Prochoice Generation Gap? Prochoice Generation Gap?
Prochoice Generation Gap? Port Chester, N.Y. In 1996 ten of the country's leading prochoice organizations collaborated to overcome many of the obstacles noted in Jennifer Baumgardner's March 5 "The Pro-choice PR Problem" by forming The Pro-Choice Public Education Project. PEP strives to energize younger women and develop the next generation of leaders. What Baumgardner seems to be missing is that PEP is an effort to "engage young women more directly in the struggle for abortion rights." As local organizations work to build their forces, challenge antichoice initiatives and raise awareness, PEP provides tools that would be too expensive for these groups to produce on their own. PEP conducts cutting-edge research on the opinions of young women, commissions ads that can compete for the attention of young women and throughout the country introduces these findings and ads to groups through workshops. Groups in forty states have used PEP's ads and research to involve and educate young women about threats to their reproductive rights. Please visit our website at www.protectchoice.org. THE PEP STEERING COMMITTEE New York City Having arranged the Open Society Institute's research support for Jennifer Baumgardner's article, I now take issue with her findings. Baumgardner is correct that the prochoice movement has faced a difficult dilemma in mobilizing young Americans who support, but are complacent about, reproductive rights. She sets up a false dichotomy, however, between efforts to engage young people through advertising and conventional grassroots organizing. In virtually all of the examples she cites the two have gone hand in hand. Baumgardner portrays The Pro-Choice Public Education Project, a collaborative effort of ten prochoice organizations, as a prizewinning advertising campaign disconnected from the grassroots. This simply ignores ample evidence that was provided her. Groups in forty states--including local affiliates of Planned Parenthood, NARAL and The Feminist Majority Foundation--all of which work with large numbers of young people, have been using the ads at no cost to educate and inspire activism. Follow-up polling after paid placement of the ads in subways in New York and San Francisco also demonstrated considerable impact. In addition, those ads drove extensive free media coverage in magazines and newspapers across the country, which dramatically increased the value of a relatively modest investment in their production and placement. Baumgardner, on the other hand, extols the virtues of Choice USA, a spirited organization of young women inspired by Gloria Steinem, which works primarily on college campuses. Not mentioned is the fact that Choice USA has also employed its own paid ads in college newspapers to great effect--ads featuring wholesome young women claiming the right to make responsible choices. Most curious is Baumgardner's claim that investment in advertising to reframe the prochoice debate has had no political impact. Nothing could be further from the truth. At least three major exit polls last November revealed that choice had registered as a surprisingly strong concern among voters, just behind education and Social Security, and ahead of taxes. Much has been made of the large numbers of women who deserted George W. Bush, despite his deliberate efforts to obfuscate onthe abortion issue and to buy silence from the Republican Party's right wing. Several of Al Gore's advisers have admitted their mistake in failing to speak more forcefully about Bush's poor record on reproductive rights. They've given credit for moving the issue up on the radar screen--and for driving up Gore's numbers in key states like Wisconsin and Oregon--to targeted media campaigns by NARAL and Planned Parenthood. If only there had been more of them. These campaigns also had strong grassroots components, which are producing an important dividend as George Bush now shows his true stripes, arousing all of us, old and young alike, from our complacency. In the Ashcroft confirmation hearings, Planned Parenthood and NARAL mobilized a rapid response. Thousands of letters, e-mails and phone calls from irate citizens finally awakened Senate Democrats to the new political resonance of reproductive rights. Now, prochoice Republicans in both houses say they are prepared to reject Bush's reinstatement of the global gag rule, which compromises rights of free speech and of privacy for countless women around the world. One could argue that media and message development has rarely seen such successful outcomes. And now is certainly no time to quiet down about what's at stake. ELLEN CHESLER Program on Reproductive Health and Rights The Open Society Institute Amherst, Mass. I have a different opinion about the "pro-choice PR problem." I was a young prochoice activist in the late 1980s-early 1990s, when there were thousands of women, born before Roe v. Wade but just barely, who viewed abortion rights as a cause they were willing to fight hard for. None of us were old enough to remember when abortion was illegal, but we devoted our weekends to clinic defense and spent evenings volunteering in the NARAL office. What happened? I don't think it was apathy. First, the increase in violence in the movement (shootings, bomb threats, etc.) combined with a sense that there was no protection from police or government was enough to scare some folks away from the frontlines. Second, with the election of Clinton some believed they could rely on Democratic promises to safeguard choice (most of us were too young to remember anything but Republican rule). Little did we know that the number of abortion providers would fall at an even more rapid pace in Clinton's first term than over the decade that preceded it. Finally, it was exactly the PR approach to abortion that led to a very real disillusionment with national groups like NARAL. All too often NARAL lived up to its single-issue reputation, ready to risk gains in other areas of women's rights for the sake of abortion alone. Yes, that's expected--the name alone implies it. But compare NARAL with the grassroots groups (like the DC Coalition for Choice, in NARAL's own backyard) that saw abortion as a key demand but only one in the broader struggle for women's rights. Baumgardner's article highlights this by pointing out how NARAL spent $1.5 million on ads attacking Ralph Nader, ignoring a raft of other women's issues in the 2000 presidential campaign (e.g., welfare "reform," free trade, labor rights, universal healthcare). NARAL's slick fundraising, lobbying and inside-the-Beltway approach--represented so clearly in its anti-Nader attack--alienated the young women who wanted to fight for choice inside a larger movement for social justice. I hope that new groups like those started by Choice USA will revitalize that kind of grassroots feminist movement. STEPHANIE LUCE Grand Rapids, Mich. I'm a progressive prolifer, 29, female and a full-time worker. There are many young, activist (not even Catholic--imagine that!) females like myself who are working to eradicate the need for abortion but doing so without the stereotypical "aborted fetus" imagery. We also have an amazing ad agency, filled with industry awards, dishing out amazing ads geared toward supporting women. I know, you'd have to see them to believe it. They are the voice of a new generation of prolife women, and they are nonjudgmental, nonviolent, nonauthoritarian. We too, had a series of ads that were rejected by the networks because they were too controversial, and they contained no offensive imagery whatsoever. AMANDA PETERMAN Right to Life of Michigan Educational Fund New York City One problem is obvious: Where does the coalition of fifty women's rights organizations have its "prizewinning New York advertising agency" target our limited liberal dollars? "Subways and buses throughout the city"! Except for a small percentage on the E train to Queens and some local buses in some neighborhoods, who will they influence in a city and state with every serious candidate running, to some degree, on a prochoice ticket? ALAN SAGNER Hudson, N.Y. For years the prochoice community has been "reactive" to the antichoice community on issues ranging from clinic safety to late abortions. Planned Parenthood has made some attempts to reframe the "discussion" in terms of promoting family health and stability by maintaining access to affordable abortions and family planning methods. However, in my private practice where I provide medical abortions (Mifeprex) to middle-class women in New York City, I find they have little interest in supporting prochoice organizations or any real concern that their hard-fought right of "choice" could disappear with loss of one or two Supreme Court heartbeats. Conservative members of the House and Senate are gathering to try to find ways of restricting the use of Mifeprex ("the abortion pill") or even withdrawing FDA approval. These threats are real and the danger posed to women's reproductive health equally real. Furthermore, Mifepristone may have important uses in the treatment of breast, ovarian and uterine cancers. In the words of Eminem, "Please stand up." RICHARD HAUSKNECHT, MD The Mount Sinai School of Medicine Scituate, R.I. Jennifer Baumgardner advocates efforts to engage young women in the struggle. My experience suggests that young men can be targeted too. Hearing Molly Yard of NOW speak, and other campus activism, helped propel me to take part in clinic defenses, marches on DC and years of NARAL donations. ELIOT LEVINE BAUMGARDNER REPLIES New York City As I made clear in my article, the ads Devito/ Verdi created for PEP are truly great. However, these great ads don't have broad or effective distribution except in San Francisco and New York City, two cities with excellent access to abortion (as Alan Sagner points out). In other words, the ads won't fulfill PEP's stated mission "to energize younger women and develop the next generation of leaders." Especially when they can't even get the ads on the air. The antichoice groups have had better luck getting their ads shown. Therefore, I have to disagree with Amanda Peterman of Michigan Right to Life when she asserts that her side is the victim of network squeamishness, too. Their antichoice ads were pulled not for being controversial but because they made false claims about then-Representative (now Senator) Debbie Stabenow's voting record on late-term abortions. (The ads claimed Stabenow voted against banning the procedure. Sadly, Stabenow stated that she "has repeatedly supported legislation to ban all late-term abortions...unless a doctor says that the health or life of the mother is in serious danger.") I agree with Ellen Chesler that the members of PEP believe in both grassroots organizing and advertising. But the PEP project has accomplished primarily the glitzy-ads part of the equation at the expense of efforts to build consciousness (and recruit young activists) through painstaking person-to-person organizing. Further, there is ample evidence that the "grassroots" (i.e., younger women--the majority of those who have abortions) are not really listened to by this prochoice establishment. A 24-year-old PEP fellow named Rebecca Gurney, for instance, initiated several projects to increase the connection between PEP and younger women (the presumed-ignorant target audience of the ads). She developed a mentoring network, among other projects, but none of her suggestions were taken. Amy Richards, who helps administer an abortion fund for young women via Third Wave Foundation, wrote a letter encouraging PEP to include young women in their leadership and strategy-building in 1996, at PEP's inception. Richards received no response. (Third Wave is listed cosmetically as part of the PEP coalition, but it has no decision-making power.) I wrote my article before Bush became President, and I almost pulled it because it felt odd to criticize some of the most important organizations providing and preserving abortion rights now that these rights are threatened more than ever. My decision not to was vindicated by the letters in response. They reveal PEP's delusion that a New York- and San Francisco-oriented ad campaign with virtually no input by younger women or men is an effective way to reach those people and ignite the prochoice majority. If anything, the ads worked to take votes from Nader (which, as Stephanie Luce points out, alienated some lefty female voters). Bush, on the other hand, received 49 percent of the white female vote. While researching the strategies and makeup of the entrenched prochoice groups and PEP, I discovered that some constructive criticism about the efficacy of this expensive undertaking was in order. I think there's a place for thoughtful critique within the movement, and I offer my article in that spirit. I do believe that we can maximize a prochoice majority, and I support ongoing efforts to do so. JENNIFER BAUMGARDNER
Apr 26, 2001 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
WHAT'S GERMAN FOR 'SWEATSHOP'? Marburg, Germany Since Jonah Peretti's "My Nike Media Adventure" [April 9] did not mention coverage in continental Europe, I w...
Apr 19, 2001 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
'FALSE AND DISTORTED' New York City Christopher Hitchens's diatribe on Professor Elie Wiesel's essay on Jerusalem in the New York Times is a false and distor...
Apr 12, 2001 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
REFORMER IN THE DELLS Milwaukee A postscript to Frances Fox Piven's excellent "Thompson's Easy Ride" [Feb. 26], on the elevation of Wi...
Apr 5, 2001 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
KEEP THE SUN IN THE SUNSHINE STATE LaFayette, N.Y. In "The Florida Fog" [March 19], David Corn asks, "Will the fog ever lift?" and concludes that a conc...
Mar 30, 2001 / Our Readers
Some Dare Call It Treason… Some Dare Call It Treason…
Some Dare Call It Treason... With "None Dare Call It Treason" [Feb. 5], an exposé of the crime committed by the Supreme Court when it appointed George W...
Mar 22, 2001 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
NUCLEAR POWER & US New York City I would like to provide an update on some remarkable events that followed Joseph Mangano's epidemiological discovery tha...
Mar 8, 2001 / Our Readers
Electoral College–Flunking Out? Electoral College–Flunking Out?
Electoral College--Flunking Out? DeKalb, Ill. Thanks for Lani Guinier's superb critique of the election horror, "Making Every Vote Count" [Dec. 4]. Corporocratic America will never allow genuine democracy in this Republic. STEVE MITCHELL New York City Lani Guinier is right on the mark. We knew she was right when President Clinton bumbled her nomination in 1993. It was, perhaps, his biggest blunder. Given what happened in Florida, we now know what the problem was: Guinier was ahead of her (and our) time. George W. Bush won the election by suppressing votes. Suppressing the vote is an aspect of fascism. It is anathema to democracy, even as imperfect a democracy as ours. FRED J. BERG Miami Lani Guinier's article is 100 percent convincing. Every Nation reader should be solidly in the corner for total election reform. That includes instant-runoff voting (IRV), proportional representation, state-of-the-art electronic voting equipment, weekend voting and the elimination of the Electoral College. Speaking of the Electoral College: We have our fourth graduate with Dubya--the first since 1888. How does a person graduate? By losing the election! It's the worst college in America and needs to be closed down by the enactment of a Twenty-eighth Amendment to the Constitution. In our political adventure novel, The Oakland Statement, published New Year's Day 2000, we predicted that Oakland, California, would be the first major city to initiate IRV, and the citizens did it on November 7. We also predicted that Al Gore would lose the presidency, and that happened on December 12. As we outlined the new amendment in our novel: All citizens shall have the absolute right to the most equitable methods of a representative electoral system. The specific language of the amendment is put forth in legal detail. As Guinier said, "We must not let this once-in-a-generation moment pass." We strongly believe that if this does not happen, our democracy will implode in the elite corporate boardrooms. Barry Goldwater was condemned in 1964 for his famous quote, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." He was correct. We believe that if the people are not given the absolute right to the most equitable methods of a representative electoral system, then, as the Declaration of Independence says, "Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to these ends...it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it." Our interpretation of this founding revolutionary document grants citizens the power to take "extraordinary action" in order to save the democracy. We challenge all Nation readers to focus on what Guinier calls a "national conversation," which must end with the enactment of the Twenty-eighth Amendment to the Constitution. FREDERICK ELLIS and PAUL FREDERICK Grand Forks, N.D. Lani Guinier made some good points about abolishing the Electoral College, but I have to take offense at her math. Wake me up if I'm wrong, but I thought representation was determined on the basis of a census and not on the voter participation in a given state. Wyoming has three electoral votes. With a population of roughly 450,000, each electoral vote could be said to represent roughly 150,000 people--a factor of two more than Guinier claimed. Her point, however, was to mark the disparity between states like Wyoming and Florida--where roughly 13 million people have 25 electoral votes. In Florida each electoral vote represents 520,000 people. JON JACKSON Brecksville, Ohio Lani Guinier's argument declaring the Electoral College as immorally conceived because it promoted slavery is incorrect. The Electoral College was intended first and foremost to temper the "passions" of the citizens eligible to vote. Considering the electoral map of the 2000 election, it appears that without the Electoral College, much weight would be placed on the opinions of those living on the nation's coasts and northern urban areas. Is that demographic truly representational of the needs and values of the country as a whole? I think not. The reverse is true as well. The Electoral College is part of the fundamental checks and balances that provide approximate equal weight to all citizens of this country. Furthermore I would bet my house that this article would never have been written had Al Gore won the election. JOHN HENRY SCULLY Saginaw, Mich. Lani Guinier argues that the Electoral College was established by the Founders to increase the power of the Southern states, by way of the three-fifths compromise, in the election of the President. While it is true that the compromise increased Southern representation in the House, and thereby in the Electoral College, the assumption that this was intended to increase the powers of the slaveholding states in choosing the chief executive misses an assumption held by many of those who participated in the Constitutional Convention. In the Convention's last comprehensive debate on the method of electing the President, several delegates expressed their belief that in most elections the Electoral College system would result in several candidates receiving electoral votes, making it likely that no one candidate would receive the required majority. In those cases, the House would choose the President, with each state having one vote. The three-fifths compromise would have no effect on a state's power in that eventuality. Of course, the development of the political party system has resulted in the electoral votes being distributed between two major parties, thereby almost guaranteeing that the choice of a President will be made by the electors, contrary to the expectation of the Founders. The Electoral College system is rightfully open to criticism, but making a causal connection between it and the slavery system is a stretch. BOB HANLEY Santa Clara, Calif. Before we scrap our Electoral College, let's remember some of the people we would have gotten without it: Stephen Douglas, Samuel Tilden, Aaron Burr, George McClellan and Charles Evan Hughes. Does Lani Guinier think they would have done better? President Lincoln benefited from it in 1860 and 1864. Thomas Jefferson was also a beneficiary. The Senate, the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court were all created to alleviate fears of states' rights advocates. Nullification, the prelude principle to secessionism, was put forth by Jefferson, the grandfather to neoliberals. So before we start attacking the Founding Fathers about parts of the Constitution that they got wrong, namely the inhuman equation that kept slavery, let's praise what they got right, institutions that may slow us down sometimes but at least help guard against Weimar constitutions. JAMES ROWEN Newport Beach, Calif. Despite her inflammatory attacks on the Founders, Lani Guinier has some valid points. But a more feasible, less extreme step would be to modify the Electoral College system to allocate the "House" votes from each state by Congressional district and give the two "senatorial" votes to the winner on a statewide basis. As a resident of a large state, I recognize the unlikelihood of three-fourths of the states agreeing to abolish the Electoral College, but a reform to allocate votes by district would achieve many of the goals Guinier seeks and would be more likely to be acceptable to the small states. It would also make Congressional redistricting more important and perhaps mitigate the current emphasis on preserving safe districts for incumbents. It would avoid the balkanization that so often attends proportional representation and a proliferation of minor parties. PETER J. TENNYSON Atlanta, Ga. Lani Guinier's comments prove once again that her writings are within the best of the traditions and legacies left to us by the Founding Fathers. When our Founding Fathers met at the Constitutional Convention, the issue regarding the election of the President generated considerable controversy. The debates revolved around how much voice the people should have. Some thought the people were not capable of making a wise choice. Some wanted the states to determine the chief magistrate of the new nation. Many wanted to continue the practice in the Articles of Confederation of having Congress elect the President. Others, led by James Madison, argued for a very radical idea--a popularly elected President chosen directly by the people. The result was the compromise that created the Electoral College. The Electoral College was, then, the mechanism developed to include the people. In Federalist 68, Alexander Hamilton wrote that the Electoral College would provide an obstacle to "cabal, intrigue, and corruption" by not making "the appointment of the President to depend on any pre-existing bodies of men [Congress or the state legislatures], who might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes," but rather the Constitution has "referred" the election of the President "to an immediate act of the people of America." In Federalist 10, Madison wrote that the Constitution was "the great desideratum by which" our form of government "can be rescued from the opprobrium under which it has so long labored, and be recommended to the esteem and adoption of mankind." Today, our form of government again labors under an opprobrium that has been, in part, created by the rulings of the Supreme Court and the actions of the Florida legislature. We again need "the great desideratum." Guinier, with her recommendations for more effective ways to include the people in the process of electing the President, has proven herself to be a modern-day Madison whose ideas, if implemented, will once again allow our government to "be recommended to the esteem and adoption of mankind." JIM SCHMIDT GUINIER REPLIES Cambridge, Mass. I am heartened by the sheer volume of responses generated by my essay, the overwhelming number of which confirm my view that the time is ripe to build a pro-democracy movement out of the wreckage of our last election. LANI GUINIER
Mar 1, 2001 / Lani Guinier and Our Readers
Letters Letters
THE SUITES & THE SWEATS New York City In "Economists vs. Students" [Feb. 12], Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood cheer on students who demand tha...
Feb 15, 2001 / Doug Henwood, Liza Featherstone, Gene Santoro, and Our Readers
Letters Letters
You Can't Get There From Here San Jose, Calif. JoAnn Wypijewski in "Back to the Back of the Bus" [Dec. 25] sheds much-needed light on the ongoing civil rights struggles, which lack the Bull Connors and Jim Clarks of an earlier era but produce results that discriminate with equal power. However, in her brief summary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, she overlooks, as is generally the case, the role of the Women's Political Council. Formed in 1946 by Mary Fair Burks, the WPC, under the leadership of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, printed the leaflets calling for a boycott of the buses in protest of Rosa Parks's arrest. The WPC had been planning a bus boycott for years, waiting for an opportune moment to strike. When word got around to the ministers about the boycott, they agreed to support it, albeit without publicly announcing this support to the white community. E.D. Nixon resented this hesitancy, calling them "little boys" who "lived off these poor washerwomen" and "ain't never done nothing for 'em." The ministers were properly ashamed and--with Martin Luther King Jr.--decided to publicly support the boycott. The rest, of course, is history. Forgetting the role of citizens' groups like the WPC obscures the dynamics of social change. It was the local citizens of Montgomery, working together for years without white publicity, who created and sustained the boycott and in doing so handed the national microphone to Dr. King for the first time. Today the struggle for economic and social justice continues in Montgomery, carried on (again) by "ordinary" citizens like Carolyn Rawls and Johnnie Carr. GABE THOMPSON Montgomery, Ala. To respond to JoAnn Wypijewski's jab at the Southern Poverty Law Center in "Back to the Back of the Bus": We don't remember the Montgomery Transportation Coalition asking us for money, but that's beside the point--we probably wouldn't make a grant to the group unless the request came from a coalition attorney seeking to cover case costs for a particular civil rights action. Because of our historic mission, that's the form that most of our grants for advocacy efforts take (see the Strategic Litigation Project at www.splcenter.org). Contrary to the article, we have worked to help alleviate the transportation problems of the poor, not just in Montgomery but in Alabama as a whole. In the mid-1990s, we filed a case that attacked the state's failure to provide a transportation system for poor people (Medicaid recipients) in need of medical care. Although the court of appeals ruled against us on technical grounds, our victory in the district court caused the state to adopt a transportation program for Medicaid recipients that is still in operation. One of our more recent lawsuits, currently before the US Supreme Court, forced the state to give its driver's license examination in foreign languages. Precisely because public transportation in Alabama is so abysmal, that case addressed an acute problem for poor and working-class immigrants. The issue is whether private parties can enforce the "discriminatory effects" regulations issued under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The enforceability of these regulations is central to the efforts of many advocacy groups across the nation that seek to prod local governments to devote more resources to public transportation. These two cases give some indication not only of our concern about the transportation problems facing the poor but also of the unfairness of Wypijewski's suggestion that we devote all our resources to the fight against white supremacist organizations. Although the public often associates us with this fight because our courtroom successes against hate groups have captured headlines, our supporters know that our work is not limited in this way. Last, to the claim that our new building is "assaulting the Capitol area's landscape," all we can say is, we've never tried very hard to fit in around here! J. RICHARD COHEN, legal director Southern Poverty Law Center WYPIJEWSKI REPLIES New York City Thanks to Gabe Thompson for the history I didn't have the space to recount. Indeed, Jo Ann Robinson was one of the central strategists, with Fred Gray and E.D. Nixon, of the boycott and, with them, had been organizing for just such an opportunity since at least March of 1955, when 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Rosa Parks, who apart from being a seamstress was also secretary and youth director of the Montgomery NAACP, was certainly aware of this. It was also Robinson who suggested that her pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church might be a good leader for the boycott because he was young and articulate and, having not yet involved himself with community politics, would not alienate any of black Montgomery's powerful factions. Robinson herself never held any official position in the boycott organization because to do so almost certainly would have cost her her job as a professor at Alabama State College. She tells her story in The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It. A terrific collection of oral histories of the people who made the boycott can be found in The Children Coming On..., edited by Willy S. Leventhal. One final historical note: 1955 marked the second time Montgomery's blacks boycotted public conveyances over segregation. The first was in 1900, when transit segregation was put into law. For that whole summer blacks refused to ride the trolleys. The white power structure was forced to make a minor compromise but would not cave for more than a half-century; almost another half-century on, the long walk to transit freedom in Montgomery continues. Meanwhile, here's J. Richard Cohen congratulating himself and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which in thirty years of existence has addressed the transportation crisis twice and the transit racism in its own hometown not at all. While the two interventions aren't insignificant, they do nothing to alleviate the transportation problems of the majority of low-income Alabamians, nor do they strike at the root of those problems. And of course they have nothing to do with the local bus system. After my article was published, Jon Broadway of the Transportation Coalition again tried contacting various people at the center, Cohen among them, to see if there might be some way this institution with an endowment of $120 million might assist the struggle going on just outside its heavily fortified doors. Four phone messages and a number of e-mails later, he's still waiting for a reply. Perhaps simple courtesy is also "beside the point" for the center's puffed-up crusaders, seeing as how the coalition's work doesn't fall within their "historic mission"--i.e., bringing headline-grabbing lawsuits. But because even the Federal Transit Administration's Office of Civil Rights advises activists that the fight for transit justice in America is unlikely ever to be won in court, that historic mission turns out here to be a self-serving cloak for indifference. Even at the level of rhetoric, Cohen and his colleagues, who regularly expound on civil rights issues in Op-Ed pieces or letters to the editor in the Montgomery Advertiser, have not bestirred themselves on the bus crisis. What is the Southern Poverty Law Center doing instead? Mostly making money. I would never have suggested that it "devote[s] all [its] resources to the fight against white supremacist organizations," because the center doesn't devote all of its resources to any kind of fight. In 1999 it spent $2.4 million on litigation and $5.7 million on fundraising, meanwhile taking in more than $44 million--$27 million from fundraising, the rest from investments. A few years ago the American Institute of Philanthropy gave the SPLC an F for "excessive" reserves. On the subject of "hate groups," though, Cohen is almost comically disingenuous. No one has been more assiduous in inflating the profile of such groups than the center's millionaire huckster Morris Dees, who in 1999 began a begging letter, "Dear Friend, The danger presented by the Klan is greater now than at any time in the past ten years." Hate sells; poor people don't, which is why readers who go to the center's website will find only a handful of cases on such unlucrative causes as fair housing, worker safety or healthcare, many of those from the 1970s and '80s. Why the organization continues to keep "Poverty" (or even "Law") in its name can be ascribed only to nostalgia or a cynical understanding of the marketing possibilities in class guilt. It barely even handles death penalty cases anymore, and lawyers struggling in the South to save the lives of people, mostly poor, on Death Row, will never forget that it was Morris Dees who smoothed the way to a federal judgeship for Ed Carnes, author of Alabama's death penalty statute and a notorious hanging judge. With allies like Carnes and a salary close to $300,000 putting him among the top 2 percent of Americans, Dees needn't worry about "fitting in" with the masses of Montgomery. Naturally, he'd erect a multimillion-dollar office building that's a monstrosity. "I hate it," a security guard across the street told me, as the sun's hot rays bounced off the building's vast brushed-stainless-steel-clad southern exposure and onto his face, making him sweat, roasting his skin while he stood watch for the militia nuts Dees would have his donors believe are lurking around every corner. So, readers, rip up those pledges to the Southern Poverty Law Center. To help people in real struggle, send your money to: § Montgomery Transportation Coalition, c/o Jon Broadway, 600 South Court St., Room 200, Montgomery, AL 36104; (334) 244-3972. (It is pushing for expanded city bus service, a community voice in transportation decisions, spending equity and environmental justice.) § Rosebud Community Center, c/o Mrs. Arzula Johnson, 7376 Highway 10, East Pineapple, AL 36768; (334) 682-9703. (In the countryside where there are no taxis or buses, it provides educational and social activities and owns an old schoolbus but can't afford the insurance to operate it.) § Annemanie Tutoring Program, c/o Mrs. Jeanette McCall, PO Box 354, Catherine, AL 36728; (334) 225-4452. (Another rural project without benefit of public transport, it tutors students after school and conducts adult job training. Unless it can replace its van, it won't be able to continue past this school year. It also needs computers and building materials.) JoANN WYPIJEWSKI
Feb 8, 2001 / JoAnn Wypijewski and Our Readers