Realities; 8; If Eugene Talmadge Were Alive Today, He'd Turn Over in His Grave

This is where it started, most of the mass meetings went shallow, right there. They had come marching out of those two doors there, up the sidewalk on that side of the street. People would come out usually two by two, sometimes just a few, 15 or 20. When Dr. King led the marches, it would be hundreds coming, they'd come along here. People would be gathered around these stores, they'd say, join us, and sometimes a few get into the march, sometimes two, though people would drop out along about here. It's hard, now 10 years later, to realize how much courage it took, because there was

something in them sales, bigger than them sales, to go down here and face the creatures of their worst nightmares, the white police. This next intersection, I can't where the bus station is, was the borderline, the police would wait there, it'd be in military order. Attention would build, and the police would say, you can come no further than this street here. They would say, this person going piece to cross the street, she'll be arrested, and saying, and they'd start across the street, and the police would get them right across here. Now they're in the white part of the town, there'd be always a few whites, but not many. The police kept white crowds from gathering, they were very efficient, just as they were in March and the people down here.

There was an alley along the yellows, they would march a motorway down into the alley, and they'd be singing, and this alley was had close walls, and it would do something to the music, so it would seem louder and stronger when they got down into there. The people who had already been arrested would be up in the jail, and they'd join in the songs that they were singing. You come back to Albany, and I asked people, was it worth it?

Did they really think that it's direct as the movement historians say that Albany was a faith in? Many of them that I've talked to say no, that it wasn't a faith, that it wasn't so much what they won, what gains they've made, but it was what it did for the person inside to experience a thing like that. They could have been scared to death all of his life, suddenly found out he wasn't scared anymore. This report is an effort to tell the story in this year, 1970, of the people of the South, black and white alike.

It's set in my home state of Georgia, but it's the story of all of us. This statue here at the entrance to the state capital of Georgia has great symbolic significance for what's going on in the South today. It depicts Tom Watson, who was a great populous leader around the turn of the century in Georgia. He had the dream of welding together, the black people and the white people. Tom Watson ran for president of the United States twice, he ran for vice president, he was defeated year after year, time after time, and so finally after all of these defeats Tom Watson turned sour. He came finally to champion only the poor white people in the state, and he did this by rallying them against the city people, the religious minority groups, and most of all against Negroes. Back around in the back of the same capital there's another statue, statue of Eugene Talmage, old Eugene Talmage, who was a governor of Georgia and a political leader in the 20s and 30s

and into the parties, who was first kind of racist demagogue in the South. The history of the South in the past 10, 15 years has been one of undoing what was done by the later Watson by the Gene Talmages. It became possible once again to dream of welding the poor white people in the poor black people together again into a political movement. A lot of people in the South are thinking about this and working toward it now. The drama of the civil rights movement has faded in the past few years, but many people have continued working quietly at the goals that excited the nation in the early 1960s. John Lewis, one time chairman of SNCC.

In 1963 I made one of my first trips to Harlem and one of the things that became so frustrating was to see the hundreds of black people standing on the streets in Harlem and talking about what they were going to do to a party, how they were going to take care of a party. And then later as I travel around as chairman of SNCC, it was a great deal of frustration, a great deal of bitterness and it was very sad to see people become so frustrated and at the same time it was not involved in a type of confrontation to bring about change. I made a decision then that the real struggle, the real movement was in the South where people involved in something open, something creative, something very meaningful. In spite of all of the problem, all of the conflict, all of the obvious stains and scars

of racism involved, that still a great deal of hope in the South because black people in the South are involved in meaningful change. One of the most important changes has been the emergence of the Negro as a power in southern politics. Last summer John Lewis and Charles Sherrod, another veteran civil rights worker, revisited one of the landmarks in the struggle for the vote. A country church not far from Albany, Georgia. This church was in 1962 or 63, I just can't exactly remember the date, was burned to the ground early in the morning and we asked the authorities to investigate it and they said that there was a storm and that the lightness struck and this church has run to the ground for

that reason. Suggest an accident, but we know about it because we had people working out of this church. Well this is a church, this has been rebuilt now but the church was a small wooden building out of half the size of this church and we had mass meetings in this church on voter registration. Actually the principle of voter registration, the only thing we were doing John was working on voter registration at that time and just because of voter registration, the pan people hired to pass the litters of church. Right. They had those litters of testin' those days, you know what I'm saying. We have a own of these churches where we say what goes on in our churches, nothing else we do we have. But then they come and burn that down, it was a real sense of frustration and fear permeated the whole section.

This been the first church that went over to other counties, we had churches run down and then the people got the idea over Mississippi and Alabama the same thing occurred all over the country. They started burning down churches, you remember, what happened burning down, where those kids were killed. I think what happened here in this part of the softest Georgia is by a great many people who had the softest birthday country and this church today is a living monument, it's a testimony to the hardworking, many brave young people and local people in this area. They did a great job, still a great deal of work to be done. I'm John Lewis, and we're addressing the people in this area to vote. Can we take your name and have someone to pick you up and take you down for the kind

of people? To register. So you can become a register vote, it's very important, good people running for office without Georgia and light people should be able to vote. In Georgia, you know you can vote at the age of 18 and at 17 and a half, you can become a register and when you're 18, you can vote on the vote. And you can go too. John Lewis is now the director of the Voter Education Project. This group funds voter registration drives, including the ones that demonstrated the need for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. John was one of the main leaders in the Selma, Alabama campaign, which led to passage of the Voting Rights Act. I'm going to begin my own involvement in the movement. Some high determinate of through my law and my experience, that the struggle that we

were involved in was going to be a long and hard struggle. And it was not going to be something that was going to happen in two or three days. I made a decision for the 60. To pace myself and to do what I could in my own way, to bring about change, to create a new South. And I have a great deal of faith and a great deal of hope that we can do just that. Those of us who have been involved in the movement of tend to refer to this kind of bad Baker, it's still a bad kind of, anything change here, anything different about Baker kind of today. There has been some changes made in Baker, although it's not as we want it to be. But when the very beginning of our struggle, we encounter numerous harassment and intimidation

from the whites and even it was so bad, once summer, that quite some other counties come in to help beat blacks, which was known in this county as a bloody Saturday. There was a lot of harassment during that day. And over a period of years, the movement has started in Baker there. There have been a major changes, but there are still intimidation from whites, but it's much less than what it used to be and most of it is discreetly. They're doing other things like, in the school system, welfare, social security, whatever, they're doing it in a different way. It's not, well, they, like I said, they aren't just getting out, beating up blacks like they used to.

It's, they found a new way of going about it. I had one case here about two weeks ago where I couldn't even get a latest name out of her. She said, her boss man had told her that she was too old to vote. And I couldn't get her, you know, I asked her for a name, she said, and I go tell you that. And I talked to her for about 30 minutes and, you know, kept asking her for a name and address so I could come back and talk to her. She, she never would give it to me, she just said, can't do that. Baker County in Southwest Georgia, was and is a tough place where things move slowly. Here in Hancock County, it's been a different story. This is one of several places in the South where Negro voting majorities have elected blacks to top positions. County Commissioner John McCowon explains how it happened. Let's say it came about because of a group of people in Hancock County deciding that it was time that people elected officials who were responsible to the needs of their constituency. And so when 1966, Hancock County had sort of a new beginning.

Yes, well, in 1966, when we decided to run blacks for office for the first time, there was a massive voter registration drive that was carried on and where we registered quite a number of people, which helped us to be able to elect black officials. Before that time, we didn't have blacks who were registered, but who felt that their votes wouldn't count anyway. And if they did vote, we'd still have rights to have them making their decisions and not considering what was needed by the black community. So they didn't really see any need to go on cast their votes after being registered. But after 1966, when we had our massive voter registration drive and we were able to elect some black officials, they seemed to begin to realize that their votes did count and they came right and voted. And again, in 1968, whenever I ran for office, it was the most tremendous turnout that we've had in the history of the county of black voters. It's not a complete takeover than even though you do have an majority. You know, I think that's one of the unique things here is that if we had decided there

should be a takeover, there would have been no problem. And in fact, it would have been easier to take over the entire government than to be selective about it. But what the community decided was that there were only concerns with removing people who failed to be responsive to the needs of people and they had a meeting with each individual who was running and if the man indicated he was going to be fair, his position was not bothered at all. But if the man indicated that he wanted no cooperation with, quote, niggas, unquote, then of course that man position was so bad. In 10 years, Hencock County has lost more than 12% of its population. But this is no panic-stricken white rush away from black control.

It's only the same remorseless shift of people of both races from the country to the cities that has been on the way since World War II. As I understand it, this used to be one of the biggest towns around here. It's a farm in town, cotton jins, plainly males, such as that. Then they had a railroad had houses, I don't know, I think they call them line monger shacks or something like that. People working in the railroad lived in and I imagine some people moved away, but still there's a lot of people that lived here then, it's still here, and of course they don't all have, have employment, but there's still a lot of people back in these woods, or kind of folks on it. And why are they just country people, really, and they're good people? Part of our duty, if you're in a folk home, having the black people in the county good on it.

It had an effect on us up here, really. One way or another, I don't think, had effect on me, Hen. No, has it really affected Sparta, the county's seat? Air municipal control remains in white hands, and there has been friction between the races. Although officials have tried to adjust to the change, they approach him, JD Compton, who runs a furniture factory. There's a much resentment among the local white people, it used to be, you know, that Niggos didn't vote, hardly at all, and now there's a majority in the county. The people feel like that Niggos are taking over all of it. Well, I personally feel that the people of Hencock County and Sparta have done a remarkable job in human relations, as far as that past concern, between different races, and we've had bi-racial committees that have operated, that have to keep this relationship good, and we do have a good many more raced public voters than we have had, and as far as the people

of the county's concern, I don't really feel that they resent any effort of raceding anybody. And there is certainly a more dedicated effort to getting people out to vote, and there's ever been a part of both sides and sides, which is a good, that's which is good, yes. Voter registration has been the key. Since 1965, the number of black voters in some areas has more than tripled, an increase of 250,000 in Georgia, 275,000 in Mississippi, and 305,000 in Louisiana. Here in all of any Georgia, as in virtually every other county courthouse in the south, local officials and registrars agree that black registration has continued to increase, and the effect on politics and politicians is apparent.

One old time is spells it out, frankly, James W. Taxis Smith, twice mayor of the town and years ago, an important official in the government headed by segregationist gene term, the issues and campaigns today are so different from what they were 15 years ago. Most of the talk for any politician was what he'd do to save the schools and the same old rabble rousing that we had. The next thing was fuel and sipper that everybody ran on trying to save the taxpayer money. Now you don't talk about that, you talk about it.

The benefits that you can give the people irrespective of what it costs them. People are wanting something for nothing. Back in those days they were conservative. Now you've got liberals that are not interested in economy, they're interested in what are they going to get, what are they going to get for their county, what are they going to get for their people. In the small counties like in South West Georgia, Miller, Seminole, Bacon. That population has expanded some, some of them have lost population and you don't have the courthouse rings that used to control politics in small counties. There's now been, there's dwindled away because first of the neighborhood, second of the 18-year-old folk, no political factions today and any county that I know of, control politics

like they once did and never went. He said you associated with Mr. Gene Tellings, what would he have done with such things. The Eugene Tellings, if he was living the day, would turn over in his grave when he sees the state of Georgia spending a billion dollars as a budget when we ran the state on 95 million. If he knew that this giveaway program, that the federal government has, I think he'd die with Appalachia just on just the thought of it. Another major change since the Talmud era, the gradual end of the rural south. In one 15-year period, the number of Georgia farms went from 200,000, most of them small,

to 85,000. The farming that remains is increasingly agribusiness, large single holdings with elaborate machinery. Other acreage, once devoted to cotton, is now in the soil bank and the monster machines have stripped sharp croppers of even the mean existence they had. These transcend people by the millions into the cities. Recently how a small farmers and poor people, mostly Negro, had been banning into co-operatives and had formed a federation of southern co-ops reaching from Mississippi to the Carolinas. This was one of the most ambitious, a plan for a huge farm area with its own supporting community built around it. The name, New Communities, a part of the Southwest Georgia project, which is headed by Charles Sharon.

Here in Southwest Georgia, some 20 counties, more, it's the most gone for second place in the country. People think that black people in Alabama and Mississippi have it bad. But what goes on in Georgia, in this section of the country, is nothing compared. What goes on in Mississippi is nothing compared to what goes on here in Southwest Georgia. The kind of education that children get, the kind of economics that the black people have, like niceties, moving into this section as it is all over the South. You can see right here, we got tractors, we got about five or six tractors, and so we don't need about southern families to do this work that we're doing at this time. We don't even in a more than that.

Farming is a big business now, so thousands of people are going to be out of homes and out of the kind of facilities that are needed. That's the reason that thousands are moving to the West, and everybody knows that thousands are going to the North every day, to New York and Detroit and Wattes and Newark and all these other places. And for what? I mean, the hope is that there will be jobs, there will be food, there will be medicine, there will be education, and they find none. And we know that they will not find any, and less than they are finding today, ten years from now, because the cities are getting more intensely populated. Now what we feel, this new community can do, I mean, look at the land. We got 5,735 acres of land. Even before the first harvest, new communities found itself in trouble when anticipated federal

funding became doubtful. Similar plans and other southern states are still moving forward. This is the Louvre, the Mecca, Atlanta, the Cosmopolitan Center of the South, behind its glittering facade and filling up with poor people. The city center bustles with activity, but most of the money earn goes into the suburbs, where they affluent whites are immigrating. Blacksile are finding some of their best spokesmen in the cities. Thirteen Negroes now serve in the Georgia legislature, mostly from urban areas. Some represent the poorest black areas. For example, Julian Bond, who after winning an election, still had to go to court four years ago to get his seat. This is, I guess, like every other state legislature, it's not peculiar because it's in Georgia,

because it's in the South. I've been to the state assembly in New York and I've been in western states and other parts of the country. They're all pretty much the same, which is to say they're dominated by old men, by rural men, and despite the reapportionment, which has shifted the balance a little, it's really given the suburbs more power. And the suburban representatives are just as conservative. If not more so, then the rural ones. So things are very tedious here, something that you'd expect would get a passage anywhere in 1969 and 1970, takes a long, long time here, and may not even get passed. So it's a very slow and very tedious process. And then the attitude of some of the members toward me has been very strange. This is my desk, and during the session of black representatives here, representative Ben Brown. And it used to be that members of the House would come by and speak to him while I was sitting here and say to him, how's Julian doing? How's he getting along?

Are you making sure he's good? And I'd be sitting right here, not two feet away from him. Now more and more of them are going to speak to me directly. They don't have to speak to me through representative Brown. But a great many of my things feel very cautious about me. They're not sure exactly what it is, I believe, and are where I stand. Another new breed of politician has arisen in the new white bedroom towns around the cities, buttoned down conservatives, often Republican, like Congressman Ben Blackburn, a Decada. Essentially, what would you say your philosophy is, what would be of the voters when you are? Well, I think I represent a group of people who want to control their own destiny as much as they possibly can, by and large, their people who are willing to accept life on their own terms, and they're not looking for Washington to control their lives or even state government.

They resent having any outside pressures brought to bed or tell them how to operate their businesses or run their schools or run the local courthouses than they'd be. I think that's what the real pressure that's developing in the country today is some foreign, I won't say foreign, but distant power of government is intervening into the local fires of people and they resent it. Augusta, Georgia, where local leaders had long closed eyes to local problems. On May 11th, one of the few Negro riots in the South occurred. The tow, six blacks dead, five from police gunfire, all shot in the back. Many more of both races injured.

It shook this town like nothing is ever happened. Roy Harris, Augusta Lawyer, segregationist, once the Kingmaker in Georgia politics. The leaders amongst the black population and the whites have been bragging about the fine race relations that have existed in this town, and they've been bragging all the time, all the years, and nobody but I'll tell you the relations aren't good now. I don't know what they're feeling among the black people is, but most of the white people I talk to have reached a conclusion that at least 90% of the blacks absolutely hate the white people now, and I'll tell you about 90% of the white people, I don't know exactly what their attitude is. Most of them I've talked to, they've been scared to death, and they all, I never saw what people buy as many guns in my life, but I'm 74 years old and never owned a pistol. The only one I cared was when I strapped around my body when I was in the army, but when

I got out of the army the last day of December 1918, I haven't cared much since, I never owned one, never thought of owning one, never thought of being a necessity of having one. But I got one now, and I take it in my car wherever I go. And I reckon the black people are doing the same thing? Well, I don't know, some of them probably are. Now... Kind of sitting in an arm, can't, can't really. I say this, that the white people have so armed themselves that if they had been another right, it would have been a slaughter because they were ready for it. The Committee of Ten, an organization of younger black leaders in Augusta. The poor quality of education that has been produced by the school system here, the lack of job opportunities, poor housing conditions. These are some of the underlying conditions that perhaps lay it up to the mayor, the eleventh

occurrence. In other words, we felt that black people in this community had suffered enough, and it was about time that somebody said something about this is how the Committee of Ten came in existence. As far as the leading role that we took during the period of the disauto of May eleventh was the fact that the issues that were at hand were the same issues that we had been presenting to the public officials for several months, and we had not warned, but we had told these people that it was a possibility, that there was not a change made, that these things could happen here in Augusta, George, as well as they did in the place else, and we got the same teeth here that the public got. And this is what brought about, mainly what brought about the rights. The militancy of this group is a little bit different from what you're on end to say in the North, that you're not talking about separatism, really, you're only my wrong about that, is it?

We are saying that black people should maintain their own identity. Basically, we are saying that we need to be, we can be as different as the fingers on the hand, but together as one. I'm saying that we can maintain our culture and still be a part of these United States, but it seems that anytime black people begin to find their culture, so they can identify with it, white people think that black people are trying to overthrow the government. And is this paradox that a few years ago, this is just what they were imposing upon us, separatism, and we are not about that. We can't be separate absolutely, and yet be a part of these United States. We're concerned about all people, and we have just as many poor white people here in the

Gusta area that have no more voice downtown than the blacks do. And they have representatives down that don't speak up for them either, and we've met these people and talked to them and went and viewed some of their problems also, and they're just as bad to shape as some of the blacks. The thing that causes me is that poor whites don't have that leadership, that leadership to draw them together to attack the system that is keeping us all down. They've been used by the power structure to fight that battle, to keep us down. And in term, they have not changed that conditions any at all. So we're both in the same bag, and until we can make a correlation between the poor whites and the blacks, we will never get too much down here in the city, in any place else in the United States. And you still have faith that there can be a just interracial society down here. We have over 400 years of that stuff, and we're going to keep a few more years of it.

And see if it works. If it doesn't work, then perhaps the next generation could figure something better. And what of white grievances? Much the same as the blacks, housing, schools, and jobs. How long have you been on Augusta? Since I was four years old, about 38 years, but all kind of work that you've done. Well, I was recently working for the city, and I- Did you make a living, anything? No such impossible to make a living, and that's just have bread and just staple foods. You can't have nothing, and you won't have no clothes or nothing. I came here, I was better off when I come here, and I'm leaving here with nothing. I had a good car, and I wound up having to get rid of that. What happened with your car? It was, I had a 66-point act, and it's paid for, but I got some fall behind here, and I had to buy my young ones, clothes, and things, and they just, the way prices are going up,

it seemed like I'm steadily going down. How many children do you have? I have five children, and I've had it tough, but you're lately seem to be getting worse. The world of the southern poor white, this is too often what has awaited them in the past when they left their farms for the city. This is Cabbage Town, a section of Atlanta where white mill workers have lived for generations. Traditionally children from this sort of section don't finish school, bad education, and they stubborn pride, prevent them from seeking or accepting help. The road inevitably leads to poverty level jobs and cotton mills in the lake.

In old plants like this one, and often in new ones, the labor is non-union, and part the result of management union busting, and in part because of an inability, as in politics, to organize for their own self-interest. Even so, for some, these jobs are a stepping stone to higher pay industries. Much of the new industry that's moved South since World War II, like this Lockheed plant at Marietta Georgia, is part of the military industrial complex. This certainly contributes to the South's sympathy for the military. These plants are here because of the influence of southern conservatives, highly placed in Congress, able to stay a big federal contract into their own state.

These same contracts force these industries to be among the first to comply with the equal opportunity section of the Civil Rights Act. They brought new jobs and new money into black and white alike, although the charge is still heard, as here at Lockheed, that most managerial jobs go to whites. Once a segregation pattern was broken, the better private industry is coming South, tended to follow the new policy. We encouraged, and it's no longer necessary to even encourage, but we've encouraged plants that are coming into our area to integrate immediately. There is no difficulty in hiring the black people and white people and working them side by side. The idea of the old industry may be partially true of a predominance of segregation, but it has not proven to be the case here.

Perhaps this is true in part because of a very rapidly expanding industrial community, where we had to use our manpower to the best advantage, and I know of no plants that have come into a gust in eight years I've been here, that we're not immediately integrated. The problem is more bases of ability to do the job than it is to what color the scan is. For many, many new job opportunities have been open for blacks here. I'm very pleased to say, certainly I know there will be many more, and importantly, these are not just menial tasks, because these are jobs that offer a real opportunity to grow and to be into supervisory and management positions, and certainly some plants have diligently sought this type of man and woman who could come in and assume these roles perhaps show to others there is a way, and this is it. So the smell of success is beginning to fill the air, often a little too much.

When it's haste to attract new industry, the South has neglected its own environment, and is repeating the mistakes of the industrial north. One of the best publicized casualties has been the savanna river, where mercury oxides and other industrial pollutants have porzoned the water. This is the Union camp plant at savanna, the biggest papal mill in the world, and recently the target of harsh criticism from local, state, and federal authorities. Industrial pollutants from its stacks are so severe that employees are provided with special facilities for their cars. One river in the fishing village of Thunderbolt, an older industry, is suffering the ecological

and economic consequences of progress. How many boats in the United States do you have going by? I say it is around approximately 300 boats, I say, with a neighborhood of 75 or 100. Some production got low and they had to leave here, most of them you find is in Texas.

That is the question that, more or less, what we think is pollution and other things along with it. It is the assets and other things that go to the rivers, due assets in all in the water are heavier, and they settle on the bottom, and you shrunk more or less seeds from your bottom. The platinum in the water is what the shrimp lives off of, and it destroys the platinum. When did the pollution start? How long has it been going on? It can't be. It feels the shrimp. Well, that I can't say, but it has been ever since your big industry has moved from north to the south. How long have you opened fishing here, respectively, how long have you been fishing around? About thirty years, I've been fishing all my life, that's all I know, nothing but fish. You folks before you, what are you doing?

Well, they're the fishermen too, sailors and fish, and you say I'm going for me too, all my people with fish and I too, this is a good life. Well, it's a healthy life, sometimes it's kind of rough, keeps rough for you, but if you ever do it one time, I don't care, I'm in the job to go in the hill and take you and come back. Yeah, once you put a boot on your feet, it's going to hurt to take them all. I was just going to bat the stuff that the plants stuff into the river, the manufacturing plants. What's the effect of it? Well, you can't eat, normally it's fresh, yeah, you can't eat. They destroyed grass, I won't say they destroyed it, but there was dead ones, we used to catch them dead ones, and if it's any alive ones, they have very little pep in them, which they always do as long. They throw, they try to bite you, but they were just like dead, no helpless. They had moved, you pushed them probably, but there was no crabs or any amount for a couple of years.

They years ago. You can find fillers now, you can find them fillers. You can't find them now. Kill them all. Kill them all. Yeah, that's right. One of the hangers around the market. You can't find none of them. They're all now. You can't fish, but you can't find none of them at all. You can walk through the marsh, you can hear them walking, going through the marsh. We used to call them souls. That's right. You can't hear them at all. But the big lake, they'd walk so far and raise that arm up, pull it down and call them fillers. You don't see them now. Kill them all. The South's young people, like that counterpart elsewhere, are becoming aware of the problems around them. But on southern campuses, these concerns have been confined to a significant, nonviolent minority. Here at the University of Georgia and Athens, a campus referendum last spring on the Vietnam war brought a response from only 4,000 of 18,000 students. Those voting, 55% opposed the war, 45% supported it. I've been here four years, and this is the first year, I think, that I've seen a large number of students.

And as we mentioned, the student body of approximately 18,000, when 4,000 students years rally around anything, besides football game, it's a major accomplishment. And so I think that there is something happening, I don't know whether it's the student body conversation here, or whether it's because it's not possible any longer to ignore things that happen, as has been true here in the past. I think that a lot of people in the South, and it's strange to me, that even though they have brothers and cousins, et cetera, going to the war, they fail to get really concerned about it. It fails to really touch them as people, and this is, I think, especially true of a lot of girls. The thing that disturbs me the most about students here is compared to students up at other colleges and universities, they just are uninformed, they just don't know. There's a bigger number of the students who come here just to prepare for a vocation, and it becomes kind of a vocational school to them.

I think this, in some ways, is the reason we have such a large enrollment in such schools as the School of Education and the School of Business. I'm not saying these are bad professions or anything, and we need people trained educators, trained businessmen, but this seems to be their only forte on the campuses to come up here and go to the education school and learn how to teach seventh graders, and they don't try to broaden themselves and bring more into the classroom, it's just simply training for a vocation, and this is what I disagree with. One of the main criticisms of public schooling in Georgia is that high school simply prepares you for college, and college prepares you for a career. It does not prepare you for life, it's a common misconception, and consequently you do have these people that are here for a career, which is perhaps, you know, very proving, that they still aren't learning or being concerned about what they're going to have to face in life. Then again, maybe they'll never have to face it. They'll just go back and they're small, so they don't have to be a good businessman, and if I guess if they're happy, then that's fine.

This year, across the South, on a federal court pressures, the amount of integration increased sharply at all levels of the school system. This meant that upper and middle-class students and teachers, not just those from poorer neighborhoods, found themselves in thoroughly integrated classrooms, chemically elementary school in Atlanta. In 1967, we had just one black student for that whole school year. In the next year, 68 and 69, we had three black students. In this past year, we had approximately 25, 35. At the present time, we have 236 black students. The racial proportion in this school is approximately 55 white and 45 black students. I have 10 white teachers and 10 black teachers.

This came about rather abruptly last year in March when the court ordered Atlanta Public Schools to desegregate all the faculties to a racial proportion of 47 and 53. We have had rather slow change in comparison with some of the other schools in the city. We have gone to this percentage now, I'd say, within the last year and a half. So often, this comes about rather quickly. Schools are desegregated and then they resegregate. It makes 27, all right, H, please, up, Beleder, 8, R equals 5. 6 times 5 equals plus 3 equals 13. 6 times 5 is 30 plus 3 equals 33.

Ah, please. I've been teaching at Campbell's School since it was opened for 12 years. And I've also lived in this community during that time. This very little change in the actual teaching that I would see that the black student in our school is above the average. We have in this community homes that are well above the low price level. They are homes that have to be bought by professional people. And we have had a lot of professional people to move into this community. Their children naturally have a better background, a better home life, and more naturally perform better in school than those from deprived neighborhoods. Now we do have some children who came originally from deprived neighborhoods and they have had a hard time catching up.

Generally, across the South, the change took place quietly. But some white children were withdrawn to hastily built, poorly equipped, segregated private academies, many of them unaccredited. The crucial question of busing throughout of a deeper problem, neighborhood patterns. Unfortunately, the young mothers in this community were quite upset last year when a good many real estate people were harassing them by phone and by personal call to their home to get them to sell their homes. They would use such tactics as, we have sold the home next door to you to a Negro family. And if you don't hurry up and sell yours, you're going to be left-holding the bag.

You'll be the last one in the block and you won't get as much for your home. Well, of course, this does upset a father, especially of a family that has to provide. And to lose five, six, seven thousand dollars is a real problem to him. So this does become a major factor in getting some of them to move. When I went to high school here, it was all white. Those who go here now are the first generation of southerners who have known any integration in their schooling. My generation, the parents and the politicians are still arguing about the issues, but those most directly involved, the young people themselves, they put all that behind them. Their concern is for their education in all its aspects. Well, as far as integration is affecting me, I've been going to school with Blacks on my life, and they go into a Catholic school for most of my life, except for this last

quarter, so when I started at grade, it has changed my life a little, but not much. When I first came here in eighth grade, I was a little worried about it. The first time I was coming to a fight school, and I was just with a shoe on myself. And so, if I got here, I got to know the students and everyone, teachers, faculty. So I found out it wasn't like everyone that said, the room was at past around, but it was real pleasant, and I really enjoyed coming to this school. And now I've been here for four years, it's my last year, senior year, and I really enjoyed. And the grade, I think, is one of the best schools in the system. And as far as integration problems, we don't have any problems here or anything. And all the problems that we do have here are real minor. And so, I really think this is a great school, that everyone can get along together, teachers, dreamers, doers, doers, dreamer teachers, as low-cost people are so old. Right now, they're a little mixed up, I guess, but the integration problem around here is not as bad

as some say it would be, some schools it is, but not particularly around here, I wouldn't think. I particularly like the school. You think it's made any difference but it lacks some white students in the same school? I think it's made a little difference, but it hadn't hurt schools that much. You begin to understand people a little better than, I mean, you know, when you're all just white, I guess you'd say, you just have the white opinion, when you got kind of mixed, you get both opinions, and you can judge it for yourself. If the older generation leaves it to the young people, they can straighten this world out. Because the young people know what it's going to take, and they're going to be the leaders of the world, and they just leave it to the young people, then they can do it. Older people really aren't considering the younger people, because I don't think the younger people mind going to school with blacks and the blacks mind going to school with the whites, because I think we're more open-minded than the older people are. Such young people are, of course, the South's greatest hope.

But like those other glimpses of hope the South sees, they represent potential more than present achievement. Southern education, by most standards, is still the worst in the nation. Even where the South is beginning to catch up with the nation, in such things as industrialization, urbanization, it finds itself grabbing on to severe problems as well as progress. The South still has a chance to avoid the mistakes that much of the rest of the country has made. To stop the processes of pollution, overcrowding, ghettoization. As the young people in the integrated schools indicate, the people themselves are capable of great achievement. But what of the leadership? One of the more hopeful signs is the opportunity, once again, to well the majority of the people into a political movement that seeks to serve their real interests. But the ghosts of Tom Watson and Jean Talmage haunt this effort. Racism for too long has been the focus of most Southern politics.

And the danger is that it will remain so, even if in more subtle forms, on both sides of the color line. The most important question in the South today is whether or not the real needs of all the people can be met. And particularly, the needs of the poor people, poor white people, poor black people, poorest people in all the country. Whether those needs can be met and soon. The most important question in the South today is whether or not the real needs of the poor black people in the integrated schools indicate that it will remain so, even if in more subtle forms,

it will remain so, even if in more subtle forms, it will remain so, even if in more subtle forms. This is PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service.