Out There in America

...now it's the capital of the recording industry, a major television production center, a favorite motion picture set...

...We got candidacy through our own efforts...

...Nashville's boosters, no less than politicians immemorial, take to heart the time-honored words of one John Wolcot: "What rage for fame attends both great and small...

...on the contrary, he is disturbingly close to the truth...

...In recent months, therefore, Wallace has been quietly dickering with black Alabama legislators over the appointment of a black state circuit judge...

...Those appointments, of course, were the fruits of a different brand of Southern Republicanism than exists today...

...The committee has maintained a judicious silence, but it has become evident that only Republican names will be forwarded to Washington for consideration...

...Our committed staff and board members have never given up...

...Hatchett is the first black to serve above t h e state appellate level in the South, but his appointment is less important than the revised system that produced it...

...A man of frank political ambition, he had scarcely won his seat on the appellate court before he began lofting trial balloons for the mayor's race...

...The Colegio's struggle has been intense and emotional and at times has threatened to turn violent...

...If a black is to be appointed to a Federal judgeship in the South, therefore, the impetus must come from Washington...

...Bell too, it seemed, had no desire to be "the bad guy...

...Maybe so, but we're not playing that game...

...According to one of the legislators, Ronald Jackson of Birmingham, the negotiations have come down to a straight quid pro quo—black votes on certain bills in exchange for a judgeship, with the governor trying to get t h e quid before he gives t h e q u o . ' 'Wallace says he won't appoint anybody until the session is over with, because he might lose more votes than he g a i n s , " says Jackson...

...Thurmond even took the attorney, Matthew Perry, to the White House to meet Administration officials who will decide on the appointment...

...Blacks to the Bench Atlanta While the number of black public officials has grown dramatically in the South over the past several years the number of blacks holding judgeships has remained low...

...I happen to believe it is, quite literally, afine old town, but I am admittedly biased...

...A compromise, suggested when the first judgeship became available, would have given it to either Gallinghouse or Sear and the post thereby vacated to a black...

...Foremost among the political hurdles is the fact that the heavy preponderance of Southern judgeships require election by a constituency—county or larger— that is majority-white...

...Federal funds stopped flowing as the Colegio's second payment to HUD fell due...

...It's more than a place, it's a state of mind...

...OUT THERE IN AMERICA 'The Athens of the South' Nashville I suppose it had to happen...

...Feldman argues that Southern blacks haven't *' met the Republican Party halfway" in an effort toward reconciliation and that therefore the Party owes them nothing in the line of appointments...

...When James C. Hill, a white Atlanta lawyer, was appointed to fill the city's last vacant district judgeship, in August 1974, not a single black name was offered to t h e local selection committee—although both of the current black assistants in the White House, Stanley Scott and John C. Calhoun Jr., are Atlantans...

...Only a year before, HEW had given Mount Angel College a certificate of eligibility good for three years...

...For a vacancy on t h e Fifth Circuit, created by t h e resignation of Judge Bryan Simpson, there are no blacks among some forty applicants...

...Perhaps it is also harmless...

...Yet today the Colegio's prospects appear bright...

...Meanwhile, Florida's new system is demonstrating its political innovativeness: The Senators, both Democrats, recommended a Republican U.S...

...Attorney Gerald Gallinghouse and U.S...

...AtleasttwoofthethreeareReaganites, andan ex-officio committee member, Congressman David Treen, also flies those political colors...

...the governor's committee, which screens state judicial appointments, consists of three persons appointed by him, three appointed by the bar association, and three appointed by those six...

...During early 1974 the Colegio submitted a succession of plans for repayment of the loan, each of which HUD rejected...

...The typical Southern Republican needs no rationale to exclude black candidates from a judgeship...

...Morial was the state'sfirst black legislator, and served as a juvenile court judge before his election to the court of appeals...

...Gallinghouse and Sear are come-lately Republicans...

...But whatever it is, it is not really Hollywood, and cannot be, and should not try to be...

...The Association had its own evaluators visit the Colegio, led by two college presidents experienced with Chicano studies programs...

...In June, frustrated, the Colegio filed suit in district court accusing HUD of racial discrimination and violation of its civil rights...

...A vigorous Chicano studies program at Mount Angel had attracted Chicano students and faculty from around the country during the late 1960s...

...HEW, foritspart, seemed unable to come to a decision...

...HUD doesn't think Chicanos can administer their own school," Ernesto Lopez charged...

...Two Republican Presidents have put Ortique on commissions, and Morial was an official of Volunteers for Eisenhower- Nixon in 1956...

...A confrontation seemed inevitable...

...This town is rich in outstanding backup musicians and recording experts who know how to put a record together, and they deserve the credit they have been given for making Nashville the best place in the country to record a song...

...The objective truth may b e that, but for its entertainment industry, it is as unexceptional as Akron or Hartford or Oklahoma City—a beautiful, ugly, casual, frenzied, peaceful, tempestuous place, with its pressing and plodding and piddling masses, its anonymous heroes and villains, its lovely hills and trees, its air and water pollution, its reviving downtown, its grim slums, its suburban fastnesses, its malfunctioning institutions, its ambient air of contentment, its quiet desperation...

...But the opportunities for abuse have been sharply curtailed...

...It might seem an unlikely setting for two controversies touching the deepest frustrations affecting the American psyche...

...The problem is how to get more blacks to apply for Florida judgeships...

...Since elected officials pick most of the committee members and make the final selections, the system is hardly apolitical...

...Joseph Hatchett was the only black among the seven names offered by the Florida nominating committee, and Askew quite deliberately chose him because he is black...

...The students and faculty were prepared, they said, to "resist nonviolently" any attempts by HUD to evict them...

...The implication was clear...

...Gallinghouse is said to have joined the party soon after he joined the U. S. Attorney' s office.'' His strongest claim to the judgeship is his wife, Claire," a New Orleans Republican leader says...

...This time, however, two black candidates entered t h e contest and made it known publicly that they were doing so...

...I ' v e done as much for t h e Republicans as Gallinghouse or Sear," says Morial with a chuckle...

...Governor Askew and Senators Lawton Chiles and Richard Stone have publicly abandonedtheirtraditionalpowersof judicial selection in favor of non-partisan nominating cornmmittees...

...The committees consider all applications and present three or more names to the appropriate elected official...

...BARRY MITZMAN (Barry Mitzman, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin, is doing educational research in Oregon this year under a National Science Foundation grant...

...George Wallace's Alabama, as one might expect, has no black judges above the county level...

...What seems to matter is all that exposure, that prime-time attention, that repetitive litany of the name...

...For ten years or so, the word has been spreading—subtle as a stage whisper at first, then crooned and chanted in ballads set to music, then hawked and hustled from stages and television studios, and now ballyhooed on the marquees of the country's movie houses: NASHVILLE...

...Local observers consider Ortique's courtroom qualifications less impressive than Morial's but Ortique has served on a number of national commissions and has friends in Washington...

...The racist legacy has left the Southern states with an inordinately small number of black lawyers...

...They placed on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers the Deep South, such progressives as Elbert Turtle, John Minor Wisdom, and John Brown...

...To him and his regional wing of t h e party, blacks are outsiders, if not the enemy, and his goal is to fend them off...

...In New Orleans, where there are two vacant Federal district judgeships, apair of typical white candidates has surfaced: U.S...

...They would do well to emulate Reubin Askew...

...They and dozens of their supporters staged protest marches up and down the Williamette Valley and held rallies at HUD offices in Portland and Seattle...

...Robert Altman, who hails from Hollywood, fanned the flames of that ambitious yearning in an interview just before the premiere showing of his movie...

...But Colegio students and faculty would not surrender...

...From HUD Colegio leaders asked only an opportunity to lease their campus...

...An advisory committee in the Office of Education twice recommended that aid eligibility be denied...

...That's what Chicanos have been asking for—to be allowed to make accomplishments through their own efforts...

...The new American Shangri-La, the magic city, the pay window for win tickets on The American Dream...

...If you want to be a superstar, the place to go is Nashville...

...If that is so, he is most unlikely to risk offending the good white folk of Louisiana or any other Southern state...

...cities, no less than people, have always been vulnerable to the lure of fame...

...We are making history," cheered a Colegio trustee...

...attorney for the Northern district judgeship, and he got the job...

...The Colegio had won...

...The Colegio had applied to become a candidate for accreditation...

...With dedication and perseverance worthy of the farmworker leader himself, Colegio Cesar Chavez in the past two years has met and overcome incredible legal and financial obstacles placed in its way by the blundering indifference—or possibly racism—of more than one Federal agency...

...It has been calling itself " t h e Athens of the South" for the past eighty years, and has a full-size replica of the Parthenon to support its claim...

...Most of those best qualified have had a substantial involvement in civil rights litigation—not the sort of experience that wins the affections of the white establishment...

...In 1973 they renamed the school Colegio Cesar Chavez...

...Normally one or both, or one and another prominent white lawyer, would b e selected by the top Louisiana Republicans (the state's two Senators being Democrats) and the names sent to the U.S...

...The Colegio had lost its accreditation and its eligibility for Federal aid...

...With Ronald Reagan snorting on his right and with a well-to-do Georgia conservative as his campaign manager, Ford seems to be headed for a "Southern strategy" of his own...

...nor does it matter that the city, as the setting for the film, comes off looking more like Dante's Inferno than Thomas More' s Utopia...

...Justice Department...

...In the 1950s the Republicans stood among t h e forward-looking elements of Southern society...

...And these have been compounded by the seeming insensitivity of Federal bureaucrats to the Colegio's aims...

...ROGER M. WILLIAMS (Roger M. Williams directs the Southern Regional Councils Southern Investigative Research Project, which provided partial funding of the research for this article...

...Now Federal funds and other grants have resumed flowing...

...If blacks are to attain Southern judgeships, politicians will have to show at least that much non-partisanship—and a lot more political courage than it takes to appoint a white member of the opposing party...

...The votes"—black votes—are at long last present in several Southern state legislatures...

...Better be damned than mentioned not at a l l ." Nashville at the moment is In City, the place to go, the mecca of entertainers and those who want to be entertained...

...Will the Florida system produce a reasonable number of black judges...

...Mount Angel College had lost its accreditation in 1972...

...Senator Strom Thurmond, in the latest of his remarkable series of moves away from his racist past, has recommended the appointment of the state's leading black civil rights attorney to the U.S...

...Columnist Tom Wicker described the film as " a two-and-a-half-hour cascade of minutely detailed vulgarity, greed, deceit, cruelty, barely contained hysteria, and the frantic lack of root and grace into which American life has been driven by its own heedless vitality...

...But last April, as American involvement in Vietnam came to a hysterical end, Mount Angel drew national attention by receiving some 150 maimed and crippled Vietnamese children, "orphans" they were called, though there has been some doubt about that...

...A few powerful voices have urged that course on the Republicans...

...This gentlemanly game of evasion and delay was finally ended this year by the Northwest Association of Schools and Colleges, the regional college accreditation agency...

...It is a city on the make, bubbling with frenetic energy, driven by the illusion that it possesses the magic formula for making it big, Hollywood style...

...While the state's future leaders may not be as enlightened as Askew, they will be under some pressure to follow the precedent that he and the Senators have established...

...Similarly, there has been no evidence of White House interest in the New Orleans judgeship...

...They gradually took over the administration and moved the college toward a full-time commitment to Chicano education...

...But even Wallace responds to political heeds, and two of his pressing needs are to put a non-racist face on his forthcoming national campaign, and, less grandly, to get his pet bills enacted by t h e legislature...

...The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was foreclosing on the Colegio property...

...But in the hands of agenthustlers and public relations flacks, the Nashville Sound was ballooned into a mystical and indefinable elixir, a patent medicine that revitalizes over-the-hill entertainers and cranks out new superstars with t h e awesome regularity of an automated printing press...

...Court of Military Appeals...

...They don't want to be the bad g u y s , " the Colegio inferred...

...Less than a month after the name change, HUD began foreclosure proceedings on a $1 million building loan undertaken in 1966...

...Martin Feldman, a moderate New Orleans Republican, says he understands why: * * While I recognize the problems blacks have had with the Republican Party since 1964,1 can't justify saying that in a Republican year [that is, a patronage year] we ought to appoint a Democrat, just because he happens to be black and there aren't any blacks on the bench...

...They lobbied for the public support of Oregon's Congressional delegation, and got it: Representative Les AuCoin told the bureaucrats that the Colegio'' can reach students that no other Oregon faculty can reach...

...Los Angeles and New York and Las Vegas have already been done, and Aspen and Austin and Muscle Shoals aren't ready yet...

...They developed an ambitious educational program to serve the special needs of La Raza, adopting an open-admissions policy and making extensive use of the "college without walls" concept, granting academic credit for independent study and work experience...

...While opinions on the Senators' motives vary, everyone agrees that they have risked nothing and managed to appear virtuous while sticking a fine needle in the Republican hide...

...Content for awhile with the hyperbole of a home-grown nickname—Music City, U.S.A.—Nashville seems now to be dreaming brashly and presumptuously of claiming Hollywood's title: Entertainment Capital of the world...

...Eligibility for Federal aid has been reestablished...

...A pair of consultants sent to evaluate the Colegio returned with the same advice, charging that the "college without walls" granted students too much freedom...

...The myth has been growing ever since, to the point where illusion and pretension and fantasy are taken seriously, and image is routinely mistaken for reality...

...Before the adulation gets completely out of hand and this star-struck city becomes drunk with overweening pride in its own popularity, a candid vote of caution is in order...

...The Association team had reservations only about the soundness of the Colegio's financial base, which they agreed could be remedied at least in part by the return of Federal aid eligibility following admission to candidacy...

...Officially, many black leaders are optimistic...

...Both committees include a black member and few, if any, racial reactionaries...

...HUD had been patient...

...The Colegio has enlarged its faculty and published a college catalog, its first...

...The reasons range from crude to subtle, and they are sometimes more political than racial...

...Like the farmworkers," explained Ernesto Lopez, the Colegio's first president, "we are also struggling nonviolently, to bring educational opportunity to students deserving a better chance in life...

...But Colegio leaders found it a curious coincidence that HUD's patience had run out just as Chicanos took over the school...

...In t h e absence of black Republican lawyers, appointing a Democrat is t h e only way to get a black into one of the judgeships...

...They want to see how we fare with HEW...

...In June the Association made the Colegio a candidate for accreditation...

...He can reject the names and ask for others, but in the end he is bound to appoint (in the case of the governor) or recommend to Washington (in the case of the Senators) a person whose name has been offered by the committee...

...Each Senator appoints three members of the Federal judiciary committee, and the state bar association appoints three more...

...JOHN EGERTON (JohnEgerton is a free-lance writer based in Nashville...

...Unable to borrow from HEW to pay HUD, the Colegio missed its payment and the foreclosure was on again...

...S h e ' s been a hard and effective party worker for y e a r s . ' ' Both Ortique and Morial, though Democrats, have some Republican connections...

...In Florida, Governor Reubin Askew made headlines recently by appointing a black U.S...

...The stars who come to record albums or tape television shows or make movies are no longer just country musicians—they range across the entire galaxy, from Bob Dylan and the soloing former Beatles and Kris Kristofferson to Mike Douglas and Burt Reynolds and Perry Como...

...We want the judgeship when we provide the votes...

...HUD was noncommittal, but made no attempt to evict...

...New Orleans' last two district judgeships, which went to members of Phelps's law firm, were announced on the same day—a bit of brazenness that went almost unnoticed in a city run by old money and vested interests...

...Perhaps it is all inevitable, even understandable...

...Nashville is an exciting place to m e , " he said...

...Both are lightskinned, articulate, and widely respected in the city...

...HUD and the Colegio did eventually reach an agreement for repayment of the loan, but by then another Federal agency had intervened...

...The Nixon and Ford Administrations have included a succession of black advisers who come from the South, but none has made any visible impact on t h e black judge situation...

...For two recent openings at the Federal district level, only one black applied, and he lives outside that particular district...

...Although the school's change in name had legally constituted only an amendment of one line of the Mount Angel charter, HEW maintained that Colegio Cesar Chavez was a new institution whose program would need to b e reviewed before eligibility could be granted...

...The school has cleared the initial hurdles toward regaining accreditation...

...A reasonable solution, perhaps, but still not palatable to Louisiana's Republican leaders...

...I t ' s like Hollywood forty years ago...

...One concludes that t h e President's black assistants are unconcerned or unimportant, or both...

...Last March the Colegio received a court o r d e r ' 4 to conduct a peaceful surrender of possession of the Colegio premises to HUD...

...But those who once scoffed at the idea of a Chicano college in tiny Mount Angel now know that the school is not easily beaten...

...But the Colegio inherited a set of staggering economic woes...

...A lot of people around this town think the movie is a gigantic put-down of Nashville, and a lot of critics elsewhere claim it's the greatest social commentary on America ever put on film...

...A three-person committee of the Louisiana Republicans has undertaken the task of selecting judicial nominees...

...the college had been unable to make any payments on the loan in three years...

...In May 1974, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare revoked the Colegio's eligibility for Federal aid, the key to all Federal research grants and student aid scholarships and loans, without which few colleges or universities, large or small, could survive...

...It is much more than its glamourous facade suggests—and it is also much less...

...magistrate Morey Sear...

...Not so long ago, it was merely the home of country music...

...But t h a t ' s j u s t a replica, an imitation...

...When the whole thing started and the stage whispers of professional recording artists were about something called the Nashville Sound, there was substance to t h e claim...

...His most recent book is "The Americanization of Dixie...

...Colegio Cesar Chavez was born out of financially troubled Mount Angel College, founded by the Benedictines in 1888...

...And many of the country stars—people like Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn and Charley Pride—have the name-recognition and the income to make legitimate claim to superstar status...

...Though HUD has foreclosed and now officially owns the campus, the Government and the school are negotiating a long-term lease...

...magistrate, Joseph W. Hatchett, to t h e state supreme court...

...Regardless of its message, regardless of the bouquets and brickbats, the picture is big box-office, and Nashville is its dubious beneficiary, and the Hollywood Syndrome grows apace, Nashville has always had a weakness for pretension...

...Given a little time, it probably will...

...Under Gerald Ford...

...When the " o r p h a n s " were arriving from Saigon, Colegio students and faculty were in the fourth week of a twenty-four-hour "live-in" in the school's administration building...

...Nashville does resemble the Hollywood of the 1930s in altogether too many ways— from its penchant for gaudiness and its infatuation with celebrity to its infinite capacity for make-believe and its aura of incipient decadence...

...HUD too allowed that if the accreditors acted favorably, an agreement could be worked out for the Colegio to take a long-term lease on its campus...

...The politically influential Ashton Phelps, publisher of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, ordered up an editorial cautiously endorsing Ortique when the first of t h e two positions became vacant...

...It is only a matter of time until they force the kinds of changes in the judiciary that they have already forced in other important aspects of Southern life...

...There is a steady influx of celebrities from New York and the West Coast, and they all profess to love Nashville, and Nashville loves them, or at least loves the reflected light of prominence they shower on the place...

...With a second seat on the bench now open, following the death of Judge Herbert W. Christenberry, the prospects of Morial and Ortique have improved somewhat...

...It seems worth remembering that the real Parthenon, like the Hollywood of the 1930s, has fallen on hard times...

...And if the movie is at all a fair reflection of what we have come to as a nation, there is one press clipping the boosters of Nashville-as- Hollywood ought to take seriously...

...The troubles the Colegio has faced raise lingering questions about higher education's economic dependence on the Federal Government...

...although their numbers have been increasing, t h e majority are at present too young to be considered for middle- and upper-level judgeships...

...It matters not a whit that film director Robert Altman's smash-hit movie bearing the city's name is intended as a personal impression of contemporary American life, rather t h an a commentary on Nashville and its music...

...They began a mass "live-in" to prevent their eviction...

...One is State Appeals Judge Ernest Mortal...

...In South Carolina, U.S...

...Colegio leaders have adopted "Si se puede"—"It can be done"—as their motto...

...HEW knew that if the Colegio was granted candidacy, aid eligibility could not reasonably be denied...

...Perhaps he could, but not in t h e direction in which he is traveling...

...Both of those views are excessive in the extreme, and probably beside the point anyway...

...In dramatic counterpoint to t h e national malaise, Nashville now basks in the star-spangled glitter of visibility and recognition and success...

...Yet Commissioner of Education Terrell Bell repeatedly deferred a final decision on the Colegio's eligibility...

...Current developments in South Carolina, Louisiana, Florida, and Alabama point up the hopeful as well as the bleak sides of the black j u d g e situation...

...It's not that I think Altman is wrong in his comparison of Nashville and Hollywood...

...Colegio Cesar Chavez MountAngel Oregon Mount Angel, population 2200, is a sleepy farm town nestled in the northern part of Oregon's rich Williamette Valley...

...the other, lawyer Revius 0 . Ortique...

...And just across the street from the Benedictine abbey where many of the refugees have been housed, a small group of Chicanos has been struggling to survive a s a bilingual educational community called Colegio Cesar Chavez—the nation's first Chicano-administered and Chicano-oriented college not affiliated with an established institution of higher education...

...President Eisenhower's Attorneys General provided just such an impetus...

...It was deeply in debt...

...In t h e eleven states of the old Confederacy, a region that is 20 per cent black, there is no black Federal judge and a mere handful of state judges...

...The NAACP's Clarence Mitchell finds Ford "more receptive" than his predecessor, and Samuel Jackson, a well-known black Republican in Washington, says Ford could' 'gain a lot of political mileage'' out of appointing a black judge...

...The new-found notoriety of this city in which I have lived for the past ten years is a mixed blessing at best...

...They also managed to slide past Alabama's Senators the appointment of District Judge Frank Johnson who has been a one-man defense against t h e worst of Wallaceism...

...A few townspeople talked of vigilante action to "get rid of those Mexicans...

...President Ford recently named him to the Legal Services Corporation...

...Still, if Altman chose Nashville as a metaphor for America, he chose well...

...But if Nashville comes to believe its own press clippings, it will do so at its peril...

...They reported that the Colegio's administrative organization and education program met all criteria for candidacy—apparently contradicting HEW's evaluators...

...Under Richard Nixon, there was no chance of a black being appointed Federal judge in the South...

...Senators Russell Long and J. Bennett Johnston also created a stir by sending a letter to the White House urging President Ford to appoint a black...

...it is, after all, just pretending, just show biz...