25 Voices for Change

How has the South changed in the last 25 years? Or has it really changed at all? And what would it take to make a better South than we have today?

To help answer these questions, we asked 25 leading Southern “change-makers” — from activists to academics, poets to politicians — to give us their view from the trenches. We asked each to write on two themes: How has the South changed, and what have those of us interested in progressive change gained in the last 25 years? And second, what are the key challenges we face for creating a better South in the next 25 years?

The following are what these 25 change-makers had to say:

 

Julian Bond

Julian Bond was a founder of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960, a Representative in the Georgia legislature for 20 years, a founding member of the Institute for Southern Studies, and has been a frequent contributor to Southern Exposure. He is now Chairman of the Board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and a lecturer in history at the University of Virginia. The following is from a recent conversation with Southern Exposure editor Chris Kromm.

Probably the most important gain we’ve made [in the last 25 years] is the understanding of the necessity for coalition. I think that understanding was always there, but as we go along, it just gets hammered home more and more.

If you think of progressives (in the plural), of necessity you’re talking about large numbers of people. And you can’t have large numbers of people unless you put different constituencies together. You have to think about the faith community, minority communities, working people. Sometimes people belong to all three, but it isn’t typical. And we need to bring all three together if we want to build toward a majority. Alone, we’ll make some progress, but not a lot.

I don’t think we’ve done this [made coalitions] very well, on a sustained basis. We’ve done it issue- by-issue, at different points. We understand what it takes, but we haven’t had the ability.

And this is because one important thing we have lost is the ability to organize. Too often, we think that if we announce something, it’s the same as doing it. It isn’t. We have to organize people — from mobilizing people for marches, to long union campaigns. Why have we lost this? Well, it’s something we always knew, just not something we always do.

For example — given the right level of organizing, I could easily defeat Jesse Helms. Easily. There’s lots of sentiment against him, it just isn’t organized. If we really took our message to people, and mobilized, we could win.

We can never match our opponents dollar for dollar. If we can’t, we have to match them body for dollar. In other words, if we can’t outspend them, we have to outwork them. And that means organizing.

So far, the right is winning the “values debate.” But we can turn that around. To do that, we need publications, like Southern Exposure. We need people who have the time to think. The right was the first to realize that ideas count — and, because of their economic superiority, they could make sure their ideas carried the day.

Southern Exposure has exposed people to the good news and the bad news about society and social movements. It’s been a wonderful, wonderful resource to people from the merely curious, to people who want to know how they can get involved and create change.

My inspiration for the future is all the young people who are doing so many things. And the old people, who won’t stop.

And the certainty that we’re right, and right does prevail in the end. It may take years, but right does prevail.

 

“A New Crusade for Racial Justice”

Anne Braden

Anne Braden has been a persistent organizer for racial and economic justice since the 1940s. Over the years, she has also been one of the most prolific writers for Southern Exposure. She is on the executive committee of the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice and is active in the Kentucky Alliance.

Since Southern Exposure began 25 years ago, we have lived through a counter-revolution in this country. The magazine began, I think, in that glow of hope carried over from the upsurges of the ’60s. The anti-war movement, new labor organizing, the women’s movement, struggles of lesbians and gays and the disabled were gaining strength. Surely, many people thought, we could achieve our goal of a truly democratic South very soon.

Actually, by 1973, the massive counter-attack on the African-American liberation movement that had started all these movements was well advanced. The movement’s cutting edge, SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), had already been destroyed; other organizations were being defanged. Black organizers were being framed and jailed across the South. And powerful voices were already telling whites the lie that what African Americans had gained had taken something away from them, and that they were victims of “reverse discrimination.”

All this created an atmosphere that put Ronald Reagan in office in the ’80s; the retreat from racial justice was written into law and court decisions; budget cuts devastated programs that helped all working and poor people; and unions were attacked. It was the end of the Second Reconstruction.

So drastically have our sights been lowered that we are like frogs that have been boiled slowly. Now when funds are voted for a few additional Headstart programs, it looks like a great victory. And we need them. But what about revamping our entire education system? What about totally rebuilding our cities? What about the guaranteed annual wage we once talked about?

The good news is that no people’s movement is ever really destroyed, and seeds planted in the ’60s have grown like sprouts of new life in many Southern communities. The movements I’ve been most a part of are those that challenged resurgent racism, supported worker rights, built the two Jesse Jackson campaigns and now are organizing against environmental racism and class bias. But there are many others, and Southern Exposure has played a key role by reporting them when the mass media told us there was “no Southern movement” anymore.

I think, however, that these many localized movements will not come together in a cohesive force until there is a new crusade for racial justice. We who are white must be a part of this. We must understand that although past struggles created a black middle class, the majority of African Americans live in poverty or on the edge of it. People of color are being blamed for their own problems, and our fastest growing industry is building more prisons to put them in. Now that we understand the South is not just black and white, but multi-ethnic, this becomes even more critical. We must take visible stands that break the wall of white resistance even to admitting that a problem still exists. That means more than the “dialogue” now so popular. It means acting every day on specific situations, policies and practices in the communities where we live.

 

“Lay Claim on Tomorrow”

Pat Bryant

Pat Bryant, a former editor of Southern Exposure magazine, is now a writer, researcher, and activist based in New Orleans.

At the outset, let me applaud the hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and persons who contributed time, money, ideas, art, poems, jokes, photographs, and visions of a better world that have filled Southern Exposure’s pages since day one. Southern society has been changed, but not nearly as much as we can. Let’s continue to lay claim today on tomorrow.

There are literally hundreds of organizations and thousands of organizers all over the South that are fighting for justice that simply didn’t exist twenty-five years ago. Many of these freedom fighters target poor conditions at a school or school board policies, recreation facilities, dumping families off welfare, job development, tenants’ rights, environmental protection, constitutional protection for the criminally accused, worker rights, voting rights, and campaign finance, just to mention a few.

It was not possible for such a multi-faceted movement to exist in the South that preceded the founding of Southern Exposure and the Institute for Southern Studies. The iron fists that ruled and divided the South prior to Jim Crow’s timely death would not have tolerated progressive collusion on all these fronts.

Let me hasten to add that these different fronts in the progressive movement have made considerable gains in changing the face of capitalism. It is simply not the same world we inherited twenty-five years ago, nor is it the place we envisioned and wanted to be.

While the military-industrial complex is not growing at the alarming rates of the Carter and Reagan years, we certainly have not achieved our vision of the peace-time economy nurtured by the very first edition of Southern Exposure.

Industrialists can’t locate their operations anywhere they damn please and spew poisons on the weakest and the people of color without challenge, but we are a long way from our vision of a sustainable economic future. Southern tenants and workers exercise rights at levels that didn’t exist twenty-five years ago, but workplace democracy and democracy where we live has not been achieved.

Although we have won the access for women and people of color in some of the highest levels of politics, piercing the corporate glass ceiling has been elusive, and the upper reaches of corporate power are still reserved for elite white gentlemen only. The South has become an important battleground for many worker struggles, and unionism is on the rise again. This is the South, yesterday and today.

Through these exciting struggles, freedom fighters envision a more democratic society and struggles for change. These struggles face significant challenges. We must overcome splintering and fragmentation. There is not enough inter-struggle pollination of vision and goals.

We must strategically focus our intellectual power to develop “bridge issues” that intersect with everything else, like housing and the environment. Strategies must be employed to unite progressives at home and abroad.

We must support Southern Exposure and the Institute for Southern Studies and create other working-class institutions that are organized to assist freedom fighters in the lifelong quest to determine who we are, where we are going, and how we will get there.

Bon voyage! And lay claim on tomorrow today, for our children’s children.

 

“Facing the Right’s “Divide and Conquer” Strategy

Mandy Carter

Over the last 30 years, Mandy Carter has dedicated her life to fighting the far-right. She is currently based in Durham, North Carolina, as Field Program Consultant for the National Black Lesbian and Gay Leadership Forum — the only national organization dedicated to the nation’s two and a half million African-American gays and lesbians.

 

As a Southern, out, black lesbian, social justice advocate, I see two very specific challenges/opportunities that lie ahead of us.

The first is how the Southern lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) movement can position itself to make social change history by working on issues about sexual orientation and at the same time work for social and economic justice — thus becoming a multi-issue and multi-racial movement.

Here in the South, as is true around the country, the radical right has been relentless in going after the LGBT community. The same radical right has also been relentless in going after communities of color, the poor and women. Yet, we allow them to use the gay issue as a “wedge issue” in communities of color.

We are all pretty much in the same boat — so why cut ourselves off from each other with single-issue organizing? For instance, in communities of color, the radical right has targeted anti-affirmative action, welfare reform, immigration, English-only, school vouchers, ending multi-cultural curricula — and the list goes on.

Something that those of us who are LGBTs of color can do is to act as a bridge between our respective communities of color and the LGBT community/movement.

The second major challenge/opportunity is the formation of a Southern People of Color Network. With the changing demographics of the whole country in general, and in the South in particular, it will be important to do coalition work with all our communities of color. What we don’t need is a sense of competition or divisiveness from within our respective communities of color and/or outside forces wanting to “divide and conquer.”

In particular, we need to address how this plays out in the electoral arena. We need city, county, state and federal political offices that more accurately reflect the “faces and voices” of people of color who live in these respective communities. For example, in 1998 here in Durham, North Carolina, the first ever Latina was appointed to the Durham Human Relations Commission, reflecting the growing Latin community. A Southern People of Color Network has the potential to coordinate, communicate, and organize.

As the saying goes,”So goes the South, so goes this country.” I believe that!

 

Sermon: “Finding and Telling the Truth Takes Persistent Spirits”

Kim Diehl

Kim Diehl — a writer, researcher and activist for social and economic justice from Florida — joined the staff of the Institute for Southern Studies as Research Director in 1997.

The struggle. The movement. The revolution. If someone were to ask me what these words mean, I’d say it’s a smile. It’s the fire in my stomach and the grin on my face when I hear James Brown sing, “Say it out loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud!!” or Aretha singing, “FREEDOM!” or Bob Marley proclaiming, “Thru the powers of the Most High we keep on surfacing!” Nothing makes me happier than reading or singing or hearing the truth. That’s what a movement is about — connecting to something larger than yourself that means hope. It’s a glorious thing to share and to believe as a group that the truth is as ancient as the first laugh. We as a people know how to treat each other and we know how to shape a free society that takes care of one another. It has been done, and it is how it shall be.

I think the last 25 years have been both saddening and uplifting. On the one hand, the South has incarcerated more people than any other region and people of color are still the last hired and first fired. On the other hand, we still have radical grassroots organizations fighting welfare deform, apartheid, toxic chemical plants, police brutality, and workplace hazards. People are struggling, winning, and uniting across many fronts. I feel a strengthening of Spirits and with that, unification — the understanding that all injustices are linked, and when gay men and black men are lynched, the hatred behind those evils must be fought on the same battlegrounds. There is no other way!

This wave of right-wing “moral” politics and religious ideas is not new, nor is it the answer to this complex world. It’s the kudzu of the real struggles in this world. Kudzu covers a tree or bush until it is stifled with green leafy vines so that it no longer functions as a rooted tree, but as a slathered, complicated piece of foliage. “Moral” politics hides the roots, hides the real problems with false questions. Sex education in schools? Too many homosexuals with special rights? Too many “thugs” in your neighborhood? Heard about some welfare frauds stealing your tax dollars?

These are the wrong questions to be asking. Why do people have to steal food and sell drugs? Why do young people suffer with sexually transmitted diseases without going to doctors? How do anti-gay policies create a ripe environment for hate crimes and lynchings? Can people really live on social welfare, and how much does the government spend on that in comparison to corporate welfare?

Ask these questions and it’s clear the Babylon system is falling again. We can see it day after day. The corporate temples crumble with every laid-off worker. Each time an elderly person dies of neglect and hunger at a run-down facility, the health indifference system tumbles. Every time a child is left alone while her mother works her third job of the day, the child careless system fails. Every time a poor urban black male is incarcerated for selling drugs, the incorrections system drowns.

This struggle will not be won with materials, but with our Spirits and our smiles. Finding the truth and telling the truth takes persistent Spirits. Southern Exposure continues to thrive after 25 years with the same Spirit of resistance, faith, and zest. It’s not a fancy magazine, it doesn’t have glossy photos or eye-catching techno-hype graphics. It speaks for itself.

That’s what Spirit does — it liberates itself in the face of incarceration and oppression and makes itself heard. Ase.

 

The Chilling Effect of Repression

Ajamu Dillahunt

Ajamu Dillahunt has a long history in African American and labor struggles. He is President of the Raleigh (NC) Postal Workers Union, and a national leader of the Black Workers for Justice.

As we reflect on the previous period and consider prospects for the future, looking back 100 years — instead of 25 — may be more helpful in examining North Carolina in particular, and the South in general. Nov. 10th, 1998, marks the 100th anniversary of the Wilmington Massacre — a coup d’état in Wilmington, North Carolina, that was the culmination of a state-wide white supremacist campaign to end a government led by a multi-racial progressive coalition. Untold numbers were killed, houses and businesses were burned to the ground, and thousands were forced to flee the city. This atrocity elicited no response from the federal government and closed a chapter on the revolutionary Reconstruction period in the South. A subtle — or not-so-subtle — chilling effect would hang over the state for many decades, and serve as a barrier to active resistance to Jim Crow.

It should be remembered, however, that 1898 was also the year of the ascendancy of a new imperial giant on the world scene, as the U.S. government began to assert its dominance in Cuba, the Philippines, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Oppression at home; expansion and oppression abroad. This is the backdrop for the last century of our history, and the repressive responses that followed to the labor movement, civil rights movement, and other efforts for social change in this super-exploited region.

In many respects, the South is almost unrecognizable from 1973. The growth of cities and continuing shifts in the economy have dramatically altered the landscape. The integration of schools and the increase in the number of black elected officials also make for a different picture. This is the portrait of the “New South” that liberals and even the so-called “New Democrats” are so fond of.

Yet just beneath the surface is a growing fire that may result in a political explosion sooner than we think. This is the social dynamite we face: thousands without a safety net forced on workfare; plenty of jobs but precious few at a living wage; over 95% of the workforce [in North Carolina] without the protection of a union privatization and downsizing as part of the globalization of capital; a growing Latino population that is coming under attack; and the criminalization of black youth accompanied by the construction of more prisons.

Activists across the South are organizing and mobilizing in resistance to all of these assaults. In some areas, the movement may be poised to go on the offensive. In this climate, we should be alert to the potential for repression in response to change such Southern reaction reared its head in November, 1979, when the Klan massacred anti-racist and labor activists in Greensboro. More than any temporary effect it had on the movement, it exposed the historic complicity of the government, the owners of capital, and fascists to destroy movements for social change. It was this alliance that spied on and tried to derail the civil rights movement, creating COINTELPRO to destroy the black liberation movement.

The conflicting forces are staggering. On the one hand, there is a frightening momentum towards fascism: the killing of James Byrd in Texas and Mathew Shepard in Wyoming; Giuliani’s police riot at the Million Youth March in New York; not to mention fascists organizing in the military and the burning of black churches. As Iraq and the former Yugoslavia command attention, we should never lose sight of Wilmington and Greensboro.

On the positive side is the growing coalition of forces challenging the effects of welfare reform, organizing public employees, building the Labor Party, strengthening the Black Radical Congress, and uniting African-American and Latino workers.

The extent to which progressive forces rally around these efforts — and their ultimate success — will have a tremendous impact on whether or not we go into the next century the way we entered this one.

 

From Segregation to Privatization

Scott Douglas

Scott Douglas is Executive Director of Greater Birmingham Ministries, an interfaith and interracial organization in Birmingham, AL. He has worked on political prisoner, capital punishment, environmental justice, labor rights and voting rights issues over the last 30 years.

The South, home to 34% of the nation’s population, is also home to 48% of the nation’s poverty. Some 30% of Southerners live in “poverty areas,” compared to 19% in the West, 17% in the Midwest, and 15% in the Northeast. At the same time, the South is home to 53% of the nation’s African-American population. Despite New South/Sun Belt boosterism, these data depict the South as the largest contiguous belt of poverty in the nation.

The entire history of the postwar U.S. civil rights movement took place during a rising tide of economic growth, a time when the U.S. was locked in ideological competition with socialist countries and dominated the capitalist world. This global context provided room for the economic and social aspirations of oppressed and marginalized people. Postwar years informed and molded by worldwide struggles for national liberation leveraged important gains in civil rights.

In the South, struggles for the rights of people of color forced the expansion of the public sphere and won the right of participation in public discourse with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While there have been key organizing victories over the last 25 years in the areas of environmental justice, labor struggles, women’s rights, and voting rights, most of the struggles waged must be characterized as defensive — campaigns waged to hold on to the legal and regulatory gains of the last half century.

Preceding this defensiveness was the Southern Strategy launched by Richard Nixon in 1968 to reenergize the social divide, a strategy that fulfilled its goals of shifting national policies to the right and undercutting the Roosevelt-era coalition. This was followed by new reactionary infrastructure — such as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition — to stampede the fears of whites, while mounting an aggressive campaign of racism, homophobia and jingoism to check the growth of the human rights movement at home and abroad. With the end of the cold war, new global political realities buttressed an acceleration of global economic concentration that transcended borders.

Now that the front of the train of economic growth has been decoupled from its rear, where organizing for social and economic rights will go is an important question. Today, the South witnesses segregation — the denial of public access and public dignity based on race — returning in the form of the wholesale privatization of public life. While jingoists seek to blame the workers of other countries for the loss of living wage jobs, Southern organizations are facing increased responsibilities of building relationships across borders to instill a sense of mutual solidarity among working people. Fighting back, organizing in the South is seeking to define its struggles by utilizing its own analysis to define the region and what role it plays in national and global struggles for justice, human dignity, and peace.

For these reasons, the increased emphasis on building to scale means building power at the state level, building new multi-constituency coalitions that include an electoral component, and moving to recapture the spirit of Reconstruction, winning new victories, and engaging new allies in order to achieve a better world yet to be seen.

 

“Cease building walls, begin building bridges”

John Hope Franklin

A renowned historian and educator based in Durham, North Carolina, John Hope Franklin was most recently nominated to head President Clinton’s national Initiative on Race. Dr. Franklin was awarded the Presidential Medal ofFreedom in 1995.

Some people think that it is naïve to be optimistic about the future of the South. Some think that it is unrealistic. I disagree. I am optimistic about the South primarily because it makes sense.

Twenty-five years ago the South was not nearly as prosperous as it is today, and the racial and class divisions were so sharp that one could be easily lacerated by rubbing against either in the effort to moderate the divisions. Indeed, class and race were blurred largely because if one didn’t work to one’s advantage, the other just might. And one of them just had to!

That is what so many of us believed with all our hearts. But that was not so, and it need not be so. I believe that in the last 25 years, we have learned some things that are proving to be invaluable as we face another quarter of a century.

First, we have learned that political equality for all Americans — and all Southerners — is a healthy, nourishing practice, because it moves us closer to democracy, which we have always touted but never really practiced. Secondly, we have learned that prosperity and economic well-being create a healthy living space for all, if enjoyed by all. And pockets of poverty and areas where institutions are dysfunctional create conditions that can easily cross racial and class lines and bring sub-standard conditions from which no group can be safely insulated.

Finally, we have learned that one community is vulnerable to the same malpractices, the same social ills, and the same dreadful dislocations as any other community. There is no foolproof way to avoid the contaminations that infect our neighbors, far and near.

These lessons urge us to cease building walls and begin building bridges, to cease glorifying our differences and begin celebrating the things that we have in common. They also call on all of us to engage in the simple ritual of extending to others — of whatever race, class, creed, or other persuasion — the same dignity and respect we have for ourselves.

Tell about the South and about Southerners — and rejoice in their move toward a new, wholesome, healthy millennium!

 

“Times that call for uncommon courage”

Jordan Green

Jordan Green first learned about Southern Exposure as an intern and researcher at the Institute for Southern Studies. He is now fiction editor of the magazine, founder and publisher at Tilt-A-Whirl Press, and an activist and poet based in Kentucky.

The Institute for Southern Studies [which publishes Southern Exposure] is an organization I passionately believe in because it is a vessel of struggle, a ragged band of true believers, and a kick-ass resource that gave me an understanding of the true breadth of my heritage growing up white and poor in the hills of Kentucky. From this experience I was clued in to the beloved community of the civil rights movement, the deep American wellspring of the blues, and the roots solidarity ethos of the labor movement — Miles Horton, Langston Hughes, Hazel Dickens, B.B. King, Stokely Carmichael, Carl Perkins, Muhammad Ali, Tina Turner, MLK, Al Green, John Brown, Ronnie Dugger, thank you so much, god bless.

I know that all we have of these three traditions that is tangible in these days of cut-throat global capitalism and retro-Jim Crow ignorance is the blues, which is survival. But the other two — civil rights and labor strength — are not done and gone. They are the two things that have redeemed the history of the United States, and as long as we breathe, live, work, and love, they will find resurgence and carry us forward to the realization of our potential.

As a traveling poet and publisher of Tilt-A-Whirl Press, my burning desire is to bring together a family and thrust beautiful voices onto the airwaves because poets are the legislators of the world. Of course, the flip side of being a poet is working-class exile. In September, I got hired by a barn builder who, on my second day, lent me out to work at a sporting clay club in Owen County called Elk Creek Hunt Club. The two guys who run the club turned out to be New Jersey retail kingpins, so for the last two months, I’ve been driving all over Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio setting up Halloween and Christmas stores.

Let me tell you, life in the labor force is nothing glorious. By the time my generation came of age, the fabled blue collar jobs with good wages and lifelong job security were long gone. I think the job I work is probably pretty typical: long hours with no over-time compensation and, of course, no union representation. Going without a break for food for sometimes six hours at a time. No job security. As for health coverage, the joke amongst workers and bosses alike is that as soon as you fall off your ladder you’re fired; if you get back up again, you’re re-hired. You work the hours you can when they need you, then be ready to hit the ground running when things slow down.

And there is definitely a lot of hostility towards black and Latino workers at play. Racism continues to be the crippling hurdle in the struggle of working-class survival. These are dire times, times when you suck up the pain and grief because you have no choice. These are times as dark and misguided as the Jim Crow years, times that call for uncommon courage.

Some signs of these times: The general store on my road now has a sign in Espanol which reads, “Por Favor, Paga Por Tu Comida Antes De Comer,” officially bringing Kentucky into the Chicano Diaspora. The second harbinger of the coming millennium is that NASCAR is building a hotel and car racing facility in nearby Gallatin County, ushering in the service economy in rural Kentucky and the death of traditional agriculture.

In light of that, these are my firmest convictions and the best my foresight can determine: black liberation and Chicano political assertion will be brought to bear on a scale not even imagined in the 1960s and they will either deliver those of us who call ourselves white or we will destroy ourselves fighting the inevitable. Secondly, we will emerge as a real roots people with insight into our past and present in the earthy, physical essence of things: musical, hardworking, intelligent, spiritual, sexual, and above all, proud. Our biggest heroes are the civil rights workers and the Beat poets. The fruits of their passions will ripen. No amount of Republican starvation and punishment policy can turn that around.

 

“A Sense of Place”

Bob Hall

Bob Hall got involved with the Institute for Southern Studies as a volunteer — and soon after joining, it was Bob who in 1972 penned the proposal for the Institute to start a journal, and Southern Exposure was born. Bob has continued his work of applying research to build grassroots struggles for change, winning a MacArthur “Genius Award” in 1992, and now working at Democracy South, a research and organizing center dedicated to ending the crippling influence of money in politics.

Twenty-five years ago, astronauts bravely probed the unknown in space, but Southern newspapers were afraid to examine the maneuverings of their towns’ power barons. Most publishers, part of the local establishment, had skeletons to hide, and too many editors embraced a very limited notion of democracy. Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill, who won national praise for criticizing integration, was still defending America’s war against Vietnam when the Institute for Southern Studies began.

Southern Exposure and the Institute challenged the silence, the fear, and the status quo with gusto. We helped push “power structure analysis” into the region, helped localize the national debate about “corporate accountability,” and helped wage “corporate campaigns” against such deserving targets as textile giant J.R. Stevens and your local utility company. We insisted on seeing the South as more complicated than white vs. black; we talked about class, we saw all the issues intertwined together, and we nurtured (as best we could) the many movements springing from the energy and space liberated by the Freedom Movement.

It was an exciting time. The modern women’s and environmental movements were only beginning in the South in the early 1970s. Maynard Jackson became the first black mayor of Atlanta, and other black elected officials were pushing political enfranchisement to its full meaning. Southern Exposure and the Institute, through the leadership of Sue Thrasher, Leah Wise and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, used and developed the tool of oral history to raise our consciousness of the legacy given us by everyday freedom fighters — people who learned to use a sense of place as the foundation for expressing their dignity and connectedness, in a song or a labor strike.

Maybe we seemed moralistic and sentimental, but we rightly sensed the evil consequences of capitalism’s march through a region freed of the impediments of legalized racial division and inconvenient customs. Through our sweetly subversive small-paper column, Facing South (“Voices of Tradition in a Changing Region”), and in a dozen other ways, we did our best to promote such community-building values as solidarity and neighborliness against the devilish glitter of money as the medium of all worthwhile human interaction.

Today, we face the stress of that money chase, infusing every aspect of our lives. It is still an external force, but it has worked itself so much more deeply into the fabric of our culture, our imagination, our identity, our sense of place — or lack thereof. The same can be said of racism. It is an external force we hardly know how we internalize and enlarge, like the toxic-laced atmosphere that affects every breath we take, yet it becomes so familiar, so routine, it’s difficult to know how to confront or change it, even though it’s damaging life all around us.

We have better newspapers these days in the South: more investigations, more information about the powers-that-be. And we have more citizen activists, more groups, and more public-interest professionals. As a region, we have made great gains. We are part of a long history of people asserting the best interests of their community, ever-more widely defined, against the narrow interests of the money lords and race splitters.

For this region especially, the challenge remains to build the base for systemic change. The institutional base includes lasting organizations; well-rooted temples of hope and renewal; mass-membership unions serving a variety of positive self-interests; and multi-dimensional networks or parties with the capacity to focus our wonderful energy.

The “idea base” for change includes the values, analysis, ideology, and vision to guide and sustain radical progressive work, along with the consciousness of being in a long line of change-makers who focus not just on self, but on a community, a people, a sense of place.

 

“It’s not enough to be progressive — we must he aggressive!”

Jim Hightower

Jim Hightower, former Commissioner of Agriculture in Texas, is a nationally syndicated radio host and author of the recently published book, The Only Thing in the Middle of the Road Are Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos.

An important gain for Southern progressive struggles over the last few years has been a sharper focus on fighting the target, rather than fighting each other. The Powers That Be, both economic and political, have long succeeded in splitting us apart — black from anglo, rural from urban, poor from nearly poor. We still have more than our share of internal squabbles — it’s often like loading frogs in a wheelbarrow to get us progressives moving together — but more often than not, our recent battles on issues like environmental justice, union busting, runaway corporations, living wages, and hog factories have had us united and our eyes riveted on the corporate greedheads who are trying to run roughshod over all of us.

For the next 25 years, our challenge is to take the terrific progressive energy that is at work throughout the South in these various battles and connect it up into a majority movement. In large part, this involves more old-fashioned, grunt-level organizing — linking folks on one side of town who are fighting Browning Ferris Industries to those on the other side of town who are fighting McDonald’s — while also helping the people of Athens, Georgia, meet the people of Athens, Texas, Alabama, and Tennessee, who are fighting the same battles against the same forces of ignorance and arrogance.

But it also involves linking our disparate, diverse, and dispersed battles to the traditional values of our movement. Our fights are not merely for another dollar-an-hour over there or a toxic clean-up over here, but for the advancement of America’s founding (and very radical) values: Economic Fairness, Social Justice, and Equal Opportunity for All.

Actually seeking implementation of those core American values is what has distinguished the progressive movement throughout our country’s “democratic experiment” — from Shay’s Rebellion through Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, forward with the Populists and Wobblies, down the road with Mother Jones and Martin Luther King, Jr., and on to us today. When it comes to these values, it’s not enough to be progressive, we must be aggressive.

The good news is that economic fairness, social justice, and equal opportunity for all are values deeply ingrained in our culture and in most people. They not only help unify us progressives, but they also broaden our reach to those who don’t call themselves “progressive,” yet actually discover they are when we engage them on issues that embody these values.

The challenge of Southern progressives is to take our issues, ideas, and ideals directly to this broader public and make ours a majority movement based on the self-interest, aspirations, and shared values of workaday people.

This means recognizing that the true political spectrum is not right to left, but top to bottom — and that the vast majority of us are no longer in shouting distance of the powers at the top, no matter whether they call themselves liberal or conservative.

This majority wants the same thing that you and I want: We want our country back! Back from the spoilers and speculators, big shots and bastards who have stolen it. The people are ready for a grassroots rebellion to take America back and begin anew to implement our progressive values.

 

Race: “The Old Categories are Inadequate”

Alicia Maria Junco

Alicia Junco has worked with the AFL-CIO in South Carolina, and service employees at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She has recently moved to California and is organizing with residents to implement a community-driven economic development plan for South Los Angeles.

Growing up in South Carolina, my community of Southern-born, white-skinned, Cuban-Americans consisted of my brothers and two cousins. Of course, none of us understood at the time that we presented a challenge to traditional Southern notions about race. But we did understand what and who these notions and labels permitted us to be.

So my five-year-old brother Manolito told people his name was Christopher, and I occasionally tried to convince others that we were not Cuban but Canadian. Twenty-five years ago, there was no space for complications. I was ashamed not only to be Cuban, but I was ashamed not to be white.

I identify myself very clearly now. In some ways people also respond differently to me. Attitudes about race in the South have drastically changed along with Southern populations, but the willingness of anglos to continue to define others in a racist context has not changed. Some anglos congratulate me on the luck of a fair complexion and what they view as guaranteed success via minority status. Leftists congratulate me on my automatic and symbolic revolutionary Cuban status. And other progressives say — or at least think — “Yeah, but you don’t really count.”

Changing attitudes in the South do not begin to dismantle or even address the social and political system that allows anglos, within and outside the movement, to objectify “difference” and consequently hold the power to redefine “difference.”

The old categories are inadequate — not just because the growing number of Latinos in the South add more categories, but because the anglo system of categorizing people will always be racist. The power to identify and control difference presently resides within anglo-dominated culture.

The obstacles Southerners face in defining themselves has an impact on how we organize. Without a change in consciousness, social justice and social change are impossible. One of the greatest obstacles to organizing in the South is not only our inability to overcome racism, but our historic inability to overcome race itself. The same categories that excluded me 25 years ago continue to exclude Southerners from progressive organizing.

I know who I am. That is what counts, not whether or not anglos have enough visible people of color working with them or that everyone comfortably assumes their anglo-designated category. Change in the South must be accompanied by the creation of a space to legitimately define “difference” from a non-anglo perspective.

 

“The Fight Is for Control”

Kamau Marcharia

Kamau Marcharia has led a long activist life in his native South Carolina, where he is an organizer with Grassroots Leadership, and where he has recently won his first term on the Fairfield County Council.

The passage of the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights legislation brought the illusion of freedom and inclusion for African-Americans. It didn’t bring the reality. While changes in technology that would be impossible to even dream of 25 years ago has happened, there hasn’t been the kind of change in uplifting humanity in the world that we did dream of.

After the end of the Civil War, and the so-called freeing of African Americans from the master’s hand but not from his control, the South won states’ rights and the Federal troops retreated to the North. The war that ended slavery had just ended. Yet black people in the South were again at the mercy of angry white males. African Americans, from that day to this one, continue to live in a system that can only be described as legalized apartheid. And now history seems to be repeating itself.

While prison activism in the 60’s and 70’s brought some needed changes for incarcerated citizens, those gains have been totally overtaken by the increase in African Americans and other people of color going to prison. At this point, 1.9 million African-Americans are in prisons, another 2 million are disenfranchised by their felon status, and there is a 400% increase in the locking up women of color, leaving 10-12 million children motherless.

At the same time, the system has created a wedge issue in our communities by training low income women of color as prison guards over men of color by offering them the best pay and benefits they have ever had. How can we as a community ask women to turn down these jobs?

What are the rallying cries for many white male Southerners and other white males in power? End affirmative action, cries of reverse discrimination, demonize black youth, reinvent government, and the endless cry that we get government out of our lives — an ominous echo vibrating from the genesis of diseased minds bent on acting out hatred toward African Americans and other people of color. The fight is for control. They want states’ rights without any interference from the Federal Government.

The right wing has moved to take back every gain we won in the decades leading up to the 80’s. Their success has created a climate that allows hate crimes to flourish, church burnings to occur, schools and other services to be threatened by privatization and the entire political system to move farther to the right.

What was considered mainstream in the mid-seventies is considered left now. We are in the midst of a fight for economic and political justice that is even more difficult than what we faced in the 70’s.

What do we need to do?

We need to educate and organize our base. We need for white people to stand up and challenge racism in their own social groups and communities. We need to intervene when we see injustice happening. We need to remember that, in reality, the African-American community has only been allowed to vote within the last 30 years. We need government and leadership intervention to ensure that the human rights of all people are protected. And, in the African-American community, we need to make sure that we choose leaders who are not self-serving, but who will act in what is in the best interest of the whole community.

 

Political disenfranchisment: “One of the next civil rights issues”

Cynthia McKinney

In November, 1998, Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) stunned the pundits when she was elected to her fourth term in the U.S. House — after Georgia’s congressional districts had been re-drawn to eliminate African-American majorities. After election day, she talked with us about redistricting and other civil rights challenges.

I believe the South is very important to the country, as an indicator of where we’re going, or where we need to be going, and at the same time, a reminder of where we’ve been.

Within my life-time my parents experienced denial of access to public facilities, and while that kind of thing only rarely happens today, there is at least legal recourse. My parents had no legal recourse.

I participated in the civil rights movement with my dad. He was one of Atlanta’s first black policemen. Living with his struggle to enforce the law for all the people of Atlanta, rather than just enforce white law in black Atlanta, was motivation enough. All of the glaring inconsistencies of what America stands for were placed in my lap as I listened to my dad, and then as I watched him picket by himself and force change on the city of Atlanta.

With the Voting Rights Act — which unfortunately is being dismantled — we have seen the color of American democracy begin to look more like America. That change in the South — which was a very turbulent process — really did usher in the acceptance of diversity that we see all over the country now, with the election of Asian Americans to Congress. And in the South, we have seen more African Americans and Latinos run for election and actually win.

So I’ve been a participant in and a beneficiary of the civil rights movement — and by happenstance, my job now is to fight the so-far successful attempt to throw back those gains.

When we have fully one-third of African-American men under the jurisdiction of the penal system, there’s got to be something wrong. And on top of that kind of victimization, states with high black populations disenfranchise those violators; states with low minority or black populations don’t have the same laws.

On the campaign trail, I meet too many black men who would like to vote, but who have made a mistake in their life, and forever cannot vote. That’s got to be one of the next civil rights issues in the years ahead.

When the fourth district was redrawn, and every political pundit across this country was prognosticating my demise, we put together the right kind of coalition to ensure victory on election night: progressive whites, environmentalists, gays and lesbians, African-Americans, women’s organizations, and labor. The traditional, hard-core constituencies of the Democratic Party came together for me.

Thirty percent of the whites who voted in the election voted for me — a major milestone in Southern politics. However, if my son brings home a 30% grade, he’s failed. So the challenge is to get that 30% up to 50%. If we could get it up to 50%, then we wouldn’t need all the special laws for protection, because access to opportunity would be assured.

 

“Try to live our vision”

Tema Okun

Tema Okun has done almost everything at the Institute for Southern Studies, beginning as a volunteer in the 1970s, when she co-edited an issue of Southern Exposure on Southern sports. She has also served as Executive Director of the Institute and, until a taking a well-deserved vacation this year, Chair of the Board.

What has the movement for change in the South gained in the last 25 years?

When I was starting out as an activist over 20 years ago, there was a lot of emphasis on what we were doing without much attention paid to how we were doing it. Focusing on the “win” at the expense of people in the organization; perpetuating racism or sexism in how we did our work; exploitation or manipulation of those being served; fear of standing up for gay rights because it would cost us our “legitimacy” were some common problems.

I think the communities and organizations doing the best work have figured out this is no way to proceed. I see people trying to do it differently, out of an understanding that we can only build toward our vision of a just world if we try to live our vision as much as we can.

I am also lucky to know a whole group of young people who are inspiring in their political brilliance and insight. I see them at the Institute for Southern Studies, I see them in organizations throughout the region. They bring an astuteness and an analysis far surpassing anything I was capable of when I was starting out. They give me a lot of energy and hope and they confirm that we can learn from the past.

What are they key challenges to making a better South in the next 25 years?

We have to continue to value how we do our work as much as we value winning on our issues. This is a particular challenge because we operate in a world that rarely rewards those who are trying to bring the “how” into the work. We need to learn to reclaim the spiritual — at least those of us who have lost touch with our spiritual side need to learn to reclaim it personally and in our work (all credit for this realization goes to my friend Claudia Horwitz). We have to be willing to look at racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and how these and other barriers are operating in our communities and organizations. If we can’t figure out how to work with each other without perpetuating oppressive dynamics, then I’m not sure there’s much point.

Those of us who have been in the South for a long time tend to think of it as a bi-racial region and many of us haven’t figured out what it means to be in a region that is now multi-racial.

There’s also this history here where white activists are always figuring out how to work in communities of color. I think those of us who are white need to take a serious look at the work we have to do with each other and with other white people. We need to focus on how we’re going to build a base of white people who are willing to work across race lines without being the ones to call the shots, without perpetuating racism.

It’s also really important to have fun.

 

“Yours in the Struggle”

John O’Neal

A New Orleans-based actor, writer and activist, John O’Neal was a cofounder of the Free Southern Theater, a cultural arm of the civil rights movement. He is known to Southern Exposure readers for being the conduit for stories of struggle and survival, as told by Junebug Jabbo Jones. A longer version of this essay is published in A Sourcebook on African-American Performance, edited by Annemarie Bean (Routledge, 1999). Reprinted by permission.

I was watching an MTV special recently about the history of rhythm and blues. I was washing dishes and couldn’t see the screen so I couldn’t tell whether it was Curtis Mayfield or someone talking about him. Whoever it was made the outrageous claim that Mayfield’s “message” music made the movement happen. A stronger case could be made for the SNCC Freedom Singers, the Georgia Sea Island Singers, Guy Carawan, Pete Seeger, Bernice Reagon, the Free Southern Theater, or even Bob Dylan. All of these were among those involved in and committed to the movement.

There’s no question that Mayfield is an important figure in American popular music, but this assertion is upside down! The movement compelled its artists to remarkable accomplishments just like it drafted its leaders to their roles. Not only did the movement provide the creative impulse that was celebrated in these “message songs,” the movement created the market that the recording industry sought to exploit and gain a measure of influence over.

Artists do make startling predictions sometimes, but our ruminations are still reflections on our experiences. The aesthetic process and its products are inseparable from history, economics, and politics (politics being the process by which we make decisions about our collective life). Along with the greater consideration of the nature and challenges of our spiritual life, politics, history and economics provide the content that art celebrates or cautions us about.

Life is a constant process of change and development. Sometimes things move along in small, hardly perceptible steps. Then sudden, dramatic leaps occur. The temperature of the water over a flame changes slowly in barely noticeable degrees before it suddenly bursts into steam. When society goes through extreme states like this, extraordinary art is one result.

The movement of the ’60’s was just such a time. In the broad sweep of history I expect that other things like the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the great migration will prove to be more important. The coming struggle to bring down racism and injustice will be more important still. Yet the movement of the 60s marked a critical period of transition. Much of what happened is reflected in the art from that era.

There is cruel irony in the fact that, despite the transformative impact of the civil rights movement, racism, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, continues its deadly rampage. By comparative measures, the vast majority of African Americans are worse off in 1997 than we were in 1957. We are more uneducated, more underemployed, more unemployed and more incarcerated. We are less healthy, die younger, and have more inadequate housing. We are more confused, frustrated and hopeless — and nobody seems to care. To borrow from the blues standard, “Nobody loves me but my mother, and she could be jiving too.”

I’m working on a new play right now. Recently I came to the conclusion that this play will be about the movement and will be addressed to my daughter, Wendi, my son, William, and others of their age group. Some of them have claimed the term “Hip-Hop” to describe themselves. They are among the most energetic who affirm the bond between the culture of oppressed people and resistance. I hope the play will help to strengthen the quality of their contribution to the ongoing liberation struggle. If the play is to be effective, those to whom it is addressed must identify with people and themes in the play.

So I asked my son to help me to gather stories from his peers and to lead me in conversation with them. I was pleased that he was willing to do so and seemed to be proud that I asked. If this first foray into the culture of the “Hip Hop Nation” is mutually beneficial, I will continue on the path. The working title for the play is “yours in the struggle.”

I don’t know who started it, but somebody in SNCC started closing their letters with “yours in the struggle.” The phrase became the epistolary equivalent of a clenched fist raised high in defiance or pressed to the heart with reverence and resolution, “yours in the struggle.” It seems to fit the idea for the play. I proceed in the faith that the play will be useful to the hip hop generation. I hope this is useful to them too.

yours in the struggle,

john

 

“I Think of Bulldozers and Republicans”

Suzanne Pharr

Suzanne Pharr, a native of Georgia, is on the staff of the Women’s Project in Arkansas. She is the author of Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism and In the Time of the Right: Reflections on Liberation.

When I think of the changes that have happened in the South over the past 20 years, I think of the place where I grew up. I spent the first 18 years of my life on a farm six miles northeast of Lawrenceville, Georgia, in a community called Hog Mountain. Until the early 1970s, that small community was fairly stable, church and school-centered, and sparsely populated with working-class white people who traveled to Atlanta to work on assembly lines or who worked small farms and businesses. It was yellow-dog Democratic, except for the renegades who defected to Barry Goldwater in the 1960s.

When I think of that community now, I think of bulldozers and Republicans and the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor. Two years ago, my nephew picked me up at the Atlanta airport, and said he would like to take me on a little tour on the way to my family visit. We stopped outside of Snellville on the road that once ran in front of my grandparents’ house, and the house where my seven brothers and sisters were born before my parents staked their own claim to a dirt farm. Not only had the two houses been razed as well as the barn made from stones that came from clearing the fields — but the magnificent giant oaks and the pecan grove were also gone. Nothing was left but raw, red clay in preparation for construction of a Home Depot.

And then we went to the former site of Woodward’s Mill, where my family ground corn for the community for over 100 years. I felt we had driven onto a moonscape: every touch of green, every rock had been leveled for the development of the enormous Mall of Georgia. I was stunned by my sense of loss.

Gwinnett County, the home of my memories and so many of my extended family, has become wall-to-wall housing developments for the prosperous, high-tech industries, redistribution centers for chain stores, strip malls — and its elected officials are Republican. Trees and fields are scarce. Rivers run strange colors. It once managed to maintain much of its white and prosperous demography by voting to keep MARTA (public transit) from coming out there, because that might bring people of color into its many communities.

However, new changes and challenges are coming to Gwinnett County. The black population is growing because many who migrated North are now returning home; former migrant workers are now becoming construction workers and are settling in; Bosnians are in most of the schools; and the sight of Asian people operating stores, running motels, or shopping in malls is not uncommon.

Racial politics are more complex. There are black, brown and white tensions, particularly around jobs and opportunity because so many people are placed in competition with each other for jobs of ever-declining quality.

Schools are multi-racial, a mixture of diverse economic classes, and in this fastest growing region of the nation, they are a battleground between the theocratic right and those who believe that democracy depends on inclusion and equality.

In fact, racial, gender, and economic equality remain central issues in my rapidly growing and changing home-town. We have a working poor that has no safety net and little hope of adequate work; we still practice racial discrimination and violence; and women are underpaid and subject to violence at home and on the streets.

The South’s major challenge for the future is to find ways to save its land from sprawl and industrial pollution while creating jobs that provide everyone a living wage — and to build a true, fully-inclusive democracy that ensures human rights and makes the dignity and worth of everyone a reality.

 

“And I Come Singing!”

Bernice Johnson Reagon

In 1973, as Southern Exposure began rolling off the presses, Bernice Johnson Reagon — a veteran of the 1960s’ Southern freedom movement — helped found another institution of progressive change: the a capella singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock. Reagon has gone on to receive a PhD in history, and narrated the NPR series on civil rights, Will the Circle Be Unbroken.

Today I live in the nation’s capital as the group I formed in 1973, Sweet Honey in the Rock, celebrates 25 years. I am aware more than ever that my work as a singer and composer is based in the Southern expression of African-American culture. My sense of being a black cultural Southerner comes from being born in southwest Georgia and from my first work as an activist in Albany, Georgia, during the Civil Rights Movement as a field secretary for SNCC (the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee), and more specifically as a member of the SNCC Freedom Singers.

In l966, I began to work with the late Anne Romaine on a series of festivals where, in concerts and workshops throughout the South, we presented a sort of live, singing anthology of black and white progressive music culture — traditional and contemporary. We sang songs from the struggle against slavery, against strip mining, for labor organizing, and the freedom songs of the Civil Rights Movement.

The performers on these tours were black and white, young and old, and today it is amazing to see local and regional festivals throughout the South where one can experience performance culture from many racial and ethnic groups.

There are still the Country and Bluegrass festivals that are predominantly white, and the gospel conventions that are predominantly African American or white, depending on the racial makeup of the artists. There are also some wonderful new festivals like the Jazz Festival in New Orleans and the bi-annual National Black Arts Festival based in Atlanta. The old Piedmont Festival of Atlanta is now new and diverse in its programming and audiences. This would have been unthinkable before the Civil Rights Movement and before the tours that Anne and I started, and that she continued for more than a quarter of a century.

The cultural power and heritage of the South is real. In offering concerts for justice and struggle against oppression of all kinds, Sweet Honey in return has received some experiences that have the power to transform one’s sense of what history really is in this world.

At our last performance in Savannah, Georgia, the concert was held in the First African Baptist Church. We were led by an elder Deacon to the basement where we were shown holes in the floor in the shape of the cross that were breathing holes where slaves making a dash for freedom could hide. That night, that church was hallowed ground for us as we sang out of a consciousness of standing in a 19th century Underground Railroad Station, the kind of space without which many more would not have made it beyond slavery.

Whenever Sweet Honey goes into a community, our sponsors and hosts tell us what is happening on the local level so that we can know more deeply where we are. Many of the issue facing African Americans in the South are not Southern and are not African American — they are national and international.

One is the changing face of AIDS to include the young and the poor and the heterosexual, as well as the homosexual communities. Our black churches have been much too slow to understand the sacred work of hosting and parenting with those among us who are living and dying from AIDS. African Americans have huge homophobic streaks running through the fabric of our culture. If there is anything that has a chance of forcing us to redress that bigotry, AIDS will.

Another issue is the expansion of the death penalty. The South ranks at the top in viciousness and abuse of human rights in its prison system, with Texas and Alabama vying for top prize in innovations of private prisons, chain gangs and similar abominations. Our people still go to jail the most for the longest times. Those organizations that are engaged in death penalty work are on the cutting edge of challenging access to justice in our society.

It is a great time to be an African-American woman. The South is one of the places where one can find women organizing as women, and sounding out voices on the issues that daily impact our lives. Domestic violence is a public issue for black women; this was not the case when I grew up in southwest Georgia where women were sometimes complimented for the way “she just held her peace through all she had to deal with. . . .” Women are demanding that the quality of our experience be a marker by which our communities are judged.

I feel blessed that more than 30 years ago, when I joined the Civil Rights Movement, I enjoined the rest of my life with a commitment to being a fighter for justice and freedom and the right to live celebrating my existence, and the existence of my people — and I come singing!

 

The Southern Paradox

Diane Roberts

Diane Roberts is a regular commentator for National Public Radio, a columnist for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, and the author of the award-winning The Myth of Aunt Jemima. She teaches English at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

To be Southern is to inhabit a paradox.

We live in a territory designated as America’s Kingdom of the Weird, a sort of stage for the great national dramas of race, religion, class, and gender. We occupy a region equal parts European and African (with a dash of Native American), where the white folks eat okra and yams and speak with soft cadences that owe as much to West Africa as Scotland; where the black folks borrowed the guitar and the horn of the Europeans to make music that rocked the world, and took the religion forced on them by the masters to make it an instrument of their own liberation.

In the South, we were multicultural before multi-culturalism was cool.

Over the past 25 years, the South has become even more so, with Latinos and Asians added to our rich gumbo. In some ways, the South has changed utterly since 1973: no one is shocked that the University of North Carolina’s football team has a black quarterback or that Alabama’s governor-elect beat the Baptist-endorsed incumbent who championed school prayer.

In 1973, the Republicans’ “Southern strategy” looked invincible, even with a Republican president in the White House who cheated on the Constitution; in 1998, the Republicans’ “Solid South” is cracking, even with a Democratic president in the White House who cheated on his wife, with Democrats rebuilding their bi-racial coalitions.

Yet we live with the old dangers, the old symbols, juxtaposed with our shiny triumphs in equal rights, education, and economic growth. We are told how prosperous we are — all those banks in Charlotte, all that Coca-Cola in Atlanta — yet we still have the nation’s highest proportion of people on food stamps. And we still have the lowest-achieving schools.

Blacks are moving back South, Southern cities are more integrated than those in the North and the West and, thanks to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Klan has even been litigated right out of Alabama. But the Confederate battle flag still flies high over the capitol in South Carolina and blemishes a corner of the Georgia state banner.

Over the past 25 years, many in the South — Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, John Lewis, Morris Dees, Virginia Foster Durr, Fred Shuttlesworth — have labored to shake up the old class, race, and gender roles that made the South the least democratic part of America.

Countering their efforts even now in the 1990s, cultural vigilante groups like the League of the South thunder that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, that the real South is white and “Anglo-Celtic,” that feminism is unnatural and the only hope for the South is for it to secede from the Union once more and do it right this time.

The great strength of the South is that it is not, and never has been, homogeneous. Southern culture is gloriously miscengenous in every sense: the new DNA evidence says yes, Thomas Jefferson did have children with his slave Sally Hemings. Jefferson wrote the most beautiful words imaginable about freedom and equality and signally failed to live by them.

This is the curse and the blessing of the South: that we must live with the paradox and burden of our history. We must fight the battles, old and new, acknowledging that, as Faulkner said, here “the past is never dead, it isn’t even past.”

 

“There’s a growing sense of pride”

Arturo Rodriguez

A native of San Antonio, Texas, Arturo Rodriguez faced the greatest challenge of his long activist career in 1993, when, after the death of the legendary Cesar Chavez, he stepped forward to become the president of the United Farm Workers. While on the road, he talked with Southern Exposure editor Chris Kromm.

One thing that has changed in the last 25 years is that there’s a real growing sense of pride in being Latino. There’s not the shame, like when I was growing up — being worried about speaking Spanish, or being worried about your culture.

In terms of the culture itself, there’s a lot more activism in the Latino community, throughout San Antonio. The mayor we have now, many city council people, people in the school districts — they are Hispanics.

As a result, in the Hispanic community, there’s this growing realization that we’re just as competent and capable as anybody is in this country. And oftentimes, we’re more willing to contribute to the American Dream, as we call it —but do it in a way that’s going to benefit everybody, that’s going to take advantage of the strengths we have as a culture, and really bring about change. For me, that’s been a dramatic change in the last 25 years.

There’s no question that [antiimmigrant sentiment] makes it harder to organize. But simultaneously, there’s a deeper realization that we Latinos are important. You take the Bush phenomena that just occurred in Texas [1998 election of Republican governor George Bush]. Not that I supported that — but here you have someone who figured out how to reach the Latino community, and knew the importance of it. Now when would you ever have a Republican doing that in the last 25 years? And I think that’s a challenge for us for the future, to ensure that we don’t get misguided, that we understand who really is out to benefit the Hispanic community, who’s really out to bring about change.

Organizing any place is difficult, but it’s really challenging in the South. Change is coming about, but in the South you have some really deeply embedded racism, and refusal to recognize people’s rights, and refusal to treat people as equals, as human beings. There’s a long way to go in erasing that kind of mentality—especially in the rural communities, it’s like a whole ’nother world. You get there and confront some of these employers, and they have relationships with the judicial system, with the school system, and their beliefs just permeate the whole climate there.

For example, we’ve been organizing a big mushroom plant in Quincy, Florida. It’s the biggest mushroom plant in the southeastern part of the United States. It’s a mostly Hispanic and African- American workforce there. Those workers had fought every step of the way. They finally said in March of 1995 that they had had enough of the abuse. All they did was, during their lunch break, they picked up the UFW flag with the black eagle, and did a little demonstration inside the plant. As a result of that, the president of the company got so angry, he went and fired 80-something workers, had 25 of them arrested. He fired close to 20 percent of his workforce, just to demonstrate to everybody that he was in charge, and that he wouldn’t allow this to happen. We’re still fighting. That’s just an example of what we continue to encounter there.

So it’s a super challenge to organize in the South. But at the same time, there’s a lot of hope, too. I know the union UNITE has been successful in winning key victories there. We continue to make our victories, and although they’re small sometimes, they give us the hope and faith that we’re going to be able to move forward there.

I think the biggest challenge for us is to ensure that our children have a better future than what we’ve had. That our children, our future, have an opportunity to be respected, to be treated as equal human beings, to get a decent education, to have opportunities that we did not have in our lifetime, and we need to fight for that.

 

Inclusion, coalitions, and power

June Rostan

June Rostan is a long-time Southern activist, and currently serves as Director of the Southern Empowerment Project — an organizer training and education center in Tennessee.

Gains: In Appalachia and the upper South we are more conscious of the need to overcome racism in our organizing. Even ten years ago, groups in parts of Appalachia said, “There’s less than one percent blacks in our counties.” That was supposed to explain all-white groups. Now, organizing groups talk about their attempts to diversify their memberships. The old response is no longer acceptable. Oh, happy day!

I remember in 1987, when we included a day of training on overcoming racism in our organizing school, there were some who deemed such topics not really central to organizing. The work on overcoming racism is as badly needed today as it was then.

After a few years, Southern Empowerment added a session on overcoming homophobia in organizing. There are now some multi-issue groups willing to work in coalition with gay and lesbian groups, and some where it is possible for openly gay organizers to work. Southern Empowerment itself now includes a gay/lesbian organizing group. Quite a few gay and lesbian organizers paid with their pain and suffering to help bring that about.

In short, our organizing is more inclusive than it used to be, but it took people pushing the envelope to make it happen.

Challenges: The region’s demographics are changing rapidly. Communities that used to be black and white are becoming multi-racial. The increase of the Latino population is significant. There is also growth in Asian communities in the South. One of our challenges is to figure out how to build multi-racial organizing groups with people of color in the leadership and with real power. We don’t need any more groups with a few people of color in the membership or leadership, but with no power.

Another challenge is for us to move beyond diversity and lip service in overcoming racism and homophobia, both internally in our organizations and externally in our organizing. It would be great to see some predominantly white, working-class organizations do some anti-racist organizing. We must get working-class and low-income people to see class interests as common ground for organizing across racial divides. For that to happen, we whites have to deal with how we benefit from white racism and be willing to help destroy institutional racism.

While we are at it, we should also re-dedicate ourselves to overcoming sexism and to making sure that women are in leadership and have power in our organizations and the society as a whole. I know we can pull these things off and change the balance of power.

The region would not only feel different, it would be different.

 

“I’m More Determined than Ever”

Malika Sanders

Malika Sanders grew up in an activist family in Alabama, and has continued the tradition. She is now Director of the 21st Century Leadership Project, which trains and organizes youth in the South for social and economic justice.

Sometimes young African agents of social, economic, environmental, and political change in the South feel like the Children of Israel, just out of physical bondage, wandering in the wilderness, trying to find the promised land. Questioning, doubting, and wondering about what we have truly gained. This feeling became familiar to me again when I started thinking about the “gains” we’ve made over the last 25 years.

I am exactly 25 years old. Before I officially entered the world and very soon thereafter, I was on picket lines. I have been doing this work as a leader for the last ten years. When I started counting back, it became clear that a lot of the changes happened in the years before this period. Initially, this was a little discouraging — particularly when you take into account the idea that, as a friend of mine puts it, “the solutions of today are the problems of tomorrow.” As I struggle over what our “gains” have been, I become more determined than ever to contribute to the movement for major change within my lifetime.

There have been accomplishments, however, and those who want so much for things in their communities to greatly improve must take a moment to look closely at the social landscape. In many communities, there have been changes in teen pregnancy and school dropout rates, as well as an increase in some opportunities. And while even these accomplishments have been small steps toward the promised land, they have been steady steps.

Also, the analysis of change agents has deepened over the last 25 years. The complex web of racism, classism, sexism, hetero-sexism, capitalism, and other oppressive “isms” is looked at as part of the overall strategy for freedom and justice. In addition, an important lesson that even those of us filled with the passion, idealism, and zeal of youth have to come to learn and embrace is that freedom is a constant struggle. This knowledge changes how we fight the fight, hopefully for the better.

The challenges we face are numerous. Each day, another tool is invented or recycled — from bills (legislation) to billions (money) — to impede our progress toward transformational change. Technology is both a curse and a blessing, and our charge is to forge ways to make it a blessing more often than a curse. We must seize and use more mediums of communication in order to do this. The whole world would think we were in the middle of a high-powered movement if the media covered half of the things going on in communities across the South.

We must understand the nature of our money: most of the foundations that fund our work were created for charity at best, not transformation. Grassroots fundraising can be done and must be done, if we are to have a people’s movement.

We must find ways to make our institutions responsive to the call for a better way of life. We must fight to make our families, schools, businesses, and places of worship catalysts for social change.

We must connect the individual needs and aspirations of the people of the South to its collective needs and aspirations. We must not forget that transformation starts with us, with our institutions. It is hardly likely that an organization crippled by internal classism will help to greatly improve class-related issues on their block, much less in their city or state. We who dare to change the world around us, must dare to change ourselves.

 

“The issues are now geared toward economics”

Hollis Watkins, Jr.

Hollis Watkins, Jr. —a youth activist and facilitator based in Durham, NC — wrote these words with his father, Hollis Watkins, a veteran of the civil rights movement and leader of Southern Echo in Jackson, Mississippi.

As one who was reared in the South, I have noticed some changes that have been very critical and crucial to the dynamics of the South that we live in,” says Hollis Watkins. “There are now a large number of blacks who are registered to vote. In light of that, there are a large number of blacks who hold political offices. You also have a large number of blacks who are attorneys and are business professionals. Plus, there is now a substantial number of blacks who are able to go to predominantly white universities.”

Hollis, who was part of the Freedom Rides, has been a community organizer since he was involved with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. I, Hollis Watkins Jr., a youth facilitator, would also like to add to my father’s comments that the racial ties within America are a lot better than they used to be.

My father and I can both agree that there are still challenges that face the South. One is the fact that most blacks elected to office are not accountable, whether by the people or by self-blame, to the needs and interests of the black community. They still have this fear deep down within themselves of whites and the power which whites hold so dominantly. Another challenge is the educational system, where you would have a white student operating (on average) at a 12th grade level and be compared to a black student of the same age operating (again, on average) at levels two to four years behind their white counterpart.

Plus, the criminalization of black youth in our schools leads to several problems. One is that they are unable to have the opportunities to learn as white students do. Secondly, police officers are brought to the school to act upon black students, not teen crime at that school. Third, black males, followed by black females, are mainly placed on the wrong side of a school tracking system that leads towards a life of poverty, prison, and/or miseducated minds that are incapable of doing well in college or in the job market.

Another challenge is around agricultural discrimination, where the government and lending institutions are biased as to who should get loans to raise crops. And black people are losing land and property in large amounts. We as Southerners must also take care of those we live with. Older people need to allow the fear that is buried in them of young people to go, so that younger folks can equally and adequately participate in the development and implementation of organizations.

In the land of Dixie, the issues are now geared towards economics. Immigrants are the new minority in the South, yet they are where blacks used to be. And unfortunately, whites have not changed their minds on running this country.

 

“It feels like, just to be able to sustain life is a victory!”

Leah Wise

Leah Wise — a founding editor of Southern Exposure in 1973 — has been on the “ground floor” of many organizations working for change in the South over the last 30 years, including North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence and Southerners for Economic Justice. She is now Coordinator of the Southeast Regional Economic Justice Network. The following is from a recent conversation with Southern Exposure editor Chris Kromm.

When I look back on what kinds of changes I see, what has been a gain is that . . . we have slowly been developing more interrelationships, more sense of vision. I can’t say all of [the left] is visionary and linked, but there has been much more motion in that direction. I would say there are many more connections now, with people understanding the nature of capitalism, and being able to talk about it — which back then we could not, openly. You look back at the language, the language was very careful in those days. Where we have progressed, is that some organizers have more of a sense of systemic forces.

I would say that there was this period of time, when the movement went through a real severe fragmentation — ultra-left type stuff. Really, it was the Klan murders in Greensboro [in 1979, of progressive activists] that changed that. Those murders really were a turning point in terms of people coming back, and making connections.

[Another sign] of progress is the leadership of women. It needs a lot more work, but there has been a lot of work done that has surfaced the organizing of women, particularly women of color, and their own methodologies.

A role I think Southern Exposure has played well is articulating and uplifting what the work has been here in the South, so we understand ourselves as a region. There is more consciousness of the South’s peculiarities as a region among organizers.

I think people romanticize the past. There was not a huge movement in 1973. It was the Nixon years, a heavy time of setback. I really get irritated with people who were involved in the civil rights movement say, “that was the movement, and there’s nothing now.” Well, it was different. People had a very clear target, and things got inspired in one place and would affect another. But there’s a difference between mobilizing, and organizing — sustaining bases of power for people. We did make some progress, but there are waves of attacks to undermine it. There’s what’s going on right now in Alabama with the voter fraud cases, the Supreme Court decisions that are wiping out black political representation. The struggle is constant, and there are always shifts undermining the progress we’ve made.

But what’s stronger now is the power of the media, to make people think that everything is fine — that their own life is just an aberration, and something is wrong with them, as individuals. So the powers are much more powerful now. It feels like, if we are just able to sustain life, and maintain joy — wow, what a victory!

Folks are learning to not come at communities and people with formulaic approaches. This is something the left has been extremely guilty of. Instead, people have been learning to start where people are. That’s our biggest challenge. Instead of getting more sophisticated, our work is getting more elemental. That’s what good organizers are learning.

Also, back in the early movement days, there was a lot of spiritual force in the organizing work. People were empowered with song. And people are getting back to that, and I think that’s a real positive direction. This work is transformational work, and it gives us the opportunity to talk about culture, and not simply the economic system or the political system. We should be creating and practicing what we want to be. I feel like women’s participation has had a lot to do with us getting to this point.

 

“Mass, non-violent direct action: it keeps us close, and it works”

Harmon Wray

Harmon Wray has been an advocate for economic justice, racial equality and criminal justice reform for many years. He is now Executive Director of Restorative Justice Ministries for the United Methodist Church in Nashville, Tennessee.

The beginning of Southern Exposure came just a short time after my unexpected discovery of a radical tradition in Southern history. The early issues of the magazine nurtured my fascination and identification with that alternative tradition and educated me in its dreams, struggles, victories, and losses. I became intimately familiar with the early Tennessee and Kentucky abolitionists; the sometimes-biracial southern Populist and labor movements of the 1880s and 1890s; the Southwestern socialism of the early 1900s; the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, Sharecroppers Union, Highlander Folk School, Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, Southern Conference for Social Welfare, and other groups.

As I look back over the last 25 years, I am struck by both the discontinuities and the continuities in Southern history, politics, and culture. We now have a black middle class, but the situation for the larger poverty class of blacks (and whites, and increasingly, Spanish-speaking immigrants) is arguably worse now than in 1973. Our fundamentalists no longer bury their heads in the sand and pretend the world isn’t there; now they are masters of high-tech machinery and of the political process. But they are still awesome in their arrogance, self-righteousness, and biblical illiteracy.

We may have smarter politicians now, but like our smart bombs, they seem to be colder in their cruelty, and capable of doing more damage, since they are now mostly Republicans or Republicrats and have the corporations with them. Their demagoguery is now targeted on “the criminal element,” the “superpredators,” and the “welfare queens,” instead of the “niggers” and the “pinkos,” but the outcome — a racist police state and gulag society — is not much different from the old-fashioned slavery, sharecropping, peonage, and lynching systems.

We don’t have the communists to kick around anymore, so, like the rest of the country, we are prone to kick in the teeth of most black men and women, low-wage workers, gays and lesbians, single mothers, drug users, feminists, welfare recipients, and the group that is the last socially acceptable recipient of verbal abuse — “rednecks,” or “poor white trash.” As always in our region, potential allies are kept divided, while the dominant white power structure exploits everyone and everything else.

What, strategically, is needed for deeper, more radical change in our South, in the nation, in the world? My answer book is very thin, but in it are a few points in large print that I can only suggest:

• Let’s not neglect or give up on the Christian churches. They are potent, for good or ill. They claim a radical, homeless, executed, Jewish worker-prophet as their organizer and exemplar. And church is still where a lot of the people are, especially in the South.

• Let’s avoid political sectarianism and ideological rigidity. If we can harness the two-edged sword of populism and make it cut in a progressive direction, let’s do so. On the other hand, let’s always maintain a critical edge against the idolatry of the capitalist market.

• Let’s put criminal justice issues close to the center of our analysis and critique. The rapidly growing punishment industry is corporate-driven, racist, militaristic, and our current version of legal slavery, as well as our domestic version of colonialism and social control. Prisons are the human analogue of toxic waste dumps. Most of the “waste” will someday walk out and live among us. We need to make friends.

• Let’s explore what it would mean to renew the vision of mass, nonviolent, direct action as both a tool for social change and a moral commitment. It gives us spirit, it makes us strong, it keeps us close, and it works.