Sunday, May 28, 2017

Supreme Court Strikes Down North Carolina's Brazen Racial Gerrymander



Cooper v. Harris[1]

On May 22, 2017, the Supreme Court held that North Carolina legislators redrew two legislative districts in ways that intentionally discriminated against African American voters. Using the pretext of complying with the Voting Rights Act (VRA), North Carolina’s General Assembly redrew the boundaries of two legislative districts to dilute the voting strength of African Americans.

The events leading to this case began when the 2010 census showed that North Carolina’s District 1 was significantly underpopulated. To comply with the one-person-one-vote principle, the State needed to place almost 100,000 new people in the district. The other District, (District 12), did not need any changes as it was only overpopulated by 3,000 people out of over 730,000 residents. Despite the lack of any significant population changes boundary lines were redrawn in ways that significantly altered the district’s racial composition. It gained approximately 35,000 African-Americans of voting age and lost 50,000 whites. The black voting age population increased from 43.8% to 50.7%.

To prevail on a claim of racial gerrymandering the plaintiff must prove that race was the motivating factor in the decision to place a significant number of voters in or outside of a particular district. This requires a showing that the legislature subordinated traditional districting considerations to racial considerations. If racial considerations predominate, the burden shifts to the State to prove that its race-based voter distributions serve a “compelling interest” and are “narrowly tailored” to achieving that goal. The Supreme Court has held that compliance with the VRA can be a compelling justification.

In this case legislators decided African-Americans should constitute majority of the voting-age population in District 1. They argued that the district needed a majority-minority voting population to comply with the VRA. In Thornburg v. Gingles the Supreme Court identified three conditions for proving vote dilution under Section 2 of the VRA. First, a minority group must be sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a legislative district. Second, the minority group must be politically cohesive. Finally, the district’s white majority must vote sufficiently as a bloc to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate.

In this case North Carolina’s evidence did not satisfy the third Gingles prerequisite; white bloc-voting. The evidence showed that year after year, District 1 was a “cross-over” district, in which white voters helped African Americans to elect the candidates of their choice.

In the case of District 12, North Carolina claimed that legislators redrew lines to “pack” the district with Democrats, not African Americans. Rejecting this argument the Supreme Court concluded that the evidence presented at trial adequately supported the conclusion that race, not partisan considerations, was the predominate factor in the district’s configuration.

The Court also rejected the State’s claim that a plaintiff in a racial-gerrymandering case had to prove that an alternative districting plan would have the same partisan impact without the same racial demographics.

As one commentator explained, “the equal protection clause does not have a partisanship exception.” Republican-dominated state legislatures have created brazen racial gerrymanders, pushing black voters out of GOP districts and herding them into Democratic ones. States attempting to use packing to dilute the voting strength of black or Latino voters cannot hide behind the Voting Rights Act to justify doing so. Republican efforts to manipulate and corrupt the electoral process undermine the foundations of our democracy.


[1] Leland Ware, Louis L. Redding Chair and Professor of Law, University of Delaware

Sunday, May 21, 2017

The Latest Print Edition of Southern Changes is Now Available

Summer, 2017

In this Issue:
  • Supreme Court Clarifies Standard for Racial Gerrymandering
  • Two Courts Reject Texas Voter I-D Law
  • Supreme Court to Consider Limits on Partisan Gerrymandering
  • Andrew McDowd "Mac" Secrest, Heroic Southern Journalist (Part Four)
  • Lillian Smith Book Awards: Previous Recipients and 2017 Nominees
  • Cheryl Knott on Segregated Libraries
 
 
To obtain your copy, contact the Southern Regional Council at charles.johnson@hklaw.com or click here.

Sunday, May 7, 2017

Pauli Murray, Mary Hood, Thomas L. Johnson and Phillip C. Dunn Receive Lillian Smith Book Awards for 1987



By Thadious Davis
From Southern Changes
Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, pp. 33-34, 36

When Georgia author Lillian Smith died in 1966, the Southern Regional Council established an award not only to honor her work and her memory, but also to foster in others the spirit of her courageous struggle for human rights in the South. Smith's first novel, Strange Fruit (1944), explored the human tragedy resulting from racial segregation. That novel catapulted her to fame as a white Southerner with a social consciousness who spoke out against a major problem in her native region. With the publication of Killers of the Dream (1949), she provided both an intensive psychological analysis of the effects of segregation on whites and blacks and an uncompromising call for an end to a debilitating system. Her visionary writing was accompanied by social and political activism. Whether functioning with national organizations, local groups, or personal friends, Smith committed her energy to persuading others to work for social justice and racial equality under the law.

The Lillian Smith Book Awards have been presented since 1967 in recognition of outstanding writing concerned with the Southern region. Recipients have not been restricted to Southerners, but they have been expected to contribute understanding of social issues and human problems affecting Southerners and the South. In sponsoring the awards, the Southern Regional Council recognizes those writers who have translated Smith's "struggle into terms appropriate to our own lives" today, as SRC President Paul M. Gaston puts it. Gaston points out that the intent is "honor the authors not so much for their own sakes. . . but so that others will, because of the award, learn about and read their books."

This year the Lillian Smith Book Awards have been jointly awarded in the non-fiction category to Thomas L. Johnson and Phillip C. Dunn for A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920-1936 and to Pauli Murray, posthumously, for Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage. The 1987 Smith Award in the fiction category is to Mary Hood for the collection of short stories And Venus Is Blue.

A True Likeness is a collection of the photographs of Richard Samuel Roberts, a black Floridian who in 1920 moved to Columbia, S. C., where he operated a photography business in the black commercial district until his death in 1936. Selected from some three thousand extant glass plates, Roberts's photographs document the lives of blacks in Columbia and the surrounding area. They make a unique contribution to the historical record of black communities in the urban South during the period between the world wars. Roberts provided a rare glimpse into the activities and culture of emergent middle-class towns people in the early decades of the modern South. He photographed people and the artifacts of their material culture: studio backdrops, city streets, public buildings and private homes; weddings, christenings and wakes; family groups, school children and individual portraits; prominent citizens, day laborers and community leaders.

Anthony Paul Dunbar, a member of the awards committee, observed that "Not only are the pictures artistically and technically excellent but they record a life that very few people knew existed. If you read the captions to the photographs you will see the civil rights movement emerging."

Published by two regional houses, Algonquin Press of Chapel Hill, N.C., and Bruccoli Clark of Columbia, S.C., A True Likeness is the result of a collaboration between Roberts's surviving children (Wilhelmina Roberts Wynn, Gerald E., Beverly N. and Cornelius C. Roberts) and Phillip C. Dunn, an art professor at the University of South Carolina specializing in photography.

With the support and assistance of the South Caroliniana Library's field archival program, Dunn cleaned and restored the glass negative plates, developed contact prints from which he selected "the most powerful and significant," and made exhibit-quality prints. Dunn and his co-editor Thomas L. Johnson state that the true value of Roberts's work lies not merely in its "intrinsic aesthetic appeal as a photography collection of undeniable technical finesse and formal beauty," but in "it's revelation--its true representation--of a lost world of a people whose identity was lost not only upon the white world but also upon itself." Essentially, the recovered photographs of Richard Samuel Roberts attest to the vitality of a Southern black community and deposit a cultural legacy for the descendants of that community as well as for those of a white community that never knew of its existence. His pictures recapture for all an aspect of Southern life rarely seen by outsiders and nearly forgotten by insiders; in the process, they further an understanding of the multicultural South.

PAULI MURRAY'S Song in a Weary Throat, published by Harper and Row, is memoir of self and society by a woman who insisted on her full humanity as a person of color and as a female. It recounts with unusual clarity, passion, and compassion Murray's journey toward achievement in the face of racial and sexual discrimination. Murray chose her title from a verse in her book of poetry, Dark Testament and Other Poems: "Hope is a song in a weary throat." Hope is the keynote that sustained her through long years of commitment to civil rights and moral justice. Robert J. Norrell, chairman of the awards committee, termed it a "powerful statement of one person's challenge to a world that put a lot of obstacles before her but that she would not let daunt her."

Murray chronicles her life as "An American Pilgrimage" which took her from early childhood in Baltimore to formative years in the black South of Durham, N.C. She presents her youthful ambitions and dreams along with the nearly devastating effects of discriminatory practices upon them. She recounts her efforts to become a lawyer during a period when both her race and sex limited her opportunities for professional education. The University of North Carolina would not admit her because of her race; Harvard University would not admit her because of her sex.

Murray not only became a civil rights attorney and legal scholar, but she also was a founding member of the National Organization for Women. From the 1930s through the 1980s, she remained a tireless teacher-activist for the advancement of blacks and women, a cause that she understood as necessary for the advancement of all Americans. In 1973, she entered the seminary and in 1977 became the first black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. She ends her pilgrimage with an account of the celebration of her first Holy Eucharist, a communion service at the Episcopal Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, N.C., where her white and black ancestors had worshipped for generations and where she herself felt all the strands of her life as a poet, lawyer, teacher, friend, and minister come together in "the spirit of love and reconcilation [sic] drawing us all toward the goal of human wholeness." Murray died in 1985 while completing Song in a Weary Throat; the book is a fitting tribute to her quest for wholeness--for herself and all Americans.

MARY HOOD'S And Venus is Blue is a collection of seven stories and title novella. Published by Ticknor and Fields, the work is about white Southerners in the contemporary world of change and transition. In these accomplished stories of physical and psychological survival, Hood shatters stereotypical views of the South. Though incorporating details of cultural reality not restricted to the South (Harlequin books, Datsun cars, etc.), she treats rural people with the expansive perception of one who recognizes the quiet valor of their determination to remain fully human in dehumanizing times. One female character envisions the world as "untrammeling. . . widening in ripples about her," and sees herself as "the stone at the center that sets things moving."

Without condescension or caricature, Hood captures the often hidden meaning of ordinary life, distills it with compassion, and renders it for others to share. Her special gift is for articulating the often unspoken conflicts of the heart among the working-class poor. A rural family man, for instance, struggles against the limits of his existence:

There was a little air stirring. The pines on tomorrow's cutting were tall against the first stars. Up toward Hammermill the sky was lighter. Cheney could see, after his eyes got sharper, the glint of the mayonnaise jar he had brought his tea in for lunch....He picked it up. the lid was missing. Cheney tossed it--it hit on something and smashed I'm so goddamn tired of being poor, he said.
His voice may not be eloquent, but the scene encompasses with accuracy and authority the contrast between the potential of the natural world and the reality of the unending human effort to create an inhabitable space within that world.

Hood lives in Georgia, whose northern foothills and mountain areas provide settings for her stories. Her fiction has evoked, for some readers, comparisons with Flannery O'Connor, another Georgian and master of the short story form. However, according to awards committee member Mary Frances Deriner, Hood's people and landscapes are neither O'Connoresque nor grotesque, but are instead the "essence of the modern South."


As of this writing in 1987, Thadious Davis was teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was a member of the committee which selected this year's Lillian Smith prize winners. Other committee members were Robert J. Norrell, Center for the Study of Southern History and Culture, University of Alabama; Mary Frances Derfner, Charleston, S.C.; and Anthony P. Dunbar, New Orleans, La. In making its selections, the committee reviewed approximately forty strong entries in fiction, history, and autobiography/memoir published between July 1, 1986, and June 30, 1987.

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

A Southern Newsman's Journey through Turbulent Times



Andrew McDowd “Mac” Secrest, September 15, 1923—April 17, 2010

As the voice of his newspaper, as the conscience of his community, his state, his country and even the world, and as a federal mediator for civil rights, Mac Secrest chose roles that—literally and figuratively—set him apart.
By Tom Scheft

Part 4

In the last issue we looked at Mac, the editorial writer. In this issue, we explore the childhood, adolescent, and adult experiences and influences that led him to become a powerful, passionate, empathic journalist.
           
In his autobiography, when discussing his role as editor, Mac Secrest was low-key and self-effacing—repeatedly emphasizing that an editor’s role is not for the timid. Activists who chose Mac’s progressive point of view in the South during the 1950s and ’60s understood they were hated by a great segment of the population, and many were the victims of intimidation, violence, and even assassination. Unlike those who used their wealth to remove themselves from the struggle of the oppressed, which Mac had the means to do, he chose a life dedicated to bringing justice and equality for all people. What was the source of Mac’s philosophical beliefs and editorial voice? To answer this question, it is necessary to go back to his childhood in Monroe, N.C., starting with his view of himself as “a boy set apart.” 

Mac painted himself and his family as “typical,” and he repeated this refrain often throughout the early parts of his book. He was a child of privilege. He recalled his mother, sisters, and hired caregivers doting on him as “the prized heir apparent, thoroughly loved and cosseted from the day I was born.” He described his mother as a sweet, loving woman, yet someone who suffered from depression and had to be institutionalized a number of times throughout her life, perhaps leading to his feeling of being “set apart” in a visceral sense. His father was a successful businessman and bank officer, a multi-millionaire with various holdings (among them a car dealership, a pharmacy, and a vast farm worked by tenants). Mac described his father as a “Democrat and a Populist” who “believed in helping his tenant farmers work themselves out of what he recognized was a feudal and futile economic system that handicapped the many for the benefit of the few.”

While the family’s affluence certainly set Mac apart from most in the community, his clothing during his early years as a student alienated him from his classmates whose families were farmers and workers at the cotton mill. Dressed by his mother “as Little Lord Fauntleroy, complete with black satin shorts and silk shirt,” Mac was an object of scorn beginning in the first grade. Looking back as an adult, Mac wrote: “The ridicule, taunting and teasing may have been understandable, but I felt picked on and rejected … I was a logical target, not only because of the way I was dressed but also because of my obvious privilege. I was taken to school by a nursemaid or chauffeur.”

In this privileged home environment Mac was able to develop an extensive vocabulary. While it would serve him well as a journalist, Mac’s vocabulary was a problem for him as a six-year-old. Ridiculed one day for his wardrobe and for using a big word (“impossible”), Mac replied to his tormentors with a phrase he’d heard his grandmother say: “How can you accuse me of being verbose, when I am only employing my ordinary vernacular?” After that episode, he was nicknamed “Impossible” and had to endure a his share of bullying. The name and abuse would stick until age 11, when — older and more physically developed, armed with a “new farm-toughened self-assertiveness” — he won a schoolyard fight and instantly became a hero. “No bully or any prior tormentor was willing to challenge me now,” he recalled.

While the schoolyard was a battle zone for the young Secrest, at home he was “the center of attention.” Admittedly “spoiled and undisciplined” during this time, was surrounded by loving, smiling females—“mother, aunts, sisters, cousins, family friends, cooks, caregivers and nursemaids” — constantly showering him with superlatives: the cutest, the sweetest, the smartest.

Mac recalled his boyhood as “carefree, happy, bucolic”—a time of improvised games, as well as basketball, tennis and croquet; vacations at the beach, as well as Sunday school outings, church and camp meetings; and sleepovers. He also recalled “explor[ing] abandoned wells and learn[ing] how to handle the animals, climb[ing] trees, swim[ming] in a local pond or the abandoned rock quarry.” On a typical day he and his farm friends “explored, hunted, fished and fought, friendly style, from early morning till sunset.”

Most of Mac’s childhood friends did not enjoy his socioeconomic privilege. Many of them were Black. While Mac would go on to attend Duke and Harvard University, meet and establish relationships with famous people—from politicians to presidents to celebrities, he learned early in life to see the potential goodness in people without regard to their lack of material things or the color of their skin.

Mac developed an early fascination with ancient history, which differentiated him from most of the surrounding preteens. His love of reading and research would continue throughout his life. As an adult, it was the rare historical or political topic with which he was unfamiliar.

Philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist George Santayana once said: “He who does not understand history is doomed to repeat it.” Surely the young Mac Secrest intuitively embraced that belief. His passion for the subject served him well as someone who “loved to argue with people,” as his son David has characterized him. According to David, Mac’s penchant for friendly arguing was an opportunity to flex his historical muscles. As editor, there were always good arguments brewing and, as explained in Part 3 of this series, Mac was quick to use historical information to justify his positions and enlighten/educate his audience.    
       
Mac’s love of history introduced him to people who would shape his values. One in particular was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with whom Mac related:

Roosevelt was set apart from his natural friends and his social set by his pragmatic political views. He was “that man in the White House” and “that traitor to his class.” He thundered against the “malefactors of great wealth.” He relished their hostility and was a self-proclaimed “tough-guy” who “loved a good fight” against the self-appointed “in-crowd” on behalf of “the little man.”

At the age of 12, as his knowledge of history grew, Mac used it to understand and come to grips with the world in which he lived—the common occurrences of daily life, the cast of characters in his hometown, and the various things that did and did not happen in his town and throughout the South. This was a time when many White children were taught the myth of the Ku Klux Klan as the “good guys” protecting the South from the evil influences of Blacks, Jews and Catholics. As a young man, Mac was able to see the contradictions between appearance and reality:
           
Blacks and whites co-mingled peacefully together in the stores and on the street, but you seldom if ever saw a black face behind the counter … Young white men, known as drugstore cowboys, could be found “standing on the corner, giving all the girls the eye,” with long suggestive whistles directed at white and black alike. No one called sexual harassment in those days. And no one ever shot and killed any of these white teenagers, either, as someone did the black 14-year-old Emmett Till from Chicago one afternoon in a little town in Mississippi some twenty years later for whistling at a white woman.

While his memoir reveals a young man who could be a typical teen—silly, moody and emotional, Mac was consumed with serious thoughts that went far beyond life in Monroe. He was well aware of conditions throughout the world, including the threat of Adolf Hitler. Even during band practice as he played the clarinet, his thoughts were on weightier matters. “How silly” to him his school-based pursuits seemed, “how trivial, while mean men in Europe are threatening the world with war and aggression and killing hapless minorities who don’t look or act as a tyrannical majority demands.” Again, the teenage Mac acknowledged his difference from others: “I was definitely set apart. No one else my age knew or cared anything at all about Europe, wars or rumors of wars that, once unleashed, would surely reach our shores.”

Psychologist David Elkind discusses what he calls "the personal fable," the common adolescent characteristic of believing "nobody understands how I feel." This trait renders itself in any number of immature behaviors and beliefs during the teen years (and beyond). However, certain people manage to take this feeling and shape it maturely. As an adult journalist, Mac would channel that feeling of being set apart into his role as an editor, a stranger in a strange land, and reach out in an attempt to include his readers.

One can’t help but wonder about the motives of reporters, editors, and pundits. Clearly, some are in love with the sound of their voice—be it aloud or on paper. Clearly, there must be some kind of arrogance, some sense of intellectual superiority—even a little bit—in assuming the role of educator to the masses. And, certainly, there are altruistic and other noble motives as well. One is inclined to give Mac the benefit of the doubt here. Certainly, he was not a saint. He was often a funny guy who, on some occasions, would do exaggerated impressions of certain people whose behaviors he found immature or egotistical. This was rare and done with humor and without meanness of spirit. Most often he was prone to do over-the-top caricatures of himself. First and foremost, however, Mac was an understanding person, which is not always the case of those born into affluence. Mac was well aware of the privilege he enjoyed, and he didn’t see it as any kind of confirmation that he was better than others. Instead of retreating into a life of materialism and safety, which he could have done, Mac dedicated himself to making the world a better place, a more just place … even at the risk of his life and the lives of his family.

His ability to embrace others as people, especially Black people living in segregation and discrimination, came from his knowledge of history and his exposure to different ethnicities. He was able to see the flaws in stereotypes at an early age; he was able to see beyond them. It was his understanding of privilege that allowed him to empathize with those less fortunate—with those exploited politically, socially and economically.

This ability to see the complexity of human existence started—unbeknownst to the very young Mac—with his parents. While he loved his parents, he was fully immersed in the dysfunction of their relationship. They, like many a husband and wife, displayed markedly different personalities and temperaments. As a teenager, Mac saw their relationship as a “parental war, which had been on, it seemed to me, ever since I could remember [and] was still being waged.” As his mother dealt with depression, Mac, an empathic child, had to deal with it as well. He missed her dearly during her times of being institutionalized—this “lively, beautiful mother who brought light, laughter, and love into our lives.” While part of him blamed his father, he understood the situation wasn’t that simple. He found himself—the dutiful, caring son—in the role of mediator. There was little public understanding of depression in those days. In reflecting upon his mother’s illness in his book, he noted: “Daddy felt Mother’s condition was spitefully aimed at him, and in some ways it may have been.” Beyond his love for his parents, he saw flaws in both: “Mother wasn’t so sick as she thought and at times behaved. Her condition really did not bother me much except when Daddy was around; to me he was the fly in the family ointment. And when Mother was not around, Daddy was all right.” As Mac became more conscious of the complexity of people and relationships, particularly the relationship between his mother and father, it must have grown clear to him that money and social standing weren’t an “answer” for everything; they obviously didn’t guarantee happiness and harmony.

Another important event in understanding Mac’s character is his having to deal with the death of his child, Phil, who died of leukemia in 1973 at the age of 21—one of those unimaginable traumas with which so many of us are able to avoid. But Mac, his wife Ann, and their children Molly and David could not escape that reality. That personal pain certainly set them apart. Under those circumstances one can understand how easy it would be to withdraw from the world, to be spiteful and bitter. But they did not:

How do you get over the loss of a child? In a sense, you don’t. You never forget. You wouldn’t even want to. Give yourself some space. Gradually angry resignation is replaced by peaceful acceptance. Father Time and Mother Nature eventually take care of everything. I don’t question any more. And happy memories have crowded out the sad ones.

Next Issue: In Part 5, we chronicle Mac’s dealings and dueling with Senator Strom Thurmond and his work in Selma, Alabama, as a member of President Lyndon Johnson’s Community Relations Service, including his relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Reference

Secrest, Andrew McDowd. (2004). Curses and Blessings: Life and Evolution in the 20th Century South. Bloomington, Indiana: Author House.