difficult as possible for blacks.

We lived with this damnable separate but equalness from 1896 until 1954 when another Supreme Court overturned Plessy vs. Ferguson in Brown vs. Kansas. In the school desegregation case which says when you educate children and you separate them by race to do it, you commit an act that is “calculated to warp their minds in a manner never likely to be undone.” So then America turned around to some degree in 1954, but it was around 1965, ’66 and some areas as late as 1970, before the integration orders from courts and from the people themselves in the areas actually began to take effect.

White Citizens Councils were formed in response to the 1954 decision. The catalyst that ignited the White Citizen’s Council was the fact that in fourteen towns in Mississippi, immediately after the Supreme Court decision, petitions were presented signed by more than a hundred families in each area, calling upon the school boards to obey the law and integrate the public school system. Well, the response to that was that the names of the people who had signed the petitions were made public. They were published in newspapers, put upon the cages of banks and lending institutions. Most of these people became victims of economic pressure, to the extent in some places like Yazoo City, those who signed petitions Y were not able to even purchase food although they had the money.

Medgar Evers signed the petition for Jackson. Medgar was able to maneuver in the Jackson area as he did because of the allies that were there to give him encouragement and assist him in every way. Now you might recall Medgar and I became involved in the Mississippi NAACP at the same time. I was a part of a team that went to Alcorn College in 1952 to help encourage Medgar to come to work for an organization known as the Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company, whose president was Dr. T.R.M. Howard of Mound Bayou. I served as secretary of that institution. Dr. Howard was also the- president of an organization known as the Regional Council of Negro Leadership which was touted by many newspapers as the home grown NAACP. And that was a pretty good characterization of it.

Upon graduation, Medgar agreed to come to Magnolia Mutual. He worked for a year with us and the abilities of the young fellow were so evident that anybody who came in contact with him immediately recognized that there was something great in this particular individual.

The first NAACP unit in Mississippi was organized in Vicksburg in 1918, about nine years after the organization was founded in Springfield, Missouri. In the early 1950’s there was strong talk that Mississippi needed someone to coordinate the efforts of fourteen or fifteen NAACP branches in the state. Ruby Hurley, who had been invited into Clarksdale in 1953 to help organize an NAACP here, had met Medgar. Dr. Howard was very willing that Medgar go to the NAACP as field secretary because this was a sort of rising-tide-that-lifts-all-boats type of philosophy. Medgar understood that every branch president must understand that you are to be enraged and involved in those issues that make it possible for the progress of the black community to come up to the standards that you yourself feel that it ought.

Medgar and I travelled over this state together a tremendous amount. We had three real intimate years of working together, working with each other, from the time I became president of the Mississippi state conference in 1960 until Medgar was killed in June of 1963.

We had gotten word that the Klan was determined to get both of us. They were going to take us off one at a time. They were going to flip a coin and see who went first. About fifteen, sixteen persons were marked for extinction–Dr. Edward Stringer from Columbus, Dr. Howard, Amzie Moore from Cleveland, Gilbert Mason from Gulfport, Vernon Dahmer from Hattiesburg, Gus Courts who was shot in his grocery store at Belzoni and after that he went to Chicago, and several others. I guess that’s the mark of effectiveness.

You know I’ve made my peace with God a long time ago. By the time I got involved in the NAACP, it had been my blessing to have finished one of the major universities in this country and to have gone into the pharmaceutical business in a way that I could give some comfort and some relief to thousands of people who either had not had the chance, that I had, or had not taken advantage of the chances that I had. I have taken a position that I’m God’s child, and I’ve never really feared the difficulties of the movement. You know we’ve had several things here. We’ve had the house bombed. The piece of tin you see up there in the store now a result of the last bombing of the drugstore. We do that to keep reminding ourselves as to what the situation has been, and what it can be.

To show you what justice can come to, I’ll tell you a story that begins in 1963. SNCC, CORE, NAACP and SCLC were determined to offset the vituperation that was being expressed by Senator Stennis, Senator Eastland, Jamie Whitten and other members of the Mississippi congressional delegation on Capitol Hill. They said that if you give blacks the right to vote, they won’t use it. We decided that we would put that lie to rest. We would run for governor.

We organized the Freedom Vote Campaign which had as its main instrument a little newspaper, The Free Press. Medgar Evers, R.L.T. Smith, Bill Minor and several other people were involved in the Free Press. It was the instrument that we used to alert people throughout the state that the Freedom Vote was going to take place.

I also went down to WLBT television in Jackson and asked the manager for the opportunity to buy time to run my campaign. He looked at me and said, “Niggah, you know we ain’t go’n sell you no time on TV for no political campaign. We don’t sell black folks no time.”

I said, “Well, I’m running and I came by to ask you.”

That night I went back to a mass meeting and reported the fact that the man at the television station wouldn’t sell me no time, and what he had said to me. The National Council of Churches had a cadre of folks in the state at

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that time from all branches and religions. Their communications director told me, “I know you don’t like to be called a niggah, but I would like for you to go back down there with me tomorrow. If this is the answer we get again, the United Church of Christ will move to divest the station of its license. This is blatant racism and is against the rules and regulations of the FCC.”

So we walked in the next morning. The cat looked over the room and saw me and said, “Look niggah, I told you yesterday,” he said yestiddy, “we wadn’t gotn sell you any damn time, and here you are back today with a damn yankee.”

I said, “Well, all right. I just come back to try.”

We walked out. The suit was filed. We fought it from 1963, won the revoking of the license and finally the privilege to operate the station in 1979—that’s fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years of fighting. The niggah that they wouldn’t sell time to in 1963 today sits as the chairman of the board of directors of that damn television station.

But anyway, when we decided to do the Freedom Vote Campaign in 1963, we set a date and put ballot boxes in churches and stores. There was one here in this drug store. In all the places where black folks congregated. And out of that effort we garnered the participation of better than ninety-thousand blacks, who registered before God and everybody, that if they had the right to vote then they would. And this was one of the very strong pieces of evidence that we used in arguing for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Ninety-thousand blacks in Mississippi who knew that their votes couldn’t count but who were willing to cast them to demonstrate their concern for the right to vote.

The following autobiographical recollections of Aaron Henry (born 1922 in Coahoma County, Mississippi) sketch his involvement in the movement for black civil rights up to the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Democratic National Convention of 1964. Presented here in an excerpted and edited form, this interview, conducted earlier this year by Worth Long, is one in a series documenting the modern civil rights movement in the Deep South. Worth Long is director of the SRC’s Civil Rights Radio Project.