For Over-All Misery, Alabama Wins Handily

This is the first in a series on Southern blacks. The author spent the summer as a reporter for the Southern Courier, a civil rights newspaper founded in 1965 by Harvard graduates.

Of all the places where it is unpleasant to be black in America, you have to look hard to find many worse than Alabama. Proximity to white suburbs and the glittering promises of Real American Life may make the Northern ghettos seem more frustrating, but few Harlemites are frustrated enough to consider returning to the South.

In the Deep South itself, Mississippi--with its title of "Poorest State In The Nation" and its legendary smalltown sheriffs--may be more glamorous than Alabama; but Mississippi's notoriety has made it the target of many more civil rights projects than have ever come to Alabama. It's possible to make a good case for Southwest Georgia as the most segregated area in the country, but Georgia also contains semi-progressive Atlanta and black legislators like Julian Bond. South Carolina has Storm Thurmond, Louisiana has Leander Perez, and Arkansas and Tennessee have their residual rednecks. But for over-all misery--that combination of systematic oppression and debilitating poverty that makes black lives bleak--Alabama wins in a walk.

Poverty, of course, is the heart of the problem. Alabama's economy has been shaky since Reconstruction days, and the euphemistic talk of the "New South" has little evident effect outside of the few industrial centers like Birmingham or Huntsville. To some extent, this general economic depression is to blame for the black poverty, and liberal-but-loyal white southerners concernedly tell visitors that "these poor folks--black ones and white ones--are a real problem."

But the "white ones" seem to be more a figure of speech than a reality. In Appalachia there might be a large scale white-poverty problem, but not in Alabama. It is no coincidence that in the state where less than 40 per cent of the population is black, nearly 97 per cent of the people who are poor are black.

Survival Level

"Poor" also has a new meaning in Alabama. The $3,000-per-family-of-four poverty line figure used in the rest of the country is awkward to use in counties where the average family income hovers around $800. Much handier is the government's survival level" figure of about $1500 per family.

Using the "survival level" (by government definition, the income necessary to keep a family going for a year) to define poverty, things start to look a little brighter. In the central Alabama Black Belt region, it means that the white families (with an average annual income of about $2500) get above the poverty line. But in the ten Black Belt counties where the average income for a black family is less than $600 less than half the "survival level"--a disturbing conclusion is obvious. Either there is something grotesquely wrong with the statistics, or else thousands of American families have missed their share of American plenty.

A quick drive through the Black Belt soon reveals what the answer is. Thousands of families have missed out; thousands of black people are getting by on less than what the country has decided it takes for people to stay alive. A first-hand look at their lives makes the abstractions of "poverty line" and "survival level" painfully concrete.

Central Alabama is remarkably beautiful. There are gentle green hills, green with meadows and trees, green from the frequent afternoon rains. There are small cotton fields along the roads, and in September the open cotton bolls make the Black Belt look like a huge snowbank. In the open meadows there are fat black cattle grazing under "Eat More Beef" signs. A traveller on the main highways, looking just at the green hills and the cotton and the cattle, might think he had found the legendary pastoral American paradise.

That's because a traveller on the main roads wouldn't see many of the people that live behind the hills. It takes some arduous tracking on the red dirt roads and the mule paths to find the hard-core poor. Alabama's poor are slightly more visible than those lost in the urban ghettos, but it's still easy to forget they are there until a trip up the dirt road shows them too clearly.

The houses are probably the most shocking part. In the 1930's, in the depths of the depression, James Agee and Walker Evans went to Alabama to photograph and write about Southern rural poverty. Several of the buildings in the picture section of their book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, still exist. Thirty years of occupancy have not improved the buildings. And where the buildings are different from the ones Agee and Evans saw, they are not much better.

A Southern "black shack" is made out of wood, that has become gray from several years of exposure. There is no glass in the windows, or plumbing or electricity in the house. The shaded front porch is where most of the people spend their time, mainly out of necessity, since there is not enough room in the house. Behind the house there is a small wooden outhouse underneath the house there are chickens, rats, and black children.

New Jerusalem

The New Jerusalem community in Hale County is a fairly typical black town. New Jerusalem is not on any of the road maps, and it is a distinct mistake to ask local gas station owners how to get there ("Why you wonna go see them niggers boy?"). Most white visitors who find themselves in New Jerusalem are there by accident, having strayed off Country Road 21 on the way to Greensboro from Akron. The only white faces that appear regularly in the town are those of county sheriffs, looking for moonshine liquor.

The poorest family in New Jerusalem is headed by Silas Miller (a pseudonym). Miller is never too sure how many people live in his house, or even how many children he has. It doesn't matter; it's obviously too many. Usually there are about 23 people--half of them Miller's children, the rest an assortment of relatives, neighbors, and "little fellers we just couldn't turn away"--living in the one-room house.

There is one bed in the Miller's house; Miller and his weary wife sleep there. Three of their children fill the floor space of the single room. Everyone else sleeps outside. Sleeping outside--usually under the house--can occasionally be pleasant, especially during the hot summer nights. Then the only discomforts are the rats and insects. But during the winter it's hard to find enough clothing to keep the cold out. Each winter since 1963 someone in the family has died under the house on a cold night.

Pork Fat

Other people die in the household. Four weeks ago, a three-month old baby died, lying alone on the parents' bed. The little girl had eaten nothing but pork fat in her short life; Mrs. Miller had no mild of her own to give the baby, and there was no money to buy milk from the store.

The Millers are an extreme case, Not many other families in the Black Belt make much more than Mr. Miller (about $12 a week), but not many families have 23 people to support. Miller himself didn't use to be in such bad condition--it wasn't until 1963 that he started losing children from cold and hunger. Before 1963, the family planted 25 acres of cotton and had enough money to have regular meals and to clothe the children for school.

But in 1963, the state Cotton Office cut off Miller's cotton allotment. Cotton is one of the nation's surplus crops, and each farmer can plant only as many acres as the Cotton Office allows him. Unfortunately, the Cotton Office is run by white Alabamians, and that often means there is discrimination. Miller's allotment went to a white planter in the country--a man who already had more than 300 acres allotted--and Miller's appeal to the Cotton Office brought no results.

The Miller's problems, again, are extreme. Not many families in the Black Belt have seen children starve to death. But malnutrition is nearly universal. Many black families know about children who "can't think right" because of the wrong kind of food; a Dpeartment of Agriculture worker said last summer that somewhere between 20 and 25 per cent of all black children in central Alabama suffer brain damage by the time they are five years old because of protein deficiency. Adult Negroes show the effect of another kind of malnutrition. A diet based on fat and carbohydrate produces bloated, formless women, and men who die twice as often of heart disease as whites do.

Part of the nutritional problem is caused by ignorance and custom: the black Southern diet is based on the pig. Southern pigs yield some meat, but that doesn't last long. At pigkilling time--usually near the beginning of fall--families have a few meals of bacon and pork loin. From then on, dinner consists of the other pig parts--the ears, the tail, the chittlins (intestines), and--worst of all--the fatback.

Nobody Starves Here

Fatback, or "white meat," is the layer of fat between the pig's skin and its viscera. It is usually three or four inches thick, and it makes up the majority of a pig's bulk. It has, of course, a high caloric value, and is great for keeping human bodies alive at low cost. But steady meals of fatback, grits, and vegetables swimming in melted fatback are guaranteed to produce lethargy, ill health, and braindamaged children.

America clings to its belief that Nobody Starves Here, based principally on the government's programs to help hungry people. It is a painful awakening for a white liberal to see that the two food programs--the older Surplus Commodities program and the newer Food Stamps plans--do little to solve the problem.

Surplus Commodities is a simple program based on a simple concept. The Department of Agriculture, realizing that the problems of farm surplus and rural hunger can theoretically be solved in one great swoop, gives out its extra food to families who don't have enough.

That sounds good. Unfortunately, Surplus Commodities has several built-in problems, both in concept and execution. Poor families learned quickly that there was no way to get enough commodities to feed the family; the supply of free food usually lasts ten or twelve days into the month. But that was more forgiveable than the program's more basic sin--its orientation to farm needs rather than the needs of hungry people.

When families went in to get their commodities, they found that the Agriculture workers were giving them whatever happened to be overproduced by American farms that month. When the surplus was corn or flour or other relatively wholesome staples, things worked out. But sometimes, the surplus items didn't happen to match with what the families needed to eat. One month two years ago, families walked away from the Commodities office with 25-pound sacks of peanuts. Another time in 1964 the total monthly distribution consisted of beets and celery. Even in the best months, there is an obvious lack of meat and other protein-rich foods. Department of Agriculture tables reveal that a diet based on commodities provides about 3 or 4 per cent of the protein needed for healthy development, and about 350 per cent of the fat and carbohydrate requirement.

Three Dollars

Partly in reaction to this obvious problem, the new Food Stamps program was started several years ago. In theory, it looked ideal: depending on their incomes, families could get food stamps worth up to $100 for as $3 or $4. The stamps could then be used in grocery stores to buy what the family wanted, freeing them from the limitations of a commodities diet.

When the Food Stamps program began, counties were given the option of choosing between it and Surplus Commodities. Most Alabama counties chose Food Stamps. But that wasn't good; because whatever its drawbacks, the Surplus Commodities plan had one indisputable advantage for poor families--it was free. No matter how little money the family had, it could always count on getting some food.

It didn't work that way with food stamps. Three dollars isn't much, but many families were unable to come up with those three dollars every month. White county administrators took careful note of the fact that the number of families receiving Food Stamps was only about a third of the number that had lined up for Commodities. And the white administrators knew that it wasn't because the other two-thirds didn't need help anymore.

And so the hunger continues. There have been sporadic efforts to solve it--the most recent by the Southern Rural Research Project (SRRP). SRRP workers, working from their headquarters in the black section of Selma, Ala., spent the summer of 1967 making a quantitative survey of just how many people were hungry, why they were hungry, and what could be done about it. Their work led to the production of several reports and to the CBS television special 'Hunger In America."

This summer, SRRP undertook a more direct assault at the program. Workers in the Black Belt counties spent all day, every day, travelling through the rural "niggertowns" finding people who had been denied the Food Stamps and welfare they were entitled to, by discriminatory white officials. Constantly aware that their work had to continue beyond the summer that the Northern students working for SRRP could spend in Alabama, SRRP tried to build local welfare rights organizations to carry on the fight against the white officials.

Raw Hamburger

But welfare rights is obviously a stop-gap approach, and SRRP director Don Jelinek was trying for a frontal attack on the welfare and food systems. His aim was to change programs like Commodities and Food Stamps into realistic plans based on the rural families' needs, and not on the needs of the Agriculture Department.

Jelinek based his attack on the technique that has so often been successful in the South--mobilization of Northern sentiment. After the CBS special, SRRP received 20,000 pounds of raw hamburger from a Northern donor. The hamburger itself might be of some help--it could give perhaps a tenth of the poor families one wholesome meal. But it would obviously be only a token effort, unless SRRP could exploit it to change the national programs.

After SRRP workers had spent two days in a refrigerator truck packing the beef into one-pound sacks, they drove off to give it to poor families. But their major purpose was to be arrested: Jelinek had a dream of making white Northern families ask themselves, "Why do they have to give out more food to people who already are getting help?" If the SRRP workers could only be arrested--for handling food without a license, for trespassing, for just about anything--Jelinek thought that the pitiful absurdity of the arrests would change Northern minds.

Unfortunately, Southern police have goten shrewder since the old days of marches in Selma and Birmingham. Police chiefs have learned that brutality, arrests, tear gas and fire hoses offer at best a temporary solution, because there is no way for the Old South to hold out against the Northern press and its hated film clips of marchers being gassed. The police knew that they could beat SRRP by leaving it alone; SRRP was beaten. The 20,000 pounds didn't last long, and without national press coverage, SRRP returned to its old local tactics.

Poverty is only a part of the black misery in the South, but it is--right now--the most important part. Some of the other phases of discrimniation--the black schools that keep churning out under-educated children, the employers who won't hire Negroes--contribute to the poverty, and other parts--segregated night clubs, "No Niggers" signs at YMCA's--almost seem superfluous compared to the poverty. As Silas Miller said, "It wouldn't be so bad if we just wasn't all the time poor.