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Even in the Deep South, blacks are uniting on the local level to assert their economic strength against the white-dominated status quo. In central Mississippi, for example, some 400 blacks have joined the Simpson County Civic League to operate a low-rent housing project, purchase fertilizer in mass amounts to reduce operating costs for about 100 black farmers, and open a cooperative grocery store to lower prices.
Midnight Raids
Black localism is also strengthened by the leadership of many forceful and talented black women. The role of women in the ghetto and elsewhere has been doubly difficult. They have been exploited sexually and have also had to find jobs, often as domestics, to support their families, when their men have been unable to get jobs in the white world. Now that the black man is nurturing his own new-found strength and pride, the black woman's role is particularly complex and sensitive. Nevertheless, because of her tradition of working and asserting herself, she has much to offer the movement.
One such leader is Mrs. Helen Howard, a housewife in the black Vine City section of Atlanta. She has turned her considerable energy to the Vine City Foundation, Inc., which has set up a health clinic, a nursery for children from disrupted homes, counseling for blacks on welfare programs and a campaign against rent-gouging landlords. On a national scale, Mrs. Johnnie Tillmon is a key member of the National Welfare Rights Organization, one of the most effective defenders of the black poor. It has chapters in all 50 states that are working to help welfare recipients secure their full legal benefits without bowing to such indignities as midnight raids designed to uncover males in a household. A mother of six, she was born in a shack near Little Rock and now works out of Los Angeles. Such determined black women as Brooklyn's Mrs. Shirley Chisholm are proving effective in politics. Formerly a consultant on child welfare for New York City, she successfully ran for the state assembly. Then she bucked the Democratic organization to become the first black woman elected to Congress.
Politics is, in fact, the field in which many blacks place their highest hopes. Perhaps the best example of the emerging black politician is Julian Bond, whose cool style charms both blacks and whites even as he assails white racism in blunt terms. Tough and smart, he has used his local position as a member of the Georgia legislature to achieve national prominence as a hall-packing speaker. A less glamorous but no less aggressive politician is Charles Evers, one of a growing number of black officials in small Southern towns. In Fayette, Miss., Evers has refused to yield before assassination threats, and is demonstrating that blacks can run a local government efficiently—without resorting to racism in reverse.
All such efforts serve to strengthen blacks' conviction that they can eventually compete with whites, but in a sense these steps can offer only distant hopes for real interracial progress. Proud as he is of his pact with A. & P., Jesse Jackson concedes that it accomplished little toward eliminating racism in the Chicago area. "We didn't change the hearts of the executives," he says. "We simply changed the behavior