
          The South and the World Community
          By Thrasher, SueSue Thrasher
          Vol. 7, No. 1, 1985, pp. 20-1, 23-24
          
          At some moment during the 1950s and '60s, many of us in this room
made a decision about where we were going to work and what we were
going to work for--a decision that made us take a stand for the future
of the South and for what we believed was right. In my own coming of
political age in the 1960s, that was an easy decision. The issues
facing our region in those years were clear-cut.
          I was in school in Nashville at the time and remember very
distinctly when it all came together for me. I was driving from my
hometown in western Tennessee back to Nashville when I heard on the
radio about a church bombing in Birmingham where four young girls had
been killed. All of you remember that particular moment.
          I made a decision then that the people who bombed that church on
behalf of the white South--did not speak for me. They did not
represent me. If I were to be a citizen of this country, and a
Southerner, I had to provide an alternative voice to what those people
were saying.
          Today, in the mid-1980s, I think that where we stand as a country
in our relationship to the rest of the world is similar to where we as
Southerners stood in the 1950s and '60s. Again, we have to make
decisions and personal commitments. I don't intend to let Reagan--or
any of the people who make national policy in this country right
now--speak for me on the issues of Central America and the rest of
this world anymore than I let the voices of the white South speak for
me in the 1960s.
          "Today, where we stand as a country in our relationship to the rest
of the world is similar to where we as Southerners stood in the
1960s."
          Two years ago the organization that I work for, the Highlander
Research and Educational Institute, located in New Market, Tennessee,
celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. In 1932, when Highlander began,
Myles Horton, its founder, said what remains true today "the issue of
the coming decades will be economic democracy."
          Initially, Highlander worked with the labor movement, training many
of the South's labor leaders in the 1930s and '40 . It stood for civil
rights in the 1950s and '60s. Working out of Highlander in the 1950s,
a woman that the Southern_Regional_Council is honoring this year,
Mrs. Septima Clark, helped establish the citizenship education
schools. Mrs. Clark and these schools helped thousands of people in
the South register to vote.
          In the 1960s and '70s, Highlander turned its attention toward
Appalachia and involvement with the poor_peoples' movements in that
region.
          In the 1980s, we've continued our concern with Appalachia, with
labor, with civil_rights-with a just society. But today there are new
questions, new issues to be considered.
          In the 1960s it made all the sense in the world to focus our
attention entirely on this region, and to work as much as possible to
focus the attention of the rest of the world on the rural South. Our
task then was to put forth a new vision of what we thought the South
should be. The difference now is that we have to advance a vision of
what we want the world to be, of what kind of world we want to help
create.
          Perhaps it is a mild case of Southern chauvinism that leads me to
believe that because of our own history of struggle for the last
thirty years, we are in a unique position to shape a vision of a just
and equal society that slips over the MasomDixon line and
more/importantly at this particular time in history, slips across our
southern border to our Latin American neighbors.

          At Highlander, we're talking about what our work should be in the
years ahead. And, we have made a commitment to bring an international
perspective whenever we can. Regional institutions should be able to
relate what's going on in the rest of the world directly to our own
work at home. Nor is it hard to find these ways. Let me give a few
examples.
          Last week I saw a work in progress--a film that should be finished
very soon and that all of you should see. You may remember "Babies and
Banners," the film about the women in an historic Detroit auto workers
struggle. One of the women who helped make that, Lorraine Gray, is
finishing a new film called "Women and the Global Assembly Line."
          Lorraine's film shows women around the world in a "global" assembly
line--a line that shifts and moves in search of cheap labor and cheap
raw materials. We previewed the film recently as a work-in-progress,
wondering if we might use it with Appalachian and Southern women as a
springboard for discussion of their own work situations and as a means
of educating them about the particular problems faced by Third World
women.
          The filmmaker was especially concerned to know how women workers in
this country would respond to the film. Would they see the women as
competitors for their jobs and simply blame them for plant closings in
the US? Or would they be able to see the commonalities of all women
workers as the assembly line becomes more global?
          We sent the film back not really knowing the answer to her
questions, with an illustration of something that we have to grapple
with in years to come. How are we going to talk to people in this
country about the fact that a lot of the jobs are leaving? They're not
coming to the so-called Sunbelt anymore, they're going further South,
for much lower wages and, in most cases, for less than human working
conditions.
          "Another thing that is coming South, and being sent further south,
is toxic waste."
          The other thing that's coming South, and going even further south,
is toxic waste. In the past five years we have had numerous workshops
at Highlander in which we bring people together who are organizing
against toxic waste dumps, usually in their communities' backyards. We
have found that people can organize against a toxic waste dump in an
Applachian holler, but the chances are ten to one that if they win,
the toxic waste will be shipped to the Chemwaste pits at Emelle,
Alabama in Sumter County. If the Sumter County people can keep it from
coming there, it will be dumped on someone else.
          The latest plan for doing away with toxic waste, by the way, is to
truck it down the highway to Mobile, put it on a barge and burn it in
Mobile Bay. You can imagine there are a few people in Mobile who are
concerned about that. Will we soon be shipping our toxic waste to
Latin American countries just as we have shipped them pesticides and
drugs that have been banned in this country? Toxic waste is an issue
that faces us in this region but I don't think we can talk about doing
away with it here only to get it shipped somewhere else.
          Another example that illustrates why we need to understand the
international economy came to our attention last year in one of the
Appalachian communities that we've worked with--a West_Virginia coal
town called Gary. Nearly a hundred percent of Gary's work force is
employed by the United_States Steel Company which runs several mines
and a cleaning plant in the area. About a year and a half ago US Steel
entirely shut down its operations in the Gary holler and ninety
percent of the work force became unemployed.
          When US Steel began to call people back to work, after many weeks
of unemployment, management called the miners into the company offices
one by one. They did not ask to come to a union meeting and talk. The
company told the miners, "If we're going to keep this mine open in
this holler, we have to increase production by ten percent. Otherwise
we close this mine entirely in March."
          Production at Gary increased fourteen percent during the first
month of the mine's reopening. Since then the mine has been kept
partially open. But the significant thing about this situation is
that US Steel began closing down the mines 

in Gary, West_Virginia at
the same time it was buying new mines in South_Africa. The economic
situation of Gary is directly related to US Steel's ability to seek
cheaper, non-union labor and offer far less safety protection for its
workers.
          Another instance:
          At the Highlander Center we have long been interested in adult
education. Earlier, I mentioned Mrs. Clark's work in the citizenship
schools in the 1950s. Right now one of the best laboratories of adult
education in the world is Latin America. Perhaps you know of the work
of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian who has helped to shape many Latin
American and African educational programs. Two years ago, as we were
talking about an international perspective to our work, we joined with
Freire's organization, the Council for Adult Education in Latin
America (CEAAL), the International Council on Adult Education
(JCAE)--headquartered in Toronto, and the Vice-Ministry of Adult
Education in Nicaragua, to organize an "encuentro"--an exchange
between adult educators in Latin America and adult educators in North
America.
          The week-long conference was held in Managua. In addition to
learning about literacy and education projects throughout Latin
America, we also learned about Nicarauga--its postrevolutionary
reality and its attempts to "reconstruct the country" by providing for
basic food needs, health_care and education.
          What we were most impressed by in Nicaragua and what we have kept
close to our hearts since returning, were the adult education projects
and the tremendous efforts to teach "people how to read and
write. Within the first year after the Sandinista revolution the
Nicaraguan government instituted a country-wide program,
Alfabetizacion, an effort that reduced basic illiteracy from over
fifty percent to approximately twelve percent. As in the citizenship
education program at Highlander in the 1950s, the intention in
Nicaragua is not just to teach people how to read and write, but to
teach people how to be good citizens. The adult literacy programs
constitute part and parcel of what it means to be involved, active
citizens in the life of your country.
          We saw several adult literacy sessions at work. In one
building--that served as a school during the day, and an adult
education center at night--there were about eight different classes
going on the evening we were there. I went to a class with twelve to
fifteen people, mainly women in their fifties and sixties. They were
learning how to read and write. Most of these women worked as maids;
there are still upper and middle_class people in Managua who have
maids.
          The teacher was a young man who had learned how to read and write
in the literacy program of 1980. He had gone through all five levels
of the adult literacy program and was now teaching people at the first
level. I watched as the older women went go to the blackboard and very
painfully tried to write sentences. From writing and reading, they
went to a session on mathematics, and again, painfully and slowly
attempted to subtract four figures, one from the other.
          There was no shame or embarrassment at any time, but rather a great
deal of pride and dignity in the room. Pride in themselves and in
their ever-increasing abilities and pride in their "new" country, a
country that now included them in its future.
          These women come to that class five nights a week, two hours a
night, to learn how to read and write. By the time they are through
they will have gone, like their teacher, through all five levels of
the adult literacy program.
          In Nicaragua you get a sense of such commitment--not just to teach
people how to read and write--but to truly liberate people so that they
might become active and productive.
          What we saw in those sessions was a process of empowerment. We also
saw the same process at work in the countryside in the health
program. Having seen what is going on in Nicaragua and knowing the
commitment of the people there-people that we made friends with, that
we enjoyed rum and coke with, people with whom we talked about mutual
dreams and commonalities--it is indeed sad to think that the United
States might intervene in the same way that it did in Vietnam.
          US intervention in the internal affairs of Nicaragua--and by that I
mean our current intervention through so-called covert activities, not
some planned military intervention in the future--is interferring with
the process of democratization that we witnessed. For indeed, one of
our strongest impressions was of people finally being able to
participate in the decisions which affect their lives. The spirit was
contagious. Everywhere we went we found Nicarguans
intensively engaged in building their own future and, therefore, their
country's future.
          When we were planning the adult education conference, the
vice-minister of adult education, Ernesto Vallancillos, came to
Highlander and spent a week with us in the mountains of East
Tennessee. He said that he had been in 

this country twice before but
that he had spoken only at big universities where the question that
people had asked him was whether or not he was a communist.
          While he was visiting us, we took him up to Appalshop in eastern
Kentucky, and we took him around in Harlan County-"Bloody Harlan"
where some of the fiercest union battles were fought in the 1930s. He
sat and talked for two hours with a community group that has been
organizing against the polluters of a creek in Middlesboro,
Kentucky. He saw a side of the United_States that he never had seen at
Yale University or Stanford.
          As we were driving through the Southern Appalachians he was
absolutely stunned. He said, "I didn't know that you had poverty in
this country. This is not our image of what your country is like."
          Since we returned from Nicaragua, we've maintained ties with the
vice-ministry of education. We're trying to determine our own works in
relationship to what is going on there-not just in supporting a
revolutionary movement in Central America-but with regard to the kinds
of work we're doing and the kind that they are doing. The more people
in Latin America who get to know people in United_States communities
who are engaged in struggle, the larger becomes the international
community who share the same understandings and beliefs. I hope that
there will be increasing numbers of people in this country who will
feel that they cannot support the policies that lead to intervention
in Nicaragua.
          There is one more thing that I want to say about international
issues.
          Last summer two other Highlander staff people and I travelled to
Scandinavia where we visited a labor folk high_school in Sweden. We
were there during a special summer session for workers and their
families from all over the country. During the week the families met
in small workgroups, to carry out projects around the week's theme:
their fears.
          One group produced a play, another an exhibit, and another prepared
some art work based on fairy tales. On the final day of the week the
groups presented their projects to the entire body. All of these
projects had to do with nuclear war.
          When we asked one of the teachers why this was the only issue that
was being raised, he looked at us as if he couldn't believe what we
were asking. His reply was simple and direct, "We are all afraid
here. You have deployed your cruise missiles all around us and we
stand to lose our lives here." That was the single most educational
moment for us on the visit. Missile deployment for us was another news
item; to the Swedish workers and their families it was an ominous
threat.
          He replied, "You have deployed your cruise missiles all around us
and we stand to lose our lives."
          As we go into the late 1980s and think about what we want the years
beyond to be like, I don't know how our day-to-day work will change,
but I do know that we constantly have to be searching for ways to be
in solidarity with poor and working class people in the rest of the
world--just like poor and working class people here. We have to reach
out and create the future with them. We can't stand alone as a region
or as a nation. Our beloved community--as we called it in the
1960s--must be much broader this time.
          
             Sue Thrasher is on the staff of the Highlander Center,
New Market, Tennessee. She is a contributing editor to Southern
Changes. This essay is a revised version of a talk given to
the Fortieth Annual Meeting of the Southern_Regional_Council in
Atlanta this past November.
          
        
