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

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.