DATELINES
Juffer, Jane & Perreault, Nancy Hanback & Ruoff, Mary
DATELINES Reprieves from the War Zone HARLINGEN, TEXAS "We're using the legal system to help oppressed people," says lawyer Rowena Jones, "people who have hardly any constitutional rights." Jones...
...And, even though the campaign left her deep in debt, she regrets nothing...
...LOUIS, MISSOURI Glenn and Clarice Johnson's two-story house in north St...
...I see women crying, women that have no one in the U.S...
...Shepley Jr., Boatmen's vice chairman and the bank's main liaison with ACORN...
...Leaning back in her rocking chair, Carrie Dickerson picks up a piece of quilting, smiles, and looks out at the trees...
...Her fundraising efforts produced not only hundreds of thousands of badly needed dollars but also high blood pressure and other health problems...
...This was the worst house on the block," says Glenn Johnson of the home they bought for $2,000 two years ago...
...The Government supports and promotes nuclear power and to them I was fighting against the Government...
...There is no safe place...
...A school teacher for seventeen years, Dickerson became a registered nurse and dietitian after her four children were grown...
...Mary Ruoff (Mary Ruoff is a free-lance writer in St...
...There was hearing after hearing before the AEC and...
...She helped her husband, Robert, run their farm, started Aunt Carrie's Health Food Store, and later built a nursing home next to the store...
...It was May 1973...
...She got busy organizing CASE in time for an AEC hearing on the plant...
...In St...
...Since opening in 1981, Proyecto lawyers have won only two asylum cases, both in the past eighteen months...
...A few days before the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union, CASE reorganized, but Carrie Dicker-son was losing interest...
...ACORN, a neighborhood-based advocacy group with chapters in twenty-six states, has been trying to force banks and bank-holding companies undergoing mergers to comply with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA...
...Very few of them get it...
...Instead, with her husband's support, she devoted herself full-time to stopping Black Fox and promoting safe alternative energy sources and conservation programs...
...But the corporate executives and Government officials who wanted to build Black Fox nuclear power plant here believe it...
...But the law has not stemmed the flow of new refugees...
...The group is diverse: Proyecto's staff includes Salvadoran refugees, local Mexican-Americans who grew up in migrant farm families, a nun from the Middle West who spent fifteen years in Guatemala, a Jewish man from Brooklyn who was a Vietnam-era draft refuser, and a man from the state of Washington who learned about Central America from refugees he met while hitchhiking through Mexico...
...In his five years here, Cushman has taken hundreds of reports of physical, mental, and emotional abuse by corralon guards...
...Two out of more than 8,000 cases doesn't sound like much, but less than total victory often counts for much in Proyecto's battle against the U.S...
...The hours are long and the pay is low—the three lawyers make $250 a week, the paralegals and secretaries, $150...
...An old flowered dress of Brodyaga's still hangs in one of the offices here, as if it waits for her to pull it on over her jeans and march into court...
...Most were withdrawn after agreements were reached, but Hibernia Corporation of New Orleans challenged the group's protest...
...Jones is speaking of refugees from Central America who want political asylum in the United States...
...But victories at the negotiating table or in Washington go only so far, points out Missouri ACORN staffer David Clohessy...
...The real measure [of the act's] success is not whether they lend up to a certain figure or abide by the Federal regulations...
...Money to pay fees for legal aid and expert witnesses was always a major worry...
...Merely delaying a merger can cost a bank millions of dollars or cause the deal to fall through...
...After years of legal wrangling, things began to happen...
...My widowed mother taught me never to ask for a penny—to work hard for all my needs," she explains...
...Moore recalls how one INS attorney, trying to prove that an illiterate Guatemalan farmer had no political claim to asylum, asked him to define the difference between Marxism, socialism, communism, and totalitarianism...
...Banks have a spotty record of living up to the ACORN-negotiated agreements, according to Shea...
...Louis...
...Lawyers shop the local Salvation Army store for their suits, and paralegal workers sport jeans and T-shirts with revolutionary slogans to match the dozens of wall posters...
...She and her daughter now run a room-and-board retirement home for people who don't need a nursing home but shouldn't be living alone...
...I'm making more of a contribution here than I would if I were in Berkeley or Madison," says Jonathan Moore, the paralegal from Brooklyn, who has been on the staff since 1983...
...The 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island caused the state Attorney General to issue an indefinite postponement of plant licensing...
...The agency recently insisted that the U.S...
...State and country boundaries do not keep radioactive clouds contained...
...They are, in effect, buying the refugees reprieves from the war zones they fled...
...The Federal Reserve Board encourages banks and community groups to define locally what the act means...
...Less than a year later, PSO canceled Black Fox...
...For nine years she sacrificed her home life, her profession, her land, her money, and her health to stop Black Fox...
...What came out of something confrontational was a sound working relationship...
...Made of wood, it is older and bigger than most of its neighbors...
...Twenty community reinvestment agreements have resulted, five of them in St...
...Then she mortgaged the farm to keep CASE on its feet...
...When I notified the AEC that CASE would intervene," Dickerson says, "I was shocked when they went to the expense of flying two men from Washington, D.C., to attempt to persuade me to back out, telling me that CASE had no chance at all of winning, that local interveners had never made a difference...
...Later, she'd sell or raffle them to raise money for the fight...
...The Woman Who Tackled Black Fox CLAREMORE, OKLAHOMA Polite...
...Michael Shea, director of ACORN's national campaign, says the agreement with Boatmen's was a watershed...
...It's been a year and a half that I've been going to the corralon,'''' she says...
...And militant...
...For paralegal Jim Cush-man, the job means driving the twenty-five miles to the isolated detention center—known as the corralon, or corral—each night to interview refugees seeking asylum...
...The Fed eventually approved the Hibernia merger after an eight-month delay and a public hearing, but it made approval contingent on the bank's meeting some of ACORN's demands...
...It was 1982...
...ACORN staffers and board members in Missouri say Boatmen's, as well as other banks, were slow in promoting the programs...
...Our methods were directed along peaceful lines," Dickerson says, "but to many people I was activist and radical...
...Central American refugees in this area had virtually no representation before Lisa Brodyaga founded Proyecto Libertad—Project Liberty...
...Paralegal Maria Rodriguez, a Salvadoran, has heard similar stories from the women she visits...
...The program's goal: to make the bank more responsive to the needs of lower-income people...
...Louis, it was different...
...And always there were the quilts—she seldom went anywhere without the makings of a new one...
...Size and age, however, aren't all that set it apart...
...So I called the Atomic Energy Commission, and their information convinced me that it could be hazardous...
...After the Chernobyl disaster, however, we have come to realize that it gives us small comfort, knowing we don't have a nuclear-power plant looming on our horizon—because even the nuclear-power plants in surrounding states could have devastating effects on our people, land, water, and food, were they to go critical...
...And as for the local style of life, Harlingen is not exactly Berkeley...
...Dickerson worked on quilts during the public hearings and meetings...
...Louis, a subsidiary of Missouri's largest bank-holding company...
...In the past, she has worked as a Proyecto paralegal...
...I wish I didn't have to spend so much of my time working for a living," she continues...
...That struggle was finally over, and Dicker-son was able to turn her attention to the one for her health—physical, mental, and financial...
...I just didn't like the sound of it," she says, "so I went to the library and read everything I could find on atomic power, which wasn't much...
...Thus, the poverty-stricken Valley has become a huge detention center for refugees awaiting hearings...
...Louis is something of an anomaly on a block dominated by brick bungalows built in the 1920s...
...In the past two years, ACORN chapters in ten states have negotiated with thirty banks concerning CRA issues...
...they held bake sales and garage sales, art shows, benefits and solicitations...
...Proyecto offers people the chance to take responsibility for other people's lives...
...As a board member of the Missouri Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Johnson had served on a negotiating team that, in November 1985, won a Community Reinvestment Program at Boatmen's Bank...
...The wars continue in El Salvador, Guatemala—and the Rio Grande Valley...
...We've been lucky to exploit that to some degree...
...Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which holds refugees in a prison-like detention center near Harlingen...
...Jane Juffer (JaneJuffer, a free-lance writer in Harlingen, is an associate editor of Pacific News Service...
...within months, the accounting firm recommended that plans for the plant be scrapped...
...That's a real privilege...
...There is so much that needs to be done...
...Nancy Hanback Perreault (Nancy Hanback Perreault is a free-lance writer in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma...
...its successor, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Oklahoma Water Resources Board, and the Oklahoma Corporation Commission...
...Dickerson was fifty-six years old when she noticed a headline in the local newspaper announcing PSO's plans to build an atomic power plant near Inola, just twelve miles from her farm and fifteen miles from Tulsa...
...The INS makes life increasingly difficult for Proyecto and its clients...
...The group brings banks to the bargaining table by filing or threatening to file protests alleging noncompliance with the CRA and documenting poor lending practices with one of the nation's twelve Federal Reserve Banks, which approve bank mergers...
...Indeed, there are few pinstripes or pumps to be found among the Proyecto ranks...
...As long as la Migra [the INS] exists," says Proyecto attorney Steve Jahn, "we'll be here to fight them...
...She also lost friends...
...Soft-spoken...
...Her husband died shortly before the end of the Black Fox fight...
...In the end, her quiet but persistent disapproval of nuclear power as an energy option ended in victory: Oklahoma is free of nuclear power plants...
...But morale is high...
...I had to reorient my thinking and instill in my mind the fact that I was not asking for money for 'me' but for 'everyone.'" Through the first several years, Dickerson solved financial crises by pulling out her own checkbook, but by 1978 her savings of $200,000 were gone...
...attorney bring charges of reckless damage and destruction against Jones after she unintentionally broke a glass door at the corralon while tapping on it with her shoe...
...I think sometimes I have to leave Proyecto, but when I tell the women this, they say, 'Please don't leave.'" Proyecto lawyers face the task of going before the same three judges day after day, pitted against the same immigration attorneys, all of whom seem callous toward the refugees' stories...
...and that have five or six kids in El Salvador with nothing to eat...
...The Johnsons are raising four children on a monthly income ranging between $500 and $800...
...But she didn't back out...
...Relations between Proyecto and the INS lawyers are sometimes as heated as the Valley weather...
...This Federal law dating from 1977 requires regulated financial institutions to meet the credit and deposit needs of their communities...
...Programs it has negotiated typically seek a relaxation of credit criteria and target a specific amount of loan funds, some at below-market interest rates, for low-income neighborhoods...
...Her group also sold aprons, T-shirts, and buttons...
...Take It from the Bank ST...
...The real measure is the condition of our neighborhoods...
...After Chernobyl, I realized I had to get back in the fight—with any fight that's left in me...
...Shepley says financial institutions have had trouble with the Community Reinvestment Act because it offers few specifics on how to comply...
...In eight cases, including Boatmen's, ACORN has filed protests with Federal Reserve Banks...
...She has suffered a stress-related heart attack, but is now, at age seventy, in good health...
...A hundred thousand dollars," she says, "is small compared to the life of one of my grandchildren...
...She ran the nonprofit office until 1984...
...Proyecto workers are proud, too, of the countless times they have delayed or prevented deportations, gotten clients' cases transferred to more lenient forums, and bonded them out of the detention center...
...But lately, says Shea, "there are signs that the Fed is retrenching in its commitment to encourage banks to negotiate...
...There are moments when I'm very depressed...
...Other refugees, released on their own recognizance, are now required to pay a $3,000 bond if they leave this four-county area of the Rio Grande Valley...
...The primary goal of ACORN's banking campaign is access to housing money for low-income Americans...
...She was trying to get the guard's attention to open the door so she could talk to her clients during regular interviewing time...
...Carrie Barefoot Dicker-son is so gentle of manner that it's difficult to believe she can be hard as nails when roused...
...Recently it raised the bonds on detained refugees from $ 1,000 to $3,000, and it opposes all Proyecto efforts to reduce them...
...I think most people would take our route rather than Hibernia's," says Ethan A.H...
...Yes," she says...
...And less bond money is coming from refugees' families, many of whom are losing jobs because of the employer sanctions in the new Immigration Reform and Control Act...
...Some of my schoolteacher friends and others frowned upon my activities...
...Before Chernobyl," she says, "I was tired of it all...
...Her favorite motto was, 'Owe no man.' Having this philosophy ingrained into my every fiber made it doubly difficult to raise money to fight the proposed nuclear plants...
...As the founder of Citizens' Action for Safe Energy (CASE), Dickerson was the driving force behind opposition to the plans of the Public Service Company of Oklahoma (PSO...
...It's not blackmail, but it certainly is a hammer we have over their heads...
...Now people come by and say, 'This is the best-looking house on the block.' " Early this year, the Johnsons bought new siding and guttering and rebuilt their front porch with a $9,150 home-improvement loan, borrowed at 2 per-cent-below-market interest from Boatmen's National Bank of St...
...There's a window of opportunity out there," says Shea, referring to the current trend toward bank consolidation, spawned in part by new interstate banking laws...
...No one knows that better than Proyecto Libertad, a legal-aid group here in the Rio Grande Valley and Jones's employer...
...Louis...
...Two years later, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission hired Touche Ross and Company to study the matter...
...We need to get right to work with all the time we can spare to mandate an orderly phase-out of all nuclear power plants in the United States and do all we can to have all foreign countries close theirs also...
...Proyecto seeks bond money from churches and charitable groups across the nation, but the need far surpasses the aid that comes in...
Vol. 51 • December 1987 • No. 12
