
          The Vote and Change
          
            
              Bond, JulianJulian Bond
            
          
          Vol. 12, No. 2, 1990, p. 4-9
          
          These edited remarks are from a panel discussion held on
political participation during last winter's annual meeting of the
Southern_Regional_Council. The participants, all with long involvement
in the drive to expand political participation, included former SNCC
leader and Georgia State Senator Julian Bond, former Little Rock mayor
Lottie Shackelford, former Alabama legislator and national Democratic
Party operative Tony Harrison and Texas voting_rights activist Andrew
Hernandez. All are members of the Southern_Regional_Council, Harrison
and Shackelford are former presidents of the organization. Bond
narrated the program, which was taped for television broadcast and is
available on videocassette from the SRC.
          JULIAN BOND: Ms. Shackelford, let's begin
with you. You were a high_school student in Little Rock in 1954 when
the Supreme_Court said that separate but equal was against the
law. Many believe that's the beginning of the modern civil_rights
movement and the present day emphasis on the right-to-vote. What are
your recollections of the political scene in Arkansas at that
time?
          LOTTIE SHACKELFORD: I think that Daisy Bates
would be the first to say that she was merely trying to make certain
that all students, particularly black_students, had equal access for
educational opportunities. And while the Court decision came down in
'54, the Little Rock schools went back and forth for three years as to
when and how they were going to integrate. Then in 1957, of course, we
had the Little Rock Nine who actually did integrate Central High
School.
          A lot of folk have asked, "Why nine?" I tell them that the number
started off being 250, but as each year would pass, the number would
drop. Some students no longer wanted to be a part. Some parents were
being threatened about their children participating. So on that day in
September 1957, there were only nine students still willing to go. Had
the date been put off even one more day, we may have had eight or
seven. But that did start an awakening-not just in Little Rock and the
South-about what was needed to bring about equality and justice for
all.
          BOND: A moment ago you remarked that your
father sold poll taxes, and a great many people won't understand what
that meant. What did you mean?
          SHACKELFORD: You needed a poll tax to be
eligible to vote. As opposed to registering to vote, you bought a poll
tax.
          BOND: How much did it cost?
          SHACKELFORD: One dollar, at that time which
was quite a bit of money. And I helped him sell poll tax
receipts.

          BOND: So he would buy a quantity and then
sell them back to potential voters?
          SHACKELFORD: Right. He always believed that
folks should exercise their right to vote. And, that was his way of
making a contribution. He'd go into the rural areas outside Little
Rock and sell those poll tax receipts. Go into churches and
neighborhoods.
          That's one of the things that black folk in Little Rock were quite
complacent about at that time. In their view they didn't feel they
were being denied so much. And, I think that's another reason the
impact of the desegregation crisis in '57 had such a meaning
there. Too many people were satisfied with the way things were
going. While in rural areas black folk were saying they could not
vote, in Little Rock, if you bought a poll tax receipt, you could
vote.
          Somehow or another they saw that as equality because white folk
couldn't vote either without a poll tax receipt.
          BOND: Do you recall any fear accompanying
your father's efforts when you got outside Little Rock, out in rural
Arkansas? Do you remember people being afraid to buy a poll
tax?
          SHACKELFORD: No, but then he never ventured
much farther than the central Arkansas area. He didn't get down into
the Delta area.
          BOND: Mr. Harrison, you're an Alabama native
and it is in Alabama, and Selma particularly, in 1965 that a massive
demonstration resulted, finally, in the passage of the Voting Rights
Act from which stem most of the political protections evident about us
all over the United_States for a wide variety of groups today. What
are your recollections of the period before '65 leading up to the
Selma-Montgomery march?
          TONY HARRISON: I was too young to have a
personal recollection of that. But my grandfather was a voter. And, he
was a teacher and minister. My fondest recollection of him is not
about voting, but about his reading. He was always reading. In the
summer he would be sitting on the porch after he had done his chores,
and he would be trying to read the paper and I would be up trying to
disturb him from his reading. He'd just ignore me and keep right on
going.
          BOND: As an Alabama state Iegislator, you
helped reapportion the state legislature, did you not?
          HARRISON: I had watched very carefully the
reapportionment process in 1970 and '74. And subsequently I ran for
the legislature and won. So I was active in the process following the
1980 Census in which we expanded the base of participation from that
in '74.
          BOND: Could you have helped to create
additional black representatives in the Alabama state house and senate
had it not been for the Selma movement in '65 and even what had
happened in Little Rock in 1957?
          HARRISON: I don't think there was any
political participation of any significance in the South. The South
was very clear that the poll tax represented a process for the denial
of the franchise to all but primarily white males. So without the
Selma march which brought the Voting_Rights_Act, my own participation
would not have been possible. Once we got the Civil_Rights_Act of 1964
and the Voting_Rights_Act of '65, we also had the litigating process
that brought one-man one-vote and which then turned out to be the
basis for all of the redistricting. If I'm not mistaken, that comes
out of Tuskegee, Alabama.
          BOND: A natural turn to Mr. Hernandez, whose
organization works primarily with Hispanics in the southwestern part
of the United_States. It was 1972 that the Voting_Rights_Act was
extended to cover Hispanics. What did that extension mean to the kind
of work that you do now? Could it have happened without this
extension, this widening of the pool, in effect?
          ANDREW HERNANDEZ: Absolutely not. In the
same way that the passage of the Voting_Rights_Act opened up the doors
of political opportunity for blacks in the South, where they went from
2-3 percent of the electorate to 30 percent of the electorate in some
of the states, with extension of the Voting_Rights_Act to Hispanics in
the Southwest beginning in the early '70s, we saw a dramatic change in
Hispanic participation. As the barriers came down, Hispanic
participation went up.
          In the same way that blacks went from a people who couldn't
participate because they were shut out of the process, Hispanics went
from a group who had the lowest registration rate and the lowest
turnout rate in the country of any other group in the early '70s to in
the '80s a group that has the highest registration and turnout
rate. Frankly, prior to the extension of the Voting_Rights_Act to
Hispanics, at a time when the population was literally booming, the
actual number of Hispanics registered to vote went down. That's pretty
hard, to be tripling your population and actually go down in the
number of people registered to vote.
          BOND: Why did that happen?
          HERNANDEZ: There was an induced apathy in
our community. It was induced by an array of election devices 

that
shut Hispanics out of the political process; for instance,
gerrymandering. When we first started our work in 1974, I was given
the assignment to look at why Hispanics couldn't win where they were
in the majority. There were sixty-seven counties we identified in
Texas that should have elected [Hispanic] county officials but that
had not. That's pretty distressing and we tended to blame our own
people for it.
          And when you got the leadership together and asked why we couldn't
win, somehow the finger was always pointed at apathy. That they were
too poor to be organized.
          What we found in those sixty-seven counties was that every single
one of them was gerrymandered. The lines were drawn in such a way that
Hispanics couldn't win, no matter how much they registered, no matter
how much they voted. When people were saying their vote didn't count,
they were telling the truth. The system had been set up to insure that
their vote didn't count.
          BOND: What about other barriers? We heard
Ms. Shackelford talk about the poll tax. What about other exclusionary
barriers?
          HERNANDEZ: We faced the annual registration
for the poll tax. But another barrier unique to Hispanics was learning
English. A large number of our older citizens weren't afforded the
opportunity to learn English. When they were growing up and when they
were working they knew as much English as they needed to know to pick
up people's clothes, to clean their houses and take care of their
children, and to cut their yards.
          They didn't figure they needed any more English than that. So
having the ballot printed in English only denied people their
citizenship. People who had sent their children to war, had paid their
taxes all these years, and been faithful to American ideals but who
had never been given a chance to learn English. When-under the Voting
Rights Act-bilingual ballots were printed, our participation
increased.
          We also started attacking by litigating. We had filed lawsuits and
were victorious in voting_rights cases. When our people started
winning at a local level and they started seeing change our
participation went up.
          In the Southwest the number of Hispanic elected_officials increased
from 1,500 in 1976 to close to 4,000 today. In Texas, one of the
Southern_states that we are talking about, we went from about 700
elected_officials in 1974 to 1,600 today. We've doubled the number of
voters, we've doubled the number of elected_officials. I think that in
Texas and in Florida you're not going to win statewide elections
unless you capture a significant part of the Hispanic vote.
          BOND: And what has it meant to the general
public in the states where you work to enfranchise this large segment
of the population that formerly was just shut out; what difference
does it make? If I were a devil's advocate here: who cares? What
difference does it make if Hispanics vote, if their lines are drawn
properly?
          HERNANDEZ: Well, in a democracy, anytime you
have a large portion of the population shut off and alienated from the
political system, that population, pretty soon, is going to try to
bring down that system. They have no part in it, no share in
it. Democratic institutions are fed and nurtured by people's
participation.
          But there's another issue that has to do with the fact that
Hispanics bring energy, skills, and wisdom to this country. The other
side of it, let's say we don't do anything. Let's say we don't
integrate people, we don't give them an opportunity. In Texas, by the
year 2025, blacks and Hispanics will make up a majority of the
population.
          Are you going to have a majority of the population shut out
economically, politically, and culturally from the life of that
state?
          HARRISON: In Alabama, the relegation of
blacks to a second-class citizenship economically has denied growth to
that state. If you look at the gaps between white income, black
income, and Hispanic income across the region and the nation, you see
lost economic opportunity. You can't buy a house, you can't feed your
children, you can't buy health_care, you can't clothe your
family. That has relegated this society to a slower growth. We have a
third-world nation living in the midst of the wealth of
America. Racism continues to be the determinant of not only political
but economic decisions. Racism is just a hell of a thing.
          HERNANDEZ: I think the first stage in a
people's development is always the acquisition of power. The second
stage is the exercise of power. I think we've gotten pretty 

good at
moving into the acquisition of political power. But we're still
learning our way on how we as minorities exercise that power.
          BOND: 1990 is the twenty-fifth anniversary
of the Selma march and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Voting
Rights Act. What does tomorrow hold? We see David Dinkins in New_York,
Douglas Wilder in Virginia--are these aberrations? Are we going to see
more dark faces in unfamiliar places? What's going to happen
next?
          HERNANDEZ: There's no question that we will
see more blacks being elected and we'll see Hispanics being governors
within this decade, and perhaps some black and Hispanic senators.
          I think that the challenge for the '90s is to exercise the
power. For a long time our politics was protest politics, meaning you
try to stop that thing from happening to you. It's a redress of
grievance, Well, that's the politics that you're involved in when
you're not on the inside. And we still need to do that.
          But
there's another politics that's emerging within the Hispanic
community. In Texas we say, "dance with the one that brought
you." And what brought us was voter_registration. What brought us
were the Voting_Rights_Act lawsuits, and we have to be vigilant about
that. What bought us was the commitment of black and Hispanic leaders
and families and parents to do something better for their community
and their children. We can't leave that behind.
          At the same
time, we need to make sure that we start paying attention to the time
when we will be the majority. By 2010, 30 percent of all the children
in America will be minority children. In the five largest states in
this country, minority children will be the new majority. That's
within our lifetime. When my boy is my age, he could be living in a
state in which a majority of the people there are Hispanic. We need to
prepare ourselves for being the majority and that means proposing from
public policy perspective things that make our society more
opportunity-filled, freer and more just.
          The whole process is
still very much alive and well in the black communities. The realities
of our politics in northern cities is often still based upon that kind
of participation. In 1991 after the census is taken and the new
line-drawing process begins, we will come to the table with knowledge
about what reapportionment is. We know how to try to make it work for
us. I think we're going to see an expansion of black, Hispanic and
other minority participation during the 1990s and the redrawing
process that will follow the 1990 census will lay foundations for that
expansion.
          BOND: Ms. Shackelford, let me shift gears a
little bit and come to you. Your biography says you are the first
woman mayor of Little Rock. We hear now about a woman's vote. We see
women's preferences influencing decisions in the New_York City mayoral
race and the Virginia governor's race. What does this mean?
          SHACKELFORD: I think that in the beginning
days of the women's movement when we were fighting for the Equal
Rights Amendment to the Constitution, it still wasn't clearly
defined. It was almost pitting one against the other. Say me as a
black_woman, whether I'm a woman or a black in the sense of how I
related to issues. There is no "if, and, or but" about it. The
abortion issue is a woman's issue. And, for the first time now, I
think you can see the impact of the woman's vote, black or white, rich
or poor, in the sense of how they are impacting upon elections. And I
think the past elections in Virginia and in new York show
that.
          BOND: You can argue that black_women have
been much more successful, proportionately anyway than white
women. There were at one time, in proportionate number, more black
women in the Congress than there were white_women. There are a number
of black_women who have had electoral successes on the lower
level. What's going to happen in black politics in the United_States,
what new faces are we going to see? Neither Douglas Wilder nor Dave
Dinkins is a babe in arms. These are men who have been around in
political office for years and years. What new faces, fresh faces,

female faces are we going to see in the future?
          SHACKELFORD: We have not had a black_woman
governor. We have not had a black_woman mayor of a truly major
city. We have not had a black_woman senator. We have very, very few
black_women who have found entry into corporate policymaking. You give
me an economic chart and black_women are still on the bottom; a
political chart, we're still on the bottom.
          But, in the sense of new faces on the horizon, I see many more
women now because they have had the opportunity or have been forced to
be a part of the economic mainstream. Really working to take care of
families themselves. Exposed-which means they are more concerned about
politics because they understand the relevance of politics and
economic well-being. We're going to see more educated women who will
not just focus on careers, but will focus on politics.
          BOND: Mr. Hernandez, earlier we were talking
about generations in politics. How is the first generation of
Hispanics elected in Texas and the first generation of blacks elected
in Alabama and Arkansas different from those elected in the last five
to ten years?
          HERNANDEZ: I think you'll find two major
differences. The first generation of leadership tends to be elected
out of communities where the districts or jurisdictions are
predominantly black or Hispanic. And as such, they come out of a
struggle of protest. The second generation of Ieadership has less of
that struggle of protest because the political process has been more
accessible to them. But they're tending to win now in districts where
they make up 20 to 30 percent of the population. For example, the
mayor's race in Denver is won in a city where only 13 percent of the
population is Hispanic. We see that happening much more. That means
that their politics are not going to be as ethnically driven.
          The more that women are integrated, the more that Hispanics and
blacks are integrated into the national body politic, the more they're
going to be talking about justice, opportunity, and freedom. I think
you're going to see a renaissance in those values coming from segments
that have been left out and now are being brought in. Because they are
close enough to their history to remember a time when they were
excluded, they will be more faithful to keeping the promise for all
the citizens.
          Once there were folks who said that you shouldn't give people who
don't own property the right to vote. There were others who said you
shouldn't have freed the slaves, or given women the right to
vote. There were folks who said you shouldn't pay attention to those
rabble-rousers in the South in the 1960s who made the promise of the
Emancipation Proclamation come true. I think that future generations
will look back at this generation that's in the vanguard of
transforming American life and say that this generation stood for what
was best in America. And, those that resisted, stood on the wrong side
of history.
          BOND: Tony Harrison, we see in the headlines
all kinds of racial and ethnic conflict, gay bashing, attacks on
Asians, attacks on Hispanics, incidents such as Bensonhurst in New
York. What does this say to us, twenty-five years after the Civil
Rights Movement began?
          HARRISON: It says that we are going through
some frustrating times. I think Andy touched it when he said that you
are sort of at the castle door. I think that there's a lot of
resentment, frustration, and lack of understanding in the white
community that is festering.
          The fact is that the economy is not generating enough opportunities
for America's people. White folks feel that blacks, Hispanics, and
Asians are getting what's theirs. The fact is that the economy isn't
generating jobs enough for all of us. And white folks are resenting
what they see.
          I don't think it speaks negatively to where we are coming from, I
think it speaks more to white frustrations. In this context, just the
other day I was watching a television piece on eastern Europe. A
Solidarity leader was attending a big rally in Chicago. The highest
population of Polish people outside of Poland in one city is
Chicago. I hope the Poles in Chicago will understand my
struggle. Their struggle and my struggle is basically the same. Racism
impedes their ability to see that.
          Those kids in Bensonhurst were almost first generation Italian
emigrants.
          Why did they come to America? Freedom, economic opportunity? The
same things I want. Racial tensions remain because the society has so
segregated us that we have not learned enough about each other or
appreciated our respective histories and those are the tensions that
we 

are seeing.
          I'm hopeful that with the new participation of blacks, Hispanics
and Asians we can make this society as vibrant and vital and energetic
as it ought to be and can be. We have to continue to pursue the
political acquisition of participation and of power. We have to make
the schools responsive to educate our children and help them
understand that if they are not ready for participation in that
society that's coming in ten years they're going to be cast aside.
          The drug wars in the inner-cities of today are, I think, a direct
by-product of the absence of hope and the absence of a sense of the
future that these kids are faced with- overbearing pressure built upon
generations of exclusion and denial. As long as our children cannot
see past the moment that is in front of them, they can't plan for
tomorrow. When they can't plan for tomorrow, there is no hope.
          I think that racism is going to impede this society's acceptance of
the changing reality that Andy described. We've got every nation here
in America. You can find somebody from every place in the world right
here. And those Americans can in fact provide linkages back to South
America, back to Spain, back to Europe, back to Africa. And all of the
Asian countries are represented here.
          But I don't think we really understand the wealth of human
diversity that we have in this nation, because we have been so
historically tied into restricting access and restricting
participation. 
        
