Holding Hands: African-Americans Reclaim the Rural South
Stack, Carol
The exodus of rural African-Americans from the South to northern cities had all but ceased by the 1970s. Since then, the process has reversed. Black Americans have been leaving an urban economy...
...Beard...
...they will know better than Washington bureaucrats how best to use these resources...
...Wages in all these industries averaged just over five dollars an hour...
...to political skills they honed in the cities as they raised families, ran neighborhood organizations, and worked in government agencies...
...We had renovated the building and completely furnished it...
...Beard...
...Nonetheless, three women believed that the time had come for an organization that would try to tackle county problems hands-on...
...When this all got started we could have been in, you know, competition...
...Another said it was a point of pride for him that in his county they served very few of the eligible famiSPRING • 1996 • 87 Race and Politics lies and that poor people had more self-respect because of it...
...Meanwhile, in the short run, she was taking her Amway products—the same lotions and cleaning products she sold to her friends in Newark— to every town for miles around...
...Their misdeeds lay bare the underside of the current debate over entitlements and the move toward decentralization...
...They are far from big cities, far from Sunbelt industry, way below national and even state averages for income, and linked historically to the traditional southern cash crops...
...Or, if there is to be any federal role in supporting the poor or the weak, let it take the form of block grants, lump sums given to the states...
...They wouldn't have to pay rent, but every inch of the building needed renovation...
...At the commission meeting, Mrs...
...But local attempts at sabotage continued...
...One administrator told her she didn't believe in government subsidies...
...Isabella smiled...
...It also gives rise to disturbing reflections about current policy on poverty and race...
...They gave their organization a name—MAC, Mothers and Children, Inc.—and they set up a timetable for fund raising, site selection, and preparing a building for the mandated preliminary inspection...
...Others, made stronger by the demands of urban life, came back to help their kin or out of a sense of mission to redeem a lost community...
...But serious and sustainable services in desperately poor rural counties require funding that turkey raffles and fish fries can never provide by themselves...
...She began by documenting the situation...
...By the end of 1982, the women had reached their goal of a hundred members in Chestnut County and had signed up fifty-eight members in Powell County and thirty-one in Harden County...
...In the late 1960s, with little or no opportunity at home, they moved north...
...Let government withdraw from the affairs of the poor, then...
...But these activities have brought them into a collision course with the established white hierarchies, which have done everything in their power to block the creation of grassroots organizations by the poor...
...The experience of the organization they created, "Holding Hands," is like that of many other new organizations in the regions I came across—groups with names like Mothers and Children, Inc., Chestnut Action for Teenage Students, The Alliance of Women Workers, and The Coalition for Employee Ownership...
...Most of the commissioners were like-minded, but Maude Allen had anticipated the tone of the meeting and at her suggestion MAC had packed the meeting room with the children who were set to attend the new center...
...Black Americans have been leaving an urban economy that failed them and returning South...
...If there was somebody without heat, they would bring a load of wood...
...Two food-processing plants in Chestnut County employed more than a thousand workers, and three other such plants in nearby counties employed two thousand more...
...day care funding was approved by a murmured voice vote...
...Isabella kept going too, raising money for Holding Hands, and looking for work herself...
...The organization 86 • DISSENT Race and Politics was honored by several black churches in the region...
...This time, the social services department presented the matter to the county commissioners, who were supposed to approve all funds coming into the county...
...Beard made no secret of her department's opposition to public support of day care...
...Isabella spoke with public officials, who admitted that they turned back federal programs that permit local options, funds like Title XX, year after year...
...SPRING • 1996 • 85 Race and Politics Chestnut County (for the sake of privacy, I have changed the names of places and people) has some twenty thousand inhabitants, 60 percent of them black...
...These networks are indispensable...
...Holding Hands and MAC, Inc., represent a new type of organizing activity in poor rural communities...
...By 1986, MAC was operating six safe and sanitary day care centers in three different counties...
...The story of this return migration is one of hardships, but it is also the story of how people came back intent on applying hard lessons learned up North to build new lives...
...For years, it turns out, officials in these This article is excerpted from Call To Home: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South...
...Unemployment was high, but there were many more people working than not working, which to Isabella's way of thinking meant that demand for day care services must be strong...
...Isabella Beasley worked for a state agency in Newark that administered federal funds for Head Start...
...Such a place could never pass even a fire inspection, much less meet minimal safety and sanitary standards— and it had a waiting list...
...They sat together in the first three rows of grownup-sized chairs...
...Shantee Owens worked in the Bronx in public administration...
...After eighteen months, the day care center passed the mandatory site inspection and they received official notification of their first grant award...
...Collie Mae and her husband followed, then Shantee returned...
...to painful lessons they had begun learning when the first of them moved home again...
...such a question demonstrated sophistication about the hard realities of local politics...
...Each success, however modest, continues to provoke anxiety and resistance among local white bureaucrats...
...In 1980, Isabella and her family moved back home...
...While working herAmway territory, Isabella visited all the day care centers she could find— scattered here and there in private homes, rundown storefronts, and church basements...
...Something as simple as that—little things that would make a difference...
...and she knew the people to call upon...
...Bureaucrats stalled, politicians filed to reduce the allocation, clerks said they couldn't locate the funds, officials forgot about appointments and forgot to file papers and forgot how to write a check...
...Over the next several months Collie Mae and her committee arranged for MAC to use the old Shell gas station in Chowan Springs for their initial demonstration project—a model day care center for several counties...
...What they need, people tell us, is not government handouts but individual or community self-reliance...
...Corporations in places like Powell and Chestnut counties have never supported local organizations in the black community...
...Since the funds would go through her office, notice of the grant was sent to the county director of social services in Chowan Springs, a Mrs...
...Isabella knew that federal money was available for day care in communities too poor to afford it...
...If somebody's porch steps were broken, if a person needed a ride to town to see if she could get food stamps— or maybe it was just a matter of a sack of groceries to get through the end of the month...
...SPRING • 1996 • 89...
...Dues were set at ten dollars a month, and the initial membership goal was one hundred women per county in three counties...
...When local power-holders attempt to subvert attempts by black communities to provide even obviously needed services—firewood, say, or safe child care—only a fool would trust these authorities to administer block grants...
...Isabella recalled an organization in Newark called Helping Hands, which got them started on a name: Holding Hands...
...Eventually, the commission informed MAC that the funding was secure, and that it would be administered by none other than the county director of 88 • DISSENT Race and Politics social services, their good friend Mrs...
...A men's underwear factory employed 210 people, and a furniture-maker employed more than 400...
...In researching the story of the return to these places, I criss-crossed nine counties in the Carolinas from the 1980s through to the 1990s...
...The good folks there are closer to "their people," the story goes...
...For many, the destinations are rural communities that by all statistical measures are some of the least promising places in America—places the Department ofAgriculture calls "persistent poverty counties...
...We had checked eligibility and assembled a group of children—not all black children, either— it was strictly on income...
...Isabella went over Mrs...
...And most of the jobs in Chestnut and surrounding counties paid minimum wage or thereabouts and offered little or nothing in employee benefits—which meant that unsubsidized day care services must be way beyond what most working people in Chestnut could afford...
...I got three phone calls in one day from people who would not identify themselves...
...This change in welfare policy, terminating federal guarantees of cash assistance for poor children, will have frightening consequences, especially in rural regions of the Southeast...
...These projects might be aided by large industries, but the precedent is not auspicious...
...Families whose houses burned up got a hundred dollars, plus household items and food...
...People found notes on their cars...
...There were all the little tables and chairs, and the mats, the toys, the playground...
...Those who had never left Chestnut County had also formed organizations around social issues, but never to the same effect...
...If one group was having trouble getting the money—political problems—well, one of us from another county would call the state capital for them, help them out with our direct contacts...
...The maximum grant for a family was set at two loads of wood plus a hundred dollars, which usually worked out to fifty dollars in cash and fifty dollars in food...
...Nor will contributions from the handful of black business and professional people in these communities suffice...
...The MAC women learned to maneuver around her, and to become accustomed to delays, broken promises, unmet deadlines, and the unmet needs of parents who trusted them...
...From then on local opposition to MAC was limited to behind-the-scenes tactics...
...As efforts in grassroots mobilization and self-help, they cannot fail to impress...
...In the midst of so much ill will, outside money is a critical resource...
...The county social services department had advertised for someone with expertise in administering federal funds...
...and on Eula Grant, who had become a vice-president of Holding Hands...
...But then we started helping one another out...
...And in the summertime, in some of those little old houses that had no ventilation, when the air would get so hot you could see the heat waves ripple around the room, the club could buy a fan...
...Going home requires reworking established relationships between men and women, parents and children, blacks and whites—and between those who never left the South and those who are coming back...
...Such backgrounds established these women locally as people to be contended with...
...In the mean-spirited, anti-government mood of the 1990s, indeed, everyone seems eager to pronounce on what the poor really need...
...Beard's head to her new friend in the state capital...
...They could help when there was an old person who couldn't get around any more without a walker, and couldn't afford a walker...
...They thrive by virtue of the help that flows from one organization to another...
...White folks don't want us organizing, but then they never stop talking how we can't do for ourselves...
...Published by arrangement with Basic Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc...
...She called on Collie Mae, of course...
...In 1980, census-takers had counted fewer than 1,000 people in the county seat, Chowan Springs, and just 467 in Rosedale, the next-largest town...
...No Head Start, and no day care—zero federal dollars...
...She was in a position to make a big difference in the lives of a lot of people...
...The women from The Working Women's Curb Market, a highway produce stand, provided MAC with "office" space—a card table and rusty filing cabinet in the storage shed behind the stand...
...Isabella was interviewed, but the director brushed her off immediately, saying that her background was not what they needed...
...More than three hundred children were supervised by trained staffs...
...These communities share a certain statistical profile...
...But everyone was shook up by an article about their group that was published in the local newspaper...
...And the parents and ministers and MAC board members who had come prepared to speak never had to say a word...
...Block grants—that is, lump sums of federal money given to the states for the general purpose of helping the poor—are a step in the wrong direction...
...A couple of weeks later the attacks got personal and Collie Mae was understandably upset...
...He reviewed their work...
...That was exactly the idea, holding their neighbors' hands, helping out at a basic level...
...They found jobs selling life insurance and cleaning motels while they worked their way through one or two years at the local college...
...A white reporter wrote that minding other people's business is not well received in the county...
...A variety of worker cooperatives, coalitions for economic justice, worker advocacy organizations, and small businesses spun off...
...This rhetoric comes from those who were never much concerned about the well-being of out-of-work and needy citizens in the first place...
...New leaders, who honed their political and organizational skills in established organizations, were encouraged to develop sorely needed services and advocacy groups...
...The story begins with three women, Collie Mae Gamble, Isabella Beasley, and Shantee Owens, who grew up in Chestnut County as daughters of sharecroppers and as best friends in the 1960s...
...Because cutting wood had become a major club activity, the bylaws were amended to admit men as members...
...We had everything but the funds...
...But the origins actually went much further back, to ways of dealing with the world they developed in their youth...
...Just as MAC emerged from the training ground of Holding Hands, other groups began to make a difference in the 1990s...
...Dogged self-help can support some small initiatives, but where many people lack the minimal necessities of life, government action has to play a role...
...hardscrabble rural counties withheld federal entitlements from their intended recipients...
...Anywhere she knew anybody—which was virtually everywhere in Chestnut County's six hundred square miles— she sold her wares and visited and learned about what was going on...
...Almost 40 percent of Chestnut County's population—nearly eight thousand people— lived below the poverty line...
...By the end of 1981, Holding Hands was incorporated as a tax-exempt, nonprofit organization...
...Eager to lay groundwork for a close working relationship with state officials, they took a preliminary draft in person to the chief deputy director in the day care section of the Department of Human Services in the state capital...
...But I say let's just keep going—cause we're helping...
...The returnees are creating networks of mutual support, institutions for community action...
...The leaders of Holding Hands would help...
...Shifting the locus of responsibility for entitlements is not just a matter of changing where the money is spent—it also shifts the moral responsibility for the poor to a different set of policy makers...
...Conditions in most of them shocked her: at one overcrowded private operation she noticed missing stairboards, a broken window with jagged glass at the children's eye level, a jug of bleach sitting out on the bathroom floor, filthy for diaper changing, Kool-aid instead of milk at mealtime...
...They also supplied sheets, high chairs, toys, kitchen tables— whatever people needed...
...After three years, MAC, Inc., was able to change the funding process so that money went directly to their projects...
...They threatened that we better watch out, we're asking for trouble . . . . Isabella got calls, too, and she also got letters, and there were at least three letters we know about that were sent to Social Services to try and discredit us...
...At the first meeting, which drew women from three nearby counties, Maude Allen asked how they planned to obtain the necessary application forms...
...She was baffled by his rejection until she traveled the backroads of the county for a while and realized that Chestnut had no projects whatsoever funded by the type of federal programs she had been working with in New Jersey...
...I worried the chief deputy director to death trying to find out what happened to our funds...
...Nonetheless, Isabella believed she could organize an effort to bring them to Chestnut County...
...Some people were drawn home by rootless, jobless urban decay...
...they made a point of consulting him about every detail...
...The inspiration for "Holding Hands" could be traced to a backyard barbecue in late October 1981...
...Shantee told me: Our saving grace was that we created alliances across at least three counties...
...Local officials preferred not to provide poor people with such services as day care, even if the services could be provided without spending a penny of local money...
...We had interviewed day care teachers and assistants, and we had begun training...
...Copyright © 1996 Carol Stack...
...They cooked, ironed, and did farm chores for their families...
...Local tax support could also help, but political resistance has remained steady...
...That is, she would make it impossible for MAC to use the funds...
...The South has regained from the cities of the North the half-million black citizens it lost during the 1960s...
...The only federal money that the social services office administered went for Food Stamps and AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), even though other programs existed that were designed specifically for areas with high levels of poverty—a description that fit Chestnut if it fit anywhere...
...What is happening today may have dire consequences for AfricanAmerican families living in rural communities in the Southeast...
...At the same time, they looked for employment themselves...
...And that was when the trouble began...
...But the experience of those returning to their rural roots lays bare a dismal reality...
...Isabella reminded everybody that government bureaucracy moved slowly...
...Back home these women began to focus on local social conditions and the poverty surrounding them...
...She immediately announced that she would return every penny of the money to the state...
...Blacks have traditionally made up the majority of the population in such places, though the decades of black exodus have sometimes changed the local racial balance...
...Moreover, she knew how to apply for it...
...Very few of the rural counties with a black majority applied for Title XX day care funds...
...Holding Hands got off on a decidedly businesslike foot...
...Fifty new full-time jobs and a couple of dozen part-time jobs were created to staff the centers...
...By the end of the second year, Holding Hands was becoming known...
...Collie Mae Gamble got a job in Camden, New Jersey, processing bids on government contracts...
...There is still time for a different ending...
...The only way was to circumvent the local social service agencies altogether...
...One thing she learned was why she was having such a hard time finding a job—why she had been rejected for one job in particular that had sounded like it would be exactly up her alley...
...they encouraged each other to stay in school...
...After this, the MAC activists began writing a grant application...
...Or if there was somebody who just wanted to learn to write his name—well, they could help with that...
...the organizers would have to drive to the state capital and request the forms in person...
...I talked with white public officials across the region, but my study primarily took place among a broad cross section ofAfrican-Americans who had gone back to the rural South: professionals, workers, unemployed workers, land owners and people who had lost their land, Vietnam veterans, people starting small businesses, and experienced but out-of-work bureaucrats...
...Such sweeping readjustment is always emotionally and socially perilous...
...If block grants are enacted, the next chapter of this story can be written even before this new intervention hits America's back roads...
...In these localities the people who proclaim most loudly the urgency of self-help—the bureaucrats and politicians—are the same people who work to thwart actual self-help organizations...
...By 1995 these numbers had doubled and serious institution building had taken root within these counties...
...The concerns they unearthed at the barbecue could hardly have been more basic...
...and on somebody else recommended by Shantee, a woman named Maude Allen, who worked as director of CATS, Chestnut Action for Teenage Students...
...The chief deputy director sent notice of the grant once again to Chestnut County...
Vol. 43 • April 1996 • No. 2
