Word: got
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...back. For years whites held all the elected positions. Then, with the coming of the Civil Rights Movement, Negroes started working their way into the system. It was Macon County that elected the first black sheriff ever (or since reconstruction) in the South. (His name was Lucius Amerson. It got lots of New York Times coverage when it happened. It also turned out what he wasn't much better than the white guys, but you'd have to know the South to understand that...
...most decisive government agencies in farmers' lives in the ASCS committee (part of the department of Agriculture, I believe). The ASCS tells farmers the quotas that limit how many acres they can plant with cotton and other crops. With whites controlling the committees, the big white farmers got as large a cotton allotment as they wanted while the Negroes, usually with much smaller farms, had to make it all balance by having their allotments shaved. Often Negroes are tenant farmers on a white man's land; so if they tried to complain, call in surveyors, and that sort of thing...
...then there's the more complicated, less conscious evil of the Federal government. The U.S. isn't supposed to do business with companies that discriminate. But they've got contracts up to here with The American Can Company. The American Can Company has its own little company-run town in Bellamy, Alabama. Stores, schools, churches, and neighborhoods are segregated in Bellamy. There's no plumbing in the Negro homes, their streets aren't paved, they get paid less. It's a really tough town. Jim Peppler, the Courier's dare-anything photographer who took pictures of some of the meanest...
...simple kinds of discrimination that could be undone by such a one-dimensional attack. And it took an unsubtle one-dimensional kind of opposition to convince powers like the U.S. to intervene. Opposition like George Wallace. He was responsible for something no civil rights group could bring about. He got the whole of Alabama under a single statewide school desegregation order from the Federal courts. Everywhere else in the South they have to bring each school to court individually. Wallace, by making his state government the antagonist, simplified everything. Brewer, the new governor, is more sly. And it's very...
...got a headache...