Traveling in Wallace Country
LEAMER, LAURENCE
NATIONAL REPORTS Traveling in Wallace Country By Laurence Learner f f ^^ou ought to see Alabama," > George Wallace told me in the state capital in Montgomery. "You ought to see our progress, see...
...They intermingle but there is no communication...
...The white townspeople, no matter how liberal their beliefs or how noble their actions, know almost nothing about the famed school that gives their town its prominence...
...Well, man, just what do you think looting in the cities is...
...I walked across the street while several girls lobbed stones at me and followed along parallel to the crowd as it approached Foster's home—an unexceptional house with a large picture window that stands on the edge of campus...
...Still, the "Never" to integration uttered by many white Tuskegee citizens has changed in some cases to a begrudging, unheralded "Yes...
...I will say this though...
...In the snack bar, however, it is possible to talk to some of the activist students...
...You ought to see our progress, see how whites and Negroes get along together...
...Laurence Leamer is a Ford Study Fellow in International Development at the University of Oregon...
...One-half never eat fruit, and only one-third eat eggs regularly...
...There is no question that the preponderant (85 per cent) and well-educated Negro townspeople have wrested major control from the white oligarchy...
...In remembering, it seemed that there had been many others who had borne me no special grudge...
...The results shocked even the researchers themselves...
...For me the 300 separate students had become one angry ebony tide as they streamed down to Foster's house...
...In Tuskegee I had seen what is often considered the most progressive community in Alabama...
...But, gawddamn it, what...
...Nor is it a disinterested ignorance, for it simmers with curiosity and suspicion...
...Taking the room key...
...It is a struggle waged by an intelligent student minority, and it leaves no politically concerned person untouched...
...When the ballots were counted there was so much unfairness it just killed some of their hopes...
...How the grass turned green in the springtime," wrote former student Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man, "and how the mocking birds fluttered their tails and sang, how the moon shone down on the buildings, how the bell in the chapel rang out the precious short-lived hours...
...One runs from shattered glass, to black apocalypse, a charge of black brigades...
...Instead leaders addressed the crowd, impressing on them the importance of their struggle...
...It just may be that the only answer—the only way to break the racist stranglehold—is through the militancy of Black youth...
...At six the next evening, students staged a protest meeting on the steps of the dining hall, a large domed building that also serves as the student union and snack bar...
...the other moves from rapport and empathy, to commitment, demands, threatened violence, and on to a very real Black Power...
...But Foster was not at home and it seemed that the meeting would break up, that the students would wander back to campus exhilarated and perhaps ashamed...
...There simply has to be some alternative to violence, I told myself...
...No...
...The expression I hear frequently is, 'They aren't doing this,' and 'They didn't do so and so,' and I ask them, 'What are you doing?' Now of course this is the talk of an earlier generation...
...Federal funds, such as subsidy and parity payments, are simply not getting to poor Negro farmers...
...Like the song, 'I've Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up To Me.' You can get to a stage where you're so far down, you literally have reached a point where you've got to do something...
...Soon after the court proceedings, over 40 families were ordered off their land...
...I left Tuskegee the following morning weE before even the most immediate problems had been resolved...
...In the gathering dusk speakers talked to several hundred students spread casually up the steps of the dining hall and down on the pavement and out onto the grassy lawn...
...They are trying to blame others—and others are to blame to a considerable extent—but they themselves are not assuming enough personal responsibility for moving themselves ahead...
...They tell me, 'You aren't able to function effectively in this new society which we are creating.' " This "new society" also has little room for whites, regardless of their political beliefs or performances, and the most active, most articulate students have no time to talk to whites...
...Let's go to Dr...
...People here don't have anything and they have a hell of a lot going against them...
...One does find an organization—the Southern Rural Research Project?that is recording the plight of Alabama Negro farmers...
...Although Negroes far outnumber whites, they hold no political positions...
...Soon the students divided into three groups and beneath the shattered glass began discussing their problems...
...Honky, get out...
...Most Negro churches in the county refuse to take part in civil rights activity...
...Still, Sumter County Negroes have made attempts to gain political power through massive voter registration and election campaigns...
...K." "Don't you remember me...
...They're surrounded by poor Blacks and they're treated just as bad if not worse...
...The white-trimmed red brick buildings, close-cropped emerald grass, shrubs, and paths, bring out the lyrical in visitor and student alike...
...As the Trailways bus tunneled through the night between Selma and Montgomery—retracing that historic route—I thought back on what I had seen in Alabama and tried to come to some conclusions...
...Although the idyllic campus belies its inner turmoil, a struggle is taking place over Black Power...
...The docility of a large proportion of the black population is especially striking...
...Thus business is transacted, meetings take place, pleasantries are exchanged, but the gulf of ignorance is not narrowed...
...Can't you cats understand...
...That's what the folks just don't have, and if you don't have it you never will be free...
...According to field workers, practically nothing is being done to better conditions...
...While Negro employes worked in the back of his store, Gregg admitted: "One of the main things detrimental to decent relations is that there is no communication between the races...
...How are you doing," he asked...
...As I sat on the front steps of the guest house waiting for a taxi, a student came up to me...
...now there are about 200...
...Despite such progress an enormous gulf of ignorance separates the two races...
...I had had no idea...
...There's as large a percentage of poor whites in Alabama as poor Blacks...
...I'm not discouraged enough to stop, but I'm very much discouraged at the position the town fathers take when you're fighting for your rights...
...The campus of Tuskegee Institute, the famed Negro school where Booker T. Washington preached basic education and self-help to his students and the nation, is extremely beautiful...
...I can work outside or inside...
...As I walked back toward campus I realized that before Foster's house I had seen the two approaches...
...The bus drew out of the blackness and passed between that endless parade of neon signs that rings Montgomery as it rings all American Cities-holiday inn, texaco, mcdonald's, colonel saunder's fried chicken, gulf—reminding one that Alabamans eat and buy and think much like Americans everywhere...
...An intense man with silvery bristled hair and rough skin, Gregg runs a dry cleaners...
...As an abstract of the report states, "these open sores and oozings and pus filled scabs on the heads, arms, and legs of the children are considered 'normal' childhood conditions and go untreated until they become so severely infected that medical attention becomes imperative...
...L. C. Gregg, a Town Council member, was one of several white moderates willing to talk to me about the problem...
...There was one difference, though, to some of the students: Their role as activists in the black struggle transcended immediate needs to study and prepare for a career in the white world...
...They don't apply themselves...
...Miss Simmons is worn wise far beyond her 19 years...
...We don't want you, honky," screamed a tall fellow in a Malcolm X sweat shirt...
...Last summer 14 student volunteers and seven locally trained research assistants interviewed 898 Negro farm families...
...I'll show you how nasty the system is...
...He continued for over an hour...
...Today their youthful dreams threaten to turn sour, and students who only a few years ago would have deferred to them now ignore them...
...A bareboard home on a side street houses the project...
...A husky Negro in a dark suit was taking notes...
...Yet even today certain churches are segregated and a good half of county white children go to a private school, Macon Academy...
...Nearly a quarter of the families interviewed do not eat fresh meat...
...Eighty-four per cent of those who attended free health clinics say that the personnel at the clinics call them by their first names...
...It takes a lot of nerve to stake your freedom against your living...
...Older Negro teachers and civil rights leaders are especially affected —those eminently humane men who are old enough to talk proudly of the progress that has taken place, yet young enough to want to continue the fight for integration that has been their raison d'etre...
...We've got good niggers here," a gas station operator informed me...
...I stood back a few feet from the speakers, ignored yet somehow afraid to write down any of their words in my notebook...
...A sheriff and a police chief head a list of Negro officials that includes a majority or major representation on all local governing bodies...
...You couldn't get to the polls," Nixon remembered, "but they got so much discouraged that we haven't had them back there since...
...Well-known for his role in contesting the Alabama State Legislature's gerrymandering of Tuskegee in 1957 in an attempt to deprive Negroes of political power, he looks like most establishment civil rights leaders...
...Yes, he knows," they told me...
...They seemed carefree until someone noticed me...
...I checked into the Institute guest house, arriving in a taxi shared with a sorority girl in a cheerleader's jumper...
...School integration has largely failed...
...He says, 'Well, there's a delicate balance between county, state, and national rights.' So they all just close their eyes to what happens to Negro farmers...
...He told me: "I'm very much discouraged...
...he led me to my room as I followed after him carrying my bags...
...Get out, get out of here," another student yelled...
...Suspicion is no stranger to Tuskegee Institute either, where it is found between students and administration, between younger and older faculty, and between students and faculty...
...In 1966, Negroes voted in large numbers...
...Unquestionably, the marches and sit-ins have meant almost nothing to most Alabama Negroes...
...Moderates tried to speak but were shouted down, and one voice yelled, "We'll have to take care of stragglers...
...one man who dared enter his two children has lost his job of 20 years standing...
...When you stole tea at your Boston tea party, it was a revolution...
...The next morning I began talking to local people...
...38 per cent of children suffer from sores and scabs...
...No American flag flies from the flag post here...
...Dressed all in grey with hair handsomely grey-flecked, he talks in measured phrases rich in reason and responsibility: "Frankly, most of those in the radical group have just about written me off as an old fogey and they don't talk to me...
...One mortician advertises his business on the radio as "The Largest Colored Funeral Home in West Alabama...
...Since no loudspeaker amplified the words, only the few students clustered around the table could hear the remarks, but it didn't seem to matter...
...From york I traveled to Selma, where one finds few signs that the Selma-Montgomery march had any major effect on race relations...
...There is no communication between those out at Tuskegee Institute, with all the people they have there, and the people here...
...The "Freedom of choice" doctrine isolates any Negro parent willing to send his child to the white school...
...One of these men is sociology professor Charles G. Gomillion, who has been a civil rights leader for decades...
...The all-white academy opened in 1964, the year George Wallace sent in state police to temporarily block integration...
...The "one who stirs 'em up" is Reverend Felix N. Nixon, president of the Sumter County naacp, pastor of a Birmingham church, and a former candidate for Congress...
...another quarter eat meat only once a week...
...As students streamed onto the front lawn, someone heaved a chunk of concrete through the front window...
...We don't have 20 folks who actually have jobs that participate in nothing...
...A research associate from Tuskegee Institute and several former students, black and white, lead the continuing study...
...Some of the persons who are the most vocal are not the most studious...
...Dig our women, they don't need them mini-skirts...
...Sumter County whites use the word "nigger" not derogatorily but as a generic term for a subspecies of the human race...
...Pictures of Wallace and Robert E. Lee hang near the main entrance of the renovated home that serves as the academy...
...There's just one who stirs 'em up...
...York, in western Alabama's Sumter County near the Mississippi border...
...When you get ready to picket they harass you...
...One worker said "the local agents do what they want with money from agriculture departments...
...The last person I interviewed in Selma was Dondra Simmons, a college girl who left school to come South to work among her people...
...They threaten Negroes with losing their jobs...
...When the public schools were reopened on an integrated basis four years ago, only 60 white children attended...
...Negro farmers have had to file suit to get parity payments that landowners held back...
...Does Orville Freeman and the Department of Agriculture know about this," I asked...
...Foster's house," someone yelled...
...The rather plodding, pedestrian success of Tuskegee Institute offended them and their vision of what a black school must be...
...how the girls in bright summer dresses promenaded the grassy lawns...
...The student who registered me was polite and distant in the prescribed manner of desk clerks...
...We have good participation, but it's not from the working man...
...The 300-odd students rose up and started toward the president's house, snaking their way along flower-bordered walks and across meandering macadem roadways...
...The complaints seemed fairly typical of the current generation—poor teaching, unresponsive professors, and an oppressive administration headed by President L. H. Foster...
...I told Wallace I planned just that and soon after my interview I left Montgomery on a dusty Greyhound filled with black and white GIs in crumpled khakis, well-dressed Negro students, and poor whites and Negroes...
...Now I traveled to one of the most reactionary...
...My first destination was Tuskegee, 38 miles east of Montgomery...
...Here the suppression of Negro rights is a masterpiece of subterfuge and subtle control, a function of the high illiteracy and low politici-zation of Sumter County Negroes...
...Their lives are little better than they were 10 years ago...
...students said he represented the administration...
...But, gawddamn it, what...
...And still George Wallace keeps counting up his progress in smoke stacks and brick buildings, and the political life of Alabama remains somnolent...
...And the poorest, I'd say, are the poor whites in the Black Belt...
...While James Brown records blared from a jukebox, one thin ginger-colored student was willing to lecture me: "Dig, man, dig our skin...
...Imperative or not, most can't afford to see a doctor as often as they need to...
...I'm the guy that warned you to cross the street last night when those cats were picking up bricks to throw at you...
Vol. 51 • August 1968 • No. 15
