From Segregation to Privatization

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.