Southern Regional Council Publishes Report on African American-Latino Coalitions

Click here or on the image of the Report below to view the complete report.

Atlanta- The Southern Regional Council (SRC), a multi-racial organization founded in 1919 to combat racial injustice in the South, recently completed a project, funded by the the Carnegie Corporation of New York, examining coalitions among African American and Latino communities in the South.

"I am ecstatic about the meaningful and timely report which we have produced. The demographics of this region are changing exponentially and we have a responsibility to illuminate the challenges which this change represents," stated Charles S. Johnson III, President of the SRC board.

Specifically, SRC report examines coalitions among African Americans and Latino communities in the Southeast to address issues of mutual importance. The SRC Project Team convened focus groups and individual interviews with key participants in a number of Black/Brown initiative s that led to significant action, i.e. the formation of organizations that actively engaged in a sustained effort to confront political, social or economic inequities and injustices adversely impacting both minority populations. Focus groups were convened in Florida, North Carolina, and North and South Georgia.

This project was be led by Joel Alvarado, Policy Director for the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention. His past work as a Policy Analyst for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Congressional Aide and current Executive Committee Member for the NAACP Atlanta Branch offered Mr. Alvarado excellent insight as to the complexity and possibility of forging strong Black/Brown relations. He is originally from New York and has lived in Atlanta, Georgia for 17 years. Mr. Alvarado holds a B.A. in History from Morehouse College.

The other principal researcher was Dr. Charles Jaret, Professor of Sociology at GSU. His research and teaching interests lie in urban sociology, race/ethnicity, and immigration. Dr. Jaret's research focuses both on individuals' attitudes and behaviors (e.g., racial-ethnic identity; responses to racial-ethnic humor), as well as on larger units and social processes (e.g., connections between metropolitan economic restructuring and economic inequality among racial groups; the process of suburban sprawl). He also studies immigration and recently published a comparison of American attitudes towards immigrants today and in the early 1900s. Dr. Jaret earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago and has been on the faculty of GSU since 1975.

The Carnegie Corporation of New York was created in 1911 by Andrew Carnegie to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding. "We are delighted the Carnegie Corporation decided to support our effort to effectuate positive change in the region by examining the issues and identifying viable solutions that will benefit the common good. We are also ecstatic to have Georgia State University as a partner," offered Johnson.

SRC's research shows that African Americans and Latinos in the South often face similar challenges as they seek to achieve their full social and economic potential. Instead of joining forces to achieve goals which they have in common, however, they often see themselves as competing in a “zero-sum-game” for limited social, economic and political opportunities. Standing against this trend are examples in which African-American and Latino communities have come together to work collaboratively around issues of common concern.

Georgia State University Professor Charles Jaret Summarizes SRC Study of Black-Brown Coalitions

The increasing presence of Latinos living in the Southeast is one of the most obvious recent demographic changes occurring in this region. Between 2000 and 2007 the Latino population in Georgia and North Carolina grew by over 300,000 and 250,000 people, respectively, while other states in the region, such as Alabama and Kentucky, saw more modest but substantial increases of approximately 40,000.

Much of this population increase consists of people moving in from other parts of the U.S. or from Mexico and other parts of Latin America. At the same time, however, the African American population in the Southeast has also been increasing, largely due to the fact that more blacks have been moving to states like Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee than are moving away to other states.

This has produced a novel situation in many communities in the region – African Americans and Latinos encountering each other in work settings, schools, neighborhoods, and other places. While some interactions have gone smoothly, many have been fraught with misunderstanding, competition, suspicion, hostility, and conflict.

Yet observers have noted that many members of both of these groups face some similar handicaps: difficulties in finding higher-paying jobs, discrimination in housing, inadequate educational opportunities, lack of good health care, mistreatment by law enforcement officials. Perceptive individuals within African American and Latino communities in the Southeast have suggested that they have much to gain by working together to solve mutual problems, and they have been attempting to make connections, start dialogues, and act in cooperative ways to transcend the rather deep divisions that separate them.

How can this be accomplished? Who is actually working on this? What problems do they encounter, and what successes have they had? What can be learned from their experiences? These are the questions that our research seeks to answer. Towards that goal, we began by identifying groups or organizations in the Southeast that are working to bridge the gap between African Americans and Latinos in pursuit of mutual goals. After locating several we focused on four that generously allowed us to meet with them and hold focus group interviews with them. Together they effectively reflect a wide range of types of communities in the region that have African American and Latino residents: a rural county (Atkinson County, Georgia), a medium-sized city (Greensboro, North Carolina), a modern international city (Miami, Florida), and a suburban county in a sprawling metropolitan area (Cobb County, Georgia). Of these, the first two are organized by ministers and have a religious base, while the latter two are more secular efforts at “black-brown” cooperation. Our report describes each of these groups and their work in detail, and then provides our conclusions and offers a set of nine elements that we think are critically important in creating a successful coalition for these two groups.

In this summary we want to highlight and emphasize four of the most significant things that we have learned from our research:

Roadblocks: Several factors limit the growth prospects of African American-Latino collaborations, but two stand out prominently. One is that many people, within both groups, do not see a need for, or a strategic advantage in, pursuing a coalition. In each focus group the point was made that they often meet resistance from African Americans and Latinos who mistrust or are hostile towards each other, or who prefer working and organizing to solve problems just within their own community. Ultimately, to grow a strong black-brown coalition, more African Americans and Latinos must come to believe that although their interests may be in opposition on some issues, on other important issues they both stand to gain a lot more by working together than by going it alone. A second roadblock is a language barrier – inability to communicate effectively or comfortably with each other hinders their efforts to collaborate. Some groups have dealt with this relatively effectively (by relying on bilingual members or by bringing in Spanish language students or faculty from nearby colleges to help translate at meeting or events, and by printing signs and flyers in English and Spanish).

Leadership: The leaders of a black-brown collaboration must understand the situation and community context very well, be able to work effectively with others, have excellent plans of action, and an ability to attract resources. The most successful of these collaborations have put together a leadership development program and also sponsors frequent educational programs that enhance leadership quality. Another useful leadership role is as a “bridge-builder” who encourages or inspires African Americans and Latinos to cross group boundaries and get to know people in the other group. Good leadership also involves an ability to select issues that can be “quick wins,” which build enthusiasm and a sense of efficacy among coalition members.

Networks and Resources: The more successful African American-Latino collaborations are well-connected with a network of other regional organizations that serve as allies providing advice, in-kind assistance, and by sending participants to events or programs. Their network also includes foundations that serve as funding sources and national organizations that are working on similar issues that the concern the black-brown collaboration (e.g., labor, housing, health care). We found that collaborations that are rural or relatively new are not so well connected to these networks and could use assistance on this. These are also groups that are in need of other resources as well, which places a great strain on the leaders or key activists.

Trust: Coalition-building is a pragmatic and political endeavor, especially when seeking resources, attempting to mobilize community support, and (as is often necessary) putting pressure on public officials. But it is also an emotional process in which fears are confronted, tentative gestures and acts of kindness may be appreciated, rebuffed, or not even recognized, and trust in each other can be gained or lost. Each of the African American-Latino collaborations we studied has worked hard to cultivate a positive emotional atmosphere and sense of trust in each other, for without that nothing else will move forward. For some this emotional work is grounded in their religious or spiritual faith and institutionalized in church activities, while for others it springs up in activities such as multicultural dance or musical programs, the study of each group’s history, or shared “pot-luck” dinners. The essential point is a willingness to cross boundaries, confront fears, and embrace the humanity that each community possesses.

Overall, our intention in studying this social phenomenon was not purely “academic." Ideally, we hope it serves as a valuable resource for local community leaders and activists who are confronting similar challenges. The South, as depicted within the annals of history, has been irrevocably changed into a multicultural, multilingual society where strangers have the opportunity to become allies. This possibility of coalition building is not idealism run amok, but a necessity if African Americans and Latinos want to further define their reality within the political process. This document offers all who struggle for freedom, justice and equality a glimpse into what it can be. The individuals interviewed were ordinary people who collectively became extraordinary, not for glory or praise, but to ensure that their families and communities would also partake of the American dream.

Remembering the Lillian Smith Book Award Ceremony for 2008

As we look forward to this year's Lillian Smith Book Award Ceremony, scheduled for August 31, 2014, we also reflect on the moving presentations at the 2008 ceremony.

The first presentation was by Joseph Crespino, author of In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution.

In the 1960s, Mississippi was the heart of white southern resistance to the civil-rights movement. To many, it was a backward-looking society of racist authoritarianism and violence that was sorely out of step with modern liberal America. White Mississippians, however, had a different vision of themselves and their country, one so persuasive that by 1980 they had become important players in Ronald Reagan's newly ascendant Republican Party.

In this ambitious reassessment of racial politics in the deep South, Joseph Crespino reveals how Mississippi leaders strategically accommodated themselves to the demands of civil-rights activists and the federal government seeking to end Jim Crow, and in so doing contributed to a vibrant conservative countermovement. Crespino explains how white Mississippians linked their fight to preserve Jim Crow with other conservative causes--with evangelical Christians worried about liberalism infecting their churches, with cold warriors concerned about the Communist threat, and with parents worried about where and with whom their children were schooled. Crespino reveals important divisions among Mississippi whites, offering the most nuanced portrayal yet of how conservative southerners bridged the gap between the politics of Jim Crow and that of the modern Republican South.

This book lends new insight into how white Mississippians gave rise to a broad, popular reaction against modern liberalism that recast American politics in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

Professor Crespino's presentation was followed by a moving presentation by Wesley Hogan, author of Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC's Dream for a New America.

How did the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee break open the caste system in the American South between 1960 and 1965? In this innovative study, Wesley Hogan explores what SNCC accomplished and, more important, how it fostered significant social change in such a short time. She offers new insights into the internal dynamics of SNCC as well as the workings of the larger civil rights and Black Power movement of which it was a part.

As Hogan chronicles, the members of SNCC created some of the civil rights movement's boldest experiments in freedom, including the sit-ins of 1960, the rejuvenated Freedom Rides of 1961, and grassroots democracy projects in Georgia and Mississippi. She highlights several key players--including Charles Sherrod, Bob Moses, and Fannie Lou Hamer--as innovators of grassroots activism and democratic practice.

Breaking new ground, Hogan shows how SNCC laid the foundation for the emergence of the New Left and created new definitions of political leadership during the civil rights and Vietnam eras. She traces the ways other social movements--such as Black Power, women's liberation, and the antiwar movement--adapted practices developed within SNCC to apply to their particular causes. Many Minds, One Heart ultimately reframes the movement and asks us to look anew at where America stands on justice and equality today.

Join us for this year's ceremony.

Sunday, September 6, 2015

DeKalb County Public Library

Decatur, Georgia

SRC Continues Tradition of Cutting-Edge Research with New Study of Black-Brown Coalitions

Click here to review the report!

The Southern Regional Council’s predecessor, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, emerged during the historic “Red Summer” of 1919 – a high water mark of racial division in the United States. For the ensuing ninety years, we have sought to shed light on barriers to the establishment of a just society in the South, and to illuminate a path toward the eradication of those barriers.

The Commission’s publications – including Charles S. Johnson’s Collapse of Cotton Tenancy and Ira Reid’s Sharecroppers All – were instrumental in shaping rural policy for the Roosevelt Administration. The Council’s Ashmore Project resulted in the publication of The Negro in the Schools, which documented the harmful effects of segregation and was cited in the Supreme Court briefing in Brown v. Board of Education. For years, the Council worked to inform the nation's labor policy through its annual reports on The Climate for Workers in the U.S. The Council’s 1998 report, Seeking an America as Good as its Promise, challenged conventional wisdom about white attitudes towards affirmative action remedies. Our 2008 report on Trends in Voting Policy revealed barriers which continue to impede full electoral participation in the South

For most of its history, the Council’s work addressed the paradigm of a South which was made up of two principal communities – one black and one white. In the waning days of the 20th Century, however, the Council began broadening its work to address the impact immigration was beginning to have in our region. The very definition of “minority” in the South had begun to shift, as Latinos and members of other communities of color began to settle in the region, and the Council was one of the first traditional race relations “think tanks” to address this new reality.

In 1999 the Council launched Partnerships for Racial Unity, a first tentative effort to envision bridges of cooperation and multi-racial understanding. We partnered with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) to co-sponsor a series of “Atlanta Parent Workshops” to increase the involvement of Latino parents in the public schools. We collaborated with the University of Memphis Center for Research on Women and the Highlander Center for Research and Education in a community-based research project entitled Race and Nation: Building New Communities for the South. This collaboration resulted in a report entitled The New Latino South, which exposed the challenges which new immigrants face in finding their way in a social landscape defined in many locations by the contentious divide between black and white. We held a series of meetings across the State of Georgia to promote cross-racial progressive coalitions and identify common interests and collaborative opportunities. Notably, our meetings in Dalton and Valdosta, Georgia surfaced important common concerns about the treatment of workers, access to quality health care, and lack of political representation. In one of our statewide gatherings, Latino participants expressed the belief that much could be learned from the experience and struggle of black southerners.

Our experience tells us that African Americans and Latinos in the South often face similar challenges as they seek to achieve their full social and economic potential. Instead of joining forces to achieve goals which they have in common, however, they often see themselves as competing in a “zero-sum-game” for limited social, economic and political opportunities. Standing against this trend are examples in which African-American and Latino communities have come together to work collaboratively around issues of common concern.

With assistance from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Council has embarked on an effort to explore the prospects for collaboration between African American and Latino communities. This effort has been led by Project Director Joel Alvarado and Principal Researcher, Charles Jaret, and much of their work has been informed by focus group participants from four very diverse southern communities. We are deeply grateful to all of the participants for their roles in making this report possible. We believe that this effort has produced insights which will be useful in identifying those conditions which best lend themselves to successful collaborations.

Click here to view the report!

Lillian Smith Book Awards for 2009 - Featured Juror

P. Toby Graham
Acting Director, Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Director, Digital Library
University of Georgia

Toby Graham is director of Georgia's collaborative digitization program, which partners with libraries, archives, and other institutions to provide online access to key collections on Georgia history and life. Based at the University of Georgia Libraries, the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) is an initiative of GALILEO, Georgia's virtual library. The DLG endeavors to provide a seamless digital library on the state's history and culture connecting users to 105 digital collections from 65 institutions and 100 agencies of government (approx. 500K objects). http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/

Graham is Acting Director of the Hargrett Library at the University of Georgia, which consists of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Georgiana Collection, University Archives, and Records Management.

Graham serves as co-director and principal investigator for the Civil Rights Digital Library (CRDL) initiative (in-process), providing Web-based access to historical news film and related primary sources on the Movement from institutions across the U.S. CRDL also includes an educator resources component designed to aid the use of CRDL in the learning process. CRDL is supported in part by an IMLS National Leadership Grant.

Toby leads digital production for Georgia HomePLACE, a partnership between the Georgia Public Library Service and GALILEO to enhance access to local and family history resources.

Graham oversees the Georgia Newspaper Project (GNP), which microfilms 200 current newspapers on an ongoing basis as well as historical content. The GNP generates approximately 2-3 million pages of microfilmed newsprint annually.

Formerly, Graham served as Head, Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg.

Graham earned his Ph.D. in library and information studies, M.L.S., and M.A. in history at the University of Alabama. He is recipient of the Alabama Author Award for Non-Fiction (2004), ALISE/Eugene Garfield Outstanding Dissertation Award (2000), and Phyllis Dain Library History Dissertation Award (1999). He is author of A Right to Read: Segregation and Civil Rights in Alabama's Public Libraries, 1900-1965.

SRC Donor's Life Exemplifies Southern Progressive Tradition.

We recently learned that the Southern Regional Council had received a bequest from the Estate of Elisabeth Larisey Kytle. We are grateful to Elisabeth Kytle and her late husband Calvin Kytle, whose lives serve to remind us that Southern progressivism has a long and distinguished history.

Elizabeth Larisey Kytle was born in Charleston, S.C., on July 25, 1913, the daughter of Alfred Oswald and Anna Belle Larisey. At age 13, she moved with her parents to Valdosta, Ga., and in 1935 she graduated from Georgia State Woman's College (now Valdosta State University). After graduating from college she took a position with the National Youth Administration, where she met Calvin Kytle, her future husband, an Emory graduate who later worked part time as a reporter for The Atlanta Journal Constitution. While Calvin was serving in World War II, Elisabeth took a position with the Citizen's Fact Finding Movement, and she also worked as a staff writer in the public relations department of the Bell Bomber Plant in Marietta, Ga.

Following the war, Mr. Kytle served briefly on the faculty of Emory University, and Mr. and Ms. Kytle became deeply involved in issues of civil rights. With a grant from the Rosenwald Fund, secretly administered by the Southern Regional Council, Calvin collaborated with Congressman James A. Mackay on an in-depth study of Georgia’s 1947 Constitutional crisis (sometimes referred to as the "three governors" conflict), which set the stage for Georgia’s political transformation. This study included interviews with politicians, factory workers, civic leaders, academics and preachers throughout Georgia’s 159 counties, including editor Ralph McGill, novelist Lillian Smith, defeated gubernatorial candidate James V. Carmichael, and others. This study, reputedly suppressed by the Talmadge regime, was later published under the title Who Runs Georgia?

The Kytles left Georgia in 1950, when Calvin took a position as an information officer for the Nationwide Insurance Company in Columbus, Ohio, and thereafter they lived in places as diverse as Cabin John, Md., Washington D.C. and Chapel Hill, N.C.

In 1958, Elizabeth Kytle published Willie Mae, a first-person account of a black woman's life and her experiences as a domestic worker in a succession of southern households in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Hailed by The New York Times as one of the best books of 1958, Willie Mae is a testament to the courage and strength of a generation of women who struggled to survive with dignity and humanity in the years before the civil rights movement. On the occasion of the republication of Willie Mae thirty years later, a reviewer in Southern Changes noted that, in the tradition of Zora Neal Hurston, Elizabeth Kytle’s listening had “produced an early ad brilliant example of what is now called ‘oral history.’”

Elisabeth’s other books include Four Cats Make One Pride, for which she also took the photographs; Home on the Canal, an informal history of the old Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, followed by reminiscences of eleven men and women who lived and worked on the boats, and Voices of Bobby Wilde, the story of a paranoid schizophrenic.

From 1964-1965, Calvin Kytle served as deputy director of the U.S. Community Relations Service, created under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1978, he founded Seven Locks Press, where he published authors including Bill Moyers. He was the author of the young-adult book Gandhi, Soldier of Nonviolence, and the Depression-era novel, Like a Tree.

Lillian Smith Book Awards - Featured 2009 Award Recipient

The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement

By Bob Zellner with Connie Curry

Even forty years after the movement, the transition from son and grandson of Klansmen to field secretary of SNCC seems quite a journey. In the early 1960s, when Bob Zellner’s professors and classmates at a small church school in Alabama thought he was crazy for even wanting to do research on civil rights, it was nothing short of remarkable. Now, in his long-awaited memoir, Zellner tells how one white Alabamian joined ranks with the black students who were sitting-in, marching, fighting, and sometimes dying to challenge the Southern “way of life” he had been raised on but rejected. Decades later, he is still protesting on behalf of social change and equal rights. Fortunately, he took the time, with co-author Constance Curry, to write down his memories and reflections. He was in all the campaigns and was close to all the major figures. He was beaten, arrested, and reviled by some but admired and revered by others. The Wrong Side of Murder Creek is Bob Zellner’s larger-than-life story, and it was worth waiting for. Zellner now lives and teaches in New York state. Atlanta-based co-author Curry is also a civil rights veteran and has written several books and directed a documentary film.

Join us for the Award Ceremony

Dekalb Public Library

Sunday, September 6, 2009

2:30 p.m.