southernchanges

"Slavery by Another Name" Comes to PBS

2012-02-07T19:52:00.000-08:00

Doug Blackmon formerly served as Atlanta Bureau Chief for The Wall Street Journal. Several years ago the Journal carried a long front-page article based on Blackmon's research into a pervasive system of involuntary servitude that persisted long after the end of the Civil War. This article was a forerunner of Blackmon's Pulitzer Prize Winning Book, Slavery by Another Name. In the Introduction to this remarkable book, Blackmon describes the reaction to the Journal article:

"The article generated a response unlike anything I had experienced as a journalist. A deluge of e-mails, letters, and phone calls arrived. White readers on the whole reacted with somber praise for a sober documentation of a forgotten crime against African Americans. Some said it heightened their understanding of demands for reparations to the descendants of antebellum slaves. Only a few expressed shock. For most, it seemed to be an account of one more important but sadly predictable bullet point in the standard indictment of historic white racism. During an appearance on National Public Radio on the day of publication, Bob Edwards, the interviewer, at one point said to me: 'I guess it’s really no surprise.'”

"The reactions of African Americans were altogether different. Repeatedly, they described how the article lifted a terrible burden, that the story had in some way—partly because of its sobriety and presence on the front page of the nation’s most conservative daily newspaper—supplied an answer or part of one to a question so unnerving few dared ask it aloud: If not racial inferiority, what explained the inexplicably labored advance of African Americans in U.S. society in the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s? The amorphous rhetoric of the struggle against segregation, the thin cinematic imagery of Ku Klux Klan bogeymen, even the horrifying still visuals of lynching, had never been a sufficient answer to these African Americans for one hundred years of seemingly docile submission by four million slaves freed in 1863 and their tens of millions of descendants."

"How had so large a population of Americans disappeared into a largely unrecorded oblivion of poverty and obscurity? They longed for a convincing explanation. I began to realize that beneath that query lay a haunting worry within those readers that there might be no answer, that African Americans perhaps were simply damned by fate or doomed by unworthiness. For many black readers, the account of how a form of American slavery persisted into the twentieth century, embraced by the U.S. economic system and abided at all levels of government, offered a concrete answer to that fear for the first time."

A Story that Needs to Be Told

2012-01-22T04:37:00.000-08:00

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood produced scores of films based on events from the Second World War. Some of them were generally well-made, and some weren’t. Some had high production values, and some didn’t. Some had great dialogue, and some didn’t. What many of them had in common is that they were based on stories that needed to be told.

We haven’t seen as many films lately about the global conflict that shaped the Greatest Generation. But a new release presents a World War II story that is long overdue for big-budget treatment.

Red Tails is based on the experiences of the first African Americans to fly in combat as fighter pilots for the United States. The film dramatizes their struggle to obtain combat experience in the face of fierce institutional resistance (a major theme of the story), the discrimination they faced (even in uniform), and the extraordinary success that they achieved in battle. Along the way, the film occasionally glimpses beneath the surface to provide genuine insights into the world of this valiant group of heroes.

Among other things, the film reminds us that, even before enlisting, these young men were already on a path to success. The Army Air Corps initially only accepted cadets who had completed at least two years of college. Author J. Todd Moye* quotes pilot Roscoe C. Brown Jr. has having observed that the Tuskegee Airmen were “probably the most talented group of African American men ever brought together in one place.” This reality is reflected in when the film’s protagonists talk about their backgrounds: Some come from medical families. One is driven to alcoholism by the pressure to please his father, a distinguished judge. According to Moye, nearly one thousand young men with similar backgrounds and similar expectations graduated from Tuskegee Army Flying School between 1941 and 1945.

The film also reminds us that these men had a keen awareness of being part of something much larger than themselves, in more ways than one. Certainly, they were aware of being part of the nation’s struggle against the Axis powers. But they were also aware of being part of what the Pittsburgh Courier described as the “Double V Campaign” – a quest for victory against racism abroad and at home. When one of the film’s characters accuses another of being his “own damned Atlanta Compromise,” it’s a signal that these men possessed a keen social consciousness. They were the leading edge of a movement to expand opportunities for people of color throughout American society. They yearned for combat experience not just for its own sake, but as an opportunity to prove what they really shouldn’t have had to prove – that African Americans are just as competent, courageous, and patriotic as any other Americans.

*Moye, Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, 2010.

The Latest Issue of Southern Changes is Now Available!

2011-12-12T18:46:00.000-08:00

Features Include:

Steve Lerner and Danielle McGuire Receive Lillian Smith Book Awards for 2011

Toxic Neighbors: Grassroots Activists Pursue Environmental Justice

Civil Rights and the Protection of African American Women

The Power of a Common Cause: Race, Democracy and the Masons

North Carolina Case Challenges Voting Rights Pre-Clearance

Remembering Fred Shuttlesworth

To request a hard copy or an electronic copy, contact the Southern Regional Council at charles.johnson@hklaw.com or deborah.jennings@hklaw.com.

Perez v. Perry: Gerrymandering Latinos in the Lone Star State

2011-12-12T16:52:00.000-08:00

By Leland Ware

On December 9, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court granted an emergency stay that blocks the use of a redistricting map drawn by a panel of federal judges in Texas. The 2010 Census showed that over the last decade, Texas' population grew by 4.3 million. As a result, the state was given four new seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The state's Republican dominated legislature redrew its congressional districts in ways that made it likely that Republicans would win all of the new seats.

Texas is a "covered" jurisdiction. Under the Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, it cannot implement its redistricting plan until it is approved by the U.S. Department of Justice or by a federal court in Washington D.C. The Obama administration objected to Texas' redistricting plan, as did several Latino civil rights groups. Instead of following the usual route of seeking approval by the Department of Justice, Texas filed a suit seeking preclearance in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (a choice that the Voting Rights Act allows). The State later moved for summary judgment on the preclearance question. The federal court in Washington denied the summary judgment motion which means that the case will proceed to a trial.

Six consolidated cases filed by individuals and civil rights organizations are pending in a federal court in San Antonio. The plaintiffs in those cases claim that Texas' redistricting plans violate the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. They contend that the legislature drew the maps to dilute the influence of the state’s rapidly growing Latino population, which accounted for more than half of Texas' population growth.

The federal court presiding over the cases challenging Texas' redistricting plans issued an order on September 29, 2011, enjoining implementation of the State's plans pending Section 5 preclearance. Texas primaries are scheduled for March 2012. After Texas' summary judgment motion was denied by the court in Washington, the federal court in Texas decided to draw an "interim" redistricting map that would allow election planning for 2012 to proceed.

Federal law provides that challenges to redistricting cases are to be heard initially by three-judge federal district courts with direct appeals to the Supreme Court, by-passing the usual route of proceeding through federal appellate courts. Texas sought review of the "interim map" decision in the U.S. Supreme Court, which issued an order staying the decision issued by the federal court in Texas. The Supreme Court said it would hear special arguments on January 9, 2012, to decide whether Texas can hold elections using redistricting plans that have not been approved under the Voting Rights Act.

It appears that the Supreme Court will only rule on the validity of the Texas court's decision to draw its own redistricting maps. None of the lower courts have ruled on the underlying question of whether the districts established by the Texas legislature violate federal law or the Constitution. But that won't prevent Justices such as Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Clarence Thomas from reiterating their claims that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional. Despite the mountain of evidence of continuing discrimination complied in Congressional hearings when the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized in 2006, they contend that the patterns of discrimination that justified Section 5 in 1965 have been eliminated.

This case is one of the many challenges to the Voting Rights Act by those who are unwilling to accept the realities of rapidly changing demographics and continuing efforts to discriminate against minority voters.

About the Author

Lela nd Ware, a member of the Board of the Southern Regional Council, is Louis B. Redding Chair and Professor for the Study of Law and Public Policy at the University of Delaware.He is the author of numerous publications, and he served as co-editor of the recently-published volume, Choosing Eq uality: Essays and Narratives on the Desegregation Experience.

The Power of a Common Cause: Race, Democracy and the Masons

2011-12-03T08:22:00.000-08:00

By David A. Taylor

My grandparents lived in the shadow of Alexandria, Virginia’s tallest building, the Masonic Temple on Shooters Hill. Grandpops ran a plumbing and heating wholesaler in the old port section of Alexandria, in a warehouse that began as a lathe shop for repairing ships docked nearby. As a small boy I visited his office with my mother: climbing the steps from the big, drafty brick warehouse, a hive of activity with shelves of copper pipe and ceramic fixtures in all sizes. Following her up the staircase for the first time, I saw the great desk and then my grandfather, a balding man with glasses, a long white face, and a deadpan sense of humor who regarded me seriously and said, “What can I do for you, sir? Would you be interested in buying a bathtub today?”

When he died, I read the death notice in the newspaper, my first experience, at the age of 11, reading about someone I knew in the obituaries. Near the end, it said that my grandfather was a thirty-second degree Mason. My eyes lingered on that strange phrase. I had heard of Masons as a secret brotherhood, which fascinated me. But I was confused: had Grandpops kept his Masonic identity a secret? What did ‘thirty-second degree’ mean? It sounded impossibly high in the Masons’ hierarchy, a fact at odds with my sense of my grandfather, who tended to disdain hierarchies. Who was this man?

As anyone who has read The Lost Symbol knows, Freemasonry in America dates back to before the days of George Washington. What started as a stoneworkers’ guild in the Middle Ages emerged as a men’s club for civic leadership. By 1900, one out of three American men belonged to the Masons or another fraternal society, and millions of women joined their sister organizations. The icons of the Masonic compass and sphinx were as visible in everyday life as Nike’s swoosh or the bitten Apple are now. With passing time they’ve become even more enigmatic, staid yet mysterious.Freemasonry has a very different connotation in black communities. For African-Americans, Freemasonry started with Prince Hall, a Boston freedman and veteran of Bunker Hill who saw Freemasonry not just as a men’s club but as a forum for transforming their history and their future. “Freemasonry gave the Negro in this country his first opportunity to find himself,” wrote a black lawyer named George W. Crawford in 1914; “it started him on the road to self-hood.”

“When you study Prince Hall, you learn he became a Mason because he saw the philosophy of Masonry as a way to advance his cause, to free his brethren and sisters,” says E. Denise Simmons, a council member and former mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts who in May 2010 dedicated a memorial to Prince Hall there on the town green. “Martin Luther King, Jr. stands squarely on the shoulders of Prince Hall.”

Simmons came to Prince Hall’s story through her own. She grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood of Cambridge, earned a Master’s degree in Psychotherapy as a single mother, and ran for city council on a platform of making government more responsive to Cambridge’s black and gay communities. She served as mayor in 2008-2009, the city’s first openly gay African-American woman mayor. Growing up in a family hurt by addiction and poverty, her guidepost to accomplishment was her grandfather, a Prince Hall Mason in Alabama. Her grandfather’s involvement in Prince Hall Masonry, she says, “gave me an interest in Prince Hall in line with my interest in black history.”

Prince Hall founded African Lodge No. 1, established in Boston in 1787 with a charter from the Masons of Britain. When white American Masons refused to grant Hall and other black applicants membership, they started their own lodge. For over 200 years, the fraternity of American Freemasonry, with a core tenet of universal brotherhood, was segregated by race.

I became curious about Prince Hall Masonry and its link to social justice after I came across the papers of George W. Crawford while doing other research in Yale’s Sterling library. Crawford came of age in post-Reconstruction Alabama under Booker T. Washington, graduated from Yale law school in 1903, co-founded the Niagara Movement with W.E.B. Du Bois, and helped start the NAACP. As a Prince Hall Mason, Crawford led the organization through an era of remarkable advances, and helped channel Masonic support to the NAACP’s campaign for equality crowned by Thurgood Marshall’s victory in Brown v. Board of Education. Barely a footnote in most histories of civil rights, Crawford’s story highlights surprises in Freemasonry and illustrates the role of Prince Hall Masons in the civil rights struggle, with links to four generations of civil rights leaders. (Washington and Du Bois were both Masons. Washington believed that Freemasonry could forge leadership in the black community; Du Bois considered Masonic lodges a natural successor to secret societies in Africa. Both saw Prince Hall Masonry as fostering black enterprise and institutional change, as Theda Skocpol and Ariane Liazos observe in their 2008 book, What A Mighty Power We Can Be.)

When I looked for people who could tell me about Prince Hall Masonry and George Crawford, I soon came to Dr. Ann Robinson.

Robinson, a North Carolina-born psychology professor and community historian in New Haven’s Dixwell neighborhood, grew up seeing Prince Hall Masons as unwelcoming, notwithstanding that her father was one. She and her husband moved north in August 1967, when her husband took a position at the Yale School of Medicine. Those years were exciting but tumultuous, with riots, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and New Haven’s Black Panther trial. For decades as the city endured waves of ups and downs, Freemasons seemed irrelevant. So she was startled when, in the 1990s, she was asked by the local Prince Hall Masons to help prepare their lodge to become part of the Connecticut Freedom Trail.

“It was a secret society,” she said when we met last winter, “a world of men closed to women.” But the Masons knew they had to extend a hand across old barriers to reach a new generation. Before long Robinson was inside the Widow’s Son Lodge, an old brick building she had never imagined entering in 30 years. There Robinson “met George Crawford as a historical personage,” she explained. “You enter the building – there’s George Crawford.” A bust in the foyer stands at a height he had in life and his contributions. You go further in, to the main room – there’s George Crawford in a large portrait on the wall. You can’t tell if he’s white or black, he’s simply stiff and formal. Who was this? Robinson wondered.

We explored this question when we met again in June 2011, on a rare day when New Haven’s Prince Hall lodge opened to outsiders. It was part of New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas, and a sign out front said: ‘Walking Tours, Arts & Ideas.’ Robinson as community historian had organized the event and invited me to share what I had learned about Crawford.

Crawford devoted years of activity behind those closed doors, through decades when black history hardly gained historians’ attention. His legal career stretched from 1903 until his death in 1972; to the end he was writing case notes that fed seminal civil and affirmative action litigation, including Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which started the year Crawford died. A longer career in civil rights litigation is hard to imagine. Yet not long after his death, the black student coalition at Yale, his alma mater, concluded Crawford had made little lasting impact on black life. Yet he had earned the praise of NAACP director Roy Wilkins, who said, “The benefits which minorities enjoy today and the efforts to expand their opportunities are due in no small measure to the men of vision, hard work and unassailable achievement exemplified by George W. Crawford.” Thurgood Marshall expressed gratitude for the support of Prince Hall Masons under Crawford’s leadership, saying, “Whenever and wherever I needed money and did not know of any other place to get it, the Prince Hall Masons never let me down.”

People who knew Crawford in life often commented on his imposing presence: “You could feel it when he came into a room,” recalled one, “You knew he was there.” They remembered his oratorical skills and willingness to trade jibes with white corporate bosses on the steps of city hall. Yet over time he seemed to pour himself less into his own individual portrait, and more into the work of changing institutions: shoring up Howard University as a member of its board, filing briefs for the NAACP, serving as New Haven’s corporation counsel, administering an obscure fraternity. It seemed that the law and Freemasonry harnessed all of Crawford’s energy.

Born in October 1877 in Tuscaloosa to parents who had grown up in slavery, Crawford faced bleak prospects in rural Alabama. Orphaned while he was still a young boy, he was raised by grandparents in Birmingham. At 16 he made his way to Tuskegee, where Booker T. Washington was headmaster. As Washington’s office boy, Crawford was one day assigned to the print shop, where other workers teased him. His anger exploded and he hurled a blocked typeform at one of them. It sailed across the room, scattering wooden type everywhere. Crawford was sent to the headmaster, where Washington talked him down, then let him off without further punishment.

Crawford graduated from Tuskegee Institute the year that the Supreme Court ruled for segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. After a bachelor’s degree from Talladega College, he launched into a new century with law school applications. He ended up at Yale Law School, and happened to be there when Booker T. Washington and President Theodore Roosevelt (also a Mason) both received honorary degrees during Yale’s bicentennial celebration in 1902. Crawford was likely in the audience then, one month after Washington and Roosevelt met over a meal at the White House. The image of a black man sitting down for dinner at the White House (with white women present) had outraged Southern whites, and mindful of the backlash, Roosevelt and Washington barely acknowledged each other during the Yale event.

As graduation approached, Crawford decided to practice law in the South, he told the Times-Picayune of New Orleans of his plans after Yale. “I am going back to my own State to practice among my own people.” He explained that 70% of criminal defendants in Alabama were black, and that “white lawyers are now taking their money to defend them. I might as well have some of that money as the white lawyers, and perhaps I can do a little more for it.”

It was a dangerous path. Black lawyers in the South were mocked and threatened with violence. “No Negro lawyer in this County, Thank God,” one white lawyer replied to a 1928 survey of counties in the South. “I never knew or heard of any Negro with nerve enough to come to this County or Court House to practice law,” replied another in Georgia. Black lawyers faced hurdles even in the black community, explained W.E.B. Du Bois, because their clients recognized that, while a doctor’s work rests mainly on his or her skill, “a lawyer must have cooperation from fellow lawyers and respect and influence in court; thus prejudice or discrimination of any kind is especially felt in this profession.”

In Crawford’s scrapbooks there’s a telling artifact from that time as a freshly minted Yale lawyer. Alongside newspaper clippings about his winning the Townsend Oration Prize, he had carefully placed the only recognition of his accomplishment from his home newspaper in Birmingham: a racist cartoon that depicted him as a grinning caricature beside a gravestone for Yale’s standards. The clipping, saved by Crawford for the rest of his life, testified to his capacity to burnish a cool outrage.

Ultimately he decided to settle in New Haven with an appointment to Connecticut’s Probate Court. Still he always remained attuned to the needs of blacks in the South, often going back to the segregated world of Talladega to serve on the college’s board or craft a vocational guide for its graduates, and through his activity with the Masons and the NAACP.

Crawford joined Du Bois at a gathering at Niagara Falls in 1905 to establish a more assertive movement for equality, in an apparent break with his schoolmaster Washington. The Niagara Movement urged the U.S. government to end discrimination and illiteracy in the South, and to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. Crawford managed the Niagara Movement’s Civil Rights Division; when the organization fell apart, succeeded by the NAACP in 1909, Crawford helped establish that too. That same year he was initiated among the Prince Hall Masons at Widow’s Son Lodge, No. 1 in New Haven. Soon afterward he invited Du Bois to be inducted as a Mason there as well. For Crawford, the NAACP and Prince Hall Masonry both were re-igniting high ideals and a search for social justice.

He and his wife Sadella had a daughter, Charlotte, and a son who died at just two days old. In the wake of that family tragedy, Crawford funneled even more energy into NAACP affairs and the Masons. He published a book, Prince Hall and His Followers, a robust defense of the group at a time when white Masons waged legal attacks against Prince Hall Masonry and other black fraternal societies. (Legal suits by white masons aimed at shutting down black fraternal orders began before 1900 and were among the first victories won by the black fraternities in the courts.) His idea of slow, steady legal change fused with his sense of Prince Hall’s vision.

“It often happens that Error and Falsehood for a time out-pace the Truth,” Crawford wrote in a play titled The Immortal Fifteen, which he intended to be performed in Prince Hall lodges. “They mostly go on horseback, while she makes her tedious way afoot.”

A test of the national coordination of the new NAACP came in its campaign against D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, Birth of A Nation. Crawford led the New Haven campaign, pushing city officials to cut the most egregious scenes in the film’s racist interpretation of blacks and American history. NAACP branches across the country waged protests, The Crisis reported, but “the most astonishing cutting has taken place in New Haven.” Crawford obtained an injunction and got the Mayor personally involved in reviewing the film, resulting in more thorough censorship of the racist scenes than anywhere else, noted The Crisis. To make sure the scenes stayed cut, Crawford got a ticket to every screening.

In 1917, the NAACP scored another legal victory in a defense of black soldiers accused of inciting unrest in a segregated town, and won. Crawford highlighted this and other victories at the national meeting of Prince Hall Masons and urged that they support the NAACP’s work. By 1920 the NAACP was receiving strong support from fraternal organizations and their sister groups. At an annual meeting in Detroit, the leader of the New Orleans branch of the Daughters of Isis, a Masonic affiliate, presented a check for $57 – half her salary – to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Contributions also came from Eastern Star, another Masonic sorority. Through the following decades Crawford kept Masons’ attention on what the NAACP was doing nationwide for civil rights.

The Masonic ideal of articulate civic discourse gained, in Crawford’s hands, a sharper edge. When the brutality of lynching continued to leave roughly 80 dead every year, Crawford supported the NAACP campaign against lynching with an open letter in the New Haven paper urging passage of a federal anti-lynching law, in which he acidly cited a recent Supreme Court decision on out-of-season bird hunting. “A white Georgian who kills a wild goose or a woodcock in the closed season will find himself facing a heavy fine or imprisonment,” wrote Crawford. “He may kill a Negro citizen, however, at any time with perfect impunity. The federal government does not concern itself with the matter, and under the laws of Georgia there are no closed seasons for Negroes.” He concluded by affirming a courtroom fight for civil rights, which was not at all obvious in 1922: “The statute book is the only recourse which a civilized state has against assaults upon its mores.”

Before long Crawford assumed the leadership of the Prince Hall Masons’ northern jurisdiction. Along with supporting litigation for civil rights, he guided the Masons toward mutual recognition with the northern branch of white Masons. “Race prejudice is a communicable disease,” Crawford said. “Usually the most effective measure against its spread is exposure to the truth.”

Thurgood Marshall, who joined the NAACP’s Legal Defense Unit in 1935, was himself a Prince Hall Mason. He grew up in Baltimore where, he would later tell interviewers, the National Urban League in 1930 found a brand of segregation “more rigid than any other city in the country, including Jackson, Mississippi. I know this is almost unbelievable, but it’s true.” Outside a few African-American enclaves, Baltimore businesses offered no toilet facilities for Negroes. “I remember one day, I had to go, and the only thing I could do was get on a trolley car and try to get home,” Marshall recalled. “And I did get almost in the house, when I ruined the front doorsteps. That gives you an idea what we went through.”

In early 1954 Crawford was appointed to be corporation counsel for New Haven, the first African American to hold such a high public office in the state. Crawford was 76 years old. That spring the Supreme Court rendered its decision on Brown v. Board of Education, ending segregation in public schools. Du Bois called the decision “unexpected and extraordinary,” and later wrote that for him, “this success was beyond anything I had dreamed.”

Crawford, too, was clearly moved but perhaps less surprised. At a Masonic banquet in Philadelphia, he spoke of the long path to that moment and said that through fraternal organizations, African Americans “first learned the power of a common cause.” He saw it globally: “A Prince Hall Mason has an inescapable identification” with people of color around the world, he declared. From Greenland to Africa to India, he said, “geography cannot diminish your inevitable concern nor your inescapable attachment. You are in Little Rock, Arkansas, even though a postman leaves your mail at a street address in Pittsburgh. You are in Montgomery, Alabama even though you vote from Manhattan. You are in Johannesburg, South Africa even though a census taker registers you on the south side of Chicago… Be proud to be a Negro American. Be proud to be a Negro Mason.”

Crawford led the northern branch of Prince Hall Masons for nearly a half century. In 1966, a senior housing project in New Haven was dedicated in his honor with the governor, Marian Anderson, and Roy Wilkins attending. The next year, Crawford watched his Masonic brother Thurgood Marshall get confirmed as a Supreme Court justice. A photo of Prince Hall leaders around that time shows the two together, with Crawford uncharacteristically smiling.

White Masons in Connecticut were the first to recognize Prince Hall Masonic lodges officially, in 1995. Most states followed suit, yet today white Masons in several southern states still refuse to accept Prince Hall Masonry as legitimate.

Within view of the towering temple of my grandfather’s white Masonic lodge, Alexandria’s Prince Hall Masonic lodge operates from a little bungalow near a subway station. Lee Roy Steele, its Historian Emeritus, is in his 90s but clearly remembers the segregated city and the duality in Masonry that mirrored daily life. “At the bus stop you were the last one they let on the bus. That didn’t make any sense, for one thing, because you’d have to squeeze past everyone who had already gotten on to get to the back.” Nothing diminished his pride in being a Prince Hall Mason; he recalls Thurgood Marshall at regional meetings. “I enjoyed every bit of it,” says Steele. “You feel good being in an organization for 62 years.” For him, the organization’s role in advancing civil rights is obvious even though few non-Masons these days know it.

Southern Changes Explores the Role of Fraternal Orders in Supporting the Civil Rights Movement

2011-11-18T14:59:00.000-08:00

On May 15, 2010 the city of Cambridge, Massachussetts celebrated the unveiling of the nation’s first Prince Hall Memorial, dedicated to celebrating a leader in the struggles for the abolition of slavery and for equal rights, and the founder of the first Masonic lodge for African Americans. Over the centuries, the Prince Hall Masons have played a key role in the development of African American communities nationwide. Recent research has shown that they contributed significantly to legal challenges to segregation.

As part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven, Connecticut, noted author David Taylor recently spoke at the Prince Hall lodge about a pivotal character in the Prince Hall Movement, George W. Crawford, one of the leaders in the effort of the Prince Hall Masons to assist in bringing about social change in the United States. In a forthcoming issue of Southern Changes, Taylor expands his account of Crawford’s role at the intersection of Freemasonry and civil rights.

An Alabama native, Crawford attended Tuskegee Institute and Talladega College before becoming the second African American graduate of Yale Law School in 1903. Influenced as a teenager by Booker T. Washington, Crawford later became a protégé of W.E.B. Du Bois and joined Du Bois in forming the Niagara Movement and the NAACP. As an NAACP board member, Crawford led Prince Hall Masons’ support of the NAACP’s litigation campaign against segregation.

Thurgood Marshall credited the Masons for their financial assistance, and the NAACP's director Roy Wilkins said, "The benefits which minorities enjoy today and the efforts to expand their opportunities are due in no small measure to the men of vision, hard work and unassailable achievement exemplified by George W. Crawford."

The Homecoming: A Profile of the Southern Regional Council.

2011-10-16T05:03:00.000-07:00

In 1919, an interracial group of progressive Southerners came together fight racial injustice under the banner of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. In 1944, the Commission adopted a strategy to pursue social change though research and action under the banner of the Southern Regional Council. Eighty years after the establishment of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, several of the Council's supporters came together for a Homecoming, for which this video was produced.

Fred Shuttlesworth Salutes His Biographer, Reflects on a Life Well Lived

2011-10-05T18:14:00.000-07:00

In 2000 a Lillian Smith Book Award was presented to Andrew Manis for A Fire You Can't Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. Reverend Shuttlesworth himself was on hand for the occasion and shared the following reflections:

I heard of the Southern Regional Council years back, when there were no voices of clarity being heard about whether or not blacks did have some rights that whites should respect. There was always a word that I could read from the Southern Regional Council and I always thank God for them, because they said segregation was wrong. Most white people that I knew that said anything about segregation tried to make it right. So, I want to congratulate you for just down-to-earth saying the truth.

I came up under the dark days of segregation, the Klan, and the collective efforts of state and local officials to stop and block integration at any cost. But I must say that this is God's world and he moves, sometimes, in his own way. Every once in a while there is someone who by faith can feel as if God is with them and that God really owns them and they want to see God overcome some of the evil in this world. He moves in the hearts of people. And I've often said that when God has a contract for work to be done it has to be the men and women who have faith. We need more people who can hear the voice of God, and who can understand that God, if he is for anything at all, he is for justice first.

So allow me to congratulate Dr. Manis on his sacred award. I think he did a good job of trying to interpret a life that is dedicated and I believe God wants more people to be dedicated. Dr. King said that if a person hasn't found something that he is willing to die for, he really hasn't begun to live.

At first when I read the book, I wanted to take offense at it. I don't take offense at things often. I take offense at segregation and he was writing about my fighting it, so I certainly didn't want to take offense at him. But he did mention the word confrontation a lot. As I looked at it and listened to what he was saying, I said, "My goodness. That is right. You ought to get mad about injustice." Mine is a life of confrontation. And yours should be too. Light confronts darkness. Good is supposed to confront evil. Right is supposed to confront wrong.

I wasn't worried about dying. It shocks some people when I say that, because they don't believe that a purpose can be something that a person could give his life for. And yet that is the greatest thing; that is what salvation is based on. I was as determined to kill segregation as I have ever been anything in my life.

My friend and compatriot, Hosea Williams--he was courageous to the point of a spiritual and obsessive insanity for justice. I said to him one time, "Hosea you've been in two armies. You've been in the army of killing, of destruction--whether for freedom or not and you were trained to kill. Now you are in another army dealing on another type of battlefield." I asked, "Which one would you agree to being the best?" He thought that the battlefield of men's hearts, minds, and souls was the main one. And that was where he lived.

So, I close with this incident. See, the worst problem I ever had was not in Birmingham. It was in St. Augustine, Florida, when those Klansmen had even the policemen almost running. So we decided that if we were going to win, we couldn't let those segregationists go to bed every night and sleep well, that the business of getting freedom ought to be both night and day, so we decided to have night marches. As we could, the leaders would go down and get the people marching.

Hosea and I led the first night's demonstration and we had policemen with guns and mace and one of them even had a riot gun on his shoulder. In Florida, in the section where we were marching, there was a grove that came up on each side of the street and then we would be right out into the wide-open street, about eight lanes. The policemen were so nervous--they even admitted it to Hosea and me. Any Klansmen could be out there with a gun. So I said to the policemen, "You shouldn't be worried, you've got guns to match their guns, haven't you?" I said, "We've got something stronger than guns." He didn't understand that. Hosea and I were at the front. When we got just about up to the grove--the police believed that the Klansmen were really out there, I guess--so they kind of slunk back. Hosea and I joined hands and we walked out. When we got right back to the edge of the street, Hosea threw his head back and yelled, "God will take care of you," and everybody started singing. And, do you know, that made the policemen happy? You can be happy too, you know. If you do God's will and work, God will take care of you.

I could go on but let me just thank God for this organization, for what you have done, for what you will do, and what you mean to those behind us.

Steve Lerner Accepts Lillian Smith Book Award for 2011

2011-09-18T06:38:00.000-07:00

Grassroots Organizers Struggle Against Racial and Economic Inequity In the Apportionment of Environmental Burdens

Steve Lerner is the author of Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States, winner of a Lillian Smith Book Award for 2011. An extended version of his remarks on accepting this award appear below. This video includes the introduction by Toby Graham as well as Mr. Lerner's acceptance speech.

Across the nation, in thousands of low-income communities, a disproportionate number of African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans are exposed to toxic chemicals from heavily-polluting industries and military bases located next door. Contamination in these mixed residential/industrial zones is more intense than in more affluent white communities. As a predictable result, the number of environmentally induced diseases and premature deaths in these hotspots of pollution are disproportionately high.

To put it bluntly, government policies and practices permit a higher percentage of African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans to be exposed to elevated levels of chemical contamination when compared with whites. More low-income citizens are also exposed to industrial pollution than are middle class and affluent residents.

This blatant racial and economic inequity in the apportioning of environmental burdens has been facilitated by a political and regulatory system that permits heavy industries to site highly toxic facilities next door to low-income residential areas. Our regulators have failed to strictly enforce existing industrial emission rules and have levied fines on corporate offenders that industry can afford to pay as a cost of doing business.

Numerous academic studies demonstrate that low-income and heavily-minority populations are disproportionately exposed to toxic chemicals. One study of 368 communities in Massachusetts found that low income communities face cumulative exposures from environmentally hazardous facilities and sites that are three to four times greater than all other communities.[1] “Clearly not all communities in Massachusetts are polluted equally,” the authors conclude. Two other academic researchers who reviewed 16 environmental justice statistical studies between 1971 and 1992 conclude: “There is a clear and unequivocal class and racial bias in the distribution of environmental hazards.[2] Commenting on these and other similar statistics, Robert Bullard, director of the Center for Environmental Justice at Clark Atlanta University observes: “Low income and minority communities continue to bear the greater health and environmental burdens, while more affluent whites receive the bulk of the benefits.”

What these studies tell us is that there exists today a pattern of environmental racism and classism that has been largely overlooked by the American public, the media, academia, the public health establishment, and the environmental and health regulators who are charged with protecting all Americans. This pattern of unequally dividing toxic exposures constitutes a grave civil rights injustice. The Constitutional promise -- that all Americans will be equally protected under the law -- is not being fulfilled in neighborhoods where our poorest and most vulnerable populations are regularly exposed to industrial emissions that cause cancer, heart disease, respiratory disease, reproductive disorders, birth defects, skin lesions, eye problems and a host of other ills.

Over the past five years I have published 13 case studies that describe what life is like in communities located on the fenceline with heavy industry. During that time, it has been my privilege to be invited into the homes of residents who live within a stone’s throw of refineries, military bases, weapons plants, charcoal factories, plastics plants, steal-hardening smelters, and other heavy industries that emit contamination that trespasses into their residential neighborhoods. In all the communities I visited I found grassroots activists who are organizing their neighbors to protest the pollution that engulfs their neighborhoods. They are demanding reductions in the volume of toxics to which they are exposed, the installation of pollution control equipment, restitution for harm to their health and property value, and, in some cases, relocation to safer areas. These environmental justice citizen activists are leading the way in demanding an end to environmental racism. Their stories are told in my last two books: Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor (MIT Press, 2005); and Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States (MIT Press, 2010).

The first of these books provides an oral history of Diamond, a small African-American neighborhood sandwiched between a giant Shell Oil refinery and chemical plant. Many Diamond residents knew that contaminants in the air were harming their health but were too poor to move or did not want to abandon their relatives who lived nearby. They were stuck in a toxic trap.

On a summer day in Diamond in 1973, sixteen year-old Leroy Jones prepared to cut the grass in the yard of his grandmother, Helen Washington. After chatting with two friends who were passing on bicycles, he leaned over and pulled the starter cord on his lawnmower and the spark from the engine’s motor ignited gas that had leaked from a Shell pipeline. He was immediately engulfed him in flames. His grandmother’s house behind him exploded and she burned to death. Leroy Jones survived for a day in the hospital before succumbing to his injuries. Subsequently, on May 4, 1988 a huge explosion at a catalytic cracking unit at the Shell refinery killed seven workers and injured 48 others in town as 159 million pounds of toxic chemicals were blown into the air. Heavy damage to property at the refinery and in town required an evacuation.

These two industrial accidents made Diamond residents aware of just how precarious it was to live next to two behemoth industrial facilities that handled large volumes of toxic chemicals. Neighbors began to compare notes about the problems they were having breathing at night when the toxic releases caused them to turn off the air conditioners, close the doors and windows, and sit in the bathtub with a wet towel over their head to escape the fumes.

One resident of Diamond, Margie Richard, a school teacher, who later won the prestigious Goldman Award for grassroots environmental activists, organized her neighbors and orchestrated a media campaign, which after a decade of struggle, embarrassed Shell officials into buying out Diamond residents so they could move to safer ground. It was a bitter-sweet environmental justice victory because this close-knit town, where families looked out for each other and had roots that went back to slave days, was destroyed.

During the several years it took to research and write the Diamond story, I read and heard about countless other low-income communities on the fenceline with heavy industry and military bases where people were falling ill and dying prematurely at alarming rates. Realizing that there were thousands of these “fenceline” neighborhoods across the nation that were experiencing problems similar to those in Diamond, I decided to write a book that would include a dozen case histories.

One of these stories I tell in Sacrifice Zones takes place in Tallevast, Florida, a tiny African-American neighborhood south of Tampa. It was in Tallevast that on a September morning in 2003 Laura Ward looked out kitchen window and spotted a crew of hardhats pulling a drilling rig onto her lawn. Not a shy woman, Ward confronted the crew boss and demanded to know what he was doing. He told her he was drilling a test well to see if trichloroethylene (TCE) and other dangerous chemicals had leaked out of the neighboring Lockheed Martin weapons and aerospace plant and polluted the shallow groundwater in the neighborhood. When she heard this Ward told me she felt the ground shift beneath her feet. Her home and those of her neighbors pumped water from this shallow aquifer. They used the water to drink, to make baby formula, to bathe in, and to wash their dishes and clothes. If the water was polluted with dangerous chemicals then they had been ingesting it for years.

Over the next several months, Ward and her neighbor, Wanda Washington, educated themselves about the science of contamination. They learned about the health effects of TCE and beryllium and other toxic chemicals that had been intruding into their neighborhood from the plant next door. They learned about environmental regulations and about the way Lockheed Martin had been disposing of these toxic chemicals. And they learned that county officials had known for years that there was a public health hazard coming from the weapons plant without having informed members of the community.

Residents of Tallevast trace their lineage back to the post civil war era when freed slaves from Virginia came south to find employment working in turpentine camps in Tallevast. A hundred years later, descendants of those freed slaves found work in a small machine shop across the street from their homes. During the Cold War the machine shop expanded, was bought by a number of different corporations, and was eventually purchased by Lockheed Martin. Tallevast men found work in this factory as painters, maintenance workers and janitors. Part of the work involved cleaning out ducts that were filled with dust that turned out to be laced with beryllium, a highly toxic agent used in the production of nuclear warheads. They brought the dust home with them on their clothes and a number of families suffered respiratory illnesses and premature death as a result.

It was the Trichloroethylene, a chemical used as a solvent, however, that caused the most widespread damage in the community. After Laura Ward spread the word about the contamination problem, Helen E. Beyers Worthington, a retired nurse, decided to conduct an informal health survey. Going door to door to interview neighbors about their health history, Worthington found that many of the members of the 87 families in Tallevast had cancer, neurological problems, reproductive disorders, developmental disorder, and skin lesions. One young man she interviewed, who had brain cancer, asked her not to tell his grandfather about his health problem because it would only cause him to worry. Another neighbor lifted showed Worthington scars and lesions on her hands, arms, and legs that had been caused by gardening in contaminated soil that had been brought out of the factory. Other families had multiple members with berylliosis or more than one member with cancer. Other families were laced with neurological disorders, reproductive disorder, or birth defects. There was just too much cancer, Worthington said: it couldn’t be a coincidence.

For their part, Lockheed Martin officials downplayed the problem. At first they claimed their toxic wastes had remained inside their fenceline. Then, when studies belied this claim, they conceded that some had leaked out under a couple of neighboring residences. Testing soon showed that the TCE contamination was intense and widespread. City water was finally piped to residents but it came too late for all those who became ill or died prematurely. A lawsuit is now working its way through the courts but to date there is no resolution of the problems that Tallevast residents face. They now have clean water but they continue to live on top of illegally high levels of contamination.

Steps to Alleviate and Ultimately Eliminate Environmental Injustice

Overcoming environmental injustices such as those described in Sacrifice Zones will be the work of decades and will require educating the public and changing laws. It will also require a public motivated to elect new representatives who believe it should be a priority to see that no segment of American society should be disproportionately exposed to industrial emissions. Among the steps that need to be taken to alleviate this problem are the following:

1. Political pressure must be brought to bear on federal and state regulatory agencies to ensure that existing emission laws are strictly enforced and that fines for illegal emissions are increased to the point where they change corporate behavior. Companies that repeatedly fail to curtail illegal emissions should be closed until they can prove they can protect their residential neighbors from harm; or they should be require to buy the homes of their neighbors so residents can relocate to safer areas.

2. High-emission industries should not be permitted to site new plants in communities already over-burdened with toxic neighbors.

3. Buffer zones should be established to provide a margin of safety between residential areas and heavy-emission facilities such as refineries. Mixed residential/industrial zoning should no longer be permitted. Instead, heavy-emission industries should be sited at a safe distance from residential neighborhoods. Where that is not practical, industry should be required to buy out residents in order to create a safe buffer zones.

4. Monitoring equipment should be erected around the perimeter of heavy industries with a history of large volume toxic releases. The equipment should be paid for by the company but controlled by a disinterested third party.

5. A small cadre of fenceline residents should also be trained, equipped, and paid to work as “community air monitors.” Their part-time job would be to take periodic air samples when they smell something unusual. They would be on the front-line of protecting their community from chemical trespass.

6. Regular health surveys should be undertaken by state officials in fenceline communities to ensure that residents are not becoming ill as a consequence of living too close to high-emission facilities.

7. It is currently very difficult to prove in a court of law that the release of a toxic chemical from a factory has caused an illness in a resident who lives next door. This should be rectified by a new law that shifts the burden of proof to favor residents who are illegally exposed to industrial releases. Where there is a prima facia case (that illnesses experienced by fenceline residents are consistent with what could be expected from exposure to a chemical release) rather than requiring that residents prove they had been harmed, it would be incumbent on corporate officials to prove that their operations had not caused illness or death among neighboring residents.

8. Tax incentives should be fashioned to penalize the use of toxic chemicals in the manufacturing process. In order to “tax bads and not goods,” income taxes could be reduced while taxes are raised on chemicals known to be harmful to health. This would spur the nascent “green chemistry” movement, which seeks to reinvent the way we make things by reducing the use of toxic chemicals in our feedstocks.

The kind of reforms outlined above will not come about by themselves. To reduce the use of toxic chemicals in industry and distribute the remaining toxic exposures more equitably will require a coalition with enough political muscle to take on the large corporate interests. As a first step, top ten environmental organizations should do more to provide environmental justice activists with technical, legal, and financial support as well as help with organizing tactics and media campaigns. This would be a double win: Environmental justice struggles need and deserve the help, while mainstream environmental groups need to increase their racial and economic diversity. By joining forces both of these goals could be met. Labor, civil rights, health, medical, academic and religious organizations also need to reach out to environmental justice activists and help them in their struggle for safe living conditions.

Finally, public education is essential in building support for environmental justice reforms. It is my hope that today’s Lillian Smith Book Award for Sacrifice Zones will help bring these pressing, environmental justice issues to the public’s attention. Looking over the list of writers who have previously won this award, I am humbled and thankful to be in their company.

Steve Lerner

Decatur, Georgia, September 4^th, 2011

[1] Daniel R. Faber and Eric J. Krieg, “Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards: Environmental Injustices in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Environmental Health Perspectives 110, Suppl. 2 (2002): 278.

[2] Paul Mohai and Bunyon Bryant, “Environmental Injustices: Weighing Race and Class Factors in the Distribution of Environmental Hazards, University of Colorado Law Review, no. 62 (1992): 927, cited in Environmental Injustices, Political Struggles, ed. David E. Camacho (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1998), 53.

Danielle McGuire Accepts Lillian Smith Book Award for 2011

2011-09-13T20:31:00.001-07:00

Danielle McGuire is the author of At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance - A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, winner of a Lillian Smith Book Award for 2011. Her remarks on accepting this award appear below. This video includes the introduction by Dr. Mary Twining as well as Dr. McGuire's acceptance speech.

It is an incredible honor to win this award since the Southern Regional Council and Lillian Smith, have had such an enormous impact on my growth as a citizen and my evolution as an historian. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that without both of them, I’m not sure I would have written this book. And I suppose that’s a really strange thing to say for a white northerner who was born decades after the civil rights movement.

Let me explain.

I was studying African American history at the University of Wisconsin in 1998 when I heard this wonderful show about the civil rights movement on NPR. I was completely transfixed by the vivid stories of the civil rights movement that the Southern Regional Council had captured in their program, Will the Circle Be Unbroken.

Anyway, that day’s episode was about the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. But it was different from anything I’d ever heard before.

Like most people educated in our public school system, I believed that Rosa Parks started the boycott partly because her feet were tired.

But Joe Azbell, the former editor of the Montgomery Advertiser talked about Gertrude Perkins. “Gertrude Perkins is never mentioned in the history books,” Azbell said, “but she had as much to do with the bus boycott as anyone on earth.”

Azbell’s statement confused me. Who was Gertrude Perkins? And what on earth did she have to do with the bus boycott?

That question took me about twelve years to answer fully. And the result is, of course, this book.

The short answer, though, is that in 1949, two white Montgomery police officers kidnapped Perkins, drove her outside town and raped her. Somehow she found the courage to report the crime to the police—perhaps the same men who assaulted her.

As a result of her bold testimony, African Americans in Montgomery rallied to her defense. NAACP activists, labor leaders and ministers formed an umbrella organization called the “Citizens Committee for Gertrude Perkins” and demanded an investigation and trial.

Their public protests lasted for over two months. As a result, they exposed the longstanding practice of white police officers sexually assaulting black women, forced a grand jury hearing and brought the city’s disparate black ministers together for the first time.

So what does this have to do with the 1955 bus boycott?

The 1955 boycott, often portrayed as the opening scene in the civil rights drama, was in many was the last act of the Montgomery movement. In fact, the bus boycott was the logical outgrowth of a decade of black women’s activism and a history of gendered political appeals to protect black women, like Gertrude Perkins, from sexualized violence and rape.

The kidnapping and rape of Gertrude Perkins was hardly unusual in the segregated South. From slavery through the better part of the 20^th century, white men abducted and assaulted black women with alarming regularity and often impunity.

· They lured black women and girls away from home with promises of work and better wages.

· They attacked them on the job.

· They abducted them at gunpoint while traveling to or from home, work or church.

· And they sexually humiliated them and assaulted them on buses and streetcars and in other public spaces.

This was the pattern throughout the South during the 1940s and 50s and underscored the limits of southern justice.

Lillian Smith wrote about this pattern, though she never spoke explicitly about rape, in her courageous book, Killers of the Dream. In it, she talks about the menace of white men’s “backyard temptations” and argues that while “there are no available statistics on the frequency or range of biracial sex activities in the South…this everyone knows: whenever, wherever race relations are discussed in the United States, sex moves arm in arm with the concept of segregation.”

In Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith explored the consequences of what she called the “race, sex, sin” spiral and how interracial sex—both coerced and consensual--sat at the center of segregation. Though that book, I think, is more of an exploration about the psychology of segregation and white supremacy, reading it made me think about sex as a lens through which I could view white supremacy in a different way. And I particularly interested in the subject of white men’s “backyard temptations”—that is, black women.

What I learned was that African American women had a lot to say about this at the time; they didn’t always keep their stories secret.

From the slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs to Ida B. Wells to Fannie Lou Hamer’s stark testimony about a forced hysterectomy and sexualized beating in 1963, black women reclaimed their humanity by organizing public protests and testifying about their brutal assaults. Their testimonies often led to larger campaigns for civil and human rights.

Even the most oft-told and illustrious civil rights struggles—like the Montgomery bus boycott, the Selma struggle and the 1964 Freedom Summer—often had roots in organized resistance to sexualized racial violence and gendered political appeals to protect black womanhood.

Essentially, At the Dark End of the Street argues that rape and resistance to rape sits at the center of the modern civil rights movement. And that movement looks really different when you include black women’s resistance to racialized sexual violence.

For example, Rosa Parks is often characterized as a meek and mild woman whose tired feet made her tiptoe into history. But her story is more revealing and certainly more interesting if you include the issue of sexual violence.

In 1944, in Abbeville, Alabama, an African American woman named Recy Taylor walked home from a church revival.

A car full of white men kidnapped her off the street, drove her to the woods and assaulted her at gunpoint.

When they finished they dropped her off in the middle of town and told her they would kill her if she told anyone what happened.

But that night, she told her husband, father, and the local sheriff about the assault. A few days later, the Montgomery NAACP called to say they were sending their best investigator. It was Rosa Parks.

She arrived on Taylor’s front porch with a notebook and a pen. Then she carried Taylor’s story back to Montgomery where she and the city’s most militant activists organized the “Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor.”

They planned mass meetings, canvassed neighborhoods, signed petitions, sent postcards to the governor and attorney general and launched what the Chicago Defender called, “The strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade.” I wasn’t surprised to discover letters of protest and postcards signed by Lillian Smith.

Like Smith, Parks was able to help organize this nationwide campaign in 1944 in part because she was already a seasoned political activist. But it was arguably her own harrowing ordeal in 1931 that made Parks an anti-rape activist decades before the women’s movement made rape a public political issue.

Recently discovered among Parks’ belongings at Guernsey’s Auction house in New York, where her personal archive awaits a buyer, was an essay she wrote in the mid 1950s.

In it she details the long history of white on black sexual violence and reveals that her great grandmother, a slave, was the victim of multiple rapes.

She also testifies about being sexually propositioned and threatened by a white man when she was 18 years old and working as a domestic. But she doesn’t just talk about her vulnerability and fear, something she makes explicit. She also fiercely asserts her right to bodily integrity: “No matter what happens,” she wrote, “I would never yield to this white man’s bestiality. I was ready and willing to die, but give my consent? Never. Never. Never.”

I am not sure how that Rosa Parks became the silent and sainted icon of segregation that is endlessly taught in schools, but it is awfully revealing. We have accepted too long this notion that women were always silent about sexual violence and that white attacks on black women’s bodily integrity were somehow separate from the civil rights movement. But they were not. The right to move freely through the world without being assaulted is a basic human right and it was something African Americans fought for during the freedom struggle.

I hope that At the Dark End of the Street recognizes and honors these women whose bold actions and willingness to speak out about sexual violence when it was dangerous, if not deadly, to do so, sparked movements that ultimately helped to change the world. And I hope that their stories serve as an example to oppressed people everywhere to use their voices as weapons of protest against injustice. I’m confident it’s a message that both Lillian Smith and the Southern Regional Council would support.

Thank you.

Lillian Smith Book Award Ceremony for 2011

2011-09-10T09:56:00.000-07:00

Two exceptional books were recognized with the Lillian Smith Book Awards for 2011. These awards were established in 1968 by the Southern Regional Council (SRC) to recognize authors whose books represent outstanding achievements demonstrating through literary merit and moral vision an honest representation of the South, its people, its problems, and its promise.

This Forty-Third Anniversary Awards Ceremony was a partnership between the Southern Regional Council, the University of Georgia Libraries, and the Georgia Center for the Book. It was presented in connection with the Decatur Book Festival at the Old DeKalb County Courthouse in Decatur, Georgia on Sunday, September 4, 2011.

The 2011 award recipients were:

Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States

By Steve Lerner

At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance - A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power

By Danielle McGuire

One Nation, Unquestionable: The News Media Responds to September 11

2011-09-04T07:59:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Wehner

From Southern Changes, Vol. 23, No. 3-4, 2001 pp. 4-7

Amid the pulse of satellite uplinks, videophones, webcasts, and tickertape displays, the taglines manufactured by the news media in the wake of September 11 have become such permanent fixtures on our television and computer screens that one almost expects to see their images burnt-in even after the power is switched off. The unfolding storylines range from "A Nation Challenged," the struggle against adversity reported daily by both the print and online editions of The New York Times, to "America Strikes Back," the big-budget Hollywood revenge fantasy that, in an unprecedented display of cooperation, is being heavily promoted by no fewer than three competing television networks. A recent report on National Public Radio likened these taglines to branded products, suggesting that in a competitive news environment where the available facts are essentially the same, subtle differences in style or image-say, "Attack on America" versus "Terror Hits Home"-can provide an edge in promoting audience loyalty.

The comparison highlights some uncomfortable truths. Much of the official news has been the same, especially when it comes to the military action in Afghanistan. The news editor coordinating the post-September 11 coverage for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Bert Roughton, Jr., recently told an audience of journalism students at Emory University that despite the obstacles faced by correspondents filing from the war zone, the "biggest problem we have with information is not there, it's in Washington." The enduring lesson that Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs learned from the Gulf War was that while the press corps may grumble, they will continue to cover military briefings that are little more than public relations events largely out of a need to have something to report each day. Comparing the major media outlets to commercial brands also admits the distasteful reality that the news business remains a business even in a time of crisis. While not all differences in coverage are the result of calculated attempts to improve market share, the marketing experts have successfully convinced many news executives that ratings and circulation are all about "selling a relationship."

The problem with the brand analogy is that the goal of differentiating a media "product" is simply inconsistent with all the obvious repetition. Overworked phrases like "The War on Terror" or "America's New War" accomplish little in distinguishing one news organization from another when everyone else is using them. So while the idea of branding the news surely captures the spirit of our market-driven society, it must also be said that sometimes a cliché is just a cliché even if it achieves that status in record time.

Despite their apparent emptiness, clichés have consequences. Swaggering taglines like "America Fights Back," for example, seem to be encouraging viewers to put their feet up, adjust the surround sound, and enjoy the special effects. But it is the more innocuous slogans, the wildly popular "America Unites" among them, that may have the most lasting effects. The sentiment is undeniably heartfelt: stories of people drawing together in the aftermath of the attacks bolster a belief that we as a nation will survive the present crisis and perhaps locate new sources of communal strength. There is also some factual, or at least statistical, justification for this continual refrain. We have all heard the polling figures-overwhelming support for a military response, high approval ratings for a President whose election was bitterly contested a year ago. Grief and confusion create a longing for certainty, community, and institutions deserving of our trust, and journalists, being human, share in those desires. Dan Rather's post-September 11 appearance on "The Late Show with David Letterman," provided one dramatic example. The CBS news anchor's pledge to "line up" wherever President Bush asked horrified many of his fellow journalists because it revealed how close to a vanishing point objectivity was being pushed.

Ironically, in helping to harden collective longings into something-an accepted truth, an article of faith, a reassuring cliché that is no longer open to discussion, the major media have contributed to a climate where journalists are condemned for living up to their professional principles. Unpopular with the public even before September 11, reporters who have asked difficult questions about the reasons behind the attacks or the wisdom of U.S. foreign policy have encountered outrage on an entirely different scale. Roughton, for example, acknowledged intense pressure from Journal-Constitution readers to be unconditionally supportive of the war. Speaking of journalists' professional mandate to uncover the truth, however embarrassing or inconvenient it may be to those in power, he admitted, "I think right now, the American public isn't very sympathetic to our cause." Nor have the charges of treason and accusations about a lack of moral character been limited to rank-and-file reporters. Talk-show personality Bill Maher, bestselling novelist Barbara Kingsolver, and even media tycoon Ted Turner have been met with a chorus of angry responses for having dared to disrupt the consensus.

Lost in the controversy surrounding Turner's speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. on October 10, 2001-in which he proposed, with no apparent sense of personal irony, that U.S. leaders could be more "humble" in their dealings with the rest of the world-was the CNN founder's pointed criticism of both the broadcast and print media. Turner accused news executives of having contributed to American audiences' lack of knowledge about international affairs by closing many of their overseas bureaus in the 1990s. "Americans are woefully uninformed at the current time about international news in general, and I've always said we were doing that at our peril," the Cox News Service quoted Turner as saying. While the media billionaire has seldom allowed facts to get in the way of his opinions, his observations about the decline of international news parallel the findings of A number of surveys and reports by media research institutes. Citing studies conducted by Harvard, UC-San Diego, and a broad range of professional groups, media critic David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times estimates that newspaper and television coverage of international events has declined by as much as 80 percent since the mid-eighties. News organizations often claim to have cut back on their foreign staff for budgetary reasons, but Shaw argues a far more significant factor in the decline was that after the Soviet Union dissolved, "most news executives decided that Americans weren't interested in international news." Scandals, celebrity gossip, and "soft" lifestyle features replaced coverage of overseas events.

Nathan McCall, an author, former Washington Post reporter, and visiting professor of journalism at Emory, sees a historic parallel for recent events in the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, issued in 1968 and more widely known as the "Kerner Report." Among the Report's most significant findings, notes McCall, was that "there was a lot of racial hostility beneath the surface in the nation's African-American communities, and the media was partly to blame for that bubbling up." The Commission described at least two ways in which the media bore some measure of responsibility for the violence occurring in neighborhoods of Los Angeles, Newark, and other American cities during the 1960s. "One, the media had compounded the frustrations in African-American communities where people's grievances weren't being heard. Two, it undermined the consciousness of the rest of the country who didn't even recognize the problem or the injustices that were occurring." In a similar fashion, reductions in the amount of resources expended on the gathering and reporting of international news have left many American audiences unaware of the deep resentments that U.S. foreign policies have inspired. "Here we are forty years later," says McCall, "and it's just that it's happening on an international scale."

As it happens, the media's response to September 11 demonstrates more than one form of historical amnesia. Part of the irony behind all the present assertions of unity is that for the past three decades, media decision-makers have been conducting business according to a decidedly opposite set of principles. Since the 1970s, the prevailing wisdom among advertising and media executives has been that American society is increasingly fragmented into separate interest groups and lifestyle enclaves. The magazines, cable channels, radio stations, and websites that have thrived have been those able to deliver a detailed portrait of a niche audience to their potential advertisers. Even newspapers, once the medium promoted as offering "something for everyone," have focused increasingly on upscale suburbanites with "zoned" editions edited for specific neighborhoods and a greater emphasis on local news, lifestyle, and personal finance. Those who work the business side of newspaper publishing readily admit that these kinds of features help attract advertisers with images of affluent readers. Whether the media, in their sudden passion for our shared connections, will reaffirm an obligation to serve all segments of American society by making substantive changes in their coverage remains to be seen. Already, the worst excesses of "America United" resemble the idealized world that journalist Naomi Klein calls "Representation Nation"-the ethnically-balanced visions of harmony that are featured in Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger ads.

Not coincidentally, media institutions that have historically expressed the double consciousness of their audiences-as both American citizens and members of distinct and often oppressed social groups-have proven to be among the most willing to question the limits of unity. The African-American press and ethnic newspapers have focused on local angles to the September 11 events, have covered benefit events and prayer services, and have attempted to alleviate the anxieties of readers for whom English is a second language. But black newspapers like the Atlanta Daily World and the Baltimore Afro-American have also featured a steady procession of columnists reaffirming a commitment to civil liberties, objecting to racial profiling practices, and questioning the wisdom of U.S. foreign policy. In a commentary published in the October 11 issue of the Atlanta Daily World, for example, columnist Hazel Trice Edney expressed concern that U.S. government actions often seemed uncaring and arrogant to people in the developing world, citing the U.S. walkout on the U. N. Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa as one of the more recent instances. In the Spanish-language press, syndicated columnist James E. Garcia reminded his readers of the mass deportations of Mexican-American citizens during the Great Depression of the 1930s, calling upon them to speak out against acts of violence and discrimination directed at Arab Americans. These examples demonstrate that while many people may feel the need to draw together in a crisis, they are not willing to overlook the ways in which America has failed to live up to its promises, or to ignore the manner in which "unity" can become exclusionary.

Peace demonstrations, marches, and rallies visibly complicate this theme, and press coverage of groups organizing to oppose the war in Afghanistan has been accordingly sporadic. "In the immediate aftermath of the attacks in D.C. and New York, there was a kind of united front and a real frenzy that we saw in the media," says Lance Newman, a member of the steering committee for the Georgia Coalition for Peace, an Atlanta-based activist group composed largely of veterans of the street protests against institutions like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. When the media have reported on the activities organized by local peace groups, the tone of the coverage has been "fairly patronizing and sarcastic," Newman observes. The eagerness with which many news executives have aligned their organizations with the cause of unity has made it difficult for peace groups to have their messages heard. "I think there's a lot of people out there who oppose the war but don't feel confident enough to put themselves on the line right now because they see what's going on," says Newman. "They see the crackdown on civil liberties, they see the way dissent is treated in the media, and they expect that's how they are liable to be treated."

When dealing with groups who oppose the war, the media seem to have little awareness of past mistakes. In late September, for example, more than a dozen black churches in the Cascade Heights area of southwest Atlanta organized a march for peace. Although other vigils and demonstrations had been held in downtown Atlanta parks and at the King Center, the march down Cascade Road was noteworthy for the number of participants (eight hundred, by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's estimate), for the range of ages that was represented, and for the fact that the marchers identified themselves by faith rather than membership in an anti-war group. "We gather to pray and speak a word of peace" read the statement issued by the march organizers, "first to the hearts and minds of those most directly affected by these horrific and haunting events, but also to the nations of the world, who have begun to position themselves for international conflict."

All three of Atlanta's leading television stations reported on the march, but only one emphasized the congregants' clear message that one might pray for the country while still opposing retaliatory violence. Of the other two, one focused almost exclusively on the presence of famous leaders like the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Georgia Governor Roy Barnes. (While the presence of these leaders was a significant show of support for the marchers, the fact that this station only highlighted Jackson and Barnes ignored the important message of the march.) The final station's 45-second piece featured a white man as the subject of its single on-screen interview, the reporter apparently having concluded that the real story of the march was the presence of people who admitted membership in a socialist group. Such racism and red-baiting seemed straight out of an era of Civil Defense drills and automotive tailfins, and the reporter went on to emphasize the "controversial" nature of the march. Overlooked was the more compelling reality that many of the marchers were acting on their own definitions of citizenship and solidarity, offering them as an alternative to President Bush's "either you're with us or against us" rhetoric.

Journalists and their critics alike agree that a few positive signs have appeared in the past weeks that seem to indicate that news organizations are beginning to focus on missed opportunities. But if there is a growing recognition of where news organizations might have failed their audiences in the past, many of the ongoing problems have yet to be addressed. When the events of September 11 have become more distant history, predicts Professor McCall, "someone will have a big media convention somewhere and the big mucketymucks will talk about what we could have done better with what I call progressive hindsight. Journalists-we're all very good at being progressive in retrospect. The problem is, it's always hard to get changes made in midstream, when they would make the most impact."

Patrick Wehner is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life at Emory University and served as a special contributing editor for this issue of Southern Changes.

Remembering our Values in a Post 9/11 World

2011-09-04T07:54:00.000-07:00

By Charles S. Johnson, III

From Southern Changes, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2001

Following the tragic loss of thousands of lives in two of our most diverse cities, our nation is struggling with feelings of suspicion, insecurity, and fear. And many have responded by looking for scapegoats.

In Dallas, Texas, a Pakistani Muslim storeowner was recently shot and killed. An arrow was shot through the front window of a Muslim-owned laundromat in Green Cove, Florida. Four men in the Atlanta area attempted to stab a Sudanese man, saying, "You killed our people in New York. We want to kill you tonight."

But racial or ethnically-based attacks such as we are currently experiencing are far from new in the South. We have seen such times before. One such time was in the period immediately following the First World War, when soldiers returned from saving the world for democracy only to be confronted with an outrageous failure of democracy at home. In the Red Summer of 1919, there were more than twenty-five race riots and seventy-six lynchings in the United States. Two hundred African Americans were killed in a single riot in Elaine, Arkansas.

It was against this background that an interracial group of Southerners came together in 1919, determined to transform what we used to call race relations. After working for more than two decades to end lynchings and alleviate property, this group by the end of the Second World War had embraced the strategy of pursuing equal opportunity through research and action, and what emerged was the early Southern Regional Council.

The Council has always linked work for racial fairness with the struggle for democratic rights. As we continue to share our concern for the victims of the recent tragedies, commend courageous relief workers, and express our convictions about U.S. actions abroad, we must also continue working to strengthen democracy at home. In light of the nation's sudden discovery last year that our election system simply doesn't work in the way that we thought it did, we must support the strongest possible election reform legislation moving through Congress. Election fairness is a civil right linked to national policy on every domestic and international concern.

We also cannot abandon our efforts to improve race relations at home. It is critical to expand and intensify that work, giving greater recognition to the increasing diversity of our nation. In light of recent events, we must work to deter acts of hate against innocent Arabs and Muslims as well as other immigrants. But the recent grotesque Halloween activities on the part of fraternity members at Auburn University and similar incidents at the University of Louisville and the University of Mississippi remind us that we cannot step back from efforts to heal longstanding racial divides and end inequalities.

The U.N. World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa may have dropped out of consciousness since September 11th, but as long as inequalities remain, we cannot sideline the struggle against racism.

Civil liberties are fundamentally linked with civil rights. We should be able to strengthen the government's ability to respond to terrorism without denying the right to dissent. However, some of our national leaders do not appear to share this belief. Under intense pressure to respond to the horrific attacks, U. S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and a number of members of Congress have taken a short-sighted view in lifting protections for civil liberties, initiating changes that directly affect immigrants and endanger the privacy rights of all Americans. The "U.S.A. PATRIOT Act" (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism), limits the role of the courts in checking law enforcement authority, eases safeguards against the misuse of surveillance and searches, permits incarceration of non-citizens on suspicion, allows deportation and exclusion of non-citizens for beliefs and associations, and interferes with the attorney-client privilege. Unilateral executive orders which diminish the role of the courts using military tribunals undermine democracy in the process.

Fear, suspicion, and distrust still live with us. The kinds of recriminations that we've seen in the past months remind us that, although we think we've come a long way since 1919, we still have a long way to go. If we are to avoid another Red Summer, we may wish to consider a little dose of interracial- and interethnic-cooperation. Intergroup cooperation is the key to broadening civic participation and preserving democratic rights.

Justice, above all, is what we as a nation must pursue. This has been recognized since the days that the Republic was founded. Before the Constitution's signers wrote of domestic tranquility, before they wrote of promoting the general welfare, and even before they wrote of providing for the common defense, the authors of the Preamble wrote of a goal to establish justice.

The work of today's Southern Regional Council is in the tradition of our nation's historic pursuit of justice. The new realities which confront us as a result of recent events cannot and will not deter us in our quest.

Charles S. Johnson, III, is president of the Southern Regional Council and a partner in the law firm of Holland and Knight.

On Dr. King, Senator Kennedy, and Lillian Smith

2011-08-25T03:17:00.000-07:00

The 43rd Lillian Smith Book Awards were presented on Sunday, September 4, 2011 at the Old DeKalb County Courthouse in Decatur, Georgia. The choice of this venue is deeply ironic.

It was in this building on September 23, 1960 that Martin Luther King, Jr. stood before Judge J. Oscar Mitchell, who sentenced him to a fine and probation for a minor traffic offense. There is now some question about whether Dr. King was thoroughly informed about the terms of his probation.

A few weeks later, Dr. King and others were arrested for trespassing when they refused to leave the restaurant at Rich's department store after being refused service. Judge Mitchell promptly scheduled a hearing on whether Dr. King had violated the terms of his probation. Attorney Donald Hollowell immediately responded by appealing Dr. King's original traffic conviction. Judge Mitchell nevertheless revoked the probation, denied Hollowell's request for an appeal bond, and sentenced Dr. King to a term of four months at the Georgia State Prison at Reidsville.

Ms. King was convinced that her husband would never get out of Reidsvile Prison alive. Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy telephoned Ms. King to comfort her. His brother Robert Kennedy called Judge Mitchell and suggested to him that all defendants had a right to be released on bond pending appeal. A few days later, Judge Mitchell changed his mind and granted an appeal bond, and Dr. King was released from Reidsville Prison.

At a rally that night, Daddy King proclaimed that he had changed his mind and would be voting for John Kennedy for President, and the younger King declared that he held Senator Kennedy in very high esteem, later declaring that Senator Kennedy had exhibited moral courage of a high order. These pronouncements are widely credited with influencing the outcome of that year's Presidential election.

All of these events were set in motion on May 4, 1960, when Dr. King was stopped in DeKalb County and cited for driving a borrowed car with expired plates, and for not having exchanged his Alabama driver's license for a Georgia license within 90 days after changing his residence from Montgomery to Atlanta. At the time of this traffic stop, Dr. King was on his way to Emory University Hospital. His passenger that day was a cancer patient by the name of Lillian Smith.

DC Environmental Network Presents Steve Lerner, 2011 Lillian Smith Book Award Recipient

2011-08-07T15:29:00.000-07:00

In his recent address to the DC Environmental Network, 2011 Lillian Smith Book Award Recipient Steve Lerner discussed his recent book, Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States.

"Across the United States, thousands of people, most of them in low-income or minority communities, live next to heavily polluting industrial sites. Many of them, like Ruth Reed, reach a point at which they say "Enough is enough." After living for years with poisoned air and water, contaminated soil, and pollution-related health problems, they start to take action—organizing, speaking up, documenting the effects of pollution on their neighborhoods. "

"In Sacrifice Zones, Steve Lerner tells the stories of twelve communities, from Brooklyn to Pensacola, that rose up to fight the industries and military bases causing disproportionately high levels of chemical pollution. He calls these low-income neighborhoods "sacrifice zones"—repurposing a Cold War term coined by U.S. government officials to designate areas contaminated with radioactive pollutants during the manufacture of nuclear weapons. And he argues that residents of a new generation of sacrifice zones, tainted with chemical pollutants, need additional regulatory protections."

"Studies show that poor and minority neighborhoods are more polluted than wealthier areas located farther away from heavy industry. Sacrifice Zones goes beyond these disheartening statistics and gives us the voices of the residents themselves. We hear from people like Margaret L. Williams, who organized her neighbors to demand relocation away from two Superfund hazardous waste sites; Hilton Kelley, who came back to his hometown to find intensified emissions from the Exxon Mobil refinery next to the housing project in which he grew up; and Laura Ward, who found technicians drilling a hole in her backyard to test groundwater for pollution from the nearby Lockheed Martin weapons plant. Sacrifice Zones offers compelling portraits of accidental activists who have become grassroots leaders in the struggle for environmental justice and details the successful tactics they have used on the fence line with heavy industry."

The Southern Regional Council Announces the Lillian Smith Book Award Recipients for 2011

2011-08-07T05:40:00.000-07:00

Atlanta - Two exceptional books will be recognized with this year's Lillian Smith Book Awards. These awards were established in 1968 by the Southern Regional Council (SRC) to recognize authors whose books represent outstanding achievements demonstrating through literary merit and moral vision an honest representation of the South, its people, its problems, and its promise.

This year's Forty-Third Anniversary Awards Ceremony is a partnership between the Southern Regional Council, the University of Georgia Libraries, and the Georgia Center for the Book. It will be presented in connection with the Decatur Book Festival at the DeKalb County Courthouse on Sunday, September 4, 2011 at 2:30 p.m.

The 2011 award recipients are:

Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States

By Steve Lerner

"Across the United States, thousands of people, most of them in low-income or minority communities, live next to heavily polluting industrial sites. Many of them, like Ruth Reed, reach a point at which they say "Enough is enough." After living for years with poisoned air and water, contaminated soil, and pollution-related health problems, they start to take action—organizing, speaking up, documenting the effects of pollution on their neighborhoods. "

"In Sacrifice Zones, Steve Lerner tells the stories of twelve communities, from Brooklyn to Pensacola, that rose up to fight the industries and military bases causing disproportionately high levels of chemical pollution. He calls these low-income neighborhoods "sacrifice zones"—repurposing a Cold War term coined by U.S. government officials to designate areas contaminated with radioactive pollutants during the manufacture of nuclear weapons. And he argues that residents of a new generation of sacrifice zones, tainted with chemical pollutants, need additional regulatory protections."

"Studies show that poor and minority neighborhoods are more polluted than wealthier areas located farther away from heavy industry. Sacrifice Zones goes beyond these disheartening statistics and gives us the voices of the residents themselves. We hear from people like Margaret L. Williams, who organized her neighbors to demand relocation away from two Superfund hazardous waste sites; Hilton Kelley, who came back to his hometown to find intensified emissions from the Exxon Mobil refinery next to the housing project in which he grew up; and Laura Ward, who found technicians drilling a hole in her backyard to test groundwater for pollution from the nearby Lockheed Martin weapons plant. Sacrifice Zones offers compelling portraits of accidental activists who have become grassroots leaders in the struggle for environmental justice and details the successful tactics they have used on the fence line with heavy industry."

At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance - A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power

By Danielle McGuire

"Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s city buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement."

"The truth of who Rosa Parks was and what really lay beneath the 1955 boycott is far different from anything previously written."

"In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer to Abbeville. Her name was Rosa Parks. In taking on this case, Parks launched a movement that ultimately changed the world."

"The author gives us the never-before-told history of how the civil rights movement began; how it was in part started in protest against the ritualistic rape of black women by white men who used economic intimidation, sexual violence, and terror to derail the freedom movement; and how those forces persisted unpunished throughout the Jim Crow era when white men assaulted black women to enforce rules of racial and economic hierarchy. Black women’s protests against sexual assault and interracial rape fueled civil rights campaigns throughout the South that began during World War II and went through to the Black Power movement. The Montgomery bus boycott was the baptism, not the birth, of that struggle."

"At the Dark End of the Street describes the decades of degradation black women on the Montgomery city buses endured on their way to cook and clean for their white bosses. It reveals how Rosa Parks, by 1955 one of the most radical activists in Alabama, had had enough. “There had to be a stopping place,” she said, “and this seemed to be the place for me to stop being pushed around.” Parks refused to move from her seat on the bus, was arrested, and, with fierce activist Jo Ann Robinson, organized a one-day bus boycott."

"The protest, intended to last twenty-four hours, became a yearlong struggle for dignity and justice. It broke the back of the Montgomery city bus lines and bankrupted the company."

"We see how and why Rosa Parks, instead of becoming a leader of the movement she helped to start, was turned into a symbol of virtuous black womanhood, sainted and celebrated for her quiet dignity, prim demeanor, and middle-class propriety—her radicalism all but erased. And we see as well how thousands of black women whose courage and fortitude helped to transform America were reduced to the footnotes of history."

"A controversial, moving, and courageous book; narrative history at its best."

The Southern Regional Council (SRC) is an inter-racial organization founded in 1919 to combat racial injustice in the South. SRC initiated the Lillian Smith Book Awards shortly after Smith's death in 1966 to recognize authors whose writing extends the legacy of the outspoken writer, educator and social critic who challenged her fellow Southerners and all Americans on issues of social and racial justice. Since 2004 the awards have been presented by SRC in a partnership with the University of Georgia Libraries, whose Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library houses a historic collection of Lillian Smith's letters and manuscripts. The Georgia Center for the Book became a partner in 2007, when the awards ceremony first became part of the Decatur Book Festival.

The 2010 winners of the Lillian Smith Book Award were Amy Louise Wood for Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 and Charles Eagles for The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Desegregation of Ole Miss.

Constitutional Challenge to Voting Rights Preclearance Appears Headed to the Supreme Court

2011-07-19T17:54:00.000-07:00

By Leland Ware

LaRoque v. Holder involves a constitutional challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

The voters in Kinston, North Carolina, approved a referendum that changed city elections from a partisan to a nonpartisan system. As Kinston is a jurisdiction covered by section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the city cannot implement the referendum until it is precleared by federal authorities. A candidate for public office and other plaintiffs filed a suit contending that section 5 exceeds Congress’ enforcement powers under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The plaintiffs also claim that the 2006 amendments to section 5 are an unconstitutional racial-preference scheme.

The district court ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing to assert their claims and dismissed the case. On July 8, 2011, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed the trial court's decision and remanded the case for a consideration of the merits. The 32- page opinion is devoted almost entirely to standing. The stakes are much higher for the Constitutional issues that the trial court has been directed to resolve.

Under section 5 of the VRA, changes in voting procedures in a “covered” jurisdiction cannot be made without preclearance by the federal court in the District of Columbia or the United States Attorney General. Legislative hearings showed that the federal government’s efforts to eliminate discriminatory election practices with court cases were thwarted. As soon as one discriminatory practice was proven to be unconstitutional, a new one would be substituted requiring another round of lengthy and time consuming litigation.

To stop this, the 1965 Act included special preclearance provisions targeted at states where the potential for discrimination was the greatest. Six southern states are covered, as are a number of counties in other states. Section 5 was extended for 25 years in 1982. In 2006 the Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments were enacted which extended section 5 for 25 more years. After extensive hearings, Congress found that race-based voting abuses continued at very high levels.

In June of 2009, the Supreme Court ruled in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder (NAMUDNO) that all individual jurisdictions should have the opportunity to "bail out" of the provisions requiring federal preclearance for changes in election procedures. To obtain a bail out, a covered jurisdiction must show that it has not used any forbidden voting test or device, not been the subject of a section 5 objection and has eliminated procedures that inhibit equal access to the electoral process. A bail out applicant must also show that it has made constructive efforts to eliminate voter intimidation and harassment and undertaken other constructive efforts to promote equal access to the electoral process.

Chief Justice John Roberts' opinion in NAMUDNO expressed a considerable amount of skepticism about the constitutionality of Section 5. Roberts stated that section 5 is substantial departure from the fundamental principles of the nation's federal system and a significant encroachment on state sovereignty. Roberts questioned the continuing need for section 5. He noted that black and white voter turnout and registration rates in covered jurisdictions are approaching parity. Discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. Minority candidates hold office at high levels. The VRA's coverage formula is based on data that was more than 35 years old.

Roberts said the exceptional conditions in southern states in 1965 justified the law, but the violence, intimidation, and subterfuges that justified section 5 no longer exist. However, since the Court ruled in NAMUDNO's favor on statutory grounds (that it was eligible to pursue the VRA's bail out provisions) it did not decide "difficult constitutional question" of whether current conditions justify section 5.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a separate opinion in NAMUDNO arguing section 5 is unconstitutional. He claimed that the patterns of discrimination that justified section 5 in 1965 have been eliminated. Covered jurisdictions are not engaging in efforts to deny black citizens' voting rights using intimidation and violence. Grandfather clauses, property qualifications, character tests, and requirements to understand or interpret state constitutions are relics of the past. Thomas believes that current conditions do not justify a continuation of section 5.

The plaintiffs in LaRoque claim that section 5 is no longer needed and the 2006 amendments to the VRA discriminate against white voters. To prevail on the first claim the plaintiffs will have difficult job of proving that Congress enacted the 2006 amendments with a discriminatory intent. As to the continuing need for section 5, in 2006 Congress conducted over 20 hearings, listened to more than 50 expert witnesses, and collected over 17,000 pages of testimony documenting the VRA violations and other voting abuses. A decision overturning section 5 on this ground will require an explanation as to why evidence of this magnitude is insufficient or erroneous. LaRoque or a case like it, will probably reach the Supreme Court. Roberts and Thomas have already made their views clear.

The plaintiffs in LaRoque claim that section 5 is no longer needed and the 2006 amendments to the VRA discriminate against white voters. To prevail on the first claim the plaintiffs will have the difficult job of proving that Congress enacted the 2006 amendments with a discriminatory intent. As to the continuing need for section 5, in 2006 Congress conducted over 20 hearings, listened to more than 50 expert witnesses, and collected over 17, 000 pages of testimony documenting the VRA violations and other voting abuses. A decision overturning section 5 on this ground will require an explanation as to why evidence of this magnitude is insufficient or erroneous. LaRoque or a case like it, will probably reach the Supreme Court. Roberts and Thomas have already made their views clear.

About the Author

Summer 2011 Print Edition of Southern Changes Now Available

2011-06-22T02:56:00.001-07:00

The Summer 2011 print edition of Southern Changes, featuring extensive coverage of the Southern Regional Council's current effort to re-launch its landmark Civil Rights Audio History, as well as the latest SRC news and views, is now available.

If you are interested in obtaining a hard copy or a pdf, please let us know.

Teaching "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" in South Carolina Schools

2011-06-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

By Diane Raschke

From Southern Changes, Vol. 22, No. 2, 2000 p. 16

On June 14-15, SRC consultant and former education programs director Marcia Klenbort conducted an in-depth workshop for teachers from across South Carolina on using "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" in grades 6 through 12. Following the workshop, the article below, entitled "Distant Voices to Recount South's Civil Rights Clashes: Key Civil Rights Voices Come Alive for Local Students in a New Documentary" appeared in The State newspaper.

More than 250 new voices will help some Columbia, South Carolina, students learn about the Civil Rights Movement this fall.

They belong to the men and women, both famous and ordinary, who shaped civil rights history in the South from 1940 to 1970. Framed by narrative and period music, they speak through an award-winning audio documentary that will soon be heard in four Columbia schools.

Educators from all over the state, including four from Columbia, will pilot a new curriculum that complements the Southern Regional Council's "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" civil rights documentary. A June workshop at the South Carolina Archives and History Center taught educators how to use the 13-hour series in the classroom.

Gussie Tucker, a member of the WA Perry Middle School Task Force, said first-person narratives make the series outstanding.

"The emotions when they're talking are something you can't see in a movie because other people are playing the part," Tucker said. "This is a primary source. You can hear and actually know what they were feeling, being part of the Civil Rights Movement"

Teachers from A.C. Flora High School, Keenan High School, Heathwood Hall Episcopal School, and Joseph Keels Elementary School will pilot the program in Columbia, and Tucker hopes to sell WA Perry teachers on it as well.

The documentary has won several honors, including the prestigious Peabody Award in 1998.

The full title of the series is 'Will the Circle Be Unbroken? An audio history of the Civil Rights Movement in five Southern communities and the music of those times."

The communities are Montgomery, Alabama; little Rock, Arkansas; Jackson, Mississippi; Atlanta. Georgia; and Columbia, South Carolina. Four of the series' twenty-six half-hour segments focus on the Midlands region of South Carolina.

The series includes the work of the Richland County United Citizens' Committee in integrating Columbia's schools; the Clarendon County segregation case, Briggs v. Elliot and the "Orangeburg Massacre," the 1968 incident in which state troopers fired op protesters at South Carolina State University, killing three.

This local connection is important, said Lalitha Shastri, a social studies teacher at Heathwood Hall.

"That's away of saying to the kids that it happened on your doorstep," she said. "You're walking the streets where this happened, you're living in the area where this happened, you're living the legacy of this."

Co-sponsors of the program with the Southern Regional Council are the South Carolina Humanities Council and the state Department of Education.

Diane Raschke wrote this article for The State newspaper based in Columbia, South Carolina.

About the Southern Regional Council

2011-06-02T20:01:00.000-07:00

From Organizing Black America: An Encyclopedia of African American Associations

Southern Regional Council

Established in 1944, the Southern Regional Council (SRC) grew out of a series of meetings between black and white members of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) who were searching for an alternative approach to remedying the ills of southern society. The CIC was founded in 1919 by “southerners of good will” who wanted to end racial violence and create racial harmony in the South in light of post-World War I racial tensions. Waning in popularity and support among white liberals and black moderates, the CIC was on the verge of collapse by the early 1940s until its executive director, Jessie Daniel Ames, set forth a plan to reconcile the different agendas and demands of southern blacks and whites in order to revitalize the organization. The result was the creation of the SRC, an interracial council devoted to “regional” research and development. Taking over the CIC’s financial assets and its headquarters in Atlanta, the SRC was headed by a president and four vice presidents as well as two governing bodies, a board of directors, and an executive committee. In contrast to the CIC, the SRC attempted to divide equally the membership of the board of directors and the executive committee between blacks and whites in order to demonstrate its commitment to interracial activism. SRC also continued the tradition of being financed by northern foundations and the contributions of its members.

Under the leadership of Executive Director Guy B.Johnson and President Howard Odum, white sociologists at the University of North Carolina; Executive Committee Chairman Charles S.Johnson, a black sociologist and president of Fisk University; and Associate Director Ira De A.Reid, a black sociology professor at Atlanta University, the SRC worked to solve “southern” problems without casting them in terms of race. As Odum noted, the SRC’s aim was to administer programs that would benefit the disadvantaged classes of the South rather than just African Americans, in the hopes of building consensus for racial reform in the process. Taking this regional approach, the SRC incorporated most of the CIC’s programs including the support of state and local interracial committees, the cooperation and assistance of church and women’s groups, the continuation of publications such as The Southern Frontier., and the adoption of educational programs for improving race relations. But more significantly, the SRC also adopted the CIC’s position on segregation. Believing that social equality was a long-term goal, the leaders of the organization recognized that the New Deal and World War II had strengthened white southerner’s commitment to the separation of the races and that the immediate goal of the SRC should focus attention on what it could do immediately to improve the lives of all the region’s people.

However, just as in the CIC, the issue of segregation proved divisive for the SRC. Within a month after its founding, the SRC was bombarded with dissenting voices concerning its ideology and approach to the racial situation in the South. Among those who spoke out against SRC were novelist Lillian Smith and English Professor J. Saunders Redding, arguing that the organization's attempts to conciliate the white power structure made its actions suspect and that the SRC needed to set an example by publicly denouncing segregation. At the same time that the SRC was criticized for not being liberal enough to eliminate segregation, the organization was under attack by white conservatives like David Clark, editor of The Textile Bulletin, who believed that the SRC was fomenting subversive activity by promoting racial cooperation. Heeding these outside pressures, the SRC chose to reexamine its policies as early as 1947. However, it was not until 1951 that the board of directors adopted a resolution that clearly outlined the organization's intention to work for an American society free of racial discrimination. Accordingly, segregation was no longer an acceptable practice and every individual deserved the opportunity to "enjoy a full share of dignity and self-respect."

One of the SRC’s main purposes was the gathering and dissemination of information as part of its goal to educate private citizens and public officials on a wide range of issues including civil rights, segregation and desegregation, police brutality, violence, unemployment, housing, suffrage, and racism. The SRC’s Information and Research Departments collected materials such as newspaper articles and literature about the South, conducted surveys of southern communities, and drafted reports on their findings. Closely tied to the Information and Research Departments was the Publication Department through which the SRC disseminated the information and data it collected. The SRC’s main publication was The Southern Frontier, first published by the CIC, which experienced several name changes throughout the 1960s and 1970s but remained the primary source of information on the organizations activities and programs. In addition to its serial publications, the SRC published a wide range of pamphlets, leaflets, brochures, and special reports to publicize the findings of the Information and Research Departments. Another significant publication was the SRC’s series of Leadership Reports, produced and distributed between 1959 and 1964. These reports dealt almost entirely with school desegregation and overall problems of race relations in the South during that period.

Though serving as a clearinghouse of information remained vital to the SRC’s goals, the organization also continued to support the work of the state and local interracial committees first established by the CIC. Under the leadership of the SRC, these state and local groups changed their names to Councils on Human Relations, a transformation that helped to emphasize the SRC’s commitment to regional development of all peoples of the South. Maintaining their original purpose, these councils encouraged individuals to join interracial activities and create specific programs to alleviate problems in their communities. The work of the state and local Councils on Human Relations proved vital to the success of the SRC in carrying out its goals and programs on the local level.

The Veterans Services Project, which operated between 1944 and 1951, was the first large-scale program initiated by the SRC. Recognizing that postwar racial tensions could destroy any hope of racial conciliation in the South, the SRC launched this project to gather statistics and other information pertinent to the reintegration of returning World War II veterans, especially African American veterans. Through this project, the SRC investigated possibilities for employment, job training, resumption of high school and college education, housing, and financing of small businesses for ex-military personnel. Furthermore, by documenting the number of black and white veterans who were taking advantage of these opportunities, the SRC could assist federal, state, and private agencies in redirecting their programs to include more eligible veterans.

One of the most important lessons learned from the Veterans Services Project was the extent of labor problems in the South. Addressing the issues of workmen’s and unemployment compensation, protective legislation, job discrimination, job training, and unions through various means, the SRC decided that it was essential to initiate a program that specifically focused on labor issues. Therefore in 1965, in cooperation with the National Institute for Labor Education and the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the SRC established the Labor Education Program. Working until 1973, the Labor Education Program volunteers struggled to expand southern labor unions to make them more inclusive of minorities and women and promoted the economic development of the South, best exemplified in the creation of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in 1968.

In the field of civil rights, the SRC took great strides after 1951 to redress racial inequalities in southern society. Apprehensive of direct action, the SRC decided to focus on eliminating the barriers to African American suffrage and investigating the impact of segregation on African American education. Under the auspices of its Councils on Human Relations, the SRC embarked on a campaign to survey the extent of desegregation of southern schools after the Supreme Courts 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Reporting their findings to local, state, and federal agencies, the SRC was able to assist in the evaluation of the progress of desegregation efforts in southern communities. Given the violent reaction among southern extremists to the Brown decision and the slow course of desegregation, many local and state Councils on Human Relations launched petitions to endorse immediate or gradual adoption of federal school desegregation policy. Because so many public school systems opted to close schools rather than desegregate them, the SRC supported the 1958 Help Our Public Education (HOPE) program, initiated by the parents of black Atlanta school children who sought to keep Georgia’s public schools open. In 1959, the SRC expanded its support of local desegregation efforts and conceived the Save Our Schools campaign for other southern states to be carried out by local and state Councils on Human Relations.

Turning to the extension of voting rights for African Americans, the SRC joined with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Urban League (NUL), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in the creation of the Voter Education Project (VEP) in 1962. With the expressed purpose of educating poor and black southerners about their voting rights and assisting them in registering to vote, the VEP helped to increase voter rolls in the South by 11 percent by April 1963. The SRC served as a clearinghouse for information gathered during the project and provided strategy-planning and administration for the organizations involved. After the initial voter registration campaign of 1963, the VEP expanded its efforts to include citizenship training, educational conferences, support of black candidates, and the publication of voter registration materials. The VEP continued as part of the SRC until 1970, when federal law prohibited voter registration organizations from receiving more than 25 percent of its funding from a single source. After separating from the VEP, the SRC continued its commitment to voter equality through a number of campaigns including the Southern Legislative Research Council, which provided aid to black elected officials throughout the South; a 1979 redistricting project, which sought to improve voter participation in more than 2,000 jurisdictions in the South; and a 1982 voter education project, which led to the extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

In the late 1960s, the SRC came under fire again as critics condemned the council for challenging civil rights organizations that purged whites from their ranks and for rejecting the violent tactics of some black power activists. Many southern black leaders believed that the SRC had become little more than a sounding board for white progressivism and believed that its policies no longer reflected a true commitment to racial equality. These charges were symptomatic of the country’s changing racial climate and created tensions between the SRC’s black staff members and white administrators. The SRC’s response was to step away from the front lines of racial reform and refocus attention on its role as a clearinghouse of information in order to achieve its goal of promoting racial justice, protecting democratic rights, and broadening civic participation in the South.

The SRC expanded its range of concerns, collecting information and publishing a variety of reports on issues such as hunger, public health, migrant labor, and prison and urban conditions. In the 1970s, the SRC initiated a “governmental monitoring project” to study the social impact of federal laws and political agendas. In the 1980s, the SRC became an avid critic of the Reagan administration’s federal policies on welfare, voting rights, and affirmative action. Throughout the 1990s, the SRC sponsored a number of programs including Community Fellows for Public School Change and the Mississippi Delta Principals Institute, which promoted education reform, and Experts-in-Training, which sought to preserve minority voting rights. Moreover, the SRC provided leadership training and technical assistance to AmeriCorps, the volunteer organization established in 1993 by President Bill Clinton that incorporated Volunteers in Service to America and National Civilian Community Corps. In 1994, the SRC launched a landmark civil rights radio documentary project titled “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” as part of an educational program to assist the American public in understanding civil rights issues of the past and the future. Debuting in 1997 on Public Radio International, this award-winning radio documentary series traced the civil rights movement of five southern cities through first-person narratives.

From its inception, the SRC has remained true to its policy of regional development by helping southerners confront the fundamental social and economic problems that have plagued their region since the Second World War II. The SRC remains a viable organization, dedicated to correcting social injustices and creating opportunities for all people of the South.

Listerners Respond to "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?"

2011-06-02T19:52:00.000-07:00

Introduction by Barry E. Lee
From Southern Changes, Vol. 20, No. 2, 1998 pp. 26-28

"Without a doubt, this was the most impressive radio program I've ever heard," writes a listener from Fort Myers, Florida, about the Southern Regional Council's radio series Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Other listeners have commented on Will The Circle Be Unbroken? as a well-crafted and valuable oral history. Produced by George King, the series, which premiered in the spring of 1997 and was rebroadcast in 1998 on Public Radio International, highlights the contributions of ordinary people to the Civil Rights Movement in five Southern cities-Atlanta, Columbia, Jackson, Little Rock, and Montgomery-along with the music of the times. More than any other initiative sponsored by Council in the last twenty years, Will The Circle Be Unbroken? has generated an incredible flood of positive response and professional accolades in the field of radio broadcasting.

The tremendous effort that it took to produce the series and to get it broadcast on over 250 stations in thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia resulted in several prestigious awards. Among them are the 1997 Peabody Award, administered by the Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Georgia, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters' Golden Reel Award, and the 1997 Nonprint Media Award for Outstanding use of oral history by The Oral History Association.

But perhaps as significant has been the more than one-thousand email responses from those who heard portions of the series. Reading through the responses makes the power of radio undeniably evident. For many listeners, the voices and the music bring back a flood of memories. For others the series makes them feel personally connected to an important historical era. Not surprisingly, numerous listeners felt motivated to take personal responsibility for the current state of race relations and to work toward multiracial understanding and cooperation. And still others see the series as the most powerful and effective teaching tool they have encountered.

Here are a few samples of the email responses received since first aired.

To: info@unbrokencircle.org Subject: Unbroken Circle radio series

Congratulations on having produced a fantastic radio program series. We are fortunate to hear it and it has moved us to tears. How good it is that you have done this, and that people, particularly us white folks, are hearing these stories that we're sure are mostly unknown to mainstream America (and need to be known!). We are grateful for your work and proud of it.

If there is any way to purchase tapes of this, please let us know. Any kind of support we can offer, including membership in Southern Regional Council, please advise. We heard your program on Friday evenings, WQCS (88.9) out of Indian River Community College, Fort Pierce, Florida.

C. D. & S. G.

Melbourne, Florida

Subject: Your Civil Rights Series

I've really enjoyed the programs in this series. As I listen to the various interviews, I can see these people, the places, and the events unfolding. I live in Little Rock, I lived in Columbia, SC and Baton Rouge, LA. I met Rev. T.J. Jemmison. I met Mrs. Daisy Bates, here, in Little Rock. I remember the slaying of Dr. King: I was living in a suburb of Washington, D.C. at the time. The racial tension and riots were intense in that city. I am so glad you did these interviews before more of these Civil Rights activists have passed on.

You really tell the story of this Human Rights struggle very well. I can see this program taken further with the addition of visuals (videos, snapshots, slides, etc). It would make a great TV documentary or perhaps a college tele-course.

After this series finishes on NPR/PRI, where will it go? I'd like to suggest that it become a part of the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. It would add a great deal to what is already a fine display. Together, your audio and their audios, videos, displays, etc. could really explain well what happened during those times. It could become a very powerful, impressionable exhibit for all.

Subject: a bit more fan mail

I consider myself a public radio junkie. I like to think that this gives me pretty high standards. I just want to tell you that your show is one of the finest and most inspiring things I have ever listened to. History books, interviews with famous people-all excellent sources of information-simply do not have the power that these average, everyday heros have as they tell their stories.

I would be very interested in getting copies of the series to share with others not so fortunate to have heard it 'live.'

Thank you for your work,

A. S.

Subject: NPR series

What a wonderful series! It is poignant beyond belief. I am 48 years old, and consider myself a strong liberal and civil rights advocate. However, I had no idea what really went on. There is not enough affirmative action in the world to make up for the indignities that most African Americans faced. Thank you for helping to further educate the public. White Americans just don't have a clue, and that is partially why the outcome of the OJ trial was such an eyeopener.

Thank you again.

A. R. Elk Grove Village, Illinois

Subject: thank you

To the folks at Unbroken Circle:

I would just like to thank you for the incredible program that you have created on the Civil Rights movement. I sit rapt, listening to the voices of the times, the music, and the soothing and articulate narration of Vertamae Grosvenor. This documentary series is the most moving and informative I have ever heard. You all have done a spectacular job. I look forward to purchasing the audio cassettes of the series when they become available. I'll keep checking the website for more info.

Thanks again for this important series, as we can all use a little reminder of our history to renew our dedication to the struggle for justice.

Inspired,

D. P.

Subject: amazing series

Just wanted to thank you all for this extraordinary documentary! The range of interviews, the music, the historical research, the footage, the editing, the moments captured, the ability of the interviewers to garner such open interviews-all outstanding.

Again, public radio producing something that commercial radio could never justify to its advertising mavens.

How do I get tapes of the series? I'm working with an elementary school in a very low-income neighborhood in Washington, DC, and would love to use this series in the classroom.

Thanks again for this masterpiece!

J. F.,

Clean Water Action

Subject: Thanks for series

I want to congratulate you on such an excellent series. I have caught several segments in the last few weeks and they are outstandingly well done.

Most importantly, I want you to know that you have opened my eyes and my mind to a deeper understanding of the whole experience of Blacks in America. For all the racial rhetoric I've heard in my 31 years, nothing else has so directly confronted me with the historical facts and experiences of American Blacks. Ironically and unfortunately, most rhetoric from civil rights leaders today has been a hinderance rather than a help to my right understanding of the racial issues we confront. But the truth you present in simple, personal accounts is the most powerful tool to foster real racial understanding, especially for people like me, too young to have experienced it firsthand. Thank you.

M.K.

Subject: Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

Your series, Will The Circle Be Unbroken? is without a doubt the finest documentary I've ever heard. I have been riveted by every episode I've been able to catch, which unfortunately has not been all of them.

I was wondering if (i) you could provide me a list of the titles of each episode and (ii) indicate if the series is available on cassette or CD ROM.

Thank you for this program. You've raised the bar that all documentaries on the civil rights movement will have to measure up against.

S. K.

Chicago, Illinois

Subject: Your marvelous series!

I was a SNCC worker in southwest Georgia, 1963-5, and Atlanta, 1966. It was a life-changing experience for me, a rare opportunity to have an impact on history. Your series is superb. The mix of oral history, narrative by the incomparable Vertamae Grosvenor, and the civil rights songs and pop music of the time is very effective. While some productions on the civil rights movement are either just plain inaccurate or just don't convey the feel of it, your series makes me feel as I did while I was part of it.

I also appreciate the substantial focus on SNCC, which is often slighted in favor of the "hero" interpretation of history, which I hear your programs contradicting. The movement was indeed made up of ordinary people doing extraordinary things with great faith and courage.You know, back in 1961-2-3, victory was not at all assured. We knew at the time that we could end up on the losing side, or it could have taken decades to do what we did in three or four years. If it had not been for the bravery and sacrifice of many people who never had their names in the news or the history books, we "outside agitators" would have been vulnerable to anything the Klan and White Citizens Council had to dish out.

Anyway, congratulations for an excellent job. As a member of the board of the Mt. Zion Albany Civil Rights Movement Museum (yes, it's a mouthful), I would like to obtain a set of the tapes for our collection. Do you have a special rate for organizations like ours (non-profit 501(C)3)? Our objective is not so much to commemorate a time in history but to inspire the kids of today to do extraordinary things in their own way. Thanks again.

Subject: PBS Radio

I am 30 years old. I am white. I am a father of 4.5 children. I am a janitor. I find the galantry of the ordinary person who sacrificed and succeeded in the movements of civil rights awe inspiring. Listening to their stories I find their courage for overcoming inspiring. It is my hope that with them in my thoughts I may overcome and succeed. I applaud you for bringing their stories to all.

C. L.

Edmonds, Washington

Subject: Kudos

After listening to "Will The Circle Be Unbroken?" on WAMU tonight, I resolved to do what I've intended to do since the first episode: to write to thank you for a stunning series, and to offer my congratulations for radio at its best.

We are, I think, doubly blessed to have this series: it's radio at its best *and* history at its best and most vibrant. How wonderful that folks in generations not yet born will be able to hear the voices of those who gave so much!

Again, deepest thanks.

J. H.

Subject: Radio Series

I am just done listening to today's broadcast of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?. Your series is exceptionally informative, entertaining and emotionally charged. As a french national who arrived in the United States 5 years ago, it is important that I understand your racial history. My parents are originally from Martinique. Having been raised near the Swiss border, I have never experienced any form of racism while growing up. My American experience is slightly different. This is why your program is important to me. Have you, or are you thinking about publishing a book based on this program? What about the musical part? Could you tell me where I could buy some of the music you are using?

P.S.: The commentator is very good

S. M.L. B.

"Will the Circle Be Unboken?" Receives Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting

2011-06-02T19:40:00.001-07:00

News Release

From the files of the Southern Regional Council, 1998

The civil rights radio documentary series "Will The Circle Be Unbroken?," produced for the Southern Regional Council by George King, is among the 34 recipients of the 57th annual George Foster Peabody Awards announced on Thursday, April 2, 1998 by the University of Georgia's Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication . The awards were presented at a May 11 ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York.

Considered the broadcast and cable industry's most prestigious prize, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken?" was one of only five radio productions selected this year. The Peabodys differ from other industry awards because they are given solely on the basis of merit, rather than within designated categories.

"We feel that "Will The Circle Be Unbroken?" provides a unique and meaningful view from which to examine the civil rights movement as well as current efforts toward racial justice and we are extremely honored to have the Peabody Awards commend it," say SRC Executive Director Wendy Johnson.

"Will The Circle Be Unbroken?" in 26 half-hour programs, portrays the civil rights movement for what it truly was the work of everyday people who were the foot soldiers of resistance and social change. It goes beyond the headlines and to the streets, living rooms, courts, and church basements to present the stories of unknown black and white heroes whose acts of conscience and courage remain largely untold.

Going behind the scenes in five southern cities that represent the breadth of experiences and strategies that made up the movement, it relies on the words of the men and women who watched, made, and sometimes tried to stop one of America's most powerful social movements. Their riveting first-person narratives are interwoven through rare archival recordings, period music and narratives. "The Peabody Award for "Will The Circle Be Unbroken?" honors the thousands of women and men who stood together to challenge America," says Producer George King, "Their example inspires us and reminds us of the work to be done."

In addition to receiving the Peabody Award, a National Federation of Community Broadcasters' Golden Reel Award, and an Oral History Association 1997 Nonprint Media Award, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken?" has also received an overwhelming public response through email and telephone calls. Hundreds of email responses have been sent to the series' website, from Portland, Chicago, and Cincinnati among others, as well as from cities across the South. Many of these listeners, after praising the series and requesting copies, have expressed their desire to "get involved," extending the Council's network of supporters across the country.

The Southern Regional Council, founded in 1919 in response to race riots, has been the South's most vital interracial organization working to eliminate racial discrimination. A nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, the SRC continues to promote racial justice, protect democratic rights, and broaden civic participation in the southern United States.

"A Better Work of History"

2011-06-02T18:55:00.000-07:00

From the Journal of Multimedia History, Volume 3 (2000)

Will the Circle Be Unbroken? An Audio History of the Civil Rights Movement in Five Southern Communities and the Music of Those Times. Vertamae Grosvenor, narrator; George King, writer and producer; Worth Long and Randall Williams, senior producers. Southern Regional Council, Atlanta, 1997. Distributed by Public Radio International (PRI)

Over a decade ago Henry Hampton's Eyes on the Prize, the six-hour series on the civil rights movement, set the standard for television documentaries. Eyes on the Prize vividly charted the course of the civil rights movement from the 1955 murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi to the battle of Selma, Alabama ten years later. The series won so much acclaim that Hampton easily secured funding to produce eight additional one-hour episodes on the history of the civil rights movement. In Will the Circle Be Unbroken? the Southern Regional Council set out to do for radio what Eyes on the Prize did for television. Making use of hundreds of oral histories, taped interviews and memorable musical clips, the producers of Will the Circle Be Unbroken? succeed in meeting their ambitious goal. Like Eyes on the Prize, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? (which originally aired on public radio stations) won instantaneous praise from reviewers. Without a doubt it will serve as a model for other radio productions in years to come. In many ways, the two series tell the same story. Both chronicle the battle to desegregate schools, white resistance to the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, the rise of nonviolent direct-action protest, the emergence of Martin Luther King Jr. as a national leader, and the broad-based effort to overcome Jim Crow in Mississippi—the bulwark of white supremacy.

In some instances, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? uses audio portions of the interviews utilized by the producers of Eyes on the Prize. While the latter has the advantage of riveting visual material, the producers of Will the Circle Be Unbroken? draw on the recollections of men and women steeped in a tradition of story telling, many of whom deliver "chillingly vivid" descriptions of the past, to borrow the words of one New York Times writer.

As good as Eyes on the Prize is, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? is a better work of history. Eyes on the Prize tends to reinforce the mistaken view that the civil rights movement was primarily a national effort, orchestrated by national leaders who aimed at attaining federal civil rights legislation and favorable judicial decrees.

In contrast, by explicitly linking the civil rights movement to struggles that took place in five particular communities, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? clarifies the most important lesson of the civil rights years, namely, that it was ordinary people who united to forge a mass movement committed to overcoming the deeply entrenched caste system that was the American way of life. By examining the civil rights movement from a community perspective, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? also shows, to borrow Robert Norrell's words, that "the narrative line" of the civil rights movement was "exceedingly long, exhaustively crooked, and extensively smudged."

Will the Circle Be Unbroken? consists of thirteen hours of oral (and aural) history divided into twenty-six parts. (Each part begins with the song that gave the series its title, which people will find themselves singing even weeks after they have listened to the series.) It focuses on the development of the civil rights movement in five particular communities and their environs: Columbia, South Carolina; Montgomery, Alabama; Little Rock, Arkansas; Jackson, Mississippi; and Atlanta, Georgia. Each community study explores a different theme, with some overlap.

The episodes on Columbia, South Carolina examine the battle to desegregate public education, which, as the series demonstrates, stretched back to early equalization suits filed by the statewide NAACP against Clarendon County, South Carolina. Indeed, the landmark Brown decision should carry the title Briggs v. Elliot, since Briggs was filed before the Brown suit and preceded it alphabetically. (The Briggs case was one of five heard by the Supreme Court in the case that came to be known as Brown v. Board of Education.) More important, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? makes clear that the Supreme Court decision to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson depended on the perseverance of ordinary people, such as Rev. Joseph Albert DeLaine and Harry and Eliza Briggs, in challenging the racial status quo in the South. The episodes on Columbia also remind listeners that the civil rights movement enjoyed the support of a select number of white southerners. Most notably, U.S. District Court Judge Waties Waring, a scion of South Carolina society, repeatedly ruled in favor of the NAACP. He did so in spite of physical threats and attacks by the Ku Klux Klan—as well as ostracism by his peers.

The episodes on Montgomery, Alabama, retell the story of the Montgomery bus boycott. Sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks, the boycott lasted for nearly a year and signaled a new stage in the civil rights movement. Much like Eyes on the Prize, Will the Circle Be Unbroken discusses the emergence of Martin Luther King Jr. as a national leader following the role he played in Montgomery. Various figures—from E.D. Nixon, local leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, whom Parks first called first upon her arrest, to Rev. Ralph Abernathy, minister at another Montgomery church—reflect on King's power while reminding listeners of the broad-based nature of the movement in Montgomery.

The programs on Jackson, Mississippi, focus on the key role played by Medgar Evers in the early years of the direct-action phase of the civil rights movement and the dangers faced by those who led the fight. Evers was assassinated on his doorstep by Byron de la Beckwith, a self-acclaimed white supremacist who went unpunished for over thirty years. One of the most gripping segments describes Evers' funeral, which, had it not been for the heroic efforts of Assistant Attorney General John Doar, could have turned into another Soweto, the infamous massacre of black South Africans following their protests against the system of apartheid.

The episodes on Atlanta, Georgia, center on the city's unique history. Wanting to build and maintain a reputation as a progressive community, white and black leaders steered Atlanta on a relatively peaceful and less confrontational course than that experienced by many other southern communities. To understand fully how Atlanta was able to avoid violent confrontation, the producers dig deep into the city's past, particularly the emergence of a politically active black middle class in the early decades of the twentieth century. By doing so, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? reinforces a view increasingly accepted by scholars, that the civil rights movement did not begin in the 1950s, but rather was part of a long history of black struggle.

While focusing on five communities, the producers take a number of detours, some of which are interesting and memorable. One show, on the shooting of students at Jackson State University in 1970, for example, leaves listeners wondering why the Kent State shootings received so much more attention in the mainstream media than those at Jackson State. In turn, this prompts one to consider the persistence of racism in the criminal justice system and media coverage of crime. The segment on the rise of black political power in Atlanta, similarly, leaves the listener with a concrete sense of one of the main achievements of the civil rights movement, black political power, and the limitations that black leaders in urban areas face due to white flight to suburbia and deindustrialization. Too often, however, these detours are episodic and lack depth. Nearly every discussion of the legacy of the movement is disjointed. The detour into the history of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and "Freedom Summer" (1964), is rushed and moves away from the community-based focus of the rest of the program. Likewise, the segment on Montgomery after the bus boycott is thin.

Without a doubt, the existence of solid secondary sources and oral histories has shaped the final product. Where the producers could draw on works such as Richard Kluger's masterful examination of the battle to desegregate public education, Simple Justice, and oral histories of lesser-known civil rights activists, such as Rev. Albert DeLaine and Modjeska Simkins, the results are wonderful. Where scholarly studies and oral sources are few, the results are less fulfilling. On the whole, however, teachers of all grade levels could make fruitful use of the series; libraries would be well advised to add it to their audio-visual collections. In Will the Circle Be Unbroken? the Southern Regional Council has produced a tremulously impressive program that should be heard both by those familiar and unfamiliar with the history of the civil rights movement.

Peter B. Levy
York College, York, PA

Lillian Smith Book Award 2011 Jurors

2011-06-02T04:31:00.000-07:00

The Southern Re gio nal Co un cil (SRC), founded in 1919 to combat racial injustice, established the Lillian Smi th Book Awards in 1966 to recognize writing which extends the legacy of the outspoken writer who challenged all Americans on issues of social and racial justice.

This year’s Lillian Smith jury is again chaired by Mary A. Twining, Emeritus Professor of English and Folklore at Clark Atlanta University. Noted for her study of the Sea Island Communities of Georgia and South Carolina, and their cultural ties to West African culture, her published work has included Sea Island Roots: African Presence in the Carolinas and Georgia, which she edited with Keith E. Baird (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press 1991); Names and Naming in the Sea Islands, a contribution to the Crucible of Carolina: Essays in the Development of Gullah Language and Culture, edited by Michael Montgomery and Louise Ferrell, University of Georgia Press, 1994; The New Nomads, Art, Life, and Lure of Migrant workers in New York State, published in The Journal of the New York Folklore Society 1987; and numerous contributions to the Journal of Black Studies.

Dr. Jerry Ward is Distinguished Professor of English and African American World Studies at Dillard University. Dr. Ward is widely recognized as one of the leading experts on Richard Wright. He is editor of The Richard Wright Encyclopedia, published by Greenwood Press; founding member of the Richard Wright Circle; and author of The Katrina Papers.

Returning juror Toby A Graham is Director of the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia and Director of the University’s Collaborative Digitization Program, which partners with libraries, archives, and other institutions to provide online access to key collections on Georgia history and life. He works to provide a seamless digital library on the state's history and culture. He also serves as Co-Director and Principal Investigator for the Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative, providing Web-based access to historical news film and related primary sources on the Civil Rights Movement from institutions across the United States. Toby leads digital production for Georgia HomePLACE, an innovative project which strives enhance access to local and family history resources in Georgia. He is author of A Right to Read: Segregation and Civil Rights in Alabama’s Public Libraries, 1900-1965.

David Ingebretsen, former Director of the ACLU of Mississippi, has served as proprietor Mississippi’s leading independent bookstores, including Yellow Dog Books in Madison and Union Street Books in Canton.

James Taylor, our newest juror, manages the Atlanta Fulton Public Library’s Library Express and also hosts the System’s Writers in Focus.

Mary Twining Baird Returns as Jury Chair for the 2011 Lillian Smith Book Awards

2011-05-28T09:59:00.000-07:00

The Southern Re gio na l Co un cil (SRC), founded in 1919 to combat racial injustice, established the Lillian Smi th Book Awards in 1966 to recognize writing which extends the legacy of the outspoken writer who challenged all Americans on issues of social and racial justice.

Since 2004 the awards have been presented by SRC in a partnership with the University of Georgia Libraries, whose Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library houses a historic collection of Lillian Smith's letters and manuscripts. Since 2007 this partnership has also included Georgia Center for the Book, and the awards ceremony is now presented on the Sunday of the Labor Day Weekend as part of the Decatur Book Festival in Decatur, Georgia. Excerpts from the 2008 and 2009 awards ceremonies may be viewed through the links on this page and through the Video Bar.

The 2011 awards ceremony will be held at the Decatur Branch of the Dekalb County Courthouse on Sunday, September 4th.

The jury for this year's awards is again chaired by Mary A. Twining, emeritus professor of English and Folklore at Clark Atlanta University. Professor Twining previously served on the faculties of a variety of institutions including the University of Kentucky and the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Professor Twining is noted for her study of the Sea Island Communities of Georgia and South Carolina, and their cultural ties to West African culture through language, cultural habits and spirituality. Her published work has included Sea Island Roots: African Presence in the Carolinas and Georgia, which she edited with Keith E. Baird (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press 1991); Names and Naming in the Sea Islands, a contribution to the Crucible of Carolina: Essays in the Development of Gulla Language and Culture, edited by Michael Montgomery and Louise Ferrell, University of Georgia Press, 1994; The New Nomads, Art, Life, and Lure of Migrant workers in New York State, published in The Journal of the New York Folklore Society 1987; and numerous contributions to the Journal of Black Studies.

She has also contributed music reviews to Southern Changes, the Journal of The Southern Regional Council.

Toby Graham: Lillian Smith Book Award Juror

2011-05-28T07:52:00.000-07:00

P. Toby Graham
Director, Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Director, Digital Library
University of Georgia

Since 2004 the awards have been presented by SRC in a partnership with the U ni v er sity of Georgia Libraries, whose Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library houses a historic collection of Lillian Smith's letters and manuscripts. Since 2007 this partnership has also included Georgia Center for th e Book, and the awards ceremony is now presented on the Sunday of the Labor Day Weekend as part of the Decatur Book Festival in Decatur, Georgia. Excerpts from the 2008 AND 2009 awards ceremonies may be viewed through the links on this page and through the Video Bar. The 2011 awards ceremony will be held at the Decatur Branch of the Dekalb County Courthouse in Decatur, Georgia on Sunday, September 4th.

This year's jury will once again include Toby Graham, director of the University of Georgia's collaborative digitization program, which partners with libraries, archives, and other institutions to provide online access to key collections on Georgia history and life. Based at the University of Georgia Libraries, the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) is an initiative of GALILEO, Georgia's virtual library. The DLG endeavors to provide a seamless digital library on the state's history and culture connecting users to 105 digital collections from 65 institutions and 100 agencies of government (approx. 500K objects). http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/

Graham is Director of the Hargrett Library at the University of Georgia, which consists of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Georgiana Collection, University Archives, and Records Management.

Graham serves as co-director and principal investigator for the Civil Rights Digital Library (CRDL) initiative (in-process), providing Web-based access to historical news film and related primary sources on the Movement from institutions across the U.S. CRDL also includes an educator resources component designed to aid the use of CRDL in the learning process. CRDL is supported in part by an IMLS National Leadership Grant.

Toby leads digital production for Georgia HomePLACE, a partnership between the Georgia Public Library Service and GALILEO to enhance access to local and family history resources.

Graham oversees the Georgia Newspaper Project (GNP), which microfilms 200 current newspapers on an ongoing basis as well as historical content. The GNP generates approximately 2-3 million pages of microfilmed newsprint annually.

Formerly, Graham served as Head, Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg.

Graham earned his Ph.D. in library and information studies, M.L.S., and M.A. in history at the University of Alabama. He is recipient of the Alabama Author Award for Non-Fiction (2004), ALISE/Eugene Garfield Outstanding Dissertation Award (2000), and Phyllis Dain Library History Dissertation Award (1999). He is author of A Right to Read: Segregation and Civil Rights in Alabama's Public Libraries, 1900-196

Joseph Crespino and Wesley Hogan Receive Lillian Smith Book Awards for 2008

2011-05-27T18:23:00.000-07:00

As we look forward to this year's Lillian Smith Book Award Ceremony, scheduled for September 4, 2011, we also reflect on the moving presentations at the 2008 Award Ceremony.

The first award was presented to by Joseph Crespino, author of In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution.

In the 1960s, Mississippi was the heart of white southern resistance to the civil-rights movement. To many, it was a backward-looking society of racist authoritarianism and violence that was sorely out of step with modern liberal America. White Mississippians, however, had a different vision of themselves and their country, one so persuasive that by 1980 they had become important players in Ronald Reagan's newly ascendant Republican Party.
In this ambitious reassessment of racial politics in the deep South, Joseph Crespino reveals how Mississippi leaders strategically accommodated themselves to the demands of civil-rights activists and the federal government seeking to end Jim Crow, and in so doing contributed to a vibrant conservative countermovement. Crespino explains how white Mississippians linked their fight to preserve Jim Crow with other conservative causes--with evangelical Christians worried about liberalism infecting their churches, with cold warriors concerned about the Communist threat, and with parents worried about where and with whom their children were schooled. Crespino reveals important divisions among Mississippi whites, offering the most nuanced portrayal yet of how conservative southerners bridged the gap between the politics of Jim Crow and that of the modern Republican South.
This book lends new insight into how white Mississippians gave rise to a broad, popular reaction against modern liberalism that recast American politics in the closing decades of the twentieth century.
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The second award was presented to Wesley Hogan, author of Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC's Dream for a New America.

How did the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee break open the caste system in the American South between 1960 and 1965? In this innovative study, Wesley Hogan explores what SNCC accomplished and, more important, how it fostered significant social change in such a short time. She offers new insights into the internal dynamics of SNCC as well as the workings of the larger civil rights and Black Power movement of which it was a part.
As Hogan chronicles, the members of SNCC created some of the civil rights movement's boldest experiments in freedom, including the sit-ins of 1960, the rejuvenated Freedom Rides of 1961, and grassroots democracy projects in Georgia and Mississippi. She highlights several key players--including Charles Sherrod, Bob Moses, and Fannie Lou Hamer--as innovators of grassroots activism and democratic practice.
Breaking new ground, Hogan shows how SNCC laid the foundation for the emergence of the New Left and created new definitions of political leadership during the civil rights and Vietnam eras. She traces the ways other social movements--such as Black Power, women's liberation, and the antiwar movement--adapted practices developed within SNCC to apply to their particular causes. Many Minds, One Heart ultimately reframes the movement and asks us to look anew at where America stands on justice and equality today.

Join us for this year's ceremony.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

DeKalb County Courthouse

Decatur, Georgia