Steve Lerner Accepts Lillian Smith Book Award for 2011

Grassroots Organizers Struggle Against Racial and Economic Inequity In the Apportionment of Environmental Burdens

Steve Lerner is the author of Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States, winner of a Lillian Smith Book Award for 2011. An extended version of his remarks on accepting this award appear below. This video includes the introduction by Toby Graham as well as Mr. Lerner's acceptance speech.

Across the nation, in thousands of low-income communities, a disproportionate number of African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans are exposed to toxic chemicals from heavily-polluting industries and military bases located next door. Contamination in these mixed residential/industrial zones is more intense than in more affluent white communities. As a predictable result, the number of environmentally induced diseases and premature deaths in these hotspots of pollution are disproportionately high.

To put it bluntly, government policies and practices permit a higher percentage of African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans to be exposed to elevated levels of chemical contamination when compared with whites. More low-income citizens are also exposed to industrial pollution than are middle class and affluent residents.

This blatant racial and economic inequity in the apportioning of environmental burdens has been facilitated by a political and regulatory system that permits heavy industries to site highly toxic facilities next door to low-income residential areas. Our regulators have failed to strictly enforce existing industrial emission rules and have levied fines on corporate offenders that industry can afford to pay as a cost of doing business.

Numerous academic studies demonstrate that low-income and heavily-minority populations are disproportionately exposed to toxic chemicals. One study of 368 communities in Massachusetts found that low income communities face cumulative exposures from environmentally hazardous facilities and sites that are three to four times greater than all other communities.[1] “Clearly not all communities in Massachusetts are polluted equally,” the authors conclude. Two other academic researchers who reviewed 16 environmental justice statistical studies between 1971 and 1992 conclude: “There is a clear and unequivocal class and racial bias in the distribution of environmental hazards.[2] Commenting on these and other similar statistics, Robert Bullard, director of the Center for Environmental Justice at Clark Atlanta University observes: “Low income and minority communities continue to bear the greater health and environmental burdens, while more affluent whites receive the bulk of the benefits.”

What these studies tell us is that there exists today a pattern of environmental racism and classism that has been largely overlooked by the American public, the media, academia, the public health establishment, and the environmental and health regulators who are charged with protecting all Americans. This pattern of unequally dividing toxic exposures constitutes a grave civil rights injustice. The Constitutional promise -- that all Americans will be equally protected under the law -- is not being fulfilled in neighborhoods where our poorest and most vulnerable populations are regularly exposed to industrial emissions that cause cancer, heart disease, respiratory disease, reproductive disorders, birth defects, skin lesions, eye problems and a host of other ills.

Over the past five years I have published 13 case studies that describe what life is like in communities located on the fenceline with heavy industry. During that time, it has been my privilege to be invited into the homes of residents who live within a stone’s throw of refineries, military bases, weapons plants, charcoal factories, plastics plants, steal-hardening smelters, and other heavy industries that emit contamination that trespasses into their residential neighborhoods. In all the communities I visited I found grassroots activists who are organizing their neighbors to protest the pollution that engulfs their neighborhoods. They are demanding reductions in the volume of toxics to which they are exposed, the installation of pollution control equipment, restitution for harm to their health and property value, and, in some cases, relocation to safer areas. These environmental justice citizen activists are leading the way in demanding an end to environmental racism. Their stories are told in my last two books: Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor (MIT Press, 2005); and Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States (MIT Press, 2010).

The first of these books provides an oral history of Diamond, a small African-American neighborhood sandwiched between a giant Shell Oil refinery and chemical plant. Many Diamond residents knew that contaminants in the air were harming their health but were too poor to move or did not want to abandon their relatives who lived nearby. They were stuck in a toxic trap.

On a summer day in Diamond in 1973, sixteen year-old Leroy Jones prepared to cut the grass in the yard of his grandmother, Helen Washington. After chatting with two friends who were passing on bicycles, he leaned over and pulled the starter cord on his lawnmower and the spark from the engine’s motor ignited gas that had leaked from a Shell pipeline. He was immediately engulfed him in flames. His grandmother’s house behind him exploded and she burned to death. Leroy Jones survived for a day in the hospital before succumbing to his injuries. Subsequently, on May 4, 1988 a huge explosion at a catalytic cracking unit at the Shell refinery killed seven workers and injured 48 others in town as 159 million pounds of toxic chemicals were blown into the air. Heavy damage to property at the refinery and in town required an evacuation.

These two industrial accidents made Diamond residents aware of just how precarious it was to live next to two behemoth industrial facilities that handled large volumes of toxic chemicals. Neighbors began to compare notes about the problems they were having breathing at night when the toxic releases caused them to turn off the air conditioners, close the doors and windows, and sit in the bathtub with a wet towel over their head to escape the fumes.

One resident of Diamond, Margie Richard, a school teacher, who later won the prestigious Goldman Award for grassroots environmental activists, organized her neighbors and orchestrated a media campaign, which after a decade of struggle, embarrassed Shell officials into buying out Diamond residents so they could move to safer ground. It was a bitter-sweet environmental justice victory because this close-knit town, where families looked out for each other and had roots that went back to slave days, was destroyed.

During the several years it took to research and write the Diamond story, I read and heard about countless other low-income communities on the fenceline with heavy industry and military bases where people were falling ill and dying prematurely at alarming rates. Realizing that there were thousands of these “fenceline” neighborhoods across the nation that were experiencing problems similar to those in Diamond, I decided to write a book that would include a dozen case histories.

One of these stories I tell in Sacrifice Zones takes place in Tallevast, Florida, a tiny African-American neighborhood south of Tampa. It was in Tallevast that on a September morning in 2003 Laura Ward looked out kitchen window and spotted a crew of hardhats pulling a drilling rig onto her lawn. Not a shy woman, Ward confronted the crew boss and demanded to know what he was doing. He told her he was drilling a test well to see if trichloroethylene (TCE) and other dangerous chemicals had leaked out of the neighboring Lockheed Martin weapons and aerospace plant and polluted the shallow groundwater in the neighborhood. When she heard this Ward told me she felt the ground shift beneath her feet. Her home and those of her neighbors pumped water from this shallow aquifer. They used the water to drink, to make baby formula, to bathe in, and to wash their dishes and clothes. If the water was polluted with dangerous chemicals then they had been ingesting it for years.

Over the next several months, Ward and her neighbor, Wanda Washington, educated themselves about the science of contamination. They learned about the health effects of TCE and beryllium and other toxic chemicals that had been intruding into their neighborhood from the plant next door. They learned about environmental regulations and about the way Lockheed Martin had been disposing of these toxic chemicals. And they learned that county officials had known for years that there was a public health hazard coming from the weapons plant without having informed members of the community.

Residents of Tallevast trace their lineage back to the post civil war era when freed slaves from Virginia came south to find employment working in turpentine camps in Tallevast. A hundred years later, descendants of those freed slaves found work in a small machine shop across the street from their homes. During the Cold War the machine shop expanded, was bought by a number of different corporations, and was eventually purchased by Lockheed Martin. Tallevast men found work in this factory as painters, maintenance workers and janitors. Part of the work involved cleaning out ducts that were filled with dust that turned out to be laced with beryllium, a highly toxic agent used in the production of nuclear warheads. They brought the dust home with them on their clothes and a number of families suffered respiratory illnesses and premature death as a result.

It was the Trichloroethylene, a chemical used as a solvent, however, that caused the most widespread damage in the community. After Laura Ward spread the word about the contamination problem, Helen E. Beyers Worthington, a retired nurse, decided to conduct an informal health survey. Going door to door to interview neighbors about their health history, Worthington found that many of the members of the 87 families in Tallevast had cancer, neurological problems, reproductive disorders, developmental disorder, and skin lesions. One young man she interviewed, who had brain cancer, asked her not to tell his grandfather about his health problem because it would only cause him to worry. Another neighbor lifted showed Worthington scars and lesions on her hands, arms, and legs that had been caused by gardening in contaminated soil that had been brought out of the factory. Other families had multiple members with berylliosis or more than one member with cancer. Other families were laced with neurological disorders, reproductive disorder, or birth defects. There was just too much cancer, Worthington said: it couldn’t be a coincidence.

For their part, Lockheed Martin officials downplayed the problem. At first they claimed their toxic wastes had remained inside their fenceline. Then, when studies belied this claim, they conceded that some had leaked out under a couple of neighboring residences. Testing soon showed that the TCE contamination was intense and widespread. City water was finally piped to residents but it came too late for all those who became ill or died prematurely. A lawsuit is now working its way through the courts but to date there is no resolution of the problems that Tallevast residents face. They now have clean water but they continue to live on top of illegally high levels of contamination.

Steps to Alleviate and Ultimately Eliminate Environmental Injustice

Overcoming environmental injustices such as those described in Sacrifice Zones will be the work of decades and will require educating the public and changing laws. It will also require a public motivated to elect new representatives who believe it should be a priority to see that no segment of American society should be disproportionately exposed to industrial emissions. Among the steps that need to be taken to alleviate this problem are the following:

1. Political pressure must be brought to bear on federal and state regulatory agencies to ensure that existing emission laws are strictly enforced and that fines for illegal emissions are increased to the point where they change corporate behavior. Companies that repeatedly fail to curtail illegal emissions should be closed until they can prove they can protect their residential neighbors from harm; or they should be require to buy the homes of their neighbors so residents can relocate to safer areas.

2. High-emission industries should not be permitted to site new plants in communities already over-burdened with toxic neighbors.

3. Buffer zones should be established to provide a margin of safety between residential areas and heavy-emission facilities such as refineries. Mixed residential/industrial zoning should no longer be permitted. Instead, heavy-emission industries should be sited at a safe distance from residential neighborhoods. Where that is not practical, industry should be required to buy out residents in order to create a safe buffer zones.

4. Monitoring equipment should be erected around the perimeter of heavy industries with a history of large volume toxic releases. The equipment should be paid for by the company but controlled by a disinterested third party.

5. A small cadre of fenceline residents should also be trained, equipped, and paid to work as “community air monitors.” Their part-time job would be to take periodic air samples when they smell something unusual. They would be on the front-line of protecting their community from chemical trespass.

6. Regular health surveys should be undertaken by state officials in fenceline communities to ensure that residents are not becoming ill as a consequence of living too close to high-emission facilities.

7. It is currently very difficult to prove in a court of law that the release of a toxic chemical from a factory has caused an illness in a resident who lives next door. This should be rectified by a new law that shifts the burden of proof to favor residents who are illegally exposed to industrial releases. Where there is a prima facia case (that illnesses experienced by fenceline residents are consistent with what could be expected from exposure to a chemical release) rather than requiring that residents prove they had been harmed, it would be incumbent on corporate officials to prove that their operations had not caused illness or death among neighboring residents.

8. Tax incentives should be fashioned to penalize the use of toxic chemicals in the manufacturing process. In order to “tax bads and not goods,” income taxes could be reduced while taxes are raised on chemicals known to be harmful to health. This would spur the nascent “green chemistry” movement, which seeks to reinvent the way we make things by reducing the use of toxic chemicals in our feedstocks.

The kind of reforms outlined above will not come about by themselves. To reduce the use of toxic chemicals in industry and distribute the remaining toxic exposures more equitably will require a coalition with enough political muscle to take on the large corporate interests. As a first step, top ten environmental organizations should do more to provide environmental justice activists with technical, legal, and financial support as well as help with organizing tactics and media campaigns. This would be a double win: Environmental justice struggles need and deserve the help, while mainstream environmental groups need to increase their racial and economic diversity. By joining forces both of these goals could be met. Labor, civil rights, health, medical, academic and religious organizations also need to reach out to environmental justice activists and help them in their struggle for safe living conditions.

Finally, public education is essential in building support for environmental justice reforms. It is my hope that today’s Lillian Smith Book Award for Sacrifice Zones will help bring these pressing, environmental justice issues to the public’s attention. Looking over the list of writers who have previously won this award, I am humbled and thankful to be in their company.

Steve Lerner

Decatur, Georgia, September 4^th, 2011

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[1] Daniel R. Faber and Eric J. Krieg, “Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards: Environmental Injustices in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Environmental Health Perspectives 110, Suppl. 2 (2002): 278.

[2] Paul Mohai and Bunyon Bryant, “Environmental Injustices: Weighing Race and Class Factors in the Distribution of Environmental Hazards, University of Colorado Law Review, no. 62 (1992): 927, cited in Environmental Injustices, Political Struggles, ed. David E. Camacho (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1998), 53.

Danielle McGuire Accepts Lillian Smith Book Award for 2011

Danielle McGuire is the author of At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance - A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, winner of a Lillian Smith Book Award for 2011. Her remarks on accepting this award appear below. This video includes the introduction by Dr. Mary Twining as well as Dr. McGuire's acceptance speech.

It is an incredible honor to win this award since the Southern Regional Council and Lillian Smith, have had such an enormous impact on my growth as a citizen and my evolution as an historian. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that without both of them, I’m not sure I would have written this book. And I suppose that’s a really strange thing to say for a white northerner who was born decades after the civil rights movement.

Let me explain.

I was studying African American history at the University of Wisconsin in 1998 when I heard this wonderful show about the civil rights movement on NPR. I was completely transfixed by the vivid stories of the civil rights movement that the Southern Regional Council had captured in their program, Will the Circle Be Unbroken.

Anyway, that day’s episode was about the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. But it was different from anything I’d ever heard before.

Like most people educated in our public school system, I believed that Rosa Parks started the boycott partly because her feet were tired.

But Joe Azbell, the former editor of the Montgomery Advertiser talked about Gertrude Perkins. “Gertrude Perkins is never mentioned in the history books,” Azbell said, “but she had as much to do with the bus boycott as anyone on earth.”

Azbell’s statement confused me. Who was Gertrude Perkins? And what on earth did she have to do with the bus boycott?

That question took me about twelve years to answer fully. And the result is, of course, this book.

The short answer, though, is that in 1949, two white Montgomery police officers kidnapped Perkins, drove her outside town and raped her. Somehow she found the courage to report the crime to the police—perhaps the same men who assaulted her.

As a result of her bold testimony, African Americans in Montgomery rallied to her defense. NAACP activists, labor leaders and ministers formed an umbrella organization called the “Citizens Committee for Gertrude Perkins” and demanded an investigation and trial.

Their public protests lasted for over two months. As a result, they exposed the longstanding practice of white police officers sexually assaulting black women, forced a grand jury hearing and brought the city’s disparate black ministers together for the first time.

So what does this have to do with the 1955 bus boycott?

The 1955 boycott, often portrayed as the opening scene in the civil rights drama, was in many was the last act of the Montgomery movement. In fact, the bus boycott was the logical outgrowth of a decade of black women’s activism and a history of gendered political appeals to protect black women, like Gertrude Perkins, from sexualized violence and rape.

The kidnapping and rape of Gertrude Perkins was hardly unusual in the segregated South. From slavery through the better part of the 20^th century, white men abducted and assaulted black women with alarming regularity and often impunity.

· They lured black women and girls away from home with promises of work and better wages.

· They attacked them on the job.

· They abducted them at gunpoint while traveling to or from home, work or church.

· And they sexually humiliated them and assaulted them on buses and streetcars and in other public spaces.

This was the pattern throughout the South during the 1940s and 50s and underscored the limits of southern justice.

Lillian Smith wrote about this pattern, though she never spoke explicitly about rape, in her courageous book, Killers of the Dream. In it, she talks about the menace of white men’s “backyard temptations” and argues that while “there are no available statistics on the frequency or range of biracial sex activities in the South…this everyone knows: whenever, wherever race relations are discussed in the United States, sex moves arm in arm with the concept of segregation.”

In Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith explored the consequences of what she called the “race, sex, sin” spiral and how interracial sex—both coerced and consensual--sat at the center of segregation. Though that book, I think, is more of an exploration about the psychology of segregation and white supremacy, reading it made me think about sex as a lens through which I could view white supremacy in a different way. And I particularly interested in the subject of white men’s “backyard temptations”—that is, black women.

What I learned was that African American women had a lot to say about this at the time; they didn’t always keep their stories secret.

From the slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs to Ida B. Wells to Fannie Lou Hamer’s stark testimony about a forced hysterectomy and sexualized beating in 1963, black women reclaimed their humanity by organizing public protests and testifying about their brutal assaults. Their testimonies often led to larger campaigns for civil and human rights.

Even the most oft-told and illustrious civil rights struggles—like the Montgomery bus boycott, the Selma struggle and the 1964 Freedom Summer—often had roots in organized resistance to sexualized racial violence and gendered political appeals to protect black womanhood.

Essentially, At the Dark End of the Street argues that rape and resistance to rape sits at the center of the modern civil rights movement. And that movement looks really different when you include black women’s resistance to racialized sexual violence.

For example, Rosa Parks is often characterized as a meek and mild woman whose tired feet made her tiptoe into history. But her story is more revealing and certainly more interesting if you include the issue of sexual violence.

In 1944, in Abbeville, Alabama, an African American woman named Recy Taylor walked home from a church revival.

A car full of white men kidnapped her off the street, drove her to the woods and assaulted her at gunpoint.

When they finished they dropped her off in the middle of town and told her they would kill her if she told anyone what happened.

But that night, she told her husband, father, and the local sheriff about the assault. A few days later, the Montgomery NAACP called to say they were sending their best investigator. It was Rosa Parks.

She arrived on Taylor’s front porch with a notebook and a pen. Then she carried Taylor’s story back to Montgomery where she and the city’s most militant activists organized the “Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor.”

They planned mass meetings, canvassed neighborhoods, signed petitions, sent postcards to the governor and attorney general and launched what the Chicago Defender called, “The strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade.” I wasn’t surprised to discover letters of protest and postcards signed by Lillian Smith.

Like Smith, Parks was able to help organize this nationwide campaign in 1944 in part because she was already a seasoned political activist. But it was arguably her own harrowing ordeal in 1931 that made Parks an anti-rape activist decades before the women’s movement made rape a public political issue.

Recently discovered among Parks’ belongings at Guernsey’s Auction house in New York, where her personal archive awaits a buyer, was an essay she wrote in the mid 1950s.

In it she details the long history of white on black sexual violence and reveals that her great grandmother, a slave, was the victim of multiple rapes.

She also testifies about being sexually propositioned and threatened by a white man when she was 18 years old and working as a domestic. But she doesn’t just talk about her vulnerability and fear, something she makes explicit. She also fiercely asserts her right to bodily integrity: “No matter what happens,” she wrote, “I would never yield to this white man’s bestiality. I was ready and willing to die, but give my consent? Never. Never. Never.”

I am not sure how that Rosa Parks became the silent and sainted icon of segregation that is endlessly taught in schools, but it is awfully revealing. We have accepted too long this notion that women were always silent about sexual violence and that white attacks on black women’s bodily integrity were somehow separate from the civil rights movement. But they were not. The right to move freely through the world without being assaulted is a basic human right and it was something African Americans fought for during the freedom struggle.

I hope that At the Dark End of the Street recognizes and honors these women whose bold actions and willingness to speak out about sexual violence when it was dangerous, if not deadly, to do so, sparked movements that ultimately helped to change the world. And I hope that their stories serve as an example to oppressed people everywhere to use their voices as weapons of protest against injustice. I’m confident it’s a message that both Lillian Smith and the Southern Regional Council would support.

Thank you.

Lillian Smith Book Award Ceremony for 2011

Two exceptional books were recognized with the Lillian Smith Book Awards for 2011. These awards were established in 1968 by the Southern Regional Council (SRC) to recognize authors whose books represent outstanding achievements demonstrating through literary merit and moral vision an honest representation of the South, its people, its problems, and its promise.

This Forty-Third Anniversary Awards Ceremony was a partnership between the Southern Regional Council, the University of Georgia Libraries, and the Georgia Center for the Book. It was presented in connection with the Decatur Book Festival at the Old DeKalb County Courthouse in Decatur, Georgia on Sunday, September 4, 2011.

The 2011 award recipients were:

Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States

By Steve Lerner

At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance - A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power

By Danielle McGuire

One Nation, Unquestionable: The News Media Responds to September 11

By Patrick Wehner

From Southern Changes, Vol. 23, No. 3-4, 2001 pp. 4-7

Amid the pulse of satellite uplinks, videophones, webcasts, and tickertape displays, the taglines manufactured by the news media in the wake of September 11 have become such permanent fixtures on our television and computer screens that one almost expects to see their images burnt-in even after the power is switched off. The unfolding storylines range from "A Nation Challenged," the struggle against adversity reported daily by both the print and online editions of The New York Times, to "America Strikes Back," the big-budget Hollywood revenge fantasy that, in an unprecedented display of cooperation, is being heavily promoted by no fewer than three competing television networks. A recent report on National Public Radio likened these taglines to branded products, suggesting that in a competitive news environment where the available facts are essentially the same, subtle differences in style or image-say, "Attack on America" versus "Terror Hits Home"-can provide an edge in promoting audience loyalty.

The comparison highlights some uncomfortable truths. Much of the official news has been the same, especially when it comes to the military action in Afghanistan. The news editor coordinating the post-September 11 coverage for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Bert Roughton, Jr., recently told an audience of journalism students at Emory University that despite the obstacles faced by correspondents filing from the war zone, the "biggest problem we have with information is not there, it's in Washington." The enduring lesson that Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs learned from the Gulf War was that while the press corps may grumble, they will continue to cover military briefings that are little more than public relations events largely out of a need to have something to report each day. Comparing the major media outlets to commercial brands also admits the distasteful reality that the news business remains a business even in a time of crisis. While not all differences in coverage are the result of calculated attempts to improve market share, the marketing experts have successfully convinced many news executives that ratings and circulation are all about "selling a relationship."

The problem with the brand analogy is that the goal of differentiating a media "product" is simply inconsistent with all the obvious repetition. Overworked phrases like "The War on Terror" or "America's New War" accomplish little in distinguishing one news organization from another when everyone else is using them. So while the idea of branding the news surely captures the spirit of our market-driven society, it must also be said that sometimes a cliché is just a cliché even if it achieves that status in record time.

Despite their apparent emptiness, clichés have consequences. Swaggering taglines like "America Fights Back," for example, seem to be encouraging viewers to put their feet up, adjust the surround sound, and enjoy the special effects. But it is the more innocuous slogans, the wildly popular "America Unites" among them, that may have the most lasting effects. The sentiment is undeniably heartfelt: stories of people drawing together in the aftermath of the attacks bolster a belief that we as a nation will survive the present crisis and perhaps locate new sources of communal strength. There is also some factual, or at least statistical, justification for this continual refrain. We have all heard the polling figures-overwhelming support for a military response, high approval ratings for a President whose election was bitterly contested a year ago. Grief and confusion create a longing for certainty, community, and institutions deserving of our trust, and journalists, being human, share in those desires. Dan Rather's post-September 11 appearance on "The Late Show with David Letterman," provided one dramatic example. The CBS news anchor's pledge to "line up" wherever President Bush asked horrified many of his fellow journalists because it revealed how close to a vanishing point objectivity was being pushed.

Ironically, in helping to harden collective longings into something-an accepted truth, an article of faith, a reassuring cliché that is no longer open to discussion, the major media have contributed to a climate where journalists are condemned for living up to their professional principles. Unpopular with the public even before September 11, reporters who have asked difficult questions about the reasons behind the attacks or the wisdom of U.S. foreign policy have encountered outrage on an entirely different scale. Roughton, for example, acknowledged intense pressure from Journal-Constitution readers to be unconditionally supportive of the war. Speaking of journalists' professional mandate to uncover the truth, however embarrassing or inconvenient it may be to those in power, he admitted, "I think right now, the American public isn't very sympathetic to our cause." Nor have the charges of treason and accusations about a lack of moral character been limited to rank-and-file reporters. Talk-show personality Bill Maher, bestselling novelist Barbara Kingsolver, and even media tycoon Ted Turner have been met with a chorus of angry responses for having dared to disrupt the consensus.

Lost in the controversy surrounding Turner's speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. on October 10, 2001-in which he proposed, with no apparent sense of personal irony, that U.S. leaders could be more "humble" in their dealings with the rest of the world-was the CNN founder's pointed criticism of both the broadcast and print media. Turner accused news executives of having contributed to American audiences' lack of knowledge about international affairs by closing many of their overseas bureaus in the 1990s. "Americans are woefully uninformed at the current time about international news in general, and I've always said we were doing that at our peril," the Cox News Service quoted Turner as saying. While the media billionaire has seldom allowed facts to get in the way of his opinions, his observations about the decline of international news parallel the findings of A number of surveys and reports by media research institutes. Citing studies conducted by Harvard, UC-San Diego, and a broad range of professional groups, media critic David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times estimates that newspaper and television coverage of international events has declined by as much as 80 percent since the mid-eighties. News organizations often claim to have cut back on their foreign staff for budgetary reasons, but Shaw argues a far more significant factor in the decline was that after the Soviet Union dissolved, "most news executives decided that Americans weren't interested in international news." Scandals, celebrity gossip, and "soft" lifestyle features replaced coverage of overseas events.

Nathan McCall, an author, former Washington Post reporter, and visiting professor of journalism at Emory, sees a historic parallel for recent events in the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, issued in 1968 and more widely known as the "Kerner Report." Among the Report's most significant findings, notes McCall, was that "there was a lot of racial hostility beneath the surface in the nation's African-American communities, and the media was partly to blame for that bubbling up." The Commission described at least two ways in which the media bore some measure of responsibility for the violence occurring in neighborhoods of Los Angeles, Newark, and other American cities during the 1960s. "One, the media had compounded the frustrations in African-American communities where people's grievances weren't being heard. Two, it undermined the consciousness of the rest of the country who didn't even recognize the problem or the injustices that were occurring." In a similar fashion, reductions in the amount of resources expended on the gathering and reporting of international news have left many American audiences unaware of the deep resentments that U.S. foreign policies have inspired. "Here we are forty years later," says McCall, "and it's just that it's happening on an international scale."

As it happens, the media's response to September 11 demonstrates more than one form of historical amnesia. Part of the irony behind all the present assertions of unity is that for the past three decades, media decision-makers have been conducting business according to a decidedly opposite set of principles. Since the 1970s, the prevailing wisdom among advertising and media executives has been that American society is increasingly fragmented into separate interest groups and lifestyle enclaves. The magazines, cable channels, radio stations, and websites that have thrived have been those able to deliver a detailed portrait of a niche audience to their potential advertisers. Even newspapers, once the medium promoted as offering "something for everyone," have focused increasingly on upscale suburbanites with "zoned" editions edited for specific neighborhoods and a greater emphasis on local news, lifestyle, and personal finance. Those who work the business side of newspaper publishing readily admit that these kinds of features help attract advertisers with images of affluent readers. Whether the media, in their sudden passion for our shared connections, will reaffirm an obligation to serve all segments of American society by making substantive changes in their coverage remains to be seen. Already, the worst excesses of "America United" resemble the idealized world that journalist Naomi Klein calls "Representation Nation"-the ethnically-balanced visions of harmony that are featured in Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger ads.

Not coincidentally, media institutions that have historically expressed the double consciousness of their audiences-as both American citizens and members of distinct and often oppressed social groups-have proven to be among the most willing to question the limits of unity. The African-American press and ethnic newspapers have focused on local angles to the September 11 events, have covered benefit events and prayer services, and have attempted to alleviate the anxieties of readers for whom English is a second language. But black newspapers like the Atlanta Daily World and the Baltimore Afro-American have also featured a steady procession of columnists reaffirming a commitment to civil liberties, objecting to racial profiling practices, and questioning the wisdom of U.S. foreign policy. In a commentary published in the October 11 issue of the Atlanta Daily World, for example, columnist Hazel Trice Edney expressed concern that U.S. government actions often seemed uncaring and arrogant to people in the developing world, citing the U.S. walkout on the U. N. Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa as one of the more recent instances. In the Spanish-language press, syndicated columnist James E. Garcia reminded his readers of the mass deportations of Mexican-American citizens during the Great Depression of the 1930s, calling upon them to speak out against acts of violence and discrimination directed at Arab Americans. These examples demonstrate that while many people may feel the need to draw together in a crisis, they are not willing to overlook the ways in which America has failed to live up to its promises, or to ignore the manner in which "unity" can become exclusionary.

Peace demonstrations, marches, and rallies visibly complicate this theme, and press coverage of groups organizing to oppose the war in Afghanistan has been accordingly sporadic. "In the immediate aftermath of the attacks in D.C. and New York, there was a kind of united front and a real frenzy that we saw in the media," says Lance Newman, a member of the steering committee for the Georgia Coalition for Peace, an Atlanta-based activist group composed largely of veterans of the street protests against institutions like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. When the media have reported on the activities organized by local peace groups, the tone of the coverage has been "fairly patronizing and sarcastic," Newman observes. The eagerness with which many news executives have aligned their organizations with the cause of unity has made it difficult for peace groups to have their messages heard. "I think there's a lot of people out there who oppose the war but don't feel confident enough to put themselves on the line right now because they see what's going on," says Newman. "They see the crackdown on civil liberties, they see the way dissent is treated in the media, and they expect that's how they are liable to be treated."

When dealing with groups who oppose the war, the media seem to have little awareness of past mistakes. In late September, for example, more than a dozen black churches in the Cascade Heights area of southwest Atlanta organized a march for peace. Although other vigils and demonstrations had been held in downtown Atlanta parks and at the King Center, the march down Cascade Road was noteworthy for the number of participants (eight hundred, by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's estimate), for the range of ages that was represented, and for the fact that the marchers identified themselves by faith rather than membership in an anti-war group. "We gather to pray and speak a word of peace" read the statement issued by the march organizers, "first to the hearts and minds of those most directly affected by these horrific and haunting events, but also to the nations of the world, who have begun to position themselves for international conflict."

All three of Atlanta's leading television stations reported on the march, but only one emphasized the congregants' clear message that one might pray for the country while still opposing retaliatory violence. Of the other two, one focused almost exclusively on the presence of famous leaders like the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Georgia Governor Roy Barnes. (While the presence of these leaders was a significant show of support for the marchers, the fact that this station only highlighted Jackson and Barnes ignored the important message of the march.) The final station's 45-second piece featured a white man as the subject of its single on-screen interview, the reporter apparently having concluded that the real story of the march was the presence of people who admitted membership in a socialist group. Such racism and red-baiting seemed straight out of an era of Civil Defense drills and automotive tailfins, and the reporter went on to emphasize the "controversial" nature of the march. Overlooked was the more compelling reality that many of the marchers were acting on their own definitions of citizenship and solidarity, offering them as an alternative to President Bush's "either you're with us or against us" rhetoric.

Journalists and their critics alike agree that a few positive signs have appeared in the past weeks that seem to indicate that news organizations are beginning to focus on missed opportunities. But if there is a growing recognition of where news organizations might have failed their audiences in the past, many of the ongoing problems have yet to be addressed. When the events of September 11 have become more distant history, predicts Professor McCall, "someone will have a big media convention somewhere and the big mucketymucks will talk about what we could have done better with what I call progressive hindsight. Journalists-we're all very good at being progressive in retrospect. The problem is, it's always hard to get changes made in midstream, when they would make the most impact."

Patrick Wehner is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life at Emory University and served as a special contributing editor for this issue of Southern Changes.

Remembering our Values in a Post 9/11 World

By Charles S. Johnson, III

From Southern Changes, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2001

Following the tragic loss of thousands of lives in two of our most diverse cities, our nation is struggling with feelings of suspicion, insecurity, and fear. And many have responded by looking for scapegoats.

In Dallas, Texas, a Pakistani Muslim storeowner was recently shot and killed. An arrow was shot through the front window of a Muslim-owned laundromat in Green Cove, Florida. Four men in the Atlanta area attempted to stab a Sudanese man, saying, "You killed our people in New York. We want to kill you tonight."

But racial or ethnically-based attacks such as we are currently experiencing are far from new in the South. We have seen such times before. One such time was in the period immediately following the First World War, when soldiers returned from saving the world for democracy only to be confronted with an outrageous failure of democracy at home. In the Red Summer of 1919, there were more than twenty-five race riots and seventy-six lynchings in the United States. Two hundred African Americans were killed in a single riot in Elaine, Arkansas.

It was against this background that an interracial group of Southerners came together in 1919, determined to transform what we used to call race relations. After working for more than two decades to end lynchings and alleviate property, this group by the end of the Second World War had embraced the strategy of pursuing equal opportunity through research and action, and what emerged was the early Southern Regional Council.

The Council has always linked work for racial fairness with the struggle for democratic rights. As we continue to share our concern for the victims of the recent tragedies, commend courageous relief workers, and express our convictions about U.S. actions abroad, we must also continue working to strengthen democracy at home. In light of the nation's sudden discovery last year that our election system simply doesn't work in the way that we thought it did, we must support the strongest possible election reform legislation moving through Congress. Election fairness is a civil right linked to national policy on every domestic and international concern.

We also cannot abandon our efforts to improve race relations at home. It is critical to expand and intensify that work, giving greater recognition to the increasing diversity of our nation. In light of recent events, we must work to deter acts of hate against innocent Arabs and Muslims as well as other immigrants. But the recent grotesque Halloween activities on the part of fraternity members at Auburn University and similar incidents at the University of Louisville and the University of Mississippi remind us that we cannot step back from efforts to heal longstanding racial divides and end inequalities.

The U.N. World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa may have dropped out of consciousness since September 11th, but as long as inequalities remain, we cannot sideline the struggle against racism.

Civil liberties are fundamentally linked with civil rights. We should be able to strengthen the government's ability to respond to terrorism without denying the right to dissent. However, some of our national leaders do not appear to share this belief. Under intense pressure to respond to the horrific attacks, U. S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and a number of members of Congress have taken a short-sighted view in lifting protections for civil liberties, initiating changes that directly affect immigrants and endanger the privacy rights of all Americans. The "U.S.A. PATRIOT Act" (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism), limits the role of the courts in checking law enforcement authority, eases safeguards against the misuse of surveillance and searches, permits incarceration of non-citizens on suspicion, allows deportation and exclusion of non-citizens for beliefs and associations, and interferes with the attorney-client privilege. Unilateral executive orders which diminish the role of the courts using military tribunals undermine democracy in the process.

Fear, suspicion, and distrust still live with us. The kinds of recriminations that we've seen in the past months remind us that, although we think we've come a long way since 1919, we still have a long way to go. If we are to avoid another Red Summer, we may wish to consider a little dose of interracial- and interethnic-cooperation. Intergroup cooperation is the key to broadening civic participation and preserving democratic rights.

Justice, above all, is what we as a nation must pursue. This has been recognized since the days that the Republic was founded. Before the Constitution's signers wrote of domestic tranquility, before they wrote of promoting the general welfare, and even before they wrote of providing for the common defense, the authors of the Preamble wrote of a goal to establish justice.

The work of today's Southern Regional Council is in the tradition of our nation's historic pursuit of justice. The new realities which confront us as a result of recent events cannot and will not deter us in our quest.

Charles S. Johnson, III, is president of the Southern Regional Council and a partner in the law firm of Holland and Knight.